So you want players to continue to be low-skilled, but why is that? Especially now that there is no remotely interesting content for casuals, why should they continue to subscribe and subsidize your expensive-to-develop content?
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You’ve been playing this game for too long.
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What is this RPG you speak of? Never have I heard of such a thing in this, The World of Warcraft.
That’s a very good way to put it. Timed content inherently discourages bonding. There’s no time for conversation when you’re racing to beat a timer. You are not encouraged to take someone under your wing and help them get better when doing so hampers your own character’s progression.
Similarly, 25-man content does not encourage working together. If 25 people all start talking to each other, chaos ensues. 25-man content is good for guilds with established bonds, and those bonds form in untimed 5-man content. This is why LFR lacks appeal. Granted, it’s better than doing nothing, but how often are you going to make a friend in LFR? When was the last time you said to yourself, “I really enjoyed running LFR with this person! Let me add them to my friends list and invite them to my next run.” That just don’t happen.
The gear ladder was fine when it was a ladder. Now it’s a platform at the level of the latest content. The best times I had in this game were back when gear level spanned multiple tiers. For example, WotLK Heroics <= Naxxramas <= Ulduar <= ToC Heroics <= ToC <= ICC Heroics <= ICC. That felt like a real ladder. I was in several guilds with players at multiple skill levels all working together to improve each other. Then Blizzard decided to artificially stratify the playerbase into hardcore and casual. The hardcore gradually burned themselves out and the casuals got bored and left.
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Exactly. That’s because those people weren’t on a freaking timer. They didn’t have to push their Mythics in order to farm enough residuum to purchase another pull on the gear slot machine. They had time to take you under their wing, and even though they weren’t going to have any gear to show for their dungeon run, they might come out of it with enchanting mats and tier tokens that could be used to improve their own situation.
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LOL, what do you mean they haven’t learned? They did learn, their main purpose is to make money and doing whatever to keep people subbed longer is one of their plan, so yeah I would say it’s working.
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^ I’d say this is a lie, otherwise they would have also retained the player base in the process. What they learned to do was milk a very specific subset of their player base, and now have a death grip on that, because in targeting that piece of the pie, they accidentally dropped the rest of it.
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Are other players somehow of more inherent value than I am, such that it is ok for me to spend time reading my class guide and researching fight strats beforehand, but they should get to just show up and have everyone stop until they get brought up to speed?
Everything you’ve said as to why someone might not look up information beforehand is such an imagined issue. If you Google your class and spec, nothing else, the first result will be wowhead, and their information is always up to date, and most of it is geared to assuming no knowledge to begin with. A Google search of any encounter will always result in written guides and videos. The only reason you’d need to really struggle on the research is if you’re doing the hardest content available, and by that point, you understand how to research.
The simple fact is people were super understanding and helpful in the beginning because resources were limited. Institutional knowledge constituted much of the knowledge base, and mentorship was the only way to get that. I promise you when classic comes out, it will be nothing like you remember, everyone will expect you to learn to play from the plethora of excellent, easily accessible guides before you waste their time with group content.
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This exactly. The game and the playerbase has changed. You can’t go home again as they say because home has now changed and is not what it was when you were there. For one thing, people are older. They now have lives, families, responsibilities. No time to make friends, spend hours on end socializing in game any longer. I’m not saying it’s bad, it just is what it is.
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No. It’s just that other players have more reasonable expectations of what a game is supposed to be. WoW isn’t a college class or a high paying job. It’s a freaking game. You’re the one choosing to treat it like a way of life. The game doesn’t have anything to do with value or lack thereof. Your perception of in-game accomplishments as a measure of value is a personal problem. I don’t get mad at other Game of Thrones fans because they didn’t read the World of Ice and Fire Companion guide. I don’t expect them to have to “work” harder to enjoy the series. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a game’s rules to be simple enough to be understood without having to research like a PhD candidate studying for their qualifying exams.
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Hmm, if memory serves there was a game recently that tried to cater to this group. Pretty sure the game tanked and the company went out of business as well.
The majority of people see this game, and most games, as a mindless activity to chill out to and waste time, not compete against some random person who knows where that they will never see again in a “competition” that is completely meaningless.
Blizzard themselves have stated that without LFR there would be no more raids because the bean counters in control of the cash flow couldn’t justify the development costs being used by ~2% of paying subscribers.
Trying to coerce players into player gated content doesn’t inspire those players to improve either. Either you want to play well or you just want to play.
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You’re ignoring the fact that most multiplayer games have the exact things you’re complaining about.
ESO
FF
GW2
The whole “it’s just a game and people should be accepting of my badness and hold my hand!” mentality is utter garbage and accepted basically nowhere, especially among the elite in any/every one of those games.
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Titanforging has nothing to do with grouping and helping others…
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30% of players have beaten heroic every raid tier since legion. That’s just what I have access to from data. I bet it’s been that way since WOTLK (heroic being modern equivalent to normal then). Also, plenty of games have content for players to aspire to, even though they’ll likely never get there. That’s part of how games actually work. You have something to aspire to, and while you have something to aspire to, you keep playing and working.
Also, I could link the wildstar video explaining what REALLY happened to the game, but you and everyone else “LUL WILDSTAR FAILED BECAUSE IT ONLY CATERED TO HARDCORE!” would just ignore it. The game didn’t fail for the reasons everyone thinks it did. It failed for the same reason WOD did: lack of content. It also didn’t implement flexible raid size fast enough. It had absolutely 100% nothing to do with catering to raiders.
As for your “most games as a mindless zone-out activity” that is precisely what I don’t want and why I avoid 99% of games out there. Plenty of games survive while actually requiring a brain.
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I don’t perceive in game accomplishments as giving value anymore than I see my squat max or achievements in any other hobby as giving value.
I enjoy playing it, and I want to do difficult stuff in it, so I learn how to play it right. That’s no different than basketball or music or call of duty or anything people do for recreation. The same resources I used to get good at it are the same available to anyone else, so again I ask you, why should players be expected to tutor someone instead of directing them to the same resources they learned from and telling them to come back to this content when they know how to do it.
If you just feel like you shouldn’t have to learn or improve at all in the game, theres content aplenty for you. I don’t know why people seem to think everything should be easy. You sound like planet fitness not letting people lift heavy because it makes other people feel bad cause they can’t lift that much.
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In BfA there are a lot of similar issues that we saw before in WoD and Cataclysm, in that popular features of previous expansions are thrown away and there is a dogmatic pursuit of ‘new’ features that are widely reviled but somehow deemed “essential” by the the Devs and are then slowly iterated upon throughout the expansion in an attempt to popularize them.
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You just contradicted yourself. I remember the hype leading up to Wildstar. The neckbeards were out in full force proclaiming that the return of 40-man raiding was going to make MMOs great again. The lack of flex raiding was catering to raiders. The same people who were hyped for Wildstar were completely hostile to the introduction of Flex Raiding in WoW. They saw it as yet another instance of WoW catering to casuals and demanded that LFR be removed now that flexible raiding was available…
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WoW’s current state is more like planet fitness removing all their free weights and replacing them with computerized equipment that has no UI. If you want to use that equipment, you can read a thick manual with pages of obscure CLI commands that have to be mastered just so that you can get the machine to unlock the same weights that used to be readily available with free weights.
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Did I miss something with the Legion order halls? To me they were nothing special, a secondary quest hubs at time and a place to spend my AP and do the mission board. Was there some secret level with an underground nightclub I missed out on?
They offered optional class and specialization based story lines, customization options, and mounts versus BFA’s grind instanced content and WQ for Azerite and reputation to unlock meh story quests.
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