I wanted to make this post because for few expansions I see the same mistakes. The same problems. The same tendencies in the community that ruin WoW experience and that at the end kill this game slowly. Current dev team isn’t able to save the game because there is no fresh approach towards the game. There is no fresh blood that wants to adapt this game to new standards of gaming. The only thing that is according to current gaming standards is releasing unfinished rushed product, short them income approach and ignoring feedback for years. Dear WoW devs if you read this I’m sorry if I’m brutal but we are way past the red line and truth have to be said no matter if it’s bitter or sweet but if you continue going this direction you will kill your cashcow product that still has insane potential.
1. No direction for the game.
Devs don’t really know if they want to go back to the way old WoW was designed (community and RP oriented MMO) or towards new approach where like in modern online games you can queue for everything alone and enjoy the game without huge get into barriers.
Since release of Classic I think that the direction should be obvious. Why would you need two of the same product.
People who want to experience community building would play Classic and people who want to play WoW for faster paced gameplay and insane doze of excitement would roll towards retail. On retail you have dungeon finder, raid finder, you can queue for bg and skirm wherever you want but there is no solo queue for arenas or M+. Why? Why not making retail a game that is mixing major activities that people play WoW for M+, Raiding or PvP oriented game with some fun side optional activities.
Right now WoW dev team seems to be like that person standing on the border trying to make a step towards new direction but hesitates if it’s right so the game isn’t actually like the old version and it’s not going towards new direction. It’s tasteless.
2. Hard to get into.
If you ask most of the people why do they play retail WoW you’ll most likely get 3 answers: raiding, M+ or PvP.
WoW community is a group of old boomers who already know what they want from this game - these 3 things. Give it to them and make it easy to access. How? Solo queue. I’m not talking only about PvP but also M+.
Many people see the advertisment of WoW on youtube and big hype around the game. They decide to try it because it’s pandemy. Then they see AWC and MDI. They are excited about how cool M+ and AWC is and then they hit the wall. To play them you need to have friends or sit hours in pathetic LFG tool that doesn’t allow to do anything else in a meanwhile.
Most of the players spend more time in LFG that actually playing the game. This game needs solo queue desperately to make people actually able to experience what is the best in the game.
Right now the best activities like mythic raiding, high end M+ and competitive PvP are reserved for people who are playing this game for a very long time. They created closed cast like communities that are hard to get into and extremely unwelcoming for new players.
This way playerbase will only shrink because there is no way new player will stick to the game and play it. The only people who keep being subbed are old veterans who have their own clique who keeps being subbed no matter what and who have always someone to play with.
3. Wrong resource allocation.
Every expansion for no reason dev team decides to create stupid system that they base the whole expansion on then waste all resources on it.
Artifact weapons and legendary items in Legion weren’t fixed till the last patch and then after they were removed. Azerite armors, essences and corruptions and I can honestly say were never fully fixed. Now covenants, legendary items and torghast.
Nobody bought this expansion because of torghast, the maw, covenants and legendary items. They should be side things. The core of the game is class design and three activities mentioned above. In fact no matter if you are hardcore WoW player or a casual you play this game for them. A lot of casual players do their plot quests and then queue random battlegrounds, raid finder and dungeon finder but how can they enjoy PvP if they queue and 42 k hp guy just 2 shots them.
Some specs are unplayable for years like Enha, Sub, BM, Arcane from early nerfs till the end of the expansion and MW now while other are dominating the content. Just watch last AWC and MDI tournament. These are the few repeating classes but whenever you check mmo-champion for any changes you see “covenant bug fixes”, “torghast power x is doing 5% more damage”.
Nobody cares about Torghast because no one bought the game for it. Even if you check 9.0.5 that should rebalance the game and make it better 70% of the patch changes is Torghast powers rebalancing and some “covenant table mission companions changes”.
Why are you doing it to yourself and to the end product? By focusing so much on these meaningless things you basically sentence yourself for huge wave of criticism and hate on the forums.
Just make the core of the game good and add multiple side activities that aren’t mandatory or power related so people can do something in between. That’s the best recipe for success.
4. Chores and unnaturally extended grinds.
This was never a problem in such scale it was in BFA and is now in SL. To get into playing M+, arenas or Raiding you have to:
- Level your character
- Get your renown
- Get your legendary item recipes
- Craft your legendary item/s
- Get your conduits
- Get your gear (usually takes around a month of playing on 1 character).
The main problem of many players is that if you are casual there is no way you get into even trying the content that is actually the juicy part of the game because they can’t invest enough time to even get there but let’s pretend someone did and he is new 60 lvl char now.
He has to prepare for 1 month of only playing this character to catch up to be able to play at 1500 cr in PvP or to get into heroic raiding guild at the moment. Due to lack of raid group members, M+, rbg or arena partners many guilds disassemble and then quit because there are not enough people to play with. This is basically chain reaction.
I can clearly say that average player in this game spends 80% of the game doing mandatory chores and 20% is only the content they subbed WoW for however 70% of these 20% is sitting in LFG looking for people to play with. Doesn’t sound promising right?
Sooner or later everybody would quit if actually from 3 hours available during the day 20 min. is actually playing the game he/she wants and the rest is Torghast, weekly renown, the Maw and other pointless grind extended to the limit.
If you compare how many wins you needed in TBC, Wrath, Cata, MoP, WoD or even Legion to get your weekly PvP cap and now you’ll realize it’s doubled amount of games required. If you compare the time you need to farm honor gear for one char compared to post Cata (where honor gain was increased for a reason) you realize that it’s also way more than it was.
5. Unnaturally extended power curve due to unnecessary difficulty levels.
What is the point of having heroic dungeons if they are barely different from normal ones. What’s the point of mythic dungeons if 1 month after expansion release they are irrelevant outside of being another chore every few months where there is weekly quest for 4 mythic dungeons.
What’s the point of 4 raid difficulties when it only divides raiding community into unnecessary groups. Imagine someone trying to join better guild “sorry, you have no heroic raiding experience” - this is my imaginary situation because probably average player is able to get into heroic raiding but what’s the point if normal raid is cleared 1st or 2nd week from release for average player.
The thing is that the whole storyline is already spoiled and then many people don’t feel the need of clearing the raid again for similar item with 7 but 13 ilvl better. At the end going from normal to heroic is doing the same raid with 1-2 mechanics more on each boss and the same things is doing mythic.
This amount of difficulty levels also created the huge ilvl difference between fresh char and fully geared one that forces devs to ilvl squish every 1-2 expansions. We had 3 of them and another one is very likely in 2 expansions.
6. Gear is gear approach and pushing players to do every piece of content in the game.
Luckily Blizzard is getting away from it but this approach caused havoc in PvP ladders. The insane amount of combined 12 levels of PvP gear created insane gatekeeping and unfriendly environment for new players.
New 60 level char getting in bg will be absolutely stomped by any player. Do you think such player will ever queue again?
Some players are already lost how much damage do they deal because if they go to legacy raid like Ulduar or Firelands the numbers appearing on their screen are so big I’m pretty sure than many people don’t even know how to say them.
In old expansions ilvl curve was probably as big for whole expansion like it’s now during 1 season.
7. Our feedback being ignored.
This is probably the most important and the worst thing that happens to the game.
Since PvP gearing rework in Legion people were saying that old PvP gearing was good and we should get back to it.
It took BFA and now 1st season of SL for devs to actually admit players who asked for WoD gearing to be back were right and they are going to listen in 9.1.
“You think you do but you don’t approach” is hurting the game a lot but we can see it in every aspect of the game. Many people already said - covenants are not going to work and they were right there are cookie cutter choices for each content.
They said that there is nothing to do in the Maw and there is nothing to do. It’s another boring chore.
It’s too many things to farm in the. People complained that it’s hard to get into the game if you skipped 1-2 months of the expansion and it is.
8. Lack of content for casual players.
By lack of content I mean fun unnecessary content to do that gives fun to players that aren’t invested as much as others.
Right now everything feels being forced. You have to do Torghast every week because you need legendary item. You need to farm 1000 anima every week because you need renown. Why?
Why can’t we create a content like Mage Tower. An optional thing that you don’t have to do but it’s nice to in free time when your friends are offline. A nice challenging content that feels extremely rewarding.
This is why Island Expeditions and Warfronts failed. You felt obliged to do them to get power improvement but they were literally no challenge so they felt unrewarding.
The reason why Mage Tower that actually is similar to Twisting Corridors felt better is the fact you didn’t have to do it by any means and it required you to prepare for it. While you don’t have to do Twisting Corridors either you are already fed up with weekly Torghast runs that you’re not willing to step into Twisting corridors.
These contents are based on the sane idea: plan your encounter and practice to be rewarded with something nice and meaningful not because it only looked cool but because you had to work on it.
There are plenty of nice looking mounts and transmogs that you forget about instantly because you got them for free. That’s also a reason why reputations like Netherwings in TBC felt great and why none of BFA or SL ones do. Netherwings reputation was absolutely optional but offered uniquely looking mount that you couldn’t get from other content.
Imagine these shadow “frostwyrm lookalike mounts” that you get as gladiator would be possible to get from 1 reputation only and instead Gladiator version would be armored and improved one as always. A lot of people would be doing this reputation just to get it.
The other thing is professions being absolutely useless after 1st month of the expansion besides JC, Enchanting and Alchemy. What’s the point of keeping BS on your main char when besides of legenadry items you can’t craft anything useful from it.
I miss Belt Buckles, Weapon Chains, Leg Armors and Spellthreads, Shoulder Enhancements from Inscription and many more. They were such cool addition to the game and another cool thing to do for casuals.
Also let’s be honest to see what actually made casuals happy you don’t have to look far behind. Look at Legion and now compare class campaigns and faction one from BFA or Covenant one. This is a joke.
I think that Blizzard should actually reimplement class halls as integral part of playing certain class from lvl 1 and a storyline sending you to different parts of Azeroth (Outland, Draenor and Shadowlands too obviously) and class campaign questline to go through whole ingame experience. It will help players to feel connected to the class they play and enjoy it. It feels weird that all class halls fought Legion but ignored Old Gods and jailer now. Seeing warlocks, rogues or mages unite seeing their approach to beat jailer would nice continuation and improvement in terms of RP aspect of the game.
Same thing can be sad as another quest line for your race. Adding a history and struggles for each race starting from Tauren and ending on Worgen to make casuals feel connected to them would be great thing. Instead of investing into boring covenants and torghast that will never be balanced maybe it’s better to create new chapter for class/race storyline like we got during Legion in Suramar.
The other way of extending longevity and people being subscribed than creating multiple chores is making the game replayable from different perspective. If someone is bored of playing PvP, M+ or Raid as Shaman let’s say he/she can enjoy the same thing from perspective of Mage or Warlock let’s say. Similar thing can be said about class covenants.
Imagine for example there a quest from Rogue class hall that you have to steal let’s say “key to torghast” and then let’s say Bolvar mentioning that thanks to Rogues we can enter torghast. This makes player who is playing WoW for a storyline curious how it happened so he will make Rogue to replay the story. This is how Legion made people try different classes.
9. Lack of frequent class balance changes.
The main reason why we don’t get it is because devs are too busy fixing borrowed power covenants that while providing same bonuses for every class have to work with all of them being balanced that is barely possible to achieve.
MW being unplayable for most of the season 1 in both PvE and PvP is just a joke. No tuning to specs like Outlaw in PvP is just a joke. We have to wait half a year since release for 9.0.5 that is fixing Warlock class and giving at least some changes to MW players that in fact are not enough in PvP to make them viable.
Does devs really need half a year to lower mana cost on spells and buff legendary items by few %? 100% not but if they are busy working on something else like Torghast then no wonder there are no balance changes.
To devs directly. If any of you will read this message. I’m sorry if I’m brutal with my judgement and opinion here and if anyone’s feelings were hurt but I really think that these things has to be said as the game is drowning even though it has insane amount of sold copies.
Shadowlands isn’t good expansion though so far and it didn’t solve most of the problems previous expansion had. It’s very small into right direction but not significant enough to make difference.
Huge amount of sold copies is short term source of income but if product isn’t satisfying it can’t be monetized with kept amount of subs and this game won’t ever keep it’s subs if core aspects of the game would be so hard to get into.
