I think in general old school MMO’s on the EQ model are just on the decline. If TOR couldn’t even pull off a Star Wars MMO modeled after WoW and EQ the general concept has issues.
Agreed. This is the larger point I was trying to make. We old nerds are a dying breed.
Way back in alpha a lot of us were telling them what they were doing wrong. The biggest issues were transportation, the time it takes to craft things (two hours??), and the fact that you could go full to the other end of the spectrum, but not actually tip into it.
Blizzard seen what would happen to WOW, before any of the QOL stuff came into the game. By the time guilds were attuned for MC, it was clear to them that the game was either breaking or making individuals in the real world. They new that elitism was going to bring the game to a halt. They new that they had no choice but to make several tiers of players in the future. It was unavoidable if they wanted to stay up and running. But in all honesty, I think I could have used another 18 months of vanilla before the expansion came out. I wanted so bad to do NAXX, but just ran out of time. I was too slow.
You’re right, but that’s only because most of the few people still playing need their “ooh shiny” handouts. They drove everyone else off, and those people are here waiting for classic. Retail is too far gone to save.
And again, LFD would have been pretty innocuous on its own. It’s that, combined with the EZ welfare gear it handed out like candy that did the damage. You take that gear out of LFR and it’s still not a “good” idea, but it’s a relatively harmless bad idea.
Is there anywhere you aren’t painfully wrong? TOR had problems that had little to do with it being sort of, but not really,like WoW. And TOR is nothing at all like EQ.
TOR played like a clone of BC with Star Wars names for the abilities and you just found yourself going if I’m going to be playing stagnant game design I might as well just play WoW.
I said TOR was similar, but it’s failing had nothing to do with that similarity.
They had everything to do with the similarities. The general design that EQ created and WoW made mainstream is dead, it peaked with WoW in Wrath.
Classic will never be nearly as successful as Wrath was because the basic game design just isn’t that good by modern standards.
I highly doubt it, but there’s nothing wrong with that. No game has a population like that anymore. Too many options and too many games now that can do what MMOs can do.
And yet we also didn’t see any growth past it. We’ve seen spikes beginning in expansions that quickly fall off - that’s it.
Modern standards are quick feel-good moments and breezing through content. You chew through content and you run out of things to do because it’s all so easy and largely irrelevant.
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Nope. It was because it had no end game and played like it was on rails. Everyone loved the stories, and much of the game.
And WoW was an aberration. Measuring the industry on an outlier is stupid. TOR is still up, as is EQ. And what about FFXIV? It’s a lot like WoW and it’s growing. So is ESO. And most of the upcoming MMOs are more “hardcore”, while there are few handholding derp fests like WoW in the works. Now, we’ll see how well those games, and classic, do, but no one is clamoring for more games with facerolling content.
I expect to see those meeting stones in Classic and possibly the option to queue at an innkeeper, as well.
I also fully expect that those meeting stones will operate exactly as they did in Vanilla. IMO, thus is exactly how it should be.
IMO, there should be no “modern” group finding tools/interface and “group finding” add-ons should be broken.
Exactly, WoW was lightning in a bottle. But it wasn’t god’s gift to gaming.
For someone who has now said the thing you’re arguing about isn’t that great twice, you certainly seem to spend a lot of time and energy on it… And not well either.
Nobody said it was. We just want the game as it was, we don’t want Blizzard to give us a compromised product to try and please everyone. That’s not the point of Classic.
I have no idea why you’re mixing these things together.
When LFR came out we were still raiding higher difficulties. Other people had epics, but they didn’t remotely compare to the epics those of us doing the hardest raiding difficulty had. I would queue with someone on my heroic geared disc priest for Dragon Soul LFR to get them a faster queue and do 90% of the healing as I lazily cast PoH on each group. The raid mechanics also got harder and changed at higher difficulties, so it wasn’t like we were just fighting enemies with more health on heroic (now mythic).
The concept of “welfare epics” is laughable. I don’t care what color it is. The highest tier of difficulty still had dramatically superior gear to the others and even does to this day (outside of lucky forging, which is a separate issue). We had better gear. We got better looking mogs. LFR didn’t hurt high end raiding. Dragon Soul being lackluster + burnout drove far more people away from raiding than the handful of childish people that stormed out because, god forbid someone see the inside of the raid at an easier difficulty? Group think and elitism is more of an issue than LFR.
Also, catch up gear is a good thing that keeps the game alive rather than hurting it. In WotLK, the most popular expansion in the game’s history, we had the most powerful catch up mechanic the game had ever had in which you could actually get Ulduar raid sets from a vendor with currency from dungeons when ToC came out. That got a lot of people who had quit WotLK early on to come back (including me) and had we not done that we might not have joined raiding guilds and spent an enormous amount of time in the second half of WotLK.
Titanforging and forging in general destroyed the sense of progression in the game and killed off a lot of desire to do the higher difficulties, but that has nothing at all to do with LFR or DF or anything else. They didn’t have to do it. We had LFR/DF for multiple years before forging came along.
World Quests were a replacement for daily quests. They have nothing to do with anything else mentioned. I didn’t really like daily quests so I’m not a huge fan of WQs, but they’re not that big of a deal by themselves. The only real issue with them is that the gear can forge to mythic raid level gear, which is a forging issue, not a WQ issue. Even so, if you have better gear it isn’t really worth your time to farm all the WQs just to fish for titanforges that will happen less than 1% of the time. It’s mostly going to just result in entry level or catch up gear.
AP/Azerite have nothing at all to do with anything else mentioned. The reason they were added to the game is because of the shift in the development team. Primarily the issue was probably that we got a bunch of D3 devs that thought making people chase infinity was a super cool thing to do in a video game (these were the people that brought us rifts and paragon levels), so they added it to WoW. It was a stupid decision, but has absolutely no connection or relevance to LFR/DF.
As far as the community comments a lot of people make go, no. Just no. I raided before and after LFR/DF. It did not change how often I played with my guildies. I ended up quitting raiding after Cata and it had nothing at all to do with LFR/DF. Many other people continued to raid with guilds after that point. Class design and other things like trying to make people chase infinity via grinds like AP or because of the horrendous addition of forging is WoW’s biggest issue. Also, a lot of people just got older and didn’t feel like playing a video game like it was a job anymore.
All LFR does is let people see raid content that aren’t interested in a harder game. It helped justify the development time going into them since so many players wren’t actually seeing any of it. It doesn’t hurt anyone. It didn’t hurt the game outside of a handful of whiny elitists leaving because someone got a dramatically lower ilvl version of an item than they did? Some people may have done LFR early on to try to finish a set bonus, but outside of that, people doing the actual raids could always safely ignore LFR. It’s only after the advent of forging that you could maybe (though very unlikely) get an extremely high ilvl drop in an LFR, which is only a problem since Legion.
Oh, and to the people complaining about CRZ etc, no that didn’t ruin WoW either. Many servers became ghost towns. Many servers had horrendous faction balance. If they hadn’t done things like CRZ and sharding later on, the reality and magnitude of those issues would have driven far more people away.
War Mode in BfA also was a good idea in general because WPvP was dead on the majority of the PvP servers. Illidan had effectively been a PvE server since probably MoP. We never saw any Alliance. War Mode finally brought about the ability to see faction balanced PvP world zones again and also gave people the ability to play in peace when they wanted even if they rolled on a PvP server over a decade ago and didn’t want to leave their friends. There were/are huge issues with it. Currently it’s mostly just, gank people at WQ then move on and never remember their name, which is not what it should be. I think they should have removed the PvE WQs from it and added PvP ones. I also think they could do some fancy things to make it more likely to encounter the same people, which I wrote a long thread about months ago, but basically the sense of seeing the same people in WPvP could be accomplished even with sharding/CRZ. It’s not being done currently, but it can be done.
TLDR: LFR/DF didn’t ruin the game. Most of the things people in this thread think ruined WoW did in fact not ruin WoW. Many of them addressed significant issues that needed to be addressed. They could have done some of it a lot better, but it was better than doing nothing in most cases.
Forging is what ruined the sense of progression in WoW. Forging is a separate issue. You could have all these other things including WQs without it.
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I’m mixing them because they go together, and I even explained why.
And even though you managed to write a small book (which I’m not going to read), you still missed the point. Casuals, or non-raiders if you like, were reduced to running the derpy faceroll LFR raid…and that’s it. And because that idiot proofed system tossed out high level gear, it removed everything else in the game that once upon a time had at least a little challenge to it.
I think the big issue was the redesign that began with Cataclysm. It felt like a very different design team was in charge by that point.
TOR was really linear, though. I played it for about an hour and stopped because it had exactly the same problems as Cataclysm. It modeled itself after a WoW that was already on the nose.