WoW's gameplay loop is entirely designed around novelty and reset patches

[Dracullus]

Ah armchair devs threads, don't you love them. Sure people, design present in 12+ yers in 16 year old game is completely broken ;D. And of course having to grind Castle Nathria when someone return in 9.1 would be incredible experience, just like geting gear now feels A-M-A-Z-I-N-G compared to Legion/BfA (dark ages of titanforging).

[msdos]

The "gameplay loop" only works if you pull the wool over your eyes and roll FOTM before the expansion starts and just be satisfied that Blizzard chose this class to be strong this patch and just ignore all the other bad design in the game. "I'm having fun on my broken fotm, topping meters and 1 shotting people, screw everyone else, OP classes is why i play this game"

Otherwise, you essentially end up bottom of logs for playing what you want to play, then the rest of the game is cheesing everything with carries and raid stacking. Then if you actually value your time, you can't even play the game because the game takes a dump on your time, it wants you to fly through 5 gates before you can get anywhere and fly in circles and not be able to mount and no flight whistles, etc etc, it's insulting.

Playing this game now just feels insulting.
Zoomers calling you noob even though you played since you're 15 years old, you do an achievement then it's erased the next expansion, no one will invite you if you choose incorrectly, there's barely any choice to make since the talent trees are filled with noob traps and stuff that decreases your damage. Your gear is all replaced instantly, your utility is spread across 55 varying degrees of conduits and legendaries, your class is spliced out into varying degrees of systems that are gated from you, all the activity and economy of the game was just destroyed and replaced with world quests. The open world serves no purpose anymore other than to house raids and dungeons. Torghast takes forever and basically gives nothing, crapping on your time. Maw = crap on your time. M+ outside of doing a few with IRL friends = crap on your time. Arena without friends = crap on your time. (playing competitively for gear that just disappears, nice)

Maybe if you never played WoW before you'll like all this new crap, but it's pretty bad, it's just throw away content with zero permanence to it, like cutting board content. It's designed to be flipped, cleaned and some other crap chopped on it really quick.

Another thing that bothers me lately is how you're not allowed to complain about your terrible class anymore. At launch I was FDK and I kept complaining about how hard everything was and how low my damage was, people told me everything under the planet except for "yeah, DKs are bad right now" then they got buffed 3 times after that.
The people who play this game don't care if other people struggle, they expect everyone to not hold any value on their time and just reroll and play the game extra for 500 more extra, unplanned hours.

[cparle87]

Not at all. And it gets me wondering.

For some reason Blizzard has this hard on to keep us in game as long as possible. Why? It doesn't matter if I spend 1 hour a day in game, or 5 hours to get the chores done. I still pay for the sub that's based on calendar months, not time spent in game.

How come Wotlk's model worked? There wasn't that MUCH to do. But the things that were there to do kept us engaged enough to renew our subs.

IDK. The current game design isnt very appealing to me. Like, most of the time I feel just relief after a daily chores grind. Which of course isnt required per se, but oh well... I'm that kind of player that would like to collect all the advantages.

Because they're terrified of another raidlog expansion like people claimed WoD was. It wasn't. There was a ton to do outside raid but people chose not to do it then lied and said there was nothing.

[Zorachus]

What's Blizzard's sick form of torture of being so anti getting around the game world quickly?

- Shadowlands flight paths are the worst, always needing to fly to Oribos to get to another SL zone. Really Blizz, you think that's fun and cool?

- No flight whistle? And why is that?

- Most classes have some form of quick fast walking or floating or whatnot on a cool down. But it's a sick joke, like DK's get Wraith Walk move fast for what several seconds, then wait on the long cool down. It's like Blizzard lives to tease us, ok you can move quickly, but only for a very short time, then back to crawling slow movement.

- The Maw. Who at Blizz thought a whole zone with virtually no mounting wouid be fun? Yeah you can grab that one mount in there, but still. It's basically no riding in The Maw just slow walking. How is that fun?

- Legacy old content, let us frigging mount up in old Raids abd Dungeons, or at least make the cool downs much shorter or last longer for our classes Wraith Walk type spells.

[NordWitcher]

People were sat in cities with nothing to do between resets. Weekly badge farm and raiding was the PVE endgame.

They simply went the other way and made the maintenance game too much, or so I thought... Positive reports on player engagement throughout BfA makes it seem as if people like what the game has become overall. Jury's out on what it'll look like for SL though.

I miss Pandaria. It had a nice balance between varied endgame and raid-logging.

Yeah Pandaria was fun. They created a gimmick that was not really tied to character progression. That is what anything new needs to be. When you tie in all these new features and game systems to player power, your player base is just going to get burned out a lot quicker. There are people in my guild that just don't even bother with the Maw and Torghast. They got their 190 ilevel Legendary and stopped running it. Similarly with the Maw. The dailies in there are pointless unless you want to get some of the cosmetic rewards or need to unlock rank 2 armor for professions.

[slender]

Would prefer to see the dev's work on systems that they don't throw away at the end of each expansion or patch, but rotating new stuff in does keep the game fresh.

[Seranthor]

You don't need to be a chef to critique food.

A 'critique' is at best someone's opinion. Dont like the food somewhere, you dont go back. You dont stand outside the restaurant telling everyone going in that you can do a better job than the chef inside.

[Tojara]

The games been like this since WoTLK and to a lesser part, even TBC.

It's largely a myth that TBC didn't have hard 'resets' between patches either, although it and some other expansions did have slight elements to going back to previous tiers to do content. On my server, and other servers where I had friends playing during TBC, not a single one of them went back and did T5 once T6 was fully available. When Sunwell came out I distinctly remember dropping Hyjal completely, and only farming continually farming Black Temple. Some of the primary reasons why people would still farm Black Temple however was because Sunwell was hard, Illidan still dropped great loot, and Sunwell was a gated raid where the entire thing took like what, 6-8 weeks to fully open?

So I mean, yes, but no? T5 was forgotten when T6 came out, and half of T6 was forgotten when Sunwell came out. If Sunwell had far more bosses and a different difficulty curve without any gating, it's incredibly likely that Black Temple would've been forgotten as well.

But what about Gruul's Lair and Karazhan? Gruul's Lair was done the entire expansion for a single item, and is basically an exception to the rule. I'm going to guess most people didn't mind doing a dungeon with several trash pulls and two bosses for a BiS physical DPS trinket though. Karazhan is unique simply because it was the most efficient place to acquire badges. Badges served a purpose in TBC but realistically speaking, it had one batch of gear when TBC launched, and the second batch of gear during the Sunwell patch. Sure the Sunwel badge gear had BT/Hyjal iLvLs, but it was only a few slots per armor type that you could acquire.

Finally, another thing that propelled the 'reset' loop of WoW was arena as a whole. Aside from a single expansion where PvP gear didn't really matter at all (this is the exception, not the rule), PvP gear "typically" ran parallel with PvE tiers. Each PvP tier would release a new batch of increased iLvL gear, and thus, WoW moved more towards a seasonal approach and 'reset' loop of gameplay as early as TBC.

It doesn't happen anymore (or rarely at least), but the reason to go back and do old raid tiers was almost always tied to legendary items and quirky trinkets. Hell, one of the primary reasons you went back to do old content in Vanilla was because of how few items dropped, and how bad they were at actually creating good items. You might see 6 belts in total for your class from MC/BWL/AQ, with 5 of them being complete shit and the only good one dropping in fucking Molten Core.

In reality the game has had this loop since TBC. Sure there were instances where you might go back and farm old content, but it was pretty rare and not the norm. The design these days is for raids to be obsoleted while dungeons keep their relevance throughout the entire expansion. Prior to MoP challenge modes, dungeons ranged from just being a raid gearing device or daily/weekly currency to buy items off a vendor (which were well below current raid tiers iLvL, and only hit a few gear slots). Personally I think keeping dungeons relevant throughout an entire expansion was one of the best moves they've ever done.