Or they’ll stick around and try normal or M+ or PvP especially if they make a few friends outside of LFR? You know. Like I did in BFA while I was soloing legion content and was invited to some guild raids and mythic runs.
You cannot use the game to force or funnel players into specific content. Especially when they can’t even get the tier pieces that content is tuned around.
This logic is straight up foolish. And I am a little worried the big devs have bought into it.
Yep, Had this discussion in general chat the other day.
Keep going like it is, this game will be COD–The word of warcraft theme
Login to lobby
select loadout for dung/raid/battle ground
queue/click portal.
No need for anything except the instances and lobby.
I’m the polar opposite. All instanced content could be removed tonight and I wouldn’t miss it at all.
WoW the game is like a job for many players who only play wow to pay for other content. What a lousy thing for blizz to do to folks that only play wow.
After last week’s gutting of diablow 4, a really slick bait and switch BTW, I seriously doubt the game will survive with more than a smattering of players it started with. Just like all blizz games. Bait and switch.
I wouldn’t say it’s foolish. Maybe foolishly applied.
When you complete your goals you’re either going to create more goals or move on from the game.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t also a risk of people leaving if they feel the amount of work and time they have to put in isn’t worth the reward. There’s definitely a very fine balance there. But people leaving because they feel there’s nothing to do, I suspect they’re much more likely to leave quietly and en masse.
IMHO losing things like archeology is part of the problem. While it may be very low on engagement compared to everything else, I suspect what it’s engagement represented was almost entirely players that feel like they’ve completed everything and otherwise would be taking a break. Only Blizzard would know if the development cost would be worth it.
Congratulations, you won! What did you win besides a smaller playerbase?
This ignores the large percentage of players who have always played MMO’s for entertainment value, as a pastime. People who run LFR for its entertainment value weekly (or even more often) fall into this category.
Not everyone is playing because they are seeing to achieve goals, and then they’re done and out of there. The assumptions that everyone is, or that this is the only reason to play, or that people who are by nature non-competitive can be converted into competitors by requiring raids to do the sort of content that used to be soloable is a big part of why many people didn’t buy the game.
Blizzard hasn’t given up on its faith in social engineering, even though it keeps failing.
Sorry to hear it Murdercarpet.
This game isn’t the wow we all started and enjoyed, it’s like a cheap counterfeit knockoff of a famous brand.
For me it was adding timers in 5 mans and the entire mythic+ scene. I do not like timers, Back in 2005 we had conversations during a dungeon run.
No amount of manipulation will EVER get me to play mythic. That’s just me and for those that enjoy it, that’s fine by me. However as the other parts of the game dwindle away I find myself logging less and less.
I’m sort of relieved they destroyed all the evergreen systems and in the process my unhealthy attachment to my game avatar. I felt like it was a pet I had that much false affection for Morg.
Thanks Blizz! You won.
It may and it may not ,i’m just saying most of my bnet list is playing diablo.
They pretty much killed dungeons for a lot of casual players. Dungeons now are just boring grinders, with generic loot to boot. Sure, the modern dungeon bosses have more interesting mechanics than the older dungeons, but the dungeons themselves just don’t feel like RPG dungeons anymore.
I think M+ pushed out a ton of players out of the game. These forums will have you believe that this sole system was the savior of WoW, but I think it actually alienated a lot of players.
The only people that really like it is the more competitive player that are just straight addicted to this game. Blizzard really doubled down on trying to pander to this segment of players, because they’re basically the whales of the game.
They stay subbed for long periods of time, they’re more likely to buy tokens and other store stuff, and they stay engaged with the game.
Prior to M+, these players would blast through the dungeons and raids, and then they would either raid log, or they would unsub, until the next patch. Now, Blizzard was able to keep these players playing patches much longer with M+ with minimal amount of effort on their part in creating actual new content.
The casual content added post expansion mimics M+
in a lot of ways as well.
People will say the game has always had repetitive content, but I’d say the repetitive content in the past was a lot more enjoyable and wasn’t so coerced in design.
I remember watching an Eve developer video once about good game design. They basically said that good game designers create worlds, systems and tools that give players a lot of agency in their games, basically allow players to make their own fun with in the confines of the tools and systems provided. Blizzard over the years has moved away from this design, and has basically forced players to play the WoW in very specific ways, namely forcing competitive types of content like M+, which is a complete turn off for a lot of people that enjoy MMOs.
Most of us didn’t sign up to play a MMO to pad some ladder score, we signed up to engage in a virtual fantasy world, one that had a rich lore and tons of RPG elements.
I recall prior to the expansion’s release that players were told there were going to be ladders for casual content, which was described as dragon races and rock climbing. Bellular thought this was a fantastic idea, but I thought it was a terrible idea that would truly have backfired on them.
Oh man, this would have been terrible. I’m really kind of over the people making this game. Either they don’t care, and they are just collecting a pay check, or most of the team is kind of devoid of talent. Either way, the game really sucks for casual MMO players that don’t enjoy climbing some e-sport ladder.
Diablo is just a better game I can play solo, with my wife, or with any combination of friends. But I still log into WoW here and there for the trading post and stuff.
Honestly I’d probably play more if it ditched role requirements and group size requirements. But IDK if everyone would be on the same page with that.
Being able to pick up and play whatever way I want without waiting for the correct roles or group size is an extremely alluring feature. If WoW had that sort of gameplay for content, I’d probably never log out when I had free time, lol.
But there’s really nothing alluring about waiting being a primary game mechanic, and that’s mostly the WoW experience unless you’re doing old content or most of the story content that doesn’t require completing a raid.
The problem is they have made the game so hard for new players to get into end game. Mods and a useless UI really is a road block with out having someone in RL to help them.
The mods and terrible UI are not the only issues, though. The gatekeeping from the community in this game is horrible, because like I said above, Blizzard has created a game that panders to more competitive types of players. The content available at end game is designed with these players in mind.
Both M+ and ranked PVP are both great examples of systems that really suck for MMOs, because of all the requirements the player base puts on players just in order to get invited to this content.
I’ve said it a million times on these forums, that the game was better off just having a few difficulties for raids and dungeons, this allowed players of almost all skill types to have a place in the game.
I think a lot of players loved being able to take down the same raid bosses as some of the best players in the world. Nowadays, only the hardest levels of difficulty in the game are considered achievements, and these are inaccessible to most of the people that play the game.
Blizzard basically pandered to the 1% players way too much. Most of WoW’s player base was a middle of the road gamer as far as skill goes, and the past versions were designed with these players in mind. The more they leaned into trying to create content for competitive types, the worse the game has gotten. Hence, why it is almost impossible for new players to get into the end game.
Edit: In the past, most raid teams had a broader mix of skill types. This isn’t the case in modern WoW. With all the different difficulties in the game now, players are segregated quite a bit. This has created some very toxic elements in the game imo.
At this point it’s clear that WoW has evolved into two separate games both smashed together in an ever increasing bad way and it isn’t working out.
Blizz should separate the two games.
Spinning instanced content off to it’s own stand alone version would benefit both types of game play.
MMO players would get their game back and the M+/raid players would free from the MMO open world that they really don’t want anyway.
The MMO version could still have a difficulty level or two of dungeons befitting the progression of the story line and a final raid that comes out at the end of the expansion for the “final fight”.
They just gonna play or 2 months come on the forum say wow sucks and leave
Blizzard needs to do something, its way easier to pick up a controller for a box. Then to set up a Mod Ui - Weakauras pulse research every nuance of the game just to feel like you belong and not behind.
Along with buying a few Tokens as they need mass gold to buy crafted gear ench/gem/raid flacks so on.
On top of having to deal with Lua-errors
Instance content is big part of what makes wow what it is. They should just expand on engaging and fun open world content and some solo instance content like torgast and n’zoths nightmares.
Fun’s subjective.
Personally, i don’t see how more or less people around effects my enjoyment of a video game. At least in World Content that i play. If there’s people around, then cool. If not, then it’s fine since i still have a fun video game to play.
Instance content is fine, although it does detract from the concept of a MMO being an open world game and makes it feel more like a lobby game for 5-30 players maximum.
But that’s not what I’m saying. WoW just has too many checkboxes required before you actually get to play the content. You need the right amount of people with the correct roles, you need the proper group size to run dungeons, and then if you want to PUG that you also need to meet arbitrary score requirements.
It’s a lot of waiting around to actually play.
Even world content is designed around sitting patiently, waiting for the right events, waiting for the right rares to spawn, or waiting for a group to fill to clear an overtuned quest.
D4 and Afflicted are doing a good job chasing everyone away. I’d imagine tomorrow it won’t be quite as frighteningly dead.