Nice constructive answer to the point i was raising 
SoD is Vanilla for Retail players, its a total departure from what made Vanilla so successful and built that initial hype for the Classic release.
If you don’t have a core of friends or a guild who have convinced you to play it, I could not possibly see the appeal of continuing or starting on these servers.
This experiment is a more of a Classic Fresh server ‘waiting room’ for me (if that ever materialises) so I understand why you wouldn’t want to continue with SoD, its not a well designed game by any metric.
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Damn i want a huff of your copium XD
nice anecdotes you have there but anyways, remove half the mechanics from the bosses and we can talk again if the raid is casual friendly now.
You are equating progress in a video game with progress in real life. I don’t think it is a good analogy, as games are designed to be beaten. However, I’ll answer you.
The reason is because there is no other resteraunt for the casual to dine at. That’s why. There is hardly any “new” content in season of Discovery. Realistically, the quests are twenty years old and have been done a million times. Casual players enjoy them sure, but if levelling a character in era people generally will pick what quests or zones they want to do on route to 60 and do them.
In SoD, if you’re not raiding then what are you doing? There is literally no content. Aside from the raid, there is STV event which is quite poorly designed and not very fun for most people who enjoy traditional 1v1 or 1v2 world PvP. It is another min max zerg fest which is realistically ran mostly by people seeking to farm coins or two or whatever for the sake of “efficiency”. Very few are doing it for fun, on the servers I’ve played on. Because its not all that fun, especially with sod PvP being a mess.
So what is there to do really ? You can run dungeons but most people won’t be doing them because most people still playing are min/max and there’s nothing for them to gain. So whilst you can start a group and run them a couple of times it’s not much to do ? Quests for gold again, something to do but hardly discovering anything, especially when world is dead because of over layering so possibility for WPvP and other encounters is low.
Give us a McDonald’s to eat at and you can have the fine resteraunt. Id personally be content doing new quests if they were interesting, even if the rewards were just gold and perhaps a few properly itemized greens.
Honestly I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt and read your post, but I had to stop right here.
Classic wasn’t a ‘casual friendly’ experience. It was easy, sure. But it was also a massive time sink. Retail is the opposite of that.
If something is a time sink it is much closer to the Classic experience than it is to the ‘Gimme everything now because I got ADHD’ experience of retail.
Shame you messed up there because everything else was well written.
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It was widely marketed as such, I’m not going to trawl back and dig out receipts from five months ago, however Aggrend himself has tweeted only today that “if you’re looking for hard content you won’t find it in SoD”. Paraphrasing, but again the dev team are communicating that this should be casual friendly, it’s not. It’s a terrible game for casuals.
If you enjoy it more power to you, but blizzard need to get real on who they’re making their game for - it’s not me !
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The problem isn’t that they don’t want to make a better game, they just don’t know how.
Most of the devs live in their idealistic concepts of what the game should be in the most abstract form possible, completely detached from the reality of things or the consequences of their actions.
It’s like they conceive an idea they deem fun without considering its implication on the game from an on-the- field perspective, because they simply don’t play their own game enough to see the issues beforehand.
It’s also worth noting that posting on any forum these days is as redundant as talking to a wall. Most of the players who actually agree with you already quit and while some remain they are the silent minority swimming in the sea of the addicts that remain, who by large cannot process the difference between how a bad design decision affects the game’s long term growth negatively and only ever live in the immediate moment where they feed their impulse off the game’s subpar content delivery all the while alienating the very people who voice concern for a game they both wished was better.
My point being, there is no real future for the game, as seen the mistakes done in the past were repeated time and again. No evidence showcasing otherwise has been seen and the masses fully living off blizzard’s eloquently tailored copium is nothing more than empty promises which some will only truly understand far too late.
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Something being a time sink doesn’t make it not casual. Classic is the most casual MMO there could possibly have been.
1-60 takes a long time in classic, 3 months for a semi-casual player and longer for someone playing less. At 60, there is a plethora of dungeons to do which are easy to get into, easy to learn and for the most part, fairly fun “have a beer and chat on discord” type content. Even the early raids like MC, ZG Ony can all be done for the first time by a casual whose drank a few too pints before raid time.
BWL onwards require a bit more Comms and it’s only really AQ40 and Naxx that would require someone to be semi-casual or semi-hardcore. Even then they’re not exactly difficult.
There is more than enough content in vanilla to keep a casual playing the game for a prolonged period of time, precisely because it is a time sink and designed to take a long time. Casuals join casual guilds and do the quests and enjoy the social aspects of the game. This isn’t present in SoD because of the way they’ve designed it, particularly with level caps and faster levelling experiences.
If you’re a hardcore player in vanilla who just wants to raid then you’re going to blast the levelling and many do, it’s ardous and gruelling if youre just trying to get to 60 asap. There’s obviously also a lot of flaws with vanilla and it’s not the perfect game.
But the base game is much more casual friendly, so much more casual friendly. What SoD has done is sped everything up (not that I have a problem fundamentally with level boosts). It has trivialised most of the content in the base game and added in very little to compensate. In P3, one can make a level 1 character on a Sunday afternoon, play for four or five hours and be level 20. He can then play half an hour to an hour a night and be 30 in a couple of days, if he chooses to do incursions he will be 50 within two weeks.
Then what does he do? He either raids*, does STV or does quests for gold. There is nothing else to do. There is no new content outside of one raid and a very poor retail like incursion content
Edit: * if he can get into a group !!
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Why nerf the only content into the ground then, so you only have 1-3 hours of playtime each week?
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Word brother.
I was kind of in your situation and agree to most of this. I recently resubbed to checkout P3 and i feel the retail disgust aswell.
You know it’s funny i went to check the very first months on the US forums and EUs to map out how the community has changed… And i gotta say how it went from friendly and engaging, to toxic and competitive in just a few months is actually remarkable.
Haha i’ve recently seens posts from people that actually starts to talk about raid philosophy, like retail philosophy.
If another version of this dungeon…
If another mode for this raid…
Gave more…
Gave better…
Would you do it?..
And im reading this and all i sense, combined with the fact that basically all new spells are just retail replicates from different expansions, that people just want retail in classic like what the actual f.
I mean SoD had it’s chance, and they do good on some elements. But the core is already infected. It’s so clear.
The mindset of sweating and competing, instead of fun and exploring as classic was, where is that core? Wasn’t that was SoD was gonna be like? Or are the devs striving for a Reclassic ++.
I’m just abit sad to see it go in the direction it is, when they are somewhat innovative but cater to retail philosophy and sweats.
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Should have gone with different types of servers (Hard/Easy - Challenger/Fun, whatever). Much like PvP/PVE, as soon as the “hard” one gets labeled as Hardcore/Semi Hardcore, thats where all the wannabies and sweats would be. Tune up content there and thats it.
Meanwhile, people rolling on the casual servers could just enjoy eachothers company and use the very limited time they have to realize that being in Gnomeregan or Sunken for 5 hours just isnt fun and goes against their idea of playing. Or they would enjoy it, who knows, seems like “I dont have time” is a excuse more than anything, as very much is sped up like crazy in SoD.
If it was widely marketed as such, surely you don’t need to dig deep?
And thats not what Aggrend tweeted at all, calling it paraphrasing is disingenuous at best.
SoD being a promised lootpinata cakewalk is not what I signed up for at least, and if you did it sounds like you made up (part of) that promise.
I agree with you 100%.
I know posting is futile, but as a long time player it’s a case of wanting to share why. If nothing changes I suspect this has been my final unsub. In the past there was always that “what if they do classic/tbc servers?”. Well they did that and I came back. Then it was what if they do Classic +? Well, they’ve kind of done that. And as you eloquently pointed out, failed because they don’t know how to actually make classic content. So what is the draw for me? I gave them the benefit of the doubt and 3 phases. What else will be the future carrot to dangle in from of the casual, classic playerbase? I don’t know about you, but I can envisage them coming up with anything now that would prompt me to return. They’ve done classic 19, I wanted that. They tried classic +, I wanted that. They failed so it’s kind of…over? Perhaps they can fix it in P4, I won’t resin to see it but if I suddenly see that they’ve realized and made changes I would perhaps consider it. Won’t hold my breath, but I’ve given my feedback now, I’m sure it won’t even be seen.
I think you’re totally right about the same mistakes being made. It is like watching history repeat itself. They made quite a lot of mistakes with Classic 19, if it was me I’d have done it differently and made it more like real vanilla. But they did a good enough job. In TBC they made the same exact mistakes as they did in real TBC, paid faction changes etc bringing this into the game. Just like it did in ,first TBC it creates mono faction servers. Going into wrath…same mistakes again that they made in the original. So just like in original wrath, I quit, but this time I didn’t come back because I know what lies ahead.
I think this is the crux of the issue. Blizzard has something like 100 million people who have played WoW at some point in their lives, many of whom would come back if they got their act together. As we saw with classic 19. They continue to alienate this market, as someone else said maybe they want fresh blood - doesn’t seem to be going well for them !
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/bow
Spot on!
You are absolutely right there and that is the thing which is missing from SoD for me, when I first played vanilla it was my friends/colleagues who told me about the game as they wanted me to leave behind my UT2004 servers and join them, but it was an older sibling who eventually convinced me to try it by lending me his discs so I could play alongside him with a trial key that came with his copy when I stopped over at his that month.
I took to it so quickly that within a couple of days I took myself off to the Trafford Centre so I could buy my own discs, I still have them somewhere.
A couple of my old friends do still knock around on retail from time to time but it is nothing like it used to be. It is this which has been missing from WoW for some time for me. I suspect it is a similar situation for many of us here.
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I quit sod after reaching 36… just the thought of having to deal with the people you see in LFG is demotivating to say the least. Id rather play on dead servers on era or dead open world on retail than SoD.
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Agree…
What’s makes me crazy in p3 is the incursions’ events… perfect for bots to lvl up to get gold and items boosting them to 500gs… Items from gnome raid are slightly better so it’s clear for players in P2 grinding the raid for two months to get items when ppl can spend few hours lvling from 40 to 50 in ashen and get whole sets without a sweat…
I feel the same.
The event for P3 made me feel sick… I was able do it for 20 min then i realized that this is blizz way of throwing you to max lvl with no effort.
And now you have people at lvl 50 trying to play god and narcissistic/psychopaths in dungeons.
Ppl must be max lvl för ZF and Mara. Mostly Mara. But still.
LFM Mega pump, fast ADHD run deluxe i check ur stats for… For a regular dungeon?
So many toxic players
Where did these people come from? In classic there were non like that
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maybe they just got realy old and bitter having spent their whole lives playing wow non stop and now they are like this.
Think about it this way, they are grown “adult” men (mostly) playing a cartoon game, do you think " wow is my hobby" goes over well in the real world with work colleagues for instance who have normal/productive hobbies like sports.
They have to make it seem more complex and convoluted as possible to validate the fact the are playing a cartoon game at their age in life and taking it this seriously.
Elite gamers /giggles
the term “man children” goes well here
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They come from retail, the retail mindset is in SoD. SoD = Retail Minus
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I know your trolling but this was quite funny