I’m going through this thread and there’s a couple of things I noticed–I’m going to speak from my perspective as someone who’s been playing MMOs since 2000. Retail is not casual friendly like WoW Classic plays. People get this twisted because WoW Retail has become about the endgame and only the endgame. This is the same issue EQ ran into in 2002 with PoP and every MMO since then that goes on longer than 5+ years. The game becomes obsessed with endgame content because you have a lot of players who’ve been playing the game for over 3+ years which is easily enough time for even the most casual of players to make endgame content.
Why is this an issue though? Well not everyone experiences the game in the same vein as everyone else. When I was in EQ I can vividly remember that leveling my Main, and my alts was more of the game than raiding in the end. Frankly I can barely remember the Plane of Fear Raid. But I can remember all the time leveling up in Kunark.
What’s at issue here is the game isn’t rewarding for casual players because the game devalues casual content so much so that emphasis is on content that’s either very time consuming, or just mechanically so difficult that why even bother. I remember in EQ and I even seen this with Project 99 that leveling isn’t something most players zoom through in a month. Actually it take a long time to grind out levels, even though we’re in the modern day MMO where we know exactly what to do, and that’s because gear was scarce, but even with that gear you still weren’t moving a light-speed pace unless you had a group that basically force fed grinding.
I think the problem here is that content that’s meant for casual players has been made so trivial that they’re now forced into content that was never really meant for them. I mean you can literally have a max level character in under 2 weeks now. That’s the issue, and honestly the complaints about leveling taking too long were wrong. Leveling should not be regarded as some sort of chore you have to do; it’s what makes up the majority of your character’s experience when you make them.
Really this is what happens in MMOs when most of the budget is spent on designing top tier raid/dungeon mechanics but then also realizing that majority of your playerbase doesn’t even try to attempt that content. So what’s the solution? Instead of trying to work on means that allow for players to group at a slower pace, or adding different meaningful grinds to the game you essentially rush everyone to the entrance and try to fit a million people into a door the size of normal front door to house.
The design is what’s at issue here. The design is massively flawed. That’s why I advocate for LFD for M+. Because that’s where their design is headed. It’s literally the logical next step in how they’ve now developed this game. By essentially trivializing all other content, and making it pointless prior to endgame PvP, Raiding, and M+ you’re basically forcing players who would’ve never seen that content back in the day, or even came close to it, having to deal with how that content works now. It becomes hostile as everyone wants to race through it. I mean even when CN first launched 2 weeks ago I remember players in a PuG I was doing via LFG were angry you weren’t racing through Shriekwing and Huntmaster. Why the rush? Well because they saw it was already solved and that this content doesn’t matter.
I think the only way you claw this back is to slow down the leveling process again. Slow it down to a crawl so you can’t zoom through the game. You can keep the drops scarce too but even if they have them it shouldn’t help your leveling too much. Either that or you have to accept that endgame content is going to lose more social aspects because otherwise you are going to see subs drop for MOBAs. Look at this comparison in Q3 Blizzard’s properties had 30M MAUs–CoD has 111m. I haven’t looked up what Riot is at but I imagine it’s big too. The reason for this? The time spent is equal to the value players receive. Log in and go.
WoW is at this place where it’s a game of contradictions and honestly it feels like the dev team has in mind what they think would increase MAUs but they only look at it from the perspective of what happens when you’re done heroic LFD which also can be done within another week of gameplay.
