Shadowlands: Rapidly Climbing the Ladder in Popularity

[Kel_Sceptic]

That is exactly the point here: SL is the same as BFA/Legion. What didn't work before doesn't work now.

Sure, from what you were saying, since class balance was fked forever, you practicaly never liked WoWfrom 2004 to present, right ?
Glad we got that out of the way.

Now, for WM, what is it not working for you ? I am playing WM ON ONLY since it has been released.


Your whole argument that Shadowlands is worse then Legion and BFA starts to vanish by your own words.

"It is ok that we have a PvP vendor but it is the same as BFA and Legion." This cannot be true at the same time.
You invoke class balance ?!?!, did you even played TBC, at the start of the expansion the paladins were 1 spell 1shoting every class in the game.

If you clearly state it just like preference, similar to "I like the GREEN colour!", then sure, go ahean, no one will even try to talk you out of prefering otherwise.

[Smash Adams]

For me, I really enjoyed leveling for the most part(just dinged my first 60 after about of week of casually playing). If nothing else, it was much more enjoyable than BFA. I’ve never been a fan of WoW’s turn towards linear three quests at a time style, but SL has felt cohesive enough and moved at a pace that I didn’t mind at all. There wasn’t a point where I was just wanting to get it over with. The worst parts for me never lasted too long, which is a good overall sign.

Even the zones, which people seem to be split on, were fine. I’m not wild about having all of them split up and disconnected but I get why and I’m fine with it. I haven’t missed flying at all.

We’ll see how things hold up now that I’m at 60, but as someone who only plays casually nowadays, I’m really not too concerned.

[kaminaris]

PvP vendor gear is a good change. But PvP gear once again is garbage compared to PvE gear.

If you look at the PvP forum, you will see people complain this season is one of worsts:
- PvP gear is trash compared to PvE gear
- Class balance is bad
- Covenant balance is bad
- WM doesn't work
...

The gear vendor is a good change, but there are far more problems.

Well, you are wrong on almost every single point.
PvP gear is deterministic so even raiders do it. Much easier than doing 50 M+. Top arena players have tons of pvp gear.
Class balance is OK, its not bad but not great either.
Covenant balance is actually good.
WM does work far better than pve/pvp server division.

The real issues of SL is completely different what you listed.

[OMGTwitchTV]

I can "stomach" opinions. Blatant shilling on the other hand...

It may be worth noting that shilling is a noun, not a verb, and the action of which you speak is also "to shill". Since I am neither an employee of Blizzard, nor an "accomplice acting as an enthusiastic customer", it would appear your insult was a desperate grasp at ad hominem. Believe it or not, it is entirely possible to be excited about something simply because you are excited about something. Shadowlands, thus far, has been a really fantastic expansion, and feels like a well written apology for the last 3 expansions.

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Maybe learn the meaning of a word before you use it?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shill

His opinion is his, he's not "shilling" just because you disagree.

Thank you. I appreciate your logic, reasoning, and concern. I sometimes wonder why people are always filled with anger for other posters. Not sure how a simple opinion could translate into being some plant for Blizzard.

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So you just made a post with a misleading title pretending this is going to be about an official statistic etc and then you subjected us to your opinion.
Couldn’t you just call a friend and tell them or something?

To my knowledge, I have not violated any rules of posting, and the topic, nor the title appear to be in disagreement with the mods who have visited this thread a few times to deal with angry posters. If my topic of conversation was so uninviting, why did you stop in to make this comment rather than something more relevant to the topic? Something like a disagreement perhaps.

[Yriel]

My bad for puting it like that, I really meant for world of warcraft MMORPG.
I've tried SWToR, Conan and EsO, and thats about all my MMORPG experience, so yeah, I just know what WoW's content contains.

If after 16 years of WoW's existence you have no clear, delimited ideea about WoW's core activities, then my bad for even trying to ... anything.

WoW always had a big casual and solo content. I mean, everyone made fun of WoW when it launched because you could level solo... that was unhead of at the time. WoW the fast-food of MMOs.
And as i said, the last expansions had much more to do for the casuals than this one.
So you have no point here tbh.
And if you look around on the MMO market, there were a lot of hardcore raiding and PvP MMO and all of them died. The ones that are still around and are going strong (like gw2, ESO, FF14) have a strong solo/casual content. I wonder why that is.

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You play WoW tho... "Hey guys.... who said that you can't play football in NBA?" You can play football elsewhere.

I played the last years in ESO. Great game. I came back because of my false hopes of Torgast and since is was supposed to be the "casual Expansion". I guess that was wrong, too.
Don't worry, when my 3 months are up i'm back to ESO.

[ryanmahaffe]

blegh... honeymoon period drivel.

It is ok, but it is not great. Certainly not better than TBC.

Blegh, rose-tinted drive.

[Laerrus]

When I get the time to play, I am having fun in the game. The Shadowlands are a feast for the eyes, cool story too.

I haven't decided yet if SL will replace or join any in my trifecta of TBC, WoTLK, and Legion.

[Shinrael]

Don't think I've ever been this excited to level every single class. And I say this as a player who has been playing WoW since Vanilla and has always played all classes. I just love Torghast so much! Now, having to do 8 layers of the same thing on every alt is a bit much, but knowing that a time will come when I will need to do 2 runs per week per alt and with the added variety of different specs, I am gonna have a blast

[darklogrus]

SL barely beats the Broken Shores....

[Osmeric]

It may be worth noting that shilling is a noun, not a verb

In English, any noun may be verbed. Although, as Calvin observed, "verbing weirds language".

[NineSpine]

I think that it's basically equal to legion and bfa. This design style was somewhat fun in legion. Now though? It's tired and incredibly boring. The game has spent too much time drifting further and further from its roots as a social game with a persistent world. It is now some amalgamation of multiplayer action RPG looter. The design is a mess and all over the place and the "story" continues to be told to us by having us follow around more important characters and watch them do things.

I think I can sum it up this way:
Ask me to tell you stories about things that happened to me while leveling in Classic. I have dozens of fun stories and they all involve other people and the persistent world.
Ask me to tell you stories about things that happened to me in any of these three expansions. I have nothing. There is never a surprising or interesting interaction. Nothing unexpected ever happens. It's all rote. It's all repetition of the same few activities ad nauseum. Other players are basically NPCs.

I'd say the game is basically dead in the sense that the MMO is dead and what's left is a pretty lame looter with a bad community.

[ashblond]

I think that it's basically equal to legion and bfa. This design style was somewhat fun in legion. Now though? It's tired and incredibly boring. The game has spent too much time drifting further and further from its roots as a social game with a persistent world. It is now some amalgamation of multiplayer action RPG looter. The design is a mess and all over the place and the "story" continues to be told to us by having us follow around more important characters and watch them do things.

I think I can sum it up this way:
Ask me to tell you stories about things that happened to me while leveling in Classic. I have dozens of fun stories and they all involve other people and the persistent world.
Ask me to tell you stories about things that happened to me in any of these three expansions. I have nothing. There is never a surprising or interesting interaction. Nothing unexpected ever happens. It's all rote. It's all repetition of the same few activities ad nauseum. Other players are basically NPCs.

I'd say the game is basically dead in the sense that the MMO is dead and what's left is a pretty lame looter with a bad community.

SL basically inherits all the principles and problems of Legion and BFA, with minor changes.

[Kel_Sceptic]

Even though I accept and respect each's opinions and preferences, and take them as they are without trying to change someone's preference, when an opinion or preference is presented as a fact, I like to discuss based on facts, or technical points that can define facts. I don't like "facts" that start with "people say that, or most people say that" etc.

Today, being reset day, I've took notes about how much time it takes to do the weekly stuff + automatically the daily stuff.

So, I've started playing at about 13:00;
-13:04 already got all quests on me and I've started doing them;
-13:23 already done the daily calling (3 rares/treasures) and the world boss is dead;
-already got 453 anima collected out of 1000 for the 2 weekly quests (1 covenant renown and 1 night fae conservatory);
-13:44 already completed the anima collection by doing 2 world quests and 2 weekly quests (maldraxxus Bet on Yourself and Callous Concoctions);
-already completed the quests that required 1000 anima to be collected;
-13:52 already completed the Return Lost souls and 1 daily are completed in The Maw;
-13:55 already rank 14 renown and started to continue the covenant story;
-14:41 the covenant story is done, rank 15 Renown;
-14:43 I'm in The Maw but I take a break for some RL stuff (feed the kids, make some coffee etc.);
-15:22 I'm back in game and continuing to do the weekly The Maw quests;
-15:46 all weekly quests are done; Jailer is dead. leftovers: The Hunt and 1 daily, because I was on maximum Tier and cannot continue in The Maw today;

-15:48 starting Coldheart Interstitia Layer 8, 17:02 the Torghast run is completed, with For the Hoarder! achivement completed; (TOTAL RUN TIME: 74minutes minus ~15mins afk for RL stuff, so it should take 50minutes);
-17:03 starging Mort'regar Layer 8 and finishing it at 17:37; (TOTAL RUN: 34minutes);
!NOTE: Because I didn't recieved the Anima Power that shows mobs who carries Anima Powers, I have done FULL KILL RUN (killed all mobs, collected all souls and cracked all vases).

BTW: got here some screenshots about this experience.


So, it took me rughfly 4hours, with RL break stuff inlcuded, to complete all weekly + daily stuff.

For some people this seems like "it is made for the casual plebs, there's nothing to do in Shadowlands", while for others this seems like "man, it is overwhelming, BFA was more casual friendly"). For me, this just works fine, since, as I repeated myself, I can finish the weekly stuff in a couple of hours and the focus on WHAT I LOVE to play only.


Now, depends from person to person, but I think this is what casual means, that you can complete solo all what is needed for you to be ABLE to play what you want (WQ, RAID, Heroic/M+ Dungeons, PVP, collectionist and so on).

Tbh, I think that Shadowlands it is casual friendly since it is handing ilvl 171 and 174 gear just from World Quests, while I have ilvl 184gear from doing Battlegrounds.

WoW always had a big casual and solo content. I mean, everyone made fun of WoW when it launched because you could level solo... that was unhead of at the time. WoW the fast-food of MMOs.
And as i said, the last expansions had much more to do for the casuals than this one.
So you have no point here tbh.
And if you look around on the MMO market, there were a lot of hardcore raiding and PvP MMO and all of them died. The ones that are still around and are going strong (like gw2, ESO, FF14) have a strong solo/casual content. I wonder why that is.

Your overall status about how Shadowlands is..... it is so confusing, cause on one hand you keep saying that BFA was much more casual friendly cause you had "stuff to do, and you got gear", while on the other hand you PROBABLY didn't even reach renown rank 10, since that is the one that upgrades World Quest rewards from ilvl 158 to ilvl 171/174.

I've showed in the top of this post how much time you need to invest in Shadowlands to be uptodate with its systems, and I've done that so that people who come to this topic and haven't played the game, could actually see some real raw data.


If it feels too casual or too uncasual, that depends from person to person, but it is what it is.


LE:

SL basically inherits all the principles and problems of Legion and BFA, with minor changes.

Can you please be more specific on what are those particular principles and problems ?

I think I can sum it up this way:
Ask me to tell you stories about things that happened to me while leveling in Classic. I have dozens of fun stories and they all involve other people and the persistent world.
Ask me to tell you stories about things that happened to me in any of these three expansions. I have nothing. There is never a surprising or interesting interaction. Nothing unexpected ever happens. It's all rote. It's all repetition of the same few activities ad nauseum. Other players are basically NPCs.

I'd say the game is basically dead in the sense that the MMO is dead and what's left is a pretty lame looter with a bad community.

While I totally agree that the MMORPG genre is not "welcomed" anymore, or not a prime-time genre and that it remained a niche thing, I am really happy that this has happend to WoW.
Over the years, I have always thought I will be happy to replay Vanilla/TBC, casue "that was where all action, passion, community was", after Classic was released, I've reactivated the subscription and only played classic till level 25 or something, then never touched it again, and of course didn't played retail BFA either since we "had a fight and we were separeted", so 25 days of subscription has gone for nothing.

It was then when I really understood that, at least for me, J. Allen Brack's meme "You think you do but you don't" was really happening. Because I don't have the luxury to waste 20-30-40-60minutes on top of Orgrimmar bank while spamming "LFG/LFM for ZF", or "LF Heal for HC SH". That time has passed for me, it was fun then, between age of 18 to 24, but it is not anymore.

I don;t challange myself anymore to kill 300.000 pirates for 2 weeks in a row just to complete 1/5 of "the Insane" title , or ONLY to kill Fire Elementals in Nagrand's Throne of the Elements for 2 weeks just to be able to make 3 tailor gear pieces so I can embark in the raiding Karazhan scene .
Oh my, not to mention writing applications at a level equivalent to applying to a real job, man what weird times.
It was fun then, but it is impossible now, that is why I've switched to PvP and I love that I can play it 90% of the time I'm in WoW, and not having to do M+ half the time just to be able to do PvP the other half.

But I still generate memorable situations since I'm playing with War Mode ON, and that is the only interraction I want and need from other players. But even if I would play with WM Off, seeing someone from time to time questing, wq, is still good for me to not make me feel I'm playing a singleplayer game.

Though, personally, I really don't have time to bound to people like I had in the first expansions, plus there was the noob in all of us, we loved exploring, we loved discovering, we didn't knew where the zone could really stop, what the zone could really hide, how things worked, but after 8 expansions .... heh, even after 3, it all became a "know situation" from the start of the expension to the end, nothing surprised us anymore, except bad calls/bad systems/bad decisions (artifact power, garrison solo house, corruption power, titanforging/warforging, warfronts, trinkets in pvp, and so on at least from my perspective, I'm sure we all have a list).
We got better at the game that we didn't feel the need to search for 2 or 4 players for the Elite mob quests, since we know our character and we kite, burst, beat the sh17 out of that elite without problems.

At the same time, you keep saying that Legion, BFA and Shadowlands are all the same, and all lost connection with the community, but to be honest that happend first with WoTLK, when LFR/LFD was first implemented.

At least there is Classic for those that really love the community part of the game, that hate systems like sharding, cross realm, LFR, LFD, and so on.

GL HF, hope all gamers find their peace and play what they like. Most people that only hate on something ... and keep on going, are either feeding from trolling or hating OR are sad people that really can't find a "place" to enjoy (a game to play and enjoy).

[NineSpine]

While I totally agree that the MMORPG genre is not "welcomed" anymore, or not a prime-time genre and that it remained a niche thing, I am really happy that this has happend to WoW.
Over the years, I have always thought I will be happy to replay Vanilla/TBC, casue "that was where all action, passion, community was", after Classic was released, I've reactivated the subscription and only played classic till level 25 or something, then never touched it again, and of course didn't played retail BFA either since we "had a fight and we were separeted", so 25 days of subscription has gone for nothing. It was then when I really understood that, at least for me, J. Allen Brack's meme "You think you do but you don't" was really happening. Because I don't have the luxury to waste 20-30-40-60minutes on top of Orgrimmar bank while spamming "LFG/LFM for ZF", or "LF Heal for HC SH". That time has passed for me, it was fun then, between age of 18 to 24, but it is not anymore. I don;t challange myself anymore to kill 300.000 pirates for 2 weeks in a row just to complete 1/5 of "the Insane" title , or ONLY to kill Fire Elementals in Nagrand's Throne of the Elements for 2 weeks just to be able to make 3 gear tailer pieces so I can embark in the raiding Karazhan scene . Oh my, not to mention writing applications at a level equivalent to applying to a real job, man what weird times.
It was fun then, but it is impossible now, that is why I've switched to PvP and I love that I can play it 90% of the time I'm in WoW, and not having to do M+ half the time just to be able to do PvP the other half.

At the same time, you keep saying that Legion, BFA and Shadowlands are all the same, and all lost connection with the community, but to be honest that happend first with WoTLK, when LFR/LFD was first implemented.

At least there is Classic for those that really love the community part of the game, that hate systems like sharding, cross realm, LFR, LFD, and so on.

GL HF, hope all gamers find their peace and play what they like. Most people that only hate on something ... and keep on going, are either feeding from trolling or hating OR are sad people that really can't find a "place" to enjoy (a game to play and enjoy).

I never did any of the stuff you are talking about, such as spamming to find a group or farming crazy stuff. I just leveled with a guild, ran dungeons where they were quick to put together, and enjoyed myself. I can tell you only played to 25 because you are describing isn't the reality of the game. It's the assumptions of people who don't bother to play the game and instead invent fictional scenarios that could theoretically be bad. At best, what you are describing is the experience of someone who refuses to join a guild, of which I've played in three of in Classic and never had to fill out an application.

LFR didn't come in WoTLK. It came in Cata, but LFD and LFR only did partial damage. The relentless sharding, instancing, and general separation of the world is what completed the job. The obsession of making the game have a prescriptive design where the designers force us to play how they want was only the savaging of the corpse. This didn't happen overnight. It was a series of small decisions that basically turned the most successful online world in history into little more than a crass mobile game designed to rope you in with addiction hooks rather than with fun and wonder.

[Kel_Sceptic]

I never did any of the stuff you are talking about, such as spamming to find a group or farming crazy stuff. I just leveled with a guild, ran dungeons where they were quick to put together, and enjoyed myself. I can tell you only played to 25 because you are describing isn't the reality of the game. It's the assumptions of people who don't bother to play the game and instead invent fictional scenarios that could theoretically be bad. At best, what you are describing is the experience of someone who refuses to join a guild, of which I've played in three of in Classic and never had to fill out an application.

I don't know how old are you, you are either young or middle age and you don't have your kids in house anymore Since I can't imagine myself raiding or guilding with my 2yo or 4yo, but thats just my type of parenting, gaming comes second, even tought I play ~5hours per day, I play them when I can without another schedule on my head, I got work and kids and those are enough for me.

LFR didn't come in WoTLK. It came in Cata, but LFD and LFR only did partial damage. The relentless sharding, instancing, and general separation of the world is what completed the job. The obsession of making the game have a prescriptive design where the designers force us to play how they want was only the savaging of the corpse. This didn't happen overnight. It was a series of small decisions that basically turned the most successful online world in history into little more than a crass mobile game designed to rope you in with addiction hooks rather than with fun and wonder.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Patch 3.3.0 (08-Dec-2009): Looking for Group has been renamed to Dungeon Finder
Supports 5-player instances
Designed for PUGs

I remember how relieved I was when DF was released, how much I loved it, even tough I was in a raiding guild and so on, it seemed an OK system. Did it make wow worse, better, who knows, I don't see myself today playing without lots of QoL features, even they are bad for the MMORPG feeling of WoW, again I play WoW only as a multilayer-queue-type of game, just like other games are: dota, overwatch, fortnite, cod, battlefield, csgo, pubg and so on.

While I wish sharding and phasing didn't happen, I can't really say I don't enjoy cross-real party forming. Hell, I'm still losing time while looking for arena partner as it is now. Can't imagine me playing in a Vanilla realm enviorement, looking for a healer and so on.

And again, the majority dictates, and that's the way things work, that's how democracy, and more important in this case, capitalism works Since it is always about the $$$$$$.
I will always quit WoW if more then 25-30% of my playing time is necessary for stuff that I need and don't like to do. This is the reason I've left BFA for 1 year.

[Matsumotto]

Dunno. It's something like WOD syndrome. Players also liked WOD. For month may be. Overall I don't see any improvements.

I asked to make daily/weekly content limited. Yeah, it's done. But it should have been compensated by replayability on alts. It's not done. May be flying will fix it. Result - I have just a hour of content on main, but nothing else to do. Because Renovn is so time-gated.

I asked to make all hardcore content optional. But we still have mandatory Maw. I don't talk about Torghast, because if you're casual and don't need legendary, it's not mandatory for you. You can do Bolvar's story quests on level 1.

Legion/BFA content design flaws also aren't fixed. For several days phasing was working correctly and didn't allow location overcrowding. But since previous week it seems to be disabled and overcrowding and lags returned again. One of the examples. Sorry, but I play with WarMode off for reason. Because I hate conflicts. Problem is - Blizzard try to force "conflicts" on me, even in WarMode off. They make WQs with "PVP" design. I.e. with exceeding competition. Faction imbalance makes things even worse. It's not comfortable to do WQ with exceeding competition, if there is crowd of other faction players around you and none players from your faction. You're literally prevented from playing game. Because everything is tagged and none is left for you. At some point somebody in Blizzard decided, that PVP in mandatory in this game. He is wrong and this should be fixed.

My solution - is not to play till 9.1, where flying will return, if Ion hasn't lied again.

These are my thoughts too. People who absolutely love it are those who had to spend hours each day farming boring stuff all throughout BFA, so ofc no mandatory content is the best for them....lol

[Kathranis]

based on the overabundance of lame sylvanas

She's appeared in like two cutscenes out of the entire 9.0 story.

The story so far is much more focused on the Covenants and the Eternal Ones, especially Sire Denathrius.

[Marsc92]

Hard to put SL in the context of a discussion about best expansions because it's still so early. However, even this early in BFA I think it was easy to see how bad it was going to be. Azerite Traits / Heart of Azeroth might be one of the worst designed systems ever put in the game. Warfronts and Expeditions had a neat foundation but they were a major disappointment. They never tried to fix them.

There's really no major flaws with SL. Things can be improved... Torghast can feel more rewarding, the covenant campaign time gating should be removed, and pvp is kinda wacky atm. But overall people seem to be having fun. And that's really all that matters.

If they put in Challenge Mode / Mage Tower content in with Torghast - hoping its for the legendary set transmog - that would be my main wish for this expansion.

We'll see in about a month / after the holidays if people are still sticking around.

The major flaw is classes sucking. I play a Druid. Feral, Balance and Resto are in their worst design state in several expansions.

Feral is in a worse state than Legion, unable to keep up in m+ due to arbitrary target capping, the current iteration of berserk leaves you out of energy for most of it’s duration which is strong but feels incredibly bad, absolutely zero customisation from legendaries and conduits.

Balance’s new eclipse cycling feels horrible to play, there is no agency in spell usage now. Our best conduit buffs our damage by 1% and our legendary only gives us even less choice in spell usage.

Resto’s power has been shifted into regrowth and out of our HOTs meaning we completely lost a 15 year old identity for no reason. Again, legendaries and conduits feel totally unimpactful. Once upon a time all our talents were viable and now we have hardly any choices, just a best set up for raid and a best set up for m+.

The resto legendary design is particularly dumb. The rejuv one is bad considering how much less you want to rejuv now. The wild growth one sucks because to fish for procs you need to avoid using SOTF empowered wild growths to instead save them for regrowths but this sucks because SM’s cooldown is 15 and you get a proc every 25 seconds on average. The lifebloom one is okay but photosynthesis was nerfed and Heal over time effects were nerfed too so it really only fuels clearcasting procs. The swiftmend legendary is pointless because you aren’t layering HOT effects on a single target and when you do, you don’t need them extended for 8 seconds.

All these specs could be reverted to their legion iterations and be much more fun and interesting. It’s sad that all these years of design leave the class worse off than before and Druid isn’t the only example of this. Only a few specs feel good compared to before, fire mages are one of a handful of examples.

[NineSpine]

I don't know how old are you, you are either young or middle age and you don't have your kids in house anymore Since I can't imagine myself raiding or guilding with my 2yo or 4yo, but thats just my type of parenting, gaming comes second, even tought I play ~5hours per day, I play them when I can without another schedule on my head, I got work and kids and those are enough for me.

My kids are 2 and 5. It's been trivial to balance classic and my children. I raid once a week, maybe once every other week when I'm busy. It's a few hours one night. The commitment is a joke compared to retail raiding.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Patch 3.3.0 (08-Dec-2009): Looking for Group has been renamed to Dungeon Finder
Supports 5-player instances
Designed for PUGs

I remember how relieved I was when DF was released, how much I loved it, even tough I was in a raiding guild and so on, it seemed an OK system. Did it make wow worse, better, who knows, I don't see myself today playing without lots of QoL features, even they are bad for the MMORPG feeling of WoW, again I play WoW only as a multilayer-queue-type of game, just like other games are: dota, overwatch, fortnite, cod, battlefield, csgo, pubg and so on.

LFR and LFD aren't the same thing. LFR came out in patch 4.3. So, this is the second smug comment in one post where you were factually wrong.

While I wish sharding and phasing didn't happen, I can't really say I don't enjoy cross-real party forming. Hell, I'm still losing time while looking for arena partner as it is now. Can't imagine me playing in a Vanilla realm enviorement, looking for a healer and so on.

Again, this is a triviality. "Anyone want to run anything?" in guild chat and in two minutes we know if there are people to do it. I play the game. You don't, so stop telling me what it's like. I've NEVER taken more than 10 minutes of work to form a group in all of classic.

And again, the majority dictates, and that's the way things work, that's how democracy, and more important in this case, capitalism works Since it is always about the $$$$$$.
I will always quit WoW if more then 25-30% of my playing time is necessary for stuff that I need and don't like to do. This is the reason I've left BFA for 1 year.

All of your arguments are based on a hypothetical game that you've invented in your head. CAN you sit around looking for a group for an hour if you want to be an anti-social weirdo and refuse to join a guild? I suppose so, but I really don't find it difficult to ask if anyone wants to go and then move on with my life in either direction depending on the answer. You are making this trivial thing seem like the most oppressive, complicated thing in the world.

This is how complex this has been for me:
I start playing classic.
I run into someone who has a guild.
I join their guild.
The rest of my leveling, whenever I log on, I quickly ask if anyone wants to do X, Y, or Z before I go questing alone.
If within 2 minutes nothing is happening, I go quest.

This is the thing you are acting like is going to burn your ability to interact with your children to the grounds.

[ashblond]

Can you please be more specific on what are those particular principles and problems ?

Well, I have said it already, but I can explain it again: So far, SL has no fundamental change or new things compared to Legion or BFA.

What I mean about "fundamental new things"? You can consider it as totally new system or end game in wow.

e.g.:
- TBC introduced arena, which brings a totally new aspect to the game.
- Cata introduced LFR. No matter how many people loves it or hate it, it is a new way and choice to let more playerbase to see the raids.
- Legion introduced M+, it is a brand new end game form today that a lot of PvE players enjoys.
- Legion also introduced the max level progression system and borrowed power system (aka. artifact and AP)

BFA is essentially Legion 2.0:
- It kept the borrowed power system. azerite armor = artifact weapon, azerite power = artifact power, essence = relics
- No new end game form, M+ is still exactly the same as BFA

SL is just another BFA 2.0 or Legion 3.0:
- Same borrowed power system. covenant abilities = azerite traits, renown = AP, soulbinds/conduits = essences. It is the same max level progression system since Legion. Although WF/TF, corruptions were removed, the borrowed power systems are the same. It will only last 1 expansion and will be a nightmare to balance, just like in BFA.
- No new end game form, M+ is still exactly the same as BFA or Legion.

What is new about SL:
- Covenant. I like covenant idea in a MMORPG. It is good flavor and lore in wow, and I praise Blizzard to try this new thing. But I don't consider it as a new end game form. It is just another max level progression system in a different name.
- Torghast. It is a new thing in SL, but it is too early to say it can be qualified as a totally new type of end game. And it is not impressive so far. Its potential needs to be checked.

In summary, SL largely keeps the same systems we had since Legion just under different names. And the end game content remains essentially the same.

The content itself is not worse than Legion or BFA, but in today's fast changing gaming industry, it is hard to keep playerbase interested with the same thing in 3 expansions.