Its also incredibly inaccurate. Since i will still be here playing it when blizzard once again swings the pendulum back and everyones crying about it being ‘dumbed down for casuals’. Its just what happens. They try to make the game hardcore and streamlined. The casuals get bored and quit. Atvi finance says ‘dudes, what happened?’ they then say ‘i think we over streamlined it a bit and turned the game into a soulless husk’ and then atvi finance says ‘dudes, we need people to actually play the game so we can give you the budget you think you need’, and the pendulum swings back. And then everyone cries that its dumb and stupid and catering to casuals.
And then we’ll have one more expansion where they’ll try and iterate on everything and ‘perfect the formula’ and everyone will hate it and complain that its now not only boring and time consuming, but also vapid, and so they’ll swing it back again by pulling out the pointless busy work and streamline the game.
I want to have fun playing this game. An “increase in power” is icing on the cake & nothing more.
At this point, I couldn’t care less about the covenants, their storylines, or their rewards. They are nothing more than something I’ve heard about, which exists in some hazy, faraway reality that isn’t mine, & to be honest, nothing I’ve heard of them makes me want to join any of them, much less do their daily & weekly quests. Aging, slowed reactions & all, I’d still rather do dungeons & LFR, even if I don’t get any significant power increase.
I’m a casual player. I want to have fun. At the moment, however, I’m not, & it’s not because Shadowlands is “bad for casuals,” it’s that in my opinion Shadowlands is just simply bad, period. That’s why I’m not playing at the moment; I’m just not feeling motivated to log in to an expansion I dislike.
It’s so funny and weird… part of what made Classic so fun wasn’t just the endless raiding - most of that was just figuring out mechanics and placement, since that was all new to the vast majority of players.
What really made Vanilla stand out was the mystery of it all. Felwood had nothing in it, which was somewhat terrifying. Karazhan was also empty, except for some random elite mobs and ogres in DWP.
The story was extremely disjointed and that was amazing - go kill these elementals… go kill these dragons, now go kill these trolls… good, now here are some bugs… and here are some undead.
There was just something fun about the world having yet to be fully fleshed out - figuring out what could be inside the Caverns of Time, or trying to sneak into Mt. Hyjal consumed hours of my time.
That vast, empty, gigantic world was just so fun and it let your imagination run wild.
You weren’t ‘Champion’… you were (in my case) just an old Priest, doing what he can in this large, strange world.
There are some good points here, but SL is nothing like classic. They just did a couple of token things to try and make it similar. Classic was a huge game with a ton of things to do, SL is a few small areas and a ton of eternal grind systems.
There are several people pointing out that it’s not casual friendly, and they are correct. They don’t care about the casual players, so the only thing that makes sense is to unsub and play another game that is more casual friendly. SWTOR and FFXIV are a couple.
In my heart of hearts i truly believe that they think that by stripping all the ‘busy work’ out of the game and ironing out all the rough edges, they are really trying to make the game better for everyone.
And i want to say ‘thank you for trying so hard, but you’re sort of missing why i play the game’. I like all that stuff you’re sanitising. I like the crunchiness of it. Its what gives me that reason to log in and play the game.
Here, let me explain:
I dont like meta systems. Every single aspect of that system can be broken apart and turned into its own little mini grinds (which players can target independently).
Story quests behind renown, transport hubs behind anima grinds (remember suramar!), soulbinds behind rep and dailys, conduits and legos as drops in the world from actual mobs and not loot boxes (giving you a reason to do other stuff in the world). Renown from just doing stuff that helps the zone out.
It doesnt have to be ‘here are your three weekly quests, see you again in an hour for your next bunch of upgrades’. Um, okay, what do i do now? ANYTHING YOU CAN POSSIBLY DREAM OF!!! See you next week!
But thats crunchy. Its too many chores and too much busy work. And players dont like that. Except, (and dont at me!), i kind of did. That was literally my gameplay loop for the last decade and a bit.
I have been considering returning to that game; it has a number of excellent points to it. For one, it’s the only MMO in which I’ve ever enjoyed PvP, much less had any success doing it; for another, the Dark vs Light system is amazing, & it’s the only game I’ve ever played where I’ve felt I could actually play an evil character & get rewards for doing so. Finally, I loved all of the various story lines I played; I felt as if I were actually playing a significant part in the whole affair, & it made me feel like what I was doing “mattered” in the grand scheme of things, far more so than WoW has done in a long time.
I’m not really into Star Wars at all, but I will admit that SWTOR has a lot to offer, especially for casual players like me.
It’s so weird that I can log in for an hour a day, do a couple quests, log back out, & feel like I’ve had some fun doing it. But yea, MMOs are so totally not for me, amirite?
A random person on the internet, and you don’t have to care, but you seemingly do. Your argument is weak, it would be like calling for the abolishment of jumping in a platformer because you personally do not like jumping. Which leads to my original question, why play it if you do not like what the genre is?
Who said I don’t like the genre? What does having limited time to play have to do with whether or not I like the genre?
& no, I don’t care about your pretend definition, but I do care that you think you’re making an argument. This nonsense about “calling for the abolition of jumping in a platformer” is simply inane chatter that has nothing to do with anything I’ve said.
Please try a little reading comprehension, & while you’re at it, try reading the thread.
Someone sounds bitter. Tell me, if I am so wrong and you are an expert on what makes an MMO, how do you make one with the ability for a person with only one hour a day to get to fully experience it? Make all dungeons and BGs ~5 minutes? Raids ~10 minutes? A “MMO” built on doing 2 quests daily is not a staple of the MMO genre, investing time for a large payoff, whether that be raids/top end PvP/etc. is however. A “MMO” that consists of doing 2 quests daily is not an MMO, it’s a mobile game. Be thankful Blizzard added these elements in, as it came at a great cost in other areas.
I’m playing this casually and think it’s pretty great. I have a warrior with about 190 ilvl and just got my Conq 2 hander. I play at most maybe 4 hours a day sometimes only 30 minutes. Do the odd mythic, raid or torghast…or even arena.
The way loot drops, casuals are geared as people who commit more time…im pumping in 30-40 hours a week maybe more and I won’t get one single item… just spent 4-5 hours PuGing Heroic Castle, 7/10 no drops but I received 2 anima items so for about 5 hours, I gained 70 anima, seems worth the hassle…
