after playing classic and seeing how challenging did the fast pace esport erakill retail?the go go go mentality everything must die fast to me really messed the game up.
what do you guys think.
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I don’t know if the homoginizarion of wow is what drew in esports in the first place, or if things were homogenized because of esports growing popularity. But I know know that homoginizarion is what killed retail for me.
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I’m with lagspike. I think esports, the rise of broadcast esports, and the resulting change in gaming culture all contributed to the homogenization of the game, which ended up killing it for a lot of people.
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I hate the term esports too. Yes, to me it has not heped retail at all.
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No. Trying to be accessible to everyone is what “killed” wow. Also wow is still doing incredibly well by any standards so killed is a bit of a problem.
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Agreed. And I sincerely hope they don’t try to turn classic into an esport.
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classic wow isnt the right type of game for esports mobs die to slow no arena and a slow grind to max.
i think classic wow is safe.
Esports certainly made M+ less fun for a lot of people in BFA.
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The design philosophies that came along with Cataclysm killed WoW.
That’s why WoW peaked with WOTLK.
Vanilla-BC-WOTLK was “Classic Era”.
We still largely had the same systems and talent trees and specs that build upon one another during that era. We didn’t “lose” anything with those expasnions, they were simply added to.
Now, Blizzard does a “rinse and repeat” with new expansions, We don’t retain any of our previous powers. Azerite and Heart of Azeroth will be tossed in the can just like Legion Legendaries were.
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I just thought the sporties were part of the package (all types of players right?) but when blizzard started targeting them and leaving behind the immersion/immersive players, I knew something bad was happening. Now we get it all back. Going to have to live together again I guess and not get milked.
I think there was definitely a push to try to cash in on the esports trend. They may be backing off since Blizz is ending some of their programs into esports. We’ll see if they dial down the parts of the game geared for esports. Doubt it though because a lot of people only for M+ anymore. The people who left and still want WoW are playing Classic now.
Fast paced gameplay is fine. Balancing toolkits around 3v3 is not.
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End of Wrath poisoned it with an incurable disease, Cata drove it home. I hope classic, after all the phases goes through, goes its own direction or only releases BC and keeps flying in that zone, alone, then does its own thing.
Theres nothing balanced about 3v3 right now soooo, I don’t think that’s it. If anything PVP balance has been left in the dust for PVE balance only.
Short answer: In part yes.
Longer answer: There are two lines of development that led to the fall of retail; Gameplay Development and Social Development.
Social Development was what it was in Vanilla. We were forced to interact by the nature of the game. It was difficult enough that grouping was encouraged and often necessary. Without extrinsic forms of automated communication and grouping it was required that we speak to each other. The randomness and “realness” that can occur during actual conversation drove a cohesive community.
Esports did not kill that; Addons and Blizzard QoL’s did. Those QoLs were not malicious, but they produced the unintended consequence of a substantial reduction in social cohesion.
Gameplay Development, and Esports contribution to it went like this:
- Arena was introduced (PvP Esport)
- Classes were “balanced” around 3s.
- Classes were difficult to balance around 3s.
- Adding functions to classes was seen as making it more difficult to balance classes around 3s
- Classes were pruned to make it easier to balance around 3s.
- M+ was added (PvE Esport)
- Classes were pruned further and essential functions of classes were made into “PvP talents” to make balancing around M+ and 3s easier.
- Classes were pruned further to make room for itemization to take over the role of essential class functionality (Not Esport related, just a really stupid F’ing idea).
- Items that held essential functions of classes were removed without compensation for the classes that lost half their abilties over the course of 3 years.
But at least 3s and M+ are balanced!!!
So its not Esports that is really the problem, but the constant (and failed) efforts to “balance” classes for them by taking functionality away from the players.
That’s how it is now, but how many times do classes flip flop between patches to become fotm. Blizzard’s balance isn’t a lukewarm mixture, but rather violently mixing ice and scaling hot water. The average of both situations equals X, but the range of the situation is widely different.
Right, I mean there’s a reason so many PvP’ers have left the game. Blizz seems to only primarily focus on keeping PVE a fine tuned machine and PvP is thrown the leftover scraps.
Don’t get confused, the only thing responsible for the lackluster which is retail are the retail developers, E-sports has been around since BC, and did not cause this.
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Ya, the biggest problem is most of blizzard devs that were needed for culture/talent and ect left blizzard.
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The same thing happens for pve. Flip flopping between specs throughout legion for a dew classes because X was good in Y tier was annoying. PvE only gets more focus cause as the devs said (and most of the game is) PvE oriented.