See, I just don’t get why a person in your position wouldn’t just decide to move into a genre of games that respects your time more, because it’s clearly valuable. There are a LOT of games where you can make meaningful progression or experience solid narrative, within the context of a couple 2 hour play sessions per week. You don’t have to give up meaningful gaming, just because you don’t have time to play. A 2 hour session of Elden Ring has the potential to put you through some pretty extreme highs and lows, but good luck getting anything meaningful done in an MMO with only 2 hours.
As my schedule tightens up for whatever reason it may be, non-social multiplayer gaming is the first thing that goes. I can have fun with it when I’ve got excess free time, but IMHO it’s a worse waste of time than doomscrolling.
I feel like a big issue is the WoW Dev team doesn’t prioritize RP or character expression, and other games have done a much better job and attracted those players from WoW. Blizzard is focused on selling frequent content to players instead of giving players more tools to make content in the game for themselves. With the proper tools at hand, players can create a lot of their own entertainment, which in turn extends the longevity of the game and provides player motivated things to do during lulls and downtime.
The list of things they could do to support this are endless, and other than transmog nothing major has been added solely to support character expression. The next thing is probably babershop options and gyphs, but these are so infrequent. We have classes that have ability animations that are older than some of the players. Random thoughts:
Dying gear. How is WoW the only modern MMO that doesn’t have this? Yes, we get it, the game engine is old and there is a lot of old gear. They have had literal decades to implement this, or just started doing it with gear moving forward at any point.
Player housing. Soon WoW will be the only major MMO on the market that doesn’t have this.
Dance studio, which was a cool idea put forward during WotLK to customize player dances. It still sounds like an awesome feature, and I feel like if it was implemented in the way that dragon customization was in dragonflight (where you can get ‘moves’ from different factions and questing and choreo them together into a personal dance) it would be awesome.
Emotes. Many emotes for many things. Lots and lots of emotes.
Co-operative Mini Games. This could be a whole host of things, and I think Pet Battles are okay for this, but unfortunately since most trading happens over the auction house and the battles are a queue system, there is little interaction that this content generates.
Blizz could iterate on things and fix them if they wanted, like Torghast, Garrisons, Mission Boards, MoP Farm, etc. They could go completely nuts with things if they wanted. They could create an entire system where players can design their own mini-dungeon challenges if they wanted and collect the spirits of enemies and bosses from around the game to populate their dungeon.
It’s just a matter of Dev capacity and game vision. Right now the team is focused on the expansion cycle, player retention, cash shop and box sales, red line must go up design paradigm. So we will only get things that are long term fun as an afterthought.
that’s great and NOTHING is stopping you from doing so. Go do every story line and side quest you want to do. They are all still there and available, and nothing stopping anyone from doing them… I simply pointed out MOST real players don’t do that
Cool, I’m not feeling stopped at all.
But you implied no one worried about lore, plot or storytelling, which is objectively wrong.
And I still disagree that most players completely ignore the world they play in.
I think most players have a mild/healthy interest in the lore (that’s me), while some are very vested in it (people on RP servers I guess), and a minority is in WoW exclusively for the action (dungeon crawling/PvP), even if that portion grows as the story quality gets increasingly worse.
There has always been competitive game play since vanilla. Guilds use to compete all the way back then to clear raids first, and even more so in TBC and Wrath. Competitive gameplay is nothing new in WoW
a minority is in game for dungeon crawling / pvp… a MINORITY then please oh wise one why is that the most poplular area of the game? Must be a lot of MINORITY players.
Talking about lore here. It has nothing to do with group play.
Most people can and enjoy both.
I said you implied it, here:
I failed to mention that it was about new players, for that, I’m sorry.
It’s still wrong though, since the people that I did manage to bring in in the last 2 years greatly enjoyed the little bits of lore they got, and quit over the stupid scaling and disjointed plot points, since I brought in actual RPG players, not action game addicts.
I said that a minority does it “exclusively” (keyword).
As in no care at all for solo play, world activities or the lore.
Try reading what I’ve posted again, slowly.
If Blizzard did that it would finish imploding. There have been very few attempts at directly competing with WoW for years now. However when they finally destroy the last vestiges of MMO spirit, somebody will swoop in and finish them off. FF is already doing a decent job taking advantage of the missteps from the last several expansions. There are a dozen previous attempts at WoW competition that if done today, the results would be very different. The long term fans of the franchise still hold onto hope that things will get better. But if they keep getting worse, it’ll be game over.
It gets a viewership of literally hundreds of thousands now, and Blizzard has at no point officially sanctioned said race which means the community and the community alone popularized it. What?
People know what actual esports are. He’s saying that the term as it’s often used here is simply a buzzword for “content that I’m not good enough to do,” which is 100% correct because people call literally everything esports-centric even when it’s casual-friendly.
