4 Years of WoW - Blue Tracker

#0 - April 3, 2009, 3:42 p.m.

God, I used to love this game.

May 6th will be my 4 year anniversary of playing WoW, and unfortunately I don’t see myself renewing my account long enough to see it. This is not intended as a blasting post, but I felt it necessary to post up what made this game great, and why I feel it has been destroyed.

1) Class Homogenization. This may sound weird coming from someone who plays a shaman and had the most to benefit. But one of the things that made this game great was that every class had something that made that class truly unique, cool, and fun. But at this point, why don’t you just have everyone choose one of the following: Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, Tank, or Healer. Because there is very little between any of those anymore. Can you honestly tell me that in an instance, a mage and a hunter have any real functional differences anymore? No. What about a fury warrior and an enhancement shaman? Not really.

Back before all this nonsense started, nobody tanked like a warrior, nobody buffed like a shaman or paladin, and nobody DPSed like a mage. –And really, what was wrong with that?

2) Content is Just Too Easy. For god sakes, we were AoE tanking level 80 heroics the moment we dinged 80, in blues and greensâ€¦ -And I haven’t seen a single time in any level 80 content where crowd control was ever needed. Why? The game content is just too easy. Anyone remember doing 10-man UBRS runs back when it was hard? –And later doing it, getting people keyed for Onyxia? Anyone remember the guild-breaker Razorgore and Vaelastrasz were, the moment you walked into Blackwing Lair? Anyone remember the first time they did heroic Shadow Labs at level 70, shortly after TBC came out, trying to get keyed for Kara? Remember having to do tons of crowd control, because otherwise the tank died in about 4 seconds? Anyone remember when heroic Magister’s Terrace first came out, and people were freaking out because of how hard the runs could be?

All that is gone, friends. The hardest thing we saw when WotLK first came out was heroic Lokenâ€¦ LOL.

3) No more Prestige to Hardcore Raiding. At the risk of sounding like an elitist jerk, unless someone has Immortal, Undying, Nightfall, or Twilight Vanquisher, chances are they are a completely casual playerâ€¦ -Wearing full 5/5 of the best raid gear the game has to offer. Anyone remember seeing someone in full T2 gear at 60, or full tier 5 gear at 70, and being like “WOW! That guy is freakin PIMP!” -Yet nowadays, anyone who isn’t half brain-dead and can mash a couple buttons can get 5/5 Valorous gear, and the best weapons in the game. Seriously! And what do the more hardcore players get? –A chance at a mediocre mount that isn’t even a proto-drake, and a title? Please.

And it’s not like this is changing folks. Ghostcrawler has already said that Ulduar is not going to be a huge step up from Naxxramas. More easy mode top-tier epic gear, available to the most casual players.

4) PvP is a total Gibfest. I consider myself a fairly casual PvPer over the years, but I have always been active in every aspect of PvP this game has had to offer. Never in four years of PvP play have I seen PvP turned into such a complete gibfest, like what is the metagame today. People die slower in Quake 4, for god sakes. Who’s idea was it to triple and quadruple DPS output from 70 to 80, while barely doubling the health pools?

And what’s with the no-skill faceroll PvP classes? Used too, people basically complained about one class not really requiring skill to be awesome in PvP: Warlocks. Now there’s at least 4 classes in the game that can basically faceroll 4 buttons each, and completely own in PvP. Funny how most are all over the top of the arena brackets. Yeah. That’s skillâ€¦

–And God help you if you’re like me, and you want to PvP as a healerâ€¦ Under-geared people die faster than you can ever hope to get a heal off. –And I hope you have 1000 resilience and 2200+ spell powerâ€¦ -Because that’s what it will take to not die in the duration of a stunlock or a chains of ice when the healer aggro comes.

Well that's it. Account is canceled, and game is uninstalled. Gonna play some first person shooters and hope that when Diablo comes out, it'll be better I guess. Peace.

Ghostcrawler

#13 - April 3, 2009, 11:59 p.m.

I understand the class homogenization concerns. It is sometimes difficult to make sure that all classes are viable for what they want to do without pushing their stats and abilities too close together. We are going to continue to try to strike a balance here. However I will offer that for every player that asks what was wrong with the good old days, there is a Prot paladin, Feral druid, Ret paladin, Arcane mage or Survival hunter who is happy that their spec isn't a joke any longer.

We designed Naxx to be easy. It was the first raiding tier. It was content many raiding guilds had already seen. We allowed players to practice extensively during beta. Ulduar is not Naxx. I suspect you'll see Ulduar pugs eventually, but not right away. I suspect you will see a ton of "Ulduar is just way too hard" posts, especially for guilds trying the hard modes. But we'll see.

Ghostcrawler

#20 - April 4, 2009, 12:12 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Aside from Arcane Mage, my guild cleared SW in early September with every single one of those specs playing a vital role in our progression. Prot Paladins weren't a joke, and neither were Feral Druids, Ret Paladins, or SV hunters. Hell, we didn't even have a Prot Warrior until we got to Muru.

I was refering more to the level 60 content. However, I think you'll have a hard time convincing a lot of Sunwell guilds that raid stacking wasn't a big problem. Certain specs just didn't contribute enough. Back then we used to balance around classes -- is there any way this class can make it into a raid? Now we balance around specs -- you shouldn't have to change your spec to make it into a raid. Now obviously that is going to depend on the comp of your individual raids.

Ghostcrawler

#56 - April 4, 2009, 1:35 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Why do Rogues have AoE again? What a stupid change. I played a Rogue for 3 years, and not once would adding an AoE ability have added anything to my enjoyment of the game.

Because rogues complained, and rightly so, that they weren’t as attractive as other dps classes when there was a lot of AE involved, which was the case for all Naxx trash and even a few bosses. We decided that single-target vs. AE wasn’t a very strong niche for classes. There are situations where one or the other are useless. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to be equal, but standing around with almost no way to contribute isn’t a lot of fun (And doesn’t make raids want to bring you).

Q u o t e:
Seriously, I'm genuinely curious, what happened to progression in terms of a character's looks? You used to be able to tell what a person had done just by looks. This has been completely destroyed in WotLK, with no rhyme nor reason to it.

You seem to be comparing a single tier of LK gear to multiple tiers of BC gear. In vanilla WoW, a lot smaller portion of players raided and for a long time they only had one tier of MC gear which wasn’t that useful for many classes anyway. If you have the legendary mace from Ulduar, (or even certain proto-drakes) then you have a worthy prestige item.

Q u o t e:
10 mans were aimed toward the casual player and what ended up happening was 25 mans became the "easy" mode.

UBRS was a casual 10 man raid. Zul-Aman was not, especially the timed run. Karazhan may have been easier than Sunwell (but then again, it wasn’t that easy for many groups when it first shipped), but that whole system of progression was brutal on guild politics (5 player -> 10 player -> 25 player). I do agree that Naxx (and the rest of the tier) was often easier in 25 than in 10, and that was not our intent. Ulduar has tighter balance in that regard.

Q u o t e:
I mean that all in good fun, but it's also a concern of my that if enough people cry the harder content will just be nerfed.

You have a valid concern. However, we tried to come with an answer for that this time. If you want to see the content, go on normal mode. If you want a challenge, go on hard mode. If you complain that hard is too hard for you, then guess whatâ€¦ go back to normal mode. Previously the answer was basically “You aren’t worthy to face the end villain of this game you have invested hundreds of hours in,” which we thought was sort of a lame answer. Now you can see Arthas, but you aren’t going to get his best, most prestigious loot if you aren’t awesome.

Q u o t e:
Does blizzard have any plans to introduce the "hard mode" philosophy into 5 man dungeoneering? That would be so incredibly pimp I would buy you a friggin case of gin.

We have discussed it. We need to see how many players really attempt the 10-player hard modes (and if those are really a different group of players than the ones also doing the 25-player hard modes). In some ways, it is harder to make very challenging content for smaller groups. Getting enough buffs in a small group is hard.

Q u o t e:
Looking around at the actual numbers, the data, the participation in various aspects of the game, you can see it. No doubt Blizzard can too, even if they're not willing to publicly acknowledge some of it.

Wrath of the Lich King is still selling very well and our subscribers are increasing. More players than ever are able to experience the raid content. I fail to see the gloomy picture, though that does not mean we totally discount feedback from players who aren’t having enough fun. That is why I am posting in this (occasionally trollish) thread instead of ignoring it.

Q u o t e:
I would appreciate an explanation for why this shift was necessary. Respecs exist for a reason.

I suspect plenty of other players will be able to provide the same answer I would.

Ghostcrawler

#57 - April 4, 2009, 1:36 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Why do you even bother with these people? :(

I don’t know. Sometimes they are just trolling, but sometimes I think players are on the verge and if I can get the right information to them, maybe they’ll realize things aren’t as bad as the (often very negative) forums sometimes suggest. But I am an optimist that way. :)

Q u o t e:
The only other thing that puzzles me is this notion that because people pay their $15 per month they have a right to see all of the content. In the Mario bros. If you failed at jumping at the right times, you weren't gonna see the end-game content. Think about it.

Most modern games view that concept as dated however. Most developers these days consider it a failure if players who want to finish the story fail to do so because the content is too challenging. (Likening it to people not being able to see the end of a movie or novel.) The opposite risk is that the game becomes boring because it is too easy. This leads me back to our trying the hard modes as described above.

Q u o t e:
As long as a spec had a "best in X situation" the spec was quite viable, and the people that played the spec were happy with that roll.

They may have put on their big boy britches and done it, but I’m not sure they enjoyed it. It sucked to be a warrior and be told “We’re going to swap you out for the paladin now because she can tank the adds better, okay?” You really had to hope that there were enough of those “best in X situation” fights per tier (and that you wouldn’t just be swapped in only for those). Imagine WoW with 12 or 20 classes for a moment. Are we really going to be able to carve off meaningful unique roles for all of them to have a “best at X”? We have already found being second best at lots of things isn’t fun.

Ghostcrawler

#151 - April 4, 2009, 7:43 p.m.

Q u o t e:
The problem is, most 'hardcore' raiders are in a 25-man raiding guild. If they're in a 25-man raiding guild, the hard mode 10 man loot will almost certainly not be worth the effort. So who is going to be doing hardmode 10 man content? I'm sure there are some hardcore raiders in a 10 man guild, but really not that many. The reason many people did sarth3d was simply because they had already finished the 25 man version, and there was nothing better to do. Plus the fact that the 10 man was known to be the hardest encounter in the game. But with both of these factors probably gone for most people in ulduar, I don't see that many groups trying to hard mode 10 mans.

We actually don't know if this is true or not. Or more specifically, there were 40 player guilds in vanilla because that's all we offered. Then there were 25 player guilds for BC because that's all we offered. We had a lot of data and feedback that there are a lot of players who would prefer to run with a smaller group of friends even if the content was very challenging. As I said, we will see if 10 player guilds are more casual or if there are a lot of 10 player guilds who are up to hardcore challenges.

Q u o t e:

So ill pout and yell at my dog instead.

No! Unless your dog caused the wipe, in which case, go for it.

Q u o t e:
The progression from Mags to TK/SSC to finally killing Kael and getting a look at MH to then entering BT was fun because you always had a new instance to work towards.

You can categorize this in different ways though. A lot of players told us that they felt SSC and TK were unpolished and unbalanced when BC shipped. Some players just want more bosses. Some players want more instances, even if there are fewer bosses per instance. Some would have been happier if we had released say Ulduar part 1 in 3.1 and Ulduar part 2 in 3.2 if 3.2 would come only a few weeks after 3.1. There are a lot of different ways to release content and we are still experimenting with what works the best. We are also likely to do different things over time so that the patches and expansions don't become too formulaic.

Q u o t e:
1. Anyone remember the feeling you had when you got your first epic way back in Vanilla WoW? Bring those feelings back. Remember when you'd work your ass off in UBRS and maybe you'd be rewarded with your tier 0 chest from Drak? Bring those feelings back.

Knowing what we know now, I'd hazard to guess that we would make Naxx 25 (and definitely Sarth 25) more difficult if we could do it over again, as well as dropping less loot per boss. But our model remains that the first tier of raiding should not be a brick wall for the majority of guilds who want to raid. Thaddius, 4H, Saph and KT are a lot more difficult for the average pug than the rest of Naxx. Maybe they should have been the model for all the bosses so that groups weren't surprised when they killed Anub'Rekhan on the first or second attempt. But, again, if you like wiping and wiping before you finally manage the kill, there will be plenty of chances for that in Ulduar and Icecrown.

Q u o t e:
So am I to assume that if the raids get more difficult, there won't be raid stacking problems anymore?

The "bring the class not the player" is a joke. You're just lucky the raid content isn't hard enough to push it, but I really hope Ulduar is not as stupidly easy then ALL the content we've seen so far. Maybe then the stupid design philosophy come to haunt you guys :D

Nah, I think you are looking at two extremes: trivial content vs. raid stacking. The cutting-edge guilds who have tried Ulduar so far had a really good mix of classes. Will there be more complaints (legit and QQ) about Ulduar balance? Absolutely. But we think it is a lot closer than it was in BT or Sunwell. DPS, tanking and healing are all closer and the raid buff design doesn't encourage stacking nearly to the BC degree.

Q u o t e:
Which makes me wonder why are you using DK tank niche encounters so much. Pre patch 3.1 it was only Sartharion, in Ulduar you have Ignis, Hodir, Mimiron and so on. Maybe there wouldn't be so much complaints in the tanking forum if so many fights didn't put DK's ahead of every other tanks.

DKs were too good on Sartharion, but that wasn't the intent and we nerfed them. Will they have a slight advantage on some fights? Probably. That will be true of other tanks as well. Do we expect most raids to tank with a DK? No.

Q u o t e:
WOW used to be a play where people had a challenge, yea things got hard, yes it took almost a year for your raiders to progress.

It took your raiders a year to master Karazhan and Gruul? Because that is what you are comparing here.

Ghostcrawler

#152 - April 4, 2009, 7:44 p.m.

Q u o t e:
What about Frost mages, BM hunters, Destruction warlocks right now? :(

We think Frost mage PvE dps is still probably too low. Not particularly concerned about the others.

Q u o t e:
can we get some Enhancement/Elemental Shaman and Shadow Priests to feel the same way?

Shadow priests and Enhancement shamans are in great shape. I don't know Elemental numbers off the top of my head. Last time I looked their dps was fine.

Q u o t e:
To put it bluntly, no one cares about trash. Sitting there telling people to sheep X before every pull isn't fun or even difficult. And I'd imagine many classes that didn't have crowd control would easily be lefted out like in TBC and classic.

Strong raiding guilds care about trash. Trash can still wipe you, especially in Ulduar. TK trash was harder than a couple of the bosses. If you clear trash slowly, you might fail a speed run or fail to get one more shot on a boss that night. I can understand how a character who sucks at bosses but excels at trash would not be attractive. But trash matters. If it didn't, we wouldn't include it.

Q u o t e:
WHY should you not have to change your spec to be raid viable?

You should have to have a raid spec to be as good as you can in a raid. That may mean skipping over very PvP-oriented or leveling talents. It does not mean Arms / Disc / Marks is a PvP spec and Fury / Holy / BM is a PvE dpec. The three trees per class should be more about play style and not about which part of the game you like to play. But within those trees there are absolutely good specs and bad specs.

Q u o t e:
What exactly do you mean by this? These specs do not belong to the player, these specs belong to the developers. The developers design the specs and the players voluntarily play them with no ownership attached. The developers own all of the specs and it was a decision Blizzard made to design and release vanilla WoW raid content, the way they did, that made certain specs obsolete. Or maybe it was the developers who skimped on certain specs due to time restraints so they could not stack up to others.

The case you make for class homogenization is backwards. The idea of each class being unique was a huge WOW factor for WoW. It was a major attraction for all of the raving fans.

I understand what you're trying to say with that last part, but the truth is our original design was that if druids want to raid, they have to heal. Our BC design was okay, you can try and raid with the other druid specs, but you are going to be inferior to other classes in tanking, casting or melee dps. We heard from plenty of druids who thought that was a terrible design and over time we decided we agreed and changed our vision for how raiding works.

Q u o t e:
Haha. No. People are quitting left and right.

The only possible way for subscription numbers to be increasing would be if the number of botters and multiboxers were increasing, or we would've had a new press release with something at the order of 13 million users out by now. Not to mention the sheer number of people who just buy multiple accounts because they have nothing better to do with their money.

The number of multi-boxers is trivial. If you are a hardcore player you may know several of them, but in the grand scheme there are very few people really doing that.

If you want to discuss parts of the game that disappoint you, that's something I am interested in. Trying to argue that the metrics by which the business success of WoW is measured are somehow specious is a waste of your time. WoW is doing very well -- better than it ever has. That doesn't mean we can't improve the experience, which is why I'm still here in this thread.

Q u o t e:
My point? I think the game needs more guild tools, more recruiting tools, more personell managing tools, more ways to identify a good PLAYER other than from his gear. (epics =/= a good player)

I agree.

Ghostcrawler

#282 - April 6, 2009, 2:31 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Does blizzard plan on making Legendarys the new epics?

No.

Q u o t e:
Be careful not to confuse trolling and venting. Trolling is a dishonest attempt at trying to create dissection on a board by saying something deliberately inflammatory. Venting is a customer that is honestly upset and may not be expressing himself in the best way. You do yourself a disservice to ignore an honest message because you don’t like the way it was delivered.

Then my advice is not to deliver the message badly. If a player isn't super eloquent, or if English isn't your first language, I can get past that -- no problem. If you're just here to rant and rave and insult everyone and I'm supposed to distill that down into some useful information, sorry. That's where we draw the line. Act like adults if you want to post here. I spend enough time on the forums as it is. I am not going to look for a needle in a haystack of garbage. One of the best defenses we have against players posting garbage is telling them we are going to skip over it.

Q u o t e:
Ret was a low DPS spec that provided more than enough raid utility to warrant bringing one. The fact that you admit that doing high DPS required skill as a Ret Paladin (something that should be true for every single class), is basically conceding the argument.

The problem with Ret was say a typical BC melee group had 2 rogues, a druid, a shaman and a warrior. (It could easily have 3 rogues too.) Yet the Ret needed all of those buffs to be decent. Stick the Ret with the casters, and the Ret buffs are wasted and the casters aren't helping her dps much. You could boot a rogue or maybe one of the others from the melee group, but your dps would likely still suffer. The old model was to bring the people to do the job (rogues in this case) and the people to buff them. Part of the move to having more raid buffs and fewer unique buffs was to solve this kind of jigsaw puzzle problem. The challenge should be fighting the bosses, not building the group in some kind of weird Tetris minigame.

Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:
Most modern games view that concept as dated however. Most developers these days consider it a failure if players who want to finish the story fail to do so because the content is too challenging. (Likening it to people not being able to see the end of a movie or novel.) The opposite risk is that the game becomes boring because it is too easy. This leads me back to our trying the hard modes as described above.

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The death knell of gaming.

On the contrary, gaming is doing better than ever in part because smart developers tried to grow their audience beyond the traditional gamer. Ten years ago you'd say "gamer" like you'd say "model airplane builder." It was a niche hobby. Now you don't say "gamer" in the same way you don't say "movie-goer" or "iPod-listener" because it has become something a lot of mainstream people do.

That doesn't mean all games have to be casual and dull. There are plenty of challenging games out there. But they try to offer different things to different kinds of players rather than segregate their market too much.

Q u o t e:
While I was gone I realised the part of the game that I missed, the friends I had made along the way (and the 2 brothers and sister that still played WOW). I came back to WOW on release of Wrath and started back with my old raiding guild, it was soon evident that "hardcore" raiding was NOT among the things I missed while away from WOW. In light of this I started a new 10man guild with the friends I really enjoyed playing with and I've been loving the game again. We've done most of the 10man achievments at about a month of being a guild and we're all having fun.

I think this is a very important point. The best thing about WoW, for me, is still my friends.

Q u o t e:
BC had Kazz, Doom, Gruul, Mag, SSC, TK at release. This was a good 4 months of progression. By the time we got to Hyjal and BT they were released.

Many players will say that Gruul, Mag, SSC and TK while technically available when BC shipped, were not well polished, balanced or fun. We thought it might be better to ship instances that felt more complete. But as I said, this is something we are continuing to evolve. Releasing with the right amount of content is something we need to refine and will probably take a lot of experimentation.

Ghostcrawler

#283 - April 6, 2009, 2:31 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Elite Mode.

Yes, a higher, harder mode with very particularly impacting events that players WILL keep on wiping and wiping to until they get the execution of the fight perfect.

That is kind of what we are trying to do with the hard modes in Ulduar. If they work out well, I could totally see selecting 3 or 4 difficulty levels when you zone in rather than just 10 vs. 25.

Q u o t e:
What killed Wow was day of kill video releases. Posted strats. PTR hardcore pugs. The geeks that cheesed encounters by stacking shamans, professions and buffs/debuffs to the point that Blizzard had to tune encounters with these in mind or risk introducing content that was obsolete day of release.

While we obviously disagree on WoW being dead, you make one point I wanted to echo which is that the average raider (or at least players interested in end-game content) are more sophisticated now. The game's community has matured as the game has matured. There are so many information sites out there with a great deal of depth. In the MC days, nobody had Deadly Boss Mobs or Omen (though we did have Decursive). You didn't link videos before your boss attempt. Half your group probably didn't know about the EJ website and there was no AJ. Players figured out what worked for them and focused less on optimization because there was no gigantic community out there advising them on how to optimize. I'm not saying that kind of community progression was a bad thing at all. But it definitely changes the experience.

Excellent thread, BTW. Unless the moderaters have just been particularly fierce, it's nice to see so much intelligent thought (even when you disagree with us) and so little what I refered to above as garbage.