Hello
I am here to post about the current state of OCE in Cataclysm Classic and how we need some changes to the things in the title in order to help support the region a little.
Lets preface this; we currently have what? 5? active versions of WoW?
- Classic Fresh
- Classic Era
- Classic Hardcore
- Cataclysm
- Retail
- Season of Discovery
Soon we’ll have added to that list TBC Classic and Wrath Classic - fingers crossed we get era of those too for those that love those versions of the game for for folks who want to play!
There’s a lot of WoW and unfortunately, too much content to play any of these versions meaningfully once we get past Wrath.
The main culprit of this is the weekly tasks required to maintain effective participation in each version of the game. Specifically for Cata and Retail, Valor/Stones and catchup mechanics. Retail has decent catchup mechanics which are, overall decent, if not gated by valorstones - but this post will focus on Cataclysm specifically, and by extension, future expansions because the lessons learned here need to carry forward.
Cataclysm classic has the Elemental Runestones which, while on paper seem good, are ineffective if the Inferno Protocol queues are dead or struggling. Now I play horde and it’s still sometimes a 30 minute wait as ANY of the three given roles. For alliance it’s probably dead. Worse is waiting for those 30 minutes to be filled with players who are using very badly geared alts or a really bad group comp for the dungeon (Quad melee for Blackrock Caverns). The catchup mechanics mean nothing if I can’t actually utilize the mechanics to catchup.
There is another factor to this; why don’t Inferno protocol heroics drop 359 gear instead of 346? It seems like ya’ll just took the Wrath system and made it worse - we don’t even have kiss/curse affixes to be able to make things go faster or make it more interesting. Just a flat HP/damage increase prolonging the experience.
There are three heroic queues, all which award valor but each giving 3 different rewards and thus fracturing the waning cataclysm player base between them. I’d much rather go level in one of the other WoW versions than spend almost an hour trying to get 240 valor. It’s particularly bad that spending 1 hour grinding out my mid 40s in classic fresh feels like I’ve accomplished more than 1 hour of heroic queuing in Cataclysm
A currency/point system is good, but we need to drastically increase the rate in which we acquire them. When Cataclysm (and by extension MoP/WoD) had these systems, they were the only versions of WoW in a market that was not competitive for MMOs/online games. In 2024 this is no longer the case, and subsequently, this needs to be reviewed to accommodate for the 2024 market and many different versions of WoW that your players want to play (and you want us to play).
So to that end I have some solutions;
- Cross Faction queues for RDF Heroics Cataclysm onward. This will help OCE alliance a long way. If Private Servers and retail can accomplish this, surely you can too.
- Cross Region queues for RDF Heroics Cataclysm onward. Make the queue function like retail. We know it’s classic but this is a retail system so lets take the lessons they’ve learned already to make the queue faster for people. We’ll have Classic Era/TBC/Wrath to enjoy the antique systems that we enjoy.
- Adjust the loot tables of Inferno Protocol and beyond to include normal loot of the previous tier, and have the runestones be reserved for heroic loot, similar to Wotlk.
- Valor should be awarded on a per boss basis - 120 per boss, and instead of 240 valor per completion, give us more runestones instead. This will smooth out the gearing curve for alts and new/returning players.
- If you don’t want to fix the drop tables for Inferno Protocol, Incentivize running Tier 11 content for gear. Double the loot and quadruple the valor that drops in thes raids. This will make the content a little more relevant for players and give us a reason to go in there for some fun. The valor means Firelands geared characters have a reason to go in and help the newer characters get gear.
I’m not a game designer, just an avid WoW player and mmo gamer. I can’t speak to the above from a design perspective but as a customer I’m struggling a lot right now. If you want us to play your games, make it a bit easier/engaging to manage the systems that come with it. The weekly tasks to maintain characters started taking off in Cataclysm but in the modern age these are much more outdated than the weekly tasks in pre-Cata versions of the game due to the way character power and gearing is different in those versions.
Hoping we get some communication on this subjuct
Lion
