I finally woke up and realized I’m going to get stuck in this cycle anymore. I cancelled my subs and got TWW refunded. But I had a yearly sub on one of my accounts so I’m just passing time on classic and reading the forums.
More and more people need to open their eyes and see it’s not normal to have to re-learn how to play your 20 year old character every 2 years.
If you weren’t there from, at least I would say WofLK, you don’t have any good point of comparison. You’re saying DF is good compared to what? Shadowlands? Us older veterans have seem how this game was before it turned into a cash grab.
When you say the older expansions were better are you talking about your opinion, how you feel about the old expansions or is there some objective measure you have for us?
If so, describe the metrics you are using to compare the expansions then show us how the old ones score higher than the newer ones.
Metrics? Here’s a simple one… they don’t publish metrics anymore since Cata. How’s that for proof? You think they’d hide it if the numbers were good? They’ve actively lost players since the end of WofLK.
Ask a GM to freeze that game time if you don’t want to use it. Tell them you will be taking an extended vacation and won’t have your PC. Whatever results in frozen game time.
A lot of people won’t really have a good frame of reference to give you. If you have spent any time on classic prior to Cata relaunch, it was a lot like that, except the entire player base was there, concurrent subs peaked (all time) during wotlk, at about 12m.
With everything they’ve published since and the Bellular video going over the infographic, their best extrapolation puts the next highest peak in concurrent subs at about the time when classic relaunched, and then again with shadowlands launch. Maybe 5-6 million concurrents peak since their highest in wotlk.
To add a little more context, Since last self reporting, it’s down from that peak, and it’s honestly hard to tell where these players are at, considering all 4 game clients are linked via 1 sub.
5 mil subs is 5 million subs that could playing all 4 game clients. or it could be 3 mil playing classic and 2 million spread elsewhere. But it’s kinda of hard to put those metrics to work when you have 4 different game clients fueling 1 set of concurrents.
But as far as which expansions are ‘better?’ None of them. The era between 2004 and 2010 featured a game that went largely unchanged, where the content really was developed with care, despite the internal struggles at Blizzard.
It didn’t seem like a different design team across Vanilla, TBC, Wotlk, not as much as it seems now, with everything Cata onward. The progress between the 3 games felt consistent and if you played back then, it wasn’t a 2 year expansion cadence. It wasn’t a 6 month patch cycle. These things were still kinda ‘soon TM’ projects that were dropped when they were ready.
It was the Push from Cata to MoP, Dropping Annual Pass and D3, WoD, where it became obvious the development of the game was no longer about the quality of the game. It was about meeting those goals and ushering players along, past the mistakes and the set backs.
‘Just keep swimming’ right? Dory loves Wow. All of it. She can’t remember a difference between expansions, let alone cite an issue she might have had with one.
For me, I was onboard with this game, pretty much 100%, until the end of WoD. Cata was an experiment, MoP and WoD took that and made it successful. Both of those expansions were regarded by players as very very good, despite also being regarded as ‘very very bad.’
Conversely, many people regard Legion as GOAT expansion. I think it’s probably the worst.
The anti botting angle is once again debunked when they can do it using DR. Furthermore, fly hacks and teleport hacks have existed pre Burning Crusade.
It’s no different than you trying to explain how skyriding and ground mounts are so alike it makes sense they are available at launch. Whereas steady flight belongs behind PF because, well, because that’s the way it’s been. That makes no sense in an evolving game, constantly changing. And it makes even less sense when the newer form of flight, the as you say more complex form of flight isn’t the reward for PF. This game has always been built around doing more difficult content reaps the greatest reward. The way tbc flight is gated behind PF runs contrary to the fundamental design of the game’s reward system.
All those players in favor of making disabled players have to do Pathfinder have the same mental outlook like Ion…a bad one…they feel as long as their zoom zoom isn’t effected they could care less about their fellow players that have physical issues with Dynamic flying…they are like I got mine and the heck with you and rest that can’t use or have huge issues with Dynamic flying…
WoW is supposed to be about player community as it is a MMORPG. BlizZard trying to sweep it under the rug is going to make them look real bad.
Moby Dick and Huckleberry Fin are considered considered great novels but romance books might sell better. That doesn’t prove romance books have better stories than the great American novels.
Also there are other considerations. Around the time Cataclysm came out, Social Media took off and robbed MMOs of their lunch. That has nothing to do with the MMO stories not being as good, more to do with people wanting themselves, rather than their avatars, being the internet star.
Well, I am not trying to compare Wow to other games or anything externally. I’m going by the numbers that tend to signify when Wow was ‘most popular,’ and I am trying to further that point by highlighting the version of the game that had the most Subscriptions concurrently, was also released again at a time when the game had less than half.
You were asking for metrics, and those are about as clear as it gets. Cata saw a sharp dip. Mop saw numbers go back up to 10m, briefly. I wouldn’t consider a 3 million sub decrease over the life of Cataclysm to be related to anything external, especially social media, at a time when players were streaming wow content.
I am also pretty sure Cata saw a sharp decline because it truly was the first time the Developers sought to rework so much of the game. It was the first time they were willing to start changing the core game.
That was when Blizzard attempted to define class progression by giving ‘core skills’ and talents starting at level 10, locking you to a spec, removing the ability to splash talents. Was also the first time they were willing to go back to the old world zones and carve them up, removing large swathes of content people actually loved.
There is a quest chain that begins the human experience, in Northshire, spanning 4 zones, representing probably one of the greatest MMO stories ever told, lorewise. It’s cohesive, it draws you into the plight of the only group of people you can actually identify with, as a player.
I won’t go into it too much, but that quest line is one of the major reasons players love vanilla as a game. It’s the first half of the game, 1-30 for players choosing Human. Why the players who play Classic demanded ‘zero changes.’
Cuz those quests, the ones spanning zones, were first to get cut for Cata. Cata fundamentally removed the standard in quest design, from the game. If all other quest design followed the design of those quests… the game would be a masterpiece.
Blizzard gets paid regardless of how much each player is immersed in the game. Besides that, there are many different levels all through the game, open world vs dungeons and raids, being the biggest. Blizzard isn’t forcing anyone to do either one.
The only rational reason left for Blizzard to lock tbc flight behind PF and not skyriding, is to preassure players to choose the flight form that is available first. And it’s a shaky rational at best.
i agree…and, if anything, dragon-gliding
should be gated behind pathfinder.
that’s…if anything!
I asked for metrics in a different context. I was originally responding to a comment about the lessons Ion said they learned from Shadowlands. As I recall he complained about paying too much attention to the story and not enough to other types of content. Most likely he’s talking about end game since that is his focus.
Then someone said I was wrong because I didn’t play back before Legion which is flat out wrong. They changed the subject to talking about how Wrath was better than Cat.
So I asked what they meant by “better”. I asked for metrics. They responded with subscription numbers but that was about the time that Social Media was stealing the MMOs lunch and also there were a lot more MMOs to pick from so it’s not clear that those numbers tell us much about the quality of the WoW expansions themselves.
I want to know what metrics show that the content itself is not as good as it was back in Wrath, not how Social Media and more competition impacted subscription numbers.
Right. Metrics clearly showing X is not as good as Y… probably doesn’t exist for MMOs. As close as you’re going to get is doing a deep dive on the concurrent sub numbers, both the set posted up through the end of MoP (down to 7.7 mil, prior to Vivendi recent controlling interest acquisition), and then the set of ‘numbers’ released by Blizzard recently, which were reviewed by Bellular.
The second set of numbers is more difficult to parse, since the graphic doesn’t include metrics to know what the graphics mean, extrapolation based on graphic positions and some known data points, gives a loose estimate of the games popularity.
I don’t like popularity as a metric, but again, there really isn’t data that clearly indicates one expansion is better than the rest. Which is why I put it the way I did. There was a turning point in the game, a clear, definitive turning point, both in overall design direction AND the concurrent sub count of the game.
Which is why Blizzard doesn’t publish that information directly, anymore. If they had kept going this whole time, every quarter, giving us the numbers for their concurrents (subs month means consistent cash flow, btw. Boxes only really serve as a temp bump for a quarterly report, which is why they aim for q3/q4), it would be really easy to pinpoint design direction vs con currents as a metric, and argue against a lot of these design choices.
I find it strange you think social media or other MMOs had an impact on Wow’s subscriber count, over something like… the actual design of the game resetting and paradigm shifting every 2 years.
That’s pretty much my point as well and as we said, quality of the game is just one factor in subscription numbers. All these other things like more competition from other MMOs, from Social Media, etc are also factors.
My feeling is that the actually quality if the game is very subjective and absolute statements saying pre Cat was better than post Cat are really just a reflection of someone’s opinion, not fact that can be proven with metrics.
Dear Blizzard.
Please put skyriding behind the same PF so people will stop complaining… that is, until they find another angle to use.
Um, one would tend to think social media has had the opposite effect, boosting visibility and increasing new player exposure. In fact, Social Media might be the reason Wow (and any other MMO) still has any concurrent subscribers.
If it weren’t for social media, Youtube channels dedicated to Let’s Play, Twitch Streams, ect: MMOs probably be doing much worse across the board.
People’s opinion’s and feelings toward the game are very subjective. No one can define for you, how you experience wow.
Objectivity isn’t limited to opinions and feelings. Objectively, one can definitely assess the game at any point, and make determinations regarding the impact of design changes. You don’t always need metrics.
What’s the impact of making a design choice, when a thread like this (and others like it) grow to nearly 1200 pages? Had nothing about Dragonriding been changed, had the DF client added to base game and level range dropped to 10-70, absolutely EVERYTHING about the DF experience would have been preserved, as we experienced it at DF launch (minus the bugs and updates to make the feature work properly after launch).
AND. AND. This thread would not exist. If people came to make a thread about a different reason, cool. But it wouldn’t be THIS thread.
Right? Without metrics or opinions I can look at 1200 pages of people literally questioning the need for change and the resulting design choices, determine they cooked their own feature, AND I can objectively state the feature was better, prior to any recent changes.
The game prior to cata didn’t experience any significant changes or reworks. Most everything was minor bug fixes, updates, or new features. Up to Cata, your experience of Wow was only going to ‘progress.’
Heck, there were people raiding prior raid content from vanilla and TBC in wotlk, not for transmog, but for challenge. In cata, you could just walk into those raids and 1 shot. The scaling in Cata alone killed that aspect of the game, for that content.
It’s not really a matter of liking Cata less, Wow is a wholly different game experience from the content before it, starting with Cata. That’s where the game started to become truncated and disposable, if you want to know the facts.
If a sudden decline in concurrent sub count, coinciding with a massive paradigm shift in game design, resulting in a reworked/reset game every two years, starting from Cata onward, isn’t enough of a ‘metric’ to determine that Wow was a better game prior to Cata, then nothing is.
You do know there is a dungeon that requires dragonriding flight right? You do know there are a couple of starter quests that will require flying right? You do know the coreway going down isn’t accessible by ground mount right?
Yes, some people may not like sky riding, or have issues with using it. But if they ignore sky riding, the game still functions the same as it did for all those other years they played it.
As you put it:
“people that have been playing WoW for years who had no problem with physical accessibility with regard to mounts (ground or steady flying).”
If anything, the elimination of a half year to year of wait time to unlock steady flying should be celebrated by folks.
But it isn’t, because they are overreacting that other people will be using a more interactive, immersive flight mode, while they will continue to play the game the same way they have been playing for years.