Blizzard's "fault" (not from a product/marketing point of view) is that it prefers to cater to new/younger/even more casual players.
Sorry, but if the +/- are in their (new/younger/even) favour money wise, that's what a company will do.
Simple as that.
Of course it went that way because of the population blast, Otherwise they would be forced to cater to the more "hard-core/mature" player base other "niche" games have to go by.
IMO, if another MMO exceeded let's say 5million players, maybe that would "sweeten" the suits and they would say : hey, how can we get the product to a moar larger audience, evil laugh etc.
Seems some say "we care about the mature players" because they can't have the other ones as well. But they would change, given the opportunity (e.g. LotrO making most of the experience soloable due to the influx of players after Ftp)
It's sad that Blizz has lost it's direction with the game. This new xpac barely even passes as a new coat of pain imo. Since leaving in Cata and making the transition to Rift I couldn't be happier and haven't looked back. I'm so glad I didn't consider getting MoP. The whole Asian oriented them including music and their stereotype culture references just seem out of place for a game called WARcraft.
It's funny to see people already speculating and wishing for their next xpac as this barely considered filler content. I guess the smart players have already left or very close to it and to to say there is nothing better out there is caused by living under a rock. Well if you truly get any length of enjoyment entertainment out of this tired and weathered game then all the power to you. I will keep my memories of when the game actually had a true sense of direction.
It's funny to see people already speculating and wishing for their next xpac as this barely considered filler content.
you are playing a game that needs content updates every 2 months to survive. That is filler content.
You are bashing a game for making an expansion designed to give people that play the game more of the same, yet you are playing a game who has an expansion coming out that is most definitely more of the same. WoW doesnt need to branch out to non or ex WoW players. Rift does.
This was the first expansion for WoW that did not show me anything that made me excited. Not the story, not the new class/race, nothing. Certainly not pokeman or farmville. I haven't bought it and after reading several reviews I likely will never play the game again. I'm looking for a different kind of playstyle in an MMO RPG now. Maybe this is why I have drifted between SWTOR (very WoW-like), TSW, and GW2 this past year. Nothing seems to have all the stuff I want anymore.
Probably won't play it. WoW just hasn't been able to really hold my interest for a long time now. It just seems like more of the same grind, the story never really manages to engage me. A lot of the interesting things I liked about vanilla have been phased out over time, like specific class quests. Some of my favorite times in WoW was doing quests for the Shaman totems, or Druid forms, or Warlock's demons. Now you just buy them at the trainer.
So yeah, I wish they would innovate. And I know it's a pretty shallow reason to be turned off by MoP... But I, like many, never played the earlier Warcraft games, so I just look at MoP and see Kung Fu Panda and am not interested.
Bring back the pre-Cataclysm talent system, return old battlegrounds that take longer than five minutes, and give me an EQ AA style way of diverting XP to something else useful (1), if Blizzard ever want me to re-sub.
(1) So I can continue to customise my toon past max level, and most importantly - so I may slow leveling earlier on to enjoy more early zones without feeling I'm losing out by flat out stopping all XP (and having the hassle of manually doing so at an NPC every few levels, and being segregated into different BGs as a result - ugg!!!) to prevent outpacing content
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Kinda a strange score. 7 for social seems low when GW2 got an 8.
Innovation a 6? Yet games that copy WoW get higher scores for innovation.
Agree on both points. But otherwise I could not care less then i do for "innovation". I do care however for FUN games. What have destroyed many games because of silly players that always search for "innovation" to suit their needs. Not only, they are incredibly vocal, basing games over all forums, because of their own problems in life. Wondering how innovative are in their lives.
Kinda a strange score. 7 for social seems low when GW2 got an 8.
Innovation a 6? Yet games that copy WoW get higher scores for innovation.
Agree on both points. But otherwise I could not care less then i do for "innovation". I do care however for FUN games. What have destroyed many games because of silly players that always search for "innovation" to suit their needs. Not only, they are incredibly vocal, basing games over all forums, because of their own problems in life. Wondering how innovative are in their lives.
That was pretty deep and profound man. * High fives*
This was the first expansion for WoW that did not show me anything that made me excited. Not the story, not the new class/race, nothing. Certainly not pokeman or farmville. I haven't bought it and after reading several reviews I likely will never play the game again. I'm looking for a different kind of playstyle in an MMO RPG now. Maybe this is why I have drifted between SWTOR (very WoW-like), TSW, and GW2 this past year. Nothing seems to have all the stuff I want anymore.
I'm with you; MoP engendered zero excitement in me. Quite the opposite, the changes in the talent sysytem made it a "negative". Every other Xpack had what I considered to be positives (and they usually had negatives too, but they didn't outweight the positives for me). MoP has positives, but they don't outweight the negatives.
Someone posted that you should know what WoW is about by now, and know what to expect, implying that it's the same as it always was. That could only come from the mouth of someone who hasn't played the game; it's not the same now than it was 4 years ago, and certainly not the same as it was on release.
Here's an example, and I think it defines the difference in the game -
Back in the day, Warlocks and Paladins had special mounts for their class. Every other class bought their epic mounts, but if you wanted a Warlock mount for your Warlock character, or Paladin mount for your Paladin, you had to do a chain of quests. Some of it could be soloed, and some required a group - and, the group ones weren't easy unless you had 5 seasoned players with good gear. You qualified for an epic mount at level cap back then (60).
Today, you get your epic mount given to you when you reach level 40. No quests required, you just get it for reaching level 40,
Now, there are plenty of WoW players that like the new way better; they don't want to trouble themselves with doing all that work to get a mount. For many of us though, the game has become insipid, about as inspiring as a bowl of pablum. Flavorless. You might as well be allowed to create level capped characters after you reach level cap on any one of them, because leveling is so abysmally weak as to have become little more than a chore.
That didn't used to be the case; WoW had some differences between the classes as you leveled them up. Warriors had to do quests to learn their stances, Shaman had to do quests to learn their elemental powers (totems), Warlocks had to do quests to learn how to control each type of demon. Now these things are all given to you, and not only that, but the abilites that were at the end of the tree in The Burning Crusades or Wrath of the Lich King are just given to you at level 10. What was the most awesome Warlock minion, the one that the game required you to earn, and was the culmination of the Demonolgy tree, is now given to you at level 10 just by choosing "Demonologist" as your specialization.
I'm sorry, but I just don't think there should be a level 10 version of the FelGuard; it should be an awesome butt-kicker with a minimum level around 55, like it used to be.
I've lived with a lot of changes throught the 8 years since I first subscribed to WoW, and most of them, frankly, have just been changes for whatever sake the devs had in mind, and I thought were pretty pointless but didn't matter all that much to me. Some were good - heck, some were great! - but there's always been this trend to simplification that has been a strong reason for me to stop playing, and, with MoP, I think that reason has reached the breaking point for me.
I won't know for awhile if it has; one thing I do know, is that when I'm tired of a game I should take a break and go back only when I feel some excitement about playing it again, and maybe that will happen for me, but I haven't played it for a good 6 months and I feel little desire to check it out at this point. For the first time, I haven't bought even one copy of the Xpack, and the last 2 saw me buying 5 copies each. I'm hoping, hoping, hoping that there are enough like me that WoW sees a huge decline in subscriptions, that the WoW team really gets what so many of us have been saying.
If WoW doesn't see a huge decline in players then I guess the word to me is that it's no longer my kind of game and I just need to go elsewhere. The trouble is, there's not much elsewhere to go. Everquest II would defintiely have been a good choice in the past, and still may be, but I'm just so disappointed in the anti-RP player base that exists in Everquest now, and I don't think mixing F2P players with subscription players is ever a good thing. I expect that game to decline like WoW has. In fact, I think the whole MMORPG genre may have passed out of the time when it was my kind of game.
Maybe though, the MMOFPS (or "MMORPS" - Roleplaying Shooter, I'm thinking like Borderlands) will come along and I'll find that good.
Have played: Everquest, Asheron's Call, Horizons, Everquest2, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall
Kinda a strange score. 7 for social seems low when GW2 got an 8.
Innovation a 6? Yet games that copy WoW get higher scores for innovation.
Well, I think the innovation score is deserved. While Blizzard has done some interesting things, such as Tillers Farm and Pet Battles, the core of the gameplay experience is still the same tried and true questing. The new Scenario system is something I've had quite a bit of fun with, but ultimately is just a 3 man dungeon. Blizzard could push the envelope a bit more in terms of content delivery, but WoW will not be where it's done. They are looking to the future now.
The overall score of 8.1 is well deserved. The expansion is a lot of fun, but it's also 1 expansion too late for many. If Pandaria had released instead of Cataclysm, I don't think the population drop would have been so dramatic.
I dont get the innovation score. Sure I will agree MoP landscape is beautiful, though it had better be considering that the last three expansions (Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm) were all dark and destruction based. It is nice to see a change after all this time.
However there is this pokemon rip off idea which is rather pathetic considering that it is the first time in an expansion the Blizz has literally stolen an idea from another company that was a major event. I play WoW for the content, social aspect, and storyline, which have all been pretty good since inception. Minus the loss of Barrens chat and the new trollville, tradechat.
Now looking at the Talents.. trashed.. I have played WoW since 2004 and have to admit though at times i grumbled about the nerfs depending on which class I used this new talent system is a joke. There is no uniqueness between character classes anymore unless you count transmog and even then thats getting rather boring. Every character has the same skills, you get them automatically now, you dont even have to see the trainer.. yet the trainers remain. oops someone forgot to do a lil house keeping?
Cross Account Achievements.. An annoyance at best.... Sure its nice that I have all my mounts on my level one.. oh and look my pets and achievements also.. well some of the achievements... so umm why should i roll another character. This feature removes the encouragement for a veteran player to roll new toons. if I already have a few i can get all the reps/professions/dungeons/raids on those, why start a lowbie when i can solo the low level areas with ease on a 90?
Finished product? get real? Blizzard hasnt released a full expansion ever. Even TBC had late raids released. Wrath was rushed and the whole endgame raid system was missing from the expansion. Cataclysm was the same. lets release an expansion and let the players wait 8 months before releasing the end game raids.. oh and we'll call them patches cus were too damned lazy to fix the bugs so well cover it with content.. by the way that content release typically broke crap in other areas of the game so it rarely made it worth doing.
Oh and lets talk about end game content... Farming dailies folks... at least til patch 5.1.. yeah you heard it another content patch.. Im so glad I spent the 60 bucks for an incomplete game. now they release the content instead of doing the mainenance they should be doing.
BTW I believe the cinematics in STV, Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge are still broken Blizz.
Simply put Since Activision gained ahold of Blizzard the game has gone south, but that isnt really surprising since Kotick had already declared that the future of Computer Gaming was in Apps...
i think world of warcraft is the best mmo ever made and i have played them all. they all have a boredom factor but WOW keeps making it interesting with well thought out and planned expansions. I have played WOW from the first day and still love it. Yes you have to grind but all other MMO's just disquise it or out and out copy it...I will keep trying the new ones in hope that someday someone will make a better MMO than WOW.
No matter what people are going to say about it this Game is the most succefull game ever made, after 8 years is still played by millions !!! So point me to another game that did this !!!
If you take into account that online population is also directly proportional to chronological factors (i.e. less people on the web as we go back in time) then Blizzards sales on its latest WoW Xpansion is barely a photon in the sun.
And a 10 for "Polish" ....... are you serious?!? 10, as the top most limit, should be unobtainable by any game. Apart from that, Blizzard does sell its products broken (Diablo III), just check some of the forums where they admit they rushed it (D3) out without a bunch of features and with masses of people unable to play it on launch. But I guess they are Activision now.
I started playing WoW on day one and stuck with it for a long time, finally quitting in late 2011. Three days prior to my exodus, my last friend and guild mate had rage quit and deleted his toons. I worked hard on my Hunter's Pets, gaining level and skills for me little babies, only to see it all striped away while the pet levels were raised to 5 levels below the player. I remember grinding Owl Bears for what seemed like an eternity. I remember losing a small fortune on AH when the first patch came out. I remember paying 1k for each of my toons on both accounts to get dual talents. I remember fuming when it was reduced to 10g and I got no refund. I remember my long list of friends and guild buddies, that was truly what made the game special for me. I also remember how cheap Blizzard made people feel, you get treated like an ATM machine instead of a person. I might have paid & played for more than 1/4 of my lifetime but I can't even reply on the forums unless I pay a monthly fee. That is disgusting, sickens me to my soul.
I might try it the day WoW goes free2play, till then WoW will always be a dated relic suviving off a dedicated but tiring fanbase. I know, I was one of them before I woke up.
I doubt that MoP is all that. I mean, according to Blizzards constant bragging, they have what....10-12 million subs? And all they sold were 1-2million expansions?
I'm not a math wiz but even I know that's a very small percentage of players who paid for this new content.
You still think MoP is all that? Then you do the math.
Comments
Doesn't matter what people "use" it for. Other game companies can only dream of the subscription income that wow generates.
Flavour of the month/year/whatever is always to knock the top dog out there - whatever the scenario, and the mmo world is no different.
The fact that any wow topic immediately generates a mass posting shows the continued level of interest in the game.
As for the game itself - wow is what it is. You know what you are going to get, so what's the point of whining when you do?
when you have 10 million subs you dont just change the base idea of the game, they HAD to stick to the old formula.
no matter how much you guys flame wow. it's still #1.
you dont need to like that to be the thruth, sorry to tell ya.
uh and rift is ages away, sorry ^^
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
well said
Blizzard's "fault" (not from a product/marketing point of view) is that it prefers to cater to new/younger/even more casual players.
Sorry, but if the +/- are in their (new/younger/even) favour money wise, that's what a company will do.
Simple as that.
Of course it went that way because of the population blast, Otherwise they would be forced to cater to the more "hard-core/mature" player base other "niche" games have to go by.
IMO, if another MMO exceeded let's say 5million players, maybe that would "sweeten" the suits and they would say : hey, how can we get the product to a moar larger audience, evil laugh etc.
Seems some say "we care about the mature players" because they can't have the other ones as well. But they would change, given the opportunity (e.g. LotrO making most of the experience soloable due to the influx of players after Ftp)
Basically a couple new things, but just a slight update.
Gee, the pay to play model is dieing? I wonder why..
It's funny to see people already speculating and wishing for their next xpac as this barely considered filler content. I guess the smart players have already left or very close to it and to to say there is nothing better out there is caused by living under a rock. Well if you truly get any length of enjoyment entertainment out of this tired and weathered game then all the power to you. I will keep my memories of when the game actually had a true sense of direction.
Happy gaming regardless what you play!
you are playing a game that needs content updates every 2 months to survive. That is filler content.
You are bashing a game for making an expansion designed to give people that play the game more of the same, yet you are playing a game who has an expansion coming out that is most definitely more of the same. WoW doesnt need to branch out to non or ex WoW players. Rift does.
So yeah, I wish they would innovate. And I know it's a pretty shallow reason to be turned off by MoP... But I, like many, never played the earlier Warcraft games, so I just look at MoP and see Kung Fu Panda and am not interested.
Bring back the pre-Cataclysm talent system, return old battlegrounds that take longer than five minutes, and give me an EQ AA style way of diverting XP to something else useful (1), if Blizzard ever want me to re-sub.
(1) So I can continue to customise my toon past max level, and most importantly - so I may slow leveling earlier on to enjoy more early zones without feeling I'm losing out by flat out stopping all XP (and having the hassle of manually doing so at an NPC every few levels, and being segregated into different BGs as a result - ugg!!!) to prevent outpacing content
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Vanilla - 9
BC - 8.5 plus .5 for start flying mount
LK - 8
Cata - 4 plus .5 for flying in Azeroth ,
MoP - 6
Agree on both points. But otherwise I could not care less then i do for "innovation". I do care however for FUN games. What have destroyed many games because of silly players that always search for "innovation" to suit their needs. Not only, they are incredibly vocal, basing games over all forums, because of their own problems in life. Wondering how innovative are in their lives.
That was pretty deep and profound man. * High fives*
I'm with you; MoP engendered zero excitement in me. Quite the opposite, the changes in the talent sysytem made it a "negative". Every other Xpack had what I considered to be positives (and they usually had negatives too, but they didn't outweight the positives for me). MoP has positives, but they don't outweight the negatives.
Someone posted that you should know what WoW is about by now, and know what to expect, implying that it's the same as it always was. That could only come from the mouth of someone who hasn't played the game; it's not the same now than it was 4 years ago, and certainly not the same as it was on release.
Here's an example, and I think it defines the difference in the game -
Back in the day, Warlocks and Paladins had special mounts for their class. Every other class bought their epic mounts, but if you wanted a Warlock mount for your Warlock character, or Paladin mount for your Paladin, you had to do a chain of quests. Some of it could be soloed, and some required a group - and, the group ones weren't easy unless you had 5 seasoned players with good gear. You qualified for an epic mount at level cap back then (60).
Today, you get your epic mount given to you when you reach level 40. No quests required, you just get it for reaching level 40,
Now, there are plenty of WoW players that like the new way better; they don't want to trouble themselves with doing all that work to get a mount. For many of us though, the game has become insipid, about as inspiring as a bowl of pablum. Flavorless. You might as well be allowed to create level capped characters after you reach level cap on any one of them, because leveling is so abysmally weak as to have become little more than a chore.
That didn't used to be the case; WoW had some differences between the classes as you leveled them up. Warriors had to do quests to learn their stances, Shaman had to do quests to learn their elemental powers (totems), Warlocks had to do quests to learn how to control each type of demon. Now these things are all given to you, and not only that, but the abilites that were at the end of the tree in The Burning Crusades or Wrath of the Lich King are just given to you at level 10. What was the most awesome Warlock minion, the one that the game required you to earn, and was the culmination of the Demonolgy tree, is now given to you at level 10 just by choosing "Demonologist" as your specialization.
I'm sorry, but I just don't think there should be a level 10 version of the FelGuard; it should be an awesome butt-kicker with a minimum level around 55, like it used to be.
I've lived with a lot of changes throught the 8 years since I first subscribed to WoW, and most of them, frankly, have just been changes for whatever sake the devs had in mind, and I thought were pretty pointless but didn't matter all that much to me. Some were good - heck, some were great! - but there's always been this trend to simplification that has been a strong reason for me to stop playing, and, with MoP, I think that reason has reached the breaking point for me.
I won't know for awhile if it has; one thing I do know, is that when I'm tired of a game I should take a break and go back only when I feel some excitement about playing it again, and maybe that will happen for me, but I haven't played it for a good 6 months and I feel little desire to check it out at this point. For the first time, I haven't bought even one copy of the Xpack, and the last 2 saw me buying 5 copies each. I'm hoping, hoping, hoping that there are enough like me that WoW sees a huge decline in subscriptions, that the WoW team really gets what so many of us have been saying.
If WoW doesn't see a huge decline in players then I guess the word to me is that it's no longer my kind of game and I just need to go elsewhere. The trouble is, there's not much elsewhere to go. Everquest II would defintiely have been a good choice in the past, and still may be, but I'm just so disappointed in the anti-RP player base that exists in Everquest now, and I don't think mixing F2P players with subscription players is ever a good thing. I expect that game to decline like WoW has. In fact, I think the whole MMORPG genre may have passed out of the time when it was my kind of game.
Maybe though, the MMOFPS (or "MMORPS" - Roleplaying Shooter, I'm thinking like Borderlands) will come along and I'll find that good.
Have played: Everquest, Asheron's Call, Horizons, Everquest2, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall
Quote :
Polish – 10
Blizzard never launches an unpolished product.
Guess Diablo 3 stayed off your radar.
I dont get the innovation score. Sure I will agree MoP landscape is beautiful, though it had better be considering that the last three expansions (Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm) were all dark and destruction based. It is nice to see a change after all this time.
However there is this pokemon rip off idea which is rather pathetic considering that it is the first time in an expansion the Blizz has literally stolen an idea from another company that was a major event. I play WoW for the content, social aspect, and storyline, which have all been pretty good since inception. Minus the loss of Barrens chat and the new trollville, tradechat.
Now looking at the Talents.. trashed.. I have played WoW since 2004 and have to admit though at times i grumbled about the nerfs depending on which class I used this new talent system is a joke. There is no uniqueness between character classes anymore unless you count transmog and even then thats getting rather boring. Every character has the same skills, you get them automatically now, you dont even have to see the trainer.. yet the trainers remain. oops someone forgot to do a lil house keeping?
Cross Account Achievements.. An annoyance at best.... Sure its nice that I have all my mounts on my level one.. oh and look my pets and achievements also.. well some of the achievements... so umm why should i roll another character. This feature removes the encouragement for a veteran player to roll new toons. if I already have a few i can get all the reps/professions/dungeons/raids on those, why start a lowbie when i can solo the low level areas with ease on a 90?
Finished product? get real? Blizzard hasnt released a full expansion ever. Even TBC had late raids released. Wrath was rushed and the whole endgame raid system was missing from the expansion. Cataclysm was the same. lets release an expansion and let the players wait 8 months before releasing the end game raids.. oh and we'll call them patches cus were too damned lazy to fix the bugs so well cover it with content.. by the way that content release typically broke crap in other areas of the game so it rarely made it worth doing.
Oh and lets talk about end game content... Farming dailies folks... at least til patch 5.1.. yeah you heard it another content patch.. Im so glad I spent the 60 bucks for an incomplete game. now they release the content instead of doing the mainenance they should be doing.
BTW I believe the cinematics in STV, Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge are still broken Blizz.
Simply put Since Activision gained ahold of Blizzard the game has gone south, but that isnt really surprising since Kotick had already declared that the future of Computer Gaming was in Apps...
Played: UO, LotR, WoW, SWG, DDO, AoC, EVE, Warhammer, TF2, EQ2, SWTOR, TSW, CSS, KF, L4D, AoW, WoT
Playing: The Secret World until Citadel of Sorcery goes into Alpha testing.
Tired of: Linear quest games, dailies, and dumbed down games
Anticipating:Citadel of Sorcery
Bingo!
I feel sorry for the guy above, he never obviously never got to play SWG, AC1, DAoC, ....
Wow just was easy street compared to those others. Wow is just easy, it is not the best MMO ever......
Pandas - 10
nice game ..
Angry Birds has sold over 1 Billion copies.
Even Tetris has sold more than 100 million.
If you take into account that online population is also directly proportional to chronological factors (i.e. less people on the web as we go back in time) then Blizzards sales on its latest WoW Xpansion is barely a photon in the sun.
And a 10 for "Polish" ....... are you serious?!? 10, as the top most limit, should be unobtainable by any game. Apart from that, Blizzard does sell its products broken (Diablo III), just check some of the forums where they admit they rushed it (D3) out without a bunch of features and with masses of people unable to play it on launch. But I guess they are Activision now.
I started playing WoW on day one and stuck with it for a long time, finally quitting in late 2011. Three days prior to my exodus, my last friend and guild mate had rage quit and deleted his toons. I worked hard on my Hunter's Pets, gaining level and skills for me little babies, only to see it all striped away while the pet levels were raised to 5 levels below the player. I remember grinding Owl Bears for what seemed like an eternity. I remember losing a small fortune on AH when the first patch came out. I remember paying 1k for each of my toons on both accounts to get dual talents. I remember fuming when it was reduced to 10g and I got no refund. I remember my long list of friends and guild buddies, that was truly what made the game special for me. I also remember how cheap Blizzard made people feel, you get treated like an ATM machine instead of a person. I might have paid & played for more than 1/4 of my lifetime but I can't even reply on the forums unless I pay a monthly fee. That is disgusting, sickens me to my soul.
I might try it the day WoW goes free2play, till then WoW will always be a dated relic suviving off a dedicated but tiring fanbase. I know, I was one of them before I woke up.
I doubt that MoP is all that. I mean, according to Blizzards constant bragging, they have what....10-12 million subs? And all they sold were 1-2million expansions?
I'm not a math wiz but even I know that's a very small percentage of players who paid for this new content.
You still think MoP is all that? Then you do the math.