Attunements - People complained, then did them. We had Attunements in BC as well, and it generated a group cohesiveness that required the raid team to interact outside of raiding hours. Guilds were far more likely to spend time together doing non-raiding things, because initially there were non-raiding things that had to be done. I still wish there were attunements, even if they were only on the scale of BWL not Onyxia.
Leveling speed and grind - Adding Thorium Point and Revantusk was a good change. It ensured that there was sufficient questing to avoid too much mob grinding during the levelling. However, its a catch 22 for them because now levelling is seen as the thing you need to get past before you can do stuff. My partner lost interest during the leveling process because she couldn’t be involved in the things we were doing at endgame, and no-one really wanted to go that far back (except me who leveled with her). The levelling process is as long now as it was in Vanilla, but its far less engaging because you are racing past everything. We got toons to level 47 after completing four zones. We won’t even have a chance to hit half the zones before we’ve out levelled them, and the ones we did do were pretty much “Do the quests, then go here and do more”. You couldn’t really step too far out of the sequence and if you did they dried up fast. Levelling to 120 is hard, and a level squish might be useful, but level speed is a hard one to work on.
Useless quest rewards while leveling - You don’t need to replace an item every third quest, to feel rewarded. That logic was in place from UO into EQ and into WoW. The change of gearing meant that no one item was precious because you knew it’d be replaced in a matter of hours. That is definitely not a good change and something they should have realized.
“Forced” to have certain pets/proffessions/classes - That’s still not a thing unless you’re min/maxing for top end raiding. Which is a player issue.
I agree, but the big thing that WoW lost, and is why the majority of its player base is leaving, is the community.
The rise of the “Do it for me mechanics” and the Faceless NPCs contributes to all of the problems WoW is having. People don’t feel like its an MMO any more, unless they’re part of a high end guild. There’s no real benefits to being in a social guild because the conversation can be had elsewhere, groups are formed randomly, and you never need to care about the other people around you to get ahead.
I get the whole “I have half an hour, why can’t I complete a dungeon” concept. But its a bad one for an MMO. If they added 30 minute Island Expeditions in an environment where Dungeons were 1-3 hours long, it probably would have been a massive success. A way to quickly go in, have some fun, then get on with the day. An alternative to the long crawl with a trusted group of friends.
But with dungeons being short, fast, and populated by people you don’t know and don’t care about, but completely accessible without guild or group, that aspect is completely lost.
And while raiding and dungeons aren’t everything, they are the core component to an MMO’s replayability and the relationships and experiences of players generally flow out from that component.
My fear is that classic will succeed and the current retail devs will take the wrong message from that. I fear they will say “See, I told you they didn’t want flying!” and they will double down on difficult to navigate terrain, no flying, and miss the whole point.
As for the point and the question posed by the OP, no I do not think retail can turn it around. As far as I am concerned what really changed WoW into a different game is LFR/LFD and to a lesser extent the group finder. I’m not bashing on these things, but they are a very different style of game. Almost overnight they turned WoW from a game that relies heavily on community interaction, to a very solo friendly experience.
I could write a book on this subject, but the point is retail WoW is too different to go backwards. They have tried to adapt the game to modern gaming and I think that is where they have failed. I say bring back all the movement abilities they pruned, let people zip around the battlefield, start designing content specifically designed for flying.
i found it helped to complete at least 2 starter zones (like opening quests for at least 2 races, for example night elf opening quest chain BEFORE they get sent to dolanaar and the northshire quest area for humans, before you go to goldshire. if newbie area quests were still green, i’d keep doing them, like the starter quests for gnomes and dwarves_. same thing with secondary zones, like elwynn and teldrassil quests outside the newbie area.
keep repeating that and you not only have plenty of xp and levels but faction also.
When WOTLK was launched I thought it was dumb you could fly. Just bypassing everything.
Pre cata, pre pathfinder. My idea was, if you discovered every zone on your ground mount and did a few quest chains, you could fly. It was really inspired by my achievement addiction back then.
I felt flying should be an achievement.
So I quit mid-Cata due to life and WOW being an addiction, I come back 8 years later… Pathfinder, go figure.
I think Pathfinder asks too much though. Again, Blizz w/ the balance issues.
I said “like 10 million” which I would say is fairly accurate in approximate terms… But whatever
That’s valid, different strokes for different folks. I find BFA do be pretty terrible. I mean it is “different” in the way that vanilla bc and wrath were fun and bfa isn’t. My opinion but I know it is shared by many many people.
Time will tell how people respond to classic, there are a million arguments either way because a million things have changed since vanilla, including yourself and many other players, but I wouldn’t be that dismissive of how much people have the potential to enjoy the game.
You couldn’t. Until you hit max level on your first toon, you had to ride everywhere, and do everything by foot. The final two zones of the expansion however were designed for flying.
oh you do it on the same character. it actually works out that you aren’t having to grind because you ran out of quests. you just have the travel time between each of the areas
Nobody. Letting their the masses influence the game is a bad idea in my opinion. All the stuff that turned Retail into rubbish, started out as people whinging
I understand what you’re saying. I mean that a brand new player, with no instruction from other existing players, would never consider that to be the right solution.
Maybe if they want to launch a sequel mmo to WoW (and make it classic-esque) they could pull some Brandon Sanderson multiverse shiz, and have WoW characters spill into Diablo’s world of Sanctuary. Maybe they shouldn’t do that actually…
OK, guess I forgot. But I still remember the “this is dumb, you shouldn’t be able to discover new zones on a flying mount” or something along those lines.
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")