Know what?
Anyone who played the game since Vanilla/TBC was witness to the changes in the overall game design, who pushed for which changes, and player base numbers are public data
WoW originally was a pretty hardcore not to mention proper RPG and it stayed this way until Wotlk.
Since Cata game was more and more changing into a more simplified and easier version and I remember vividly the outcry of people being mad that the game started catering to the casual player base.
Cata had a peak of around 12mil players and the end of BfA was estimated at around 2-2.1mil which is over 80% loss of playerbase.
What happened from around Work/Cata was an overall shift in game design which went from catering to RPG fans to catering to everyone and a lot of times devs listened to whiners complaining that XYZ is too hard or takes too much time.
And I’m pretty sure I didn’t said they did so take your strawman argument and take a break Chief
Sure and complaining about flying was one of the reasons for WoW’s downfall. People fell in love with the big WoW world and once they started flying they realized that the in-game world is a “scam”.
The illusion of what they thought the in-game world is was shattered and it caused them to leave.
It’s like magic tricks. They feel magical and cool when you don’t know how they are being done but once you learn it those tricks are boring and people are not interested in them anymore.
Let me remind people that many of those who lobby for certain “simplifications” of the game are the same people who say that they are too busy IRL to play.
Blizzard is right now (and was for years now) making game for those people
It’s not World of Warcraft, it’s Instance of Warcraft: The HUB Game
That reflects how gamers have changed… for example MMOFPS are now much more popular, between 2017 - 2020 Fortnite went from 30 million players to 350million (Statista)… not to mention PUBG Mobile had been downloaded approx 750million times by 2020 (Statista)… making MMORPGs a rather more niche market, than it was back in the day. Plus, there is a lot more competition in the market place, which means the MMORPG player demographic, is now split between a lot more titles.
Fact is, the demand for MMORPGs which lean into ‘no-life’ mechanics too hard, is tiny.
In Fortnite, the average Battle Royale match, withg average players, takes approx 15 minutes.
So being around 30-40 YO means people don’t want to play MMORPGs not to mention that new players also exist? lol…
You do realize that older people have more money and free time than the average 20YO?
Gamers didn’t change, there are still tens of millions of people wanting to play MMORPGs.
What changed are MMORPGs because Dev’s making those games changed.
The market is saturated with MMORPG’s which are made strictly for fast profit catering to people who want to play from time to time, want to spend money on Cash Shop, or looking for brain dead time killer.
These days 99% of MMORPG dev’s doesn’t care about making amazing game because it takes a lot of time and it’s risky so they settle for fast and easy profit.
The idea that you need to make a game focused on profit for your business to work is BS and a lame excuse to justify bad devs and their crappy games.
Great games make great profits but it’s up to developers whether they want to sell their good name for profits or whether they want to profit while being recognized for being great developers who made a great game.
But they can 40 (especially after the last changes) but there is no 40man PvE content
EDIT: Actually, scratch that. Current EBGs hold 40v40 quite fine and that 70-80ppl in the same place
Nope, profit first or the shareholders take legal action…not to mention no profit, no business.
Working for free, to create amazing art, is where the meme about starving artists living in garrets, comes from… people may love art, but they deffo don’t want to be the starving artist.
Great games make great profits.
That’s the philosophy of a CEO being behind Witcher 3 which is one of the greatest RPGs of all time. So the only excuse to make crappy games is being bad greedy dev
Besides, private studios have even more freedom to do w/e they want like Hinterland which completely ignored whining casuals and designed one of the best survival games ever made and they keep going
Last time game didn’t have new changes. In BfA mid fight in IoC was unplayble and now it’s pretty much no lag. They did actually improve larrge battles compared to the poop show it was in last xpac. I’m getting into IoC and I’m actually happy
Go bust, on a very regular basis.
A successful game is a bit like a ‘one hit wonder’ in the music business…no guarantee that the next release will be as successful…or indeed, successful at all.
Witcher 3 is a console RPG game with a main story that lasts approx 53hrs (HLTB)… not a continuous MMORPG, with over 15 years of patches and Xpacs.
i doubt it was my personal preference for flying and portals that stopped it. nor the combined preferences of everyone who wants flying and portals and flying that stopped it. as someone (before wow) that would go back every now and then and play an old game, the fact that i could not revisit old versions of wow has always irked me. even just wanting older log in screens for the music.
so no, go point your blame back at blizzard, cause its not like their mind set was “you think you do, but you don’t” or anything…
again, no. vanilla is not retail and cant be for many reasons. maybe the biggest of which is it is not 2004 anymore. people are just different now for better or worse.
how? if i port from SW to tanaris, and then run around and quest in tanaris, im socializing there. my goal was being in tanaris. so while i might not mind wasting time in and around tanaris, i would be less likely to stop for half an hour while running through loch modan. same with flying. for longer distances we’ll just take a gryphon. still flying and missing whats going on on the ground, just not as direct.
people didn’t do this during TBC & WotLK? the most popular time of WoW?
here i somewhat agree with you. i never bothered with transmog before cata and even then only just had one set, i believe the T6 set. but since Legion, i collect transmog (all FOUR armor types and ALL weapons) just because the box is greyed out. i NEVER collected pets until the epic parrot dropped for me in WotLK or sometime, and even then that was the only pet i had. i sold any whelps that dropped. and as for mounts, i only wanted 1 or 2.
side note, when did mount collection start? im guessing it was WotLK as thats when both achieves and the influx of mounts began.
i do think that achieves have always gone too far, and i say this as an achievement hunter. “kill boss X” is ok. “kill boss X standing on your head”, “kill boss x while standing on one foot”, “kill boss X from with no hands”… yeah, blizz have abused the achievement system, and out of the 4,000 achievements that are out there, there should really only be like a 200.
i dont however know if removal of the “collector’s game” is what a lot of players want. collecting seems to have become a massive aspect of the game now, alongside with pvp and raids.
i think from what ive seen around that collectors may be the part of the playerbase that have kept retail surviving in the last 6 years tbh.
zoom around the zones chasing meaningless wq’s which are 99% useless you mean? but seriously, you are sorta right. there are FAR too many pets and mounts in the game. transmog is another issue i wont touch on here. but i think you can collect up to 2,000 pets, or which about 1,400 are “unique”. same with mounts, theres over 600 or so of those. too much meaningless items which are often just reskins. would be nicer having a base mount/pet and let us have a colour slider for it like GW2. but we know blizz would lose a LOT of ideas by not just putting reskins out.
to your point, as with the gnome… there is a LOT wrong with retail. i dont like many aspects of it, including the story (look at the 9.1 story direction, pathetic in presentation) but flying and portals are the least of retails issues.
remember, we have SEVENTY new zones since vanilla (unless im missing some out). Thats a lot of distance to cover ON TOP of vanilla zones which were quite large to start with. the items are already here, dont begrudge us trying to reduce the mindless travel time between them. a lot of the item (like ye say) are not really wanted, but are part of the “win” conditions of collections.
again, this happened back in TBC (and prob vanilla, dont know i didn’t play till 2007) where there was always at least one player, usually 2 who waited for the stone summon.
true. and even then you can skip the mandatory. my alts never left SW or Org until 90, and that was only because WoD treasures and legion invasions were FAR faster to lvl with. for mains and new players? i dont know how many people actively sit in a city the whole time from their creation, but def alts do.
im not quite sure what you’re trying to say here. do you mean the open world doesn’t matter anymore? in which case i think you are right and agree. the open world needs more done to it. however, it is harder now as we have a broken crz and sharding system in place.
remember trying to fight your own server players for kills back in vanilla. now, try that against every player in the EU :\
forgive me if i have mistook you, but you are propsing things go back to vanilla? sorry, but 12M players was achieved at the end of TBC and during WotLK. i think vanilla had about 6M players without looking at the graphs, still more than BfA & SL i think, but not 12M.
also, why abuse whales? these people already have an issue that they’re being abused by blizzard and other organisations because of their mental lack of control. is it right to abuse someone just because they are missing part of the brain that we all have?
i have been in an “adult only” guild from the end of 3.0 until now. always peoples familys and jobs took priority. im sorry you, from your suggestion, dont have any such things in your life but dont try turn a game that millions of people with other priorities have enjoyed over the last 15 years and turn it into your own personal s&m dungeon.
however, i do agree that boost selling has become an issue, but more about the sellers spamming every possibly location with their adverts more than the people actually buying them.
also, i would wonder, as we have no real numbers, how many people spend 200k a year, or in reality, any significant amount of money on boosts. i dont know the number right now, but someone calculated how many tokens it would cost to buy a long boy with token money alone, and it was something like $500. while there probably is a couple of poor souls who’s done this, i dont think many do do this as unless you’re a billionaire, you will see this is not clever.
that will not work and probably why we’ve seen a lot of talent leave blizz over recent times. the final picture is decided too much by people like Ion (who i will believe doesn’t care about the game until the day he gives us an actual facial expression while talking about it) and the more buisseness and financial departments of activision blizzard. bringing in talented people will only result in those people feeling constrained because they are not allowed to bring their imagination to life because there are no loot boxes in it.
and who says that QoL doesn’t lead to more fun times and is such a bad thing? was dual spec REALLY such a bad thing to do? people were constantly having to swap specs in vanilla and TBC anyway, and not having to remember all 41/51 talent points was a good thing. cause in case you forget, vanilla and TBC had 41 and 51 points respectively, not 7 like we have now.
but, you have classic? and i had more fun in classic than in retail during the last 10 years or so. i have not raided “progression” since i downed ICC 25hc. however, in classic i have gone to MC and ZG and had massive fun and met an amazing guild with great players. it was nice to be a raider again, and i was even on the ragnaros progession team twice.
however, like i said above, for many reasons, time maybe the biggest of all, retail is not vanilla. does retail have MANY issues? yes! hell yes!! but the balance needs to be found that is having a setting like the end of TBC and start of WotLK and bringing it to todays game.
remember, the natural mindset of a lot of people in their teens and 20’s is rush rush for gratification. hence why social media is such a thing. these people will get bored with a TBC style game and people who are now in their 40’s and 50’s+ have their own list or irl tasks to do. and people in their 30’s? well they are an unlucky mix of the two.
we cant go back to 2004, and any attempt to do that cold turkey will probably kill the game for real. classic needs retails go go kids to pay for it.
why do you need such a mindset unless you’re a of a person irl?
i quoted the part i did because its the part i find personally disagreeable and im sure most other people would too. theres nothing wrong with being a certain type, but being a type, and more, taking pleasure in being a , what you said before has been voided tbh.
im presuming fiero is killer in another language cause i never found it on a wiki search. and so what if you’re type of player, with that sort of attitude, you’re a player and if that translate to irl, you’re a person. does a murderer get off with conviction cause he says to the judge, “you dont understand your honor, im a killer player type”.
i’ve not read the page about Bartle taxonomy of player types, but i would be surprised if any of it said about it being ok to be the type of person who takes pleasure and shows this outwardly at those in a worse position than themselves. so you laugh at people without a job too while you’re at it?
So far you’ve typed a long wall of no and provided no solutions to making wow an mmorpg again, thank you for your input.
There’s more reasons why flying is terrible for social interaction, ganking. You can hover as high as you want in the sky and wait to get a nuke on people, it completely kills wpvp, something that is so fun in vanilla STV and so memorable, you can’t have an mmorpg and all these QOL’s in too, if you want a seriously good mmorpg you have to keep it real, humans cant take flight irl so it feels as overpowered as using cheats to fly hack in other single player games, flying is complete garbage and they shouldve gotten rid of it a long time ago.
Gear should be made garbage and mobs hit harder, so that ret paladins can barely solo 2 mobs at a time, this is a part of making the questing experience last 5x longer.
People havent changed, the games have changed, Im not aiming at changing the zoomers who like Fortnite and have no patience.
You can still level 1-60 and have a job and family even though it takes 5x as long and offers a non-linear questing path which was ONLY available in vanilla, no other version of the game had you running between zones and continents as much as vanilla did. This is part of a really clever way to give people the option to explore chunks of a zone and going back to a previous zone once you reach a high enough level.
You cant have that part of a great mmorpg and teleporting to instances, teleporting to instances completely eliminates travel to the instance, why is travel to the instance so important? First off, instances used to have packs of mobs you had to fight through to get inside them, where’s that now they’re all wide open with a sign that says ENTER ME, they should just place a WELCOME mat in front of them too, you miss any sense of danger that you’re entering a dangerous area, it’s all a loot pinata.
Imagine had they incorporated quests you could pick up outside the dungeons like they did before, now all of a sudden gathering all the quests and meeting in front of the instance would make sense because leveling takes 5x as long so zoomers aren’t in a rush to get to 60 knowing they wont even gain 1-2 levels from doing the instance without picking up the quests which offer significantly more xp than the garbage bonus xp you get for just completing the dungeon.
All these elements hold hand in hand, you cant have a no rush mentality and quick leveling, people will adapt to the game style as they see they cant take shortcuts unless they straight up pay people (gold) to get boosted
Without traveling to the dungeon and fighting your way through packs of mobs you shouldn’t deserve to enter it, something that is further made easier by giving everybody flying if the instance isn’t located in a cave which barely any instance does anymore.
These design choices were all made for kids. Since we all agree we’re all adults now, we want our mmorpg back, the only way to do that is to skim the 13cm of baby fat accumulated over 16 years and get rid of these systems that have been Holding down this game from getting traction and start from a clean slate which is vanilla.
but seriously, you are sorta right. there are FAR too many pets and mounts in the game. transmog is another issue i wont touch on here. but i think you can collect up to 2,000 pets, or which about 1,400 are “unique”. same with mounts, theres over 600 or so of those. too much meaningless items which are often just reskins. would be nicer having a base mount/pet and let us have a colour slider for it like GW2. but we know blizz would lose a LOT of ideas by not just putting reskins out.
of a person irl? 