Think it suffered quite a bit from a gated roll out of the zone specific system and flight.
And if they’re going to have zone wide rare announcements on the map they needed to make it like the torments of torghast with “event starts in…” Nothing like two or three rares in row where you make it just after it dies to really leave a bitter taste in ones mouth.
And in general I think calling like systems with a wide verity of quest to chose from plays a lot better than here’s two quests, and here they are again for your alt.
And the Northern area suffers from the maw philosophy of horrible game play as atmosphere. Only fun on my cat with fast stealth travel.
I think this is true for most people. I will disagree with you on the testing grounds thing, and I am not dodging that post I just really don’t have anything to add to it. I don’t deny you have a solid reasoning for why you feel as you do compared to me but my reasoning leads me to seeing it as something different even though we can identify and agree on the same logic. Whole “read the same study, get two completely different conclusions” thing but that is what it is.
Or well, I would say it applied to most people. Egg Timer design is horrid if you’re trying to either make a game, or play a game that is heavily centric around the idea of playing the game to advance your character and it feel meaningful and left you feeling like you accomplished something. In 2004 we called this the core pillar of the MMO genre because that’s what it was. Everything you did was about advancing your character, or experiencing the game in some way with that character.
I think the issue is players now for WoW specifically. These types exist in every other game and society at large, but in WoW they are significantly more concentrated and perhaps that’s because the game design appealed to those exact types of people so they migrated to WoW where it’s the name of the game instead of “something we would like for our convenience.” Those who did not like this design flocked to other MMOs, like XIV which while being very casual friendly, the community and design team knows if they started throwing out Savage raid rewards for doing something easier than Savage it would kill that entire community so they are not really too upset when they sit in catch up gear every odd numbered patch because they are getting good thing, just not the best. In WoW “good things” is never enough. On these forums alone, people will argue “I just want to have good things too” but you ask them to define “good things” and it almost always comes back to rewards equivalent with the best or just so very slightly beneath them that there’s hardly even a difference. If you do LFR I would say having Normal mode raiding gear is good enough, it’s better than LFR loot. Except to them, it’s not Mythic therefore the game is elitist and caters to the top raiders exclusively because the game won’t give them the best item level for doing their world quests and it never should. The fact it could rarely happen with Titanforging was stupid itself and that’s why it was dialed back in BFA before being removed. It was stupid design and killing raiding because why raid if you can get the same rewards potentially doing something that takes 1% of the effort?
The types I’m referring to are people who play MMOs without any respect or care about the actual genre as it were or game health. The people who will spit in the face of game health or any long term ramifications it will have on the game or community so long as it means they are getting really good gear out of content that doesn’t warrant that level of reward. Or in other terms, the “MY 15 DOLLARS IS EQUAL TO YOURS SO I SHOULD BE ENTITLED TO THE SAME REWARDS AS YOU DESPITE YOU DOING SIGNIFICANTLY HARDER CONTENT FOR THEM!”
I can’t exactly pinpoint where, or why this happened but the closest I can identify is late 2009. When social media was becoming more mainstream, like when Facebook went from being a thing that high school and college kids used to becoming Boomerbook because of the average age of its current users. The reason I say this is because that’s when a large wave of later adults, like in their late 30s began to play the game instead of being a hobby primarily driven by degenerate college students. What did those adults also happen to be primarily responsible for advocating in schools? Participation trophies, removal of special advanced learning groups in the same classroom, NCLB.
Bottom line, the adults responsible for the participation trophy generation started using Facebook, likely saw a lot of people engaged with some video games and went for the one every celebrity was talking about. Then started demanding participation trophies for the game because “this is a hobby, I shouldn’t have to apply effort to have things from it.” Blizzard catered to that, people who rightfully saw this dumpster fire on the horizon jumped ship. Now most of WoW’s audience does what? The egg timer gameplay because it’s easy, takes no skill or effort, and craps loot on them they don’t deserve. And yes, as a rational person I will say they do not deserve it because to deserve something means you are actually capable of earning it the legitimate way.
If a boss in this game bugs out and just becomes a target dummy and that resulted in the World First kill, people would correctly say they didn’t earn that kill because it wasn’t legitimate. In the same way that Ensidia was stripped of credit for the World First Lich King Heroic kill because they “cheated” because Blizzard had some goofy coding. On that, I still maintain they didn’t cheat because none of them knew what was causing it, and in Wrath using a Saronite Bomb was part of your optimal rotation while you were letting energy regenerate. Wasn’t like they picked some niche item because they knew it did that, rogues in Heroic guilds with engineering were using bombs in the rotation since first tier of Wrath.
I realize that you guys keep repeating this to yourselves and to each other as though somehow that will make it real, but it’s not. You don’t see people who do LFR demanding to get mythic raid gear. Or people who used to do world quests in Legion and BfA but now have zero meaningful to do, at least in part to satisfy raid loggers who constantly demand that casual content have meaning and rewards removed.
Once a month we see an obvious troll - probably an alt of a raider posing as a “casual”, repeating all the elitists truisms - demanding top gear. And once a month we see a solo player who wants elite solo content and gets trashed for not being willing to suck up to angry, spiteful, unreliable people who would want nothing whatever to do with him.
Repeating that doesn’t make it true. The game is imploding thanks to your mindset.
Or they will quit. The rules have changed, but human nature has not.
It isn’t terrible, it is thin. Very few world quests. Slow respawn versus quick kills for rares. Events are very simplistic at best. I described it the other day as feeling like they copied someone else’s homework. It has all the right answers but is missing a lot of work.
I’m cancelling my sub today and probably won’t be back for a while.
Story sucks.
Timegating sucks.
Randomness of progression sucks.
Might be back in a few weeks, might not be back for a long time, depends on how quickly I forget how irked I am over the dumpster fire that the game has become under Ion and Danuser.
I actually don’t mind ZM and the new raid. I even like the cypher and the protoform systems. Though I think they made the protoform crafting a little more grindy than it should have been, I enjoy that feeling of working towards something still.
My problem really, especially this expansion, is that Blizzard patches far outstay their welcome. They hit that point where it starts to feel stale, and then tack on another 3 months to it. This is compounded with the fact that after we finally live out Season 3, our reward is going to be a Season 4 that just has all the raids we’ve been doing for 2 years and are already sick of.
This is a popular line used on the forums to try and get attention to an issue that really isn’t an issue. It’s very hard to take this and posts like seriously when it’s not a serious post.
You are able to outgear the normal raid without ever stepping foot in the normal raid. Your two strongest items in the game come via crafting. BoE items exist on the AH that increase your ilvl even further.
People need to understand that open world content and/or casual queued content already reward gear far stronger than the effort put in doing them. The content you’re talking about is to help get you to end game, not completely invalidate end game.
People have been saying this since I started in 2005. I’ll believe it when they shut the servers down. I also will never believe it’s because they listened to the people who claim to be some vast majority on the forums who aren’t going to engage in anything other than quests.
Tl;dr
You shouldn’t get mythic raid gear for shooting yourself out of a cannon. Go raid and do M+, arenas and rbgs if you want some gear.
Well…I’ve decided to stop playing ZM. It’s really lacking in so many ways. I can only play solo. Health problems.
So I started two new Toons. One is level 26 in Shadowlands the other 31 in Frostfire Ridge. I’m having fun again. Like the old days for me. Everything is better relative to ZM which is so bland and boring. ZM, too few open world quests, and drops are pitiful. Over and over again. There are times in ZM when 3 rares will be up. Later in the day none spawn for a very long time, and rewards are a laugh. Back to my 2 little guys.
I think the OP has hit the nail on the head of why this patch feels so – onerous. I too like goals I can work towards and the random element being so high and the reliance on it so high, the game just becomes utterly not fun.
I had some personal goals for my current main, such as max rep, getting the gear and then maybe doing pet/mount chasing. But given how rare the rare bits for mounts and pets are, I’ve lost most of my interest on this. I can keep pulling that lever on the one-armed bandit or – do something else.
But people see ‘rewards’ as the only thing and that’s not the case for everyone. Gear is nice, yes. What I want is to be geared so I can more easily survive the elite Mobs and psychotic fauna of ZM. Once I get that, I’m fine.
What I don’t want to see is PvE content assuming or requiring raid or Mythic + gear to survive.
But more importantly and this is the key, gear is not progression. Progression means stuff to work towards, to plan towards. Random drops with low percentages is not ‘work towards’.
I’m one of the folks who doesn’t mind working towards flying. Not flying is annoying, yes. In ZM it really irked me but not because I couldn’t fly, but because of those stupid jumping games they put in. To me it was one of those ‘let’s put another snub on the players’ that gets in their face every time they look at a map. But that’s my issue.
So rewards mean, get better, progress, feel like you’re getting somewhere. Some of that is ‘great, I made to to where I want this toon to go, let’s work on another toon’.
But there’s too much sameness, not enough variety in SL so that fails quickly into been there, done that 6 times over already.
