I am usually not one for conspiracies but this is really the first time I have played a WoW expansion where it is so painfully obvious that systems are in place to slow you down it is becoming pretty unreal. Whether it be “lore” reasons or not, here is a list of things I have noticed on how they have slowed us down. Some of these might only slow you down a minute here, two minutes there, five minutes over here, but over time it all adds up to more time playing.
Keep in mind I understand time gating the story and renown that’s fine so we don’t blow through everything the first week.
World Quests Take Longer to Complete as some mobs give 1% per kill
Some World Quests and Objectives don’t list everything you need to do at first and just keep adding step after step after step.
Yellow attackable mobs purposely placed near quest kill mobs (so you Aoe them)
No mounting in the Maw, slowing you down
Scarse loot in raids/dgs runs
Notice how when you are doing the “Defended” world quests you seem to always end up at 95%, having to overshoot it to complete this calling?
Eye of the jailor limiting you on how much you can do per day in the Maw.
Emissaries/Callings giving almost no reward
A very time-consuming Torghast giving almost no rewards
Only one mailbox in the city, and super far from profession trainers and bank.
Outer ring of the city drops you off your mount
Anima is a physical item you must deposit
Callings don’t even give you gold directly, they give you items you must sell
Treasure chests involve many more steps than normal
Can’t swap specs in Torghast
Cannot fly via flight master from zone to zone; have to go through Oribos (debatable)
Legendary system forcing content; requiring Torghast runs
Lots of things requiring you to go to Wowhead; some quests don’t explain, treasure chests, Torghast bosses
Updated (12/29/20) The weekly "Rescuing Souls form the Maw now requires 10 souls instead of 5. Blizzard doubling down.
Overall, it feels like the game is actively trying to be as tedious and confusing as possible with very little payback.
You’re not wrong - one thing I will say is the “flying thru Oribos” is necessary because the zones are instanced from one another. That’s why you can’t fly direct.
While you aren’t necessarily wrong, most of these activities are optional are require very little investment per week. If you have to complete everything available to your character every day, yes it’s a huge time sink. But I like that the rewards for most of the tedious content isn’t very much because they actuallly feel optional now.
I don’t feel compelled to grind rep. I don’t feel compelled to grind anima. The world quests provide very little of value making them very optional. The callings can often be completed in conjunction with doing a dungeon. And yeah the rewards are mediocre making them optional as well.
The maw and torghast offer 85% of their value doing the weekly content which takes a couple hours to complete. After that if you don’t enjoy them you aren’t missing much by skipping them.
So I actually feel that I don’t have to play that much to get the most essential content done.
I think feels slower as a symptom of ‘no flying’. First two weeks they felt like a slog. At 190+ on alts most content I’m able to kill quickly. It’ll only get easier - maw except, we’ll get a mount for it but it’ll still take a while to do.
Things are definitely slowed down. I feel like it’s so we’re actually traveling through the world, adventuring. Rather than just speeding through a checklist.
You could argue that they slowed down the checklist…though not so much feels mandatory to me anymore. I don’t feel forced to grind rep at all. Only Torghast once a week, a few renown quests.
It’s always about the “time played metric” on the forums. Though I genuinely believe they’re trying to come up with a better/more rewarding game.
This has been true since the beginning. Ever wonder why the entrances to zones are nearly always small paths through passes and such? Why you’ll sometimes catch a resource node on your minimap and it’ll disappear as you get closer, right around the edge of a zone? How chat channels and the like are pinned to each zone?
Every zone is technically an instance with some magic to make the transition more seamless. Individual zones can and have crashed when too much is happening within them.
And even if this isn’t true there is no limitation to go from one zone to another. There are several instances where that has been done, for example going into MC from BRD or BWL from UBRS. They could easily have let us go directly from one SL zone to another, they just chose to make it a pain.
You hit the nail on the head. Was just doing WoD levelling and it was quicker to do bonus missions there then it was to do WQs in Shadowlands… And those bonus missions were known to take extra time for extra reward.
Not only that dude… wasn’t the 1st clear for mythic Nathria guild had some hundred million gold. This crap is literally p2win Chinese bs mmorpg now and people are too deep into the fanboy to see it.
You can literally buy all your 200+ epics in AH right now, buy all the mats, stand afk in both Nathria/mythics +/pvp and get boosted. PVP ratings mean nothing. And the fact that WoW tokens are so deflated in gold price? It’s pretty clear what’s going on. World 1st means nothing so time gating content makes no sense either.
Time gating has nothing to do with helping less hardcore players “not feel left behind.” It’s more a business model/strategy to keep the game dragged out so you make more subscription money. I have no problem with companies earning revenue but when you’re intentionally gimping the quality of your content just to draw it out and include p2w elements to the game, the game literally becomes a trash chinese knockoff mmorpg.
When my thing-you-pump-anima-and-souls into (whatever it’s called) gets it’s next upgrade (5000 anima), at least in Bastion, I’ll be getting a servant that makes the Bastion transport network available. I don’t know if that guy will have a cooldown or what.
However, the flight whistle will be moot if we indeed get flying in 9.1.