Where did WoW go wrong?

Where did WoW go wrong?

ICC and everything afterwards

When the Cata LFD nerf happened and nothing has been good since.

Mists of Pandaria.
They need to get on with the plot, not take a bunch of detours.

A certain patch somewhere during the last few quarters of WotLK. Cataclysm sucked hard.

activision shoved its fist up blizzards ass and uses it as a sockpuppet

Mists of Pandaria was by far the best post-Wrath expansion though. The current one, entirely centred around the "main plot," is complete garbage.

November 4, 2009

...

I dunno user. I played vanilla to Wrath and quit for about 6 years after we killed Arthas. I just started playing again about a month and a half ago. This expansion is pretty goddamn good.

People who think Vanilla was better have mental problems. They've replaced talent trees which offer negligable statistical bonuses with specs that completely change how every class works. Each class is now basically 3 classes. Everything is faster and more exciting, the engine is a million times more stable so there can be more mechanics based around timing and movement, and the actual encounters in dungeons and raids are really really cool.

Broken Isles zones are really well designed and world quests are sweet. They keep people out in the zones interacting with one another. After dungeon finder got introduced the whole game became a giant matchmaking lobby, and world quests are an extremely fun solution to that problem.

I loved vanilla WoW as much as the next guy, and unlike most of you I actually played it and don't just pretend I did on a Malkavian autist blood addict support group. WoW is leaps and bounds better now than it ever was from launch to Wrath.

Cross-realm anythigns. Killed server identity and fun world PvP.

Dailies.

Flying mounts.

Group finder.

Too many raid difficulties.

Burning Crusade
>1 world boss
>no more 40man raids
>daily quests

Might as well finish it now, rather than letting it drag on forever.

You forgot
>resilience

Activision bought out blizzard. They started casualizing the game hardcore starting at the end of WOTLK in order to appeal to an even wider audience. What they didnt realize however is their focus on casualizing and lack of content would start the downfall of wow and lead to it having less than 10% of its max subcriber count during WOTLK. Greed and hyper capitalism always always always ruins video games

>world quests are sweet

Activision "merge" - they bought Blizzard and pretended to join them. Almost immediately, the TOC patch was released rendering Ulduar useless, and it was eventually followed by the poor ending ICC and dungeon finder.

You could also argue BC is where the game first went wrong, but the Activision merger is what killed the team, objectively speaking.

When it stopped being an MMO designed for extremely dedicated basement dwellers allowing strategy and character building and featuring passable writing and references to other video games and classic literature.

Now it's an MMO for the "instant gratification" generation of normies who need to be rewarded for no/minimal work every 5 minutes and for who the game needs to be streamlined to hell removing all thought from the process. Also now featuring LOL SO WACKY writing and references to internet memes.

There is no one specific moment: it's just been a steadily increasing list of things that basically all points to Blizzard getting way too involved in trying to direct the way you play their game.

They've become far too obsessed over making sure everybody raids and everybody gets sweet loot and that instead of players getting to create a character that makes their own path it's become everyone doing the exact same grind daily and weekly to see the exact same cutscenes. The sensation of it being a Skinner's Box is stronger than ever with you chasing after Artifact Points and hoping for Legendaries and Titanforged drops that can happen literally anywhere... so keep running Mythics and Mythic+ Dungeons and be sure not to forget all your World Dailies!

I've switched to FFXIV even though in many ways I think WoW is still the better game. But at least in FFXIV I often find myself doing things that I want to do and not because the game is heavily designed around pushing me to the next thing it's decided I need to do.

there were plenty of things that wow did wrong, but deleting the old maps with cataclysm's launch was totally unforgivable

> They keep people out in the zones interacting with one another
> interacting with one another

you tried

here's a (you)

>There must always be a lich king!

Literally the first time the game royally fucked the audience over. Should have taken the clue and stopped right then.

I literally got merged with MOON GUARD.

Where the fuck do you think it went wrong op?

>I loved vanilla WoW as much as the next guy, and unlike most of you I actually played it and don't just pretend I did on a Malkavian autist blood addict support group. WoW is leaps and bounds better now than it ever was from launch to Wrath.

You know most people who say they prefer Vanilla actually DID play Vanilla, right? And not everyone who did play back then thinks it was the best version of wow.

Too many raid difficulties is the only bad thing on this list.

Group finder improved the game significantly, especially now that to do the harder difficulties you have to actually make the group yourself.

Stop playing on a PvE server

>inb4 LOTROfags blame MoP nonstop

WoD is the answer.

>halfassed content
>facebook game shit
>shit class design

So you think crz and flying mounts are good?

if by "interaction" you mean le epic gank xD then go fuck yourself

nothing will ever beat vanilla's genuine player interaction where you teamed up and befriended completely random people you happened to come across to do a dungeon or kill an elite mob for a quest

Why not? Flying over content you've already done is pretty convenient and the zones designed around flying have been pretty cool.

CRZ saved dead realms, but I can't say I've experienced it much since my realm isn't CRZ at all since it's full population.

>Following the NH world first race
>Watching all the different streams
>Want to get back into raiding so fucking bad it's insane
>Don't have the time or money to get back into it
>Not enough gold for a token
>Completely behind on class and game changes, last time I played was MoP (and a free week in WoD)
>Favourite spec was completely gutted. Things I loved about it changed/removed blood dk
>Despite all these hurdles, still have the urge

I just want to raid. The rest of the game seems to have gotten worse but goddamn is WoW raiding just so fucking good. What other MMOs have good raiding right now? FF?

i know its fun to shit on wod but legion fucked up WAY more
if we go just by subscribers wod held more subs than legion did
because atleast in wod classes were fun to play

The world isn't big enough for flying mounts to be necessary and all they do is make it feel really small.
Merging realms saves dead realms, crz just fills areas with ghosts you get almost no interaction with. You might as well play with bots.

Legion's map already feels really small. It's smaller than Pandaria.

i played on a dead as fuck realm and crz killed my realmcommunity even more
the zones are still empty and i dont know anyone anymore

>and all they do is make it feel really small.
cause it is small, not flying doesn't change that

Lotro is beautiful but grindier than anything, even allods. The combat is goofy as fuck honestly but the aesthetics and music are on point.

Flying makes you realize just how small it is. Remember that mounts used to be expensive luxury items.

Sure it does. Having to get around on foot/slow ground mounts makes even small areas like the Ghostlands feel much larger than they actually are. Tons of games use smoke and mirrors to great effect to make them feel much more grand in scale.

>i'll just point out menial things in this post without actually disputing it

Yeah maybe it saves dead realms.


BUT DID YOU GET MERGED WITH MOON GUARD?

Fuck you. I ran into 24+ naked erping characters every fucking day and every fucking where I went.
That server was always quarantined for a reason.

From an outside observer's point of view, WoD seemed like they had a barebones dev team working on it. I'm guessing they pulled people to finish up sc2 and diablo 3, getting HoTS up and running, and were probably going nuts into overwatch, Legion looks like it has a lot more work put into it.

You were already on an RP server if you got merged with them, or at least Normal.
What are you, pussy, afraid of world PVP?
lil white boi get cucked doin his dailies xD

The plot wad one thing but what really broke the game was LFD and cross realms.

Instead of actually taking the time to socialise with people on your server and getting a group ready for a dungeon or raid you just get sucked into the next dungeon and blaze through it with little to no conversation.

It really damaged communities in the long run.

Fuck off retard, erpers always stick around the same areas or places really out of the way. They're easy to avoid.

Is there any way to play WoW solo? It looks like a fun game but I don't want to deal with other people or that subscription crap.

CC was anti roleplaying.

We were there because other servers were fucking trash that completely allowed harassment of the highest level.
Rp realm rules made the game playable for the unpopular opinion guys. I had people attempting to invade my life and privacy because they didn't like me on a normal realm.

Also I didn't have a choice.
A gm gave me a free transfer to come play with her and that's where I was to go.
You act like I signed up to roleplay.

jesus christ that's some beta autism
I'm outta this thread

Raiding has been heavily devalued in favor of running Mythic+ 100+ times a week. The shitty itemization in general and nerfed tier sets, combined with the RNG of warforging/titanforging have destroyed motivation to raidlog.
The open world in Legion is CRZ. Goodbye server cohesion. Enjoy spending far more time than you ever would, competing with a very high population, even if you are on a low/medium population, for world quests and resources. Also, if you aren't a stealth class or not a mythic raider, enjoy getting owned in typical high population PvP.
Legendary RNG makes or breaks you at high levels. Either you get your BiS legendaries, or you are benched. Simple as that.
The prune has devolved the gameplay to an elementary level, MoP offered the same level of rotation interactivity, with far more flavor and utility still present.
Every expansion after MoP has done nothing but remove skills and attributes from the game and implement shitty ill-thought-out redesigns.

no its an mmo
you can do questlines solo but dungeons raids and pvp are only with other players
you can queue for anything and pretend the other players are bots though
also sub is payable in gold now so only retards pay with real money

You would've taken a free $15 transfer too if your entire server was against you too, old chap.

Legion's map feels insanely cramped to the point where your map tool feels useless since so many points can be stacked on top of one another.

don't forget that's when gearscore started taking off too.

i'm still utterly dumbfounded that blizzard incorporated that idea into the game.

I heard the other day they are merging english and spanish realms in Europe. Lol rip game

how did you manage that your entire old server hated you?
storytime pls

They didn't, gearscore was 3rd party mental retardation.
Ilvl is pretty reasonable though.

I never got a single piece of gear during wrath because of the massive faggot that invented the gearscore website.
Never raided, never saw endgame, never did anything but get one shorted by newfag death knights that they couldn't balance.
Wrath was shit honestly.

Some point during wotlk when everyone stopped having fun and just went on for raids. Community lost its flavour

Burning Crusade was a huge step back, but WotLK was a step forward until that coliseum raid. Why do I nominate TBC?
-Daily quests seemed cool at the beginning until everything was locked behind them if you weren't a raider. You don't form groups and play with others, you just do the same quest once a day like a god damn job.
-Arena began the e-sport shit. Weapons and trinkets became less interesting (random) specifically because they messed up blizz's vision of hardcore super serious arena to match starcraft.
-The card game. After aforementioned fun things were removed, they later added fun stuff with no combat effects with loot cards for the card game. The game itself bombed and its subforum on the official site was just "WTS ____". This stuff used to be created by the Engineering profession.
-Blood elves fucking suck and ruined the Horde playerbase, not to mention it goes against the lore of trolls hating them
- Halaa was a total failure- artificial pvp zones never work
-Crafting "bonuses" that pigeon-holed your character if you wanted to be the most effective and this was particularly important for non-raiding cloth-wearers.
-Alliance getting Shaman and Horde getting Paladin made things a lot less interesting in dungeons and PvP
-Most zones are fucking ugly

There was a guy on Terenas that back in Classic he checked the "At War" box with every faction that he could. And he was a Rogue that would gank anyone he could.

how is ilvl reasonable?
it is the exact same thing as gearscore
i cant get into groups because my ilvl is too low and i cant get ilvl since i cant get into groups

When they made it instead of Warcraft 4.

LFG and teleporting to the dungeons.

>They didn't, gearscore was 3rd party mental retardation.

yeah i know. i'm not talking about during wrath, but after. pic related. but the gearscore mod started during wrath and its ubiquity prodded blizz into putting it in the game themselves.

>talent trees offered meaningless stat increases and everybody played the same build anyway
shitter detected

I think it's because I spoke to people in trade chat, nothing more.
One guy pretty much made sure that the entire server hated me because he didn't like me.

I'm not sure what happened. It was pretty much trade chat use. I didn't post too many unpopular opinions, I just made sense and was accurate, and that pissed everyone off.

Also.
It was bladefist.
Just go visit. That's how the server is. Sup Forums Is NOT the asshole of the internet. That server is.
People will attempt to dox you if you one up them in an argument.

I mean how fucking bad does it have to get that a gm initiates you and gives you one of their transfer codes to end your misery?

>Be a Shadow Priest during TBC
>Only stats that mattered were Spell Power and then more Spell Power: Haste started to matter a little bit later on
>Gear Progression was "Get to level 70, Craft Spellstrike and Frozen Shadoweave and get your Crusade Card: you now have Best in Slot until your Tier 6 set."
>After a Wand from Sunwell your next Best wand was a Level 70 Green Wand of Shadow Wrath
>Was known as one of the best Shadow Priests on the server
>Got denied to Karazhan farm groups because my Gear Score was too low according to their mod

I still miss being a Mana Battery, though.

Item level was not what gearscore was. Gearscore used scaled item level based on slot, since a high ilvl weapon meant more than a high ilvl bracer.

yiff in hell furfag

Only shitty pugs and crap guilds used GS as a measure of anything, you dodged a bullet

shills please go

>Where did WoW go wrong?
correct answer
when i stopped playing it

wrong answer
when you stopped playing it

Blizzard didn't want people taking shamans and shadow priests along like they were just another consumable item but I liked being useful. It's not like either got better in Wrath when they were supposed to stand on their own.

Oh, I often just checked how bad Karazhan farm groups were in Trade. I still remember the last months of Burning Crusade and the shit I saw:

>Guild cleared Sunwell a few times
>With the exception of the Sunfire Robes I had the absolute best in slot list for a Shadow Priest with all the enchants and epic gems
>See a group forming in Trade for Karazan
>Remember I BARELY made the Gear Score requirement to join
>Ask anyway out of curiosity
>Person forming it was a Hunter with that one Blue Quality Quest Axe everyone had
>All green gear

And then I remember PUGing Trial of the Crusader during Wrath and just listening to people on their Mumble obsess over item level/gear score/whatever. They talked down to so many players but then spoke to me like some Golden God because I had Grand Crusader gear.

Average Item level works on the same principal.

Activision merger. All the people who made Blizzard what they were are gone.

It was an odd feeling at times, feeling like a raid resource. But my favorite moment of TBC raiding as a Shadow Priest:

>Raided from 8 PM to Midnight Monday through Friday
>One of three Shadow Priests in our raid group but the only one that was consistent and talented
>NEVER benched: even our tanks got to rotate out for off-nights
>Experiencing extreme burnout
>Talk to my best friend who was our webmistress and one of the officers because some other friends were inviting me to a party on a Friday Night when we were going to work on Illidari Council
>Officers say it's cool, I can take a night off
>Driving home that night, call my friend and ask how things went
>Her: "Uh... we called in an hour in... the healers had no idea how to function without you."
>My face

And that was my only day off for the rest of Burning Crusade.

Halfway Wrath. LFD was the beginning of the end.

There was no distinct point in which WoW became shit, it was a gradual process like boiling a frog.

BC added flying, arena, badges, and welfare epics
Wrath added rolling welfare gear, recycled content, LFG, chievos, the in-game store, 12-month raid cycles, and managed to both perfect AND ruin the concept of heroics in a single expansion
Cataclysm cemented the rigidly structured Disneyland "see everything the first time" themepark design, pet battles, extreme welfare raids, furries, ruined 60% of the game's content and was the point where every. single. piece of content has to contain a pop culture reference
MoP had more furries, fat fetishism, jokes becoming real, and other cancers.

And who fucking knows how WoD and Legion managed to further shit it up, nobody I know fucking played them.


The point is that somewhere near the end of Wrath the game passed the 50% good, 50% shit mark and by now you'd have to eat a gallon of shit to find something even a kernel of quality.

Can you actually take selfies in this game? With what, your wizard phone?

And why the fuck is "selfie" a word now? I'm actually mad that spellcheck has no problem with it.

You get a S.E.L.F.I.E. camera. It was the entirety of a content patch.

The WoW fanbase started to accuse FFXIV of ripping them off because they learned of FFXIV Selfie contests that had existed years before the Camera was added in.

You've been able to since they added the S.E.L.F.I.E. camera toy in patch 6.1, which was universally despised because it added basically nothing except the toy and Facebook integration of some kind.

This guy gets it.

it's hard to compete with vanilla simply because it was in development for 5 years as opposed to 2 for an expansion, the world was massive and there's a new dungeon like every 5 levels

it's weird how awful hellfire peninsula was like they put no effort into it despite being the first thing you see in TBC

Legion has been absurd with the grind. You have no idea how bad it's gotten.

>Facebook integration
>S.E.L.F.I.E. camera

I regret nothing by never trying this game.

>Blizzard didn't want people taking shamans and shadow priests along like they were just another consumable item

As opposed to being brought along like they're just another dps number.

I just don't know. The whole "bring the player, not the class" mentality was so contradictory. Before when there were unique classes, roles and buffs everything had its niche and you had options to optimize groups. Then things got homogenized and with blizzards sense of "balance" you started taking the class rather then the player EVEN MORE. Why take X when Y does 50% more damage while provding the same buffs, CC, role etc?

>That feel when paladin
>That feel when I never got to be in the SP group
>had to learn to play super smart with my mana because blizzard kept nerfing illumination for arenababbies

What a damn shame about WoW. SP's being a mana battery in BC was such a cool and unique role.

they started designing around meters, nevermind you could carry your weight in other ways, being at the bottom of the meter wasn't "fun"

That's weird: I often had a Holy Paladin in my group because if there was raid damage they doubled down from benefiting from my Vampiric Embrace healing generating Mana for them on top of the Vampiric Touch Mana.

>contradictory
>be rogue
>be tripping balls
>everyone complains about bringing me on Uldum raid (skywall?)
>get to first pull
>press f
>f is fan of knives
>do 240,000 DPS with deadly poison
>players have 35,000 health each
>oh that's why we brought him

Never had anyone complain about me again. It's the player, not the class. Every time.

Like everything to come out of Blizzard post-Activision-merger, the intent was to make it impossible to fail at the game. "Why take X when Y does 50% more damage" does not lose them money. "Why take X when we NEED 5 Y and we CANNOT HAVE any X" loses them money from people who main X. Everything has become about lowering the barrier to entry and making it impossible to fail.

They decided to release an expansion, then repeated that mistake 5 more times

Sup Forums i want to play a holy paladin and level in instances, convince me this is a bad idea

Seems like a waste of time.

Just buy a level cap character from battle.net/store

>new players do not realize how hilarious this is

Remember when you used to be able to shit on people by saying they ebayed their character?

adding a bunch of jewish eq poopsockers to their original dev team

everything else wrong has just slowly trickled down from that

I wonder if it still holds the same stigma to get it from ebay, if people still buy from ebay at all.

Maybe the ebayers look down on the battlenet buyers because they were able to buy their characters for half the price, or with better gear or something.

what a strange existence.

When they made it a shitty static railroad MMO.

So, at release.

ebaying is 100% dead and has been for a while because the real money now comes from selling challenge mode/mythic raid carries. Most people you see with fancy gear or mounts paid a couple hundred bucks for them, so at least that hasn't changed too much.

Yes. Fucking yes.
Pay to win was literally the only thing that killed wow.

My dude probably had 25 million gold at token release worth $10,000.
Then in one patch it was worth $250.

Imagine the rage. You don't sell in game content and you don't fuck hard workers.

I guess some accounts still hold value due to some titles, mounts and Feats of Strength have now been made unobtainable.

I still hate how Blizzard waited like... two weeks before announcing they were making the Immortal and Undying impossible to get after the patch went through for Ulduar.

...One of our add tanks on Kel'thuzad got frozen and gibbed when Kel'thuzad was sub 10% health.