Firstly, I will be speaking only of negative aspects of WoW, but this is not a hate thread. The only goal I have is to gather opinions from the community as I know WoW is popular here, and most importantly, find out why people find it acceptable from Blizzard. There are only 2 aspects of the game I find to be poor, so I'll hopefully keep the post size to a minimum, I am only looking for feedback.
1) The grind to max level; the insane amount of time to hit the level cap, and the overall poor experience the game gives the player. I know WoW is all about the end game content, and that's great. My issue is though, it's 100+ hours, and iterally every zone is:
Step 1: arrive, spam 'accept' on the NPCs quests
Step 2: quest 1) kill x monster, quest 2) gather x items from monster, quest 3) interact with x objects littered around the monsters
Step 3: hand in for boring loot
Step 4: move onto the next area.
2) The monetization; each expansion upon release is the cost of a full AAA retail game on PC (beginning price range) and that on top of a mandatory subscription makes it an extremely expensive game. MMO's these days like to provide the base of the game for free, with expansions either as one off payments or included in an optional subscription. That is already double dipping, in an MMO with little content outside of raids/dungeons, with expansions only adding a handful of content that you will spend any real time in.
The character boost secondly is absolutely horrendous business practice, but not in the concept, but the pricing. Blizzard know that most people do not have the time to level alts and so provide a paid option to fully level a single character to max level... That's great... except it costs £40/$60, that is more expensive than an expansion!! For this price surely you would unlock an unlimited amount of level boosts to be used on every single character created for the rest of your accounts life... That price is absolutely insane, as the only alternative is to power through what is by far the game's largest flaw; the leveling process.
The issue with the cost of a single character boost ties in with the leveling system flaw. People enjoy lot's of different accounts; a PVP character, a DPS + Tank + Healer PVE characters, different class (regardless of roles).
The choice of gathering these from scratch is hundreds of £/$ worth of boosts or potentially thousands of hours spent in the weakest content the game delivers.
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IMO Blizzard are extremely disrespectful towards the WoW playerbase with such a high price of entry and absurd microtransaction pricing, which I find amazing as they otherwise provide extremely replayable games of the highest quality and value in their genres (Diablo 3, Starcraft and Overwatch).
Opinions I'm looking for:
1) Why do people find it acceptable?*
2) Have you quit WoW due to the price gouging? If so what is your opinion on what WoW has become.
3) Would you like to quit WoW? It is easy to see why some may find it difficult to quit at this point, due to the sheer amount of time and cost a lot of accounts have racked up, the idea of quitting must feel like a huge waste.
4) Do you find the character boost to be bad value?
5) Do you agree that the leveling process is poor, and if not what are your reasons?
*I know a lot of people justify the pricing with 'because they can' and I'm not looking for those sort of responses, nor do I wish for this thread to devolve into people who dislike the game generating only negativity. I am looking for the opinions of those who have played it or still do, and those people only. (For what it's worth, I played from the release of WotLK but stopped at the end of Cataclysm because I realized how much money and time the game required)
I am looking for an answer as to why a game with a fundamental flaw, and extremely expensive microtransactions to bypass said flaw holds such a gigantic share of it's market. WoW is a complete package and I understand this, as an overall experience it has a larger world, more content (even if a lot of it is copy and paste - leveling) and stronger endgame than other MMOs, but there are MMOs on the market which struggle to make a profit while WoW literally prints money, and there are MMOs that are much stronger in certain aspects (Combat, Quest variety and design, world design and content to world size ratio) all of which are in it's shadow, and most likely will be until the genre itself dies - which it may never do.
1) The grind to max level; the insane amount of time to hit the level cap, and the overall poor experience the game gives the player. I know WoW is all about the end game content, and that's great. My issue is though, it's 100+ hours, and iterally every zone is:
Step 1: arrive, spam 'accept' on the NPCs quests
Step 2: quest 1) kill x monster, quest 2) gather x items from monster, quest 3) interact with x objects littered around the monsters
Step 3: hand in for boring loot
Step 4: move onto the next area.
2) The monetization; each expansion upon release is the cost of a full AAA retail game on PC (beginning price range) and that on top of a mandatory subscription makes it an extremely expensive game. MMO's these days like to provide the base of the game for free, with expansions either as one off payments or included in an optional subscription. That is already double dipping, in an MMO with little content outside of raids/dungeons, with expansions only adding a handful of content that you will spend any real time in.
The character boost secondly is absolutely horrendous business practice, but not in the concept, but the pricing. Blizzard know that most people do not have the time to level alts and so provide a paid option to fully level a single character to max level... That's great... except it costs £40/$60, that is more expensive than an expansion!! For this price surely you would unlock an unlimited amount of level boosts to be used on every single character created for the rest of your accounts life... That price is absolutely insane, as the only alternative is to power through what is by far the game's largest flaw; the leveling process.
The issue with the cost of a single character boost ties in with the leveling system flaw. People enjoy lot's of different accounts; a PVP character, a DPS + Tank + Healer PVE characters, different class (regardless of roles).
The choice of gathering these from scratch is hundreds of £/$ worth of boosts or potentially thousands of hours spent in the weakest content the game delivers.
--
IMO Blizzard are extremely disrespectful towards the WoW playerbase with such a high price of entry and absurd microtransaction pricing, which I find amazing as they otherwise provide extremely replayable games of the highest quality and value in their genres (Diablo 3, Starcraft and Overwatch).
Opinions I'm looking for:
1) Why do people find it acceptable?*
2) Have you quit WoW due to the price gouging? If so what is your opinion on what WoW has become.
3) Would you like to quit WoW? It is easy to see why some may find it difficult to quit at this point, due to the sheer amount of time and cost a lot of accounts have racked up, the idea of quitting must feel like a huge waste.
4) Do you find the character boost to be bad value?
5) Do you agree that the leveling process is poor, and if not what are your reasons?
*I know a lot of people justify the pricing with 'because they can' and I'm not looking for those sort of responses, nor do I wish for this thread to devolve into people who dislike the game generating only negativity. I am looking for the opinions of those who have played it or still do, and those people only. (For what it's worth, I played from the release of WotLK but stopped at the end of Cataclysm because I realized how much money and time the game required)
I am looking for an answer as to why a game with a fundamental flaw, and extremely expensive microtransactions to bypass said flaw holds such a gigantic share of it's market. WoW is a complete package and I understand this, as an overall experience it has a larger world, more content (even if a lot of it is copy and paste - leveling) and stronger endgame than other MMOs, but there are MMOs on the market which struggle to make a profit while WoW literally prints money, and there are MMOs that are much stronger in certain aspects (Combat, Quest variety and design, world design and content to world size ratio) all of which are in it's shadow, and most likely will be until the genre itself dies - which it may never do.
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). 3 nights a week I sit on voice comms with some good friends and have a laugh for 3 hours. 36 hours of fun with my friends for £10 not much will come close to that in terms of value for money.
