The expansion of unrewarding, irrelevant, laggy, open world content

Community General Discussion
1

I honestly can’t understand how and why they keep making these massive events every single major and minor patch, which all serve to lag out the zones, automatically become irrelevant in a few weeks at best, and become completely impossible a patch or two later because of how irrelevant they are.

So far we’ve had:
Elemental storms on launch
Primalist tomorrow
Forbidden Reach rare farm trains and technically the tower too
Zaralek rares and researches under fire
Time rifts

All of these offer pathetic rewards to anyone but the freshest of alts, all of them require a lot of people which makes the content impossible for anyone doing it late, and makes them insane lagfests while they are current. The entire Taldraszus zone is unplayable while there is a time rift, and doing the event itself is even worse.

They keep pumping these events out to keep up the “DF has so much content guys” message for streamers and YouTubers to shout out, but the content is being made obsolete at the fastest pace we’ve ever seen.

Elemental storms and Primalist tomorrow events are a joke at this point, and don’t offer anything to anyone.

Forbidden Reach is nearly completely pointless with all the nerfs to the ring, so the tower is dead a few months after coming out. The rares themselves still fare better than any other open-world content they’ve done this expansion because they’re convenient to farm, and they do offer some low catch-up gear, but there’s one less incentive to farm them without the tower, and they’ll soon die out completely.

Zaralek was dead like a week after it came out because the rares drop a single pathetic drake fragment (ONE fragment), and they have too much hp. Researchers under fire is solid in terms of rewards, but it goes into the lagfest/impossible to do without 20 people categories like the rifts.

Time rifts make entire Taldraszus unplayable while they’re on (every hour), and doing them is even worse in terms of lag. The rewards suck at all times, rather than at least giving one good item a week like researchers, and the currency is of course, tied to the character even though it’s just used for cosmetics, so you can’t spam them on different characters for the same rewards.

The worst part is that I LIKE these events even though they are completely braindead, it feels good to go on rare trains and participate in massive activities with 40/60+ players in an MMO, but the game is unable to handle it due to pathetic servers that start burning with more than 40 people doing a single thing in a zone. This is what Nazjatar was like with those godawful PvP events etc.

Why is all of this content so useless, unrewarding, and designed to become irrelevant in a week? Why are you pushing 100 players into an event knowing full well that everyone will be playing with 5+ seconds of delay? Why are all of them nearly impossible to solo for people who would like to do them after they have become irrelevant?

5 Likes
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Sure if all you care about is gear gear gear.

Aside from that these open world rifts give us plenty of stuff. Loads of mounts, toys and transmog. If you want high- end gear go do dungeons/raids?

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Forbidden Reach rares were killed the entire time the patch was current. People do the content when it’s the relevant patch. If you already raid, m+ or PvP no it’s not going to have amazing gear upgrades for you but it will offer you a set to collect, mounts, pets, toys, transmog, achievements etc. It’s also nice for alts to get gear if they don’t do the main three higher end activities.

Zaralek rares activity died because Blizzard changed how they worked.

Everything in this patch:-

Which in turn lets you do Hard Mode:-

It may be that none of that appeals to you but it’s a lot of content.

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if content were “relevant” the way you mean it, you’d be crying that there is too much to do and everything is a chore to stay up to date.

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Servers are indeed struggling, though. I’ve decided to jump from one Eonar platform to another using my wings to glide but I fell into the water below because my wings opened when I was already at the very bottom of the lake. I got my reward, so you can “farm” on these events but you sure as hell can’t “play”.

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I dunno, I’ve done it three times this week and gotten loads of the currency already to buy a few tasty pieces from the vendors there and then had some really good accountbound mog drops including a full set for my rogue :dracthyr_shrug: I got a usable weapon from the first one I did too so I guess it does give good items at least once a week it is just also repeatable for the cosmetics.

I don’t even find the lag that bad until after going into the rift to face the boss and haven’t noticed any zone wide lag during the event when I’m elsewhere in the zone.

What I did notice though, when I upgraded my PC a couple of months ago and got some more RAM the lag issues I used to have in WoW stopped being a thing

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Ive done like 10 times now. have 500mb internet, a 3070 and 32g of Ram. Im still lagging af in a bigger server after entering the rift especially. Also people are reporting lags outside of the event, fps drops etc that are not tied to your hardware.

Also: the event is flawed in and off itself. When it beggins there is so few mob spawns, that meele is left running around trying to tag mobs that die in 0.5s, its just no fun. Also add the slight lag in the open area and it becomes frustrating

2 Likes
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I never said no one was doing this content when it comes out, I’m saying the content is becoming irrelevant at an insane pace, and faster than ever before considering the amount of these events they are making.

It only makes sense to do it on an alt that just hit 70 and if you happen to like any of the cosmetics, but if you DO like the cosmetics, you can rest assured that they will be hell to get in half a year or when the expansion ends, just like Warfronts and Islands now.

Exactly my point. They made it irrelevant and useless 2 weeks after it came out.

I’m specifically talking about open-world content. Of course the mega-dungeon is content, but they only made 8 dungeons this expansion just like SL, the lowest amount any expansion has gotten. up to that point. I’m not gonna applaud them for what used to be standard for a subscription-based MMO that also has a box price.

They are making content, but most of it is useless to most people excluding a few niche groups. Who cares about whelpling daycare and tier 3 items with 5 polygons that are already an insane gold sink cost and a grind. They made gear unavailable, and are now allowing you to grind and pay to get it back.

No I wouldn’t, you’re talking about the sweatlords.

Yep, I’m doing a rift just now and I’m not playing the game, I’m just staying in an area where the event is taking place because I can’t cast my abilities. The lag was so bad on Varian that the game froze for 10 seconds on a high-end PC and ported me back.

Then it has to depend on the server because it’s unplayable on Draenor, both the event and the boss are 3-6 second delay on every action.

2 Likes
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Totally agree with everything you stated.

The FOMO is aweful, because even though you don’t have the crave to play the game, you NEED to if you want the rewards the event provides on your account, because well, as you stated, these events will most likely be deserted in a couple weeks.

So you have to farm it, and you have to farm it NOW, otherwise there are plenty of mounts / battle pets / transmogs and toy you’ll never be able to get… that’s kind of a bummer let’s be honnest.

My second biggest concern goes for … WHY THE HELL IS IT SO LAGGY !!!
You’re telling me 2004 Blizzard could handle massive PvP battle on Kazzak with close to no lag at all , but current 2023 Retail WoW can’t handle 100+ people in the same zone at the same time without having massive 20sec lag spikes?

In its current state, this event is straight up unplayable, this is ridiculous …

3 Likes
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I didn’t specifically mention FOMO just because I’m not even sure if this is malicious like FOMO always is, or if they are just incompetent with these events. It can easily swing both ways and you’re probably right, but with how poor any group activity runs I’m leaning towards incompetence atm.

I don’t think they ever improved server capacity or how the game handles groups since the game came out, at least to any noticeable degree. If your game can’t handle 100 people in one place, and it can’t, then don’t put 100 people in one place.

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I actually think they handled this one in a really good way. Other than the lag.

You can do the daily quest to get the currency and never have to touch the event to get the mounts and transmog.
And at the end of the event, you go through a portal to the boss where it puts you with other people so sharding isnt as issue.

So you can still succeed now, later in the expansion, and in later expansions fully solo

2 Likes
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Battles got a lot more complicated since Vanilla, all the procs, trinket effects and other stuff added to the game make running the numbers on events with lots of players far more math-intensive than they were in 2004.

But i agree, trying to do the time rift boss on a hard-casting class is downright painful, it takes a bunch of attempts to even get a simple shadow bolt cast so i can tag the boss and get credit.

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I dont get any gear upgrades but i do not find any of it useless. I’ve got loads to do.

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I agree with this, content is dead very fast and seems a waste of development time.

Anything that takes large groups of people in the open world will last a few weeks at best.

Perhaps they should have less new stuff and work on more evergreen content.

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I am still killing forbidden reach rares to complete my S1 raid normal/heroic transmog set on multiple chars.

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LFG = never dead old world content.

People are still farming old expansion raids for mounts and transmog.

And, there is NO evergreen PvE content.

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Old patch content being irrelevant is a common thing, it happens in most xpacks, even in Legion where we had a lot more chores, Suramar was quiet empty by the time Argus was released.

Tbh this expansion has been the xpack that got me playing the most (been playing since wotlk). It feels refreshening to NOT have chores, and not everything about being gaining power. We already have rated pvp, M+ and raiding for the end game, hardcore folk. (I tend to stick to low rating rated pvp max 1,9k and normal rading that’s about it)

So having extra casual ‘content’ like open world events, whelp daycare, crafting, and so on has been a blessing. It’s really rereshening to be able to log after a week and not be behind anything.

And it’s also quite refreshening to be able to take a break from pvp or pve when it gets so heated and still having some chill stuff to do in the open world.

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It’s good to see that they are at least trying to provide some open world content. Expansion with poor end game outside of the big 3 have generally been poorly regarded by the playerbase, see WoD or Cata.

But unfortunately the content has several flaws.
Very little is soloable, it nearly all requires a critical mass of players.
It’s drip-feeding rng gear which is slow and erratic. As this content is primarily aimed at non big 3 players as an laternative gearing path this isn’t great.
They’re scheduled so you can’t do them when you want to. Hunts are even worse as they’re rng spawns.

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Open world content will always be boring, mind numbing and frustrating when you design the world based on the idea that navigating it should be a chore.

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Just as well I came back after 2 years… :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like