This is almost impossible to change.
The game encourages competitiveness and performance. It’s not just WoW though. Games have evolved and the players with them. We are faster, more skilled and more results driven.
WoW has to keep up or it will become irrelevant.
We have to accept the new world of gaming and treasure our memories. 2004 is never coming back.
Haha you say that, about being “faster” and “more skilled” and yet the divide between people doing end game or hard content vs the past is waaaaaaay larger.
In WoW yes, but that’s because we lost the middle part of the playerbase. All we have left is the casuals and the sweats.
I disagree. End game content was something very few people saw in the past.
These days a lot more people have access to it even though the difficulty scaled up considerably.
i am all up for this
content must not be gated
me, being random solo can clear 4/8 mythic bosses
Can relate, M+ and PvP are easily two contents that one could do solely as their only gameplay in wow. I also begin play only m+ after quit raiding and now I only log on to play pvp, for m+ or pvp I can play whenever I want and how much I ever like. Even the content is endless per se as its literally limitless.
Well put, I like how you phrased it, and it’s true. I remember just wanting to be in the world. When I was a kid, I played a lot of wc3, so transitioning into wow was just intrinsically amazing to be able to explore the world. I remember meeting Cairn and Thrall for the first time and being in utter awe that these legendary figures were in front of me.
Now I’m more likely to say “shut up Kadghar, where is my bis trinket”. And yes that is partly my fault as a player, how I changed, and sure we the game is made differently too that promotes this mentality.
Hot takes for sure. I dare say none of it will happen, but I get the sentiment.
I think the production machine that produces WoW content is so optimized in its operations after 20 years that it can’t really change very much. Like a very large ship, it can easily go straight ahead but it takes a long time to do a u-turn.
I mean, the WoW team is effectively structured around certain crafts, like making dungeons and raids and quests and zones and items. And the developers have done all that a certain way for so many years that you can’t really tell them to stop doing that and do something else. That’s not really what they’re set up for.
Plus, WoW is a Live Service Game and Blizzard have made a lot of attempts and put a lot of effort into optimizing Blizzard’s otherwise slow development cycle to the point where we get regular content patches and relatively regular expansion releases.
The last thing Blizzard wants is to disrupt a process they’ve worked so hard to optimize.
But I get the sentiment.
Retail WoW has slowly but surely evolved into a Seasonal lobby game. And there are many of those type of games on the market and Retail WoW doesn’t really stand out among the competition. So in a way you can say that Blizzard played their hand and it was a poor hand. And now they’re stuck with a product that really isn’t very popular or attractive. And considering the above point about operations and productions, it’s really to change what Retail WoW is.
Like it or not, but Retail WoW will probably just carry on as it is for as long as it can, with some extra bells and whistles added here and there (Delves! Housing!).
And it is in stark contrast to Classic WoW which seems to be both a popular and an attractive game experience that gamers in general find enjoyable.
And it kind of makes sense, right? Classic WoW is a proper MMORPG experience with the open world, the easy accessibility, and the social interactions. That classic style of an MMORPG is a niche where Classic WoW has a very viable product on the market.
Will it last forever? Probably not, but the here and now experience seems solid.
So yeah, it’s a bit unfortunate. In retrospect it’s easy to sit here and point out all the things that Retail WoW perhaps shouldn’t have done over the years, or should have done but didn’t, but a hot take would also be that Retail WoW wouldn’t have gotten this far if it hadn’t become what it is. Even if what it is, is a bloated and bland monstrous amalgamation.
If you want the season to be shortened to two-three weeks, with 20 weeks of down-time…this is it. Terrible idea. We, players, cannot control ourselves.
Just make Mythic Raids cosmetic only, together with M+ higher than 7(?). So M+7 and Heroic raids are the loot-limit. Simple.
Don’t be! You were asked and your experience matters either way. You were honestly given a pretty unlucky hand there and you were persuaded to do something you clearly weren’t happy with for over a year.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.