I let a friend see what WoW was like now

Community General Discussion
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He hasn’t played in awhile since probably Mists of Pandaria…When he made his character and the race intro cinematic started (Where they give you a lil backstory about your race) the “Dragon Isles Awaits” audio dialogue played over the entirety of that. I was pretty much dead inside at that point. Then once in-game immediately is prompted with a large popup about stuff and updates completely irrelevant to him…They received “The Dragon Isles Await” “Another Timely Invitation”

They were really confused/concerned why there were a bunch of death knights standing in the middle of Orgrimmar while trying to send him to the Shadowlands… /4 services is automatically joined so he immediately sees nothing but spam nonstop for boosts and who knows what else.

He had absolutely NO CLUE what was going on and was just wondering where to train mining and go mine copper and do some quests.

Doesn’t end there unfortunately. Lol. I say lets just try this… Make a different character and choose Exiles reach right?..Um.

His sight? Awful, got some major problems there - Accessibility is important.

Hats off to Blizz, they continue to improve this in retail (for some reason does NOT carry those features over to Classic?)

Upon logging in, Half of the UI is missing. Large pop up telling him how to move. No way to completely disable all of this. And worst of all? EDIT USER INTERFACE IS LOCKED. AND NO WAY TO SWITCH TO THE UI I MADE FOR HIM TO SEE HIS BUTTONS? Sorry caps. This just blows my mind.

This is absolutely ridiculous, and embarrassing. Your game is a convoluted mess. I felt like I wasted his time more than anything. You know those F2P MMORPGs where you can’t even enjoy the first moment of logging in to a fresh new character because it’s just pop ups, spam, hand holding, weird UI features disabled, etc, etc… Yeah…See above.

That’s what WoW has become. Good job. :clap:t3:
Hate to be negative but I don’t get a lot of time with this person and this annoyed me more than I can I say without this being deleted if it won’t be already. When you make a fresh new character in a video game, I think a lot of MMORPG gamers would agree that is a nice, warm feeling, a little moment we all kind of have if you’re weird like me anyway…

That doesn’t exist in retail currently. It’s complete trash. Please fix it.

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wow aint getting more new blood with the way its handling stuff like this

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As a Guide, I see tons of newcomers having terrible experiences, it is not new player friendly whatsoever.

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This is going to sound pretty silly. But it makes me sad. WoW is something I enjoy a lot and have for a long time. I don’t have many friends in-game anymore, they moved on for the most part years ago like he did.

You can’t even bring those people back to enjoy some nostalgia with you for a night or two without it being some sort of tutoring session… I mean “Go make some characters on Classic” sure, I like classic.

He didn’t want to see classic. He wanted to see WoW in 2024 (almost 5)
So much for that.

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funnily enough my first wow character was a level 90 boost at the end of wod.

i skipped all the tutorial phase and now im one of the best players at world content

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Exiles Reach starter here (2021 - Oct).

Intro felt good, taught me where my buttons were, how to interact, attack etc.

My confusion came after Exilies reach. So many quests and it wasn’t as guided to the BfA stuff then.

Not surprised your friend finds it confusing because it is.

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The new player tutorial doesn’t let you resize buttons if you can’t see. Edit UI is locked. Has nothing to do with figuring out how to hit enemies or complete a quest.

/facepalm

Great fix. Makes total sense on whim to do that, then not being able to hear the cinematic dialogue either sounds like Blizzard doesn’t need to fix this at all. People should just disable Dialogue audio first before starting, Duh!

I can’t.

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Not for nothing, but this is probably exactly why the DF stuff is pushed as prominently as it is now for new characters. So that you can’t miss it.

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They funnel new players in via Classic.

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If I started playing a different MMO and saw something like WoW’s services channel traffic then I’d strongly consider quitting the game. It’s very off-putting.

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Second this to the moon. First thing I do when I’m making a new character is turn off channels 2 and 4, because it’s almost nothing but spam.

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Oh for sure - I agree. I have no clue why this is enabled by default. I got it disabled pretty quick but I can’t imagine how many new players this turns off. Who knows to type “/leave 4” or right click the tab lol. I hate it in games, instant turn off.

A simple google search yeah but why? lol just disable it for new characters. These little things add up and really ruin it.

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We do get a continuation of the exiles characters at the start so it’s a nice touch.

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I started a few new characters. I think classic should be the default edit mode setting. Starting in Stormwind it did suggest I go to Chromie, but it isn’t obvious that Cataclysm is Classic ( which you need to make food you can eat), but overall it wasn’t a terrible experience.

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Yes sadly I must agree, the new player experience is incredibly rancid and leaves a horrible first impression. When the time comes to get my SO into this game I won’t even let her do Exile; I’ll set everything up first before she even sees it and then walk her through it myself.

Doubly sad since the neat little racial area zones were some of my favorite early memories from my personal Vanilla experience.

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Remember way back when I first started and there was still an ongoing influx of new players. Rolling a Night Elf hunter and seeing all the new players spawning into the newbie cluster, some high levels hanging around and helping newbies. Some waiting for their friends, some recruiting for guilds.

It was fun, and there were so many people willing to help out and explain the game.

It’s nothing like that anymore. A lot of that has to do with how old the game is, I’m sure. But I can’t see the new player experience helping that, either.

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Yeah, sadly the game has a terrible starting experience. Surprisingly, ESO seems to do a great job at this. The world is properly scaled, with a variety of options and cool areas to explore, and they don’t shove 1000 outdated quests, systems, announcements in your face all at once. I’d say FF14 is good at this too, but it’s only good if you actually care about story, because though the story is organized neatly, it’s very very very long. Still had a great time with it personally though.

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I’m curious if after all of this he was able to mine a copper node. Poor fella.

In all seriousness, this is sad and so true i dont think we realize the learning curve of this game at all - even if you played it for years and are returning. I thought they were gonna keep improving the new player experience when they released Exiles Reach and just keep building on that but…they didn’t. You just see the insanely annoying fantasy trope characters a couple of times after. :roll_eyes:

oh and you’re right edit mode is disabled on exiles reach LOL.

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If your friend hasn’t played since MoP, then none of the new allied races would be unlocked. If they logged in and created a new character, they shouldn’t have gotten any of those pop-ups and instead received a notification asking if they’d like to go to exiles reach or start in their starting zone. If they used the boost first, then yes they would be confused. But if they created a brand new character as you suggested, they wouldn’t have gotten any of those pop-ups. So it kind of makes me wonder why did you make this thread?

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I played for years, from BC through MOP. I had some free time and thought I’d rejoin with TWW, even as a multi year multi ex pack veteran, I was overwhelmed and lost for the first week trying to remember and then relearn how to do basic things.

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