Its the old argument. Should it be time or skill. Usual it ends up being a mix but I lean heavily on the skill side of it.
An interesting point, I wonder what the total quest count difference is between Wrath and TWW.
easy, so that rewards mean something. if everything is simple and fast to get, then everything is boring and meaningless.
It should always be skill because players can improve on that metric. When itâs time you quickly become aware itâs time because you canât do anything about it. Itâs static and thatâs grating
Honestly, self found HC is the mode youâre looking for. Itâs all about the journey, at your own pace.
Just commenting to say I appreciate your effort to define terminology and build an effective case. Too many people throw around words and self insert their own meaning into them these days without being clear to the people they are conversing with.
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Plunderstorm didnât have âabsurd dropsâ, MoP Remix only for the weapons actually. But I get your point, and agree.
I only played Dragonflight starting end of Season 3, but while I love crafting⌠I evaded it like the pest. Crafting and Gathering are their own minigames now, and I have no interest in that, lol. I thought I am all alone in this⌠it is nice to know this isnât the case.
I already play alts, allot of them. I do play with people, but I mostly do what I enjoy, stuff that doesnât waste my time with like waiting or being rejected, like Heroic Dungeons, low level Mythic + dungeons, the occasional LFR Raid⌠mainly because I canât be bothered trying to find a raid that raids at times that work for me. Seemingly everyone raids at EST and I sit in PST. And I donât want to waste time with Group Finder either.
It wasnât untrue it was you having no idea what you were doing not the content
They could replicate this easily with each no expansion. Just make leveling dark souls level of difficulty. And then have all the end game content as the cherry on top.
Watch subs shoot thru the roof as all the old elitists cry about how they canât rush to max level anymore.
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Not really. A lot of old WoW reputations were completed by logging in and smacking your face into your screen until
You got enough of x, y, z tokens, did raids every week, ran dungeons every day, or had enough gold to bypass the grind by buying the items outright which was something like 95% of the players did not have access to. Want Bloodsail Buccaneer reputation? Time to beat the ever loving heck out of goblins. Want Hydraxian Waterlords reputation? Time to go live in Molten Core forever. There were even bosses that required items bought from reputation vendors in order to summon these bosses as well. WoW, at itâs core, has always been a grinding game. Either you did it or someone else did it and you purrchased it from them. Asking to remove that grind now is asking for the basis of the game to be torn away, and I think thatâs okay as long as you give us something to do that isnât gimicky nonsense and isnât some knock off of something else (Plunderstorm and Remix). If I am going to spend $15 on the game, I need to see difficulty and value in the gameplay or at least a well laid of path of progression that I can take to eventually see my goals. I canât get them same day or even same week because once I do, thereâs no purpose for me to keep logging into the game. If reps are done before I get good gear, why do I need to keep getting the better gear? In old WoW PvP was always available whether you wanted it or not which pushed a lot of people to get better gear for that exact reason. Gear made the rep grind more tolerable. Set pieces made classes more accessible and fun. New WoW itâs all there but too easy and far too short.
What people forget is that if you ask for an easier game that requires less time to play it and fulfill your goals, you got your game but I did not. I got robbed of my experience and what I wanted. Saying âgo somewhere elseâ is the same argument or response people used to say to the âcasualâ players and still do. You have to find that middle ground and ride it hard. It has to be hard enough to engage us but easy enough to where less skilled players can do it too. That approach makes the open world weaker, easier, less threatening, and tajes you out of the immersion. Death was your punishment for not doing your class well enough or making a mis step or miscalculation. Now, I can play the entire game and never die because itâs so mind numbingly easy that I can auto attack enemies to deathâŚ
Those are rather weak examples⌠molten core wasnât a long grind and blood sail was entirely optional and rewarded no power.
I donât get the burning need to rewrite the past as classic can still be logged into. We can dispel your claim instantly why bother to lie?
Edit: as for difficulty i donât think I touched on it
Optional is still part of the game. If we want to be technical, the entire game is an optional experience. You have an option to login and participate in the game. While I agree that a lot of dungeons were actually easy and us as younger selves were just unseasoned and unaware of what we needed to do, back in 2004 we didnât have, or maybe just didnât know that we could use the internet more to help us in our goals. We chose to just do it and do it by figuring it out. Iâve played WoW for 17 years. Just because you were in a state where you understood the game and had the blessed ability to run it in 40 minutes doesnât mean that all of us did. If I can recall, classic WoW was when I was 11 and I started when I was 12. 12 year old me didnât understand most of that stuff and I had to learn it all. I donât know how old you are, but for a lot of us our reality was that the game itself was harder because we had to make the most of our 4 hours. I went back and played Classic. Was it hard? Nah, not really, but if one person didnât fully grasp what was happebing ans they were someone like a tank or healer, you could easily die. Currently, I can get on my DK and kick the absolute dirt out of a dungeon and all iâd need is someone to taunt and live for a few seconds so I can press keys. Back then, we used coordination and our kits to get where we wanted.
Winterspring and Scarab Lord are good examples of harder reputations to obtain, but they werenât the only ones. No one is lying when they said it took 3 hours to do a BRD run. I had several back then that took a very long time. Between bathroom breaks, wipes, and god knows how many other factors, it took a long time. However, imposing the idea that the time sink was never there or implying that it wasnât competitive just means you did not see it that way. Others did and actively played for that exact reason.
The issue is⌠even if we devolved the game for your twelve year old selfâŚit wouldnât make you twelve.
Its dangerous to ignore the lessons of the past and worst romanticize it till what you are trying to remake isnât a video game anymore but a memory. You canât cross the same river twice and I honestly sympathize with you.
If i could I would forget entire novels to experience certain stories when they were fresh and new again to me.
Bit late to the party but Remix/Plunderstorm werenât really that big of a grind.
Moreover, they became a joke after the multiple changes they did to them.
Crafting in DF is timegated because they want to create rarity, same reason why some recipes were terrible to get. They have this idea that professions have to be valuable, which if youâre someone that like professions I think you like. Personally, itâs not something I like and often mean I simply have to spend more gold than I like on crafted stuff.
Limited time events and content in general has currency or drops to reward your playtime, they are often a way to make it so you get more by playing. It also means that you canât get what you want as quick, but if the gameplay is something you like adding rewards to it should be something fun. And thatâs a big problem with some events with really poor/slow gameplay, they arenât that much fun to start with.
But yea like the first post said, this started with M+ mostly and the war on raid login. The game was pretty chill before that and they didnât try to string you along more than waiting on your next raid lockout and maybe some rep farm which could be done quick.
As much as M+ is liked by many it definitely distorted how you approached the game the same as them pushing artifact power for multiple expansions. They can talk about how you need a way to catchup gear but never added catchup to raids when it comes to gear. Ask the question why raids donât just drop more gear once the tier is over or after .5 patch, itâs because they donât want you to be done quicker. Theyâd rather you spam more dungeons.
I donât feel like it was mythic plus itself but more the vault⌠though its hard to pin point the exact moment the mandatory grinds kicked in. A lot pointed to the mop cloak quest line and the wod ring too.
It isnât game breaking to me but I would prefer going back to the bonus roll system myself.
And I understand that, but if we were to remove all time gates, revert crafting back to how it was (which was entirely worthless unless you were a JC or Engineer), and reduced the total amount of game time to a fraction or even half of what it is, then yeah weâd gain more time back in our day to do other things but to what end? Blizzard isnât holding a gun to our head and saying play. If you want time back, you can unsub and do it, or even just stay subbed and play when you can/want to. I do that. Iâm 32 now and work from home so I have more time where iâm essentially strapped to my desk so I have thee ability and luxury to spend more time than others.
Iâve watched friends come in and say leveling is easy because the damage to ourselves is nowhere near enough to scare me into thinking I will die unless I pull like an entire room or island of people. We as players know so many tricks and tools to get the game to do what we want it to do that we didnât back then.
I agree wholeheartedly with you that we canât go back to old WoW and we canât romanticize it but I will always ask for more difficulty, not less. If the game is too easy, iâm not paying a subscription for it. If itâs too hard, like so hard that itâs unplayable (sky is falling and I get 1 shot for breathing) then obviously tune it down but I would rather see a longer and harder leveling system, an in depth crafting system that rewards the crafter as well as the person that enlists their services, as to give a game with a strong story that shows us that Blizzard still gives a damn about us as players. Right now their model is to throw content at us so we can play for 15 minutes to 30 minutes and then log off and rinse and repeat until we reach Tuesday and get our Vault and do it again.
I enjoyed Dragonflight on launcb but I created my own guild and found my own version of difficulty in that so that was nice. However, since this is an MMO, then Blizzard has to find a way to make the game worthwhile, fun, and repeatable over and over.
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The turning point was actually when Blizzard merged with Activision, shortly after the success of Wotlk. Soon as the merger took place, we started seeing the first micro transactions on the shop. The Celestial Steed was first. After that, it turned into pets, promotional bundles, and even toys and transmogs.
Since then, all game development has shifted toward a focus on releasing regular patch cadence so new content can pull in the players it is designed specifically to target: players who donât remember how the game was in the most recent patch.
IE: new players. Thatâs who this game is designed exclusively for.
The vault definitely multiplied the number of m+ you did weekly which also in itself was pretty bad if your goal is for the game to stay pretty casual. Doing 1 M+ weekly was a better compromise for many but I can understand why for people that focus on that content it could be not enough.
Iâm also a big fan of bonus rolls which work way better at least for raiding as you can save them and use them later, they make the start of a raid tier better and make extending less penalizing.
But at the end itâs this war on raid login, we had artifact power, M+ and titanforging to make sure you kept doing content. Now we have M+, vault and the upgrade system. All made to make it so guilds arenât deserted through the week because having players paying to raid log isnât enough even if thatâs a big part why raiding on classic is as much successful.
If the goal was truly to have catchup for people that join later in the tier which is something theyâve argued about how M+ work without a lockout then like I said they could have easily made raids drop more loot later on but itâs not something they would do as that would save you time.
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Blizzard takes unique, beautifully crafted zones and encounters and renders them trivial.
Then what they decide to make hard is recycled content (hey do this same dungeon again but with a couple new abilities and higher scaling)
This game would have plenty of content if all the leveling content was actually challenging. Like the mini bosses while leveling are a fair challenge. But everything else you could legitimately kill with no armor, no weapons, and no abilities. Just right click it with your bare fists and it will die.
I recently got into Final Fsntasy 14 and found that I enjoy the gane because of itâs casualness but WoW has always been my RPG with difficulty and nore elitist vibes ever since I was a kid. I can choose to join in or not login that day, my choice. But iâd still rather see challenging content than mass produced content to accomodate the players who will login and then evaporate and say âsee ya tomorrowâ after 30 minites of game time like I just watched a coworker leave for the day.
I think the issue is that âcasual playersâ donât neccissarily play for 2 hours a week.
The might play for 8 hours a day on release, or if their friend is online. I highly doubt casual players treat games like a job where they need to clock in weekly.