Let’s be fair here… I don’t think anyone is stating that this one thing is the pinnacle of the loss of player interaction in the game… It’s more a death by a thousand cuts sorta thing.
Preach said it best imo. I have to go so far out of my way (high level M+ and Mythic raiding) to finally feel like I need other people in this game… Not random nameless faceless people, but people who I get on my friends list and routinely meet up with to be able to do the content… It wasn’t like this before… Before the world was inconvenient enough that it was worth it to start building those relationships immediately. Because going into a cave… was dangerous.
I’m not saying that retail is terrible (heck I still play it and enjoy it), but as an MMORPG… The world content feels more like a single player game that happens to have other players in it. I may as well be playing skyrim.
I think that’s when I stopped playing. Crazy the difference between that MMO and this MMO. I have played WoW since 2 weeks before the Dark Portal opened and I have maybe a handful of memories with others. EQ the stories are insanely funny and many. I won’t list them all here as people probably don’t want to scroll through all that but yeah.
I think a lot of that is just nostalgia glasses. I dunno how common it was, but I know I got into the game in Vanilla due to friends bugging me, I did stuff with them, I ended up in a guild with them, but since we were all low levels and the rest of the guild was working on one of the mini-raids I didn’t really interact with any of them in a real way. So I don’t know how much the spread varied between playing mainly with people you already had a friendship with (and maybe then people those friends introduce you to) vs making random friends because you needed to. I’ve had some of both in my time in the game, but I don’t think older versions of wow had any incentives for that (and man I have stories about anti-social people in group content back then, there’s a reason I don’t even consider tanking for anyone I don’t know since BC)
And some of that feels like revisionism to me, yeah, there were some things you couldn’t kill on your own, like Stitches, or the damn Sons of Arugal, but they were the exceptions. A cave needed caution but it was doable. WoW got the start it did by ditching the whole you need a party to level up thing. It was its easier difficulty in the world and soloability that let it take off the way it did. Yes, there were harder parts if you wanted to do them, but you never needed to.
While I’ll agree that it certainly wasn’t impossible to do things solo and I definitely did my fair share of questing solo then… What I couldn’t do… was pull 10 things while leveling, pop CDs, and murder them. And not only that… but be ready to do it all again in 1 minute.
Either way, classic will be out soon and we’ll all get to see whether we’ll be eating our own words.
I am so tired of people telling me how I think and how my memories are just nostalgia or inaccurate. Speak for yourself on this matter please. I know what I like and I can accurately remember the game back then too.
Also, I’ve played private servers for years and I can assure you that the things we are talking about in this thread are alive and well on those servers.
This is and has been a design issue since around the end of Wrath. The newer developers that were brought onto the team just lacked the insight on how to make a MMO that encourages player interaction. Kevin Jordan one of the original WoW developers streams on Twitch regularly and he agrees with a lot of the sentiment that is in this thread.
He says the same thing as a lot of us are saying, that the game has changes to accommodate a completely different demographic and that the changes have undermined a lot of the core appeal for many players that are seeking the perks of playing an online game.
It’s crazy to me that all the current developers cannot draw a correlation between the popularity of Battle Royale games and the demise of their own MMORPG.
People who play online games want frenetic online experiences with a multitude of other people. They don’t sign up to play an MMORPG that plays very much like a Diablo lobby game where the only dynamic element is a chat window.
NO ONE is trying to kill your play style sheesh! We are just stating the fact the game has changed and has killed a lot of what we liked about the game. If anyone is killing people’s play style, it is people is this thread asking for more anti-social content.
Yes, I know WoW always had solo game play, but it was limited to leveling and maybe end game crafting and gathering. The game now has been completely opened up to any type of player and requires ZERO socialization to see all of the content.
We are just pointing out, that the current design sacrificed a lot of the past ways players interacted for the sake of accessibility and blunting or removing any and all negative player interactions. It has come at a great expense to the overall MMO and has made the game feel like a single player RPG.
Funny, how no one is trying to kill my play style when any time I see a topic complaining about the mindless addition of meaningless (as in it’s nothing more than a “do the dungeon” quest) dungeon quests into content that has always been soloable there’s always a ton of people in there trying to convince me I didn’t play the game I’ve been playing and that the changes that let them do content they may not have liked to do before by just doing the content they do like is a good thing and I need to get over it.
And since I came into this on the tail of “And this is why QoL changes that lessened the amount of negativity between players by making it easier to cooperate is actually a negative as it was better when players had more reasons to get p.o.ed by other players playing.” I really question your desire for more social game play, as opposed to some haves vs have nots competition.
Well, I don’t know what to tell you. There have always been quests in leveling zones that required you to run dungeons. The game is littered with them.
Also, your perception of WoW just being this completely solo affair since the beginning is weird to me. This game has always be centered around instanced content that requiring grouping. I can provide thousands of examples of quests that were handed out in leveling and end game zones that required you to run a dungeon and were part of the narrative of the zone.
I’m not trying to be mean here, but maybe you are just not cut out for MMOs? I’ve said it in this thread a few times, try out Elder Scrolls Online, this is the game you are looking for. Please just try it.
You are still not getting it. The streamlining has removed ALL player interaction in the world both negative and positive. You mentioned cooperation, what content do you do now in the open world that involves you having to socialize with other players in order to cooperate with them?
It’s weird to me too since I never actually said that. But don’t let that stop you making more stuff up to push your side.
And likewise I’m not being mean when I say that maybe you aren’t cut out for an MMO if you don’t value the widescale world stuff that has a less direct but wider interaction with other players. You might like Warframe, it’s free and has great small group instanced content. That might be the game you’re looking for. Please just try it.
When has grouping up EVER required socialization? When have dungeons ever required it? I’ve had more socialization sitting in Orgrimmar with a dozen heavy leather balls starting games of catch with random people than I’ve seen in any dungeon or raid that I’ve done outside of people I’m already friends with.
I’ve played, and loved, some great sandboxes: Asheron’s Call (while some of you were doing EQ), SWG, and DAoC to name my favorites. If you didn’t create content at end game there was no content. That’s great.
WoW came out of the gate as a different game than any of them, and out of the box was far more casual/solo player in a big world friendly. Yes, that’s gotten incrementally tilted to not needing anyone unless you’re doing dungeons, raids, or group PvP - other than the odd world boss or world mini-boss that’s not soloable.
There are some people who find that a better environment for their ‘log in, do what I want to do, log out’ playstyles.
There are some people who want to see it far less solo friendly. That’s fine too. What’s not remotely likely to happen is a change making it harder for solo-friendly casuals suddenly resulting in a reversal of fortune for sub #s.
Before I get roasted for saying “Classic is that way ====>” please bear in mind that it is a return to the way things were in Vanilla - and if that’s what people want then it’s coming, and coming soon. I don’t think that’s remotely the majority of today’s player base. I could be wrong, and so could you.
I do think this is true to an extent. I think it’d be game suicide for retail to revert straight back to a classic or even BC style of design… The community that they’ve fostered has been one that is reliant on the current style of gameplay. If they wanted to move in that direction though… slowly and incrementally… I’m not sure it wouldn’t be healthy for the game.
In the end all any of us can do is shake the magic 8 ball on this. As you said as well… Classic is coming and we can see how it does.
Seriously, my alliance alt (Human Warlock) is at Ilevel 350 and he’s destroying everything in Kul Tiras. There’s still the occasional boss that requires grouping, but that’s maybe 1 out of every 5 WQs I come across. You really don’t need that high of an Ilevel to do WQs until you hit Naj and that’s a breeze once you get past 400.
So I agree that’s there no reason to get raid level gear unless you raid
Im in my late 50s as well and been playing before tbc and belonged to big guilds and raided a lot but last raid i went to ,someone actually wispered me and said “Go kill yourself” which i never heard that in all my years playing wow and went solo after that . Just blew me away…I have my own guild with my son (he is not on much) but i just do my own thing and dont group period except for occational rare and just quest and dont do raids and dungeons anymore unless i can solo them.
I remember pvping over a node and getting it stolen by a third party. That wasn’t fun. It was frustrating. A decade passed. I like the changes. I also remember bots flying around and stealing nodes.
The game devs are pandering to transient casual players who play 1-2 months per expansion. That’s what I’m referring to. Stop pandering to transient casual who drift in and out of sub status and float around to other games.
You win!