BFA is not to blame WotLK is

[Battywash-area-52]

i commend you for being so passionate about this game, but honestly that long of a post -TLDR

[Jalen-emerald-dream (Jalën)]

Cata was when I started being a PvP only player and I do agree that it was fun. MoP was just amazing because in my opinion it had the best class design and the World PvP on my realm was amazing. I actually remembered caring about the Arena Tournaments and watching people pull off amazing feats. Like when Cdew kept everyone alive sub 20% HP against Boomy/Lock/RSham for what I want to say over a minute.

[Lacryma-wyrmrest-accord (Lacryma)]

This was an excellent read and I agree with most of it. I do think however that LFD and LFR was a good thing, though like many other things it’s all about how it’s presented. The problem was that the dungeon / raid aspects of the open-world were discarded. It used to be you had to run dungeons to progress stories at times, and that was fun.

In FFXIV you have the Duty Finder, and the Social aspect / Social Score at the end of the Dungeon makes every run a joy even if it winds up being Brayflox Longstop or Dzmael Darkhold. Contrasting that, WoW is all about “go go go!” The journey and agency is gone. Even worse, the loot is rare due to the Casino oriented nature of the loot, and the way the world is represented makes your eyes glaze over rather than draw you in.

What I wouldn’t give for a quest that sent me into Atal’Dazar to slay Yazma, and my reward was a new age version of the Sword of Serenity (like what Classic had with the Scarlet Monastery).

And as you said… the story is too campy.

Case and point. Westfall in Cataclysm compared to Westfall in Classic. That’s like night and day by comparison. One felt dangerous and menacing. In one, your fighting the spiritual successors of the Stonemasons who want to join the Bloodsails and bombard the coast of Stormwind for loot and plunder.

The other felt like a B-Material joke. A little 4th wall breaking, like a Giant Mech called Megatronus attacking you in Netherstorm is funny. CSI Azeroth or Rambo meets Redridge makes you want to head-desk.

[Tarrok-thorium-brotherhood (Tarrok)]

@Eco-uldum

Cataclysm turned the Warcraft franchise from fantasy to something more steampunk

Ahem.

http://classic.battle.net/war2/units/submarine.shtml

http://classic.battle.net/war2/units/fz.shtml

http://classic.battle.net/war3/human/units/siegeengine.shtml

Blue Mechanostrider

[Sayura-earthen-ring]

I will add that the majority of players, those who aren’t fools, appreciate LFD because they hated how much of their time was wasted having to constantly shout in chat for 2 hours to fill the last spot for the group. That was the very reason why LFD was added in the first place. There was a huge demand for it and Blizzard finally gave the people what they want and needed.

Nothing ruins immersion more than other people. Because unless you are rolling only with hardcore RPers, other people will take you out of the game world by constantly talking about the real world and breaking the fourth wall.

Also OPer you completely failed to seperate your SUBJECTIVE preferences from objective truth. There is no truth in your post, only your SUBJECTIVE OPINION.

[Rankin-shandris (Rankin)]

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.

Your cherry picking is amusing. We also fought the Mantid, Sha, and Mogu.

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.

Someone didn’t read any of the quests. Especially anything on the western side of the wall.

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).

Warcraft 2 had helicopters, oil rigs, and tankers.

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.

No. I don’t want boring Humans vs Orcs all of the time. I want a WORLD of Warcraft.

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.

That’s a whole lot of your definition, which doesn’t match with anything else. Also, we’ve been beating up world-ending threats for a decade now. We’re not random adventurers anymore.

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.

There was a ton of complaining during TBC because of all the poaching going on because of a lack of effective catch-up mechanics.

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.

Continuing down this road would have lead to the death of large raids. They continued to become increasingly complex to design, so they needed a larger audience to justify those increased costs.

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.

The original PVP system was the worst system ever designed. Nothing else even comes close.

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.

Someone’s got a lethal dose of nostalgia because not everybody had such a rosy experience. The LFG tool was a necessary addition to the game.

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.

And I’m sick of wannabe elitists who hate how other people play the game. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from forming your own group and doing stuff. That hasn’t gone away, you’re just throwing a tantrum because the “wrong” people have an easier time seeing content.

[Sayura-earthen-ring]

I know why OPer thinks WotLK was to blame. Because WotLK was made for the people whereas vanilla was made for the elitist snobs. THat’s why he is so angry that the people in the cheap seats were able to have nice things in WotLK.

[Gobbyjr-draka (Gobbyjr)]

i wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a problem with the expansions themselves (in terms of the story, the setting, world design), but the design decisions blizzard decided to implement over the course of those expansions, overall if those expansions were developed in the same manner but with good design decisions fitting of an mmo as it’s structure, I would like them as much as i did vanilla/TBC

[Vãrick-emerald-dream (Vãrick)]

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

That’s the culmination of the story. It started off in a very storybook wonder, with happy pudgy panda bears running about showing us our way through World of Warcraft: Jackie Chan Adventures.

Nobody liked the panda arc in WC3. Nobody likes the Pandas on the Warglaives of Azzinoth. Nobody likes the one guy at blizzard that keeps forcing pandas into this Orc vs Elf fantasy world. (all an exaggeration.)

I personally like all that stuff, but I completely understand people who signed up for Orcs vs Elves lost their immersion by the rise of the care bears.

It’s like what they’ve done with dwarves. Dwarves in Wow have gone from the mines of moria to Snow White.

[Floridax-black-dragonflight (Floridax)]

LFD tool was destruction to the World

[Funkflex-tichondrius]

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

Can sort of agree,
I miss doing os 10 then os 25 then eoe 10 then eoe 25 then every single raid and stuff on each difficulty.
imagine being able to do 10 man azshara raid then 10 man heroic then 25 man then 25 heroic, thats 4 different “raids” . I know we have normal / heroic today but its not the same stepping stones. it all feels the same besides maybe mythic has that extra dagger in the arkse mechanic

[Funkflex-tichondrius]

LFD tool was destruction to the World

IMO what “killed” the game was cross realm / sharding and tools that are like just queue and wait 30 minutes and game will auto derp for you.
questing on cross derp is sorta the same, does it really matter? you can just wait till someone else kills the world boss and spank it once on the side and you get the 500g and epic item anyways.

[Floridax-black-dragonflight (Floridax)]

LFD, and sharding, and class pruning by making the game “more accessible” to new players has killed the game. Cross realm was almost a dream come true, but sharding was necessary for it

[Darkthurr-the-venture-co]

It is the feature that nearly single-handed destroyed the world. It is the gog and magog of warcraft. I could not disagree with you more, with every fiber of my being I disagree with you.

[Nerubian-rexxar]

Sir, I like what you’re selling.

[Fadirgaldrs-wyrmrest-accord]

He’s not wrong though.

[Darkkníght-sargeras]

I liked Pandaria, I started in (early) Cataclysm, so I’ve been playing the game for quite some time now.

I did feel that Pandaria was a bit…different than say Outland, Northrend, or even the Cataclysm zones. Not necessarily in a bad way, I think some of their best writing, world design, enemy design, and more came during the MoP expansion, Monk is probably my favorite class, and always will be.

[Raistmajere-dawnbringer (Raistmajere)]

I think you have some good points, but also feel you may be confusing cause and effect. Take LFD, for example. I started at the beginning of Wrath and it was hard to get people to take you into instances, as a new player I couldn’t get over that the game was as popular as it was considering how bad the community treated new players. What I think the greatest travesty of Wrath was the removal of RPG elements. No questing for pets, totems, etc. That shift in focus probably heralded the current mechanical state.

MoP was where I thought the direction of the game really took a turn for the worse, though mechanically it may be considered a high point. They were pushing dailies so hard at the start, now they gate critical function behind doing simple, boring, repetitive tasks. It seemed to start there. I definitely didn’t like how they simplified character design in Cataclysm, and I think they killed casual PvP in Legion. There’s plenty of blame to go around, I don’t think you can blame 1 expansion.

[Illdewild-whisperwind (Illdewild)]

OP, you lost me at the “Trashy kid from the ghetto” comment.

[Ravenmayne-moon-guard]

What a very long way of saying “I got banned from the Ren Faire and now I want to force people to RP my way.”