Alas, Poor WoW, I knew ye Well. Blizzard, Please Wise Up

Community General Discussion
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Alas, poor WoW, I knew ye well. Blizzard, please wise up…

New players cannot compete in current or even past challenges. New player retention is going to continue to suffer until the community is willing to be patient again.

How can the community become more patient now a days? Simple. Better and fun game design. Stop pressing people into HAVING to maximize their play time for actual fun.

RNG is a joke for an endgame experience. It should have Tokens and Badges like we once did in Wrath. If I don’t get a piece of gear I actually need, have a vendor where I can trade my item for a token that I can either swap directly or some item and token combination that lets me get gear I can actually use.

RNG does not EVER seem to stat check for what the player actually needs, nor does the RNG check care about what the person might actually be looking for in a drop. What exactly can be done to fix this unfortunate discrepancy? Well, it’s worth looking into badges and tokens so that gear drops go back to being meaningful. Part of the reason so many quit Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls was that drops are just… pure crap shoots. You might be beating Las Vegas at undercutting your players on returns.

On Lore and Story.

On lore and story, the story is said to be “rule of cool,” which is just another way of saying, “The story never innovates.” The lore is said to be “epic do-over,” so, "The lore will only ever repeat. The constant retreading of WoW’s lore forest, um, excuse me, single lore tree, is slowly what’s killing this game. You as developers need a metastory, in game, showing ALL that you want to convey to your players, your PAYING YOU customers, to get more out of this game.

Blizzard, if you want to make the virtual money mint you seem to seek, please:

  • Return to RPG MMO roots, like it was in Vanilla. Modernize it, and keep it feeling lived in
  • Metastory. Without a relatable, fun, and engaging story throughout the game, the experience that is WoW will die because you’re not taking it seriously.
  • RNG is bad endgame design. You need to be ready to make drops meaningful, so some stat locks or stats and secondaries requested by the players are actually favored is better game design

Can the development of Facebook like mission walls, followers that I can’t adventure beside, cash grabs from the cash shop, make an actual RPG that has MMO slapped on the front!

You want WoW to come back?

RPG with a metastory, RNG is not meaningful loot, and the quests need to all be tied together into a single metastory, so that way you don’t lose anyone during leveling!

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New player retention is going to be trash because a new player starts playing the game, sees the most iconic weapon his class/spec can earn, and is told NOPE you don’t even have a chance to get it because FOMO. Then they stop playing and who can blame them.

:rofl:

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New player retention has to get through the wall that is competitive content by somehow helping said new player actually learn the encounters and not die while trying to do that themselves.

New player retention is failing because of the Auction House prices in gold for items, the lack of support for new players in game, the unwelcoming community that’s just going to only accept the most learned…

This list just gets longer and longer.

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What else might save this game from its own impending death?

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Or they could remove all the competitive stuff like the e-sport angle, the leaderboards, ect and reward co-operative play instead.

Oh, this is just another thread crying to make the game easier, simpler and more convenient for the lazy and entitled.

No, they don’t.

Little stories are the best stories. An example of this is the ‘Until Death Do Us Part’ quest.

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The Dev team wouldn’t know where to begin nor end if they cut E-Sports. And it’s sad. The issue is more they don’t have a clear vision of what raiding and other endgame activities need to look like to get players interested AND investors into teams to see said endgame content types.

RNG isn’t checking what it’s supposed to in game. Call it lazy and entitled gearing all you like. Gear isn’t meaningful, and in this worse than Las Vegas Craps shoot the dice are loaded against not only one player, they’re loaded against all players.

Quests are fine alone, and in series, however it would make the game a great deal more fun to see stories at least reference each other and past quests long and well after they’re done, and a single cohesive story would be easier to follow, increasing chances at player retention.

Little stories are best, however turning the entire game into a playable, fun, and interactive movie of a book would likely do still yet more for player retention.

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System upon system is daunting for the seasoned player at times, I cant imagine being new.

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Pretty sure as a new player I would’ve been like “Hell naw lmao” if I looked at WoW and it’s community compared to the other MMORPGs out there now.

A lot of WoW’s subscriptions these days are just people who’ve been around for so long the nostalgia factor coupled with sunk cost fallacy is the main thing keeping them here.

WoW as a game is really not attractive to new people at all, let alone the playerbase with this “muh special collections you can never habe! blizz made me a promise! >:(” or “know the mechanics and follow proto or you’re done bud” attitude

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New people?

I’ve seen one forum poster that’s apparently new, he’s afraid, and sadly rightly so, of what him admitting he’s new would do in terms of any dungeon, raid, or PVP activity group would do…

“Hi, I’m new! Got any helpful advice, please?”
Vote to kick passed…

Yeah, around here, new player retention is going the way of the do-do because players are forced by Blizzard’s design to maximize their time played, and that means no patience for new players. NONE.

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This is true of showing up late in any multiplayer game.

Like an FPS where you don’t know the maps that people have been playing on for 12 months.

If you show up to the party after the kegs been floated you need to bring your own beer.

Not that blizzard hasn’t gone over the top with mechanics or that LFG couldn’t use some sort of learning option where you don’t get teamed up with people that can pull half the dungeon as you just watch and learn nothing.

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And how exactly is a new player supposed to do that, hm?

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Accept the reality and take the hit.

You’ll get booted for doing noob things because you do noob things. No big deal, don’t take it personally. Join up for another one and don’t do that noob thing again.

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And how long before the ignores start weighing on your time to * Finder?

I realize there’s a lot for new players, heck ANY, to look up, if that’s the attitude of most of the community then what can we do about people being chore harders on any mistake?

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I think you’re severely overestimating the number of people that will ignore every noob, the number of ignores a person can have, and the frequency you actually run into the same people over and over.

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The skins are not the iconic weapons! If anything the BASE WEAPON is what is suppose to be iconic(Ashbringer is iconic for being its base form!)

And this has been a thing since Vanilla. Or do you think you can still get Medivh’s staff?

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And if you play at the same time each day, I think you’re not seeing the potential issue here.

Also, since when has Blizzard coded things like this well? For example, RNG is just another name for sample the clock time stamp and pick a digit so far in, first, second, third…

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Trying to convince the community that the community’s bad doesn’t work.
You just accept that WoW’s playerbase is only in decline from here on out and keep playing until you feel there’s no longer enough people relative to other MMORPGs to justify staying.
Sucks but them’s the breaks.

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People like you are why I’m afraid to queue for normal SL dungeons these days. I’m new to them and want to learn them, but apparently that means I should get raged at and kicked.

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Speaking of…

Here’s the new player.

Why should they be forced to have less fun because the rest of us have only managed to play the game longer, hm?

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Personally, I don’t think the leader/top dog/whatever has a clear vision for the game as a whole, period.

Why don’t you find gear meaningful?

I am basically just an open world quester and even I find gear meaningful.

This is already done to a certain extent with repeat characters and situations. Bran Bronzebeard is an excellent example of it.

I strongly disagree.

The last thing I want is an even more on-rails questing experience. I like my meandering adventure, meeting new people, hearing and helping out with slice-of-life stories as much, if not more, as a big overall zone storyline.