Weapon skills are awesome! Love having to train with all of them.
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This company is still making millions. Is that dead to you?
It’s great you realized classic isn’t for you.
/bye
/wave
Okay, now that’s a little overstating the case. Nobody can say with a straight face that something like LotRO or SWTOR lacked iconic characters, though both obviously drew the bulk of their inspiration for mechanics from WoW. Something else makes the difference.
It’s not tedium; it’s immersion. It’s the nature of an rpg. It creates a connection to my character and the things I do. It’s good mmorpg design.
I agree completely, and Classic looks AMAZING. So much better than BfA. It’s baffling how a 15 year old game looks better than its current iteration.
Again, agree. But at least there’s Classic.
Not gonna happen. Mmorpgs take way too much time and way too many resources. Why do that when you can release a game like Hearthstone that takes a tiny fraction of that time and money to make and yet yields as good as profits?
I didn’t implicate any specific person or thing as the cause of it. I’m just stating the opinion that these changes, while by themselves sound convenient, were bad as a whole for the game. I’ve felt that way for a long time, but talked myself in to thinking it was “nostalgia”. Now that Classic is out and I’m just as hooked as I was back when I was 19 years old, it turns out I actually did prefer the old system.
I’m not saying there isn’t a dedicated base for what the game has become, I just don’t think it’s a better game, even from an objective point of view.
Legion was the best version of new WoW, even though it wasn’t really my cup of tea. BfA went too far. It’s tainted the game so much that the barebones game has become the most appealing option. I honestly didn’t expect to ever feel that way, not even in the Wrath/Cata/MoP days.
I even thought I wanted a Wrath server, but I don’t. I want Classic to continue on a totally different path or just stay what it is.
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Even worse. Why are you on the forums of the people who love this complaining?
LOL we already rejected their FIRST mobile venture with the Diablo franchise. Hence the random dev guy that said “Don’t you guys have phones?” ROFL
I have no intention whatsoever of playing any mobile games that are sanctioned by Actiblizz because I know damn well it’s just a cash grab, and I ALSO know it will have some form of cash shop/microtransactions in it as well as possibly even loot boxes…I HATE that crap in games
The problem is since 2004 WoW copied a harcore MMORPG called Everquest and nerfed it to cater to casuals. This made the game immensely popular and WoW ended up with 10x the amount of subscribers EQ had at its peak.
Imagine where WoW would be if it stayed hardcore like EQ and EQ 2 USED to be before becoming casual like WoW?
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Because WoW is the thousand-pound gorilla in the room, and as it made stupid changes, the other morepigs followed along slavishly. Quick leveling for everyone. Talent trees, or skill trees as SWTOR originally called them, slashed in favor of “you choose a spec and we tell you what you get.”
Hopefully, Classic will inspire some other morepigs to stop copying modern WoW. Or release new servers for the original versions of their game*. Either/or.
*Yes, I’m aware that EQ did this, theoretically, a while ago. I’m also aware that, at least for EQ2, those “Time-Locked Servers” were actually just “you keep the current ruleset, but we bring back the lower level cap and block off the newer areas.” Not at all what I’m talking about.
Both of those are tied to a more fundamental flaw:
A system of expansion design that keeps increasing the level cap when none of the game’s systems were actually meant to extend beyond the original level cap. If you’re going to keep increasing the level cap, you have to make sure that your systems don’t start breaking down past Level 2,345.
Which is to say that I agree that other systems are copying WoW even to the point of copying its bandages to cover existing faults.
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Fade leaf for blind is an herb from gathering
That’s where you lose me.
Too few folks realize just how much WoW was lightning in the oh-so-perfectly timed bottle. The market was ready to give the MMO its 15 minutes of fame. And it did just that…and then took it away. Now its back in the niche from whence it came. No one is spending $100 million anymore to make one of these; there’s no real money in this genre. The money is in mobile gaming now; if anything, that’s where the next AAA MMO will be.
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I dropped retail because nothing interested me anymore. The leveling and questing became mindless.
Not with Classic, you actually have to work to progress through quests and you arent some overpowered super god hero. Youre just an adventurer right now.
Me neither. But, our kids have different tastes. Otherwise, MMOs wouldn’t be on their death beds as a format.
Game development is different now. It costs more money to make a game, let alone a AAA MMORPG, than it did 15 years ago. This means that in order to make their money back devs have to appeal to the lowest common denominator of mouthbreathing casual possible meaning that you can’t have an experience like classic which actually requires some thought. Everything has to be streamlined, it has to hold your hand the entire time, it can’t punish you for playing poorly, etc.
There are some middleware attempts at recapturing what made MMOs great. Pantheon was mentioned a few times here, that’s what I’m looking forward to.
It’s kind of interesting because this is what other products do. If you go to McDonalds or buy a Pepsi it’s essentially the same thing, all the time. If you really love a TV show and pay a subscription to watch it on HBO or Netflix or whatever, it’s the same show you watched before - even if later seasons are terrible, the ones you loved are still there. I think it goes to show that if you have a great game, you don’t have to constantly progress the formula. Progression means you eventually veer so far away from what made it great in the first place.
Blizzard’s “rockstar developer” culture is well documented and the source of the problems for all their recent offerings. Diablo 3, BfA, why Overwatch is circling the drain…
SWTOR died because it was a literal WoW reskin that had nothing new to offer except for the ‘story’ but only a handful of class storylines were interesting. The majority of the ‘story’ was pointless fetch quests with boring, binary morality decisions because Bioware has zero subtly in their writing.
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I am 100% in agreement with everything you posted here. 
Since Vanilla WoW hasn’t become more casual friendly; it’s become more friendly for entitled players. There’s a difference between the two. And clearly the devs don’t understand that. Vanilla was the most casual friendly the game ever was.
There are some in the works. Hopefully, they don’t take too long to launch.
There are very different markets for mobile games and MMORPGs, but sadly, some are oblivious to this fact.
Actiblizzion should know by now that one size does not fit all. Let’s hope others have been paying attention and learning from their mistakes.
Maybe other games can actually do this. Bring back the original Smash Bros for its 20-year celebration, for example. Or mine craft.