World of Warcraft: Current Year

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Seriously though it's sad that Arthas had to go out like a ghost fart in the wind. Jaina and Uther didn't even have anything to say; it was all Sylvanas blabbing on about her feelings. A story 20 years in the making, indeed.

Patch is dead on arrival. It's the first week and not even that many players in Zereth Mortis. It's not a bad endgame zone but once the reality of the grind sets in it seems a lot of people are like 'nah'.

Raid participation is pretty bad at least on my server. Number of guilds that killed at least 1 boss in normal mode:
9.0 - 178 guilds
9.1 - 96 guilds
9.2 - 30 guilds

I know it's only the first week, but there are some really old guilds on my server (like since Vanilla/TBC, including mine) that have raided casually for a decade+ and stopped completely during 9.1, and are not coming back for 9.2. Let's hope 10.0 can turn it around for Vanguard?

Dalien said:

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Seriously though it's sad that Arthas had to go out like a ghost fart in the wind. Jaina and Uther didn't even have anything to say; it was all Sylvanas blabbing on about her feelings. A story 20 years in the making, indeed.

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With all this soul splitting stuff...

Imagine if we found the good half of Arthas in Torghast (like we did with Uther) and took him to Revendreth to atone for his sins.

Meanwhile The Jailer puts the evil half of Arthas into Anduin and OH SHIT DEATH KNIGHT ARTHAS IS BACK. Could just be for two patches like dominated Anduin was or do something more long term with it.

I've been enjoying it just fine skipping every cutscene.

Is the player character part of any of this at all?

xmod2 said:

IIt's not even world of warcraft anymore, but the world of Danuser's stillborn baby.

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It's "Zone of Danuser", featuring a one zone and a handful of Warcraft characters.

xmod2 said:

It doesn't help that every single 'patch zone' since WoD has been a) some 'rares' b) a new rep to grind c) an artificial time gate to pad it out. They had success with timeless isle and then in blizzard fashion tried to formalize/systematize it. Every patch is just the same shit with different models.

It's weird to think how long WoW has run on the good juju of the pre-Cata era. The majority of the game's existence now has been post-wotlk and it's only now running out of favor earned from that period. If people weren't so mazed and locked in with the history of the game, their character, etc, that shit would be as dead as any 'new mmo' that is launched. It's not even the world of warcraft anymore, but the world of Danuser's stillborn baby.

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The moment I realized that comfortable familiarity was why I still played came when I faction-changed to Horde with my guild to continue Mythic raiding. Not knowing where the fuck any of the horde shit was was a continuous low level background drain on my enjoyment, which left me irritated and with little good will remaining for shit expansion.

xmod2 said:

It doesn't help that every single 'patch zone' since WoD has been a) some 'rares' b) a new rep to grind c) an artificial time gate to pad it out. They had success with timeless isle and then in blizzard fashion tried to formalize/systematize it. Every patch is just the same shit with different models.

It's weird to think how long WoW has run on the good juju of the pre-Cata era. The majority of the game's existence now has been post-wotlk and it's only now running out of favor earned from that period. If people weren't so mazed and locked in with the history of the game, their character, etc, that shit would be as dead as any 'new mmo' that is launched. It's not even the world of warcraft anymore, but the world of Danuser's stillborn baby.

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We used to be able to grind that rep by doing the dungeons/raids. ZG you just killed trash and bosses.

In WOLK I think you could put on a tabard and run dungeons to get rep

Now you have to do daily wizard chores. But its okay: blizzard says people "love world quests" because they get "so much engagement with them".

New expansion just "announced"

The Worlds of World of Warcraft

On April 19, the World of Warcraft development team will reveal the next expansion. We’re excited to show you what we've been working on and where your adventures in Azeroth will go next.

Until then, we hope you are enjoying Eternity’s End, the newest content update and final chapter of the Shadowlands saga. The heroes of Azeroth have been called forth to this intriguing new land of Zereth Mortis to thwart the Jailer's efforts and stop him from rewriting reality as we know it. This past week we have seen brave adventurers make their way into the Sepulcher of the First Ones raid zone on Normal and Heroic difficulty, and this week they will finally come face-to-face with the Jailer himself as Raid Finder and Mythic difficulties become available. I’m eager to see who will achieve world first!

In Bloom for May

Beyond World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, we're preparing to get the first game in the Warcraft Universe designed for mobile into your hands. We will tell you more about it in May.

The future of Warcraft is bright. On behalf of all of us at Blizzard working to bring even more exciting Warcraft experiences to you, we thank you for being a part of the community. We're excited about the journey in front of us and are grateful that you're joining us for it.

Thank you for playing, and we'll see you in Azeroth, the Tavern, and beyond!

—John Hight, General Manager Warcraft

Elden Ring outsold Rockstar Games. The wild popularity of the game can't be understated.



lol

The FromSoftware game’s launch was the biggest for a title outside of the Call of Duty or FIFA franchises since 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2.

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If you can smash a record set by mainstream major studio launches, as a niche title-- that's a new meta.

I don't think it's about comparing games so much as people aren't checking for 9.2 with other games competing in the gaming space itself. It doesn't matter if the offering is different. It's similar enough to cause defection, add lost Ark and it's not a real head-scratcher why they are announcing a new WoW expansion. They need to get people interested again. Shadowlands isn't pulling eyes against Elden Ring or Lost Ark.

Qhue said:

The 'my two dads' energy was palpable...

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What's with the Disney/Dreamworks style art aesthetic? When did WoW cutscenes start looking like this?

Neranja said:

I think that is at least a bit disingenuous, and a talking point most likely from the gaming press and other developers to feel better about their own failure.

From Software built their reputation over time with a lot of games that are considered "good, but hard", from Dark Souls to Bloodborne to Sekiro. Dark Souls III sold more than 10 million copies, and now people claim Elden Ring is a "niche game."

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It's a tough sell 10m boxes sold or not, that DS3 appealed to normies. Elden Ring is widely regarded as being "too easy" by core souls fans. The verdict is out on that.

That inherently makes it less niche given they softened the difficulty for mass appeal.

They didn't soften the difficulty. It's an open world game and open world games can be cheesed by corpse running to uber items in much higher level zones.

It also makes it vastly easier to farm levels for the same reason. Just mount up and rush back to your runes!

krismunich said:

I mean when did this become widely accepted?

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At exactly the same time blizzard put it into the game.

krismunich said:

Watching "the race for worldfirst". I mean when did this become widely accepted?

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How is that a race if the wealthiest guild can just trade gold for tier sets and gain a major advantage?

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It's how these have gone for years. The couple guilds in the running spend just all the golds picking up BoEs and using whatever community they have in place to super split heroics by armor type and funnel as much as the system allows. It might have been Jaina last expansion where the play was to do several tradeskills on each character to equip as many high ilevel crafted items to then have those slots open for funneling during splits.

Then of course you get shit like the "everyone race change troll" or "everyone swap sides and swap back to do the weekly quest one more time."

Oh no.



So this seems to imply that 9.3 was meant to be Icecrown and Jailer is actually a good guy trying to unite the cosmos against unknown cliffhanger big bad.

Why the fuck is the end of an expansion and the Warcraft 3 saga a cliffhanger... I expected at least... something...