As a new player, I have been thinking about news related to WoW and people leaving the game. I can imagine several different reasons why this is taking place, so I thought to post what I’m thinking here.
The grind, it’s this way with any MMO that offers progression. There is a certain amount of effort that is required to achieve different goals. Character progression is tied to grind. But grinding doesn’t have to be so bad, not like it is with WoW. As a matter of fact, more could be required of a player to achieve certain goals and it not be such a grind.
While playing in areas people need to do daily quests in order to get the first pathfinder achievement I noticed that it was very seldom, if ever, I saw anyone flying anywhere. I see people flying other places but almost never in areas where you have to grind hard for the ability to fly. I thought at first that maybe it was simply the overwhelming list of garbage needed to be done in order to get the 1st pathfinder achievement but I no longer think this. I think what happens is that we are required to grind out missions in such a way that after you get the pathfinder achievement you no longer want to play in those regions anymore.
So why get the achievement at all?
And why is the grind so terrible?
The first question is easy, we all want proof that we accomplished something, it’s part of why we put up with any kind of grind. For an achievement to be worth anything, there must be some difficulty involved in obtaining it. But what about the grind being so terrible?
There are many problems with the way the grind is set up in WoW. First, it’s repeating the same quests over and over and over again. After you do a quest, you don’t want to do it every day over and over again. It’s the quests themselves. They are not stimulating, difficult or even interesting past maybe the first time and many times not even then. It’s as if all the work and effort has been put into the graphics, the design, the things you can buy off the market, the game mechanics and very little real effort or interest in making the quests engaging or challenging. They are a bore! And the worst part about it is the same boring quests have been digested and barfed back out again for every version of the game. So as the game itself has evolved, the quests have not changed.
What makes this worse is the incorrect way the challenges scale. If you are attempting to get pathfinder now, it’s no challenge at all to do the quests, they are so easy that it feels everything has been dramatically dumbed down. So obtaining the achievement almost feelings like cheating. It’s certainly not fair to those who came before, who were required to do these things when they were a challenge, and difficult.
It’s as if the developers decided they would spend the least amount of effort and time, of money, of intelligence in regards to quests and the stories.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, we are required to do all the main story quests, and all the daily quests several times over in order to fly in that region/expansion. So what reason would you have to go back to those areas after you get the achievement, and then what is the achievement even good for?
If you do all the content to get the achievement so you can fly, then there is no reason to ever want to fly in any of those areas ever again, and thus why you almost never see anyone flying in these areas.
It’s intellectual laziness, it’s laziness on the part of Blizzard to create interesting and engaging content. It’s a lack of interest in keeping all the old material relevant. So the next questions are?
Why subscribe?
What do you get by subscribing?
Super easy content is not engaging, not challenging, those achievements mean nothing so are you paying for that? Or paying so you can get the companions and mounts easy?
You are subscribing for the engaging and new content, if you don’t hurry up and finish the current newest content, when the next big updated comes out it will all be so easy to do you might not find it interesting and/or engaging.
I do not understand why Blizzard does not understand their customers, or understands them so poorly. The reason why people are leaving the game is because there are other things they could be doing for entertainment that are more fun, that create more laughs, more smiles, more challenge. People are leaving because frankly, the Blizzard developers, the managers of those developers, have become lazzy. Repeating the same thing over and over in different ways is not new content, it’s boring content.