What's going on at Blizzard?

kudos said:

Everquest

Click to expand...

Heh, very funny.

Ukerric said:

Same here.

The new daily format (WQ) is a lot better than previous systems. You open up your map (using addons, of course), try to figure out what targets are important, complete your daily bonus, and then, you may hit a dungeon or two. I'm even behind on Nightfallen quest line, because I've been doing other stuff. I raised a leatherworking alt for cheap obliterum stuff, but I shouldn't even have bothered, I should have hit my miner instead.

Oh, and I need to find out what to spend the sightless eyes on before I hit the cap.

Click to expand...

Yeah I have a bunch of shit I still haven't done. I ran Court of Stars for the first time last night (I didn't use any guides going in, so I was a bit behind on the Nightfallen rep), I'm nowhere near finished with my crafting (which I'm actually finding interesting for the first time, now that it involves something beyond doing some grade school math, buying mats and then tabbing out for a minute) and I'm still finding new daily quests (The Kirin Tor puzzle boxes are cool). Then there's PVP, which seems to be in a marginally better state than usual (I've avoided WoW PVP like the plague since BC), and I really want to level some of my alts to check out all of their class specific content. And raiding is coming up in a few days, along with the Kharazan remake in 7.1 (I'm really stoked about this, since having skipped BC I never had a chance to run it as it was intended, while everyone I know says it was one of the best raids in the game), I haven't been this engaged with WoW since probably vanilla and the brief two or three months that I really enjoyed after the Wrath/Cata releases (I wish I'd played more during BC, but life got in the way) - I'm actually keeping up with things like min-maxing my rotation and speccing/gearing, reading the class forums, etc. which I couldn't bring myself to give a shit about in MOP/WOD because I was really only playing to kill time or hang out with friends.

The world quests are a big part of it. Obviously there'll come a point where we've done them all a dozen times each and they get boring, but just being able to log on at any time of day, play for 20 minutes and log off with some small progress being made, even if it's just gold/resources/AP, is a huge thing after the relentless repetitive daily quest grind. Even small things like the way they rotate randomly keep it fresh, compared to zones like Tanaan Jungle, which made my eyes bleed with boredom after about 3 days.

sure, the game was great fun in vanilla but it's still fun. Honestly have a good feeling for Legion, WoD's biggest downfall to me was the lack of a real expansion cycle, it was just the new world and then 1 content patch.

Click to expand...

Yeah I don't know what happened with WOD. It just fizzled out - I was talking to someone the other day and realized I didn't even know how the Garrosh story ended, which was apparently in the form of a single player quest somewhere in Nagrand. Yeah the actual narrative side of the Warcraft setting has never been amazing, esp. with raid villains, but that's especially pathetic after the way they built him up then turned him into the impetus for an entire expansion pack.

Sometimes I suspect some kind of major interruption happened in the dev team, and they reached the point where they wrote WOD off as a lost cause and decided to devote their energy to Legion, which is why it feels so much more content dense.

kitsune said:

sure, the game was great fun in vanilla but it's still fun. Honestly have a good feeling for Legion, WoD's biggest downfall to me was the lack of a real expansion cycle, it was just the new world and then 1 content patch.

So far we know we'll get a couple of patches at least

Click to expand...

I miss the days of dying to two mobs. Having to use CC. Having to interrupt a fireball that would take 40% of your health. The days of having to group, pay attention, have good gear, and actually try in "NORMAL" content. You can basically two man any Legion dungeon at level 100. That's pathetic.

Without Ghostcrawler, they've basically made this game for the 97% But what makes MMO's fun is improving your gear, improving your skill, working together to overcome obstacles that you have failed to complete the first 10 times. Try, try, and try again.

Casuals SAY they hate it, but there's nothing that felt better to them when they finally accomplished something they thought they couldn't. Casuals aren't all bad plays, they just underestimate their skill. They cry because they can't beat a raid boss, but NOBODY can (on the first try). Malygos in WOTLK took 10+ attempts for us to beat in normal.

(that's because my mage's DPS was so high that I kept pulling aggro off our tank, lol)

Didn't we have this exact same conversation when WoW came out and everyone was whinging about how easy it was compared to it's predecessors?

Not saying you don't have valid points, but all this "it's all built for casuals now, not like back in the day!" discussion gives me a pretty strong sense of deja vu.

And if you're going for examples of difficulty, Malygos is an odd one, since Wrath was notoriously (almost absurdly) easy at release, compared to vanilla and BC.

Malygos was mostly a DPS check if I recall correctly. That and people trying to figure out the final stage when you're on the dragons.

Wooly is right. Wow is too easy. Vanilla was too hard. BC was the best expansion.

I think they're going for a "choose your own difficulty" type approach these days, with Mythic+ and the 4 raid modes. You could argue about whether it works or not - during vanilla I got frustrated with being forced to stay in my guild long past the point where I enjoyed playing with the people in it, just so I could see content. LFR has allowed me to jump into the game for a month or two every xpac, catch up on the content, then bail, but I'm not sure if not having access to LFR would mean I'd put more effort in the join a guild so I could see stuff, or just not bother jumping back into the game, but I suspect it's the latter. I'm interested to see whether the challenge of Legion raids and M+ enough to keep me going once I've done everything a few times or not.

I think there's a certain egotism to it as well. I'll be the first one to admit I got a kick out of being in a top tier guild (for Oceanic servers, at least), getting messages from strangers when I won Nefarion's staff on our first kill, being able to roam around and 1v4 random alliance players because I outgeared them (and because warlocks were OP), smashing PUGs in BG's while helping our PVP people grind to HWL or clashing against the guilds on the other side. Having that power gap and that tiny bit of e-celebrity was cool back then.

These days everything is a lot more compressed, the gap between the guy in the hardcore guild who turns the game into a second job and the guy who plays for shits and giggles is a lot smaller and less visible, and the field of people you interact and play with is a lot larger, so nobody really cares about that stuff.

Part of it is probably just the playerbase growing up as well - I know the things that make me invested in the game now are different to what made me invested in vanilla. More about engaging content and seeing new shit, exploring one of the better fantasy settings out there, less about the competitive ego aspect. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is largely a matter of perspective, I think, but it's definitely a trend that's been moving forward ever since the game came out, and probably since the inception of the genre.

sadris said:

Wooly is right. Wow is too easy. Vanilla was too hard. BC was the best expansion.

Click to expand...

TBC is considered the golden age of Wo

Azrayne said:

Didn't we have this exact same conversation when WoW came out and everyone was whinging about how easy it was compared to it's predecessors?

Click to expand...

Nobody said WoW was easy. There were a few imbalanced classes, like Hunters, which didn't have problems but it wasn't easy. Group wipes were really fucking common, even among the best players. People dying was really, really common.

Wooly is right. Wow is too easy. Vanilla was too hard. BC was the best expansion.

Click to expand...

There's a reason TBC is considered the "golden age" but I honestly don't think there's a thing as too much difficulty. Players will find a way to win. Look at Dragon Souls, or whatever that super hard game is.

You guys forget that old video games like Sonic, Mario, Tetris, and all that shit were super fucking hard, unforgivable games. If you died 2-3x it was -game over- and you had to restart. Look at a list of the top 10 hardest games and you'll see a plethora of games from the 90s.

We LOVED those games even though the premise fucking sucked, because it gave an obstacle we wanted to overcome so badly. Now games are like playing with godmode, there's no threat of death or loss. That really drains the fun out of them.

sadris said:

Wooly is right. Wow is too easy. Vanilla was too hard. BC was the best expansion.

Click to expand...

I'd say BC was harder than vanilla. Heroic Shattered Halls was harder than any dungeon that came out in vanilla. Sunwell was probably harder than Naxxramas other than the issue of 40 people increasing the chances of a disaster.

Woolygimp said:

There's a reason TBC is considered the "golden age" but I honestly don't think there's a thing as too much difficulty. Players will find a way to win. Look at Dragon Souls, or whatever that super hard game is.

You guys forget that old video games like Sonic, Mario, Tetris, and all that shit were super fucking hard, unforgivable games. If you died 2-3x it was -game over- and you had to restart. Look at a list of the top 10 hardest games and you'll see a plethora of games from the 90s.

We LOVED those games even though the premise fucking sucked, because it gave an obstacle we wanted to overcome so badly. Now games are like playing with godmode, there's no threat of death or loss. That really drains the fun out of them.

Click to expand...

What you're not stating though is that these are all solo games, if I fuck up it's my fault, I stop playing when it gets too much and come back to it later. In a MMORPG 99% of all my deaths have been due to some other tard, and when you're reliant on those other tards to achieve anything it stops being fun pretty fast and someone elses actions are impacting on my play time.

Like some others have mentioned in the thread I quite like the spread of difficulties we have right now, LFR for us old fuckers who don't have the patience or time to raid for 5+ hours per night and just want to see the content, and mythic for those who are willing and able to devote the time and energy to it, with normal and heroic in between. Leveling can be the same, you can plod along solo pulling and playing on auto-pilot but if you want to up the game just pull more shit, solo group quests, or don't play an OP class. The difference between my fury warrior and the BM hunter is night and day in open world leveling for example.

It's a matter of taste I guess but I always wonder what people disliked about leveling in MoP. It think it was *far* better then Cata and the old world revamp which suffered greatly from too many pop culture references and phasing/empty-areas-if-not-on-right-quest and linearity. The new 1-60 felt less like a world then pre-cata in a bad way. On the other hand with Pandaria they nailed their theme (mix of asian cultures) and the idea of a more or less peaceful land being engulfed by new and escalating conflicts. If anyone has not seen them, their prelude shorts for MoP were also great (link to first one in spoiler).


As far as Metzen goes, orc fatigue is certainly a thing. But I think their other properties took a much bigger dive on on the world/lore/flavor side. D3 was mostly bad and terrible storytelling. The SC2 story turned Kerrigan into space-thrall and went from bad to worse over the three campaigns (and they took 5 years for that turd).

Woolygimp said:

It actually took around a month without questhelper, knowing where shit was, and playing classes that couldn't just wtfpower through shit like Hunters. The very first 60 took roughly 23 days, the first Hunter around 29, and it took me about 35.

You are drastically underestimating how long it took to hit max level in Vanilla. Go play an authentic Vanilla server and I'd bet my house that you couldn't get there in under 4 days.

So many ignorant people who don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about. There was even a thread about an authentic WoW server and people were absolutely amazed how long hitting max level took. I remember ending a 40 hour gaming session only having completed everything up to RedRidge mountains, which is probably one of my favorite zones. 40 hours to hit level 16-ish.

This was when the game was actually fun:

When pulling three dragon whelps meant death. Look at the Paladin get his ass handed to him by just two mobs (@ 4:40). Now you can pull fucking 15 elites and just facepalm your god damn keyboard and everything dies, it's ridiculously juvenile.

I also remember when the mages in Westfall, the Defias mages would kill you within 4 fireballs.

Click to expand...

A month? I hit 60 in just under a week (well maybe it was like 10 days, but it certainly wasn't a month). And since we're swinging our big leveling dicks around I was the first level 60 on my server. Wasn't the first mage 60 serverwide, but was the first level 60 of any class on my server Nathrezim.

Well that's because to the EQ purists the only thing that makes a game difficult is how long it takes to level up.

Valishar said:

I'd say BC was harder than vanilla. Heroic Shattered Halls was harder than any dungeon that came out in vanilla. Sunwell was probably harder than Naxxramas other than the issue of 40 people increasing the chances of a disaster.

Click to expand...

Heroic SH is exactly what I want every 5 man to be.

You need to pre-plan every pull, who is going to CC first, second, etc. Hopefully mythic+ isn't like "challenge mode" WoD where you could still just group pull everything and AOE down.

Supposedly Cata was like that (I didn't play that expo) and everyone bitched.

Cata heroics were perfectly tuned at release.

Valishar said:

I'd say BC was harder than vanilla. Heroic Shattered Halls was harder than any dungeon that came out in vanilla. Sunwell was probably harder than Naxxramas other than the issue of 40 people increasing the chances of a disaster.

Click to expand...

The BC dungeons were pretty hardcore. Its TIME FOR FUN were words I dreaded hearing having wiped so many times on that guy in shadow labs. It took us a long time before we did full clears on shattered halls because the end of that dungeon got pretty brutal and my group did not have an ideal class mix for it.

Cad said:

Xenif on Stormreaver, a Troll Rogue who apparently stopped playing at level 63, dinged December 3rd, 2004.

Blizzard Entertainment released WoW on November 23, 2004.

10 days

Click to expand...

And that was with quite a bit of server downtime on most major servers. Archimonde was offline for like 2 whole days.