What kept you playing WoW in the past? What made it fun to play?

[Aesahaettr]

In still playing wow for the exact same reasons I played in the past.

I enjoy raiding. More specifically I enjoy raiding with my guild.

Everything else is just noise, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but ultimately whatever systems are in place doesn't make much difference to my enjoyment; as long as the raiding is okay I'll enjoy it.

Honestly can't say I've found anything in SL a particular grind or slog.

[Ashleyxoxo]

Friends played it, plus the PvP community was entertaining with drama and whatnot.

[deenman]

So you're fine with the bulk of the playerbase jumping ship and switching to a different game where they aren't treated as some sort of pest? Even if it means less money for Blizzard, less content being developed, empty servers etc?
Should they only design the game for the sub 1% and fuck everyone else? Instead of 12 million subs like in Wrath you'd be fine with something like 500k?

and if they sold gear on the shop for copper the game would see 20m+ players im sure,wouldnt make it a better game,a shit game with 12m isnt better than a good game wwith 500k,the game can survive with 10k players just fine

[Zka]

Enjoyable group PVE designed for normal people - long gone
Alt friendliness - not really there since Cata
Freedom of choice in schedule and game area - no longer exists since chores

[potis]

So you're fine with the bulk of the playerbase jumping ship and switching to a different game where they aren't treated as some sort of pest? Even if it means less money for Blizzard, less content being developed, empty servers etc?
Should they only design the game for the sub 1% and fuck everyone else? Instead of 12 million subs like in Wrath you'd be fine with something like 500k?

Devils advocate , but these last few months, ever since the complains started, whenever we need to pug someone, especially a DPS, there is still 20 people signing up instantly, but this time no matter how you pick, does not seem to be insanely terrible at the game.

Maybe its the new raider.io system, that before all the bads were just doing freebie weeks and now they cant skip Tyrannical so they are stuck at 1300 and they arent considered.

But for anyone actually noticing, the whiners might have left, but the quality of groups feels much higher.

[NineSpine]

1. It was very easy to put together a BiS list for the content I wanted to do, and chase that with the intent of having it in a reasonable amount of time. That doesn't exist anymore for anyone who isn't mythic raiding.

2. There was no pay to win option.

3. Content was not deprecated the minute the new patch came out.

4. There weren't as many chores. For example, if I wanted to focus on a specific rep or two, I was typically allowed to do that. Now, I have to do whatever chores Blizzard has chosen for me for the day or week.

5. If you didn't want to do raids or very difficult content, you didn't have to, and you still had a game to play. You could spend months gearing from regular old dungeons or plain battlegrounds. Now, that phase of gearing is over in literally a few days at most.

6. The classes had a lot of flavor and utility that mattered, giving them a more three dimensional role and filling the class fantasy better.

7. Demonology wasn't whatever the hell it is now.

8. We got new abilities every expansion.

9. You always felt like your character had an aspect of every spec in the class, and that your chosen spec was just a doubling-down on one aspect of the class. Now, every spec feels like a totally different class in most cases.

10. The game was more about the world than it was about the story. The story has always been bad, but it didn't used to feel like the centerpiece of the world design.

11. Daily Quest hubs felt like areas that were actually designed for players to have fun in. The quests were built to flow together and make sense, and it felt like you were spending some time in a specific part of the world, having a coherent experience. World Quests feel like random tasks strewn about a zone.

12. The dungeon design wasn't throttled by the need for every dungeon to neatly fit into the M+ system.

13. The developers tried to iterate and improve on core systems, rather than reinventing the wheel every expansion just to throw it out at the end.

- - - Updated - - -

Devils advocate , but these last few months, ever since the complains started, whenever we need to pug someone, especially a DPS, there is still 20 people signing up instantly, but this time no matter how you pick, does not seem to be insanely terrible at the game.

Maybe its the new raider.io system, that before all the bads were just doing freebie weeks and now they cant skip Tyrannical so they are stuck at 1300 and they arent considered.

But for anyone actually noticing, the whiners might have left, but the quality of groups feels much higher.

14. The game didn't make me play with people like potis.

[Eazy]

That you could be the best only with the items and skill - without any hard grind.

For example: wotlk you didn't need to farm AP for the abilities(bonuses from artifacts), you didn't have to farm some reputation for bonus sockets, you even didn't have to do some other content for the bis gear(random/crafted legendary), there were no heavily RNG drop system(compared to bonus sockets/corruptions/TF/WF/bonus stats).

[Sondrelk]

Well for me I was more engaged with the game before since it was new.
Every expansion I have played since the "beginning" (being MoP) I have done something completely new.

In MoP I knew nothing about the game, so everything was new. Old raids were new, old dungeons were new, old transmogs were new, all the classes were a unique experience.
After that I had to find new stuff to hold my interest. Running old raids to collect stuff, WoD I started with a mostly new guild and got into raiding. It was the first expansion I played in its entirety, so I had fun collecting all the things available.
In Legion I started running into issues, however the game had luckily just introduced the transmog collection tab, so instead of just running old raids I knew I wanted I could run all the old raids just for general collecting. So during Legion I mostly exhausted my supply of old raids to collect things in.
For BfA I decided to do the Loremaster achievement, and later did all the per battling dungeons.

Now come Shadowlands I have pretty much completed everything. And since I play regularly I have severely outpaced the flow of content, meaning that I often find myself with nothing I really feel all that interested in doing like before.


In short, the game hasn't really changed, I have simply done everything there is to do.
My passion for the game might be revitalises if I had taken a long break from the game and started from scratch, but even then you can only discover the game for the first time once. Not to mention most of my enjoyment from the game is be sure I have friends I like playing with, so taking a complete break isn't really possible if I want to stay properly in touch.

- - - Updated - - -

To compare to a different game entirely.
Recently I had a craving for Legend of Zelda, so I decided to delete my old save and restart Breath of the Wild from scratch.

I knew most everything in the game, but starting from scratch with something I had not played properly in at least a year was really fun, and I had more fun with that game then I could remember having with any other game I played this year.

However, at some point I had done everything I wanted. I had found and completed all the shrines. I had upgraded all the armor, done all the important sidequests, and for that matter done all of that with soft limitations.

At that point I stopped playing, not because the game was no longer great, but because I had done everything I wanted.
The game hasn't changed, but I do not feel the need to boot up the game and roam around Hyrule like I did that one week.

I think my feeling for WoW is mostly the same. There is new content fairly regularly, so it isn't like I am completely bored of it, but I have outpaced the content, and really I am going on autopilot more than anything waiting for more stuff to be added.

[PassingBy]

Well apart from the obvious being younger, having more time and energy for the game and everything being new it would be the class design and the endless time syncs.

I am now happily playing TBC classic and I can choose myself at what pace do I play the game. After the early push for reputation, attunes and preraid BIS I am not forced to do anything, apart from raiding if I don't want to.

And I don't feel like I am holding my guild back. I can grind if I want, I can not grind if I don't want to. I can level some alts, gear them from crafting/badges/pvp/heroics and still be somewhat competitive.
I can get my grinding in one 8 hour session if I want, or I can grind every day for an hour and something.

I am not left behind if I can't log in on a week.

My profession choices mean something, I have pieces of gear that stay relevant through several tiers and I can be happy when I get them, however if I don't there are options which are similar and I don't feel shit that I don't have that one specific item that makes or breaks my spec.

My class and spec choices matter, and even though I can be utterly useless in one situation I can shine and excel in another. I don't feel as though I'm playing a generic tank class, generic melee dps, generic caster dps, generic healer.
Even the hardest content is forgiving. Yes some classes are better at some things than the others, but if a guildie doesn't want to play whatever fotm class/spec combination - we can still find a place for him in the raids, and in most cases he will at least bring some unique utility to the raid.

I know people from the server, as I see them in my pug runs, I see the guilds and I know oh these dudes are good, and these not so much.

And, frankly speaking, even though the badge system and crafting sometimes provide gear that is on par, or in some cases better than some drops in tier 5 I am not bothered by that, as I am not in some weird competition for rankings, or scores, or whatever color parses on a website, the boss is dead, the content is cleared, more ppl can enjoy having some gear and try the content - good for them.

[unbound]

At it's height for me (original BC), it had a lot of components that I found engaging. For some context, even though I played starting in the closed beta of Vanilla, I wasn't a heavy player for Vanilla. I became a much heavier player when my wife joined at the beginning of BC.

Keys of that engagement:
- Lots of content while leveling and at max level (this is really the number one thing missing from retail)
- Character progression at every level (initially getting new abilities, then talent tree) that emphasized your character's growth (yes, even including buying improved abilities)
- Sense of character growth passing through lower level zones...that those things that challenged me before were trivial now as I was moving forward (hence, RP)
- Chests that might provide you with a pleasant surprise, lieutenants that dropped actual items (not just grays and AP)
- Dungeons that were a bit challenging (as opposed to the trivialness of dungeons currently)
- Use of unique abilities (e.g. cc) that made each group at least a little different in dungeons and raids
- Each class having uniqueness that would change the dynamic of a dungeon / raid run, both from a leading perspective as well as a player perspective (e.g. playing a hunter in a dungeon was very different than being a mage or a lock)
- Raid progression so that bringing an alt did require running Kara again, but since it was different than before (see point above), it was actually just fine. This also meant that if you weren't in the first wave, you actually could run Kara as a challenge instead of for the lols like current retail.
- Raid progression means that I'm *not* running the same raid over and over again at different difficulty settings...I'm actually moving forward to new content.
- Expansion that brought truly new things (BC was the first time new races were introduced, flying, profession, zones; Wrath was the first time new class was introduced, war zone)

All of those things take actual effort on the part of Blizz. Top executives at Blizz are not willing to give WoW Devs sufficient budget to do those things anymore, so engagement went down accordingly.

This isn't difficult, and the top executives at Blizz absolutely understand this. Just like phishing emails, they don't care about individuals who aren't being fooled by it...they only care that they can continue to sucker enough to keep giving them money. 10% to 20% of peak playerbase is more than enough if they accept a fraction of the content and are supported by enough whales.

[froschhure]

Titanforge minmaxing and farming essences was fun (speaking for lategame)
Unlocking new races, farming reputation and paragon chests <3

[Dadwen]

I like the way the classes played, I've played most MMO's and I enjoyed the game play, up through MOP (were I played the most alts on different classes) I really like just leveling the toons, my most favorite was my Survival hunter WOD - MOP, after they started neutering the classes in WOD and killed SV is when I started losing interest in the game.

[Cosmic Janitor]

In the past I played because I enjoyed the gameplay loop and the world, i wanted to be part of and experience it. Today I only play because of the people I've met in WoW and because of the time we spend hanging out ingame. As I've said in other threads of this kind, if we could agree on another game we'd be doing that instead, because none of us actually are invested in WoW itself atm. In fact I'm probably the one among us who still does by far the most and actually still gives a toss about the world (I bothered to follow the story) and my opinion on the game can be seen on the forum. Heck I'm having more fun spamming FATEs in FFXIV to get glow effects on some weapons than doing anything WoW has to offer.

[Viikkis]

I've noticed some change in the WoW community and maybe it is because I'm not digging deep enough but these days even the casual guilds stare at warcraft logs and bis guides. Back in the day people just looked at recount for DPS but now it is a lot more scrutinized. I'm sure there are still guilds that don't care about that stuff but haven't had the luck personally to find one.

[Echocho]

Devils advocate , but these last few months, ever since the complains started, whenever we need to pug someone, especially a DPS, there is still 20 people signing up instantly, but this time no matter how you pick, does not seem to be insanely terrible at the game.

Maybe its the new raider.io system, that before all the bads were just doing freebie weeks and now they cant skip Tyrannical so they are stuck at 1300 and they arent considered.

But for anyone actually noticing, the whiners might have left, but the quality of groups feels much higher.

No it's because all the casuals started to quit back in January due to being treated like second class citizens and now there are barely any left.
Great for the key pushers, awful for the health of the game.

The funny thing is that if casuals had badge gear back you wouldn't have to suffer through dungeons with "the bads" because they would be out doing daily heroics, LFR and world quests to cap their badges and buy their piece of weekly heroic gear.

If the only way to get good gear is from m+ and raids you're literally forcing players to do them even if they aren't fit for the task.

[Demsi]

My friends mostly, but i also played less each day so i consumed the content at a much slower rate and i took longer to reach my end game goals

[dacoolist]

If people get tired of a 16.9 year old game that's totally ok..

I still play and just run some M+ keys is literally all I do currently

[vizzle]

Honestly looking back on it now, the biggest reason I was addicted to WoW was because I had a crappy teenage-hood, stuck in a house with a bad dad and no clue where I was going to go. The moment my life started improving, WoW started making less and less sense to keep in my life. These days I play games that you can pop in and out of in a few minutes, games that keep you playing because they're fun, not because you need a reason to wake up tomorrow or next week for dailies and a raid commitment.

[Relapses]

Above everything else, it's been the people I've played with.

However, I do miss the days before everybody just watched one of Bellular's shitty "WoW sucks" videos and pretended like they know exactly how to fix this game. (Spoiler: Just re-release 7.3.5 again)

[LordVargK]

My guild. And MoP WL design. Maybe alt leveling before Legion (dungeon spamming ftw).

Nothing else, WoW is boring without a guild.