Cash shop allows blizzard to supplement their income by offering optional cosmetic items to players that want them, which helps the rest of us by not having the monthly subscription change price in 20 years while the price of streaming services increases regularly.
Most long time players have multiple max level characters. Leveling up another one isn’t special or magical. It’s a mechanical process at this point. Boosting allows players with more money than time to skip that part and play at max level where everything and everyone else is.
Dungeon finder helps those with limited time quickly find groups. If you have only an hour to play and want to knock out a quick dungeon, you don’t want to spend 45 minutes of it spamming chat trying to find a group.
Can you explain why not having these things on one specific server will somehow make the game much better?
I say let 'em try. Just as an experiment. If it fails, it’s just another dead server. I wouldn’t play it, but if there’s a niche for it without much resource allocation…why not?
Look, you can stay on the topic and ignore these guys, or let them control the topic by continuing to respond to them. I’ve already lost interest, so no idea why I’m even responding.
I “fail to grasp why these features exist”, yet the reason you’re leaning on is monetization? I figured it would be a gameplay reason that you had in mind, considering you’re presumably a paying consumer and not a financial stakeholder.
Because by your own admission the gameplay itself in WoW is not all that interesting, but the social intricacies of server cultures and player interactions is very interesting.
I can tell you’re not in the business of learning or hearing other perspectives though. Can’t wait for you to discard my comments out of hand again!
You don’t have to be a financial stakeholder to appreciate the subscription price not changing in 20 years. Would you rather blizzard removed the store and started charging us all $25-30 a month instead?
When did I ever admit that? I was strictly talking about the leveling process. The gameplay is fine once you have full access to all your skills, abilities, and talents.
None of these things impede social interaction. That’s there for those that want it. The fault in your logic is thinking that having the game force these things on players makes the game better when in actuality it does the exact opposite. No one likes being forced to dance at the mandatory social mixer.
I’d rather they continue milking you like a cow and give me servers with unadulterated experiences on them
It’s silly for you to pretend you have any insight into their financials. If you wanna justify it for yourself, go ahead, but you’re purely speculating, and that’s useless for the sake of argument.
You figured it out for yourself. Good job.
Fine? Sure. Stands in its own? No.
The game has always lived and died by its social elements. The devs know that. It’s the terminally casual introverts “with more money than time” (and skill) that expect the game to be a hollow solo lobby game who have their head in the sand.
Leveling doesn’t have to be a pos chore that you’d rather pay to skip. It’s the fact that you people expect and want to pay that they choose to keep it trash and keep you buying boosts.
Their kowtowing to players like you are why the game has been at an all time low. Retail isn’t an MMORPG.
I think it’s seriously strange that you’re so adamantly opposed to a ruleset on a different server that brings the game back to its MMORPG roots being created. It’s beyond reason to me. It doesn’t affect your ability to play MMO Lobby Cash Shop whatsoever. Can you explain what you’re scared of?
I was considering quoting parts of your meltdown, but seeing as it’s pretty much all a mess I don’t think it worth my time. Nobody is scared of your disfunctional server idea that maybe a hundred people would play on, but your idea of a broken game that doesn’t interact with the majority of the playerbase is bad. You fail to understand how the game works, refuse to listen to explanations given, and resort to insults when people disagree with you.
It’s not a speculation, I was asking you a hypothetical question. Would you rather have a store that’s completely optional to use and a steady non increasing subscription cost or no store and a subscription that keeps pace with inflation like everything else? Answer please.
This means nothing other than you trying to dodge getting called out for misrepresenting what I said.
What does this even mean? It’s fine either way.
Yet one of your ideas is to make it even more tedious and take longer to complete. Brilliant Explain how you would make it fun and engaging.
Boosts are such a non issue it’s kinda funny people like you and madseason are so obsessed with it. It’s so trivial to level a new alt now that buying a boost is largely irrelevant.
The numbers released contradict everything you say. You literally have no idea what you are talking about.
The game blew up because it was the first mainstream mmorpg that you could solo all the way to level cap without grouping with other players at all. It was a low time commitment game compared to the other options at the time. Again, you literally have no idea what you are talking about. The revisionist history people like you and madseason try to peddle is completely false.
I think it’s way more strange you can’t just play the game and ingore all these optional elements you don’t have to interact with.
You can’t even explain why it’s so important other than ‘it’s how the game used to be bro, mmorpgs have to be social’
He’s a vanilla andy, you should have seen some of the SoD non-sense he’d push… he’s literally a bad take magnet. He’s got vanilla but it’s not enough for him but thrives on wanting to ruin all the other versions.
The fact that many people play this game solo proves you wrong. Also the idea that social to you means forced group is misguided. Being around other players is itself social even if you are not directly interacting with them.
All you guys have are vague concepts and fanciful ideas but nothing concrete. I know I’m wasting my time but I’ll ask again. How would you expand the leveling experience and make it fun and engaging? Details.
Continuing this ‘discussion’ with you. You continue to ask for explanations, which I’ve provided, while offering none of your own or answers to my questions. You have nothing, so this is a waste of time. Later.
Unsure of the convo ive stumbled upon or the context it was within. That said the things i have previously enjoyed about leveling have been removed. Things like leveling zones and finally being ablee to go explore them have been utterly gutted by a scaling world. This in turn introduced the feeling that quest experience and player danger was also normalized.
Leveling was once a lengthy and time consuming gameplay metric, it almost serves no purpose in todays game outside of growing in power (infact currently every level you gain reduces your power and serves purely as a pourpose for balencing higher leevel content and gear inflation), a staple of any rpg.
Some people like being on rails and told when and where they can level and some people like me like the freedom of being able to pick my favorite zones to level in and my favorite quest lines to do.
Because at the time, endgame was barely a thing. Leveling essentially was the game in vanilla.
What purpose did it serve before that it does not now other than keeping you subbed longer?
Even with scaling, as long as you keep gearing up post level cap, you will eventually reach a point where you outscale the scaling and everything in the open world becomes trivial. Enemy scaling isn’t infinite.
The fact way less people play more than they did even five years ago proves me right.
Dynamic storytelling instead of linear is top of mind, but that isn’t the point.
The point is that boosts encourage the devs to make leveling suck so they can get boost money. If they were incentivized to make engaging leveling then the people who are paid to develop good experiences could do so.
Again you didn’t explain. Those numbers prove you wrong, as I’ve explained. You’ll have to explain how they prove me wrong. Can’t just throw numbers back at me that I’ve already used to show you.
Damn right you are, which is why you won’t explain why you’re so terrified of pristine servers being provided alongside the servers you already enjoy (and most people hate). Coward.
Seriously bro. “I have you muted and didn’t read the post, but I’m gonna jump in with an opinion anyway.”
Explain how you would make it fun and engaging.