** Official World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Thread**
- Thread starter Mr-White
- Start date
On paper, yes, the game is way better now.
In reality, cross realm everything has killed the community utterly stone dead. All you do is stand in cities and get teleported to instances with people you aren't going to say a word to. The worlds are empty.
In reality, cross realm everything has killed the community utterly stone dead. All you do is stand in cities and get teleported to instances with people you aren't going to say a word to. The worlds are empty.
... Think bigger than the group environment though, for a second. The trend to focus on single-player wants and desires (i.e. gear, personal Xbox Live style achievements) is what has atomized the game and completely annihilated the 'Massive' part of 'MMO'. Yes, you can still play in an insular group of personal friends in parties and never notice the harmful effects that cross-realm and LFG has had on your gameplay experience - but really? The best thing about Vanilla - in my opinion - was the sense of community on each server (especially before the Battlegroups, as well). Idling in a capitol city you'd get to 'know' so many people by their name/gear/guild alone - a real sense of a pecking order, certain guilds having reputations (good and bad). Most importantly, a real tangible and overall sense of server progression (events like AQ gates were a masterstroke in MMO experience). Nowadays the server you play on is pretty irrelevant. I really miss that feeling of knowing certain guilds and groups of players just from sheer familiarity alone. The same with battlegrounds: getting to know other players on the opposite faction, as well as PvP guilds, and knowing when someone was 'skilled' and infamous, etc. That really contributed to an awesome, epic feeling to the game... which has been shattered and lost now. Everybody basically playing a solo version of the game where the sole occupation is getting over 9000 achievement points, or farming epic-gear tokens in random LFG. It sounds like a cliché complaint, repeated certainly ad absurdum... but clichés exist and gain prominence for a reason (i.e. they contain at least an iota of truth). If WoW wants to regain its stride and pick itself back up into that early feeling where everybody was buzzing to play it, they'll certainly need to try and reintroduce a real sense of community cohesion in Mists of Pandaria.
Of course the sad truth at the end of the day is that there is absolutely zero financial incentive to do so such a thing. And with WoW Gen 2 in the development pipeline I really doubt they'll ever be so bold as to try and revive their company cash-cow's fundamental strengths.
Of course the sad truth at the end of the day is that there is absolutely zero financial incentive to do so such a thing. And with WoW Gen 2 in the development pipeline I really doubt they'll ever be so bold as to try and revive their company cash-cow's fundamental strengths.
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I said that was gonna happen on the official forums when they released it and everyone flamed me down. :]
Testament to how good WoW actually is - The amount of bitter trolls who come and slam it in every and any thread possible. Be it an expansion announcement, Graphics or General Hardware with someone asking for a good WoW spec (and how you can run it on a calculator...)
No other games attracts such envious hate but yet here you all are, hating on a thread you never needed to enter preaching like a religious fanatic about how evil and sinful WoW is but, your chosen religion however - Enlightenment!
No other games attracts such envious hate but yet here you all are, hating on a thread you never needed to enter preaching like a religious fanatic about how evil and sinful WoW is but, your chosen religion however - Enlightenment!
I would agree about the community aspect you brought up. Whilst I still enjoy wow I really miss my old community from vanilla/tbc. You knew all the best players (and those to avoid) by name, I played boomkin in the no2 guild on the server and me and the no1 guild boomkin were minor celebrities on the server
If you wanted to do a heroic you had a friends list of good players on the server and people really got on. Me the no1 guild boomkin used to run kara nights for new players where we would guide them through to get raid exp
Good times and I agree that's a big loss but I think that's more what you're modern mmo players want (a cod mmo where you can spend 30 minutes and acheivr it all) rather than wow ruining the genre, they need/want to keep on top and you can't blame them. Great game still.
Tragic in what way
I have made some very good wow friends who would do anything if i asked and i would for them, lost some of that with all the cross realming LFRs and all that.
Sad maybe but not tragic
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You sound very silly. Me a "bitter troll"? "Envious"? ... Envious?!? I've spent nearly 3k hours in Vanilla and TBC WoW. I loved the game - probably my favourite game of all time. But you don't have to be a troll or a jealous seething person to know that the game has lost its former lustre and is now flailing around in its death-throes, auctioning off half of its essential gameplay elements for a quick cash-conversion.
You talked about micro-transactions earlier, and now a cash conversion - what do you mean? People don't pay to transmog their gear, apart from a token in-game currency cost which you can earn from a couple of dailies. It's not like you need to throw in a handful of pennies when you want to join the LFR queue. Where exactly are these 'micro-transactions' taking place?
You played vanilla and TBC......and?
I played everything until I quit about a year ago and invested more time than you did but I still do not hate on the game despite it's changes. For the best part the game has evolved as it has needed to and while some changes are sucky most of them are actually pretty decent.
The game has changed, deal with it. You whining about former glory is not going to change anything so why bother?
The expansion is MoP not "Return to Vanilla Days" so why are you in here whining? WoW is going nowhere despite what all the nay sayers bleat on about with regards to diminishing subscriptions.
It is still the most successful MMO. Every few years some new AAAAAA+++ title is announced and everyone prophecizes that it is the next WoW killer and it is never fulfilled.
Just curious, but what changes (non cosmetic, so not Transmog as thats been around for ever in 1 form or another) do you think were successful? For me, the last real mechanic change that was decent was the move to 10 and 25 man raiding.
I highly doubt anything will surface as a 'WoW killer' in the future, either. People have invested too much time in woW to just abandon it for the next shiny thing, plus new games are always lacking something - end-game content, bug-free gameplay, balanced PvP, progression issues, all the things that WoW suffered from in its time and has had years to iron out. No MMO is going to have the longevity to reach that volume of tweaked content. The MMO market just isn't set up to accept that sort of steamrolling accomplishment any more.
One of te best quotes I've heard about WoW came from these very forums, but I forget now who said it. "WoW used to be a slightly flawed gem - now it's a highly polished turd". To a certain extent I agree, as must most past or present players to a greater or lesser extent, but it's that level of polish that people have come to expect from a monthly sub game that means newer MMOs never really stand up long enough. There are a lot of games out there that are as good as or better than WoW in many ways, but there are a lot of independant fast food shops that do better food than McDonalds. A second Sushi Surprise restaurant opening up in the next town isn't going to be a McDonalds killer, though.
Cross-realm BGs and the dungeon finder have undoubtably proven successful - despite the issues, it's made dropping into a BG or runnign a level-appropriate dungeon much, much easier than hollering in trade chat for a group or waiting an hour to get a WSG game going.
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LFG tool
BG queuing tools (drop in out from queue/join location)
Dual Spec (HUGE SUCCESS)
Talent tree streamlining (was against it at first but made sense once in action)
Cross realm bg/instancing
Reputation changes + championing
BoA/heirloom items
I liked a lot of the new guild perks also, as a hardcore raider things like mass res and mass summon made the cutting edge raiding all the more bearable.
Probably a fair few more I have forgotten as I have not played for a while but there are many awesome change if you ask me.
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Debatable on whether DF was a success or not. I think the negatives outway the positives personally.
Cross realm bg's, yeah ok. Then again there was nothing wrong with BG's in Battlegroups from what I remember (and that was pre TBC)
Besides, you were more than likely to remember the guys you fought against in your Battelgroup
Agree with those – totally forgot about Dual Spec though
Don’t agree with those
In some ways "guild perks" have had a detrimental effect on the WoW's community aswell, would your average Joe rather join a super level 25 guild, or a close knit level 10 guild? I honestly don't think the guild I ran in BC times would have been able to get off the ground if super-conglomerate level 25 guilds had existed back then.
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See, it's a matter of perspective, because I think all of those (perhaps excepting some talent tree revisions) have made the game markedly worse. You can turn the benefits offered by those above major changes into criticisms, just as easy. For one thing, the atomization of the game has truly diminished the 'Massive' feel; easier convenience for the individual player has shattered the 'epic' sense of participating in something bigger than your own sole avatar.
Oh and I levelled and casually completed the instances/raids through Wrath and Cata as well, just I had absolutely no real interest in them as endgame expansion packs. No challenge and the saense of achievement and wonder was genuinely lost for me. So whilst you probably have more overall 'experience' in the game as a whole, I don't think that invalidates my opinion. I played the game at its most challenging and demanding - a state of play that most people now seem to be allergic to. Their loss.
Most people who say WoW is too easy were never cutting edge or close to it. If you were not aiming for high end guilds to do the difficult stuff you cannot say it is too easy.
Sunwell Plateau cutting edge pre-nerf was sanity draining difficult as was plenty of other newer encounters in Heroic mode.
As for Normal/Heroic modes, I think thy take some things away from boss kills but can see why it was done. That's not to say the HC modes are a cake walk.
Don't get me wrong, I would love the days of old to continue but it was never going to happen, I accept that - No point arguing against Blizzards decisions because most of the new stuff caters to MOST of the playerbase.
You are entitled to any opinion you want. My original post is directed at people who come into a WoW thread that is clearly titled to be about the upcoming expansion and we get the same old drivel. How bad WoW is, how it's not what it used to be.....why bother opening the thread?
Sunwell Plateau cutting edge pre-nerf was sanity draining difficult as was plenty of other newer encounters in Heroic mode.
As for Normal/Heroic modes, I think thy take some things away from boss kills but can see why it was done. That's not to say the HC modes are a cake walk.
Don't get me wrong, I would love the days of old to continue but it was never going to happen, I accept that - No point arguing against Blizzards decisions because most of the new stuff caters to MOST of the playerbase.
You are entitled to any opinion you want. My original post is directed at people who come into a WoW thread that is clearly titled to be about the upcoming expansion and we get the same old drivel. How bad WoW is, how it's not what it used to be.....why bother opening the thread?
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I co-ran a PvP guild that was widely recognised as the best on the Battlegroup (Misery) when the Battlegroups were first formed. I was rank14 before Battlegroups were invented - something that took about 2x as long because of diminishing returns and limited cp points per weekly cycle. I crossed over into Naxx after getting bored of helping my friends reach r13/r14 through weekly guild farms. Is that not "cutting edge" enough to qualify me to say the game is now incredibly easy? Even getting Tier1 epics in Vanilla days took some effort, time and sheer determination. Wrath and Cata were a joke in terms of real difficulty - all Blizzard did was keep a (lazy and artificial) form of 'difficulty' in the game through the HC25-man stuff. Which was mostly boring and frustrating because it clearly wasn't as well thought-out for high-end play as the Vanilla (and even TBC) encounters.
And of course this is a relevant discussion to the upcoming expansion... because it is aspects of the game design philosophy that (imo) need to be returned in some part. Otherwise the game will just continue to degenerate and lose its appeal. People earlier on in this thread talking about WoW being a "game that people won't quit because of time investment" are really over-estimating how much 'time investment' matters to a bored and generally unengaged player. GW2 is a major threat to WoW at the moment (and actually has a studio and publisher behind it that aren't suspect to the faults that most other so-called 'AAA+' MMO titles have been).
And of course this is a relevant discussion to the upcoming expansion... because it is aspects of the game design philosophy that (imo) need to be returned in some part. Otherwise the game will just continue to degenerate and lose its appeal. People earlier on in this thread talking about WoW being a "game that people won't quit because of time investment" are really over-estimating how much 'time investment' matters to a bored and generally unengaged player. GW2 is a major threat to WoW at the moment (and actually has a studio and publisher behind it that aren't suspect to the faults that most other so-called 'AAA+' MMO titles have been).
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