I see this sentiment repeated through out this thread but there’s a big difference between now and then.
Back in Vanilla and BC, even wrath a little, it took forever to level to the cap, and not everyone had almost every class there like they do now.
In retail wow I just leveled my shaman from 50-60 in a day using timewalking dungeons…
Leveling alts isn’t the long term content filler that it used to be before systems existed.
Yep. Recently leveled a character in WOTLK classic. it took 3-4 days of /played with a 50% level boost. And it took a similar amount of time to get to 80.
You keep advocating for changes that will continue to kill the game you pretend to love. What ever you’re doing keep insulting the people here while actively trying to kill the game off to anger others.
They repeat variations of their previous mistakes. lol.
A skunk by any other name…
Good ol’ Ion: a player who went so hard upside their head with his spreadsheets that they hired him.
Exactly and that’s when a lot of people became upset.
Cata wasn’t a popular expac for a different reason.
Systems are fine when contained inside GOOD content.
Ion doesnt do that, however. He makes BAD content then uses those systems to try to force you to play it by dangling crap like cool looking BFA backpacks on string out in front so you’ll play the game. lmao.
just make a GOOD game and the systems wont be noticed as much.
If the quest is fun, I’ll play it. If it rewards some AP or anima, fine.
If the questing sucks, offering me AP or anima to buy some mog 6 months later is just cheap and lazy.
AP type grind is an activity for players not everyone is required to do it so there’s no reason to complain about it when developers give into whiners like this it ruins the game that is why right now World of Warcraft has not been ranked 1 in the world in the past year Final Fantasy took over that torch a year ago as far as player count
How is that different from now?
WoD’s problem wasn’t due to people thinking that the typical leveling/end-game options were bad. It was due to garrisons taking some of those options away, particularly the open-world elements. For example, in older xpacs, you could do dailies in the open world to earn rep. In WoD, they took that away and funneled everything into garrison missions and/or participating in a nauseating mob grind to get little bits of rep with each kill.
I don’t know about you, but clicking “Go” on a mission command table isn’t my idea of fun gameplay. And that’s alot of what WoD was outside of raiding, dungeons, and PvP. The only thing WoD had going for it for open world was the plethora of treasures and rares you could find. That was genuinely fun and a good change that carried over from MoP onwards that I’m still glad to see in the game today. But switching out dailies for endless mob grinds and/or garrison missions just felt awful.
To piggyback off my own reply:
Another example was that blizzard was working on something called, “path of the titans” that was supposedly some type of alternate advancement system that wound up getting scrapped and turned into archeology.
I think things like that add more depth to the game other than the raid or die mentality.
Im a solo player and even Im nauseated by how all consuming the garrison is/was.
And that kind of stuff was the ONLY thing that kept me really going. I love flying around the map post mortem finding all that stuff.
I enjoyed it. I was only disappointed by the stripped down, bare bones version we got as opposed to was was teased at their announcement of it.
So we agree daily quests are the secret sauce.
It had multiple reps, and they were completely in timegated, but they just had a single assault daily and then mob grinds.
It had all the dungeons, raids, PvP, achievements, mounts, pets, etc., of past expansions. It had the lowest barrier to entry for a lot of content, especially PvP maybe ever.
How content is delivered is the secret sauce imo. Time-gated content like grinds & dailies have always existed in the game. But how they have been implemented has differed over time. It’s about finding the right balance between the time-gated aspects and creating content that actually feels engaging and fulfilling to participate in.
So, if we take WoD, it had time-gating that was similar to past xpacs but it lacked engagement due to how garrisons were baked into gameplay. And when you look at Shadowlands, the time-gating elements have been dialed up to the extreme, which is one of the reasons why so many people have been unhappy with SL content. If Blizzard is actually able to strike up a better balance in Dragonflight vs. swinging too wildly in one direction or another, I think the xpac has a pretty good chance of being successful.
Sub numbers without the “why” are useless. There’s a lot more factors that influence the overall.
I used to know a lot of people IRL that played, almost none still do, and most of them just don’t play MMOs anymore if they even still play vgs at all.
Dragonriding is dull AF.
Hilariously, Elitist Jerks was specifically made to help casuals. People forget that. They just thought the name was funny.
I’m a solor player and loved the Garrison. It was a home base. It was fun to upgrade and have a bank right there. I love WoD and it was my first WoW Expac so it sits well in my heart.
THing is knowing Blizz they would lock player housing behind some kind of system and time gate.
Blizz: Good news players we are bringing in player housing.
Players: Yay finally!!!
Blizz : In order to build your housing we are introducing a new currency for players to farm called Architecture Plans (yup AP ). This currency will be used to purchase materials to build players their houses.
Players: WTF 
Blizz : Also each phase of the build will be on a weekly lock out (starting with footers) due to needing to build renown with the newest faction called the Gnome Owners Association.
Players: 