I would like to point out that the “difficulty” of the Mage tower in particular fluctuated a lot from its introduction on 7.2 and the time like 2 months before BFA where the artifact weapons were overcharged to god mode power levels.
Saying that the MT was removed to certain difficulty level is not very accurate considering how it became from something only the best of the best could do to something that anyone with a braincell could do at least on their main.
No the post you made, that i responded to, clearly made the point that supporting old content was basically no big deal, and that only occasional things need changes, and when they do it’s done in no time, no big deal.
Now you keep bringing up things that boil down to “well yea, but they did that because they HAD to do it”, which is in essence of my point.
I know my replies have been attacking most of the point you’ve made, but that’s not because i think you’re stupid (i don’t) and not even that i don’t agree with the feelings you have (sad about things being removed) because from what i can tell we basically feel the same way about those. It’s that the initial claim you made (maintaining old content being not really a big deal) is so false in my opinion and experience.
You clearly have some technical background as well, i know you aren’t clueless about some of the things Blizzard devs do, but some people are (and nothing wrong with that).
It just bothers me, when those people read comments like yours, take them at face value (because nobody bothered refuting it) and then complain about the game or Blizzard for false reasons.
Blizzard is by no means perfect, and plenty of decisions made by them are worth pushing back against or complaining about, but often when i see threads where people are throwing around complaints (i don’t mean this thread), 80%-90% of the complaints thrown around as “proof of how much they suck” are either demonstrably false, badly informed, or just a personal preference (that some people would agree and a similar amount of people would disagree with).
I don’t like that at all. I think it has all sorts of negative ripple effects. More of the negative changes in my wow experience over the last years, have come from the ways players see the game (attitude), than from actual game-changes by Blizzard.
But yea, fair enough, i won’t pick apart every example given.
GAME DESIGN / NEW EXPANSION DESIGN
To make my argument in a very different way,
From a game designer point-of-view, the existing content is a massive shackle, that limits what you can realistically do with any future expansion/content.
If the exact same people were asked to design and build the next wow expansion as a separate game, with no concerns about compatibility or retaining any “old” code or assets (but still being allowed to use whatever they want). Then you could say they would be able to produce vastly superior content. That said, even though the new content would be a lot better, the overall product would not be nearly as interesting to us, because it would lack all those pre-existing things (and we’d likely have to start fresh characters and all that).
This is the same reason that you can look at MMO’s on steam or youtube, and might think to yourself,
Holy ****
Half these games look way more interesting than WOW,
How come wow is (still) so much more popular ?
The reason very likely isn’t that they have better developers, or that they have better artists, or better leadership. Likely not even, and i know i’m being bold here!, that those other teams don’t suffer under the brilliant loomin cloud of Activision.
No the biggest reason, i suspect/claim, is being shackled to old content. It makes the game more of an oil tanker than a fishing boat, and hence it takes much more effort to turn or reverse.
Now while it’s the biggest shackle, it’s also the biggest asset. For one thing, i know i’m personally going to fork over my money for Shadowlands, honestly even if every single thing i hear about it is negative, i will still pay for Shadowlands.
I don’t buy many games, and other companies/productlines, they have to work very hard, to convince me to pay them money. But the reason for the difference is not really my faith in Blizzard, though there is some of that in there, it’s that i know whatever Shadowlands will be, it will be the current game plus some new stuff.
I know, just like you have said, that they’ll make an effort to keep the majority of existing stuff playable. And i’ll be sad about the few things that do get dropped, and when significant enough, i’ll let Blizzard know i am, and also i’ll (selfishly) hope it will be things that i managed to complete pre-Shadowlands. But i’ll buy that puppy, because aside from everything else, i know that a big chunk of their efforts (by choice or lack of choice) has gone into keeping old content, and my characters, alive.
All the arguments that boiled down to “well they’re just following the path of least resistance, they had to do it this way” are in my opinion, cop-outs. They could have gone another way, but it wouldn’t be the wow-way that many, like me, care about (often just subconsciously). Maintaining old content causes extra work and imposes extra challenges every step of the way, at every level along the pipeline. One could even make the argument, with a straight face, that “old content” has more of a say in the direction of the game, than Ion does (or whoever is in charge).
There’s truth in that, but of course that argument goes for anything in wow, like Mythic raids.
Mythic raidmount rewards are a guaranteed drop (for one person per raidgroup) while it’s current content, and become a 1% dropchance around the time the next Raid tier opens up.
Clearly there’s a big difference in effort/skill between say a Method raider who gets that mount shortly after the raid opens, and a much more casual raider like myself, who might get his first Mythic kill (with mount drop) on that boss only a few weeks before the next tier opens, when my groups equiped ilvl might well be 30 higher than what Method had.
A player who waits until the next Expansion, has even higher ilvl, but has to deal with the 1% droprate, where-as i didn’t.
The line always has to be drawn somewhere, it’s the same sorta situation as when countries decide that age 18 (or 17 or 21 or w/e) is the age at which someone can be trusted to operate a car. Clearly there is no good evidence that 17year+364day old persons bring more risks with them than 18year+1day olds, so it feels arbitrary, but the line has to be drawn somewhere and that’s what they ended up picking using reasonably sensible arguments.
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What? 
I’m talking about the fact that people either don’t want to play WoW or leave WoW because Blizzard is arbitrarily for no reason removing content from the game which people take as punishment because they didn’t play at a given time.
People are being feed up with what Blizzard does to the content and effectivly game looses players.
You are right it should be removed befor Argus patch.
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People are not leavinng beoucse of it. If anything it motivates them to push challenging content to get those rewards. Only reason why you dont like removing old content is becouse youa ere just bad noob what want everything for no effort. And no Blizzard cant scale it up becouse classes work differently. Stop being entilted noob what just want free stuff.
Yes, they do and there are even people in the streaming community which publicly admitted that they and their friends went to play different MMO which didn’t remove content after new xpac is released.
It’s only understandable becasue why would you want to play a game which punishes you for not playing the game in given xpac/seasons. People should be rewarded for what they can achieve in-game with their own skill and not for the fact that they played given expansion.
I actually felt disenfranchised with Destiny 2 after seeing that the Season Passes added content… And then removed it because they wanted to replace it with something else instead. Because as I said: It defeats the purpose of an expanding world if you delete things just because something new and shiny is coming over the horizon.
Ah, if only we could have this paradise of a world in which this was an actual thing. And as compensation for the potential self-entitled crybabies who would scream about their fake prestige, they can keep their ahead of the curves and achievements, maybe get a title for it as well, to show that they were around there for the relevant expansion.
Only people I see who are truly entitled are the ones who demand that they shouldn’t share in their toys… Hmmmmm 
There is not “your point”, you have started quoting me when it was answering what other player said totally ignoring the other part of the conversation. My point was developers not to remove content with the deliberate purpose of reducing the workload having fewer things to fix or change in the future it is absurd. You have no point because you are not arguing my opinion, you are arguing against your made-up version of my opinion, probably it is also my fault, by answering everything I was going offtopic too. I can’t argue that they do not dedicate any work to fix anything from old content, because that never was my opinion and of couse I do not belive it neither. You have gone too much offtopic to remember what was the point of the post.
I refresh your memory my point is “Old content removed like Mage Towers and WOD/Pandaria quest chains have not been removed with the purpose of reducing the work developers must do in the future to adapt it/fix it. It has been removed for other reasons and the future development work has nothing to do with that decision. Anyway, those removals do not have a significance impact on that”. You just go too offtopic that you forgot what we will talking about.
I’m no fan of removals either, but there aren’t too many examples of content really permanently being removed from the game. There are more examples for rewards than for actual content though, which can be just as annoying but still…
Cataclysm for example replaced a lot of content (whole zones and a few instances), so that includes removal of sorts in some respects, but in many other respects it’s still there, and more up-to-date or fitting with the rest of the game.
Many times they removed things and then bring them back later after they’ve gotten around to refreshing it (think Brawlers’ guild). There’s no saying that some of the things you hate being removed, won’t be back at some point.
Since removal is mostly annoying for people who did not experience the content, it makes sense not to do a re-release for Mage Tower instantly, in 8.0 (when the playerbase is likely 95% identical as during 7.3, so not many ppl will give a sh*t), but to wait for say somewhere mid-Shadowlands (maybe in 9.1 or 9.2), when the amount of players who never did the MT is no doubt bigger (and ore of those who did do it, care to try it again).
I highly doubt this is such a big issue. People leave the game for any number of reasons, but i doubt this is the heart of the issue for many, More likely, it may just be the last drip that causes the bucket to overflow. But then it’s misleading to blame that last droplet and ignore the liters of slowly build up frustration/reasons that made that bucket close to full to begin with.
Most of the time, people just need a break. If you play this (or any other) game long enough there’s definitely some parallel’s to be drawn to say drug addiction, in that the ratio of reward vs pain, that you receive for your time/money investment, starts to slide more and more towards just pain.
Many of the players who stop for that reason are back at some later point, unless changes in their life cause them to abandon (or heavily reduce) gaming in general altogether. I myself have been playing for most of wow’s history, and i’ve taken a year off or a few months off at various points in time. Played very sporadic/casual through some tiers, and very active through others.
People have been saying wow has been dieing and not attracting new people, since vanilla still had the new car smell (“Netcraft confirms it!”).
One day it’ll end, sure. But this game has been trucking along longer than anything else i can think off, and done it in a way that still allows long term players to maintain most of the things they’ve worked for, resulting in a sort of emotional investment in their avatar/character, that’s hard for many to ever truly shake.
As much as i appreciate other awesome game franchises, with long rich histories (like say Doom or Half-Life), they never really accomplish what wow has.
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As far as I am concerned, it’s a practical removal of content from the game. Which is funny considering I have promotional mounts that you can’t get anymore and I don’t ride them, or don’t run around with Mage Tower skins because I see no purpose in “Showing off” 
With Cataclysm I’d say it was more of a revamp and changing the playing field, but it was still a removal in its own way, considering we’re likely to not get to walk around in the TRUE Barrens without logging onto Classic.
The Brawler’s Guild is an interesting thing actually. They don’t actually remove anything from it, only add onto it over the expansions while scaling old encounters up to meet with the new content. And yet I don’t see anyone screaming about how it’s impossible that some bosses should work in the Brawler’s Guild because “Muh old content geared towards that xpac”
I know you say “Mostly”, but it isn’t only for “People who didn’t play through it”, it’s also annoying for anyone who has played through it, but doesn’t want to see it removed. Que all the normal people on this thread.
Well, Cataclysm changes has been regarded as very bad because it removed soo much content from original wow and until recently new players have no way to experience many things from the origin. But anyway it is undoudable that having at the same time Cataclysm zones and Vanilla zones it requires so much work and I understand why they opt it to just change it, even if I personally hate it and I would love to have both versions. At least now we have Classic and soon TBC.
About the other content removed in the case of Pandaria and WOD it made impossible to follow the story of those expansions, the story has a big hole without those quest chains. I have recently played a little in TESO and FF14 and they have something that WOW can’t never have without those quest chains: A Main Story Quests that goes chronologycally with the story of the game or an expansion of the game in order and no matter when you start the game you can follow all the story in order. Maybe because TESO and FF14 are based on single players games franquises the players of those games cares more about the story that WOW players and so nor Square nor Bethesda will leave big holes in the story of their games.
It annoy people who did it too. That removed content can be completed by anyone, included those who already did it. That means no replayability. If I wan to refresh my memory of Pandaria story I can play most of the content with an alt, or with my main again with Party Sync, but there are two major quest chains removed (Patch 5.3 and Legendary quest chain) that I just can do it again. Instead of refreshing my memory replaying it I must watch a youtube video.
Curiously it hurts me more not to be able to play that quest chain that playing WOD Legandary quest chain. I never did it the later, but WOD was the only expansion who made me quit for over two years. I do not have good memories of that expansion.
Rewards are the part of the content so when someone says content it means also rewards and people are most annoyed with rewards like gear sets being only available for a short time and you can never get it.
The whole idea of time exclusive rewards in the game where have limited time to play every day is just dumb becasue at the end of the day people don’t have enough time to get what they want and they feel disappointed and punished.
During BfA people were doing Legion content which they didn’t do first time and there was influx of new people who wanted to experience Legion becasue it was a better expansion that BfA. To some degree during BfA people played more Legion content than current content.
Removal of e.g. Mage Tower doesn’t make any sense and it just makes people angry.
No one says that this is the main issue or the biggest issue.
The point is that this is an actual issue which shouldn’t exist in the first place because it’s irrational to do something which makes people leave the game or even not wanting to play the game in the first place.
What I don’t get is why the people that didn’t play when the Mage Tower, for example, was a thing actually care about it being a thing or not. For them it doesn’t really matter and wouldn’t add or take anything away from their enjoyment of the game.
There are some good arguments against the removal of things in this thread but this one I just don’t get.
Two reasons:
- People want to experience something which they didn’t experience before.
- Rewards.
If that’s really the case then i’m sorry, but i have read (and now re-read) the preceding comments, and i still see the context exactly as before.
To be clear, i don’t agree at all with Aeshma’s first comment which is a mixture of bizzare gibberish and seemingly random insults, i have no idea what gnome took a sh*t in his cornflakes. But that was already addressed and doesn’t really concern me.
I have no real problem with those proverbial tinfoil-hat wearing loonies who rave about 9/11 being an inside job, while drinking their own urine. I just keep a little extra distance while i walk past (to be clear, you did not come off crazy)
His next reply to you however, was (either by accident or on purpose) imo correct:
And your response to that (quoted in its entirety, and with the preceding context), is (in my opinion) entirely misleading/false, and that is what i quoted and argued against.
Even with preceding comment in mind, statements like “It does not need any work to adjust old content because there are no adjustments to doing in the first place” read to me, as pretty cut-and-dry generic statements.
I don’t really see how you can interpret that as
But either way, if it’s been miscommunication, fair enough, let’s leave it be. I doubt either one of us really cares if it’s because of you not clearly writing it, or me misunderstanding/misreading it.
I agree that that would have been desirable, and Blizzard did learn from that.
That is exactly why (for example) after introducing the 8.3 version of Uldum, they went through the trouble of not destroying old Uldum, but instead adding a Zidormi NPC to both new and old Uldum, and letting both zones exist side-by-side in alternate realities. I think we both agree that’s at the very least a much better method than what they did in Cataclysm.
I’m sure we could come up with “even better” ways of supporting multiple versions of zones in situations like this, but the whole premise i had been arguing from, had been that this doesn’t just magically happen at the flick of a switch. That it does require (often significant) development work, because there are many side-effects that aren’t immediately apparent, to arrive at this outcome where the old stuff still “just works”.
Yea, i totally agree that that is not desirable. I didn’t anywhere argue in favor of something like that though, nor was i even aware (before this thread) that they had removed that much.
I knew they removed the MoP Legendary cloak of course, but i had just assumed (before this thread) that that ment just removing the very last quest (that actually awards the cloak), or making it give some grayed-out vendortrash cloak instead. Maybe there was a reason for it that isn’t immediately apparent to either of us, or maybe they were just overzealous and didn’t give it much thought, i have no idea, i do agree it seems like the wrong choice based on the information i know about.
Yea, WoD was def a mixed bag. I personally found the quality of the content (questlines , mobs, dungeons, etc.) in Warlords to be among the best ever, but it had a very limited shelf life, so you basicly had like 6 weeks of great content, that you were supposed to stretch out over years. I think, in hindsight, way too much of the development resources, had gone into Garrisons, and that did not at all live up to all the hype, especially after years of “player housing” requests.
I think Legion’s Suramar zone for example (pre-Pathfinder) was a prime example of a continuation of most things that Warlords did right, but without many of the mistakes/downsides, and i very much enjoyed that result.
Actually, it has to some degree:
- Ordos cannot be accessed anymore
- The flail-weapon from the Mage Tower was unique and with the Mag’har Orc allied race made in mind design-wise before they were even announced.
- The Spellwing mount from the Argus heroic raid is actually suited for the NB-race, like the Uncorrupted Voiddrake is suited for the nelves. What should these people do now?
- The Burning of Teldrassil-mounts are based on the Vicious Tiger mount and the Warfront Armor. You will never have a complete set because they removed it.
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For point 1, they’d not really be experiencing it as they would either outgear it, or not even come close to being well geared enough for it.
A standard new player is aiming to get to max level for endgame content. The Mage Tower stuff wasn’t really aimed at the levelling geared player but at people who had at least spent a bit of time at end game and have increased their ilvl through WQs and other avenues. So a new player wouldn’t stand a chance of completing it ‘at level’.
As soon as the player moves into the next expansion zones most greens are going to be more powerful than end game items from the previous expansion so at this point they will start to cheese the encounters.
So we’re left now with just the rewards, and to be honest now we know that we are in a position where the encounters are just a cheesefest, what is the point? Unless the rewards, or the ones that people want, could be added to the 1% category.
First of all, it’s relatively easy to implement scaling so people can experience given content more less properly.
Secondly, how does new player post-Legion can be undergeared for content from previous expansion?
What are you even talking about? XD
It’s about experiencing content from past expansion not about getting max level or endgame. Seriously what are you talking about?
You didn’t discredit anything so…
All of those things are removed but only for new players, anyone who got those items back them still have it, even there could be players with Mag’har Orc with those skin unlucked by other characters, so if developers must ajust the game for those things they will need to do it even even if it have been removed.