The most frustrating part to me is how much potential is there for this product. If only they invested resources into it…
Cata being fairly new, the retail xpac and SoD p4 all going at the same time is also a mess.
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Cata classic isn’t even the same as OG Cata. It feels off. Way off. Feels more like Wotlk+ with Cata stuff tacked on. Not sure they know what they are doing, tbh.
To me, the most frustrating part is how little they’d have to do to keep a player base happy. They act like an overcommitted spouse who showers with gifts, except the gifts are things that you’d use to do chores around the house or complete home improvement projects with.
It’s never something you will actually keep and cherish long term, because it’s not designed to be. It’s designed to fit within the paradigm of ‘play this for now, until the next thing’ rather than ‘here’s another really cool thing we are adding to the game, to the plethora of other really cool things the game already has.’
You guys remember Legendary items? Like Sulfuras, Thunderfury, ect? What is the point of getting them now? Is it even possible to do the things you would have done originally to get them?
I doubt it. Blizzard had an opportunity, this whole time, to continue to make those items legendary. Instead of adding to the content we have, things have always been displaced by new content.
Value, has always been lost, the minute a new patch is announced, every day up until release, and then things are relegated to the bargain bin of Wow history. Go solo it if you really care about it, if you can’t solo it, wait until Blizzard has added enough power creep to the game so you can solo it.
This is patently absurd game design. That’s the frustrating part.
Thanks. My intent in saying this is to highlight the very real competition Blizzard has here. My current Jam is BOTW on my PC. Such a beautiful game on high end hardware… not that Nintendo will ever value a higher end play experience.
Switch 2 is rumored to play BOTW at 60 fps. But like, that’s another console to buy for a game that has been out since 2017. I’ll just play the games I enjoy, rather than continuing to spend time playing in these games.
Blizzard uses participation metrics to make choices. Rather than sound logic and reason. Most things that go live in a game are products of design-by-committee, where ‘good enough’ gets things implemented, and we function as live beta testers for each new patch.
The game would be better off if they stopped developing it, sunset it, and then devoted time to maintenance and player issues. A reduced sub fee, a one time box purchase, reduced shop prices, things that make more sense (66% across the board price reduction would bring this game into the realm of reasonable) for the average budget, and then the popularity of this game would explode.
They would feel compelled to step in, add some new content to ‘satisfy players’ or ‘reward players,’ the new content would be more powerful, start the cycle of creep over again, and then we are back to losing subs and asking for eternal realms.
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Bro you’re not entitled to support and updates on the live service game you pay monthly for. You’re lucky you can even log on. Be grateful.
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The problem is sod/classic era is too easy. You have to be brain dead or nostalgia sick to find this rubbish engaging.
All WoW is easy. I know retail is harder, but from a strict gameplay perspective, neither game stands on its own.
The entire point of the game is the community and your interactions within it. Everything is in service to that in Vanilla, which is why people want to play it to this day.
Sod is dead because the devs thought they knew better and removed community content. It’s strange because GDKP banning was intended to push players toward guilds. Their lack of cohesive vision and objective leaves sod all over the place.
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You guys are going to hate this but the fight to keep monitization out is what makes this project not interesting to them. To be clear, i like the og buy the box and pay a sub type of monitization ceiling of the past. But in todays world of AAA the companies dont care, if another model points to a line going up more with higher degrees of monitization, then thats what they want. You have hit the monitization ceiling here. So you probably have hit the effort ceiling as well. They wont invest a ton more in further staffing and r&d if they got no more upward mobility. So the plan, as it always was, is to hurd people into Cata for a more classic appeal with higher monitization model or, in thier eyes, the ultimate catch to get you into the war within where the monitization options are just about endless.
Online communities have proven fewer players paying more is more value. So saying they can keep some subs or get some more subs isnt that impactful. Roping in a dozen whales to lose a lot of players is just better for them.
Sad, but true.
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I hear you, and I think there’s some truth to it. They clearly care about subscriber counts, considering they had a huge public post-mortem at a conference recently about just that, but I think they actually care about the “right subscribers”.
Otherwise they’d look at the gargantuan spike after Classic 2019 boosted them from record lows to decade heights and continue offering that sort of unadulterated Vanilla experience. Instead they’ve added MTX to Classic and leave Vanilla on final phase in perpetuity.
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There’s a “conspiracy theory” that the changes to SoD and the way that it’s been handled are a push to get “Classic only” players into Retail. MoP Remix lines up with that theory pretty well too.
I also think that the SoD audience that Blizzard wants to target matches up with the type of player who would do the best in Retali (more self focused, less community focused - and people who don’t have a lot of time so they are more likely to spend money on monetization things).
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guilds died because the pug scene died and they couldn’t pickup players for the few slots they needed them in. nobody wants to sit there for an hour spamming LFG or waiting for your raid to form. Accessibility was why p1 and 2 were successful you could pug a gnomer/BFD group from scratch in about 10 min. why ? because 10 mans are easier to manage from a guild and pug standpoint.
Oh look a gm of huge raiding organization on a low post alt sock puppet. Same old bs.
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What your post relies on as a basis is that you are owed a certain experience within an MMO that’s contingent on other players.
You are NOT entitled do that. What you ARE entitled to is your sandbox.
What the classic crew seems to lack awareness of is that OG Classic did well as the ONLY alternative to retail, largely because it landed in the off season.
Many people who were in OG Classic did not want to play late Vanilla, but were supporting it so that they could experience later expansions. WotLK and Cata are some of the best raiding experiences in the game, a few exceptions, so it’s not surprising to find that as later expacs became available, players would move forward and support those.
Because they didn’t want to play late Vanilla. And that’s where the majority of the population has gone.
SoD was a good stopgap, but the “let’s keep classic as Vanilla pure” crowd was so vocal that we didn’t get what would become SoD until late in the game. When Classic was announced, SoD is what much of the playerbase had been expecting; an old school sandbox with a twist/updates.
What you’re describing isn’t even a pitfall of the current era of WoW, but of the engine design decisions of Ye Olde WoW backed with the biggest driver to move away from that; the community itself.
Your premise is that by offering multiple offerings, they’ve diluted the player pool such that your sandbox isn’t any fun.
But the majority of those who started in your sandbox were only there with their eyes in other sandboxes.
If they didn’t increase their offerings, you would still have the same issues. Why? Because the issues you’re having are issues of early WoW that we had iteratively evolved past…and that iteration would become closer and closer to retail over time.
Blizzard gave the community these sandboxes because that’s what the community has hounded for over a decade. The reason you’re experiencing the issues you are is because the community does not share your desires outcome and have left you behind, much like OG PvP servers.
Your ask also isn’t a free lunch, either. Old WoW is a nightmare to deal with in terms of coding, and there’s a very real time cost to implement new designs, let alone handle the infrastructure of the game having many nuances that most modern day programmers wouldn’t even encounter.
So yes, the BUSINESS that provides a service to a community is… servicing the community. And they’re servicing their primary customers first because they HAVE to when in an MMO
You had the option to ride the wave and chose not to do so, as did many others within the community, and as such you’ve created a self-inflicted situation that, even if it is to be addressed in any meaningful manner, it’s going to be a slow rollout
Because it HAS to be, because you are NOT the primary customer and catering to the fringe crowd first is a recipe for disaster in most any business model.
You are paying them for the ability to access a sandbox, they are providing you many sandboxes to choose from. You’re choosing the old cruddy and dirty one at the far end of the park where nobody else wants to play.
And just like in real life, those areas take the longest to revamp and get a glow up, because there simply isn’t enough people to justify doing it often or frequently.
In essence, you’re complaining that the park should make your sandbox nicer so people want to come back to play in it, but the reason people aren’t playing in it is because it’s on the far side of the park. It’s inconvenient for the majority of goers, and most people don’t just want to play in the wooden sandbox, but they want to play in the penguin or turtle sandbox. But even if you make yours into a lion or a shark, or something cool…the reality is that it’s always going to be on the far side of the park. And it’s only going to get juuussssst enough maintenance to keep it usable by those already using it, until it can’t be maintained, or until not enough use it and it needs removed.
Sorry to be the one to inform you, but your fundamental problem is “I don’t like what I have because others have more desirable things”
And I get it, it sucks when you’re part of a dying minority within a gaming community and being left behind by your community at large. It sucks that Blizzard isn’t a bunch of magical genies that can snap their fingers and grant your wishes. It sucks that logistics and behavior of the real world doesn’t cater to your whims.
But people don’t want to go to the far side to play in your sandbox. And they certainly won’t want to go when there is a snotty kid throwing a tantrum!
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No. That wasn’t it.
A lot of people grew tired of the bloated collection and lobby game that Retail has become. Where you don’t really have to get to know anyone, you just need to show up with a good score, even with end game stuff. Then you’re off to the next transactional group of people you won’t remember to collect more things.
I was done with that. Classic hooked me back. I didn’t think it would either. I was far from alone, the majority I knew were not also Retail players, they only subbed for Classic.
As for people coming back and waiting for Wrath and Cata, no. First off no one knew was after the Vanilla stuff. Secondly, people have been getting on and off the Classic train the entire time. That’s part of why attitudes have shifted.
The only part of your post that I think is correct is about the devs splitting time between versions and how not much should be expected from them.
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The problem with era is its going to stagnate, It’s going to stagnate so bad that most of you WILL quit because there is nothing to do. Another long term problem that’s actually a player created problem is the lack of a real community, you can say guilds are community but in reality they’re social klicks, they’re the immediate social group you talk to, not the greater and broader server wide community. As for the classic development team, they’re small and they’re busy working on two separate world of warcrafts, warcraft 3 updates and starcraft 1 (assuming that even gets updates, I don’t really play it anymore). I can see vanilla+ being successful provided era gets an entirely dedicated team to it that could go through old revision ideas such as gilneas being available in vanilla to as far as an old dragon isles, an old emerald dreams as well as so so many other cut things.
As for balancing purposes, all classes and specs need to be brought up to be within 10% margins of one another, tanks without taunts should get the taunts they need.
All in all, between the trash balancing of vanilla as a whole, the community or lack there of (with elitist attitudes attached) to as far as an objectively better version of the game (cata, even if you hate it, it is objectively better)
For my entire guild and associates of guild, we all pretty much stopped playing when Lava Lash got closed and people started moving to WG. At the same time remix was soon so we just left SoD behind. For the RP community, SoD is dead, period.
WG? I heard stories of people getting trolled for RPing there literally day one of the transfers there. RPPVP? Are you mad? I don’t enjoy getting camped by 3 horde players who sit there and /laugh spam until I logout. RP is dead on SoD.
And the pve? It devolved into emerald nightmare runs, where if you fall behind at all by being dazed off mount or something, if you are not with friends you are screwed. You will be left behind.
Worse, in S1 I was excited to get runes. In S2 they basically all required a group or to be level 40. S3 wasn’t much better on rune acquisition.
Most people seem to get their runes in the first weekend of SoD, and my job has me working every other weekend and for some reason, SoD seasons always drop on a work weekend, when I am too tired to do more than talk. Then when my work week ends on the following Wednesday, no one is forming groups for the runes and I am left to try and do it myself. The same thing happened with wild offerings. I never got the 45 I needed. 14. Not even enough to replace my level 27 green belt with a blue. I am a mage healer in SoD, even.
Anyway enjoy your dead game mode.
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You should probably learn what a strawman is since you used it incorrectly twice, now.
Your post is honestly just trash whataboutism. This isn’t a game on Steam made by 2-3 20 year olds sitting in their childhood bedrooms. This is a billion dollar corporation and people have every right to expect a certain level of quality. Right now the bar is in the floor and they’re still managing to trip on it.
What they’ve done to Vanilla Wow is akin to the attempt to restore the Ecce H*mo. (lol I had to censer the name of the painting oof)
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That’s the perception of some people, within the context of the current game design. ‘Era means stagnation because they won’t add anything new to the game.’
Here’s a list of pain points you will find in any thread right now:
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Too many clients, players are segmented from each other by design.
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Too little challenge, X or Y feature has made some part of the game ‘too easy.’
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Getting into X or Y activity is too complicated or challenging.
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I can’t enjoy X or Y version of the game because it’s not fitting within the expected scope of World of Warcraft I experienced at Z time.
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There’s something wrong with an aspect of the game I enjoy, it’s been reported, other players have offered similar feedback, ultimately Blizzard has decided things are fine.
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Something is coming/ending soon, I won’t/haven’t had the chance to participate, can we stop designing the game around Fear Of Missing Out?
All of these pain points exist intentionally, within World of Warcraft. If you take a small step back, their naming convention since about WoD has been saying the quiet parts out loud. ‘The War Within’ could be an apt description of the current development cycle between multiple development teams, a representation of their eternal struggle to make anyone having anything to do with Wow, happy.
I think the biggest challenge Blizzard faces: Toppling poor management/leadership and re-defining the genre that made Wow such a magical experience in the first place. The open-ended, ‘sky is the limit’ fantasy of Wow, is what’s been lost.
Replaced by their best attempt at offering new content consistently enough to appease management/shareholders, while doing their best to make that content palatable for the people consuming it… players who inevitably live in a cycle of ‘do I unsub until this gets better’ while the developers scramble to be human beings developing quality content for other human beings.
The whole point is missed by everyone involved: None of this leads to a meaningful gaming experience one can cherish, regardless of their time investment or the time period they chose to play. Players hope/cope, Devs shovel more under the rug to keep the place looking nice, and if anyone were to take a peek under that ‘rug,’ they’d uncover the heard of elephants hiding in plain sight, right in the middle of the room:
This game is never going to be what it was in 2003/2004. The devs know it. The leadership knows it. The management knows it. The veteran players know it. Anything enjoyable is a fleeting experience at best with the moment to moment game play being the most rosy of colors to be found on that rearview mirror.
Those moments were created with friends and guildmates. Other players. Those moments were not created by Blizzard. At least, not since the days of GMs interacting with players, when some nerd behind his desk at HQ is role playing his entrance/exit and bidding me the best of luck upon my next adventure.
As long as new players continue to gravitate to check out the hype, as long as shareholders, internal numbers, and leadership recognize this new crowd as their Bread and Butter, Wow will always be what it is now. Adding Era realms would fix 99% of the problems. Having standards and following best practices for development, giving players actual value for their time and money, committing to excellence or keeping the nonsense out of this game, those are things we asking for.
Not this. Not like this. Never this, never will be this. Ask yourself why the game feels more empty than ever, with some of the best quality of life features, updates, artwork, and overall development this game has ever seen. Across four different versions.
So many choices, so much to do, none of it has much value, amirite?
Hate to break it to you, but SoD, unless it had the new unfinished content that was promised, was never going to be anyone’s “main” game that didn’t have literally anything else to play. Locking down the “content” (if you can call a handful of retail abilities using a private server’s acquisition and utilization system “content”), a barely changed dungeon, and an “event” that really does feel like it was made on a private server with how barebones it is (blood moon is literally just giving everyone a buff that changes their tag to FFA and a vendor, a long with a giant version of a normal mob set to a level and hp pool where it shouldnt be able to be killed, with an instant death spell.) to level brackets that you literally admitted was inspired by vanilla BETA, and adding literally nothing else, was doomed from the start.
Esp when the only thing to change from P1 to P2, was another barely changed raid no one ever did, the aforementioned barebones pvp event (that didnt even work as intended because the original intent was actual FFA, not “FFA but you can be in groups of 5” and an even smaller pool of retail abilities, and we all know how P3 was. “Incursions” was just them acting like they didn’t know how to make daily quests despite having them for 20 years, in a zone that was just "ashenvale but slightly more green and sparse see through vines everywhere. Despite having:
Written proof the Dream Portals were supposed to be connected
A vanilla version of the ED
A raid of both the EN and the ED
An actual ED zone in dragonflight
they chose to go with…what the incursions were. The only thing more minimalistic than that, would be to do what they did with the ED quests in wrath were it was just “the exact same zone with no changes but add a green filter to the camera for the duration of the quest”
On that note: Where is the content?
There is so much they could do that could have made SoD better considering they said they were going to do things that were unfinished/uncompleted.
Where is:
Grim Batol
Azshara Crater BG
Whatever was going to be underwater in Azshara from the Alpha/beta (likely a far fetched thing I know, there likely isn’t anyone even left at blizzard that remembers what that instance was supposed to be)
Stormwind Prison
Twilight Highlands (make up a vanilla name for that area, doesnt matter)
Uldum, and by extension, Throne of the Four Winds/Vortex Pinnacle/Halls of Origination
Quel’Thalas
Vanilla Broken Aisles
northrend
outland
Karazhan (still)
Scarlet Cathedral (because they teased it they clearly still remember it)
and the myriad of other unfinished or unimplemented things they could do.
In every phase they could have done something that was new, but they didn’t.
I started vanilla opening day in 2004, and our guild was competitive for progression in BC and WotLK, getting AOTC before there was aotc, having ‘the Undying’ and Starcaller / Astral Walker etc. As the private servers were getting popular after wotlk etc, Bluzz was suing and whining the server providers, and so long story short, they decided to vacuum up all that money of people who wanted the old vanilla stuff but never to go beyond BC i believe was the original desire of players and promise of Blizz.
When do you think they will announce Classic MoP? Its not 2004, and there are millions of new players since then. Players who are looking for different things. I was disgusted by a couple of the xpacs and have sworn with all the filth and flarin that Id never load WoW on my pc again…many times. There are always things I don’t like, but theres obviously a lot more things I like about the overall WoW experience.
Bottom line is that the entity creating wow is concerned with $$$$ first. Unfortunately, transmog and collecting has overshadowed most everything else. I had left at the beginning of BfA and came back just recently, and the crowding of transmog vendors EVERYWHERE is overwhelming. I always hated how a new xpac would mess over flying requirements, and dragonriding was super annoying until I flew with it a bit and got some skills in the tree and practice with the flying. Now I love it and wish it was in the game long ago.
It will be more fun and better for your health if yall accept where you are on the priorities, and in reality who the whole player base is made of.
It isn’t even about being “owed”. It’s about the fact that it behooves Blizzard to ensure those experiences are happening, because if they don’t, they won’t have a populated game (they don’t and they don’t).
OP isn’t even making demands, they’re pointing out that “Hey, you guys need to get your ish under control or you will lose me and players like me as customers.”
A transaction is a two way street.
You’re deluded. 4 million new subs stood head and shoulders over the release of the previous two expansions, and the population sustained higher than we’ve seen in recent recorded history.
And thank goodness we got to enjoy P1, because clearly the “what would become SoD” is undesirable.
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