When you look at it from Blizzard’s point of view though, Wrath dungeons are an absolute faceroll. You can basically solo them they are that easy.
I didn’t quit wow because of any particular change. I just got hooked on league. I mean, before league, we played dota 6.xx after raid, after getting our arena games in. Maybe some CS, but mostly dota.
Arena queues weren’t as robust as classic, since we had battlegroups, and only bg9 was truly poppin. Of course, we would try league when it hits the market running like it did. Of course we would try it, as gamers, as dota enjoyers, as rpg players, as arena players. It had all the right draws for all the above, easy to get hooked. And the skill cap, so high. The game, so pure.
I mean you might not see it happening these days after 11-12 years. It has lost a lot of it’s luster, but it was quite spectacular for awhile, enough to make me forget all about this game for a long while.
Cata killed wow, not RDF.
4 Likes
Nah, Cata was ok. Nuking the talent trees did suck, as did destroying the old Azeroth. But I can see why they did it. And those things exist in Classic Era now anyway.
MoP also wasn’t bad. I didn’t like the butchered talent trees, but classes were still mostly fun. I ended up enjoying the dungeons. Challenge modes is how timed, challenging dungeon runs should be: rewards were transmog, mounts, pets, titles. That’s how you do difficult dungeon content. You don’t attach progression to it. Obviously it needs to reward valor as any dungeon would. But I’m pretty sure no gear actually dropped.
WoD is where WoW died. It became a completely different game with a completely different design philosophy. FUN was abandoned and everything adopted a…‘we need to time gate and string players along’ philosophy. Aka the Ion method. That’s when WoW ceased being a game and became a job. Casuals were given the absolute boot.
2 Likes
For a short while after they came out. 6 months in people would immediately drop if they got halls (specifically halls) due to it being slightly longer and one of the only heroics people could wipe on.
This is why they added the mount to OCC, because people would actively avoid it due to the length compared to other heroics and the vehicle mechanics.
I don’t know what you guys were experiencing. HoR was a home run. My groups loved it. Hiding in a corner and mass aoeing waves was as brain dead simple as anything. And the Lich King had a cool factor.
I’ll grant you the Oculus. And yeah Blizz had to encourage people to do that. I think there were extra emblems too.
Yeah the true evil was dynamic sharding and cross realm grouping. Once you lost the feeling of your local players, the game turned into lobby waiting.
Even RDF, with all its conveniences, would be totally fine if it only matched players within one realm. Even if the queues were forever long. But if you got in, at least you would know that you were all teleported from the same world and would be going back into the same world and could bump into each other.
2 Likes
I agree about WoW died in WoD, but I disagree about the reasoning to that. The problem with WoD wasn’t the design, it was just abandoned before its first major patch. Leaving an entire expansion with basically no content. Take patch 6.1 for example, where it is supposed to be a major content patch, and all we got was a S.E.L.F.I.E Camera, which was basically a toy to take a screenshot of your character as if it were a selfie.
Legion was where the complete changes came, with the introduction of Artifacts and Borrowed Power, and the endless grinding at the end, and none of that was made friendly towards alts. Mind you the ridiculous amount of RNG Legion had too. It was from Legion where it all fell downhill for Retail WoW, right up to Dragonflight.
Now, I can’t really say much for Dragonflight, because it is too early to really say what the expansion is like, considering we’re only on week 2 of the expansion. But judging by playing so far, I believe Dragonflight is taking a step in the right direction to playing the game that we all knew and love originally. But that is my own guess.
I think the two are related. I didn’t even play WoD until they put flying back in, though little did I know it would involve the terrible pathfinder nonsense that is based on the design philosophy shift I mentioned. It went from a system that you just got and enjoyed into a massive time-gated grind designed to slow players down and string them along. The design shift of the devs saying, “We know you enjoy flying. Have fun and go crazy!” to “How do we use this system we know the players love to manipulate them and string them along?” Which is just WoW design philosophy in a nutshell now.
As far as the lack of content, again that encourages the kind of design I’m talking about.
To relate it to a hot topic in Wrath Classic, think about RDF. It’s a system that increases accessibility, let’s players progress faster, and removes tedious time wasting. Can’t have that! Gotta slow players down. So that’s what they’ve done. That’s the same design philosophy I’m talking about. It’s not about FUN. It’s about metrics. It’s about pie charts and Ion’s player activity models. Getting players to play a certain way. Take away freedom and choice and put a collar around the players and lead them exactly where you want them to go.
This is what Ion did to the game, and this is what the clowns running Classic are doing to this project.
2 Likes
Pretty sure people on megaservers already don’t care.
That one guy you got? Probably won’t ever see him again.
And half the reason some people want RDF is because they want others from other servers, dead servers aren’t fun to be in.
4 Likes
It was Cata. Cata did it! Blame it on Cata. lol Now that we’ve got that squared away. Love the group finder though.
1 Like
The design change happened in Legion with the class/spec overhaul of “play the spec, not the class”. They became gimmicky shells.
1 Like
That’s fair, but still I think even on a megaserver it’s nice to know that you’re with people that are going to continue about their day on the same realm after the run and they’re not going to dissipate into nothingness after. You’re still going to go to the same AH to buy enchants for the loot that dropped and you might even see them there in the crowd. I think it adds to the game, even if in a very subtle way.
The sense of locality gives more meaning to things in MMOs, otherwise you’re just interacting with anonymous bots pretty much.
1 Like
Cataclysm killed wow let’s just be honest.
4 Likes
RDF didn’t kill WoW. What RDF represents killed WoW. Which really means, Wrath and its mindset killed WoW as we knew it.
Wrath put the pedal to the metal when it came to becoming Retail. The being said, it might have been better for Blizzard. I’m not sure how people would react to becoming gate kept and feeling “behind” by maintaining the OG Vanilla and to a lesser extent OG TBC mindset .
Can we please just have 5 man vanilla dungeons back
2 Likes
There really is no reason not to open RDF to Normals only 15 - 80.
1 Like
Ok, wrath was the last expansion of the Warcraft og Story line. Id say it was a good Trilogy. Great way to end the game. Almost anyone who would have come back after woltk but didn’t all say it was because of the pandas. So id say its not knowing that your community that has enjoyed playing a semi lovecraftian high magic universe would not be into, a group of time wizards time screwing your timeline and erasing all of your heroic achievements, as well as a bunch of cuddly pandas somehow whooping your boot with sticks. that and the players felt like the game was continuously being numbed down instead of being given more options to make their toon their own they were given less and less options as time went on.
Another boring thread to mute.
RDF killed dungeon design.