Is WoW out of touch with it's core audience?

[Quenya-shadow-council (Quenya)]

@Rsweet-thunderfury

It’s been obvious for 10 years they have no idea what the playerbase wants.

Who are we kidding? The playerbase doen’t even know what the playerbase wants.

[Zerilla-stormrage]

@Dantëu-sargeras

I don’t like feeling like “a champion” I’d much rather be a random traveler in a living world instead of a Saturday morning cartoon fighting that weeks villain.

I love this

[Thisisokay-illidan]

Ever since WoD they were gaining new audience. I’m not sure if the Wotlk community is the core audience anymore. I think everyone is a legion kiddo nowadays, I IS CHAMPION, EVERYWAN IS ASHRINGER. I don’t think half the community even knows what heroic means.

[Arithawn-stormrage (Arithawn)]

Hmmmm…

@Dantëu-sargeras

WoD was boring from launch

@Dantëu-sargeras

This expansion has been the most boring and lackluster expansion I’ve ever played

[Teksuo-grizzly-hills]

if they went from 10mil subs to 1mil subs ; i guess yes.

thats a 90% loss.

they dont care as much nowadays because they fill the holes with candy crush money and such

there’s enough ultra casuals with money to make the “hardcore-er” players unimportant, i guess.

[Kholin-drakthul (Kholin)]

@Rankin-shandris

Being able to sit in your garrison and make money was boring. It also only took a few minutes out of your day to do the missions, leaving the other 23h 55m to, uh, twiddle your thumbs or something while waiting for raids. If you weren’t raiding, then you had almost nothing to do outside of your garrison. Which meant most people just quit. Which is why WoD is still the single worst thing to ever happen to this game. All because they wanted to try catering to the hardcore players.

My SUBJECTIVE opinion…

WoD was the casual guild killer. (In the social circles/guilds I was part of at the time.) It erased entire guilds full of casual people that worked on professions, worked on old achieves, traded stuff among their friends and did group stuff that wasn’t cutting edge content.

It pretty much drove the social glue people out of WoW. What need was there to mine/herb when there was no one to buy it? Everything was in your solo play garrison and everything your friends needed that you could have supplied was in their garrison.

My take, that decision wasn’t made to appease the “casuals”. Providing all the goodies in the garrison was done to appease the hard core raider types that hated having to deal with enchants, gems, food buffs, flasks, potions and all of the farming that went into getting those consumables.

I still remember the epic rant in Teamspeak, during MoP, from a guild member that had left our guild to go off to a cutting edge guild and was running SoO with us on an alt. We’d just downed Sha of Pride and the usual stuff was going on. People were swapping enchants, gems, and a couple had popped back to reforge. Then someone asked for a food buff. Instantly we had four or five noodle carts up and people were laughing at how many there were. His rant started with “What in the @#$@# is the matter with you people, everyone of you is gemmed, enchanted and has maxed professions, but you aren’t raiders… all anyone in our raid guild complains about is having to do all the extra crap required before they can set foot in the raid and you people are giving away gems, enchants, and consumables for free…”

Doing the extra stuff was a natural for people that were into that kind of thing to begin with. Besides we had people that knew they weren’t going to have the reflexes or reaction times to be the best at mechanics, but they could be the best at everything else the game/world provided. To quote one of our officers, “just because we are casual doesn’t mean you get to be bad”.

Edit: spelling

[Mursh-blackwing-lair (Mursh)]

If anything, I would say its the opposite. A lot of the people playing
WoW are out of touch with what a MMORPG is suppose to be.

[Daark-cenarius]

@Alseint-stormrage

The idea of forced content is purely a complaint from a competitive point of view. The more types of content give needed gear, the more you’ll be compelled (basically forced if you ever want to reach a state of BiS) to play them.

So essentially, you want raid or die back. Because if anything outside of raids reward decent gear, it’s “forced.”

No thanks.

@Alseint-stormrage

if you don’t think alt-friendliness

That is relative. I’ve played my warrior this entire expansion. It’s character progression/ power reflects that. There is no universal answer on how quickly an alt should reach that same progression.

But if the answer is a week or two, then again, no thanks.

@Alseint-stormrage

less forced content are good things

If you think M+, visions, and pvp rewarding decent gear is a bad thing, then you are right, we don’t.

@Mursh-blackwing-lair

If anything, I would say its the opposite. A lot of the people playing
WoW are out of touch with what a MMORPG is suppose to be.

Winner.

[Rsweet-thunderfury]

I would agree. Turning an MMORPG into an MO was a bad decision. Nerfing the realm community completely was a terrible decision. Ignoring pvp for years for multiple expansions was a bad decision. Having all of your gear need 3rd party sights because stats are so convoluted. The loss of “epic” items. I remember items from vanilla-wrath. That were popular and you couldn’t wait to obtain them. Now it’s like weird random purple text generator. Not exciting not as rewarding just chasing ilvl.

Look I could go on and on. Blizzard has just been on a huge downward spiral for 10 years. Things are not getting better it seems going into SL. Just a whole lot of boring base classes/specs that are going to rely on “LeGenDaRiEs” and stupid systems. I’m glad after 16 years I’m putting this game behind me. Hopefully BC servers don’t suck me back in ugh.

[Rsweet-thunderfury]

No the playerbase knows what they want. There are just multiple people and groups that want different things. Blizzard goes straight to trying to please everyone at the same time which then leads to everyone being upset. Blizavision just got a strong case of smooth brain for anything except money.

[Silverleigh-drakthul]

@Pikkarg-bleeding-hollow

So the right build for retail is an offering of a multitude of core gameplay features which mutually share a core gameplay reward structure.

This means in practice that:

1. Dungeons
2. Raids
3. Battlegrounds
4. World Quests
5. Mission Tables
6. Pet Battles
7. Scenarios
8. Arena

Should offer gear, gold and rep.

So eight different games on one MMORPG?

No, thank you.

There needs to be unifying features and paths. And rewards should match the content. Purple gear should not be given out for pet battles anymore than they should be given out for open world quests.

[Naìattavaìn-moon-guard]

with the currant design there is no reason for me to log into the game and play the character now. im mostly a casual pvper but yea its gone down hill really bad. it feels as a ghost town now with none really caring to play or socialize. i think the game got made for hard core players but i think the game was best when it was designed for everyone in mind.

i hope shadowlands will fix the problems but idk shadowlands might be my last expac; to care about this game is a waste of time.

Chris Metzen said it best. but here is the thing if it works then why do you have to redesign always? i think the players like the nostalgia of the game best its why classic is so successful right now over retail.

[Jhannae-bronzebeard (Jhannae)]

@Dantëu-sargeras

I should note I’ve done m+20 and healed,tanked and dps mythic bosses in the current raid tier and find the game extremely boring.

You reached M+20 becoz it’s boring? I wont reach my M+15 if it’s boring.

You just played too much. I got my Greater Rift 70 in Diablo 3 before I stepped in back to do M+15 on me… previously all M+14s. I realized that there are other games to excite me. Shadowlands is in the works. But before that, I am ok with once a week 5-Mask, one Heroic Nzoth kill and one M+15 completion while I play other games.

[Mafic-emerald-dream (Mafic)]

The problem is the game doesn’t focus on core game play and too much on flashy systems with an expansion that last less than two years.

WoW is a MMORPG and they need to focus on more evergreen systems. People don’t pay a sub to have their class re-invented with rental and borrowed power every two years.

[Azorahaí-thrall]

@Grymauch-zangarmarsh

merging servers due to lack of population, and the classic game that hasn’t changed in 20 years is locking servers due to too much population.

Classic servers capacity is MINISCULE compared to retail servers dude. And its only a select few classic servers being locked. AND theirs probably 5x the amount of retail servers than their are on classic.

This argument is completely false.

[Dantëu-sargeras]

@Jhannae-bronzebeard

You just played too much. I got my Greater Rift 70 in Diablo 3 before I stepped in back to do M+15 on me

I’ve ranked high on seasonal hardcore doing over GR 100, I think 124 or something like that can’t find my leaderboard ranks for past seasons so maybe someone can help me (https://us.diablo3.com/en/profile/Danteu-1696/career) but the game is boring and there’s no real challenge in Diablo nor in WoW. The closest things we have to gameplay that rewards skill is brawlers guild (when it first came out) and the mage tower.

I don’t play the game too much and barely find any reasons to login. just like with Diablo 3 there’s no challenges to overcome. In D3 you have 4-6 buttons to press and most of the revolve around using passives and 2 or so active abilities and you just face roll down hordes of demons without ever needing to critically think. I think the vanilla D3 experience was more challenging than the abomination that we have nowadays.

I think we can all agree the game is best when raiding was a chill environment and turning raids and m+ into an e-sport has ruined the game and doesn’t reward players based on skill but rather who can aoe the best. I want the game to be fun again for everyone and to remove e-sports from the game. If you were to ask me I don’t find mythic raiding fun nor “high” mythic+ keys.

Something about the game feels super hollow to me, I’m not a smart person so i can’t express myself very well but I know I can’t be the only one who feels like something is wrong.

@Jhannae-bronzebeard

I am ok with once a week 5-Mask, one Heroic Nzoth kill and one M+15 completion while I play other games.

I find that content to be extremely tedious and boring. I can’t even force myself to do a mask run anymore. It’s more frustrating than it’s worth to run on any of my 120s. I miss when I only would play a single toon and slowly gear them up but now I feel like there’s no goals I can achieve and the ones I do go for are so easily completed that I just move onto the next alt because none of my toons feel fun to play or rewarding.

[Ippollite-frostmourne (Ippollite)]

We need to itemise this

Lets see:

1. Hardcore content:

• Raids (specifically mythic).
• Dungeons. (specifically +10)
• Power progression systems (grinds et al, specifically essences and corruption systems).
• Battlegrounds (specifically RBGs).
• Arena (specifically 2200+)
• Resource acquisition (AH, gold grinding, mission tables, emissaries, world stuff, rares, pretty much standard content).
• Guilds.
• Extra content (brawlers guilds, pet battles, etc etc).

Did i miss anything?

Okay, now for the other side:

2. Casuals:

• Raiding (specifically all spheres).
• Dungeons and mythic plus (up to and including all levels).
• Power progression systems (grinds et al).
• Battlegrounds (all of it).
• Arena (find your level folks!)
• Resource acquisition (all that world stuff).
• Guilds
• All the other stuff.

There we go, thats very clear. The game keeps on catering to pretty much everyone playing the game. Thats nice.

[Frei-frostmourne]

@Dantëu-sargeras

Every time they reward skilled players the game does extremely well but each time to cater to the masses of lazy drooling gamers an expansion suffers.

“Different approaches work for different products, and I don’t want to second guess the WoW team. Let’s just say that after working on Age of Empires and World of Warcraft for a total of 16 years, it’s really refreshing to work on a game where I don’t have to worry whether someone’s grandmother can pick it up or not.”

Still one of the best quote from League’s Head Developer.

[Pikkarg-bleeding-hollow (Pikkarg)]

@Silverleigh-drakthul

So eight different games on one MMORPG?

MMORPG = sandbox.

@Silverleigh-drakthul

There needs to be unifying features and paths. And rewards should match the content. Purple gear should not be given out for pet battles anymore than they should be given out for open world quests.

No, no unifying features. That line of thinking gets us dailies and world quests in order to run visions. That gets us pathfinder. That gets us PvP requirements.

This is exactly the problem with retail.

[Hrungar-zangarmarsh]

@Pikkarg-bleeding-hollow

There is no core audience. The entire WoW audience is vast, diverse and comes for different reasons.

So the right build for retail is an offering of a multitude of core gameplay features which mutually share a core gameplay reward structure.

This means in practice that:

1. Dungeons
2. Raids
3. Battlegrounds
4. World Quests
5. Mission Tables
6. Pet Battles
7. Scenarios
8. Arena

Should offer gear, gold and rep.

With each core gameplay feature offering additional feature-specific rewards like cosmetics, mounts, gear, etc.

This design is fool-proof for maintaining a diverse playerbase that comes to the game for its sandboxed nature. A do whatever floats your boat approach. If you just want to arena all expansion you can. If you just want to world quest all expansion you can. Etc, etc.

No more forcing people into a feature they dislike. No more telling players they have degenerate playstyles. No more big brother developer input.

Build it and they’ll come. Mudwhimp and you lose.

While I do agree with this premise, I do think rewards from different activities should give awards based on style. Pet battles is the one that has it right. Mission tables should offer gear for followers, while resilience should be brought back for pvp. World quest and scenario gear should be effect driven while dungeon and raid gear should be stat driven.