Different characters? You sure about that bub? Pretty sure it’s been just the one that I’ve been on since MoP, setting aside some server hopping.
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All I know is one month you have thousands of posts, the next you get a nice little reset. Wouldn’t surprise me if you “server hop” to wipe your slate clean with how obsessed you are over this narrative of yours.
Don’t really care what character it is, although you’ve definitely posted on alts before after you get laughed out of the place.
That tinfoil hat is cutting off circulation bub.
(X) for doubt.
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Oof, if raiders were leaving Warlords, that doesn’t bode well for Shadowlands since raid participation is in the toilet and there are less people playing now than during Warlords lol.
The removal of stuff like AP was designed to do such. The removal of world value and all value in matchmade content like LFR/LFR was designed to do such as well.
It’s a mixed bag of problems. One being how they don’t know how to create interesting reward structures that don’t involve raising power directly, and the other is them removing value from content or content itself to appeal to people who don’t want to play the game outside of their niche content (rated PVP, progression raiding, etc…).
It’s the whole “cut off your nose to spite your face” thing. Shadowlands feels like they designed the game to appeal to people who don’t want to feel like they have any reason to play it more than they have to.
Actually, that’s exactly what Ion told us his direction was for the game in one of his interviews. He wants to make the game around seasonal players.
It’s a balancing act. Too much grind and it feels like a job. Too little grind and people just fall off and stop playing. This goes across the spectrum but varies from player to player. It’s tough dude. There’s no easy answer here. People who say let people raid log don’t understand that expansions like WoD people just drop off when they get bored. You have to keep people hooked but not overwhelm them.
Yeah, I won’t argue against this. It has to be a hard job to design a game.
IMO the best things they can accomplish is having multiple paths to the same goal, rather than trying to create a cluster of different things with different layers of reward. Things like Torghast only rewarding one thing, and raid only rewarding one thing, and having currencies that don’t work with either of those things, etc… It’s all just a frustrating design.
I know I bring up other MMOs occasionally, and I don’t want the fact that I play diverse things to somehow negate my criticisms on WoW (I do play WoW, too), but the design of many other popular competitors right now is for the player to log in and think “what do I WANT to do today?” while WoW’s current design is “what do I HAVE to do today?”
It’s one reason why this 16-year veteran who only ever really played WoW is now playing different games more often than this one. Something broke after that wonderful last year in Legion, and only now is it starting to sound like it’s being addressed.
Although I haven’t seen anything about their reward structure yet. So that’s concerning. Nothing in a videogame should ever feel like an apparent waste of time. I mean, yeah, that’s what videogames are, but it shouldn’t feel so obvious.
I agree, raiding should be something fun ppl can do not something people ‘must do’ or if they don’t do it are penalized heavily for it.
Shadowlands tried to make PvP an alternative to raiding but pvp should never be about gear rewards and should be about individual and team accomplishments and competition towards a goal (capture the flag) or something else. (scoring points in a football game)
Shadowlands is far to heavily gear and ‘feature focus’d’ grind out ur covanant renown and abilities, grind out ur gear, grind out ur domination shards…
gear should come naturally and an average level of gear should be the result of just playing the game and doing stuff not poopsocking mythic raids with specific abilities weekly in order to mess around on alts and have fun doing other stuff like 5 man instances, or mythic plus or pvp.
That said shadowlands raids aren’t terrible, but they’re not as fun as legion’s or bfas for whatever reason, I really enjoyed Eternal Palace a lot more compared to nathria and domination
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I’ve been mythic raiding for years at this point and I haven’t met a single person that actually likes the systems you’ve mentioned. Some people are apathetic towards them but that is about where it ends.
I’m just saying that trying to pin the blame on mythic raiders is short sighted. It is Blizzard’s fault despite their intent. They have made the game worse over the years for just about everyone. lol
I just want them to make content that everyone can enjoy and stop trying to force people to do stuff they don’t want to.
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Sure, the buck stops with them; the simple truth is that they should simply ignore the whining and carve a path forward that they’re confident in. They don’t do that. They try to pander and it backfires.
These memes about how Blizzard is “too proud” are a joke - Blizzard isn’t proud enough. They really ought to just shut the whining down. People don’t dictate core game design to the devs of FFXIV for instance, but WoW players feel entitled to ride shotgun with Ion Hazzikostas and tell him what to do instead of just choosing to play or not play. Ion should turn up the radio and tune them out but he listens to the detriment of us all.
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The Shadowlands developer attitude that no one deserves any decent gear unless they spend hours a day on voice comms with toxic groups and get lucky with their Great Vault is why WoW is dying.
Shadowlands gearing in 9.1 is an elitist raider’s dream: no titanforging, no welfare epics, and no “free” max iLvl from PvP, while multiple special upgradeable bonuses exist just for raiders. But the elitist raiders are still not happy. And despite the fact that elitists said that gear elitism was good for the spirit of game, subscribers have just not stayed because the game feels unrewarding.
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Because only 5% of the playerbase is said elites. When the game doesnt cater to the majority of the players, the players leave.
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Korthia is what the elitist developers thought would be a suitable punishment for non-raiders to obtain the same power levels in 9.0 that we earned easily from covenant sets and epic calling caches.
It is an unimaginable grind, and too unstructured.
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Korthia is a nightmare. There are literally no straight lines anywhere, blades of grass that you get stuck on, the tiniest of curbs that a snail could jump over, yet you get caught on them. Breaks in the ground that make you detour half way across the zone because its 1 pixel too high to jump over. Designed to make us all slow down, also annoy us to the point that we stop, so that next time they can say “see. no one likes this, we arent going to add another zone this expac, because no one likes it.”
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They literally did that with Covenants and Conduit Energy and it sucked. Do you not remember those like 5 months leading up to the expansion where you were praising them sticking to their guns not allowing raiders to swap because min/maxing is some toxic evil, only for the Covenant system and Conduit Energy to be like… LITERALLY terrible.
This is the problem with people like you. You move the goal posts so often that no matter what the result is, you’re going to change whatever narrative you need to to be able to argue on the forums that all the bad in the game somehow circles back to being the fault of raiding.
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All PvP gear is a base 6 item levels lower than its 9.0 equivalent, and cannot have domination shard sockets.
A developer literally said that raiding gear will be the gear that everyone will want in 9.1, and the development team went to great lengths to make that the case.
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Well if recent bellular stats to be trusted, only 10% of currently active characters raid. So you are indeed just that, a small minority.
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I actually have no idea what I’m reading.
Korthia is now elitist-driven content?
What?
This is a dishonest argument, because you’re assuming everyone in the “90%” cares about the same thing you do. The raiding community is pretty unified in what they want, whereas the rest of the audience has such a broad spectrum of interests that it is impossible to act like it’s raiders vs everyone.
That “90%” is made up of hundreds of demographics much smaller than the 10% that raid that all want different things.
Islands, Covenants, Torghast, Visions, Warfronts, etc are all recent content & systems that ate up the large majority of developer resources that were aimed at that 90% and they all pretty much flopped because it is impossible to make content that everyone outside of the raiding community will universally enjoy.
The result is them making everything pretty much auto-win so the largest amount of players can actually complete it, so they call that a win via engagement metrics. But obviously nobody would say Islands are better content than raids despite a much larger % of the population completing it, right?
I’d also pretty easily argue that a minority of players make up the majority of /played metrics. Content designed around people that play the least would be a horrible design philosophy and would result in a phone-app level of quality. Sure, Candy Crush has a massive audience. Does that mean you make every game with as much depth as it? No.
It doesn’t matter what other 90% do, whatever it is, it’s not raiding. While the game is designed around raiding.
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