Board 8 > WoW Patch Summary (Very bad)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Three new campaign chapters! They will take an hour. Total. Cutscene where we magically obtain an item we (Apparently?) needed to chase that jailer that we had all along because cut content. The Jailer is apparently trying to stop us, but a few minutes later when he sees us hes like "lol they dont matter move on".

We are at the end of the expansion, we are trying to stop the jailer from doing ??? because of ???. He told sylvanas he wanted to do ??? but really he wanted to do it in ??? way. Sylvanas was only helping him because she sold her soul to someone because ??? and this person was really just helping the jailer because ??? and now any plot line surrounding this relationship has been forgotten. None of this has yet to be expanded upon in this patch.

One new zone, it is pretty, but the content is not any different than the last zone. There are like 6 quests outside the main campaign. They feel like they should just be part of the campaign.

There are rares that drop items that we need for ???. Theres like 6 versions of these. They are used for things not yet implemented in the game. The one item we get that can use is timegated for no reason(A change from the PTR apparently). The only purpose this serves is to limit the stuff we can do in the new zone.

The new zone has 3 fast travel points. Two are right next to each other. One is an outer area. The zone is a big circle. The zone gives you two daily quests and 2 world quests. These can be done in 20 minutes. The rest of the time you hunt rares. But theres no centralized hub so everything is a long walk. These two dailies have already repeated a quest on day 2. The rest of the stuff to do is kill rares and open chests which again offer currency that currently does nothing. The rares give you reputation. It is something like 0.01% of the rep you need per rare.

Oh and multiple quests dont work. You are given a pet that makes things on the map clickable but they also do nothing. You can play dress-up with the useless pet.

The patch just launched and the servers are pretty empty. Rightfully so. No one should be paying for this game anymore(I'm not paying for it I had a stockpile of WoW tokens).

Also the plot is so horrifically bad I have given the entirety of the expansion plot in this post and a spoiler tag would be entirely unnecessary. There is no plot.

I know the company is going through tough times, but the obvious and complete lack of planning is embarrassing and in some ways unfathomable.

How do you not even write down the basic motivations for your antagonists before executing your multi multi million dollar expansion?

I enjoyed the launch patch, but unsubscribed about a year ago when it was obvious that bad times were ahead.

It's sad, because I don't think there is any living mmo that does raiding better

Jay'lor is just playing 42D chess man. You just cant comprehend his plan!

Note: resubbed last month

I am having fun creating my own content of being a gold baron.

But also I got to the 'lol they don't matter' and screamed into the void.

I am trying to appreciate wow more and tbh it is easy. The new zone is amazing and the rares are fun and engaging. I think since I stopped playing wow as my only game it is a lot easier to like and appreciate it. I like my own goals I have for it and waiting for ffxiv content.

Maybe I can finally get the TLPD.

...But then I'd need to log in. Pass.

Wait people arent still playing it just for Classic/TBC?

banananor posted...

It's sad, because I don't think there is any living mmo that does raiding better

This cant be emphasized enough though. Its too bad everything else about the game has shit the bed.

redrocket posted...

This cant be emphasized enough though. Its too bad everything else about the game has shit the bed.

I don't know that raiding has really gotten better.

You get a bunch of fights where Blizzard attempts to beat weak auras but in doing so pretty much every hard encounter has boiled down to "push this phase at this exact moment to make timers line up so they dont kill you". It isn't great boss design at that point.

Hell the last raid launched without proper fast travel, something perfected...back in Wrath. It didn't even have proper respawns so a failure to have a combat res available on a wipe would result in a 10 minute walk. Trash design returned to being a long winded grind with little regard for the setting. It was basically one homogeneous crawl with little relation to the coming boss.

The best people left Bliaazard 10 years ago when Activision bought them, and the passable devs all left after the dumpster fire that is the last 2 years. All you have left are garbage devs that can't get hired anywhere else, and a bunch of women that have completely checked out of work that are just sticking around so they can win a sexual harassment lawsuit or settlement

Imo the two biggest problems with WoW are one from the players and one from the devs.

The devs honestly from what I know have just started to announce things like tied alt progression, cross faction raiding. And so on. Things that the game has needed for years. They are just very slow on the uptake for these qol things. They try to do a lot of stuff when they should do a little less better.

On the player side it's been that WoW is such a min max mentality game that I find often times people have optimized the fun out of the game.

KokoroAkechi posted...

On the player side it's been that WoW is such a min max mentality game that I find often times people have optimized the fun out of the game.

Blizzard in more recent years catered more to players in the wrong ways and this is the result. Rather than design the game in a fun way that people can play how they want, Blizzard went "people are min/maxing this way so lets force them to play this way".

Other big gripe is that they've basically decided that since the player base is using WoWhead or whatever external site to learn how to play the game that they simply don't need to give good directions on what players are actually supposed to be doing. Korthia/ZM don't give any information on what you are actually building towards. So you are stuck in a situation of rather than do something that might be wrong you have to follow a guide someone outside blizzard made. Doesn't help that Blizzard made people paranoid by starting this expansion with a permanent "bad choice" decision you couldn't reverse(Covenants).

Anyway, I don't know that this game would have anyone logged in without WoW Tokens being a thing.

I stumbled across a random small youtuber who was like "yeah the difference between 8 and 10 dungeons doesn't matter at all for the great vault. They should keep letting you have more and more rewards if you do 12, 16, all the way to 100!"

and I am like... oooh, this is why if I took the game seriously I would hate it. These people exist.

WoW has been so bad for so long, I think the combination of Korthia and wipes on the last phase of Sylvanas (which took about 10 minutes to reach) were what finally set me free.

I just can't stomach the weekly grind of m+ anymore or being told by the raid leader to download another weakaura to avoid any sort of player agency or decision making. Raids just devolved to designated spots and moving on timers. Even something like Fatescribe that could have been fun just turned into automated symbols for your designated task.

It's definitely partly a community issue but everything about the game feels so jaded now.

Genoard posted...

I just can't stomach the weekly grind of m+ anymore or being told by the raid leader to download another weakaura to avoid any sort of player agency or decision making.

Your raid leader has been placed in a toxic position of only ranks mattering and if you fall behind the weak aura power race you'll lose the players you need to play.

Blizzard needed to break weak auras when they started to do things well beyond being a better way to display information you already had(These old features are actually somewhat baked into the game now).

Now they've let them go for too far and the failure to take a stance would probably get too much community backlash. You have too many players that dont want to play the game but would be happy with every boss being Patchwerk..

I'm having too much fun in Season of Mastery right now, so I haven't checked out the patch. I'll get around to it maybe.

I've enjoyed Torghast a ton this expansion, but I don't really wanna do yet another wing, even if it is fancy.

red13n posted...

I don't know that raiding has really gotten better.

tbh, i was comparing to other mmos, so wow raiding didn't have to get better to beat the rest!

i'm still interested in what you're saying and my experience is a bit out of date. i haven't gone super tryhard in a while, but have rather enjoyed normal/heroic modes for the final few years i played

i assume you're talking specifically about mythic difficulty- when do you think the decline first started? i still enjoyed normal/heroic as of nathria

Oh yeah heroic/normal doesn't count.

But having 4 difficulties of raid in the first place is still a gameplay problem in and of itself.

When did mythic start getting bad?

i remember back in wrath when they intentionally broke the addon that was drawing on the floor where you were supposed to stand. it sounds like they need to do something like that with over-the-top WA functionality

they should make the switch during a content drought at the end of an expansion, hand in hand with like a 20% nerf (or whatever is appropriate) to current raids that the playerbase overgears anyway. this will ease players through that transition

the whole situation is 100% a player/community issue. players get mad and call the game casual if professionals clear mythic in the first week. The only way to prevent that is to make the fights so ball-bustingly hard that even savants with insane skill (and in this case, ridiculous addons as well) can't do it. And then players will get mad about that when it's their turn to hit that wall and want every advantage they can get, even if it's unpleasant.

What the thing the vocal playerbase seems to ignore is that if you're not part of the psychotic (or professional, whatever term) retinue of world first contenders, you have control over how much pain you put yourself through.

the nice thing about MMOs is that content is self-nerfing via gear. If you take away the most powerful addons, mid- and low-tier tryhards will still progress a few weeks after the pros

idk if it's changed, but back in legion you could clear mythic raids within two months with DBM and a chill guild, no crazy grind required

banananor posted...

i remember back in wrath when they intentionally broke the addon that was drawing on the floor where you were supposed to stand. it sounds like they need to do something like that with over-the-top WA functionality

Yeah I remember that addon quite well aside the name.

But weak auras at this point have evolved pretty much beyond what that oddon used to do. Every aspect of the fights are basically automated at this point.

Name of the addon was AVR btw. I'm sure it stood for something.

But it was nowhere near as good as weak auras is these days.

red13n posted...

Yeah I remember that addon quite well aside the name.

But weak auras at this point have evolved pretty much beyond what that oddon used to do. Every aspect of the fights are basically automated at this point.

...

If everything is automated it's not a game it's a job.

Usually people pay you for that not the other way around

red13n posted...

Name of the addon was AVR btw. I'm sure it stood for something.

But it was nowhere near as good as weak auras is these days.

that's super sad. when did weakaura cross the line to get to this point? was it sometime during BFA?

masterplum posted...

...

If everything is automated it's not a game it's a job.

Usually people pay you for that not the other way around

I mean, you still have to press buttons. But your weak aura is going to tell you where to go and your weak aura is going to tell you what button to press for optimal rotation.

banananor posted...

that's super sad. when did weakaura cross the line to get to this point? was it sometime during BFA?

It has been a slow creep over a few expansions as the programmers got better.

I'm going to put the blame on G'huun, primarily. Blizzard was so intent on making a boss that would not fall week 1 that they created a fight that necessitated addons going beyond simple convenience.

Legion was where the Weak Aura creep probably started to really take off but it was G'huun that kind of cemented it as the only way to clear a fight.

There were some outliers like WoD archimonde but they were more exceptions than the rule at the time and usually isolated to a single mechanic(Wrought Chaos, which Blizzard pretty much admitted was a mistake to put in the game).

That's super interesting, thank you. I guess a lot has changed in the past 3-4 years

Hopefully they can reset the escalation while still keeping the ultra hardcore engaged

The game is functionally dead. It is probably too late to fix anything.

Yeah the player concensus is that WoW 2 would have to happen due to how fundamentally broken the game is ATM.

It is 100% time to pull the plug. But dev cycles will dictate at least one more really terrible expansion.

There's been a trend lately where people expect companies to exclusively balance a game targetting a VERY small niche of "professional" gamers, people who make income from Twitch/eSports and have 16 hours every day to play their game of choice. And then you have people in the community that barely play the game, but echo the "professionals" because they want to feel some sort of weird validation for "agreeing" with them, as if that makes them somehow a better player.

That's why I stopped playing Dota 2, and I suspect that's what's happening here as well

UltimaterializerX posted...

Forgive my ignorance, but how is this even possible? Can't an MMO be theoretically updated in any way and fix any issue?

The playerbase is too tiny for the amount of servers in existence. The game is dated in every possible way. The Alliance doesn't even exist at this point. The game is old, the only way to fix it at this point is to blow it all up.

BlAcK TuRtLe posted...

There's been a trend lately where people expect companies to exclusively balance a game targetting a VERY small niche of "professional" gamers, people who make income from Twitch/eSports and have 16 hours every day to play their game of choice. And then you have people in the community that barely play the game, but echo the "professionals" because they want to feel some sort of weird validation for "agreeing" with them, as if that makes them somehow a better player.

That's why I stopped playing Dota 2, and I suspect that's what's happening here as well

Honestly, this was the beginning of the end for me. I'm not a hardcore player...or at least I don't want to be. But the game really started catering to the hardcores specifically with mythic dungeons, and specifically mythic+ dungeons. Having a game mode that becomes "You HAVE to clear the majority of trash AND beat the bosses AND you have a time limit AND you have to specifically find people willing to do this with you, since we can't expect LFG to cover that level of skill" isn't fun, when you're expected to grind M+ for raid gear (to the point where you can outgear raids with M+ gear). Raids are already supposed to be the "this is super hard to progress" content, yet M+ suddenly became the new thing, and you had to set aside time and schedule content with specific people (which meant two nights of doing so, if you already had raid nights). Plus, M+'s whole aesthetic seemed designed to tailor specifically to Twitch streamers who want to push for records and high scores, but with rewards that become necessary for casuals to find any level of success.

Throw in the level scaling that removed any sense of progression (making the starting zone and ending zone of any expansion all feel exactly the same), and WoW really does seem like it started trying to desperately cling to the hardcores, without doing anything to appease the people who might be on the fence about enjoying the game.

Implementing mythic+ rating instead of breaking the addons that made mythic+ rating a thing was one of the worst design decisions.

If you dont grind every single mythic dungeon for 2 weeks to get score you end up completely locked out of the community. And now there are two more (not fun) dungeons in the mix.

The worst part is on launch of Shadowlands I actually *liked* the dungeon selection, but the mythic affixes that were always in combination made some actually impossible for my friend group, so trying to go with others and "oops your M+ score is dogshit due to rough times during Plaguefall, try again later even though you +15'd Spires of Ascension shortly before the first raid hit."

The most fun mythic+ has ever been was way back when everyone used to grind 789 Maw of Souls for AP. Even then I wouldn't call it fun but at least it was a way to relax outside of raid. But Blizzard does nothing except listen to the fringe too hardcore part of the community so nothing in the game outside a single repeating rare farm island can be available for casual play.

Oh and the average raid is going to consume 10 to 12 hours a week. With mythic+ and endgame island locking raid level item progression, the game is basically asking another 10-15 hours out of its players a week to raid.

With the age of the player base this isn't sustainable anymore. WoW isnt suddenly bringing in new 18-24 year olds.

I am trying to raid 6 hours a week with my guild this patch. Trying it out. I think playing more casually so far since I came back increases the fun. I just do what I want.

What would WoW 2 have?

Timeskip?
No more Horde v. Alliance?
Action RPG game play?

HanOfTheNekos posted...

What would WoW 2 have?

Timeskip?
No more Horde v. Alliance?
Action RPG game play?

Reboot with Infinite Dragonflight stuff or Jailor winning and pulling an ARR

The problem I always had with WOW is how even from the beginning it just seemed to completely invalidate the old lore/canon of WC 1-3.

A potential WoW2 needs to look at the thing FF14 did right, first by allowing a single character to respec and level all roles/jobs.

HanOfTheNekos posted...

What would WoW 2 have?

Timeskip?
No more Horde v. Alliance?
Action RPG game play?

The first two are a necessity at this point.

The characters are all written poorly and into corners. The PC is basically god, we've been to space. And horde/alliance costs development time and continually forces bad storyline decisions. Nevermind that now with such a small playerbase basically no one plays alliance.

Also race restricting classes blows. I cant play the race I want because ???

red13n posted...

The game is functionally dead.

so the real WoW-killer was inside us all along?

UltimaterializerX posted...

Based on a recent Asmongold video (yeah I know), the mass majority of players don't want PVP. Like, less than 10% even bother with it and just want to play whatever they want whenever they want.

Something WoW really really really needs to steal from FF14 is letting you change classes without making an entirely new character. In 14, you can just change jobs.

I think the community these days likes opt in duels and battleground style PvP as options. But the days of world PvP and a 50/50 community pve/pvp split are dead. The playerbase is older, they dont want that 24/7 tension that comes with world pvp.

I think it's also worth keeping in mind (correct me if I'm wrong), that servers tend to veer toward one faction, making it shitty to be the minority faction.

Also, where would you vets rank Legion in the expansions?

HanOfTheNekos posted...

I think it's also worth keeping in mind (correct me if I'm wrong), that servers tend to veer toward one faction, making it shitty to be the minority faction.

This rarely matters anymore. Theres only a handful of servers with any sort of Alliance PvE activity at all. Outside the auction house you don't have much interaction on-server anyway, most stuff is cross-server.

This issue is alliance just doesn't have players period.