I think that’s one of Blizzard’s greatest issues just in general with WoW at least in the last couple of years.
If something works well, they will start making reiterating it until it loses sight of what made it good in the first place. See Legion Artifact AP grind and the World Quest system.
If something doesn’t work well, they will shoot it out back and never mention it again. See Garrison system.
You have oddities that somehow start off as a bad idea, but just keep getting dragged back worse and worse, such as the Mission Table, but I’d argue something like that exists purely for metrics.
That’s one of the main reasons why I’m optimistic on Dragonflight. Instead of taking something and trying to reinvent the wheel like Old Blizzard could do, Current Blizzard is just taking what they know works and doing as little reiteration as possible, which hopefully means they can continue building off of it going forward.
I’m playing a bit of WotLK Classic and I will say for me it’s great, not perfect, but great in my opinion.
But I will give it credit, it knew how to make use of what little it does have without getting itself lost in it’s own BS. I’m playing Paladin (because of course I am) and the class feels complete from the get go without having to add in or consider much else.
Since they’re wanting to go with smaller but more frequent patches, maybe without having to constantly build and tend the mandatory borrowed power grind systems we’ll see more smaller optional grinds. A small patch with something akin to the Argent Tournament for example I think would go over quite well.
Which is honestly the best course of action they can take in my opinion.
If players stop playing a game because they’ve done everything they wanted to do, they will consistently come back when there’s new things to do .
If players stop playing a game because they got fed up with doing crap they don’t want to do, nothing is going to bring them back, short of an addiction.
Let me correct an illusion you have. World of Warcraft is not the only video game out there in a world with thousands of them. You do not need to only play World of Warcraft exclusively. You do not need to play one character exclusively. You can take breaks to avoid burn out, you can have other hobbies to do things with your time. Its not world of warcraft or nothing. Take this opportunity to enjoy the time you do play the game and find new or different things away from your main character or account while not being punished for wanting to do something different for once.
I rather have no AP grind system of any kind than boring and tedious grinds that mean nothing but burning time for the sake of burning time.
do not bait and switch on me.
There ARE facts. They lost a huge number of subs at specific points in the game. WoD / 2015 for example. This company DID SOMETHING SPECIFIC AT THAT TIME that caused people to leave in droves.
it was GAME related. CONTENT related.
Im NOT interested in this little game youre trying to play here where you seem tot think Im stupid enough to NOT KNOW players leaving is BECAUSE the company did something to make them leave…bad content, trying to remove flight, 100 other idiotic bad decisions.
…and IF I want to keep playing the game, I can go run old content, farm old mats, pets and mounts or even, as you hint at, run an alt or two thru the content.
IF I have to choose between some boring, tedious, brain dead AP style grind (or crap like anima) and doing something I WANT to do, I’ll take the latter.
Yes we do lol. Literally from WoD onward the game has been in decline. Legion brought back a lot of people because it brought back systems people enjoyed, BFA and SL have been horribly damaging to the game because of the horrid systems, people dont like them, so people stop playing the game.
People flocked to classic, and look what happened? DF is touting talent trees and actual professions like they just discovered the wheel.
Clearly they did something better than this current team has been doing for 3/4 expansions since 2015 or so…WoD thru SLs…with the exception maybe of Legion.
I complained about how the Legion artifact became the focus of my game INSTEAD of my character being the focus. But honestly, what came after was so much worse that I’ll never complain about the Legion weapon again. It at least had personality. Azerite gear? Please.
I think Ion is personally OBSESSED with systems. I think he thinks THAT is an RPG and not the content itself. The last two expansions have pretty much confirmed that in my mind.
Like I’ve said in my previous post. They had a good idea with Legion artifacts.
A system that you empower over the course of the expansion, with added rewards like appearances that people can collect and enjoy. While the player power portion got annoying really quick, the appearances and the like was very well received. Because who doesn’t like getting a cool weapon skin?
That was the lesson that should have been taken and reiterated on. Players weren’t particularly big fans of endlessly grinding player power, but they will chase after that appearance carrot. They could have leaned into that, (sorry stealing another idea from XIV) maybe even make expansion based weapon skins for each class that you could spend the expansion unlocking.
Instead…they went with “Clearly players love the AP power grind” and made Azerite armor…
My stance on the artifact weapons has not changed since legion.
Great idea that could have been amazing if they put a hard cap on the levels you had to acquire, and they removed the type of relics, IE no blood, iron, fire, ect ect. Just 3 relic slots you could put what ever you wanted into them.
Ive been playing computer games since Pong was first out many years ago. lol.
Over the years Ive come to learn, because of playing so many various games, if Im going to like a game or not simply by its description. Because Ive played pretty much anything one can imagine.
Had I started WoW in WoD, BFA or SLs, Id have lasted about a month before I quit playing entirely.
Luckily, I started with Legion, which is far better than any of those. The garrison alone nearly made me quit WoW the first time I hit WoD before I got a chance to play Legion content (which was current at the time).
I loved retail WoW at the time, the content, all the way thru Mists, but when I hit WoD I couldnt stand it. HATED the garrison. HATED the empty feel of the content.
I decided to stick it out till I got to current content, Legion.
Thankfully I did and loved it. The weapon was a bit of a let down, more focus on it than my character, but not enough to not like the content itself.
I wanted to like BFA. I really did. Felt like Mists 2.0 at first. But quickly devolved into vomitous system overload.
Same with SL’s. Though SL’s felt even more empty than WoD had. BFA at least felt like I wanted to be there if they hadnt turned it into the crap of farming tiny shards of feces day after day. SL’s really had nothing that made me want to be in the content…at all. Nothing. Not even the mogs were a good enough hook.
That poster can try to pretend we dont know why players left the game.
Yeah…we DO know why…the game turned into SUCK at a point.
players dont quit games theyre enjoying.
They quit games that SUCK.
I genuinely think classic has been a wake up call for retail blizzard. Its brought a lot of people back into the game. Blizzard really needs to refocus on what made the game good.
VERY well said.
I wont bother with vacuous crap like system grinding, but I WiLL persue a great appearance I can get IF its not going to be some eterna-grind with a 0.0000001% chance of dropping, lol.
But even then, i might run it here and there just for a chance. lol.
I really think IF Ion can keep from doing something very stupid, that DF has found the spirit of the old game in a list of ways.
I found myself WANTING to run alts nearly immediately. The exact opposite happened in WoD, BFA and SL…the thought of alts was nauseating .
I think you can attribute that to the fact that it was the ONLY thing to do in wod vs up until then you could log in and do a lot of other content besides raid logging.
