Honestly , you can totally bypass the content for a few patches and it completely invalidates the progress of people that played before. How do people feel about this , good or bad?
Do you think it still feels like an MMO-RPG or a game with isolated events every 2-3 months that you can pay 15$ for and then peace out?
Has the sense of adventure been lost?
Gearing matters within the season but not between seasons. You can jump back in with any new season and not be behind. However if you jump back in during the middle of the season, you’ll be a little behind for a while (at least in the context of an M+ player who depends on the vault for bis). If you just want to do open world content you can wait and do it one or two expansions out even.
same goes with expansions all the best epic you have will be replaced with quest greens and blues in a few hrs
Lot of people have that old MMO mindset about gear, but I never cared for temporary item level which will be meaningless the following patch. But then again I only started in BFA, so what do I know.
Every road I take already leads to do end game content, but I don’t. Even if you make raid the only path to gear progression, I still won’t join.
Oh yes, I’m so invalidated that the guy who didn’t raid in season 1 gets to obtain gear good enough to come to season 2’s raid. WoW has been like that since as far back as Wrath. They didn’t call them “seasons” but the major content patches were the exact same thing. Didn’t do Naxx? Np run some heroics, get your badge gear and lets go do Ulduar now. If you feel invalidated by that then I’m not sure what to say to you.
That’s the price of catchup content coming with each patch… previous tiers quickly become obsolete.
I personally didn’t mind the Vanilla/TBC model where catchups were rare or came in the form of intermediate raids (e.g. Zul’Gurub). In my Vanilla guild that wasn’t anywhere near cutting edge, it meant our trajectory was stable between patches and that our rate of progression was a lot less important, making for a more chilled out feel. It also meant that there was always something higher to push for, rather than running out of things to do once the guild had put the chosen difficulty level of the current tier on farm.
The downside of that model though is that people can’t jump in immediately, and that players can’t keep an army of alts up to date with the current tier, which I guess bothers more people and so here we are.
It’s been like that for a while. What I usually do is play for a couple months at launch, unsub and then come back around the time of the last patch. Everything in-between is meaningless.
Always has been.
Gear is a means.
It is now a seasonal game but gearing matters… cause it is the carrot per se.
Without gear mattering or gearing then I think lots would leave the game.
I think it’s a non-issue.
Its been like this since what, Cata?
The big issues of all the following expansions wasn’t related to a seasonal-style of gearing
Having to carry people through old content to gear them up for current content was bad and dumb and I’m glad it’s gone.
Replace “seasons” with “tiers” and you’ve got the story of WoW. It’s always been like this. You replace your gear multiple times and then start over when the next expac launches.
Watching people who claim to have played forever complain about this is weird to say the least.
Arguably even TBC. Due to how good badge gear were. But i don’t think you could get a full set from just badges. So maybe not.
Same case with WotLK. Do your ICC dungeons+ToC and daily heroic for badges. Buy gear.
It has effectively been this way since MoP, my dude. Backfarming non-current raid content for relevant pieces has not been a thing since the end of Firelands in Cata.
You can tell when thread makers have 0 clue what they’re talking about.
WOW has always been a seasonal game where you do new raids and gear.
But, when you post on a classic character to hide the fact you don’t do any of the content you’re making complaints about… nothing new
People were doing Kara and ZA every week just to farm Badges for Sunwell vendor gear. On multiple characters. To the best of my recollection, very few people complained about the grind.
My guild experience was the exact opposite as people were super bored doing the same old raids. I guess M+ fills that spot of repetition now.
this game is just an in-your-face blunt hamster wheel now
goals of immersion or systems that make sense in the world are dead, replaced with f2p style designs to keep players on the hamster wheels
vault is a great example… what part of a magical vault generating slot machine loot based on how much you grinded in the prior week makes any sense at all in an RPG?
it was created solely to increase grind metrics and FOMO
This was king of formed at the end of TBC with the IoQ catchup and solidified in Wrath.
So you’re like 15 years late.
Spoken like a person who truly has no clue how the game evolved based on player feedback, not some forum psychoanalyzation of player behavior. Pay closer attention to feedback and how the devs respond to it.