Epics everywhere, but not a soul to use them

#0 - May 21, 2009, 12:18 p.m.

Since the advent of the burning crusade, the curve on which gear has scaled and been made available has gone off the charts. Once upon a time the focus of the typical level 60 was twofold... to group with others in raids to clear Strat, Scholo, (eventually MC, then BWL etc) or to group with others to do PVP. With the proliferation of the epic, arguably beginning with the removal of PVP ranks and the implementation of an honor+token system, the paradigm has subsequently shifted from MMO to MSO (Massively Singleplayer Online Roleplaying Game).

I believe that this fundamental shift in design philosophy on the part of Blizzard has changed the game for the worse. While some might say it's been changed for the better (lots of gameplay options), stalwarts like me decry the loss of, essentially, this game's innocence. To the contrary, I believe that the game has been made more linear. The epic (along with the Individual WoW Trophy Case... I mean Armory) has become the sole motivation for today's WoW playerbase. The problem has been completely exacerbated with Wotlk. Literally, epics are everywhere... but there seems to be no souls to use them. It's like an online pyrrhic victory... yes, you got your epic, but what now? It's hollow.

Players seem to have an epics first mentality anymore; appreciating the social aspect on which this game was founded is merely ancillary to that goal... and in fact a hindrance to many. This is evidenced by the fact that players now desire to completely forgo regular dungeons and dash straight for the heroics to rack up their tokens. Others attempt to slip in Naxx groups rocking 1100 DPS. Still others will claim to want to PVP, but in reality their grind is no different from the heroic or raid junkies.

I know plenty of people will flame me because they think, oh well, another nostalgic poster who can't accept that times change! Others will say, how dare you question Blizzard, creators and stewards of the most popular online MMO of all time! Clearly they know something that you don't! The fact is that I have no problem with times changing but I don't believe that design philosophies should. I also question the motives for why these particular philosophies were forced to change. Sure businesses exist to make money, but even this goal can only be attained with sound philosophy in mind. I believe Blizzard has lost a bit of perspective, and generally lost its way, in this regard.

#107 - May 21, 2009, 6:57 p.m.

I am not entirely sure where to start on this, so I'll go with what came to mind.

We changed some of the base design of the game to cut down on the idea of content (and the items come with it) being only for a certain group of the playerbase. We have tried to open up content and give more people more things to do.

I don't have any numbers to share, but we are seeing more people in the raid instances than in the past, so people are running things and picking up as many epics as possible. A lot of players are skipping normal dungeons because it's faster to do so, but they have done it on other characters already so they know the fights and just want to get geared up asap. Sure, we could limit the number of epics to certain content and whatnot, but we don't feel that would be a real benefit to the game.