There's no incentive for returning, or new players to try SoD

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

I’ve been trying to get back into SoD lately, but there are a few things just absolutely killing my motivation to play. Mechanically, the game is fine and is super fun to play when one can actually play, but there are a few things that really need to be addressed:

  1. Dead servers: I originally rolled Horde in SoD, but there is absolutely no one playing on my server. No one to to do dungeons with, and no one to help obtain old un-soloable runes. Is there anything planned to address this? Are server transfers ever going to be a thing? It’s actually unplayable.

  2. Obtaining runes: So, I re-rolled Alliance on a different server, sucks to leave all my progress behind but I was motivated to play. Leveling is super fast with the XP buff too, so overall it hasn’t been too tedious. I leveled a Mage up to 28, enjoying the experience but it’s still impossible to obtain older runes. No one wants to go way out of the way to help someone get a rune, even when offering gold. Especially when 3-4 mages are needed for some.

I understand not wanting to allow server transfers, but the game is basically impossible to get into as a new or returning player. I need to group with other players to do the older content, but no one is doing that content even on the super populated servers. What happened to making older runes easier to obtain, is that still something that is being worked on?

16 Likes
2

What server are you on? My buddy and I switched from Horde to Ally, and also switched servers from CS to Lone Wolf.

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Going to be hard to do old content with phase shift or if you chose chaos bolt / lava lash. On LW alliance it’s pretty active, but the normal dungeon route has changed - you wouldn’t really do DM for example since you’d do BFD at 25.

4

0 post alts make the best troll posts.

1 Like
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I’ve stopped posting on the forums for more than a decade, so all my toons are 0-posts. Doesn’t invalidate anything I’ve stated, if you would like to provide an actually constructive response - I’m open to feedback.

3 Likes
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It’s now impossible for new players to catch up in SoD and get geared enough to be accepted to raid.

1 Like
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There are a ton of things messing up the new player experiance. No incentive to go back and do old content, no incentive to run old dungeons or get old runes (unless you bought gold and can pay for runs). Nobodey is Queing AB or WSG so that reputation and gear is impossible. Reputation with emerald wardens is harder to get (which is a MUST for ferals with catnip.) Once you get to max level you have to spend 800 gold on the new 0.5 set to get invited to dungeons and another 1k on epic mount. Not to mention enchants for gear, profession costs.

You can definitley get into SOD as a new player, you just need to understand you will have be unemployed in order to GIGA grind a game mode that maybe has another 5 months left. before the “season” ends.

2 Likes
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The devs should really take a page from FFXIV to get end game players involved in lower level gameplay.

There is genuinely no route for a new player to start now and experience SoD as it was intended, nor for them to catch up before everyone “takes a break” again.

1 Like
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Either make all of the phase 1-3 runes soloable at the level they become available, or put them on a vendor.

4 Likes
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The rune issue is what is stopping A LOT of us from making Alt’s… When people don’t make ALT’s the server dies…

You would think these um people who run this Development team would understand this and fix the rune issue by putting a vendor in or something…But all the threads in the world about it and they refuse to listen…

3 Likes
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There’s no real incentive to play the game period beyond burning time with friends, the game has no goals or challenges to overcome, it’s barely a game, it’s a glorified cookie clicker at this point

4 Likes
12

I disagree.

Making a FFXIV clone isn’t a good move when players who prefer FFXIV will stick with that model. It fails to help your product stand out. Mostly, I hate FFXIV even if things like the FATE system were good, there’s a ton of terrible examples all over the FFXIV ecosystem. The worst example rests behind the MSQ system which forces you to relive those older content packs and reinforces their demand to have that system in that game. Things like Chromie Time offer flexibility at the cost of opportunity, and is a closer example of how to lean in on this game’s strengths (character building and combat fluidity).

I believe the better path forward (and this applies to ALL versions of WoW) is pristine servers. In the case of SoD, that would mean each new phase would be a new server to “restart” the experience – everyone going again from level 1 with zero gold, no mechanisms to skip the pack. While this is a little different approach exclusive to SoD (normally, do not start at level 1, start at max for last expac), it recreates the entire journey, and that’s what is beautiful about an MMORPG anyways, the social and the dynamic gameplay from that SHARED starting point.

The way I see it for other clients is that when TWW launches, you can make a new character on the “Pristine” server that starts at level 70. Doesn’t matter if you did prior expansions before or not. (Existing players have a chance a few days early to “Namesake” their existing character, which just reserves their character name and titles.) That way EVERYONE, new returning or other, gets a chance to experience the new content at a starting block of where the content team expects people to come in…

Sure, you have your blowhard “I WANNA KEEP MY STUFF” hoarders sticking it out on their old dead servers, but I think a lot of folks are welcome to seeing major content versions with fresh eyes. The central dealbreaker for those players is allowing Pristine characters to feed their gained gold and items back home at the end of an expansion.

This is also extensible into every version of the game. When MoP Progression drops for example, everyone creates a level 85 on the Pristine server and experiences directly into the Pandaria content instead of requiring the leveling process or the somewhat confusing new player boost redeems.

I feel that’s a better way to keep people engaged.

After all, the level 60 who has it all just stands in the main city all day, or does the equivalent of run incursion loops to buy solo play. They still won’t walk down to do DM unless it was optimally designed (and then they would complain that the optimal method of play is dealing with undergeared, underleveled, old content).

(FWIW, I would enjoy trying out a Pristine Hardcore retail realm and seeing where that community could climb.)

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I’m not reading that but with no incentive for higher level players to participate in lower level content, there’s no community for new players to start in and you’ve got a dead game.

3 Likes
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GDKP says hello

15

When your post begins with, “I’m not reading that,” I have a simple answer:
I’m not reading any post from you again. That was easy enough.

16

How To Kill A Game 101.

No one* is going to tolerate being forced to “re-roll” every ~4 months.

*Maybe like 100 would.

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This game has strayed from:

  1. Anti-RMT to encouraging players to buy gold for level boots, rune carries, and BoEs, quest items in the inflated AH.
  2. Catering casuals to spending hundreds of hours for runes and grinds, which only sweaty players can do.
  3. Focusing on world pvp content to unbalanced classes and faction war.
  4. Improving clunky and bad designed classic content to buggy content with no insight.
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But we tolerate them making run the same dungeons over and over and over for undermine currency so they don’t have to add anything new lol

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Old servers would still exist. /?

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True, returning players and alts suffer big time especially where runes are concerned!

Seems with some runes you had to play when the content was current otherwise you cant get them as people don’t want to do old content and the rep for the incursions is only 250 per day…

Good luck getting to friendly with only 250 rep per day :joy: :neutral_face:

Sad part about it is some of these runes are so integral to a class and are needed, if they didn’t intend on changing this (clearly) why not swap the runes with lesser used runes.

e.g. put a lesser used rune as the incursion reward and make the incursion reward rune another easier rune to obtain