Yeah I could live with content draughts, if they ended with a large amount of content. I haven’t played really since halfway through 8.2.
8.2.5 was not impressive to me at all, and now we’re waiting upwards of like probably four months total for 8.3.
They announce stuff now and then go “yeah it’ll be cool. We should be done in a year or so.” You guys have all the money in the world. CoD makes like billion dollars a month. Why is it taking this long for patches? Not even expansions, but patches?
Reminding me of wasting weeks at a time farming apexis crystals made me feel physically ill. I didn’t think a memory could do that, but wow.
I think they’ve got their resource allocation skills down fairly well now, they’re just lacking in… talent and judgement.
BfA had a lot of lore. Maybe more than any expansion up until now? The war campaign is a huge questline, we got all those fancy Saurfang movies, plus more in-game cinematics than you can shake a stick at. But, um, the writing is not good. The resources are there, but the talent isn’t. People aren’t having fun with the story. The answer isn’t “give them more time” or “give them more money”, it is “afrasiabi should probably lose his job”
Same goes for stuff like Warfronts. Lots of resources had to go into creating all those fancy race-themed sets, redesigning zones, developing the AI and rules for the scenarios, but the game designers didn’t actually make the content challenging or meaningful.
And Islands. I’m not a game designer but shouldn’t it have been obvious that creating easy casual content which rewards exclusively artifact power, AKA a thing that only hardcore players care about, is a bad system?
Island expeditions could have been a fun way for casuals to collect gear and cosmetics, but the cosmetics are so rare that they’re not even worth farming for and there is no gear. The only people bothering with these casual scenarios are hardcore players leveling their necklace, which is weird. A lot of effort went into this system which could have been fun simply with a different reward structure, but ultimately it was a failure.
Apexis.
Artifact.
Azerite.
Anima.
Man, how long have we been doing this.
oh god… was this game EVER fun? I have hazy, prelapsarian memories of having fun with this game, but when you lay it out like this it sounds like we’ve been torturing ourselves…
I remember the Daily slog on Quel’Danas, made all the more painful because specialization switching was a hard cost. Thus my Holy-spec Paladin self desperately trying to grind out the dailies and farm ingredients for flasks that I’d turn over to other raiders to go do Tempest Keep content while I got told to be the pocket healer for the newest batch of recruits running through Karazhan.
Every.
Single.
Week.
There’s a reason I tend to just run content solo, now-a-days.
When you vomit in disgust, it will be inexplicably full of apexis crystals
I ran BC era Achendouin last night and all the bosses were dropping Spirit Stones.
Remember THAT garbage currency?
I don’t think any of us here are under the impression that you can have an MMO without collecting a garbage currency. Even us cranks can affirm that it’s needed and there may even be kind of a rush to the collection.
Back when there were still class quests, collecting ingots for a Warrior quest was a thrill, for example.
But what the Apexis/Azerite/Anima grind does is hide everything behind the grind. The grind is the point. It echoes, unnervingly, the FTP mobile game method and (perhaps unfairly cynically) I can’t help but feel that it won’t be long before we get messages like: “You ran out of Anima and can’t do any more quests today! Buy extra Anima for $3.99!”
jeeze did you learn your Draenic from Turalyon or something
Kronokai Christmas, friend.
that kind of grind kind of made sense in context of the world, our adventure and our character’s role in that world. Also it was usually different for each class, and often had several ways of approaching it (like paying for it on the AH, helping a friend with that profession, or trying to level up those professions ourselves) so we felt we had at least a little input into choosing this long, difficult journey we’re on.
Now everythings pretty streamlined for everyone and is pretty transparently a grind for its own sake (with some exceptions in the Legion order halls).
Look, I put just as much effort in spelling it as I did actually running said dungeons.
If the place wants me to spell it properly, it can drop the damn Raven Mount after almost a decade of farming.
thats how they keep you auchindoin’ it
grinding is weird because no one really likes it but the way it’s made can make it tolerable
usually by making the number of items you need small but by making the content actually enjoyable in some way to replay
like for dark iron and mag’har, it takes 2 full weeks of doing every single daily/weekly quest and getting reputation tokens after beating all story missions to unlock them
races that have been in the game since BC and Vanilla
that’s not good design
Yeah, they definitely went into a hard turn on that one. I feel like the greater and more rare the reward, the more meaningful the grind, but races are just something we should get by buying the game. Having to grind for it feels like being forced to eat a bug before you get to eat dinner.
they probably could have gotten more mileage out of making cosmetic sets for the reputations instead of races
people love cosmetic sets
i put myself through rare hunting on Argus just for the big sword
Hot take: brutosaur mounts were a bad idea and I’m glad they’re going to be harder to get. Ever since I saw an IC wedding get trolled by a herd of mammoths, I’ve been against oversized mounts.
Coming out on the side of predatory anti-consumer practices is quite a hot take, yes.
I saw a warlock use their brightly-colored AoEs to troll RP once, so I hope they get removed from the game.