Do you play classic?
There is no WoW token or paid services and the bots and paid boost selling is a much larger issue/occurrence there.
Not yet on western servers but on the Chinese servers you can buy tokens and whatnot.
Yeah that is also completely insane
I’m shocked they haven’t come up with a way to fix it
Could be because they have to pay a sub fee or something so they still get a cut from the gold sellers
Ok, but why are bots and boost selling massive on US servers?
Depends on whose their core audience 
LOL
The final stretch of every expansion is always boring.
All RPGs are progression games. Progressing in power as you progress through the role / story.
MMO just means it’s that experience but designed around a massively multiplayer experience.
WoW stopped being an MMO a long time ago. I don’t consider 5 man nor 20 man instanced content MMO. It’s more quasi-lobby action RPG. Where it’s closer to team based ARPGs than it is MMORPG.
Unless you’ve got a method to get max corruption resistance without doing the required dailies you’re not selling me on this point.
PvE isn’t a genre. It’s a gameplay feature.
Did you play EverQuest back in 1999? Or even WoW up to about Wrath / MoP?
I’m not sure we’re in the same universe to be having this conversation. You may not remember the golden era of the MMORPG. I do. Believe it when I say there has never been such a magical time to be an MMORPGer.
I won’t mince words here. You’re a tryhard who is realizing everything they do in this game doesn’t mean anything. Either try less hard and continue to enjoy it, or my personal favorite choice, abandon this game and put your creative energy into something that actually matters. Trust me you’ll feel more satisfied doing something you genuinely enjoy, and preferably getting paid for it as well, far more than filling voids with this game, as admittedly I have done.
With any luck in another year I’ll be out of this game. With any luck I won’t have the time to spend. I welcome it. If I continue to play that’s fine too, but I won’t ever take anything here too seriously.
And the people on the other side of the fence call that gating.
This is a multi-player game. So yes, it does. Look at fights like Helya or Crucible. S2/S3 M+ balance. If alts hit max progression in a week, players re-rolling fotm are hugely rewarded and players on less powerful specs are sol.
You are spouting the same streamer click bait “forced content” and “systems” that everyone else is. Again, just because there is varied content and nearly everything is rewarding, does not mean you are forced into it.
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But BFA has been boring since launch. Legion had so much content and stuff go aim for and in BFA there’s been next to nothing. In legion you had the balance of power questline.
In BFA you have RNG sockets on RNG benethic gear. In legion you had random legendaries from doing any content in the game that felt rewarding.
In BFA you had RNG mythic ilvl gear that felt absolutely unrewarding.
(so much so that they finally removed it from the game)
In legion there was a mage tower with unique appearances for each spec. In BFA there’s nothing unique for any specs or classes.
In legion you had set bonuses to aim for in raids. In BFA you have no set bonuses and no reason to run raids outside of a particular weapon or trinket from a single specific boss meaning that most of the raid was pointless to run thus further killing the pug scene for the community. People leave after you kill the one boss they want.
BFA has been absolutely terrible for the community and newcomers to the franchise and may have done irreparable damage. There’s no challenge in the game, no strife to overcome. Everything is passive and boring. There’s no rewarding of skill or anything that requires skill to overcome a difficult challenge. The expansion is just boring.
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As you can see from the multivariate regression analysis we’ve got up behind me, casual fun has the best ROI when [checks notes] they engage in a progressive power system and…says here Island Expeditions.
I think wow is at it’s best when everyone can do the same content with elective hard modes. Think Ulduar with it’s hard modes before heroic was added in ICC. The game was much better then before adding multiple difficulties and fracturing the playerbase even further. Now we have four raid/dungeon difficulties that does nothing but segregate the playerbase and turn what used to be fun PVE content into an e-sport.
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I 100% agree with this. I also don’t think they understand that if you’re going to make raiding the main content - and it seems they want to - that you need to have a community for that. People say LFD destroyed the community but in my mind it was moving to 25-man/10-man raids.
What Blizzard refuses to clarify is this: When you have 40-mans, roughly 5 people per raid were “getting a chance.” The community calls this “dead weight we got rid of with 25 mans” but what this community of nerds fails to realize is that if you get too exclusive, you’re no longer a community, you’re a clique of jerks no one likes.
Hence the community falls.
Letting everyone play isn’t the answer either, at least in the way they’ve done it because as you say, it’s segregational. If you’re someone who just wants to see the Raid, you go to LFR. If you’re someone who is playing for world first, you go in Mythic. I ask Blizzard, how do those two people meet/talk?
tl;dr - Only when the person pushing for world first, and the person who plays LFD on the weekend when they have time interact will you start to knit back a community. I don’t see how else you’d do it.
Forcing vastly different play styles and mentalities to play together is a recipe for disaster. It’s a cause of frustration on both ends because the expectations are so wildly different.
I can’t post on my druid for some reason but LFD/LFR did ruin the game. No longer are you searching for people to do content making sure they’re decent players or forming bonds by interacting with the same players over and over. Instead you’re instantly qued up with people you’ll never see again.
Now add the fact that servers don’t mean much anymore and you no longer have to be a respectful player in order to get groups thus making the community toxic because there’s no repercussions for those players because you’ll never see them again. Making servers matter and having a reputation would bring back the glory days of the game but activisionblizzard went for low hanging fruit aka lazy players that refuse to wait for a reward aka for a group to fill in order to do content thus killing incentives for guilds with scheduled raiding.
So in short LFR/LFD and cross realm raiding has killed the game when they could have just condensed realms but opted to be greedy and sell transfers from bad realms to good realms for a premium.
TL;DR activisionblizzard’s avarice ruined the game.
No worthwhile content is queuable so not sure it ruined anything.
I’m mixed on cross realm grouping. I can agree it hurt realm “communities” but being able to put a group together for almost anything, at any time of day, is absolutely amazing.
I’ve played classic extensively since it came out and one of thing this I absolutely hate there is trying to put together groups for anything outside of prime time is hell even on very high population servers (I play in Fairbanks and Sulferus). So much so that if I’m on in the morning I just pretty much accept its solo farming time only.
With cross realm I can put a pug dungeon or raid together at any time of day.
And this is max level stuff. Leveling dungeons are very hard to put together even during prime time.
So it’s choosing a “community” vs actually playing the game.
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The core audience isn’t represented on the internet, in forums, on social media or on youtube. The core audience is playing the game which is why they rely on their metrics and not the overly negative internet.
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Me too, I have three 60s. A rogue,mage and druid. I see absolutely nothing wrong with using trade chat to find groups and do content. Even then joining a guild makes doing content that much faster.
But yeah cross realm raiding,lfr,lfd and four levels of difficulty have ruined the game and gave into the lazy players demanding instant gratification.
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Have you ever worked in an office?
What world are you playing in? Mythic Dungeons and Arena teams repeatedly do background vetting on a scale the rivals a cabinet secretary. I asked to join a 3s team as DPS and they asked for bank statements.
The game is increasingly a job. And I don’t need a second one, I certainly don’t need one that doesn’t pay me.
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