First of all, i am known on this forum to be a very “complaining” player. Usually players that complain a lot about a game, they really care about it and want that game to thrive and become better. I know that many of my “critiques” where too aggressive, but it was because i cared and loved this game. Many of you will ask me why you play/played if you don’t like it. The answer is very simple: there is no other game like WoW. The only 3 games similar with WoW (Rift, AllOds and Runes of Magic) where ruined by bad management and cash shop. Rift had a real chance to compete with WoW but their greed surpassed the will to compete with WoW and that was why that game is a disaster now.
Now going to the main topic, why we play WoW? Not even I can’t answer it anymore. At beginning it was the feeling of “new”. After a while was the feeling of progression …then it became a monotony.
What is a mmo in my “ideology”? A mmo is a game where many players play a online game with the goal to complete progression through cooperation. A game where your progression is not locked by time-gating. A game where crafting and other “types” of progress are fluid and constant. A game where daily activity is minimized and where questing/exploring and other types of activity are rewarding and gives you motivation to complete them.
What is WoW today? First of all, WoW is a enforced time-gated game. Any type of progress you wish to complete (except mythic+ dungeons and PVP) are time-gated. Examples? There are plenty:
- Crafting: there are daily materials needed to craft high lvl gear or unique items, that are time-gated by allowing player to craft only 1-2 materials a day or week.
- Raiding: weekly lock-out.
- Story-line and War Campaign: time-gated.
- Daily questing/farming: for example Nazjatar followers progression. Even if you would want to do more levels, you are locked and limited by the game to max 1 lvl a day.
- In-game rewards: for example Artifact Power. Your daily pool of AP reward is limited by the number of world quests or weekly quests. Yes, you will say: “but, by doing unlimited islands, you are not limited in gaining AP, you can gain unlimited AP” . Well, later we will talk about this topic also: repetitiveness.
- Essence upgrading : time-gated through repetitive objectives that takes a lot of time.
Secondly, WoW is a very repetitive demanding game: everything you want to do is brought to extreme repetitiveness. What i mean with the word “extreme”? I mean long time demanding requests. Lets give a few examples:
- The Worldvein Essence: so first you do some islands. You collect some map fragments which after completion will turn into a one day mission. After finishing the mission you need to collect 3 fragments which can be obtained only by doing the weekly island wq and you get 1 fragment a week. After 3 weeks you receive a 6 days mission that required 3 followers (so basically you block 3 followers for a week,therefor slowing your AP gain from other mission) and rewards you with 750 AP (a 6 days mission that rewards you 750 AP is a mockery towards players). After that you need to do again another mission that takes 4-6 days and at the end of it you get the rank 3 essence.
- The honor Essence: to achieve rank 3 essence, you need to gather 50k honor on your char. But the funny part is that all previously gained honor it doesn’t count. It counts only the honor gained since you received that essence. 50k honor is a huge farm. Its not like you do 2-3 BG’s and done. You need to do aprox 100+ BG’s and win at least 70-80 of them. Taking in consideration the high que times and the limited daily BG time window (usually is between 15:00-23:00 EU time), you will require to focus a lot of time to finish it.
- Nazjatar follower level upgrade: limited by daily repetitive quests. They didn’t even bother to make around 20-30 different daily quests and each day to receive randomly 3 of them. You have every day the same repetitive quests: stop geyzers, kill mini-boss for the head, take the giant and kill nagas. Not even here, they didn’t bothered to add some diversity.
… And the list can continue for hundreds of pages.
Third, WoW is a exaggerated competitive game, where the meaning of cooperation and in-game friendship doesn’t apply anymore, like in other mmo’s. By turning the game into a competitive “content” , where each player’s actions are analysed and stored into logs, aka dps meters, the community turned from a friendly and helpful one into a vicious, competitive, mean, mockery, evil one. Now if you want to do a PUG raid, you need to prove that you are “worthy” to be accepted, by displaying your logs or Rio score or achievements. In the first week when Eternal Palace raid was released, Thursday, the second day after release, i even saw EP PUG’s that requested players to link last boss achievment to be accepted in raid. Out of curiosity i pm-ed the leader and asked him : “How ridiculous can you be to ask EP last boss achievement in the second day after raid release?” . His answer? : “F off noob” . That is a pure example of stupidity and ridiculousness and how the game changed in the past years.
And even if you are a decent player and you respect the dungeon/raid bosses mechanics, if your dps is average or bellow, you are kicked instantly without even asking a reason for that poor performance. What we talk about? If you sit by mistake 1 sec in a fire pool, you risk get kicked. People lost patience and they want only the perfect players to join their teams.
I don’t mind the fact that there exists dps meters and Rio scores that have the role to “filter” good players from bad ones, but nowadays, most of people abuse this system. At the first smallest mistake done, you risk to be kicked. Wich is ridiculous. I was quite lucky and didn’t gived people reasons to kick me from raids or dungeons, but i saw many examples where players where kicked for stupid reasons, just because someone who is still virgin is raid leader.
Blizz didn’t do nothing to stop this “evil competitive behaviour” phenomena and what’s more funny, they even encourage it by turning WoW,slowly but steady, into a esports game. We see already that m+ dungeons and rated PVP is already turned…soon they will add raiding (which unofficialy already is) and even pet-battles in the future.
This “esport-ing” ideology is very wrong, especially that is enforced into a mmo game, which by its original concept, mmo can’t be a esports game. Yes, games like FiFa, DoTa, LoL,Counterstrike, can be converted into competitive esports games, because they require human teams to compete between them,but when you try to “esport” m+ dungeons, by making people to compete against AI and who finish faster, that in my opinion is stupid. That means they alter the base concept of the mmo meaning and try to create a new one.
Raiding and m+ progression turned into a challenge where you need to focus 100% of your brain and reactions, otherwise you are rejected. So instead to play a game to relax and be with friends and to do a content together, you need to stress yourself and put a lot of effort to prove your worthiness.
For example i even lost a real life friend because of the game: we started to do raiding and m+ together and because my usual dps logs where around 70 blue and 85 purple, which was quite decent dps compared to majority, she considered that if i don’t do legendary logs (above 95+ orange) it doesn’t worth his time spent with me. So slowly, she pushed me away, every time pretending to be busy, starting m+ without me and then saying : " ohh but i called you in guildchat and you didn’t answered", and so on…until eventually at the end she didn’t even replied to my pm’s anymore. Then i realised that this person is putting a dps meter above a friendship and doesn’t worth my effort to be friends anymore.
Fourth,WoW is a game where all your progress means nothing. With each patch/expansion, all your progress on your char, especially gear progress is wiped and restarted from scratch again. The only proof of your past progress is a text in a achievement tab that is acknowledging your deeds. Nothing else.
A good example are the legendary items. Especially the Legion legendary weapon:
So you worked almost 2 years to grow and upgrade that weapon, so that after 5 sec (the next expansion update), that weapon became useless,obsolete. The only use for it now is for transmog. Even the most sh#ty green weapon is BFA is better than that “legendary” weapon. What is funny, is the fact that they are called “legendary” items. Only by taking this word in consideration and the concept of it,Blizz did a huge mistake by making this item useless. A legendary item is meant to be used forever. Its the best item possible (BIS) that a char can use, that’s why the reason for upgrading it, was so tedious. So what they did? They pissed on our 2 years work and made that item useless.
The same will happen with the neck also. What is frustrating about the neck is that you can’t even use it to transmog it. So after this expansion, all our work, will be again useless and obsolete.
So why bother spending so much time and effort for a item that becomes useless?
Where is the sense of accomplishment when you can’t even use what you achieved? Just a text in a achievement tab proving what you did? That’s all?
And the last thing, WoW is a enforced scarcity game. Yeah…Blizz like to make things rare. Especially Blizzcon “goodies” like those pets that now cost 6k USD for one pet. You are great. You bought a ticket to Blizzcon 6 years ago and you received a Murlok pet that worth 6k USD. You are awesome. Same applies for other rare collectable items in the game.
…
So, long story short, WoW is just a collectable game where you just collect pets, mounts, toys and achievements and everything else you do is very repetitive and restarted once at every 6 months. You can’t use any piece of gear for which you worked 2 years by grinding daily the same world quests. You can’t do any high level content unless you stress yourself and give 150% of your brain capacity. You can’t relax and make friends because most of them have this “elitist” ideology and if you are not equal with them, you are rejected. Basically, WoW brings more frustration and nerves than real-life daily events (family, job, bureaucracy,etc).
…
What can be done to make WoW a true mmorpg as they claim it is? Well there are a few suggestions:
- Remove exaggerated repetitive content. Its very annoying to do the same thing, every day for month and after the patch ends to add new repetitive content and just change the name.
- Hire a few employees and put them to create new story-lines, quests, campaigns, scenarios, events, world quests, etc and update the game weekly with new content. This part is the most important and easy to do. Why is important? You keep the players busy by offering them new and updated weekly content to do and therefor he doesn’t get bored of the game so fast. When you do every day the same thing and grind like a crazy AP, at a moment you loose the will to continue this grindy content. How can Blizz do it? By reviving old content. There is so much old content and so many opportunities to revive it. You don’t even need to bother adding new content (new maps,zones,dungeons,etc). Just edit the old content to “fit” the current patch and voila, jobs done. Add a few NPC’s, some mobs, some quests objectives, etc. I dont think is such a hard stuff to edit some zones and add/replace/remove some NPC’s,mobs,quests. At least, by doing this, beside the fact that you add diversity and “new” to the game, you also revive old content which is very, very low populated. Same thing can be done also with old raids: revive and scale them to the current patch so that new players can experience them also. Its not fun at all to go ICC at lvl 120 and two-shot Lich King. Taking in consideration that WoW earn a monthly media of around 50-80 millions $ only from subscriptions, not to mention aditional sources like cash-shop and esports/publicity, i don’t think that hiring a few employees to improve the game constantly will not be such a “problem” in WoW’s expenses and profit.
- Make the game more rewarding. For example treasure chests. They are called “treasure” for a reason. But what we have now, is anything else except treasure. You loot a treasure chest and you get a 10 gold trash item+ 30 war resources. Really? At least put in those chests some AP, more gold, a chance for a pet,mount, something, to make it worth have the name “treasure”. What we got now is a real mockery from Blizz towards the players. Quests: make them worth doing them. To do a quest that rewards 11 gold isn’t so motivating. Add diversity. Make small chain-quests (that contain 8-10 consecutive quests) that at the end reward something worthy: 2000 AP, a pet, a mount, a toy, a transmog, 1000 honor, 200 conquest, something. The quests nowadays are so boring and so unrewarding that the player looses any will to do them.
- Drop: remove titanforging from the game. Its such a biased content that only add frustration and argue between players. Its a luck based content which makes unlucky players even quit game. Also make drop chances more equal. For example the Rustfeather mount: some people farmed him daily since 8.2 release and others received even 4 mounts drop. At least, if a player is in party and receives the mount (or any drop) and already has it, make it tradable only with party members. Its a frustrating thing to see how this drop is so unbalanced. Also, regarding drop, especially from old content, you could add a “fidelity” feature in the game. Lets take for example the Invincible mount: we all know that the drop chance is very low. There are players with even 300-400 tries, that’s 400 weeks, tha’ts almost 8 years of weekly farming and still they didn’t got it. And there are others who received it after 3-4 tries. Imagine the frustration for those players. What Blizz can do regarding this could be the following: add a feature where after 100 tries, if you don’t get the drop until then, at the 100th try, you get it 100%, but with the condition that you don’t have breaks between tries (that means you need weekly, for 100 weeks, to farm ICC without any one of the weeks to not do the raid). Its a win/win for everyone: Blizzard ensures that if the player wants the drop, he will be subscribed for 2 years without break and the player will be happy that after so much effort,at the end he gets the drop. Same rule should be applied for all old content rare drops. At least casuals and collector’s players, for sure,will stay subscribed.
- Keep alive legendary gear through expansions: It is called legendary for a reason. The reason is simple: the most powerful and BiS piece of equipment a char can have. Removing and making obsolete legendary gear, especially gears like Legion legendary weapon or BFA neck, for which you need to put a lot of effort and time to grow and upgrade it, its very frustrating. The feeling i had when Legion ended was that Blizz pissed on my entire work and effort and as mockery they said: "Okay, my dear hamster, here take this necklace, grow it , upgrade it and start all over again. I don’t think its hard to keep legendary gear active through future patches/expansions. With a few tweaks the legendary piece can be kept on future expansions. I don’t think Blizz needs to reconfigure the entire game for a legendary weapon or neck. Either keep the legendary gear to pass into future expansion or remove this “concept” forever. Its very frustrating that hundreds of hours of work into your char to be removed, just like that, in a second, just because we started a new expansion.
- Remove time-gating forever: its the most frustrating thing to know that to progress, you are stopped by daily/weekly or even patch time-gating. I gaved above the Worldvein Essence example, where you guys, due to lack of inspiration on how to make players progress it, they need to wait weeks for a piece of fragment. That’s ridiculous. I know and I understand that WoW is a subscription based game, but by adding time-gating on all content and progress, that adds more frustration and anger, than patience. Another example is the Nazjatar follower. That’s ridiculous that i need to wait 30 days to max it. Make a total exp pool, for example 1 mil and make that each mob killed gives 100 exp. At least i know that i need to kill 10k mobs to max it and that i have the choice to focus on the follower or not. But when the game enforces my choices and doesn’t give me any freedom and limits my progress through daily repetitive quests, that’s beyond frustration, its ultra-anger. Better make farming for things more tedious and slower, but without any breaks (aka time-gating) and then the player has the choice to focus on that content or take it slow.
- Copy other games contents: its not a shame to copy it. Other games copied WoW’s features, so WoW can do the same. You can add “enhance gear system” (aka +x gear) , “constellation system” (a additional skill tab with passive skills that require star dust for example to be farmed so that you can improve your passives) , permanent followers in all zones with manual usable skills tab (like the hunter,shaman pets), add socketing system where players need to farm different materials to make a hole into the gear so that it can be socketed, add title buffs, add anything. There are so many possibilities to make progression to be motivational, but you guys don’t even bother to do it. The game system, especially gear system is so obsolete and stagnated, that in reality it didn’t changed at all since Vanilla,except some slight modifications. Other games “updated” their gear and progression system with the current times (2019), while WoW remained the same dull system since 2005.
- Add more World Events/Zones like Darkmoon Faire: except Darkmoon Faire, which is fun only first time you do it, there is no other “off-game” event. And not to talk about World Events (Summer Festival for example). They are not changed since release: each year you do the same thing and the only thing new is that you add a new hearthstone toy. Lol? Really?
- Remove raids/m+ difficulties: this is a mmo. Its not Counterstrike or DoTa. You want to be competitive? Np, play CS-Go or DoTa. A mmo means a game where players cooperate and become friends to achieve goals (finish a raid for example). Its not a d#ck contest where whoever has it the smallest will be removed and rejected. Many guilds and many friendships have been ruined by this “competition” ideology. Nowadays the community is so toxic, evil and unhelpful that new players barely have a chance to do anything in this game and most of them quit in the first months after playing it. No wonder that majority of people and statistics sites say that WoW has the most toxic community from all mmo’s on the market. Make this game to be more friendly and helpful. Don’t contribute to this toxicity.
…And many more other.
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I write this post because today is my third day since i didn’t logged-in in the game. After i received the 6 day mission for the WorldVein Essence, i got so angry and pissed off because of this “enforced constant time-gating” and that was the last drop for me. My patience and will to play this game is gone. At least for the moment. I dont know how much it will last, but for a while, i am sure i wont play anymore. Until 3 days ago i was rank 11 shaman on my realm at Azerite level. I was a really dedicated player and really wanted to be as best possible i can be, taking in consideration my limited time to play. I invested a lot of time (have a total of over 400+ days /played on both accounts) and i invested a lot of money. Only in the last 5 months i bought around 40 WoW tokens, i bought a Cataclism+Pandaria Collector’s Edition (which costed some money,every one know’s how expensive nowadays are the old expansions collector’s editions are ), i bought all pets/mounts/what-ever from shop, i bought a lot of TCG pets,i bought even the 6 months subscription in advance for the new mount, etc…spent almost 2000£ only in WoW in the last months. I even wanted to save 1-2k £ to buy the other collector’s editions. For what? And how i feel now? I feel that Blizz is pissing on all my investment and effort I put into this game and that they try as much possible to make my gaming experience as much miserable possible by time-gating everything, giving me only sh#t drops, slowly driving me mad by making me to do this daily, tedious grind and by allowing this community to become so evil and competitive in a game that by its own concept, it isn’t competitive.
Its sad, because its a game that i love a lot and i really put passion in it (my passion can be seen in my forum comments), but i can’t do it anymore. At least for now or maybe until things don’t change. This repetitiveness is really ridiculous and patch 8.2 brought it to the extreme, especially that now it is enforced, due to the Essence system.
Blizz, do something, change your “vision” and “ideology” or in a few years WoW will end as a free-to-play game with a cash shop as only source of survival.
https:// i.gyazo .com/745c1bcc54e98fa14534dcfd7d52c17c.png
https:// i.gyazo .com/e7bfea4e6a01b9238ea56b3846d7856c.png
(remove the spaces)
I put these screens to prove that i dont sh#t-talk only and that everything i said is true.
For the moment i will try ESO and FF14. Especially about FF14 i heard only good reviews and beside that i saw that many old WoW youtubers started this game and they praise it a lot.
This is not a “good-bye WoW” post and a attempt to gather drama. I still love this game and i still think that this game is the best. I will return to it, if things change. Nothing and no other game can change my “nostalgic” love for WoW. This is a “awareness” post that tries to warn Blizz how easy they can loose good and passionate customers. They failed the 2018 Blizz, when the entire hall “boohed” them when they announced the mobile Diablo. And it seems they don’t care. But soon they will care, when more and more people like me will start to have enough and say good bye.
The only problem is the “management” , especially under Ion’s supervision. Since he took the lead, the game is going on a downfall path. And it seems that with each new patch, they accelerate even more this downfall path.
They did such a good job with Legion, revived the game completely…and suddently they ruined it with BFA. Since BFA started, every day when i look WoW youtube videos, 90% of them are negative reviews,opinions,complains. Lazy Peon, Nixiom, Heels vs Babyface and so on. The only WoW remainer is Asmongold, who i consider to be a patological creep (but thats my opinion). Method? They do it for the money. Otherwhise they would migrate to other games also.
