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The Changing Face of World of Warcraft
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue May 20, 2008 11:43 AM
from the lowest-common-denominator dept.
from the lowest-common-denominator dept.
Back in March Blizzard released patch 2.4 and significantly altered a good portion of the overall gameplay and provided a much more casual experience. Since then Blizzard has continued to make the game more approachable through new dungeons and removing attunements and other restrictions throughout the game. While this may open up a lot of new content to the masses and help the game's overall appeal, does this continuing trend promise to alienate the high-end players who thrive on new challenges? Should Blizzard care?
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iIt has done so already. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:iIt has done so already. (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate the idea of funding the development of content that only 5% of the player base is intended to enjoy.
Sorry, but I want them to spend their development $$s making content I can get into with my wife and a few friends.
cc
-GiH
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Re:iIt has done so already. (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me new areas that I can explore on my own or with a friend or two. New quests outside of killing 10 more of those things or gather 20 more flowers.
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Re:iIt has done so already. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also implemented to still have a carrot ready for the raiders that have a lower pace.
Everything in WoW is build around the philosophy that no matter what you do, how hard you try, how much time you invest. There is always some reward or instance just out of reach for you.
They will give you the idea that if you just try a tad harder you might reach it. That is, until a new patch
Re:iIt has done so already. (Score:5, Informative)
There is no evidence that Blizzard is suffering from an exodus of casual players. The opposite appears to be true.
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Re:Killing Raiding (Score:5, Insightful)
WoW isn't a job where you are "putting in effort", it's a game. I'm not hardcore about playing, but I have had fun raiding. That's the point. If I'm raiding and enjoying myself and learning the fights and feeling some accomplishment, what difference does it make if someone else gets loot in a different way? I still have the accomplishment. I've run a couple of marathons... the fact that many thousands of other people have run faster than me doesn't invalidate what I did.
Relax and enjoy the game. At the end of the day, unless you are a serious pvp'er, it doesn't matter what gear someone else has, it's whether you had fun playing.
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Re:iIt has done so already. (Score:5, Informative)
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hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
The high-end players got to be high-end players through thousands of hours of grinding. They don't thrive on new challenges, they thrive on the same old ones.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Take it as a flame if you want, but the game felt mindless to me. My mage pretty much used the same 3 or 4 spells over and over and over. I signed up for a world of adventure, not something more boring than my cubicle.
Re:hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, the gaming is obviously a draw, but, at least for me, and for most of the folks I play with, it's not the biggest part.
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Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
I've never had an insult leveled at me that I understood so little as this one. It's like you're talking some moon-man gibberish language.
BUt you probably never spent the time.
Since I've never really played WoW your guess is right.
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Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah, no doubt. But you eventually beat the encounter, didn't you?
Then you did it again the next week.
And the next week.
And again.
And again.
And no you're not even close to getting all the gear out of the raid yet (why won't [insert item here] drop?!), so you do it again.
And then again.
And I've only typed out a month and a half of "agains", and I'm not even close to how many times most raiders have repeated the same content, am I?
My raiding experience is limited, ZG in the old world, Kara and Gruul in the new one, but in both cases it's months and months and months of beating the same bosses over and over to get the gear because you have to contend with the RNG and 10-25 people needing gear. Sure in the first month you're getting to new bosses you haven't beat before, but the everything you do up to the new boss is repetition of previous attempts, and from thereafter it's doing the same thing over and over and over to try to get everyone in the raid geared up.
OP was spot on. WoW end game is about doing the same content over and over. They occasionally add something new, which is great, but especially for the "bleeding edge guilds" that you clearly consider yourself part of, that doesn't last for long and you know it.
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Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Strawman
"Then your opinion is completely invalidated. "
I suggest yopu loom up the word 'Opinion'
". If you played WoW, then I bet, even if you were handed top of the line gear when Naxx came out, you wouldn't have even downed Anub'Arak"
Irrelevant to the point.
"Encounters when they first come out are HARD."
And this ties into some sort of point?
"They're hard and imbalanced."
Imbalanced isn't exactly a glowing statment. It is a poor reason for something to be 'Hard'
"Stop being jealous, and l2p. "
Who is Jealous? The poster doesn't even indicate an jealousy.
Stop putting your frustration out on others. l2a( Learn to Argue).
The poster is correct, high-end players do the same thing over and over again. Thinking otherwise means you've never done it, or have deluded yourself into thinking it has value to you.
Yes I play, yes I ahve done high end raids, no not very often and I do it behind the curve. My value in the game isn't doing the same thing over and over again.
I suggest you don't actually know what hard is.
Nothing in th game is 'hard' Difficult at times, but not hard. Getting a group that plays well together is hard.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How does this alienate the high-end? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:How does this alienate the high-end? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end this is the fate of nearly all raiding guilds. The focus is on pushing content, and getting loot. There is basically no loyalty, and the second the grass looks greener on the other side people jump ship. When everything is going good, it looks fine on the outside but basically rots from within. It's sort of strange that people think of MMORPGs as being unique in this way. Crime organizations often go the same way - ala drug cartels, the mob, etc. Didn't anyone learn anything from scarface?
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Good changes (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall I think it was a good move for players like me. I don't know what the "old-timers" would think about it, though...
Re:Good changes (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You might want to flee~
Re:Good changes (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I find grinding the least favorite part of MMO's. Leveling in itself is fun for the first few times but after playing MMO's and plenty of other single player games that are based almost solely around leveling (hell even pokemon is based on leveling your pets), the process has gotten old for most people and the need to come up with some other gameplay is needed.
One thing most people are rumbling about in WAR (Warhammer Online) is that there will be horizontal progression rather than vertical progression with a hard cap at 40 for levels and the end game is the Realm versus Realm (like DAoC).
Most people agree that increasing level caps will alienate casual players who will be at a disadvantage to hardcore players because it is PvP in a sense and even if they separate higher levels from lower, increasing the Cap simply for the sake of keeping the players playing the game will only cause the player base to be separated even further.
The idea of horizontal progression is that once you reach level 40, new content will be added for a second tier of leveling which means any expansions that add new spells, gear, and content will be equal to that already added by on a second scale completely separate from the levels gained from 1 through 40. They will be balanced so that these new features don't actually make the old ones obsolete. They WAR devs haven't really gone into exactly how this will work especially since they haven't released the very first part of the game, but the idea of horizontal progression at a certain point actually makes more sense to me, because you don't have to grind to experience new content but to use some other scale (I think there is something called realm pride etc) to which the end game can be progressed without simply raising the level cap.
The idea is interesting to me because I could care less about leveling another character ever again and would rather focus on another way of advancing a character through a game. I think Ultima Online had it right, but no one seems to want to copy them
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
however, what with the recent changes, we have been able to go into dungeons and down bosses we never thought we'd ever get to see. we're downing bosses in Tempest Keep, Serpentshrine Cavern, Black Temple, and Mount Hyjal, and we're plowing through Zul'Aman picking up three of the timed chests on the way. it sure beats farming karazhan
More Money in Casual players (Score:5, Insightful)
I Agree with GP (Score:3, Insightful)
Morons (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody who cites the removal of attunement from a high-level raid instance as a reason to give up raiding is a complete and total idiot. The fact that you can set foot into a raid does not in any way mean you can beat it. The only thing attunement gives is a way for raiding guilds to weed out the complete and total idiots. Honestly.
For those of you that don't grasp this, here's how it was before the patch:
Level to 70. Replace gear with low-level dungeon loot, and complete a quest while you're doing that. Raid one thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Hooray, you beat the game, go outside.
And here's how it is after the patch:
Level to 70. Replace gear with low-level dungeon loot. Raid one thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Hooray, you beat the game, go outside.
Guess what. It doesn't matter if there's no attunement. Everybody still had to spend the identical amount of time and effort getting better loot to even survive stepping in the front door of Illidan's house.
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And here's how it is after the patch:
Level to 70. Replace gear with low-level dungeon loot. Raid one thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Hooray, you beat the game, go outside.
Crappy example.
It's now Raid one thing and get better loot. TURN IN BADGES to received from raiding or heroics or daily quests for loot as good as that found in the next two raiding zones.
Removing the attunements makes perfect sense. It's called mudflation which was coined to demonstrate that the dem
Not for casual players (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to see new content, you cannot do so as a casual player. I was far beyond a casual player (2 RAIDs a week, several hours of farming) and still noticed, that i was falling behind on the content scale.
New instances were added faster i could complete them. Going through SSC and TK literally took months. The RAID had several crisis meetings, weaker players were encouraged to seek their fortune somewhere else. In the end, we made progress and were inside the black temple, but the fun was left behind. In April i quit after playing my Rogue for more then 2.500 hours.
Quitting hurts... as intended. But there was no choice. You can either do the easy instances again and again or try new content. There you need two things: equip and error-free playing. I loved the game, but it was becoming a second job. No need for that :-(.
The desertion rate is currently high. In the month after i quit, the RAID lost 4 more players with 3+ years under their epic belt. There are still new players coming in (still got 330$ for my Rogue), but WoW is loosing a lot of experienced players currently.
All the things done for casual players considered, the R&D of Bliizzard is still focussed on the power gamer (Nihilum&Co). 90% of all instanced content (SSC and higher) will only be seen by a small minoritry of all players (~15%).
Please don't missunderstand me: The game was fun till the last minute. But to continue and make progress it would have required more time of me, that i was prepared to give. The content for the casual player (daily quests, small isntances, etc) didn't appeal to me.
CU, martin
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, many more people see high end raid content than you might think. Wowjutsu is a site that crawls the Armory and compiles stats and progress for guilds and servers, and it also breaks down the percentage of the population that sees raid instances and even specif
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Re:Not for casual players (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah. Isn't that how it is in real life too - you build up your stats (CV) and gear to get higher-paying jobs (instances), which both build the CV further and drop better gear ? And while you're at it, you need to join a guild (social network) to succeed at those higher-end dungeons. Repeat until you die. Sure sounds like my life, except that I'm stuck at level 1 due to a chicken-and-egg problem ;(.
The only real difference between WoW and Real Life is that in Real Life, you aren't allowed to split the Boss's head with an axe.
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WoW has "raids", computers have "RAID". (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, most of the dead weight I've seen isn't particulary entertaining.
The Future (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Blizzard are willing to risk alienating one group of their players if it means holding upon another; if indeed those are mutually exclusive. Whatever happens I am sure in the end serious competition will force Blizzard to improve or die.
In my opinion, 2.4 sucked a lot of fun out of it.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, you didn't have to grind away on dailies. You could always grind badges instead. Or grind PvP by getting your weekly beatings in the arena.
The point was made up above, but I'll reiterate it: Play has changed to a combination of the best gear and a complete mastery of the metagame.
And frankly, if you're lacking in either of those areas, this really sucks the fun right out of it - ESPECIALLY when mindless repetition is your only way out of the deficit you're facing.
Oh, and when that next patch hits, you're now even further behind. Gratz!
WoWs influence outside of WoW (Score:4, Interesting)
At this point I'm kind of set off by MMORPGs. Just like Hollywood, the gaming industry has a way of creating cookie cutter results. What fun is it going to be for a real gamer if they start to dumb down in order to draw in the casual player? Not that I play 60 hours a week or something but I certainly don't mind a challenge. How many more MMORPGs will be dumbed down to follow WoW's lead?
Also, as a side note; Age of Conan came out today. I took some interest until I found out that it was 50 USD without ever stepping foot in the game and the games website seemed to have little content (not that I spent much time there). Why is it that a gaming company still thinks that we should shell out bucks to buy a game that we need to subscribe to? I'd be much happier and more likely to try it if I could download the content and play for 15 USD a month. I'm a hell of a lot more willing to pay 15 to see if I like a game instead of 50 for a game that I can't play without shelling out another 15 if my interest in it wanes for a few months.
Blizzard should care (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just part of a longer cycle in the game (Score:4, Informative)
Already lost them... (Score:3, Insightful)
By forcing smaller groups, they caused both an increase in smaller, tighter cliques of players, alienating many on the outside, as well as limiting the likelyhood of non-cookie-cutter classes and builds from getting into raids. This further alienated even more players.
If they ever release a lot more 40-man content I *might* consider re-subscribing, though a high price for buying the expansion will likely stop that. There's also the whole issue of "I already have a job, I don't want to play like I have two," which was a large factor in me quitting.
Re:Already lost them... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, and what people did you know? Perhaps just the very small percentage of folks who just discovered that their obsession with raiding actually marginalized their value as customers to Blizzard. So those folks left "in droves"? Big Whoop. WoW isn't EQ and Blizz eventually recognized that being held hostage to the demands of "serious raiders" was not a good way to serve the vast majority (90%+) of their customer base.
Be brutally honest and you will recognize that there are probably more Chinese gold farmers in the game than "Serious raiders".
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Re:Does it alienate players ? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're playing for fun, the memories of the good times you've had shouldn't be diminished just because somebody else now gets to see that content. You still got there first, anyway.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not quit after that first 15-20%?
I think anger at Blizzard for making the part of the game that you admitted wasn't fun for you more fun for other people is misdirected.
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If you're still playing, I'd suggest that you definitely want to quit before the next expansion, since nothing you're doing now will matter in 5 levels.
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And no, I ahve never felt I was screwed. No more then I feel I am screwed when the people who get to the theater first have to wait longer for the movie then the person who walks in last.
Fortunatly, I only did the initial grind for a few things, not worth my time. OTOH some people find being one of the first with a Dragon mount worth the extra effort. The players I know that got one k
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Re:New requirements a slap to raiders (Score:4, Informative)
1) You can't get a full set of T6 level gear from badges. Take cloth for example, there are three pieces of healing gear at the T6 iLevel. That's not even half the armor class restricted slots.
2) It isn't easy for casual players to get badges. They don't already have T6 geared people to destroy Heroics with, or to burn through Kara in under 2.5 hours. At the highest end of the casual spectrum, they might be able to muster one upgrade for themselves a month.
3) Experience counts. You can't ebay 25 T6 toons, wowwiki a strat, then waltz into BT and kill Illidan. Skipping progression like that is like skipping grades in school. You're either extremely smart or extremely stupid.
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