Originally posted by MMOExposed

 

This is my view, and my opinion. 

This is the only thing I agree with. I admit World PvP was fun before battlegrounds but after battlegrounds were released World PvP died. There were no more PvP raids. What is funny is that most people and critics thought WoW barely had any PvP before they introduced battlegrounds. I still remember reviews saying that there was no real pvp in the game. This was one of the very few criticisms the game received. Who's right then?

What I loved about Vanilla and TBC was immersion. You can laugh your ass off but I enjoyed WoW so much because I was in love with the lore and the universe. Vanilla was super immersive from the brilliant graphics to the amazing sounds the game had. I saw so many amazing places which I have only read about. Seeing one of your favourite universes in detailed 3rd person view was priceless. TBC still had immersion. It never actually implemented anything to break immersion.

Then WotlK. When I started playing it was too cookiecutter. It implemented so many things which break immersion. I mean how do you explain instant teleportation? What about splitting raids into 10 man and 25 man?? Huge immersion breaker. They just kept adding system which didn't have any explanations in game. I remember in Vanilla and TBC they actually released articles with relevant story to the patch. 

For me WoW was not simply a game. It was my favourite RTS embodied in a huge 3D world. I have no such attachments to other MMOs. This is why I can never enjoy them to the extent I did WoW. That's why Ultima and Everquest did not hook me up when I tried them. It was WoW that pulled me in to give an MMO game a chance.

Wotlk made the WoW just that. A game called WoW. It was no longer the World of Warcraft. 

I agree to an extent with the OP.  My fiance and I were playing EQ2 while my brother was playing WoW.  It was watching him play AV that got me interested in WoW and was the reason I ended up giving it a shot.  I HATE quest grinding and spent as much time dungeon running as I could and ran BGs when I needed a break.

I didn't get into raiding until BC when I joined a casual guild who was just starting out at Kara.  I enjoyed the Wintergrasp scene, the dungeon finder and more accessable raids that WotLK era brought.  That was until Wintergrasp ended up just being the Horde camping the Alliance (us) at the gy and fp. 

We moved into Cata and as a Holy/Disc priest I managed to keep my pug groups alive through some heroic content, but in the end it was mostly just a pissing contest between the dps and tank, tossing the blame around when something went wrong rather than just enjoying the experience and learning from it.   

As an Alliance TB was a joke before they implemented the system to balance out the numbers, then it just became a matter of sitting at the bridge waiting to cross over just in time, if you weren't lucky enough to get into the BG itself for the points.  The contested area was a campfest for roaming gank squads of Horde and no Alliance willing to band together to counter them. 

With my dungeons being a disaster and the new BGs being nothing short of a rehashed version of the old, the only thing I found interesting was the new "story mode" quest lines that Cata brought.  I actually enjoyed the questing this time through so I leveled up my pally to 85, learned quickly that nothing had changed and started the quest ride with my warrior to 85.  I only made it to 82 before I quit. 

I'm not sure where the downturn was. I thoroughly enjoyed WoTLK I thought it was one of the best MMO expansions I had ever played. The sheer amount of content and constantly adding the wings to ICC kept pushing the envelope. But I found Cataclysm to be incredibly frustrating to play. I couldn't put my finger on it exactly, but no matter what  you wanted to do... PvE or PvP every where you turned it was just frustrating mechanics. And there really isn't enough crafting to solely do that.

PvP was "balanced" by adding obscene amounts of CC causing lots of rage when not having control of your character for 30 seconds and the patches only increased the rage. PvE got thrown in the deep end by making heroics hard again. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a challenge, but there is a reason why difficult raid situations cannot be accomplished by random pugs who are thrown together using a group-finder system which could be "tricked" by using pvp gear or non-spec gear. So the system was in place for easy, casual dungeon running and the dungeons required raid-level commitment. 

While there are many reasons why I think WoW is bad for the MMO-community and MMO-genre I think Blizzard shot itself in the foot by making the players look left with WoTLK and then pulling us to the right in Cata. The end-game change was too much for me anyways. 

I would also like to note that Blizzard has done everything they can to remove "delays" in their MMO. "Delays" are also known as filler and they might have also caused another problem for themselves by removing (almost) all the filler allowing for players to power through content MUCH faster than they can make it. 

If blizzard can't see whats wrong with cataclysm then they deserve to have Wow become a second class MMO. So many obvious knee jerk design decisions made every patch you would think the devs have schizophrenia.

I could go on and on about what Wow needs to come back and what needs to be changed to make Wow work. But if the Wow players leaving can't wake up a game company, then my puny opinion wont as well. But for the sake of causing myself pain I will.

1) Put back the hybrid system and expand on it. As of right now, you have a closed and limited system to switch up game play style. Why can't shamans off tank? they were good tanks level 40 vanilla, but that got removed. make it so we have diverse options thats is immersion.

2) Remove flying mounts from azeroth.

3) Take that crappy crafting system and make it super complex and make it so that what you make if you put the hard work in can be equal with end game items/gear.

4) Remove guild leveling. You made a guild a single entity and penalize players who devote time into the guild that so when they get kicked or leave the guild, rep gets reset. You should have made it so a player of high value even if he leaves or gets kicked can carry with some prestige with them to the next guild. Plus wheres guild housing? Plus just remove it.small guilds will never get the people to make it to Glvl3 in a human lifetime.

5) remove heroics or change them to be more casual freindly. take restrictions off of LFG and allow high levels to be able to help lower level groups out. make all cross server tools choose from your server first then go xcross to fill the group out. encourage server specific rewards for people who do home server only groups.

6) Stop rehasing old content. it's obvious to older players you lack the vision to add new stuff. You make 300 millions dollars a months take 4 of it and add devs to just make item/armor/weapons misc

7) Stop with all nerfing policys for classes. Just becuase someone or a grooup complains doesnt mean you change an entire class to become useless every other patch.

8) remove battlegrounds or make them legacys BGs that dont reward nothing but fun. make world PVP and warzones the way to go. Remove arena and reward those that played with a special title like grandmarshal had, then never make that mistake again. focus on world PVP or warzones.

9) remove resillence from the game.

10) Allow crafters to destruct item/weapons/armors and extract the magical atrributes from the them to make upgrade componets for new weapons.

11) upgrade your dam game engine. It's very long in the tooth and can't handle large amounts of people in smaller areas.upgrade it for the new warzones and world PVP i suggested above.

12) add random weekly world events. not talking about rifts well like rift, but add some excitement gets those asshats off those flying mounts in capital citys. make it so if your afk hovering above the auction house, a group of insane dragons attack the city anything to break up the boredom of ques.

Not much else who cares right hehe.

The problem with Cata are these three points:

1.  The talent trees lost their luster and became too restrictive.  

2. An entire expansion dedicated to attracting new players while neglecting the existing players doesn't make sense given how old the game is.

3. Lore doesn't make sense anymore.

I like BC because the lore was very good, and PVP was at its zenith.  BG PVP and arena PVP was fun, although world PVP declined.  PVE wise, heroics were a bit tedious, but still interesting.

I really like WotLK because it encouraged alt play, which means there wasn't a significant shortage of tanks or healers for PVE heroics.  PVP was on the decline in WotLK, but my best memories was with Wintergrasp.  As soon as I was off work, I would come home, log in, and mess around every night in that zone.  It was fun, fast, and easy, and it is unfortunate Blizz didn't do enough to balance the servers.

A wise man once said, "nothing breeds success like success" which seems to be the case with WoW. You make some rather opinionated points here. After my second account hack I gave up on WoW but remember the ol days in AV where the game did not end until one of the gernerals died. I once played a game for 3 hours with players coming in and out. It was the best of times...it was the worst of times.

Nevertheless, if you have any stats to back-up you writting it would make for a better thread.

Originally posted by nate1980

Just as a reference, I own all the expansions and don't play WoW and probably never will again.

In my opinion, there are a few different types of people that play WoW. Keep in mind that people from each type may dabble in the main acitivity from other types, but their focus will be on the activity that defines their type.

Type 1 are the players that care most about the solo questing. They keep playing as long as they have a character to level and new content to quest through when expansions release.

Type 2 are the players that care about challenging group based PvE (dungeons and raids). These people loved vanilla WoW, because it was a challenge to collect Epic gear and to complete the dungeons and raids. TBC made raids even harder and these players loved it. WoTLK ruined the difficulty of dungeons and raids to pull the first type of players into that content, but ended up upsetting the people that played WoW for this reason. So Cata went back to making things difficult, pleasing this crowd once more.

Type 3 are the PvP oriented types. They loved world PvP the most, and got used to BG's when they released after complaining about them for months, and some still do. Each expansion, in my opinion, ruined this portion of the game. At first, new PvP additions were received with mix emotions, but as the novelty of the new BG's, arenas, and etc. wore off, these players have become increasingly unhappy.

 You missed people like me, I dabble in everything for the achievements!

Over the past few years there has been a deliberate promotion of an "orthodoxy of play".

YOU WILL be active in a guild.

YOU WILL level to max level and participate in endgame.

YOU WILL satisfy your PvP needs in instanced bgs or arenas.

YOU WILL live in a plastic compartamentalized world.

YOU WILL submit to artificial hierarchies and bask in the glory of artificial achievements.

YOU WILL be satified with only two meaingfull professions.

YOU WILL be forced at every level of the game to cooperate with others.

YOU WILL grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind !

YOU WILL stay in Q until the day you die.

Originally posted by seabeast

A wise man once said, "nothing breeds success like success" which seems to be the case with WoW. You make some rather opinionated points here. After my second account hack I gave up on WoW but remember the ol days in AV where the game did not end until one of the gernerals died. I once played a game for 3 hours with players coming in and out. It was the best of times...it was the worst of times.

Nevertheless, if you have any stats to back-up you writting it would make for a better thread.

The culmination of the PvE endgame is the 25 player raids. Prior to WLK, only a few players got there; for example, only about half the number of players who killed a boss in Karazhan ever killed a 25 player boss, and less than 5% defeated the final boss of the expansion (Kil'Jaeden). In vanilla WoW, less than 2% of all players ever entered Naxxramas (the original version).

http://www.wowwiki.com/Raiding_for_newbies

The silent majority that play and you never hear them complain make up a good portion of the game population. Blizzard has stated that people leave and come back all the time and that its normal and expected. The way they put it is that they just keep expecting people to act this way indefinitly.

I "believe" people leave and return due to the new games  released tending to be poorly made or content lacking clone style games that lets face it...pay to play the "new"game and start over that "feels" like wow or just go back to the one you know are comfortable with and have alot of "time" invested in.

 Problem for WoW is there is looking to be some real games that a HUGE number of poeple are looking at that are getting released within the next year. Pop on you tube and pull up some ToR vid's with almost 2 million hits on them. It isnt the Chinese checking out you tube it's the NA and EU markets that are looking. GW2 is the same thing. there are others as wellbut those are the BIG 2 atm.

WoW has done alot of things right and alot of things wrong in many peoples opinion but IMO they just got there first. They were the First BIG BIG commercially successfull game. You have a leg up then cause now everyone is trying to copy you and copying someone elses work while trying to feel unique is a losing proposition.

Dunno about a WoW killer ever coming out but Activision/Blizzard might shoot themselves in the foot at the WRONG time for once and lose a Substantial portion of their player base.      GOOD

I hope they put in the premium charge real id. I hope they make the raid content so narrow people are done with it in a week in 4.2. I hope they start selling gear and everything else shitty you can think of to keep pissing their players off. GOOD.

Time for some fresh ideas and fresh concepts and fresh blood in the MMO world. WoW wasn't my first car so to speak , but i'm ready to upgrade from my Pinto to preferably at least a Camaro.

To make a long story short they should have left the old world vanilla, and should have created another Continent instead of screwing things up

Originally posted by Kamandi777

YOU WILL grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind !

Amen. This is the creed of every MMO.

/goes back to playing shooters/rts 

Nothing lasts forever and you'd be stupid to think a computer game will.

That said, WoW isn't going anywhere in the next few years at least. Heck we still have UO and that's how old?

WoW ran its course for a lot of people (including myself) but new non-MMO-playing gamers will most likely choose WoW as their first MMO cause MMO = WOW to a lot of people. It is a bit like Facebook in that there are other social sites, but to most people; social site= Facebook.

Originally posted by jpnz

WoW ran its course for a lot of people (including myself) but new non-MMO-playing gamers will most likely choose WoW as their first MMO cause MMO = WOW to a lot of people. It is a bit like Facebook in that there are other social sites, but to most people; social site= Facebook.

There are other social sites besides Facebook (everyday stuff), Twitter (follow stuff you like) and LinkedIn (for professionals)?

The servers in the early days couldn't handle large scale world PVP, not to mention it interfered with newbies leveling which cost them a few accounts, I'd wager (not alot, but still...)

So, they implemented HKs.

That wasn't enough, so then came battlegrounds to coral the PVP freaks off into separate instances away from leveling players.

Battlegrounds were a huge success in all aspects (as much, or more as world pvp was in the early days) - but people complained about long AV games, long queue times - guilds and teams of bros ruined the ranking system (I played 18 hours a day for several months and couldn't break rank 11 due to some guilds controlling 11/12 in 24/7 played character WSG farm teams.)

So they kicked AV's timesink features to the curb, implemented crossrealm battlegrounds.

Crossrealm battlegrounds killed the formation of communities straight off - no longer were you playing with, or against, the same people for months on end for the majority of the games max-level "idle time", forming friendships and rivalries.

People complained about fast kills, being one, or two shot.

So they threw in resilience for TBC, which very effectively disallowed PVE gear in PVP under most situations, while implementing arenas.

With a new-found hardon for the arena (e-Sport, LOL)  they worked towards coercing the playerbase into it for their PVP fix, which, while it was successful for awhile, didn't progress or take well past season 4 or so. Willfully interfering with classes PVE performance and abilities for the sake of arena only a small portion of the playerbase has a interest in? Idiots.

Though vanilla 40m raids were a thing of the past (due to the difficulties in finding 15 core members and 25 warm bodies that could follow basic instructions) five mans picked up greatly in popularity come TBC, most people got to see up to Karazhan at least, for the most part, everyone was satisfied that could or would ever be, even though they were strangling battlegrounds for the sake of arenas.

Fast forward to WOTLK.

Arena might as well be extinct, 5mans are still the primary "end game" - they attempt to coax more max level players into "serious" PVE - see Naxx for a warm up, the quality of Ulduar and the easy mode crap of ToC, not to mention the joke of ICC.

Since most people are hardcore farming 5 mans for emblems and what not, they finally implement crossrealm dungeons to keep people busy - fast queues, easy reward vs. effort, heirlooms for idiots that'll spend three weeks grinding low level gear to level their alts "faster." This finally seals the deal, so to speak, for any hopes of community or stability.

Cataclysm comes out with the overall worst instances (Quality wise) created, since they spent most of their effort and development time on revamping the old world (Which should've been done BY TBC release at latest) - the 5mans are vanilla level difficulty, with a playerbase trained on WOTLK content - there is no community, people don't want to work together or play with one another, they simply want their rewards for doing said instances.

The only relevant (skill wise) players are the people pushing into raid content within a couple weeks of Cataclysm release, I'm assuming they hoped uping the difficulty would not only slow progression and burnout down, but train the playerbase to be a little more capable - which backfired, for the most part. People are burnt out regardless, forcing them into actually difficult (relatively) 5mans with idiots they do not know AND they're expected to carry (see vote kick restrictions) is enough to push a reasonable chunk of the playerbase away in frustration.

Now they're toning 5 mans down steadily, after already taking a population hit from burnout and failure to deliver or realize what the progression of expansions would do to the playerbase, while implementing nonsense features in hopes to compensate for the missing portion of the population.

TLDR:

WoW isn't dead, nor will it ever really die, but it's growth has now came to stand still, yes, Cataclysm cost them a bit of their playerbase, but they're still clutching the Cashcow's teet and yanking for all their might.

If anything, I think the real downfall of WoW is confusion and communication.  Specifically, lack of communication.  Look at the big Feral nerf(shapeshift roots and other nerfs).  Now look at the current DK outrage on the forums.  What do they share?  Confusion and lack of communication.  More and more, Blizzard has decided to comment less and less on their changes.  Even hotfixes get little actual info.  GC stopped posting at all.  I, honestly, was never a fan of his posts.  But, it was communication.  Now all we get is a Blog.  Specifically designed to cover topics that most people aren't asking for with zero chance for comments or questions by the players.  You can only take the discussion to the forums, where he will not reply or post anymore.

The changes are drastic and not understood by the players.  The changes are "game changing" in that they have a large impact on the play style or ability of the class/spec.  Blizzard refuses to even discuss them at all now.  No explanation at all.  This leaves players scratching their heads and getting angry.  People start out with simple questions of why.  Those posts get locked or deleted without a word.  So people get angry and alienated.  And still, nothing gets explained.  To top it off, they address all of these things with an air of superiority.  They always post with a "we don't owe you anything" style or just paste forum guidelines that sometimes have little to do with it but provides a 100% "I win" in all situations to them.

I used to tell Blizzard in posts and emails that they are wasting their forums.  They have a direct line to their customers.  It's already being paid for.  They claim the forums are the vocal minority, but refuse to ever refer people to them or link them in game.  It's like they go out of their way to avoid communication with their customers.  While there are some legit counters they use to say why they don't, almost all of them can be explained by their own actions.  IE:  People nitpick at their words because they go out of their way to be vague about actual answers to anything or actually explain anything. 

The last time that I can think of that Blizzard actually explained anything really was the rage generation formula.  And, even then, they threw in an insult that they figured people wouldn't be able to understand it.  It's insulting because they know about all of the player made tools used in WoW and all the simulators for damage based on your gear and level that are available and work.  Entire sites designed to theorycrafting.  But how could we the lowly dense players ever comprehend their secrets...

Treat people like children?  Why be surprised when they act like a child.

Originally posted by Foomerang

This guy constantly creates new topics then leaves. He rarely sticks around to discuss anything. Why would someone take the time to create a topic, present your point of view, request a discussion, then never really bother to reply? Before you know it, hes creating a new thread about something else. I wonder, whats the point?

It's called trolling, and he's one of the best at it on MMORPG.com.

Originally posted by Razeron

WoW isn't dead, nor will it ever really die, but it's growth has now came to stand still, yes, Cataclysm cost them a bit of their playerbase, but they're still clutching the Cashcow's teet and yanking for all their might.

There is one issue in that.  Gaming companies think short term.  They think that when they make a new product and use the same tactics from their previous one, it will all have been forgotten.  They think people won't remember how they are treated.  While it's true that some people who must be either very young or have alzheimers will jump on "the next big thing" without a thought, even they will tire faster of the same treatment in the new game.  At some point there will be someone from Blizzard who will in an interview say "We learned a lot from WoW and we will put that to work in [new game]".  What exactly will they use from WoW in that new game?  Whatever you paid them for.  The more you let them get by with, the more they will use it in the new game.  At some point, you have to be honest with them and yourself about it all.  You have to do whatever it takes to let them know how you stand on things.  Posting on the forums has little to no influence on that.

Originally posted by fivoroth

Originally posted by Kamandi777

YOU WILL grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind !

Amen. This is the creed of every MMO.

/goes back to playing shooters/rts 

The problem is the result of that grind.  The formula for the grind requires that you are gaining something from that grind.  When you don't feel like you are gaining anything.  When the gains are even repetitious(same every time).  When you say to yourself, meh...it won't make that big of a difference if I do this.  That's when the grind fails.  If you aren't gaining anything of importance from the treadmill, you're just running in place.

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Originally posted by page
To make a long story short they should have left the old world vanilla, and should have created another Continent instead of screwing things up

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agree at 100%, even new planted will work, but not try to puch old players into redo whole game, it just silly.

if you don't redo all you have like 2 months to play before you got bored of new content or find it too hard & long.