Those were the good days.
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They really weren’t.
Go play Classic; real WoW obviously isn’t for you.
I will when it comes out. I’ve been waiting for wow to be more like wow for about 10 years.
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I predict that classic will only have the niche market and how it will not be nowhere near as popular as the retail WoW. Not many players will want to play the game without LFG/LFR, travel to long destinations on the foot or grind the gold for ages for the basic ground mount, not have in the game quest markers, like the long runs from the graveyard and have very limited things to do at the endgame.
Besides if you look at the current online market most played games are usually ones which have the least grind possible and which aren’t much time consuming, games like Fortnite and various MOBA-a in which you can get right into the action without leveling and which don’t have long gearing process. And if we look also on various current MMOS now in the time when MMO-s as genre isn’t popular the ones which are at the top are still the ones which cater to wider variety of the gamers, and the ones which would have that old vanilla type of design like WoW had or which are even more restrictive or catered only to the more hardcore players belong to the niche market.
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Yeah, well those games are only pvp and even a match of lol or dota might take way over 1 hour to complete (My longest match in dota was 2 hours and 47 mins). Moba’s still require you to spend hundreds of hours in them to understand what you need to be doing in them. Also there is market for games that are made to consume time by grinding like Monster hunter world a game based around grinding won the rpg of the year and Path of exile game that tries to be more like old diablo is doing better than ever. Also wow classic will bring back part of the lost subscribers of current wow for sure. No idea how big part it will be but I think a big bunch of ppl have been waiting for it.
Can’t say for sure how popular it will be till it’s out, but I am very excited for it.
Yes if you want to play at the master level in them they do. But even in the current WoW if you want to accomplish something more you need to dedicate more time into doing that to be able to play at that level - Method raiders wiped on raid fights in this xpac several times in the mythic difficulty while they were mastering it. The fact that the game currently has the content for the more casual players in the same time didn’t influence their gaming experience at all.
I played in the time of vanilla, and the game was good for me than because it was new and because I didn’t know about anything better at that time, and because of the community. But looking by the current standards and the features I’m used on in the current version of the game the vanilla doesn’t interest me at all.
Just to be a somewhat average player you still have to know all the heroes, items, skills and tactics. That takes way over 100 hours, I have 7k hours in dota and I’m still nowhere near master level player. I guess you haven’t really played dota or league. Just try and go in a game of dota (if you haven’t ever played it) and come back to tell me how easy it is just to jump into the game.
Vanilla had it’s flaws but as someone who didn’t really understand the game that well back then, I am very excited to go through it with my current knowledge. Like actually understanding english was a problem for me back then.
I played HOTS, and others are similar, in my experience those kind of the games have modes for the casual players which play for fun and the ones for competitive players which are looking for the higher challenge. And casual players in them have the access to almost all the maps to which competitive players do to, so access to the content is not restricted just to some type of the players. To be casual there you aren’t required to know to play with all the heroes, its enough to get some knowledge about the ones which you like and which fit your playstyle and to get some understanding of - the maps, about the different variations of the classes in the game and their synergy to be able to decently play in those in the casual level.
HOTS is the most casual of mobas, its like saying that LFR is the same as mythic raids. Seriously that game has no items, you don’t have to last hit creeps, everything is shared. There is not much ways to make moba more casual than hots.
By all the maps you mean that 1 map in dota and the 5v5 map in lol + the 3v3 map that no one plays. This even furthers my suspicions that you have no idea what you are talking about. Access to content at least was restricted in league cause all heroes and runes and stuff you had to grind or buy with real money, same goes with hots. Yes it is restricted even if you can purchase them with real money.
That works for HOTS, I dare you to try and jump into a game of dota with your knowledge of mobas. It will be bad, russians will flame you and you will feel bad. Mobas aren’t accessible if they are made well. See what happened to HOTS when the game had no depth.
you just remove the determination buff and the queu button and you are doing normal raid.
Well HOTS is the game which is very team focused, to get objectives done in it your team still needs to know what it is doing, and the players have to perform. And the players which got the experience there and were able to get into competitive modes would get easily used on the other MOBA-s to.
I said almost which is not the same as all entirely. My point still stand about those games having the modes for the casual type of the players which got access to the maps. And yeah in HOTS the items were just cosmetic and haven’t influenced the gameplay at all. If I would get into other MOBA-s I would need to get used on that difference. But those items can be still bought, you don’t need to grind in the game to obtain them right, so the casual players can get the access to them right away without spending the time to grind for those in the game.
Flaming exist in all MOBAS, even in HOTS, actually in majority of the online games and the players are usually used on that sad fact which nerds like to do until they get some experience with the games. HOTS had depth for a lot of the players just the game launched in the time when already 2 other big MOBA-s existed on the market and already occupied a big chunk of the playerbase interested for those type of the games which didn’t want to change the games it played for years and invested the time and money into them to play the new one.
It is still very stripped version of the other moba games. It is a moba but saying that mobas are easy to get into and doesn’t require a lot of learning because you have played just HOTS is just wrong. I have played couple of matches of hots and it got very boring very quick since there was very little depth in it. I love mobas like I said about 7k hours in dota prolly the same in league, but hots just didn’t feel right.
This is again your knowledge from hots, dota is pretty much meant to be played in just 1 map. Other maps and game modes are pretty much just player made mods. Same with league you pretty much play 1 map for 5v5 and well no one plays 3v3’s, hots is the only game where maps change.
I didn’t mean skins every moba has skins, in league and dota you get money from last hitting creeps. You know by doing the last hit to a creep and you get gold, and ofc xp. Dota adds a deny mechanic where the enemy can last hit he’s own creep to deny that gold and part of the xp from you and he gets a small amount of gold from that.
Items are bought from hundreds of different options with that gold. In league there’s just 1 store to buy which is in your base. In dota there are 3 stores in the map for both sides and these stores offer different items. These items are just for that 1 game you are playing.
I mean you would be bad at the game and not just bad horrible, like everyone in their first game. Dota is not a game you just jump into and play it casually, it needs a lot of time and effort to get the basic mechanics (last hitting, denying, jungle and the stores). In dota it’s not enough to know the hero skills you also need to know the skills that jungle creeps have because some heroes can use those creeps or steal their spells.
Also correct if I’m wrong but I think there’s no warding in hots. Wards are bought from the store and used to get vision into the map. This is done to have knowledge of enemy movements in the map and making it safer for your core players to farm. Warding is mostly done by support.
There’s some basic stuff for you to start the game with, not enough to even be average player but that’s something.
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Every game requires learning, I didn’t said that they don’t, especially any with competitive elements in them. But the amount of the learning required to get used on them depends also on the difficulty or the level of the challenge you want to have in them. And I don’t think that to anyone who has the experience of playing the team based games before, especially RTS ones and other MOBA would need a lot of time to get used on similar games.
Oh seems like you got an superiority complex and its showing here, and think how you can throw insults and your hyperboles just like that, well I would now say something to you but I don’t want to get banned because of this shi* you stated here. I’m an old guy, been gaming and have played RTS games since their beginning, and started with the games like C&C series and was pretty good at it, played FPS competitive games like Wolfenstein and also did good there, in HOTS I performed good, in WoW I never had trouble getting into endgame content so I don’t think how I would have problem to get used on those other MOBA-s either.
Well the amount of the time someone needs to get used on something also depends on the individual person. I learned all the maps and objectives in HOTS relatively fast and that game has lots of them. Also I did know what all the heroes could do in that game, just I played the ones which did fit better in my playstyle and like that is usually in shooters and in MOBA-s players have preferred classes/heroes they like to play. And I am teamplayer and know how important is the team synergy for those types of the games.
As I said the additional items in HOTS are just of cosmetic nature, but the thing like you described here exist in the HOTS and you should know that some heroes has it under their skills like Tyrande for example if you played it.
I can say this is 100% wrong, I played lol for way too much when I was younger then switched to dota 2 when it came out. I knew the basics and much more about league and that knowledge did absolutely nothing for me in dota. Only the map was somewhat similar with the 3 lanes and jungle in between. It took me about 500 games to get somewhat used to the game and still I was really bad. The first time I really started learning the game was when my friend who had played dota back in warcraft 3 told me some good tips and played with me.
Even after 5k hours I learned that a hero that I played a lot had secondary things with 3 of hes skills. This might be because I didn’t read the abilities cause I thought I knew what they did, the secondary things were passive stuff so it wasn’t anything flashy but still a big thing.
I tried HoTS and it felt just easy, and I really felt there was nothing for me to learn so I left after couple won matches. Then I played couple with my sister, cause I needed a casual game after I played overwatch way too much.
I think it’s great that there are mobas for everyone, for casual play there’s hots, for a bit more depth there’s league and then the monster that is Dota2. Same goes with MMO’s I just don’t think that wow, which was pretty complex before should go through the transformation of being the MMO for casual players.
I didn’t mean to be insulting, everyone is horrible in their first game of dota, not just you everyone. I didn’t mean it as an insult, sorry if you saw it that way.
I really can’t seem to be able to explain this to you but there is no way you would do fine in your first 100 matches in dota, no matter how much you have experience in different games. You might get wins since everyone should be very new if the matchmaking works, but the thing is you wouldn’t be able to use the core mechanics (shops, courier, wards, vision and lots and lots more) while you try to control your character and do great things with it. I don’t mean that you are bad in anyway, that game just has such a high learning curve. The only moba that is even close to the complexity of dota is HoN, and that is because it’s very much made to represent dota.
To be a god like dota player you need to learn to be efficient, no time wasted anywhere meaning that mouse is only for moving and targeting. You need to be able to gather gold and xp as fast as you possibly can while still being ready for unexpected. I suck at this, 7k hours and I can say I am not masterful dota player.
Yeah I didn’t bother to learn the maps since just killing the enemy heroes was enough to get a win most of the time.
Ofc you should have deep knowledge of the hero you are playing, but having knowledge of the enemy heroes is just as if not even more important.
Tyrande had her owl that she could sent to a location, or was there something more to it? I never played her, I never bought a single hero in that game and played only the free ones. That is an ability that they have in all the mobas, because vision is the most important thing and having something like that really gives you an advantage. The thing is in lol and dota everyone can do it, but they have to use their gold to buy them and go and place them. Also in other mobas the map is a lot bigger than in hots, so these wards are life savers.
Adding in that there are skill that can totally screw your entire team and even make you lose the game. For example Faceless voids Chrono sphere is an old classic, with Tinys toss he throws closest unit to what ever he targets, Vengeful spirits swap, well swaps places with targeted hero. There is a lot of ways that you can frick up your entire team so you need to be extra careful with these powerful skills.
I would really love to talk about mobas a lot more, but this is highly missing the topic of the original post now.
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Quick reminder of what the normal mode currently is in Blizzard’s minds.
10m Naxx, Toc and ICC were perfectly fine for social driven players. When cata came out, normal T11 and T12 were too brutal for them : many mecanics could instantly kill the player if not avoided. That kind of gameplay suits well to players motivated by challenges but certainly not to social guilds. So Blizzard decided to make an easier version, LFR at the end of cata. However they saw that LFR was in fact the worst possible thing for social purpose and so they made Flex at the end of MoP, wich became the actual nm, wich suits to social driven players. So in Blizzard minds, LFR is here so players can see the story and nm is for social groups. [Edit : with these different modes, Blizzard is also trying to incentivize players to do higher difficulties but I dont think this is a huge success].
On wich xpack had more players
At the very end of TBC wow had 11M subs, it oscilated between 11M and 11.5M during all the wotlk era and it reached 12M only once, between the 4.0 cata prepatch and few weeks after cata release. This is normal, the population always growth when an xpack is about to be launched, and then always decline few weeks/month after. Wotlk subs numbers looks like a big plateau, not a peak.
I hate mythics. Do I think they’re a waste of resources? Yes. Do I think they nurture a toxic way of playing the game? Yes. Do I want them removed? No. Because I know there’s people who do enjoy them.
I don’t understand what’s people’s problem with LFR. If you dont like it, no one force you to do it. So give me a single argument to remove LFR.
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beside technical issues (need for a loot or runes) there is the eternal question of inaccessibility.
For some people the game simply has no interest if they cannot participate in the endgame, for others on the contrary the fact of having content that is inaccessible to them is a source of motivation and pleasure. In that sense, paradoxical as it may seem, naxx 60 or sunwell is a kind of real content for them because even if they don’t have access to that content, it create pleasure and motivation. That’s the meaning of Jeff Kaplan’s sentence : « The world feels bigger for everyone if there is unbeaten content out there ». And this is something a shareholder can hardly understand. -
It must also be noted that the debate is difficult, because no argument can go against our personal feelings. And yet, in 15 years of wow, we have not failed to read some of them: « If the game is quickly finished, it has much less interest », or conversely « What is the point of the game if we know we can’t finish it? ». These two arguments are paradoxical in their own way, but they remind us one important thing: pleasure cannot be explained in a logical way.
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And btw, players who claim here to be for LFR removal are defenitely not super competitive gamers like < method > or whatever. It seems more like they want a game wich ask them to commit into it, to learn and improve by themselves, to work a reasonable amout of time to know the stories, to invest themselve to make groups … so they can show their own value in a various spectrum of things. And so they dont like the easy way : auto grouping, websites/addons which do TC, questing where everything is shown and every single mob is trivial, etc.
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At the start of WotLK, Blizzard decided to make raiding something almost everyone can do. Shareholders can’t really understand why an unacessible content only 1% will see could make the game any better for some players. Following that reasoning the money invested into deseigning the bosses, the music, the art of a raid should give playtime to everyone.
Less people doing raids > less resources for raids > less raid content and/or less quality of that content. It all eventually leads to raids being reduced to almost nothing or outright removed. Making content that only a minority of your playerbase does/sees is NOT cost effective and it is BAD business.
That’s why Ulduar is said to be the best raid ever made by wide opinion. Cause everyone could just go in and do it without having any gear or skill to do it… oh wait there was no LFR back then.
When Throne of thunder came out, it had everything to be a huge success. Blizzard themselve claimed it was as good as Ulduar. It have a nice storyline, the raid itself is huge and immersive. You start at the entrance of Lei Shen’s palace, which quickly sends you to its depths, and you have to progress to reach the summit again and finally face Lei shen. However the subs number kept declining and that raid felt into oblivion…
You people, that hate LFR, do you want random BG’s to be removed too?
I had a lot of fun in the BG’s, unlike LFR which is mostly boring for me. But are BG’s good for the game as a whole? If you ask me, the answer is: no, they have been a terrible addition. The concept of instances is not bad if it is used with caution, but when it is the only place where « real » gameplay takes place, we’re no longer playing a MMORPG but a strategy/action multiplayer game.
WoW is supposed to be an MMORPG, and it’s no longer the case.
It is very much still an MMORPG.
It’s no longer a MMORPG since the start of TBC. Vanilla was great on the gameplay side but already poor on the MMORPG one. Everyone who played MMO’s before wow know that. Does it means it’s a bad game ? No of course it doesnt but it’s not a mmorpg. It’s a cooperative online strategy/action game where the only « RPG » aspect lies with gear evolution, sold under the name of a « mmorpg ».
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I think raids are not needed in general. They are an old concept. Who even has the time to be stuck in a group for hours? The only difficulty being the number of idiots in your Team? Its expensively designed content for a handful of people
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I dunno if this is sarcastic or if you are serious. Anyway if you are serious you are suggesting that we remove the end game content just because some ppl are too stupid to be able to do them? That seems to be the direction we are going, and I am afraid this might be the case in couple years.
You are not supposed to think about the costs of the development as a customer, that is the job of the slimy executives at the top of the structure. These are mostly ppl who don’t even know what a video game is and they don’t care. You as a customer aren’t seen as a customer, you are seen as some money they don’t have yet.
There is the challenge for them, how to get that money. Is it by making quality games? Is it by making finished products? Is it by trying something new and innovative to make the gaming experience better? Likely none of those options. Like Activision stated that they had a bad year financially. Whats the solution? More microtransactions and rushing products out, which means less development time, which probably means that more games are unfinished at launch.
I see this as a customer and I won’t buy a single game from companies like that. (Gotta make an exception with Activision because they are publishing Sekiro)
Let’s face it gaming industry has gone to poop (plz don’t ban me Blizzard) and is not getting any better at least with companies like EA, ActivisionBlizzard, Konami, WB and many more.
There is still hope since we have companies like Nintendo that just released a video where the Senior Managing Executive Officer gives us information about the new Metroid game and its development. He tells us that the product that was in development didn’t meet the quality standards they have for it and they scrapped it and started the development from beginning. This ofc means that the game is delayed a lot but as Shigeru Miyamoto from Nintendo once said “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad”. I really don’t care about the new Metroid game since I don’t have Nintendo Switch, but I think the gaming industry should learn something from Nintendo.
Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLIv_UXI_So
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What kind of silly reply is this?
Yeah you just do an extra mechanic, take a little more dmg and stuff has a little more hp and you do mythic. What?!
There’s an obvious difference between the LFR and normal and the queueing system is a HUGE part of this. Many people don’t want to spend time looking around for a group (me included).
Well, if those resources could be better spend developing content more people liked, then it’s a win/win imo. So of course some players would think about that.
They could get rid of LFR as long as they gave players something else to do instead. I’ve talked about this before, but apart from the latest raid tier and mythic+, end-game PvE progression does not exist. That’s really bad. If they made it so that progression existed on all levels and at all stages of the game, I would say it would be a lot healthier than what we currently have, even if we removed LFR and normal completely.
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