Current Events > Former WoW players - where did the game start going wrong?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm not asking what it was that finally killed your interest in it - unless you liked literally everything else about the game and it was just that one thing which did it for you. I'm talking about the first change which really made you think, "I don't like where this is going."

Looking back, I think introducing achievements was the first sign. Not gonna lie, that shit was like a drug for me at first - seeing the number increase was so satisfying. It took a long time for me to realize how...iunno, cynical of a tactic it was to implement them. Obviously Blizz wants people to keep playing their game, otherwise the subscriptions dry up and it stops being profitable, but there are a lot of ways to do that. Achievements seem like the first blatant sign that building the world itself was no longer their primary focus, and that the world was simply a backdrop for implementing things to keep you coming back month after month. It wasn't the first sign completely, just the most transparent one.

(The "just don't worry about them if you don't like them" argument is bullshit, by the way - Blizz still made them regardless of whether you care about them.)
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id say pretty much the entire WoD expac. WoW had been going towards a "raid or die" design for a while and then WoD was the peak of this, and along with the huge content drought and shitty garrison mechanic, it almost killed the game. iirc this is when blizzard stopped reporting server numbers, started merging servers, etc. it really did look like they wanted to kill off WoW.

thankfully Legion fixed a lot of the problems with WoD and the new expac looks cool.

there have been a bunch of fuckups along the way, but tbh i think a lot of the decline of WoW has more to do with changing tastes in games and the allure of MMOs wearing off now that being in a persistent digital world is no longer novel
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WoD was the only expansion I hated. Legion has been one of the best though, I've been enjoying it very much.
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Pandas.
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SomeLikeItHoth posted...

Pandas.

MoP had a shitty theme but it was a great expansion.
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Cataclysm heroic dungeon nerf

It has been getting worse by the expansion, there's not really a specific turning point when the game became shittier.

Also people been playing for years and are jaded to all of it.
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I keep starting and stopping. It's a good way to kill some time and I feel like now matter what they change, I "know" it in the same way I don't know a new MMO and that keeps me away from them.
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Cookie Bag posted...

It has been getting worse by the expansion, there's not really a specific turning point when the game became shittier.

Also people been playing for years and are jaded to all of it.

Been playing since 2006, played every expansion. It's still good. Legion is the 3rd best only behind Wrath and BC.
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Ask much as I liked Wrath of the Lich King, it probably started there. The raids and heroics were much easier, compared to BC and vanilla, and that was when they started homogenizing the classes.

Cata saw some improvement early on with the new difficulty of heroics, but just got so damned boring later on.
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Romulox28 posted...

iirc this is when blizzard stopped reporting server numbers, started merging servers, etc. it really did look like they wanted to kill off WoW.

Honestly I thought cross-server stuff was a nice thing, if we're talking about things like instances being multi-server and such if done through LFD. I started on a low-population server and making stuff like that happen was a pain in the ass. Course, I went DPS, so even when there was enough people I was the most saturated market by far.
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When they took gearscore and actually put it in the game. I think that really set back the progress of the majority of players looking to get into endgame content.
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LinksLiege posted...

Romulox28 posted...

iirc this is when blizzard stopped reporting server numbers, started merging servers, etc. it really did look like they wanted to kill off WoW.

Honestly I thought cross-server stuff was a nice thing, if we're talking about things like instances being multi-server and such if done through LFD. I started on a low-population server and making stuff like that happen was a pain in the ass. Course, I went DPS, so even when there was enough people I was the most saturated market by far.

oh man, i haaaaaated CRZ. all it did was give the illusion of other players. you couldnt group with them, trade with them, etc. it was like your server was populated by ghosts
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Blizzard basically started giving away things that were once difficult to get. For example, several epic mounts were only available by having certain levels of PvP honor that you gained mostly in the battlegrounds. This was a grueling process, so I felt like I earned the mounts by being committed enough to fight for them as a non-guild player over months of game time. Eventually one of the patch updates made it so you could run easy dungeons and turn in the badge rewards for the mounts. To me, that made the PvP pointless. (This was years ago, and I never went back.)
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nexigrams posted...

When they took gearscore and actually put it in the game. I think that really set back the progress of the majority of players looking to get into endgame content.

That's straight-up the thing which made me quit. It was the final step in Bliz showing off how cynical they are about the game.

Obviously GS was a thing before that - there were addons for it, and it was common for dungeon/raid groups to require a certain score before they'd let you join. But Bliz not only acknowledging it, but making it the major focus of equipment progression in the end game, was awful. I was on the edge of leaving already, but seeing items which say "Increases the item level of your weapon by 5" or whatever finally pushed me over.
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LFR/LFG and old world flying
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Esrac posted...

Ask much as I liked Wrath of the Lich King, it probably started there. The raids and heroics were much easier, compared to BC and vanilla, and that was when they started homogenizing the classes.

Cata saw some improvement early on with the new difficulty of heroics, but just got so damned boring later on.

Exactly this
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When they ruined PvP by having Battlegrounds.
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Cata.

I mean there's a reason that's when numbers started dropping.
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As others have posted, I think it was midway through Wrath. That's when stuff starting becoming all about farming badge gear for the latest patch.

And the end of BC, you still had people running Karazhan and the earlier raids at least. By midway through Wrath, when people were doing that ToC raid, there was no point in anyone running Naxx or Ulduar anymore. The game got to a point where each patch made all previous content in that same expac basically irrelevant. When the next patch would come out, new badge gear could just take the place of all the epics you had to get in previous raids.

WoW became all about badge gear.
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I stopped playing during TBC, so this is mostly motivated by my own experiences, but I think it has a lot to do with the pre-max level grind getting less interesting/quicker. That just means that anyone left behind by raiding at any point ends up having little to do in the game.

I tried out Vanilla WoW recently, and there's only so many times you can run some of those dungeons for pre-raid gear without actually wanting to commit to a raiding schedule.
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One guy i knew stopped because he said the player base started to change to really toxic. It apparently became more about playing the certain way and players were acting like elitists.
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Sativa_Rose posted...

As others have posted, I think it was midway through Wrath. That's when stuff starting becoming all about farming badge gear for the latest patch.

And the end of BC, you still had people running Karazhan and the earlier raids at least. By midway through Wrath, when people were doing that ToC raid, there was no point in anyone running Naxx or Ulduar anymore. The game got to a point where each patch made all previous content in that same expac basically irrelevant. When the next patch would come out, new badge gear could just take the place of all the epics you had to get in previous raids.

WoW became all about badge gear.

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I'm going to be jaded and say BC. It's the expansion that really started pushing high level raiding and high level (re: Arena) PVP. If you didn't do one or the other, you were nothing. Battlegrounds were in their prime, and the addition of a whole new world meant Azeroth was left behind, which in turn meant world PVP was dead there and practically nonexistent in the new areas thanks to flying mounts. Oh, and of course, the birth of dailies.
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I just got bored really. Played the end of vanilla to like mid WoTLK. MMOs take up too much time anyway. I always thought WoW did it best though.
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im what they used to call a Wrathbaby so i can't speak on how it was before. maybe ill play classic when it comes out and like it more. who knows.

i do remember LOATHING WoD and Garrisons and how they were tied into end game. and how EVERY GOD DAMN piece of gear was random, meaning you either had to farm gear over and over and over just to get the right item with the right stat, or farm the items to reroll the stats on gear. it also killed professions! i think i only leveled fishing cuz i wanted that DAMNED WATER STRIDER AND OH MY GOD LUNKERS

legions better, but world quests are just dailies without a hub. so i dunno.
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I played from vanilla all the way through the first couple of monthd of Cata. I didnt like how the revamped OG areas like Azshara and started giving away things that used to require tons of time investment (warlock epic mount, baron mount, ect) . Those were really my only gripes, i just felt it was time to stop spending so much of my free time on an mmo lol. Then i saw the kung fu panda expansion and was glad i left. Ugh.

Sami1000 posted...

One guy i knew stopped because he said the player base started to change to really toxic. It apparently became more about playing the certain way and players were acting like elitists.

the players can be kinda rude sometimes. that is why I mostly solo. one of the last times I did a dungeon I was a tank, and this dps kept posting his aggro numbers or whatever in a snide way. he was saying I was not being a tank as good he was as a dps. but I don't even get why he was whining. we did fine. I did everything I knew how to do to be a tank, and nobody died and we beat the dungeon with no problems. but he just had to let me know the numbers. I never got into the numbers game and I don't understand people who obsess over it and turn a fun game into math homework. if you are beating the mobs, everything is fine. simple as that.

MegaTech posted...

MMOs take up too much time anyway.

You woulda hated Legion. I got that after ignoring Cata through WoD, maybe halfway into 2017. Older xpacs had a decent amount of content added per patch so, even if you jump in near the end of the xpac's cycle, you won't be drowned in solo content to do. Legion, in comparison, is just fucking packed full of too much stuff. So many quests, so many factions, so many continents/planets - and then drop a ton of daily things that factor into that progression.

Granted, raid content starts at such a piss-easy level that you could also ignore all of it and jump right in at 110 if you wanted, rendering huge chunks of it pointless.
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Esrac posted...

Ask much as I liked Wrath of the Lich King, it probably started there. The raids and heroics were much easier, compared to BC and vanilla

no they werent

take off the glasses and look at the mechanics in vanilla raids vs wrath

the difference is night and day

vanilla was only "hard" because it was a buggy mess, there was no clear design or balance among classes at all, gearing was a nightmare (3 drops for a 40 man raid, lol), itemization was garbage, there was very little theorycrafting, addons were not as complex as they are now, etc etc

i mean seriously, look at a fight like 25h arthas compared to literally anything in vanilla

I_Stay_Noided posted...

Esrac posted...

Ask much as I liked Wrath of the Lich King, it probably started there. The raids and heroics were much easier, compared to BC and vanilla

no they werent

take off the glasses and look at the mechanics in vanilla raids vs wrath

the difference is night and day

vanilla was only "hard" because it was a buggy mess, there was no clear design or balance among classes at all, gearing was a nightmare (3 drops for a 40 man raid, lol), itemization was garbage, there was very little theorycrafting, addons were not as complex as they are now, etc etc

i mean seriously, look at a fight like 25h arthas compared to literally anything in vanilla

Vanilla is hard in different ways. For one it's far less forgiving. I remember playing as a warrior tank during MoP and WoD and I had so many different "oh shit" buttons I could push if something went wrong, like Shield Wall and Last Stand and stuff, and they were on fairly short cooldowns no more than 5 mins each.

In Vanilla, you have far less wiggle room and mistakes get punished more severely. Compared to mythic anything, vanilla raids will all seem quite simple, but only the super elitists of WoW ever even set foot into mythic anyways.
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I hated the focus on the Alliance vs Horde war. I also hated how much farming was needed. I remember getting up to max level and thinking "here's where the game really starts" and then realising I'd have to do the same stuff day in and day out.

Sativa_Rose posted...

As others have posted, I think it was midway through Wrath. That's when stuff starting becoming all about farming badge gear for the latest patch.

And the end of BC, you still had people running Karazhan and the earlier raids at least. By midway through Wrath, when people were doing that ToC raid, there was no point in anyone running Naxx or Ulduar anymore. The game got to a point where each patch made all previous content in that same expac basically irrelevant. When the next patch would come out, new badge gear could just take the place of all the epics you had to get in previous raids.

WoW became all about badge gear.

I think that is a big part of it.

They wanted to make the game more accessible to people who didn't have the time to see the endgame content. Because they couldn't or wouldn't get the keys to unlock each raid by doing hard heroics, gear up through the earlier raids, and then finally make it to end game.

Fine. But what they did was go to far in the other direction by making content too easy, giving out too good gear for badges, and make previous raids obsolete.
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Been playing since Dec 04, and though there have been few things I didn't like, I don't feel "the game has gone wrong".

YMMV, but I loved MoP for being so different and alive (first expac where you genuinely were exploring a new land with non combat villages/towns) and was thrilled by Legion bringing so many things full circle (even if the major character body count rivaled a Shakesperean tragedy)

MoP
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Wedge Antilles posted...

LFR/LFG and old world flying

See, this is where the game REALLY started to die. When vanilla crybabies couldn't feel special in the game anymore.

Literally listed flying as a con. Unironically.
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Cataclsym+WoD.

Also when they turned class rotations from a comfy and simple thing into an obnoxious spastic carpal tunnel fest for special people with 0 attention span.

>guy turns on his mic on vent
>CLACKALCKACLAKALCAKCLACKALCAKCLACKALCALCAKCLACKACK
for 4 hours straight

Theres a reason I only play healers now.

Sativa_Rose posted...

I_Stay_Noided posted...

Esrac posted...

Ask much as I liked Wrath of the Lich King, it probably started there. The raids and heroics were much easier, compared to BC and vanilla

no they werent

take off the glasses and look at the mechanics in vanilla raids vs wrath

the difference is night and day

vanilla was only "hard" because it was a buggy mess, there was no clear design or balance among classes at all, gearing was a nightmare (3 drops for a 40 man raid, lol), itemization was garbage, there was very little theorycrafting, addons were not as complex as they are now, etc etc

i mean seriously, look at a fight like 25h arthas compared to literally anything in vanilla

Vanilla is hard in different ways. For one it's far less forgiving. I remember playing as a warrior tank during MoP and WoD and I had so many different "oh shit" buttons I could push if something went wrong, like Shield Wall and Last Stand and stuff, and they were on fairly short cooldowns no more than 5 mins each.

In Vanilla, you have far less wiggle room and mistakes get punished more severely. Compared to mythic anything, vanilla raids will all seem quite simple, but only the super elitists of WoW ever even set foot into mythic anyways.

Vanilla is hard in the same that it's hard to cut a block of wood with a wrench.

Mythic raiding is hard in the same way building a house is hard with every tool available.

The reason you dont have CDs in vanilla is because its so ridiculously easy it's not needed. You have 10 year old f2p kids with pentium 2s from brazil facerolling naxx40 in classic Pservers with their 1 button fire mage rotation and warriors who literally just make a shield block/sunder/heroic strike 1 button macro.

FluttershyPony posted...

The reason you dont have CDs in vanilla is because its so ridiculously easy it's not needed. You have 10 year old f2p kids with pentium 2s from brazil facerolling naxx40 in classic Pservers with their 1 button fire mage rotation and warriors who literally just make a shield block/sunder/heroic strike 1 button macro.

lmao, let's wait and see how people fare in 40 man naxx again, I don't think any of the private servers have gotten that far yet in terms of patches released. If it was as easy as you seem to think, a lot more people would have cleared it back in the day. It was only out for like 7-8 months before BC came out which didn't give people in retail vanilla a lot of time for naxx, but still I doubt it's going to be very easy even these days when people get around to it again

also you still need CDs for "oh shit" moments, you just only get a few maximum and they have much longer cooldowns, like shield wall having a 30 min cooldown on prot warriors IIRC
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Sativa_Rose posted...

FluttershyPony posted...

The reason you dont have CDs in vanilla is because its so ridiculously easy it's not needed. You have 10 year old f2p kids with pentium 2s from brazil facerolling naxx40 in classic Pservers with their 1 button fire mage rotation and warriors who literally just make a shield block/sunder/heroic strike 1 button macro.

lmao, let's wait and see how people fare in 40 man naxx again, I don't think any of the private servers have gotten that far yet in terms of patches released. If it was as easy as you seem to think, a lot more people would have cleared it back in the day. It was only out for like 7-8 months before BC came out which didn't give people in retail vanilla a lot of time for naxx, but still I doubt it's going to be very easy even these days when people get around to it again

also you still need CDs for "oh shit" moments, you just only get a few maximum and they have much longer cooldowns, like shield wall having a 30 min cooldown on prot warriors IIRC

The "best" players in the world in 2004/2005 were all clickers and keyboard turners, even the mage GM of nihilum was a clicker till he got exposed and humiliated, kungen was literally jumping around like an idiot spamming emotes and not seriously DPSing in their BWL clear videos. Average player now will faceroll any content now that they actually know how to keybind/move and the 1 mechanic of each fight has been done and studied to death.

Thats like saying computers were more complicated and required more skill 15-20 years ago, when the truth is the average person was just dumb as a rock and uninformed at the time.

Cross-server instancing.

Don't get me wrong, it basically eliminated queue times and made it feasible to play on low population servers, but it also killed any community/culture unique to a particular sever. I missed the drama in general chat about certain infamous players, and it generally required you to maintain a sort of level of "gaming professionalism", because you wouldn't get invited to end game content if you had a reputation of being a fuckboy.
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FluttershyPony posted...

Sativa_Rose posted...

FluttershyPony posted...

The reason you dont have CDs in vanilla is because its so ridiculously easy it's not needed. You have 10 year old f2p kids with pentium 2s from brazil facerolling naxx40 in classic Pservers with their 1 button fire mage rotation and warriors who literally just make a shield block/sunder/heroic strike 1 button macro.

lmao, let's wait and see how people fare in 40 man naxx again, I don't think any of the private servers have gotten that far yet in terms of patches released. If it was as easy as you seem to think, a lot more people would have cleared it back in the day. It was only out for like 7-8 months before BC came out which didn't give people in retail vanilla a lot of time for naxx, but still I doubt it's going to be very easy even these days when people get around to it again

also you still need CDs for "oh shit" moments, you just only get a few maximum and they have much longer cooldowns, like shield wall having a 30 min cooldown on prot warriors IIRC

The "best" players in the world in 2004/2005 were all clickers and keyboard turners, even the mage GM of nihilum was a clicker till he got exposed and humiliated, kungen was literally jumping around like an idiot spamming emotes and not seriously DPSing in their BWL clear videos. Average player now will faceroll any content now that they actually know how to keybind/move and the 1 mechanic of each fight has been done and studied to death.

Thats like saying computers were more complicated and required more skill 15-20 years ago, when the truth is the average person was just dumb as a rock and uninformed at the time.

Well like I said earlier, let's actually wait and see what happens when kids start doing this stuff again.

And do you know if those BWL vids were their first clears? If they already had it on farm then I wouldn't be surprised.
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It never "went wrong" for me, it was just all the people I played with stopped playing for one reason or another. I still resub from time to time, but not having anyone to play with makes it pretty boring.
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Esrac posted...

Ask much as I liked Wrath of the Lich King, it probably started there. The raids and heroics were much easier, compared to BC and vanilla, and that was when they started homogenizing the classes.

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I raided in Vanilla WoW, and I raid now. Raiding has never been the issue.
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When they removed flying in new expansions
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