Every expansion for the most part follows the same grand scheme:
*Mythic+ Dungeons to get better gear to do raiding
*Lower difficulty raiding to get better gear to do higher difficulty raiding
*Difficult raids that cater to the top 2 to 1% of the entire player base.
*PVP for those that enjoy that aspect
Whenever there is outdoor content, it’s meant as a path for alts to play catch-up moreso than it is new content to sink your teeth into and have a blast doing on a regular basis. That’s what it feels like to me anyway.
Where are the outdoor zones like we had in Suramar in Legion? It delivered an entire end-game experience for a solo player who could invest hours and hours into the story. You also had rewarding World quests that didn’t feel like it was wasting your time with paltry rewards. It had Wither training, a fun solo experience where you could make progress without the worry of someone screaming down your throat for doing bad DPS.
Where is the outdoor experiences like we received in Mists of Pandaria? Tons of love and attention to detail were given to that expansion. It had tons of solo daily quests, activities, ways to progress and upgrade gear outside of hardcore raiding, I had some of my most fun ingame during Mists of Pandaria and in Legion.
There are end game zones in every expansion, but many of them don’t really deliver that impactful solo progression experience that I received in say Timeless Isle, where I would gather up coins to farm up neat things, find chests to gear up, collect empowerments to upgrade my gear, it was a sense of progression I could do by myself if I wanted to.
Legion had a lot of content geared towards outdoors and was fun for solo players to do. You had the Mage Tower (not really outdoor content, but still solo), you had Suramar, an entire end-game zone dedicated for solo play, Wither training (not outdoors, but in a sense, it really is), Argus had a fun storyline and had fun World quests, progression and plenty of mounts to solo for.
Shadowlands didn’t deliver on that experience to a player like me. The Maw was a husk of an experience, I’m sorry to say. The complete goal of 9.0 was to keep you out of the Maw as much as humanly possible. Instead of developing engaging and innovative content to do outdoors, you literally created a zone that had build in mechanics to rush you out as fast as possible, literally punished you if you tried to stay for too long. I get it, that was supposed to be the theme of a hellish zone, it was not fun, thematic or otherwise, not for me it wasn’t.
Korthia was a little bit better of an experience at first, but once you started to progress, you saw how little progress you were making and the huge time sinks required to make any sort of upgrades to your gear. It wasn’t fun on alts and wasn’t fun as a catch-up mechanic. Even getting to the World boss in the Maw was more of a chore if you had to hoof it. Having to run through fifty elites, get dismounted, killed, lose all of your currency and then repeat all over again? Yeah, a real fun time blast, indeed.
Then you had the World quests in Shadowlands that were for the most part unrewarding, had way too many parts to many of them and it felt like a slog for literally meager rewards.
The Callings are okay, I like to make gold, that’s about the only fun thing I have to do in Shadowlands. I don’t if I’d call it fun, but it’s there and it’s something.
Admittingly, I haven’t done Zereth Mortis for the most part because Shadowlands burned all of the fun I had for the game completely out of me. I didn’t enjoy the leveling experience, I didn’t enjoy the outdoor content, I didn’t enjoy the borrowed powers to the extreme, I didn’t even enjoy something I did in the previous two expansions, World quests.
Quite frankly? There needs to be more developmental time and focus put into players that enjoy the solo experience, players that enjoy outdoor content, players that enjoy progressing their characters outside of organized content. I’m not alone in this thinking either, you can scour the General Discussion forum over the past number of years and you’ll find tons of threads that discuss this very same topic.
Of course there will definitely be people that will label me, “Lazy”, “entitled” and whatever label you want to give a player like me, I’m fine with that. I have thick skin, I’m not worried about being judged poorly for voicing my opinions. I talk a lot, I say a lot and I’m not afraid to speak my mind, that doesn’t mean what I’m saying is full of hot air. I’m saying as a paying customer of sixteen plus years of what I want to see more of and expect from the game I love most.
I applied to become a member of the Community Council, not because i care about text color differentiation, or to make me feel empowered, it does none of those things for me. Why I did apply was because I wanted to provide a voice that could be heard more easily and more directly for the right people. I feel that a lot of what gets posted in General Discussion, Reddit, YouTube comments, Twitch, Wowhead, MMO-Champion, those places are probably overlooked by Developers.
This forum gives me an avenue to voice what I feel needs to be heard. That’s not to say I’m always right and the developers are always wrong. That’s why it’s called feedback. I’m making suggestions on how i think the game will do better as a whole for the entire player base, not just me. There are a lot of people like me that play World of Warcraft.
I’m not talking about casuals or just LFR’ers, I’m talking about people that like to do solo content, people that like to do progressive content on their own time, their own experiences and of their own volition. LFR is a great avenue to experience the story for people that do not like to do organized content like me.
I like to do group content, but not organized content. For me, the difference is a matter of utilizing voice chat, discord, organizing a block set of hours per week to accomplish a task/goal, that’s not my cup of tea. I was diagnosed with Psoriatic Arthritis five years ago. My flare ups in my hands disallow me from pursuing organized content any longer. That was a decision I made on my own and I will never change my mind.
So that leaves me with more time to pursue other areas of the game that I do enjoy, which is outdoor content. I also enjoy doing regular and heroic dungeons, queueable group content is fun, such as LFR. Many will call it brainless, effortless, that’s fine, but I always put in 100% effort each and every time I play. I learn the fights even though it’s not organized content. I try to help out in every way I see fit possible.
I’m rambling on here, but the point I’m trying to get across to Blizzard is that there needs to be much more focus on outdoor content. I’ve watched recent interviews with Ion from 2-3 weeks ago. When asked about outdoor content for players like me, it sounds like they are delivering a system like Zereth Mortis multiplied by four. The new renown system is going to be the reputation system and it will involve cosmetics, unlocks for your Dragon, recipes (I’m guessing), but sounds like it will be lightweight in terms of actual content.
This is simply guesswork from me and I may be jumping the gun, but I didn’t get the biggest impression that outdoor content was going to be receiving a whole lot of love in 10.0. It just didn’t come expressed that way in the way the answers were conveyed and this has me very concerned.
I’ve been enjoying the phases in Alpha and we’re in phase 4 as of this writing, the questing has been fun, Dragonriding for the most part has been engaging, the talent trees are interesting, professions look intriguing, love the UI options, but I want to know what there is to do at max level beyond M+ dungeons, raid or die and PVP.
Why don’t I just, “get better or do other content?” Because I don’t enjoy organized raiding and don’t enjoy M+ dungeons, it’s not fun for me. Just because I enjoy different aspects of the game doesn’t mean I’m playing the game wrong or that the game, “isn’t made for me”.
A bulk of your player base are players of my ilk. I’m sure I’m not conjuring that up out of thin air. We are a massive part of your entire picture. There needs to be content for every player style. I’m fine with raiders getting the best gear, best looking mounts, but give outdoor content some more loving, more options, more pizazz.
How about some random events that spawn throughout world? Not World quests, not bonus objectives, not invasions, but purely random world encounters that offer strange, but fun rewards for accomplishing a set of goals with either by yourself or lots of other people engaging in said activities. I know many other MMOs have systems like this that are similar and I’ve enjoyed these types of events in those as well. We need something like that in WoW, it’d help make the game world feel more alive and eventful. When I say random events, I mean random to the point you can’t base a countdown timer on an add-on or via Wowhead, but truly random.
More end-game zone content ala Suramar. I know that zone wasn’t fun for every one, but it’s my favorite zone in the game. Legion is also a beast of an expansion because of how much developmental time and resources were put into it, you could tell the attention to detail, the sweat, tears and time investment. I wanna feel that again in Dragonflight and beyond.
I also want to take this time to say that I disagree with things like not allowing the Slime Cat to be in LFR when for months it was noted to be completed on any difficulty. This precludes someone like me, with my disability, to not be able to acquire this mount. Sure, it’s possible someone could carry me, but I don’t want to do that and won’t put myself in that situation to have to feel burdened to someone. I also won’t pay for a carry, that’s not my bread and butter. Not for me. I just think it was a poor PR move to change the achievement mere days before season 4 was released and then players like I are left up in arms.
Of course you’ll have all of the usual suspects that are saying we are entitled, crybabies, want to receive a mount for free. Last time I checked, slogging through 30 bosses over the span of three weeks, waiting in queue for hours combined, hours combined within the actual group content, that’s participating. You can claim it’s AFK’ing, but 99% of groups boot out players that are actually AFK for any length of time, at least it’s always been my experience.
The decision to not allow the mount in LFR has left an extremely tepid taste in my mouth. It’s one of the motivational reasons behind this post, which admittingly is TL/DR in nature by now. It was the wrong decision on your part. Do you realize there were people that re-subscribed with the thought of being able to achieve the mount in LFR? Even Wowhead stated it would be available for months on any difficulty. That doesn’t exclude LFR or else it would’ve been made abundantly clear months ago.
Then the decision to not extend the XP buff left another tepid taste in my mouth. Why? I know we weren’t promised more than two weeks. However, Classic WoW gets an extended XP buff that lasts for over a month, so why not give retail the same treatment? The excuse was so that most players could get ready for season 4. Most people I talked to didn’t even know a thing about season 4 when I was leveling in dungeons across NUMEROUS alts over that two week span. I find that to be a little disingenuous.
So, instead of throwing players of my ilk a bone and giving us something to do in season 4, you decide that our voices don’t matter as much as someone that does organized raids and M+ dungeons. That’s exactly the message that was sent, loud and clearly, unintentionally or not, that’s the message you sent and it’s not one I take lightly and one I refuse to sit on my hands about.
This thread isn’t meant to be entitled, only whiny, it’s meant to give a voice to those that feel like me, that want more content to do in the manner that I’ve suggested, that many have suggested over the years. Some people may get rubbed the wrong way, may think I’m entitled, whiny, lazy, LFR hero, whatever you want to call me, I’m fine with it As long as I have a voice to state what I feel is wrong with the state of the game and the messages that Blizzard are sending (by lack of saying anything in most regards) then I will make sure to do that.
I’m not advocating for less organized group content as a whole, I’m not advocating for better mounts for easier content, I’m not advocating for top gear for little effort, I’m not advocating for receiving more than I should be entitled for based on the play time ratio and the content I consume.
I just want more content that I can actually consume that’s fun, engaging and not unfun to do on alts. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.
(Yes, I know I rambled on too long, but that’s who I am, right or wrong. So for those that want to skip this post, here is the gist of it):
TL/DR: I want more outdoor content, more things to do outside of organized raiding, M+ dungeons and PVP. I want developers to take this section of their player base more seriously and not treat us like we have been this week and throughout much of Shadowlands and in BFA to be quite honest.
I don’t that’s being unreasonable of me to ask. Thanks for listening.