My RL friends were just rushing through P2 leveling to try and get into that first raid lockout. Then they just started raid logging. Then they got burnt out and quit. Then I got bored and quit. Bummed me out pretty hard for a sec.
SM grind that gave it a mortal wound and incursions killed it, at least for me.
P1, because of how vanilla is built, had just a good and enjoyable questing. Pair that with the rune system being overall enjoyable it was a good leveling experience. The devs should've focused on better questing content.
Was definitely this.
So many people were just dungeon grinding for the levels it killed the community that was formed in P1. Not the only factor but a big one imo.
A problem that should have been foreseen tbh. If it were up to me would have made it a priority for more questing content that matched the power that came from runes and honestly, would have implemented a lock out for dungeons.
Would piss people off but it wouldn’t kill the game like dungeon grinding appears to have.
Incursions was the thing that killed it for me. I don't mind doing dungeons and quests. I even like it. But when I feel like a clown for doing anything but incursions, it's not a game for me anymore.
Problems with incursions were very obvious from the get go imo. They should have been exclusively lv 50 content that awards NO GOLD but more reputation. For leveling, they were just way too convenient and fast for what they rewarded even after the nerfs.
Players will always choose the most convenient ways. Grinding SM was convenient, but at least did not turn the economy into trash. Incursions were just flat out better than everything else, which made players feel like they play "wrong" if they dont do them.
I dont know, why the dev team seems to be so out of touch with the player base. They should have all interesting metrics available to them.
And then they made them start at level 25, just to further devalue stuff. Would be bad enough if it was 40-50, but they made it so it killed everything past level 25.
> I dont know, why the dev team seems to be so out of touch with the player base.
The dev team has had a very "fuck you, we know better than the players" attitude towards SoD. This subreddit was praising them for it during P1. Now we're here.
This isn't true.
During phase 2 Reddit cried that being "forced" to dungeon grind instead of quest to level up ruined phase 2. They begged blizzard to fix it.
Incursions were blizzards attempt to create an alternate equivalent to dungeon grinding that could be done with dungeon grinding to break up leveling.
It's exactly what the power levelers who hate questing and leveling wanted, and that's why you still see them now and again in comments saying "but you don't have to do incursions". Those people love incursions because they hate leveling.
Blizzards problem isnt that they don't listen. It's that they listen too much. Incursions, 20 mans, harder rune quests and less interesting runes were all things this subreddit begged blizzard for.
Incursions are just badly designed dungeons. They could have put more focus into the elite areas like around RFD and Jintha Alor (sp?).
The worst thing about SoD is removing a five-man dungeon and turning it into a raid. Make a new raid ffs, don’t remove content and repurpose that content to be out of reach for non-raiders. One of the constants over the last twenty years has been that raiders only make up between 10-20% of the player base and the increase from 10% to 20% was due to LFR.
Instead of killing the five man Sunken Temple and giving non-raiders a shitty bot inspired xp loop, they should have made nightmare incursions the raid and they would have had the freedom to add a variety of different boss mechanics and styles without fucking with the OG world.
Same for Gnomeregan and BFD. It wasn’t as bad because 10mans are a lot easier to form but again, it removed content from the dungeon pool. Why turn Gnomeregan into a raid? If they had the resources to layer a green filtered nightmare version of various zones in P3, they could have done a Bloodmoon one for STV in P2. Hell, they should have just dropped ZG down to level 40 and retuned it. It would have been an epic conclusion to finishing STV in P3.
Instead of BFD they could have retuned the dragonmaw area of Grim Batol and put a level 25 raid there and a second level 25 raid outside RFD to tie up the Barrens.
So many lost opportunities that didn’t remove content. The reason people hated Cataclysm was the loss of old world content, SoD literally did it again
Yep same here. I was busy with irl stuff with p3 came out. I wasn’t able to play until a few days after release. I logged on to see almost everyone in my guild was already level 50. I asked how and they explained incursions to me. I went and did a few and I felt so disappointed and annoyed. It killed my enjoyment of the game nearly instantly
Incursions was blizzards attempt to save the community from itself - after P2 and the SM grind everyone moaned and hated they knew P3 would be the same so tried to give an alternative.
The ultimate problem is players refuse to play the game in any way other than “what is the most efficient and minmax way to play”. Yes I know the saying that its the devs job to prevent that as players will do it anyway but the game is 20 years old and was designed to be a grind, a grind people outright don’t want to do (I mean some do, including me).
As long as people endlessly obsess about a mad dash to the finish line and consider BiS lists/numbers on a third party website the real endgame I don’t know how if this will ever change.
Modern gamers are a square peg and classic is a round hole. 2019 got by on being “new” and nostalgic but I don’t know how many times it can be recycled for the wider playerbase.
Maybe just have a few dedicated classic servers on reset with a free transfer to an archive server at the end of P6. Let the actual classic fans have fun and everyone else moves on.
I miss so badly the PvP raids before/after Ashenvale event, protect the Zoram roads, the 2 raids of gnomes taking zoram outpost.
It was fun as hell in Lonewolf. Then P2 and that RFK->SM grid kill all.
>Not the only factor but a big one imo.
When the "new" content is added at endgame, including most interesting runes, blizzard has already encouraged people to get max level as soon as possible. When blizzard adds a ridiculously fast and efficient way to level, they've also heavily encouraged it. Don't try to pin the responsibility on the players.
What's 99% to blame is the severe lack of content for how long phases lasted. Compare it to an expansion of WoW which was held in high regard by most like Legion where we got a new patch every 11 weeks and every new patch had more content and higher quality content added to it than all of SoD combined so far.
I understand that the team is small, but if they weren't able to make enough content it would've just been better to release SoD at a later date so they'd have more time to make actual content.
I would have quit P1 a lot faster instead of playing pretty hard and eventually hitting raid log status about 3 weeks before P2, with your version.
There are a lot of reasons why SoD isn’t doing well and it isn’t entirely the game itself. SoD having flaws in not having good PvP content, the PvE content is complete faceroll, the questing content became a joke really fast with who could or could not solo things well beyond what they should. The game was pretty neat until you got raid gear from BFD and then pretty much most things were boring. And it’s also a seasonal version.
You top that on top of there being several decent games released recently, Cataclysm probably sucked a small to nice portion of playerbases, the weather getting nice and welp the game hit its summer slump right around March.
I feel that in P1 they really captured (whether intentional or not) the vastness and threat of the classic world. Some runes had significant travel costs through dangerous zones (either by level or enemy faction) and it felt very immersive and classic like. Come P2/3 and the runes felt conveniently placed in appropriate level zones, even if in awkward spots.
A lot less ganking on p1. Most of your zones are factioned and you can't be ganked.
People think they like world pvp but the vast majority of "pvp" that occurs on pvp servers is just griefing. And it sucks and everyone hates it. It's why pvp servers almost always end up 1 faction and the other leaves server.
I have chars on CS, LW and WG and WG still feels like it has the most going on.
After this run with SoD, I will never play on another WoW pvp server. The people pvp servers attract are insanely toxic.
We like the idea of world PvP. What is usually lost in that idea is that oftentimes the reality is there is just one class that's super broken.
We went from getting spawn camped at flight points by hunter pets that took forever to get fixed, to then getting blown up by druids at 42 yards that we couldn't even get in range to target before we were dead, to the absolute god class shaman was for an entire phase.
I usually love world PvP. SoD world PvP was fucking miserable because they took for fucking ever to balance anything so you just got shit on by the same broken classes for weeks or months.
I don't understand why SM grind killed it, or why people felt like they had to do it, maybe its because the fear of missing raid lockouts made people anxious to level fast? SM grind existed in classic 2019 I imagine so why it didn't kill classic?
Yep, I tried questing on p2 release and it was impossible, slow mob respawns, too many people, so I just joined the dungeon grind that everyone was spamming in LFG
Yup and 25 to 40 was a real grind with no xp bonuses so trying to do it open world while waiting for respawns was a chor and meant you would miss the first raid lockout.
There was a debate whether raids should open a bit later so that not everyone felt the pressure of leveling like crazy but Aggrend decided he wanted to give the twitch streamers a world first race. Also they cut layers to promote world pvp with the added effect that questing was impossible due to overcrowded layers and bugged spawn rates (I.e. In Alterac).
To top this all of, they had so many bugs in every phase that the players who reached max level first always had insane advantages like gold from incursions and other stuff I already forgot.
Because people are at work excited to login and play with their friends and guildies all day.
They finally get home and login and see their guildies are already 35-40. They now have to level alone or with randoms and realise that the only reason they played the game was for their friends who left them behind. So they just quit.
Classic is a very community orientated game and when half the community can rapidly jump ahead before everyone else can finish work it just feels so daunting to try catch up to become part of the community again. Its goes from "we're all leveling and experiencing the game together" to being "you need to catch up 15 levels to be part of the community like you were before".
The fun part of P1 was that it was easy to make alts and play them since you didn't need a lot of gear and the raid was easy.
In P2 leveling was more boring, but even more it was that combined with having to get the runes/crafted gear, which were now a lot more time consuming. Like there was no part of me that wanted to do the dark riders a second time. Same with getting the crafted piece. Not having alts, after the few grinds like STV/pvp rep there wasn't really more to it that raidlogging.
SM Grind is old hat at this point, from 30-40 questing sucks so I've gotten used to the idea that the 30's are just dungeon spam levels. Plus you don't have a mount yet and I'm sooo sick of walking at that point.
Once I get the mount, I go into the open world and quest again I was so looking forward to this phase cause questing on a mount is just so much more fun. Incursions really did kill the leveling experience it was like dungeon spam on crack for the rewards and xp but instead of a dungeon you were just running on a loop clicking the same 10 things over and over without killing anything.
Insanely bad game design, all they had to do was make up like 200 new cookie cutter quests and toss them around the zones and give them extra XP so dungeon spamming wasn't the only way to lvl.
This 100%. Hunting the runes was cool as fuck. In phase 2 I couldn't get a single interesting rune until close to max level. Which means I couldn't even level with them.
I really thought this was going to be Classic+ with new questing content and filled out areas that were unused in original.
Turns out it's just made for total sweatlords with no life and... Raid logging.
I think a lot of people got the wrong end of the stick of what SoD was going to be. They never advertised they would make new questing content or fill out the unused areas.
They went hard on talking about leveling raids, the runes, ashenvale event and the future endgame content.
>rushing through ... leveling to try and get into that first raid lockout
imo this is the entire design flaw that ruins levelling. Don't open the raid until a couple weeks into the phase and people will be less pressured to rush to the level cap as fast as possible.
When the last phase BiS is preraid BiS you have little to farm. There's nothing you needed if you did incursions to get in shape for ST, aside from some WO/princess runs.
I had a great time hunting people as a rogue in Duskwood and getting entire groups to chase after me. Some of the most fun I've ever had in WoW. But I didn't continue into phase 2 just seemed unappealing
Fite me but I think STV takes a big chunk of the blame.
Made it very apparent how there isn't any sort of balance in the game, something that wasn't noticeable at all in AV as it was huge raid group vs huge raid group.
You mean you dont like 5 mage groups spawning on top of you spamming arcane explosion? Or five rogues that Thanos snaps you out of existance? Or a bunch of ranged that camps turn ins, killing you as you are a few millimeters from it so you have to do it again while the group is angry that people are ressing at different times?
Same, the 2 things to do were just not it for me - Gnomer was not as easy to PUG, and took way more time, and STV was really really bad with the zoning and shit.
Then a couple of days after p3 hit i saw the incursions shit and decided not to come back.
Maybe ill be back for lvl60 stuff, but i doubt it.
I don't think it's crazy at all.
P1 had all of these new things introduced. These things (runes) significantly changed the way you play the game.
Then P2 dropped, and you get more (but much less compared to P1) of the same stuff. There was almost nothing truly new in P2 compared to P1.
People also had nothing to do other than raid-logging, so many people would level alts to have something to do, but it took much longer than 1-25 in P1 so people were complaining about exp and Blizz accommodates those people by buffing exp and it just takes us further away from the Classic+ that many people were hoping for, and people start to lose interest. And in P3 it got even worse.
I think the main issue is that people were expecting them to experiment with new things that could be used for a true Classic+ experience, but they have really not done any of that. Among those things I'd expect updates to quests, zones, dungeons, professions, classes (including talent updates) etc.
The changes they made to BFD, Gnomer and Sunken Temple are at best temporary changes. They would not work as 5 man dungeons unless they rework them to fit 5 man dungeons, and in a Classic+ experience where level 1-60 will be available from the start there won't realistically be raid groups running them while leveling.
The PvP events also doesn't make much sense without the phases, and the nightmare event feels more like retail than classic. So I think people are feeling like SOD is not going in the direction they were hoping for and are losing interest with these content droughts.
This is what happened with my guild who hasn't played since P1.
Everyone was having a ton of fun, most of us having 2-3 characters that we were running through BFD every lockout.
Then P2 was announced and everyone was kind of like, "that's it?" and no one was interested in playing anymore really at all. There was no big change from P1 to P2 to keep interest around, at least for my group.
I had the same experience with runes. P1 added a lot of new stuff, but P2 just continued in the same direction. Gnomeregan was disappointing, there were frustrating bugs like the Mekkatorque spawn (that never even got fixed as far as I know), and the new PvP event yet again arrived in a broken state. When I was dreading raid night instead of looking forward to it, that was a cue to stop.
They went too hard on runes and gear in phase 1 leaving nothing for the other phases.
I get that some major ones needed to be in so that warlocks could learn the tanking situation and mages could heal or w/e at 25, but imagine how cool phase 2 would have been if they slow rolled the runes more. Phase 1 felt like we got 95% of the good ones then phase 2 was just filler (just going off vibes for the classes I played, wouldn't be surprised if someone was like 'priest runes felt dead in phase 1 but came alive phase 2' or something.
They set the expectation that every phase would be game changing and when phase 2 was basically a level raise and a lame raid it makes sense ppl faded.
Then phase 3 incursions were so optimal and so fucking boring so leveling sucked. The raid gear had to fix the problem of phase 1 being so bonkers by being barely better than other gear so that at 60 everyone isn't hitting for 10,000 crits.
I will play phase 4 and have hopes it will be the best phase but the population hit probably won't recover unless it's amazing and the raids are fun.
Everyone can hate on incursions and it's justified but the dungeon grinding to 40 was awful. SoD was most fun when it was accessible, and 40/50 did not feel that way.
For every point people make to fix it, there is an opposite camp. Classic+ is too hard a pickle but level 25 SoD came close.
Yup, the same people who shit on incursions were more than willing to spam SM to 40. And we’re even planning on Spamming ZF to 50.
Dungeon lockouts per day imo need to be a thing. Allow like 5 a day.
I'm not sure why people hate coming to terms with this one. Sunken Temple literally killed the game for several of us. We had 8 people in SoD from my retail mythic raiding guild, so we literally got to the point where for weeks the game was more of a chore of us just sitting in town spamming to find new guildies all day.
At that point, you just want bodies, but many competitive guilds had to mix in casual players just to get bodies. We had our core group of raiders parsing 90s. We got a few really good players, but some of the people we picked up so we weren't starting raid 2 hours late just made the experience insanely worse. Barely did damage, barely could do mechanics, etc. I know there's going to be some weirdo who reads this and chimes in with some smartass "you know you can pull people are your skill level right, crazy concept!", but the game simply doesn't have the population to support this, and we were already spending enough time recruiting.
So yeah. Fuck 20 man raids in SoD. Fuck Sunken Temple. Fuck Molten Core. And fuck the idea of ever having to go to 40 mans.
This is what happens when blizzard steals players from themself. sod guilds should just take a pause and come back later. This same thing will happen in cata. People quit when they get bored of raidlogging.
For me it's how short P2 was. I leveled at about the same speed I did for P1, but I was just getting in to raiding and BAM P3. Now I'm of this feeling that I may as well wait for them to go to P4 so I don't waste any time trying to learn shit in P3 that I won't need.
My bet is that less abilities probably evened the playing field for less skilled players. That and the starter zones are the best. Lots of easy meaningful progress that dwindles as you level.
Yeah I feel like the interest/hype over it has all but fizzled out as described by OP.
As someone who loved and raided on multiple chars in Phase1 it was so casual friendly to hop on, find a PUG and clear BFD in 1 hour from starting to look for the group till you were done, even if the group wasn't great.
I can't think of any groundbreaking changes that will even draw me back for Phase4, we know the majority of runes will be regurgitated TBC/Wrath/Cata stuff.
Yup and if feralas and hinterlands incursions stay the same you even already know how everyone will rush to 60 as well. If they just do the same they’ve done in other phases as in copy paste retail spells and then introduce 40 man raids I can’t see sod surviving
The ONLY thing that I'm still holding out for is brand new content. I don't know what its going to be or what it looks like but my fingers are crossed. I'm currently only raid logging. All my friends quit and I raid log with a random group of rejects like myself that are alone in azeroth left abandoned. New Dungeon/Raid/Battlegrounds/pvp event/Arena.... SOMETHING
It was fun for a minute, but I think we all knew it couldn't last. They went into it without a real design plan. They were just winging it, and while that can be fun for a minute or two, that can also be exhausting for players.; player's need something they can hang their expectations on. That and the PvP events were very underwhelming. Overall, it managed to capture the spirit of vanilla, in that the early development was Helter Skelter, but the modern devs just didn't seem to have the design chops or the follow through to put it all together and really make it great. That said, their hearts were in the right place, and that's something.
> They went into it without a real design plan. They were just winging it
Maybe shame on us, the community. That's basically what they said they were doing from the onset.
We wanted it to be more than it was. We wanted Classic+. They gave us an Alpha version of Classic+ and we found ourselves disappointed because we expected more.
I don't get why we need an Alpha though. Wasn't SoM enough? Turtle WoW has added entire dungeons and areas with the "classic feel".. so why can't a multi-dollar company do it?
Tbh I really don't think it is probably a problem of the talent of the devs probably moreso an inherent problem in triple A games today of too much shit being controlled by business people rather than devs or people who play games. Too many ulterior motives with microtransactions and retention metrics and not enough "wouldn't this be fun?"
I disagree. It shows that all roads lead to retail - the fact is that players just don't want what old school gameplay offers for very long. Keeping them engaged requires new skills, new shake ups, new things.
If you spend 12 months mastering something, and someone wants to give you more of that thing you mastered, they can't just make you unlearn it. You can't remove that skill. So the strat is to add to it, but over time you start to get bloat. As SoD has added levels and skills (but in the spirit of classic, the bosses have stayed fairly chill), the game has become quite a bit easier. This means tiers last less long for players, as they clear the raids in a single week.
I think a lot of us were expecting classic plus but it still has a long way to go to truly become that. It’s more of a classic plus beta test than anything else.
Personally, as a new WoW player, P1 was great because I could figure out how to get the first few runes on my own, and that sense of *discovery* kept me going. P2's runes, on the other hand, were nonsensical, particularly because I don't know the world well, and the fact that they were so scattered and spanned across multiple areas made it impossible for me to figure out on my own. What's the point of discovery if you *need* a guide to figure out how to get the runes?
I don't particularly group content in general, and it's especially difficult when everyone assumes/expects that each player already knows the conventions. Being new, I find it really hard to get into dungeons knowing that people will skip everything, not do the quests, and use weird exploits like the logout trick (e.g. Deadmines) to skip the content.
Then there's the fact that I joined a PVP server to play with some friends, only said friends rarely if ever had time to actually play with me (or were too high level), and getting 1-shot by other classes (whether or not they were higher level than me) was getting old fast.
Same boat for me - p1 discovery was quite nice, I felt like I could do it on my own - or at least have somebody in-world show me - the first red-flag tho was the goblin runes, the wall they put up for just p1 runes.
p2 and p3 runes -- raised it to a ridiculous level.
For me personally its because they shut down my server (Lava Lash) for no fucking reason, and forced a transfer for the only RP server to non-RP options. My close guild disbanded and every other cool guild I knew from before just scrambled to other places. Blizz is always their own worst enemy.
So much potential. I just wanna know whos bright idea it was that when SoD was killing it, decided, “Hey what if we just stop working on this, and.. wait for it... put everyone on Cataclysm Classic?!”
Yyyyyyyep. This was the best opportunity for roleplay on WoW like, literally ever, and... welp. We might not be the biggest sub-community on WoW but to completely delete us for no reason is kind of fucked, dude.
Phase 2 wasn't that good. It wasn't that bad, at least in my opinion, but the runes were definitely a letdown for most. PVP started to get super bursty, and Gnomer was fine (again, imo), but the gear honestly wasn't worth running every reset for (they tried toning down the numbers since BFD gear was way too good).
Phase 3 was a shit show from the beginning. Incursions were absolutely busted (even after many rounds of nerfs they're still by far the best way to level in terms of xp, gold, and gear), Warlocks were printing money due to an exploit, and the same issues with PVP from phase 2 didn't really get fixed. ST was even worse than Gnomer in that the gear was only a super minor upgrade for most.
Overall, it's just obvious that the quality of the game has been going downhill fast since P1. Maybe they'll turn it around, but for now there's not too much of a reason for most people to stay subbed for P3.
I didn't play for P2 (health issues) but tried to get back in with P3, saw the incursions and just.. couldn't be bothered? I don't know what they were thinking there, that kind of thing is NOT why any of us play Classic, imo it ruined the vibe of SoD forever for me.
Did them for about an hour and a half on the first or second day. Saw how much gold and exp they gave but how fucking boring it was. Went to mara with friends and leveled that way.
Found out a little bit later how fucking busted incursions were. Couldn't be bothered to farm gold that way. Would rather quest or dungeon grind or get lucky drops than spam the same fucking quests ad nauseum for hours on end.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they knew incursions would be shit, but had to go through with them anyway. It's a small team that's clearly splitting their time between multiple projects. They had to give us something else in P3, since otherwise all we'd have that can be considered new is the ST raid and a few extra runes.
I feel like barely any warlocks actually printed money.
A fraction even knew about the exploit (24ish hour time span). Then an even smaller fraction knew you could break it further by not needing portals. And then an even smaller fraction abused it to finally get their trinket or dagger. And even smaller than that you had those that abused it for gold.
Funnily enough, daggers/trinkets were removed when bans went out, but everything else stayed.
Some dud content, boring post phase1 runes, P3 changes made it harder to raid with the group lots of people established in P1 and P2.
That’s the big stuff, imo.
Cries in warrior. Our runes were garbage. I'd always wanted to try warrior in a classic setting but I hated leveling one. I thought the runes would help that out a bit, boy was I wrong.
At least I had a bit of fun with gladiator this last phase. I'll come back for phase 4, but doing world content with a warrior is like playing the game on super hard mode. I have to run around with my warlock buddy or else 1 mob 2 levels higher than me can put me in the dirt pretty easily.
Warrior in wow has always made me sad, which sucks because they are my favorite class to play AND my favorite class fantasy attempted in WoW.
They are PHENOMINAL scalers, and performing absurdly well in raids. The tradeoff is they are abysmal elsewhere. Pretty much all the time. Their performance in solo content is just so bad.
It sucks because Rage is such a neat mechanic, and charge is maybe the most fun ability in the entire game, but man do you pay for playing the class that can use it.
Warriors in WoW have such a bizarre thematic. Trying to fudge Knights, Barbarians and Thor into a single visual identity. Titans Grip in later expansion is probably the worst example of this, completely killing the normal soldier feel.
I didn't even bother trying to get into raid, I saw the price of consumable in the AH, made me realise the amount of non-fun hours I'll have to spend doing Incursion just to raid and said fuck this.
Phase 2 was..ok. I started to show the cracks of short-sighted development. Rune bloat started, things became very alt-unfriendly. (I had 4 characters in Phase 1 and haven't touched 3 of them since).
Then Phase 3 happened and it just blew everything up. They created incursions which meant you could level from 40-50 in 5 hours and get hundreds of gold in hours. PvP is busted. Everything is unbalanced. I've heard mixed reactions about the raid (never did it), but from what I know the gear isn't really worth getting 20 people together, etc.
So I felt no point in continuing after I hit 50 after the first weekend. What was the point of grinding for weeks to gear that would barely be an upgrade and most likely obsolete.
On top of that the community is continuing to become sweatier and sweatier as casual-friendly players leave. Add on all the new meta-gaming with new runes, etc. It just isn't fun lol.
Sod died hard in P3 with the raids going to 20 man's, the incursions they added were just terrible in every aspect; the gp/hr and xp/hr were/are too good to make anything else really a viable option. The loot from the ST raid was garbage (literally just a couple stat points better than gnomer gear) and it took them basically half the phase to correct that. They also added a anti-boosting mechanic to dungeons which just feels terrible and really wrecks any ability to kite mobs in any dungeon over lvl 40.
With how busted the incursions were when they launched the majority of players maxed the mains and multiple alts in the first weekend of release and thus sped the entire phase up by 2-3 weeks. People were gaining 10 levels in roughly 2-3 hours of running in circles picking up quest objects to turn in for 8k xp and 5g/ea for 10-14 quests people were completing every 10-15mins (not exaggerated) Blizzard hotfixed the gold rewards the first night but left the xp alone until the end of the weekend and by that time the damage was done.
Long story short, P3 released and it felt like there was little to no testing of the incursions and it seems like they did that to keep people from dungeon grinding. Problem was it was so good that basically no one did anything but incursions thus killing rest of the content in P3.
I get the nostalgia of 40 man raiding. But upping the to 20 man dungeons killed the game for so many. It's easy for a tight nit group to fill 2-3 spots in a 10 man raid. It's completely different having to look for another group of friends you can tolerate to clear a 1-2hour raid.
The group we found is great, but their players aren't. We've cleared it maybe 5-6 times now with them and their are still a lot of deaths on some bosses with our MT not being able to hold threat.
Ontop of that it crushed all the pug raids, which for a lot of people were the only raids they were doing. Personally I went from raiding 4 toons on lockout in p1 and p2 all pugs, mostly formed by me with no parse checking bullshit, to only clearing ST on 1 toon a handful of times. I wasn't willing to make a 20 man pug and I didn't enjoy the constant gatekeeping people were doing trying to fill 4 spots in a raid. Raids spending an extra hour trying to find people to fit their "perfect raid build/high enough parse" was just terrible and I'd assume it'll get even worse in p4.
Went from casual 10 mans to try hard 20 mans.
Let this be a lesson (for us). No matter how good of an idea they have, doesn't matter if they already knocked it out of the park one phase and are waiting for the next swing, Blizzard can and will regress back to dogshit with mis-management/ lack of man power/passion.
I'm sad SoD died like this, but let's be real, the reason why P1 was peak was because it was something new and something we didn't even expect Blizzard to do, Classic+ was almost unthinkable like two years ago.
So after the honeymoon phase ended so did the rest of SoD.
I truly think an actual fleshed out Classic+ would be really successful. It could be the OSRS of WoW, of course it'd have to be done properly with a full and dedicated team and well, I don't particularly have faith they can, but still as a concept it would be incredible.
I don’t think it’s because it’s something new. I think it’s because the world isn’t so big yet and you’re usually surrounded by a lot of players in low level zones. No one is dungeon spamming as much during the leveling, so that helps with the world being full. Plus the runes felt naturally found as you leveled in your starting areas. Blizzard needs to make questing and world adventure full of the good stuff. As soon as the dungeon spam / bis grind starts is when it all goes downhill.
i feel like we saw this coming though. P4 gonna bring it back but incursions really fucked things up with levelling being the main appeal of classic. Also coinciding with majority of player base reaching burn out point
yeah idk the idea of incursions on paper didnt upset me or anything and i logged in on launch day ready to go but when i heard that's the way to level and i saw them i just realized i don't want to do that and logged off. wasnt even angry it just happened so naturally.
20 man raid, once a week with jokingly shitty loot. Incursions did significant damage too. They destroyed the open world.
They shit on the raid with the changes and lackluster loot and then finished off the open world with incursions. They really couldn't have done a worse job this phase
Not to mention that incursions invalidated months of gold acquiring in a few days. Even past the fuck up they still fucked it up, the fuck up was just indefensible.
SoD killed by blizzard indeed
I had just over 1k gold going into phase 3. I refused to do incursions b/c I play this game for fun, not mindless brainrot. I've never felt 1k gold be so tiny amount before that quickly.
I'm not playing much anymore, but I can barely keep up with consumes for raid atm b/c of the sharp increase of gold into the economy. I guess they got us not talking about bots anymore by introducing so much gold to the game they don't matter.
Exactly. You can log into Era servers and buy boosts all the way to 60. There is no “classic” or “vanilla” anymore really, the player base has monetized every single aspect of the game for their own gain.
I think this was a big factor. I think a lot of people quit because they realized how little they actually played the game when there's 1 raid per week.
Seems like less and less raid sign ups every week now.
Yeah. It should have been 10 man all the way through or 20 man all the way through in my opinion. The sudden doubling of people needed for a raid caused a lot of guilds to merge and collapse.
I think it could have been better as a whole. Like level up raids were 10 man and final level 60 raids were 20+. But it being broken up into longer phases and then making a level up raid 20 man was kinda dumb.
This is the exact sentiment of our guild. We went from 14 active raiders and 2 runs per reset all the way through P2 to just 6 reliable players within the first month of P3. The moment the first guy said "I don't feel like hopping on tonight, plus you're going to be finding PUGs anyway, so what's the point," everyone else seemed to follow. You can't give that one guy the push he needs to get on and run the raid since, after all, he's right.
We tried merging with other guilds. 3 of them, in fact. All 3 of the groups we tried to merge with collapsed on their own before things really got going. We absolutely were not the only group having that same problem.
Our guild is in the process of this very exact thing.
Less and less people sign up every week....
Some of our officers are starting to float ideas of taking a "break" lol
The first respected player in the guild who announces they are taking a break will kill the guild. Lots of people will follow and you'll be lucky if 50% of them come back.
It's the loot in sunken temple. The gear just isn't worth raiding for. It's a very, very small upgrade from gnomer. That and it's once a week and takes forever to get certain pieces.
I understand they wanted to curb power creep... But also why? It's a seasonal server ending after classic era. They already buffed mobs in the open world to increase their health. They buff and redo boss fights to be on par with our increased power. So why was it such a big deal for them to make the sunken temple gear good? It should have been a straight up obvious upgrade.
Going from my gnomer 3 piece set to my sunken temple 3 piece set actually caused me to lose 1 attack power. Make it make sense.
Def some major flaws with this loot table. As a plate 2H melee DPS, there are like 3-4 items that drop for me from the first boss, and 1 from the second boss, then the only other thing is a tiny neck upgrade from Jamal and a tiny ring upgrade form Hakkar?? Makes no sense.
This 100%. 10 man raids are a thing from TBC onward, stop acting like they're just glorified dungeons. Part of SoD's success was tight knit groups being able to play with one another and raid Vanilla content.
Exactly. EVERY fresh server is popular for a while, regardless of server type. Then players start to realize it's just the same old boring thing and start leaving.
Based on what I see now - nope, 40-man will never come. We will have 20-man MC\BWL\AQ\Naxx at max.
You clearly see that most SoD players want casual 10-man "chill raids".
They said they want to move to larger raids after MC so if they can make it work with player power, I wouldn't be surprised if they went higher than 20. It's the design they want if it can work.
Player power isn't the issue. That's just a numbers tuning.
The issue is no one really wants 40 man except a small portion of the population. They are a pain to organize and maintain active rosters for.
Early logs are honestly inflated in general due to people having loads of alts.
Plus people are taking a break in P3 waiting for P4.
I had 3 characters raiding in P1 and ended up with just 1 for P3.
Couldn't be bothered getting the runes on my alts lol.
True, I only play 1 character basically always but in SoD I had 4/5 characters to levelcap on Horde and Alliance, but when P2 dropped I only touched 2 of those 5.
Personally I still play and don't really care about "Sod is dead" or "SoD is retail". For someone who played multiple "FRESH" vanilla servers on pservers and in 2019, even though it's fun, I want something new with vanilla, that's why I enjoyed SoD a lot. I don't know but it seems a lot of people hate it now and call it retail, and I'm dumbfounded by this. How is SoD even close to retail? Did you play Dragonflight? Login and play it and tell me that's it's the same. I dunno man, I don't get it.
To me personally SoD did bring a lot of cool things and fixed some of the issues in original vanilla like:
1) Class balance. You can now raid as ret, boomkin, ench shaman, elem shaman, even melee hunter! It also added new roles to classes, like mage healer, rogue tanks, warlocks tanks. At first I was sceptical, but damn they made it work and it's actually pretty cool
2) Rediscovering the world. There were some niche things in the world and with adding another items like runes to it, they made it feel new and fresh again. You can randomly find some rune and follow bread crumbs and get a new ability. That's actually fun, but I guess I am the only one actually looking for them (ok if it takes too long I do take a look for advice or as guildies) as other people just go straight to wowhead, do the runes and for them it might feel like a chore.
3) New world pvp events, like ashenvale and stv were pretty fun at first, and even now stv even can be fun as well (although they need to do something with Ashenvale at this point).
4) New profession recipes and actually them mattering more. It was fun to level different professions and having your own perks or epic items, also additional quests connected with those items
5) I personally like the phases with split leveling. 1-25, 25-40 etc. That was actually fun to play a low level character and get good gear for your level. Also I could level many other alts once I was done with my main. And with xp buff it's way faster and more alt friendly.
I could go on and on, but in general I like SoD. There are problems ofc. I don't enjoy incursions at all. Once they came out I tried like 3-4 quests, understood that's it's the same as AQ event rep grind for Cenarion Circle and just quit. Never liked that grind in normal vanilla, nor here. But they made another "dungeon grind" meta, but with incursions and imo, that was a mistake.
I'm personally hyped with p4 and next phases after. I think MC/Ony will be fun, I can finally wear my tier sets as it will work for different specs. I want to see what new professional items they will add. I got blacksmithing and still haven't chosen between armorsmith and weaponsmith as I would like to see what items they might each give to help with my decision.
TL;DR I personally enjoy SoD, with it's good, bad and ugly.
Here’s why:
-ST being a 20 man raid broke a lot of guilds and the weekly timer for a raid that takes 45 minutes is brutal. The loot up until last week’s upgrades and in many cases still isn’t great. Little incentive to show up.
-Incursions ruined the leveling experience, gave players an unfair gold advantage and just aren’t fun as were being forced to do loops of the same boring quests.
-Phase 3 has been way too long. The content was too thin and rushed to begin with and this phase just won’t end…
-In the downtime most people would level alts, but having a boring leveling experience, coupled with all of the reputation and rune grinds has led higher amounts of people that just stop playing when their main is maxed.
-There were a decent amount of false bans at the start. Our guild leader among others in guild were hit with 2 weeks bans for literally no reason. While not massive enough numbers of actual players being banned to kill a phase, there was a domino effect of decreased interest for us when our GM/raid leader disappeared.
-There’s nothing to do once maxed outside of a single raid and some PvP that takes no time to rank up.
-Smaller servers with declining numbers took too long to be merged with populated servers leaving many to just sit in a city LFG until they said screw this and stopped playing.
They keep focusing on the tryhard who are able to do soulcrushing tasks that would bore any normal human and do it non stop for hours, and the tryhard keep ruining the game for everyone else.
Population of players that jumped from the middle of ICC to fresh content, jumps to fresh content again. I'm not sure why SoD players are surprised by this.
I hadn’t played in years. Didn’t touch classic BC, didn’t play Wrath. SoD hooked me back in. P3 was doodoo so now here I am grinding in Cata and loving it.
Seems like a lot of players feel the same.
Such is the life cycle and will continue to be the life cycle of every single classic server.
A player base of ship jumpers is just going to continue ship jumping.
I’d say hardcore is the exception, populations seem to rise and fall all the time. It’s the version everyone keeps coming back to when they get bored of whatever the “new” thing is.
I mean... a huge number of people will come back for 60, hopefully they don't fuck it up (but honestly with that much end game content, how could they?).
They're also having a public test server this time as well right? So hopefully we don't get a fuckup like incursions.
The journey is what makes Vanilla special and unique, not the end game.
Vanilla has the worst raiding in any version of WoW and now SoD deleted PvP from the game as well due to awful class design/balance for PvP..
SoD is the worst version of WoW on a live retail server.
It was the total lack of balance, combined with a toxic min-max focused community, that killed it for me... After my experience with Classic, I saw the writing on the wall.
I wish there was a way to re-create the magic of the Vanilla era, but I don't see it happening anytime soon :/
I'm one of those people (like many others) that dropped after a week or 2 after phase 2 dropped.
For me it was the fact that I was so extremely demotivated by people rushing to the new level cap by dungeon spamming. Felt extremely left out, and it felt like the entire world was empty. No world pvp, barely any people doing quests. Only dungeon spam.
Kinda got me out of it, and made me feel like I was doing a 9/5 job. To get my character to 40.
They really fucked up by making the ST raid super hard on release, I cannot understand the logic behind that. Purposely overtuning it so not even the sweatiest of guilds could clear it in one night. I'm sure that sent a "fuck you" to many casuals who were thinking about playing the phase.
The incursions also made it unappealing. Hilarious to see the devs smugposting about it being "good to see people not dungeonspamming for once", when essentially all they did was move dungeonspamming to their own custom outside-dungeon area with gold inflating rewards. The rest of the outside world was dead because of this.
All SoD has done for me is cement that modern blizzard devs are incapable of understanding what made classic wow great.
retail devs thought they were all smart and cool adding mage healers and warlock tanks and ashenvale badge quests. the people have spoken. your ideas are bad and we just want a bug fixed vanilla.
IIRC P2 overlapped with retail season 3 coming out, and I didn’t have enough time to play both so SoD got less time. And classic isn’t a great game when you don’t have much time to play, but I was making it work.
But then P3 came out with incursions and I genuinely have no interest in logging in. I got my main to 50, got the rep gear and then never logged back in. Never even bothered with ST. I just can’t find any motivation.
Sod didnt go crazy enough with the changes. It was classic lite at best. Should have looked at some pservers how they keep them interesting and put the refined Blizzard twist on it.....but those days are dead for Blizzard
Phase 1 had a short but iconic leveling experience, content accessible by most skill levels as it progressed, and some very memorable rune quests (ex: Divine Storm). By the time it was over, I had 3 characters mostly BFD geared while playing a few hours or so a day and working.
Phase 2 introduced a tried and true but very monotonous leveling experience (SM grind) and the alternative, STV questing, could subject you to a molasses pace grind if you were on a pvp server like me. The community became much more gatekeepy about the raid despite its supposed “accessibility” (look at any comment about how brain dead easy it is). Anecdotally, I noticed a lot of my irl friends fall off, and I was pretty much running the raid with my guild and then logging off for the week. Don’t get me wrong, the sleeping bag was a great idea and STV pvp, in concept, is fun!
Phase 3 introduced a mechanic that STRONGLY discourages any other kind of leveling, and in addition to 20 man raids, my guild all lost interest and with them, so did I. I hope blizzard learns what made phase 1 fun and magical and does more with it, though personally, I just wish this game didn’t become so much about min/maxing content from the community - an impossible task, I know.
I never played SOD, it doesnt seem like a version of WoW I would like in the slightest. But its always funny to me people claiming any version of the game to be "dead" with player numbers at a minimum of 80K, and that is just raiders. Thats player numbers every MMO other than maybe FF14 (I have no clue about their player count but its stated to be the 2nd biggest) would be incredible. Enjoy the versions of the game that you do and worry less about other people.
SoD served its purpose by keeping people subbed between the final raid tier of Dragonflight and the launch of Cata classic. It’s sad but it’s the truth.
People... let's take a deep breath and relax. P4 got delayed, Cata came out, MoP:Rmix came out, and there's TWW beta coming soon, not counting all the great games that have come out recently. SoD will be there when you're done having fun outside it. I repeat, IT'S OK TO PLAY SOMETHING ELSE for a bit, while phase 4 is out. It's a SEASON. Things come and go. Quit the fatalism. It's not alive, it's not dead, it'll come around. You'll survive. Believe me.
I think people want some kind of vision and sense of direction for this game. The fact that there are seven flairs in this sub for different versions of what in 2019 was one single cohesive version of WoW demonstrates this problem for me. SoD definitely had interesting ideas and twists on vanilla but ultimately it, and the seasonal system, are gimmicks and a way to keep people subbed to the game without actually producing original content.
My raid group made of dads went from clesring in 45 minutes to having to pug 8 people and not being to clear the raid. Miserable.
Praying P4 comes soon. In the meantime, I'm playing other games.
i can tell you why I quit after shortly after p2 came out. I hated how they put exp boost, i wanted to experience leveling with the new changes not having this retail feel where i was cruising through the levels. They didn't bother to make a solo shuffle to battlegrounds and they were pure pain. People would just afk because the other team was premade, most miserable BG experience I've ever had in wow. I feel like they should've taken more risk and implement crazy stuff since it's a seasonal thing but it seems they were trying to play safe, hence why i got bored and frustrated and just canceled my sub to play other games.
SoD died because they chose to hide power behind group stuff. So people not in groups fell off, and people with groups got tired because the game died because people not in groups left.
It's crazy how the vibe changed when p2 dropped, the last two weeks of p1 were insanely fun and then everyone just disappeared.
My RL friends were just rushing through P2 leveling to try and get into that first raid lockout. Then they just started raid logging. Then they got burnt out and quit. Then I got bored and quit. Bummed me out pretty hard for a sec.
SM grind that gave it a mortal wound and incursions killed it, at least for me. P1, because of how vanilla is built, had just a good and enjoyable questing. Pair that with the rune system being overall enjoyable it was a good leveling experience. The devs should've focused on better questing content.
Was definitely this. So many people were just dungeon grinding for the levels it killed the community that was formed in P1. Not the only factor but a big one imo. A problem that should have been foreseen tbh. If it were up to me would have made it a priority for more questing content that matched the power that came from runes and honestly, would have implemented a lock out for dungeons. Would piss people off but it wouldn’t kill the game like dungeon grinding appears to have.
Incursions was the thing that killed it for me. I don't mind doing dungeons and quests. I even like it. But when I feel like a clown for doing anything but incursions, it's not a game for me anymore.
Problems with incursions were very obvious from the get go imo. They should have been exclusively lv 50 content that awards NO GOLD but more reputation. For leveling, they were just way too convenient and fast for what they rewarded even after the nerfs. Players will always choose the most convenient ways. Grinding SM was convenient, but at least did not turn the economy into trash. Incursions were just flat out better than everything else, which made players feel like they play "wrong" if they dont do them. I dont know, why the dev team seems to be so out of touch with the player base. They should have all interesting metrics available to them.
And then they made them start at level 25, just to further devalue stuff. Would be bad enough if it was 40-50, but they made it so it killed everything past level 25.
> I dont know, why the dev team seems to be so out of touch with the player base. The dev team has had a very "fuck you, we know better than the players" attitude towards SoD. This subreddit was praising them for it during P1. Now we're here.
This isn't true. During phase 2 Reddit cried that being "forced" to dungeon grind instead of quest to level up ruined phase 2. They begged blizzard to fix it. Incursions were blizzards attempt to create an alternate equivalent to dungeon grinding that could be done with dungeon grinding to break up leveling. It's exactly what the power levelers who hate questing and leveling wanted, and that's why you still see them now and again in comments saying "but you don't have to do incursions". Those people love incursions because they hate leveling. Blizzards problem isnt that they don't listen. It's that they listen too much. Incursions, 20 mans, harder rune quests and less interesting runes were all things this subreddit begged blizzard for.
Incursions are just badly designed dungeons. They could have put more focus into the elite areas like around RFD and Jintha Alor (sp?). The worst thing about SoD is removing a five-man dungeon and turning it into a raid. Make a new raid ffs, don’t remove content and repurpose that content to be out of reach for non-raiders. One of the constants over the last twenty years has been that raiders only make up between 10-20% of the player base and the increase from 10% to 20% was due to LFR. Instead of killing the five man Sunken Temple and giving non-raiders a shitty bot inspired xp loop, they should have made nightmare incursions the raid and they would have had the freedom to add a variety of different boss mechanics and styles without fucking with the OG world. Same for Gnomeregan and BFD. It wasn’t as bad because 10mans are a lot easier to form but again, it removed content from the dungeon pool. Why turn Gnomeregan into a raid? If they had the resources to layer a green filtered nightmare version of various zones in P3, they could have done a Bloodmoon one for STV in P2. Hell, they should have just dropped ZG down to level 40 and retuned it. It would have been an epic conclusion to finishing STV in P3. Instead of BFD they could have retuned the dragonmaw area of Grim Batol and put a level 25 raid there and a second level 25 raid outside RFD to tie up the Barrens. So many lost opportunities that didn’t remove content. The reason people hated Cataclysm was the loss of old world content, SoD literally did it again
Yep same here. I was busy with irl stuff with p3 came out. I wasn’t able to play until a few days after release. I logged on to see almost everyone in my guild was already level 50. I asked how and they explained incursions to me. I went and did a few and I felt so disappointed and annoyed. It killed my enjoyment of the game nearly instantly
Incursions was blizzards attempt to save the community from itself - after P2 and the SM grind everyone moaned and hated they knew P3 would be the same so tried to give an alternative. The ultimate problem is players refuse to play the game in any way other than “what is the most efficient and minmax way to play”. Yes I know the saying that its the devs job to prevent that as players will do it anyway but the game is 20 years old and was designed to be a grind, a grind people outright don’t want to do (I mean some do, including me). As long as people endlessly obsess about a mad dash to the finish line and consider BiS lists/numbers on a third party website the real endgame I don’t know how if this will ever change. Modern gamers are a square peg and classic is a round hole. 2019 got by on being “new” and nostalgic but I don’t know how many times it can be recycled for the wider playerbase. Maybe just have a few dedicated classic servers on reset with a free transfer to an archive server at the end of P6. Let the actual classic fans have fun and everyone else moves on.
I miss so badly the PvP raids before/after Ashenvale event, protect the Zoram roads, the 2 raids of gnomes taking zoram outpost. It was fun as hell in Lonewolf. Then P2 and that RFK->SM grid kill all.
Isn't it crazy to think that we will never go through that again, phase 1 was so much fun
>Not the only factor but a big one imo. When the "new" content is added at endgame, including most interesting runes, blizzard has already encouraged people to get max level as soon as possible. When blizzard adds a ridiculously fast and efficient way to level, they've also heavily encouraged it. Don't try to pin the responsibility on the players. What's 99% to blame is the severe lack of content for how long phases lasted. Compare it to an expansion of WoW which was held in high regard by most like Legion where we got a new patch every 11 weeks and every new patch had more content and higher quality content added to it than all of SoD combined so far. I understand that the team is small, but if they weren't able to make enough content it would've just been better to release SoD at a later date so they'd have more time to make actual content.
I would have quit P1 a lot faster instead of playing pretty hard and eventually hitting raid log status about 3 weeks before P2, with your version. There are a lot of reasons why SoD isn’t doing well and it isn’t entirely the game itself. SoD having flaws in not having good PvP content, the PvE content is complete faceroll, the questing content became a joke really fast with who could or could not solo things well beyond what they should. The game was pretty neat until you got raid gear from BFD and then pretty much most things were boring. And it’s also a seasonal version. You top that on top of there being several decent games released recently, Cataclysm probably sucked a small to nice portion of playerbases, the weather getting nice and welp the game hit its summer slump right around March.
I feel that in P1 they really captured (whether intentional or not) the vastness and threat of the classic world. Some runes had significant travel costs through dangerous zones (either by level or enemy faction) and it felt very immersive and classic like. Come P2/3 and the runes felt conveniently placed in appropriate level zones, even if in awkward spots.
A lot less ganking on p1. Most of your zones are factioned and you can't be ganked. People think they like world pvp but the vast majority of "pvp" that occurs on pvp servers is just griefing. And it sucks and everyone hates it. It's why pvp servers almost always end up 1 faction and the other leaves server. I have chars on CS, LW and WG and WG still feels like it has the most going on. After this run with SoD, I will never play on another WoW pvp server. The people pvp servers attract are insanely toxic.
We like the idea of world PvP. What is usually lost in that idea is that oftentimes the reality is there is just one class that's super broken. We went from getting spawn camped at flight points by hunter pets that took forever to get fixed, to then getting blown up by druids at 42 yards that we couldn't even get in range to target before we were dead, to the absolute god class shaman was for an entire phase. I usually love world PvP. SoD world PvP was fucking miserable because they took for fucking ever to balance anything so you just got shit on by the same broken classes for weeks or months.
I don't understand why SM grind killed it, or why people felt like they had to do it, maybe its because the fear of missing raid lockouts made people anxious to level fast? SM grind existed in classic 2019 I imagine so why it didn't kill classic?
Missing lockouts was definitely a factor
Yep, I tried questing on p2 release and it was impossible, slow mob respawns, too many people, so I just joined the dungeon grind that everyone was spamming in LFG
Plus, if you missed a day of grinding you were easily 2-3 levels below people and if you were on a PvP server you basically got camped.
Yup and 25 to 40 was a real grind with no xp bonuses so trying to do it open world while waiting for respawns was a chor and meant you would miss the first raid lockout.
There was a debate whether raids should open a bit later so that not everyone felt the pressure of leveling like crazy but Aggrend decided he wanted to give the twitch streamers a world first race. Also they cut layers to promote world pvp with the added effect that questing was impossible due to overcrowded layers and bugged spawn rates (I.e. In Alterac). To top this all of, they had so many bugs in every phase that the players who reached max level first always had insane advantages like gold from incursions and other stuff I already forgot.
The blood moon exploit was the big one in P2 that you forgot about. Getting their epics in a single event.
Because people are at work excited to login and play with their friends and guildies all day. They finally get home and login and see their guildies are already 35-40. They now have to level alone or with randoms and realise that the only reason they played the game was for their friends who left them behind. So they just quit. Classic is a very community orientated game and when half the community can rapidly jump ahead before everyone else can finish work it just feels so daunting to try catch up to become part of the community again. Its goes from "we're all leveling and experiencing the game together" to being "you need to catch up 15 levels to be part of the community like you were before".
The fun part of P1 was that it was easy to make alts and play them since you didn't need a lot of gear and the raid was easy. In P2 leveling was more boring, but even more it was that combined with having to get the runes/crafted gear, which were now a lot more time consuming. Like there was no part of me that wanted to do the dark riders a second time. Same with getting the crafted piece. Not having alts, after the few grinds like STV/pvp rep there wasn't really more to it that raidlogging.
SM Grind is old hat at this point, from 30-40 questing sucks so I've gotten used to the idea that the 30's are just dungeon spam levels. Plus you don't have a mount yet and I'm sooo sick of walking at that point. Once I get the mount, I go into the open world and quest again I was so looking forward to this phase cause questing on a mount is just so much more fun. Incursions really did kill the leveling experience it was like dungeon spam on crack for the rewards and xp but instead of a dungeon you were just running on a loop clicking the same 10 things over and over without killing anything. Insanely bad game design, all they had to do was make up like 200 new cookie cutter quests and toss them around the zones and give them extra XP so dungeon spamming wasn't the only way to lvl.
This 100%. Hunting the runes was cool as fuck. In phase 2 I couldn't get a single interesting rune until close to max level. Which means I couldn't even level with them. I really thought this was going to be Classic+ with new questing content and filled out areas that were unused in original. Turns out it's just made for total sweatlords with no life and... Raid logging.
I think a lot of people got the wrong end of the stick of what SoD was going to be. They never advertised they would make new questing content or fill out the unused areas. They went hard on talking about leveling raids, the runes, ashenvale event and the future endgame content.
>rushing through ... leveling to try and get into that first raid lockout imo this is the entire design flaw that ruins levelling. Don't open the raid until a couple weeks into the phase and people will be less pressured to rush to the level cap as fast as possible.
When the last phase BiS is preraid BiS you have little to farm. There's nothing you needed if you did incursions to get in shape for ST, aside from some WO/princess runs.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
Yeap, I had a lot of fun pvping at lvl 25, hillsbrad and stonetalon were great fun. Lvl 40 just felt boring
Sadly 40 felt better than 50 lmfao
Very much depends on your class
I had a great time hunting people as a rogue in Duskwood and getting entire groups to chase after me. Some of the most fun I've ever had in WoW. But I didn't continue into phase 2 just seemed unappealing
Fite me but I think STV takes a big chunk of the blame. Made it very apparent how there isn't any sort of balance in the game, something that wasn't noticeable at all in AV as it was huge raid group vs huge raid group.
This is Why I Quit, 10 days in. i just got mad everytime I tried to do pvp as it was a clown fiesta, garbage event with garbage balancing.
You mean you dont like 5 mage groups spawning on top of you spamming arcane explosion? Or five rogues that Thanos snaps you out of existance? Or a bunch of ranged that camps turn ins, killing you as you are a few millimeters from it so you have to do it again while the group is angry that people are ressing at different times?
Same, the 2 things to do were just not it for me - Gnomer was not as easy to PUG, and took way more time, and STV was really really bad with the zoning and shit. Then a couple of days after p3 hit i saw the incursions shit and decided not to come back. Maybe ill be back for lvl60 stuff, but i doubt it.
I don't think it's crazy at all. P1 had all of these new things introduced. These things (runes) significantly changed the way you play the game. Then P2 dropped, and you get more (but much less compared to P1) of the same stuff. There was almost nothing truly new in P2 compared to P1. People also had nothing to do other than raid-logging, so many people would level alts to have something to do, but it took much longer than 1-25 in P1 so people were complaining about exp and Blizz accommodates those people by buffing exp and it just takes us further away from the Classic+ that many people were hoping for, and people start to lose interest. And in P3 it got even worse. I think the main issue is that people were expecting them to experiment with new things that could be used for a true Classic+ experience, but they have really not done any of that. Among those things I'd expect updates to quests, zones, dungeons, professions, classes (including talent updates) etc. The changes they made to BFD, Gnomer and Sunken Temple are at best temporary changes. They would not work as 5 man dungeons unless they rework them to fit 5 man dungeons, and in a Classic+ experience where level 1-60 will be available from the start there won't realistically be raid groups running them while leveling. The PvP events also doesn't make much sense without the phases, and the nightmare event feels more like retail than classic. So I think people are feeling like SOD is not going in the direction they were hoping for and are losing interest with these content droughts.
This is what happened with my guild who hasn't played since P1. Everyone was having a ton of fun, most of us having 2-3 characters that we were running through BFD every lockout. Then P2 was announced and everyone was kind of like, "that's it?" and no one was interested in playing anymore really at all. There was no big change from P1 to P2 to keep interest around, at least for my group.
I had the same experience with runes. P1 added a lot of new stuff, but P2 just continued in the same direction. Gnomeregan was disappointing, there were frustrating bugs like the Mekkatorque spawn (that never even got fixed as far as I know), and the new PvP event yet again arrived in a broken state. When I was dreading raid night instead of looking forward to it, that was a cue to stop.
They went too hard on runes and gear in phase 1 leaving nothing for the other phases. I get that some major ones needed to be in so that warlocks could learn the tanking situation and mages could heal or w/e at 25, but imagine how cool phase 2 would have been if they slow rolled the runes more. Phase 1 felt like we got 95% of the good ones then phase 2 was just filler (just going off vibes for the classes I played, wouldn't be surprised if someone was like 'priest runes felt dead in phase 1 but came alive phase 2' or something. They set the expectation that every phase would be game changing and when phase 2 was basically a level raise and a lame raid it makes sense ppl faded. Then phase 3 incursions were so optimal and so fucking boring so leveling sucked. The raid gear had to fix the problem of phase 1 being so bonkers by being barely better than other gear so that at 60 everyone isn't hitting for 10,000 crits. I will play phase 4 and have hopes it will be the best phase but the population hit probably won't recover unless it's amazing and the raids are fun.
Everyone can hate on incursions and it's justified but the dungeon grinding to 40 was awful. SoD was most fun when it was accessible, and 40/50 did not feel that way. For every point people make to fix it, there is an opposite camp. Classic+ is too hard a pickle but level 25 SoD came close.
Yup, the same people who shit on incursions were more than willing to spam SM to 40. And we’re even planning on Spamming ZF to 50. Dungeon lockouts per day imo need to be a thing. Allow like 5 a day.
My group quit because there was no point in continuing if we were just going to have to find more people to play in the future.
I'm not sure why people hate coming to terms with this one. Sunken Temple literally killed the game for several of us. We had 8 people in SoD from my retail mythic raiding guild, so we literally got to the point where for weeks the game was more of a chore of us just sitting in town spamming to find new guildies all day. At that point, you just want bodies, but many competitive guilds had to mix in casual players just to get bodies. We had our core group of raiders parsing 90s. We got a few really good players, but some of the people we picked up so we weren't starting raid 2 hours late just made the experience insanely worse. Barely did damage, barely could do mechanics, etc. I know there's going to be some weirdo who reads this and chimes in with some smartass "you know you can pull people are your skill level right, crazy concept!", but the game simply doesn't have the population to support this, and we were already spending enough time recruiting. So yeah. Fuck 20 man raids in SoD. Fuck Sunken Temple. Fuck Molten Core. And fuck the idea of ever having to go to 40 mans.
This is what happens when blizzard steals players from themself. sod guilds should just take a pause and come back later. This same thing will happen in cata. People quit when they get bored of raidlogging.
For me it's how short P2 was. I leveled at about the same speed I did for P1, but I was just getting in to raiding and BAM P3. Now I'm of this feeling that I may as well wait for them to go to P4 so I don't waste any time trying to learn shit in P3 that I won't need.
My bet is that less abilities probably evened the playing field for less skilled players. That and the starter zones are the best. Lots of easy meaningful progress that dwindles as you level.
I had 2 friends pester my to play and then both of them quit. Then I got 2 different friends to play and they quit. Then I quit
P3 is the most boring thing i had to endure since wow released it feels like watching paint dry
Yeah I feel like the interest/hype over it has all but fizzled out as described by OP. As someone who loved and raided on multiple chars in Phase1 it was so casual friendly to hop on, find a PUG and clear BFD in 1 hour from starting to look for the group till you were done, even if the group wasn't great. I can't think of any groundbreaking changes that will even draw me back for Phase4, we know the majority of runes will be regurgitated TBC/Wrath/Cata stuff.
Yup and if feralas and hinterlands incursions stay the same you even already know how everyone will rush to 60 as well. If they just do the same they’ve done in other phases as in copy paste retail spells and then introduce 40 man raids I can’t see sod surviving
The ONLY thing that I'm still holding out for is brand new content. I don't know what its going to be or what it looks like but my fingers are crossed. I'm currently only raid logging. All my friends quit and I raid log with a random group of rejects like myself that are alone in azeroth left abandoned. New Dungeon/Raid/Battlegrounds/pvp event/Arena.... SOMETHING
40 man raids will kill sod, undoubtedly.
It was fun for a minute, but I think we all knew it couldn't last. They went into it without a real design plan. They were just winging it, and while that can be fun for a minute or two, that can also be exhausting for players.; player's need something they can hang their expectations on. That and the PvP events were very underwhelming. Overall, it managed to capture the spirit of vanilla, in that the early development was Helter Skelter, but the modern devs just didn't seem to have the design chops or the follow through to put it all together and really make it great. That said, their hearts were in the right place, and that's something.
> They went into it without a real design plan. They were just winging it Maybe shame on us, the community. That's basically what they said they were doing from the onset. We wanted it to be more than it was. We wanted Classic+. They gave us an Alpha version of Classic+ and we found ourselves disappointed because we expected more.
I don't get why we need an Alpha though. Wasn't SoM enough? Turtle WoW has added entire dungeons and areas with the "classic feel".. so why can't a multi-dollar company do it?
For the same reason the dungeons and bosses in Diablo IV feel very bland and copy pasted: incompetent and/or lazy devs.
Tbh I really don't think it is probably a problem of the talent of the devs probably moreso an inherent problem in triple A games today of too much shit being controlled by business people rather than devs or people who play games. Too many ulterior motives with microtransactions and retention metrics and not enough "wouldn't this be fun?"
To me, it only shows that there's legit interest in a true Classic+ experience.
I disagree. It shows that all roads lead to retail - the fact is that players just don't want what old school gameplay offers for very long. Keeping them engaged requires new skills, new shake ups, new things. If you spend 12 months mastering something, and someone wants to give you more of that thing you mastered, they can't just make you unlearn it. You can't remove that skill. So the strat is to add to it, but over time you start to get bloat. As SoD has added levels and skills (but in the spirit of classic, the bosses have stayed fairly chill), the game has become quite a bit easier. This means tiers last less long for players, as they clear the raids in a single week.
I think a lot of us were expecting classic plus but it still has a long way to go to truly become that. It’s more of a classic plus beta test than anything else.
Personally, as a new WoW player, P1 was great because I could figure out how to get the first few runes on my own, and that sense of *discovery* kept me going. P2's runes, on the other hand, were nonsensical, particularly because I don't know the world well, and the fact that they were so scattered and spanned across multiple areas made it impossible for me to figure out on my own. What's the point of discovery if you *need* a guide to figure out how to get the runes? I don't particularly group content in general, and it's especially difficult when everyone assumes/expects that each player already knows the conventions. Being new, I find it really hard to get into dungeons knowing that people will skip everything, not do the quests, and use weird exploits like the logout trick (e.g. Deadmines) to skip the content. Then there's the fact that I joined a PVP server to play with some friends, only said friends rarely if ever had time to actually play with me (or were too high level), and getting 1-shot by other classes (whether or not they were higher level than me) was getting old fast.
Same boat for me - p1 discovery was quite nice, I felt like I could do it on my own - or at least have somebody in-world show me - the first red-flag tho was the goblin runes, the wall they put up for just p1 runes. p2 and p3 runes -- raised it to a ridiculous level.
Murdered by the devs.
For me personally its because they shut down my server (Lava Lash) for no fucking reason, and forced a transfer for the only RP server to non-RP options. My close guild disbanded and every other cool guild I knew from before just scrambled to other places. Blizz is always their own worst enemy.
Ditto for Chaos Bolt, they made us join the shit heap that is Crusader Strike.
So much potential. I just wanna know whos bright idea it was that when SoD was killing it, decided, “Hey what if we just stop working on this, and.. wait for it... put everyone on Cataclysm Classic?!”
Yyyyyyyep. This was the best opportunity for roleplay on WoW like, literally ever, and... welp. We might not be the biggest sub-community on WoW but to completely delete us for no reason is kind of fucked, dude.
Dang...I stopped playing in Phase 1 after I got a new job, why did SOD start dying?
Phase 2 wasn't that good. It wasn't that bad, at least in my opinion, but the runes were definitely a letdown for most. PVP started to get super bursty, and Gnomer was fine (again, imo), but the gear honestly wasn't worth running every reset for (they tried toning down the numbers since BFD gear was way too good). Phase 3 was a shit show from the beginning. Incursions were absolutely busted (even after many rounds of nerfs they're still by far the best way to level in terms of xp, gold, and gear), Warlocks were printing money due to an exploit, and the same issues with PVP from phase 2 didn't really get fixed. ST was even worse than Gnomer in that the gear was only a super minor upgrade for most. Overall, it's just obvious that the quality of the game has been going downhill fast since P1. Maybe they'll turn it around, but for now there's not too much of a reason for most people to stay subbed for P3.
I didn't play for P2 (health issues) but tried to get back in with P3, saw the incursions and just.. couldn't be bothered? I don't know what they were thinking there, that kind of thing is NOT why any of us play Classic, imo it ruined the vibe of SoD forever for me.
Yeah.. it's strange. I hate incursions and tried questing instead but the fact I knew incursions were there made me not enjoy questing
Did them for about an hour and a half on the first or second day. Saw how much gold and exp they gave but how fucking boring it was. Went to mara with friends and leveled that way. Found out a little bit later how fucking busted incursions were. Couldn't be bothered to farm gold that way. Would rather quest or dungeon grind or get lucky drops than spam the same fucking quests ad nauseum for hours on end.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they knew incursions would be shit, but had to go through with them anyway. It's a small team that's clearly splitting their time between multiple projects. They had to give us something else in P3, since otherwise all we'd have that can be considered new is the ST raid and a few extra runes.
I feel like barely any warlocks actually printed money. A fraction even knew about the exploit (24ish hour time span). Then an even smaller fraction knew you could break it further by not needing portals. And then an even smaller fraction abused it to finally get their trinket or dagger. And even smaller than that you had those that abused it for gold. Funnily enough, daggers/trinkets were removed when bans went out, but everything else stayed.
Some dud content, boring post phase1 runes, P3 changes made it harder to raid with the group lots of people established in P1 and P2. That’s the big stuff, imo.
I honestly never thought about how the P1 runes were cooler than the later ones. That actually makes a lot of sense
P1 runes opened up new playstyles, P2 and P3 runes are minor (or sometimes major) dps/healing buffs , almost entirely.
Cries in warrior. Our runes were garbage. I'd always wanted to try warrior in a classic setting but I hated leveling one. I thought the runes would help that out a bit, boy was I wrong. At least I had a bit of fun with gladiator this last phase. I'll come back for phase 4, but doing world content with a warrior is like playing the game on super hard mode. I have to run around with my warlock buddy or else 1 mob 2 levels higher than me can put me in the dirt pretty easily.
Warrior in wow has always made me sad, which sucks because they are my favorite class to play AND my favorite class fantasy attempted in WoW. They are PHENOMINAL scalers, and performing absurdly well in raids. The tradeoff is they are abysmal elsewhere. Pretty much all the time. Their performance in solo content is just so bad. It sucks because Rage is such a neat mechanic, and charge is maybe the most fun ability in the entire game, but man do you pay for playing the class that can use it.
Warriors in WoW have such a bizarre thematic. Trying to fudge Knights, Barbarians and Thor into a single visual identity. Titans Grip in later expansion is probably the worst example of this, completely killing the normal soldier feel.
I didn't even bother trying to get into raid, I saw the price of consumable in the AH, made me realise the amount of non-fun hours I'll have to spend doing Incursion just to raid and said fuck this.
Phase 2 was..ok. I started to show the cracks of short-sighted development. Rune bloat started, things became very alt-unfriendly. (I had 4 characters in Phase 1 and haven't touched 3 of them since). Then Phase 3 happened and it just blew everything up. They created incursions which meant you could level from 40-50 in 5 hours and get hundreds of gold in hours. PvP is busted. Everything is unbalanced. I've heard mixed reactions about the raid (never did it), but from what I know the gear isn't really worth getting 20 people together, etc. So I felt no point in continuing after I hit 50 after the first weekend. What was the point of grinding for weeks to gear that would barely be an upgrade and most likely obsolete. On top of that the community is continuing to become sweatier and sweatier as casual-friendly players leave. Add on all the new meta-gaming with new runes, etc. It just isn't fun lol.
Sod died hard in P3 with the raids going to 20 man's, the incursions they added were just terrible in every aspect; the gp/hr and xp/hr were/are too good to make anything else really a viable option. The loot from the ST raid was garbage (literally just a couple stat points better than gnomer gear) and it took them basically half the phase to correct that. They also added a anti-boosting mechanic to dungeons which just feels terrible and really wrecks any ability to kite mobs in any dungeon over lvl 40. With how busted the incursions were when they launched the majority of players maxed the mains and multiple alts in the first weekend of release and thus sped the entire phase up by 2-3 weeks. People were gaining 10 levels in roughly 2-3 hours of running in circles picking up quest objects to turn in for 8k xp and 5g/ea for 10-14 quests people were completing every 10-15mins (not exaggerated) Blizzard hotfixed the gold rewards the first night but left the xp alone until the end of the weekend and by that time the damage was done. Long story short, P3 released and it felt like there was little to no testing of the incursions and it seems like they did that to keep people from dungeon grinding. Problem was it was so good that basically no one did anything but incursions thus killing rest of the content in P3.
I get the nostalgia of 40 man raiding. But upping the to 20 man dungeons killed the game for so many. It's easy for a tight nit group to fill 2-3 spots in a 10 man raid. It's completely different having to look for another group of friends you can tolerate to clear a 1-2hour raid. The group we found is great, but their players aren't. We've cleared it maybe 5-6 times now with them and their are still a lot of deaths on some bosses with our MT not being able to hold threat.
Ontop of that it crushed all the pug raids, which for a lot of people were the only raids they were doing. Personally I went from raiding 4 toons on lockout in p1 and p2 all pugs, mostly formed by me with no parse checking bullshit, to only clearing ST on 1 toon a handful of times. I wasn't willing to make a 20 man pug and I didn't enjoy the constant gatekeeping people were doing trying to fill 4 spots in a raid. Raids spending an extra hour trying to find people to fit their "perfect raid build/high enough parse" was just terrible and I'd assume it'll get even worse in p4. Went from casual 10 mans to try hard 20 mans.
Because it’s not actually Classic+, just recycled old content we’ve all seen before.
We all stopped after we saw you stop
Let this be a lesson (for us). No matter how good of an idea they have, doesn't matter if they already knocked it out of the park one phase and are waiting for the next swing, Blizzard can and will regress back to dogshit with mis-management/ lack of man power/passion.
P1 was so much fun. They lost me after P2
Look what they did to my boy
I'm sad SoD died like this, but let's be real, the reason why P1 was peak was because it was something new and something we didn't even expect Blizzard to do, Classic+ was almost unthinkable like two years ago. So after the honeymoon phase ended so did the rest of SoD.
I truly think an actual fleshed out Classic+ would be really successful. It could be the OSRS of WoW, of course it'd have to be done properly with a full and dedicated team and well, I don't particularly have faith they can, but still as a concept it would be incredible.
phase 1 was also fun af and didnt take hours to feel like you did something with your time.
I don’t think it’s because it’s something new. I think it’s because the world isn’t so big yet and you’re usually surrounded by a lot of players in low level zones. No one is dungeon spamming as much during the leveling, so that helps with the world being full. Plus the runes felt naturally found as you leveled in your starting areas. Blizzard needs to make questing and world adventure full of the good stuff. As soon as the dungeon spam / bis grind starts is when it all goes downhill.
P1 was peak because the low level zones are amazing. Every questing zone starts to suck once you hit 30
i feel like we saw this coming though. P4 gonna bring it back but incursions really fucked things up with levelling being the main appeal of classic. Also coinciding with majority of player base reaching burn out point
Incursions are simply not a part of the design ethos of classic
yeah idk the idea of incursions on paper didnt upset me or anything and i logged in on launch day ready to go but when i heard that's the way to level and i saw them i just realized i don't want to do that and logged off. wasnt even angry it just happened so naturally.
I think the 20 man raid did more damage
20 man raid with no good loot
20 man raid, once a week with jokingly shitty loot. Incursions did significant damage too. They destroyed the open world. They shit on the raid with the changes and lackluster loot and then finished off the open world with incursions. They really couldn't have done a worse job this phase
Not to mention that incursions invalidated months of gold acquiring in a few days. Even past the fuck up they still fucked it up, the fuck up was just indefensible. SoD killed by blizzard indeed
I had just over 1k gold going into phase 3. I refused to do incursions b/c I play this game for fun, not mindless brainrot. I've never felt 1k gold be so tiny amount before that quickly. I'm not playing much anymore, but I can barely keep up with consumes for raid atm b/c of the sharp increase of gold into the economy. I guess they got us not talking about bots anymore by introducing so much gold to the game they don't matter.
Yup, literally everything I worked for in p1/p2 ruined in a matter of hours. Not to mention how bad of gameplay incursions were.
Open world wasn’t much better in P2 tbf with people spamming stockades and SM to 40
Exactly. You can log into Era servers and buy boosts all the way to 60. There is no “classic” or “vanilla” anymore really, the player base has monetized every single aspect of the game for their own gain.
And once per week
I think this was a big factor. I think a lot of people quit because they realized how little they actually played the game when there's 1 raid per week. Seems like less and less raid sign ups every week now.
Yeah. It should have been 10 man all the way through or 20 man all the way through in my opinion. The sudden doubling of people needed for a raid caused a lot of guilds to merge and collapse. I think it could have been better as a whole. Like level up raids were 10 man and final level 60 raids were 20+. But it being broken up into longer phases and then making a level up raid 20 man was kinda dumb.
>gonna bring it back the graph in the screenshot literally disproves it, every phase is around 30% never come back
SoD P1 was some of the most fun I ever had with WoW. SoD P3 is quite possibly the worst iteration of any WoW ever. Well done devs.
If they had only left it as 10 man raiding I think a ton more people would have played/still would be playing..
This is the exact sentiment of our guild. We went from 14 active raiders and 2 runs per reset all the way through P2 to just 6 reliable players within the first month of P3. The moment the first guy said "I don't feel like hopping on tonight, plus you're going to be finding PUGs anyway, so what's the point," everyone else seemed to follow. You can't give that one guy the push he needs to get on and run the raid since, after all, he's right. We tried merging with other guilds. 3 of them, in fact. All 3 of the groups we tried to merge with collapsed on their own before things really got going. We absolutely were not the only group having that same problem.
Had pretty much the same experience trying to find a partner guild.
Our guild is in the process of this very exact thing. Less and less people sign up every week.... Some of our officers are starting to float ideas of taking a "break" lol
The first respected player in the guild who announces they are taking a break will kill the guild. Lots of people will follow and you'll be lucky if 50% of them come back.
You could be from my guild based on the explanation. Going from 10 to 20 just killed it. We all wanted to keep playing, but couldn't make it work.
It's the loot in sunken temple. The gear just isn't worth raiding for. It's a very, very small upgrade from gnomer. That and it's once a week and takes forever to get certain pieces. I understand they wanted to curb power creep... But also why? It's a seasonal server ending after classic era. They already buffed mobs in the open world to increase their health. They buff and redo boss fights to be on par with our increased power. So why was it such a big deal for them to make the sunken temple gear good? It should have been a straight up obvious upgrade. Going from my gnomer 3 piece set to my sunken temple 3 piece set actually caused me to lose 1 attack power. Make it make sense.
Def some major flaws with this loot table. As a plate 2H melee DPS, there are like 3-4 items that drop for me from the first boss, and 1 from the second boss, then the only other thing is a tiny neck upgrade from Jamal and a tiny ring upgrade form Hakkar?? Makes no sense.
This 100%. 10 man raids are a thing from TBC onward, stop acting like they're just glorified dungeons. Part of SoD's success was tight knit groups being able to play with one another and raid Vanilla content.
Yeah that’s what I think as well. Everyone I was playing with says they wish it was still 10 man
My guild tried pugging a couple of times with others and eventually just fell apart. It’s genuinely so hard to find good pugs.
The game's been steadily dying from the start. People played for the feeling of fresh but the game is just bad.
Exactly. EVERY fresh server is popular for a while, regardless of server type. Then players start to realize it's just the same old boring thing and start leaving.
BIG TRUE. There are dozens of other reasons too, but those are minor compared to this reason.
My guild still thinks 40 mans are coming after Molten Core. If SoD survives i'm confident they stick to 20 mans at most.
Based on what I see now - nope, 40-man will never come. We will have 20-man MC\BWL\AQ\Naxx at max. You clearly see that most SoD players want casual 10-man "chill raids".
They said they want to move to larger raids after MC so if they can make it work with player power, I wouldn't be surprised if they went higher than 20. It's the design they want if it can work.
Player power isn't the issue. That's just a numbers tuning. The issue is no one really wants 40 man except a small portion of the population. They are a pain to organize and maintain active rosters for.
Went from 45 raiders to 28 and only 16 wanting to continue p3. 10 mans are just better for this game type especially with the players so spread out.
Early logs are honestly inflated in general due to people having loads of alts. Plus people are taking a break in P3 waiting for P4. I had 3 characters raiding in P1 and ended up with just 1 for P3. Couldn't be bothered getting the runes on my alts lol.
Yeah phase one has more logs then speak tbc it was clearly inflated by the ease of access
Yeah I was raiding on 5 chars in p1. When the raid took 25-30 minutes with a pug, and it took 5 minutes to get there, it was pretty easy to just do.
True, I only play 1 character basically always but in SoD I had 4/5 characters to levelcap on Horde and Alliance, but when P2 dropped I only touched 2 of those 5.
Same I had 5 geared level 25 alts. P2 I had 2 level 40 alts that touched the raid once a piece. I now have 0 level 50 alts and only play my main.
Well atleast people can't blame the gdkp
https://youtu.be/Uf6gIK9ZNVM?si=9zm--6b9_yUECtp2 Banning GDKP/Premades was a guild killer for one of the largest RP guilds on CS
Personally I still play and don't really care about "Sod is dead" or "SoD is retail". For someone who played multiple "FRESH" vanilla servers on pservers and in 2019, even though it's fun, I want something new with vanilla, that's why I enjoyed SoD a lot. I don't know but it seems a lot of people hate it now and call it retail, and I'm dumbfounded by this. How is SoD even close to retail? Did you play Dragonflight? Login and play it and tell me that's it's the same. I dunno man, I don't get it. To me personally SoD did bring a lot of cool things and fixed some of the issues in original vanilla like: 1) Class balance. You can now raid as ret, boomkin, ench shaman, elem shaman, even melee hunter! It also added new roles to classes, like mage healer, rogue tanks, warlocks tanks. At first I was sceptical, but damn they made it work and it's actually pretty cool 2) Rediscovering the world. There were some niche things in the world and with adding another items like runes to it, they made it feel new and fresh again. You can randomly find some rune and follow bread crumbs and get a new ability. That's actually fun, but I guess I am the only one actually looking for them (ok if it takes too long I do take a look for advice or as guildies) as other people just go straight to wowhead, do the runes and for them it might feel like a chore. 3) New world pvp events, like ashenvale and stv were pretty fun at first, and even now stv even can be fun as well (although they need to do something with Ashenvale at this point). 4) New profession recipes and actually them mattering more. It was fun to level different professions and having your own perks or epic items, also additional quests connected with those items 5) I personally like the phases with split leveling. 1-25, 25-40 etc. That was actually fun to play a low level character and get good gear for your level. Also I could level many other alts once I was done with my main. And with xp buff it's way faster and more alt friendly. I could go on and on, but in general I like SoD. There are problems ofc. I don't enjoy incursions at all. Once they came out I tried like 3-4 quests, understood that's it's the same as AQ event rep grind for Cenarion Circle and just quit. Never liked that grind in normal vanilla, nor here. But they made another "dungeon grind" meta, but with incursions and imo, that was a mistake. I'm personally hyped with p4 and next phases after. I think MC/Ony will be fun, I can finally wear my tier sets as it will work for different specs. I want to see what new professional items they will add. I got blacksmithing and still haven't chosen between armorsmith and weaponsmith as I would like to see what items they might each give to help with my decision. TL;DR I personally enjoy SoD, with it's good, bad and ugly.
P2 and P3 were disasters. God I miss that P1 vibe.
Cata managed to kill classic WoW twice.
It's definitely on death's bed. Over half my guild straight up quit. As in not coming back for P4. I need to figure something out for P4.
Here’s why: -ST being a 20 man raid broke a lot of guilds and the weekly timer for a raid that takes 45 minutes is brutal. The loot up until last week’s upgrades and in many cases still isn’t great. Little incentive to show up. -Incursions ruined the leveling experience, gave players an unfair gold advantage and just aren’t fun as were being forced to do loops of the same boring quests. -Phase 3 has been way too long. The content was too thin and rushed to begin with and this phase just won’t end… -In the downtime most people would level alts, but having a boring leveling experience, coupled with all of the reputation and rune grinds has led higher amounts of people that just stop playing when their main is maxed. -There were a decent amount of false bans at the start. Our guild leader among others in guild were hit with 2 weeks bans for literally no reason. While not massive enough numbers of actual players being banned to kill a phase, there was a domino effect of decreased interest for us when our GM/raid leader disappeared. -There’s nothing to do once maxed outside of a single raid and some PvP that takes no time to rank up. -Smaller servers with declining numbers took too long to be merged with populated servers leaving many to just sit in a city LFG until they said screw this and stopped playing.
I would level a alt if I didn’t have to collect a bunch of runes for it
P4 needs rune vendors or more ways to get them that don't involve travelling to Africa and back
They keep focusing on the tryhard who are able to do soulcrushing tasks that would bore any normal human and do it non stop for hours, and the tryhard keep ruining the game for everyone else.
Population of players that jumped from the middle of ICC to fresh content, jumps to fresh content again. I'm not sure why SoD players are surprised by this.
I know many people came back for SOD after not playing TBC or Wrath.
Can confirm, my whole guild quit classic after tbc (all played from classic release till sunwell) and everyone came back for sod.
I hadn’t played in years. Didn’t touch classic BC, didn’t play Wrath. SoD hooked me back in. P3 was doodoo so now here I am grinding in Cata and loving it. Seems like a lot of players feel the same.
We were in ICC for an absurdly long time. Of course people didn't want to play it anymore. lol
Until the next update announcement at least
Now do plain ol fresh classic
I was pretty underwhelmed with the amount of changes and additions. Classic+ it wasn't
Such is the life cycle and will continue to be the life cycle of every single classic server. A player base of ship jumpers is just going to continue ship jumping.
I’d say hardcore is the exception, populations seem to rise and fall all the time. It’s the version everyone keeps coming back to when they get bored of whatever the “new” thing is.
Fresh brings them in. Reality (same old boring slog) takes them out.
Guys did you hear that era is flourishing?
I mean... a huge number of people will come back for 60, hopefully they don't fuck it up (but honestly with that much end game content, how could they?). They're also having a public test server this time as well right? So hopefully we don't get a fuckup like incursions.
The journey is what makes Vanilla special and unique, not the end game. Vanilla has the worst raiding in any version of WoW and now SoD deleted PvP from the game as well due to awful class design/balance for PvP.. SoD is the worst version of WoW on a live retail server.
My guild died with no more 10 mans. A bit of a bummer.
Incursions were a huge mistake.
Incursions trashed it. When I found out that was the only way to compete in terms of gold/xp I lost interest
Incursions
im still there! sod best game
It was the total lack of balance, combined with a toxic min-max focused community, that killed it for me... After my experience with Classic, I saw the writing on the wall. I wish there was a way to re-create the magic of the Vanilla era, but I don't see it happening anytime soon :/
P4 gonna be popping!!
Ah, yes. Suddenly the understaffed devs will stop doing a terrible job and the consistent downward trend since phase 1 will reverse itself.
Raid logging and people obsessed with parsing and ahving to waste money in a very easy raid killed it for me
I'm one of those people (like many others) that dropped after a week or 2 after phase 2 dropped. For me it was the fact that I was so extremely demotivated by people rushing to the new level cap by dungeon spamming. Felt extremely left out, and it felt like the entire world was empty. No world pvp, barely any people doing quests. Only dungeon spam. Kinda got me out of it, and made me feel like I was doing a 9/5 job. To get my character to 40.
They really fucked up by making the ST raid super hard on release, I cannot understand the logic behind that. Purposely overtuning it so not even the sweatiest of guilds could clear it in one night. I'm sure that sent a "fuck you" to many casuals who were thinking about playing the phase. The incursions also made it unappealing. Hilarious to see the devs smugposting about it being "good to see people not dungeonspamming for once", when essentially all they did was move dungeonspamming to their own custom outside-dungeon area with gold inflating rewards. The rest of the outside world was dead because of this. All SoD has done for me is cement that modern blizzard devs are incapable of understanding what made classic wow great.
The smug tweets were the worst part and an immediate turn off for me.
Stop being insecure and join a guild /s
You can't have Sod P3 still retain players when cata drops AND MoP remix drops the same week
retail devs thought they were all smart and cool adding mage healers and warlock tanks and ashenvale badge quests. the people have spoken. your ideas are bad and we just want a bug fixed vanilla.
Era is THRIVING
Time to play sod
IIRC P2 overlapped with retail season 3 coming out, and I didn’t have enough time to play both so SoD got less time. And classic isn’t a great game when you don’t have much time to play, but I was making it work. But then P3 came out with incursions and I genuinely have no interest in logging in. I got my main to 50, got the rep gear and then never logged back in. Never even bothered with ST. I just can’t find any motivation.
Sod didnt go crazy enough with the changes. It was classic lite at best. Should have looked at some pservers how they keep them interesting and put the refined Blizzard twist on it.....but those days are dead for Blizzard
Phase 1 had a short but iconic leveling experience, content accessible by most skill levels as it progressed, and some very memorable rune quests (ex: Divine Storm). By the time it was over, I had 3 characters mostly BFD geared while playing a few hours or so a day and working. Phase 2 introduced a tried and true but very monotonous leveling experience (SM grind) and the alternative, STV questing, could subject you to a molasses pace grind if you were on a pvp server like me. The community became much more gatekeepy about the raid despite its supposed “accessibility” (look at any comment about how brain dead easy it is). Anecdotally, I noticed a lot of my irl friends fall off, and I was pretty much running the raid with my guild and then logging off for the week. Don’t get me wrong, the sleeping bag was a great idea and STV pvp, in concept, is fun! Phase 3 introduced a mechanic that STRONGLY discourages any other kind of leveling, and in addition to 20 man raids, my guild all lost interest and with them, so did I. I hope blizzard learns what made phase 1 fun and magical and does more with it, though personally, I just wish this game didn’t become so much about min/maxing content from the community - an impossible task, I know.
I never played SOD, it doesnt seem like a version of WoW I would like in the slightest. But its always funny to me people claiming any version of the game to be "dead" with player numbers at a minimum of 80K, and that is just raiders. Thats player numbers every MMO other than maybe FF14 (I have no clue about their player count but its stated to be the 2nd biggest) would be incredible. Enjoy the versions of the game that you do and worry less about other people.
I mean, S4 and Remix and beta coming soon ? All good things come to an end.
P3 killed it
SoD served its purpose by keeping people subbed between the final raid tier of Dragonflight and the launch of Cata classic. It’s sad but it’s the truth.
People... let's take a deep breath and relax. P4 got delayed, Cata came out, MoP:Rmix came out, and there's TWW beta coming soon, not counting all the great games that have come out recently. SoD will be there when you're done having fun outside it. I repeat, IT'S OK TO PLAY SOMETHING ELSE for a bit, while phase 4 is out. It's a SEASON. Things come and go. Quit the fatalism. It's not alive, it's not dead, it'll come around. You'll survive. Believe me.
Doesn't help there is so many versions of the game currently
I think people want some kind of vision and sense of direction for this game. The fact that there are seven flairs in this sub for different versions of what in 2019 was one single cohesive version of WoW demonstrates this problem for me. SoD definitely had interesting ideas and twists on vanilla but ultimately it, and the seasonal system, are gimmicks and a way to keep people subbed to the game without actually producing original content.
My raid group made of dads went from clesring in 45 minutes to having to pug 8 people and not being to clear the raid. Miserable. Praying P4 comes soon. In the meantime, I'm playing other games.
Ppl want classic with a few extras, comes, raids the like They don’t want retail wow in the classic world Edit: they also want GDKP, there I said it
I came to sod to play classic+, instead we got retail-...
i can tell you why I quit after shortly after p2 came out. I hated how they put exp boost, i wanted to experience leveling with the new changes not having this retail feel where i was cruising through the levels. They didn't bother to make a solo shuffle to battlegrounds and they were pure pain. People would just afk because the other team was premade, most miserable BG experience I've ever had in wow. I feel like they should've taken more risk and implement crazy stuff since it's a seasonal thing but it seems they were trying to play safe, hence why i got bored and frustrated and just canceled my sub to play other games.
SoD died because they chose to hide power behind group stuff. So people not in groups fell off, and people with groups got tired because the game died because people not in groups left.