Some things don’t happen at your discretion. For example you don’t choose surprises, surprises choose you.
Further your relationship to the real world requires being surprised once in awhile. If everything were exactly what we were expecting life would be boring and probably is if we find ourselves there.
So I’d say it’s difficult to get people to understand what I’m talking about with WoW because WoW was never EQ 1999. The world by comparison isn’t alive. EQ 1999’s world was very much alive and engaging because all points of interest were in the world. All player engagement happened in the world, good or bad. All the mystery and surprise of thousands of players assisting and competing with other players in a sandbox meant to last months.
Having been in guilds for both games, having raided in both games, I could never say the same things about WoW that I could about EQ 1999. WoW is superior to EQ 1999 in every way save community and it’s because of discretion.
Even Vanilla WoW allowed for more personal progression than the MMOs that came before it.
In its current form in retail WoW, guilds still offer the top-end progression for players that want that kind of gameplay (you can’t get the best gear without being in a guild just like Vanilla) but the range of options for personal progression have widened. And that’s a good thing. If WoW still depended solely upon the guild model for progression gameplay, it would be a small shell of what it once was (look at how many competitor MMOs WoW has outlasted to date).
Because the player base has turned over several times since its inception in 2004. Players have changed. Their expectations for MMOS have changed. WoW still remains the best MMO, despite its many flaws, because it recognized this.
This is why I always question when people start quoting WoTLK sub numbers, the introduction of “QoL” features – and their ultimate analysis of subs showing it was the pinnacle of WoW.
If WoTLK produced so many “wrath babies” why weren’t subs up to 20 mil? Why’d it level off and stall? I really am curious to see the in/out from those times. I kind of get the impression the traditional MMO crowd was leaving as a newer type of SP gamer was entering the fold. The Cata bump with a return to older methods in the early part of the expansion seem to hint at that – Blizzard decided to change direction for a brief moment for a reason…
But… anyway, I do agree. The game is very different than what it once was. Completely different focus. The one argument I don’t like very much is that the changes were needed because of the toxic community… As I recall the transition, the community became toxic because of the changes.
I remember that. Funny you bring that up because there is one thing I always remember about that transition period from WotLK to Cata.
When I was doing pug dungeon runs very late in the expansion, I experience a load of those Wrath Babies who had very poor technique, players who had been carried through runs by overgeared players, and who had come to think everything was easy. I remember saying that what Blizzard was planning in Cata was going to crash head-on into reality and there was going to be chaos early on. Which came to pass. Players who had learned nothing about a group run or about
their class, found themselves getting trounced in Cata
I recall tanks and healers refusing to partake in LFD runs, to the point where Blizz had to offer caveats to them to get them to run.
I avoided the whole mess by leveling a toon in the peace and quiet of the backwoods while coming to these boards and having a laugh reading players flaming each other and Blizz for over tuning the dungeons. Which they weren’t, so many of those wrath babies simply had no clue how to do a run.
Eventually, Blizz capitulated and they never went back there again. They had bred a new kind of player who was nothing like his counterpart from Vanilla/TBC.
then why play an MMO?!
There are plenty of console solo games that give you full control of your progress.
This is the part that mind boggles me. You want to be around people, but you don’t want to be around people.
Now don’t get me wrong, if you simply want to socialize while you frolic through azeroth or are a pure pvp player, that is your business.
But the game was built by guilds, on the premise of guilds being the face of the game and end game contents was built on that platform and it worked.
To waterdown contents so players could “solo” their way was a poor decision as the subscriptions number expose.
It was more the last year of Wrath that had the greatest impact on how people ran dungeons. Before people were over geared for dungeons they could be difficult and you had to know how to run them. That last year of Wrath you could just pull the whole dungeon, ignore mechanics because you could just power through everything. Cata just took it back to people needing to follow mechanics, do things like CC and just not pull everything in sight. Cata dungeons really brought out the worst in the WoW community and sucked if you did not have a guild run.
Having that huge content drought and gear that vastly over geared what content that was left is what hurt. And honestly dungeons did not make me learn a bunch about my class or help with my technique. It was when I started getting to raiding that I really learned more about my class and what worked. Dungeon rotations was just the tip.
You know, it’s funny that you commented on my comment because I was going to respond to an earlier post of yours but chose to just delete the response instead.
I like having other people around me even when I don’t constantly interact with them 24/7. I used to live in a city with over 4 million people, but I still lived alone, commuted to work alone, mostly ate out alone, mostly went shopping alone, and mostly hung out at home alone. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t have friends, that I didn’t socialize sometimes, that I didn’t group up with others for fun sometimes, , etc. I just didn’t do it all of the time.
When you play only singleplayer games or live alone in a cabin way out in the woods, you can’t socialize with anyone at any time. I don’t want a game or life like that or at least not for very long. (I’m a guild officer in what was once a huge social guild after all.) But I also don’t want one where I can’t do anything meaningful or productive unless I have other people available to help me to do it. There’s a happy medium in there.
I have seen this debate come up repeatedly over the years on this forum. The devoted extroverts, the ones who play WoW (or another MMO) primarily for its social aspects, just can’t see why those who favor introversion aren’t like them. And if they aren’t going to be as social as the extroverts want them to be, they should all just go somewhere else entirely. No middle ground is allowed.
I am gonna sound like a broken record, but all this “interdependence” was decided before WoWs launch. EQ had extreme interdependence, to the point of requiring other people to level (with a few extreme exceptions).
WoW came to and said yeah we see that as too extreme, and we are going tome things simpler. Level solo. Do things on your own. No need for a guild just to survive in the world.
Yet here we are, everyone wants to see going back to that time, or at least if not that far, a lot more in that space than retail currently is.
He didn’t want to say anything bad about his last employer because a) he may still be looking for a job, and no one wants to hire anyone who might publicly roast them as well, and b) maybe he wants to leave that bridge unburned.
By focusing on his own impressions, he leaves Blizz & their game off the hook.
Those Cata dungeons were a pain even late in the expansion because of the nonlinear layouts and sociopathic design choices (VP, anyone?), but they were indeed so difficult early in the expansion that my brother and I both unsubbed for several months because we couldn’t accomplish anything.
And those overgeared Wrath raiders who “carried” everyone through dungeons? Not the nicest folks in the world – this was also the heyday of Recount, and they flashed those stats all the time. Occasionally they made snide comments, even when we were running through dungeons. So later, when they cried real tears over LFR, I couldn’t help but laugh: they deserved it.
WoW itself offered NO help to new players, and I played though most of TBC and a month or two of LK before another player watched my pally–armed with a sword & shield, taking so long to kill anything that respawns arrived before I finished killing the last one–struggling so hard just to survive that he stopped me and asked what I was doing. Why was I specced as holy (because I thought healing myself would really be important) and carrying such insufficient weapons if what I really wanted to do was kill things. He took me to an AH, pointed out a 2-hander for me to buy, and told me how to respec as retribution. He took me back to Northrend to kill a few things and we were both stunned by the massive change. I thanked him profusely…and wonder to this day why the game wasn’t offering even 10% of that much help.
I argued here for years that there should be a practice dungeon with bot teammates so you can learn your role…and Blizz still hasn’t delivered. I’ve thought about healing for years, but I ain’t gonna do it if I have to learn how in LFG.
The general reaction to the zombie invasion (both now and pre-WotLK) is the perfect example of this. The world isn’t allowed to exist as a world. The players demand that it exists solely to serve the player’s motivations.
Eh, Cataclysm dungeons were unusual in that they were un-carryable. After people had gotten fat and lazy off Wrath heroic dungeons the Cata dungeons were a rude awakening since many bosses had mechanics specifically intended to prevent face rolling.
Otherwise I’d ask who the hell you were running with.
