Browsing quickly thru your points, I think Im the same in some aspect, though my thought processes not as clearly defined as yours…mine come down to the simplicity of not liking ANY CURRENT content because it feels like a rat race that I cant relax with and enjoy.
Im sitting here counting the moments until TWW is old content so I can go nuts with it without feeling that rat on the gearing wheel feeling like I do with every current expansion.
I finally had to admit to myself with my love for DF and now TWW that its not the content itself in many cases that Im trying to get away from…its the feeling of NEEDING to gear ASAP and being in a high speed car chase where Im hanging on by a seat belt thread just to keep from fallling out the window in sharp turns that I hate and want to escape from. lol
I realize now I just want to play old content so the rat race feeling has long passed and I can just enjoy it at any pace Im in the mood for, because the race no longer matters since its out of date.
While you were leveling? Sure. Loot wasn’t raining on us like it is now that’s for sure. Getting an epic item these days feels like you found a penny on the sidewalk. Meaningless enough to forget to pick it up some of the time.
I always felt the older versions of WoW were better if you wanted a chill experience. Even at endgame to some degree.
It just wasn’t that hard, and people bonded easier over it.
Yeah, retail has some stuff like that like world quests, but most of the audience here will laugh you out of the room for preferring a chill PvE experience over pulling teeth out in high keys.
But if you aren’t sweaty? Get out, there’s no place for you here.
Not anymore.
Speaks for itself- the community is why there’s almost no casuals kicking around anymore.
Everyone is a Keystone Master, or Arena Master, or Mythic Raider or what-have-you.
It goes all the way back to Vanilla, when raiding and other “hardcore” content was put on a pedestal. It feels like they throw casuals a bone every so often, but the game is firmly structured to draw players into the endgame progression ladder and keep them there.
The moment players figure out they’re not having fun doing that, the illusion collapses suddenly & violently.
If Blizz didn’t want to waste our time, they’d have done away with RNG (“random number generator” is the acronym) loot a LONG time ago.
They arguably did do during Cata/MoP with justice & valor point systems… but that shortens the gearing process CONSIDERABLY. Which is why they’ve dropped it with WoD as a primary gearing method.
Meanwhile, FFXIV keeps using a currency system with no ill effects on progression. But the main draw in that game isn’t endgame progression.
Path of least resistance.
Especially when gear is the main draw, not the experience itself, then players will seek out the easiest gearing methods.
There’s a reason why boosts & carries are so lucrative in WoW - the game favours getting results.
17 years ago your gear lasted longer than the next dungeon run. The game was just completely different. Things were still new and exciting. Now it just rush to max and gimme my lewt.
Reading countless threads on General Discussion and Battleground forums, I can see that a lot of players here have been playing since the beginning or more than 10 years ago.
I am sure this game changed a lot throughout 20 years of its existence. It really takes time to manage all the available things that one must do in a game.
In my opinion, the story is what drives players to stay and push through all the repetitive hardship game-play. If you cannot grasp onto the story, it’s hard to stay active.
Even players on the forums have spoken about just staying because they’ve made a few friends on WoW, so it is like a place to discuss their daily routine and wandering thoughts. They call it a second home. So, if that is what it is, then it is not about the game itself, but rather a sense of human connection. If you don’t actually need that because maybe you have it in real life, then it becomes even harder to stay active in game.
To be honest, it’s quite easy to gear up right now. Easy, but time-consuming. So if time is a constraint, that definitely shifts things from “easy” to difficult. The only reason I’m as geared as I am and doing the content I’m currently doing (M+ and raiding) is because I have the time to do so since I have very few social obligations (or friends) outside of the game.
My coworker has the same challenges you do, OP. He’s got a girl, additional hobbies, and other real life stuff to handle. He’s constantly frustrated at not having enough time to progress and do the things he wants to do in game. But that’s the way WoW has been since I started playing 19 years ago. It’s a massive time sink to play at the upper levels.
I can’t say if that’s a good or bad thing. It just is what it is. Maybe adjusting your expectations and goals based on the amount of time you have to sink into the game is the play here? After all, I can understand the frustration of feeling like so much is unattainable, but perhaps there’s an avenue for you to enjoy the escapism of playing WoW without engaging with the proverbial hamster wheel of the endgame loop?
I dunno. I’m not trying to minimize your frustrations because, obviously, they’re valid and shared by others in the game community.
Very based and accurate. I especially love the “my life in PvP bit.”
One thing you didnt mention that I wanted to is that combat genuinely feels so much worse in retail than in classic.
I never have to kit anymore. I raraly ever need to worry about pulling too many mobs, more often im actually trying to pull as many as humanly possible before their aggro breaks. And mobs just dont seem to do anything.
And the end result is every fight is me standing in a pile of mobs focusing on my roations.
Mobs in westfall had more meaningful mechanics than mobs in TWW in 2024. All mobs do now is get interupted and summon swirling circles that can be ignored half the time.
And part of this is class design. Which has exploded into absurdity with the new talent tree. So many passives that interact with each other it feels like a modern yugioh deck. Bloated. Dense. And impossible to navigate without guides.
Whats reallt crazy is that the playerbase has somehow gaslight themselves into thinking they love end game content.
Why would spamming the same 8 dungeons over and over again be better content than a non-linear leveling experience with more zone variety, more encounter variety, no forced grouping, and more ways to reward the player besides increasing their ilvl…
I say this because I legit have a IRL friend who always said “I only like wow for the end game” and yet he would quit the game anytime he got to max, and he only ever really liked leveling and PvP.
It was just this toxic brain virus that spread in the early days of WoW.
I’m a long-time player, too, and my expectations evolved with the game. I’ve found contentment in each iteration of WoW and where I couldn’t, I stopped my subscription.
Nostalgia’s nice but you’ll never be happy if you hold contemporary WoW up to those rose-coloured glass-tinted standards.
I do really enjoy running raids and just your run of the mill dungeons. But the current GOGOOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO and the underlying toxicity of the playerbase is what really makes it un-fun. I usually just hide chat altogether. Its also not fun to have to relearn your spec every expansion.
As you said, you dont have time like you did back in the day. Retail wow is a lot better for casual players. You get more things done in less time compared to classic. However, the game is not friendly to bad players, even if you spend a lot of time in the game. If you are bad, you will progress slowly. There’s a big difference between casuals and bad players. I learned that after playing classic again in 2019, they way players played the game changed a lot over time.
I’m closer to 50 than 40, playing for 20 years and I enjoy the pace of retail (outside of m+) far more than I did playing vanilla. I tried classic again and it was a snoozefest.