A curious thought I suppose as I sit here and think about BfA, and how they keep saying “we aren’t out of touch we just have to design for everyone that plays” or something along those lines.
My challenge to blizzard would be I think in trying to design every part of the game for every person they’ve just made the game as a whole bad. It has to be ok for there to be casual content, it has to be ok for there to be content that only more harcore players will do. It has to be ok for systems to work different depending on how you approach the game.
It also has to be ok to purely focus on content you want. If you don’t want to do islands there should be other, equally productive, avenues to get AP. Instead of every single different thing in the game having it’s own currency maybe it should be more universal to allow players to participate as they want.
Instead of tyring to make every thing in the game for everyone, maybe the old system that focused on different things for different people was fine.
Maybe it should be ok for there to be different loot systems in place for different types of players.
Playing WoW the way you want to play it has often been what’s been so great about the game. When I look at BfA it seems like everything has been tried to be policed to control any kind of negative aspect that might ever happen. Yet in doing so, they have removed mounds of player choices and options. In making all content special (yet not all of it enjoyable), they’ve removed the ability of the player to focus on what they enjoy.
I like raiding and M+ in season 2. I despise islands immensely and I loathe having to farm world quests endlessly to progress my stupid azerite neck. The currency I get from M+ is basically useless, even for anything related to M+. Islands have their own currency, warfronts have their own currency, azerite has its own currency. There’s no need for this IMO and I think it’s a huge part of the problem with BfA right now. By trying to design everything for everyone, they’ve made the game great for no one.
My own opinion is that by recognizing that they have a diverse playerbase that enjoys different aspects of the game is what has allowed the game to remain as popular as it has been for as long as it has been.
You got it backwards. That is how it is now. It wasn’t like that in the past.
I learned from experience way back that the quickest way to burn yourself out on this game is to force yourself to do things you do not like/want to do in some kind of misguided attempt to keep up. Do the things you enjoy doing. Ignore the things you don’t. I know we can’t fully escape having to do tedious things, we are in a mmo afterall, but you can pick and choose the annoying chores so you don’t drive yourself crazy.
One of the challenges with WoW is that there are very diverse audiences and play styles. When players accuse the team of being out of touch, it isn’t that they don’t understand players concerns, or what they’d like the game to be. The team has to keep in mind the other half dozen groups of players that want the game to be different things, often opposing things.
I can’t link, but it was a recent interview posted on MMO champ and he’s also said that a few times in the live Q&A
No, that’s why I gave the examples and context that I did in my OP of how it has not. It sounds great on paper, but my point was they’ve failed at this in BfA.
I honestly think the dev team are trying to turn WoW into a Diablo 3 clone. Easier face-roll specs and loot being thrown at the player everywhere we go. In Diablo you do 4 quests per zone and get a chest of loot, in WoW you do 4 faction quests in a zone and get a chest of loot. The incredibly bad to mediocre writing which you’d think was written up by a C student in junior high.
Island Expeditions are also in the “do four and get loot” format. Do four IE’s get your reward, cash that in for more reward. In Diablo you collect 3 or 4 keys after doing 4 quests or so and then you cash those in for more rewards or reward potential.
In Diablo you open “rifts” which are essentially Diablo’s way of getting you to rerun old dungeons at a chance at better loot, and in WoW we run M+ which are essentially a way of getting you to rerun old dungeons at a chance at better loot.
If the game was an RPG it’d appeal to more people. Unfortunately, the game is raid or die. This has broken immersion, gutted professions, destroyed character customization (stats, glyphs, talents, etc), halted character progression (whole world scales with you), created a heavy faction imbalance, removed excitement from the gearing process, and so much more. There are too many loading screens, too many menus, and not enough emphasis on the game world as a whole. The “world” of warcraft only pertains to the zone the current expansion takes place in and there is no impact on the rest of Azeroth or it’s inhabitants.
^ That. Back in the day, raiding was the only endgame. Later they added PvP as a potential endgame with RBGs and Arena. Now we have all of those plus a dungeon endgame (M+) and even the Emissary/Warfront/Incursion “endgame” for those who truly just want to log on once a week and still progress in some way, albeit in the slowest way possible. There are more paths now for more player types than there ever have been before. And those who enjoy everything will get the most pulls of the lever.
This is also true. You can progress your neck just by doing 5 islands a week or jumping in a warfront for war resources and working the war table. You can skip WQs entirely if you hate them. But trying to do all of it is just going to burn you out.
Speaking personally, WQs are the easiest lift of them all, I just throw on some music or put Youtube on the TV and roll through them.
I don’t think you will get much of an argument about this. Even class design has followed the D3 model which is basically every class has resource builders and resource spenders that dictate your rotation of abilities that you use in combat.
The real question and the one I think that is open for debate is whether or not it is a detriment to the game.
One one hand you can say that it is dumbing/watering down the game, but on the other hand you can say that the game has to change with the times or get left behind.
For example a common complaint I see now is :
but I remember a time when loot was few and far between and you could go through frustratingly long droughts between drops. So if you were to ask me which one I prefer, I’m going to go with the current one.
It seems like a lot of the friction comes from blizzard feeling like they need to constantly iterate to keep things fresh and a segment of the playerbase that is resistant to change.
I’m more comparing to Legion here, not whatever the game used to be 8 years ago. This is specifically focused on how BfA feels relative to what we’ve been playing recently before it.
Getting 15% of a neck level isn’t really progressing though. This is more or less what I do on my alt, and it just hit 34 yesterday. That’s still several levels from even having the normal powers unlocked, let alone the +5 empowerment.
Like I’m fine with that stuff giving AP, but my question would be why can’t M+ and Raiding compete with it? Even in a heroic raiding guild, you have to have your powers on your neck or you aren’t competitive lol.
In my opinion, to make most happy, the game needs an overhaul. First, the types of major play styles need to be identified. Then progression defined to make that play style content with the content.
Subsequently, the play styles need to be segregated so as not to infringe and affect the progression of other play styles. When the play styles overlap, then friction and reactions develop such as we see with the constant back and forth here over LFR, titanforge, PvP.
By doing this it allows the player to progress on their particular avenue. The player also is never prevented from venturing into a different play style, but when they do, they start at ground zero like everyone else.
This is why I liked resilience. It seemed to me a move in the right direction.
Understood - in that case, the only new thing is Warfronts, and those provide a boatload of War Resources that you can use at the mission table to progress your neck as stated.
Yeah, I agree with you that you should be able to get decent AP just by doing dungeons and raids. With that said, the fix to the neck in 8.2 should resolve this issue.
I don’t think this was the route they took. They purposely made gearing easier in order to push as many players into Higher levels of content as quickly as possible.
Problem is, this has backfired. Instead, we’re seeing a lot of players that have never set foot in, nor will ever set into high end content with outrageous ilvls.
So to combat this issue, they introduced ilvl scaling to keep the open world still relevant.
It’s Legion all over again but this time they added some Crack to amp it up.
I mean their excuse for not having PVP vendors in the Q&A was because some of their players would not be able to find those vendors… If they are making the game for those types of players…well there is not much hope for compelling game play in the future.