I’m watching a documentary about WoW and how the playerbase declined in Cata.
Personally, I think it’s due to the talent trees being simplified. Does anyone have a positive take on this?
Also, I feel like group finders don’t are disliked because of how people treat randos. Everyone has been guilty pf doing it and everyone has been thr victim of it…
People just run in, get what they want, and dip.
This is just one person’s opinion so I can’t vouch for everyone else but my biggest complaint would be the community but, again, this is from someone who really doesn’t trust people in real life, either.
It’s like going back in time and watching someone die again knowing you can’t change the outcome.
I’m new so i didn’t see before but I have to admit, simplifying the talent trees seems like a bad idea.
Am I misinformed? What’s your take on this?
Positivy welcomed. Even corny.
Also, guys…you think you do but you don’t. Lol.
My lesson with hardcore. Cracks me up.
So the playerbase declined because, off the top of my head:
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Cataclysm changed the world that people loved. Quests may have improved but the sense of just wandering in a dangerous world where you weren’t the chosen one was was kinda lost. Flying in Azeroth removed a sense of connection with the setting.
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Heirloom gear did change leveling. Some liked it, some felt pressured into needing heirlooms.
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The dungeons were very hard at the start compared to the dungeons in Wrath and people were not pleased.
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Dragon Soul was a drag and that patch lasted too long.
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Honestly? I think some folks were just burned out at this point too. For some of the more hardcore fans defeating the Lich King was endgame.
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It will be interesting to see how long the last phase lasts this time.
the 10v25 is what killed Cataclysm. Most 25man guilds were erased.
This mirrors my feelings totally.
For me it’s these things:
- the world being shattered (First and worst).
- talent specialisation, locking spells behind specs (Second and next worst).
The rest being in no specific order
- everything wjhile levelling becoming laughably easy.
- Hunters being half-heartedly remade (focus for mana - yet no focus potions or food).
- all the new bling and things clamouring for attention,
- the linking of quests in Quest hubs, so that you eg. have to do some Quests in Feralas before you can Quest in 1K Needles.
All this leading to a linear, two dimensional experience. I am not going to play.
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If you search for Cata videos on YouTube by WillE he gives a good breakdown of the good and the bad.
Personally I don’t think Cata was a bad expansion. I played through it in its entirety, I just lost steam when my guild moved to trying to work on Heroic Dragon Soul. In particular I remember the early heroic dungeons being very challenging and fun to grind, and seem to recall I had generally positive raid experiences. Even though I was a big proponent of what has come to be called RDF at the time (which is no longer true), I remember very much disliking LFR. I think that was the only thing I maybe didn’t jive with?
With that said, I just have no desire to relive it. Like, at all. I think it will be popular though… WoW Classic seems to have a meta crowd that follows the latest and greatest as long as it’s not retail. It keeps the game’s numbers high but, at least for me, it also makes me just not enjoy my tme there.
If I was to ever enjoy Cata again, it would be in like 2 years after everybody stopped playing it. Unfortunately Blizzard doesn’t seem to want to do Era servers for anything except Vanilla.
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Well, first of all I have to take issue with the assertion that everyone treats random group-finder people poorly. Many people do, but it’s not necessarily universal. I want to be good to the people in my group regardless of the circumstances, even if I could be 100% certain that I’d never see them again or face negative repercussions. I’d rather everyone gets their fair share and has a good time playing the game. I’m really not interested in sacrificing that just to ninja some pixels.
I’ve always found the “you’ll never see them again” assumption to be a massive overstatement anyway, because I actually do tend to see those players again, sometimes in the very next dungeon or battleground. On the other hand, if I were to assume a priori that everyone else is a faceless rando, then I probably wouldn’t recognize those people next time I saw them, and the assumption would just be confirming itself.
So anyway…
I don’t have much stake in Cata classic either way. I probably won’t play it, but it doesn’t bother me that it exists. I had so much fun doing Classic Vanilla and TBC again that if Cata scratches that itch for other players, then I’m happy they get to experience that.
I didn’t hate it, but Cata was the first expansion that I remember not being obsessed with. I played fairly actively throughout, but I didn’t really like the changes they made to the overworld, especially after I was done with the initial re-exploration. I remember not liking the time-skip between WotLK and Cata, and not liking that they took some things away. I remember feeling by the end of WotLK that the classes had become too homogenized, and thinking that the differences had become mainly aesthetic. Some of those changes didn’t work for me, but I understand why they made them.
I liked some of the new zones (the dwarf one) and the new CtF battleground. I liked some of the dungeons but disliked others. I remember liking how they did faction rep with the tabards.
I hesitate to ascribe things like “The Decline of WoW” to any specific system or feature because the playerbase is so broad and varied. My interest started to wane in Cata and MoP, but it’s hard to know how much of that is because of changes to the game and how much was because I had been playing pretty heavily for several years by then. I think it was a little of both for me.
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For some reason Blizzard updated my character from level 25 to my actual level 80 but somehow thinks theyre two different characters lol. Wth. Anyway, yeah I’m glad you you are mature enough to allow others to enjoy it peacefully.