It’s gotten better with 8.3 but overall it’s been a bad expansion.
If you want to continue to enjoy BfA the way you do, stay off the forums.
I disagree. If you like the game then it’s a good expac. It really is that simple.
Welcome to the game.
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A lot of people tend to have an issue with ‘time-gating’. We’ve been seeing more of this since in previous expansions, players would grind through the game’s new content like mad, but then complain that they had “nothing to do”. So Blizzard decided to stagger the content out so players wouldn’t burnout so quick. This was especially true with Suramar in Legion, but that at least made sense to do so narratively. Essences though? Memory of Lucid Dreams third rank took 20 days to unlock. 20 days. Per character. It’s BiS for a handful of specs too, so if you want to be semi-optimal on your alts who need it, you gotta be on top of grinding that.
Timegating makes sense when it’s to keep you from burning through content too fast the first time. There’s a lot to take in with the game, and the devs want you to savor it. When it gets to the point of oversaturation however, that’s when it gets a bit ridiculous. That’s where a lot of the distaste for the current system comes from.
There’s an argument to be made that alts aren’t supposed to be as strong as mains and that you should put in the work to get your alts optimized if that’s what you’re going for. To that, I’d agree, but having you do three minor tasks for 20 days straight (well, 16 now that they’ve reduced the time) isn’t work as much as it is an arbitrary tedium you have to go through to get a piece for your build. At that point, it’s become padding.
The worst part about it though is that it probably won’t matter at all in the next expansion. Flying in zones at least is useful for leveling alts and traversing the world, but essences will likely be discarded for the new system. This is what people are calling “Rental Power”, and we saw this with the Legendary Ring quest in WoD and the Artifact Weapons in Legion. Gear is always going to be replaced, sure, but these new artifacts like the Heart of Azeroth and the weapons we had in Legion required more work. A lot more work. Knowing that it’s not going to matter later on leaves a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, and Blizzard reinventing the wheel each expansion pack gets frustrating for people who felt the old system worked.
Change is hard for a lot of people who’ve been playing this game for awhile. If you stick around long enough, chances are there’s going to be a tweak to a system or a change to the game that may hurt the game in your eyes.
As for me though? I’ve been playing since 2015, and BfA ain’t so bad. Definitely better than Warlords since there’s actually a game to play. The leveling experience was great (especially for Alliance), dungeons and raids have been fun this time around, and war mode is a blast with the right people. My mileage definitely varies with working with these new systems, but BfA is far from the “worst” expansion. It’s no Legion, but it’s not as bad as other expansions we’ve had.
it is really addicting to check forums though.
I think I recently gave it a 5/10 score.
Artistically the game delivers. Sound is good. Story is passable though 8.3 felt unnecessary. Many of us on the story side felt like OGs could be an expansion on their own which may still be the case for 10.x.
The problems are all over the place though and make it really hard to enjoy the work the art team did.
Warfronts / Island expeditions / Azerite: These are the systems BFA delivered and each one has been a perceived failure by a lot of players, myself included. I will briefly explain.
Warfronts out of the gate were on rails and hard to lose experiences that were rewarding for a couple weeks at most. Darkshore was the worst of the two because Darkshore was actually more on rails than Arathi. The more on rails an experience is the less replay value it has. Replay value comes from variation. One of the most enjoyable activities in any RPG is to reroll different characters to experience the world in a different way. A dynamic world is one that isn’t static and is always changing. Think of how the Diablo 3 team answered the question of randomized dungeon layouts. Where they referred to the world as a painting. People don’t find a painting all that interesting beyond seeing it once and that’s the problem. People will stare WAY longer at a nature cam because nature is always changing, always evolving and that makes it engaging.
Island Expeditions were something I rarely did and while I should give it more time to get a better idea of it I know what others have said. Boring, highly repetitive without much variation. Again this painting idea comes up. That’s enough for me to consign it to the same bin as warfronts.
Azerite is a problem of another flavor. This one itemization. In the past you figured out what you needed and where it dropped. There was a clear tasklist formed in your mind of what you needed to do. A sense of finality existed as well. Level > Gear up > Go have fun in PvP or late game PvE. Somehow this transformed in BFA and maybe even Legion where the focus became more like an ARPG where upgrades never stop coming and the whole thing is stretched to its limit. The result has been you use a gearing simulator if you take the game seriously. There is no finality with gear so nobody ever feels confident they’ve got enough to have fun. Worse was that many traits were useless distractions from the ones that were useful. Hence the need for a simulator.
…
Aside from those three main complaints I want to talk about World Quests / Dailies as well. Let’s go back to that painting discussion. Much like Warfronts, much like Island Expeditions (I presume) are World Quests and Dailies. The painting idea is very relevant here. You go to a zone and it spawns a collection of hand crafted quests with very little variation. What this meant was by the 2nd week you did all the available world quests / dailies. Sure it was fun for 2 weeks but now it isn’t. Now it’s a chore you are to repeat for weeks on one character, then weeks on another, then weeks on another, etc. It destroyed any fun people had with rolling alts because it’s an obligatory grind. That was the big problem with it. It’s one thing to have this content on the side for people to do but when you marry it to all power gains such as essences and AP well now it’s mandatory. Essences not being account wide means it’s mandatory on every alt you run. That’s a whole lot of boring gameplay to endure.
Anyway that’s long enough. I do love the conversation about painting vs ecology though so I’ll go a bit longer. On the difference and how WoW could be better as an ecology than a painting.
So we’ve covered why a painting isn’t good as a medium for entertainment. Paintings are nice to look at but fail to exercise the brain beyond an hour or so of looking at them (most paintings anyway). Therefore if you intend to make a highly repeatable form of content the worst way to make it is with static / painting like designs.
An ecology is completely different. An ecology is seeding ingredients for a certain outcome and letting nature take its course. It means not limiting the outcomes of the gameplay to the idea of the developer but letting players decide their fate. Because it grows organically it’s never the same thing on any particular instance. Each one a variation of another. That makes it so every time you log in it’s different in some way. Like the nature cam. You might find it interesting today, tomorrow, a week or a month from now. It has a lot of replay value.
Of course WoW is story driven so your ability to design by ecology is kind of limited but not entirely. The whole game doesn’t need to be story driven and I think this is where BFA messed up. Story to introduce us and story to conclude. All the bits in between are flexible and thus should be design by ecology.
Just take one area of the world. We’ll say Mechagon. When Mechagon was designed we got a general idea of the layout, where things should be placed and why and a bunch of objectives were hand planted with a bunch of handcrafted quests. That’s generally how the zones are made. All hand crafted. In an ecology Mechagon would be quite different. You’d have a map, likely much bigger than the current map to allow more transformation by the players. Objectives in the world would depend on how players interacted. Such as the old zones where capturing the flag changed the world for a brief period of time but not that binary. Instead there would be many objectives and many ways the players could shape the zone in their favor. In Mechagon for example players could contribute resources to create events, destroy certain objectives to stop events, create certain things or work with certain NPCs to do the same. There would be P2P, PvP and PvE events. Most activities in the zone would transform it in some way. Impactful actions. Such that I farm 1k sentry fish and it does something for the world. Or I kill 1000 robots and it impacts the world. Etc, etc.
Maintaining player engagement is as easy as having designed by ecology. Having the systems in place that players can interact with the world in a way they can change it. At least for some period of time. That’s how you get replay value.
I’m sure someone can list ever questionable thing they have done, but one thing that always stands out is that they implement something broken, allow X number of players to abuse it and than do nothing once they hot fix it.
One thing that bugged me and still does was the Data Anomaly fix where they allowed players to farm for some 10 hours and gain all the items from those rares before fixing it to once per rare per event, the only day I logged out early before the new daillies hit and by the time I logged back in when I woke up they had already hot fixed it.
I got that record only about 4 days ago when the event was last up. I was angry at the time that they allowed players to farm it for hours, than fix it and do nothing to revert what players had achieved and make the two main items a massively low drop rate.
Blizzard could have said “Sorry we broke it, we are going to revert it all and make it fair for all players involved” and simply take away what was gained so we all have to do it equally. They could have at least left it the way it was for the first event to still make it fair, or they could have changed the drop rate since the event is not always available to make it fair for all.
That is one example where something was changed that benefited only a handful of players and one I remember as it was the last piece I needed after completing 95% of that achievement across 3 characters.
There have been many more that made players angry and many just in BfA alone where they could have fixed it much better than they did, but than that would mean they could not…
And I think that is what we are really salty about, not because we remember what it used to be like, but Blizzard have done whatever they can to ensure players must log in. We have WQ’s, daillies, rep farm, essence farm, HoA farm, cloak farm, weekly quests, mission tables and probably more I am forgetting to add to the list that if you want the best gear you can either wait until they nerf something, like the weekly neck requirements, or farm for 3-4 hours a day every day.
Don’t forget everything they’ve launched so far being essentially in beta form.
At least they continued the tradition with 8.3 by massively buffing/nerfing corruptions and redesigning their Visions system on the fly.
Beta for Azeroth keeps going strong!
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ma girl said “bring back pvp vendor” and had me heart reacting before i could read anything else.
No, friend, have fun with the game!
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They rushed BfA on the back of the success Legion was, and that was a success in part due to how bad WoD was. That rush to bring BfA brought out a lot of snowballing where they spent more time fixing things than they could testing and ensuring it was done right the first time.
They ignored, completely, all player feedback on the PTR and only made changes when the masses where here complaining and the numbers stopped looking good. It was just not a good expansion from start to finish.
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Pretty much. Hell, they deleted our feedback and then told us we never gave any… That was rich.
Basically, either our feedback was wrong (“you guys will like the GCD change, you’re just not used to it yet”) or didn’t exist.
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They could just not stand how much disliked what was coming and than how much we absolutely hated it once it was live when they done nothing to address our concerns.
This was BfA all over and is pretty much Ion and his team since they took over, change after change time and time again ignoring us and telling us how much we would enjoy something, just give it time.
It’s a combination of things and the more we talk about it the more we realise how much the dev team ignored the PAYING customer base. We don’t play this game for free, we pay and we have every right to ask for things to make us happy.
We know why the numbers are as low as they are, we know the numbers even without admittance from Blizzard, we know they are on struggle street and anything going worse will spell the end of WoW and possibly the end of Blizzard.
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My favorite was when Ion decided that we just didn’t like it because we didn’t understand his reasoning and did that reddit AMA to explain how right he was.
Ion: “We’re crafting systems with an eye towards the grand scheme of the game as it unfolds over the course of many months.”
Chad: “Cool. Can I pay $15 per grand scheme instead of $15 per month?”
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If you are a casual gamer BFA is no worse than any other expansion. Perhaps even better.
If you are a PVP player and have been playing for years its pretty bad right now.
If you are a end content raider I dont feel its to much different than any other time other than your performance is VERY dependent on what corruputions you get.
If you just like dungeons and M+ it feels about the same as all others but you will be limited in M+ without the right corruptions.
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Personal opinion - Meh, depends on what you like doing I suppose. Compared to the second year or Legion… it’s a let down. The rent-a-systems for the expansion were a failure along with some of the expansion’s features. Classes and professions need help.
Per usual, the Art and Music Team showed up. While I don’t follow the story/lore like some people do, seems like a hot mess this expansion from what I can piece together.
8.3 didn’t help things outside of the new raid. Assaults/dailies/rep grind/the non-legendary cloak… not so much.
Meh, I just do all that stuff in between BG Q’s.
People act like Blizzard makes you do all the content, I’ve always found games that I pay for to be voluntary.
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Its very meh.
I don’t wank when it comes to the story of this universe because its always only been so-so; BfA is par for the course on that front.
The real problems are in the game’s design and have been gone over ad nauseum.
Short answer, yep. Long answer? Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
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Pretty much this. The actual content of BFA is incredibly good. They’ve only improved on dungeons and raids this expansion, and while some of the content isn’t amazing, Island Expeditions or the overarching story aren’t anywhere near worth hating BFA over.
The things that make BFA bad can only really be noticed when you compare it to older expansions. The systems, the grinds, the actual class design, BFA’s flaws are almost entirely that kind of stuff, and you can’t see that without having experience in the older expansions.
DEFINITELY second this. BFA Raids are amazing and well worth experiencing, if you have even the slightest interest in the content.
Talk to your guildies, specifically the officers in charge of raiding. Bringing you in for some of the easier fights, even if they don’t take you for some of the more challenging ones (like N’zoth) shouldn’t be a huge issue.
We had a player join in a similar position to you. Extremely new to the game, but very willing to learn and improve. He went from being a completely fresh player, to clearing the raid on the hardest difficulty within months.
The difference between an experience and inexperienced player might seem insurmountable, but trust me, it’s not.
Read guides, Icyveins is an “okay” place to start, but the individual class discords are the best place. Practice your rotation until it becomes muscle memory and then you can devote almost all your attention to perfecting mechanics without impacting your DPS.
Well said.
Complainers still play, why have you not quit yet???
Must love bfa!!!
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