1.) Garrisons/(Guild Wars 2 zero endgame progression/loot)/copying WoW/copying WoW badly (see Final Fantasy)
2.) Flying mounts/Water mounts
>destroys all immersion
>was already fixed with better flight path system in BC
3.) Welfare Loot/LFR
>letting everybody getting legendaries and seeing the destroyer of world even while doing nothing/being afk
>it destroys every sense of accomplishment and wonder
welfare loot existed in vanilla too you know, it was called running molten bore and ubrs. the mechanics were literally only dps checks.
Difficulty settings for raids were the biggest mistake of all.
>You have to repeat the instance hundreds of times in order to acquire the gear necessary for the dps checks to progress in the higher difficulties.
All because casuals were too bad to clear past content even with several tiers worth of gear, fuck that shit.
unironically, FFXIV does the themepark MMO formula better than WoW now. All WoW today is Diablo lite.
Just getting to MC was still a huge chore. BRD and UBRS used to be fucking hard
That is still sickening to this day, and one of the biggest reasons Cataclysm failed.
You needed all the blue gear from dungeons to make it into the first raid tier, yet even then you were massively undergeared. In order to complete the heroic dungeons, you needed the best weapons available.
That first arena season was magical. You could AFK in battlegrounds for gear that was better than heroics.
things get easier over time. i dont remember ubrs being that threatening other than standing in one spot to avoid being knocked back to dragon eggs
Yes exactly, you needed gear and therefore investment to do these. As opposed to welfare where you don't need anything.
I was in Naxx40 gear when about 75% of the population was still in blues. Even this late, seeing some T2 was the mark of a big player.
it was a chore because you needed 39 other players that had not only the attunement but the time schedule and gear to beat the fights.
mechanically speaking, MC was easy as fuck. It was the LFR raid of WoW back in the day.
ThisThe challenge of the first raids was miraculously getting 40 people together at once.
Of course not. LFR does no damage and the mechanics can be completely avoided. At least in MC you got oneshot if you didn't do the mechanics, as easy as they were.
>That one LFR encounter here and there where you actually can't avoid mechanics
>Wipe all day until people leave and you get better pawns
MC in Vanilla is comparable to the 24 man raids in FFXIV. Designed for casuals but mechanics can still instant wipe if people are headless chickens.
You needed a guild and be brought for MC, UBRS runs were annoying even when they cut down amount of people needed not everyone got in on that.
You are right about them being dps checks and some people couldn't even fill that criteria thus were never brought.
>Designed for casuals
And this is where you fail hard, at the time mechanics were unknown, blizzard didn't know what they were doing and gear even tier gear was highly unoptimized and not everyone used addons which made dispelling very difficult, it's not as easy as nowadays.
I remember plenty of people Pugging MC successfully. You didn't need a guild for MC or UBRS. Sure it made things a lot smoother and higher chances of success but it was never needed. Just play your class well and meet the minimum requirements to enter and you were solid.
>You will never get 10g for opening UBRS to a group ever again ; ;
maybe at launch window but MC and later raids got progressively easier as time passed. better gear came out, balance changes happened, and more people got wiser.
That was his entire point. It was Blizzard's first raid so it was pretty much slapped together with not much knowledge of design and other people had to learn how to work with 39 other people. It was designed for everyone to see how raiding would go in the future not just casuals.
Vanilla as a whole was not much knowledge of design. WoW staff at the time were mostly ex Everquest nerds.
>Flying mounts/Water mounts
>destroys all immersion
Fuck your immersion. I managed to stay immersed even with flying mounts.
Spotted wotlk babby. In early cata heroics you had to use cc and it was easy, wotlk babbies dont know shit about it
>make outlands entirely designed to encourage WPVP
>oh yeah here's flying mounts so you can run away instantly also :)
Blizshit
Friendly reminder that Jaina was 100% right and the world would objectively be better off without the Horde shitting it up.
>2.) Flying mounts/Water mounts
>>destroys all immersion
What destroys my immersion regarding flying mounts is suddenly every new piece of land suddenly being unable to support flying for "reasons".
Flying mounts were just a mistake to ever have in the first place.
Why is copying wow a regret, because of it FF is the second biggest subscription mmo in the west
I think what a lot of people do not understand is that MMO's in general are a dying genre. WoW is an established brand and in general is having a difficult time attracting a new members while the majority of current members have been subscribed to years at a time.
Blizzard therefore is catering to this aging player base. The same players who could spend hours upon hours upon hours grinding for loot are no longer children and teens, but adults with families and other responsibility and cannot dedicate as much to the game as they once could. By making the game easier in the aspect that obtaining loot is easier and has become more "soloable", I feel this is Blizzard's way of keeping the current player base.
On an off note, the game would improve ten fold if instead of their serving merging technology they would just offer free xfers from dead servers to medium populated servers.
much of the design still exists in some form, it held up pretty well
>PvPers defend removing flight
>now randomly outnumbered 50:1 because of CRZ
>world PvP is getting globaled by a tank because PvP templates aren't active
That lead to MMOs being creatively braindead since everyone tried to copy one game and now the genre is failing to capture the younger generation since most kids don't care for MMOs and want to play MOBAs or FPS games.
>>PvPers defend removing flight
>>now randomly outnumbered 50:1 because of CRZ
I was talking about TBC, CRZ wasn't a thing back then so you knew what you were getting into when you rolled on a server
I have to give them credit for making current WoW working somehow, sure it's shit, but it's pretty much this weird frankenstein's monster. All kind of popular trends slapped into it every expansion and it's still half-alive. It's just very dying genre, probably it would have been dead already if they would have kept the game same as it was in vanilla/tbc.
>That lead to MMOs being creatively braindead
Even commercial game development has a 'meta', and sadly these are the things you need to do to survive in today's market. MMOs more than any other genre because of how much of a behemoth of an investment each game is to make.
Hell, even in CCGs which should be considerably more lightweight you have nothing but a bunch of samey hearthstone clones.
the mechanics were unknown but easy to understand once you saw them all