Why would people bother when they can see all the content on a level my cat could play and they get good rewards too? This game has a huge problem with it’s approach to accessibility.
Good MMOs don’t give away group content to solo players and this is why has horrible retention issues.
Raiding should have never ever been put on the level LFR is, so many people just chose that route now along with just doing Heroic dungeons.
Blizzard created this problem by opening up too much content to the masses and not requiring some of the most basic skills you needed in the past in order to get into raids.
to be fair, they’re not trying to hold player interest. whether or not we’re enjoying what they’re putting out is completely irrelevant. they know no matter what they make, people will log in on mass because they’ve successfully trained them to stick around.
Speak for yourself, there was nothing interesting about increasing wand damage by 1%. There wasn’t much for customization either, you were either using the raid spec, the dungeon spec, or the pvp spec. The ‘clever’ specs weren’t really clever and it wasn’t fun carrying people with those specs in dungeons or raids.
And yet, the folks who don’t do those competitive activities are often the ones who stay subbed during content droughts and long after the PVP season is over and everyone else is finished with the raids and dungeons for the expansion.
That Blizzard isn’t considering the casual player only goes to show how much they’re shooting themselves in the foot. The casuals are the easiest group to please; just give us the freedom to entertain ourselves and we’ll find our own fun. Except, little by little, Blizzard is removing that freedom and is making it more and more tedious and tiresome to continue finding that casual fun.
Why can’t blizzard hold peoples interest? Because they have systematically erased everything that made wow great in the name of accessibility and appeasing to everyone. In the past you had to adapt to the game, and now it adapts to you. In Vanilla a new player would come into wow and see someone in Tier 1 armor. They would think “I want that”. Now a new player comes in, and they see nothing but an illusion inspired by the game that should be renamed to Cosmetics Of Mountcraft.
When everything you are, how strong you are, boils down to a number… what’s the point? Why do I care that Billy is a mythic raider and has a 412 gs? Getting to any goal in modern wow means nothing, when it’s all boiled down to a 3 digit gear number.
There is loss of identity. To make up for it people farm transmog but it is all meaningless in the end, as all you need to do is farm raids once a week. Blizzard can’t hold players because this game is hollow, without a real meaningful purpose. When people say “It’s just nostalgia man” as soon as someone mentions Vanilla I rage a bit. It’s not nostalgia, it’s the desire for something that doesn’t suck.
The talent trees were an illusion of progress that had one correct path and a handful of useless points that increased abilities you didn’t use in your rotation by 0.1%. Talent paths don’t punish you for experimentation and every option works.
I feel like I’m playing a collectathon more than an MMORPG now a days. Kind of miss when choosing a race, class, and even combat pets mattered. Now, everything is just cosmetic. Nothing feels unique. It’s not like it was when I first started playing WoW in Wrath. I’m not changing my gear around to compensate for the lack of hit since I don’t have Heroic Presence. I don’t need to switch out my pets to accommodate for a lack of buff/debuff my dungeon/raid/battleground party needs.
I miss when being a certain race and/or class mattered. Races are just cosmetic now and being a class just changes the effects and what you wear.
What’s the use of grinding rep when it just gives me a damn mount and easily replaceable gear? Stopping giving me mounts and pets! I want gear! I want shiny new gear that helps me slowly progress me to finally getting into a new normal dungeon, heroic dungeon, or into a raid. And these world quests are boring, too easy, and don’t even feel rewarding. Nothing feels like I actually deserve it. When I clean bear crap off a gnome and get an epic bow for doing a menial task, it’s not rewarding.
Running a tough dungeon over and over again and wrist piece finally drops that increases my item level by just 3 points off from finally getting into the next wing of the dungeon, that’s exciting. I’m so close to the next piece of content. Maybe I should grind some rep and try to finally get revered to finally get those new pants that one faction sells to increase my item level higher. I’ll reque for a dungeon while I’m grinding for rep in the mean time and hope I also get another gear piece from a dungeon.
I don’t even know what’s the use to even joining a guild anymore. No one is even social. You can do battlegrounds, dungeons, and even raids by yourself. The only reason now to be in a guild is to get perks, join a guild a friends or family members made or is apart of, to RP or you want to do high end raiding or pvp. I don’t see leveling, dungeon, or just social guilds anymore. I mean, what’s the use when leveling is so easy and socializing is just optional.
I was once a traveling adventurer that banded together with their friends and others to kill the Lich King and Old Gods, now I’m the one and only Hero of the Alliance and Savior of Azeroth. I’m a pretty little draenei pokemon master with no friends, gear I don’t deserve, and a shiny star sticker that says, “I’m special”.
Spoiler, you are so under-geared its criminal. Please tell me you did not “slay old gods” on this character and then at 329 ilvl claim to be the hero of anything. I’m not entirely convinced that you can walk outside of Boralus and not get eaten alive by a random wolf…
Tag me when Classic opens up and all you do is log on a few times a week to raid MC for meaningless gear the minute they release AQ40. But hey, it won’t have an ilvl attached! What meaningful gameplay!
That’s true. I may play well but I can’t handle Esports/top tier raiding. Tried em, to stressful for me. Besides my interests in any RPG are the lore and crafting. Oh also RP.
BFA has been primarily focused on non raiders and the solo/casual player.
blanket dismisses every dev’s position based on Ion alone
“I can’t believe the entire dev department is dismissive.”
There is more casual content in BFA than raid content. BFA’s entire point is the casual player. You could argue they swung and missed with items, but pretending they aren’t even considering the casual player…when they are bending over backwards to do things like continuously give the solo/casual player heroic raid quality (and better) gear just sounds silly.
This. I cannot stress this enough. The question that needs to be asked is how to keep player interest relevant for as long as WoW has been around? No matter how you slice it, a double-edged sword is a double edged sword.
Do you continue to try and innovate and work new things into your very old engine and very old game to give people exciting new toys to work with, or do you keep on doing the same old thing and hope that it’s exciting enough to work as the proverbial carrot on the stick?
BfA was a very disappointing expansion overall, but there were a lot of things that work on paper that did not translate too well into the final product, at the end of the day. Warfronts sounded exciting, wanting to emulate the old RTS games. Island Expeditions, at the start, were unrewarding but interesting and new, and carried some degree of risk: you could easily lose a Heroic or even Mythic expedition if you weren’t really coordinated. The Azerite Armor sets and perks worked on paper: the idea of “building” your own tier sets and the possibilities it could provide were interesting.
Ultimately, everything collapsed on itself after launch. It’s fine if one or two systems don’t pan out as well as everyone thought it would: for examples sake, Garrisons weren’t able to ever truly shine, ultimately becoming a self-sufficiency game on top of a Facebook app. Tol Barad ultimately became a game about win-trading rather than genuine conflict and skill. Halaa was the only PvP objective worth any interest during TBC. It’s when many ideas crumble due to rotted or ill-placed supports that everything starts to take a turn for the worse.
A lot about BfA failed, from the expeditions, to the core MacGuffin, and even Mythic+ design. While many things in this expansion certainly were ambitious, it ultimately was a failure, and failures are important.
There’s a lot to be said about Blizzard as a whole but ultimately, they took a chance and failed. Call me a shill all you wish for not being on the ‘hate everything Blizzard ever does’ train, but I can see positives out of this whole mess of a disappointment that is BfA.
![:wink:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")