As soon as the guildmaster for Elitist Jerks became the game director.
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Except the main thing he’s done since taking over is crap all over raiding and guilds.
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An I’m telling you that you are factually wrong. The things I want are being worked on and have been worked on since Warcraft I: Orcs & Humans.
Yeah its funny Ion gets blasted for this specific issue.
I dont care what worked on WC1.
its irrelevant to the conversation about WoW and its gameplay. Its a completely different game, a completely different genre.
If you consider how people had to farm rankings in vanilla for PvP, you could argue it’s always been somewhat competitive.
TBC introduced arenas which led to a higher competition drive, Wrath and Cata improved upon the arena mindset, and Wrath had the gearscore addons which led people to keep driving for more and more gear.
The game has always had competitive elements and for the most part those elements started at max level.
You want leveling to matter? Classic era is there for you, so is SoD right over that way 
not his guild tho isnt it
Like I said:
…huh?
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No, when the game keeps changing the “area that’s the new level up experience to get to the new expansion final 10 levels zone” that’s what’s pushing it. When leveling is so fast you almost can’t help but get to 70 before you even want to. When you have to basically wear bad gear for quests to be remotely difficult while leveling, that’s what pushes it.
I absolutely enjoy quests. I love them. I do them all the time, on multiple characters. It’s just difficult when it’s all completely lacking in difficulty. And now, given that everything is lumped together so no matter what character you are on, you are quickly rushed to be completed with everything, it’s even less immersive. The game doesn’t even want you to do quests you’ve already done on other characters. Hello warband! Grow reputation? Nope, that’s too much effort, here’s all the effort you got on your last character, lumped right in. Enjoy!
To not be forcibly rushed to end game content is an absolutely deliberate work of effort by the player. I’m actually lucky (sort of) that I was absent for BofA and Legion, I took an 8 year gap break to have kids (just the way it worked out). So there’s a lot of content for me to enjoy that others have already done, and I’ve done most of it by now. But I have to do it at trivial effort. It’s more walk around and be told story, than put in effort. I tried doing it with low level alts but they leveled too fast.
To suggest it’s the players leveling too quickly by their own effort is to turn a blind eye to the reality of how the game is designed.
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I don’t know what the limit is for characters, but I’m one shy right now. And most of them are at 70. I try to enjoy all of the activities I can. Just running out of stuff.
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I often play classic on heavy downtime patch days. It’s fun. I’m actually probably going to consider the idea of a (can’t talk about this here) for my kids to play without the hassle of online goons soon too, and it won’t be any higher than wrath probably.
I played SoD for a bit too, but got bored. The forced waiting on levels I didn’t mind, but the incomplete spell books because of it really bummed me out. Classic was better this way IMO, although the differences from SoD were interesting.
Right now because of how botched the prepatch week is I’ve been spending a lot of time in FF14 for the first time. Reminds me of a EQ/EQ2 combo a bit, in spirit. EQ is where I spent like 5 years before WoW came out, so digging that vibe.
EverQuest, despite its name, had like…the least amount of focus on quests out of all of em.
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They were pushing for that shortly into TBC. Blizz was still butthurt about missing the Dota train and wanted that sweet esport team buy-in money. Problem is no one explained to blizz that matches actually have to be fun to watch for viewership, so they just kinda forced it down everyones throats with every attempt.
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I think “e sport” just means “they made something that isnt trivial” in most of these conversations.
Ty. One little “RPG” aspect I love in Classic Era that Retail doesn’t have is the Pet Happiness factor, for Hunters. And, how certain pets can only eat certain foods. IK the Retail players probably enjoy the QoL in not having to worry about Pet Happiness nor which animal eats what kind of food, but that’s what makes it an “RPG” I feel.
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‘Esports’ is just a buzzword that people let fly to cover for the fact that the game got more difficult to adjust to average player skill, and they just fell behind the curve.
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No, esports specifically refers to players competing against each other, normally in teams, and ideally in front of an audience. And absolutely in a tournament style fashion, not simply a back and forth, like how say AV used to be historically. As in, like a “sport” but with the “e” for eletronic, as in gaming. This is obvious.
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I know what an esport is.
I am saying that any time something is remotely challenging the response is “omg they are turning this into an esport”
M+ is considered pushing e sports on us, despite the fact 99.999999999999999% of people will never participate in m+ in the way you described.
I have run a lot of m+. The amount of times I participated in m+ in a team format, against another team, in front of an audience, in a tournament style fashion is 0.
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I’m curious if you can explain, without mentioning or discussing difficulty, how Blizzard has been moving WoW towards an “Esport mentality.”