There’s really nothing wrong with convenience. Retail is a different game than Classic.
Just like I like Civ 3 because you could stack units into balls of city eating death. Afterwards, I think they got rid of unit stacking. And taking Cities took more thought. I didn’t like that.
It’s really no better or worse.
Totally agree with this. My greatest hope is after a couple years not everyone is running around in stupidly OP naxx gear and I can still compete with at least some of the player base.
I think this is mistaken. This is the direction development has taken. Sure, some of the community has asked for this but it’s development that has gone here and a lot of people have voted with their wallets. This is one of the reason subs for retail have fallen and it is a reason that Classic WoW, Project1999 and Pantheon have a growing following.
It’s unclear if there’s a strong enough niche to support all these “classic” MMOs but it is clearly a market that has been ignored by AAA gaming and they’re coming back around to it finally.
It doesn’t “have” to, but when the alternative is some pseudo world where you beam to and fro and never actually enter the world, slower is better.
And no one ever said grindy, but if you want to go there I would say that modern WoW is far grindier than vanilla was.
Did you do your WQs yet to fill up your daily allotment of (insert xpac themed hamster wheel resource here) for your (insert contrived xpac themed super item here)?
It doesn’t have to be slow and grindy, but since you prefer it to be that way: you just don’t want anything you don’t like to exist. Even though its more logical to change the game to the modern era of gamers to appeal to the masses, you are just “me me me”. Yes: WoW has changed for the worse in OUR eyes, but it might be for the best of the game. Not every game can say exactly the same for 20+ years. Things have to change to fit the newer market. If more and more gamers want quick action and less and less want slow action, business wise: I see no logical reason to stay pleasing the minority when we can be pleasing the majority/
Greed is the simplest answer. Its easier to get people to spend $$$ by pretending you still care. WoW has been dosing a slow drip of morphine for many years. I bet they still make as much money as they did even before the subscriber decline off microtransactions. If they didnt, they would have stopped.
Many companies follow this trend. They inject you with a flood of gameplay that is really easy and convenient, entertaining too. But its a short high.
They dose you just enough to get in it for a little while. Then you drop 60$ on a microtransaction.
Thats the equivalent of 4 months of sub.
Then you take a 4 month break, and come back for some new expac or patch.
They draw you in with their antics once again, and if they are lucky… you drop another 20$ or 60$ before you realize its all a drug. It got you high… and you spent a little extra for one last dose before you quit. Again.
its easier to keep player retention with convenience. If you play classic and Raid for 2 weeks but don’t get any reward, its considered a “Negative experience”. Some people might quit due to it, and that’s why retail is the way it is. Classic will be a rude awakening for a lot of entitled people that they will most likely go back to retail
First off, the game was already changed to appeal to the masses. If that’s your cup of tea, go play it and stay off the forum dedicated to the version of the game you apparently dislike.
And in case you missed it, and you obviously have, Blizz has been pandering and pandering and pandering to the “newer market” and have been rewarded with plummeting subs. Not to mention there were enough people who didn’t like those changes that they decided it was a good idea to bring back the old, “slow” game.
I assume you mean they stopped paying. I believe this is true. However, alot more people have bought into the video game industry.
Market growth:
2005: video game industry market ~$11 Billion
2018: vidoe game industry market ~$135 Billion
That is alot of growth and alot of change. While personally WoW retail loses more and more of it’s appeal for me, its style and competing styles are popular.
It is encouraging to see Blizzard doing Classic in contrast to massive successes like Hearthstone and OW. There is alot of money to be chasing out there and I don’t think you can blame them for chasing it. But props should be given for doing things like Classic.
Because central to your point, there is a market (though smaller) for Classic and it is nice to see it not neglected. Yet it might not be as small as some believe.
Yet this thread is talking about the convenience changes of WoW?
You can’t really quote sub count of retail on now from retail back then when you don’t even need an actual sub to play the game anymore in a sense with the WoW tokens. Also: We don’t know how their subs have been since they took down the sub shower in WoD. With how successful Legion was: I’m pretty sure they got back a lot of subs. Not to mention: They don’t need 10 million subs if 1 millions subs will still give them the profits of 10 million subs through the cash shop and other means.
Like a lot of people have said convenience needs to be balanced, too long and people get bored too short and people dont feel like they earned it. Current retail is a bit too far on the ease side and classic is a bit too far on the tedious side.
I mean it takes around a week of play time(time in game not real life) give or take a few days depending on optimization to hit 60. That is a lot of time to invest in a character, so if you want to try a different class besides your main you have to put in a LOT of time, which can dissuade people from even attempting and is why max level alts were rare in vanilla. For some this means you are forced to invest in your characters and its a positive thing for others it means they don’t get to experience all the classes they want to play and thats a negative.
But for more concrete examples, if you are playing and you get into combat what would you find more fun hitting 1 of 2 or 3 abilities every few seconds and waiting on auto attacks to do most of the damage OR having abilities to hit on the GCD and depending on how you use those abilities can significantly change how quickly you kill the mob?
Also quick note cause people seem to misunderstand this ALOT on these forums…
LFG=/=LFD/LFR
LFD/LFR is the system where you indicate your roll(s) and join a queue and are teleported into the instance.
LFG is a tool where you can post and search for groups based on content and description. The only automatic joining is if the group leader turns on auto accept which means he doesn’t care who he gets he just wants more people, like in a TMvSS type situation(it can be toggled on/off at will too). It wont be turned on for a pug group/raid(unless the leader is an idiot). The tool allows people to show interest and talk to the group leader and the group leader can talk to applicants. It has no ability to move anyone anywhere. The only change they would really need to make to bring the retail version to classic is hide ilvl and change what/how they show your spec. But I personally think it would be a great addition to Classic.
Vanilla WoW was designed to be exactly that; Quick and Painless. It was based on the design of original EQ. Compared to its inspiration it fully accomplished both quick and painless.
So really its a matter of degree. If you compare EQ to WoW, WoW still had a sense of accomplishment, a sense of reward, just like you had in EQ, even though everything was super easy by comparison. Of course then they lost that as expansions continued and things became even MORE quick and painless (which is in line with the original intent of the game).
So really Blizzard devs got lucky (or were just brilliant) and Vanilla hit the sweet spot.
On the other hand, Vanilla WoW might have been too easy. There was very little sense of danger when compared to EQ. In EQ I was f’king SCARED of dying. Death was brutal in EQ, so you learned how to not die (not really, but you tried really hard). I actually missed that quite a bit going into WoW so maybe a little harder, or at least a little more punishing for failure might be the sweet spot.
^ This. I try not to bring it up much as alot of people think its bashing. But when WoW launched it was considered an easy streamlined non penalizing MMO, and would continue to be referred as ‘carebear’ for years to come. It was a game for people who hadn’t really gamed much.
It is only now, as many popular games (WoW included) have only gotten easier that Vanilla seems rough. The point is WoW has always been considered quick and painless.
People always blame dollar chasing or community whining for WoWs slide into ez mode, but the reality is ez mode is where WoW started, they were just continuing to innovate their own model just a bit too far. Where WoW shined was dungeon/raid encounters.
However, I agree with you that Vanilla hits a sweet spot. I am not a veteran of EQ but played alot of UO, DAoC, Lineage 1 and 2, Asheron’s Call, WWIIOL… Playing those games is like trudging through WWI trenches while playing in Vanilla WoW is like skipping through Disney Land, which makes sense because its designed as a theme park. And it turns out that they did a really nice job.
In a forum dedicated to the original form of WoW…
Legion was successful, but BFA wasn’t. And unless you’re being willfully ignorant, you know that.
Though you seemed to have completely ignored the part about how Blizz has already pandered to the “modern gamer”. So again, if that’s you thing, why are you even here?
Quick is not better per se but i am sure i am not the only grizzled old gamer who gets to spend increasingly less time with my wonderful, stress relieving gaming and more time than ever working to make ends meet along with spending time with the wife and kids. I just don’t have time to game as i used to, so a lot of the so-called quality of life changes in modern WoW allow me to still feel i accomplished something even in the far smaller slivers of playtime i now have.
I cannot wait for Classic though! I don’t care if it takes me 6 months to hit 60 and my bags are full every step of the way. I am looking forward to the ‘slowness’ of it. To me, i think it will almost be like gaming meditation. The only things i will _really_emphasized text__miss from current WoW are the wealth of races to choose from and flying. Otherwise, i prefer everything about Classic to modern.
Is this a stealth crbg thread
I enjoy the journey. When I look back at what vanilla was there was certainly a lot of travel but it also provided breaks and time to talk with your group/guild. This is how bonds are forged. That flight from UC to Thorium Point always took forever!
I will say that I dont have the time I used to but I would still rather travel then zip there (unless there is a warlock of course!) Those PVP battles into BRM were always really fun!
I’m not an instant gratification type of person. I mean its nice in small doses but actually having to work for something yields a much better sense of accomplishment. Not everyone will put forth the same effort.
I keep imagining my perfect game where there are no levels, the economy is 100% player run and there are no loot drops from mobs. Loot is 100% crafted by those who want to craft and dungeons can hold resources used for crafting that can be blocked/guarded by enemies/threats. The skills/character builds would be extremely deep. Questing is not fed but rather found by exploration. One day!
This is still the case in Retail WoW.
Granted Leveling is faster, if you don’t fall asleep while leveling.
Why is long and suffering the better way?
So if blizzard adds in the convenience of grabbing on to a ledge to save myself from a fall, that’s immersion breaking and thus defeats the purpose of playing the game?
I won’t argue that your talking about LFR and things like that nature. Those are immersion breaking, no question about it. Unnecessary even. But not all convenience is immersion breaking, some even help with the immersion. I don’t feel immersed as either an adventurer or champion of azeroth (whatever that means these days) that my character can’t even simply grab on to a ledge with their hands to save their life. How can i be immersed if my character is dumb enough to not save themselves from falling with their hands? Immersion to me is about Balance. You can’t make things too inconvenient or convenient.
Imagine if you will there’s no bonfires in Dark Souls. That’s great if you grew up with the NES and looking for a challenge to be the end all challenges, but for the rest of us, that’s simply impossible to go though the game without a bonfire consider we die alot, which takes us out of the immersion. (And no offense NES players, but most of your games are just simply impossible.)
And imagine if you will if there’s Auto-saves and Quicksaves in Dark Souls. Every boss room you step in? checkpoint. Pick up a weapon? checkpoint, pick your nose? checkpoint. Oh you die? go back to the quicksave you had where the boss is at 10% health. That just makes things too easy to go back and correct a mistake that fast and it would be boring.
common question for young people / student who don’t have any time constraint.
once you grow up and get more responsability, waiting around doing nothing for extended period of time become more problematic than you think.
Therein lies the problem. People need to feel accomplished with minimal effort. I get it i have 2 kids and no time. I dont expect anything.