Title. I’m not big on raids/dungeons or the lobby part of this game…but that’s all there really is when you venture outside of current expac zones. I was recently going through some random ESO and GW2 zones and I was shocked at how many players of all levels/CP just going around doing quests and participating in world events.
The WORLD felt alive. Players all over participating in the open world and talking in zone chat.
Then I logged on to WoW and I immediately felt the difference…a bunch of players in the main city town spot jumping around and a few scattered throughout the latest zones doing WQ’s some who were in instanced groups. I ventured to other zones from more recent expacs (yes even shadowlands) and outside of Oribos, ghostland. Same with BFA zones.
I was bummed to get to Maldraxxus and see it a barren wasteland, not a single player.
I’m on Stormrage mind you.
Not to mention that there was virtually no reason for me to be there anyway less hunting for mogs/pets/mounts. The content was irrelevant to my current “leveling” requirements to be able to even LFR.
The world just doesn’t feel like a world. WoW does some things much better than other MMO’s (instanced content mostly) but the world leaves so much to be desired. Running the same zones over and over and over as a non-raider/dungeon runner gets old. We need relevance in the older zones again…and that includes some difficulty, not 1 shot everything.
Other MMOs I think do a better job of keeping lower level zones alive.
I was surprised to see people in FF14 in pretty much every zone I was in, while leveling.
WoW, yeah you may spend most of your time alone leveling unless you’re spamming dungeons.
I think it’s a side effect of the world being so vast, and Chromie Time.
Players are effectively given too many options for leveling (choose your past expansion) and thus spread themselves out, when they could all be playing together lol.
It has a lot to do with Blizzard fast-tracking players through levels and amping the experience they get despite the expansion they level in.
Throughout the leveling skew, players are scaled well above the monsters, so it’s not only a quicker grind, but easier as well. It is a missed chance to teach players their specs and give them enough time to understand basic mechanics.
It also doesn’t help that developers re-invent professions and profession materials every expansion, so there’s no need to go out to old zones even to farm materials.
I wonder if it’s due to the way Blizzard shards the player base, opting for multiple low performance shards vs fewer high performance ones.
The former should be cheaper as the fastest CPUs and memory are sold at higher premiums.
That’s why the world feels empty, instead of fewer high performance shards, they opt for multiple lower performance shards resulting in players being spread across more shards.
Definitely the case old zones are dead, its not really a world, a majority of the population will exist in the current expansion. Often times its World of War Within, and World of Dragonflight before it, etc.
Its not something ive ever seen confirmed, nor something ive thought particularly hard on, but I think blizz hard decided on leaving older zones alone from the blowback from the cata world update. So much anger over old zones losing this or that, blizz just didnt want to touch it again.
I really like when they push us to older zones tho, happens every once in a while. But for the most part, theres simply no reason to be anywhere but current xpac.
My guilty little pleasure is I still sometimes afk in pandaria, I like to sit at the top of Mount Neverest with that wild onyx serpent looping around, overlooks the shadopan temple. And i get to hear the sha of anger die on repeat lol.
What’s hilarious is you have this massive cavern vertically filled with tons of space for hidden things, new quests, or whatever and there’s very little to be found.
Too many servers. Too many shards. Not enough players. But the moment blizz tries to combine them, the aging engine starts to fall apart and everybody starts getting hit with massive lag. A big reason for this that nobody likes to admit is the over-complication of abilities and their multitude or rng procs. This causes a lot of lag between the client and server. There was a video on it by that bald guy (not asmon) who used to be a high end mythic raider that explains it and the devs basically admitted that he was correct.
Blizz would have to delete like half the talents out of every spec in the game to eliminate the amount of lag necessary to make the game feel like an actual mmo again.
That’s the issue and Blizz is king of over sharding.
I remember D4 launching and as I leveled I saw almost nobody, was odd to me that a new game would feel so empty, then you go to the World Boss and THEN you start to see everyone phasing into the event.
It was sad that I was surrounded by so many players I couldn’t see or interact with.
Blizzard packed up their social game and handed it to Discord basically.
WoW’s population are mostly on the current Season/Expansion.
WoW is 20 years old. If you expect people to be on the Zone where we were 20 years ago, you wont see people. To explore old Zone, you need Chromie. But on Retail, most of the players are on the Zone of the current Season/Expansion.
If you are on Retail, if you want to play with people on a Task, you could open your GROUP FINDER. Find a Group with the same Task as you. Get invited, and voila, you have someone with you.
But when I farm for Herbs or Ore, I don’t want any players in my Zone. Empty zone is a plus for me when I farm stuffs.