Blizzard should swallow their pride to save WoW

[Deleted]

So you want them to make every single casual player quit, because that would be the result of most of the things you've suggested. You want them to revert most of their QoL changes.

Look at the front page. 'Less engagement from casual players'. Not saying the Op's ideas would work.. but what theyre doing now certainly isn't satisfying people.

[Mirishka]

I agree that WoW needs less... convenience and more immersion, but many of the solutions proposed by the OP wouldn't help things at all. The way you would like the game =/= the way other people would like it.

Get rid of flight mounts? Hell no. If you don't like them, you don't have to use them. Don't try and shove your feelings about it down 8+ million other players' throats.

Removing guards would just lead to even more idiot level 90s griefing low level players, as they do already as it is, by killing off lowbie quest givers, flight path NPCs, etc etc. One day on my alt, I had to wait for nearly an hour to complete a quest because of a goblin rogue killing NPCs over and over and over in HFP. I eventually switched to my hunter and killed him repeatedly until he finally left - wasting my time in the process. So yeah, this would be stupid. There's no 'immersion' in ganking an NPC 30-50+ levels lower than you are. Its simply a way to fuck with players too low level to do anything about it.

I also like zoning into dungeons the 'old' way, but the convenience of queuing is something that many people enjoy and so, I'm not about to say 'HEY REMOVE IT SO ITS THE WAY I LIKE' because I don't speak for everyone.

Oh and about Blizz swallowing their pride? They do all the time. They've admitted a great many mistakes this expansion... dailies, gated reps, extremely powerful spells like Stampede (people have likely already forgotten how obscenely OP Stampede was at launch) and limited means to get things like lesser charms and JP. So yeah, Blizz is quite forward when it comes to admitting mistakes.

Mists is one of the strongest expansions in WoW's history, and while it's had its share of missteps, I for one appreciate the attempts to fix/improve them.

Oh and as a final point... WoW doesn't need 'saving'. The game is profitable at 1 million subs, let alone 8. So, even if they lose a million players a year, they will still be making money off the game until 2020. It isn't dying.

MMOs in general are in a slump... pretty sure games like TOR and Conan (and Tera, and Rift, and Aion) would murder baby animals to have 8 million subs. Hell, the 5 of those games put together probably don't have 8 million players.

[Nobleshield]

I could see them maybe adding ONE Vanilla or TBC server, but that's it. I know they won't, but it'd be an interesting experiment just to see how many people go there and stay there after a few months when they've done everything (perhaps again) and have no expansion to look forward to. That's what a lot of these "They need Vanilla servers" arguments fail to even consider: It'd be cool at first, but what about when you have Naxx40 on farm and are decked out in T3 and have your High Warlord or whatever it was PVP title? Then what do you do? ALso, a lot of people play on private servers just because it's usually free, and they don't want to pay Blizzard. You get the occasional person like the OP that loved Vanilla/TBC and hated everything past, but a lot of them just don't want to pay. I honestly think that Blizzard should just partner with a private server company (one of the bigger ones that actually does things fairly well) and say "Hey we sanction this if you pay us X" so it's not against the TOS anymore, even charge a fee and pay royalties to Blizzard. Best of both worlds: Blizzard doesn't have to do anything, the private server company is no longer illegal as Blizzard is letting them operate, and people like the OP can go play TBC again.

I would like a Wrath-era server but the problem is it would be the crappy badgefest Wrath; I would love to play on a Wrath-only server if you actually had to progress through Naxx, Ulduar, then ToC (yuck) and ICC but it would be the 3.3-era Wrath where you hit 80, farm badges, go to ICC. Screw that.

[Deleted]

I dont see how any of that would fix wow.

[Banzhe]

Why do all of these posts follow the same generic formula?

1) Mention that you played X years ago where X was during Vanilla/TBC
2) Mention how much better the game was back then, and how something is "missing" now
3) Bring up one or more of the following as the reason for the decline:
3a) LFD/LFR
3b) Lack of very difficult and time-consuming dungeons a la TBC heroics
3c) Flying mounts
3d) World PVP/Having to risk being ganked to do anything

It seems to be a common formula that ignores how the game must evolve. If you played the game 6 years ago, 6 years is a very long time and a lot of things change. That's enough time to finish a bachelor's degree and get a job. It's enough time to have a child and have said child start going to school. It's time to get married, buy a house, and settle down. The game lost its immersion long ago, and very few MMOs actually care about immersion beyond the basics; if you want immersion go play tabletop D&D because at its core an MMO is basically just a hack & slash game where all that matters is if there are monsters in the next room and what treasure they have.

At least you got the points right, everything after is just pure ignorance to put it softly.., especially the bolded part!

Most have completely accepted that there's no reasoning with children / Cata players of today, so all that's really left to say is, have fun with the ever shrinking and even less enjoyable Warcraft

[Deleted]

£108 is too much? It's half a day of working. rofl.

If you're a congressman or CEO of a mid-range company, sure. Not everyone is, though.

There is no correct answer to whether or not WoW is too big of an economical investment. It varies on loads of factor for every single player. But acting as if €5,1k after taxes is a normal everyman salary anywhere is pretty darn ignorant.

[Theendgamelv3]

The game was total sandbox, no one had any idea what would happen during your daily play time. Our guild would have a plan to maybe go to BRD but on the way we may be ganked by another guild, again this would start a war off which usually ended with both sides calling in other guilds for help. Then when you eventually got into the Dungeon you had to concentrate, use your class well and be prepared for at least a good hour long Dungeon.

They tried harder dungeons in Cata and people and people left.

Then we had the questing, quite often I would find my quest areas compromised by Alliance and have to send for help in order to get them to leave, it was great fun. Sure you sometimes were corpse camped but Azeroth was dangerous back then.

Azeroth is dangerous again due to CRZs.

Now though it's totally different, the Cities are full but the towns and roads are empty. People don't need to leave their capital city, they can teleport everywhere like lemmings, striving to get gear but for what? So they can dual outside their City gates?

So I can do Isle of Thunder Dailies in my capital city? I can stay in the city while raiding ToT with my guild? People strive for gear to do better in raids. I don't know about you, but in order to get transmog gear, farm mats, do dailies and do raids with my guild, I have to leave Org. If I wanted to capture pets, I have to leave the city as well. There is stuff to do outside of sitting in queue for a LFR or LFD queue to pop.

All over Azeroth the little towns and villages that attracted so much world PvP are now guarded with level 90 Guards. Instead we have to PvP either in the boring battlegrounds or try and find someone questing.

PvP servers with their lower lvl guards say hi.

World PvP is the thing that brought immersion and it was immersion that brought the players and the players brought the money. If you look at a graph of the subscribers you will see a steady rise in Subs while wow was immersive during the Vanilla and BC times but then as WOTL arrived you will see it level off and then fall and it's falling fast now. This is because people left but more important, people left and told others how bad the game had become.

Again CRZs do bring players together. If they don't pvp, guess what, it is on the players. World pvp was ALWAYS about the players and there is still world pvp and a lot of it happens on the Isle of Thunder.

Remove the following things:

All ability to teleport to Dungeons, Make everyone ride there.

I think this is fine if it was LFD. You get a queue it pops and all the players then fly to their dungeon.

Remove Flying mounts from Azeroth

Too many people will complain, it is done and it can't go back to non-flying.

Remove all high level guards from low level towns and villages

PVP servers already do this.

Buff Dungeons so that you actually need to play your class properly

They did this in Cata and people left. Making them easy makes people leave, making them hard makes people leave, just maybe this game is just getting old.

Remove at least 50% of wind riders and graveyards, get the traffic back on the roads

How does removing a lot of graveyards get traffic back on the roads? Also Blizzard made it so again you have to find FPs. So anyone leveling up, there will be traffic cause they have to find the FPs.

Remove Ability to teleport into Battlegrounds, make us go to battlemasters as in the old days (just make more of them to avoid griefers).

Again like dungeons, I like this.

Remove a lot of phasing as it ruins immersion when you chase someone and they suddenly vanish.

However one can argue removing the phasing also can ruin immersion. I mean what is more immersive, killing 5 boars, or doing a quest that in the end effects the area you are in? They are doing a better job with phasing especially with MoP areas.

All future expansions should take place in Azeroth, do not add any more zones, just develop the story on Azeroth so it thrives once again.

No, this game and a lot of other MMORPGs add areas to their world especially with expansions. If there is one guarantee outside of new bosses and a high level cap to expect in a new expansion, it is new areas to explore. It is one of the things people love to look forward to.

Conclusion

Ofc none of this will happen as the tears that would be shed could possibly flood the world and wipe us all out. The new breed of player has no balls, has no ability to shake him/herself down after being ganked and certainly has no patience to ride from A to B. Can you imagine the wow players of today trying to survive in Vanilla, they would have a heart attack at how hardcore it used to be. No I am afraid MMO's now are so easy, so spoon fed that the players today simply could not cope with old wow.

Getting ganked has been happening since MoP came out. There has been more world pvp since MoP due to CRZs and the daily areas being shared by both sides. I have been ganked by Horde on numerous occasions while doing dailies. If no one has no patience to ride from point a to point, then no one would level up at all. You still can't fly til level 60.

From a business point of view Blizzard are currently their own worst enemy, they are killing the game by making it so easy and forgiving. If they opened a BC server millions would return, but this would be an admission of doing it wrong and the PR department won't allow that

What do you mean by easy, there is still challenge in this game. It is up to the players to meet that challenge. There is a reason why there are heroic modes and challange mode dungeons and now they are adding heroic scenarios. There is a difference between easy and saying "I don't want to fight the bosses again on a harder mode." (this is a legitimate complaint). There is a difference between convenience and difficulty. WoW has IMO been always been forgiving. There is no death penalty. Maybe I should ask what do you mean by forgiving? If they did BC servers (btw which is a expansion that isn't on Azeroth), millions won't return. Would people return, sure, I think they would actually get a influx cause of nostalgia. Once people get over that, a lot of them will leave IMO.

[Milkyz]

If you are so sure you know how to design a game, write a draft and present it to any game company. I'm sure they will be overwhelmed by your ability, hire you and put you as Main Game Designer, maybe even name the game after you. Or you could even try kickstarter website. I'm sure will you be millionaire in two and a half months. Three at most.

[Armourboy]

I've been playing since Vanilla, I like the convenience they added, and frankly if they walked in and took it out I would move on to something else. I went through that same line of reasoning with SWTOR and you know what it helped? Nothing. All it did was help lead to the demise of the game and force them to put things like LFD in.

[Deleted]

Why doesn't Blizzard release a Vanilla server/TBC server/Progression server as an experiment, like a PTR? Couldn't hurt to give it a try.

Yes it would mean allocating some server hardware, some developers and some moderation staff, but its not like Blizzard are strapped for cash, and one test server wouldn't be that dear to run.

[Herecius]

Thinking on it even further, something really baffles me and makes me wonder:

Shouldn't a shrinking playerbase be a good thing for WoW players? At the very least, the players who cry the loudest on the forums, play the longest, spend the most hours in game? Because a smaller playerbase means that a higher percentage of the players are hardcore players, not at all identifying themselves as casual players... which means content becomes more and more geared towards those players, because they comprise a greater majority of the playerbase.

Is that not true? What if WoW went down to say, 2-3 million (still quite a few subscribers for a sub-based MMO! In fact, it's MORE THAN ANY SUB BASED MMO STILL), and that an appreciable chunk of the remaining playerbase was pretty much the hardcore, those that had stuck with Warcraft for a long time, and so on and so forth... well, then content would begin to be aimed at them.

Then Titan trundles along and all of the players that aren't playing WoW anymore go towards that and suddenly all of the cash moneys for Blizzard. And then the players who are hardcore and playing WoW ALSO play that because they're hardcore and cash moneys for Blizzard.

[Raelbo]

Why do all of these posts follow the same generic formula?<snip>

The game lost its immersion long ago..that immersion is lost the first time you clear it and the story is finished<snip>

Very well said. I agree 110%

What Blizzard needs to do is realize that throwing mindless busywork quests and people that basically need to be done each day isn't fun, and nobody is fooled into thinking that it's "more content", it's just extra tedium so you feel the need to log in every day and by extension keep paying that sub. In an ideal MMO, there are several paths one can take at the end that all lead to the same thing; that means you'd have solo content, small group (i.e. 5-man) content, large group (i.e. raids), PVP, and the end goal is the same thing so you let the player decided HOW they'll get there, instead of making it so you MUST do X content to get Y, when not everyone likes X. Of course that won't work with a game like WoW that's raid-focused, and any other WoW clone that has everything revolving around raiding (and to a lesser extent, high-end PVP), but that's the unobtainable MMO utopia.

Isn't that pretty much what Isle of Thunder is all about? It has pvp dailies, pve dailies it has the 5 man weekly quest with enough unique encounters to keep people busy for weeks, it has solo scenarios, it has rare mobs, treasure chests a world boss and finally one of the best raids ever created. It even has a few zone specific battle pets

And the great thing is any of that stuff is strictly optional. If you don't like dailies you can valor cap in other ways.

[Deleted]

I stopped reading at the "i quit for 3 years , and this game i played for 6 years . " what ? the game isn't even 9 years old...so how is this possible? I smell the rest of the text is another "wow is dying thread caus i have no life what so ever " post..

[Mithfin]

Blah bla blah World PvP blah blah blah LFD blah blah blah World PvP blah World PvP blah blah World PvP.


Go away.

[Prancing Minstrel]

I stopped reading at the "i quit for 3 years , and this game i played for 6 years . " what ? the game isn't even 9 years old...so how is this possible? I smell the rest of the text is another "wow is dying thread caus i have no life what so ever " post..

Fairly sure it is 9 years old.


Oh look, someone using the sub drop to make out their pissy little grievances with the game are totally to blame for it all. Cause everyone really played the game to run to dungeons and have long corpse runs.

[Phookah]

These were all clearly great ideas, must have been why Blizzard removed them.
/sarcasm
No. Nostalgia is a bitch, but WoW is NEVER going to go back to that, thank god.

[Lylandra]

you have a point with the immersion. However, this immersion has nothing to do with PvP alone. I, for one, could be deeply immersed in a world where PvP was not possible and only consented (group)duelling was allowed. What I find lacking is the "realism" of the developing storyline. Since Cata, pop culture references really went over the top and WoW lost a good deal of its Azerothian spirit to me. It got slightly better in Pandaria, yet I'm not too fond of the continental theme since it is too much borrowed from RL china.

Alas, more (world) PvP will not save WoW. I'm a classic veteran as well and I do not miss the oldschool PvP. It was fun for some time, but I guess nowadays it would only annoy the hell out of me if my precious questgivers were ganked for another 2 hours. Not everyone wants to PvP or have PvP influence their gaming experience. Just imagine how frustrating it would be for PvPers (olden days) if there was a multiple zone-wide peace debuff for 1-2 hours every time a raid killed C'thun. Wouldn't be that much fun either.

I'd like to see more difficult 5 man instances or "challenge modes" that are not only challenges by time limits alone. I would not cut away the "normal" 5 mans either.
People do have less time nowadays as most of the core playerbase grew into adults and faced the responsibilities of an adult life. Younger people might be turned off by WoW's old engine and graphics and are generally more shooter oriented than before.

[Yogg-Saron, God of Death]

@!#% Your casual players, they are the reason we have lost the game we love,

IF YOU DONT HAVE TIME TO PLAY A GAME, DONT PLAY IT!!

Great post, 100% agreed.

No, you lost the game you love because you think your view of how a game should be is superior. Fun thing is, if I am to be blunt and offensive like you are, YOU and YOUR KIND are the unwelcome players. Deal with it, your time is over, and it's a good thing because nigh every last of you are toxic.


Old players always talk about the community and how it was more social, but those are also the people who get all fussy when someone disagrees, call them wrathbabies, tell them to stop playing and demand that the game bend around their will. Very social, that is. Hypocrites.

[DechCJC]

That, and make leveling take as long as it took in Vanilla - Sure, part of the reason for that may have been crappy quests with terrible drop rates; But it could still be made to take longer, you should at 'least' have to clear one zone without BoA, and on that note - Remove the bonus xp on BoA gear, make it just give flat-out stats (which I think also ruins the immersion because you never find any damn upgrades this way, but simply not using BoA is retarded; it's like winning the lottery but refusing to use the money because it wasn't hard-earned).

Why does Blizzard 'want' leveling to take barely any time though? Why does everyone have to get to the level cap within a week of joining the game, or even much less if you're an experienced player? End-Game content gets very old very fast and I think everyone realizes that eventually - Leveling is very boring to some but NO ONE can deny that leveling up for the first time in World of Warcraft is exactly why it was so successful to begin with. I mean sure, it was new to the market and it didn't exactly have any ground-breaking concepts, but it was just so immersing, nothing was easy to get, being a max level character really meant something back then now it's just like "gotta get to 90 asap so i can farm tier 57 and get 2400 rating on my new hunter". Didn't most people play WoW for FUN back in the day? What the FUCK is fun about getting to 90, spamming dailies, bgs, arenas and dungeons/raids? The fun part is the journey, and that doesn't exist anymore. Imo they're just trying too hard to please everyone, you can't do that - It doesn't work.

I'm probably just outgrowing this game and my opinions are heavily weighed down upon by nostalgia, but I'm bored and have nothing better to do so i'm gonna post this anyway.

[Blockygame]

Rose tinted memories rolled into self serving suggestions, not ever going to happen. What your feeling is nothing more than dissatisfaction from no longer getting what you want from a game that you claim to have played for 6 years, after playing something for so long it's only natural that you would loose the feeling of immersion and discover that what you have really been doing is painting by numbers, which to be honest, is the backbone for this game when you really think hard about it.