No PVP gear vendors.
That is a huge change.
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Shut up PvP guy. We lost our vendors to Ionās disdain for badges of justice and loot determinism first.
Classicās success proves everything in this post is wrong. Old School Runecape hit over 1 million players for 2019 and is still growing.
Gamers havenāt changed all that much, especially MMO gamers and to say current WoW is the same game it was just even few expansions ago is just laughably stupid.
The Diablo team that was put onto WoW at the end of WoD is the reason this game sucks now. They have been trying to turn WoW into an action RPG, probably because of the mandate from Activision to push e-sports on their IPs.
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As an authority on myself, you are dead wrong on this one.
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WoW has changed. Classes were pruned, why? So what if X ability didnāt get used according to Blizzardās spreadsheet? They changed the old talent system to what it is now and over time a lot of the talents arenāt what they were when they first put it in because cookie-cutter builds even though builds are still very much cookie-cutter. They added and removed reforging because people were using a website to get their stat weights, which they still do today. Players are less free to do what they want, how they want and if you disagree then tell me why it should be required to grind rep for flying and rank 3 recipes.
Unless you donāt care about current content, you play BfA how Blizzard wants you to play and you only get an illusion of choice. WoW is a time sink, you play it to pass time where as before if you PvPād, getting your PvP set felt good. Finishing your raid set felt good but no more set pieces. RNG gem slots. Itās like a skeleton crew is making WoW and weāre paying a subscription fee for a subpar MMO hoping it gets better. In Legion, I had something to aspire to. Mage Tower appearances. What is there in BfA?
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Riggghhhht OP. The game hasnāt changed, just the players. BfA is just like Classic.
I dunno what youāve been smoking but itās evidently impaired that part of your brain capable of critical thinking and reaching the obvious conclusion.
Wow is being mud-whimped to death and if you donāt realize it itās because youāre smoking that funny stuff.
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I donāt know if this was directed at me or not but, no I donāt think I can read peopleās minds, nor do I think iām completely unbiased on the subject. I will stick to my guns on this one and say that the core of wow is more or less the same. Run around world killing badguys for thing you want. Many new bells and whistles have been added that change how we view things, or what strategies are optimal but, at the end of the day wow is still wow. Iād say that thereās a pretty good case of the game almost being too refined in that we know more or less what the bulk of what weāre gonna do in a patch without even looking at it. Youāre going to do dailies, youāre going to do dungeons, youāre going to do raids. Its not very often much substantial happens other than those.
My problem with World of Warcraft is not that itās changed. Thatās ludicrous. Everything changes.
My problem with World of Warcraft is that it has become excessively grindy to the point where everything in the game is intentionally drawn out to be grindy in this fantasy scenario by people who are not developing the game, that it will ākeep people playing longerā. All itās doing is burning people out faster.
Shadowlands looks like it might turn around on this, thankfullyā¦ if not, this may be my last expansion with World of Warcraft after 15+ years of playing this game on and off, but I digress.
All of this said, you are at least correct in that peopleās mindsets have changed in the past 15 years. The thing is, MMORPGs are not as popular as they were back then. But they are still fun to playā¦ most of the time.
Activision is trying to milk WoW for all it is worth, which I have no issue with in and of itself, but now they are damaging the gameplay to push āprofit-drivenā mechanics at any cost, and this is extremely unhealthy for this gameās lifespan.
BFA has a very real chance of permanently damaging this game; we may be looking at WoWās downfall. Iāve never seen so few players ingame before in the week before 8.3, it is worse than the worst content droughts in this game. How do you think the actual content drought will be?
Things are not looking good for this gameās future right now.
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A lot of games share dna from their ancestors, but to say even the core of WoW is the same as it was 10-15 years ago is a stretch.
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Classic has a comparable playerbase right now, and theyād disagree. Grind has always been a thing, but the nature of the grind is vastly different.
Before, grinds fell into three categories:
- No timegate (most of your key upgrades and recipes came from here)
- Timegate, but offered only cosmetic rewards (mounts, mainly)
- Attached to a raid, which is a timegate but progress was incidental to what you were already doing
If you wanted to grind out, say, Netherwing, you could expect to show up and do 2-3 dailies in about 15 minutes total, spend a few weeks doing that, and get a mount that changed absolutely nothing about your endgame viability. If you were a druid and wanted the Zangarmarsh Cenarion hammer (pre-raid bis for feral), you could get a group together whenever you had time and just hammer Coilfang dungeons for as long as you felt like doing ā there was no requirement to do it for X days.
Today, the grinds take the worst of both worlds and double down worse than they ever did ā your only paths to endgame progression are on separate timegates of several weeks, and on top of that the time investment per day is longer than the old daily zones because individual quests of comparable length dripfeed 50-75 rep instead of 200-250. Azerite, essences, and cloak/corruption are the only character advancement we get this xpac. Azerite is balanced catastrophically poorly such that the overwhelming majority of traits are unusable crap, and gated behind a 3-4 week loot box that draws from a drop table consisting mostly of said crap. Essences are largely substitutes for removed class abilities, and are uniformly gated behind rep or weekly caches. Cloak is hardcapped weekly and even attempting to upgrade it is on an even grindier timegate than weāve had previously.
This is not grind = grind. Not remotely.
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My mindset hasnt really changed im just getting tired of not being rewarded for playing content i want and not the few select things blizzard thinks players deserve rewards for.
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This back then you grind to get services and items cheaper now you just grind to access these things, also grinding wasnāt too bad you could knock out most rep by equipping a tabard and quest, run dungeons or killings mobs another proof how horrible they made grind was by MOP once exalted you could by an item that was account wide that made getting to exalted easier on other characters why did they drop that by WOD and never implemented it again?
2 Likes
The game was NOT always this grindy. Even in the newer expansions. What did you have to do in mop for example? You literally had to do nothing but lfr to get a few items for your legendary cloak. You were done each week after a few hours tops. It didnāt stress you out or force you to do anything excessive.
1 Like
Uhā¦ people kicked up a storm for months over the MOP dailies on the forums and elsewhere. There were like 5 or 6 per zone and they all resembled Uldum, but with raid quality gear and basic profession recipes locked behind them. The cloak came way later in the expansion and was accompanied by a gear upgrading system where people basically spent all day farming frogs on the Timeless Isle for coins. By the end of the expansion, there was literally nothing else to do.
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You found them in 20 minutes? I spent close to 50 (this was the Vale). Todays indignity was needing ONE item from a million health elites. Iām better geared than the run of the mill toon, but these do take some time to get down and every third kill, I need to eat. NOT to mention swarms of horde tagging them and shutting me out (blizz COULD have made it multi-tag).
Even more drastic attempts on their part to force their customers to spend inordinate amounts of time in the gameā¦ because we all know there are those who spend 20 hours a day and blizz is aiming at keeping those folks happy with gating content. Itās just the gates have gotten completely out of handā¦ we NEVER should have to take an hour to complete a daily (that awards bupkis, 50 coalescing, which is 0.005% of the item one needs to get!
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This exactly what he meansā¦ You canāt even be bothered to read but you think you can counteract his argument without listeningā¦ This is it. This the problem with the player baseā¦
They think they know betterā¦ They donāt
They want instant gratificationā¦
They want everything easy and achievableā¦medal of participation
They think set backs to big companies never happenā¦
You sir are the reason shampoo has instructions and games are now interactive moviesā¦
Anyone remember battle toads? If a game like that came out now adays people would lose their absolute ****
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I only play one character now. The grinds are no problem on one character. When I finish everything I have to do on the one character, I just play, or do, something else. Itās the only reason way to play this game now. I guess we just got used to having it easy on alts, and they are putting a stop to that now.
This person gets the point I was trying to make where most of the people have Twisted what I said completely around into something else.
I applaud you.
Short Readerās Digest version people complain about the grinds in World of Warcraft all the time and my question to them is what game have you been playing this game has always been a grinding game if youāre wanting something else youāre playing the wrong game. Either that or youāre expecting wow to turn into something that it never will.
@Luzvel I will add that itās not just the player base though itās just about anywhere in the world nowadays. People try to debate you in a conversation only half listening to what youāre saying and assume they get gist of what youāre saying. Half way in they twist what you said around to what they thought you said. No one actually listens anymore.
Disclaimer: This is just my opinion and observations from the 12+ years Iāve actively followed both this company and the gaming industry.
Aside from specific issues this game may or may not have (class design, content, balance, etc) which I find those conversations very subjective and difficult to pin point from player to player:
Two major things are actually the reasons why blizzard and this franchise are where they are today:
- Number One:
MMOās are Dead
RPGās are Dead
Classic Fantasy is Dead
and yes, they are. 46M people playing these (average stats for all MMOs currently) are nothing in comparison with over 550 Million players engaging in Battle Royal games.
What do I mean by dead? I mean that these elements are not popular anymore and thus have become niches. What happens when you are a niche:
You only have two options: one you double down on your niche and cater to your fans and maintain them or two you dramatically change and adapt into something else entirely in order to compete with the popular genres. Many games have done this and branch out into āAction-RPGs, Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy, etc, etc.ā and this franchise has done neither.
They have been juggling and toying with both sides without being fully committing to either side which has been detrimental for them. Their niche player-base is upset while also not attracting new players in.
- Number Two:
The other reason is Blizzards apparent new shift in PR policy. They have systematically shut down engagement and communication with their community (I will leave you to speculate why), very evidently for the past four to six years and it has only elevated the toxicity, the mistrust in the word, and the expectations on false promises.
They have handled EVERY SINGLE mess during this expansion (Hong Kong, Long Boi, PVP, Charities, eSports, CEO departing, Layoffs, CMs quitting, etc. etc. etc.) in the worse possible way; not once getting ahead of it. Allowing players to discover these instead of coming clean with proper official announcements. And then theyāve doubled down on radio silence. That is dramatically changing even the most devoted fans and really changing whatever is left of their image.
2 Likes
Nah this has nothing to do with the playerbase. I just have adhd and canāt make it through long and boring stuff.
1 Like