The game has become "how can I do the things I need to do as fast as possible"

[Aucald]

I've found this sense of the game has diminished greatly since I choose to stop raiding competitively on my own realm - moving from a competitive end-game playstyle to a far more casual one. I still do some M+ and light raiding with my friends in my guild, as well as end-game content in the overworld (e.g. Horrific Visions and the upcoming Torghast) - but all of it on a casual basis, without dipping into Mythic raids and so forth. Since semi-retirement I've found WoW has become a lot more enjoyable in the general sense, and there was a definite sense that *everything* I did back in my raiding days was focused on raiding, from playing non-raid content solely to accrue crafting materials for flasks, feasts, and such to doing lower raid difficulties like LFR just to get an edge on whatever current content my guild was in.

Can't say this is true for everyone, but I've found myself doing a lot of unorganized exploration and sometimes just seeing the sights in WoW now that I actually have time to do that. Raiding rendered WoW into more or less a chore for me, with the raiding itself the only highlight (and that when it actually was a highlight and we weren't simply stuck on a boss for hours). Sure, I no longer have the best gear possible in the game; but even without that I'd say my overall fun quotient is much higher. I can also more easily put the game down when something else comes out that consumes my attention (like BotW on the Switch), and then pick it back up without the strong sense of FOMO.

[rhorle]

That was almost 15 years ago, and they moved away from that to better systems for a few expansions thankfully, up until now.

Not really. Time gates "borrowed power" etc have always existed in WoW. They have just changed forms over the years. Remember the game had 6 talent rows for 4 years. And 7 talent rows for 6 years. And the contents of talents have changed almost every expansion in some form even prior to the system we have now. It just wasn't a big deal or the "buzzword" of the time.

[Starscream101]

"exploration and immersion"

That part is dead the moment you are finished with leveling. And completly obliterated the moment you can fly.

Exploration was only really there in classic. No one knew what to do and took months to get to max level.

Immersion is highly!! depended on who you are asking. I was never immersed in wow. Because you have zero influence on the world. YOu have a predestined path and it has always been that way.

Eso and Swtor had more immersion ebcuas ethe whole campaign was just for you and no one else.
Immersion and MMO mechanic are contradictory most of the time.

Also you can the stuff just once and be done with it... who forces you to do anything more than that?
I like having stuff to do in an MMo i pay 14 €a month. It would not be worth the money if i would be done with everything by logging in once a week for 2 hours.
And most of this is fun for many people. I like dailys. I like raiding and dungeons (highly repetetive, even more than dailies)

TLDR: This is highly subjective and what you describe hasn't been wow since BC

I do more exploration and immersion with flying when im on my ground mount i just want to get the quest done as fast as can and leave when im on my flying mount i see that cave well lets go see what it is or never been over here because didnt want to deal with the bs mobs at the time. i go do more of that with flying than without.

[arandomuser]

i think one of the th ings about old wow too i dont see mentioned alot, except i think morhame did in his latest interview it was basically social media befora facebook and twitter and instagram you could log on and always talk to and interact with people you played with, now mainstream social media has basically tooken away that niche

[cparle87]

That's essentially the problem with current WoW.

It has gone from exploration and immersion in a huge fantasy RPG world to "I have this list of tasks, how can I get them done as fast and as efficiently as possible".

If WoW ever wants to be great again, it needs to move away from tasks and chores, away from daily and weekly things to do and rerunning the same content over and over again, and towards creating more unique content that is supposed to be done once for the mere fun of it.

That's not the game, that's human nature.

As for the "stuff once and never again" that would leave us with WoD's raid or die.

[Gestopft]

That's essentially the problem with current WoW.

It has gone from exploration and immersion in a huge fantasy RPG world to "I have this list of tasks, how can I get them done as fast and as efficiently as possible".

1) This is an issue with the community more so than the game
2) It has basically always been this. The fundamental nature hasn't changed since...Wrath at least. Maybe before but I don't really remember endgame BC

- - - Updated - - -

As for the "stuff once and never again" that would leave us with WoD's raid or die.

This here. We saw an expansion that had little reason to log in at max level.

[Jastall]

With the current game? Classic is exactly what you want and its players have blasted through the content at light speed, with the only "challenge" being farming consumables then raidlogging for their speedruns of super easy raids.

We're not in 2004. A time machine, or an entirely new MMO, is the only way to have the community take it slow. Nobody is immersed after playing this game for up to 15 freaking years.

[McNeil]

Its more of a player problem. The game is very old and it mostly recycles the same formula for every expansion, and people are able to use the PTR to find all possible paths to maximise their characters progression before the expansion is even out. I'd actually love to play an expansion without a PTR so nothing gets spoiled..... but we don't want a bugged game either. I doubt that Blizzard is interested to hire a bunch of people to test for them instead.

I've seen this being the meta in a lot of games though. It has also carried over to Classic where guilds wants everyone to have all the world buffs and just clear a bunch of raids on the same night. Its not something I want to participate in personally.

[Jujudrood]

Reminds me of the "always has been" meme...

But anywho, yeah, the game was exploration and wonder when MMOs were still fairly new to the general masses.
Being on the internet, playing a video game with a bunch of people from all over, in this world of undiscovered wonder? Yeah!

Fast forward 16 years, and now it's a "been there, done that" type of thing.
It's not new, there's very little wonder left in the world, and with every secret being exposed online and in discord in record times, there's no exploration to be had.
Want something? Look it up, go there, do the thing.

But in reality, the "hardcorde" players have always been on the fast track to the quickest way to achieve something since Vanilla.
Now, it's just spread to the casuals because they, too, have done a lot and find it easier to just follow the arrow to the target and be done with the quest.

[rhorle]

I kinda forgot about those dailies on Sunwell Isle, but as you said, the mechanics were different compared to what came later. And that was my point.

The mechanics of dailies didn't change. Just how many you could complete in one day. It was just an evolution of the system but the content and stuff didn't change at all. World quests was the big change to how daily quests worked.

[Ragnarohk]

They should add more role-playing tools, story based character cutomization, custom quests/events/maps, evolving world content, housing. Currently I wouldn't call this an MMORPG. Now it's more like an action game.

[loras]

They should add more role-playing tools, story based character cutomization, custom quests/events/maps, evolving world content, housing. Currently I wouldn't call this an MMORPG. Now it's more like an action game.

Frankly it's a shame they fail to utilise their fan following, imagine the sheer volume of content the player base could create.
Sure it'd require moderation, both by the fans themselves and Blizzard, but the trade-off might certainly be worth it.

[crusadernero]

Sure, in many ways the game is much more focused on min/maxing and the whole "do everything quickly as possible" idea.

BUT - You dont need to be one of them. You can perfectly fine play wow and clear most content at your own pace. We get access to every questing zone, quests, dungeons, raids++++ no matter how you decide to play or how much effort you put into min/maxing your character.

With all the added difficulty to most relevant content(dungeons/raids), its mostly up to each player how they want to approach it. Only doing LFR? Thats cool, and you dont need to bother with a whole lot to clear it. Doing Mythic? Well, thats a different story. At that point its sort of required to make sure you are as ready can be for raids.


The question you gotta ask yourself is: Does the game suffer from to much attention on the min/maxing focus? Have Blizzard been drawn into this neverending battle with the part of the community that constantly demands changes, balance+++ that for the most part only concern those on the higher end in the game? Like those doing mythic raiding and high m+ keys.

[arkanon]

The correct title should read "much of the community now have a mindset of "how can i do the things i need to as fast as possible."

[Doffen]

I've found this sense of the game has diminished greatly since I choose to stop raiding competitively on my own realm - moving from a competitive end-game playstyle to a far more casual one. I still do some M+ and light raiding with my friends in my guild, as well as end-game content in the overworld (e.g. Horrific Visions and the upcoming Torghast) - but all of it on a casual basis, without dipping into Mythic raids and so forth. Since semi-retirement I've found WoW has become a lot more enjoyable in the general sense, and there was a definite sense that *everything* I did back in my raiding days was focused on raiding, from playing non-raid content solely to accrue crafting materials for flasks, feasts, and such to doing lower raid difficulties like LFR just to get an edge on whatever current content my guild was in.

Can't say this is true for everyone, but I've found myself doing a lot of unorganized exploration and sometimes just seeing the sights in WoW now that I actually have time to do that. Raiding rendered WoW into more or less a chore for me, with the raiding itself the only highlight (and that when it actually was a highlight and we weren't simply stuck on a boss for hours). Sure, I no longer have the best gear possible in the game; but even without that I'd say my overall fun quotient is much higher. I can also more easily put the game down when something else comes out that consumes my attention (like BotW on the Switch), and then pick it back up without the strong sense of FOMO.

It's exactly how I feel too. Saying that, raiding back in the day(TBC for me) I had lots of fun, maybe the most fun I've had in the game, but looking back at TBC, WotLK and some extent Cataclysm, I am today a much more relaxed player, in the sense I do what's fun in the game, and that's just not only raiding, but playing the game as an allround experience. Everything isn't about raiding anymore, which is something I find as a good thing for me personally.

I barely had any alts before WoD as an example, vanilla I had 1 char, TBC 2, WotLK 4 and Cata all the way to WoD I had 5. All of them, no matter how many characters I had they had one purpose: raiding. From WoD that changed for me. Last 5 years I have enjoyed seeing how all the classes work, I got to do all the content we had in for instance Legion which were very diverse. If that was back in the day I would not get that experience. I am still a hardcore player if you like, but what I do in game is different than it used to be.

[ohwell]

That's essentially the problem with current WoW.

It has gone from exploration and immersion in a huge fantasy RPG world to "I have this list of tasks, how can I get them done as fast and as efficiently as possible".

If WoW ever wants to be great again, it needs to move away from tasks and chores, away from daily and weekly things to do and rerunning the same content over and over again, and towards creating more unique content that is supposed to be done once for the mere fun of it.

Add ons and information exchange are the main cause of all of WoW's problems. The second can't be stopped, but so much of what people cry is broken when a patch lands are things that nearly play the game for them.

[Th3Scourge]

It's because they put mandatory grinds in the game that you MUST do for your character to be able to do any content. It's purely for MAUs, because no one likes having to do world quests and dailies to grind a currency, to run through more instanced content to get an upgrade, to allow your character to be viable in the 3 main forms of content (Raid, Mythic +, PVP)

Besides grinding/buying materials for consumables, I don't remember having to do this fucking garbage content in BC-Wrath-Cata. You just levelled your character, and geared it up by getting a carry, or buying some crafted gear and you were good to go in all end-game forms of content.

[Eurhetemec]

That's essentially the problem with current WoW.

It has gone from exploration and immersion in a huge fantasy RPG world to "I have this list of tasks, how can I get them done as fast and as efficiently as possible".

Nah, you've gone from exploring and being immersed to listing tasks and trying to get them done ASAP. Not the game.

How do I know this? Because that happened to me in Vanilla.

WoW wasn't my first real MMORPG, unlike most players, EQ was, then DAoC, and sometime late in DAoC, not long before WoW came out, I stopped playing for exploration and immersion as much and became more about getting things done. WoW reset that a bit as I was leveling and so on, but once I got to 60 (which took a while!), it crept back in. And this was in Vanilla - even back then I was mostly working out lists of things I had to do and stuff I needed to get. Hell, I've got lists on my Google Drive from back in WotLK (I think it took them from my email attachments), I was looking at one a few months ago.

So yeah, this isn't new. This didn't happen in WoD, or Legion, or BfA. This is how people who play MMOs for a long time typically come to approach them.

Even they took out all the "tasks and chores", you'd either:

A) Make up tasks and chores for yourself, and declare them tasks and chores.

or

B) Complain about the lack of content.

Also, if you don't want to "re-run the same content", where do you think all the new content is going to come from? They going to make the team 4x bigger or something so they can perpetually churn out the "run once" content you asked for? No MMO has ever, or could ever, do that.

I also know that if you decide to play in a more casual way, go back to just doing what sounds cool, instead of what makes sense, or what advances you most, you can get that old mindset back, and suddenly the game is more immersive again. It works, I've done it. But as long as you keep trying to make sure you've upgraded to the maximum degree, and following lists of things you "need" to do and so on, the game will seem that way.

If WoW ever wants to be great again, it needs to move away from tasks and chores, away from daily and weekly things to do and rerunning the same content over and over again, and towards creating more unique content that is supposed to be done once for the mere fun of it.

There's no doubt WoW could do more to support immersion, exploration, and so on, but every single person who says "WoW changed, I didn't!" is deluding themselves. WoW changed a bit - you changed more. If you go back and play Classic, this will be really obvious to you. It won't feel the same as it did (assuming you played it the first time around). It will feel much more like hard work, and at max level, it will feel much more like a list of tasks and chores. They will be different tasks and chores, maybe a bit more fluid/freer, sure, but it'll still be tasks and chores.

You want to get away from that? You need to change your mindset. You don't change your mindset, you'll be stuck with this approach forever.

- - - Updated - - -

Besides grinding/buying materials for consumables, I don't remember having to do this fucking garbage content in BC-Wrath-Cata. You just levelled your character, and geared it up by getting a carry, or buying some crafted gear and you were good to go in all end-game forms of content.

You did do this in BC-Wrath-Cata. The fact that you don't remember it says a lot about how you thought about the game back then, and nothing about the actual content.

Those expansions were absolutely full of "mandatory grinds". Particularly bloody BC, which had actual key'ing and so on, and a load of rep grinds.

Cataclysm is a particularly forgetful/deluded one to claim wasn't like this. It had horrific basically-mandatory dailies. Easily the least-pleasant dailies with the most annoying daily system that WoW has ever had, which is saying something. The idea that you could just "get a carry" (wtf?! in BC or WotLK? You weren't there if you think that's true) or "buying some crafted gear" is just ludicrous. I mean buy crafted gear with what money? Did you do RMT? If not you had to grind like hell to get the money to get even half-okay crafted gear. And it wasn't "good enough for any endgame content", that's completely nonsensical.

- - - Updated - - -

Add ons and information exchange are the main cause of all of WoW's problems. The second can't be stopped, but so much of what people cry is broken when a patch lands are things that nearly play the game for them.

Yet compared to Vanilla, what add-ons can do now is absolutely tiny.

So this doesn't make sense in the context of this argument. Add-ons have got steadily less powerful over WoW's history. Blizzard have limited them time and time again. Back in Vanilla, they actually could pretty much "play the game for you" (automatic decursing for example). But what they can do now is about 20% of what they once could. Yet the complaint is being made now, not about Vanilla when the problem was worse.

You're being like one of those people who says "Well back in the 1970s we could just leave our door unlocked!", when in reality, all crime, and particularly violent crime, was vastly higher back then.

Information exchange is more of an issue - but it's FOMO and being told there's only one way to do things and so on that's the major issue there now. Back in Vanilla, if you wanted to do a dungeon, you pretty much had to work it out, even with mods to tell you what the boss was doing, automatic decursing, and so on. You could read some guides and stuff, but video guides were rare, and people had a lot of different ideas about what worked.

Now? If you go into a normal, non-heroic dungeon, and don't immediately start following some precisely pre-described route from a video, there's about a 50% chance people will try to kick you or similar. God help you if it's heroic or m+ and you don't follow some exact video-suggested route.

So yeah, information exchange makes it worse, but people's attitudes do too. The elitism, the one-true-way-ism, the refusal to let people explore or work stuff out because it might waste 90 seconds of someone's time and so on are much more an issue than just the information exchange alone. Does help with all the mindless cultists following various YouTube shitlords and so on. Mods are way less an issue now than they were back then.

[InfiniteCharger]

The mechanics of dailies didn't change. Just how many you could complete in one day. It was just an evolution of the system but the content and stuff didn't change at all. World quests was the big change to how daily quests worked.

I am talking about the mechanics involving the phases of unlocking various parts of the Island based on how many people on a server completed the quests. That server specific kind of phasing does not exist anymore. It was one Island and those dailies weren't the sole or best way to gain rep. So, they were easily ignored. Those quests themselves didn't reward much while the reps were for recipes, gear, mounts and other rewards that were not a major factor in progression. The distinction between TBC and Pandaria is that they became much more of a focus for endgame with 3 max level zones with dailies: Timeless Isle, Isle of Thunder and The Isle of Giants. The Isle of Quel'Danas was simply the prototype. Prior to that most dailies were limited to things like mounts.

Other than that I agree a quests are quests and there isn't really anything new about that formula.

[Kithelle]

It's true to some extent, but dailies were still quite alright because in TBC and Wrath, Cataclysm even, I never felt pressured to do them. That started in MoP.

I see you ignored my last post because it was detrimental to your argument...this isn't a modern wow problem, it's a modern player problem...same rushing takes place in Classic as it does Live. People want everything done as quick as possible (And ironically complain when there is nothing to do after they rushed it)