What ? you think EU / asian ppl like gating ? NO
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Dunno about Chinese players. One way out example. The Chinese government doesn’t want Chinese players to be online grinding 24/7. They want players to “play in moderation.” So either Blizzard’s Chinese partner will have to enforce hard time limits on how long players can be online (like parental controls enforced by government regulators) or Blizzard can introduce elements into its game design to accomplish the same goal.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-07-21/american-game-developers-china-surveillance
So is time gating something used to force gamers to play in “moderation”? What’s good for China is good for everyone else, right?
China has a different client too. Undead models are different, all bones and skeletons are removed or covered up, basically tons of censorship. If they can put that kind of effort in for them then they can tailor time gates for the chinese market and leave the US alone.
If they wanted to…
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exactly. they could customize the experience. it would actually be easier than making new models for undeads. the real reasons why devs created pathfinder is so people are forced to see the content they created and to delay unsubscribtion. to me these are bad reasons, but i guess blizzard sees this as more money in their pockets. we cant blame them for that. lets just keep saying they are bad game designers.
I’d be perfectly fine with pathfinder IF it unlocked flying as soon as you completed it. We’ve seen and done all the content and there is no reason to put that spiteful time gate on flying.
quite the opposite. it is fine that we cannot fly 100% of the time. but stop gating flying behind days and days and days of WQs. it should be one long questline palyers can complete in one single (but long) shot.
The reason I say I’m fine with pathfinder is it gives flying to your account. Just do away with the time gate and I’d instantly preorder the next expansion.
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Not only do I disagree with that explanation, it really ticks me off. I’ve got a mom. Yes, she lives in a retirement community in Florida, but I sure don’t need nor want Blizz to pick up the slack. I don’t have to listen to you, Blizz, you ain’t my real daddy!
Most of all it’s just grotesquely wrong. There’s never nothing to do in WoW, and even if you could teleport yourself around the map by clicking on where ever you want to be you’d still never run out of things to do. As long as you desire to play WoW, there is something for you to do. That’s just an absolute fact.
The problem arises when you do not desire to play. Which for me was all of the time leading up to flying in BFA save for a single month somewhere in the middle where I quickly unsubbed and waited for flying. Then the horrific rep grind when flying was released completely soured me on the game again.
WoW without flying is like punching yourself in the face every time you blink. I wasn’t bored with nothing to do, I wanted to play WoW, but NOT being able to fly just made the game so horrible I had no desire to play at all.
It’s because of the absolutely dreadful terrain design. I couldn’t fly in old school WoW, but there were roads you could travel safely. There were also huge open areas with plenty of room to strategically plan your attack and retreat if need be. You can’t turn around without pulling half a dozen mobs today, and they’ll fear you into a dozen more. It’s shamefully bad.
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The really sad part if that Blizzard will just set everybody back to 60, and the idiots around here will think ‘look at all the stuff I get to earn now’, that they just took away and you have to re-earn again.
The game is out of space. For the last three expansions we’ve had things taken away only to earn them back. Then they throw away the content from the previous expansion. Got rid of old enchanting, got rid of first aid, only to use that space for other things.
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more like the current deve team is out of ideas since theyre not as passionate or perhaps as talented as their predecessors
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And that design changed in WoD, the expac they supposedly designed to show us how amazing a world without flight could be. The terrible terrain design is 100% intentional as a means to slow us down and force us to engage mobs.
It’s ironic that expansions which were designed with a flight-at-level cap mindset have zones which are more ground friendly (outside of areas like Storm Peaks, which were intended to be navigated with flying).
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I think many of the players here either have short memories, or they’re just ignorant about the behavior of players who consume content quickly during the beginning of expansions. There have been tons of instances where players will hit max level on the first day of an expansion release, and then several days later, those same players will complain about there not being anything to do.
And then they’ll have the audacity to blame Blizzard for “not putting out enough content,” never realizing that the problem is them. The game isn’t made to consume new content in one day, hell, probably not even for one week. And when they’re bored because they’ve run through all the content, then here they’ll come to the forums to moan and complain about Blizzard not doing enough to keep us entertained. Many of them need to check themselves.
There have been tons of instances where players will hit max level on the first day of an expansion release, and then several days later, those same players will complain about there not being anything to do.
Maybe, and just roll with me here, the problem is that the content at the end isn’t worth playing? The existence of Classic should indicate that consuming the content doesn’t immediately trigger a loss in subs, otherwise people wouldn’t WANT to go back to it.
That’s just a subjective opinion, though. For players like myself, the endgame content is worth playing, especially if you’ve engaged yourself in the storyline and not just clicked on NPCs, skimmed at the quest objectives, and then quickly done the quest so you can reach max level. This is an MMORPG, after all.
In Classic, you’re not going to be able to consume content as quickly as we can in Retail, and that’s going to be the poison that seeps in the blood of Classic for many players because they will get a rude awakening at how much slower it’ll be to level up, not to mention how much harder the mobs will be (requiring HP and MP replenishment after almost every mob).
The main thing keeping the hype for Classic alive is nostalgia. Once people who complain about the leveling systems in Retail experience the leveling pacing in Classic, they’ll come to realize why so many changes were made up to Retail.
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I have played mmorpgs that try and cater to the no life hardcore player. It never ends well. When you try and create time sinks for that 10% that play 10 hours a day, eventually joe average falls so far behind that he just gives up and plays something else.
One of Blizzards smartest decisions in 2004 was to cater to the average gamer. So many people will tell you how hardcore vanilla wow was. Those of us who played before WoW laugh at that statement. Vanilla WoW was not hardcore at all. I also do not think WoW has gotten easier over the years. It has actually gotten harder. But Blizzard has done well to keep catering to people who actually have lives.
Pathfinder however is not something Blizzard has done well. The game was fine with flying before WoD. Why they had to create this mess of non problem is beyond me. Ironically WoD is where players ran out of content, yet that is where pathfinder started. So no, I don’t
think Pathfinder has fixed anything. In fact flying was not a problem to begin with, except in the minds of some blind devs.
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And that’s how you shoot yourself in the foot. Sticking to bad decisions tends to backfire, horribly. Investors would have soon started asking why there was such a huge dip in the # of players and the corresponding loss of profit. They would have been … less than pleased to hear it was caused by Blizzard’s ego.
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That was in fact what it was built for. There was a game called Evercrack, loaded with many nasty bad things. Blizzard saw these things was costing them subs. They figured if they went the Opposite Direction they could nab up a bunch of these fleeing subs.
And they were right. It worked. Classic was a whopping success.
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Need to disagree a bit here. I do not think it is so much an issue of consuming content too quickly as it is skipping it altogether. Many people want to get to end game things (mythic+ at that point i’d think) as fast as possible). Doing a run of all of the quests in the various zones isn’t the best way to accomplis this.
Running through everything on at least one toon will kill time. You will also complete everything required to clear each zone. Also, it gives you a nice lead in the much hated reputation grind. Beginning at honored is better than starting at neutral or lower.
China has age based restrictions on how long people can play online games. Blizzard doesn’t have to change any content to comply with that law.
You’re talking about cosmetic changes.
I doubt Blizzard would re-work or customize quest lines or the storyline by region. They’d just tailor the game to what they think regulators would approve and bake them into retail WoW.