I recently discussed this with a friend I used to play WoW with.
I think WoW has lost it's middle ground. There is still a large group of the very casual players that are in for the social experience and just derping around a little doing some quests. And there is obviously still a competitive PvP and raiding scene.
But for the middle segment. The group of people that wants to be the best character they can be but doesn't want to devote 5 hours an evening to raiding. The serious 5 manner that tries to get into a pug raid every once in a blue moon.
For those people it has become stale and lost most of it's appeal. I stopped playing several months ago because the challange started wearing out and I felt I really needed to devote the crazy time required for raiding to push me further. And I have no intention to devote that time, and with me the rest of the middle segment I mentioned.
The new cartoon style expansion (panda's, really?) only serves to prove my point they want to serve the group that comes for the casual social experience and they will always have the hardcore raiding and pvp content.
conclusion, they can't add enough new stuff to keep the serious gamer with limited time challanged without fundamentally chaning the game (making a WoW 2 or something). Don't get me wrong the new direction they took with dungeons in Cata kept me in longer then I expected but it's done now. And thats not that bad a thing. A game that has been going on for 8 years has all the right in the world to run out of steam. It will continue to be a meeting ground but I doubt it will still be the behemoth it is now some years from now
There's certainly this; appealing to the casual social crowd is the way to go because the influx of them will outweigh the small number of hardcore players leaving - because Blizzard knows that there are people who will always keep coming back.
The problem I have with WoW is it's stagnant. It refuses to evolve and update, mostly because it's new content that keeps people subscribed, and finding the time and resources to fix problems and update existing things gets more and more difficult as people clamor louder and louder for NEW CONTENT.
I NEEDS an engine update, it NEEDS a graphics update, it NEEDS to change its mechanics past the traditional tank/healer/DPS.
I love GW2's model of everyone being responsible for themselves in a fight, so you can have as many of whatever class fighting the same encounter for the same reward.
You either play it or you don't. If you don't play it because you hate it how can you give a decent opinion of it's current state other than I hated it then and I still do.
I think I'm one of the only people that played during vanilla that doesn't really complain about the current difficulty level (well, one of the only people that I've noticed). Yes, WoW has been streamlined and it's vastly easier than when our guilds had to organise 40 man MC days/weeks and distribute dkp, etc. But, I've always played for lore, and to be honest Cataclysm certainly delivered in that regard. I just like being a Warlock, that's all, as long as I can cast Corruption and Drain Life I won't complain, although to be honest, I do miss my SL/SL spec.
It'll fall apart once action MMO's like TERA are recognized as a much more rewarding and entertaining style of MMO. Everything in WoW relates to grinding, it gets old fast.
If you can find me an action MMO that isn't grindy as hell, let me know. From what i've heard/seen they're all just as grind/repeat as traditional MMOs
It'll fall apart once action MMO's like TERA are recognized as a much more rewarding and entertaining style of MMO. Everything in WoW relates to grinding, it gets old fast.
If you can find me an action MMO that isn't grindy as hell, let me know. From what i've heard/seen they're all just as grind/repeat as traditional MMOs
It's less about diminishing grind entirely and more about making it less noticeable.
In WoW there's no skill involved in anything, so long as your equipment is better you've essentially won the battle unless your opponent just so happens to be the overpowered class of the month.
I'd suggest DFO since it's fast paced, fairly balanced, and minimizes the grind by simply allowing you to take higher level enemies out through sheer skill alone. It's free to play and all the micro-transactions are fairly pointless to buy as they're nowhere near necessary.
I NEEDS an engine update, it NEEDS a graphics update, it NEEDS to change its mechanics past the traditional tank/healer/DPS.
I love GW2's model of everyone being responsible for themselves in a fight, so you can have as many of whatever class fighting the same encounter for the same reward.
Blizzard has straight out said before that they will not update the engine or really the graphics. They want the game to be playable now with the same computer you had when you bought wow eight years ago. They feel that jacking up the requirements would piss a lot of people off since they would now either have to upgrade their computers or nolonger be able to play a game they bought and paid a subscription for.
A refusal to evolve or change their product to appeal to the absolute maximum demographic possible, because of the people who're still running Windows XP on some piece of garbage from - as you said - eight years ago, or simply react with lunatic hysterics at the notion of change.
They're a business, so I can't fault them for this, because it's what's attracting and keeping the most customers, but I'm sure there are developers who're going to fuckin' therapy because their opus, their life's work, is being forcibly reduced in quality and evolution by a business model.
Compare this to EVE Online - they update the engines and graphics regularly, and the response to people bitching that they can't run it:
"Stop trying to run EVE on a graphing calculator or cinder block."
That, and I believe they have a separate client with their graphics from four years ago for people who're either too poor or stubborn to upgrade their cinder blocks.
I would really like to get back to WoW - I usually play it for 2-3 months every 2 or so years. I own a few 60+'s but I've never owned the latest expansion (always one behind).
Problem is, I want the game to be a mixture of the past and present. I want the level cap stuff to be rock-solid, dungeons too; doing that is what brought the community together - and I want grinding abolished, so levelling up to, say, 70, isn't so boring as it was with TBC. They've gone from one extreme of úber-grinding and ultra-hard raids, straight to the other extreme of 24-hour 1-85 levelling and easy raids, cocking up the game for quite a few people by doing so.
I decided to PVP shortly after that. problem was I was max level with no gear. This means the only use I had in PVP was killing other max level people with no gear and watching the godlike immortals who actually HAD gear kill me in three seconds. seriously: try to hurt someone who has top tier PVP gear when you have raiding gear on. It doesn't work. This is only till I play a HUNDRED or so games and have enough honor to buy gear.
See, now that's the problem. The game is so "balanced" (read: flat-lined) that it's no longer about exploiting player skill, but mostly about gear. You used to be able to simply kill a hunter by staying within the black spot between max meelee range and min bow range. They ditched that, making hunters less vulnerable and locking a lot of skill-based actions out of the equasion.
That, and raiding is way too easy. I get that new and bad players should get a chance at all the content; but that's no fun for the skilled players that used to take a concrete wall to the face around every corner of a new raid-instance.
It was hard. And I mean, really hard. No-mistakes-allowed hard. Right now, with the right gear, the game will basically play itself.
So making the game 'Balanced' (debatable as to whether it is) makes the game rely less on Skill? How does that work?
To use your example the Hunter 'Deadzone' was a piece of garbage that meant you could kill any Hunter regardless of their skill simply by running into it and casting a snare, I don't remember any other class that could be beaten that easy.
sure...if the hunter had zero abilities on his action bar.......
it was a weakness, like what EVERY OTHER CLASS HAD. melee could be kited, spellcasters get screwed hard by interrupts and silences. deadzone was fine, especially since it was incredibly easy to avoid. a skilled player could shoot enemies that were on top of him (jump forward, spin 180 in midair, shoot, repeat). required more effort, but hey.
my feral druid had many weaknesses (at least as of the end of wotlk when i stopped playing). one, he can only access 1/3 of his utility at any given time, and the utility he had access to at once was rather weak. two, his opportunity cost for his abilities was extremely high. and those are just the mechanical weaknesses, rather than specific ability weaknesses.
I love hearing people say it's dead. You clearly have no idea what the hell you're talking about. They JUST said they have 10.2 MILLION PLAYERS. Millions upon millions MORE than next closest MMO. And people call WoW dead? Call me when take your alternate reality glasses off.
short intro, I have played WoW for some time now, I started 3 weeks before the BWL patch and have been playing with limited breaks ever since (I was one of the people to genuinely canceled there account when the Real ID forums fiasco happened). I USED to raid "hardcore" from classic though to ICC and was semi successful at it, We downed all bar KJ in Sunwell, got to Twin emps and the first few in Naxx and managed all bar LKH and no lights in wrath, I then got burnt out of raiding (nothing to do with the quality of the raids, Death in the family+years of it killed the fun, and if I could Do Hyjal for a year and a bit and not quit, wrath wasn't going to kill it) and have played casually for the rest. I am also currently level 87 on the MoP beta and have been playing my arse off to test new content.
Ok so now my opinion.
WoW is not dying. If you think WoW is some stabbed beast bleeding and looking for a place to die you are mistaken. 10.2 million people still pay every month to play the game. And add onto that the millions upon millions of payed transfers, character changes, mounts and pets etc and you have a company that is in no fear of losing money on its project anytime soon, The only game that has a chance of dethroning WoW would be a major main steam almost Facebook game like F2P MMO like you see mostly in the Asian markets or Titan, Blizzards next major MMO. And on the engine? Doesnt matter at all. The Engine works for the task it is given, it needs little power to run and can still look striking (well the Mists stuff anyway, while its still below average on graphics the art style and colouring hide it amazingly well.) Making your MMO need a high spec PC is just losing you customers.
I know or have known a hell of a lot of people who played wow because its a game that will work on their old PC/Laptop when others don't. More too the point, if you took a poll of the 10.2 million people who played wow, me and Mr straw man would be very, VERY surprised if more than 500k of them even mentioned the engine or cared about it when asked what they would improve. Games like Sims social and Angry Birds are insanely popular and for the most part they look like slightly improved GBA games. Hell if you look at the most popular MMO f2p games none of them look impressive or at least none of the insanly popular ones, Function>form) Graphics matter little, and the gameplay style still works within the system for the most part. And last of all, the people upset about the "Kung Fu Panda" art style remind me too much of the anti Wind Waker brigade from so many years ago. That ended well.
To sum that up, here is an almost direct quote from someone in my guild a few months ago. "This game is awful, it looks like siht and the engine is f**cking old, f**k this I'm going to play counter strike"
WoW's real problem sadly is its community. While you can get yourself into a big friendly guild, having to fend for yourself or at least deal with a majority of the WoW community can be a heart breaker.
And onto the content, Cata wasn't the best, Mists looks good. Challenge modes and more practice with the LFR tool (IE not having to nerf the normal or heroic content so much) but i will hold my judgement on this, the addition of more Casual (Pokemon, Daily quests that look interesting etc) with the addition of more PVP content and HOPEFULLY harder raids at the higher end if you can show the people like me who don't want to commit that much time into the game yet still see the content and even give us some subpar epics for the effort, added with the genuinely great questing and lore content seen so far. What I've done of the Beta has reminded my a lot of the older WoW with all the vast VAST improvements that have been added in recent years (LFG, as much as you tend to get paired with idiots, is still a great addition) also account wide Mounts, achievements and pets etc (less punishment for people with vast alts) mean it is looking good. Unless they do another Hyjal or ToTC style raid, then F this game in the A.
But still, If by most peoples standards WoW is dead or dying. Looking at the numbers Blizzard have, I'd love to know what you'd class the other MMOs out there.
PS Someone said Mists has no main protagonist they recently announced that it does and it will be *warning spoiler*
A Corrupted Garrosh Hellscream, how and why is still unknown. But at the end of the Xpac there will be a completely new Warchief (as in not Thrall either)
It's in the same state it was in at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. I can still remember the countless people who were saying Cata would kill it, hell, I remember people saying Wrath would kill it back in Burning Crusade.
I like the game. My only complaint is that the team working on it seems to have a skewed perspective of what exactly "new content" means to the players. I will probably end up getting Mists, but honestly I don't know what to think. Wrath and Cataclysm have both had the same issues at the tail-end of their lives - Namely, the "final" content patch is released something like 7 or 8 months before the next expansion is released, and the content patch contains only one raid dungeon and three heroic dungeons.
I don't care about how short or "easy" Dragon Soul is. My guild raids one night a week, and we're still more than halfway through all of the heroic modes. I just wish they had released another raid so that we could switch which one we did every now and then. Dragon Soul week after week is a chore... Dragon Soul every other week with a completely different raid filling in the other week might be more bearable.
But honestly, from the sounds of it Mists will put in far more things that are worth doing aside from dungeons/raids/PvP. And it needs more things to do. Dailies are crap, leveling professions sucks, old raids are fun to burst through with two or three other guildies but you can only do each one once a week, and dungeons suck. You're not left with much else to do than level another alt or troll /trade chat in Stormwind/Orgrimmar. So people can make jokes about "PokeWoW!" all they want, because at least it's adding in more things to do that don't involve gear grinding.
I NEEDS an engine update, it NEEDS a graphics update, it NEEDS to change its mechanics past the traditional tank/healer/DPS.
I love GW2's model of everyone being responsible for themselves in a fight, so you can have as many of whatever class fighting the same encounter for the same reward.
Blizzard has straight out said before that they will not update the engine or really the graphics. They want the game to be playable now with the same computer you had when you bought wow eight years ago. They feel that jacking up the requirements would piss a lot of people off since they would now either have to upgrade their computers or nolonger be able to play a game they bought and paid a subscription for.
A refusal to evolve or change their product to appeal to the absolute maximum demographic possible, because of the people who're still running Windows XP on some piece of garbage from - as you said - eight years ago, or simply react with lunatic hysterics at the notion of change.
They're a business, so I can't fault them for this, because it's what's attracting and keeping the most customers, but I'm sure there are developers who're going to fuckin' therapy because their opus, their life's work, is being forcibly reduced in quality and evolution by a business model.
Compare this to EVE Online - they update the engines and graphics regularly, and the response to people bitching that they can't run it:
"Stop trying to run EVE on a graphing calculator or cinder block."
That, and I believe they have a separate client with their graphics from four years ago for people who're either too poor or stubborn to upgrade their cinder blocks.
You guys talking about the same game right? Or are you blissfully unaware at the graphical improvements over the last xpac and this upcoming one? The aesthetic is the same, but the game sure as hell looks a lot smoother than it did.
And whats so bad about older games exactly? I remember gamers being overly nostalgic about their old n64 and snes titles. If you find it stale then don't play it, but the game is good for what it does.
People can complain and ***** about WoW all day. The only fact that matters to me is I'm having more fun in Mists of Pandaria then I did in Cataclysm...
It a Mogu, ancient enemies of the Pandaren. He just a temp stand in as a teleporter to a Mogu dungeon that was in a Zone not accessible yet.
The Activision-Blizzard quarterly report came out yesterday. In the same period that Swtor lost 400,000 subs, WoW didn't post a net loss. Still standing at 10.2 million subs.
MOP isnt mainly about Pandarens its about the Alliance vs horde and the old hatred reaching boiling point. This is the ytime where the alliance and the horde are both villain and hero. Were reaching the ending oh phase in storytelling. This is to work out all the bad demons inside of us so we can focus it on the true threats.
From the Hero's Journey
Atonement with the Father
In this step the person must confront and be initiated by whatever holds the ultimate power in his or her life. In many myths and stories this is the father, or a father figure who has life and death power. This is the center point of the journey. All the previous steps have been moving in to this place, all that follow will move out from it. Although this step is most frequently symbolized by an encounter with a male entity, it does not have to be a male; just someone or thing with incredible power. For the transformation to take place, the person as he or she has been must be "killed" so that the new self can come into being. Sometime this killing is literal, and the earthly journey for that character is either over or moves into a different realm.
The attonement we speak of is attoning for the past crimes of of the days when the horde butchered without mercy. This is the time we kill those old hatred and move on.
But for the middle segment. The group of people that wants to be the best character they can be but doesn't want to devote 5 hours an evening to raiding. The serious 5 manner that tries to get into a pug raid every once in a blue moon.
For those people it has become stale and lost most of it's appeal.
This is a great way to describe it. I used to be about as hardcore into WoW as you can be, 8 hours a day, world top 50 guild etc. Now I play a lot more casually since hard modes have essentially ruined the fun of raiding forever. For people like me the casual content is far too easy, and the hardcore content is far too frustrating/time consuming.
LFR helps somewhat if you enjoy alts, but that doesn't last very long when you introduce it with a short, annoying instance like Dragon Soul. Other than LFR though... there really isn't anything to do these days that doesn't involve leveling even more alts.
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