The bloat is a natural consequence of the game having be iterated on for 20 years. The age of the game (and changing market trends) is likely also responsible for the story becoming wacked out, since the whole “where do we go from here” thing leaves creators painted into a corner. It seems like everyone expects things to continually expand and escalate without some form of reset or return to a status quo. Same problem is seen in corporate companies with shareholders expecting bigger years, every year, in perpetuity.
So, while we’ve gotten level squishes and talent prunes to try and address the bloat of things, other areas get left behind and stick out because of it. Like, how do you make a new player experience that both a) makes the player feel like a common adventurer and b) exceptional, but also convey what that character will feel like at level 80? It’s basically an impossible ask.
The same thing is going on with endgame right now (and has been for a while). How do the devs make novel encounters and bigger/better/more challenging mechanics to slake the desire for content without being accused of recycling? It’s not an easy question to answer or solve. At some point, they started designing stuff around the use of add-ons because the majority of the community uses them and not doing so would see them accused of making trivial content. So we end up with Mythic Broodtwister, where an addon becomes yet another requirement on top of already “required” add-ons like DBM and interface add-ons that help to trim down the unnecessary and highlight important information.
I can only imagine how rough it is trying to be a dev for WoW due to the expectations of the community, company, and shareholders while also attempting to understand human psychology enough to keep people in all three groups hooked in and investing their time/money.
Once you realize itemization is random at its core, you put guides into perspective. The game is easy to learn, it’s just faster and (feeling) more comfortable/safe to use outside ressources. Some sites are like a drug, some add-ons too. You delegate some of your responsabilities to that guy who looks nice and confident, it saves you energy, makes you feel stronger, whatever, in the end it’s all on you and just super marginaly on the devs. If you feel overwhelmed go away or think on you.
And don’t mistake the customer support pointing you to Wowhead because it’s failing, and the GAME doing it, most players I know had never heard of Wowhead before game issues, and even less of Icyveins, even though they regularly use fan sites for help.
Oh, they’re not. That’s the thing. For raiders, add-ons are simply part of WoW. It’d be stranger for them to be against using them because the benefits they provide outweigh any other potential issues.
It depends on your definition of problem, really? Those of us who’ve been playing for years (since 2005, for me), I can’t imagine playing the game without a host of add-ons installed. But for Joe Newbie who’s trying to start the game for the first time, the whole game can be overwhelming to start with, then being told that he needs to install add-ons to play the game the “right way” can drive that new player off.
Basically, the more complicated and convoluted things are made, the less likely new blood comes into the community. Less new blood means no replacements as people leave the game for greener pastures. It can be seen as a major population problem for shareholders which then ends up being a knee jerk change by the devs which would cause headaches for all of us.
Feel like my thoughts are all over the place this morning. Apologies for the rambly response.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all to be honest. If you’re tabbed out researching some poorly detailed goal, learning the piano routine rotation for your spec, resizing weakaura/timer bars, cleaning up the garbage UI, or watching a 15 minute guide on what is a 5 minute fight when properly executed then you aren’t progressing within the game.
No no, Broodtwister was just the most extreme example, which is why I used it. There are plenty of other systems that don’t seem well-explained or fleshed out. Like, it’s as though the developers take for granted that people have been playing for years and design content through that lens.
It’d be like a math teacher instructing students in algebra without realizing some of them haven’t learned the basics of addition/subtraction/multiplication/division first.
It’s basically a systemic issue at this point and not an easy one to fix because of how many times that system has been changed and iterated on over the years. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Add-ons are only one small part of a larger bloat issue. But people who’ve been playing for years aren’t as negatively affected by that bloat because we had the luxury of dealing with it in smaller chunks instead of all at once.
I am fine with boss mechanics, I am just trying to get you to realize not everyone learns by reading some text, some people learn by doing. I guess you are the type of person who thinks because you do something that’s how everyone must do it.
Your argument was that you couldn’t figure out what the bosses were doing during the fight because the bosses are too big and take up the whole screen. That’s why I suggested reading the journal so you can see what the ability does.
If someone can’t learn by seeing the mechanic and can’t learn by reading the mechanic how is blizzard supposed to make it more obvious while still providing some kind of semblance of difficulty?
This was a conscious decision made quite a few years ago. WOW used to be fairly simple, and people would make macros to simplify it even further, till we reached the point of ‘one button macros’. Then Blizz decided to make everything ‘interactive’. No more rotations at all, only procs at random times so you had to pay attention. Then they decided tanks needed ‘active mitigation’ so they would have to pay attention at all times. And number have dropped ever since.
The easiest example I can think of is the game funneling new players into the dragon flight expansion almost immediately after exile’s reach. Basically, the entire world of warcraft is thrown into a new player’s lap, which is a LOT to review and comprehend. The game currently requires a lot of study not just in game, but also on 3rd party sites to bring someone who’s fresh off the boat up to what most people consider an acceptable standard. I wish I had an easy solution for it, but I doubt one exists.
And that’s just systems. Nevermind the mountain of lore that gets glossed over in the process.
blizz shot itself in the foot when it added ingame questhelper. People no longer had to read quest text and then they were expected to read the dungeon journal.
I disagree. I spend more time in classic looking up every quest to figure out what it is they want me to do and where to do it than actually doing quests. All of this happens on outside websites. So do you, given that there is often no indication in the quest of where to go to do this thing, and sometimes no clear indication of what it is you’re supposed to do.
The game gross overwhelming even with help. Its both complex and simple. The average player has an hard time figure rotations and actual good for them. Its not clear enough for people jumping in without outside websites to tell them how to do 90% what they need.
The game tries to be too many things. Ion doesn’t want people to master playing the game, because they might get bored. And so they stretch it a little more every patch. Compound for 20 years, and now you have to spread out, but stay close to a specific person and in relation to a specific moving point on the floor while you don’t miss the critical dispel and avoid the moving obstacles. Any mistake one shots your raid. Repeat for 6 minutes.
That’s why pull counts are now the metric for difficulty. No individual mechanics can be that threatening because of the nature of the game, so they just pelt you with them until you learn the choreography. And as fights get more complex, so have the tools players have to deal with them.
I can see why they did it. I just don’t agree that it makes the game better. Thaddeus was much more satisfying to me than Smolderon. It’s been years since I killed a mythic boss and felt anything besides relief that it was over.