In EQ 1999 it was common practice that every zone had mobs in it that would one shot you. The level range in dungeons for example would swing 20 or 30 levels based on the location in the dungeon.
On top of all that a mob of equal level had a very good chance at beating you 1vs1.
On top of encouraging community by requiring players to lean on each other it also made the world engaging. The world could kill you and for that you needed to pay attention. Sgt. Slate roamed the entire section of the western commonlands. That’s an entire zone patrol of a mob that could kill any party 20 levels lower.
Dungeons again had another interesting mechanic. That was called the TRAIN. Chain aggro mobs inside Castle Mistmoore and watch an army come through the gates to kill you. It created some of the most engaging gameplay you could get. This back in 1999 and somehow Blizzard just never thought it was important.
People ask why EQ 1999 could be so much fun but it was. It seems illogical to WoW players but EQ was the genuine MMO.
I don’t think you can really equate M+ as truly casual content. Sure, a run might only take 30 minutes, but unless you’re on a FoTM toon or ina guild you’ll spend another 20-30 min getting into a group. In my mind casual has to be something you can just jump into, therfore single or queued. If mythic dungeons are the next step an M0 needs to be on the LFD, at an appropriate minimum gear level. As a ret pally I spent a total of 75 minutes trying to get into groups for 4 M0s during the weekly event, at a 382 ilevel. If they were on the LFD I could at least have been doing something else during that time. Casual content doesn’t have to be brain dead, but it does have to be automatic to get into.
I started in Legion, have been very introverted in game play and the times I did pug in Legion, it wasn’t all that fun. Apart from finding a Guild, I’m missing any drive to find one, I did in Legion but that’s gone in BFA for me.
Now each time I resub, it has come down to thinking, ‘‘well warfronts come around every so often, islands I’ve done with rando’s and it feels dreadful, I can imagine it’s funner with friends’’ It’s just IF I’m not raiding or PVPing, there really isn’t anything motivating, meaningful and immersive to jump in into BFA.
I think content was done for it to have a replayable factor but I just think they are trying to sway people with ‘‘rewards’’ and ‘‘cosmetics’’ to do this content like it changes the ‘‘fun’’ factor. I feel like it doesn’t. Other’s will disagree but throwing more rewards and cosmetics in every aspect of the game doesn’t necessarily change how fun/engaging the actual content is.
‘‘Shoot, this is boring’’…
Blizz; “Here is a vendor, currency, and mounts/pets etc…”
EQ didn’t reward player skill though. The content and gameplay meant you had to find enjoyment from the game elsewhere. Like the social aspects. Which to this day is the only important thing of note about EQ.
MMOs are more than creating forced grouping content because they didn’t have the technology to create good gameplay.
Just because people don’t share the same nostalgic retrospective of a game you liked doesn’t mean they are trolling you. I means I have a different point of view.
Kinda seems like some people arguing for “better” casual content really want “solo” content. That one guy keeps arguing that “of course LFR has issues because raids are designed to be an organized group”… well … welcome to ALL group content, friendo.
The second you make mechanics matter enough to not be “boring” and provide a chance of failure, you end up with a Nazgrim situation where people are so bad they’d rather whine for nerfs than actually do the mechanics properly. People couldn’t even do Heroic DUNGEONS in early Cata and they considered the expansion to have no casual content at all because of it.
I think solo content like Brawler’s Guild and the Mage Tower are fantastic. I’m totally okay with seeing them expanded (just not on a class-by-class level like in Legion, takes too many resources for not enough gain – also, now that I think about it, Mage Tower could have just been another 2 tiers in Brawler’s Guild, it’s the same thing more or less). But that sort of solo content is just about the only “casual” content that you can make difficult enough to be interesting without causing big issues. And that’s probably only because they reward primarily vanity things. If it spat out gear, the same sort of casuals that got Cata dungeons nerfed and constant LFR bosses gutted would whine until THOSE were nerfed.
Personally I hate WoW mechanics for the most part but it’s chiefly because I hate how they deal with player to player dependency.
In WoW all the complexity is in movement which absolutely sucks for some classes. In EQ the complexity wasn’t in movement. It was in managing debuffs on the mob, damage, crowd control, tanking and some movement. For example in EQ shamans and enchanters had slows. Shamans were the daddy of debuffs with the largest slow. Enchanters offset that disadvantage by also being the daddy of crowd control.
A typical 6 man party in EQ required tank, heal/debuffer, CC, DPS. I’ll admit the DPS rotations were less complicated than WoW DPS rotations but healing, tanking and CC were WAY more complicated in EQ. So movement wasn’t everything. You also needed people who could be engaged to know when their role had to be fulfilled and the fight mechanics were designed around it.
Nothing in WoW is as engaging as vanilla EQ enchanters managing 5-6 adds in a pull. Or bards twisting songs to kite 20 mobs at once.
Fair point, but also worth noting that the existing “casual” audience in WoW would not be able to handle that successfully. You gotta remember that WoW was a more accessible and casual option compared to Everquest, even back in Vanilla. And it’s only continued in that direction over time.
Brawler’s Guild is coming back soon, and that’s pretty engaging solo casual content that you can digest at your own rate.
I don’t think we’re getting anything like the mage tower in BfA, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw something like that make a return in the next expansion.
In doing so I think they lost some critical features of the game. I don’t think a casual version stripped of its complexity is the same thing and certainly WoW’s casual approach made it less an MMORPG.
Personally i like the island adventures alot … they do feel like they need something else in them… but as you can que nonstop and any lvl they cant be cash cows.
Maybe add some more drop probabilities in chests etc or make chests games to get to like the floor squares in mop with island clues to pattern… and limit to a few ques a day
What i miss world content wise is something like the hatchlings from legion. You can work on as you want, but its a long chain with rewards throughout it— i thought that was genious.
World stuff you can do but not nerded for anything other than the fun of it.