I wonder if these metrics have changed just because all the non-raider players have quit/retreated to ffxiv. I kinda wanna buy some time to come unlock eredar and stuff but I think I’d do that in an afternoon and not really have anything else I wanna do because the game is still so raid/mythic focused. I could level a Draenei Warlock alt too and I guess that’d be fun but again, post-shadowlands leveling is something I could knock out in a weekend and I don’t really wanna spend money for that brief empty experience
I might come play to do the retail stuff I want and then try classic stuff, because classic appears to be the game where they are working on interesting non-raider game modes and content, but I’d love to see stuff like what classic is getting in the main game
this is where BFA went wrong imo. All that Azerite and Sylv didnt think to make the rest of the Forsaken like Nathanos??
new Allied race, DARK HUMANS (they can make babies)
it doesnt need to. especially not tied to dailies or current content. thats taking a fun concept and making it a chore (see Garrisons)
Even the Halfhill market didnt really serve a purpose outside of the Cooking Profession (no dailies, though you did have to grow stuff. but its a farm so c’mon) we have toys that serve no purpose other than rp appearances
Found my post (originally from my Trading Post thread lol but I reposted it in a Kirsy thread about player housing) about how to give player housing gameplay mechanics without it actually becoming like Garrisons or just being…there.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the sentiment that player housing needs to somehow be tied to vertical player progression. It doesn’t need to be anything other than another way to play the game for people who aren’t as interested in running Wigglebottom Citadel 40 times in a row to get their BiS trinket.
Dragonflight has been a welcome change to gearing and player power since there aren’t any mandatory grinds, but it’s also highlighted how little there actually is to do in WoW outside of the “big three” (M+, raids, PvP). I’ve said this in other threads but I’ll keep saying it until Blizzard makes some changes: FFXIV has way more content, overall, because there are so many “game modes” that you can prioritize if running on the gear treadmill isn’t your thing.
Housing is one of those game modes, and I think WoW can only be better for adding such a much-requested, inevitably evergreen feature. It would breathe all kinds of life into professions as well: think about all of the furniture items only craftable by tailors, blacksmiths, alchemists, scribes, jewelcrafters, etc. that could be added in patches at any time.
I love WoW, but it desperately needs to expand its options (and it seems like they understand that, which is what I think led to the creation of Delves). Such a titan of the MMO landscape deserves no less.
I really don’t see where people are getting the ‘omg player housing MUST have endgame raid features’ or anything of the sort from what I said, lol. I really only just want a house that offers stuff to do rather than just a mostly static storage area. Gameplay mechanics in the sense that you have to actually interact with the place instead of just standing there.
I feel like WoW’s raiding philosophy is a bit of a relic, a holdover from when there was no real meaningful content in MMOs beyond raiding and looting. The genre and the technology have both grown since then and so has the audience.
FFXIV has proven that people will consume the content that isn’t raiding, if it’s there. A significant number of them might actually prefer it. Let’s not forget that an RPG is about building a character and the more ways you can do that beyond just looting, the better.
What I’m saying is I’m not really that excited about Earthen as an Allied Race.
I really only just want a house that offers stuff to do rather than just a mostly static storage area. Gameplay mechanics in the sense that you have to actually interact with the place instead of just standing there.
I get where you’re coming from, but as someone who is fortunate enough to be a homeowner on FFXIV, I can assure you that it’s not just “yay I have a house, now I have a new place to stand around”. I have invested hours upon hours of game time decorating and rearranging the items in my house to create a comfortable, cozy space, not to mention the amount of time I spent going out into the world to acquire materials to make furniture (or complete achievements that reward certain decorative items that can’t be crafted). And also the money I’ve made selling duplicates of those furniture items on the marketboard.
The content is there. Please take it from me, it’s not just a new inn room for the people who really want this feature.
This is why I say the raid or die mentality is a relic.
The casual aspects of an MMO (dressing up, collecting, decorating and expression) are relentlessly devoured when those aspects are present. We have so much proof of this. There’s no reason Blizzard couldn’t try to benefit from this.
I do wish I had an inn room, though. I really enjoyed that part of the game.
Seeing the road Blizzard has been taking with Warcraft, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these desires are put in game. Their philosophy with the game has changed dramatically with Dragonflight
the cutthroat housing market of final fantasy makes me think that WoW would really be in a good position to best them on this front if they properly tried, because I do think it is true that FFXIV has some very flawed systems.
The fact that many/most players won’t be able to own a house is an obvious example, that implementation is sort of nutty. In my time in FFXIV I only ever owned the private room in a FC house, so I didn’t really get to enjoy the system fully because buying a house in that game is quite difficult.
And FFXIV’s glamour system is incredibly cumbersome compared to WoW’s mog. They win the fashion game overall since WoW is still struggling to get away from “armor that’s just a texture applied to the character model”, but that’s changing too–they’re adding skirts! Behold my beauty!
WoW has the best fundamentals of any MMO, it feels like a newer game then FFXIV in some respects despite its age, and I think it’d do really well with the casual collector RPer sort of crowd if it properly tried, rather than focusing most of their effort on the raid/m+ crowd
There are entire communities of people who buy games that weren’t made for building, just for creative mode in those games, so they can build, design and decorate.
Valheim is one such game. I’ve played through the actual game only a couple times but I’ve spent the majority of my time in Valheim, in godmode, building. Conan Exiles is a good game, but I log into it to build and design.
I bought Sons of the Forest, just so I could log into godmode and play with the building systems. I am far from the only one who has done this.
Of all the people I’ve played WoW with over the years who no longer play that I’m still friends with, they all say the same thing - legit player housing would bring them back.
I don’t like calling businesses stupid, but Blizz is stupid for not already doing it.
tangent but I’d love to see an MMO add an ARK/Valheim/Conan/Rust-mode as like, a side activity.
That would obviously be quite a big side activity but these games are rather simple at their core in the sense of “not requiring huge amounts of assets and handcrafted content”, which is why they have often been developed with smaller indie teams.
They tend to be sort of lame on a mechanical level when it comes to combat, and very bad on the character creation level (nobody is playing ARK to customize their caveman I think), but if those systems could be grafted onto an existing game that already has robust combat and chargen it’d be really neat
if player housing is off the table maybe give me a zone where I have to eat berry to not die idk
The closest thing to what I’m describing where survival mechanics were grafted onto an already good game is Fallout 76 I guess, which was a little misguided since Bethesda games are fun as single player games and were poorly suited to being translated into a multiplayer rust-like (although I know some people do like that game a lot, and I personally haven’t played it since release so maybe its a lot of fun now). But I’d play WoW 76
Taliesin had a compelling argument/thought about why he thinks housing could come in Midnight.
As for raiding, there are numbers out there that say 10-20% of players are getting ahead of the curve and 50% or higher are completing normal.
M+ has overtaken raiding because it’s less people and less scheduling.
FYI: wowhead’s numbers are not accurate for this stuff, so if you see “3% of players got KSM” that is so, so off.
On the PvE server I play on, almost everyone I talk to is raiding and the great majority of people are doing keys. PvE is not dead weight in this game by any means.
On RP servers, RP is the main social aspect of the game for most.
On other servers, it’s PvP or PvE.
Interesting is how deeper the nerd hole goes for PvP and PvE vs. RP nowadays. The amount of addons, math, simming etc. is wild.
It’s incredibly disappointing that they didn’t add housing as a feature for 11.0, the game’s 20th anniversary… announcing a “block” of expansions might make for an interesting Blizzcon but the 20th anniversary is coming and when it does, we’ll be in a giant cave with Earthen as the new thing – wtf???
The game isn’t ending with the World Soul Saga, though. They’ve outright stated it won’t, it won’t lead to “WoW 2” etc. in dev interviews after Blizzcon.