All these people whining but as someone who’s played since launch day this is the longest I’ve played an expansion before quitting from boredom since wrath. Legion was good when I came back at the end but starting out there was way more I hated than BFA. WoD there was nothing to do besides raid and raid content was slow.
Sure BFA has it’s issues but all these whiners have some serious rose colored glasses when looking back.
You do understand a lot of players had only been playing to finish off the LK storyline, right?
Part of that 12m were those folks.
Once the LK story was over, they lost interest. I kind of want Blizzard to pull a Cata with Northrend but for 120 on up.
Redo the zones to show what is currently going on up north. I don’t see Slyvanas dying this expac. I see her heading back up to Northrend.
It might sound weird but maybe have the usual “Horde and Alliance have another fragile peace” thing going on (maybe focus on internal politics again).
Gives them an excuse to update TOC I guess. I just don’t want ALL rehashes of LK dungeons and raids. New stuff.
We killed everything in those places already. Give us new stuff. If you want to reuse some of the inside of ICC, fine. But we want a reason to be back in there.
Okay enough giving Bliz story ideas. (I have writer’s block or I’d write the story idea myself).
the game is getting old. It happens.
that its lasted this long shows that there was …WAS…some real talent involved in it.
Then WoD happened and the money grubbing began. More interested in the $$$ than making the product that was WORTH the $$$ they wanted.
Its all on them now.
Part of the reason they had 12m is because WoW was the FoTM too. You may like certain systems better back then, but simply changing everything back to the systems that existed in WotLK for BfA content is not going to bring those 12m back.
People have moved on. People have gotten bored. People have found other games.
I’m sure at some point, Pac Man had millions of players, but that’s not going to happen today… and that game hasn’t changed at all.
Understand the devs don’t care anymore. The ones in place are don’t have any passion at all with the game. BFA is solid proof of that. The wotlk team has been split up. I’d say give it time , actv will bring in people that actually want to work. Got the feel when Morhaime was around that people got to slack off while at work.
You haven’t heard the old saying, those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it? It must have been too much work for them, so to rectify the problem, they continue to alienate their playerbase. That’ll show us for supporting them, right?
The winning formula is League, Fortnite, and numerous other MMOs didn’t exist, but I’m not sure how Blizzard is going to go back to that.
But Counter-Strike and Call of Duty were. WoW was more compelling back then. It’s not like Fortnite revolutionized the industry and changed the game.
It’s astonishing the number of people who believe this tripe.
What Blizzard did right was take a proven MMO formula (proven through EQ) and wrap a hugely popular intellectual property around it. While they didn’t see the success of it back in 2004 in hindsight it makes perfect sense.
Warcraft had millions of fans already long before World of Warcraft. The Warcraft IP still has millions of fans. They don’t play the MMO because the MMO stinks. Once upon a time it stunk less.
Actually WoW’s subscription base regularly goes between some pretty extreme numbers – between 3 and 12 million subscribers – sometimes even in the course of a single expansion. This is because the majority, maybe even the vast majority, of the player base don’t keep a regular subscription throughout the game.
When everybody was absolutely hating on Warlords of Draenor it still got a massive subscription boost because of then-upcoming movie (and associated promotions) as well as the hype and pre-order business for Legion.
Unforunately common sense doesn’t stand in the way of a mentality that Blizzard is being divinely (?) punished by losing millions of subscriptions because they dared to displease a player that hold themself in high regard.
It was dramatically different. Heroic Dungeons were the focus in Wrath, and Raid content was for the hardcore players who had Heroic Dungeons on autopilot. If you wanted epic shards for crafting, you didn’t have to go to raids; you got them out of dungeons. The primary focus was on the casual player. Cataclysm completely reversed that dynamic. The primary focus became raiders, and casuals were cast aside. High end crafting was completely inaccessible to casual players because it required materials that only dropped from raids. The number of released dungeons drastically dropped. As the expansion went on and subs began to plummet they relented a little bit, and they finally started dropping real gear in dungeons. Still, the raid-to-dungeon ration skewed far more heavily in favor of raids. This is why LFR was added. LFR was an excuse to work less on dungeons and more on raids because in theory, the raid content was now for everyone instead of just for raiders.
MoP continued that trend. Dungeon loot was completely worthless in MoP. The only reason to run dungeons was to get the achievements.
TL;DR - Back in Wrath, you could formulate a solid gearing strategy that worked exclusively off of dungeons. You could acquire all the high end mats that you needed for professions through dungeons. This has not been the case since Cataclysm dropped.
Things just aren’t like they were. Release WotLK now (with modern WoW graphics of course) and you wouldn’t get 12 million subs. There’s more games out there, MMO aren’t as popular, and the subscription model is a dinosaur.
Look at WildStar (RIP WildStar). Their whole deal was making a old school, subscription based, WoW-like game specifically for hardcore 40-man raiders. The game is now shut down and the studio is out of business.
And WS was a fun game. I really enjoyed it. But what’s most telling is that what kept the game alive after the ‘hardcores only’ thing failed was going free to play and the extremely casual player housing part of the game.
As much as I loved WotLK I think if it were released now numbers would probably fall. Who (and I’m talking about gamers who are the age now we were back then) wants to invest that much time and money in just one game anymore?
Bring back flying and currency for gear#
Justice/valor and honor/conquest points.
Daily hubs with collectibles. World quests don’t need to go away though.
Dungeons should be normal and heroics only. Raiding Normal and LFR only.
New sets for each class.
Something like the mage tower.
No more azerite or ap farming!
Actually go back to vanilla and BC. They flatlined in wrath and stopped gaining subs because they started changing things. at the end of wrath they started losing subs when they introduced LFD.
the game isn’t “casual friendly” it is entitled friendly.
true casuals didn’t mind the way things were in vanilla and BC. They existed back then and were still the majority of the playerbase. They progressed at their own pace and the progressive tiering back then and the game demanding you improve yourself to progress helped a lot to gain and keep those subs. The reason being that the players not at the top looked at those rare items and armor sets and all the other stuff those top tier people had and gained a desire for it. It being exclusive bred that desire to progress in the game.
In wrath they changed that to have complete catch up gear so you didnt have to run through old raids and could go straight to the current patch raid. What this does is invalidate past content in the same expansion. It also lessens the impact of getting that good gear. The game starts to feel less rewarding and this continued and got worse every expansion up to bfa.
Now we are at a point where gear is meaningless for the most part. You don’t care about the name of it and probably can’t even remember the name of some stuff without looking at the item. all that matters now is the stats it has. You look for the gear with the proper combination for a spec/class.
It’s an old game, it’s really that simple. You can’t magically go back to your glory days because in real life that doesn’t work. Be happy you were a part of the good times. Look at all the games these days why would a child/teenager even pick up world of warcraft? The game can’t even hold on to their “loyal” players who have been around for years and years.
I think mmos in general are dying. They’ve turned from something you pay $15 a month to play to something you throw a ridiculous of money at just to “skip” something. I can understand people avoiding mmos like the plague.
While I agree with a lot of what you said, I don’t believe that this was the rationale for making the gear accessible. The reason was that as raiders began to burn out, there was no way to bring new players into current raids without having to first carry them through all the previous raids. The catch-up mechanics were added for the convenience of raiders, not casuals.
There used to be multiple tiers of gear progression at one time:
There was a clear sense of progression. Here’s where we stand today:
There is no more progression. Everyone is funneled straight into raiding. I’m not sure why people think this would be done for the benefit of jealous casuals who wanted better gear. Better gear was always available to casuals. These changes were purely for the benefit of raiders.
It’s not an old game. The definition of an old game would be Warcraft III. Old because it hasn’t seen an update in years. Well, it’s getting redone now but up to that point it wasn’t changed.
Games that get routinely updated and groomed with development dollars can’t be considered old. Diablo II is old but Path of Exile is not, etc.
That said changes made to games can be negative. Like changing the Cadillac line of cars to pickup trucks. This is what Blizzard did with the MMO basically trading a community-driven experience for a single player game.
As it turns out World of Warcraft the single player game isn’t nearly as interesting as the community driven one. The numbers don’t lie.
I’m not saying kids that age aren’t playing wow but I’m pretty certain most of them would rather play something like fortnite over world of warcraft.
Fortnite is community driven. League of Legends is also community driven. All of the top games today including Overwatch and Call of Duty are community driven.
In fact there is more community-driven mechanisms in those games than any of the current MMOs. You basically can play some of those games single player but it gets old fast.
The current WoW design is madness. Things they are doing like personal loot, world quest focused, marginalization of gear in dungeons and raids point to less of a community driven experience. The worst part is you can’t toggle this off. It’s not like those other games where you can choose single or multi player. It’s all on rails and inescapable. People don’t find community anymore. They level alone, 110-120 and find out the entire thing is a solo experience. The story gets old, the game gets old. 2 weeks tops. Little wonder they drop off after a month.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. The only thing left in the game that is community-driven is raiding. Back in Wrath I remember profession guilds that focused on gathering mats and crafting stuff that they could sell on the auction house for tons of gold.
That ended in Cataclysm. I remember casual guilds that ran Heroic Dungeons every night and occasionally raided on weekends. Every change since Cataclysm has further marginalized the casual playstyle. Before Cataclysm, LFD was an alternative that you fell back on when it was a slow night in your guild. From Cataclysm onward, LFD was the only way to see heroics because the risk-to-reward ratio was too punishing for most casuals.
Eventually there were no casual guilds left to run heroic dungeons, and all the raiding guilds were too busy raiding to bother with dungeons. At that point, all that was left for casuals is LFR, which is effectively solo. No casual guild is ever going to get 25 players together to run LFR.
Nothing has been done since that change to bring any sense of community back to casual guilds. Bonds among casual players simply don’t form in 25-man content.