Originally posted by Righteous_Rock I think the combat has run it's course now as well. Compare Wow combat to ESO for instance, I think it's interesting that wildstar for example is basically a hybrid of eso and wow combat, if wildstar made native controller support for consoles, it would be a huge success just like eso has been. Not that eso doesn't have longevity, because it does, but I really think that wildstar could have a run like wow has hadon pc, only wildstars would be on console.
Was talking about this yesterday. I feel like Wildstar would have been much bigger as a console mmo.
"Beliefs don't change facts. Facts, if you're reasonable, should change your beliefs."
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
This expansion feels like they took a bunch of starter zones and added higher level mobs to them. Nothing feels epic at all. Then they have the nerve to go on selling flying mounts when they never intended to let anyone fly in content going forward. Yes, I know they have set forth a path to flight now, but its a boring ass grind for grind sake. Probably the thing that ticks me off the most is the tone the devs take when speaking to the people who pay their wages (Us), they act like we should be kissing their arse for all the great content they are throwing at us. I don't believe the folks running this game at the present time even play it.
Not surprised by the poor review and the associated comments. This site is one of the most anti-WOW gaming sites on the web.
I like WOW and am still subbed.
A lot of people here still play Wow but that doesn't mean you have to like every expension they make just because of that. Sure, there are plenty of old UO/EQ/SWG vets here who hates Wow but most people in this thread are rather unhappy Wow players.
The fact is that the 2 last expansions are far less liked than the ones before even by most Wow hardcore fans. And all MMOs with a bunch of expansions have some good and some not so good.
How would you rate Wow expansions from best to worst? TBC is usually the most popular one on this site at least.
Not surprised by the poor review and the associated comments. This site is one of the most anti-WOW gaming sites on the web.
I like WOW and am still subbed.
As an active subscriber, I take umbrage with that comment. I do NOT hate WoW. I am disappointed in Warlords for not being up to Blizzard's promises and for not utilizing its resources (lore, developers, it's "biggest team ever, etc.) to create an experience worthy of the game's heritage -- think Lich King here.
No fan, player or subscriber should have to keep their comments to themselves if they are less than pleased with the product they have invested in. It's OK to be constructively critical, but not OK to remain silent and let this sort of development continue yielding another subpar expac.
Fully agree. I still have 2 months of sub yet, but after almost 10 years of constant playing I totally lost interests in this game. I used to be a hardcore raider and pvp player. For me the game lost it's soul. Slow developed poor quality content, broken pvp, garrisons and those freaking ships were the final nail to the coffin.
I have about 15 hours left on my sub and although it will be sad to see it end, I think I will be relieved to take a break after playing for so many years. Wrath was the last time I was really satisfied with WoW gameplay. When Blizzard revamped the landscape in cata, it killed my love of the game.
Anti-WoW; totally disagree?
For "anti-WoW" ~> official forums; EU or US; pick any page and almost any thread.
In ten years I have never seen such wide ranging umbrage from pretty much every poster - posters who are still subscribed.
Not surprised by the poor review and the associated comments. This site is one of the most anti-WOW gaming sites on the web.
I like WOW and am still subbed.
As an active subscriber, I take umbrage with that comment. I do NOT hate WoW. I am disappointed in Warlords for not being up to Blizzard's promises and for not utilizing its resources (lore, developers, it's "biggest team ever, etc.) to create an experience worthy of the game's heritage -- think Lich King here.
No fan, player or subscriber should have to keep their comments to themselves if they are less than pleased with the product they have invested in. It's OK to be constructively critical, but not OK to remain silent and let this sort of development continue yielding another subpar expac.
Fully agree. I still have 2 months of sub yet, but after almost 10 years of constant playing I totally lost interests in this game. I used to be a hardcore raider and pvp player. For me the game lost it's soul. Slow developed poor quality content, broken pvp, garrisons and those freaking ships were the final nail to the coffin.
I have about 15 hours left on my sub and although it will be sad to see it end, I think I will be relieved to take a break after playing for so many years. Wrath was the last time I was really satisfied with WoW gameplay. When Blizzard revamped the landscape in cata, it killed my love of the game.
Anti-WoW; totally disagree?
For "anti-WoW" ~> official forums; EU or US; pick any page and almost any thread.
In ten years I have never seen such wide ranging umbrage from pretty much every poster - posters who are still subscribed.
I suppose I could throw my 2 cents in here. This game has such a huge fan-base, whether or not those fans are playing right now. In fact, some of the biggest WoW fans aren't playing because they are just done with the game right now. There are many problems with WoW, but it's hard to pinpoint what is exactly wrong.
What is fun?
First of all, the vibe from the Dev team is coming off as, "We know more about what is fun than you do." The reason I mention this are the nerfs to pointless things like cosmetic toys. Why would they even bother with that unless it was actually hurting gameplay somehow. We are limited in so many ways, and the excuse has been immersion for years. With as much that has happened in the game, that just isn't the case anymore. Players want to dye their armor. They want to have options to use holiday items as transmog options, instead of just wearing them once in a while. We can get a costume-wearing bird to wear upon our heads, but the Noble Garden bunny ears are game-breaking?
Garrisons are not player housing. The extra functionality was nice, but people like to express individuality and accomplishments. There is this grand opportunity to add content to the game that is being ignored. They could have added a new carpentry profession and let old content drop all sorts of furniture and trophies for players to show off in their "space." Legendary weapons could hand from special weapon racks. Yes, people want to do raiding and PvP, but there is so much more to the MMO universe than that. Players need stuff to do outside of the average grindfest and combat systems. It's what keeps us up late at night.
Raiding
I played this game from Sunwell to SoO. I took a break during that long gap at the end, and I am taking another break again. I think something needs to shift with raiding all together. I know people like LFR because it lets them see stuff. I'm okay with that... sort of. When you beat the end boss, it's hard to get super excited about doing it again on a higher difficulty. For the most part, I think many of us play and raid on the difficulty we feel comfortable with to start, and then maybe go up a level to get better. I think LFR should only offer the first few bosses of a raid/wing. I think Heroic should always offer a special boss fight somewhere. I think Mythic should be an entirely different raid. The main story should remain within the LFR-Heroic place. The Mythic raid could be some uncovered secret place. Maybe a weapon was discovered. Maybe a massive creature has awakened somewhere because of all the chaos going on. There are plenty of ways to slip a mythic raid in.
I don't see this happening though. We are already down one raid tier per expansion. It doesn't look like we'll be seeing that relief of year long droughts at the end of expansions. Right now, it just looks bleak.
There is a reason so many of us watch what's going on with WoW, even though we aren't playing. We want to. Despite our bitter comments about how happy we are that subs are dropping, this isn't really what we want. We want the game to be great again. It doesn't need to be Vanilla. It just needs to be meaningful.
WoD has an amazing questing experience, great zones, art, music, sounds. Garrisons themselves are OK the first time you do them.
But overall, WoD fosters the same idiotic mentality that a few million nostalgic players cannot seem to break away from. Grind, repetitive grind, grind...same old same old.
"Lets give them dailys! Yeah they love that! its content!"
"Lets gate stuff behind the dailys! Yeah, now people will have to do dailys and stay logged in longer!"
"Lets give them raids! They like raids!"(honestly, raiding was fun in WoD...)
I tried WoD for about 1-2 months, leveled 3 or 4 chars to 100, two were raid ready, and one was pushing heroic raids easily. I stopped playing for two reasons: 1. I began to log in only for raids because WoW has NOTHING to offer a solo player without daily grinds. 2. I am done with the "schedule life around raids" type of gameplay mentality. I don't want to stay up until the wee hours of the night to push endgame. When will "solo endgame" content come?
Done with MMOs I think, and honestly it feels as if a weight has been lifted. If/when EQNext ever comes out, I'll probably look at that, but otherwise...I'll just play around in ESO or something if I ever want a taste of an immersive MMO world. Outside of this, I've been gravitating toward shooters and hack/slash ARPG (just started Path of Exile a week ago and Im truely addicted).
Dirty Bomb + Path of Exile > Any WoW expansion since WOTLK.
This game has become too much a single player game and is why I left. I want forced grouping where you cannot take a quest line farther unless you do an Instance. Also I would love to see them get rid of LFD and LFR because too many people who use these tools just want easy fast content and they are at the core of the problem with MMOs. You cannot have easy fast content in an MMORPG and expect people to stay for any time. Does it have to be TBC hard? No. However if you can do a 25 man raid boss with 20 people dead and the other 5 people completely ignoring boss mechanics there is a major problem.
I was in the WOD beta and the first week where I needed to CC mobs and focused killing 1 mob at a time all the way through the instances was Refreshing and great. Yet having people who Hate doing instances posting on the Beta forums how much the instances suck and how hard they were because these same people wanted MOP 15 minute dungeon runs. Blizzard then relented to these people now what do we have with WOD? People bored because they can tunnel a boss, kill mobs without any threat of dying and sub in decline. All for people who want easy fast stuff. Telling people on these forums that tunneling a boss is not fun however having a boss like Watchkeeper Gargolmar the first boss in Ramparts is more enjoyable because back in BC you would CC one or both of the bosses healers, kill the boss then the healers one at a time is more enjoyable. Then being told screw off them days are gone and that boss fight is too much work. Guess what this is why I left WOW and why I play FFXIV, because you cannot tunnel vision bosses in the game. You have to do the mechanic or die.
WOW's days are over. They continue to listen to people who DO not like the game and just want an easy welfare like game.
So I assume you've cleared all the Mythic raid content?
Five man leveling content is not indicative of the highest level of challenge offered at endgame. Not sure why so many people seem to have an issue grasping this extremely simple premise.
Claiming that the game is too easy when you, and most other people included among the current subscriber pool, have never even attempted the hardest content the game has to offer is about as contradictory and discrediting a statement as anyone could make. Unfortunately this trend has become commonplace over the years, as those with an axe to grind about the game desperately look for ways to belittle and downplay the content offered.
The title of this article is rather offensive and classless as well. "Warlords turns to Borelords", are you serious right now?
I would think that the writers on this site would have a little more respect for the company that revolutionized the mmorpg genre, single handedly carrying it from the dregs of electronic suburbia and thrusting it into the arena (no pun intended) of mainstream PC gaming, then dominating the industry for the next decade.
They've made the barrier for entry into the hardest content the game has to offer easier than ever to get passed, but only the most hardcore even bother to make the effort. That doesn't silence the complainers though! They'll still throw a tantrum about the difficulty being "too easy" even though they'll never see the "hard mode" and have no intention of even trying to participate in it.
As an example, lets take a look at the numbers for Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry:
As you can see, roughly 12.5% of players (on an account based level, not individual characters) have killed Blackhand in normal, 9.8% in heroic and 0.4% in mythic difficulty.
The real problem here are the players, who find themselves asking the question "If I got what i needed, then why progress?". These players run LFR and Norm, never making it any further, and having zero intention of ever seeing the hardest content. Those same players then spill over onto popular forums and complain about the game being too easy, perpetuating an ever revolving oxymoron of almost unfathomable proportions.
The game has been this way ever since vanilla. On one hand you have people who have never experienced all of the available content, yet claim the content available is too easy. On the other you have people who have directly experienced all of the content, who know for a fact how difficult the hardest available content actually is, trying to convince the rest of the populace about the level of difficulty.
Haters gonna hate, that is never going to change. However, the reality is that the game is too hard for the majority of the populace and the metrics gathered accentuate that fact.
I love the "It's not the game, it's the players" arguments...
WoW pretty much killed itself when they killed all their antagonists off, such as Illidan and Lich King.
Nobody cared about Deathwing or Garrosh, or alternate timeline villains from the past.
Well, actually adding a new good arch nemesis isn't really hard, it just takes some imagination.
And frankly can small things do a lot, Lucas was worried that Darth Vader was a far too weak antagonist until they had James Earl Jones dub him, just the voice really made all the difference in his case.
You do have a point, Blizzard needs to add a nemesis or 2 for the PCs,a good villain makes a huge difference for the story part of a game.
I fear that a good villain wouldn't help much with this expansion though, the story and raid content just ain't large enough, the main time consuming thing here is the garrisons and while the idea isn't bad they put way too much focus on it instead of letting the players own a farm or a small mine or something similar.Something that is fun and a bit of distraction but isn't the main time sink of the game.
I am not sure how WoW should do to get it's players back or even if that is possible. Maybe launching a new campaign, like Guildwars Factions and Nightfall would breath fresh life into the game. That is of course a lot of work but I think Blizzard would earn back any money spent on something like that.
Another possibility is to add in some new type of gameplay. Maybe something like AoCs guildcitys but better, maybe something we never seen before. Soloing, dungeons, raids, crafting, battlegrounds and arenas are all fine and well but to gain 10M+ active players again for longer than a month takes drastic measures for an 11 year old game.
The one thing that is clear is that whatever the next campaign is it needs to be better than MoP and WoP or they might be forced to finally go over to F2P.
I Wont lie if someone told me about a WoW 2 2-3 years ago i would've said gtfo
Now though it llooks to me as a better and better idea.It would give us the opportunity to feel what we felt 11 years ago with insanely better graphs all that experience that has been accumulated in Blizzard all these years, and it would also give the oppurtunity of the latest subs to start the game from the scratch.
Game has done its cycle as many correctly said, the world is too big and some areas have no interest or point of existing.Fantastic game which is beyond succesfull all those years, let it die gracefully
tottaly agree with this comment. I think a WoW 2 is viable. BUT they need to make the game slow and hard, it will give the game life time, put the elites back the group quests etc
The game has effectively jumped the shark. Some very committed drones still haven't come to terms with that yet, but anyone with half a brain can see that Azeroth's future is one of increasing darkness.
Once you merge an item mall with a subscription model, you are essentially conceding the point that you are farming your loyal playerbase for money. There will ALWAYS be goon soldiers and yes-men who will rise up to defend that kind of behavior, but everyone else is moving on.
This is a GOOD THING for the genre, too. The death of WoW can only assist in the growth of alternatives. The only sad thing is that it took this long.
Yes I'd love to see a WoW 2. But if it's made by the same people who have made the recent expansions, then I'd have major worries about it. But then I'm just an old fart who thinks the best version of WoW is Vanilla.
I really hope that the lack of content for Wod means that they plan on getting the next expansion out the door sooner. Blizzcon needs to have an epic announcement this year.
Originally posted by WhySoSerious Yes I'd love to see a WoW 2. But if it's made by the same people who have made the recent expansions, then I'd have major worries about it. But then I'm just an old fart who thinks the best version of WoW is Vanilla.
Dude i consider WoW vanilla pretty close to TBC.Yes it had issues it lacked a few things, but that simplicity was beautifull, and it was difficult in more than 1 way.From finding a group and travelling as 5 to go there, to elite quests to endless beautifull AV battles. VANILLA forced u with a beautifull way to play the game by socializing, and it was difficult in more than 1 way,
Many people say give us content.NO VANILLA/TBC wasnt that way, it had a decent amount of content , tbut the main difference with the latest patches was the survivability of the specific content.Whats the point of twerking a char for 3 months, just for my gear and my progression to be erased after 3-4 months in the name of new content....no no
I only got 3 achievements left to do and there is not really any reason for me to play WoW anymore other than to get more kills since that's the only number I have left which can go up unless they release another tier or put in more achievements.
Dude i consider WoW vanilla pretty close to TBC.Yes it had issues it lacked a few things, but that simplicity was beautifull, and it was difficult in more than 1 way.From finding a group and travelling as 5 to go there, to elite quests to endless beautifull AV battles. VANILLA forced u with a beautifull way to play the game by socializing, and it was difficult in more than 1 way,
Many people say give us content.NO VANILLA/TBC wasnt that way, it had a decent amount of content , tbut the main difference with the latest patches was the survivability of the specific content.Whats the point of twerking a char for 3 months, just for my gear and my progression to be erased after 3-4 months in the name of new content....no no
That have always been the problem with MMOs, you can add more levels and new better gear so people have something to aim for but at the same time you make all older content players have gotten useless.
A few games like the GW games don't use this model but they get a lot of crap for it as well. People tend to get the best gear pretty fast.
Another version is to let the gear slowly get worn out so you have to get new but that isn't popular either.
And the problem is worse now then back in the late 90s (even if games like EQ still had the problems) since you progress so much faster now.
But the question is how you solve it and keep players interested for years. A long timer on raids and low drop rate tends to frustrate players. I can't say I have any good ideas about it.
Originally posted by Righteous_Rock I think the combat has run it's course now as well. Compare Wow combat to ESO for instance, I think it's interesting that wildstar for example is basically a hybrid of eso and wow combat, if wildstar made native controller support for consoles, it would be a huge success just like eso has been. Not that eso doesn't have longevity, because it does, but I really think that wildstar could have a run like wow has hadon pc, only wildstars would be on console.
WoW is old. Many saw the flaws in the past,w ere laughed at by the fanatical WoW players, now many more ppl see the flaws more and more and say it: "been there, done that, boring".
World has become too big, content looks all the same and is too easy, new content often makes no sense. (alternate dimensional universe with other timelines to prevent messing with current world lore?)
PVP is a joke.
The mystery is gone, Blizzard realizing this and selling out more and more through their cashshop.
Everything is available to everyone now, no racial differences.
Wow is old. Players get older and bored, and move on.
Blizzard can not recover this fully, only slow down a bit. Or grow a new young playerbase.
So. Much. THIS.
One of the dumbest changes (in my humble opinion as a 10+ year MMO veteran) is the removal of individual skills acquisition (manually purchased or selected) and (as Muke so succinctly put it, "selling out") and removing the race/class restrictions and giving everything to everybody. I'm seriously thinking of resubbing to DAoC, because I so much enjoyed the thorough planning out of a character's skill point assignment all the way through max level. Now it's a checkbox (What focus area? Choose arcane, fire, or frost for WoW mages) that removes an astounding amount of depth. It's a surface-only experience for me. Nothing to really sink my teeth into. It's really sad, too. I enjoyed vanilla SO much. It was the only game ever that I actually stood in line for at midnight on release day.
Thanks for the excellent comment, Muke. I agree completely.
I'm seriously thinking of resubbing to DAoC, because I so much enjoyed the thorough planning out of a character's skill point assignment all the way through max level.
I'm actually awaiting the launch (relaunch?) of the Uthgard DAOC server. While DAOC is primitive in many ways, it is also fantastic in many other ways.
After finishing the story content for Heavensward I realized WoW did combat and class variety (lol I know right, who would believe?) much better and that I should go back... but then I realized:
A) There would likely be no new content for a year and I would have to pay $50 for it when it finally arrived.
Garrisons
Ugh, maybe I'll try and stick it out a little longer in FFXIV.
Comments
Was talking about this yesterday. I feel like Wildstar would have been much bigger as a console mmo.
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
Seems more anti-Wildstar than anti-wow
but I agree with the forum, I loved WoD for the first month but by the end of December, I realized how light on content dreanor was.
A lot of people here still play Wow but that doesn't mean you have to like every expension they make just because of that. Sure, there are plenty of old UO/EQ/SWG vets here who hates Wow but most people in this thread are rather unhappy Wow players.
The fact is that the 2 last expansions are far less liked than the ones before even by most Wow hardcore fans. And all MMOs with a bunch of expansions have some good and some not so good.
How would you rate Wow expansions from best to worst? TBC is usually the most popular one on this site at least.
WoW pretty much killed itself when they killed all their antagonists off, such as Illidan and Lich King.
Nobody cared about Deathwing or Garrosh, or alternate timeline villains from the past.
Anti-WoW; totally disagree?
For "anti-WoW" ~> official forums; EU or US; pick any page and almost any thread.
In ten years I have never seen such wide ranging umbrage from pretty much every poster - posters who are still subscribed.
QFT!
Those are real anti-Wow forums:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/984270/
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/872818/
Not to mention that any positive post gets buried pretty quick. Also, not suprised. As someone who love Wow, this is the worst expansion ever...
Edit: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/18300171826
I suppose I could throw my 2 cents in here. This game has such a huge fan-base, whether or not those fans are playing right now. In fact, some of the biggest WoW fans aren't playing because they are just done with the game right now. There are many problems with WoW, but it's hard to pinpoint what is exactly wrong.
What is fun?
First of all, the vibe from the Dev team is coming off as, "We know more about what is fun than you do." The reason I mention this are the nerfs to pointless things like cosmetic toys. Why would they even bother with that unless it was actually hurting gameplay somehow. We are limited in so many ways, and the excuse has been immersion for years. With as much that has happened in the game, that just isn't the case anymore. Players want to dye their armor. They want to have options to use holiday items as transmog options, instead of just wearing them once in a while. We can get a costume-wearing bird to wear upon our heads, but the Noble Garden bunny ears are game-breaking?
Garrisons are not player housing. The extra functionality was nice, but people like to express individuality and accomplishments. There is this grand opportunity to add content to the game that is being ignored. They could have added a new carpentry profession and let old content drop all sorts of furniture and trophies for players to show off in their "space." Legendary weapons could hand from special weapon racks. Yes, people want to do raiding and PvP, but there is so much more to the MMO universe than that. Players need stuff to do outside of the average grindfest and combat systems. It's what keeps us up late at night.
Raiding
I played this game from Sunwell to SoO. I took a break during that long gap at the end, and I am taking another break again. I think something needs to shift with raiding all together. I know people like LFR because it lets them see stuff. I'm okay with that... sort of. When you beat the end boss, it's hard to get super excited about doing it again on a higher difficulty. For the most part, I think many of us play and raid on the difficulty we feel comfortable with to start, and then maybe go up a level to get better. I think LFR should only offer the first few bosses of a raid/wing. I think Heroic should always offer a special boss fight somewhere. I think Mythic should be an entirely different raid. The main story should remain within the LFR-Heroic place. The Mythic raid could be some uncovered secret place. Maybe a weapon was discovered. Maybe a massive creature has awakened somewhere because of all the chaos going on. There are plenty of ways to slip a mythic raid in.
I don't see this happening though. We are already down one raid tier per expansion. It doesn't look like we'll be seeing that relief of year long droughts at the end of expansions. Right now, it just looks bleak.
There is a reason so many of us watch what's going on with WoW, even though we aren't playing. We want to. Despite our bitter comments about how happy we are that subs are dropping, this isn't really what we want. We want the game to be great again. It doesn't need to be Vanilla. It just needs to be meaningful.
WoD has an amazing questing experience, great zones, art, music, sounds. Garrisons themselves are OK the first time you do them.
But overall, WoD fosters the same idiotic mentality that a few million nostalgic players cannot seem to break away from. Grind, repetitive grind, grind...same old same old.
"Lets give them dailys! Yeah they love that! its content!"
"Lets gate stuff behind the dailys! Yeah, now people will have to do dailys and stay logged in longer!"
"Lets give them raids! They like raids!"(honestly, raiding was fun in WoD...)
I tried WoD for about 1-2 months, leveled 3 or 4 chars to 100, two were raid ready, and one was pushing heroic raids easily. I stopped playing for two reasons: 1. I began to log in only for raids because WoW has NOTHING to offer a solo player without daily grinds. 2. I am done with the "schedule life around raids" type of gameplay mentality. I don't want to stay up until the wee hours of the night to push endgame. When will "solo endgame" content come?
Done with MMOs I think, and honestly it feels as if a weight has been lifted. If/when EQNext ever comes out, I'll probably look at that, but otherwise...I'll just play around in ESO or something if I ever want a taste of an immersive MMO world. Outside of this, I've been gravitating toward shooters and hack/slash ARPG (just started Path of Exile a week ago and Im truely addicted).
Dirty Bomb + Path of Exile > Any WoW expansion since WOTLK.
I love the "It's not the game, it's the players" arguments...
Well, actually adding a new good arch nemesis isn't really hard, it just takes some imagination.
And frankly can small things do a lot, Lucas was worried that Darth Vader was a far too weak antagonist until they had James Earl Jones dub him, just the voice really made all the difference in his case.
You do have a point, Blizzard needs to add a nemesis or 2 for the PCs,a good villain makes a huge difference for the story part of a game.
I fear that a good villain wouldn't help much with this expansion though, the story and raid content just ain't large enough, the main time consuming thing here is the garrisons and while the idea isn't bad they put way too much focus on it instead of letting the players own a farm or a small mine or something similar.Something that is fun and a bit of distraction but isn't the main time sink of the game.
I am not sure how WoW should do to get it's players back or even if that is possible. Maybe launching a new campaign, like Guildwars Factions and Nightfall would breath fresh life into the game. That is of course a lot of work but I think Blizzard would earn back any money spent on something like that.
Another possibility is to add in some new type of gameplay. Maybe something like AoCs guildcitys but better, maybe something we never seen before. Soloing, dungeons, raids, crafting, battlegrounds and arenas are all fine and well but to gain 10M+ active players again for longer than a month takes drastic measures for an 11 year old game.
The one thing that is clear is that whatever the next campaign is it needs to be better than MoP and WoP or they might be forced to finally go over to F2P.
I Wont lie if someone told me about a WoW 2 2-3 years ago i would've said gtfo
Now though it llooks to me as a better and better idea.It would give us the opportunity to feel what we felt 11 years ago with insanely better graphs all that experience that has been accumulated in Blizzard all these years, and it would also give the oppurtunity of the latest subs to start the game from the scratch.
Game has done its cycle as many correctly said, the world is too big and some areas have no interest or point of existing.Fantastic game which is beyond succesfull all those years, let it die gracefully
The game has effectively jumped the shark. Some very committed drones still haven't come to terms with that yet, but anyone with half a brain can see that Azeroth's future is one of increasing darkness.
Once you merge an item mall with a subscription model, you are essentially conceding the point that you are farming your loyal playerbase for money. There will ALWAYS be goon soldiers and yes-men who will rise up to defend that kind of behavior, but everyone else is moving on.
This is a GOOD THING for the genre, too. The death of WoW can only assist in the growth of alternatives. The only sad thing is that it took this long.
Not all who wander are lost...
Dude i consider WoW vanilla pretty close to TBC.Yes it had issues it lacked a few things, but that simplicity was beautifull, and it was difficult in more than 1 way.From finding a group and travelling as 5 to go there, to elite quests to endless beautifull AV battles. VANILLA forced u with a beautifull way to play the game by socializing, and it was difficult in more than 1 way,
Many people say give us content.NO VANILLA/TBC wasnt that way, it had a decent amount of content , tbut the main difference with the latest patches was the survivability of the specific content.Whats the point of twerking a char for 3 months, just for my gear and my progression to be erased after 3-4 months in the name of new content....no no
yea, after a week of Garrison grinding i was bored to tears
just like the DO system in STO, this is a HUGE time sink, , that wont Progress your character
much
making it account wide would help a lot
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
That have always been the problem with MMOs, you can add more levels and new better gear so people have something to aim for but at the same time you make all older content players have gotten useless.
A few games like the GW games don't use this model but they get a lot of crap for it as well. People tend to get the best gear pretty fast.
Another version is to let the gear slowly get worn out so you have to get new but that isn't popular either.
And the problem is worse now then back in the late 90s (even if games like EQ still had the problems) since you progress so much faster now.
But the question is how you solve it and keep players interested for years. A long timer on raids and low drop rate tends to frustrate players. I can't say I have any good ideas about it.
So. Much. THIS.
One of the dumbest changes (in my humble opinion as a 10+ year MMO veteran) is the removal of individual skills acquisition (manually purchased or selected) and (as Muke so succinctly put it, "selling out") and removing the race/class restrictions and giving everything to everybody. I'm seriously thinking of resubbing to DAoC, because I so much enjoyed the thorough planning out of a character's skill point assignment all the way through max level. Now it's a checkbox (What focus area? Choose arcane, fire, or frost for WoW mages) that removes an astounding amount of depth. It's a surface-only experience for me. Nothing to really sink my teeth into. It's really sad, too. I enjoyed vanilla SO much. It was the only game ever that I actually stood in line for at midnight on release day.
Thanks for the excellent comment, Muke. I agree completely.
-iX
I'm actually awaiting the launch (relaunch?) of the Uthgard DAOC server. While DAOC is primitive in many ways, it is also fantastic in many other ways.
After finishing the story content for Heavensward I realized WoW did combat and class variety (lol I know right, who would believe?) much better and that I should go back... but then I realized:
A) There would likely be no new content for a year and I would have to pay $50 for it when it finally arrived.
Ugh, maybe I'll try and stick it out a little longer in FFXIV.