It’s also the fact that the game plays totally diffrent (for better or worse) and TBC has introduced so much changes it always felt like vanilla 2.0, the definitive edition and the way to experience it.
All that aside I don’t think it’s performing badly. Sure you might not see your friends returning but I see plenty of full servers with some queue times. I don’t think there’s as many people playing as there was on peak Classic interest but I’m fairly sure there’s at least double the people than on retail servers. Case in point it’s enough to keep those high numbers up and Activision happy.
Oh, I believe there are people who made Wow so intertwined with their identity that they simply can’t quit it, there’s also the apathetic player who just will play no matter what without much deeper thought given to it.
But anyone who pays attention has or will realize that they’re really not enjoying themselves anymore and will naturally drift away.
If you lose players and monthly users, that’s one good standard to define “Bad performance”.
If the life support they rely on are Classic experiences then it too will run out. What do they have left? Classic WoTLK? Doubt they’ll see any clamoring for Classic Cata, Mop or WoD and the irony here is that those experiences had an end, a clear end, no endless treadmill. They might nurture a die hard pool of people and that’s the best they can hope for.
Again this is not Doomsaying or having a prophet moment, I’m just observing a pattern that’s going in a clear direction unless there’s substantial changes that last.
Yeah - it turns out, if you don’t feel slightly forced to RP (FOMO is real) for several hours most days, there’s actually so many more hours to a day than there were before
I’m still interested in the characters I’ve created and hope that the lore won’t kill them entirely, but now that I’m not really playing the game any more I can just have them exist in a completely separate vacuum where everything’s nice and headcanon.
And because the PvE is also kind of meh (though Castle Nathria was pretty fun looking, I am a bit sad I didn’t get to enjoy it completely), there’s also no pressure to keep up doing M+ or other content.
To me the main problem is that it is too dark. What you say is of course something I agree with as well, but I have managed expansions filled with weirdness before, and I think if the problem had only been the game sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong I would find the situation more tolerable.
The Maw thing, though, is incredibly intrusive and hijacks the tone of RP no matter where you are or what you do. Even if your character is ignorant, you are not, and it tilts the impression of even the most innocent of events.
Yeah, I really like my characters - just don’t feel like I derive much enjoyment from actually RPing them as is, which is sad and even as much as trying to RP 'em kind of takes away from that enjoyment so I figure it’s best to just not bother
I don’t think it’s as much about the Maw or the Shadowlands, but rather the entire cosmic angle is eating away at what I enjoyed about Warcraft. It was never really about these giant cosmic forces playing a great game to the point that existantial threats e.g the Burning Legion, Old gods etc are pawns.
It’s strayed away from what I enjoyed, which was the Alliance and Horde trying to eek out a living in what is - let’s be honest - a pretty hostile world. It was seeing Stormwind struggle against its own corruption and its provinces suffer for it. It was seeing the Kalimdor Horde come together to cut out their own place to live in the Barrens against imperialistic dwarves and murderous centaur. It was seeing the blood elves plunder the Thunder Kings trove and claiming anima for themselves.
Not Baine, Anduin and Jaina going on an adventure to repair “the wheel of death” at the expense of not just prior characterisation but the narrative of Warcraft 1/2/3.
Yeah, I agree with you all on that issue. Maybe I am invested in a different sort of way. The Maw thing is just utterly abhorrent to me. I remember what Wrall said in another thread about how the setting has often been very dark, but there has always been hope. In Wrath for example, the game depicted absolutely horrible things, but there was always a light at the end of the tunnel - even if there was no saving Bridenbrad’s body, his spirit was saved, and the same is true for the many horrific reanimated crusaders in Scourgeholme.
There’s no such hope in SL. We enter the expansion having already lost, with innumerable innocent people having been sent to the Maw to be irreversably tortured into oblivion or turned into slaves/soul juice/the floor itself, to the point where they say the Maw army rivals the Legion.
Maybe I am just weird/queasy/thin-skinned? But this sort of thing just feels beyond awful even in a story. Especially one with the premise of WoW. This isn’t a grimdark setting, this isn’t Warhammer (and even Warhammer didn’t have anything like this).
Of course but the point is, as someone has pointed out before me, they are operating Classic on bare minimum costs. They don’t have to create any content for it, it’s just basically maintenance work to run the whole thing and now they’ve added monetisation to it, which a lot of players gladly swallowed. From a business perspective that’s an ace in the hole so nobody will really care to change something. For now, at least, because you say that cow will eventually get milked dry, but even then it’s still wishful thinking that they’d start actually trying to make a good experience instead of their usual list of promises and smoke tactics to make players think that MAYBE THIS TIME things will be diffrent. I don’t think this cycle has a chance of breaking anytime soon and that alone is enough to keep WoW afloat.
Honestly the entire setting just became so depressing because of the shadowlands as a whole when you realise that most of the afterlifes kinda suck and are very stupid. Even when we end up ‘fixing’ the Maw I wouldn’t want Jeyce to end up anywhere save for Maldraxxus maybe so that he can keep being a spy there.
But there’s meant to be an infinite number of them (don’t get me started on that) so there’s probably one when you can just chill and play hearthstone forever. Uther is actually there too, he’s fine, he’s just trying out his new Paladin deck.
Shadowlands should never have been touched tbh, but if I had another wish i’d have erased Warlords too. Best I can hope for is that the weird time dilation of the Shadowlands gives Blizzard a chance to do a soft reboot/timeskip and redo Azeroth completely with some EK/Kalimdor zones acting as end game content like Vanilla did.
Though that’s a monkeypaw wish with Danuser + co. At the helm. =S
There’s infinite afterlives, so clearly there’s a happy pandaren afterlife and a nice tauren afterlife and so on and so forth, with only a few specific souls willing to undertake such a sacrifice sent to the maintenance realms (returning to the Arbiter for re-judgment is mentioned as an option Pelagos has considered).
I think the cosmic angle can absolutely be done well, it’s just such narrative decisions are horrible when your entire priority is gameplay over story.
Why would we even give a crap about the story or the next bigger bad, when we know we’re going to defeat them anyway? We’re gonna give a crap even less when the bigger bad destroys everything, because then truly there’s nothing to care about except your one character that you cannot connect to because they’ve been reduced to a generic low-customized general/commander/hero/champion without any identity. There’s no personality to the PCs, they’re nameless. There’s no storytelling to them, there’s no meaningful choices in any story quests, nothing to give them any sort of individual thought.
The other characters in the story have been reduced to trite stereotypes existing in an unstable tale, where their powers are just as all over the place as the story in general. If we actually cared about them and our own characters, we would feel a larger worry about insurmountable odds against us, which WoW has managed to achieve before with much more grounded villains. You can still feel the ‘oh no’ with cosmic deities coming into play after having survived the previous big bads, but they lose their effect very quickly when we deal with them in a single patch with absolutely no effect to surrounding land.
Blizzard’s stubborn lack of care for their own world, deciding to keep most of the zones unchanged thus not reflecting their own story in real time just creates a juxtaposed story for which you gotta read several novels to know the actual current story for, which you still might not care about because the story itself is just painful to read because the writers are not meant to tie the hands of the creators of gameplay, which has also become increasingly tedious and unfun.
Argus was a cool ‘oh crap’ moment, but much like the content on it, Argus too was reduced to a visual a-hole in the sky.
You and I both hope they will do a time skip and not blunder it, but let’s be honest, if anything, they are more likely to make it so that, while we were in slands, only 1 day has passed. The whole time thing was an excuse to not do anything, not the other way around.
It’s both in world and IRL canon, because not only does time seem to pass slower in lore, but us as players as experiencing what feels like an agonising amount of time for the next patch/expansion.
I dont remember seeing anything anywhere saying that the time moves slower, just that it passes differently, but I’m not gonna insist on it.
And yes not like it matters, considering that the moment the writing team gets a new dumbass idea, they will torch whatever they need to make the new thing work (or make it appear as if it works ). No matter how rickety the foundation and walls are, it’s all peachy as long as they like the roof.
I think it’s down to Jaina’s dialogue in the Maw intro where she implies they’d been there for a long time, while it had only been a few weeks in Azeroth since they’d been taken.
That I remember, but again, I interpreted it as time flowing differently, not strictly slower. Like one moment 5 minutes take a year to pass and the next moment 5 minutes pass in a second. Always fluctuating, you know? Similar to how time passes in Feywild in DnD, you don’t know how much time will have passed when you come back from there (unless I got that wrong too)
). No matter how rickety the foundation and walls are, it’s all peachy as long as they like the roof.