This is how to do it, if you’re going to insist on tying story quests to instanced (raid/dungeon) content. This helps solo players who never want to engage with raid/dungeon content still progress through experiencing the story, which is something the vast majority of solo players do care about.
It’s also been my experience that the higher up the dungeon/raid food chain you go (such as those pushing the highest M+ keys, or Mythic raids, and RWF teams), the less they care about the story. So it’s ironic that you gate it to reward access to that story to those who don’t care about it, but to those who do care about it, are stuck behind a wall, and essentially have to go to Youtube to see it, outside of the game.
It’s to mimic progression you would see in a casual raid group or so they originally said. And if you wanna pretend it’s so easy people are clearing on the first day so LFR should be too, well then you shouldn’t have any trouble clearing it in normal right?
Legit question though, was the prompt available day one of the patch or was it later, say, when it was available in LFR?
I may be wrong, but I seem to recall it being very early on, if it wasn’t week one of raiding opening up in Zereth Mortis. But you’re missing the greater point, which is that it’s not a matter of “how hard can it be?” I’ve already finished it on Normal, and am working on Heroic with friends in a guild.
But for some players, anxiety or other social pressures/difficulties make it such as that they can’t bring themselves to engage with organized group content. It might be one thing to just show up at a world boss and toss out some spells, but organized groups aren’t something they feel comfortable in handling. Yes, I know it’s an MMO, but there’s no shortage of players who treat the game as if it were solo. They love exploring quests and zones at their own pace, and not one set by others, or feel like they’re holding back others. Some players chose the solo life because their real life is far too busy to allow them to commit to a raid time (and gearing requirements) that guilds require of them.
In short, I’m advocating for those who just want to engage with the story without the social pressures of having to play with other players regardless of reason. For those who just want to see it in their own time, in-game, and not on Youtube.
And today Wowhead published a massive story spoiler on their front page.
I wasn’t even visiting the webpage, but I saw it due to my Discord community having a news web hook.
So yeah, whoever thought that this was protecting the story for people was either extremely disconnected from how the online community works, or Blizzard is outright lying about why they made this decision. Either way looks bad.
Players should not be expected to change the way they play to progress the main storyline. It doesn’t matter that the raid is easy…it matters that this once solo-player-friendly MMO is now intentionally being designed to prevent solo and casual players from progressing the story without waiting for more than a month. That is just horrible game design that they have no real justification for.
Yep. There was a time where open world story wasn’t locked behind a raid. Raid story doesn’t need to be the open world story. It can be an off shoot. We still kill the big bad in the raid, but open world content isn’t gated behind it. We just keep going with our story separately.
If it’s not a spoiler, then why doesn’t Blizzard just release the quests?
Right now, it’s not about how obvious a story point may be- yes, most of us are story savy- but by how out-of-touch the devs are being. If they are doing this now, they will do it again on things that might not be so “obvious” to people. So they need to be told now that is is completely unrealistic for them to gate story beats and then claim it’s for the good of those who care about story. It means anyone who actually wants to experience it “chronologically” has to avoid visiting community websites or taking part of story discussions that increase engagement with the game. If we want to be part of the active community, we’re going to end up spoiling ourselves anyway, so there is no point in withholding the quests.
We can’t have it be “so important to the story gameplay experience you can’t do the quests yet” but also “so unimportant you don’t need the quests, who cares if you see the story elsewhere, you had it figured out, right?”
As someone said earlier in this thread, I’d have a lot more respect for the devs if they just straight-up said they were locking the quests to increase MAUs and push people into raiding. If their goal is to nudge people into a certain gameplay style, then they need to own it and say that’s the goal. I can understand a company making a business decision even if I don’t like it.
But if it’s not a lie, if they really thought this was a good idea to better gameplay experience, then they’ve lost touch and need to be told that, too.