BFA is not to blame WotLK is

Community General Discussion
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I am constantly hearing complaints about this expansion and how World of Warcraft is no longer in it’s prime, but I don’t really think Battle for Azeroth is the problem. I actually think this is a good expansion and I can tell the developers are trying hard to make the content more engaging.

In my opinion the three expansions that harmed World of Warcraft was Wrath of the Lich King, Mist of Pandaria, and to a lesser point Cataclysm.

The Sacred Roots of MMORPGs

Before I state my reasons why I think WotLK, Cataclysm and MoP damaged WoW I first want to say that as someone who started playing MMORPGs since the days of Asheron’s Call and Everquest, the motivation to play MMORPGs is to experience the world and to experience it with other players.

When World of Warcraft started to abandon the roots of what makes MMORPGs great, the new motivation for players was to just to rush through content quickly as possible all for the “phat loot”. The result was that the players didn’t care about the content, they just wanted to rush through it as quickly as possible. Everything epic was gone and replaced with something more similar to a xbox game.

Reasons Why Mist of Pandaria and Cataclysm Damaged WoW

The Campy Nature

During Cataclysm and Mist of Pandaria the environment of World of Warcraft became too campy and nothing was taken seriously. Mist of Pandaria was a worse offender than Cataclysm. The bosses in Cataclysm were taken seriously at least, in Grim Batol you were fighting a giant Etlin inside an ancient lore heavy city, while in Mist of Pandaria you were fighting a giant rabbit.

I will admit that Pandaria was a beautiful continent, but the content in Pandaria was so childish it was a turn off. Everywhere I turned there was something campy, and it didn’t help that the storyline was so childish.

The result was that it made the players not take the world seriously either. This was during the time where players started to wear costumes, and I never liked costumes especially in raid and pvp because it kills the immersion. It reinforces the fact that no one is taking the world seriously anymore.

A complete deviation from a medieval fantasy setting

I enjoyed the Warcraft franchise when it was still holding onto it’s fantasy roots before Burning Crusade. When Burning Crusade came around, there were some deviations, but you still saw characters armed in chain mail and humans, elves, and orcs were still at the center of the story.

Cataclysm turned the Warcraft franchise from fantasy to something more steampunk and that is when I had a huge problem. It got worse during Mist of Pandaria. Instead of taking a boat to Pandaria, you were on a air ship (and the gnome puking made my eyes roll because it wasn’t funny).

Mist of Pandaria felt so alien to me because instead of seeing medieval buildings and characters such as paladins, warriors, priests and mages, I saw cartoony and stereotypical races. Some races are meant to be “side kick races”, and World of Warcraft should mostly be about humans, orcs, and the Elf races.

Players became THE hero instead A hero

In an MMOPRG, your character belongs to the world, the world does not belong to your character, therefore there should be times where your character should feel outmatched in certain situations. Ideally the story of any MMORPG should be the player’s experience with the world and with other players. A player being chased by a giant out in the wilderness, then meets another player and teams up with that player to kill the giant should be the story.

When it comes to the story of the world, ideally it should be static across the player base, meaning that one event in the game should be the same experience shared by other players. This happened during vanilla when the top guilds would kill Nefarion, and mount his head on the Stormwind gates because it was a community experience.

Blizzard takes the approach that every player is affected by the overall story of the current expansion, and that is forgivable, but by giving every player an instances version where they are the almighty hero of Azeroth with a disregard to the other player’s experience, it takes everything organic about the player’s experience away.

This trend is still happening and was at it’s worst during Legion where EVERY player became the leader of the order of their own class.

Again, the storyline for players should be a shared experience.

Reasons why Wrath of the Lich King Damaged WoW

The flawed design of accessibility

I constantly hear players claim how Wrath of the Lich King was World of Warcraft “at it’s peak” but I think the downward trend started during Wrath of the Lich King where World of Warcraft started this whole “no player left behind” that killed any sense of community.

During Vanilla and Burning Crusade there was no expectation among every player that they just had to see the highest end raid. Raids never went obsolete within the same expansion before Wrath of the Lich King and the result was that you had the player base spread across all raids built within the same expansion. You had guilds who were still working on the Tempest Keep and they weren’t complaining how they didn’t have access to Black Temple. You even had players that didn’t raid at all and they weren’t complaining.

People knew that if they wanted to raid they had to take WoW more seriously and that motivated the players to work as a team, respect other players, and not act like idiots. When Wrath of the Lich King came around, players lost that motivation to respect other players and the world around them. This resulted in this new entitled generation of MMORPG players.

Is it really hard to believe that hierarchies are natural and people aren’t equal. It’s that same feeling you get when you see some trashy kid from the ghetto with low SAT scores get a free scholarship to college just because of Equal Opportunity worked in his favor, but you are still expected to view him as an equal. That is how I felt during patch 3.3.

Speaking of patch 3.3.

LFD Tool

This had to be one of the worst implementations in World of Warcraft. What happened was the LFD Tool removed everything organic about the dungeons in World of Warcraft, and just turned them into instanced areas players teleport to for 15 minutes just to get their “Phat Loot”. Instances were no longer part of the World but instead a list of zones players can click on in a window.

I remember the days back in Vanilla where I would meet my group in town and we would all travel together at the dungeon and we would spend the whole night at the dungeon. There were even times when we didn’t finish the dungeon but we were cool with that because we still got rewards and had a good and epic time.

We all had fun because we experienced the world around us and gave each other company, that is what MMORPGs are all about. LFD took this experience away and just thinking about this makes me upset.

People keep on telling me to play this “new MMORPG” but it will have all of these same flaws that I mentioned. If I was to play another MMORPG I would play Asheron’s Call, but since that game is no longer active, I would more likely go back to Everquest hoping that it’s core concepts are still intact.

The Real Problem lies with the community

The real problem today lies with the community. Players are constantly thinking about the loot and rewards but they should think about the experience. It’s ironic because the content in WoW right now is fun. Dailies give us something new every day, and allow us to experience the world around us and you never know what you will come across in island expeditions, but players are only thinking about the rewards. Players are constantly complaining about “RNG” and how the content is “unrewarding” but the experience should be the reward.

So here is a very important tip to make World of Warcraft more enjoyable:

Forget about the loot, just enjoy the content, and more importantly enjoy it with other players, even if you can handle the content on your own. Don’t rush through the content, mess around in the world, explore a nearby area after completing a world question.

Overall

I am sick of how players praise Wrath of the Lich King even though it started this downward trend when it abandoned its MMORPG roots. Just so it can be more accessible.

I am sick of how the world and gameplay design became overly simple because MMOPRGs were meant to be epic and therefore complex.

I am sick of how the player base doesn’t take anything seriously and how they just want to rush through content wearing costumes and only caring about getting their gear quickly.

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Its 100% on Blizzard. You can like or dislike Wrath and thats ok. It might have been the beginning of the end but it was a great expansion. Class Design was still good and a culmination of everything we have built up over the past 4 years. It also ended Arthas storyline which everyone was waiting for since Warcraft 3 ended.

Mists was also a great Expo it actually went back to more exploration and story. We were no longer the hero just some random interesting creature to the people of pandaria. For almost half the expo we had no contact with our factions it was nice. Class design was also very well done for most classes which made the game fun to play no matter what you were doing.

Blaming anyone other then Blizzard is silly.

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a faction leader killing many people and turning their home city into a literal fortress is childish…

Rose colored glasses… imagine being a guild that finally cleared tempest keep only to get your now attuned players poached… it happened. There was tons of complaining… but less so because sunwell released with a major daily hub.

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WotLK, Cata and even MoP (to a point) didn’t turn away millions of subscribers.

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Wrath was fine until the end of it when they combined 10/25…that patch right there started the downward spiral…it’s facts…They effed up with the combining lockouts, loot, and lfd

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LFD tool was one of the best things they ever added.

You’re reading too far into things.

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Yikes, OP. Yikes.

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It’s not the root, but denying BFA being the most…‘predatory’ expansion yet just because the seeds were planted in Wrath isn’t really doing much.

We can fix what happens after BFA if we make enough noise, we can’t go back and fix Wrath.

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Heaven forbid they added Quality of Life features for the majority of their playerbase to enjoy the game eyeroll We get it,you lot are still salty that you can’t play the superiority card over other players now that they have access to means to gear up at their own speed and any way they want. Stop trying to push your agenda and take that away from people/use queable content as a scapegoat,Blizzard realized that the endgame content is an expensive resource and there would have been no point in it existing if it was made for a small percentile perceived as “worthy” aka pretty much be glued to the PC nearly 24/7 which meant either no job,flexible college schedule or luck of the draw with early decent paying shifts [since the market didn’t crash 'til late 2008 so was entirely possible and outsourcing wasn’t as bad as it is now]

Also your analogy…racist much,OP? Heaven forbid some inner city kid busted their butt to try and better their lives and do well,can’t trigger the privileged slackers who got in through nepotism/mommy and daddy’s money who spent most of that time getting drunk,fornicating with drunk sorority girls and snorting illegal substance NO perish the thought! By sounds of things you feel only the alleged elite should enjoy nice things and to that I say go suck a big,fat lemon.

Point is,Alienating the majority to appease a regressive,stingy minority is asinine,the QoL features give players casual and hardcore alike more options and Wrath making things a bit more accessible is a GOOD thing as they get to see their hard work get played by many and I say this as someone who has raided since mid BC [that main got shelved a long while back when the old rig decided to peter out mid MoP and more personal and important stuff came into the woodwork] Classic is fine and dandy but again,this thread comes off as “I’m not a special snowflake anymore because people get to do the things only I and a few others should get to do!!! How dare they get shinies when they should only be MINE REEEEEEEE.” Which is a very odd mentality to have allegedly wanting community yet turning the nose up at people in said community.

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The downward spiral can be traced back to one point. Trial of the Champion. It wasn’t even the end of the expansion, yet there was suddenly a 5-man rewarding gear on par with ulduar. Everyone was able to skip naxx and go straight into the new raid. This one 5-man made all previous content irrelevant. Before trial, people were still doing naxx, eoe, and os runs, Pug raids were thriving. When trial was released, there was no point in doing them anymore. You could now skip all previous content by running this same 5-man (on normal mode!) over and over again until you had full epics. That one 5-man killed all the previous raid content.

The dungeon finder wasn’t too bad when it came it. It just simplified the process of running your random heroic for the day to get your badges. However, Blizzard then repeated the same mistake in Cata by introducing the troll dungeons which were again 5-mans which rewarded raid-level gear. Casual players suddenly had no incentive to raid since they could just gear up from running the same 2 5-mans. This led to blizzard introducing raid finder in the end to try to entice them into raiding, but it led to a deterioration of the community since people no longer had to be social to do raid content, and could just quit since they no longer had to put in any effort to see the end of the expansion. Pugs for old raids were dead, and people quickly ran out of things to do. Blizzard’s focus on “convenience” led to Cata hemorrhaging subscribers, which wow never really recovered from.

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This is flat-out wrong. SW:TOR and FFXIV do exactly that (putting the player at the center of the story) and they are head and shoulders above every other MMO in terms of story-telling, including of course every iteration of WoW so far.

Blizzard are simply doing it wrong.

I don’t mind the WoW-Classic way of storytelling where you are a nameless grunt exploring Azeroth after the outcome of Warcraft III. That was totally fine for the game and it’d be fine for 2019 WoW too. If Blizzard felt more comfortable going back there for the next expansion I would be totally okay with it.

But I think it would be equally as cool if Blizzard succeeded with this new model of storytelling and people were hyped to see what’s coming up next in the story.

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Not everyone feels the same way you do about the game and how it has changed over the years.

I am sick of people making up definitions of what they think a MMORPG is.

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Okay, I’m gonna stop you right there, OP. You see, I played Warcraft II and Warcraft III. Religiously. (I was a smidge too young to play Warcraft I when it was new. I don’t really feel too deprived, though.) It’s always been a game with wacky goblins blowing themselves up and stupid pop-culture jokes and overblown voice acting and the whole nine yards. And yes, it’s always let that live side by side with more serious themes. That’s the whole appeal of Warcraft! If I wanted something that was super serious and grimdark all the time I’d play Elder Scrolls.

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Meh, accessibilty is fine, as long as they still do the work. I was raiding 25 man heroics. But the most fun I actually had in Wrath was the ICC 10 mans I did on Sunday nights with my friends that were kind of sucky. I’d buy a six pack. We’d just laugh and have fun. We had to PuG 4-6 players every week, but only once did we run into a toxic person. Everyone knew from the start we were only going to get 6 or 7 bosses down. It was just pure fun…and I miss it.

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OPer every single thing you said was completely wrong.

Being first doesn’t mean that you did it best and the only way to be good is to copy what the first couple of MMOs did. The reason why the first MMOs were popular is because the choices were few and everything was equally terrible. But that “popularity” was actually small. Compared to the millions that played WotLK WoW, few people actually played the early MMOs. The systems were rough, unfriendly, unfun. But people played them because they were novel. These crappy early MMOs had no competition. Hell most video games of that time were pretty bad and looked like poop.

The players themselves were often high schoolers and college students with oodles of free time. There were some older players but not as many.

What players were willing to put with was very different as the entire scenario was very different compared to today.

In WotLK players were finally having so much fun that they were having their friends join, their family members join, getting people to join by word of mouth and this was just as many of the players were starting their lives outside of education. WoW was as its zenith of popularity, having finally become the game that most of the player base could really enjoy.

I will also say that I am getting absolutely disgusted by WoW’s horrible storytelling. It is time that they stopped having the story revolve around some unlikeable undeveloped NPCs with the player just being there as a witness and actually have the story revolve around the player. No more pooping on players in cinematics, no more pooping on players by having them be CCed while important events are happening, no more cutscenes that exist simply to kill characters off left and right simply to try glorifying undeveloped villains with undeveloped goals. There is absolutely no emotional payoff to any of the storylines. This is doubly true when the storyline ends with a cutscene where the player is CCed so that the boss can kill a NPC and then run off. Getting a dungeon or raid quest after is the antithesis of emotional payoff, it is the writer telling you this quest has no emotional payoff and all your work and theirs was for nothing.

But this is what happens when the PC has no voice. If you have no voice then you aren’t allowed to participate in scenes where characters are talking because you cannot talk. And if you can’t talk then you are considered to not exist. So the writer doesn’t care about how you feel, they don’t care about making you feel rewarded or validated, they don’t feel they need to care that you feel like a wet doormat. A character with no voice will never be given agency. And no, being given dialogue choices is not the same as being given an actual speaking voice. Because the writer will disrespect your character just as much. But when they have to write lines that the VA for your character will read then they feel the necessity to exercise more care.

A story is also a very solo experience that is ruined by forcing people to group. NPCs and the player can create an concept of world that is immerse and closed. But when the player is in a group then someone will be talking about the tacos he is eating or his day at work and that instantly takes you out of the story and the setting and thrusts you back into the real world.

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Everything went to poop during/after MOP imo. Still enjoy the game, but not near as much as I used to.

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TBH MoP is what truly started to kill this game probably one of the worst expansions along with WoD

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Best PvP expansion! Wooooo!

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Not sure where the whole “No player left behind” came from with WOTLK. There was plenty of content that many players never got to see until Cata or maybe even MOP. I actually was in a guild that raided and we never took down all of ICC before cata.

I will agree the whole theme of MOP was childish and while people get mad when you suggest it I feel it was trying to rip off KungFu Panda which was a thing during that time.

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Wotlk and Cata are easily better imo