Yes and No. If you remove all the resources put together by players and play in a truly default state, can you still do the content you currently participate in?
In my case, I probably could stay in my lane (AOTC, mostly default UI). The players who do completionism might struggle to do certain activities, but mostly due to the lack of information (it’ll take longer in 99% of cases, but still doable nonetheless). Could the players doing +25’s handle that difficulty still? I doubt most of them could (reliance on addons is too heavy).
I don’t think the game is complicated at all, it’s very end game focused and throws you into everything current upon 70. (Which I think is a fault for a new player experience).
Some things could definitely be more modular tho, that’s where I see problems in.
I’d argue the game is too simple and lacks depth outside of higher end raiding/pvp.
There are also spillover effects from the way the talent system has ended up. Instead of choosing one defensive ability, some specs can have all of them. WW monk can have as many as four, I believe! Because they are all available, for monks as well as other classes, encounters and the healing meta need to be tuned with the assumption that they will all be taken, making it no real choice at all unless your healers are looking to flex.
Again, this isn’t a problem for non-higher end gameplay, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a problem.
You do have me wondering if I should consider complexity a factor in my Shadowlands burnout. Some of my frustrations with the pacing of content could be blamed on not having optimally min-maxed all my soulbinds.
The game not complicated but the world is to people that are old ,I’m still trying figure out my new phone.I’m use to it being just a touch tone hand handle,not a computer
I am getting up there in the years, mostly vision is hampering my gameplay. I have a hard time reading stuff and would probably miss a mechanic that is not glaringly obvious.
as far as complexity, I enjoy a system that makes sense and flows smoothly from one ability to another
not
"If ability Z is ready, use abiliy 2 then chain into ability 4 to set up for the proc of passive Q so you can use ability 7
BUT if Z or proc K is on cooldown then use ability 5 and hope for a proc of passive W so you can chain cast ability 8 and 12"
When I was a kid the only phones around were the kind with the dial you turned to get each number. We were on a party line so before making a call you had to pick up the receiver to see if either of the other “parties” (i.e. neighbors) were on the phone.
Each of us had separate rings. Our ring was one long ring, the people up the street had two rings, and a 3rd “party” which didn’t seem to use the phone much had three.
It’s both. It is no secret Blizzard is and will continue to be in an arms race against the mythic tryhard raider and their developer of addons and cheat auras. Most every spec is objectively impossible to optimally play without the crutch of addons/auras taking much of the mental load off the player and distilling necessary actions down to simple auditory and/or visual stimuli for the monkey brains to react too.
Obviously Blizzard will never put the lid on Pandora’s box ever and they benefit because they have a slew of unpaid (least from Blizzard) labor building out the various customizations and freeing up the actual developers to focus on other tasks instead of tasking the developers with giving the player a completely functional UI and human-parseable information without the aid of addons.
The end result is specs having more and more interactions with itself and other players, more buttons to bind and manage, and bosses with more and more abilities needing tracked and handled along with faster and faster reaction times with straight up extremely harsh to downright 1 shot fatal punishments for failure.
Yes, kind of - to both. When less than 20% of the players can actually figure out rotations to do meaningful damage, that means it’s kind of complicated. We have a player with cataracts and arthritis who has been playing for 16 years. We have to read gear they link to them and they have difficulty in dark, low-contrast dungeons, like Darkheart. So it’s kind of both.
Where are you getting this number from, and (if it’s accurate) how does it compare to how many people could actually perform well in the olden days?
On topic -
The game’s obviously more complicated than it used to be, and a lot of us are older than when we started, but we’re also better players. I know I’ve definitely lost a step or two, but I’m still a country mile better than I used to be.
This describes most of the systems in the game anymore, not just abilities. This is professions, this is gear upgrading, this is world events-- everything is do X unless you haven’t done Y, in that case do Z, to get access to Z do A and B, keeping in mind that B is an RNG drop from C which is unlocked at renown level D with faction E X π2…
This expansion has been the worst with clutter items even worse than Shadowlands. I don’t know what half of this crap is for in my bags. Been trying to slowly go through it all and check wowhead for each thing. I quit professions because of it which used to be one of my favorite things about WoW. The profession revamp was trash and very confusing.
Other than that learning a class can be overwhelming but I think any MMO can be daunting at first. I couldn’t imagine being new joining WoW in DF because every past expansion is treated like a junkyard after it is over with and nothing is relevent. It’s sad.
I go through phases, right now I am enjoying retail but for the people I have tried to get into the game nothing sticks. They will play for a couple of weeks and quit.
