Why do you think doing low keys 1-9, a normal raid or some 1400 pvp makes you a non casual. How come only doing world content is what makes you casual. I know plenty of casual players who do end game content.
Casual doesn’t mean just do world content
That’s great, go play them. Log in to LOTRO and smoke pipeweed for 6 months, nobody is stopping you.
I play a ton of Kerbal Space Program, I play it for what KSP is good for. I don’t come to the WoW forums and complain that I can’t earn science points for sending probes to Draenor.
Problem here is the experience players are having is what’s driving this.
Some players only remember being max level and having to deal with the downtimes before the QoL items were brought in.
Other players remember that the game was significantly slower and the rewards were literally fewer but it took so long to actually get to the levels where you needed those rewards that they didn’t notice the down time.
WoW is at this place where they decided probably based off of metrics, that the first concern is the actual concern, whereas the latter isn’t a concern but rather a perception issue.
But when you decide that you’re killing a delicate balancing act. I see on these forums and across all of the MMORPG genre forums people pine for the older games and how the communities felt. Well newsflash you can actually go play those games still. But that’s at issue here because you probably will level up faster now than you did say 10+ years ago just because of the experience you now have in these types of games.
That’s all true. But what’s also true here is that WoW and some other iterations of WoW-like games have basically openly said that the end-game is the game. As a result players who can basically press 1-2-3 will level up and do so in a fashion that’s so fast they’ve now arrived at a point in the game where before there was a healthy chunk of players who weren’t there.
This is where you get the complaints. This is where all the casual concerns come from. It’s because in the Dev’s infinite wisdom they decided over the years that making the game more accessible meant that players get to the end-game but did not give much thought as to what they would do when they got there.
End-game MMORPGs especially older ones like WoW aren’t for everyone. It takes a certain kind of player to only want to do end-game content constantly. The problem is that I’m betting WoW at most probably has between 2-5 million subs. While that’s great for the MMORPG genre, compared to where the game was at it’s peak, that’s pretty awful. You’re talking about a 50% decline in overall population over the span of ~10+ years. What’s important about this is the question:
Do you think current retail WoW could support that many players?
Not technology wise, but playable content wise. I think the answer is no. I say that because the Devs decided that in order to keep what population they had and to stop the hemorrhaging that has been constantly ongoing over the past 10 years they needed to ensure that the end-game content could keep 2-3 million players playing at all times and anything above 3 million is gravy.
It’s clear to me that Blizzard as a company is kind of in the doldrums. It was apparent when D3 launched, apparent when WC3 Remaster launched, and it’s clear now how Overwatch is being regarded by many as a game that could’ve been great but just never lived up to what it could be. Blizzard’s creative development team is probably in the same spot Bioware was right after they made ME3. They were a hot creative company who knew how to make games, and they tried to branch out with different content and because it was okay, not bad but just okay, they’ve remained that way for quite sometime.
This game isn’t fun for casual players. Just because casual players before could get at least 2-3 months of play time just by leveling up and doing overworld quests and a few dungeons. Now it’s basically the highway to the gear wall and when most casual players hit that, they quit because the “harder” content to them isn’t fun to play.
They still can, I know true casual players who still haven’t hit level 60.
Well sir, they added valor points after people claimed for the badges to return
Stigya rework comes to make hoarding a non-factor
A new raid we barely know about is not part of their disengage
Anima drought is the whole shabaam of the xpa, but we’re seeing increases in anima progressively
What do you mean, Customization? The wow playerbase is impossible to satisfy, ever. Many, many care about it… i couldn’t give 1 shlt about it, and so many people that wear ther full tmogs and can’t see a speckle of their former race. Culling expectations, well any surprise ever made, has that. you expect something and are given something else, happens in absolutely everything dude, from christmas presents to food flavour, relationships, professions and having a family itself, how’s that a fault/flaw? it’s part of the surprise factor, you get some, you lose the chance of other.
The audience that likes more stuff, which i believe is… everyone? Those that like customization, we already got a lot of it at the start, and in the grand scheme of things, it’s very meh/non important when you’re not wearing normal clothing, but rather tons of armor with more special effects than Michael Bay movies.
Dungeons? you got a new one coming
Raid? new one coming
bored of zones? new one coming
walking around is a hassle? flying is coming
PvP? we got new arenas, i don’t play pvp so i really don’t know sht bout it, but we did got more maps, not fo RBG, maybe soon? has every expansion added RBG maps? I know kotmogu but can’t recall a map for every xpa, not my thing :c
TL;DR they are adding a lot, if they happen to “scrap content” then yes, come and let’s party to bash their lying a$$es, but so far, they deliver what they said.
I do. I maintain subscriptions to both. That doesn’t mean I that I believe that WoW cannot improved by introducing these types of systems. I’m not a fan of stagnation.
That’s not the point tho. Saying they still can isn’t addressing what so many are saying. Because a small handful of players you claim to know aren’t max level yet doesn’t remove the fact that the broad general consensus all across the WoW community is that to get from 1-60 on a fresh character typically takes 2-3 weeks now whereas the consensus before was 2-3 months.
The issue here the game has changed. Some players feel the game isn’t as good as it once was because they feel that they’re being forced to play a game that wasn’t how they remembered it.
I don’t think anyone here truly believes it takes 2-3 months now to go from 1-60. That’s actually an exception. And yes I fully believe slowing the game down for leveling is needed. Scaling on the lower end of the game needs to be harder. The decision to make going from 1-60 a literal log in and kill 10 things a day and you’re 60 in 2-3 weeks was a bad decision.
Oh, you’re talking 1-60? I was just talking about 50-60.
The reason that leveling is faster now is because Serial Alters were complaining for an extended time that leveling their 189164th character was taking too long.
The reason that leveling from 1 is faster now IS BECAUSE AN OVERWHELMING NUMBER OF PEOPLE DEMANDED IT.
Take it up with them.
yeah, every game ever made can be subject of improvement, and you can see the non-doomsayer posts, the actually useful posts, suggesting changes that we can all agree, are better, like how Valor was added after the outcry of the community, a positive change. Now the WoD pvp system is on the midst of being implemented, after many claimed it was better than current system.
Personally, I’d like a Great Vault change, actual covenant benefits in-SL zones, expanded torghast, more weekly events that I have ideas for, but can’t find the time to post 'em as… i’m playing! or here debating this, or doing work stuff
Do yourself a favour and pull the plug. Make a statement. Its no wonder they have content bottlenecks if they scratch everything theyve done prior expansions and give no incentive at all to go back to older stuff.
And im not even talking about old quest/raids. Im talking about the old zones which can be used for more quests, class related stuff, professions. Tons of opportunities wasted because every 2 years we need to scrap everything weve done before and never built on something.
We need a big design philosophy change - I mean why should i be excited if i finally get a good expansion when i know that most of its systems and content will be scrapped next expansion. More so since we have seen how quickly they can ruin stuff like classes from legion -> bfa. I want an MMORPG back and not an instance grinder full of league of legends toxic communities.
The question is, however… why are they demanding it?
The obvious answer is that levelling has become superfluous because of the hyperfocus on the endgame that WoW has. It is a formality - a system that is a relic of what WoW was originally, but no longer is.
I don’t think that’s true to be honest. I think the community who got the most exposure to the devs demanded it and as a result were placated. If this was true then why would the game start to lose numbers from their peak? Why has their been a drop-off? Why did Blizzard decide to stop posting their numbers?
If that were true then wouldn’t it also be true that the faster leveling mechanics should’ve been introduced when WoW was rising because that’s how players demanded it?
I know saying leveling should be slower seems like blasphemy—but it’s only blasphemy for players who only think of end-game content as the only real content in the game. To everyone else it’s just a slower leveling experience.
they call blizz lazy when they do that. Plus, after an xpa fully using a zone, people kinda get tired of it… idk about you but personally I don’t wanna go to Northrend now, I played there for years, I’m okay not going there anymore.
In BFA we got a bit of Pandaria/Uldum again? not much i know. Currently, older zones serve as recipes for old yet still good craftings like mounts of cosmetic things. And in most MMORPG, zones are level restricted, so once you overlevel the zone, you never have to go back again… wow is similar, but zones scale up with you up to some point, so in theory, you could go to any zone while leveling, and once you’re at top level, it’s only understandable those zones no longer present a threat
Could you imagine if they added a dungeon or two that weren’t for the current level cap? The outcry here would incredible because of “useless” content being added. And they would be quite correct.
The restructuring of levelling has precluded this as a possibility, but that just demonstrates how unimportant the levelling system has become to WoW.
Honestly, you could just have a short zone that feeds you abilities when you start a new character like Death Knights and Demon Hunters and go right into the endgame from there - levels are absolutely meaningless, and that’s by design.
with the Chromie thing, they made so you can enter any timeline and do their dungeons at your level. So in theory, you can queue with people of any expansion.
Leveling is a non-factor now bc it’s the 8th expansion, people by now has progressed so far into the game that they had to squish levels. Leveling is relevant when there’s not much at the endgame, like Vanilla, where leveling was most of the adventure, and past that, only raid (as dungeons did not scale) and PvP.
Personally, i see leveling as “training ground”, you can’t take a lv60 character out of thin air and perform well with it: learning how to use it through leveling is what makes someone good at their class, only to refine later with pros/main spec guides. it could be faster, I come from servers where you had x20, x10 or x100 XP rates, so you could get a character to lv120 in 2 hours by mob farming, but then you end up with a bunch of people not knowing what to do or how their class work. It’s understandable by now that a lv60 knows what their class can do after 59 levels of learning it.
I agree and that’s where your problem lies in my view.
I see this as a straight fact because it’s just simple logic. Retail WoW today would not be able to sustain 5+ Million players and that’s because of the design they chose.
Blizz hit a wall back in WoD when they didn’t have a good plan to make continual content that’s meaningful to all players. Once they got that big WoD population drop they got spooked and realized that the majority of accounts had at least one max level character due to how old the game was; This was the undoing that eventually would create a self-fulfilling prophecy which is that by only focusing on developing content for that end-game player you’re basically signaling that you can really only sustain a smaller portion of your players.
I think of other RPGs I play. When I get to endgame in those, I restart like in the examples of every video game RPG, or I never actually make it to the endgame like when I play DnD.
The design I even said multiple times is dumb and archaic. One the one hand they act like they want to keep the leveling system, but in the same hand and the other hand the devs clearly signal that the endgame is the only content they’re concerned with; So I ask the question–why have a leveling system at all at this point? Either slow it down so players have to go through a longer time to get to the end, which will make that older content more valuable because there’s players in that market, or scrap it all together and move the start up to lvl 50 and ilvl 100.
I mean at the end of the day the way I see this is that I don’t believe for one second that WoW is adding any new accounts for new players in any significant manner. I say that because the way the game is designed compared to other genres and games in the video game world why would anyone want to play a game like this?
WoW is a game that’s coasting off of it’s name at this point. It’s on auto-pilot and it’s designed to keep 2-5 million players playing. That’s the philosophy at this point. Lets put it another way: If WoW 2 released and they put the same amount of effort into the endgame that they put in now the game would flop. WoW is never not have the majority of players in the current market of MMOs. It’s going to take a new innovative tech to take that title.
I see this more as a criticism of MMORPGs rather than just WoW.
I don’t know why they made leveling up from 1 so fast, my guess is that player demand was part of it, but I think the greater part of it was just the end-game focus of WoW game designers and wanting to ramp everyone up to that point as swiftly as possible
I suspect it’s because the players who were the most vocal about it were already there and those players probably have more exposure to Devs than anyone else. That’s why they take their concerns more seriously just because they’re their MMO neighbors.
Say you live in Manhattan, you’re going to probably be more concerned with the concerns of your wealthy neighbors than you are of those who live in Harlem just by nature of being around them constantly.
Bookmarking this to like it later, out of points for the day… again…
Wow, this post is all kinds of crazy and ironic to me because you accuse others of revisionism due to nostalgia but you yourself revise and downplay 3.1 to such a wild extent.
Let me refresh your memory. 3.1 brought -
All this in addition to major tweaks they did to classes and specs, many of which had just been majorly revamped since TBC for the positive like ret paladin, big adjustments to existing profs (when those mattered) as well as to the brand new prof Inscription.
Like it’s truly crazy and inaccurate to put 3.1 and 9.1 in the same breath. 9.1 is a ghost of a patch.