I have played the game for a long time and this is the first time I felt the game is not fun. I even played during WOD. The story was great. I’m not trying to bash the game, I just want the game I love to be fun again. I want to leave some suggestions here.
I don’t see other player anymore. Isn’t the whole point of MMOs to play with other players? Sharding is killing the game. Create server populations again. Create a sense of community. The only time I see players are in city hubs. We need server communities again.
We need more incentive to join guilds. Guilds used to be a great method to make friends now it’s a wasteland. There’s no reason to join guilds. The communities feature has some good features but it’s not enough. We had class halls. Why not guild halls?
Level scaling was a good idea. But don’t do it with latest content. I want to feel like I’m getting stronger in the world. Does world content really need to be balanced? Why does WQ have to be a challenge? If I get better gear content should become trivial. I don’t do it for the gear anymore. I’m past that.
Players that play a lot should be rewarded. At the moment I can log in and be Mythic raid ready within a day or 2. This is not fair towards players playing non stop.
Gear is to easy to get. There are to many LFR quality players doing heroic raids and failing. High end content is becoming more accessible, but it gets frustrating playing with players that have no clue how to do the content. There needs to be a learning curve. iLvl requirement helps with this, but gear is just to easy to get.
Character progression is a joke. Is wow not a rpg? A level 1 toon feels pretty much the same as a level 119 toon (I know I’m over exaggerating a bit) But if I don’t see the chat and pop up I wouldn’t even know I leveled. Each level should mean something.
Characters should feel unique. There is not a single class that feels fun to me. I click my 3/4 buttons in my rotation and that’s that. There’s no interesting gameplay. Everyone plays the same build and that’s that. Look at m+ logs. Prot tank Druid heal 2 rogues. There’s no interesting gameplay, no variation in tactics.
It does become trivial. The only times I’m finding WQ to be difficult is when there’s too many Alliance players around (or Horde, if I’m playing Alliance) while I’m alone.
No, people should not be encouraged to spend an excessive amount of time in a game. Certainly not rewarded for “playing non stop”.
Because time is kind of irrelevant. Yes there will be daily and weekly resets that keep asking you to come back and chances are if you log in more often and do your emissaries or islands every time your necklace will be a higher level than the necklace of someone who doesn’t.
Time spent alone does not matter, it is how you use that time:
Extreme example: player 1 and 2 play Shadowpriest, player 1 looks up the rotation, stat priorities and starts practicing. Player 2 literally just presses Shadowword: Pain over and over and over.
Both do this for an hour, guess which one will have improved more.
I see this “Time invested should matter.” argument so often in so many games and it is never true as long as the game has some form of player input and decision making, because that is what you actually improve. If you spend your time efficiently you do not need to be playing nonstop.
Time alone never gets you there and never should and it still doesn’t in WoW. As much as I dislike many things about the game right now this has not changed and it is for the better, though the necklace grind for mythic raiders at the start of BoD was already a bit silly.
That’s why I say time and SKILL. I can’t login on a Tuesday and be fully geared on week 1. There needs to be a reason to login everyday. But atm we get discouraged to do that.
This is pretty subjective. Low population realms probably see alot more people around then they used to. However unless there’s an assualt going on the world feels void of life and this haven’t changed much compared to other expansions. You used to see people on the “daily grind” at those specific areas and apart from that it’s about the same as now. Legion was sort of an exception due to how smal the legion areas are, the broken Isles are about a 3rd the size of Northrend/Pandaria and later on when everyone was at Broken Shore or in Argus it felt even smaler.
Guilds are still a great means to meet likeminded individuals. Just because you can PuG stuff don’t mean it’s the best way. I see daily posts about “PuG’s ruining the game” and most common suggestion being “join a guild”. I agree here, guilds make people connect. I do however agree a guild hall feature whould be fun…
Overworld content feels trivial already. Unless you got your rates and traits all in a jumble world quest mobs dies within seconds alt. you can AoE everything down.
Players who play non-stop still get rewarded in terms of amount of dungeons they can do etc. But really, it’s all about “efficient game time” now adays. People who do the bare minimum to keep up to par, will always be behind people who plays more and do content which could progress their character.
I agree that gear are to easy to get, well at least “Ilvl” is to easy to get. Getting the better secondary line up, trinkets etc. are still pretty hard to do(acctually it’s harder now due to Titanforging). Well if you don’t like to raid etc. with people who don’t have a clue… why not join a guild. Your own point here give you a incentive for your 2nd point.
I agree that leveling somehow got lost amongst other systems. Blizzard have proposed a level squish to fix it.
Well class variation are there to some degree. However people will follow the “meta” even if the “meta” ain’t required. Specs. acctually overall feels better now adays from my PoV, the rotations more streamlined and less clunky etc. However there’s plenty of utility lost amongst some classes which makes them feel “void” of situational abilities. Hopefully the Heart of Azeroth changes and those special abilities might change this a bit.
I don’t care about this at all. Less people, means less annoyance tbh.
Another thing I don’t want nor care about.
The scaling at max level is slower than the power you gain, so you ARE getting stronger. It’s pretty noticeable too.
Yes and no. Outlook on gaming has changed. Instead of the devs wanting you to be online 24/7 they now want you to log in regularly.
They should add trials to be able to do heroic and mythic raiding (like in the past). Then players can prove they can actually use the power they have. Then it doesn’t matter if gear is easy to get, you still need to prove you have the skill.
Agreed.
No single class? Really?
That just sounds to me like you’re just tired of this game.
Am just here to comment on the “players that play a lot should be rewarded”.
I dont play that much, but if you do a +10 every 2-3 days youll pretty soon have bags full of gear.
Right now i could equip 2 additional characters with the gear from my bags. Its not perfect gear but its still all 400+. And that is after i raided my bags for things that scrap into expulsom.
How would you go about doing that? Merge all realms into five servers for Alliance and five for Horde? Because that’s probably the only way of doing this with a reliable result. And then when the next expansion comes out, will you be OK with waiting 5 hours in the queue to log in?
The old system didn’t work. Maybe players on high population realms didn’t notice this, but many realms were half-empty and half-dead after some time had passed. You couldn’t find people to do anything with, especially in the off-hours. Even a year into vanilla, you had trouble getting groups for a leveling dungeon unless you played at the peak hours or were on a mega server. By TBC, vanilla leveling dungeons were something barely anyone did anymore at all even if the person did play at peak hours,.
I’m glad you can now actually remain relevant if you don’t “no life” the game. “No lifing” the game in vanilla was damaging to many people’s lives, school, and career. WoW still gives you more rewards the longer you play (you could do M+ all day long and get loot), but you actually can play it moderately now and still keep up. It’s a video game, it’s not a replacement for real life.
Funnily enough I actually am enjoying the game more for a lot of the reasons you dont like it, probably because we are different types of gamers. Guilds you should join because you want to socialise or raid with people, that is easy enough to do. I see lots of people on my server around in the world.
Level scaling I enjoy, I want a challenge and not to faceroll over content. I mean we all pay to play this game why do you want it to be easy?
Players that play more should be rewarded and gear is too easy to get. This is the biggest one for me. I have a social life, and a job, and the gym. Im not a 14 year old anymore who can waste hours of his life on wow. I dont want that anymore, and this opens up the upper parts of the game to more casual gamers like myself.
And characters do feel unique if you spend time getting into the character. Yes if you logon and mash your four buttons it will of course feel the same. But priests arent similar to rogues or warriors. Mages play differently to afflic or demo locks?
Can’t agree with the scaling. You do feel the progression even if the content scale, since it scale slower than players do.
I’ve been skinning a lot since bfa launch and i can tell you really feel the increase in ilvl. Packs of mobs which were a challenge back then gets anihilated with 390 Gear.
You get far more power per tier than you did back in wotlk ect, so i wonder if you don’t actually overpower the content more now than you did back in 3.1
True story: I really haven’t been doing much for a long time, but I logged a 110 DH just to get him into KT a couple weeks ago. I’m not a fan of the DH class in general, to put it mildly, but I was so struck by the difference between playing at 110 and 120 that I locked his XP. I’m using him to complete the Adventurer and Treasure achievements, a little bit every day.
I did a few dungeons, so I have all 210s plus starter Azerite pieces, but he’s not twinked in any meaningful way.
Like you, my 110 is a skinner. My 110 can pull as much as he can see, anywhere in KT, and blow it all up faster than either of my main characters, whom I find it hard to log these days.
I agree with where you’re coming from OP. I don’t agree with all of your ideas, but I really do agree with where you’re coming from. Especially this bit:
Why can’t WoW just be WoW again? Why did it have to change into something unrecognisable? If we wanted an MMORPG like this, why didn’t we just play ESO? ESO does what WoW does now, but way better. Just let WoW be WoW, because WoW was great!
We’ll see if the community can still see what I’m saying when Classic comes out. I don’t think Classic is the solution to our woes though, but it can definitely test the waters and tide us over. If Classic is a total failure, I’ll gladly eat my words, but for the time being…
This is a really big problem, and a very big part of the MMORPG experience. I recently got the WoW Diary by John Staats, where he actually mentions that Blizzard actively decided to keep server communities stable and small, and refused to offer cross-realm functionality, precisely so that we’d get what you’re talking about here. They even carefully picked the size of the server. The size of the server wasn’t a technical limitation!
It was a design choice. I never even realised, nor did most of the classic private servers that came out, but it’s actually important that realms not be too big.
So what about playing with your IRL friends? Well, what about it? I mean it’s great if you can coordinate and make sure you’re on the same server, but at the end of the day WoW is about living another life in another world, and any time we have to choose the game community vs real communities when designing this game, we should choose the game community - and we didn’t!
Well they didn’t really ruin guilds, but they ruined so many things that revolve around guilds that guilds have lost much of their place in the game. The objective of guilds was to build a social network with people you met on your adventures whom you trusted and could work together with, such that you could build even better communities and dig into harder content and get to see what’s over the next hill.
But if you put easy group finding systems that let you see all the content and remove all other challenges, and then make it impossible to invite 99% of the people you meet in the open world or through dungeons and other group quests on top of that, then what exactly are guilds, exactly?
I really don’t think it was, and you already mentioned one of hundreds of reasons why. But ask yourself this: If we wanna get new players to the game, shouldn’t we give them the kind of experience of progression and character building that we get? Yeah, they should get a simplified version at first, but we really should just give them WoW the way we like WoW. We wanna get them hooked! We want them in our community!
The problem it was addressing was absolutely real, though. Yes, there was a serious problem with levelling out of zones too quickly and the game world being too linear, but that could have been solved in a wide variety of ways that aren’t scaling, such as creating larger overlaps, widening the amount of levels for a piece of content to be appropriately levelled, retuning or tweaking the levels of various zones, etc. or, as Ion is now suggesting, a level squish. In fact, most of those combined sound like a good bet in my opinion.
Honestly I don’t really mind this from the perspective of “you can’t have what I’m having”. I think the real problem is that what’s fun about WoW is the journey. Reaching the goal is really satisfying, but the vast majority of the game is journey, and therefore the journey and the adventure and the progression needs to be centerstage.
If you just skip new players past the whole thing in a matter of days, you basically kill WoW’s core reward loop and destroy the fun for new players, and you don’t give them enough time to grow into the players that high-end players need. They get intimidated, they complain about being unable to progress without raiderIO scores and website applications and so on. This is really big problem, and it has nothing to do with perceived unfairness towards high end raiders. I really couldn’t care less as far as my own enjoyment is concerned.
There has been too much fingerwagging and people just not understanding this subject, and it’s led to a really toxic discussion that Blizzard has subsequently ignored. We don’t want to keep them down because we hate them, we just wanna give them a journey as fulfilling as the one we had. That’s really it. There’s no malice here. <3
This feeds into 4). People get showered in gear, they don’t know how to play, and they don’t know what to do with it all, and they just outgear the content that’s appropriate to their skill level, and then they run around in the really hard content and can’t find good groups thanks to 1) and 2), and they understandably get frustrated, because they’ve hit a wall and their adventure has stopped, so they quit.
This feeds into 3). It has to be fixed. This is why level scaling is not a good idea, nor is item level scaling. I get where they were coming from with this idea, but it just isn’t a good one. Wasn’t a good one in Diablo 3, either.
There’s way too many problems to get into here, but in short:
There’s a lack of interesting resource mechanics. Generally “ABC” applies - always be casting. Well, what if you want to play something with more downtime? Doesn’t exist, sorry. Deal with it.
Utilities don’t cost anything, and classes are simmed to do the same DPS. As a result, classes with the best utility just straight up win the contest. Rogues are good in M+ because of the percentage combined with the timer and their AoE stealth plus their very high AoE damage, and everyone wants an AoE CC, so shockwave, leg sweep, Fel Eruption, and even Ursol’s Vortex (hence resto druids) rule the day. In raids, where there’s less room per player and usually single targets, melees suck pretty much in general. Some fights like an even distribution, others punish even having a few melee very hard. No fights punishing not having melee at all. BIG problem.
Classes that have high AoE are not balanced against classes that don’t, because they’re both balanced around their single target damage, not AoE. This is another reason why rogues are so ridiculous in M+. Btw rogues being masters of AoE is ridiculous. Just gonna put that out there.
Healers have so much mana and everyone is taking so much damage that healers aren’t really thinking about when a heal is needed, they’re just desperately scrambling to keep everyone alive. To the extent they stop healing, it’s because they think the time is better spent DPS’ing. Mana, in general, is not a big issue, and this got so bad in arena PvP that they gave us several different systems to try to drain healers out of mana over time, and only recently did they realise that it was actually MP5.
GCD locking can be very frustrating if your utilities and cooldowns are on GCD’s themselves, which they should be to avoid breaking PvP, because in PvP there otherwise is a choice of whether to signal incoming damage and letting the opponent react vs. not signalling it before the stun and then popping it, but sacrificing some of that damage. But if we’re constantly pressing rotational buttons, popping a damage CD comes at the cost of popping a damage ability at all, at any time, and therefore the CD starts to feel like a dud in PvE, raiding especially. Not good! And again, as mentioned in the first point in this list, there’s just no way out of this. There literally does not exist any class in the entire game that doesn’t have this problem. It’s completely universal.
I basically agree with OP on everything except scaling and guild housing, but on the other hand I absolutely see where he’s coming from. His diagnosis certainly isn’t faulty!
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