It’s not so much being “forced” to get these buffs, at least depending on the guild. Realistically I only get them for AQ40 and Naxx, because we hopelessly outgear everything else. I tend to live longer in AQ with the extra stamina from ZG and DMT buffs. It’s kind of a big deal if a suicidal mage like me doesn’t die once all the way till C’Thun. Plus, dominating the dps charts even harder is always a plus.
But it is true that world buffs incentivise NOT playing on your character in favour of logging out and saving buffs, which is incredibly stupid in an MMO. I will most certainly not miss this in TBC.
To be fair the devs did tune naxx with wbuffs in mind.
Yeah I don’t know, I guess I don’t find it so hard to get dmt/SF the day before raid and then get ony and zg with the guild 10min before pull time.
People also tend to play better with buffs because they don’t want to die.
Majority will raidlog in tbc aswell, after doing a few Heroics you don’t need badges, there are only 2-3 items worth at most. Not everyone will enjoy arena/BG either, and when you only need 1-2 flasks per raid and some buff food you don’t need to farm gold either.
I’ve also seeing a lot of people running like chickens or just standing more or less idly because they don’t want to risk losing wbuffs. Either way, it’s not a kind of pressure I enjoy having on EVERY run. It’s like playing each raid like an Immortal run in WotLK - those kinda runs are nice, but I sure as hell wouldn’t enjoy having every run be like that.
Well, you can raidlog in TBC as wel if you want. But the thing is, you can just log on when it’s raid time and head there or get summoned, you no longer have to go through the bother of organizing server-wide wbuffs that you might lose to the most ridiculous stuff.
That being said, I for one played a lot more in TBC/WotLK than I did in Classic, and will do this time around too. Heroics are way more rewarding, both for mains (at least you can still convert badges into gems or other commodities in later phases) and especially for alts (since, unlike Vanilla dungeons, TBC heroic gear is actually pretty damn good, and not just the <10% chance loot). It also helps that those dungeon runs don’t take 1-2 hours like in Vanilla, so I can do them whenever I feel like. But, most importantly, raids in TBC are a lot more fun than the MC/BWL crap you’d end up running with your Vanilla alts - nothing besides Naxx (and maybe the 2nd half of AQ40) is even remotely engaging in Vanilla to begin with.
That being said, you’re free to like what you want. But for people who have a real life and don’t enjoy wasting it on server politics and unconvenient schedules, the game is generally more fun w/o worldbuffs
even engaging with this world buff meta, min-maxing to the absolute limit while the content is incredibly easy. It’s absolutely ridiculous if you ask me. It’d be as if guilds demanded maxed HoA levels for normal raiding and mythic0 dungeons in BFA.
You know, if the game drives your players (by any means, really) down a gameplay path they don’t enjoy, then it’s the game’s fault, not the players’. A good game should be a game where the best path to victory is also the most fun/enjoyable - and I’m not the one who said it, this claim comes from MTG designer Mark Rosewater.
That being said, ofc Classic isn’t a new game and we were promised it, “warts and all”. Which is why I’ve never been advocating for no wbuffs or w/e. But I sure as hell won’t miss all the flaws of Vanilla when I get back to TBC/WotLK.
Dmg meters, as addons, existed back in Vanilla too. So the competition was still a thing, at least within the guild itself.
It was pretty clear that they were talking about the logs scores and not the dps meters.
And it’s not the game fault that every1 got obsessed with WBs, they are surely useful and can make bosses a lot more easy but you don’t need them to that extent. The only one who are reasonably hunting them are the guild chasing first kills and even that is pretty ridiculous considering that in Classic you get just some e-fame because you did that.
I don’t necessarily agree, especially in a genre like MMO where victory itself is nebulous. It’s not even like Mario Kart DS where “snaking” was discovered and it dominated online races. There is no “race” in WoW Classic (in game at least), you get the same loot whether or not you clear Molten Core in 1.5 or 2 hours.
Devs can’t, won’t and shouldn’t always cater to speedrunners (or "top players). Like when they remake games or make sequels, should they fix bugs to improve the games in general, or should they leave them in so speedrunners can keep taking advantage of that? It’s a legit dilemma, most people would prefer to have the bugs fixed.
Unless we talk about an exact port where people expressly want to experience the old version. Let’s say they want Super Mario Bros. exactly as it is, no physics changes to make it more like the new ones, etc. It’s a legit reason, too. Same with Classic WoW and the #NoChanges crowd. Only difference, with SMB the people don’t interact in game, so people who use expoits like wall clips don’t alter the experience of 99.99% of the player base.
But for some reason in Classic WoW, it feels like the majority of the player base bought into the idea that the ONLY way to play the game is to absolutely min-max it. Like, imagine in Super Mario Bros., if the player base only cared about the speedrun route which includes 8 out of the 32 stages, and THEN complained “why did they make the game in a way so that you can beat it by clearing only 8 stages?”.
That’s exactly how I feel about wbuffs - as in, they’re like bugs that should be fixed because of the gameplay derailment they cause. I shouldn’t have to choose between playing the game in a fun way and playing the game in an effective way. There might be different ways of making the gameplay fun, but the effective way should be one of them. Which is definitely not the case when it comes to wbuffs - at least for most people I know of.
The thing is, WoW has always been about doing your best to beat encounters, even back then. The only difference is the extent to which people are willing to go nowadays compared to back then. In fact, even back then, eventually wbuffs were just removed as a whole because what they did to the game back then, at that point (i.e. in early TBC), was starting to get as ridiculous as now. Blizzard’s reaction back then wasn’t “Heh it’s up to you to not make this toxic”, they just realized it was a bad mechanic and removed (or at least neutered) it.
Now, you’re right that Classic isn’t a new game, but there’s no denying that it’s a heavily flawed one and wbuffs are one of the main reasons for it. I honestly have little doubts that, in the long run, both TBC and WotLK Classic (if they happen) will be more popular than Vanilla Classic. For many reasons, actually, but one of them will surely be wbuffs.
What if I told you that World Buffs had nothing to do with making the content easier, but improving the performance of the character and raid. If World Buffs only were there to make content easier, people would drop them a few weeks into content - yet they dont. That shows its irrelevent to talk about the difficulty of a raid in regards to World Buffs.
Also, not everybody do things for fame. Some people like to perform at their very peak and compete, not for the fame and glory of others, but themselfs.
People that think everybody do things for others, from Rank 14 to speedruns and progress clears, just show how the world works for them - and they often fall short because their inner motivation is lacking.
Ppl who want the for themselves are hunting them and not complaining about removing them because stuff. What I’m saying is that you either want to perform on peak and then you get them becuase YOU want it or you don’t care about it so you either get them when the chance pops and you are avilable or you simply don’t and don’t come here complaining because others do it.
That would have been the case if everybody always acted and followed whatever is enought for them. However, guilds, groups and players set the bar according to the majority, the norm or “meta”, which pushes the requierment of individuals to take part of it. Just because World Buffs arent important and used by me, doesnt mean that the community will treat me the same when I dont use them.
Most guilds would clear content with a (one) Warrior only using his bow during the raid. However, do you think this player would get more chances in that raid or guild? Would he be picked over anybody else? Would he be able to play in a context that is enjoyable for him , with friends for example? Perhaps not. It doesnt help if HE ignores melee weapons when nobody else, or the majority, do not. “Just play with your bow/Ignore melee weapons” doesnt solve his problem, its either do what everybody else is doing or struggle.
The same is applied for many in regards to World Buffs. Saying “Just dont use them” shows that people dont think longer than their nose.
Why don’t YOU play with people that want to play how you want to play, why should 1000s of people have to change they way they want to play just cuz you want it.
I want to play with wbuffs so I joined a guild that require me to get them. So we all get them together, more or less.
I don’t see why the two things are mutually exclusive. I’m the kind of player who enjoys doing the best thing in the game, meta-wise - playing the right chars, building the best teams, that kind of stuff. But if doing so doesn’t result in a fun gameplay, the problem is with the game, not me.
A good game should be made so that the game encourages you to make choices that result in an actually fun experience. When a game’s “meta”, for example, revolves around mindlessly spamming one move (like it’s common in many single-player RPGs of old where balance wasn’t rly a concern for the endgame experience), the fault is not with me trying to play meta, but with the game having a bad meta in the first place. The meta is made by the game, the players are only those that discover it, so it’s the game’s responsibility to make the meta feel good and fun to play.
By that logic, any kind of change to the game is bad by design because some players enjoyed the game as it used to be and now are forced to change their gameplay because other players wanted the change.
That being said, if we’re talking about recreations of old games, not much of this matters because the point isn’t about changing the game - if I wanted to actually fix Classic, I might as well play TBC. Classic is for the people (like you, I guess) who like Classic for what it is. I can’t wait to see wbuffs gone, but I don’t see the point of asking for them to be removed in Classic - not at this point, at least, when we’re already into p6.
That being said, OP’s point seemed to be simply that wbuffs destroyed the experience for a lot of players, and that’s almost certainly true. I’m not here to discuss majorities, minorities or w/e - we’ll find out once TBC comes out how many people actually wish to part with Classic’s perceived flaws or not.
Honestly, the Worldbuff Meta is pretty fun from my perspective. I don’t care about about parses or how big someones numbers are in a raid. I get the ony buff just 10mins before the raid starts because that’s almost no effort but at least it makes me look like i care a little bit.
The fun part about the world buffs is how dramatic other players react when they get purged or die. I have players in my guild that collect every single world buff for every raid and they die on the first trashpack, that’s just hilarious…
It also makes the game something closer to a hardcore mode in the sense that you have something to lose when you die. Real Hardcore means death=delete character. Some people act that way during raids when they have world buffs to lose.
I think it would be cool to have some hardcore raiding modes where every player has only one life per ID and can’t be rezzed. How big would your raid be when you reach the final boss? I was once in an AQ40 raid where i myself rezzed over 59 players alone in one session but hey we still managed to kill all the bosses… ZZzzzz
Which is so true to the WoW experience, considering that one of the selling points of WoW back then was actually not having a hardcore experience where dying is heavily punished /s
It’s fun when players complain about the lack of an authentic experience and then say this kind of stuff the reveals how they don’t rly remember (or care about) what that experience was in the first place.
The player base in general complains about EVERYTHING.
Most of the time it’s contradicting views/complaints don’t come from the same person. Obviously many different people have many different opinions.
the “authentic experience” is also not something universal. Nobody experienced the game as i did back then and i haven’t experienced the game like you did.
Whishing for an authentic experience is basically wishing to be the same noob as one was 15 years ago. Very unrealistic.
I played some Diablo2 recently and even tho the game is still the same, the experience is different for me because i am much older now and i know much more things compared to when i was 10 years old…
There’s a difference between something which is subjectively experienced/remembered by a player or another and something that was both an intent on part of the developers themselves as well as explicitly stated in the Bradygames official guide that came alongside the game when it first came out.
I do understand that it may surprise you and many others, but WoW not putting harsh penalties on deaths was one of the many ways it actually improved over the likes of EQ and similar games back then. What we’re playing now feels in many ways the opposite of that (at least Immortal-style achievs in WotLK were exactly just that - an achiev that you did once for the novelty of it, not a static feature of the game).
Sometimes, reading these forums feels like people are purposefully trying to rewrite history.