I think the two of us see eye to eye generally, but I’d just like to point out that when updating a zone I obviously intend for the there to only be one new phase and that phase is the current situation - and that phase just gets updated and overwritten.
So there’s the original story experience, and then there’s the current situation. Two phases, no more.
The current one sort of removes the core time-dependant storyline of the zone and instead deals with some sort of aftermath. Threads of Fate literally does this perfectly. Just Threads of Fate the whole game, more or less.
That’s debatable seeing as your asking for no loading screens etc. Which I’m pretty sure is not advertised. They also do not advertise for that every NPC should be meaningful.
The buff/debuff thing also isn’t advertised on the box.
I feel like your picking and choosing what you want to represent from your post when you’re talking about it being advertised by Blizzard on the back of the game.
Indulge in seamless beauty
Explore expansive environments that are in a word: legendary. The World of Warcraft graphics engine renders the game universe seamlessly - so you spend your time adventuring, not waiting
It does, actually. At least it promises for there to be very few.
That’s true, but it’s also something that I can’t really understand the opposition to anyway.
You have entire continents (and you still do) without loading screens. The only time you have to get a loading screen is when you travel to a different continent or go into a dungeon/raid. Literally nothing changed there.
You don’t want NPCs to yell at your across the world with talking head boxes but you want NPCs in town to go “Oh wow isn’t easter a wonderful time to go collect some eggs?”.
Doesn’t matter how big the landmass is if I’m constantly sent to loading screens anyway.
I explained this in my OP. They’re still using the tech, but they’ve forgotten the reason why they have it and have refused to implement the tech in new aspects of the game as they have been developed.
Yeah. And all sorts of other things.
I want NPC’s telling me what I end up knowing about the world, or I want to see it for myself. I don’t want to just intrinsically know unless there’s a very good lore reason why I do.
For example the talking head is a good idea if I’m literally in a professor Quirrel from Harry Potter scenario, or if I’m actually dealing with an enemy that has a loud speaker throughout his entire castle, or I’m dealing with a gnome that’s given me some kind of crazy gadget telephone that might blow up at any minute. That’s all fine.
But Khadgar’s disembodied head appearing whenever I approach a Horde base as if it’s there? Miss me with that please. Taliesin and Evitel’s wondrous wisdom show actually makes fun of this by always including his disembodied head in their episodes because it’s so ridiculous that it’s funny - but it’s definitely not immersive.
I’m also okay with intrinsically knowing things that my character would actually know even if I don’t - for example my character might be aware that, when she was a little girl on the Wandering Isle, she lost a little trinket that had been given to her - and I’d be absolutely fine if a quest appeared that asked me to go and find it out of thin air. I also don’t mind those quests that appear because I see something and my character gets an idea of where to put it.
The issue you’re gonna run into is the world is laggy as it is already on Wednesdays in world boss zone. Let’s say for example Revendreth world boss is up, now all of a sudden nobody can run any Revendreth dungeon or even the raid for the entire day. That feels really bad towards all those people wouldn’t you say?
But your character has a calendar which means it does know about all the timewalking stuff etc. so there shouldn’t be an issue with them as buffs then? Cause it’s all written in the calendar anyway.
Well in theory Khadgar is one of the strongest mages to live so I’m pretty sure he can do some whacky stuff. I mean Jaina can summon a flying boat that destroys cities so a floating head doesn’t seem that far off…
Large concentration of players causing lag spikes isn’t a tech issue, it’s a game design issue.
Furthermore, as I explain in the OP as well, it’s possible to make instance boundaries in the open world so that boss fight would run on a different server anyway.
Furthermore, the game already has optimisations that prioritises small jobs over large jobs. That means that an open world zone out in the middle of nowhere will be prioritised over a complete chaos at the boss fight. This is an unintuitive decision, but what it means is that congested areas become laggy and everywhere else is still fine.
They solved this problem in 2006. I vividly remember Outland opening up and near the Dark Portal the game was nearly unplayable, but if you went to Zangarmash everything was fine despite the fact that both zones were running on the same physical server.
Yeah I bought that calendar from somebody, so it probably has holidays on it just like they do in real life.
Also, given the fact that it’s in the calendar, why does it need to be on my buff frames anyway?
/gquit. Solved. No reason whatsoever to stick with a guild that has this mentality.
Mayhaps. However what would even classify as “harder”? Soul ash would be fine if at least the ash drop rate would have been upped for second, third, fourth lego and so forth.
There is if you have that attitude yourself. If you want to play the game that way.
Obviously you should be prepared for the game getting a bit ugly at that level as it wasn’t designed for it, but I would argue that deliberately setting up systems that bore everyone else and abuse those guys isn’t really a winning recipe.
I would classify something harder as being something harder than what already exists.
Increasing the Soul Ash drop rates only solves one half of the issue. Now, instead of having content that’s boring but you have to do it, we’ve now got content that’s boring and nobody’s doing it.
How about making fun content instead?
And making something fun implies making it engaging, and making it engaging implies making it difficult enough or at least adventurous.
Torghast is basically like M+ except you can’t go higher than level 8 or something. It’s completely pointless.
At least it promises for there to be very few.