Bingo. Player power (either gear or unlocked buffs and abilities) is the single biggest motivator for almost all types of MMORPG players.
Zaralek Caverns is dead because the above ground offered more player power even when Caverns was first released. Mage Tower is dead because it offers no player power.
10.2 might not be much better because I don’t see many reliable ways of earning Champion gear or higher level crests from the open world.
DF devs chose to appeal to higher end players over the health of the game. We have more systems than ever, but they don’t fully benefit the open world, casual, and solo players that form the bulk of what WoW’s active population used to be.
Configuration. Building for TD or Stars or Amps, slots in the neck, using different abilities than you usually have.
Being strong. Their preferred classes were Meta during that time. That certainly helps.
M+ was really fun during that time. A great dungeon, very well received seasonal affix.
It was also before shadowlands took a massive poo all over the universe/lore.
All in all, BfA was really fun for people who just do endgame. I enjoyed it. You’re conflating forums and community. The forums are like 20 raccoons in a trench coat. Most of the personalities are alts of the same 5 people. It’s not a good measure of what people find fun.
I missed the part where they claimed to represent the player base. You could also start a podcast and put your opinion out to the masses instead of being a key board warrior if you disagree with them that much.
The echo chamber makes this claim all the time. They are always bringing up their favorite point which the devs are ignoring saying “The devs ignored THE PLAYERS” when they have no idea if what they are saying is what “THE PLAYERS” want.
Now if they said, “The deves ignored SOME PLAYERS that agree with us”, then fine.
I’d argue this is because all of the open world content, besides dragon races which are awesome, is the same generic crap we’ve been doing for at least 3 expansions. How many rare / daily quest zones can they possibly make?
I think both Legion and BFA proved that you honestly dont need anything but go and kill one WQ boss here if the rewards are fun / good enough.
I think the success of Classic WoW also proves that the bar for content is actually very very low. If millions of ppl were willing to spend an hour getting world buffs to fight a boss that takes 50 seconds to kill, and only pressing frostbolt.
Regarding WQs I never during BFA thought to myself, what Blizzard need to do is add some kind of convoluted world quest that takes 10 minutes to do, yet that is what they did in Shadowlands lol.
If you disagree with the points I am making you can take up being a keyboard warrior urself and try and argue with me. The points dont become more valid by making a podcast lol.
What annoys you is that ultimately I am right. They all complained, like others have pointed out in this thread, about the vast majority of stuff in BFA, yet now point to that expansion (S4) to being the most fun they ever had?
It is the same with Legion complainers. But but… but… the expansion was terrible until the last patch?
Then why did we not see a MASSIVE drop-off in players during Legion? Why did this massive drop-off occur in Dragonflight? The GOAT expansion with the best patch cadence™ just weeks into S2 of DF? Where by the way Augvoker and all the balance issues did not exist.
Again, they are simply completely out of touch with reality, and do not understand that WoW players a very very simple people. WoW players play for a fun power progression system.
Yes Legion and BFA had a lot, and I mean A LOT of stuff to grind. Even if you ignore all other BFA stuff, and only look at corruptions and only look at the final part of the corruption patch with deterministic acquisition, that was still a really big grind (compared to what we have now).
DF has barely anything to grind.
Which expansion is more successful? Turns out maybe WoW, the game that has ALWAYS been associated with grinding… is more about… grinding? Than dull cold poridge gitgud endgame content? Which barely anyone does anymore?
Again it should be painfully obvious that I am making generalizations about what the WoW playerbase wants.
Y’all, people like OP are incapable of forming their own thoughts and rely on content creators to do it for them. It’s a case of lights are on, no one is ever home though, kind of deal.
I think Classic kind of proved how popular those expansions were, I don’t recall anyone complaining about TBC or Wrath years later.
Classic has a pretty big population right now, as far as MMOs go.
I fully expected to see your name in this thread, making excuses yet again for Blizzard.
I saw a thread pop up on Google from 5 years ago, something that was similar to this thread, and what do you know, 3 posts down was a Goblin poster named Akston making excuses then.
This is how games slowly die off, the feedback gets drowned out by people that make a job out of making excuses for a company that clearly hasn’t been doing a great job the last several years.
I’d love to see your source for this claim.
I think MMO populations overall have increased, way more gamers now than there were 5-10 years ago.
They’re just spread out among more games, we have more MMOs right now than we have ever had. I include games like Warframe and Destiny 2 in this category.
This is something the other big MMOs get. FF14 for all its faults, really knows how to capture the attention of your typical MMO player, ESO, same deal. Those games would be bigger if they didn’t have their own set of problems which are kind of baked into the core of said games.
Edit:
The top end players are the main problem with this game. Way too much focus for over a decade was put on these player types. Designing your MMO around competitive esport players is just a recipe for disaster.
All the flavor and soul has been constantly stripped out of the game in order to bring balance to Mythic raids, rated arena pvp and now M+.
WoW gets its DNA from DnD table top games, and this is why people were attracted to it in the first place, basically just one big online DnD session when you log on.
Retail WoW has strayed so far from this original design in an effort to appease a small portion of people that want to play the game competitively.
It killed the soul of what made this game so great.
Also visions gave some good gear as well, depending if you were missing some pieces and ofc corruptions, based on how many masks were active.
It wasn’t really hard, but not easy either, close to a single player merit(higher difficulty = more effort = better rewards) based system of acquiring gear.
I wish they’d put vision type of challenges again for some single player gear acquisition…
Savior, no. Representative, yes. Even Bellular, who played a role in giving development feedback, thinks he is a typical player. He’s not a great player. He’s a guy who pushes keys and does heroic raiding. He’s also a raid/key logger who likes to log in once or twice a week and leave it at that. And he’s really happy with the game, and really confused why people who have always played differently from him haven’t come back now that the game is great.
Blizzard simply can’t accept that if they want to be a massive game with a massive number of players, they have to do research that enables them to serve more than one player demographic. They can’t accept that fact. It’s pure business sense that if you decide to serve only part of your customer base, the ones you are neglecting will leave, as so many did in advance of DF.
