It’s funny that was at the end of Lich King, which was also the peak subscriber count. HMMMM
Not really wrath stagnated till they added all of china to it…
Actually, it IS a fact. Less people are playing WoW. Less people are playing MMOs. And, again, the “MMOs” they are playing aren’t really very MMO anymore. WoW certainly isn’t… That’s why many of the game in development are being made.
1 Like
There are many who disagree.
I mean Blizzard themselves admitted the Azerite system needs work and they’re doing an overhaul of it for 8.2
A system they created that is a year old is already getting an overhaul.
That’s a bad sign. Things are not “better”. Conversely, things could be a lot worse than they are. I mean, we don’t have microtransactions offering xp boosts (oh wait, we have pay to reach lvl 110), we don’t have PAID extra slots for auction house, we don’t have gold caps that can be increased via real world currency.
There are lots of ways the game could be worse. But no, its not in its “best” state right now.
I pull out games that are 16 colors every so often for the nostalgia. Of course getting them to run can sometimes take an act of congress.
1 Like
I wouldn’t call it an overhaul, more like adding to the current system like the nether light crucible that was added to artifact weapons in legion
1 Like
WoW is just as much a mmo today as it was in classic. You’re personal tastes don’t dictate what is or is not a mmo. Just because people aren’t playing wow, doesn’t mean they aren’t playing other mmos.
1 Like
But was it fun?
IMO the issue is these web sites like WoWHead and MMO.
The fun in the game is to explore new lands and be afraid of what is around the next corner. Having that little scary feeling is what I remember when I started EQ in 1999 and WoW in 2005.
I’m not saying WoWHead is all that bad, but too many things are at peoples finger tips now days. What happen to those days of actually reading up on a quest and putting 1 and 1 together to get 2?
Now days people either looks it up on the net or asks in chat without even trying to figure it out. I also blame it on the PTR. Some, if not most of the people gets on the PTR to look around and see what is new and not really testing anything out. So when the actual game comes out, there really isn’t any surprises left in the game.
PTR has everything, story line, loot, quests, mounts, pets…etc…etc. You name it and you pretty much know everything that is in the patch or xpac before it goes live. Can we please have something that is totally new and not ruined by giving away all the secrets?
IMO those that I mention above is a bit to do with the downfall of MMOs.
That is one of the biggest reasons why people want Classic. Not because it was awesome above the heavens, but because it was new, it was exciting, you were afraid to walk off the road and exploring new things because you might get one shooted, BUT it was FUN not knowing what you might find.
We lost the FUN in MMOs.
2 Likes
Or as I’ve phrased it simple … “the internet ruined the game”
During Vanilla if you wanted to be a better Paladin, you had to find a Paladin on your server. Strategy guides and all that didn’t really exist for WoW back then. Now, you don’t need other people to become a better player. There are free strategy guides all over the internet.
It’s a lobby game that a person can do everything in without ever interacting with other people. And, before you say otherwise, LFR/LFD is NOT interacting with other people. 99% of the time it may as well be NPCs, and most of that 1% you wish they were…
1 Like
That’s a ridiculous and dishonest argument. Everything has problems. Everything is continually being improved upon. Saying something has problems or needs work is not necessarily an argument against it being in good shape.
Wow this thread sure blew up! Great discussion guys.
The community has changed. I think atleast for me my childhood was completely %*#!ed. Not going to complain about that. But WoW was always an escape. I found a world that was mine to protect. I was young. Like 10 when I picked up vanilla. I lvled to 50! Spent my whole 40’s in stv killing the gorillas and selling their teeth to buy my mount! I remember meeting people and going on adventures. This whole world felt alive.
Wpvp wasn’t about what you could get out of it. It was to attack those who have attacked you and defending cross roads for hours upon hours.
WoW back then just felt like a real life fairy tale or something. I remember people coming up to you asking if you wanted to get on top of iron forge… he’ll yes I wanted to get on top of iron forge so I did. Took us hours. Especially hard as horde. But god what a great memory.
This is what mmos were. If you did they high end content and had an epic mount you were a god on your SERVER. That reminds me this whole patching servers together really guts the community aspect of the game.
Sorry this is a scatter brained post but I think that we have all just changed so much that the game couldn’t ever be the same for us. It’s not about the journey anymore it’s about the convoluted loot stats that you need a 3rd party website to tell you if it’s an upgrade. It’s nasty and off putting.
My memories of this game are something I will always hold onto. And always be thankful for.
Actually the fact classic/vanilla broke from the punishing xp debt upon death among various punishing systems found in EQ is pretty much why WoW is the thing it is today, and EQ is practically forgotten. EQ’s team refused to ever budge on any possible QoLs, WoW has made it through having a diametrically opposed philosophy of giving every player something to do even if solo.
I don’t really get what this guy is going on about. Leveling in classic is not more fun or compelling than leveling in retail, so I just don’t see what he’s waxing nostalgic over. I have tons more to do “endgame” than I did back in TBC even. My version of “endgame” isn’t as narrow as his, but it’s an arbitrary point anyway.
The world doesn’t feel smaller either, imo, the numerous extra continents mean it’s vaster than ever. It is unfortunately true that they like to cram all useful content into one tiny place and forget the rest exists, I’ll grant him that.
1 Like
Yes and No.
Class Design is infinitely better now. Running around basically autoattacking things because you don’t have enough relevant abilities or god forbid you use mana and run out every other mob you kill isn’t fun.
But the relative difficulty of the leveling world back then vs what it is now due to that difference in power between the player and the world mobs made it a MUCH different experience regardless of Class Design.
It’s what made you actually WANT to group, even in early content. Well, that in combination with tags that weren’t shared, but it was legitimately both, even for non-group quests.
It’s why you actually met people and made friends and found guilds naturally while playing back then. Because the game naturally made you interact with people.
Not to mention ACTUAL group quests with elite mobs that meant something. Group Quests today are NOTHING like they were back then.
Today, if you’re grouping to level, it’s because you already know the person, or you queued for a dungeon which you could literally solo at-level (with some difficulty, admittedly) but the game wants to pretend it’s a group activity.
Then on top of the social benefits of how the game used to be, there’s the various systems to keep you engaged with the leveling process outside of actually having to pay attention to not die.
- Ability Ranks. It gave you a boatload of upgrades to look forward to over the course of your journey and gave added relevance to earning silver/gold along the way. The current system of automatically upgrading based on level and stats is convenient, but takes away much of the reason to care about each level.
- Talent Trees. Same as Ability Ranks, they gave a boatload of upgrades to look forward to over the course of your journey, as well as offered ways to make your character play differently from the next, since the talent trees were somewhat freeform, and almost entirely freeform depending on xpack. I do think the current talents are better for an endgame-only standpoint, but the old one was better for leveling and general “fun”.
- Class Quests. This was never huge, but it should have been expanded on, not removed. Druids earning their forms, Shamans earning their totems, All Hybrids earning their Resurrection spells, Warlocks earning their Demons, Hunters unlocking Tame Pet, etc, etc. That was all fantastic, and now it’s all gone for literally no reason. Now we have a couple super generic mid level quests that give a piece of rando gear. They mean basically nothing in comparison to what we lost.
WoW streamlined too much. WoW made Solo play too easy and at this point too lucrative even at Endgame. WoW stopped caring about the early game and focuses entirely an endgame. Even the upcoming changes don’t address the issues that make leveling worse today than it was before, it’s just making it faster so people can “get it over with” without hopping all over the place.
At the end of the day, I do think that’s probably a somewhat natural progression - moving to Endgame development over and sometimes to the detriment of Early Game. Because, naturally, long-term players end up at or near cap on their active characters and no longer gain as much enjoyment from the leveling process that they’ve already done multiple times. Endgame is what keeps most people subbed. Even if leveling was everything I wanted it to be, my interest in it would run out, as would many others’.
It’s also the nature of expansion release timeframes vs the “it’s ready when it’s ready” base game. They had TIME to make an entire world for the base game. Expansions are expected more quickly than that, which means they have to consolidate things more, which is why we get isolated continents, and why as they get more complex we get even smaller isolated continents. It becomes necessary to focus on more repeatable endgame content when there’s not time to make a whole world every 2 years.
So I DO get why development moves this way. I get why the focus becomes instanced dungeons, raids, PvP and other instanced content they want to try.
Because that can be tightly tuned for specific group sizes, specific skill levels, and you can’t just overpower it with numbers like would happen with any form of actual world content.
It’s where people can continue to progress their characters after level cap via gear and other systems. It’s where people can show off their skill, compete with friends, and generally work with other players, which would be lost if the game effectively just “stopped” at level cap with only token content to poke at.
There’s a lot of merit to making the leveling process more engaging. There’s a lot of merit to making the world feel bigger. But I just don’t think MMORPGs would even be relevant today if that’s where the focus was. They’d be fun to play through once or twice like a Co-Op RPG or something, but would lose the long-term appeal that draws me to MMORPGs, outside of maybe some niche PvP-focused MMOs where people stick around just for the PvP in the same way some folks stick with a single game like Halo 3 or whatever for literal years at a time just to continue shooting each other.
I guess my experience is a bit different. I started in TBC, the game was playable solo but mostly just compared to EQ which really wasn’t, at all. WoW may not be at it’s very best this exact moment but I doubt I could do a TBC Classic anymore than I could do the vanilla Classic, which was level 26 before crapping out to boredom.
My main point being that the game being more tedious did not make me more social. At all. It was fun to play with my brother, and sometimes we’d try to 2-man a dungeon just below our level or get one of our capped friends to nuke it for us, but exactly none of that “spontaneous” socialization occurred.
What did occur was I saw less content. Way less. So much less that I’d find it unacceptable now. But again, I was probably still doing way more than I could in EQ.
So the very concept of the more tedious game being in any way shape or form better is almost literally foreign to me. More tedium simply means I get less accomplished, and it doesn’t magically cause me to have more friends either. In fact I felt mad isolated from the heroic 5 man crowd in TBC, I capped too late so was effectively shut out. I quit the character and didn’t cap again until Wrath.
Again, game was good compared to punishing no-solo everquest, but we’ve evolved since then. I’ll go out on a limb and say shadowlands looks like it’s gonna be one for the ages, I’m more into this game now than I’ve ever been.
1 Like
It is the raid or die mentality. It’s starting to get old, and honestly, it’s driving a lot of my friends away to other MMO’s that are a bit more… lax and varied with their content.
WoW isn’t a world the moment you finish your questing.
It’s just a series of tasks you do to go raid, do M+, or queue up for the arena.
It’s still possible to get that wordly RPG out of it, but at max level? There’s nothing; no player housing, customization is lacking, world quests /are/ very repetitive.
Legion was a step in the right direction with class halls and their quests and what not, but BFA stepped back on it all.
Every single time I’ve played another MMORPG, it’s because there’s other stuff to do. WoW just has RP as a side thing, and that’s not really even an actual gameplay mechanic; it’s a community thing.
They need to embrace more sandbox elements. They need to go harder on letting us customize stuff. And they need to focus on elements of the game that aren’t raids.
Something to consider is that WoW’s hyper-focused endgame development is basically the advantage it has over many other MMOs. If they dial that back to focus on more world / casual / stuff instead, they’re competing with other MMOs that already do that better at the expense of the thing they’re “winning” at.
1 Like