“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.
MMORPG = sandbox.
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.
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.
Yes, that’s how it’d work.
As stated core progression rewards would be gear, gold and rep that all gameplay features have in common.
Core gameplay features can have their own unique rewards. Like the ideas you’re suggesting are good ideas for that specific content.
Then why do you play WoW? It’s been like this since end-game in vanilla.
so much 
He has been in charge for one expansion, the game has been going down hill for more than half its lifespan. Players / Blizzard ruined WoW years ago.
I gotta admit I like the narrative of adventurer rather than champion of everything and anything
I’m a classic player first, retail casual second, and I have to say this statement misses the mark. Classic servers needed to get locked because they do not make use of sharding/phasing (or rather they didn’t, my server of Herod has been sharded for the last two or three months, whenever they reinstated it). The game was designed around a much smaller active population, and some of these mega servers have almost 3x the amount of people playing them at once.
BFA is also in the twilight hours of it’s existence, which means you’re naturally going to have a lower population of active players as people have seen and done all there is to do, or at least all they care to do. Classic still has “new” content coming out for it.
Or just maybe the genre changed, and the game had to or not be around, let alone still at the top. AKA markets change so you must too, just saying.
If the game changed too much, then there are other options like classic.
No Blizzard is not and the reasoning behind this is, WoW is made for every type of player and skill level, from players who log in 2-3hours a week to the extreme hardcore.
In Blizzards pursuit of accessibility and ease of access, they made a game that doesn’t really please anyone, especially the original audience WoW was aimed at, MMORPG fans.
The real question is why is WoW targeted audience everyone and not true MMORPG players?
Being presumptuous, and based on the last few weeks of discussion on forums, this is for me the defining discussion of this era.
Over the expansions theyve played with this idea (wrath vs tbc/legion vs Wod for example).
The idea is this: Should the game accommodate the player in the sphere of the game they want to play with a relevant progression system attached to it? Or should the game spread out its rewards throughout the entire game encoura… i mean… forcing players to participate in aspects of the game they dislike?
Hang on… i just realised im imagining this…
I swear i didnt know id end up with this position, but its been a pyramid since day one with raiding at the top. So i guess that age old argument is nonsense. The problem is its now happening. Shadowlands seems to be the last roll of the dice on the theme park. So how do we feel on this? Because its pretty much the genesis of the future of the game. (until it maybe isnt… oh god, am i gonna be playing this stupid game in a nursing home?)
This is super comment and really made me think. I’d never considered the situation regarding casual players and the garrison but when I read your comment I realised how true it was. WoD was the only expansion where I actually left the game (went off to play ESO for some months at the end) because all the social/casual aspects of the game had died for me. I am a professions nut, I love to gather and make and the garrison removed the need to do that. It’s so true!
Our social guild is much like yours was in MoP - our guild bank is full of items that have been made by the members for use by the members because we are all crafters and gatherers, so there is always food and flasks and gems there for when they are needed. Without more of those social players I’d find the game a whole lot more sad and boring - and BfA atm is pretty damned boring. Not as bad as WoD because at least I get out a bit, but its not a good look for the future of the game.
I don’t mind if it caters for the those who want to test themselves and achieve things through their skill and effort. I would just hate it if Blizzard decided that they were more important again than us ‘casuals/non hardcore’ players because we have fun when the game is at its best and caters to everyone. Even an older woman player like myself.
EverQuest 1999 had a 1/5ths rule on hardcore players to casuals. Such that no fight in the game was so difficult to require 40 or 72 hardcore players.
That essentially made the game a great social experience. Because now there was a place in a guild for all these people. Both hardcore and casuals. Instead of being focused on challenging an exceedingly smaller number of people they took the approach of more is better and a mix of casual and hardcore players. It was probably the best time ever to be an MMORPG player and I pity those who never got to experience EverQuest during that 1999-2003 era. I say 2003 because that’s when they started instancing dungeons and the game was never the same after that.
Kind of. I think years of nepotism have been eroding away at the game.
I think the people that make the decisions don’t actually care about the game and know that if it goes under, they’ll be able to get in anywhere they want because HR is generally pretty dumb and will just see “World of Warcraft” on the resume and pick them up. They don’t care that their awful decisions putting people out of jobs when teams downsize and just care about getting experience to put on a resume in order to get their next position at a different company.
The misconception is that hardcore is the core audience. Another misconception is that hardcore means you raid and such when I’d argue it’s more about devotion in the sense that a competitive 20s player or a seriously dedicated gold farmer is just as hardcore. Maybe even heavily investing into RP and your character lore could be considered hardcore, so I think it’s more about the time and attitude towards the game instead of about skill or whatever angle the hardcore players have to differentiate themselves.
I’ve gotten pretty invested in almost everything the game has to offer except pet battles and raiding. Raiding doesn’t seem enjoyable, it just offers the best loot, so it feels unfair to people like myself that are “hardcore” in other ways.
I would like to see rewards based on time spent. Despite Classic being a thing, it still feels like the hardcore audience is asking for a vast hierarchy. I’m making some assumptions, but it feels like they really just want a walled garden around the progression that makes their gear or items feel superior to the majority. I’ve just never been intrigued by taking down raid bosses, I would rather WQ’s keep scaling to 90% of endgame raid tiers because the other side of the debate is that it’s not about skill, it’s merely preference that I would rather do something moderately enjoyable to me for progression.
Gearing doesn’t have to flow from a “How to design MMOs for Dummies” either… Why can’t I fish up a badass endgame trinket or ring after thousands of casts? After all, the One Ring was lying dormant in an unsuspecting place for quite some time before Smeagol found it.
Really? Which did better Wrath or Cata? When did Cata start tanking before or after LFR?
Last time I was in the classic section people there were asking for server merges in classic.
Incorrect.
MMORPGs can be a sandbox but they can also be be a themepark (aka progression game) or a mix of the two.
And World of Warcraft is mainly a themepark (aka progression game).
None of those activities are unifying features so no unifying the game is not why those activities are in the game.
PvP should still be a part of a unifying path (ie story) and features (ie crafting) but have their own end game power/gear progression because it is a completely different genre than PvE.
No, those activities are not the problem with retail.
My personal opinion is the problem with Draenor (from playing it), Legion (from playing it) and BfA (from what I have read on this board) is a lack of vision.
The further I get into Draenor and Legion, the more I get the idea the developers are throwing activities (often from other games) against a wall and seeing what sticks, as opposed to taking the bones of the game and building onto it.
I am enjoying Draenor but I think it is a mess in terms of MMORPG game design. Too much anti-immersion framing. Too many unconnected activities. Too many progression-blocking bugs.
The problem with retail is that they’re targeting the people who dump tonnes of dollars into WoW services and tokens then cleaning up after that and saying they’re responding to feedback
If this wasn’t the case we would see hardly any bots rolling around and trade chat wouldn’t just be spamming of selling carries from huge carry companies
Oh yeah trying to smash people into other content they don’t enjoy more than likely is less than helpful to
There goes a strawman. I never said I wanted raid or die back, fyi I’m a purely M+ player, the only raid I’ve done this entire expansion is Eternal Palace for Vit Conduit and LFR Nya. Maybe I’m not being clear enough though. When I say “less forced content” I mean less in the magnitude sense, not the quantitative sense. A perfect example is Torghast. You only have to do Torghast for a certain amount of time, then you’ve gotten your legendary pieces and you don’t have to do it any more. It’s less forced. Which is a good thing.
Well obviously it’s relative. But I do think there is a clear too much point, and I think BfA has hit that. There’s just too many grinds you have to complete on each character. But more importantly, why do you have a problem with how fast people can get alts to playable levels? Why does that matter to you? You can gear an alt at whatever rate you want to, how fast other players do it has no effect on you.
Again, strawman, I didn’t say any of this. I think that the system we have now is generally okay, it has it’s flaws, but I don’t think that alternative forms of content dropping gear is a bad thing