I can relate… Most of Shadowlands end game systems are not fun at all… I still get fun from leveling up toons, gold farming and doing legacy content but Blizzard dropped the ball on Shadowlands overall
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Agreed, catchup gear should not require long grinds, from an alt viewpoint it’s far more beneficial to just do the dailies that award gear and hop into M+ instead of farming cyphers, all this would be alleviated if the cypher was account wide, and I doubt anyone would be mad at alts getting 252s from World quests.
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Idk,that one oopsie over the edge was amazingly funny and fun because it was a accidentally planed.
Yeah, I had to get my nephews to play because my guild just decided shadowlands suck and the vast majority of them just quit. Now im helping them through all the systems so i can mythic+ with them.
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As long as i really dislike min-maxing players, still is a valid way to play the game.
Can empatize with all your struggles to “keep up” being relevant or competitive on multiple characters.
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All my friends quit after 2-3 months. Lasted longer then BFA at least… they were gone after just 1 month.
“The best players in the world” isn’t that great a comparison when high end players tend to have an apparatus carefully set up around resources, scheduling, etc.
The player that suffers is the person who gets up there, picks up some gear, maybe has an alt or two (especially since the shinies more or less encouraged you to have at least four 60s, since initially covenant swap was deliberately made not easy and so much was tied to your covenant). Probably has at least one or two alts that aren’t the meta covenant for their spec. Doesn’t invest real money into the game outside of their sub (which itself is getting cold reactions from the community, I myself have literally had people tell me that being able and willing to budget away an extra 40-60 or so a month on Tokens is just part of the game at endgame and if that’s an issue I should quit gaming and go “work on improving myself IRL”).
You get to endgame, and if you find (as you will) that the PUG environment is a complete butt, you’re asked either to ditch your super friendly guild (Well maybe this is a generational thing but it seems like guilds that are dominated by say 30+ adults tend to actually use the ingame chat as their main vehicle of socialization, using Discord only lightly, so swapping guilds purely for content reasons is a much higher price to pay than is likely often thought. This has been my experience with big friendly guilds in both WoW and SWTOR, btw. FFXIV is the one real outlier, which I expect is because of both having a generally younger audience and because FFXIV’s ingame comms are pretty jank, increasingly so especially as they add more and more cross-realm features, thus heavily incentivizing folks to use Discord as the main thing) or simply suffer. Any kind of cogent explanation as to why this is a problem gets binned in “we gave you a solution, you continue to whine” and given the Block and Ban treatment that seems to infest online social interactions in general these days. We used to discuss and debate. Now we block and ban. This is somehow a positive trend?
Cynical me: This is all deliberate, and it’s because the increasing saber rattle governments have been placing on online safety in the last few years (it really started to begin around … oh … 2017 ish, to put it cautiously? But was especially accelerated since Covid lockdowns meant even K-12 kids had to move to primarily interacting online) means that literally the MMO as we know it might not be financially viable going forward - especially if the norm is a duty of care similar to the recently passed UK online safety act (which provides fines of several % of a firm’s GLOBAL receipts if it doesn’t maintain sufficient moderation standards for an online social venue). And worse, almost specifically the MMO, meaning it can be easily glossed over by watchdogs as a niche situation. Let’s see -
Console games don’t have to worry, because their social interactions are mainly through platform-provided voice comms (which is on Sony and Microsoft, rather than a game publisher) or Discord.
Facebook fluff doesn’t have to worry, because Zynga and King aren’t handling players’ chats, Meta is, and Meta would be held responsible for people getting toxic over Words With Friends or Candy Crush.
Esports don’t have to worry, because unruly fans aren’t usually talking within the game, they’re talking on their favorite streamer’s chat which means … yeah, it’s Twitch’s responsibility, not the game maker’s.
Social MMOing? Given the kinda stuff that goes on in Trade chat on large servers? I can easily see Blizzard being squeezed into having to hire back a whole bunch of those CS people to moderate chat, if put under pressure to “regulate their online social venue.” Do keep in mind, they’re in California, so even at minimum wage, your monthly sub pays one employee for one hour of work. (I did a back of the napkin once regarding the 800 CS people everyone was up in arms about the firing of a while back. If you assume they each work 40 hours a week and only make CA minimum wage, that’s about 150,000 WoW subs that would be needed just to fund their wages - just wages, mind you, not even counting things like Social Security employer contributions or health insurance contributions or such.)
What alternatives does Blizzard have in those cases? Pretty much they all amount to driving player interaction out-of-game - which would in fact lead to an atmosphere of fixating on e-sports (which, as noted, largely kicks the moderation ball into Twitch’s court instead) and incentivize a stance of “maybes” when it comes to improvements for the fun players 
For me, I’d say the OP isn’t recognizing the reality… “game over”.
Yes, of course, the illusion, WoW doesn’t end, there is no end game, no game over.
We enjoy the climb… for a moment, we enjoy the view, having reached the mountain top.
Life was simple, at the bottom, looking up, seeing the goal, and we start the climb.
Up here though, to continue climbing, we start setting more goals… and we reach those goals too.
Eventually we set impossible goals… and it becomes Blizz fault.
In this case, can’t maintain 12 min max mains, one for each class, to just hop on and play with friends.
It happens.
That’s not a problem though. You’re expecting to START playing the game with a fully maxed out character. That’s not how rpgs work. The journey of getting a character to that fully maxed out state is the game. This isn’t an “issue” caused by Blizzard and their game design, it’s the communities unrealistic expectation to begin playing at the end of their characters progression.
that’s what happened if you think you need to buy them week 1. I waited just a few weeks and bought my lego base this week and they cost around 20-50k each.
If you think your alts should be showered with gear then no. But alts are easy enough to gear if you know what you’re doing
NO. Just NO. Issue is you people think that you should do everything. You can choose not to do it. I choose not to raid this season. I choose not to pvp ever. Sure I’m slightly behind but guess what I can do what I want to do and still be ok.
Ah ok a quitting thread. Can I have your gold then?
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I agree 100%, and that says a lot coming from me because I rather enjoy repetition and simple goals. The last 3 expansions have been progressively less enjoyable to me for many reasons. Like you, I’m going to expire and find something else to fill my time. I guess we’ll see if Microsoft can improve things, personally I feel they need to clean house in the developers department and go back to the considerate game design that started WOW.
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I’m not quite sure what you’re on about, but you didn’t read anything I said, so I won’t take the time to read any of that rambling.
I’m not expecting to START anything. We’re at the end of an expansion and still being gated by multiple power systems that ARE mandatory for high end content.
And since I don’t feel like individually replying, to the person that said you can choose what you do within the game, that’s kinda the entire point of this post. My choice to want to play at a reasonably competitive level is hindered by multiple gated systems that are designed to falsely extend the duration of current content, rather than spending resources to develop actual fun and engaging new content. This has been the trend for a while now, and I’m not quite sure how I can be any more clear on the point of my post, or my personal opinion.
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Yes you are. You’re expecting to do high-end content but don’t want to progress to that point…ie, you expect to start playing at that level
You’re clearly not getting the point at all, and obviously didn’t read my original post. My complaint is with the fact that progressing to that level is such an arduous thing to do that it makes playing any alternate character miserable. It has nothing to do with being handed gear, or starting at any level. It is entirely about the fact that getting to that level is such a ridiculous grind when it should not be.
Do what I do. Check out the game the last patch of each expansion. It’s not as bad that way. All their “fixes” are enabled and you don’t miss out on good single player games.
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Yup, looks like it. Wants every character to be absolute max best but cant understand why that’s time consuming
It’s only a ridiculous grind if you’re only interested in playing at the end of it. The grind that you consider the prerequisite for competitive play is what most people consider the day to day gameplay. The place where you want your characters to be to begin enjoying content is where I hope to end S3 at, and the enjoyment I get out of the game is my journey to that point.
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People like to trash talk WoD but it really was a great xpac for the very reason people didn’t like it, “there was nothing to do” 
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If they learned anything hopefully it’s that the Classic/TBC approach is worlds better than the garbage they’ve done, and they bring the game back to that. Some people would complain sure but more people played Classic/TBC than retail so it should work out.