You are correct about the players growing up and a game just getting older.
The current game is based around 15 minute dopamine cycles. It’s like fortnite almost in terms of the way it plateaus. You get a epic, u are bored doing works quests, you get a epic, you run a dungeon for the 37th time with randoms, you get a epic…
Well it probably became too much in mid wrath gear itself but it was still ok levels.
Everything from cata to now has made gear into a meaningless gear grab.
1 month into bfa when we got warfronts we were given 340 item gear which made professions even less meaningful to the point they added restrictions on the alliance side for entering warfronts.
they wen’t so far as squishing item level in legion then starts throwing gear out with huge amounts of item level increases to the point where, the gear structure is just an illusion. They are probably going to increase mythic gear to 370 if they haven’t already in mythic dungeons which kinda defeats the purpose of mythic plus/raid even though you can still get better.
Its kinda sickening people will whine about leveling takes too long when it is fast or was super fast. I’ve leveled over 20 alts to max level each expansion things were still easy when dungeon exp was nerfe.
Well people like that will say things like they deserve to get any game they want free because too expensive/etc.
Well I think that item level progression carrot on the stick is kinda where it goes too far, instead of having unique items you get the same item with slightly improved stats.
I think Blizzard just has to accept that the “hardcore” players are what sustains the game now. Everyone else is just a fly by night user. They thought they could retain a large casual player base by pandering to them, but the theory I have for mostly any game out there held true: that those players are going to leave no matter what. Now all that’s left are players who really want a true MMO experience once again, but it doesn’t really exist anywhere else so WOW will have to do.
But to your point Akaidian, there was definitely a bubble that was inevitably going to pop in terms of player base for WOW. No doubt about it. So “making as much as it used to” is not really a realistic goal. In the end the revenue was going to decrease no matter what. So really the only question became, “What kind of changes do we need to make to keep our player base as high volume and as committed as possible?”. Blizzard thought they could create a game that was interesting to fly by night players, and thus rake in on short term subs with sheer volume and micro-transactions. And they kept pushing more and more in that direction. In the end what they created was a game that was far less interesting to EVERY kind of player. They thought they would only alienate the most nostalgic players, and they ended up alienating everyone.
This strategic move is made even more ridiculous when you consider a basic principle that is taught in Business 101, which is that in most markets it costs more (in some cases many times more) to gain a new customer than to keep one you already have. Which is why my dudes, unless you have a game that is intentionally built from the ground up to be shallow and quick play style catered to the one & done, fly by night player…you should always cater to the players who are going to be still playing your game in 2 years no matter what. Even if that is only 10% of your player base…10% of WOTLK sub numbers would be a good turn out this far down the road.
I think that casting this in terms of Hardcore vs Casual is too simplistic because it focuses the game solely around raiding.
I would argue that leveling is just as critical if not moreso. In Vanilla levelling was a HUGE part of the game. Talent tress made every time you dinged a small celebration. You got a point! You got stronger! You often got a new skill/ability or had to go visit a trainer. Content that used to beat you up is now manageable. Something was happening regularly, and this fun, especially for new players and casuals. The journey itself was pretty cool.
Now leveling is dominated by Heirlooms and blasting through content. Part of that is because we are at 120 levels, which is insane. Part of it is the loss of talent trees which IMO is a bad move. Part of it is because some segment of the playerbase has decided that a major part of the game is getting one of every class to end game and fully geared and leans heavily on Blizz to streamline everything to facilitate zillions of alts.
Not sure why this switch happened, but IMO Blizz lost an interesting game when they allowed leveling to become something that you did on the way to playing the “real” game at max level. Once the journey becomes boring and unfun, how much of the game’s content has been lost?
Everything except for raids and epic gearing, which is all we ever seem to talk about anymore.
All that old content out there just gathering dust that apparently no one at Blizz really cares about. That content is an asset, it’s a sunk cost. You would think that they could find a way to rehabilitate it or at least keep it relevant as opposed to only focusing on the newest bright and shiny. And this is why I believe Classic is a smart play for Blizz, not only to revive the excitement of a certain segment of the player base, but to turn old content into a “new” revenue stream (potentially).
I agree with you that it’s not just an issue of raiding, but overall progression. But the spirit of the issue is still the same.
You have this bright shiny something off in the distance and there are steps you have to take to get there. The shiny might be gear, sense of achievement, whatever, but it’s there. The issue is that people just wanted the shiny handed to them rather than having to jump over hurdles, and Blizzard obliged, which broke the game.
I absolutely agree that incremental progression is big missing element. But how do you get that when you have been max level 5 times already, and helped defeat guys like Arthas and Sargerus?
The answer is with xpac specific buffs/talents:
It’s super easy to come up with stuff like this without breaking end game content.
A lot of the players don’t care about it either, and at worst, they actively loathe it and see it as an impediment to their progress in the real game at max level. So that puts Blizzard in a very awkward position.
Agreed. I really hope it works out for us all.
Uh that’s objectively not true if you’re saying wrath because counting subscribers gained in Vanilla and TBC don’t count and wrath was when the player counters stopped growing which was never the case in Vanilla or TBC.
LFR was a good idea terrible execution. It should have been a scenario of NPCs completing the raid bosses with the player having to survive the fights mechcanics (dps) or heal/dispel fights (healers).
Not a bad idea. It definitely should have been made into a pure story mode. Not any sort of gearing or progression element.
Yup. It should have been what you see on some RPGs: the easiest difficulty, usually something called “story mode”, which was for people who only wanted to see the story of the game played out without having to deal with really any combat mechanics.
Some games don’t even have random combat in “story mode”, and Bliz could have probably even done something like that in a “single player scenario” where you have some NPCs do the fighting for you and you get a buff that lets you regen 100% HP every 2 secs and the bosses have a debuff for 90% less damage done. No loot, or maybe even just a cosmetic/transmog thing so people could “show off”?
I don’t have a problem with Blizz wanting to have people see more of the content, but LFR a sham of a system now (even more so than when it was released). Just let people faceroll it solo, see the story bits, and get their gear through every other method that Blizz adds to the game (warfronts, expeditions, 5 mans, other raid difficulties, etc.)
I’ve always thought it would have been cool to have some single-player scenarios that play through very much like the WC3 single hero missions where you picked up dudes along the way to some objective.
I guess it’s a bit like the class quests and mage tower content in Legion- pretty intensive to develop creatively, but would be a way to experience the storylines in the content of still playing your individual hero and role. Might even be better TBH, but certainly less cooperative and ‘epic’. Still could be challenging if that was desired (I suppose it would kinda be like the proving grounds).
they must have liked wrath for what it was too or i would think they would quit
personally i wont keep playing or paying for wow if im not actively having fun.
They actually tried this in wod, but instead of nothing the bosses just dropped random items of low quality.
The outrage was immense and instant. As a result they forced raiders into doing LFR in HFC as it was the quickest way to farm your valor cap for the week.
Then they about faced and put tier and trinkets back into LFR for legion.
Why did the generation of kids that grew up in the 60s drop Big Bands for Rock and Roll?
Why did the kids of 70s drop Rock and Roll for Disco?
Why did the kids of the 80s drop Disco for Pop & Hair Metal?
Same thing.
Right because blizzard decided to make LFR end game content for most people instead of making alternate content to raiding. Of course people were upset when they took it away in WoD and didn’t replace it with anything. And no they didn’t change things back to the way they were in Legion, the rewards didn’t justify the time.
They added tier and OP trinkets back, It was worth doing if you were a casual.
Not really the drop rates were abysmal comparatively and once again other than set bonuses you could get better gear from dailies.
Legion set bonuses were worth more than 15 ilvls, and you’re assuming that they didn’t titanforge.
Filthy casuals don’t need good gear.
Technically noone needs good gear, everyone should play in the same gear just for the fun of playing right?
And no the value of the set bonuses varied greatly by class/spec.
Yes they did, but to outgear your set bonuses you needed to be raiding or doing high level pvp to do so.
Lol making an argument for arguments sake is the best you can do? come on you can do better than that. Some people play for gear, some people need better gear to beat challenges you don’t indulge in.