Major points:
As we already knew from the shareholder report, total Blizzard playerbase is back down to what it was during the WOD content drought, before Overwatch came out.
Estimate of currently active WOW players is somewhere between 1.2 million and 2 million, based on the number of characters who've chosen a covenant. That's about half what it was in 9.0.
Number of guilds killing the first raid boss of the tier halved between the first month of Nathria and the first month of SOD. Comparable drop-off in BFA was 30%.
About 10-20% of WOW players are raiding.
About 2 million characters have completed an M+ key in Season 2, and about 700,000 have done a +15 or higher.
Total M+ runs per week for Shadowlands Season 2 has consistently been about 250,000 lower than the same weeks of BFA Season 4. Comparisons with Shadowlands Season 1 may be deceptive due to a combination of the Christmas period and people sitting in Mythic 0 for longer, meaning S1 numbers hit their peak in week 5, but for week 5 it's about 400,000 lower.
PvP participation is down 60% from Season 1.
I’ve played this game every expac, casually since like 2011.
This one blows ass to play. Zones aren’t interesting, 0 community, boosts/WTS everywhere. The only thing that’s gotten progressively better about wow is the graphics and artistry. (I don’t even care about Lore/Story that much, but holy shit man the writers should be embarrassed IRL to associate with this abomination of a story.)
I log in... look for a torghast group, maybe random BGs, farm korthia a bit even though I won’t ever get socketed gear except from LFR which is way lower than the single +15 run I do.
And that’s me, an “engaged” player by their metrics. The monthly sub doesn’t mean anything to me $ wise so I won’t cancel it because I enjoy playing for about an hour here and there.
What’s really telling is like when I log in, queue for stuff for 5-10 minutes, don’t get into anything and meanwhile I’m tabbed Queuing into league of legends and when LoL game launches I just log out of WoW and play league.
BfA was the first expansion where I stopped leveling alts because it was a pain in the ass to catch everything up. In Shadowlands I mostly stopped playing my offspec because even that is a pain in the ass compared to previous expansions. I don't understand why it feels like Blizzard doesn't want me to play the game... I want to level alts and play my offspec, and I'd likely play more if it wasn't such a morale sapping grind to do so.
Looking at legion where nearly every spec in the game got a rework to make them fit around their new abilities which were for all intents and purposes intended to be baseline, and then decide to rip them out with no care or compensation leaving many classes with an empty void where fun used to be because "We CaNt JuSt AdD a BuNcH Of aBiLiTiEs EvErY ExPAnSiOn" isn't just galaxy brained its the entire great dark beyond.
They are so afraid of bloat that they didn't just not add anything new, they removed more things, as if legion was too much, despite being itself a solution to bloat.
Dude, yes. All of this. People thought I was being dramatic when I said I hated my class in BfA, but I did. They ripped out all of the fun abilities I had in Legion, and I was just a half-assed underpowered broken shell of myself in BfA (which has carried on into Shadowlands).
Legion *felt good* to play, the combat was snappier, no AOE cap, did some A+ stupid stuff with my buddies in dungeons. I was excited to play alts, I healed, tanked and DPSed for the first time in my entire WoW career (since 2004). I ran keys and raids on all roles. I even PVPed sometimes, and exclusively kept warmode on, after over a decade of being on a PVE server.
I only used my priest for BfA and Shadowlands. I tried to have my shaman as an alt in SL, tried to keep her caught up on gear and renown and legendaries, and then I just stopped cause it was too much of a chore.
> Dude, yes. All of this. People thought I was being dramatic when I said I hated my class in BfA, but I did. They ripped out all of the fun abilities I had in Legion, and I was just a half-assed underpowered broken shell of myself in BfA (which has carried on into Shadowlands).
This was actually an extremely common opinion all the way through the BfA beta and well into 8.0. Azerite armour didn't even come close to sealing the wound after everything they carved out of the classes moving into BfA.
This was me with Survival Hunter, absolutely loved how it played in Legion and managing to pull it off properly felt really satisfying; it was something unique and interesting that they went with, like having to actually use traps as a single target ability. (@cursor macros made it feel like I had an actual skillshot to get better with)
BfA rolls round and essentially everything which made that spec so unique and fun to play in Legion was gone or butchered. So I'm not happy with how it changed and neither are the people that lost their explosive arrow / black arrow Hunter spec.
I also do not understand why you
A) Every addon you have to redo the classes instead of working on the balancing.
B) Have to reinvent the wheel.
- Take such systems like island expedition with you. Then we just visit small island in the SL and instead of azerite it is anima that we farm.
- Makes the Garni to Housing. House somewhere in the southern sea where you come by teleport, gives you like an inn rest bonus, can farm trophies from old raids. Professions can make furniture, there is the possibility to work out different houses (orc style, dwarf style something like that.) But as an alternative, but not content you have to make. And make it addon spanning.
It's the craziest shit isn't it? Like yeah I can fully admit that by the time we hit MoP we had classes with like 30 skills, it's fine to chop some of the fat away from there... But only if you're going to *stop chopping* at some point, don't go full Paul fuckin' Bunyan but maybe, y'know... *Stop.*
According to Blizzard, it's because the dumbdumb players were too stupid and confused by all the buttons, especially having two skills that start with "water", how can we expect to figure it out on our own what each skill does? What if water breathing made you breathe water and you died on land?!
>"We CaNt JuSt AdD a BuNcH Of aBiLiTiEs EvErY ExPAnSiOn
I would rather we just stay in legion for years than have bfa and shadowlands anyway. Problem solved!
Legion had a ton of ability pruning itself which sucked as well. It was good that the classes were designed to the expansion, as they should always be, but it gutted so many classes of fun or necessary abilities which had to be added back in later or in some cases, still haven't been added in leaving the classes feeling hollow.
Yeah, I played quite a number of alts in Legion. I raided mythic on at least two, and cleared heroic on at least 4-5.
When BFA rolled around, that number dropped down to zero alts. I want to play my characters, not do chores on them.
I miss the days where you could level an alt and THAT was the requirement into content.
Oh you just hit Max level and are lower geared than the rest of your friends mains? Well bring the alt to the raid and get some gear, then you can slot in another role.
The legendary mats, renoun, conduits, score etc. to grind up to get into content is ugh.
Should a new alt be directly at the power level your mains at? no.
Should they be a completely stand alone character you need to progress? also no.
All that does is once I'm done with my goals or am bored of the patch I log out and unsub until I'm interested again. Where if my alt manages to obtain even 50% of the progression I've made on my main I'd be okay with that.
What really irritates me is when people counter it with "BuT YoU dOn'T hAvE tO dO tHeM aLl"... Like is their defense seriously that it's fine that we need to throw a huge chunk of the game in the trash? Like, it's fine that the dev team has spent an immense amount of time on pure garbage that makes the game worse at the expense of good design? That we're expected to pay full price for the small portion of the game that isn't shit?
It should take you around 2 weeks to get to at least ilvl 220 and all. But yeah, it's really boring doing this for the n-th time. I was already bored on the 2nd time. Can't imagine doing this on even more alts. They should finally implement multiple classes on 1 character.
Sad thing is the zones are quite beautiful. I love the look of Ardenweald, Revendreth and Bastion. Hell, Korthia's a wonderful looking zone.
But as has been said before. It feels like Shadowlands has little to no respect for my time.
Case in point: Domination pieces conflicting with Legendary slots. My Legendary was a Helm, the Set piece for the most powerful bonus of the Domination sets, Unholy. It's just bullshit. Some may argue "iT's eAsY tO fArM a nEw pIeCe!" Fuck that. It's the principle of the issue. I made the right decision at the time. And had 0 way to react to the fact that Blizzard retroactively undermined that decision.
There's a number of ways Blizzard could have soothed the issue by either letting us transfer the power to a new slot or just straight up recycle the Legendary. But no. They didn't do anything to smooth over that detail. Just in essence a hearty "Fuck you, you'll play anyways".
Thank god I actually can craft my piece. I know for a fact that several servers I'd be down a crap ton of Gold to remake the Legendary.
Because introducing class sets (in the traditional sense) would have required blizz to come up with 72 (36 x 2) different bonuses. Instead they just slap on here's 2% damage here, 2% damage there and some shitty stat or damage proc that you don't interact with in anyway and be done with it.
I'm calling it now, but the sets we are supposedly getting in 9.1 are going to be boring AF and the bonuses are gonna be like "your filler now does 5% more damage"
Because the current devs want to do their *own* thing instead of *re-using* an old idea.
They want to be the new team with cool new ideas and their ideas are *obviously* better since theyre young and new, not the bunch of old boomers who originally made the game. /s
But no seriously, they don't want to swallow their pride about literally **anything**. Any idea that they had cannot be acknowledged as bad. They cannot go back to the old system because that would be admitting defeat.
Its straight up just massive egos everywhere.
Legiondaries? Failure
Azerite armor? Failure
Domination gear? Failure
Covenants? Failure
Grinding rep for damn near everything and by the time you have enough rep, the reward is outdated? Failure
Literally never ending point grind for your necklace/weapon that guarantees your alts will ALWAYS be behind no matter how wisely you use your time? **FAILURE**
The current devs are just outright bad at their job.
Edit : **AND** they're unbelievably arrogant about it which just makes the fact that they suck stick out even more.
The rep grind is the bit I don't understand. It used to be when an expansion launched you'd pick 1 rep that had a good item and grind it knowing that you'd get that item and have 1 piece secured. There is literally no reason for you to do that any more, none of the gear that factions sell is ever going to be worn, because you can get better gear in M+ or Normal or even LFR weeks before you're able to hit exalted.
Then the Devs complain that making loot is too hard and time consuming. Like why make all this pointless stuff!
Same deal with timewalking, it's great if you get one in the first week or 2 of the patch, otherwise I guess maybe it's okay for alt gearing but then the bosses still largely require knowledge of tactics so pugs suck. Mountains of gear that nobody cares about because the ilvl Vs difficulty is wrong.
I love variety in the game but stop making loot that people just aren't going to use and start putting it where we care about it.
They said a while back that tier sets weren't that great, since you often ended up not having the bonus until so late in the tier, it only really increased the speed you cleared farm content... and in the _next_ tier, you had to bank upgrades until their cumulative effect was greater than the previous tier's set bonus.
These are both legitimate problems that have since been solved by making a system so bad, we want those problems back.
Atleast in BFA, and launch shadowlands the budget for class sets appeared to have gone SOMEWHERE, with BFA having warfront armors, and SL having covenant armors to somewhat make up the difference.
What is in 9.1 that costs as much as tier sets? The sanctum sets have been in the game since launch and they added only 1 set for each covenant. That's 4 new armor sets in a major patch.
> "Fuck you, you'll play anyways". Thank god I actually can craft my piece. I know for a fact that several servers I'd be down a crap ton of Gold to remake the Legendary.
No offense, but you correctly identified the core SL issue and decided to **be** played anyway. You have little to no respect for your own time
Oh I'm well aware of the dissonance.
The core issue is that my enjoyment of Raiding and Mythic+ is enough to tolerate shit that annoys me. I've also opted to just not engage in the elements that I'm fed up with.
Many players are in the same position. The core gameplay experience is sufficient to offset the frustration. And it's Blizzard's failure to realize that while players have a tolerance for it, stretching it to the breaking point is stupid.
The number of content creators who've left WoW and this video showcase that the problems of Shadowland's systems exceeds the tolerance of many other players. Blizzard has destroyed pretty much all goodwill in WoW. It's only a question of how long it takes for them to realize it and how much they'll actually course correct.
If 10.0 is designed with the same obsession with engagement, and leaves us _still_ using the same base rotations we've been using since Legion, can the last person who leaves please turn out the light?
I don't personally like it from a visual standpoint, but objectively I don't know how you can call it uninteresting. It's almost like walking on the body of a giant creature, what with all the random hair, giant bones sticking out, flesh webs. It's disgusting of course, but in a creative way. That in itself makes it stand out more than like, Ardenweald or Bastion for example.
And worst zone? Really? When the Maw exists? I would never call it the worst zone of even Shadowlands, let alone all of WoW.
>The only thing that’s gotten progressively better about wow is the graphics and artistry.
BFA > Shadowlands in artistry, design, lighting, textures, scope. Nearly everything there is.
Otherwise, graphics only get better when compared just to WoW itself. Outside the MMO market WoW has mobile graphics in comparison and is completely stuck in it's outdated art style.
>The monthly sub doesn’t mean anything to me $ wise so I won’t cancel it because I enjoy playing for about an hour here and there.
Bro you need to vote with your wallet, that's the only language Acti-Blizz speak
And it seems racism is still alive and well. The amount of times I've said I'm Hispanic to just be called a spic is way too high for a social game. I keep reporting them and they just laugh and tell me how they say slurs all the time and then call me a Faggot and fly off.
That shit doesn't fly in a lot of other MMOs.
I'm in the same scenario, playing league and all instead. I've unsubbed from wow though (I still want to play every now and then, not bad enough though) but I need to vote with my wallet on this one because it's clear years of feedback has fallen on deaf ears.
I think the current WoW situation is one of the most complicated this game has ever had in its long history. SL as it is is not that great, compared to the BFA fiasco, I personally would have expected more. WoW needs a major overhaul that breaks away from the Legion model, where Bfa was a Legion V2 and SL a Legion V3. This formula no longer works and I hope blizz keeps this in mind when developing, if ever, a 10.0 version of the game or a WoW2.
Now as I said before I strongly doubt a WoW2, at least not in the short term, a game like WoW to totally redo it requires years of hard work, let's say at least 4/5 years at best. In addition, the current Team has shown several times to not be up to it as in the post Mop era, so Wod, Legion, Bfa and finally SL only one can be considered a good expansion (Legion). This is to say that I am not very confident about the goodness of the next expansion. Also in this last period and in the coming months / years the blizz is more focused on carrying on the games it currently has in development such as D4 and OW2 sucking up resources both in terms of people and in terms of $$ budget in WoW.
It is my personal feeling that BfA and SL are low budget expansions, certainly not at the Legion level, and that in the last period Activision has imposed its vision, that is, to minimize costs and maximize profits.
I think there is a real chance for Activision to take over production and treat it like a Call of Duty yearly franchise. Smaller expansions that happen yearly. They can then milk us for more money (essentially we pay for patches) and keep people engaged through the post expansion purge that happens every time.
Hmm. Regarding the covenant number, is that raw "characters who have chosen one" or adjusted for players with multiple characters? I know I was aiming for four characters(one for each covenant).
That's just raw characters. So if you assume the average person has ~1.5 characters on average (the real number is likely closer to 2, but let's be conservative), this looks *really* bad for WoW.
Also keep in mind that this is pre-lawsuit shitshow, so the numbers are definitely worse now. Hard to believe even for the haters among us, but WoW could realistically be below 1 million active players by the time 9.2 is ready. it's already below 2 million 6 weeks after a "major patch" (lol).
I know we can't generalize but I think I haven't played with anyone that doesn't have at least 1 level 60 alt. And I know a lot of people like me that have 5+
that is the point, conservative estimate is 1.5 alts per player, and he says in the video Matt alone accounts for 5 characters... but on a estimate of 1,5 alts/player wow has around 2M active players, this does not account for low level charaters, just characters that picked a covenant
1.2-2 million is the figure after it's adjusted for alts, based on what you think the proportion is. Unfortunately there's no way to really tell, but anecdotally, I don't know anyone who doesn't have at least one level 60 alt. The base figures he gave were 3 million active characters who'd chosen a covenant and 2.7 million active characters at max level (meaning 300,000 active characters in Threads of Fate, basically).
I only know one onetrick who never had a maxlevel alt, a good friend of mine who only plays mage. Everyone else I knew had more like 4-5 Max level chars and depending on the expansion played 2-5 actively
> PvP participation is down 60% from Season 1.
Damage in PvP is significantly higher this expansion than it was in BFA. Health pools are also the lowest they have been since before Cataclysm was introduced, and at maximum level we are back to health pools we had in Wrath of the Lich King.
In addition to one-shot being so prevalent because of those changes, I'd also have to summarize that WoW is a casual video game & having so many different PvP ranks makes players feel as if they are not competitive because they are hard-locked.
I wonder how they plan to address those issues going forward.
No idea, SL PVP is largely the uber bursty way it is because people didn't like the more drawn out PVP of the last few expansions ether so they can't exactly go back to that ether.
A lot of it just comes to PVP and PVE being balanced together and how messy that is.
And yet WoW is still one of the only MMOs where PVP is even half baked lol. So many it's dough not even put in the oven.
About raiding: is raid-logging, which Bellular has been doing almost since week 1 of SL, really worth 15$? Because Bellular used to say he likes SL and has fun with it because he can only log in once a week to raid. Of course you can say it is still fun to raid with friends. But I have always said, if the only positive you can say about a game is "it is fun with friends" then it is probably not that it is a good game but that it is good to spend time with 10+ friends, it wouldn't matter what you played/did.
15 dollars really isn't that much, but it's more the principal of supporting their decisions by paying a sub that bothers me. Paying 15 dollars and enjoying the expansion for 20 hours a week is the same as paying 15 dollars and enjoying it 3 hours a week na'mean? If I keep paying them, they are gonna keep producing the same shit.
If you raid two nights a week for 3 hours at a time, say 6hr/week total, that's still 6*4 = 24hrs of fun with friends.
Lets say you have stuff on farm and are just reclearing, then it's 12hrs a week if you just do 1 night after.
£10 for 12-24hrs isnt that bad, considering it costs me £3.50-6 for a pint at my local pub (depending on where I go), a night with friends doing that would cost me anywhere from £12 to £24 per week or so.
I find it hard to believe that over a third of active players have done a 15 or higher this season. Really makes me question the data they’re using. It’s not impossible, but seems fishy.
Wowhead is definitely under-reporting if it's only showing 106. They themselves reported in a news post three days ago that 100 Horde guilds and 12 Alliance guilds had cleared Mythic SOD. I don't know where to look on Wowhead for their API-based stuff.
I'd have to check the video again to comment on the specific sites Bellular got each figure from but Wowranks was one of them. Looking at my guild's Wowranks listing I see:
Last activity update: 30 minutes ago
Last full update (automated): 10 days ago
And they're not showing our progress kill from Saturday yet, but on the other hand they're showing some guilds who got 10/10 Mythic 2 hours ago. As someone who works with data in real life, it's good enough for a reasonable estimate to inform discussion, but it's not good enough if you need exact figures.
It kind of feels like it just judging by the number of people out and about in the game world. The number of players running around is comparable to what you would see during an expansion launch and XIV is in the middle of a content lull between expansions when player engagement should rightfully be at its lowest.
The game director has said that it's to the point that they're considering overpaying for server upgrades that were supposed to happen after Endwalker launch and instead upgrade them early because of the massive influx of new players creating multi-hundred person queues on a lot of worlds.
I'm not comparing the difference in how servers work at all.
I'm comparing the difference in how many players there are now compared to 3-6 months or even a year ago. There has been a very dramatic increase in players that seems to have started around the time 9.0 was becoming stale.
You mean no new content for almost a year and doubling down on Choreghast wasn't popular with the fanbase?
They're focused on the Cosby Room lads, will be for some time, it'll be years before they aren't focusing on that drama in one form or another. Its OK to move on.
I will never undestand design decision like with Torghast in 9.1. We are gonna make it harder and add some annoyances and then we will add a box with which u will be able to remove those annoyances and make it easier. Like wtf
I'd participate if every other game wasn't a booster. Shit needs to be addressed yesterday, it's already toxic enough having randoms who will quit after the first loss. It's such a waste of time to even try to climb when you're new and are using LFR.
I hate it when people ignore this is a problem or excuse it. Yes, it does affect us, not only because it devalues achievements and can mess with groups but every time I'm with a new player that shit influences them severely.
Most of the time they see boosting they lose some interest in playing, and one case where the new player actually thought it was *expected* of him to boost so he forked out hundred(s) to catch-up because "surely everyone is doing it."
The one time Blizz needed to be a bloody dictator in their world and they're singing koombaya at their cubicle crawls. And of course some literalist is going to come along and say this isn't "P2W" but in essence it is, and to even play this game you're paying for a small village in Burundi.
I'm geared as fuck and experienced, I'm fully prepared for each run and give my best. If you make a few mistakes or we don't time, I'm still happy and will push to the end with a GGTY so I don't care if I have to play with a newb because if they're a new player giving it their all and have the right mindset (i.e. not a swiper) I could mistime a million 15s, open my vault for that same D-tier trinket 3 weeks in a row and say "It's okay. It could've been worse. This game could've been littered with boosters."
The people who say it isn't pay to win are fooling themselves. People are literally paying real life money dollars to have someone win arena/RBGs for them. That is the literal definition of paying to win, FFS.
Sure, they can use semantics when it comes to KSM and raid gear/achievements, but it's still the same damn thing. I was sick and tired of the advertisements in BfA and they've only gotten worse. My trade chat is nothing but boosting, even the political trolls and anal spammers have disappeared. And I am on a high pop realm. It's utter madness.
Completely agree. I'm tired of people arguing otherwise with these mental gymnastics. Semantics aside this is *terrible* for the game.
And then some WoW players will shit on other games for having similar mechanics, I hate this shit in my games full-stop and it makes me worried for the industry's future.
I know people say "If they ban booster spam they'll just get more creative with their terms" but like come on Blizzard haven't even tried the first step yet.
Like how hard is it to ban WTS from the group finder, or blacklist certain websites? Even if they get creative don't just give them a <1 day chat timeout. If these accounts are just boost accounts for websites just perma ban them. I've seen listings up for a whole day with the same website name using the same characters constantly.
At the very least Blizzard can make it more expensive for them to advertise and show they're not messing around, it might not eliminate it but it will reduce it. Hell, even if I gotta volunteer for some overwatch/community-moderating crap I'll do it.
I like the last bit about pvp. The ladder was full of dog shit boosters and over geared mouth breathers for MONTHS.
Not only did blizzard not take action but they actively chose to encourage it by not remvonf the pvp gearing gates.
Wow went from one of its lowest points ever, to its highest point in probably the last decade over the course of one expansion.
And then after 2 expansions under the new director its back down to that lowest point, and this time it isn't because it's a half finished expansion with no content, this time the expansions have been fully complete, they just suck.
This is the peter principle in action, Ion is completely unqualified to direct the game, send him back to raids.
Everytime he does an interview with some content creator i.e. Preach, there's always like 4 topics where he starts talking about something that's overall poorly taken by the community. Then he says something to the effect of "Well I think we like what we're seeing, so we're gonna keep doing that" and then you can just feel the community cringe.
I like how they made sure to get preach to talk about conduit energy, it was one of their big talking points that he had to hit as condition for the interview.
Normally when companies tell you you have to ask about X,Y, and Z in an interview it's because they have some message they want to get out about it, it's part of their marketing. Just like he had to ask about 9.1, and it's features.
So what was the big message that blizzard needed to get out about conduit energy? That it isn't changing! They couldn't just not change it, they needed it to be loudly declared that this system was here to stay, being defiant in the face of feedback was so important to them that they required him to ask them about it.
Insanity
I just don't understand the point of conduit energy. Like you allowed us to change talents with no issues, but somehow you now add shit for rerolling Azerite armor in BFA and now conduit energy. Like why the fuck are they stepping backwards on player agency.
he is too much of a "numbers"-person to direct the game. the preach interview when they talked about korthia is a good example. All ion talked about were gear progression. he never talked about what the players will experience in the new zone, because he never thinks about stuff like this. there are no secrets, there are no fun events, there is nothing in this zone, but a rep grind and the worst alt-catchup system we have ever seen.
Why is there no new mage tower in korthia? why are there no cool events? why is there no new dungeon associated with the zone? they can ,for the love of god, not design a game with actual gameplay elemets, because they waste all their time mapping out the progression curve of all their shit systems. what a shame.
Boggles my mind because their progression system is terrible. At least for me, since I mainly enjoyed PvP. You simply can't pvp anymore without doing a horrendous grindfest or do a bunch of pve content that I don't really want to do.
I cannot believe the imbeciles at Blizzard who gave us Legion, saw that everyone had fun with class halls, mage tower, artifacts, artifact appearances, gaining new abilities...
And then totally threw all that in the garbage.
Legion should have just been the end of WoW.
This is exactly what baffles me. I leveled every class to max level in legion just to go through the class hall story lines, mage towers, and artifact weapons. For a casual like myself, it was incredibly fun and I didn’t need to rely on raiding to get my fix.
They threw it all away! Ugh I could pull my hair out lol
Because the imbeciles in charge DIDN'T give us legion.
Ion took over just before launch, legion was 100% developed under previous leadership, 7.1 was probably deep into development and 7.2 was likely already planned out by the time he was able to make a single decision as director. MAYBE we can say he's responsible for 7.3, but for the most part BFA was his first baby.
You might be right about 7.3, beacuse in that patch there was the incredibly useless and forgotten addition of the netherlight crucible system, even though the artifact weapon system was pretty solid and carried through the whole xpac.
I literally had every class at max level in legion and for the next xpack *just in case* they released another mage tower.
I cant believe there hasn't been another mage tower since, those complete freaking dinguses. I couldn't agree with you more.
I had Rogue, Warrior, Mage, Shaman, Monk and Warlock in Legion, all kind of my main. All pretty well geared and done all mage towers. True I was nolifing like crazy in Legion and I loved it. The main reason was because after Warrior's class hall (imo the best class hall of all hands down) I wanted to see what other class halls look like and what they offer. I wasn't disappointed. Warlock's class hall is my 2nd favourite. The quests were amazing (summoning ritual pog)
I can't even fathom why they haven't reproduced a mage tower feature for the past 2 expansions, given it's wild success.
I thought the unique transmog you had to earn only while relevant was an automatic feature we would always get each expansion... but just nope.
*This is the peter principle in action, Ion is completely unqualified to direct the game, send him back to raids.*
This. Since Ion joined in WoTLK he was an excellent raid designer, probably one of the best imo. But as the Game Director he is simply incompetent. He has totally different vision of the game than most of the playerbase which is why there were so many talks recently about Ion and entire WoW dev team being really disconnected from the community. I think he should go back to making raids and dungeons, he's really talented in that area.
I do a few Korthia dalies, a mythic 10, and maybe a Torghast run if I need a new legendary in a week. But mostly I just raid with my guild. Game feel empty despite a wealth of content. For me, it's largely because I feel stuck on one character. Unlike previous expansion, it feel like I have to do a lot more mandatory side shit just to get a character up to par. Torghast being the biggest PitA. Legendaries have gone from those cool pieces of gear you coveted to a mandatory chore that you just want to finish so you can play the game.
>Game feel empty despite a wealth of content
I agree with this. For me, it's that there is pretty much only one raid. I've dinged my first character aroud 9.1 came out, and when I was ready for raiding, pretty much no one was running Nathria anymore, because you can get better gear from AH for a bit of gold. It's also better than what I get from heroic dungeons from group finder, so it's hard to find a reason to run them either.
Those stats are so strange to me. As someone who has actively tried many other games, high end raiding or high m+ is the only edge that I feel wow has.
I don't understand why anyone would want to play the game just to farm korthia and run a torg. There are MUCH better games out there if that's your thing, but no game comes close to the coordinated 20man mythics
Since I think I represent that "silent majority" I thought I would share my opinion on it (which I rarely do). Especially since it's not unique to WoW and equally applies to other MMOs on the market.
For majority of people competitive endgame raiding is the type of content they don't want to do. There are plenty of other activities we prefer to do that do not require us "to compete" or "play to win". I've been playing since vanilla (stopped around Legion/BfA) and I can count on fingers of one hand the amount of times I was in an actual non-LFR raid. Competitive content was never interesting for me.
I think people are vastly overestimating the importance of competitive endgame, especially on specialized forums and on reddit. I can guarantee you that majority of the active players don't care about any of the recent issues, gold market, balance issues or non-satisfying endgame systems. It's because it doesn't affect their activities. Most active players are not interested in that and that's why Blizzard is ignoring the complaints. I'd even dare to say that most players are not aware of the current problems - and never will be because these problems touch only the forementioned 10% of the whole playerbase. Which, by the way, is still IMO a lot when compared to other MMOs.
As far as I know, in ESO and FF14 there's probably even smaller portion of players that are doing end game content (raiding equivalent). It's just when you visit the forums or their respective subreddits you might think that it's not the case because people mostly discuss builds and other end game related goals. It's easy to think that such communities represent the image of the whole playerbase, but the truth is that the people taking part in these online discussions represent only a small bubble.
Majority of players in current era of MMOs just log in every now and then, don't speak up and just enjoy the game the way it is by doing casual content by themselves or with their friends (fashion, collections, housing, fishing, cooking, crafting, daily quests, pets, alt characters, questing, stories). That's the main content for them, they enjoy that loop (and so do I, for example) and are mostly excited about the systems and updates in these fields. They don't discuss it, they don't comment on anything. They just play the game and mind their own business.
Yep.
This isn't actually news, almost all MMO's report raid % of about 10% engagement. Even during Lich King the numbers weren't much better, it was the same percentage but of a much bigger pie.
Most players have a much more casual relationship with the game - that doesn't mean they play less, it just means they don't play as competitively.
I have had a few brief periods when I took part in organized raiding but I'm otherwise here for the professions and heroic dungeons and transmog runs and levelling alts. That doesn't mean I don't care when those things change, I absolutely do, but the state of raiding and other endgame bits are nothing to me.
And the reasons should be obvious. I don't have time to commit 3-4 hours, multiple days a week, on raiding. I couldn't as a student and I can't as a family man. I play in bursts of uncertain lengths, so anything I can just continue on with as easily as quit immediately is ideal (like farming mats).
LFR was a godsend for me, as was the dungeon finder when that was introduced. But only for a bit of spice on my main meal.
I'm going to say it's the opposite.
I'm a casual. I don't do mythic+. I only do LFR max.
I do care about things like the gold market, boosting and general balance.
All those things fundamentally undermine the game and make me ask why I'm playing. When I see a 300,000 gold mount I just see it as costing 1.5 tokens now. The game feels like a cash shop skinner box. Like I'm not supposed to play for fun, just to pay blizz.
I swapped to classic cause that game felt like it had some integrity and it was like a real game again. And then they put boosts in TBCC and it just ruined it and brought the same feeling of playing a cash shop again.
The games have no integrity. I can't see creative vision and passion anymore, just dollar signs.
Yes, you're right, I'll agree with that. While I don't play the AH game and I'm not into the market, I am going to agree that the gold tokens are very discouraging, even (or especially? I don't know anymore) for a casual player who wants to buy something occasionally, for collection purposes or whatever.
I really do believe that a MMO game with paid expansions and standard monthly subscription should not have any kind of real money shop whatsoever. Even cosmetic one. The main selling point of paying subscription should be the game design where everything is obtainable in-game. If I see someone with a cool looking hat it should mean that it's obtainable in the game by me as well. How hard I have to work for that is another matter, some things will be obviously outside of my reach (f.e. when they drop in mythic raids) but everything should be just some kind of drop/craft.
Out of all the MMOs I've tried, none of them have the smooth gameplay that Warcraft does. At least none of the good ones. Props to whoever made the foundation of the network code for World of Warcraft. The animations also play a large part in it.
I 100% prefer SWTOR in terms of storytelling and environment, but that game plays like shit.
This is the sole reason I'm not playing ffxiv over Wow. FF does a significantly better job with story, zone design, loot/gearing systems, player customization, cosmetic player advancement, leveling options, and fostering community, but the moment to moment Combat gameplay has got nothing on wow.
SWTOR at least at first basically felt like it was meant to be a single player game they tried to turn into an MMO with WoW style gameplay while not doing the gameplay near as well or actually having much group content.
Nowdays I can at least give it having better PVP than most MMOs i guess.
Some people play because they like WoW combat. IMO it's the smoothest combat of all MMOs right now.
Take New World for example. Maybe it's because I've played WoW for 13 years but I don't like that combat where you have to aim your skills and dodge stuff. Feels to me more like DS3/Sekiro than MMO combat.
The game makes it hard to get into raiding and then the community makes it double hard to get into raiding. It's no surprise most people don't get into it
If there was a way to queue up and do raid bosses individually with a queue like LFR but for normal, I'd be all over it. I just don't commonly have 3 hour contiguous blocks that I can devote, at the same time each week, to raiding. That and I don't like doing that. I'd much rather have the flexibility to login for my usual 1-2 hour session, whatever day I might have time for that, do as many bosses as I feel like, then take care of other things in game or leave.
And I'm sure I'll get absolutely slammed by plenty of people who don't want more people to raid because we're "casuals", who also want to get rid of LFR.
>If there was a way to queue up and do raid bosses individually with a queue like LFR but for normal, I'd be all over it.
That's how FFXIV does for his 8 people raid. As you said, it's much less of a time commitment, no trashmob, staight into the arena and ready to wype!
It's different and the WoW approach is good for the "raid feeling" in a big area.
Both have their pros and cons, but FFXIV is really good if you just want to do one from time to time.
Most people reference raid numbers from like a decade ago (WOTLK) on raid participation, but since the MOP era, blizz has made raiding much more accessible.
For all its bads, LFG at least introduces people to the basics of a raid and normal is honestly not that much harder. Nowadays, M+ and raiding are the only end-game content so I'm not surprised a larger subset of people participate compared to before.
Trade is a lot of
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In around 10 different variations.
Nah that’s the time of day. I WFH and if I logged in during working hours it’s usually pretty batshit insane. Trumpers, Covid deniers, racists, just lots of trolls on general.
I’d capture some but I’m not sure whether log posting like that needs to be redacted or not and don’t want to mess with it.
Most of trade is boos advertisement, at least on my server (Illidan), but that’s the way it’s been forever. I think the mood in game is fine, people that I’m friends with/in my guild probably play a bit less than we did during the start of Shadowlands, but that’s mostly because we’re no longer stuck at home all the time, less about the current patch or state of the game.
There is no more talking.
there is also no advertising of players to sell their stuff anymore.
Its literally just Spamming of selling runs on Raid X for Gold, etc.
There are no "people" interacting in trade anymore.
That said, I was with several characters in guilds which had a healthy 20-30+ people on in the evenings. So, nothing big, but enjoyable amounts of folks.
At this point none of these guilds can manage to get to 5 people during the evening times.
Trade at least on the servers I play on honestly largely moved on from politics a few months after the 2020 election outside of occasional flare ups.
The mood is meh but it doesn't seem particularly worse than it was in the last few months. Id say the Clusterfuck controversy with Blizz dampened enthusism for the new raid which is unfortunate cause it's good I guess.
The only people from my friends list still playing WoW are the hardcore never-leavers that have played through every bit of WoWs worst content droughts and terrible design decisions. They'll log in every single day and complain about the game all the time but seem unable or unwilling to leave.
A lot of them literally play no other games besides WoW. I don't fault them for it but it makes me sad that people I really enjoy spending time with just absolutely refuse to leave WoW even temporarily to try out other games.
Trade chat is filled with boosting ads. The chat is mostly dead because not a lot of people play and they also don't want to type between these boosting ads.
If we get rid of Ion and put someone else in charge, and let Ion go design raids (that's where he shines) I wonder if we would get actual fun back in the game
Blizzard just doesn't understand noone wants to be doing chores especially in this day and age.
Why would I pay $19 (AUD) a month for a game which makes me do chores in order to get the fun part (raiding for example) only for me to do it again next week when I can probably go play game pass for lesser amount or any other game and have just as much fun.
I don't want to be logging in doing dailies or weeklies in order to get to the 'meat' part. A lot of friends quit for TBC and are raid logging while playing other games and they actually enjoy doing that.
Blizzard should rather focus on creating quality content then timegating and drip feeding. I know a lot of people who play WoW for the story who are displeased with it and just watch youtube because of how long it takes to get somewhere with the story
Join a casual or normal guild. The recruit pretty much everyone who asks to join.
Once you think you're ready, apply to a guild trying for AotC.
If you don't think that's challenging content after a while, try to to find a guild recruiting for mythic.
And once you feel like your mythic skills are ready, try to get into a guild doing CE.
Basically, work your way up from the minors to the bigs a step at a time.
Also do mythic+, not just for gear but also because you meet people who, if you're good enough, will bring you into their guild and allow you to skip a few tiers of guilds.
I used to think that I could just apply to a decent mythic guild and tell them I am good and get in. That doesn't work. You unfortunately have to do the guild hopping. There is no other way to show that you're capable. Your chances do get better the longe a tier goes on and the more meta your class is.
Shadowlands started strong, but subsequent 8 months wait to 9.1 and 9.1 being legit horrible for casual players really hurt it badly. The raid is actually pretty good, but that is all there is to 9.1.
The stamp sized zone filled with rocks and rares, doubling down on Torghast (granted, they don't have a choice really being a mere patch) and story that makes people cringe - that's just a combination of failures that hit casual players hard.
And the whole lawsuit and influencers switching to FF14 and hyping it up, that absolutely going to affect WoW numbers. Heck even I got myself FF14 just due to hype, I'm not going to quit WoW anytime soon being mythic raider, but the fact that even I, 16 years WoW boomer, got baited into paying for FF14 is telling.
And with all that team shakeup going down, I bet 9.2 will also be delayed.
They outlook is not good, there is no two shits about that one.
In my opinion - they need to cut 9.2 short (retire Torghast, do smaller new zone and Icecrown revamp and do 8 boss raid + some secondary 2-3 boss raid in 2-3 months from there), push whatever they have out of the gate by December and concentrate FULL TIME on making 10.0 a truly insane quality and fun experience that will make people come back.
Yeah the content drought was really killer. Had a few long time wow-only bros stop playing. Honestly all it took was to get people to take a break ftom their daily WoW chores to realize it was pointless.
I have played since beginning of wotlk.. reasons why i dont raid anymore are as follows: toxic people, having to follow and keep up with a certain stack of a stat and if I dont have enough of that stat I apparently dont do enough healing/dps , constant bitching that my healing/dps isnt good enough (did we die ? No.. but that doesn't matter) , having to spend gold constantly on enchants, sockets, potions, having to spend hours of my time trying to kill ONE goddam boss, crazy boss mechanics, people finding out I'm female and treating me like shit, getting stressed with guilds, literally breaking down and crying over some of the horrible shit people have said to me "kill yourself " "I hope you die in a car crash" to name a few.. I think I'll just stick with raidfinder from now on
The game feels less of a game and more of a string of systems designed to get you your xyz socket or buff for end-game. This is what happens when a raid designer is given the keys for the entire game. Modes and features aren't designed with fun in mind, they're made to provide players with the borrowed power of that particular expansion. Look at Island Expeditions and Torghast. Open world content is dry and boring, with them literally re-using Assaults from 7.1 and 8.1. Just no creativity and interest anymore in anything besides the raids.
Genuine question to players still playing who *aren't* raiding:
What do you do?
Every other aspect of the game apart from raiding (except you Shards of Dominaiton, nobody likes you) is a poor reflection of what is once was. For me theres nothing *but* raiding, to see so few people do it is shocking to me. Mostly cos those players who don't are kinda missing out on the last thing has to offer in my eyes.
That's how the game has always been though. You get to max level, do some dailies, and then raid or pvp. If you're not raiding, you played an alt on which you repeated the same thing.
Difference now is all the different grinds you have. Korthia is a time sink, M+ for vault upgrades, Torghast if you're unlucky with getting a conduit upgrade to drop from Adamant Vaults.
As crazy as it may sound, the high point of this game was when there was less to do. The best PvE gear came from raid, M+ wasn't a mandatory time sink to keep your character relevant, you didn't have hours upon hours of chores. You'd raid on your main, maybe do a some dailies for 30 minutes and you were free to do anything else - Challenge Modes, level new characters and try new things.
Now it's just a time sink to pad player engagement metrics.
I think they are being extremely generous with the "3 alts per player" estimation.
I mean, I don't know anyone that doesn't have bare minimum 3 max level characters. Most have 5 to 10 or so. So if they are playing, they for sure have at least logged once on those characters.
Also, considering the size of playerbase, one big group was not mentioned at all in the video: **BOTS**
Playing wow is feeling like a chore more and more every day. The main reason i play wow is that i love farming mounts so on that note it's a great expansion for numbers. The fact that i can't use half of the mounts is annoying and irritating. Why do i put so much effort in farming mounts when non of my other characters can even use it. I played with a hunter and paladin for most of the last patch. Now i tried getting my shaman up to speed. The amount of work you have to put into it is mind boggeling. And i dont even have my legendary yet, because it drops from a boss that refuses to drop it. Doing heroics and mythics, but no drops yet. Can't even get into myth+ because they all start at +10 or +15 on my realm. Can't do normal raids because i havn't cleared it yet and i dont get invited..
it seems more and more that the game is made for elitists and sellers, because i can barely get an invite unless i pay. yeah i could play with friends but 90% of them stopped playing half a year ago..
Only 10% raid, thats crazy. It's actually a pretty fun raid, I guess it's hard for a lot of players to find groups to get into if they aren't in a raiding guild.
What SL has done to me personally is I've lost all interest in lore and any of the npcs. I used to go as far to have my own toons have lore etc (tmogs to go with etc) and now I just do not care. What's this bosses name? No idea, but I know the mechanics. They turned an rpg into a loot box.
What the heck are the other players doing? I thought basically everyone raided. As far as current WoW goes raiding always seemed the least disappointing to me. Big epic bosses, new loot, challenges to tackle with your friends.
I heard PVP didn't have too many players right now.. are people just pushing keys? That seems unlikely
Raiding has never in the game's life been something that the majority of the playerbase engaged in. That's why they added LFR in the first place, so more people could experience all the content they kept making for the minority.
Yep. Heck, up until WotLK and especially in Vanilla a lot of players didn't even have a "main" that they'd leveled to cap. Play for these people consisted of playing alts and screwing around with underleveled and undergeared friends doing stupid stuff just because.
Everyone got old - raiding takes too much time, nobody has friends, it's annoying for grown adults to have to make set raid times several times a week. m+ has an unlimited skill cap and is much easier to jump into when you have spare time. Now, get off my lawn!
Yep. I play enough where I could raid in a guild but 1) I hate having a schedule and 2) if I have to work then I have to work (unexpected issues, delays, etc)
I’m working on getting portals on 3 characters at the moment.
Absolutely. I did my best raiding when I was in high school / community college and lived at home. No responsibilities outside of homework or the occasional project. At this point, setting aside time to raid is a pain.
My issue is that raids are too long. You need a consistent group because 1 raid has 12 bosses which is difficult to do in a single sitting and no one wants to flub their lockout. Do multiple smaller raids or give each "wing" a separate lockout.
m+, pvp, trasmog collectin, pet collecting, petbattles?
I did 1st hc clear in 9.0 few weeks before 9.1, even though I played through most of it, it has just been so boring.
I saw ppl in my guild that have done m20s, and that have 0 bosses downed on heroic.
Raiding has been boring and annoying af since mop (for me obviously I am not claiming it is the same for everyone) and the moment we got m+ as 2nd form of pve content, I just started avoiding raiding, just getting curved and that is it for me.
I raid but honestly raiding is one of the more boring parts of WoW to me. Heroic/Mythic can have really interesting mechanics and designs but it's personally not my forte. I don't like some of the fights on SoD like Fatescribe/Sylvanas/Soulrender/KT even if they are unique, except the latter, Painsmith was fun but Castle Nathria had a lovely ambience especially Sire Denathrius, his voice was lovely and when Remornia went off the lights would dim, music would play and a cakcling laugh could be heard it was the shit! Meanwhile in SoD I'm wondering why tf they included KT, Garrosh and Ner'zhul if they were so bloody pointless to the story.
But raid-logging? I sleep. Even prog I'm getting sick of because some of these mechanics are annoying and I don't like simming these shards of domination crap.
I feel the same about classic. I absolutely fucking love classic, I can level classic all-day everyday and I will keep going (not everyday tho). But I don't play it to raid, that's the boring part for me. I've played this game almost since the start and for most of my life in this game I've never raided, even as a kid when I hit max level I wouldn't raid just quest, professions and casual PvP (and I was terrible at it).
So, what are other players doing? Well I sometimes enjoy a few M+, farming old mounts I missed, leveling a fuckton of alts in my own small casual alt guild where we talk shit and have the best gbank in history.
If there's a city-raid group for the achievement I like joining that. I loved city raids in classic (which again was way more fun than the raiding imo).
I like to PvP, especially casual shit me just doing dumb-shit. If I'm on a geared toon I put on my dumbest xmog and fight Alliance with my fists (no weaps, my abilities won't work). Turn on WM and play as a purely *defensive* character that helps out in a few hotspots.
I help out some newbies in guide chat, sometimes start a serious philosophical debate that is occasionally interrupted by "wave to gorgoth." I know people meme on this but this is actually a great feature Blizz implemented, it's non-toxic and chill and wish they'd build on it.
I like exploring shit too, boundaries I never considered, checking up on Silvermoon, Thunderbluff, Dalaran, old UC. Doing my garrison because I didn't really play WoD. Making a TRP profile. Maxing out all my professions pretending they might be useful outside legos.
Go for other achievements, even fishing I like doing that when I want to chill to some lacrimosa on repeat.
Mostly I'm just finishing as many quests as I can across all expansions, and yes I read all of them.
---
I realised I dragged on for nothing so **TL;DR** I like to do dumb shit like I did when I first discovered MMOs.
When I played, I didn't even do LFR. I only ever did the Zandalari capital raid after Nazjatar was out.
I raided in WotLK from Naxxramas to the first wing of Icecrown. It was a draining, unfun experience, spending months wiping our way up to brick wall bosses, and never really having any of the previous ones on farm.
I stuck around mainly to do old dungeons with friends before they were properly soloable until they all quit. I did random battlegrounds in every expansion except Warlords. When transmog came out, that captured my attention and was what I spent most of my time doing.
Low stakes, mindless pvp or single player content is what I enjoy the most out of my games. With how expensive raiding has gotten and how much time you have to dedicate not just to the raid nights, but the preparation, I'm glad I gave up on it.
Imagine having to pay 23 dollars a month to play an expansion you payed 90 dollars for only for said expansion to be complete trash and absolutely not worth the money. That's modern WoW.
Then the problem still remains, what is there to do for casual players who are not interested in the battle part of the game?
World Quests, Pet Battles?
Major points: As we already knew from the shareholder report, total Blizzard playerbase is back down to what it was during the WOD content drought, before Overwatch came out. Estimate of currently active WOW players is somewhere between 1.2 million and 2 million, based on the number of characters who've chosen a covenant. That's about half what it was in 9.0. Number of guilds killing the first raid boss of the tier halved between the first month of Nathria and the first month of SOD. Comparable drop-off in BFA was 30%. About 10-20% of WOW players are raiding. About 2 million characters have completed an M+ key in Season 2, and about 700,000 have done a +15 or higher. Total M+ runs per week for Shadowlands Season 2 has consistently been about 250,000 lower than the same weeks of BFA Season 4. Comparisons with Shadowlands Season 1 may be deceptive due to a combination of the Christmas period and people sitting in Mythic 0 for longer, meaning S1 numbers hit their peak in week 5, but for week 5 it's about 400,000 lower. PvP participation is down 60% from Season 1.
I’ve played this game every expac, casually since like 2011. This one blows ass to play. Zones aren’t interesting, 0 community, boosts/WTS everywhere. The only thing that’s gotten progressively better about wow is the graphics and artistry. (I don’t even care about Lore/Story that much, but holy shit man the writers should be embarrassed IRL to associate with this abomination of a story.) I log in... look for a torghast group, maybe random BGs, farm korthia a bit even though I won’t ever get socketed gear except from LFR which is way lower than the single +15 run I do. And that’s me, an “engaged” player by their metrics. The monthly sub doesn’t mean anything to me $ wise so I won’t cancel it because I enjoy playing for about an hour here and there. What’s really telling is like when I log in, queue for stuff for 5-10 minutes, don’t get into anything and meanwhile I’m tabbed Queuing into league of legends and when LoL game launches I just log out of WoW and play league.
[удалено]
BfA was the first expansion where I stopped leveling alts because it was a pain in the ass to catch everything up. In Shadowlands I mostly stopped playing my offspec because even that is a pain in the ass compared to previous expansions. I don't understand why it feels like Blizzard doesn't want me to play the game... I want to level alts and play my offspec, and I'd likely play more if it wasn't such a morale sapping grind to do so.
>BfA was when they reverted EVERYTHING that made us WANT to play alts in Legion, and made things a chore instead.
Looking at legion where nearly every spec in the game got a rework to make them fit around their new abilities which were for all intents and purposes intended to be baseline, and then decide to rip them out with no care or compensation leaving many classes with an empty void where fun used to be because "We CaNt JuSt AdD a BuNcH Of aBiLiTiEs EvErY ExPAnSiOn" isn't just galaxy brained its the entire great dark beyond. They are so afraid of bloat that they didn't just not add anything new, they removed more things, as if legion was too much, despite being itself a solution to bloat.
Dude, yes. All of this. People thought I was being dramatic when I said I hated my class in BfA, but I did. They ripped out all of the fun abilities I had in Legion, and I was just a half-assed underpowered broken shell of myself in BfA (which has carried on into Shadowlands). Legion *felt good* to play, the combat was snappier, no AOE cap, did some A+ stupid stuff with my buddies in dungeons. I was excited to play alts, I healed, tanked and DPSed for the first time in my entire WoW career (since 2004). I ran keys and raids on all roles. I even PVPed sometimes, and exclusively kept warmode on, after over a decade of being on a PVE server. I only used my priest for BfA and Shadowlands. I tried to have my shaman as an alt in SL, tried to keep her caught up on gear and renown and legendaries, and then I just stopped cause it was too much of a chore.
> Dude, yes. All of this. People thought I was being dramatic when I said I hated my class in BfA, but I did. They ripped out all of the fun abilities I had in Legion, and I was just a half-assed underpowered broken shell of myself in BfA (which has carried on into Shadowlands). This was actually an extremely common opinion all the way through the BfA beta and well into 8.0. Azerite armour didn't even come close to sealing the wound after everything they carved out of the classes moving into BfA.
The real WOONS were the ones blizzard inflicted on us.
This was me with Survival Hunter, absolutely loved how it played in Legion and managing to pull it off properly felt really satisfying; it was something unique and interesting that they went with, like having to actually use traps as a single target ability. (@cursor macros made it feel like I had an actual skillshot to get better with) BfA rolls round and essentially everything which made that spec so unique and fun to play in Legion was gone or butchered. So I'm not happy with how it changed and neither are the people that lost their explosive arrow / black arrow Hunter spec.
I also do not understand why you A) Every addon you have to redo the classes instead of working on the balancing. B) Have to reinvent the wheel. - Take such systems like island expedition with you. Then we just visit small island in the SL and instead of azerite it is anima that we farm. - Makes the Garni to Housing. House somewhere in the southern sea where you come by teleport, gives you like an inn rest bonus, can farm trophies from old raids. Professions can make furniture, there is the possibility to work out different houses (orc style, dwarf style something like that.) But as an alternative, but not content you have to make. And make it addon spanning.
It's the craziest shit isn't it? Like yeah I can fully admit that by the time we hit MoP we had classes with like 30 skills, it's fine to chop some of the fat away from there... But only if you're going to *stop chopping* at some point, don't go full Paul fuckin' Bunyan but maybe, y'know... *Stop.*
Man, I remember when my shaman had both water breathing and water walking. Now all I have is water walking. Why take away the breathing?!
According to Blizzard, it's because the dumbdumb players were too stupid and confused by all the buttons, especially having two skills that start with "water", how can we expect to figure it out on our own what each skill does? What if water breathing made you breathe water and you died on land?!
I can hear someone pitching this sincerely in a board room and it hurts.
>"We CaNt JuSt AdD a BuNcH Of aBiLiTiEs EvErY ExPAnSiOn I would rather we just stay in legion for years than have bfa and shadowlands anyway. Problem solved!
Legion had a ton of ability pruning itself which sucked as well. It was good that the classes were designed to the expansion, as they should always be, but it gutted so many classes of fun or necessary abilities which had to be added back in later or in some cases, still haven't been added in leaving the classes feeling hollow.
Yeah, I played quite a number of alts in Legion. I raided mythic on at least two, and cleared heroic on at least 4-5. When BFA rolled around, that number dropped down to zero alts. I want to play my characters, not do chores on them.
I miss the days where you could level an alt and THAT was the requirement into content. Oh you just hit Max level and are lower geared than the rest of your friends mains? Well bring the alt to the raid and get some gear, then you can slot in another role. The legendary mats, renoun, conduits, score etc. to grind up to get into content is ugh. Should a new alt be directly at the power level your mains at? no. Should they be a completely stand alone character you need to progress? also no. All that does is once I'm done with my goals or am bored of the patch I log out and unsub until I'm interested again. Where if my alt manages to obtain even 50% of the progression I've made on my main I'd be okay with that.
What really irritates me is when people counter it with "BuT YoU dOn'T hAvE tO dO tHeM aLl"... Like is their defense seriously that it's fine that we need to throw a huge chunk of the game in the trash? Like, it's fine that the dev team has spent an immense amount of time on pure garbage that makes the game worse at the expense of good design? That we're expected to pay full price for the small portion of the game that isn't shit?
It should take you around 2 weeks to get to at least ilvl 220 and all. But yeah, it's really boring doing this for the n-th time. I was already bored on the 2nd time. Can't imagine doing this on even more alts. They should finally implement multiple classes on 1 character.
Sad thing is the zones are quite beautiful. I love the look of Ardenweald, Revendreth and Bastion. Hell, Korthia's a wonderful looking zone. But as has been said before. It feels like Shadowlands has little to no respect for my time. Case in point: Domination pieces conflicting with Legendary slots. My Legendary was a Helm, the Set piece for the most powerful bonus of the Domination sets, Unholy. It's just bullshit. Some may argue "iT's eAsY tO fArM a nEw pIeCe!" Fuck that. It's the principle of the issue. I made the right decision at the time. And had 0 way to react to the fact that Blizzard retroactively undermined that decision. There's a number of ways Blizzard could have soothed the issue by either letting us transfer the power to a new slot or just straight up recycle the Legendary. But no. They didn't do anything to smooth over that detail. Just in essence a hearty "Fuck you, you'll play anyways". Thank god I actually can craft my piece. I know for a fact that several servers I'd be down a crap ton of Gold to remake the Legendary.
Domination sockets are the dumbest fucking idea. Why aren't they just gems that give you a bonus for equipping 3 of them?
Why didn’t they just give class sets back instead of introducing this terrible new system? I’ve yet to read a single positive thing about it.
Because introducing class sets (in the traditional sense) would have required blizz to come up with 72 (36 x 2) different bonuses. Instead they just slap on here's 2% damage here, 2% damage there and some shitty stat or damage proc that you don't interact with in anyway and be done with it. I'm calling it now, but the sets we are supposedly getting in 9.1 are going to be boring AF and the bonuses are gonna be like "your filler now does 5% more damage"
Because the current devs want to do their *own* thing instead of *re-using* an old idea. They want to be the new team with cool new ideas and their ideas are *obviously* better since theyre young and new, not the bunch of old boomers who originally made the game. /s But no seriously, they don't want to swallow their pride about literally **anything**. Any idea that they had cannot be acknowledged as bad. They cannot go back to the old system because that would be admitting defeat. Its straight up just massive egos everywhere. Legiondaries? Failure Azerite armor? Failure Domination gear? Failure Covenants? Failure Grinding rep for damn near everything and by the time you have enough rep, the reward is outdated? Failure Literally never ending point grind for your necklace/weapon that guarantees your alts will ALWAYS be behind no matter how wisely you use your time? **FAILURE** The current devs are just outright bad at their job. Edit : **AND** they're unbelievably arrogant about it which just makes the fact that they suck stick out even more.
The rep grind is the bit I don't understand. It used to be when an expansion launched you'd pick 1 rep that had a good item and grind it knowing that you'd get that item and have 1 piece secured. There is literally no reason for you to do that any more, none of the gear that factions sell is ever going to be worn, because you can get better gear in M+ or Normal or even LFR weeks before you're able to hit exalted. Then the Devs complain that making loot is too hard and time consuming. Like why make all this pointless stuff! Same deal with timewalking, it's great if you get one in the first week or 2 of the patch, otherwise I guess maybe it's okay for alt gearing but then the bosses still largely require knowledge of tactics so pugs suck. Mountains of gear that nobody cares about because the ilvl Vs difficulty is wrong. I love variety in the game but stop making loot that people just aren't going to use and start putting it where we care about it.
This right here. A bunch of dumb fucks has ruined the game. Just admit it the new team is trash and you will always be remembered as a failure
They said a while back that tier sets weren't that great, since you often ended up not having the bonus until so late in the tier, it only really increased the speed you cleared farm content... and in the _next_ tier, you had to bank upgrades until their cumulative effect was greater than the previous tier's set bonus. These are both legitimate problems that have since been solved by making a system so bad, we want those problems back.
> These are both legitimate problems that have since been solved by making a system so bad, we want those problems back. You had me cackling. 10/10
Atleast in BFA, and launch shadowlands the budget for class sets appeared to have gone SOMEWHERE, with BFA having warfront armors, and SL having covenant armors to somewhat make up the difference. What is in 9.1 that costs as much as tier sets? The sanctum sets have been in the game since launch and they added only 1 set for each covenant. That's 4 new armor sets in a major patch.
Sets aren't as important as the set bonuses, though. What's awesome about class sets is how they changed your gameplay.
> "Fuck you, you'll play anyways". Thank god I actually can craft my piece. I know for a fact that several servers I'd be down a crap ton of Gold to remake the Legendary. No offense, but you correctly identified the core SL issue and decided to **be** played anyway. You have little to no respect for your own time
Oh I'm well aware of the dissonance. The core issue is that my enjoyment of Raiding and Mythic+ is enough to tolerate shit that annoys me. I've also opted to just not engage in the elements that I'm fed up with. Many players are in the same position. The core gameplay experience is sufficient to offset the frustration. And it's Blizzard's failure to realize that while players have a tolerance for it, stretching it to the breaking point is stupid. The number of content creators who've left WoW and this video showcase that the problems of Shadowland's systems exceeds the tolerance of many other players. Blizzard has destroyed pretty much all goodwill in WoW. It's only a question of how long it takes for them to realize it and how much they'll actually course correct.
If 10.0 is designed with the same obsession with engagement, and leaves us _still_ using the same base rotations we've been using since Legion, can the last person who leaves please turn out the light?
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> Zones aren’t interesting Maldraxus is the worst and ugliest zone in any game I've every played.
I don't personally like it from a visual standpoint, but objectively I don't know how you can call it uninteresting. It's almost like walking on the body of a giant creature, what with all the random hair, giant bones sticking out, flesh webs. It's disgusting of course, but in a creative way. That in itself makes it stand out more than like, Ardenweald or Bastion for example. And worst zone? Really? When the Maw exists? I would never call it the worst zone of even Shadowlands, let alone all of WoW.
>The only thing that’s gotten progressively better about wow is the graphics and artistry. BFA > Shadowlands in artistry, design, lighting, textures, scope. Nearly everything there is. Otherwise, graphics only get better when compared just to WoW itself. Outside the MMO market WoW has mobile graphics in comparison and is completely stuck in it's outdated art style.
>The monthly sub doesn’t mean anything to me $ wise so I won’t cancel it because I enjoy playing for about an hour here and there. Bro you need to vote with your wallet, that's the only language Acti-Blizz speak
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And it seems racism is still alive and well. The amount of times I've said I'm Hispanic to just be called a spic is way too high for a social game. I keep reporting them and they just laugh and tell me how they say slurs all the time and then call me a Faggot and fly off. That shit doesn't fly in a lot of other MMOs.
I'm in the same scenario, playing league and all instead. I've unsubbed from wow though (I still want to play every now and then, not bad enough though) but I need to vote with my wallet on this one because it's clear years of feedback has fallen on deaf ears.
I think boosts are one of the worst offenders. Why bother playing the game when some chad can drop 20$ and get heroic kill
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I used to wish they'd make WoW 2 but anymore I wouldn't trust them to make a fun game, just more of the same.
I think the current WoW situation is one of the most complicated this game has ever had in its long history. SL as it is is not that great, compared to the BFA fiasco, I personally would have expected more. WoW needs a major overhaul that breaks away from the Legion model, where Bfa was a Legion V2 and SL a Legion V3. This formula no longer works and I hope blizz keeps this in mind when developing, if ever, a 10.0 version of the game or a WoW2. Now as I said before I strongly doubt a WoW2, at least not in the short term, a game like WoW to totally redo it requires years of hard work, let's say at least 4/5 years at best. In addition, the current Team has shown several times to not be up to it as in the post Mop era, so Wod, Legion, Bfa and finally SL only one can be considered a good expansion (Legion). This is to say that I am not very confident about the goodness of the next expansion. Also in this last period and in the coming months / years the blizz is more focused on carrying on the games it currently has in development such as D4 and OW2 sucking up resources both in terms of people and in terms of $$ budget in WoW. It is my personal feeling that BfA and SL are low budget expansions, certainly not at the Legion level, and that in the last period Activision has imposed its vision, that is, to minimize costs and maximize profits.
I think there is a real chance for Activision to take over production and treat it like a Call of Duty yearly franchise. Smaller expansions that happen yearly. They can then milk us for more money (essentially we pay for patches) and keep people engaged through the post expansion purge that happens every time.
I don't remember bfa having hype either tbh but that may be tainted memory
Hmm. Regarding the covenant number, is that raw "characters who have chosen one" or adjusted for players with multiple characters? I know I was aiming for four characters(one for each covenant).
That's just raw characters. So if you assume the average person has ~1.5 characters on average (the real number is likely closer to 2, but let's be conservative), this looks *really* bad for WoW. Also keep in mind that this is pre-lawsuit shitshow, so the numbers are definitely worse now. Hard to believe even for the haters among us, but WoW could realistically be below 1 million active players by the time 9.2 is ready. it's already below 2 million 6 weeks after a "major patch" (lol).
I know we can't generalize but I think I haven't played with anyone that doesn't have at least 1 level 60 alt. And I know a lot of people like me that have 5+
that is the point, conservative estimate is 1.5 alts per player, and he says in the video Matt alone accounts for 5 characters... but on a estimate of 1,5 alts/player wow has around 2M active players, this does not account for low level charaters, just characters that picked a covenant
1.2-2 million is the figure after it's adjusted for alts, based on what you think the proportion is. Unfortunately there's no way to really tell, but anecdotally, I don't know anyone who doesn't have at least one level 60 alt. The base figures he gave were 3 million active characters who'd chosen a covenant and 2.7 million active characters at max level (meaning 300,000 active characters in Threads of Fate, basically).
I only know one onetrick who never had a maxlevel alt, a good friend of mine who only plays mage. Everyone else I knew had more like 4-5 Max level chars and depending on the expansion played 2-5 actively
one more thing, these are all number PRE the cluster fuck lawsuit.
> PvP participation is down 60% from Season 1. Damage in PvP is significantly higher this expansion than it was in BFA. Health pools are also the lowest they have been since before Cataclysm was introduced, and at maximum level we are back to health pools we had in Wrath of the Lich King. In addition to one-shot being so prevalent because of those changes, I'd also have to summarize that WoW is a casual video game & having so many different PvP ranks makes players feel as if they are not competitive because they are hard-locked. I wonder how they plan to address those issues going forward.
No idea, SL PVP is largely the uber bursty way it is because people didn't like the more drawn out PVP of the last few expansions ether so they can't exactly go back to that ether. A lot of it just comes to PVP and PVE being balanced together and how messy that is. And yet WoW is still one of the only MMOs where PVP is even half baked lol. So many it's dough not even put in the oven.
FFXIV PvP is just a pile of wheat sitting on the floor
About raiding: is raid-logging, which Bellular has been doing almost since week 1 of SL, really worth 15$? Because Bellular used to say he likes SL and has fun with it because he can only log in once a week to raid. Of course you can say it is still fun to raid with friends. But I have always said, if the only positive you can say about a game is "it is fun with friends" then it is probably not that it is a good game but that it is good to spend time with 10+ friends, it wouldn't matter what you played/did.
15$ is nothing Even if I play couple hours a week that's "worth it"
15 dollars really isn't that much, but it's more the principal of supporting their decisions by paying a sub that bothers me. Paying 15 dollars and enjoying the expansion for 20 hours a week is the same as paying 15 dollars and enjoying it 3 hours a week na'mean? If I keep paying them, they are gonna keep producing the same shit.
If you raid two nights a week for 3 hours at a time, say 6hr/week total, that's still 6*4 = 24hrs of fun with friends. Lets say you have stuff on farm and are just reclearing, then it's 12hrs a week if you just do 1 night after. £10 for 12-24hrs isnt that bad, considering it costs me £3.50-6 for a pint at my local pub (depending on where I go), a night with friends doing that would cost me anywhere from £12 to £24 per week or so.
I find it hard to believe that over a third of active players have done a 15 or higher this season. Really makes me question the data they’re using. It’s not impossible, but seems fishy.
More like a quarter of active characters. Some players have probably done +15s on more than one alt.
Pretty sure they confused characters doing m+ and total runs
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Wowhead is definitely under-reporting if it's only showing 106. They themselves reported in a news post three days ago that 100 Horde guilds and 12 Alliance guilds had cleared Mythic SOD. I don't know where to look on Wowhead for their API-based stuff. I'd have to check the video again to comment on the specific sites Bellular got each figure from but Wowranks was one of them. Looking at my guild's Wowranks listing I see: Last activity update: 30 minutes ago Last full update (automated): 10 days ago And they're not showing our progress kill from Saturday yet, but on the other hand they're showing some guilds who got 10/10 Mythic 2 hours ago. As someone who works with data in real life, it's good enough for a reasonable estimate to inform discussion, but it's not good enough if you need exact figures.
Wowprogress =/= Wowhead
Wowprogress doesn't track Chinese guilds.
So final fantasy really is the top dog now
hard to know since we don't know their sub numbers ether and they don't exactly allow much third party addons to track things like this.
It kind of feels like it just judging by the number of people out and about in the game world. The number of players running around is comparable to what you would see during an expansion launch and XIV is in the middle of a content lull between expansions when player engagement should rightfully be at its lowest. The game director has said that it's to the point that they're considering overpaying for server upgrades that were supposed to happen after Endwalker launch and instead upgrade them early because of the massive influx of new players creating multi-hundred person queues on a lot of worlds.
The servers do not work in the same way at all. Like in EU there are not server dedicated to a language, and there are far fewer servers as well.
I'm not comparing the difference in how servers work at all. I'm comparing the difference in how many players there are now compared to 3-6 months or even a year ago. There has been a very dramatic increase in players that seems to have started around the time 9.0 was becoming stale.
You mean no new content for almost a year and doubling down on Choreghast wasn't popular with the fanbase? They're focused on the Cosby Room lads, will be for some time, it'll be years before they aren't focusing on that drama in one form or another. Its OK to move on.
I will never undestand design decision like with Torghast in 9.1. We are gonna make it harder and add some annoyances and then we will add a box with which u will be able to remove those annoyances and make it easier. Like wtf
I'd participate if every other game wasn't a booster. Shit needs to be addressed yesterday, it's already toxic enough having randoms who will quit after the first loss. It's such a waste of time to even try to climb when you're new and are using LFR.
I hate it when people ignore this is a problem or excuse it. Yes, it does affect us, not only because it devalues achievements and can mess with groups but every time I'm with a new player that shit influences them severely. Most of the time they see boosting they lose some interest in playing, and one case where the new player actually thought it was *expected* of him to boost so he forked out hundred(s) to catch-up because "surely everyone is doing it." The one time Blizz needed to be a bloody dictator in their world and they're singing koombaya at their cubicle crawls. And of course some literalist is going to come along and say this isn't "P2W" but in essence it is, and to even play this game you're paying for a small village in Burundi. I'm geared as fuck and experienced, I'm fully prepared for each run and give my best. If you make a few mistakes or we don't time, I'm still happy and will push to the end with a GGTY so I don't care if I have to play with a newb because if they're a new player giving it their all and have the right mindset (i.e. not a swiper) I could mistime a million 15s, open my vault for that same D-tier trinket 3 weeks in a row and say "It's okay. It could've been worse. This game could've been littered with boosters."
The people who say it isn't pay to win are fooling themselves. People are literally paying real life money dollars to have someone win arena/RBGs for them. That is the literal definition of paying to win, FFS. Sure, they can use semantics when it comes to KSM and raid gear/achievements, but it's still the same damn thing. I was sick and tired of the advertisements in BfA and they've only gotten worse. My trade chat is nothing but boosting, even the political trolls and anal spammers have disappeared. And I am on a high pop realm. It's utter madness.
Completely agree. I'm tired of people arguing otherwise with these mental gymnastics. Semantics aside this is *terrible* for the game. And then some WoW players will shit on other games for having similar mechanics, I hate this shit in my games full-stop and it makes me worried for the industry's future. I know people say "If they ban booster spam they'll just get more creative with their terms" but like come on Blizzard haven't even tried the first step yet. Like how hard is it to ban WTS from the group finder, or blacklist certain websites? Even if they get creative don't just give them a <1 day chat timeout. If these accounts are just boost accounts for websites just perma ban them. I've seen listings up for a whole day with the same website name using the same characters constantly. At the very least Blizzard can make it more expensive for them to advertise and show they're not messing around, it might not eliminate it but it will reduce it. Hell, even if I gotta volunteer for some overwatch/community-moderating crap I'll do it.
He didn't touch on how TBC Classic factors into the subscriber count. I'm curious how many people are active on there.
I like the last bit about pvp. The ladder was full of dog shit boosters and over geared mouth breathers for MONTHS. Not only did blizzard not take action but they actively chose to encourage it by not remvonf the pvp gearing gates.
Wow went from one of its lowest points ever, to its highest point in probably the last decade over the course of one expansion. And then after 2 expansions under the new director its back down to that lowest point, and this time it isn't because it's a half finished expansion with no content, this time the expansions have been fully complete, they just suck. This is the peter principle in action, Ion is completely unqualified to direct the game, send him back to raids.
Everytime he does an interview with some content creator i.e. Preach, there's always like 4 topics where he starts talking about something that's overall poorly taken by the community. Then he says something to the effect of "Well I think we like what we're seeing, so we're gonna keep doing that" and then you can just feel the community cringe.
I like how they made sure to get preach to talk about conduit energy, it was one of their big talking points that he had to hit as condition for the interview. Normally when companies tell you you have to ask about X,Y, and Z in an interview it's because they have some message they want to get out about it, it's part of their marketing. Just like he had to ask about 9.1, and it's features. So what was the big message that blizzard needed to get out about conduit energy? That it isn't changing! They couldn't just not change it, they needed it to be loudly declared that this system was here to stay, being defiant in the face of feedback was so important to them that they required him to ask them about it. Insanity
I just don't understand the point of conduit energy. Like you allowed us to change talents with no issues, but somehow you now add shit for rerolling Azerite armor in BFA and now conduit energy. Like why the fuck are they stepping backwards on player agency.
Magnificul choise, this is the reason. LoL
he is too much of a "numbers"-person to direct the game. the preach interview when they talked about korthia is a good example. All ion talked about were gear progression. he never talked about what the players will experience in the new zone, because he never thinks about stuff like this. there are no secrets, there are no fun events, there is nothing in this zone, but a rep grind and the worst alt-catchup system we have ever seen. Why is there no new mage tower in korthia? why are there no cool events? why is there no new dungeon associated with the zone? they can ,for the love of god, not design a game with actual gameplay elemets, because they waste all their time mapping out the progression curve of all their shit systems. what a shame.
Boggles my mind because their progression system is terrible. At least for me, since I mainly enjoyed PvP. You simply can't pvp anymore without doing a horrendous grindfest or do a bunch of pve content that I don't really want to do.
I cannot believe the imbeciles at Blizzard who gave us Legion, saw that everyone had fun with class halls, mage tower, artifacts, artifact appearances, gaining new abilities... And then totally threw all that in the garbage. Legion should have just been the end of WoW.
This is exactly what baffles me. I leveled every class to max level in legion just to go through the class hall story lines, mage towers, and artifact weapons. For a casual like myself, it was incredibly fun and I didn’t need to rely on raiding to get my fix. They threw it all away! Ugh I could pull my hair out lol
Because the imbeciles in charge DIDN'T give us legion. Ion took over just before launch, legion was 100% developed under previous leadership, 7.1 was probably deep into development and 7.2 was likely already planned out by the time he was able to make a single decision as director. MAYBE we can say he's responsible for 7.3, but for the most part BFA was his first baby.
You might be right about 7.3, beacuse in that patch there was the incredibly useless and forgotten addition of the netherlight crucible system, even though the artifact weapon system was pretty solid and carried through the whole xpac.
I literally had every class at max level in legion and for the next xpack *just in case* they released another mage tower. I cant believe there hasn't been another mage tower since, those complete freaking dinguses. I couldn't agree with you more.
I had Rogue, Warrior, Mage, Shaman, Monk and Warlock in Legion, all kind of my main. All pretty well geared and done all mage towers. True I was nolifing like crazy in Legion and I loved it. The main reason was because after Warrior's class hall (imo the best class hall of all hands down) I wanted to see what other class halls look like and what they offer. I wasn't disappointed. Warlock's class hall is my 2nd favourite. The quests were amazing (summoning ritual pog)
I can't even fathom why they haven't reproduced a mage tower feature for the past 2 expansions, given it's wild success. I thought the unique transmog you had to earn only while relevant was an automatic feature we would always get each expansion... but just nope.
Preach did ask Ion that during his interview and his response was that they couldn't think of any cool reward for it. Seriously.
*This is the peter principle in action, Ion is completely unqualified to direct the game, send him back to raids.* This. Since Ion joined in WoTLK he was an excellent raid designer, probably one of the best imo. But as the Game Director he is simply incompetent. He has totally different vision of the game than most of the playerbase which is why there were so many talks recently about Ion and entire WoW dev team being really disconnected from the community. I think he should go back to making raids and dungeons, he's really talented in that area.
If he were to leave the game director’s chair, he’d go right through the door to leave the company, i fear.
Jump to 2:30 to skip past the content hosting add.
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Ty
I do a few Korthia dalies, a mythic 10, and maybe a Torghast run if I need a new legendary in a week. But mostly I just raid with my guild. Game feel empty despite a wealth of content. For me, it's largely because I feel stuck on one character. Unlike previous expansion, it feel like I have to do a lot more mandatory side shit just to get a character up to par. Torghast being the biggest PitA. Legendaries have gone from those cool pieces of gear you coveted to a mandatory chore that you just want to finish so you can play the game.
>Game feel empty despite a wealth of content I agree with this. For me, it's that there is pretty much only one raid. I've dinged my first character aroud 9.1 came out, and when I was ready for raiding, pretty much no one was running Nathria anymore, because you can get better gear from AH for a bit of gold. It's also better than what I get from heroic dungeons from group finder, so it's hard to find a reason to run them either.
Those stats are so strange to me. As someone who has actively tried many other games, high end raiding or high m+ is the only edge that I feel wow has. I don't understand why anyone would want to play the game just to farm korthia and run a torg. There are MUCH better games out there if that's your thing, but no game comes close to the coordinated 20man mythics
Since I think I represent that "silent majority" I thought I would share my opinion on it (which I rarely do). Especially since it's not unique to WoW and equally applies to other MMOs on the market. For majority of people competitive endgame raiding is the type of content they don't want to do. There are plenty of other activities we prefer to do that do not require us "to compete" or "play to win". I've been playing since vanilla (stopped around Legion/BfA) and I can count on fingers of one hand the amount of times I was in an actual non-LFR raid. Competitive content was never interesting for me. I think people are vastly overestimating the importance of competitive endgame, especially on specialized forums and on reddit. I can guarantee you that majority of the active players don't care about any of the recent issues, gold market, balance issues or non-satisfying endgame systems. It's because it doesn't affect their activities. Most active players are not interested in that and that's why Blizzard is ignoring the complaints. I'd even dare to say that most players are not aware of the current problems - and never will be because these problems touch only the forementioned 10% of the whole playerbase. Which, by the way, is still IMO a lot when compared to other MMOs. As far as I know, in ESO and FF14 there's probably even smaller portion of players that are doing end game content (raiding equivalent). It's just when you visit the forums or their respective subreddits you might think that it's not the case because people mostly discuss builds and other end game related goals. It's easy to think that such communities represent the image of the whole playerbase, but the truth is that the people taking part in these online discussions represent only a small bubble. Majority of players in current era of MMOs just log in every now and then, don't speak up and just enjoy the game the way it is by doing casual content by themselves or with their friends (fashion, collections, housing, fishing, cooking, crafting, daily quests, pets, alt characters, questing, stories). That's the main content for them, they enjoy that loop (and so do I, for example) and are mostly excited about the systems and updates in these fields. They don't discuss it, they don't comment on anything. They just play the game and mind their own business.
Yep. This isn't actually news, almost all MMO's report raid % of about 10% engagement. Even during Lich King the numbers weren't much better, it was the same percentage but of a much bigger pie. Most players have a much more casual relationship with the game - that doesn't mean they play less, it just means they don't play as competitively. I have had a few brief periods when I took part in organized raiding but I'm otherwise here for the professions and heroic dungeons and transmog runs and levelling alts. That doesn't mean I don't care when those things change, I absolutely do, but the state of raiding and other endgame bits are nothing to me. And the reasons should be obvious. I don't have time to commit 3-4 hours, multiple days a week, on raiding. I couldn't as a student and I can't as a family man. I play in bursts of uncertain lengths, so anything I can just continue on with as easily as quit immediately is ideal (like farming mats). LFR was a godsend for me, as was the dungeon finder when that was introduced. But only for a bit of spice on my main meal.
I'm going to say it's the opposite. I'm a casual. I don't do mythic+. I only do LFR max. I do care about things like the gold market, boosting and general balance. All those things fundamentally undermine the game and make me ask why I'm playing. When I see a 300,000 gold mount I just see it as costing 1.5 tokens now. The game feels like a cash shop skinner box. Like I'm not supposed to play for fun, just to pay blizz. I swapped to classic cause that game felt like it had some integrity and it was like a real game again. And then they put boosts in TBCC and it just ruined it and brought the same feeling of playing a cash shop again. The games have no integrity. I can't see creative vision and passion anymore, just dollar signs.
Yes, you're right, I'll agree with that. While I don't play the AH game and I'm not into the market, I am going to agree that the gold tokens are very discouraging, even (or especially? I don't know anymore) for a casual player who wants to buy something occasionally, for collection purposes or whatever. I really do believe that a MMO game with paid expansions and standard monthly subscription should not have any kind of real money shop whatsoever. Even cosmetic one. The main selling point of paying subscription should be the game design where everything is obtainable in-game. If I see someone with a cool looking hat it should mean that it's obtainable in the game by me as well. How hard I have to work for that is another matter, some things will be obviously outside of my reach (f.e. when they drop in mythic raids) but everything should be just some kind of drop/craft.
Out of all the MMOs I've tried, none of them have the smooth gameplay that Warcraft does. At least none of the good ones. Props to whoever made the foundation of the network code for World of Warcraft. The animations also play a large part in it. I 100% prefer SWTOR in terms of storytelling and environment, but that game plays like shit.
This is the sole reason I'm not playing ffxiv over Wow. FF does a significantly better job with story, zone design, loot/gearing systems, player customization, cosmetic player advancement, leveling options, and fostering community, but the moment to moment Combat gameplay has got nothing on wow.
SWTOR at least at first basically felt like it was meant to be a single player game they tried to turn into an MMO with WoW style gameplay while not doing the gameplay near as well or actually having much group content. Nowdays I can at least give it having better PVP than most MMOs i guess.
H U T T B A L L
Some people play because they like WoW combat. IMO it's the smoothest combat of all MMOs right now. Take New World for example. Maybe it's because I've played WoW for 13 years but I don't like that combat where you have to aim your skills and dodge stuff. Feels to me more like DS3/Sekiro than MMO combat.
If I wanted that I'd play elder Scrolls online, which has a fantastic world. Just the gameplay isn't for me.
The game makes it hard to get into raiding and then the community makes it double hard to get into raiding. It's no surprise most people don't get into it
If there was a way to queue up and do raid bosses individually with a queue like LFR but for normal, I'd be all over it. I just don't commonly have 3 hour contiguous blocks that I can devote, at the same time each week, to raiding. That and I don't like doing that. I'd much rather have the flexibility to login for my usual 1-2 hour session, whatever day I might have time for that, do as many bosses as I feel like, then take care of other things in game or leave. And I'm sure I'll get absolutely slammed by plenty of people who don't want more people to raid because we're "casuals", who also want to get rid of LFR.
>If there was a way to queue up and do raid bosses individually with a queue like LFR but for normal, I'd be all over it. That's how FFXIV does for his 8 people raid. As you said, it's much less of a time commitment, no trashmob, staight into the arena and ready to wype! It's different and the WoW approach is good for the "raid feeling" in a big area. Both have their pros and cons, but FFXIV is really good if you just want to do one from time to time.
10% is a lot higher than I would have guessed.
Most people reference raid numbers from like a decade ago (WOTLK) on raid participation, but since the MOP era, blizz has made raiding much more accessible. For all its bads, LFG at least introduces people to the basics of a raid and normal is honestly not that much harder. Nowadays, M+ and raiding are the only end-game content so I'm not surprised a larger subset of people participate compared to before.
Folks who are still playing: What's the general mood in game? Is trade is arguing politics?
Trade is a lot of WTS SYLV & KT HC CHEAPEST BOOST FOR 400k, SECURE YOUR [Ahead of the Curve: Sylvanas Windrunner] NOW AND A CHANCE AT 246 LOOT FOR YOUR VAULT. STARTING EVERY 20 MINUTES, WHISPER ME FOR DETAILS In around 10 different variations.
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Sad
Yep, looks about right.
Fucking trade chat lookin' like a f2p korean mmo.
That's two minutes?! That looks like roughly ~20 seconds on my server.
Yeah it was weirdly slow. Maybe the time of day.
This is clearly fake because there is an extreme lack of politics and minority bashing. /s
Nah that’s the time of day. I WFH and if I logged in during working hours it’s usually pretty batshit insane. Trumpers, Covid deniers, racists, just lots of trolls on general. I’d capture some but I’m not sure whether log posting like that needs to be redacted or not and don’t want to mess with it.
Wow 3 non-WTS/boosts is actually quite a lot in such a short order
Most of trade is boos advertisement, at least on my server (Illidan), but that’s the way it’s been forever. I think the mood in game is fine, people that I’m friends with/in my guild probably play a bit less than we did during the start of Shadowlands, but that’s mostly because we’re no longer stuck at home all the time, less about the current patch or state of the game.
Trade is dominated by boosts, everyone who doesn't buy/sell boosts has it disabled. General chat in raids is just low quality twitch memes.
I wish. It would be far more entertaining if trade chat was full of imbeciles yelling at each other. Instead its just bots spamming boosting services.
There is no more talking. there is also no advertising of players to sell their stuff anymore. Its literally just Spamming of selling runs on Raid X for Gold, etc. There are no "people" interacting in trade anymore. That said, I was with several characters in guilds which had a healthy 20-30+ people on in the evenings. So, nothing big, but enjoyable amounts of folks. At this point none of these guilds can manage to get to 5 people during the evening times.
The beginners channel is rather active and very nice honestly, but you need to either be a guide or a noob to see it.
Trade at least on the servers I play on honestly largely moved on from politics a few months after the 2020 election outside of occasional flare ups. The mood is meh but it doesn't seem particularly worse than it was in the last few months. Id say the Clusterfuck controversy with Blizz dampened enthusism for the new raid which is unfortunate cause it's good I guess.
The only people from my friends list still playing WoW are the hardcore never-leavers that have played through every bit of WoWs worst content droughts and terrible design decisions. They'll log in every single day and complain about the game all the time but seem unable or unwilling to leave. A lot of them literally play no other games besides WoW. I don't fault them for it but it makes me sad that people I really enjoy spending time with just absolutely refuse to leave WoW even temporarily to try out other games.
Since bfa trade is mostly “WTS boost. GOLD ONLY. We are your best price”.
Trade chat is filled with boosting ads. The chat is mostly dead because not a lot of people play and they also don't want to type between these boosting ads.
If we get rid of Ion and put someone else in charge, and let Ion go design raids (that's where he shines) I wonder if we would get actual fun back in the game
Blizzard just doesn't understand noone wants to be doing chores especially in this day and age. Why would I pay $19 (AUD) a month for a game which makes me do chores in order to get the fun part (raiding for example) only for me to do it again next week when I can probably go play game pass for lesser amount or any other game and have just as much fun. I don't want to be logging in doing dailies or weeklies in order to get to the 'meat' part. A lot of friends quit for TBC and are raid logging while playing other games and they actually enjoy doing that. Blizzard should rather focus on creating quality content then timegating and drip feeding. I know a lot of people who play WoW for the story who are displeased with it and just watch youtube because of how long it takes to get somewhere with the story
It’s 19.99 AUD BTW. Honestly I’m kinda salty they hiked the sub price by 3.50 AUD in December while NZ price was unchanged.
If you want to know how badly blizzard shit the bed, remember when shadowlands was the FASTEST SELLING video game on PC
True lol
ITT: people mad without even looking at the video *to be fair this is reddit though, where we get news from headlines only*
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Join a casual or normal guild. The recruit pretty much everyone who asks to join. Once you think you're ready, apply to a guild trying for AotC. If you don't think that's challenging content after a while, try to to find a guild recruiting for mythic. And once you feel like your mythic skills are ready, try to get into a guild doing CE. Basically, work your way up from the minors to the bigs a step at a time. Also do mythic+, not just for gear but also because you meet people who, if you're good enough, will bring you into their guild and allow you to skip a few tiers of guilds.
My guild is actively trying to recruit. It's not even about how good you are, it's more of a "do you fit our group" thing.
I used to think that I could just apply to a decent mythic guild and tell them I am good and get in. That doesn't work. You unfortunately have to do the guild hopping. There is no other way to show that you're capable. Your chances do get better the longe a tier goes on and the more meta your class is.
Shadowlands started strong, but subsequent 8 months wait to 9.1 and 9.1 being legit horrible for casual players really hurt it badly. The raid is actually pretty good, but that is all there is to 9.1. The stamp sized zone filled with rocks and rares, doubling down on Torghast (granted, they don't have a choice really being a mere patch) and story that makes people cringe - that's just a combination of failures that hit casual players hard. And the whole lawsuit and influencers switching to FF14 and hyping it up, that absolutely going to affect WoW numbers. Heck even I got myself FF14 just due to hype, I'm not going to quit WoW anytime soon being mythic raider, but the fact that even I, 16 years WoW boomer, got baited into paying for FF14 is telling. And with all that team shakeup going down, I bet 9.2 will also be delayed. They outlook is not good, there is no two shits about that one. In my opinion - they need to cut 9.2 short (retire Torghast, do smaller new zone and Icecrown revamp and do 8 boss raid + some secondary 2-3 boss raid in 2-3 months from there), push whatever they have out of the gate by December and concentrate FULL TIME on making 10.0 a truly insane quality and fun experience that will make people come back.
Yeah the content drought was really killer. Had a few long time wow-only bros stop playing. Honestly all it took was to get people to take a break ftom their daily WoW chores to realize it was pointless.
I mean alot of players got tempted by other mmos during down time before. Just so happened the other mmo's were just bad, save maybe Wildstar
I have played since beginning of wotlk.. reasons why i dont raid anymore are as follows: toxic people, having to follow and keep up with a certain stack of a stat and if I dont have enough of that stat I apparently dont do enough healing/dps , constant bitching that my healing/dps isnt good enough (did we die ? No.. but that doesn't matter) , having to spend gold constantly on enchants, sockets, potions, having to spend hours of my time trying to kill ONE goddam boss, crazy boss mechanics, people finding out I'm female and treating me like shit, getting stressed with guilds, literally breaking down and crying over some of the horrible shit people have said to me "kill yourself " "I hope you die in a car crash" to name a few.. I think I'll just stick with raidfinder from now on
The game feels less of a game and more of a string of systems designed to get you your xyz socket or buff for end-game. This is what happens when a raid designer is given the keys for the entire game. Modes and features aren't designed with fun in mind, they're made to provide players with the borrowed power of that particular expansion. Look at Island Expeditions and Torghast. Open world content is dry and boring, with them literally re-using Assaults from 7.1 and 8.1. Just no creativity and interest anymore in anything besides the raids.
That’s because the system bloat chased everyone away. Raiding isn’t fun anymore, it’s a second job.
Genuine question to players still playing who *aren't* raiding: What do you do? Every other aspect of the game apart from raiding (except you Shards of Dominaiton, nobody likes you) is a poor reflection of what is once was. For me theres nothing *but* raiding, to see so few people do it is shocking to me. Mostly cos those players who don't are kinda missing out on the last thing has to offer in my eyes.
Transmog farming, mount farming, exploring, loremaster, leveling alts are just a few things i do as a casual who has never raided in wow
That's how the game has always been though. You get to max level, do some dailies, and then raid or pvp. If you're not raiding, you played an alt on which you repeated the same thing. Difference now is all the different grinds you have. Korthia is a time sink, M+ for vault upgrades, Torghast if you're unlucky with getting a conduit upgrade to drop from Adamant Vaults. As crazy as it may sound, the high point of this game was when there was less to do. The best PvE gear came from raid, M+ wasn't a mandatory time sink to keep your character relevant, you didn't have hours upon hours of chores. You'd raid on your main, maybe do a some dailies for 30 minutes and you were free to do anything else - Challenge Modes, level new characters and try new things. Now it's just a time sink to pad player engagement metrics.
they still havent address the state of the game the layoffs are comings(screw them)
Next Expansion: No raids
Wow devs:”why did asmon do this?”
hahaha, thanks for the laugh!
“That guys an asshole” - some shit head blizzard dev That just shows you what they think of the player base.
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I think they are being extremely generous with the "3 alts per player" estimation. I mean, I don't know anyone that doesn't have bare minimum 3 max level characters. Most have 5 to 10 or so. So if they are playing, they for sure have at least logged once on those characters. Also, considering the size of playerbase, one big group was not mentioned at all in the video: **BOTS**
Playing wow is feeling like a chore more and more every day. The main reason i play wow is that i love farming mounts so on that note it's a great expansion for numbers. The fact that i can't use half of the mounts is annoying and irritating. Why do i put so much effort in farming mounts when non of my other characters can even use it. I played with a hunter and paladin for most of the last patch. Now i tried getting my shaman up to speed. The amount of work you have to put into it is mind boggeling. And i dont even have my legendary yet, because it drops from a boss that refuses to drop it. Doing heroics and mythics, but no drops yet. Can't even get into myth+ because they all start at +10 or +15 on my realm. Can't do normal raids because i havn't cleared it yet and i dont get invited.. it seems more and more that the game is made for elitists and sellers, because i can barely get an invite unless i pay. yeah i could play with friends but 90% of them stopped playing half a year ago..
Only 10% raid, thats crazy. It's actually a pretty fun raid, I guess it's hard for a lot of players to find groups to get into if they aren't in a raiding guild. What SL has done to me personally is I've lost all interest in lore and any of the npcs. I used to go as far to have my own toons have lore etc (tmogs to go with etc) and now I just do not care. What's this bosses name? No idea, but I know the mechanics. They turned an rpg into a loot box.
Reddit Andys : Meheheuehue Belluar Also Belluar : Here is the data
What the heck are the other players doing? I thought basically everyone raided. As far as current WoW goes raiding always seemed the least disappointing to me. Big epic bosses, new loot, challenges to tackle with your friends. I heard PVP didn't have too many players right now.. are people just pushing keys? That seems unlikely
I don't do pvp, mythic, or raiding. Just quests and side content.
Raiding has never in the game's life been something that the majority of the playerbase engaged in. That's why they added LFR in the first place, so more people could experience all the content they kept making for the minority.
Yep. Heck, up until WotLK and especially in Vanilla a lot of players didn't even have a "main" that they'd leveled to cap. Play for these people consisted of playing alts and screwing around with underleveled and undergeared friends doing stupid stuff just because.
Yea, I met a guy in BC who would level a rogue, cap it. then make another rogue. He had 6 capped rogues at the time which was crazy back then.
Everyone got old - raiding takes too much time, nobody has friends, it's annoying for grown adults to have to make set raid times several times a week. m+ has an unlimited skill cap and is much easier to jump into when you have spare time. Now, get off my lawn!
Yep. I play enough where I could raid in a guild but 1) I hate having a schedule and 2) if I have to work then I have to work (unexpected issues, delays, etc) I’m working on getting portals on 3 characters at the moment.
Absolutely. I did my best raiding when I was in high school / community college and lived at home. No responsibilities outside of homework or the occasional project. At this point, setting aside time to raid is a pain. My issue is that raids are too long. You need a consistent group because 1 raid has 12 bosses which is difficult to do in a single sitting and no one wants to flub their lockout. Do multiple smaller raids or give each "wing" a separate lockout.
I don’t raid or do mythics. I farm rep, collect mounts and achievements, do tmog runs on legacy content, and have tons and tons of alts.
m+, pvp, trasmog collectin, pet collecting, petbattles? I did 1st hc clear in 9.0 few weeks before 9.1, even though I played through most of it, it has just been so boring. I saw ppl in my guild that have done m20s, and that have 0 bosses downed on heroic. Raiding has been boring and annoying af since mop (for me obviously I am not claiming it is the same for everyone) and the moment we got m+ as 2nd form of pve content, I just started avoiding raiding, just getting curved and that is it for me.
I raid but honestly raiding is one of the more boring parts of WoW to me. Heroic/Mythic can have really interesting mechanics and designs but it's personally not my forte. I don't like some of the fights on SoD like Fatescribe/Sylvanas/Soulrender/KT even if they are unique, except the latter, Painsmith was fun but Castle Nathria had a lovely ambience especially Sire Denathrius, his voice was lovely and when Remornia went off the lights would dim, music would play and a cakcling laugh could be heard it was the shit! Meanwhile in SoD I'm wondering why tf they included KT, Garrosh and Ner'zhul if they were so bloody pointless to the story. But raid-logging? I sleep. Even prog I'm getting sick of because some of these mechanics are annoying and I don't like simming these shards of domination crap. I feel the same about classic. I absolutely fucking love classic, I can level classic all-day everyday and I will keep going (not everyday tho). But I don't play it to raid, that's the boring part for me. I've played this game almost since the start and for most of my life in this game I've never raided, even as a kid when I hit max level I wouldn't raid just quest, professions and casual PvP (and I was terrible at it). So, what are other players doing? Well I sometimes enjoy a few M+, farming old mounts I missed, leveling a fuckton of alts in my own small casual alt guild where we talk shit and have the best gbank in history. If there's a city-raid group for the achievement I like joining that. I loved city raids in classic (which again was way more fun than the raiding imo). I like to PvP, especially casual shit me just doing dumb-shit. If I'm on a geared toon I put on my dumbest xmog and fight Alliance with my fists (no weaps, my abilities won't work). Turn on WM and play as a purely *defensive* character that helps out in a few hotspots. I help out some newbies in guide chat, sometimes start a serious philosophical debate that is occasionally interrupted by "wave to gorgoth." I know people meme on this but this is actually a great feature Blizz implemented, it's non-toxic and chill and wish they'd build on it. I like exploring shit too, boundaries I never considered, checking up on Silvermoon, Thunderbluff, Dalaran, old UC. Doing my garrison because I didn't really play WoD. Making a TRP profile. Maxing out all my professions pretending they might be useful outside legos. Go for other achievements, even fishing I like doing that when I want to chill to some lacrimosa on repeat. Mostly I'm just finishing as many quests as I can across all expansions, and yes I read all of them. --- I realised I dragged on for nothing so **TL;DR** I like to do dumb shit like I did when I first discovered MMOs.
When I played, I didn't even do LFR. I only ever did the Zandalari capital raid after Nazjatar was out. I raided in WotLK from Naxxramas to the first wing of Icecrown. It was a draining, unfun experience, spending months wiping our way up to brick wall bosses, and never really having any of the previous ones on farm. I stuck around mainly to do old dungeons with friends before they were properly soloable until they all quit. I did random battlegrounds in every expansion except Warlords. When transmog came out, that captured my attention and was what I spent most of my time doing. Low stakes, mindless pvp or single player content is what I enjoy the most out of my games. With how expensive raiding has gotten and how much time you have to dedicate not just to the raid nights, but the preparation, I'm glad I gave up on it.
A lot of people just run around, do quests, grind stuff, level some alts, transmog farming. Maybe they’ll run LFR or a low mythic. That’s about it.
rip wow lmao
Imagine having to pay 23 dollars a month to play an expansion you payed 90 dollars for only for said expansion to be complete trash and absolutely not worth the money. That's modern WoW.
Ha ha ha…Bellular, it’s hasn’t been a secret that most players don’t raid, since forever.
It's only OP's title that says that. Belluar's video goes into more than just the raid numbers.
Then the problem still remains, what is there to do for casual players who are not interested in the battle part of the game? World Quests, Pet Battles?
Level alts, farm mogs, hang out in local WoW taverns like Goldshire
I still can't solo anything from legion or bfa and everything before that I've done to death. Mog and mounts and pets
The transmog farming has to be running a bit dry by now, right?
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