World of Warcraft: Forever

ronne said:

Didn't blizzard themselves post that forever is the largest launch they've ever had

Kinda feels like there are a whole lot of fuckin people that don't want retail convenience

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I don't think that's a 1:1 correlation. They literally want a classic experience WITH QoL. Classic exists for purists, this is supposed to be Classic Smooth. There's a million factors that killed retail WoW and it had more to do with daily chores and RNG than dungeon finder.

Early in vanilla '04 dungeons/instances still felt special. Many didn't even do them due to the time and difficulty involved for the average player. It wasn't at all unusual to run into respawns trying to clear an instance because the shit took the average group hours. Instances/dungeons didn't even really exist in that form before WoW came along.

Maybe there is some middle ground to be found between convenience and novelty but I doubt it. Not enough has changed for Forever to allow that. There's no true exploration or discovery to be had here for the returning players. There's only nostalgia; which wears thin for the majority of folks in proportion to the annoyances they experience. The genie is out of the bottle and people aren't too keen on returning to the days of slamming your dick in a door purely for the excitement of being able to slam your dick in a door. They sold this as a new experience. Not a return to the QoL, or lack thereof we had in vanilla and I assume classic.

Every single instance I've done the group has chain pulled multiple packs and AoE'd their way through it. Because that's what instances are these days. Pinatas with no challenge due to the advances in player knowledge, paint by number class guides, and a thousand other things. What's the solution? Fucked if I know.

Dungeon finder would be a nice QoL, but I understand why they don't want it (at least initially). I'd be surprised if it didn't make it into the game within the first year.

I'd love to see them stick to their plan of making this an alternate timeline where the Dark Portal wasn't opened, and changing the world and stories - I just don't know how they will keep it going for years without ever scaling up the level or adding in some QoL.

I think at the very least they'll do something like you unlock a fast-travel to the dungeon once you go there (or beat the final boss) at least once. Then you can click on the retarded rocks outside the dungeon, and it unlocks the ability for you to be summoned there.

darkmiasma said:

I'd love to see them stick to their plan of making this an alternate timeline where the Dark Portal wasn't opened, and changing the world and stories - I just don't know how they will keep it going for years without ever scaling up the level or adding in some QoL.

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This is my huge question and something I really don't think they care much about. They're capitalizing off the nostalgia train with no real plans going forward. They're just going to ride off of hope and speculation long enough to get another retail expansion or two funded so that Microshit doesn't BioWare their asses.

Was this game really pitched as classic with qol? I never saw that from the devs, never seemed to get that sentiment from anything I watched, and dont know where it comes from other than maybe wishful projection? This always always always seemed to be pushed as a return to classic in its methodology. Quests and zones and what have you may change, season of discovery stuff or emu designed stuff might get included, and new content would come out, but the overarching effort would be to keep to the spirit and feel of classic no matter what else comes in.

I've bounced off of Forever pretty hard.

My opinion hasn't changed in decades: travel time isn't content. It's just downtime that (nowadays) virtually everyone spends out of game, whether alt-tabed, on a second screen, or on their phone. Whether that's manually traveling to dungeons every time, quest chains that run/fly you right back and forth to town, corpse runs because of too few spirit healers, etc., it's all nothing - it's the lack of a game.

(I will say that one plausible middle ground would be that each dungeon entrance would serve as the discovery point allowing you to use a dungeon stone / LFD tool to get there.)

Layering is bad, bordering on broken, and I'm unconvinced it will be fixed. Apparently, the classic servers have always had these problems and Blizz never fixed them.
Waaay too many zones (especially 30+) have devolved into a person / group camping each individual spawn point because there aren't enough layers. Yeah, people can group up, but it's not a perfect fix either - quest drops don't appear to drop an item per character, meaning grouping does nothing, the grouping tool is still as simplistic as always (a group of 3 can't one click add a group of two), and in the most extreme case, all grouping really does is turn one person camping each spawn point into one group camping each spawn point.
The hyper-spawn rates break linear areas (e.g. caves) as beating backspawns can be very ugly.
The model is based on putting you in the same layers as people you've grouped with - which only works if those people have stayed in the same level / ilevel (for 60) as you have.
Because all timezones are the same server, there are no lower population periods.
For the PVP sadists, you can't actually control territory, since people will just get on a different layer.

The Other Shoes:
1) Blizz has already admitted infinite sideways progression isn't possible, and some future content will have to be straight +ilevel.
2) We still don't have any clarity on what the monetization will be in the future.
Combine those together and Blizz offering paid-for zones with higher ilevels seems a given, with significant negative consequences (devaluing the 'free' (there's still a sub fee) lower ilevel zones, people requiring hard ilevel minimums for group, etc.), depending on just how obnoxious Blizz's prices for new zones might be.

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While I do expect to get to 60 to see new content (espeically when I'm already subbed to retail), I doubt myself or much of the player base will stick with this once the nostalgia wears off.