The part that cracks me up is I remember the like ghost gryphon that would spawn in the Waking Shores and I remember seeing it, trying it and barely hurting it and laughing and then saying meh, i’ll have to come back when i’m ridiculous. A week later I came back and kicked it into the curb because the second we get gear, haste makes us attack so fast and our other secondaries make us hit so hard that ita just a race between my health and it’s health
I see myself as a hardcore player where I played a ton on launch and set myself up real good, do the reps and things I want and need, and then I go play something else or hang out with my fiancee but during that launch, I can take a week off work and just enjoy staying logged in and doing the old approach of buying way too much soda, eating way too much food, and just enjoying the fub of a new expansion with friends. I play with my Dad and Brother and fiancee as well so we pkay as a 5 man family and just have a blast. But once it dies down and the hype ends, we go 8nto maintenance mode and just do the bare minimum to progress which is like 2 hours on Tuesday, 20 minutes the other days and on weekends I do like 2 hours of M+ for the vault and then it’s the waiting game again
Playing a sport or a table game weekly with a group of friends is not a job.
Yes the more serious groups can raid 8-12 hours a week but you’re not a superhuman for that (and some go way higher than that but that’s a really small percentage). Add M+ to the mix tho and you have in certain cases nearly doubled the amount of time you’d have to play to stay current and the game is balanced on you having that gear.
The only thing I have to say about this is that it’s also a luck based system. If you need gear, you can farm dungeons but thats a huge time sink that a lot of people HATE doing. So if you’re lucky like my brother who can gear a toon out in 8 hours then once you’re geared you just peace out and you’re done. But there are people like me who end uo never seeing the items I need no matter how long I do the farming and that sucks and feels bad so the standard approach is play long on launch when everyone is available and excited and when the population dies, so dows my playtime
Yea think about how worse technically that is, you have to farm more because you got unlucky in raids? To some point rng in raid is compensated if you play with a guild as gearing the guild also helps you. It’s something I understand from a pug point of view is bad but also something I think is good for the game to promote guilds.
If joining a guild was more casual as you’d need less to enter raids I think that would help a lot. For me stuff like M+ and the great vault have been something that I’ve seen many people quit over as that is a lot of extra time added to get into raids.
While I don’t disagree, that means that the game feels good when there are more players in it and should find ways to retain player login instead of catering to the approach of players that want to login and just be done in a half hour.
The problem is you’re not simply trying to retain player login, you’re trying to hold them hostage. There is tons of content in wow. And if clearing the raid wasn’t enough once then you played an alt.
The only issue I had was an overzealous guild leader who required a 10 dungeon all 15+ great vault every week oe we did not raid that week. The vault, in my mind, is like a credit card. You pay into tbe time sink for the promise that you’ll get good stuff later. The more you go towards it, the theoretically better the rewards are. I personally believe M+ everyone should get a piece of gear no matter what, with an option to Bonus roll on specific bosses to get specific items as well as a one time per week reroll of your vault by selecting with of the windows you want to toss in order to reduce the amount of RNG we have.
Edit after reading your response: WoW has a lot of content that can be seen as actual content but if the reward does not match the time spent, I will not do it. For example, I largely ignored Remix ubtil 4 days ago because someone told me about the Magister’s weapons from the Throne of Thunder achievement as well as the Landfall achievement (its still bugged and i’m MAD about it but thats beside the point), I am on Remix now for specific transmog items. Once I get them and the mounts I like, I take it and leave. Not all content needs to be cleared 100%. I do the content that is worthy of being done. @Zoumz
Because Blizzard moved from subscription numbers to time played as a metric of success for shareholder meetings.
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There is tons of content in wow
There really isn’t. There’s Raiding, Dungeons, and PVP. And usually one other thing per expansion.
All the other “content” either is way too easy, or it is a mini game that doesn’t really mesh with the main gameplay loop (Like adding tetris to WoW and calling that content.)
That is true. But before it was mostly player choice what grind you want to do and how. Well how, most reps where “run dungeon XYZ to get rep”, some had token drops that you could turn in, in TBC Daily Quests became a thing for some reputations.
I feel like, reading this that you talk about all the Expansions with Artifact points, mainly Legion and BfA. Both had a “gimicky nonsense” system that had a relatively harsh grind early on… which then got loosened up over the course of the expansion. “Artifact Knowledge”.
That “laid out path” was also muddied. Like in MoP when they came in with RNG “Warforged” upgrades to always give you the possibility for an upgrade. In Legion and especially in BfA they followed that up with the M+ system and the “weekly chest”. Keep you in the running wheel as long as possible, to run after those possible upgrades. BfA’s “Corrupted” system was the tip of that system.
I think the biggest blunder “New WoW” has is something that is actually a good thing, but at the same time negative. Whenever a new content patch launches, you’re in the hamster wheel to get the best gear that patch offers. Only to see 6 months down the line, that with the next content patch the ketchup gear pours in which is as strong as the Heroic Raid gear. I always feel like Blizzard tries to pull my leg. But without it, you could never change the Main Raiding toon and it would make little sense to start to play in the middle of an Expansion.
Yeah I feel you. In Vanilla depending on RNG you could attack a same level mob while questing and get killed, but it was rare. If the mob was one or two levels higher the chance to not make it was also higher. If a second mob added, that was often times the end and you had to know how to pull out of that situation, which meant most of the times to run away or pull all the CDs you have intelligently to push through.
Every Expansion reduced that tension by a little. In TBC and WotLK they reduced the difficulty of mobs, but kept the mob density like in vanilla. Which meant that if you pulled too many, you still could die. There was also some skill involved, inclusive gear, to pull groups and make it through.
I remember having farmed the Mammoths close to the Ice Giants on a rogue for skinning. A few wrong moves and you would die, lol, what fun that was.
Raids where never really all that hard, at least for me. The issue was always that you ran in with people that either watched a movie while raiding or just didn’t know the mechanics… or just ignored mechanics. And yes, sometimes, especially in a new raid, I didn’t get all mechanics either, lol.
What I see in WoW now is, open world content is like going to a theme park. There are World Quests left and right, with Dragonflight also events. The only other thing you can do is run Dungeons or Raids. I personally find dungeons boring, especially M+ like back in Legion and BfA. At least now they not make you run the same 8 dungeons for the 2 years the Expansion is life. As for Raids, the timezone I am in, I only see people Raid on EST, which is bad for me.
The Vault makes no sense to me. It’s the weirdest system in the present game.
It’s bad luck protection. But blizzard never even asks why does loot have bad luck in the first place. If they actually did what they said they’re doing in TWW and reanalyzing everything they thought was essential they would realize that random loot is not essential.
Just make loot determinative. The only reason it wasn’t in original MMO’s was because they didn’t want builds to be determinative. WoW doesn’t do that, your build in WoW is not an amalgamation of random loot rewards.
So just make loot determinative.
That’s your choice to see it like that but that doesn’t mean it’s true and even then I already answered that problem, if you want to do more the solution before was simply to make more alts. The game doesn’t need to keep you hostage simply to play your main character for longer.
Things that turned WoW into a grind, for one Warforging in MoP. The Artifact weapon of Legion and the Neck of BfA, Legion still having Warforging and I don’t remember did BfA have Warforging… but it did have the Corruption system at the end which was similar. That M+ chest and for sure the Vault, that requires you to run 6-8 M+ per week at least to open all slots.
It sounds cheesy but I remember being a kid and logging in before school just to squeeze out that little bit if time to play. Now I am older and it cracks me uo but I have favorite spots in classic WoW and expabsions up to Cataclysm but after that, like you said, it’s like being in a theme park. The only way I coukd describe it was like WoW in it’s past felt like every minute in game was a minute and a half of real time. Like the game timeline was slow. We moved slower, fought slower, did everything slower but still faster than any other MMO in its time. Now I feel like I run at two times the speed and everything is like i’m watching a Youtube video at x5 the speed and I feel numb to the entire thing except for when big achievements happen.
Edit: to some degree having all of us as “champion” instead of whatever our race is makes us feel all powerful instead of like a soldier in the army for the Horde or Alliance. The faction war is all but gone, but ths game functions like it is still there and it sucks because we’re at this stage where everything is instanced and my family is Horde but I want to be Alliance and can’t because lfr abd queued content is still faction locked which is dumb
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To some degree I agree that loot shouldn’t be determinative but we can’t have a system where set pieces drop and no one can use it within our raid, thats not our fault. We took our guild in and didn’t have anyone that picked that class section, why punish us all for that?
Questing can be done for other reasons then levelling. If a level 70 character arrive to the Dragon Isles today there would be lots of things to do but at that level the rewards are sub-par. Imagine if ALL quests had an alternative quest reward that could be chosen. Instead of receiving an obsolete item you could earn a token that is used to upgrade your gear. I know we do have an upgrade system already, but this would be a simple evergreen system. The system would not care if you got your token in the Barrens or for hunting down Fyrakks forces in the Emerald dream. The currency would be the same.
The group loot system is to encourage class diversity, you could simply add more loot to raids if your goal was for people to gear in it faster. But the game is designed so M+ is that solution.
Which is nit a fair route to push people into. Not everyone wants to do M+ and relies on their guild to do the raid. Sure we could open it to pugs but then we lose gear to pugs and the guild doesnt get stronger so we get stuck until the RNG gods bless us with our holy gear. That doesnt feel fair or fun to do when suddenky an entire boss drops loot for someone and no one can use it
Yes, Elden Ring has massive number of players in the same zone as you. It just doesn’t let them tag your mobs.
That’s smart. That’s how every MMO should do it.
You get all the benefits of feeling like you are in an active world with other players with none of the downside of griefers or other people trivializing content without your permission.
If Blizzard had stayed inside the box of what an MMO is they never would’ve made WoW.