Yep, cataclysm biggest mistake in giving people bonus exp. What happen next was no one quested anymore and spam dungeons because bonus exp was so huge that it probably was triple the leveling speed or more then cataclysm quests.
Yep. Leveling is a joke now. This past weekend I took an alt from 59-80 and only completed the hellfire peninsula quests, just queing lfd the whole time while I flew from quest to quest. Whole thing only took a few hours
Edited to add: also didn’t talk to a single person the whole time. ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
This one is pretty subjective. You aren’t wrong, but I’m guessing for a lot of players that is not their experience or how they use those tools.
I haven’t seen an actual recruitment post from a friends and family social type raiding guild in years. They might exist, but they are not common.
What gets advertised is guilds that do Mythic content and Rated Battlegrounds etc.
Cataclysm started the decline in multiple ways. Not least of which is that guilds wanted to be player capped because of the “Cash Flow” guild perk.
What you are describing is common for guilds that do a little better than average in the game in general. They raid, they PVP etc together largely with guild members.
There have been many thread capped posts on the forums about how poorly tanks and healers are treated in LFD/LFR. These super casuals are so bad, they even expect to be carried in the easiest content in the game. Disgusting and toxic as hell.
It was doomed long before that. When they lowered the CD on realm Transfers from 6 months. That really started to destabilize servers. You used to have to make an informed decision about what server to transfer to. after that, you could hop, skip and jump until you found something, instead of creating something where you were at.
My personal opinion is that the Armory really derailed the forums. Used to be you would have to actually read what people said and see if it applied to you or was something that was utter nonsense. After the armory, the interesting theorycrafting that was all over the forums died out and gave way to people armorying the poster to nitpick them to death without even reading their post.
You are right, but LFD was one of the three extra large bricks in that wall. The others being CRZ and welfare, ahem…“catch up” gear.
LFD was a response to an aging player base. People that started with the game were entering the workforce and had a mortgage, kids and a spouse. It allowed you to be more productive in less time. Whether or not that added to game more then it took away is however you choose to view it.
The player-base aged that much from 2005 to 2009?
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Partially false. It was an attempt to woo a younger, more easily distracted player base. Which has led to ever increasing cycles of pandering to the least likely to play.
Flying, less focus on rpg elements and gear crafting profs / gold being made worthless is when the game died for me. Each expansion kept corralling the players onto an island and invalidating all the previous content, it hasn’t really been the “World” of warcraft since vanilla.
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LFD obviously wasn’t the major player in “killing” the game as the numbers continued to do well for the next few years after that was released. I think the real issue was watering down raid tiers, the old guild leveling system (which basically led to Mega Guilds), Creating 600 tiers of raid/dungeon content (Heroics, Mythics, M+, Hard Modes, etc.), level scaling, everything being turned over to dailies, etc.
It’s odd there’s still nerds grinding an axe for badge gear being “Welfare” epics as they took a substantial amount of time to get and were always inferior to equivalent raid gear. I thought it was a solid measure to keep casuals engaged.
The current epic system is much closer to “Welfare” epics (though I detest that weird classist bent to that whole phrase.) Where you can get previous raid tier gear for taking 2 minutes to kill a “world” boss or killing a rare every couple week cycle.
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LFD/LFR was only part of the problem. It was mostly harmless by itself, out side of dumbing the game down, but coupled with EZ epics it gutted so much of the game, they had to invent more stuff for people to do. That’s where dailies came from and why they eventually became more or less the only thing to do outside of raids.
Freakishly easy content that rewards high level gear and you’re left with a game that has very little of value to do.
Well, you were wrong. It kept people out of content by removing the incentive to do a lot of the content.
I don’t like Retail but I don’t think that quality of life improvements killed it either.
I think the times have changed. pc gaming just isn’t a thing anymore. Heck, PC’s have been dying and smart phones, tablets, etc are ruling the world. Everything is on the go.
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Why can’t they just disable flying if you are flagged pvp? Seems like a simple piece of code to toggle off/on…
Which it was silly to try to pander to people that aren’t really interested in that style of game.
I think making it easier increased their audience in wrath, but when mmos became 2nd to other games like league, it turned off alot of their existing player base as well. They took it too far.
But then again when they made things hard again wasn’t there some huge outcry from ppl?
No it didn’t?
You had to run very many dungeons to even acquire one piece.
What it did do is ensure people who consistently raided or did dungeons we’re able to get gear or a particular slot even if the RNG , DKP or Council wasn’t in their favor. It also gave you a little more to do besides bash your head against dailies if you couldn’t commit 10+ hours a week to leveling. I wouldn’t have stayed a minute after Wotlk dropped if it weren’t for the badges and heroics. It got too time consuming for my post high school life.
I’m excited to level in Vanilla again because the leveling was a tad more interesting. But I can’t imagine how I’d commit the 12-20 hours raid guilds demand out of you now that I work full time, married and actually do things with my friends. I was only able to juggle that by being a literal no lifer.
PvP isn’t really very time friendly either. I agree people who have the time and dedication deserve better stuff and deserve it faster. But I think shutting out more casual players would’ve been just as fatal to WoW faster. I definitely don’t think it would have ever reached the late Wotlk/early catalog numbers it did.
Truthfully the whole MMO genre outside of RP Nerds is just a carrot on a stick. WoW I think found a good balance in late Wotlk/Cata. But then they also started making time gates and pointless grinds more obvious and mandated. Legion/BFA is probably the cap of this with nearly everything outside of elite PvP and raiding being blocked out by rep, points, etc. While at the same time invalidating old raids and literally giving out free epics for bland, easy daily quests.
The issue wasn’t badges.
I liked the idea behind it but like all ideas Blizzard seems to implement it wrong…
I liked that you can go to more dungeons on your own and check out more of the games story, but I always felt like the dungeon finder gave you too powerful rewards, in Wrath of the Lich King it gave you frost badges that let you jump right into ICC, it just felt wrong <_<
The dungeon finder should of been more like an easy mode for dungeons and shouldn’t give better loot then running normally with your guild. It should of just been a system only casual players would use so they weren’t missing out on the game, but everyone uses it to farm the bonus loot and xp and gold.
If you don’t understand how limiting that is, live with someone who does it. We moved to a foreign country and while I went out every weekend to explore and immerse myself in the culture, experiencing the world around me my wife sat at home and worked, shopped and lived vicariously through the interwebz.
I don’t begrudge her that choice but as a microcosm it highlights exactly the problems that killed WoW.