World of Warcraft when I started 13 years ago was a wonderful game with a vivid beautiful world to explore, People to quest and dungeon with, Its not like this anymore, No sense of adventure no mystery. The world is empty and the group finder is the only way to get anything done
I’m dabbling in classic tbc and my god it’s what it was back then, Going to deadmines on my level 16 blood elf hunter with a group of like minded individuals traveling the vast of Azeroth to clap vancleef was a better feeling then anything in retail today, Seeing people questing in the world and joining forces to complete a quest.
What the hell went wrong I love WoW but today it’s an empty shell of what was
Our consumption of the product changed. We wowhead and YouTube faster. We expect more decision making from our peers on the fly. We wanted faster paced gaming to keep up with the industry.
WoW no longer has that wow appeal when in the game or game world any longer it used to. There are better games out there for that experience these days.
Lack of quality of life features. Long hearthstone CDs meant that you made friends with or at least paid mages and warlocks regularly
Lack of the ability to solo the game and a long time taken to level an alt - this makes people have to rely on each other
A social reputation - if you’re a jerk or a ninja then your rep will suffer so people have an incentive to behave decently, even if some don’t.
Server rivalries and friendships - someone who saved you in STV could easily be in trouble in Winterspring and could be someone you save, many levels later. Similarly, you could take revenge against the guy who killed you on the boat, when you see him out and about in the world
An active world that you have to traverse to get to the dungeon - no summoning stones means that the entire raid is vulnerable to ambush attackers and just grouping for PVE provides PVP content. In turn, when the ambushers go raid, you can camp them. No xrealm LFD / LFR - you afk in raids, you’re getting kicked and blacklisted. So people end up putting in (more) effort.
Honestly, I want a refund before I rage quit too…Only need more binding of windseeker to mog thunderfury didn’t drop yet again on demon hunter…went back on monk still neither dropped…Went back on prot pally still no luck…Went back on rogue and the Baron GEDDON DROPPED THE VERY BINDING I NEED ON demon hunter! so pissed…wow wow
Honestly, it’s more of a reflection of the current state of the world than something that happened to WoW internally. Most people today would struggle to sit outside and be alone with their own thoughts for an extended period of time.
That “Holy COW!” feeling can never be recreated, you’ve seen the world for 13 years. You get small “Ohhh and Ahhh” moments from new expansions, but it dies quickly, and we get to the business of leveling.
This right here, was the bad change that started it all. Those “recommend 5 player” quests were toned down so they could be soloed. Because sub numbers had fallen from the mighty 12.5M, and folks couldn’t find anyone to help, there was no one there. BUT then they introduced CRZ & Sharding to make the zones feel alive again and didn’t change the quest back to hard mode.
This, in my humble opinion, was the beginning of the end of that community feeling your describing. It was no longer necessary to call for help out in the world, why talk to anyone?
You just played it, you made friends, and you did things with other people.
The biggest things you had for spoilers and a meta back then was just clicking around on Thottbot when you got stuck or asking a guy who seemed to be doing well how you can be more like him.
Now we are actively criticizing the Dev team’s poor decisions regarding things in an expansion that isn’t even in open beta yet and crunching numbers on what the optimal talent builds will be in talent trees that aren’t even close to being finished yet for potential metas that don’t even exist yet for running raids we haven’t seen yet.
(even our emoticons are different now. I miss ASCII graphics)
They never updated their product much. Only kept pushing forward until its too late. They then started losing people internally to other companies because they didnt pay enough and so the vision they had at the start was no more. And then they got even more greedy fired qa and put stuff like wowtoken which nailed the coffin.
It sure seems like most people did but I hate how fast every thing has become. I play DH because its one of the few ways I can reduce the complexity of the game.
I really hope that prot warrior turns out easy next expansion because I want to play my warrior but the weird charging and intervene made it irritating, with the amount of ground effects and frontals.
(even our emoticons are different now. I miss ASCII graphics)