MMO was a new genre.
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Why was BFA their fastest selling expansion launch then? On the first day.
I get tired of hearing it’s not relevant and even more importantly to the company would be if it is profitable. Which is most definitely is. More so keeping the subscription metric. Some people want them to get rid of this tho.
I don’t mind either way, (going free to play has potential to bring in a lot more players… obviously) but they need to stop treating the game with no respect. A weak amount of funding and acting like they can limp it along and milk it to the bitter end. With little to no effort or resources. Instead of making a lot more money from it. Otherwise the consumers pick up on this and have no respect for it either. A majority will not purchase a game (expansion) that feels half assed.
I most definitely agree with this. I remember Cata being much harder for some reason. I don’t remember why…I just do. This probably discouraged a lot of players from staying around and playing. I did enjoy the tabard rep for that expansion though. A long with a few other things…
Edit: I have a hard time understanding their logic. It’s like short term instead of long term. Which is bizarre practice by a billion dollar company.
In the next 20-30 years we are going to come into a whole new era where majority of people are gamers and were raised with video games in one form or another. (Mario etc) Where grandpas/grandmas will be like yes I played all these titles… why Blizzard is so systematically trying to destroy a franchise that is profitable for them, is beyond me and they should give it some pride and respect instead. Also it has the potential to have a majority of consumers come back after retirement. (maybe even sooner) As older generations spend lots of money trying to relive their nostalgia. (Look at old vehicles, signs… etc) Which we don’t know what the future holds. Again the behavior is bizarre to me.
Maybe it was the fastest sellling expansion on launch day because they counted 6 months of pre-purchase in their “day 1” sale? Also can buy the game electronically from home.
Versus older expansions where people had to drive to a real brick and mortar store and buy the expac on a single day to count?
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So it seems like the majority of expressed opinions here is that the game (since WotLK) is less friendly for casual players. I can definitely see that as a reason for population decreases. Casual players don’t want to be required to invest in time sinks just to be able to have fun and be capable of playing with others. Personally, I attributed welfare epics to creating the necessity of time sinks - but I can definitely see people disagreeing and the arguments are persuasive. I 100% agree that the time sinks themselves - that is to say, the amount of time doing chores/etc that prevent you from having fun quickly - really turns away players and that has most assuredly increased. Having to say “I want to run a dungeon with my friends, but I need to do my dailies first” is pretty off-putting.
I can also see it as being not as friendly to new (and/or returning) players. I stopped playing at the end of Cataclysm because I was more than a little bit burnt out. When I came back during the last Blizzcon (judge away) I honestly had no idea about most of the systems were. World quests, paragon chests, mythic+ dungeons, changes to lockouts, raid scaling, leveling up an item, pathfinder, the strange lack of a talent tree, let alone the heresy that is that I no longer have life tap (and I basically can’t run out of mana).
I’m not saying those are all bad - but they were very different. For a new player some would just be a matter of acceptance. There are raids and they scale with player amounts. But the fact that we have mythic dungeons that are timed - but even if you don’t complete it in time, you get a reward, but you can’t play higher difficulty dungeons off the key you have which would give higher rewards… that’s not exactly as simple as clicking on LFR or LFD. And then mythic islands/dungeons/warfronts require forming parties beforehand, etc.
I never played the original warcraft games, so for me, all of the stories are new. I do think some of the writing and expansion designs have gone a bit off the rails over time. I’ve gone back and done the content I missed and the underlying basis for MoP was a bit silly (we found an island with pandas!) and I felt like the overall storyline was a bit disjointed across raids (okay so… Shas… and bugs… and Trolls… and Ysaarj) but it wasn’t bad. I thought WoD had an even sillier basis, but when I accepted it, I found the story to be pretty cohesive. I really wanted to like Legion’s storyline - and the overarching story wasn’t bad - but finding another set of islands and having very disconnected stories in each area, some of which were tangentially (at best) related to the demonic invasion didn’t feel like they tied together. That said, some of the individual storylines (like Suramar) were cool (though traversing Suramar sucked) and overall I’d say it was pretty good. I don’t really understand BFA at all. Supposedly back to the war between Alliance and Horde. Then we found more islands, fought a fake old god, fought one battle at the new Horde faction city, then the Naga queen (who worked for an old god) then the old god. All in one expansion, while the entire battle for azeroth was played via a mission table.
I think the storytelling of Warcraft 3 helped setup BC and WOTLK.
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I’d say it was just more character depth, sensible storylines, and of course a lack of timers and stuff with exception of “some” of the dungeons and stuff like blackwing’s lair. It all just feels “rushed” now… Don’t get me wrong the world arts and other such teams are still spot on, but the story suffered greatly in direction in BFA to the point that most of us can’t even wrap our heads around the chronology of events in order.
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It was on South Park that one time and people thought it was cool so they played because the game ran on their toaster oven-strength PC’s.
Then they did what people usually do when the next cool thing comes along. They moved on.
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Its not a huge leap of imagination to believe that someone who buys the game six months ahead of time would also have bought it on Day 1.
Now that is a much more credible distinction.
It was the big continuation of WC3 for starters. Cata, MoP, WoD, all greatly diverged from that.
In WOTLK, pug culture was awesome. You could pug with tons of people in your server and progress that way, meet lots of new people etc… I still remember all the congratulations I got after I downed Arthas as I walked through Dalaran with my title. Nowadays pug is more convenient but also more soulless, you don’t meet anyone you just go and kill stuff or leave the group. Pugging was killed in Cata with the idiotic guild system that killed many guilds and non-guild participation though. That was just stupid if they never did that, we wouldn’t have what we have today.
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What WQ are you talking about rewarding 465 gear ?
I could jump around / arena log or raid log on alts as long as I could raid with them a few times. Without having to devote a few weeks of time to get them somewhat on par with everyone else.
We still had server reputation to consider for raiding and PVP, there were more interpersonal relationships. PUGing when was probably just as meaningful as raiding with your guild. Again, if a tank dropped and I didn’t need gear for the main. I could switch to my sightly less geared alt to tank or heal. Which NEARLY EVERYONE did this, which throws out the clown intelligence of “You just want handouts arguement for alts.”
Gameplay was more focused on being “fun” rather than tuning numbers to the extreme. WC3 lore also helped press the numbers up, but most people I talk to really don’t focus on the lore. But rather that the community and game itself was better developed and gave a better sense of satisfaction and gameplay that didn’t feel like an absolute grind or second job. In essence, the game was built for fun. Not with the competitive aspect in mind.
I used to hardcore raid from WOTLK - Legion. The game absolutely took a more competitive gameplay style in mind. It can’t be denied.
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I ended WotLK with room to continue exploring. To this day, I haven’t completed every single quest on any 1 character—which is probably because that wasn’t the focus!
BfA, complete everything. Exalted with everything. In WotLK, never required, though worthwhile if you took the time.
Some might argue that the combat was better (not that I’m seeing it), but WotLK also featured some keyboard-smashing classes, like ret pally! You weren’t zooming through everything though. It wasn’t simple classes with 10 second quests and rooms cleared in 1 pull. But simple classes that still had to get through potentially lengthy content.
WotLK, it was also easy to appreciate a lot of class changes. With the exception of affliction lock, every class I was playing became a bit more fun. Suddenly liked mage for the first time. Ret pally went from a strange seal dropping spec to the pure hybrid that WoW was kind of missing at the time. This was even the 1 expansion I got into rogue, and I can’t say why.
BfA, it’s not like the classes are as bad as people make them out to be. There just wasn’t any improvement to appreciate. Same with art (WotLK was a huge upgrade from TBC, while BfA and Legion both looked nice) and a lot of aspects. And relevant to that, the mounts obtained were very cool. A variety of dragons for the first time…now we get ugly lizards, vultures, and their 1000 reskins.
BfA offered nothing to impress us.
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I wanna know this too so I can do it on my alts. The highest I get is 420.
It was kind of a sweet spot of accessibility, difficulty, playability, etc…
It wasn’t that any one thing was perfect, but they felt better balanced than they do now. It took me longer to level alts, but it felt more rewarding.
Also, speaking purely from the PvP standpoint as an altoholic, it was far less punishing to step into BGs as a fresh max level than it is now due to the power creep. Really hoping the squish brings that back down.
Edit: Actually not sure how I replied to your comment. I didn’t even see it until after I posted, just hit the general reply button. lol
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Hey there 
Novelty, that’s all. End of thread.
Reopens thread
That just happened. 
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You can beat a dead horse, but it’s still a dead horse.
Gear actually meant something. That was the best of times.
For me the Wow experience was still fresh and I was hungry for new content. Things didn’t stray too far from vanilla roots IMO, the gameplay was still comfortable and enjoyable. At the time I still had RL friends playing which made it fun. I guess part of what made that era special is Wow was still peaking, things were new and fresh but still centered around what made vanilla fun.
The fun factor started to decline once they started trying to do too much in the expansions to come, especially for some features that didn’t turn out as well as they expected.
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