A new/casual player's thoughts on SoD (and MMO culture in general)

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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I’ll put a TLDR here since this is a big one. Put simply I’ve come away with the conclusion that WoW (and presumably MMOs in general) tends to value players who sink so much time and effort into it that a solo casual player cannot really enjoy it. It fosters an elitist community whose elitism is justified and reinforced by core game mechanics.

Yo, for some background I’m a player that doesn’t normally play MMOs. The grind to max level is always super boring since I’m late to the party and usually have to do that alone and even then it normally takes too long. I figured with SoD coming out in level phases which would make it so that I had a community to play with as I leveled, it’d be fun.

And it was. Kind of. So here are my thoughts since I’ll never bother with getting into gnomregan or P3. I’m just kinda done with even trying MMOs because I’ve seen the culture and it is absolutely disgusting.

Put simply, WoW is an elitist’s wet-dream, and that is reinforced by nearly every part of its design.

Leveling:
I don’t actually have too much to say about leveling. It’s just boring. You kill X things, collect X things. I kind of wish it didn’t exist. P1 leveling was more fun than P2 because in P2 I had BFD gear, so none of the items a quest might give me were valuable as anything more than vendor trash and if the auto-run feature didn’t exist I’d have quit well before reaching 40. Maybe even before level 25. Imagine the barrens without auto run. Sheesh!

Raids:
I really enjoyed the bfd raid. I like that there is a pool of loot for everyone to roll against and the fights are a joy to go through. Fighting Kelris and learning my part as a rogue was great and I want to make it clear that the problem with raids doesn’t stem from the skill requirements or any loot drama. It comes from…

Lockouts:
Lockouts are important. You only get to raid once per lockout so it is a valuable resource that you don’t want to waste by running with filthy casuals who you’ll need to carry. And you know what, I agree! I can’t even argue with that point!

But that does lead to things like parsing, demanding that people have experience with the raids, demanding people have pre-bis, and it just feeds into the elitism which makes the game feel like it really doesn’t want a casual player to enjoy its content. Like I said, I get it. But it seems to me like the developers created a systemic issue where players who are solo casuals have a harder time reaching the real fun parts of the game and surely there is a better way of milking a player out of another month’s subscription- er, i mean, dragging out that loot grind.

PVP

Has wow ever done PVP right? Every event in SoD has been a disaster where the potential fun is optimized out with surgical precision either by the community or the game devs.

Ashenvale event:
It’s not a PVP event. It’s a PvE event poorly masquerading as a PVP event.
and is more or less dead as of p2 because it wasn’t fun to begin with and was just a grind. Aren’t games supposed to be fun?

WSG (and presumably battlegrounds in general):
PUGs are able to be matched with premades.
wot? I am not a game designer but do you really need to be one in order to see how a super well optimized premade will just stomp on pugs and have fun at the pugs’ expense?
Again, elitism is favored here. The discord-coordinated, min-maxed team will crush the casuals who dared to think PVP might be fun every time.

No I am not expecting a pug to stand a chance against a premade, but I sure as hell wouldn’t design a game such that premades could be paired with pugs. Matchmaking should really be a thing.

STV event:
Unless you are part of a coordinated team or a lucky group, you are the farm. I have had runs where I am lucky to get 80 coins by the end because everything hinges on that last hit and, as a rogue, I am mostly stuck trying to steal a kill and escape before their team jumps on me. Which sucks because sometimes I’m just stuck waiting for opportunities and more often than not, I become the farm. This is literally the easiest thing in the world to fix.
Just give blood for assisted kills. Even if someone that isn’t on your team finishes the kill, just have there be a little timer after you hit someone where if they die, you get at least partial credit. Sure, it’d favor AOE players, but at least it would guarantee that casuals can farm coins instead of being farmed for coins.

But again, if you are part of an elite guild you can also just camp a shrine with multiple teams and farm everyone else. That works too.

Overall:

WoW has been a mixed experience. There is a good game in there somewhere, but man, the effort it takes to dig up makes this a game that casuals are simply unwelcome in. I appreciate SoD because it has shown me exactly what reaching endgame in an MMORPG must be like and it’s rough for someone who just wants to fight cool bosses and have some fun for a few hours. If anything I just wish they tore out the open world/pvp and just made a game where players played a wide variety raid-tier content because bfd was where I had the most fun.

I’ve got enough of a feel for the community to know that the response to this is probably going to be “well duh, raid logging was going to always be how it’d end up.” or “join a guild, It’s an MMO, so you shouldn’t be a solo player and shouldn’t expect the game to cater to you” or something like that. But hey, if that’s how this community has fun, more power to them. I just wanted to share my thoughts.

Ty for reading! Have a good one. If nothing else, the Season of Discovery was certainly a discovery for me and it cost me less than a AAAA game to experience!

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Folks are still doing Ashenvale on my server, Living Flame.

Not every event, but I was just swinging by to turn in some quests and I noticed a battle was underway, so I jumped in real quick and we won.

Less players, for sure, because it’s not lvl 25 anymore, but still the best/fastest way to get WSG rep pre-revered, by a long shot.

As long as lvlers want those lvl 40 epic bracers, and need to boost up to revered and then grind to exalted in actual WSG, the event will be utilized.

It’s incredibly cheap for how good the game is, yeah. Part of the reason I’m still playing WoW all these years later.

The $15 price tag just to play for a month, is nice. All other games over the years have inflated their prices, but WoW remains the same sub-fee, just the box prices changed.

No box needed for SoD, just $15 needed.

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The parse culture has gotten worse over the years. Originally it was simple. Did you have epics? You were generally considered good to get into a guild (pugs weren’t really big then)

Then in wotlk I believe is when gearscore became a thing, so like the epic gear being a sign of skill / ability but a larger distinction between the phases that by that point became huge power creeps. If your gear score wasn’t up to scratch, then you got gatekept. This sucked for anyone that skipped a few months or new players.

I’m not exactly sure when parsing became a huge thing, like there was always dps meters, but they were largely a measure of your ability to that of your guild mates. Parsing has become such a huge gatekeeper in classic specifically due to there not being multiple raid difficulties like retail, where only heroic and up parses really become a thing. Parsing can be a fun side game to test yourself, but the negatives to a fun fostering community it brings far outweigh the positives.

Parsing has largely caused the toxic WB meta (creates rage when a wipe happens and buffs are lost, promotes raid logging, forces people to get WBs or you are destroying others parses). Parsing is used to gate keep newer or returning players, gate keep under-performing specs, force players to play a certain way, promotes exploitation and cheesing, promotes brain dead dps not doing their mechanics because they don’t want to parse low.

It’s honestly been bad for the broader community.

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Yeah I mean this isnt even so much lockout as it seems the majority of players are little parse slaves, which is weird when you think about how few can hit 99s anyway. The culture has changed to parse slaves and sweating. Youtube/Twitch has contributed a lot to it, wcl definitely has.

I dont think its really the developers fault, gamers have just changed over time. Unless Blizzard wants to shut down WCL and start filing DMCAs on every wow video, theres no way they can combat all the sweaty minmaxing. Idk it is wild to see in classic, people want to bring a ‘retail mentality’ to a classic game and sweat. I think the weird need to try and parse is a huge part of the issue.

I do agree that a progress lockout would beat individual raid ids though. Would let people pick up if someone left, also wouldnt have to worry as much if people were bad.

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Lockouts: the problem with parses is actually pugs, not the lockout itself

The pug culture, of being able to form a raid with random players, insentivizes parses. Because out of all the randoms you can take to the raid, you are going to want to take the one who is best. You have a lot to choose from. If I’m forming a BFD group and I have 8 hunters whispering me for a spot, why wouldn’t I take the hunter that deals more damage?

However guild raiding should be the prime form of raiding. Here they don’t care about parses, and will take guildies just so they can gear up. At most, if you are too bad, you will get demoted to a secondary raid group. Even if your guild group fails to finish the instance one day, it is much easier to re-assemble the same raid with the same people another day before the lockout ends. Its also easier to share consumables with those who have no gold. Because you are a guild, you are there to gear up together. There is also more inclination towards fair loot distribution.

In pugs its about your own self interest, so you take whoever is best to help you get that gear. Also, higher parses means more gear, which means they need less loot from the raid, which benefits other players.

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Here’s the thing about WoW: it’s nearly 20 years old. You would have to had played games like EQ or MMOs in the early 2000’s to appreciate WoW’s questing/levelling system. What you today call boring was ultra casual back in 2004. You get rested EXP in WoW which is essentially exp for not playing the game. If you don’t like the prospect of joining a guild to raid in WoW, you never would have gotten any leveling done in the genre prior to WoW.

Is that elitism? Knowing the raid and putting in the effort of gearing up for that raid’s difficulty? Go join a raid of people who didn’t gear or research the encounters and let me know how that goes. It’s not an unfair ask for people who don’t know you to require a minimum threshold of effort on your part.

Now, it’s important to point out that doesn’t really exist within guilds or a group of friends. If people know you they’re not going to treat you like a random stranger.

If you want easier access to raid content without being part of a group; play retail. it has a queue system called Looking For Raid. You hit the button, select your role and wait. When enough people have queued up, you teleport into the raid and you’re off and going!

This is a ‘grass is greener on the other side’ falshood. Everybody is farmed in the bloodmoon event. You don’t need a coordinated group–You need a group. Everyone does. Join one, meet up near the boss for the buff that increases how many coins you get per kill. Learn how to get back to your spot when you die (Hot Tip: you don’t rez at the GY and try to run back).

Again, the raid logging is the lowest common denominator for PUGs–It doesn’t impact people who play in a group of knowns (guildies/friends). But yeah, it is an MMORPG and you do need to play it with a group of people if you want the benefit of all the content with none of the downsides. That’s not bad game design and it’s not elitism. If you want little to no effort to reward you with everything this game has to offer, the bar would have be lowered so much that the game itself would be far more shallow than it is… and it certainly wouldn’t be around for you to play 20 years later.

Much of the issues you have addressed have been fixed or iterated on in subsequent expansions to WoW and players realized over time that those QoL changes took something away from the game experience. So much so that there was a massive outcry for the ability to play the vanilla version of the game because it was a more enjoyable experience and preferable to what the retail game has become.

Part of that is because the classic version of the game better facilitated a social environment. And I can’t stress enough; what you see in city/zone chat regarding dungeon/raid groups is a distillation of the lowest common denominator. It does not represent the community and it’s not how this game was intended to be played.

Breaking though that barrier isn’t easy. It takes effort to socialize and build friendships with complete strangers. It’s not a quick process but it’s a long-lasting one. I have friends that I made in 2005-2009 that I still play WoW with. We play other MMOs. We play other genres of games together. We’ve graduated post-secondary educations, Gotten our first jobs which lead to careers. Gotten married. Bought our first homes. Had kids. Lost family members.

I’ve gone through life itself with these people. What a shame it would have been If I focused on my interaction with the game mechanics for pixel rewards and less on the players in it.

I’ll tell you something: I can remember the first time my WoW buddies and I first cleared Karazhan in TBC… or 3 drake Sartharion or Algalon or The Lich King back in 2008. What I can’t tell you about any of those hallmark achievements was what loot dropped or who won it. And I think that exemplifies the real purpose and reward these games are structured to provide.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees.