Dragonflight is so good that I unsubbed!

Community General Discussion
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I really don’t think this is accurate, though I understand where you’re coming from. This isn’t a “back to basics” expansion, this is another “huge threat being discovered that will top the previous one” expansion.

The lack of cool comes from this being a new continent with enemies we’ve never heard of before now which weren’t set up well.

A back to basics would have been actual OG zones on Azeroth in which we go about trying to solve problems that we/our characters have some investment in already: e.g. dealing with problems back home, in Durotar, the Barrens, Westfall, Quel’Thalas, etc. Even discovering new things in those zones.

And I do think that is sorely needed. WoW has lost touch with its roots, the cultures that built up the immersion and excitement, and the sense of adventuring aimlessly without having these very narrowly focused story threads.

Don’t get me wrong, I love grand narratives that are nuanced and well laid out, but I got into WoW to find adventures of my own choosing, not to be railroaded into following one straight and narrow plotline.

WoW Classic was golden for me for one reason in particular: it catered to people’s individual interests. We had a wealth of diverse zones, stories, encounters, and professions to choose from. These days everything is homogonized, and every character–regardless of race or faction–has to go through the exact same story on the exact same quests at exactly the same time.

Legion was fantastic becasue it finally introduced content that was fairly exclusive (to classes, at least) and that it made the experience exciting because there was always a new component to the story that was specific to you/your character. That, for me, is what made it a great adventure.

And I think this is big too. I’ve been playing non-stop since the very beginning; I’ve never unsubbed, never really taken super huge breaks, but Shadowlands became the first expansion I ever skipped (I just roleplayed and never went through the expansion until DF, and even then just to level up). DF I tried, but I fell off a few weeks in. There hasn’t been one glaring thing I was so upset about that I stopped playing, I just… didn’t find anything that made me want to stick around. Up until yesterday I hadn’t logged in for six months, and that is staggering to me.

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44

Can i have ur gold?

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45

Think about this. Warcraft is just a way larger franchise than the rest of them (aside from FF, obviously). WoW also has rampant brand loyalty and humongous whales.

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46

But that doesn’t answer my question. You called WoW objectively bad. So using your same “objective” standards…which one is “objectively” good

Because right now, none of them are doing great.

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I think WoW is a mediocre-bad game in general. I am not judging it based off MMO standards, but as a GAME in general. However, as an MMO, I think it is JUST ok, completely mediocre. It is still the best MMO, in my opinion, based off other MMOs I’ve played, though, which is really sad. I don’t know much about the other MMOs aside from GW2 and FF14. Both FF14 and GW2 bored me to pieces. GW2 lost me as soon as I found out there was an anti-dragon expac. Those devs can F off. FF14 also lost me (aside from it being boring) for dragon-related reasons as well because of some implied stuff.

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im in a bit of a weird place because im somebody who hasnt played since legion…and i decided to start playing again at beginning of year

however im basically playing 3 expansions at the same time because of that

DF is easily better than BFA and SL…but i can imagine those 2 did a lot of damage to the playerbase…perhaps too much

but the xpac itself is not bad…theres a lot of QoL improvements that i wish the game had ages ago…and it sure as heck doesnt feel like the grindfest that was SL…im not sure there is a single thing about BFA that ive liked so far

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49

Literally this. How can people not see this… Even MoP felt more “back-to-basics” than DF.

Don’t forget the complete kiddifcation of everything as well! The writing itself feels like it is made for 3rd graders.

As much as this would be cool, we all know they would completely SQUANDER IT. I have ZERO trust in the writing team with ANYTHING. Everyone speaks of a world revamp, but that just worries me. Not to mention the gameplay… Given how questing has been Legion-DF, a revamp would be a HUGE SLOG.

On the other hand… it also solidified the player as “da chosen one”, which was already being pushed a little too much in WoD IMO.

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Honestly…

Fart moles aren’t doing it for me in any way. I’ve gone back to leveling up a worgen priest and that’s been interesting. The midsummer fires have been helping too.

No one in my guild or friend list or other guild or communities have been logging in or very active.

Oh well.

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51

And that’s fair. I really don’t trust them either, but even just seeing the old world revamped with updated assets gives me (as a roleplayer) infinitely more maneuvering room than a brand new continent.

And with regards to the narrative? All of DF (as far as I can see) could have been told in older zone territory. If they had revamped the world and merged some of the zones together to make them larger, a lot of the stories could be just adapted.

Do we need a whole zone in DF for Tauren? We have a lot of their history in older zones already: Highmountain, Stonetalon, the Barrens, Mulgore, 1k Needles, etc.

Big dragon tower? We have Wyrmrest Temple already. Snowy magic biome for blue dragons? Borean Tundra has a whole zone that is the home of the Blue Dragonflight.

Titan themed areas? Badlands with Uldaman, Storm Peaks with Ulduar, Uldum as a whole zone, etc.

Black Dragonflight area? Deepholm does exist, as do many other lairs of black dragons throughout Azeroth.

It’s just frustrating to me that the devs will do literally anything, including retcon tons of old lore, to justify not going back to the old world and making use of it.

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Yeah that’s another underlying issue is all the Disney-fication and kiddie themes sprinkled throughout the expansion

It’s a minor thing, but it is kind of a turnoff when most of the playerbase is either late-teens or working-age adults at this point in time (2023ish)

I’m not really aware of any younger sub-age 18 players in this game anymore… it’s almost the exact opposite of 2007-2008 when I observed plenty of younger players in the sub-age 15 age bracket. I was late teens myself so was fresh out of high school and knew of younger kids in the neighborhood that played

These days though, you almost never hear of a younger kid - say, aged 10-15 - playing WoW or even interested in trying out WoW. Most of the younger kids are playing other/non-WoW games from what I see

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what they have done with the specialty map like the Cavern has been a big part of the problem imo, made it dead and undesirable for many players, Blizz keeps making very strange changes.

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But it’s not bad, it’s just that there is nothing to do, and after Legion, BFA and SL where we had a ton of things to do, and none of them being alt friendly so if you wanted to run another character or swap mains you absolutely had to run all the content again, it means coming into DF we just get bored very quickly.

So Legion was fun, and because that model of game worked they moved it into BFA and turned it up to 11. And what I loved about BFA, aside from that you had to run this or that content if you wanted specific HOA essences, or to min/max your AZ gear, is that you could choose to run any content and still gear up sufficiently.

And many things in BFA where optional, but still had items you could farm and feel like you have achieved something.

Warfronts and Island Expeditions are a good example, WF may have given some gear to help level up and get into raids and M+, but for both it was mostly content that gave currency and achievements towards pets and mounts, something to do outside of the holy grail (M+, PVP and raid).

People complained a lot about BFA, you had some 20 or more weekly quests, daily quests, plenty of zones, lots to do, but what people did not realise was that most of it was not needed. Yet thanks to their complaints we got SL where world quests became a chore, legendaries absolutely were needed to be farmed and if you had the wrong one you just missed out on a good portion of power, and therefore could not really progress past a certain point.

And thanks to the complaints from SL what did we get? DF, a bare bones, alt friendly, minimal farm, nothing to do expansion. And not just the amount of content, but look at the raids. My guild historically farm heroic until 1-2 weeks prior to the end of season and push some mythic bosses in there, we are never and have never been good enough to do more than 3-5 mythic bosses.

But last season, for the first time in however long, we beat heroic and downed 3 bosses in mythic before FR released and had that much spare time that many people just took breaks. Come this season and we have already got to the point we can alt farm the first and last 2 bosses in the raid in 15 minutes or less on normal and clear full heroic in less than 2 hours.

That’s 3 months in S1, but not even 2 months in S2 and we are basically done with what we want to achieve and are just doing mythic for the lols and the vault slots.

What we need is a combination of DF and BFA, an easier raid, less convoluted crap, but more things that are optional to farm. In BFA and SL I was spending so much time just farming things, right up until the last weeks of each expansion, that when DF dropped and I seen how little there was to do I knew I would have spare time, and I do.

Been playing a bit of LoL, now D4, even spent some time on OW and even going back to Steam to do some games over there which I never did previously because there really is not enough to do here to keep people entertained.

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Nah man, Disney movies are better written and more mature than WoW… and also more enjoyable…

Even when I was 14-18 (very beginning of BfA to the very end of SL), I couldn’t stand what they were doing. Some Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms Post-revamp were even pushing it for me.
It is sad when I could recognize how awful BfA’s writing was when I was merely 14-16.
People forget teens aren’t completely stupid. When a teenager of all things doesn’t think your game is cool, you know you did something wrong, just saying.

Now I am 19, going to be 20 come January 2024, and the only reason I still am subbed is because I’ve been addicted since I was 8. Despite the fact I barely play the game unless for a stupidly specific reason (i.e. playing the Worgen starting zone for the 500th time), when I unsub, the withdrawal symptoms kick in.

Another thing, I think people forget that people don’t bash WoW because they hate it, but because they love it. WE WANT the game to be good, but it just isn’t, and we are heartbroken. If we didn’t love this franchise so much, we wouldn’t be bashing it so hard. If someone really DOES hate the franchise for real, they would’ve been long gone already with 0 attachment.

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So you went to reddit and asked a bunch of whiners what they thought about WOW, then paid 15 dollars for a 2nd account… to post this pointless nonsense? LOL

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imo they made the mistake of listening to the “just make everything optional! i don’t want to have to do anything” vocal minority, without realizing that “mandatory” tasks and dailies are what add longevity to a zone map

When you remove even basic “mandatory” tasks/dailies/chores - like what they did with ZCaverns? …we soon found out that the zone quickly went dead/low player-counts/ghost-town after only like 2 weeks :desert:

Maybe they’re unpopular, but stuff like borrowed power and “mandatory” activities (like dailies, rep, chores, etc) do actually extend the lifespan of a map/zone out longer than 2 weeks

Some recent examples:

  • Maw/Korthia… stayed relevant for months since you could farm borrowed power
  • BFA “corrupted” Pandaria zones… stayed relevant for months since you could farm borrowed power
  • Nazjatar/Mechagon… stayed relevant for months since you could farm borrowed power
  • etc etc
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If you were to ask a lot of ppl they will claim they were forced at gunpoint to do Island expeditions a billion time even though the only ppl who had to do them were world first guilds. Same with Maw of Souls during Legion.

Most Mythic raiders who eventually clear the raid only do so after 3-4 months when it is nerfed into the ground. By this time you will have all the AP you need from just playing the game.

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I feel like we’ve all burned out on the game very hard long time ago, and Dragonflight is just the first expansion that doesn’t have an addictive hamsterwheel mechanic to cope with it. You actually need to get out of your way to find things to do, instead of having to do mandatory grinds.

And I think that’s okay! It’s okay that you like the game, but don’t want to play! There are other things to do and play.

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ghost town in ZC , can’t find people to do anything there, yes this is part of the problem, the Forbidden Reach on the other hand was decent , why they went this rout with ZC is any ones guess, terrible decision.

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This isn’t a small thing, and it’s actually a pretty big factor in the changes of the game in recent years, and trends in our friend groups thinning. We grew up with this game, and instead of Blizzard continuing to cater to us (as grown adults now), they’re trying to change and adapt to the times.

I think about the Harry Potter books and how they matured as the audience grew, but Blizzard has done the opposite in the hopes of attracting new, younger players. The kidification (shorter, bite sizes activities, bigger focus on RNG, less content designed for complex social engagement, etc.) is their attempt to garner a newer audience, and it’s driving away a lot of the now older, original players.

At least, that’s my observation of it.

This isn’t exactly new, though. Think about Timeless Isle, Tol’Barad, Naz’jatar, Zerith whatever it was… it’s a challenging thing because it becomes obsolete when there aren’t enough people with interest becasue of whatever reason (newer content replaces interest in it, for example).

of releasing a really neat concept that isn’t complete, and SHOULD have been more fleshed out, expanded on, and made evergreen. WFs and Expeditions should have become the new battlegrounds or dungeons. Just like scenarios in MoP that got abandoned.

edit:

This is a really important piece here, and good to bring up.

It’s also why I think RPers are some of the best players to get feedback from. Regardless of the ebb and flow of content, spec balances, etc, RPers generally stick around for the RP. So you can find them almost always in game and they’ll have a much broader perspective since a lot of RPers dip into all content, but ultimately won’t quit when one piece doesn’t meet their interests.

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Or, it could possibly be… they’ve outgrown the game.

Look at the posts you shared. Most of those indicate exactly that.