Hard to take your time and explore the world when the keep adding timers to stuff.
Honestly, as I get older, the customizable API is kind of becoming the reason I pick WoW over the competition.
It’s just so nice for accessibility. If you’re lacking in reflexes, or just plain can’t read/discern a certain buff, or even straight up colorblind - there’s addons that can help fill in the gaps and keep you at a competitive level. Playing Outlaw, in particular, without addons to track those buffs - that’d be fresh hell, finding them amidst all the other buffs/debuffs!
Yeah, to some, things like this might be considered a ‘crutch’ - and I can see where they’re coming from, but I think it’s okay to have a couple crutch mechanics if it means more people can play the game and have fun. The difficulty should be in the game, anyway, not the UI!
As a counter-example, if you’ve ever played Guild Wars 2, then you’ll know how absolutely infuriating it can be to manage buffs/debuffs (boons and conditions) in that game. The icons are tiny, shift constantly, and visually indistinct - there’s no way whatsoever to make them larger, or move them to a more comfortable part of the screen. They just sit there, on the bottom, jittering around like mad.
In more stressful situations like PvP, this becomes a huge problem - especially if your eyesight isn’t too great. All the corrective lenses in the world can’t make up for what is just bad UI design, and what’s worse is there’s no way around it!
Having a singular, basic UI does mean that the experience for all players is more consistent, but I think the downsides far outweigh the positives.
1 Like
There is still a decent amount of wonder you just gotta look for it I suggest the secret finding discord if you want to see some true digging.
I was in a casual raid guild in Vanilla. We did Molten Core, Onyxia, and Blackwing Lair. Our goal was to get people in the best gear, but it was mostly tier sets and weapons from the raids. We didn’t have to worry about all of these gem slots, azerite traits, corruptions, etc. Maybe you get some enchants, maybe you don’t.
I avoid nearly every spoiler I see, unless the poster is just blatantly revealing stuff in the title and article image. The only ones I have been looking at on Wowhead are the character customizations, Chromie Time, and some interviews (where I know they aren’t allowed to spoil any key information).
I also currently do not raid, and when I log in, I decide what I feel like doing for that session. Will I play some lower characters to 60, go feed my Shadowbarb larva, work on rep for Class Hall armor, farm old raids for pets/mounts/transmog, or other activity.
Players are choosing to throw out the wonder and magic out in order to create a false narrative where they ‘win’. They don’t understand a MMORPG is about the experience, the fantasy, the journey; not ‘winning’.
Should Blizzard try to stomp that? I don’t know. I mean, it is those players’ loss. And would they even be able to experience the wonder and magic if forced down that path? Not everyone has that capacity.
I too am against the Open API and Armoury but more for privacy reasons. But the reality is the genie is long out of the bottle and I don’t think there is a way to stuff it back in even if Blizzard was willing to explore the situation.
1 Like
I like how the opened with how WoW lost its sense of wonder, but immediately tees off with how he started playing in Vanilla and immediately pivoted into the game losing the sense of wonder.
WoW had a great sense of wonder for a lot of people when the genre was fresh, not datamined, and not hyperanalayzed. Classic still holds some of that sense of wonder, but it’s overly analyzed now so there’s less wonder unless you treat it strictly as a game rather than something you can master with questing/raiding addons and guides.
1 Like
False lol. Blizzard will just nerf paladins and that problem will be solved
Everything has a sense of wonder before it gets min-maxed, theorycrafted and optimized to where all the fun is sucked out unless you are uber-competitive and feel that unless you’re doing 110% optimally it’s garbage and you suck.
The sad part though is there’s no way around this. Games are based on math, and math has finite numbers. So anything that can be min-maxed will be min-maxed as soon as it can, and from that point onward there’s no more choice since everything is “solved”.
I ran as a SP with am MP5 stack build back in Vanilla. You may think coming up with a cool and relatively novel approach was fun back then. It wasn’t. Everyone “optimized” in stupid ways. Good luck convincing people that “Priest = HAEL!” was a limited view of the class.
Why is everyone required to have fun the same way you want to have fun?
Why can’t we embrace the diversity?
1 Like
…and then I can ignore every last bit of it, as if it never existed in the first place, and play how I want, leaving my wonder intact.
1 Like
Until everyone else jumps on it and you find if you don’t play the way you’re expected to, you’re shunned.
I don’t generally associate with the type of people who shun others over their playstyle, so I think I’m Ok there.
1 Like
They’re not. And nowhere in my post do I say that.
Ok. Lets pretend you aren’t implying it.
Why is your method of enjoying a MMO the correct one that people need to understand?
Why can’t there be a variation of ways to enjoy a MMO? Not everyone enjoys the “journey” or cares as much about the “fantasy”.
1 Like
I magine tha blizz encripted everything but a few little tid bits here and there, tht would make the things that we got from the datamining more exciting.
Rextroy isn’t doing anything new. Just go all the way back to vanilla and look at stuff like the Reckoning Bomb.
Clearly the only solution is to delete LFR.
Why is that a “false narrative”?
That’s your definition of an MMORPG. That doesn’t mean it’s the only correct definition.
But a lot of this comes from the general populace as a whole. How many movies or TV shows are spoiled well before they are released, due to the sheer volume of people over-examining them on the internet? People want early exclusive information, and whether these APIs were open or not, people would find ways to get their information before the game launches.
I personally ignore those people, and experience things when they are ready.