Transmog did not ruin WoW. That is such a ridiculous claim, that I almost want people to own up to it so that I can point and laugh, before carefully dissecting their points and showing them why they are woefully incorrect.
Right, lets start with; Vanilla armour looked garbage. Sorry, but it did. If you all think back to those days, it looked garbage. Do you know what looked worse than Vanilla armour? TBC Armour. I mean that was hideous, we had green and purple jumpsuits made out of plate mail. WotLK it actually picked up, you used to get sets that matched, and some of the TBC sets matched, the Assassination gear, sorry, you want to play a G.C.O Gnome, that’s your go-to set, it is the absolute . Mostly, utter gash though…
Suddenly we had transmog. Suddenly my character does not have to look like Pennywise the Clown, sucking a haribo, with a rainbow cloak and wearing big flippety floppity shoes that squeak and are purple and yellow. Amazing. Astounding. Suddenly my character can actually look like an NPC, so one of the serious people in the armies we are supposed to be roleplaying in! I can actually look like a Stormwind footman/woman. If you think Transmog ruined WoW, then go and do on, you’re what is ruining WoW, and no, I played a very, very long time before Legion. Get thee gone.
I may sound like the last person who would defend transmogg. But without transmogg pvp would lose even more participation , you would ruin the rpg part of the game , making every character look the same just in different stages.
Old raids would lose their purpos , parts of the old world would be empty for ever , a big part of the economy wouldn’t exist.
But it’s important to see what gear is someone wearing and determine if you want to do content to get the gear ? Don’t you feel inspired by someone rocking current mythic gear to clear mythic ? If not ? Why would it be different without transmogg
For me yes. This killed the “coolness” of WoW. I didnt want to raid anymore when I realized that leeroy jenkins who dont want to work for anything can just do something at a later point for zero effort.
Wiping 100-200 or even 300+ times on a last boss for the loot and titles just to see it being handed out for free later … yeah no not gonna waste time on that then…
Transmog hasn’t ruined anything infact for me it’s actually improved things (personally for me).
I have a tmog blog I have hundreds of followers on I’m branching out on to Facebook and twitter now and I’m also thinking of trying my hand at YouTube to. The sense of achivement I get when a mog of mine comes together is irreplaceable and if I get positive feedback well that’s the icing on the cake for me. If I see a nice/unique or interesting mog ingame I’ll whisper the person and we’ll start chatting I’ve got people on my friends list MORE people on my friends list because of mogs so I don’t really see what your getting at.
Yeah, I think so, but I don’t blame you at all. Almost everybody missed this.
I’m basically going to make a reverse slippery slope argument, in that the slippery slope has already happened and is observable.
The game came out with realms the size of towns in order to encourage community, and it had visual progression in order to be able to look at somebody and immediately know how dangerous they would be without having their stats on hand, or know what they had experienced and done without them telling you, which was a design inspired by D&D, just like most of the rest of the game.
The game deliberately did not feature a queue/LFD system. Blizzard could’ve made one - they’d developed one for Warcraft 3 two years prior, but they chose to not do it in order to foster the community aspect.
But then one thing led to another. It started innocently, and nobody really had a problem with it. I’m going to list off a bunch of things here that don’t seem related, but one thing leads to another.
Getting a bad name sucks. Let’s provide server and faction transfers.
Make dungeons easier because not everyone can do all of it because of their bad name and they don’t wanna pay money. (Which is fair enough)
Now that dungeons are really easy, make them more accessible, because participation was still too low apparently. In comes the LFD system.
Let’s make dungeons hard again nvm it doesn’t work because of the LFD system. Nerf the entire game! (That’s literally what they did…)
Now that you’ve encouraged players to play using a queue for the entire levelling experience, they get shocked when suddenly they have to find a social group and they don’t have one. Better add LFR.
Now everybody’s queuing LFR. Let’s shorten queues and open people from separate realms to join up.
If people can join up across LFR and LFD, why not anybody with anybody so you can play with your friends? Hello CRZ round one!
Now that everybody is spamming dungeons using LFR and LFD or being in CRZ mode, our world is becoming empty. Let’s fill it up! More CRZ!
People can’t trade with one another or join guilds now. Profession system breaks. Oh well. Let’s try to fix it with collectibles. Now there’s even more ways to change your appearance to the point where nobody recognises your shape, by it doesn’t really matter after all because you’re not going to run into the same person twice anyway because of CRZ.
Since everybody’s flying and/or not in the world anyway, let’s give them an instanced player house and put everything they could ever need inside it. Hello Garrisons!
Since everybody’s in their garrisons, they don’t get to see one another, and gear is no longer something you can show off, so armour appearances don’t matter to anybody but yourself - and just the vanity of it without the social elements is boring! Let’s make it easier to change up your looks - hello Transmog!
SInce everyone’s using transmogs and generally can’t see or trade with one another anyway, let’s expand transmog. Now nobody knows anybody else and nobody can tell one another apart.
Now that everybody is using transmog there is no need for us to make really cool armour sets. Now everybody gets a clown suit unless they transmog! Now we can’t even live without transmog.
And that’s where we are today. Blizzard has chipped away at the MMORPG foundation one feature at a time. It all started with really innocent stuff, but instead of sorting out the problems and getting WoW back into being a functional MMORPG, they instead keep implementing ever-more stupid bandaids that destroy the foundation of the game.
Eventually everyone came back with pitchforks and said “You darn better put our favourite MMORPG back up!” and there comes Classic.
We’ll see what happens next. Exciting times indeed.
I think that the community has evolved over the years. What worked in the past can’t work nowadays. I would have never played WoW in its old incarnation where I have to spend hours (!) finding a group just to do a dungeon. I can’t do that RL-wise, especially when I have only 1-2 hours/day to play from time to time.
This myth needs to die. Just because Jay Allan Brack said it was so, does not mean that it really was. Sure, if you didn’t queue with anybody and never made a guild, it was like that, but it was easy to overcome.
Actually transmogging is perhaps the only thing i think i will miss in classic from retail, alltough vanilla gear was not as insulting as TBC gear so no biggie there.
Transmogs would destroy Classic. A lot of the things I listed off above would.
I hope that, IF they decide to continue working on and patching Classic in some sort of Classic+ server, they will go in a completely different direction, knowing now what happens if they go down the same road, and knowing there are two very different audiences here.
I agree 100%. I was not asking them to be there i just said it is perhaps the only thing i will miss. While i am happy with lot of things in retail you might be surpriced how strict i am (opinion wise) about classic having to be just like vanilla was, no exceptions. I see retail as it’s now and vanilla (and classic) completely different games and i have different expectations for both.
The only bad choice they really made was to make previous expansions meaningless.
Classic in itself was a whole game. With BC leveling through Classic probably still took it’s time, but dungeons, raids and to a certain degree professions weren’t meaningful anymore (dead content).
And with every further expansion old content becomes less relevant/interesting. So you have to pull out enough content per expansion to keep enough players entertained. And making dungeons more accessible was the best option (easier difficulty, M+, profession/campaign quests)
I wouldn’t honestly be suprised if they will offer dungeons with NPCs in future expansions.
Aside from this transmog had 2 huge benefits:it partly made old content interesting again and gave many people something to do aside from current dungeons/raiding. It’s something you can do solo or in a group, without having to worry about skill differences.
And it helps making your chara unique. We aren’t soldiers all wearing the same outfits, we’re adventurers. Yeah, you can’t tell by first look that the one with the extreme ugly armour is just a hunter wearing the current set. But it makes the game much more engaging when my mage doesn’t look the same as every other.
Trasnmog didnt ruined game. It is just system what keeps your cosmetics. Fact people can go back. faceroll content and get good looking gear is what is wrong with this system.
Everytime content gets absolote Blizzard should remove all gear from that content so value of those items actualy stays same. And ifc if you are entilted 12y what want everything in game for no effort. We dont deserver those cosmetics becouse we didnt clear that content when it was relevant. Same for mounts, titles, achievement, gear all should be time exclusive.
Thing is that you dont deserver to have those items. You didnt cleared that content when it was relevant and you should not own such items like this ever.
You seem to think transmogging is about dressing up in some raid epics? Perhaps some people exclusively do it, but mostly what i see is people combining all kinds of items to make outfits that feel right for them no matter what quality they are.
It is also very difficult to tell who “earned” what gear at right time. Transmogging came so late in the game and did not pick up retroactively all the items you had owned in some point of the game that it would be impossible to say who “earned” what. If that would be possible all the items would have been already there learned in your list, when transmogging came out. And same way you don’t know what Mellisandrae has “earned”, you are just making rude assumptions.
There are some parts of truth to this. Blizzard kept adding post-endgame expansions, and those kept piling on, so Blizzard felt a need to make older content easier to pass through, which of course further thinned out the world and concentrated it in one place (Orgrimmar and Stormwind) to such a degree that the servers started breaking.
However, nobody compelled this choice, and I do not understand how adding the LFD system helped. Obviously the solution was the repopulate the world, and repopulating the world implies a long levelling experience and removing as much content as is necessary for there to be an appropriate amount of players around.
They constant did what was expedient, superficially popular, and easy. They increasingly stopped asking themselves how such a change would impact an MMORPG.
I would still definitely characterise what I wrote as being bad choices, but you are probably right that some of these decisions arose because the world just got too darn big.
We will find out soon enough when Classic launches. But after reading the postings here for a while, I took the liberty to check your linked character. It’s quite hypocritical in speaking against transmogs but you still use it on your own character.
Either you remove it completely or just accept it as part of your own pleasures.
I don’t think you’re reading my posts very carefully, are you?
Because of the rest of the design, it doesn’t matter anymore. Transmog would destroy Classic, but the live game has so many other destroyed components that transmog does no further harm to it. It’s kind of like removing a GPU from a computer with no RAM in it.
Transmog has become a “may as well” because the way that gear appearance was used socially cannot materialise because there are no persistent worlds because of CRZ. In fact, high-end rewards are now so obscure and meaningless that you probably don’t even realise what the title I’m wearing right now even means without having to go look it up.
You’ll also note that I don’t maintain my mogs that well. I just sometimes change it 'cause I’m bored and then everything falls to pieces a little while later because I swap pieces and I just go “meh, k”. That’s why my head has been untransmogged for like 3 weeks running I think? Looks completely out of place. Don’t care.
EDIT: Like, seriously… I just leveled a Tauren alt to 120. Check out how much I care about transmogs: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/608035606618177545/608035647953043506/unknown.png
