Seriously though, the game used to be good. Not so much anymore. There are much better games out now. When WoW was at its most popular point, there wasn't much competition. Now the market is saturated with MMOs. You can pretty much take your pick and all of them are less expensive to play than WoW. Blizzard is just greedy at this point. They have your money and they don't care about their players, as evidenced by WoD.
I'm torn on the subject, really. Blizzard did make a lot of good improvements to the class system over the years and added in systems that the game desperately needed, such as better quest log tracking, better ability trees, in-game calendar, boss journals, etc.
The major downfall of WoW is the game world and direction they have taken with dungeon design. They made everything a linear corridor or a pick your linear corridor experience. They also removed elite world monsters, did nerfs where they shouldn't have to the leveling experience and crafting, etc. Flying mounts were probably the biggest mistake they ever made in the game world as it made the world feel way too small compared to what it used to be. We wanted flying dragons and other mounts, though, so can't really blame them for it's inclusion.
I don't HATE WOW it just offers NOTHING to the rpg element or the online element.Basically Blizzard fails the same way so many other devs do and that is failing to realize what a MMO and a rpg should be,Wow is basically the ANTI MMORPG. There is no surprise really,look at Blizzard's entire portfolio,nothing but single player games even with the online status.MOST if not all devs are doing single player games but think adding in pvp warrants calling it a MMO,Blizzard in most cases is not even going that far. How do you play OW ...solo,,how do you playHearthstone 1 vs 1 ,how do you play Diablo or Starcraft solo,how do you play HOTS ,likely by yourself.Blizzard does NOT know anything about making MULTIPLAYER games,more like co-op gaming or just solo gaming.
Why have 16 million gamer's login to play solo,it makes absolutely no sense at all,then when you do join others it is in a co-op format in some instance lol,so yeah why bother with a login screen?I can co-op in an instance map in UnrealTournament and i don't need a login screen nor do i pay any sub fees.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I liked it on release. The overall course of making it "Even easier" simply drove me away. "Vanilla WoW" was easy enough for a casual, part time player, like myself. Sadly part of the initial community also drove me away.
I remember getting a blind whisper I received, "Your playing wrong", while I was running around the dwarven area mining copper. Someone had inspected my character and had decided that I was an "uber raider" or something and since my gear was not optimized they needed to "fix me" and let me know that I'd never get a group wearing "that" gear.
That was a first in a long string of bad community encounters that really only started in WoW from my perspective. EQ had a good community as well as several of the other games I played.
Play what you Like. I like SWOTR, Have a referral to get you going! --> http://www.swtor.com/r/nBndbs <-- Several Unlocks and a few days game time to make the F2P considerably easier
it isnt so much that i hate or love WoW. it's more the fact they have dumbed it down so far that it makes even logging in a bore. i recently started back playing Wildstar,yes that game,and it blows me away how WoW can have so many subs but Wildstar is failing. Wildstar's combat is more fluid,yes the graphics are cartoony but personally i like it. the zones feel like you have more than a i'm just there feeling. the community i've seen has been helpful and respectful.have yet to see the go f your mother or the usual dick jokes in Wildstar. Wish people would give Wildstar a second chance.but ya WoW,to me,is no longer engaging and not worth the 15 a month cheers
I liked it on release. The overall course of making it "Even easier" simply drove me away. "Vanilla WoW" was easy enough for a casual, part time player, like myself. Sadly part of the initial community also drove me away.
I remember getting a blind whisper I received, "Your playing wrong", while I was running around the dwarven area mining copper. Someone had inspected my character and had decided that I was an "uber raider" or something and since my gear was not optimized they needed to "fix me" and let me know that I'd never get a group wearing "that" gear.
That was a first in a long string of bad community encounters that really only started in WoW from my perspective. EQ had a good community as well as several of the other games I played.
When I got whispers like that back in the olden days I never really took that as being a bad thing. People had different expectations for the community and raiding was always a pita of trying to find enough members to fill all the slots, especially for casual guilds that often put more time into raids than they should have. Most casual guilds simply don't have the dedication to study up on difficult boss strategies and just want to do something as a community activity, after all, which blizzard sort of acknowledged with the introduction of Raid finder. They also were desperate for people so if they found an unguilded person walking around doing mining that looked like a potential recruit, they'd definitely go after ya.
Unfortunately, i was so burned out on WoW by the time RF got introduced (playing since inception), that it was too little too late. There's only so many times a person can go out and do daily choirs at end game before they grow tired of the entire effort. Especially when it becomes a rinse and repeat process like it always did at end game post Wrath of the Lich King.
I'm of the opinion they should have ended WoW 1 at Wrath of the Lich King and made a new MMO entirely for Cataclysm and onwards. Instead they made WoW 2 on top of the corpse of WoW 1, causing a lot of problems down the line. They just can't keep increasing player level and expect things to work! No one is going to want to run characters through level 1-80 content for the billionth time that is identical to the content they ran before, and they changed the focus to end game already by the start of Wrath by introducing the isle of cash danas.
They also ran into problems with introducing account bound benefits to the game and achievements. They should have never included achievements, end of story.
I liked it on release. The overall course of making it "Even easier" simply drove me away. "Vanilla WoW" was easy enough for a casual, part time player, like myself. Sadly part of the initial community also drove me away.
I remember getting a blind whisper I received, "Your playing wrong", while I was running around the dwarven area mining copper. Someone had inspected my character and had decided that I was an "uber raider" or something and since my gear was not optimized they needed to "fix me" and let me know that I'd never get a group wearing "that" gear.
That was a first in a long string of bad community encounters that really only started in WoW from my perspective. EQ had a good community as well as several of the other games I played.
When I got whispers like that back in the olden days I never really took that as being a bad thing. People had different expectations for the community and raiding was always a pita of trying to find enough members to fill all the slots, especially for casual guilds that often put more time into raids than they should have. Most casual guilds simply don't have the dedication to study up on difficult boss strategies and just want to do something as a community activity, after all, which blizzard sort of acknowledged with the introduction of Raid finder. They also were desperate for people so if they found an unguilded person walking around doing mining that looked like a potential recruit, they'd definitely go after ya.
I get that they may have been trying to help, BUT when the introduction sentence is "Your playing wrong." to a non-shield using warrior who is ignoring most things to simply mine, it tends to send the completely wrong picture.
If you are trying to help, you do not go after someone who is obviously NOT raiding, and say that you are playing a game wrong. For all the person knew that toon was a crafter, not a raider. It so happened that it was the toon that I used to typically ignore people as MOST people ignored the gatherers except to flip them off when a node was stolen. OR to laugh when they got hit with the perpetual gather bug that had you stuck in the kneeling position until you logged out.
Play what you Like. I like SWOTR, Have a referral to get you going! --> http://www.swtor.com/r/nBndbs <-- Several Unlocks and a few days game time to make the F2P considerably easier
I liked it on release. The overall course of making it "Even easier" simply drove me away. "Vanilla WoW" was easy enough for a casual, part time player, like myself. Sadly part of the initial community also drove me away.
I remember getting a blind whisper I received, "Your playing wrong", while I was running around the dwarven area mining copper. Someone had inspected my character and had decided that I was an "uber raider" or something and since my gear was not optimized they needed to "fix me" and let me know that I'd never get a group wearing "that" gear.
That was a first in a long string of bad community encounters that really only started in WoW from my perspective. EQ had a good community as well as several of the other games I played.
When I got whispers like that back in the olden days I never really took that as being a bad thing. People had different expectations for the community and raiding was always a pita of trying to find enough members to fill all the slots, especially for casual guilds that often put more time into raids than they should have. Most casual guilds simply don't have the dedication to study up on difficult boss strategies and just want to do something as a community activity, after all, which blizzard sort of acknowledged with the introduction of Raid finder. They also were desperate for people so if they found an unguilded person walking around doing mining that looked like a potential recruit, they'd definitely go after ya.
I get that they may have been trying to help, BUT when the introduction sentence is "Your playing wrong." to a non-shield using warrior who is ignoring most things to simply mine, it tends to send the completely wrong picture.
If you are trying to help, you do not go after someone who is obviously NOT raiding, and say that you are playing a game wrong. For all the person knew that toon was a crafter, not a raider. It so happened that it was the toon that I used to typically ignore people as MOST people ignored the gatherers except to flip them off when a node was stolen. OR to laugh when they got hit with the perpetual gather bug that had you stuck in the kneeling position until you logged out.
Yeah, it's the well meaning idiot situation all over again. I'd be surprised to find any that still exist in wow given how many people probably have played the game and know the basic mechanics of it.
I don't think many of us hate WoW. It's just that the game is so extremely overrated, especially with a dozen of better MMOs out there nowadays.
I get it why the game got so popular, but I seriously don't understand why can't people just let it go already. Blizzard doesn't deserve all that money, not with that attitude and (non)effort they are providing. I seriously don't remember when was the last time they published a decent game, perhaps diablo 3 after a few years of fixing it, till it finally became good.
People like saying that Activision ruined them, when in reality Blizzard was never better than Activision anyway. With their fame increasing they became worse and worse. EA might be garbage, but they've never been as bad as Activion Blizzard is currently, they are the definition of word greed. In the end people will see it through, just as they did with EA, and then all these sheeps will abandon them.
I'm looking forward to see how CDPR evolves, what path will they take. Will fame and success of the witcher 3 corrupt them? If they keep caring about their playerbase as much as they did with their first 3 witcher games, then I can see them achieving something really great. It's been over a decade since anyone has treated us (gamers) like that.
1. It is solely responsible for the current state of MMOs. It is the game that ultra casualized the genre, and turned robust living worlds where people worked together to achieve a goal, into a glorified single player RPGs where you don't EVER have to communicate with someone, you don't have to traverse the landscape, etc. It took the "Massively multiplayer" out of massively multiplayer online RPG.
2. It is almost solely responsible for so many games trying to pull the "we have crappy graphics, but it's because it's *stylistic* and we intended it to be that way!" card. When the reality was it was the "we need to make sure this will run on as many PC's as possible so we can reap maximum profits" card. It spawned a deluge of games which tried to use the same crap graphics and use the same crap justification for those crap graphics.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
I firmly believe that very few people are actually enjoying WoW anymore and only play it because they have invested so much of their lives into the game that they can't even entertain the thought of quiting because all of it would be "wasted".
And I'm not just pulling this out of my butt, everyone I talk to that stills plays it says something to that effect. None of them ever tell me "oh I did this or that raid, or this or that quest and it was awesome!"
It's always "yeah I know I should quit, but I've just invested so much into the game".
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
I don't hate WoW I hate Blizzard. Used to be my favourite company for their quality games but now they are clearly after your money without even disguising it by doing something in return.
Buy WoW, pay sub, pay for expacs, have a cash shop and for all their money, you don't get anything new in a year and a half! Appalling as each patch or expac feels smaller and less relevant. Total lack of investment,it's all about profit without a care for product.
Primarily the fact they ramped up gold making, introduced tokens and created an effect to where you're worth more if you go "F2P" to them so why wouldn't they aggravate addicts with an ass load of gold.
Generally speaking most people that buy Tokens are those that want a lot of gold but don't have the time or patience what have you. People normally addicted to app style games drop $$ all the time for 'gems, gold, whatever other currencies are in the app' So this means you only have to keep your a small % of the player base truly happy and that is convert everything in the game back to being purchased with gold, create high prices essentially turn wow into clash of clans; And you will forever have the token buying community.
Now that you've squared that away just dangle content on a string during blizzcon and secure you're pre-purchases, convince ppl they need to buy the digital and also your physical CE copy don't worry though you'll get a code to give to a friend http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20419283368#1 .
Then just keep pulling the wool over your player base because they seem to be gullible enough to buy into it. Those few that can see how stupid it's become say ' screw this, I'm done out!' By now if you're still playing WoD, pretty sure Blizzard has a decent sense of the players emotional stability towards the game. They know you're upset they want to offer you a way to play for free, seems like a great idea because hell if you'd give them anymore of your money...
They aren't counting on you in the first place, they've put all their chips into Johnny App addict to carry the weight of all the pissed off community that doesn't want to sub but still willing to throw gold at someone pitching out in a month $15+20=$35. compared to the $30 might not seem like a lot, but the more addicts they can get to unsub while paying gold the more profitable it is for them. People complain about blizzard not listening to them... start paying a sub and buying tokens so you can carry other players and maybe you're voice would be heard.
This is why Blizzard should never be able to reproduce Legacy servers! Love WoW and ashame it's been brought to such a state of affair where misery = $$ and you wonder why the developers are 'blind' .... they aren't they just see a bigger picture. /end rant (partly built up over the past few days of all this back and forth BS between Blizzard & Nost) Wish we could vote a motion of no confidence in Acti-blizz and free WoW from Activision
Look... the game is garbage. E.g. heirlooms have made leveling in dungeons a faceroll. It's pathetic and almost demoralising as a new player to enter a dungeon expecting a challenge only to see half the group kitted out with heirloom gear and one shotting almost everything. This was a great game at one time, I loved the Burning Crusade, the dungeons and raids were fun - maybe the dailies sucked but overall it was a great game. Now it's a single player f***ing cookie clicker.
Comments
The major downfall of WoW is the game world and direction they have taken with dungeon design. They made everything a linear corridor or a pick your linear corridor experience. They also removed elite world monsters, did nerfs where they shouldn't have to the leveling experience and crafting, etc. Flying mounts were probably the biggest mistake they ever made in the game world as it made the world feel way too small compared to what it used to be. We wanted flying dragons and other mounts, though, so can't really blame them for it's inclusion.
There is no surprise really,look at Blizzard's entire portfolio,nothing but single player games even with the online status.MOST if not all devs are doing single player games but think adding in pvp warrants calling it a MMO,Blizzard in most cases is not even going that far.
How do you play OW ...solo,,how do you playHearthstone 1 vs 1 ,how do you play Diablo or Starcraft solo,how do you play HOTS ,likely by yourself.Blizzard does NOT know anything about making MULTIPLAYER games,more like co-op gaming or just solo gaming.
Why have 16 million gamer's login to play solo,it makes absolutely no sense at all,then when you do join others it is in a co-op format in some instance lol,so yeah why bother with a login screen?I can co-op in an instance map in UnrealTournament and i don't need a login screen nor do i pay any sub fees.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I remember getting a blind whisper I received, "Your playing wrong", while I was running around the dwarven area mining copper. Someone had inspected my character and had decided that I was an "uber raider" or something and since my gear was not optimized they needed to "fix me" and let me know that I'd never get a group wearing "that" gear.
That was a first in a long string of bad community encounters that really only started in WoW from my perspective. EQ had a good community as well as several of the other games I played.
--> http://www.swtor.com/r/nBndbs <--
Several Unlocks and a few days game time to make the F2P considerably easier
Unfortunately, i was so burned out on WoW by the time RF got introduced (playing since inception), that it was too little too late. There's only so many times a person can go out and do daily choirs at end game before they grow tired of the entire effort. Especially when it becomes a rinse and repeat process like it always did at end game post Wrath of the Lich King.
I'm of the opinion they should have ended WoW 1 at Wrath of the Lich King and made a new MMO entirely for Cataclysm and onwards. Instead they made WoW 2 on top of the corpse of WoW 1, causing a lot of problems down the line. They just can't keep increasing player level and expect things to work! No one is going to want to run characters through level 1-80 content for the billionth time that is identical to the content they ran before, and they changed the focus to end game already by the start of Wrath by introducing the isle of cash danas.
They also ran into problems with introducing account bound benefits to the game and achievements. They should have never included achievements, end of story.
If you are trying to help, you do not go after someone who is obviously NOT raiding, and say that you are playing a game wrong. For all the person knew that toon was a crafter, not a raider. It so happened that it was the toon that I used to typically ignore people as MOST people ignored the gatherers except to flip them off when a node was stolen. OR to laugh when they got hit with the perpetual gather bug that had you stuck in the kneeling position until you logged out.
--> http://www.swtor.com/r/nBndbs <--
Several Unlocks and a few days game time to make the F2P considerably easier
I get it why the game got so popular, but I seriously don't understand why can't people just let it go already. Blizzard doesn't deserve all that money, not with that attitude and (non)effort they are providing. I seriously don't remember when was the last time they published a decent game, perhaps diablo 3 after a few years of fixing it, till it finally became good.
People like saying that Activision ruined them, when in reality Blizzard was never better than Activision anyway. With their fame increasing they became worse and worse. EA might be garbage, but they've never been as bad as Activion Blizzard is currently, they are the definition of word greed. In the end people will see it through, just as they did with EA, and then all these sheeps will abandon them.
I'm looking forward to see how CDPR evolves, what path will they take. Will fame and success of the witcher 3 corrupt them? If they keep caring about their playerbase as much as they did with their first 3 witcher games, then I can see them achieving something really great. It's been over a decade since anyone has treated us (gamers) like that.
I hate WOW for 2 reasons.
1. It is solely responsible for the current state of MMOs. It is the game that ultra casualized the genre, and turned robust living worlds where people worked together to achieve a goal, into a glorified single player RPGs where you don't EVER have to communicate with someone, you don't have to traverse the landscape, etc. It took the "Massively multiplayer" out of massively multiplayer online RPG.
2. It is almost solely responsible for so many games trying to pull the "we have crappy graphics, but it's because it's *stylistic* and we intended it to be that way!" card. When the reality was it was the "we need to make sure this will run on as many PC's as possible so we can reap maximum profits" card. It spawned a deluge of games which tried to use the same crap graphics and use the same crap justification for those crap graphics.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
@josko9
The reason it is still as popular as it is, has almost entirely to do with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy
I firmly believe that very few people are actually enjoying WoW anymore and only play it because they have invested so much of their lives into the game that they can't even entertain the thought of quiting because all of it would be "wasted".
And I'm not just pulling this out of my butt, everyone I talk to that stills plays it says something to that effect. None of them ever tell me "oh I did this or that raid, or this or that quest and it was awesome!"
It's always "yeah I know I should quit, but I've just invested so much into the game".
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Buy WoW, pay sub, pay for expacs, have a cash shop and for all their money, you don't get anything new in a year and a half! Appalling as each patch or expac feels smaller and less relevant. Total lack of investment,it's all about profit without a care for product.
Generally speaking most people that buy Tokens are those that want a lot of gold but don't have the time or patience what have you. People normally addicted to app style games drop $$ all the time for 'gems, gold, whatever other currencies are in the app' So this means you only have to keep your a small % of the player base truly happy and that is convert everything in the game back to being purchased with gold, create high prices essentially turn wow into clash of clans; And you will forever have the token buying community.
Now that you've squared that away just dangle content on a string during blizzcon and secure you're pre-purchases, convince ppl they need to buy the digital and also your physical CE copy don't worry though you'll get a code to give to a friend http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20419283368#1 .
Then just keep pulling the wool over your player base because they seem to be gullible enough to buy into it. Those few that can see how stupid it's become say ' screw this, I'm done out!' By now if you're still playing WoD, pretty sure Blizzard has a decent sense of the players emotional stability towards the game. They know you're upset they want to offer you a way to play for free, seems like a great idea because hell if you'd give them anymore of your money...
They aren't counting on you in the first place, they've put all their chips into Johnny App addict to carry the weight of all the pissed off community that doesn't want to sub but still willing to throw gold at someone pitching out in a month $15+20=$35. compared to the $30 might not seem like a lot, but the more addicts they can get to unsub while paying gold the more profitable it is for them. People complain about blizzard not listening to them... start paying a sub and buying tokens so you can carry other players and maybe you're voice would be heard.
This is why Blizzard should never be able to reproduce Legacy servers! Love WoW and ashame it's been brought to such a state of affair where misery = $$ and you wonder why the developers are 'blind' .... they aren't they just see a bigger picture. /end rant (partly built up over the past few days of all this back and forth BS between Blizzard & Nost) Wish we could vote a motion of no confidence in Acti-blizz and free WoW from Activision