The focus is what you make it. If you want storyline character development you can choose to avoid M+ and just do heroic or normal dungeons for the questlines. If you want challenging content with increasing rewards you can do M+ and Raiding at higher levels.
You decide how and what to play.
Who wants to worry about lore and story? What? A good story seperates legendary games from everything else. A good story is key to keeping interest in a game.
I appreciate the response.
So the issue is that leveling specifically has changed and gearing while leveling means less?
I would say that during Vanilla your secondary stats had a very little effect on you while leveling. That you could just as easily equip the best ilvl gear for your spec (like today) and be ok. I know when I was originally leveling I rarely looks at any of that.
The largest change to leveling I see today is that it is much quicker. I had asked if you wanted the slow leveling process to return, and you said it is not what you are asking for.
Yep, and I’m not really contesting that. PvP is innately competitive, which is why I have chosen to not focus on it as my chief complaint with the game in its current state.
Correct, but it’s important to recognize that such an activity is designated towards the upper echelon of players within the community and isn’t core to the game’s design philosophy. World first is a one-and-done thing. M+ keys, on the other hand, are central to endgame progression and are spread across the entire playerbase.
Again, AQ is an anecdote. I recognize it as a competitive activity, but I don’t think it’s evidence of the game being competitive at its core.
I agree. I prefer open world questing. I’d like to see Blizzard add more challenges there, as they do in dungeons and raids. I also think there are a lot of players that really like to level. So let’s open new areas to leveling, too, so you don’t have to continuously repeat content. I want to see more content in the current world.
This is not the same thing as an e-sports competition, which is what the topic is talking about: “When did wow become primarily about competitive gameplay?”
That is the topic title, keyword bolded.
Small friction/competition will happen in any multiplayer game that is not 100% coop.
You could say that looting in groups is competition too, interpreting it in that way.
By design, focusing primarily on competition, we only had PvP and AQ gates in Vanilla.
TBC introduced Arenas.
Wrath introduced difficulty tiers, which are not really competition per se either, but foster it more than other options.
Cataclysm added Rated BGs.
Legion introduced M+, which is at the same time the best and worst thing ever added to WoW.
DF introduced Solo Shuffle.
TWW added BG Blitz (best addition to PvP in over 15 years).
Don’t forget that prior to wod, while you had to buy each new expansion to play it, you could continue to play old expansions on accounts that had not. Lots of players would stop their xp on characters that joined twink guilds that did old raids and dungeons at level. That’s a fun thing to do that people no longer have to do when things are slow.
And that’s the point. If people are having the wrong kind of fun, they will look for a way to remove that fun. Which always means that there is less to do in the game. I guess they’re still working on the assumption that this means players will have no choice but to do competitive content.
It was Ensidia, they ended up clearing it on alts anyway. Also it was only normal LK.
True. I remember how active the 19 and 70 bracket was.
The issue with that is that open world challenges are by default trivial. The delve type system will slightly help with that. But open world content either has to be accomplished by everyone, or you just get enough people to make it easy.
I’m not even talking about the e-sport style gameplay though. Also, my original first comment mentioned TBC being the primary culprit since a lot of people like to place blame on WoD or Legion.
Not expecting people to reach the 200+ messages to go and find that which is fine.
As far as design choices, Blizzard chose to award and acknowledge world-first races in vanilla.
Yes AQ was a single event, thats fine.
PvP was also a very large part of the game. It wasn’t some minor nebulous thing that just existed.
Most posters here would disagree with you, though I agree.
Either way, it’s really not an issue that the game is focused on competition, as long as there are ways for non-sweaty PvE players to get good gear.
Here’s hoping Delves will hit that sweet spot, just like BG Blitz kinda did for PvP in DF.
And I agree with you on that part entirely. The thing here is the topic was when it started
Which would be long before legion ever introduced M+.
Vanilla had competitive aspects, PvP being the largest and other smaller forms being present. TBC introduced arenas, which as noted by me earlier (again huge thread, I get not seeing that) was more than likely when all of this started in my opinion
I can say from the Beta, I have loved delves!
They are really fun imo and it’s great to have content that I can just kinda play at my own pace.
That said, I’m hoping they keep the system and iterate on it for the other expansions as well.
And yet, the same methods they have applied to PvE have been a disaster for PvP. As they keep pushing harder to invalidate unrated PvP, players don’t move up into rated. They just quit PvP forever.
I would say M+ already meets this.
It could work if the added a new area, like Emerald Dream but it was 70-80 plus. Some have suggested redeveloping the old areas so they scal to level. That would be fun.
Isnt content scaling to level one of the largest complaints, though?
I don’t know. I would just like to see more challenging content added regularly that is different than dungeons and raids.
No, the topic is when it primarily became about competitive gameplay.
WoW always had competitive content, but it was never the primary point of playing the game. Not until Legion.