Idk I’m as casual as one can get and have way to many alts but the only real issue I’ve run into is myself.
That’s not true. If OP said they wanted to do competitive raiding/M+/become a god in PVP, then yeah, they can’t do that in a mmorpg with one hour a day. However, it is not difficult to level up and move foward with the story with limited time, provided the game developers develop the story (open world) portion of their game correctly.
People should not have to spend every waking minute in a game just to feel like they are progressing through it.
At no point in WoW’s history has full BiS equips ever been accessible within a few months if you only played 1 hr a day.
It took me 2 months to get to zm.
Not because its hard really, because its honestly just an awful unrewarding and frankly incredibly boring process.
Then it took a month and a half for me in zm to unlock unity, again, it could be done in a few hours, but the whole zone is just awful. It seems to be designed to just be obnoxious and completely unenjoyable, in 124 ilvl gear it was an incredible slog till i bought 227 off the ah.
Now im grinding out revered to try and get 291 legendary for my unity… got q couple weeks to go, and grinding pvp with inferior gear has been… well, i mean ebing undergeared was always bad for pvp, but the dmg output of 2x legendaries and sets vs nothing is staggering, its almost like a whole level bracket.
Just this weekend i realized that conduits have ilvl that needs to be raised, on top of all the other garbage. Also i have to be necrolord or else i dont survive long enough to hit a single cooldown, with 78k health and 27% you get stunned qnd pop trinket and you are already at sub 10k health… if you dont have that extra gcd from fleahcraft… you get erased.
The whole thing has honestly been the worst expreience i have ever had in this game. BC levelling and clown gear was better than sl. Its so convoluted, so time gated and drawn out… you struggle to make any progress then you are halted all the time for arbitrary nonsense reasons… even with all the skips (thank god for those) its still honestly just an incredibly unenjoyable gameplay loop, which is why i spent 4 months of this 5 month season avoiding it.
Going back and facerolling old content is far more rewarding… you meet people, joke, laugh, have time to chat and goof around… thats great, people are mostly in a good mood… if that wssnt there i would have left ling time ago.
Theres no time for fun in zm, you are chain dazed and attacked by nonsense the entire zone… endlessly… while the mute colors and obnoxious story that means nothing are just… painful.
I honestly dont have much hope for df either, there seems to be a management issue in the game and a new expansion isnt fixing that. Ill putt around doing old stuff till thats not rewarding then maybe take a couple years again.
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you know you can just buy a 226 set from the vendor in ZM for anima right? Sounds more like you just didnt do any game research/play the game tbh.
I have millions of gold, i wasnt sweating the 227 i bought off the ah.
The issue isnt the gear, its the entire gameplay loops is wildly unrewarding. Its a painful slog, just for the sake of being a painful slog… its not just qn obnoxious grind… i did battlemaster in 2010, original insane, etc grinding isnt a big deal… as long as you put in effort and receive rewards that make the effort feel worthwhile.
This is like "ok, heres an obnoxious grind… also its time gated, also the whole reason you are doing everything makes little to no sense, also the zone design is crippling slow, etc etc etc.
This is a video game, qnd entertainment medium, its like they forgot to add “fun” in at all and their design philosophy was “ok, they dont have any choice they HAVE to do this, so, how to we make it take as long as possible with the least effort on our end to get to the end content?”
Not even master end content… just get to it.
Its a miserable experience imo, and because it’s such a miserable experience i have just done other stuff instead.
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Bingo!!! Which is it blizzard, wow either continues into decline and looses subs or you change the design to NOT require multiple hours a day.
Also your need to separate out your reward structure… you cant balance fun around mythic gear (haste, crit, procs etc) and have the game feel bland to non mythic players or guess what you loose subs.
And yet a large portion of the player base wanted a return to classic where I think the grind is infinitely more lengthy and non rewarding. SL isnt hard to get gear, the only real grind is reputations, You can clear out all the zone activity in a couple days. I’m not a massive fan of SL simply because it really has very little in terms of storyline. Heck BFA had a better consistent story than SL and I always had something to do in BFA right upto prepatch. I just dont have that need/desire to log in with SL because im not invested in the story or my toons. But the raid content is good, I enjoy keys. I’m super casual this last tier or 2 but I havent found anything other than the rep system to be particularly annoying. Well that and by extension the crafting system but I believe that is being tweaked in the next xpack so I’l reserve comment until we get more info on it. But grinding rep and crafting isnt required gameplay. I do miss when crafting was more fun and engaging tho. Really comes down to what your goals are with the game. SL has had so many gear catchups its not funny. The whole next patch is basically one giant catchup to prep for DF as well.
I used to do hardcore/casual content.
Now, I am full time casual yes I know casual looks different to different ppl. Casual in my mind. Okay? 
I think its all so ridiculous.
I want player housing, to rp, go to fun events, chill events that groups of ppl can do. I think it would bring in a lot more ppl.
I’ve done (so many I’s) what I wanted to do and I just want chillax and ez fun unless the reward is amazing, I’ll do harder content
It just feels like the sweaty nerds that understood and have passion are gone and its just business suits wanting chedda that run the company now. They have no clue. clearly.
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Thats my point.
Its unfun, tired, and obnoxiously gated and convoluted.
I said in my one post it took me 2 months to do unity, though i could have done it in a few hours… but it was just so… uninspired. Its just a painful slog with a story that… sucks. Like i can not be bothered to care about any of this dtory. Nothing has hooked me.
People complain about bfa, and it drew out a bit with the story, or had places where the story didnt really make sense… but i felt involved at least, i was invested in my character and invested in finishing.
Now, im back 4 months and about 20 minutes after logging in im wondering why i bothered, and i just go do bgs. This expansion you have no reason to care. Tonally the setpieces are all muted tones, the story is… i mean, i think theres a story somewhere, but again… i dont care, i really dont. I made an honest effort at one point, but i just dont care.
I hope DF doesnt go down the same road, though i think they will make the gliding system a giant chore, which will make doing everything in df a chore, but we will see.
I think the grind and the novelty was the reward though, I think once players reached max level the numbers TANKED hard!!! I know I quit vanilla after clearing MC/Ony and I quit TBC after doing the first tier content there too.
I have only just come back to wow after ~6 months… with no LFD autogroup in WOTLK I am gonna skip it altogether (calling it now they will patch it in later because numbers will tank there too).
The story for SL just wasn’t any good. For all the flak BFA got, I enjoyed the story for both factions in that expansion. Gearing has never been an issue for me because normal raid gear is far as I usually go and the open world hasn’t been really difficult in years so I feel no need to get higher. SL was okay until Korthia then I lost interest and went to other games(STO and DCUO). I just couldn’t get into it for some reason. I only recently came back and am enjoying it again. The next expansion sounds pretty good but we’ll see.
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I think that will happen as well. If New World taught us anything, it’s that not having a group finder tool of some kind in your MMO isn’t going to work with today’s players. No one enjoys standing around screaming in chat for an hour just to play the game. And for a company that was all about “no changes” it’s interesting how that mantra changed when we got to WOTLK and LFD.
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Oh look I get it, they want to change dungeons to be relevant, they believe wow is best with a frequent social interactions among the same players… and they are right on that BUT the content cant be so restrictive that players do not have a smooth path to it. If I have to find 4 other players with specific roles before I can play the game, I wont play.
If I could play the dungeon with 4 AI bots and have friends drop in/drop out as they are around so my time is respected, thats perfect for me (and pretty much everyone I talk to). I dont think they understand their audience or are targeting a different one.
Vanilla’s experience wasnt the game.
People forgot the game was trash, it was honestly bad… and classic is in spirit vanilla, but its not vanilla because we have wowhead, youtube, etc.
In classic you had thottbot if you were lucky.
The vanilla experience wasnt players playing the game… it was players BONDING because THE GAME WAS SO BAD. It was bonds forged through adversity thats what brought people together… and the memories of what you did WITH OTHERS is most often what people cite… which wasnt because the game was good, but because it was so bad… that you bonded and created these great moments where you overcame that adversity together which hits some primal human feelings.
People think it was the game, it wasnt. The game was trash back then but the community was awesome. Now its very toxic and narcissistic (as is society as a whole) and we are older and more jaded, which leaves a disparity for many.
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There is always a new group ready to take our places… After 17 and a half years of play I feel old.
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mmm more engaging world content wouldnt be bad, Garrisons were a good start but I think making it more adapatable and personalised would be cool.
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I can 100% agree with you there.
If you focus, you dont notice the grind so much atm but it is a little hard to focus on uninspired content. I dunno ZM is actually a super pretty zone with some cool things in it, but I can understand its just another grind to alot of people. I basically stopped caring after I got my free leggo sorted. The last I wanna say 2 xpacks the gear sets have been kinda bland across the board, but being a hunter ive gotten used to boring looking brown tmogs sets.
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Yeah, look im a bc baby myself, I remember first playing and each ding was exciting because it was new and each level up felt good. Leveling now I dont even care about upgrading gear or choosing talents till I hit 60 cause it just doesnt matter. So I think that feel is what people remember, but that doesnt exist in retail anymore I dont think.
I cant get into ny hunter ever because the gear is soooo bad.
Warrior and lock are cool, hunter is just… always awful.
I genuinely thought this seasons elite wasnt bad for hunters, im working on this seasons elite on my rogue as i like that set too, but yea… gear design is fairly lackluster. Moving away from class sets was just more cheap laziness at least they are going away from that.
Maybe im too old for the game now, idk. I dont mind a grind as long as i feel like theres a reason for it. This just feels like its a grind for the sake of wasting time, which doesnt interest me.
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