As I mentioned before: It doesn’t necessarily bother me, that they enjoy the game in a different way. I am afraid of the consequences of this. Namely that it will change the game and community by making it accessable to a crowd that is more about instant gratification and not about working for it. Stuff that makes the game fun for me and many others.
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May I just ask, what evidence do you have of this ‘instant gratification crowd’ that will all of a sudden rush into playing TBC?
Or are you, as is everyone else, riding the hate train since ~Cata?
I honestly dont get how some people can be so righteous that they know exactly who and what other players are and do.
Classic is full of people,and I mean full of people getting boosts right now. This so called crowd of yours has maybe always been here, perhaps they were there back in the day but without modern social platforms it wasnt so easy to broadcast what was happening.
Bottom line, dont judge the book by its cover.
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That does sound like the kind of thing I might say, but not sure which specific post of mind you’re referring to, or at least I can’t find it.
So your solution is to surrender to the problem and lay down to die?! Great. Can wie choose a different route though? Because I still got my balls and don’t feel like a loser.
Erm what?
I dont follow how this is related to what I posted.
Also Lorran it wasnt a post of yours I was referring to.
I think there must be some gremlins in the forum.
You said that classic is already full of people who are getting boosted. But instead of stopping that you are saying “Can’t do anything about it. Might aswell let Blizzard make money from it.” instead of FIXING THE PROBLEM. This is your approach. To give up. Instead of demanding this getting fixed.
Well…
…I’d bloody love it if they fixed the issues, wouldnt stop a boost being added though, just fyi.
I’m no fan of dungeon boosting but I wouldnt go so far as to say they should ‘fix’ it.
Bots on the other hand can shove their heads up their own rear ends.
However, I still dont see the relevance to me asking about the so called ‘instant gratification’ army that you think is gonna all of sudden invade TBC.
Well given that the same ‘army’ ‘invaded’ Classic during the first few weeks of launch I don’t think it’s a big step to imagine they’ll ‘invade’ TBC - play for a few weeks, get bored and quit.
The difference is in Classic they were largely denied their instant gratification, as there is none to be had, unless you count spellcleave dungeon boosts, which, to be fair, was largely a thing used by ex-private server zoomers.
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There is a certain kind of people that play certain types of games.
Tedious games are played by people who want to commit to it. To stay on it and work through it.
Inconvenience creates comradery, because you help each other out to overcome these inconveniences.
And then there are people who just want to play a quick game, who don’t want to commit, and just have a bit of fun without any strings attached.
If the game caters to the latter, inconvenience will go, and with it the comradery (you see it in the Dungeon Browser, where people are leaving groups very quickly, rather than trying to fix a problem if the group is struggling). What will also go is the need for some commitment to the game. Therefore everything is cheap, nothing means something.
Now the latter kind will join the game, have some fun and leave again. Because they won’t commit themselves to it.
But if the game caters to them, the game also doesn’t offer anything worthwile to the first kind of player. We now see the latter kind in Retail, safe for a few commited raid guilds that try the hardest stuff. But that is the last bastion of the first kind of gamers in retail, whereas at some point the majority was the first kind.
Edit: The Boost IS the elimination of inconvenience and caters to the second crowd.
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I must get incredibly lucky then, on retail levelling a new character recently, I’d say 95% + dungeons runs involved the group committing when we hit a snag. Of course sometimes you get a drop out but that’s more a dungeon finder issue (which I think the 30min CD is to short) not a boost problem.
Also the idea of the boost for end game players not being committed is questionable. Raiding isn’t an instant gratification system. You need to farm your gear, farm gold to get it enchanted, farm more gold to get consumables and then farm some more for repairs. Nothing end game is instant, not in classic, not in TBC and not in retail.
I’m not involved myself but I know the guild I’m in on retail is having trouble with the current raid, I believe they are on HC or mythic or whatever it is. Retail players committed and persevering at retail content.
I’ll bet there are a lot more players like that in retail than you might realise, trouble is you listen to the hate storm that’s been raging on these forums rather than just play the game.
I stopped playing WoW once because of it. It’s not me listening to the hate in the forum, it is my own experience with the game. The latest drop of 41% of players in shadowlands should be enough to prove, that most aren’t commiting to the game anymore but just go for the next big thing, after Shadowlands is no longer new.
And blizzard published this 41% decline in subscriptions…
Of course if you left as a direct consequence of your own experience in the game then fair do. I would like to ask though, in the run up to you leaving, what were you doing and what were the people around you doing?
I’d say it was mostly the dungeon finder, but it wasn’t the only reason. I played WoW for many reasons.
One was the community. Especially on an RP-Server.
Another was the lore, because I was a Warcraft fan since Warcraft II.
Another reason was the gameplay, because I liked this cooperative gameplay that made us work together as a team and gave us a role fitting for our class.
It also felt less grindy before the Dungeon Browser.
All those things were changed over time.
The community stopped existing, because the Dungeon Browser made you play with players that weren’t on your server and that you never met again. People that loved the game because of that, like me, became more rare and the opportunities to meet them too.
The homogenized classes broke down the cooperative nature of the game as you could do more yourself and didn’t need other classes and their strengths as much anymore.
The lore… well… the writing just got bad, the characters inconsistent, past events became meaningless, like Muradin’s “death” or the resurrection of Cenarius, Thrall abandoned his people and left a guy in charge he didn’t even know very well, after all the things he did to save them.
One or two of those factors maybe could’ve kept me in the game. I invested so much time, I liked my character and all the good stuff. But the community changed. I even tried to look for groups the old fashioned way, and I was told “There is the Dungeon browser, you don’t have to ask for a group” or even outright told to not spam and just use the Dungeon browser. It was also quite hard to find a group, which wasn’t even surprising, because the DB gave you extra rewards. Especially when you listed as a tank.
You see, the community wasn’t welcoming the old approach anymore. You didn’t meet people to befriend ingame anymore. Someone I met here in classic said it very well when they said “During cataclysm I felt lonely in the game.”
Maybe I would’ve kept playing simply for the RP, because I liked the lore, but as mentioned before, they broke that too. So there was nothing to keep me playing at this point and many other MMORPGs that did so many things better than WoW. The only thing that was still there, was raiding. But I wasn’t too big into that back then.
But this is going off topic and my post is already too long for that. Point is, that I think I have valid reasons to believe, that the boost is a step in that direction because it caters to a different crowd than the one that loved and loves the original vision of WoW.
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Can’t do the original Zul Aman or Naxx though. Or class quests.
@Undúrael, Copperbolts: Small, but critical note. To my knowledge, it was SuperData, that is an entirely outside entity that published an estimate of 41% player and 69% subscription revenue losses (compared to launch). We also have to keep mind that Shadowlands launch pushed the numbers rather high. As far as I can determine, we are still somewhat above the pre-launch numbers. Naturally, large drops are not great, but as some other posters have noted in various threads, return towards pre-launch “plateau” is not a major catastrophe by itself as multiple previous launches have been very “spiky”.
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Exactly my point. As it is, the game wins a lot of players each expansion and then looses them again.
This means, that the games aren’t good enough to keep people playing for more than a few weeks. During Vanilla, TBC and WotLK this did not happen. People who started kept playing until Cataclysm, which pretty much marks the end of old-school wow.
A special kind of person to think that is remotely the same thing.
I feel it’s a very simplistic connection to make between a spike in unofficial numbers at launch and player satisfaction.
And then also comparing this to the vanilla > wrath growth, there are far more factors to take into consideration here.
When you consider that,
Its unofficial numbers
It’s only 1 stat, based on unofficial numbers
It doesnt take into consideration any out of game reasons.
It’s reasonable to imagine that these numbers are just best guess and in no way paint the whole picture.
If wrath or cata were the sole reason people left the game, why are wrath servers so popular? How does a cata server keep numbers and how did a mop server ever come to exist?
Unless blizzard release the official figures the best anyone can do is guess and estimate.
Edit:
There was also a financial crash in 2008, I’d imagine a video game subscription is something a lot people couldn’t justify, so it stopped.
Then of course you have to consider all the “old school” players who just grew up and started a family and either had to put their money elsewhere or didnt have the time.
Point is, an unofficial sub number by itself cannot be used to say as fact the game is bad or cant retain players.
Because it usually is that simple. A good game will be played, unless the marketing fails. We can’t really say marketing failed in WoW’s case though.
Of course there are more factors there. WoW was, after all, the first huge MMORPG. There were MMORGPs of considerable size before, but none got as popular and wide known as WoW at it’s time. I blame this mostly on Blizzard’s name and the Warcraft Franchise back then. But keeping the players playing was the quality of the game.
We can apply the law of big numbers here. Sure, there are so many out of game reasons why people might quit or not. But in the end the big numbers show us, that WoW back then was a game that kept people playing for YEARS. Multiple Years, not just weeks.
Easy. WotLK was one of the best times of WoW. Dungeon Finder came only later. And WotLK servers surely didn’t have a cross realm dungeon finder, or did they connect to other private realms to do that?
And a MOP server is just a niche market. There is also the return of reckoning project. Because Warhammer Fans like the niche that is a Warhammer MMORPG, regardless of how good or bad that game might have been. Those exist, yet they aren’t as huge and popular as… well… huge and popular things like WoW during TBC, WotLK and vanilla times.
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