Yeah this hasn´t happened by a long shot. Throwing some random abilities back with little or no thought doesn´t constitute proper unpruning. A few specs have been improved (shadow, enhance, warriors and subtlety). The rest is pretty much the same as legion/bfa.
Classes are far off from the fun and tool rich era of cata and mop. Many classes need much further unpruning and not the least, redesign.
Q4 result published. Best result in wow in a decade, so wow really is a fail? Growing, growing , growing. Lol
my point wasnt weather it was successful, my point was people looked at it and Screeched about their being too many abilities and people dont think ur rotation / kit should expand.
Very few things are succesful when done haphazardly.
Every expansion hype, except for MoP has been off the charts. Every expansion is going to be “the best ever” and then isn’t. Your disappointment isn’t in anything being wrong with the expansion. Disappointment always comes from your own expectations.
I expected Cyberpunk to be a mess on launch. I deliberately avoided all hype surrounding that game and when I saw the early reviews, my thoughts were “Everything I’ve been saying for the past 5 years has come true”. Yes, I’ve been talking about CDPR’s problems since The Witcher 3 came out and they’ve come to light. In fact, expecting Cyberpunk to be a solid, bug-free game was unrealistic. Point is - I expected it to be a mess, played it on day 1 and wasn’t disappointed. I quite enjoyed it.
Without the hardcore players, the casuals will quit, because there’s nothing to aspire to. Around 20% of the max level population plays heroic raids and m+10. There is no MMO alive that doesn’t cater specifically to its hardcore audience. All casual MMOs die.
That is as long as you insist on NOT running your own key. If you run your own key, you set the rules. In fact, the people running their own keys are a vast minority.
WoW has been described for 16 years as a “Theme park MMO” as opposed to sandbox MMOs like ArcheAge.
Overall, don’t get yourself too hyped, because you’re bound to be disappointed. Your OP is a you problem, not the game’s. Consumers these days have been primed to tie their identity to Product, to be hyped. Hype is basically pre-consumption of something, and then when you actually get to taste it… it of course doesn’t live up to the hype and that leaves you disappointed.
Shadowlands has problems, definitely. It’s still the best expansion since Wrath or MoP.
This is true. Warrior for example has just random abilities thrown in. Shield abilities on Arms or Fury? Why? Problem one - you can’t swap weapons in combat, so they can’t be used if you have your main weapons equipped. Problem 2 - if an off-tank is needed, outside of combat you can simply swap to prot. Shield abilities on arms and fury are a waste.
In order for the unpruning to happen we need the entire spec system to be removed and to go back to pre-MoP design where you specced your talents, mixing and matching the three talent trees you had.
Classes still are all about picking best of 3. They ARE more enjoyable than BFA, but that doesn’t mean all that much. Every fire mage is the same, every retribution paladin is the same - not because we all play the same meta, but because all the choice we have is “Pick the obvious best of 3”.
WoW will not die, not soon at least. Blizzard will find a way to pump this expansion with some excitement, WoW is still profitable for them.
As a side note, besides what I usually comment on this kind of threads, I want to add a few things that I think make Shadowlands a tough experience for casuals:
The content is hard. That leads to elitism among the community and stuff like RIO and boosting blow up. They need to stop looking up to pros so much and look a bit lower, at the average Joe that is just strolling around.
The story and the map were a big hit or miss deal. I see people loving them and people hating them. Being so different and out of character for the WoW lore, it’s a tough pill to swallow for some people.
It’s the 3d expansion in a row that follows the same pattern (borrowed power, systems, and big ilvl gaps).
I dunno I feel some stuff was decent but some classes and speccs coulda been done better.
I don’t get how is this expansion harder than previous ones.
I find the raid pretty well balanced for casuals. I only raid twice a week with no pressure to do mm+ on the guildies and everyone enjoys it and finds the content to be well balanced.
Concerning borrowed powers, I’m really not getting the frustration. First this is not the 3rd exp to have some. Every single expansion has some. They’re called raid sets, WoD perks, Artefact weapon, Glyphs, etc… This is expected for the gameplay to remain fresh and interesting.
Never loosing power would prevent us from getting more. How is this a good trade off?
Retail is for grinding gold so that you can play Classic WoW for free. Imagine having A: no flying everywhere, B: Quest areas filled with players, C: an actual leveling experience with challenging mobs and real level gaps.
D: Gear scarcity and much much better stat balance while leveling, tougher mobs. E: Fun classes with a ton of spells available by just hitting level 10, always having new spells to learn & look forward to learning because leveling is 10x more time consuming, literally.
What else can I say, Shadowlands has gloomy sadboy chores that give you no reason to do them other than more dresses for your wardrobe and Classic WoW is a complex eco-system brimming with life.
Classic WoW is the casual’s dream, it’s so much better in every sense just because the leveling carries that game & every level bracket has something interesting going on.
To understand the casual’s perspective, would you rather play Super Mario Bros on the game boy over and over by beating every level, or would you rather grind the same level over and over and over and over again in an effort to beat your score? (speedrunning)
That to me is the difference between classic wow & retail. Classic wow is 60 levels, retail is 6 levels, 1-6
It’s not harder than previous ones, they’re all similar in difficulty, a trend that started back in WoD.
Experience varies from person to person. Most people seem to think Nathria is overtuned.
Technically you’re absolutely right only that in practice it’s a lot different.
I mean compare tier set bonuses to a well timed convoke. Not even close imo.
And I don’t think the game is fresh and interesting because every expansion we have new OP stuff to play with.
Fresh and interesting to me is a good storyline, a good map, PvP balance, new class abilities and talents. Things that are actually integrated in the game and part of a class toolkit.
Overall I do enjoy Shadowlands, I think it’s fun. But I also understand it has issues and it could be much much better.
Completely irrelevant as Q4 mas hype/honeymoon phase. See what Q1 results bring.
Also further proof that only engagement rates matter aka timegating and chores. The big hammer will come soon enough. But i hope you enjoy doing pointless chores why players leave in swarms.
Just check how many people write about empty friendslists, oribos and dead guilds. This expansion is a huge failure in many ways.
I also wonder how bots fake their engagement rates as they are online 24/7 killing stuff. Must look good on paper when presenting it to the suits huh. Havent even talked about that problem yet or boosting. Another 2 huge issues growing substantially larger in SL which could alone could break the game already.
The truly scary thing is that they might already see the huge player drop off (in engagement aka not logging in) and think its only because of the loot disaster. But thats only a portion. Many will still stay away because this expansion is no warcraft anymore and has nothing besides raids, pvp, m+.
Only seen one of this. The Village. And i liked it. He does this weird Alfred Hitchcock thing and cameo’s in all his movies but you have to spot him as was not obvious in The Village.
Mate.
We now have free to play accounts. We also have Classic - these guys at least pay, but they are playing a different game.
Most of all, this “best result in a decade” is on “engagement”. That’s not the number of unique players per month. That includes how often they login and how much time they spend. Yes, they got better at making people sit longer in their chairs, woohoo.
And for general perspective on MAUs, see this (they are declining):
You keep going with you undocumented opinions, even if numbers in q1 will show different you will keep goin, why do you even play?
The decline cannot be compared in the way some wants it. You can only assess their succes due to income and profit due to the fact that many Pays gametime with gold. You cannot not use subscribers to compare other than legion , if so you need to make a lot of reclassification in your comparisson data. I get that some dont like blizz and the game as it turn out for some, but due to the revenue and income it is clear that some does. Those who dont like it , it is fair to express an oppinion, but some of the anger keep one big question to me : why do you play if you hate blizz and the game so much?
I already said im not playing anymore, but would like to and therefore give feedback. Theres nothing undocumented about the fact that Q4 numbers are completely irrelevant due to hype phase. Even YOU should grasp that, no?
Also read the forums. Theres tons of people saying how bad it is, not having fun, guilds falling apart, friendlists being empty. And thats just the very small portion of people actually writing. Most are just quitting silently.
They are not irrelevant if you compare the same periods with same periods with other expansions. They wont tell you how fast players drop off, but they still indicate if the game was a succes before you get other numbers in next quarter that might tell another story. Based on the numbers we have atm there is only lne conclusion untill next time. When next time comes there might be some who said we need another quarter or another again. I really dont mind what happens in the next quarters, I still like the game. I dont defend the game, I defend what I beleive is facts and that be documented. Everything else should have a big dusclaimer on.
The TS and loads of other “I no like game, game bad, me still play, but game bad”.
Meanwhile Blizzard during the quarterly investor call:
Guess who’s to blame for their own misery? And no, its not Blizzard…
Seriously though, I will never get people who buy goods and services that they dislike. Its like buying a coffeelike drink at your local Starbucks without liking that stuff, nor the brand and would rather be drinking a beer at your local bar. Why would anyone in their right mind do such a thing?
Still irrelevant as you need a time frame of minimum 3-6 months and SL had 2 months in Q4. I played everyday until christmas. Havent logged in since and my sub runs till june cause i made the mistake of buying 6 months.
Many come to the realisation now that this expansion doesnt offer much and has nothing to do with warcraft. Hence you will see a large drop off soon.
Also all the loot problems.