Some of your points are valid but cmon dude… example Shadowlands: not letting people choose freely between covenants and not abolishing entry barriers for alt characters is just dogsh1t gamedesign that came directly from Actiblizz. Sometimes you do have to listen to the community. Can’t bend to everything but yeah.
The problem with covenants is that retail team has, for more than 10 years, cattered to a public that do not like RPG core principles. Retail is a diablo-like loot-shower game. It pleases achievers and lootvores, which is ok.
So retail attracted this kind of players, and all RPG addicts quited long ago. Retail is not a RPG in the original sense of the word, and its players are not RPG players (which again, is ok ; just identifying a fact, not judging it in any capacity).
But then classic came. Ion saw and understood the original philosophy for the first time (you actually can trace his slow opening to it in interviews). And he said to himself “hoy I wanna try that. I wanna build a real RPG for a change”. He thought it would make wow good again, as vanilla was a big success.
Problem was not his design. Covenants would have been a huge success if done in 2004. Problem was : his public is not a RPG public anymore. He tried to give RPG restrictions and voyage to diablo-looter players. They cried. OMG they cried. Because “why restrictions ? me want all now me want to be optimal on all fights me can’t have restriction”.
So the failure of covenants (SL has real problems on other systems, I’m only talking about covenants) comes not from the deisgn, but from the fact retail’s public has been forged by 10 years of restricted design catering only to 1 kind of players (achievers). The slow but steady exclusion of all non-achievers players made a context in which RPG design became impossible to implement.
Go see the Ion’s interviews commented by original vanilla designer and you will see that he mainly agrees with Ion but predicted the players would backlash and blizzard would be forced to surrender.
1 Like
100% spot on. I woulf count myself towards the mentioned “achievers”. I don’t care about any stupid RP i just want to optimally play my character in raids because the core mechanics of wow always were fun to me. It was dumb of Ion to think that retail could go back to RPG principles, too much has changed, as ypu explained.
1 Like
Yep. I actually think the way to “save” wow is to double down on the 2 opposite designs.
- Do a full loot achiever experience on retail, with zero RPG restriction and zero story. Just good raids, shower-loots and systems like mythic+.
- Do a vanilla+ for non-achiever players. With the original immersive design. Story content, quests, professions, zones… to attract roleplayers, casuals, explorers, and all other kinds of players who quitted retail over the years.
So each public would have his perfect game.
But they are now making classic into a retail-like, which is the worst idea as it will shrink again wow’s customer base. If classic caters only to achievers, by bending to forumers and twitchers demands, it will become an avatar of retail and wow will continue to lose customers.
1 Like
You created a topic about dual-spec and your first response to a contrary opinion is to derail your own thread?
The digital RPG genre has distanced itself quite a lot from the original pen and paper RPGs. Respecialization doesn’t make much sense from a “diegetic” point of view – but it’s not completely void of logic. You go to your trainer and pay a sum to respecialize. This process is instant – a moment ago you were a master of shadows and then you became a beacon of light (using the worst example possible for effect) – it doesn’t make much sense. However, I don’t think it would have been wise of them not to include some form of respecialization. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a bit of immersion in order to improve the experience, but where to draw the line is difficult to tell. Some people will tolerate more, some less, as is apparent in these toxic wastepits people call “discussions”.
Personally I don’t want dual-spec, but it has nothing to do with me not wanting changes to TBCC. I consider retail to be an unsalvagable mess at this point so don’t go and tell me to play that, but I do think there have been plenty of good changes along the way. The problem is they are outweighed by the number of bad changes. I think it is very possible to take some innovations from later installments of the game and improve the TBCC experience – the question is, as you (Lahire) have pointed out, is whether we can trust Blizzard to implement the right ones. And I honestly don’t think we can.
… that said, these forums are here for people to talk about this stuff, and there are certain things that I’d really like to see included in TBCC. I don’t expect them to ever be added, but I can dream.
Well yeah respec never made sense from RP perspective because originally there was no respec in wow. The trainer’s respec has been added because players were missclicking or regretting choices during alpha/beta. So it is already a compromise of vision in vanilla. The high cost is here to detter from routine respec, to keep it just for 1 to 3 “mistakes” player could make during his journey.
Vanilla’s designers were adamant on the idea that if you wanted another journey, you needed to reroll (and not respec).
For the evolution of RPG see my post about retail : the distantiation from RPG core vision over the years made it into something that cannot be called an RPG. This neo-RPG genre (FF XIV is also part of it) attracts a specific kind of players.
If you do the same with classic, you will have 2 games pleasing the same playerbase (3 actually because diablo is also the same playerbase). So blizz will continue to bleed customers and shrink. It’s a business choice to keep the integrity of RPG design for classic, as it would potentially attract customers with other tastes than diablo/retail.
I can believe that this was the original intent, however it’s not really how the playerbase ended up using the system. People will min-max their character for the relevant content. If you play PvE you will pick all the talents that makes you pump out the biggest numbers and if you do PvP you will pick the talents that helps you mitigate damage or control effects. I myself am not a min-maxer (I currently main an assassination rogue lol) but before going to a raid I make sure that I spec in a manner that will yield the best results when it comes to damage (for my specialization). That means I’d rather spend two talent points in “Off-hand Specialization” (which increases damage with my off-hand weapon by 20%) rather than putting them into “Endurance” (which reduces the cooldown of evasion and sprint by 1.5 minutes). If someone held a gun to my head and told me to never respec again I would pick the latter talent any day of the week because it’s simply a more fun talent, but that is not how the game is played.
I agree. Retail-WoW makes for a terrible RPG. I’ve long had the opinion now that retail might have been more appealing if it shed itself of the RPG-genre and embraced the genre of action-adventure instead. On these forums people pointed to the linear, streamlined story of Shadowlands as being a quality of an RPG and I think it’s fair to say that these people don’t really understand what an RPG is. Other people will point to the gear progression as being an aspect of RPG, and that may be true, but in retail it’s perhaps the worst aspect. I felt nothing when I got gear in retail, it was just a nuisance.
Classic WoW makes for a much better RPG. I don’t think dual-speccing ruined the game, even if it was an addition that reduced the immersive quality of the game (we could call it “anti-RPG”). All of a sudden your character wasn’t defined by its specialization; you could perform more than one role if you so desired. This alleviated certain problems, such as the lack of tanks and healers, but it also desaturated the game in a way, I feel. That is why I oppose dual-speccing, but I don’t conisder dual-speccing to be so bad as to quit the game if it was to be implemented into TBCC.
Perhaps! It will be interesting to see how far they’ll take this “classic train”. Again, I don’t think dual-spec ruined WoW as an RPG. But in WLK they introduced the dungeon finder, which I think is the most damaging thing they’ve ever brought to the game.
It’s not really a question of “ruining” or not the game. I actually agree with you that in itself, respec is not a (big) problem for the RPG core design. But the real question is : what signals do you send to your customers to indicate the kind of game you are building ? So you can attract the aimed customerbase.
If you bend to every forumer whim (like free respec), you will attract retail/diablo achievers, as this change is made to make optimisation easier while compromising the RPG identity of the game (even if it’s a little compromise, it still is one). This sends the signal : “this game is for achievers and by crying enough you will make us bend to your will, we are feeble designers without a vision, we are your puppet.” So RPG players will see that and go “yikes… it’s retail evolution all over again, I’m out of here”.
If you stick to your gun and send other messages to non-achievers players, it is probable they will come back and achievers will tire and go cry about something else (like a retail patch or whatever). Then you will build a RPG community which enjoys the original vanilla vision. It is also a marketing strategy (the “no change” was that mainly) : “we will serve the silent RPG community, because we are a strong independant company and we don’t fear influencers” (even if it’s false, the message is strong).
Again, it’s mainly a question of : “what would attract more players?” Because WoW is shrinking right now. Would another game made for retail-buyers atract more players ? No. Blizzard needs to attract the people who quitted because of metaslaving, achiever mentality and change for raiders. So no respec is more a matter of signaling they want to make a RPG again, while respec would signal “this is gonna be retail-like”.
Vanilla was great because they got lucky. If you actually listen to Kevin it’s pretty easy to see that he is totally clueless about the game.
What makes WoW great is the gameplay, not the fact that you have to spend 50g to switch between activities. Also you are comparing vanilla to TBC which are very different games.
In vanilla I could see your point but it doesn’t work in TBC, the game just doesn’t work like that. But you are in luck, there is vanilla F R E S H coming out so you can play that.
You are also lucky, there is retail wow with dualspec so you can play that.
Thanks for making it so easy.
2 Likes
No there is not. Also the gameplay is not the same. Like this is the problem with you guys. You just keep making up lies after lies.
Go back to retail was some funny meme people made but you guys managed to take it seriously for some reason.
You got it all backwards. I told him to go play vanilla because he wanted to play vanilla, you told me to go play retail because I wanted to play TBC? That doesn’t maky any sense at all.
OK you don’t understand anything about video game design and history. Good day to you, come back when you are educated.
Problem with video game design is that no one understand the recipe for making successful mmorpg, or tbh, any other genre. Anyone claiming to do so is a moron. The only reliable way to print money people have found is reskinning Call of Duty once a year. Don’t be blind Kevin fanboy, there is a reason why they didn’t hire him again.
History I do know pretty well and if you watch some of Kevin’s videos with critical eye you can see why you probably shouldn’t take him that seriously. Btw he streams regularly on twitch so you can even go and ask him about some of the very basic mechanics in vanilla, and you will see that he knows nothing about the game.
Btw this is enough about this off topic for me, you are free to reply and I will read but I won’t reply anymore.
Ps. retail design philosophy is the worst ever existed but that doesn’t mean the classic one is all gold.
Fixed that for you.
Go and farm? With extreme inflation and bots farming every farming spot?
Dual spec was one of the best features introduced to wow and doesn’t slow/speed progress, just allows for more flexibility for many classes. It’s not like top guilds aren’t already swapping players to have best progress setup, won’t change a thing for them. It opens the game for more casual gameplay, it doesn’t impair it at all.
Explain ingame shop then,it was also a wotlk feature but added by bobby for moneys.
You sir have my respect.
Stop this please. Dailies are coming and you’ll be able to get a static amount of golds.
BTW, inflation = prices are higher = easier to make money = easier to respec because the respec cost isn’t affected by the inflation.
Static amount of gold being undervalued due to inflation.
What are you talking about it being beneficial? Farm spots are occupied by bots, which makes farming harder and making money harder.
Making money in TBC is incredibly easy - don’t give me farm spots are occupied because there are a ton of open world farm spots - primals, tomes and armaments plus other farms such as Vanilla dungeons, professions, boosting etc.
Raids are easy enough to clear in 1 night so you only have to respec once per week, it’s 100g.
This is the problem with the community they whine and whine about GRINDING in an MMORPG and then they whine when they have nothing to do after everything is handed to you for minimal effort…ya know…just like retail.
Any class can easily boost a low level dungeon like Stockades or WC and make 100g in less than an hour. People just be lazy, that’s the truth.
1 Like