just want to point out i am a wrath baby as you put it. and i find that categorization to be nauseating at best. because not all newb wrath players had issues with cata dungeons. were they difficult? for sure they were when they were implemented. but like in BRC with Karsh the Steelbender and people just letting him soak 10-15 stacks right up front using now party CDs to mitigate any of that damage. then the tank would blame the healer, then the healer would leave, the dps would chew the tank out for being a dumb A** then he’d leave and the dps would follow suit. I know because i watched a lot of RDF pug groups fail on this one. SFK was another where people would fail on either Commander Springvale or Lord Godfrey. because they were too dumb to move out of the way or watch their damned feet. so don’t use generalizations there were some pretty bad vet players who failed these heroic cata dungeons. i was made the heroics got nerfed. there were some that were tight for achievements but those achievements were fun to chase down. early cata dungeon’s were hella fun. hell Cata least tried to make dungeon’s relevant through the xpac with 5 additional dungeons added on top of what we got yes two were recycled raids converted to dungeons but they were still a blast.
That is the most likely outcome IMO.
I have no issue with hard dungeons, I have an issue with dungeons with bad pacing. I think 5 man dungeon design in general leaves a lot to be desired in WoW (up to wrath at least).
It wasn’t a question of if people had problems, it was their reaction to those failures. Actual veteran vanilla/TBC players recognized that they were bad, and tried again. The get good mentality. These were players who trudged through actual original vanilla minus all of the final patch quality of life stuff.
Pre nerf TBC dungeons were every bit as, maybe even harder than pre nerf cata. But there wasn’t that outlandish screeching to nerf the content from TBC era players.
Wrath spoiled the player base, they chased quality of life to attract and retain very very fickle players. In doing so, they didn’t even grow their base, wrath pop was completely stagnant for the entirety of it, as old guard was replaced by wrath babies.
When cata dropped, there’s actually a spike in pop, as old players presumably returned. But quickly left when it was obvious that they were going to develop the game to appease the screechers. The ones that are NEVER happy, no matter how much quality of life is added, if the purples are not mailed to them for logging in, it’s not enough.
i’d say that is more of an entitlement to see the content and experience the content and get said gear from content more than it being a wrath baby syndrome as you characterize it as. it can be even seen in today’s retail. they have too many difficulties in retail. they could easily clip that down by dropping LFR and making people form groups. but then their justification for LFR was they wanted more people to view the raids they spent so much time on. yet, with that also being said, they wanted to carrot people into using this feature so they gave it better than previous raid tier gear. yes i know normal is pathetic but LFR gear is generally better than normal mode gear. Blizzard cultivated that entitlement mentality. it wasn’t just one subset of players who were entitled. i love how everyone likes to punch down on the wrath players yet in your own statement you admit the TBC and vanilla players were equally as guilty and in some cases were the problems and yes some evolved but i’m willing to be just as many refused to adjust their play. and why would they. blizzard eventually caters to their wants in that i should be able to see said content so they need to make it accessible to me. i’ve never advocated for that. i hate that mentality.
Things change based on averages. On average, wrath player base was much more vocal about demanding QOL changes that had non obvious impacts on the game at large.
RDF was a core reason for the decay of “norms” in how players engaged with both community and content. Pre wrath, you were expected to do a little bit of lifting in terms of finding a guild, or at least curating a social circle to do content.
Post wrath launch, it was trivial to complete content without ever saying so much as “hello” to someone. You clicked the instant gratification button, and you were suddenly inside a dungeon getting progression. The content itself was so pants on head easy, that there was no real incentive to actually learn your class, or get better at communicating with your new auto generated party. Just roll your face on keyboard, and badges+purples come out.
I think it’s too late to really get that back unfortunately, even the people who play classic for nostalgia, are mostly still obsessed with efficiently progressing as fast as they possibly can, so they can raid log. I’m guilty of it too, the golden age of MMOs is gone, and it’s never coming back. Gaming in general has become too much about min max, and information too prevalent, there’s no learning phase at all. It’s just “open wowhead/icy veins, parrot what they say, and install some handhold add-on to do most of the work for you”.
gonna have to check ya on this one. i don’t care what argument you throw at for this when you say social whatever. thats bunk and a strawman argument at this point. it didn’t decay anything having to do with social circles. it didn’t. what decayed that was absolutely two things and they were paid servers. hell if you want to throw in the third paid service fine i’ll give you that one but when you can freely throw many at leaving a server that decays the social circle. it makes that original social circle less valuable. it reinforces that if you just spend a little extra money your experience will be absolutely better. like wise when you can freely abandon your faction for the other side. it erodes again your precious social circle. it also unintentionally with out saying it to them you who paid to leave the social circle are too good for them. it cheapened the server’s community when you can just take off on a whim. further more if you’re on an illidan or proudmoore and have a bad name you can just go ahead and rename your character. temporary stop gap but if you’re known to that server for having poor behavior just change your name. problem solved. allowing money to impact where and whom you play with and be able to retain everything you had is what has eroded this game RDF didn’t do this. nets not even remotely kid ourselves of this. these paid services has devastated the servers and factions. its inarguable especially with each new expansion up to WoD/Legion on how they completely devalued and neutered the Alliances racials. by that point Racials were an after thought, they didn’t offer anything special the factions were imbalanced to the point those who moved to horde if they were on a low pop server would just flee to a high pop server. its all circular in nature. Blizzard has never been able to address the issues they have caused. everyone wants to point at RDF as the decline of world of warcraft. it wasn’t it was paid services to leave your faction and server and abandon an old name.
You are saying that like as if we, today, have some peak communication.
We don’t. No rational player makes besties in dungeons. 9/10 dungeons I run (and I run A LOT OF dungeons), no one says a word other than
- Summ plz
- hi
- ggwp
- pala noob
- stop afk
- noobs wtf u doing
Not even pug raids have active comms with an exception of RL calling out starts, brezes etc. Same goes for guild raids. Same, pretty much, goes for PvP as well (not arenas)
wait i thought this was peak communication skills…
Apparently it is for some people. They’d rather lose a chance of doing tons dungeons 1-79 with other players than lose “hi” and “gg noobs” level of comms in 1/10 dungeons they run once a week.
And all of this really raelly makes me hate PvP. Like, wtf is this double standard?
Go on then, remove cross realm PvP. Remove pvp UI queue., Go back to running to BG locations like in P1 of Vanilla, Bet your azz you gonna hate it.
RDF was a key factor in WotLKs overwhelming success. It allowed people to level characters, experience old content, and gear up with less friction. The only problem was RDF was the fact that it eventually lead to raid finder, which did destroy the guild community.
Disingenuous comparison. Current classic community is obsessed with mega servers, and only plays on servers with pops that are 4x or more the pop of some of the largest servers of vanilla. Of course you’re not going to have a community in that environment.
Doesn’t change that RDF created an environment where there was zero reason not to be a jerk to your group, because you can just leave and find a new collection of disposable, faceless automatons to get your purples faster.
RDF could theoretically work, but only if they added the ability for people you grouped with, to rate you. And if your “guy was a jerk” rating drops low enough, you’re thrown into an alternative queue that’s measured in hours.
oh god if they removed cross realm pvp. Benediction and faerlina would have to murder each other in their BGs.
They need to NEED TO keep the RPG in MMORPG. Keep Class Trainers relevant, keep Weapon Skill (doesn’t make sense for your character to automatically know how to use a sword the first time he picks one up!), and talent trees: condense them to a point where they equal the length present in either TBC or Wrath… but let the player freely allocate their talent points.
Also if they’re adding a whole new version of dungeons in the form of Heroic +, then why can’t we see some of that scrapped “Path of the Titans” system? It’s like the glyph menu directly teases it with that unfilled cirlce in the middle.
It was an issue because Wrath specifically moved away from CC heavy dungeon design because it kind of sucked.
The thing is in WoW trainers aren’t really compelling, you just go some guy spend some gold and you magically learn stuff(for the most part). So it’s not really an RPG element it’s just a time sync.
In a more serious RPG you would actually have a process to go through to learn new skills and abilities. Which they did do for some limited cases like some of the druid forms or shaman totems but for the most part trainers are just meh in WoW anyways.
your argument now is the definition of disingenuous. megaservers were being cultivated in retail back in wrath. we just didn’t notice them for what they were. anyone remember korgath in wrath and cata? top 5 server. often time was in contention for top 3. what happened to that server? well the top 5 guilds well 3 dread, burning sensation and gentlemans club are no longer exist in the way they did during cata. they persisted. but they’re not the same guilds. further more they had other great guilds that rounded out the top 10 that would end up clearing the content for FL BWD TB and DS when they were relevant. those guilds don’t exist as they do now. some do but not on korgath (not to mention korgath linked or murged server i believe?) but what killed this thriving server, was indeed faction and server transfers. burning sensation went horde in mist during the middle of ToT which i believe was Thanksgiving or christmas time. and they fizzled out as the rest of the players from that raid team ended up server hopping off the server. one of the other non top 3 guilds fled to Sargeras. guilds started to bleed players to other servers horde and alliance but mainly horde. the idea of megaservers hasn’t been a new concept. if blizzard wanted to kill this concept they should’ve discontinued allowing faction and server transfers and if someone wanted to leave the server they are on regardless of the amount of alts they have on their current server. they should be forced to completely reroll and start recreating new toons on these new servers. again a mega server argument is totally disingenuous argument. they’ve pretty much never not been a thing. everyone just wants to throw RDF as the downfall good positive player interaction. when poor player interaction’s culprit was the ability buy your way out of a bad server or being a dominated by a specific faction on your server.
Nor it doesn’t make sense how you can miss swinging a 10 feet long Broadsword against a 12ft tall Ogre.
Such RPG elements are a thing of the past. It really use.
As for the talent tree system, DF got a good one. I never understood why some are so obsessed with Wrath talent trees. Cool. For next 5 levels I’m increasing my parry by 1%. The only real meaningful ones are at 20/40/60. Rest are just passives. Following a build.
Even BFA/SL talent trees were more impactful imho.
All these changes came as a result of players, back then, asking for those changes.
oh, yeah?
Literally shut up, go to retail.