I know, that is why I love MMORPG and hate Fortnite. I love character progression! It’s why I ONLY play MMORPGs. However the character progression shouldn’t SUCK!!! It shouldn’t be painful, tedious and mind numbing!! Trying to complete a build shouldn’t make you hate life. It’s a game it should be fun!
There are correct and incorrect ways to have RPG like aspects be great and engaging. I love power progression. Just the Devs don’t know how to design an MMORPG anymore or have meaning RPG progression.
Well, I’ll just throw my own experience onto the table.
I returned to WoW mid October after quitting in January, so something like 9-10 months of no playing. And I truly mean no playing at all, I did not log in for months.
Upon return I was obviously incredibly behind on gear. I had no idea what domination sockets were, didn’t know the new +10 affix, had no idea there was an item upgrade system, etc. I personally found it rather easy to gear my toon up and get back on track to 246 ilvl. Keys and raids are my fun. In order to get to the “fun” you don’t need to do much. You can go into keys and normal raids equipped with minimal knowledge and learn as you go. There are not hoops and hurdles you need to jump to get there.
This is why I asked what your fun was, but you never directly answered so I don’t know how to direct my feedback. However, there are not many aspects in the game where you HAVE to grind Korthia dailies in order to unlock something. I can count the times I’ve done Korthia dailies on one hand. My toon’s ilvl is still good, and I have renown 80 on two covenants with minimal effort. There are plenty of catchup mechanics in place that allow you to do what you want and passively acquire renown and currency.
I want to agree with your post, because I don’t think WoW is in a great state at the moment. Player retention is a number we can’t simply ignore. However, I don’t think it’s because of the chores and the dailies. You truly can ignore those if you don’t want to do it, and it won’t harm you in other aspects of the game.
I think the problem is lack of new content keeping people around. This became very apparent to me on Tuesday when I logged in and Legion Dalaran was PACKED with players eager to do their Mage Tower and Legion keys. This is the type of thing we need more often: engaging content coming at a regular pace. We don’t have that now.
Just gonna disagree. It is the chores and daily’s combined with the gearing character progression is not engaging at all. It’s quite literally possible to not get an upgrade for weeks and if that happens you will quit every time.
Disagree it’s character progression. Want to keep players around remove the toxic weekly chores of the great vault. No more forced weekly RNG that makes players feel worse and worse as weeks go by. Where their happiness is determined by RNG.
A characters progression path should be relatively clear and mapped out. Not time-gated and appear impossible because RNG hates you.
We fix character progression by fixing gearing. This means ALL of it including conduits and ease of use of the systems. BiS gear should be at a vendor and you take Token, Valor or Conquest to the vendor and buy a meaningful BiS item that excites you to keep playing.
This is a progression game and if you aren’t progressing then you feel like uninstalling. It’s that simple and Blizz has designed a game that constantly makes you want to uninstall. The character progression couldn’t be less rewarding then it is.
Time gating is a huge issue for me so I agree with you there. Time gating is an excuse for playing to draw out their subscription for their reward… but I won’t get into that right now.
Still not understanding the correlation between dailies and gearing. You can ignore dailies and gear up just fine. You can spam dungeons and go kill some raid bosses for gear, and none of those require you to do dailies to access. Unless you are referring to the 220 gear you obtain via Korthia, then I don’t know what alternative you propose. You can’t just log in and conjure up some gear without doing something. Pug some keys and raid if you want to avoid dailies for your gear.
What weekly RNG are you referring to? The vault?
And how do you propose we obtain this currency if not grinding in some way…?
Feels rewarding to me. You get a chance of loot after each boss kill, dungeon, and a guaranteed piece of gear each Tuesday. The only issue is the time gating, imo.
Personally, I’d say the best expansion period in WoW gameplay-wise was mid-to-late MoP.
I’d attribute a big part of the problem to chores. It’s true that you CAN ignore those things, but the important question is what Blizzard’s design makes players feel is the right course of action, even if that feeling is deceptive. Blizzard designs quite a bit to lead players to feel like they’re never done, and should be checking off the list of chores put in front of them. It invites a lot of burnout.
I saw player retention go much better in many past eras of the game (Vanilla - WoD) where practically everyone in my guild spent most of the expansion just raid logging. They were literally out of significant content to do (for their mains in PvE) if it wasn’t a raid night. The flipside is that being “done” meant that when they did feel like playing WoW on non-raid nights, it made them a lot more likely to either try new classes or engage in PvP, which creates a constant activity to engage in at any time. Raid logging was often a sign of a healthier design approach (not trying to stretch out solo content into infinity).
I don’t think chores and RNG are entirely bad. Like I said, I think MoP’s level of it (mid-to-late expansion) is probably optimal. A key aspect of that is that at the time, most chores were just associated with dailies that were part of a rep grind, and the rep grinds had a very defined end-point: Exalted. Hit exalted? You were done (to the extent you were after player-power things). If you wanted to work on a few achievements or something associated with the dailies or area, you could if you enjoyed it, but Exalted was THE player-power endpoint. There are still endpoints today, but they’re harder to define, and take a lot longer to reach.
Yes I’m aware of that and the OP post was objectively well put together.
I didn’t see any whining and maybe you can’t objectively read threads.
Many people agree with this. Most would love for the weekly chest/vaults to be removed. I have to say it would instantly make the game better.
I’m actually leaning towards you being the troll here. Since A you are off topic and attacking a player. B not offering anything to the threads discussion.
Just because you don’t agree with the discussion or topic doesn’t mean it’s trolling. It would seem you have a lot to learn.
Ohh it hasn’t been, this game isn’t for most WoW players anymore that is why millions of them left! Why do you think I made the post
Been trying to fix this game for a few years now. Again, I just want WoW to be good again I literally resubbed to test the PTR and offer PTR changes. I’m trying but dam “The Problem” is tough to overcome.
It is still this way, not much has changed in this aspect. It was made worse by timegating the vault rewards, so now we have a one-and-done mindset of doing one dungeon and logging off until Tuesday.
You can still do this. And they’ve made it easier to do so than it was in Vanilla-Wotlk with heirlooms and XP bonuses.
Exalted back then also offered nicer rewards. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not aware of a lot of mounts/mogs/titles etc that are awarded from SL rep. This is definitely some incentive that needs to be improved. I remember doing the brutal Netherwing rep grind because I wanted the cool dragon mounts.
I need sockets so I need to grind dailys and resources. Daily’s are part of gearing. I did already mention how annoying it was to have something taken away then having to grind for it back.
We should just have sockets on gear. This is part of the complication of gearing and progression that feels bad.
Yes I know I can suffer through that and get it done. Ideally in a perfect world I’m not spamming dungeons though. Again the gearing process should be better again.
Yea the most toxic system in the game. Everyone would rejoice if that gets removed and Vendors added.
Again I don’t mind grinding! I mind pointless grinding! There is a big difference!
I enjoy grinding but again the progression path for the grind has to be rewarding!! You do that by removing the RNG from the grind and have clear paths on progression.
I’d be more inclined to grind Torghast and do Adamant vaults “IF” it was rewarding. Maybe if everytime I completed Adamant vaults I got either a choice to socket an item, upgrade a conduit etc… Instead of wasting my time.
All of SL is designed to waste your time instead of creating a great game you want to waste your time in.
A guaranteed disenchant. We want rewarding character progression not infuriating.
Yes these are very real things and strategies being used by large AAA companies. They love to use predatory monetization tactics too. It’s a real thing and should be acknowledged that is happening in gaming. The reason why WoW’s numbers are as bad as they are is because players are tired of the abuse.
What you define as what’s actual content and what isn’t, is subjective. If you also said “Arenas and Battlegrounds aren’t content either”, given how just as, if not more spammable then M+, it would be at least consistent.
I don’t know mate, the world content is better then it is before with… you know, more content to boot? More reason to go out and explore? Get reward by it?
Define better questing.
Define Better Story.
Define Better Solo content.
Define better Gearing and Progression.
…Define Team progression first and how you would make it better second.
So you must’ve treat the raids the same way, yes?
Yeah, it’s not like they gated everything behind chores before. Raid attunements? Doesn’t exist, figment of your imagination. /s
And having fun is… doing a bunch of completing builds and doing it all over again?
I mean if that’s your fun, that’s fine, but to many of the people of all different sorts, all of what you’ve said are fun, or where the fun begins. Heck, the fun begins for some when they level up from 1 to 60.
You must’ve really hated vanilla then if you hate Devs forcing players to play how they want.
“No True Scotsman” fallacy.
You don’t even know the real numbers mate. Nobody does.
Not to butt in, but nobody does and that is by design by Blizzard here. Any number we get is going to be cherry picked out of a certain group like only Mythic plusers or PvPers, questionable data, tracking from sales which is no way reliable or reflective of current players, just flatout wrong because it doesn’t take into account if they played the game at all…
I’m looking at you MMO population.
…Or just trying to extract the exact money made out of WoW’s MAU’s which also takes into account of store items bought.
Mate, if you know the problem isn’t going to change, why resub at all then?
“This game is bad!! imma quit!.. but you know, i’l check back every once or while to see if it’s improved or not, ya know…Oh what? 9.1.5 sucks because Blizzard made it out of fear?! That’s it! im quitting!.. Ooooooooh but you know, i’l wait until 9.2 to see if it’s improved…”
Gosh, i wonder what your next thread it would be when 9.2.5 drops, or 10.0 on PTR. I mean it’s not like there’s a pattern emerging here or something. /s
If your going to call somebody out for going off-topic (because they accused you of being a troll), besure you don’t contradict yourself before or atfer.
Essentially saying “I agree” doesn’t offer anything to the threads discussion either.
As for Objectivity, that is extremely questionable given this is the same person who thinks Mythic Plus isn’t content, considering you didn’t even explain how it’s objective other then “i agreed with it”.
Or maybe, giving a re-read of your comment again, your one of those types that throws “objective” and “fact” willy nilly at every single breath.
You can eventually reach a point where this is true. I got to that point too. But for a returning player, this is not true for a very long time. There is almost always something the game makes them feel like they should be doing to improve their gear.
Leveling itself certainly goes faster. Entry into PvP is it’s own beast of an issue. However, the issue I’m addressing is more whether the person feels like it’s a good use of time, which depends on whether they feel “done” for the week with PvE chores on their main.
Ironically, I think Shadowlands has actually been a great expansion on that front. There’s a primary end goal to a lot of the “chores,” and then you can be done with them unless you really like grinding out some additional minor rewards.
Torghast is the legendary grind, but then you can be done with it once you have what you need for a tier, unless you want to grind cosmetics. There’s no progression reason to go back in most cases (alt ash sending aside).
Korthia’s grind was certainly rough, or at least longer than it probably should have been, but the end goal of it being 233 gear, or sockets is pretty defined. It’s not a treadmill.
Unfortunately, I think a large portion of the player population is used to relying on those treadmills, and that led to the early outcrys of “nothing to do!” (Prior to the actual content drought.) Maybe there’s a better balance Blizzard could strike between long term goals, and not treadmilling things. But who knows.
I’d agree with this if it wasn’t for sockets and conduit upgrades. The Korthia grind is worse than the initial 9.0 grinds in terms of how much repetition of task is involved, however, the 9.0 activity was extended through the unique mechanism of removing the ability to mount in the primary daily area, which (as interesting an idea as that was), I think was probably a very big mistake. It’s a mistake the expansion is now past, but I think inability to mount definitely was a bad call for a game that needed to reduce sources of burnout.
I think the weekly vault also contributes a lot to the burnout earlier on in a patch. A lot of high-end raiders feel somewhat compelled to get their 10 dungeons in for maximum chance at the best loot. I don’t think there’s an obvious solution there necessarily, because I also think that reducing RNG by creating more slots is also good. You’ve also got the very real aspect that it creates a higher pool of players searching for dungeons to do, which is a good thing.
It was an epic time. Nothing like it had ever been done before. To the extent Blizz did, at least. And doing something in game felt like an achievement. Grinding for HOURS to get mats on the AH to be able to afford your first mount was an incredible feeling.
Having to get multiple guilds together to get mats to make an epic piece of gear, was just incredible fun. The world events to open new aspects of the game were wondrous.
40 man raids. Trying for weeks to get that one boss down and finally making that happen. Molten Core was FANTASTIC. Sure there were hardcore people back then, but even for the “casuals”, the experience was just phenomenal.
If you haven’t heard about it, there was an Alterac Valley game that went on for 28 hours. I was there and played almost the whole time. So much fun and fresh. It was CRAZY. And you were part of something special. And everyone knew it.
I’m really going to age myself here, but it us much like people not seeing the genius of Jimi Hendrix. Because these days, there are many, many others. But back then, hearing him for the first time. There was nothing like that on the scene. At all.
I literally resubbed to test the PTR and offer PTR changes. I’m trying but dam “The Problem” is tough to overcome.
/s
