Zereth Mortis has barely any content and it’s so timegated and the rep grind is so wild that honestly I don’t really even want to try. I got to chapter 3, did the weekly and saw… 500 rep from the chest. Yeah honestly I guess I’ll probably not participate then. Too bad because the art and sound is mind-blowing, but like always, the amazing effort the art team put in is held back by the insane design decisions and inability to listen to your playerbase.
I guess I just don’t want to farm a slog of a rep with more dailies designed to actually waste your time. Why do the items you need to use to finish quests have such long cooldowns? I don’t enjoy sitting there and waiting for 20 seconds so I can then finally click the quest objective in front of me and get to 1/20 of something. Even worse, this rep slog is even slower than Korthia, and Korthia just took a lot out of me.
And seriously, making me earn flying again? I don’t even know what to say about that. What point is there in “earning” anything then if you’re just gonna make us “earn” it again next time you release another content starved patch?
Speaking of, there’s really hardly any content. Like I said the art is great but really? This is all you put out after SO LONG that we have all waited and given you a sub fee?
Also who decided that I want to do puzzles in these areas? Does anyone actually log on their character and say wow, can’t wait to go do that puzzle? There’s already add-ons to solve them for you, that’s how hated they are. If I wanted to do puzzles maybe I would have went and installed some puzzle game, but I didn’t. I installed an MMO where I was actually hoping to PLAY MY CHARACTER. Please just let me play my character and focus on the combat and not stupid little puzzles meant for children. I’m not in grade school anymore.
For people who like to PvP I guess you better get good at those puzzles because you’ll have to farm 1873918 of them before you get enough rep to actually get past these systems and do anything decent in PvP. I mean, you weren’t hoping you could just log on and do some arena or RBG’s or anything right? Haha.
Why is Poco time-gated too?! Are you serious? He has energy that takes time to earn back. Why is this treated like some mobile game? Is his energy really necessary? It’s just inconvenient and stupid and blocks you from doing what you want for ZERO reason.
Why is LFR time-gated? For people who want to only go as far as LFR, I guess come back in 8 weeks when it’s actually out and you actually get to play it. Meanwhile the people who raid can just go ahead and get a huge head-start on both storyline AND gear (not that LFR rewards good gear anyway).
I see people posting “this has way more content than Korthia did” and frankly they’re out of their minds.
Not only was there way more to do in 9.1 in Korthia/Maw, but it was way more rewarding and had something for everyone.
ZM is very light on content because Blizzard caved in to the “we don’t want to play the game” crowd.
I’m doing it because I’m a completionist and a collector, but I think most people would be just fine skipping the zone entirely apart from doing the story campaign, and they’d never even notice.
They do not make decisions with ‘fun’ as their core metric. They say, ‘how can we make this take time?’
Just look at where the quests are located as one more example. The thing to upgrade your robot is across the zone from where you zone in. And another quest hub is across the zone from that.
It’s as if they said ‘people didn’t spend enough time each day in Korthia. So instead of having a cave right below zone in where we do our patch research stuff, let’s make it take some extra minutes to get there.’
WoW wants as much of your life as it can get. They act like they are paid by the minute we play, rather than by our sub.
Doesn’t take any time at all if the zone has no reason to do it so people don’t.
I think the notion that Blizzard is designing stuff just to take more time is off-base. I think they design things a certain way because they feel like it. Otherwise they wouldn’t have made a pointless zone like Zereth Mortis.
I definitely agree that they do not think about the game from the player’s perspective.
I’m just saying if they do consider us at all, it is often only after people tell them how bad something feels. And when they do think about us, it often feels like they consider us as sheep who need to have time consuming activities with minor rewards to keep us coming back to the feeder.
They made the rat race more obvious by making it a circle.
Then when they pull the lever the center ball raises up and we will be
flushed out of the game.
Isn’t ZM basically just a catch-up zone? I like the gear and options for that, makes me think they made it so people can level and gear up their alts quicker.
For real. There’s no excuse for this. They should have seen that what they were about to release took players roughly 4 hours to complete before they hit the timegate. That’s unacceptable for a game like WoW.
Everyone went back to Lost Ark and a lot of people dropped it for Elden Ring or other stuff.
Hell, I even know some people ditching for the new GW2 expansion. 9.2 ain’t good.
That “player engagement” thing you see on their quarterly report? That super undefined and unclear term? That’s what they’re designing the game for. It’s not for fun or anything like that.
The directions they’ve taken the game in SL to eek out as much time (without adding actual content) makes it all the more obvious, too.
Forced taxis between the four original zones
Artifact/azerite power auto-collected. Anima power required a trip to a NPC to deposit, which is just more time wasted.
Legion/BfA dailies were there for you to do upon login. In SL they made you go to your covenant sanctum first to accept the daily, then fly back out to complete the daily, then fly back to turn it in.
The list goes on and on when you really think about it. They’re designing the game to waste your time, not to be fun or rewarding.
I enjoy the zone, and my baby alts are loving the free 226+ gear, but I have to agree with this statement. I completed the story line and I have no intentions of spending hours upon hours chasing rares.
Although I’m not too hurt about the low content right now, as I’m still focusing on alts until 10.0 and all that fun jazz. It is a fun zone to be in, and I’m excited to see the raid (may actually attempt to find a guild to raid with this patch).
All in all, they’re wrapping this up to be another WoD where it’s cut short.
Yeah, I can get that. I have no clue what all goes into a game of this size and don’t pretend to understand. I feel that this release went really well - the best I’ve seen in awhile. I say let them move at their pace. These things take time I’m sure.