When did World of Warcraft die for you?

When did World of Warcraft die for you?

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Cata

WotLK was the beginning of the end.

Cata was trash.

Pandaria was fun leveling but after hitting cap I got bored in few days.

Never touched it since.

Dungeon finder.
Everything after that was just beating a corpse.

this, although it started in lich king with group finder.

cata just put the nail in the coffin with LFR among other things like ruining the vanilla world to make 1-60 even more of a theme park.

2010

When my friends started playing it and I couldn't be alone anymore.

>they turned all of westfall into one giant CSI joke

I will never fucking forgive them for this.

Walking around Cataclysm and just seeing all you favorite areas utterly destroyed. The game just began losing its spark.

what does "theme park" refer to in an MMO context

Unsubbed when Burning Crusade came out. I was in the Beta and already bored of it

when they gave mounts to level 20s

WotLK, dungeon finder was the beginning of the end.
People don't realize it, but killing the social and community aspect of an MMO means you kill what makes it good.

fucking google it you lazy bum

it's a term that gets thrown around all the time when talking about modern MMOs

>probably could have explained it in fewer keystrokes than you just spent complaining
wew

True but laziness shouldn't be rewarded user.

Not when the answer is so easy to find.

At one point it was when I first saw the Tauren Paladin kodo mount and how awful it looked, during the Cata alpha/beta, but I guess I still had some faith in the game because MoP sparked my love for it again.

I played all through MoP and really adored the game again. Then 6 months into Siege of Orgrimmar patch it died for real, I've felt nothing since.

Its when you are meant to walk around and enjoy the "rides" ie the dungeons etc that the developers have made for you. once enough players get bored of the current "rides" the devs have to shit out new ones creating an endless, unsustainable cycle. the contrast to this are games that are basically giant sandboxes for you to create fun for yourself and play with the other kids. i havnt played EVE online, but im pretty sure thats more about creating corps and minning or whatever and just chilling in space.

Basically it means an unchanging world in which you just go from "ride" to "ride" to experience it.

In WoW's context it would be going from quest to quest or area to area and nothing really changing for the world.

BC when t2 flying mounts became common.

I quit April 2005

>making conversation is bad
>wanting to hear it from the person who stated it so it's described fully in the relevant context to the complaint isn't valid

highmaul but never quit until january becuase sunk cost

These.

When it wasn't Warcraft IV.
lich king was when it died, not that bc or vanilla were even that great

>explaining the definition of a thing is conversation
go out and make some real friends and learn what a conversation is.

>I'm too lazy to read more than one line of a post

>edgy tryhard telling other people to go outside
very ironic

When Arthas died
>Cata was trash.
Cata was fine at the beginning, challenging dungeons and raids, "reworked" vanilla areas. Then the shitter whined and cried how hard everything is and because of that, they've nerfed everything. Fireland raid was also fine but Dragonsoul fucked it up again.

This. I was initially excited for new quests, but after I got to level cap and tried actually playing in the old world it was like my house had burned down.

Soon after it was done with Warcraft 3 story and began making up his own.
I was a raider in a very good guild, but 5 months of Firelands took their toll on me and made me drop it.

man, i used to be such a petty one when talking about DPS...

It didn't.

look if someone doesn't know what a themepark MMO is then they should educate themselves before discussing the subject.

you don't have to get so salty when I tell someone to just google it

This. Pretty much same thing for me.

I played vanilla WoW everyday for 10-11 months straight then BC came out and I just didn't have interest anymore. What exactly went wrong? It didn't seem like Vanilla WoW, it went too theme-parky maybe?

>be an autistic douche
>get confused when people don't like you

Cata is when the group finder started showing its negative effects. People I met in the dungeon finder during WOTLK were still willing to communicate.

Wasn't it always like that though?
Or are you talking about how the cata quest lines are a lot more streamlined and guide you down a set path, have quests linking to the next zone, etc

You can have mounts at level 1 now. wowhead.com/item=120968/chauffeured-chopper

>Cata is when the group finder started showing its negative effects.
SeeCata was fine at the beginning, challenging dungeons and raids, "reworked" vanilla areas. Then the shitter whined and cried how hard everything is and because of that, they've nerfed everything.

Cata had really nice dungeons. They've felt like mini raids and were challenging. Halls of Origination felt like a raid.

1 month ago

fuck legendaries, AP, and titanforging

Sup casual?

Do you know how to talk other than through greentext?

when aaron wade died

>Lore
End of Wrath started the ball rolling. Cata was the final blow. BC did have a couple of stupid lore changes I'll give you that, but honestly I think they were for the better. Sort of.

>Gameplay
Mists because I had played warrior since vanilla and Mists completely ruined warrior for me, to the point where only now has warrior been playable again.

I'll give em this - current fury has some of the best gameplay the spec has ever had. Current arms is the worst it's ever been though. Prot's pretty hit or miss for me, I'm more upset about losing banners and bladestorm on prot than any rotation changes.

>End of Wrath started the ball rolling
This. Once they had to start creating their own stuff instead of concluding Warcraft 3's storylines the lore went to shit.

Group finder was a slow downfall and then it just came crashing down with raid finder.

The community was never the same after.

>people blame metzen for green jesus
>they dont realise he was on titan and only a supporting role for WoW once Wrath was finished
>Dave ''The Real Hack'' Kosak decided to make every cata zone have some absurd amount of pop culture reference in it

All of that suspense for Uldum to be finally accessible, only for it to be one big Indiana Jones meme. Redridge having some parody of John Rambo. CSI Deadmines. JUST.

To answer the OP though, WoD - MoP at least was enjoyable and they put a lot of effort in presumably due to knowing the backlash on the drastic change in theme/aesthetics was inevitable. Only weak patch was 5.3 but it had plenty to do.

WoD was just shit, and looking back now we have Legion it makes me even more depressed knowing now all of the shit they had in the works that got canned for that mediocre movie (which got delayed anyway so it's big marketing push was all for naught)

Now in Legion it feels like they want you to go back to subscribing every few months with breaks between each content patch, but due to the fuckery in the Legion game systems you're either subbed permanently or not at all unless you want to gimp yourself to the point of being stuck in LFR. Not to mention the class design being at it's absolute WORST since ever. There're far too many gaps and the prime example are Warlocks, 3 strong spec identities since Xelnath took over in Cata/MoP, and since 6.0 they've been slowly gutted into RNG turrets that can't even fulfill their fantasy nowadays due to how streamlined and shit the pet system has become.

I'm not even a nostcuck but jesus christ it saddens me whenever I hear that Teldrassil or Brill music play and remember myself taking those quests to go tame shit.

>Reminder Jeff Kaplan himself referred to as the WoW team as Blizzard's current Team 2

It's officially on the backburner. (Not that we didn't know this ever since WoD and OW's inception mind you.)

When they announced a dumbed down vanilla raid as a feature.

To add to this: Kosak is just on Hearthstone or something now, so they only supposedly have Afrasiabi and a bunch of literal who's still writing, and given this interview on how miscommunications fucked Garrosh up; it's no shocker as to why Legion's current story is totally fucking ridiculous and unfulfilling in every corner.

engadget.com/2014/11/11/alex-afrasiabi-on-warlords-garrosh-and-alternate-azeroth/

It always has been like that

The point is though that when you constantly build on top of it over time it becomes unsustainable.

Cata though MoP managed to regain me, brawler's guild might have been the most fun I ever had through all expansions.

Yeah, one area of a zone being centered around a line is fine, and the occasional zone wide story is fine, but Cata (and later expansions) made every single zone so damn linear in following a single lead you by the nose questline. And generally being too restrictive with quests.

I understand that TBC added more sophisticated systems but fuck you if you don't think vanilla was the shit.

Vanilla WoW was the only WoW I could play and actually enjoy.

Tried WoW not long after Burning Crusade came out. Got to somewhere in the low-mid 20s before giving up on it.

I enjoyed mop a ton, and I enjoyed wod more than I thought I would due to being in a good guild.

legion has been utter shit.

>it's no shocker as to why Legion's current story is totally fucking ridiculous and unfulfilling in every corner.

See, that's the funny thing. From a lore perspective Warcraft is at a massive fucking high with the Chronicles. The second Chronicle was like someone pouring salt on the wound that WoD left. Pretty much everything that can be explained so far has been, and the way it's going makes it seem like after the next expansion (Which will very likely focus on Azshara and N'zoth) things are gonna die down a lot in terms of 'Big extraplanetary threat'. We have two, maybe even just one expansion before Warcraft 4 becomes a big possibility, and the set up for it could be extremely simple.

A big problem is that the game is so old that so many fucking zones are meaningless now.

Playing on elysium it is refreshing to see all levels running around nearly everywhere. I feel like in retail I haven't stepped foot in old Azeroth in forever. Makes it feel so dead.

As someone who only played PVE in vanilla and never even hit level cap but just resubbed to play PVP, how is it now compared to any other points in the game's history?
It seems pretty alright to me, but I have zero points of reference.

>Warcraft 4

Fucking how? No way. There will never ever be another Warcraft RTS

Not just that to be honest, I also went through Elysium and there's just a massive difference in replay value, post cataclysm zones are so one note and restricted that every trip is exactly the same, which paired with being mind numbingly easy makes for the really shitty questing zones in the long run.

It never lived

elysium is awesome.

The Legion is being mostly dealth with this expansion.

N'zoth is the only remaining Old God that hasn't been re-contained, and he's with Azshara.

Dealing with then Void Lords is dozens and dozens of years in the future, more than a simple timeskip away.

So what happens in those years? Well, so far,

>Genn is slowly becoming the main-race Alliance (Dwarf, Gnome, Human) military leader, and very much wants to fight Sylvanas and the Forsaken
>Sylvanas just went and almost fucked the planet away trying to get immortality, which is likely to get some big flak for her from other Horde leaders
>Vul'jin is still around somewhere
>Jaina is still out for blood over Theramore, and can get allies pretty fast

We're one war crime away from factions getting split, which sets the perfect stage for WC4.

I played pretty consistently from early TBC all the way through MoP, and I had a lot of fun throughout. I definitely felt the burnout with SoO though, came into WoD with high hopes but as is well documented it was a shitshow outside of raid content. I put the game aside and came back for Legion.

And what a disappointment Legion has been. Every aspect of the game has been carefully handcrafted to keep you subscribed for as long as possible. Everything from the warforge/titanforge lottery roll system, to AP grind, to Class Hall work orders, to rep grinds locked behind time gates to unlock ANOTHER timegate quest is tedious as hell. World quests are novel in theory but soul-crushingly boring in practice. PvP is a hot mess they still don't know what to do about, and despite pushing this as the special snowflake expansion classes are more generic than ever. And everything to do with the Legendary system is hot fucking garbage.

Blizzard can have their Illidan wankfest- the game is dead to me.

When my laptop couldn't handle the game anymore

Beginning of Cataclysm. WotlK was fucking awesome and early Cata with it's hard as balls dungeons was great. But then they nerfed everything again and it went to total shit.

there was no "it died right here" moment, but group finder was the silent killer. WoW and MMOs in general are NOTHING without a sense of community and yet they implemented all these new things that made player interaction unnecessary.

what's the point of talking to other people about making a party to run dungeons with if the game just forms the party automatically for you?

what's the point of talking and strategizing during a dungeon run if all the dungeons are so easy that five blind monkeys could run them?

what's the point of talking to others and asking for help if the game itself tells you literally everything you need to do at all times?

what's the point of building up a reputation as a good player on a server if your group will be from different servers anyway?

what's the point of pvp servers if everyone just transports by air where you can't pvp anyway?

multiplayer is right in the acronym MMO and yet their developers seem to forget more and more that the social aspect is the MMO's X-factor. without it you just have a really, really shitty online singleplayer game. people often say that MMOs were just a bubble and that's why they went the way of the dodo, I say it was that the teams making MMOs all steadily lost sight of what people actually play an MMO for. over-policing like banning people for pvping or even social banter and slowly removing all the NECESSARY social interaction is what killed fucking every single MMO.

If they had left Group Finder to server only it would have been fine.

i think people need to be forced to talk to each other in MMOs

If it is server wide only you still would be.

Group Finder also came with a nerf to a ton of these dungeons. So that didn't help.

Playing vanilla now I literally just sit in General saying LFG Dire Maul, or I will whisper random people from /who. The LFG too itself isn't what discouraged comms

Keep dreaming user, if it got made it'd suck dick and be so far off of your headcanon you'd see why we aren't hopeful.

>not just being sensible and hoping for a WC3 remaster/HD upscaling with BNET 2.0 integration and semi-frequent patching

Didn't WC3 actually get a patch recently?

this, it's as ghostcrawler said about LFR (among current devs when referring to difficulty)

>Tuning content's difficulty around the convenience of grouping with people you'll never see again at the click of a button

But user, think of all those people who dont have the TIME to find a group of people that want to do the same thing as they do. Think of the people that just CAN NOT find the TIME. It's THEIR $15 a month and they SHOULD be able to do WHATEVER content they want WHENEVER they want. In fact, why should you even need a group at all? Classes need to be self sufficient, this would solve a lot of your problems too! And think of all the transmog runs you could do without need anyone else!

FUCKING KILL THEM ALL REEEEE

minor but they have a classic games team working on it slowly but surely, supposedly.

Oh fuck off. Uldum as Indiana Jones was the best way they could have done that zone and was probably in the top 5 zones they've ever done.

Mop is a fucking disgrace, biggest peice of shit China cash grab I've ever seen. Eastern bullshit "zen" nonsense doesn't fit with warcraft. But now that shit is part of the fucking canon.

Fuck you if you play a panda, you don't know what the fuck warcraft is

Patch 1.28 dropping soon, also Blizz is locking down on the Hive.

No, you shit smear. They could have done a more in depth look at the Titans, sure as shit better than a throwaway gag that you won't ever see again.

Not when the first expansion came out, but about a month before when my guild stopped raiding and everyone began losing/quitting

Yeah, the only way to dive into the lore of the creation of azeroth is to have oh so whacky characters explain it to you while you collect 10 of 10 monster bones

The only time I ever feel anything or show emotion, is when I think about my WoW days

>to the point where only now has warrior been playable again.

I hope you're fury, because I pity you if you're arms

Is Legion worth it?

>N'zoth
>next expansion

There's no way that the true purpose of the pillars isn't to imprison him. There's been too many hints.

Pandas for me

When Draenor started ability pruning away everything that defined a class

This is the root of it all.

MMOs will always have inferior combat mechanics compared to other games. It's just the mathematical consequence of the exponential networking required with each additional player. But that's okay, MMOs are supposed to be social games and you can derive a lot of the gameplay from this. Players themselves can be your content.

When you start fucking that formula up because you want to "tell a story" and give the player some shit-tier grindy narrative zone/dungeon experience you end up shifting away the focus of your gameplay.

If you ask me the whole reason that WoW is what it is today is because the company grew too large. You get all these product owners/designers with a massive (relative) number of art and engineering teams and tell them to produce as much content as possible. You have so many people you can't just tell one of your teams to fine tune a balance issue or come up with a fun modification of an existing design.

Blizzard is a software company! They need to use Agile design because that's the hip thing to do. Everything gets designed top-down as an epic (not the item kind). There's an epic for designing that new dungeon, there's an epic for that new reputation, there's an epic for a connecting story-line, there's an epic for all the new gear that's associated with these epics, there's an epic for all the new NPCs and making sure they're voiced. All these epics get picked apart and managed by dozens of people all with mish-mashed design philosophies.

I know, I'm being cynical. Maybe Blizzard really has their coordination down and all this cooperation comes together and produces something cool. The issue is they've spent so much building all this new content for players to experience there's this obligation to make sure everyone has a fun time playing it. Someone from management looking to cut costs wonders why we have all these content teams if only 10% of the playerbase gets to see it all.

cont.

So they realize they need to save their own ass. If the content is too difficult then we'll hand it to them, in whatever way is necessary to make sure they can accomplish it even if the player is a brain-dead narcoleptic with Parkinsons.

So you end up with LFD, LFR, and whatever other bullshit I can't remember anymore. Streamline all the content, shift the focus from the social to the theme park. Now you just gotta keep spinning that carousel faster because the players are draining up all your content. It's so easy and they're always hungry. The social element won't sustain them anymore because you killed that off. Keep spinning more narrative content because it's all you've got left.

I'm done ranting, it's time for bed. I feel like I could write a book on this subject.

>grew too large

Nah Blizzard were just a group of people who threw together a well held together system that looks pretty good for the time in an MMO format. They lucked into what they had completely. Blizzard either never knew what they had, or the people that knew left and didn't think to tell anyone to keep it social above all else. I think the size of the company is only a problem when an idea snowballs, but the idea itself is still the root problem.

When I got put on the bench after parsing top 5 in every fight

Warcraft 1, 2 & 3 player here

when I walked in the first week WoW came out and there was no WAR in it..

Cata

>Top healer in my guild
>guild leader adds his girl friend to the guild
>She gets my fucking tokens that I'm in line for because "we need to gear her up"
>once she's got gear as good as mine I'm put on second strong
>mfw

>I think the size of the company is only a problem when an idea snowballs, but the idea itself is still the root problem.

That's kind of exactly what I'm saying. It's a problem related to narrative style content vs. the content of game mechanics.

Game mechanics should be iterated slowly, adding one new ability or tweaking an attribute can cause a massive shift in balance. No matter how many employees you have there's some sort of logical soft limit on how many people can work on this.

Narrative content is different though. You can just keep adding more teams because it's more modular. Separate teams of artists and engineers can build everything without effecting what some other team is doing. If you want you could keep increasing the size and number of teams relative to the size of your company.

As this narrative content department grows so does the focus of the game. Someone from the game mechanics department might be like "Well if we add a LFD feature it will damage a lot of the social interaction at the realm level." But he's just one guy and the meeting he's at has a dozen people from the narrative department and they just say "Well if people can't play all the content we've been building then they'll get bored and quit, what are we making it for anyway?"

Narrative content becomes the thing to look forward to in each new patch. Thus, it snowballs.

When they killed burst damage and open pvp.

So in short lorefags ruined the game.

It'll die for me when it shuts down. I'm pretty accustomed to MMO's changing for the worse, it's happened with pretty much every game. At least WoW is still receiving support for people playing.

However, I completely understand why people quit. I'm just a big shiteater for Warcraft stuff.

Didn't WC3 have pandas?