There is so much wrong with the game but for me, sharding and phasing is the main reason why this game is so terrible nowadays. It literally killed everything that this game used to be.
Just tried to hang out with a friend who plays Horde and I couldn’t. I play Alliance and we wanted to meet up in Nazjatar but we just couldn’t see each other.
Same realm, both warmode enabled but apparently we weren’t in the same phase, shard or whatever it’s called.
Generally, I don’t recognize anyone in the world anymore. It’s just a bunch of strangers. Back in the days I used to know almost every single player on my realm, Horde and Alliance, and I made friendships, communities, even enemies.
It made the game feel so alive and made me feel I’m actually part of something.
I don’t see how today’s version of the game is any different from League of Legends, or any other game with matchmaking. You log in and play with a bunch of other guys you will probably never see again.
Your guild is basically just a a friends list or a group chat. You might not even see your guild mates because they are in a different shard, have warmode turned off or whatever makes them not appear on your screen.
It’s so bad. I don’t even feel like I’m playing an MMO anymore.
I have to disagree with the notion that phasing should be the top of their todo list and it killed this game solo.
LFR
LFD
Titanforging
Removal of vendors
Making professions suck
Removal of set coloured gem sockets
Remove of tier set bonuses
Class design pruning
Mythic raid
Flex raid (removal of 10 & 25 man)
These are all way up my list in things to revert before I want blizzard to get to phasing.
Phasing you can play around, you can sometimes even avoid it, everything else is the core foundations of the game.
I agree that phasing and sharding was a major contributor to the decline, but also that it had a lot of help.
As we see from this thread,
there is widespread agreement on what is bad, but it’s tough to get agreement on where to place the entries in the “Top 10 Badnesses” or even the “Top 50”.
I like the name you have there like the first dictator that ever lived Julius Ceaser.Yes agreed one of the main reasons community in wow is somewhat dead is phasing and sharding destroyed it.Those good times where you build your own rep on the server is long gone now everyone can get away with being a douche to others and no concequences people had to engage and had fun communicating and doing stuff with each other now they use you and then when they are done with you just leave you to rot it’s quite sad how community has become but it is what it is we have to adapt to it or die and some people don’t even speak English like what the hell.For example how would you like if I spoke random stuff in Serbian and you had to be like what the hell is he even saying well other Slavic people don’t count we can naturally understand each other.
Indeed it is, I made the tread because I am very curious if I was the one taking crazy pills or something. But it seems lots of people have very similar complaints. I even noticed some new stuff that I agree with, some people proposed solutions, it’s great to see that we can agree on a lot of things at least.
I have no difficulty meeting up with other players in WM. Couple clicks to form a group so we are in same shard, bingo, can see each other. Not difficult.
The not seeing familiar players issue is trickier, but there are things you can do to help.
For enemy players…
I use an addon called Spy, that has a ‘kill on sight’ list feature that alerts me when kos players are nearby. By using it, I realize that I actually see the same players again and again, much more often than I would realize if no kos list. And that’s only kos players, I likely see other repeat players without realizing it.
I disagree on this one, especially on the original implementation with wings wich could have easily replaced lfr as a whole. I think the best thing would be 2 difficulties. one winged flex mode wich you can choose like in lfr whatever part you want to go or simply go through the hole raid from beginning and one hard mode, aka mythic.
There is definitely pros to flex raiding, as you suggest the default being flex and the hard mode being set (like it is right now) is a fine system but I think locking the hardest mode out of 10man really killed off a lot of guilds and is a big turn off for making one.
Usually people make guilds with friends and it builds from there, with 20 man mythic there’s a good chance more than half your raid will be random people.
I liked flex in MoP but 4 raid difficulties is just too much. Flex should have replaced LFR and normal should have used the flex technology.
Heroic should have remained 10 & 25 only.
Let me explain please.
When 10 man was equal to 25 man raiding balance was a nightmare. current mythic raiding is exactly tuned around having 20 people. If 10 and 25 would be a thing again blizzard would have to balance mythic mode twice, even with different mechanics in it. I believe 20 man raiding was a fair compromise.
4 raid difficulites are too much, I agree. I stated in another thread It could be possible to scrap heroic and just have 2 modi called normal and mythic wich normal being flex, either winged for people with less time or just do whole instance. lfr could stay as it is as long as there are no important sets or trinket to fish for.
The problem with flex raiding is that Blizzard is unable to scale the raid to lower amount of people. If you want to kill Azshara on week 1, while you have 10 members in the raid you are going to have a bad time. The wards simply cannot be managed with only 10 people unless you are heavily overgeared.
Not for all of the 10 man raiding guilds out there, they either died or had to merge with another guild and that rarely turned out well.
A very very small percentage of players are able to do mythic now because the only way in is through an already established guild.
Balancing it is better, sure, but I don’t think it’s a good trade off. If they cut back on raids ie remove one of the four difficulties and axe flex then it allows them to focus more in the set sized 4-6 versions. Flex raiding isn’t very balanced either, there’s always the better set up ie 2-3-7 or 2-4-9.
10 and 25 were their owns bubbles, leagues, communities, whatever you want to call it and I miss that. So even if one was harder or easier it didn’t really ruin anything,
Its cool technology but yeah, I don’t think 10 man flex could ever be as balanced as a sat 10 man.
I agree sharding has ruined it.
I play on a server which is mostly alliance and because of this when doing dailies all I see is alliance running around, just being able to claim a monster is nearly impossible and I’m sure this is true in reverse for some people on other servers.
Sharding just doesn’t work and it’s extremely frustrating.
It seems like you would need to rename mythic to heroic otherwise there is a big hole where heroic used to be.
Phasing and sharding are not the same thing though, phasing isn’t a problem when it was done like back in WotLK but they have gone overboard on it and now with sharding as well it just messes everything up.
25 man was still healthy though, and what’s worse, people just quit raiding because they don’t have enough people, or 1 big group now being 2 small groups of people still playing.
I can only speak of personal experience. I’ve lost my 25man raiding guild at that time and struggled to find a new 25 man guild for a long time because everyone wanted to just 10 man raiding.
![:grin:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/grin.png?v=6" ":grin:")