You could try giving the game an ago with out it.
*Addons.
Again, you don’t need to install them. Infact when I returned to the game some years ago, I didn’t install any addons for ages.
Or if you want to give them the true WOW experience, let them play Classic without Addons or WOWhead. Let’s them really appreciate the game :).
Abbsolutely agree. What a mess.
Agree about not putting all the story in books.
Roses are red, violets are blue,
Stop trying to support your opinion by claiming “this is why new players don’t come to WoW”.
Everyone posting here is a veteran and doesn’t truly know what deters the majority of new players from sticking around.
From what I read here the new player experience hasn’t changed much since the game came out. I recall playing with my Brady Games guide on my lap and even then spending half an hour by the wrong waterhole trying to find a quest object in Mulgore.
Eventually I was introduced to thotbot.
Yup, then questhelper addon being a major use back in the olden days,
Tbh addons have been a major part of WoW. Imho i like it and think it adds to creativity from players to help work on a game they love
I dont understand why people demonise them.
If addons werent allowed, its likely the game would be critised for lack of customization as ffxiv is.
Not even a new player would know.
The only thing a player can know is. Why they play and why they would quit. Nobody knows why someone else quits.
I’m all for addons but Raszageth has to be one of the few bosses where you really do not need a addon to know what is going on, everything is really well telegraphed.
Have not seen the fight on Mythic but cant say I’ve noticed anything in that fight that needed a addon to be done.
I had a potato on dial-up so addons weren’t conceivable for me until I went to broadband.
Watch this. And remember that he has an experienced player beside him, helping; that makes a HUGE difference. A real new player probably wouldn’t, and would wander around trying to figue it out for themselves.
You will find it educational
But in general, you can’t generalise about “new players”.
New players come in all ages, readinesses, expectations, and experiences.
Some are completely new, and have never moved a character with a mouse before. And movement - basic movement - is very strange and takes consierable concentration for some people.
Some are FPS gamers. They can have all sorts of reactions to WoW. 
Some are RPG gamers. People who are familiar with FF, for example, just need a translation cheat-sheet and a link to Wowhead, and will then be as good as any regular WoW player.
There is no statement that is valid for all “new players” except the definition that they are new to WoW.
But what’s the problem with that? That’s how the original game worked and we all learned it just fine.
Well, the problem with that is the new experience is so linear. Until he learns X it WILL NOT allow him to move on to Y. In fact it’s very strict about this.
In the older versions people might not learn things in the same order, but they still learned them.
It solves the problems for you instead of letting you experiment with the open world to push you along so you don’t get stuck in this linear set of quests. Problem is, when I’m not problem solving in a game - even at the most basic of levels levels - I’m bored. Instantly. And that’s far from just me.
One more thing about this footage: One of his major issues appears to be the controls. The default controls are junk. They were always junk, since day 1. But as the game has evolved into more and more of an action game these controls have gotten increasingly out of touch with the nature of the game and now they’re not just poor, they actually make the game nearly unplayable.
You’ll also notice many of the things he struggles with are rather new - except the targeting issue, that’s a classic. The quest item problem was hilarious in particular.
Well that, and that they’ll be interested in WoW.
What’s going on in this video is Taliesin is trying to teach somebody who isn’t even really interested in Warcraft. He didn’t go and look at MMO’s or RPG’s or Warcraft in general and say “Oh wow, this looks really fun. It’s kindda similar to X, Y, and Z I know, but different enough to be interesting to me”.
this is weird experience. just brother pushing baldy for funny content on youtube.
i would need take my time, actually be interested in new mmo
and go with the flow
All legit points.
True. But in the original game, everybody was learning at more or less the same time. By now, anyone who has gone through most of an expansion has already internalised a vast amout of information. A genuinely new player is thrown into a world where everybody else is so far ahaead of them that they feel lost.
In my experience, few new players, whether experienced in other games are not, are actually very interested in WoW when they start.
(Personal story: I actually started WoW when I was working through a stack of discounted games I had bought to see what had happened with games since my day. WoW just happened to be the next one in the stack. I abandoned it at level 7.)
The devs shouldn’t and can’t rely on every new player coming in with a burning desire to explore and master WoW.
Yes, this is true, but it’s only true because the game is failing to attract new players.
I also think it’s somewhat less true than one might think. WoW has a much larger playerbase of people invisible to those of us who are very experienced at it.
Look at it this way: We can have end-game WoW and levelling WoW coexisting. That’s what it did back in the day, and it should do so again. But levelling has kindda been removed if you think about it. It’s very short. Shorter than it’s ever been, and it keeps getting shorter. Back then you had like 1 million players at 60 iirc and the remaining 6 million were levelling. Yes, seriously.
Well, it doesn’t have the best reputation right now. But it used to. The hype for WoW from 2002 to 2010 was insane. Everybody and their dogs were playing it at my age - and if they didn’t it was because of the subscription, ie no credit card etc.
Let me tell you my story. I don’t tell it often cause it’s kindda weird, but here goes:
When I looked at this game for the first time back in 2003 on their “Town Hall page” I was playing Warcraft 3 and Morrowind. My jaw hit the floor. I wanted to play it so badly.
People were making Warcraft-inspired mods for Morrowind, all-of-Azeroth RPG maps for Warcraft 3, and the hype was just out of this world everywhere. You can’t even imagine, honestly. I’ve never felt like that about a game since. And everyone around me were the same. No matter where I went on the internet - the GameSpot gaming magazine, the various modding communities, forums, various websites, and so on - everybody was hype.
So I was talking about it all the time, and my family came to the rescue. Somehow I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy… you know. It can be real. So my dad. His cousin lives in Florida. She had a husband (who passed away a few years ago, RIP), and that husband had a friend in California who had a friend at Blizzard. Using my dad’s cousin’s address I was somehow let into the 0.6 alpha as a 13 year old and I swear to God I’ve never felt anything like it since. It was incredible. Just opening that map and right clicking on it… I mean I’d played Morrowind but this was next level.
And I had a hard time letting go. 19 years on, I’m still holding on…
But around 2010 this crazy hype train slowly starts to die off. And, of course, this can be because it was just old, but I think there’s more to it than that. They did something wrong for new players - and indeed one of the most common things I hear about Cataclysm is that it made the levelling worse and sped people to the end-game who didn’t want to be there.
They don’t need to. They just need to design a game that’s more discoverable.
I’ve met a sample of them.
They constitute about 50% of all players. Many have played for years, so they’re not new, but they’re still invisible to most of the other half, including me. Because they don’t read guides or watch tutorials, some simply have no idea that many common things are even possible, like upgrading your bags. Maybe they discover these things by themselves, or maybe they happen across the information, but inevitably some never will discover these basic tips.
There was a Preach video where he explained what happened, from his point of view, in Wrath, when LFD opened for the first time. He said, with genuine recollection of amazement, something like “And then there were all these players we never knew existed, who obvioously never had done the dungeons and didn’t know what to do.”
Oh yes. It was this huge smattering of players who had been pulled up through the levelling experience (because Blizzard kept making it shorter, RAF, etc.) and all of a sudden they had this tool accessible that allowed them to just join dungeons as if it were solo content.
It was, quite frankly, an absolute disaster.
These people - I mean it’s just plain okay that they’re invisible to us. Like, seriously. They just want to play the game that they know and love, and that game is an open world questing experience. They’re like me in ESO. I’m max level but I never raid and I never do delves. I’m just wandering around playing the game like I’d play Skyrim. Nobody knows I’m there, really. I just am.
And Cata took that game from them. First they put them in WotLK’s end-game like you said, and then they put them in Cataclysm’s end-game but made Cataclysm’s end-game like vanilla and tBC’s end-game. They rail-roaded and simplified and shortened the levelling. That just wasn’t the experience these players were looking for. Millions quit.
It’s amazing that even now, the devs have nobody among them who understands that half of their subscriptions.
Ion is very well aware of them. He has spoken knowledgeably about them, and can list attributes and statistics. But he doesn’t understand them. He clearly has no intuition about what the game is like for them.
But they really should get some of them in, and have some devs try to learn about them.
Those saying you don’t need any addons are being disingenuous. Anyone who has played this game for a great length of time knows full well the demands on mythic raids seeps into the general player base. Any new player is going to hit that gatekeeping wall. And as the player base gets smaller the chances of finding groups that do not impose those demands gets slim.
I’ve been away from the game for a long time and came back for a month for a look-see. With a fresher set of eyes the experience is really bad. Even running early BFA instances players have the same mentality as those running M+, which is ridiculous. Blizzard insists on making toxic systems, which by their nature grows a toxic player base. Most new players are going to nope right out pretty fast.
FF14 is way better for new players atm. I’m thinking of switching to it after my sub runs out in 3 days. YoshiP said apparently, that they design the hardest difficulty in the raid in a way, where you need zero 3rd party help to clear it. Just your group and the raid. All information is in the game itself basically, which is very nice…
wowhead is required indeed and should have been built in game. I don’t think that other websites are strictly required for new player.
Addons are not required. I’m playing many years with absolutely minimal set of addons and no addons are required. Addons might be required by some (or even all) raiding guilds but that’s a different topic for discussion and raiding is a niche gameplay by itself.
Old content is absolutely optional. I don’t experience non-working quests. Yes, it’s a mess, but this mess is optional.
Books might be required to fully understand lore, but who cares about WoW lore nowadays…
So my opinion is that WoW not very good for newcomers but for other reasons:
Game is old. They’re trying to make it better but it’s absolutely not on par with modern AAA games. Graphics is bad, physics just does not exist, world is static. Most quests don’t have audio. And price is pretty high.
Game is very complex. There’re lots of abilities. Lots of choices. New talent system is overwhelming. So yeah, playing without guide requires quite a bit of time to understand what’s going on.
Old players are very skilled. New player will have very hard time even in normal dungeons. He’ll be permanent victim in battlegrounds. He’ll lose every arena. He’ll be kicked from mythic dungeons. This is very discouraging.
WoW playerbase is very elitist and unwelcoming for new players.
Developers are out of touch when designing content for new players. So yeah - they’re trying, but it looks more like they’re ticking the boxes. Like trivial tutorial where you’re learning to press button “Accept”. And 10 minutes later you’re expected to target NPC and type /wave with very little tips. And 20 minutes later you can join BFA dungeons which are not exactly beginner-friendly! Compare Atal’Dazar and something like Ragefire Chasm which was actually designed for new players.
I queued up a level 18 mistweaver and got Tol Dagor. It was a hot mess. Balance seems all over the place with one player getting one shot by what seemed to be anything and everything. It was only the fact I had many years healing chaotic content that got us through. But I could not help but feel that someone who is new to the game and new to healing has any chance of getting through it. When half the group are new and have no clue and the rest just got out of M+ 20 to level an alt and charge ahead pulling all the things.
It’s also a bad autoscaling. I had bad experience on Lord Stormsong during this character leveling. In the phase with octopus on the head, we could not do enough damage no matter how hard we tried. The guy run through all orbs, we pressed all our burst cooldowns, tried 5 times - no chance.
Fresh new player here - started WoW for the first time with DF expansion.
Long time MMO player here . Will quit WoW once anything new comes out tho.
D4 is only 4months away,so that’s the closest thing. Considering how boring the game is already after not even 2 full months i will probably quit before D4 comes tho.
*It’s an lobby instanced game, i just log in to queue for raid/M+ ,once i reach 415ilvl ( which i would already be if Valor wasn’t capped) i probably wouldn’t even do M+ anymore.
*I play purely with pugs so any content is extra hard on top of being a bit difficult as is. ( Cant join guild cause of real life,so i cant really commit)
Anything above +16 mythic is useless in a way,only doing +16 for craft regent, already got weapon 418 crafted ,so just need 10 more for upgrading Lariat.
*Unless u got premade/guild there’s low chance of timing anything above +16/18 ,and that content is more for achievement then anything else. Since it’s weekly reward of 1 random item being 421 . Chances of getting full gear of 421 items BiS stats/items are gonna take long time considering it’s weekly.
*Worst thing about the game is players toxicity,i would say it’s even worse then LoL players.
And Blizzard is just encouraging it by not doing anything against that.
But im usually not the one to complain cause it’s easier to just quit then hope something will change . Just answering the thread.
There’s nothing to do ingame.
*Farming old raids/dungeons isn’t content - and even if it were, it’s weekly anyway. So you’re practically done with the game in 2-3days.
*Professions are useless,its easier and faster to farm money and paying someone to craft for you then it is to level up professions.
To me it seems that WoW will always have it’s old players ,who just come back for month or two at each expansion, then new players that will stick around. And i guess old players love that - cause it’s not newbie friendly community.