Hunters love their pets, lets take them away!
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I totally disagree. “Respect my time” has zero to do with parts of or changes to the game outside of current end game. Those who make design decisions and plan out the future of the game have never had any interest in the parts of the game we see around us being deprecated. They do not value it and never have. They think it is interfering with their plan to fast forward all players into end game.
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OP - Because short-term FOMO baiting is how it’s done now. Retail should have remained the only game and gone more horizontal, and feedback loops should have increased threefold. Alas, the entire opposite of this has been practiced widely since WoD, and increasingly since 2019.
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Not just the old version of wow, but many other games.
Heres the deal- they dont care what happens because they have years worth of money from players in advance. Multiple year long subs, wow tokens effectively replacing gold and paid subs ( 20 bucks a token for what used to be 15 bucks a month), etc all leads to a game designed to get you to log in once a day, or 3x week, then nothing til the next week.
Its much cheaper to run a server when the only ones using it are bots or raiders.
that’s odd - I don’t remember ever saying that
I think maybe you’ve assumed I’m agreeing with OP or you were possibly thinking of other comments at the same time. It happens 
The only thing I meant is what I said - that some of us have challenging lives and want to relax. I’m glad that people have choices. I’m glad there is a variety for those who enjoy playing a different way than myself and I’m grateful there are so many new things being given to those of us who prefer to solo most of the time. I hope that you have plenty of fun challenges. My honest opinion is that the right way to play is whatever way you enjoy the most. Personally, I think elitist gamers who think everyone should min/max or do this or do that are ridiculous human beings.
I hope everyone has fun, sincerely
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agreed and you see it so often with literally everything when it comes to humans. It’s mindboggling how many people seem to feel it invalidates their reality when other people do diff things, make diff choices, like or dislike diff things, and navigate their own life via their personal experiences and perspectives, even though when it doesn’t affect anyone. I truly don’t understand why someone would want everyone to like what they like and do what they do and act like if someone else has completely different preferences, that somehow invalidates their opinion, enjoyment, or even their reality. Makes no sense.
Personally, I’ve been really enjoying the directions the game has been going in. There’s variety and choice. People who like harder challenges can do M+ and pvp etc. Those of us who game to relax can do tmog farming in legacy raids, explore old content we missed (even with higher level characters if we want to focus on the story more), choose follower dungeons, run delves solo and still be decently geared. A lot of us enjoy the catalyst too because we just really dislike raiding for various reasons and those of us who feel that way don’t even care that much about ilvl and whatnot, a lot of us are more interested in having the tier mogs.
Sadly, far too many people seem ensconced in an “Us vs Them” attitude in every single facet of their lives. “If you aren’t with me, you’re against me”. Frankly, it’s very limited and immature thinking.
Yes, walking for 10 minutes to get across a zone is optimized! Having 6 slot bags and having to again walk back to crossroads to empty them is optimized. Smacking ore nodes 3-5 times is optimized. The massive size of WC is optimized. No mob scaling…etc
I could go on and on. It’s the (almost) OG version without all the QoL bs they added. Retail is easier in the sense that it’s on rails, you max level in a few hours and dying is nearly impossible. Then at max level all there is to do is run on the m+ treadmill.
Nj being wrong on every part of your post…
Looks like someone was raised to want participation trophies and not to earn things.
LOL. why would Blizz want people to play a game that they definitely don’t play, that is the question.
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… I have to wonder if we have differing definitions here.
By “endgame”, I mean pretty much EVERYTHING outside of leveling and questing. That includes dungeons outside of normal difficulty (which including M+ in its entirety), all forms of raiding, probably the vast majority of delve-related content, all forms of “world quests” (more like random objectives for rewards), reputation and renown grinds, and so on. So pretty much anything and everything designed to be done repeatedly within WoW.
It’s Blizz themselves who have fast-forwarded players through that part of the game so that you can start the weekly repetition cycle as soon as possible.
You’re comparing different versions of the game, I’m talking about optimization WITHIN Classic’s ruleset… which is substantially different than how it was during Vanilla WoW. Things like stacking world buffs, clearing raids in far less time than it took during Vanilla, and even the leveling being completed far quicker. There’s plenty of other things, including the ideal talent builds and BiS lists for optimal DPS, and so on.
Even if Classic is generally slower than Retail, it is still very much optimized within its own ruleset. Significantly moreso than how it was during Vanilla WoW.
Classic just has a better balance at the endgame. It’s not completely trivial and you can screw up, particularly with inexperienced/uncoordinated groups who won’t be able to do things like Naxx or AQ40 easily. But most raids can be done by nearly any player over time.
Retail raids are clearly being designed as some kind of pseudo-esport for professional organizations. It’s gotten a long way from gaming as something to do for fun.
Because people in this game hate leveling.
(Just like they hate everything to do at level 80.) Wonders why they even sub.
I don’t think you want Blizzard to answer that… they would simply prove you wrong.
For one thing, I play Retail, I only touch Classic if it gives me rewards in Retail, like “Make a DK in Wrath Classic and you get a Mount in Retail!” And then I didn’t touch that DK again.
The fact that they had to even incentivize Retail Players to look at Classic Wrath speaks volumes. Been there, done that.
Prior to the announcement of Classic as a freestanding game, I was saying the same things as you, that they should have found a way to turn old content into entertainment for all, including things like adding back story that existed only for a brief period in the game at those times, and giving background to those who had not played old warcraft games and purchased all the outside media, which players at the time were expected to be intimately familiar with. Giving players a reason why they are killing troggs in some dungeon, and turning dungeons and old raids into follower content that could be played solo or with as many or few of your friends as you wished.
But they decided was that most players wanted to relive the grind.
There have always been some players who hated leveling. But the big change was in Legion when they implemented level scaling across leveling content, turning it from a progression oriented activity into an infinitely long progress bar to fill with kills of essentially identical mob packs. There is never any feeling of progress.
Better than being like you, who hates everybody who plays the game, wishing you could drive them all away, so you could sit in town and see nobody, like a single player game. Why do you sub if you so despise EVERYBODY ELSE who thinks the game is entertaining enough to pay for?
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I agree, they’ve added accessibility for the mid-range to rousing success. The world development team has always been the backbone of the game’s staying power, and transmog has been the most important feature they’ve ever added to the game.
It’s what happens when you hit the end of the mid-range that’s the cause for concern. The end-game team seems to have this idea that only way to increase difficulty is to take power away from players. Take the following examples:
Spec utility kits full of a variety of stuns/fears/knockups/knockbacks for creative uses of short, in-combat cc? That’s too powerful, we’ll just make it so only interrupts are effective cc. We’ll throw in a boatload of required interrupts in dungeons as well. Oh, not all of our classes have interrupts or only have interrupts wth long cooldowns? Guess we just won’t bring those classes.
Three seasons in a row they’ve identified that healing apparently too easy and healers have been fully maximizing their class kits by creatively damage weaving in the downtime or being able to set up and be ready for mispulls/mishaps/have an extra ace for a big save. Can’t have that. Healers heal. Better put in a bunch of unavoidable damage. Let’s drop in a bunch of curses and poisons. Oh not every healer has a poison or curse removal? Well just don’t bring them to those specific dungeons (6/8 this season I believe? #shamanmeta).
They’re shaping the end-game in a way that appeals to a very low segment of the playerbase in a way that’s framed as “if you don’t fit this box, don’t bother trying”. The devoted defenders of the hard timer, 1-shot mechanics, gear-gating, etc. are the folks that fit this box. Either flavour of the week meta jumpers, or players who have been around long enough to have learned the precision play required to meet these goals. It’s not that it’s not doable content. It’s that the entry level awareness or class requirements to do this content are punitive to the point of straight up being “this may not be for you”, instead of offering proper ways to encourage players to practice it and get better.
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Aren’t you on the side of delve people?
No, you are definitely the one misunderstanding. As a quick and dirty example, if everyone but the top 10 M+ teams stopped playing, the old 10th team, which previously sat in the 99.9th percentile or higher, would now be the 10th percentile.
In competitive games it is a general trend that over time you preferentially lose players from the lower parts of the ladder. They aren’t as good or invested and over time they leave more often. People from the top of the ladder also leave, but it’s just not as frequent. In the case of M+ this season it got hit by the release of delves in addition to standard attrition, and it would be asinine to claim that delves had an equal impact up and down the ladder.
The only kink in interpreting M+ data is that the keys themselves have completely arbitrary difficulty. Their mapping onto the playerbase ladder is entirely manufactured. However, the playerbase ladder itself is still sacrosanct. So long as there exists sufficient granularity with IO (there is) the relative standing of players on the ladder will still follow the trends which impact all other ladders. If you are a 90th percentile player and the ladder loses 10% of the players above the 50th percentile, but 40% of the players below it, your standing will drop without your absolute or relative skill having changed.
Dude you’re saying a lot of things without addressing any of the actual mechanical issues with the keys themselves. Long time players have quit this season because of the ill-advised, highly scrutinized, and overly brainless decisions the devs made. No amount of explaining the math behind calculating percentiles changes the fact that you are flat out wrong in trying to dismiss the systemic issues causing playerbase fallout. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Retail raids are the exact same way, the difference is that there are multiple difficulties to cater to players of different skill levels, rather than everyone being forced to do the same one.
If you want bleeding hard progression in Classic, you have to be in a World First Speedrunning guild. But ultimately you’re still just doing the same content as everyone else, except faster.
In Retail you have a whole difficulty tuned for that, which means that players who want any easy, “dad-raid” kind of experience, can jump into normal and just kill some dragons.
The difference is that raids reward top end gear in classic regardless of whether you speed run them or not. The prestige of parsing and speed running is entirely a secondary meta game. In retail normal and heroic raids reward substantially worse gear.
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