It was based on played metrics which should be the first sign that played metrics are a meaningless way to figure out what most people like.
Best example here are World Quests. The single most power rewarding piece of content in the game from 110-120 but also the most unrewarding experience to be part of.
Naturally a lot of us are going to do the content because it offers the best power progression of the bunch. In some cases it is the ONLY way to progress, be it professions or reputations or even gold and AP.
The only way you could ever really tell what people like is to remove power progress from all of it or make each piece of content equally rewarding. This is why I propose bringing rep tabards back. If I can get the same rep gains in dungeons Iâd never do another world quest again. I assume everyone at that point would go their own way and do the content they enjoy. Then played metrics would actually mean something.
Until they balance the way the game rewards you through various forms of content played metrics are meaningless.
This does not even qualify as a filler. More like a kindergarten assignment to paint a picture of a cat. You get 40 things thrown in for good measure. Still it fun to watch people flame.
Iâm sorry you canât understand anything other than the flashing neon signs though. You need Arthas to show up every 3 seconds to make sure you know who the bad guy is or whatâs going on.
Donât even compare WoD to BfA, itâs insulting. The garrisons worked just great as a feature, and it had some of the best challenge mode dungeon designs while class design hadnât been totally mutilated even if it wasnât MoP level.
BfA is a graveyard of failed ideas, from island expeditions, to azerite armor and corruption and essences. On top of the fact we are playing Legion classes with the Legion artifact ripped out.
People want the open world to be relevant again, but then are shocked when in making it relevant they added powerful character progression to wqs, dailies, rep, and wpvp.
People donât mind that WQ are rewarding. Itâs like you read half of the post and just chose what you wanted to reply to out of context.
This is a better idea of what I was actually saying.
While they are rewarding unlike any other content they are also extremely poor gameplay wise. They are trivial, highly repetitive bits of content that lose their luster weeks into the expansion.
Thatâs not good for the game. The reason the old way was better was that effort and reward were married such that the most engaging content was the most rewarding. Itâs fine that the open world has great rewards but it also needs to be married to great challenge.
Not to say the whole world should be a challenging experience. Just that having some open world dungeons and raids would actually not be a negative thing for the game.
I consider Mist of Pandaria the height of WoW design, story, and ingenuity. On the other hand, Wrath was as phone-it-in as you could possibly get, on top of being boring to.
BfA has itâs good points and bads, but a filler? Not even close. Go watch anime or something.
Thatâs PvE content, though. The only way to increase its shelf life is to up the difficulty and intricacy to create progression. Itâs very hard to have spontaneous content in PvE like with PvP. WQâs ultimately have to serve a casual playerbase and be able to be completed by everyone.
If you try the Timeless Isles model, it will lead to a lot of headache, and that came with problems of its own as it was basically a matter of population density and having access to the best group-making add-onâs to quickly collapse players on rares.
They tried that. Quests like the bare-back brawl. The BRH arena. The KT puzzle quests. Players complained that they were too hard and took too long.
So now we get turtles.
They tried that too. Players complained that it was the art/ dev team being lazy and just re-using assests because they couldnât afford to make a real dungeon.
Players also complained about withered jim rewarding powerful items. So now world bosses drop horrible loot and canât be failed =)
It wouldâve made more sense for shadowlands to come out right after legion. It feels like a sequel to that, we now sorta know what Sylvanas goal was and her deal with Helya. Everything Sylvanas did was all sub plot and felt like they forced a story to work for BFA.
People wouldâve enjoyed her story better if she wasnât forced into the faction conflict and was doing her own mysterious acts behind the scenes and with quests hinting and guiding us.
From the start the faction conflict never felt natural this time around.
Like even going back into legion the alliance knew why the horde withdrew from brokenshore invasion, how come non of the alliance leaders did? Why didnât the horde send a rep to go communicate why they withdrew?
Why isnât Baine or thrall trying to clear our names?
Dev team could pull a anime and just say this expansion wasnât canon. (I wouldnât mind that at all).
Itâs not binary. Some want easier challenges than others. This is fine.
The World Quest system can be done in such a way that it rewards various tiers of rewards for various tiers of challenges. If a stiff challenge isnât to your liking then donât do that one. If it takes too long donât do it either.
Also this doesnât address the issue of how repetitive they are. Iâd like to see a procedural generation of them so that NPCs, locations and objectives arenât always the same.
I think both of these would be massive improvements over the existing system. Something that you can choose to do as a group or solo, given you have tiers in the world to be in and basically never the same path twice.
I think both of these are poor complaints to listen to.
It would be. It would also be unplayable for casuals. Theyâd have to look up guides on how to do wqs, let alone keys, raids, gearing and class mechanics.
We canât even get real challenge mode visions, harder that the mage tower ever was, with scaling, because that would be too hard.
Then weâd be back to the complaining about catering to hardcore players.
I agree as well. But that is reality. The player base is too big and will never compromise on what they want WoW to be.
There are players that think the content drought of WoD was great because there was so much time for alts. And others that think instanced content killed this game. Imagine thinking raids, dungeons, bgs, and arena donât belong in wowâŚ
That is what they are dealing with. They have no chance.
I played, I think, 6-8 months before I stopped my sub and started playing another MMO I had yet to play. Truth is Iâd be gone now if not for Vulpera and being an officer in an RP guild.
Having some trivial, soloable quests next to some group required quests next to some hardcore group / raid quests is not unplayable for casuals. Itâs a matter of choice.
Obviously the easiest way to do this would be to keep the WQ as-is and put rep tabards back in the game. So people could choose where they wanted to do their grind and what best fit their skill level.
If you really want everyone in the world though you need a sandbox mindset that accommodates everyone. It can be done but not with keeping the world as it is. The world has to be far more varied in challenge.
Thatâs not how I read the complaints regarding BFA vs WoD. BFA has a ton of stuff to do that is also not fun for a variety of reasons. WQs are shallow and boring. Dungeons are tuned incredibly hard for casual play and both Warfronts and Island Expeditions have their own flaws.
So while WoD had none of these things sometimes less is more. It sucks to say but this is how bad content can be worse than no content.
The game canât afford things like Garrisons, like Warfronts and Island Expeditions. Not only does it cost money to make it also loses money. Itâs a double whammy. The tried and true methods of content will never be bad investments. Yes, even the instanced variety which I personally think is not good for the game. Itâs still the best content the game has.
The best move now is to take all the existing forms of content and make them equally rewarding in core progression terms. Then each has their own progression curve specific to that content. We all want something different from the game and if done right, the game can reward us all.
Yeah, I was stoked to play a troll-based xpac. The devs probably expected the memes rather than the content to carry the xpac. BfA content smothered my excitement early on.
Would only promote rep boosting while carries afkâd dungeons. They did it then, it 100% becomes a thing now.
They tried that. Itâs wm. Wqs are safe and trivial with it off. If players didnât ruin the faction balance wpvp would make these same quests fun in the same way tm vs. ss or gurubashi arena were fun.
It became pretty clear how âseriouslyâ blizzard was taking bfa after they followed up islands with the âcontentâ that was warfronts. Visions just feels like we are being used as guinea pigs.
