World of Warcraft: Current Year

Fadaar said:

actually shocked that didnt happen in SL

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He's in the Anduin fight, it's coming.

krismunich said:

Also: no child left behind everyone's a winner attitude. We wanted more "War" in Warcraft, not less.

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Except pvp is a tiny subset of your customer base, and their own lore has us teaming up constantly to fight big bad.

War != pvp

Fadaar said:

actually shocked that didnt happen in SL

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It did, kind of. Arthas' soul was used to forge Kingsmourne from Shalamayne and so Arthas is technically inhabiting Anduin's body.

Neranja said:

I'd like some insight into why you buy boosts. Is it the gear, or a way to skip all the "bads" in the LFG tool?

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It's the in-and-out aspect. No guild, no static group. Just straight up log in, clock weekly, log out.

Time is the main reason. I boosted all 3 of my alts weekly during 9.0. It could be a symptom of the game itself not being fun to play. (likely)

Something you have to understand about organizations is they are so organized and big, you can immediately get access to whatever it is you need within 10 minutes. Raids, PvP cap, M+ and it's a go soon after hailing it down.

jayrebb said:

It's the in-and-out aspect. No guild, no static group. Just straight up log in, clock weekly, log out.

Time is the main reason. I boosted all 3 of my alts weekly during 9.0. It could be a symptom of the game itself not being fun to play. (likely)

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Why are you bothering?

Chris said:

Why are you bothering?

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I didn't play more than a few days of 9.1 enough to see what they were doing. The tense would be "bothered" in this case.

Neranja said:

From what I saw from feedback on forum posts and friends: A lot of people kept characters somewhat "up to date," mostly just out of habit. In case it gets better and/or people come back to play with. By 9.1 people realized:

• It won't get better, at least not with a trajectory like this
• People aren't coming back to play
• Keeping characters up to date is pointless, especially when considering you have catch-up systems for the latest patch

Would you say this fits your case, too?

Viewed rationally there is zero gain for you: You don't need the gear/M+ score you get from boosting, because you just boosted next week anyway. And you only play to get boosted, so you don't really need the gear for playing the game itself. Even more so on alts.

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I kept buying the expansions and playing for 3-4 months.

There isn't really a point in the game if you're playing for gear instead of to play with friends.

sadris said:

I kept buying the expansions and playing for 3-4 months.

There isn't really a point in the game if you're playing for gear instead of to play with friends.

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The idea is that friends will rejoin the game at a later date. Playing for gear is still a way to play the game though.

It's a lot of "We'll do this now, and so maybe later...."

Neranja said:

From what I saw from feedback on forum posts and friends: A lot of people kept characters somewhat "up to date," mostly just out of habit. In case it gets better and/or people come back to play with. By 9.1 people realized:

• It won't get better, at least not with a trajectory like this
• People aren't coming back to play
• Keeping characters up to date is pointless, especially when considering you have catch-up systems for the latest patch

Would you say this fits your case, too?

Viewed rationally there is zero gain for you: You don't need the gear/M+ score you get from boosting, because you just boosted next week anyway. And you only play to get boosted, so you don't really need the gear for playing the game itself. Even more so on alts.

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Alts aren't going to get on early Heroic/M raids necessarily without investing a ton of time into the game.

And yeah, it's about keeping characters updated for the "what's to come". Even if that means 10.0 to have that initial content be slightly easier. Or in the event fun happened in 9.1.

Ability to swap characters for FOTM is a big incentive.

jayrebb said:

Alts aren't going to get on early Heroic/M raids necessarily without investing a ton of time into the game.

And yeah, it's about keeping characters updated for the "what's to come". Even if that means 10.0 to have that initial content be slightly easier. Or in the event fun happened in 9.1.

Ability to swap characters for FOTM is a big incentive.

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Yeah you really don't want to go into 10.0 without the latest boosted raid gear, that first quest before they throw raid ilevel gear at you is going to be rough if enemies die in 5 hits into of 4 hits.

Also if you don't read any news about the game, for all you know 9.2 will have no catchup gear, easier to be up to date than spend a minute reading PTR info.

Chris said:

Yeah you really don't want to go into 10.0 without the latest boosted raid gear, that first quest before they throw raid ilevel gear at you if going to be rough if enemies die in 5 hits into of 4 hits.

Also if you don't read any news about the game, for all you know 9.2 will have no catchup gear, easier to be up to date than spend a minute reading PTR info.

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It's still a way to play the game and get more involved in the game while population languishes. The alternative was to not play the game at all. You're still accomplishing acquisition of gear and playing the game. My reasons for acquiring the gear could be as simple as acquiring gear as efficiently as possible given the state of the game. That could be said to be some twisted defintion of fun in current retail WoW. That's just what it came down to.

I haven't boosted any other expacs besides SL. I didn't feel the need to boost anything. Something changed with SL. It's a symptom of becoming phobic to actually playing the game. I coined the term Zomebielands to describe the phenomenon last year of people continuing to do things that don't make sense. I've fallen victim to Zombielands the same as anyone else.

jayrebb said:

The alternative was to not play the game at all.

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This would have been the sensible option.

Shadowlands should have had such a cosmic scope to it. Even the writing of the different Covenant areas alluded to the concept of moving on and removing yourself from the concerns of your mortal existence as you realize that there is a larger scale to everything.

Instead it was just sort of soap-opera drama tangled up with the existing irrational narrative and now is, apparently, concluded with a whimper?

"I went to the afterlife and it was significantly less interesting than an island full of panda people"

Qhue said:

Shadowlands should have had such a cosmic scope to it. Even the writing of the different Covenant areas alluded to the concept of moving on and removing yourself from the concerns of your mortal existence as you realize that there is a larger scale to everything.

Instead it was just sort of soap-opera drama tangled up with the existing irrational narrative and now is, apparently, concluded with a whimper?

"I went to the afterlife and it was significantly less interesting than an island full of panda people"

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The crazy thing is how few returning dead characters there were (each zone got 1-3) and how there were no established rules (everything walking around like a mortal like they didn't die).

FF14 Endwalker has a single dungeon that dips into the afterlife and it has more returning characters than Shadowlands and everything is mostly intangible spirit forms awaiting reincarnation so death has consequence.

Maybe its meant to ensure we care more about the fate of Azeroth. We've seen what comes after death and its pretty meh.

Additionally the fact that they did an entire expansion about life and death without addressing the frequency with which PCs get rezzed / respawn feels rather inauthentic.