That cross-realm pvp is really destroying community amiright? or is that somehow different
âcross-realm pvp is bad for the communityâ
Said no real pvper ever.
What an incredibly useful point. You must be a blast at parties.
Iâm sorry if you donât like being corrected on an error. Maybe next time add âdonât correct meâ before making a sarcastic comment.
You canât give all of the success of WOTLK to the game itself. Just because there were more players does not mean that the game was good. There are plenty of games that have high adoption but arenât structurally sound. WOTLK had many ulterior factors that played into its âsuccess.â
Looking at the time The hardcore dedicated fans built up the popularity through Vanilla & TBC. Back then gaming PCâs werenât widely owned and PC gaming itself wasnât super popular ( it was very expensive). During the WOTLK era, PCâs became cheaper, the game itself was easier to navigate for casual players (LFG, Easier Raids, Less time required to play to gear up) And Wrath was the first time Blizzard started HEAVY public marketing as they were now a public company. NIGHT ELF MOWHAK! kekâŚ
After Wrath they continued with their monetization and capturing revenue from casual players who love Transmog & mounts. Which is what we still see in retail. The original players like myself & ones in my circle all bailed because it was a ghost of its former self and turned into a publicly traded IP.
The original gamers from Vanilla & TBC are rolling in their graves figuratively & literally.
Itâs sort of a hybrid. WoTLK is really where the game design explicitly turned to supporting casual first time gamers >> to welcome friends and family of gamers.
This led to the genre growing its market but also meant bleeding subs - the expansion itself ended up breaking even with lower retention than previous iterations but maintaining high numbers of new subs.
It was part of Blizzards shift to a long term market strategy - as the player base were getting older and started having family and work commitments the game started marketing itself as a family and time friendly game with multiple tiers of difficulty and a very low bar to entry (from an already low base).
This is basically the legacy of WoTLK which really is the spiritual successor to Retail.
The thing that puts WoTLK into the classic frame still is that it is the last iteration still based in the original WoW vanilla game world with the old 1-60 quests and world structure.
WoTLK is actually the first plateaux point. The game stopped growing after the initial peak in prepatch and the first couple of months of WoTLK release - with a lot more attrition but also new subs, essentially breaking even. This suggests to me that the peak was a carry over from the success of TBC.
WoTLK was definitely the place a lot of modern WoW players entered the game, but it is also where a lot of Vanilla players dropped out.
To my mind it was the weakest of the first three iterations of the games but it had some definite high marks - such as the levelling and questing experience, the world detail, and the Ulduar and ICC raids. It was the entry point for a lot of first time gamers of that generation.
I definitely think Legion was the best xpac since Wrath. Nothing can change my mind
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No it wasnt that is just false blizz even has the sub numbers. You can clearly see A huge increase in growth going right up all the way until wotlk hit and then it just started to stagnate and then cata hit which then started negative growth. WOTLK was the end of WOW growth and cata was the decline of wow subs.
It is different because PVP (Arena\BGS) is not comparable to dungeons or raids.
Why? I remember one of the biggest complaints of cross realm BGs is that the sense of community, especially cross-faction rivalries and the like, was lost because⌠it was cross realm now.
Donât forget the ToC patch also added the shop.
I honestly would have to disagree. Cataclysm is when wow became retail for a few reasons.
For one thing, they really nerfed the class designs in this expansion, and completely lost hybridity. In my op, the class designs in wrath were amazing. And they were just kind of, ok in cataclysm.
The second thing, was the revamp itself. I mean, the original 1-60 quests were outdated, but they were just really memorable. Mainly because of alot of the developer oversights. And, alot of times, they were just remembered, including the old overworld, for good or for bad reasons. To me, it doesnât matter whether something is remembered for a bad reason or a good reason or not. Thats why it made an impression.
I could go on about that, but for example, would the find mankrikâs wife quest be nearly as memorable if his wife was like, 10 centimeters in front of him. No. Because it would have been super easy. Even more so if a mini addon was provided showing exactly where she was. While i understand alot of folks like to use questie and all that, for me, i just chose not to do that to myself. At the rate i was going, classic wow was basically brand new. Because i hadnât played it for years. And the old content was completely deleted in cataclysm.
Barrens was well known for barrens chat. And just being a giant zone in general. Again, splitting it in half just completely removed this charm. I always felt like the zone was cool, and that it being well known for its barrens chat motif and just being a giant zone, was amazing. Some thought it was a bad thing. Either way, it was memorable.
You had quests like the one with gilthares firebough. For some reason, he is always flagged for pvp, regardless of whether you are on a pvp or pve server. And there is always that risk that an alliance will just come up and own him as you are almost to ratchet. But this npc also aggroes everything in sight, even if they are like 200 feet away from him. Like good lord.
And nothing in retail since cataclysm stands out like that at all when you are questing. The mobs are usually dispatched easily. No further from the quest area than you would expect. Some quests from the cataclysm revamp were memorable though. Like the day that deathwing came quest. Or the welcome to the machine quest becoming a quest giver. Fourth wall breaks are always fun. And there were some others to, but nothing really stood out like the old stuff did.
Some dungeons were memorable in cataclysm to. The music was cool in grim batol. I preffered it from the antichamber in ulduar. But, it is important to give credit where credit was due. There were a ton of memorable experiences in cataclysm. But i do think that blizzard just did not hit the mark, and the lack of the old overworld, they deleted alot of the charm that the game had been known for 6 years. I feel like it is important to add on to the game, but this has been part of the problem with retail since cataclysm.
I am talking about inflation. Just general inflation. How many abilities should each class have? How many talents should each class have? Should the classes have hybridity or not? How many levels should there be? How much damage should each class be doing based on each individual be doing based on gear up to the best gear? How much health should everyone have across the board? Etc.
I honestly feel like, with as much hate as shadowlands gets, chromie time was the best thing about the expansion. I just feel like they had a missed opportunity, not adding the old overworld back. I also feel like there should be adversity back as well to any given chromie time option that you choose also.
With dragonflight coming around now, and blizzard making the level cap 70, i will say that, blizzard should just keep in mind the template. Specifically the wrath of the lich king template of 80 levels. I think they should not add anymore levels than that to the game. With chromie time, they can organize everything in the game around a maxximum of 80 levels. 80 levels is the perfect amount.
I think this is going to be one of the biggest selling points of Dragonflight. This is blizzards chance, to actually make the classes more chilly and cool. I mean, i donât hate the current class designs. But i have never had the amount of fun on the classes as i did from the classes and their designs as i did in wrath of the lich king. Other than the old overworld, which i mentioned, which also separates classic wow from retail in my op, as well as the lack of adversity, i think the class designs were another part of what made wrath so amazing. The story could have been fighting off some random goat. Trying to take over the world. But if the class designs arenât fun, there really isnât a point either way.
So the talk of hybridity is huge for dragonflight going forward. While some might not like chromie time, and the level scaling, I honestly feel like it is ok. I just feel like adding levels and content to the game, there just hasnât been a decent balance. Because going through each individual piece of content for like 130 levels just would make no sense to me. Where as with chromie time, you can cherry pick the pieces of content that you want to level through on your way up. I just feel like, if they added alot of the adversity elements back to the game for any given chromie time option. And they added the old classic 1-60 overworld back in. I would say we would have one heck of an expansion on our hands.
I also feel like homogenization played a huge role in the class designs going down hill as well, and this started in cataclysm. But all the classes feel the same now. I definitely feel like it is something they need to look at going forward as well.
With all this talk of class designs and hybridity in dragonflight, i think this is the time to do it. Class designs stand out, among alot of other things that are kind of minor really. Like not having to get ammo on a hunter anymore. Or the breath bar being like 2 seconds back then, and lasting like 10 minutes now. Weapon skills. Level 20 being a paid requirement to dual wield and needing to visit a weapon master when you wanted to learn to use a weapon. Things like that.
One of the things people mention alot is the dungeon finder. And how it made a toxic community, and people became more toxic because of it. I just see it as a giant social experiment. In this day in age of the game, regardless of whether you are playing retail or classic, it is all about min maxxing. And being fast. Like ASAP. I honestly do not think that the dungeon finder turned the community into a bad community. They were already bad before.
Homogenization just created even more problems, because now, you donât even have to really watch mana all that much. Way to often, in classic and retail, i have seen tanks, just expecting the healer to adapt to them. The tanks are supposed to adapt to the healer.
I honestly feel like, much like how the internet and all this hyper access to all the information in the world at any given moment has enabled impatience, so to has the dungeon finder. In wrath, general knoledge was already pretty easy to get by 2008 standards. You only could not know where mankriks wife was unless you were brand new in like 2010. Where as in classic wow, when it came out, mankriks wife did not go missing for very long, even by a new players standards. It is legit advertised everywhere.
At the same time, it is a millenial thing. I donât understand why most of them cannot focus on something for more than 5 minutes, but the average player playing wow now just want things done. Especially leveling. And then the end game separates the men and the woman from the boyz and the girlz. Because it takes alot of work and patience to actually get raids and heroics started to get gear going. General knowledge of the situations only makes it easier.
I honestly feel this is why the turnover for wow is really high to. And that goes for any game. Even if it is brand new. And it came out tommorow. It would be min maxxed so fast before you could even blink. It puts developerâs in an interesting situation to. Because they cannot create content as fast as people consume and get bored of it.
World of warcraft started development in like 1999, and came out in 2004, back when everything was like insanely slow. Every mmo was hardcore and annoying. Heavy armor and skill and durability loss. In any case, regardless of whether you play retail or classic, it is all about being super fast.
I think that cataclysm is what really shifted it into retail, wrath shifted an even broader focus towards the casual and hardcore market blend. It just felt like cataclysm fell short. Like it did not even know what it wanted to be. And it deleted, altered, and changed to many things that people had grown to love about wow.
I mean, wrath just hit the casual and hardcore markets so well. Which is why it peaked in subs. Cataclysm through alot of things out the window, and i honestly truly believe this is when it became retail. It was fun, but i dunno, it just wasnât as fun as the fun i had had before.
At the same time, with classic wow, blizzard vastly underestimated the community. Especially min maxxing and patience. Because it did take a while to get to max level. Alot of people were still held back. I think the goal of classic was to get more people to experience the end game content of classic, which no one saw as much back when wow was out from 2004-2007. I think the paid boosts were a combination of getting money, but also getting more folks into the game. Because burning crusade took a while also.
The dungeon finder made it even easier to get experience gains, especially for those who liked dungeon crawling. And you still had all the class designs, and all that as you would expect. But in my opinion, cataclysm became retail. Not wrath. Wrath was intermediate,
I think retail needs to move slower by a bit. Wrath had perfect pacing. The class designs need to be better and more fun. And the old overworld needs to come back. Lookin forward to dragonflight. Dragonflight is looking at the class designs, which i think they should have been looking at for a long time. But it definitely seems interesting to say the least.
Friendly reminder that until the day Blizzard announced they were not including RDF, Zaalg was fully against convenience features, including RDF. He constantly tied the implementation of convenience with the downfall of WoW. Now, he claims WoW was always about convenience.
Donât take the bait folks.
Cata or mop is the start of retail bucko.
Vanilla wow was the start to retail, it was retailed out as a game which turned into many Expacs âthe start of retail is a fundamentally incorrect statementâ
However you could say it was the start of the decline into the current retail (it would be incorrect at thatâs CATA) but at least it would make sense
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except it isnt at all, youâre talking with 0 knowledge at all. Those features are the reason wotlk was the most successful expansion to date. LFR, pruning, content droughts and horrible balancing is what ruined retail. Cross-realm made the game playable for everyone and this cringe server gatekeeping just going to have people quit and have servers with literally single digit player count again like in tbc
Ltp does this at the with flying I havenât caught the zep obviously so not sure if it works there
it was MADE to have those zones flyable and the content was to suit, much like dragons now with the dragons you get from scratch, making content to suit flying is a much better concept than just giving it to us at the end.
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Retail is the start of the drop in player base. Anyone with a rational mind knows we should keep Retail garbage out of wrath to keep players.