World of warcraft: Shadowlands announced

[Sykar]

I mean HUD/UI adjustments don't bother me but all the shit they add that tells them exactly everything the boss and gives massive warnings so you need even less skill while also cluttering your entire screen with bars, timers and icons is just disgusting to me. Game plays semi automatic nearly.

 

[Ravielsk]

Its almost poetic how this ending reflects the absolute downfall of Warcraft as a franchise. The whole thing really only got off the ground because of the amazing story of Arthas and his downfall. Yet here we are 20 years later and a side character that some writer waifud is telling the perhaps most influential Warcraft character to buzz off despite her entire persona being built entirely around him.

Its this absolutely sublime moment where the hacks writing this reveal how entirely unaware they are of their own position. Their entire body of poorly constructed nonsense in built upon a foundation they do not even respect and barely acknowledge yet without it they would literary have nothing. They had the chance to make another immortal piece like Lord of the Rings yet they only managed to turn it into a poor mans devianart story. Its almost funny. Almost...

 

[Dr1f7]

I mean HUD/UI adjustments don't bother me but all the shit they add that tells them exactly everything the boss and gives massive warnings so you need even less skill while also cluttering your entire screen with bars, timers and icons is just disgusting to me. Game plays semi automatic nearly.

oh yeah fuck that dbm shit i am NOT installing an airhorn to blast in my ear every time a boss farts tyvm

 

[El Presidente]

WoW is so fundamentally fucked up at this point I pity whoever will be responsible for the eventual fix attempts. Essentially 95% of WoW is dead content, from vanilla to BfA. For some 9000 IQ reason, Blizzard doesn't allow the playerbase to queue for dungeons and raids other than the current expansion ones, it simply doesn't show up in the dungeon finder at all. The only way for them to show up is if you use "Chromie time", you talk to an NPC in SW/Org and select an expansion to play through to level your character. However this limits you to that expansion only and the moment you reach lvl 50 you are kicked out of it and teleported to your faction's capital city, no matter where you are. It also automatically abandons a few of your quests and sometimes it kicks you out of a dungeon if you level from 49 to 50 in it.

You can do these contents by yourself, both the overworld quests and the old instances, but you will one shot everything, including raid bosses. What this means is that the only reason old content isn't simply deleted from the game is to let the playerbase farm for cosmetics in these quests/duns/raids by one shotting everyone. There are many beautiful, atmospheric zones in more recent expansions, but what's the point when you can mob a billion giant monsters, take 0 damage and instantly wipe them all with a single press of a button?

Not to mention, the "timeline inconsistensies" all over the place are just hilariously bad. For example, to start the Mists of Pandaria questline you need to watch a cutscene in which King Varian is angry because his son Prince Anduin apparently got kidnapped. When the cutscene ends you go back to Stormwind's throne room, where... Turalyon is sitting on the throne, because *King* Anduin is absent and his father Varian has been dead for 3 expansions.

So essentially WoW retail isn't this grand MMO with mountains of content for its long history of expansions and patches. WoW retail is WoW Shadowlands and Shadowlands alone. With a bunch of legacy content for you to peek at if you get too bored and decide to farm some cool sword transmog. There is absolutely no hope for this format, and new players are probably completely lost cause it'll take time to understand all this complete shitshow of a mess.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Not to mention, the "timeline inconsistensies" all over the place are just hilariously bad. For example, to start the Mists of Pandaria questline you need to watch a cutscene in which King Varian is angry because his son Prince Anduin apparently got kidnapped. When the cutscene ends you go back to Stormwind's throne room, where... Turalyon is sitting on the throne, because *King* Anduin is absent and his father Varian has been dead for 3 expansions.

This could trivially be fixed using phasing but they're too lazy to bother.

 

[Talby]

And people always wondered why I hate addons especially in WoW. That screen clutter is maddening. Blizzard should have never allowed that garbage. To me using this shit was like using map hack in D2. Disgusting. Worse they added the funtion so players could know if you had addons installed or not. The ultimate middle finger to players who did not want to conform. Fuck Blizzard, and fuck a large chunk of the WoWfantards.

Fortunately, someone made an addon to spoof those addons that check for addons.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I feel like people have unnecessarily cluttered UIs. Honestly, if you're a DPS, you don't need to have your party member HP bars showing. If you're casually raiding then you don't need DPS meters. WoW rotations aren't stupidly complex like FFXIV rotations where you need to have 3 bars filled with 40+ different abilities; you can usually fit your rotation onto 1 or 2 bars, and still have room for other stuff like mounts.

Where WoW fails at is informing the player what is going on. Boss and mob mechanics are not standardized or intuitive, nor do they have tells/wind up animations. Many boss abilities have a bizzare mechanic that you cannot possibly learn from observation, and require consulting an out of game guide that explains to you how the mechanic works. Or you have to install DBM, which is very unimmersive because you're constantly hearing an airhorn or the "run away little girl!" voice line. And there are so many mechanics going off that if you die, you have to spend several minutes looking through your logs to figure out what killed you.

One thing that FFXIV does very well is mechanic tutorialization and standardization. Most bosses in the game use some variation of the same ability, and the mechanic specifically unique to a boss is very clearly demonstrated to the player early on in the fight before the mechanic is layered with other mechanics. There is never more than two or three mechanics going off at a time (never more than 2). I never felt confused by what was going on, and if I died it was obvious what happened.

The other problem with WoW fights is that there is too much visual noise going on. It is hard to see where mobs, NPCs, and other characters are, so you have to keep their HP bars turned on and label them with obtrusive markers to see their position. In the screenshot I posted, there is a NPC you have to keep alive or else you fail the fight (Kor'vas), but he is standing in a green puddle and you can't even see him, only the orange marker on him, and this is a pretty mechanics light fight compared to your average raid fight. GW2 is 20x worse than WoW, though. In that game you can't even see if you're standing in an AoE or if a boss is about to hit you.

 

[El Presidente]

Not to mention, the "timeline inconsistensies" all over the place are just hilariously bad. For example, to start the Mists of Pandaria questline you need to watch a cutscene in which King Varian is angry because his son Prince Anduin apparently got kidnapped. When the cutscene ends you go back to Stormwind's throne room, where... Turalyon is sitting on the throne, because *King* Anduin is absent and his father Varian has been dead for 3 expansions.

This could trivially be fixed using phasing but they're too lazy to bother.

Yes, but as it is now WoW phasing is pretty silly, you get to see the "present state of things" from afar and when you get closer you enter in the phasing radius and it changes to "your moment", many such cases. It also vanishes the players that are on the same spot as you but in a different phase/moment of the story. This wouldn't be that much of a problem if WoW didn't have loooong periods before a phase would finally change to the next one. Like Varian is king of Stormwind from the beginning to WoW Legion, so if Blizz decides to start organizing things in order like FFXIV is, it would take possibly months before you finally get out of this beginning.

I don't know how I would solve these problems, all I know is that they should at least try. As it is now the game is a gigantic mess and I can't begin to imagine how insanely bad it must be to be a new player in retail.

At least in my opinion, part of WoW's appeal is knowing you're playing this behemoth with almost 20 years worth of content. If 95% of it is legacy stuff that barely makes any sense or works as a game, then all that advantage is pretty much gone.

 

[Cromwell]

I can't begin to imagine how insanely bad it must be to be a new player in retail.

What they could do is scale things up not down. Let me decide which xpac to play and change everything accordingly, scale everythign thats below me somewhere close to my strength so I dont oneshot everythign everything thats vastly stronger then me should stay like this and then let me play in this versio of the world as long as I want in chromie time. This way I could explore the story if I wanted to and skip out if I want to farm shit. But since the lore has become so utterly retarded they not only made the content redundant they also invalidated the story because I dont care about super evil monsters If I know Sylvannas would probably futafuck them into submission anyways, like the writers did with every bit of lore I actually liked. They shit so hard on everything that came before whatever you do you cant get rid of the smell.

theres some little quest in burning crusade at the ring of the elements where you talk to an old shaman who grieves the death of his wife, you kill some evil hag and set things right and after you turn in the quest he dies peacefully and goes to his ancestors. Its a small clishee thing but I liked it very much when I saw it again playing classic bc. But I know now the poor guy doesnt go with his wife to the ancestors, he probably ended up turning into a naked weasel and you already collected his essence for your covenant.

 

[Sykar]

Not to mention, the "timeline inconsistensies" all over the place are just hilariously bad. For example, to start the Mists of Pandaria questline you need to watch a cutscene in which King Varian is angry because his son Prince Anduin apparently got kidnapped. When the cutscene ends you go back to Stormwind's throne room, where... Turalyon is sitting on the throne, because *King* Anduin is absent and his father Varian has been dead for 3 expansions.

This could trivially be fixed using phasing but they're too lazy to bother.

As it is now the game is a gigantic mess and I can't begin to imagine how insanely bad it must be to be a new player in retail.

 

[Ravielsk]

WoW is so fundamentally fucked up at this point I pity whoever will be responsible for the eventual fix attempts.

The only way the game could be fixed is via a hard reboot. Reset everything and star over but this time with a bit of consideration for what you are going to do with old content when new stuff is released. Trying to retroactively fix 18 years of not giving a fuck will never result in anything good.

This is a problem they should have started tackling in 2008 with Wrath of the Lich king when the content being added directly tied back to the previous expansions. Doing it now is just a lost cause because you are essentially trying to tie back to together 8 expansions(9 if you count the base game) most of which were conceived as stand alone stories. Seriously the events of Pandaria, Bfa and Dreanor can just be straight up removed from the cannon with 0 negative consequences. They are just that disconnected.

 

[Sykar]

Problem is who would accept a hard reset?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It can't and won't be fixed. The people who made WoW largely do not work at Blizzard. The people who maintain WoW inherited something greater than they could ever create and destroyed it.
There's a reason there was so much pushback to classic WoW servers that it took years to finally get them.

 

[J1M]

Problem is who would accept a hard reset?

Until the data mining showed otherwise, most of the players commenting on YouTube videos were advocating for Zovaal to achieve his goal of "unmaking reality" as an in-universe way of justifying sweeping changes, including a hard reset or time jump that invalidated everything currently in the game. A sign of how poorly received the last two expansions were.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Until the data mining showed otherwise, most of the players commenting on YouTube videos were advocating for Zovaal to achieve his goal of "unmaking reality" as an in-universe way of justifying sweeping changes, including a hard reset or time jump that invalidated everything currently in the game. A sign of how poorly received the last two expansions were.

Current devs were largely unwilling to accept that players would prefer playing classic WoW over the frankenstein monster they created, they'd never accept such a blow to their ego.

 

[Ravielsk]

Current devs were largely unwilling to accept that players would prefer playing classic WoW over the frankenstein monster they created, they'd never accept such a blow to their ego.

Yup and that there is the biggest obstacle towards fixing anything in WoW. The egoism of the people making it directly prevents any meaningful changes. The only way anything might change is either Microsoft fires everyone and gets fresh blood in there or at least puts in charge someone who does not have their head firmly connected to their anus. It sorta worked with Halo Infinite and it could work with WoW.

Although truth be told Infinite is already a dead game so who knows.

 

[J1M]

Until the data mining showed otherwise, most of the players commenting on YouTube videos were advocating for Zovaal to achieve his goal of "unmaking reality" as an in-universe way of justifying sweeping changes, including a hard reset or time jump that invalidated everything currently in the game. A sign of how poorly received the last two expansions were.

Current devs were largely unwilling to accept that players would prefer playing classic WoW over the frankenstein monster they created, they'd never accept such a blow to their ego.

An easy enough problem to push past with "recontextualization" of this "progressive" idea to "let the past die" and replace the "toxic" "patriarchy" of the original game.

Since these people have no consistent principles or ethical framework, you just need use newspeak to tell them a hard reset is a way to bully the original devs and their opinions will be reprogrammed.

 

[Sykar]

Current devs were largely unwilling to accept that players would prefer playing classic WoW over the frankenstein monster they created, they'd never accept such a blow to their ego.

Yup and that there is the biggest obstacle towards fixing anything in WoW. The egoism of the people making it directly prevents any meaningful changes. The only way anything might change is either Microsoft fires everyone and gets fresh blood in there or at least puts in charge someone who does not have their head firmly connected to their anus. It sorta worked with Halo Infinite and it could work with WoW.

Although truth be told Infinite is already a dead game so who knows.

They could learn a thing from Square Enix considering what a fuck up he original FF14 was and they apologized, blew it up and started over from scratch. If Blizzard had released FF 14 1.0, they would have clung to it probably.

 

[Reever]

Current devs were largely unwilling to accept that players would prefer playing classic WoW over the frankenstein monster they created, they'd never accept such a blow to their ego.

Yup and that there is the biggest obstacle towards fixing anything in WoW. The egoism of the people making it directly prevents any meaningful changes. The only way anything might change is either Microsoft fires everyone and gets fresh blood in there or at least puts in charge someone who does not have their head firmly connected to their anus. It sorta worked with Halo Infinite and it could work with WoW.

Although truth be told Infinite is already a dead game so who knows.

They could learn a thing from Square Enix considering what a fuck up he original FF14 was and they apologized, blew it up and started over from scratch. If Blizzard had released FF 14 1.0, they would have clung to it probably.

With the size of their ego that would never happen. They'd rather the game have 0 players than to come out and recognize that they fucked up.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Until the data mining showed otherwise, most of the players commenting on YouTube videos were advocating for Zovaal to achieve his goal of "unmaking reality" as an in-universe way of justifying sweeping changes, including a hard reset or time jump that invalidated everything currently in the game. A sign of how poorly received the last two expansions were.

Current devs were largely unwilling to accept that players would prefer playing classic WoW over the frankenstein monster they created, they'd never accept such a blow to their ego.

Ion is a massively arrogant cocksucker. How that faggot hasn't been sacked yet I have no idea.

 

[abija]

I doubt anyone in blizzard/activision has the balls to do big changes in WoW as long as it brings in the $$$.

 

[Delterius]

Problem is who would accept a hard reset?

is there anybody left to protest

 

[Kem0sabe]

Legacy content is something that wow never managed to deal with successfully. Each expansion is as if they were releasing a new game, but much smaller than the original concept and the players consume it much quicker, so they invent new and more boring treadmills to keep players subscribed.

At this point they should just announce a new MMO and put wow on maintenance. I think StarCraft has amazing potential as an MMO, with 3 ready made factions and a bunch of interesting class ideas. They would also have a lot more freedom to design a more action oriented combat system.

 

[J1M]

Legacy content is something that wow never managed to deal with successfully. Each expansion is as if they were releasing a new game, but much smaller than the original concept and the players consume it much quicker, so they invent new and more boring treadmills to keep players subscribed.

At this point they should just announce a new MMO and put wow on maintenance. I think StarCraft has amazing potential as an MMO, with 3 ready made factions and a bunch of interesting class ideas. They would also have a lot more freedom to design a more action oriented combat system.

At some point they started treating every patch as if it was a new game, creating all sorts of tedious work for themselves because now each patch needs catch up gear and new end game activities. I assume this is because they employ too many system designers and 2 years is a long time for them to wait if they only make new systems for expansion launch.

Their problem is that they treat the endgame as mutually exclusive progression paths, instead of a collection of activities that all players do.

Even a design where the only way to get a helm upgrade is to raid, trinkets come from dungeons, and all of the shoulder items come from PvP would be healthier than what they do now. The way players engage with content can be adjusted. (Random vs. rated battlegrounds, raid size, etc)

Finding a way to keep older expansions a form of content is something to work on as well, but they need to figure out how to make the whole endgame a form of content first.

If they can't do that, it will always feel lacking in content.

 

[Ravielsk]

The problem is that ever since TBC WoW has adopted a completely dysfunctional form of segmentalism where everything is treated as its own walled little garden. The leveling, raiding, pvp, crafting, expansions and even individual patches are all treated as their own separate things that either do not intersect or intersect only very little. Nothing you do while leveling is really relevant once you hit max level, pvp is its own little world, raiding is literary divorced from the rest of the world in instances and crafting is balanced around excessive farming which makes it unusable while leveling. All these things at best only exists parallel to each other and at worst hinder one another. The game forces you to essentially hyper focus on one thing and one thing only which means that no matter the amount of content or its difficulty you are almost always speed running it even if you are not consciously aware of it. With that attitude its essentially impossible to factor old content in newer expansions let alone produce enough of it to keep the players engaged for longer periods of time.

The only reason why it worked back in the day was because for all intends and purposes WoW players were much less focused on min-maxing everything so whatever bracket they were in they would stay for a while(a.k.a they would not finish Black temple in less than 24 hours after release). However that was always going to be only a temporary state of things and really its something Blizz should have abandoned when making Wotlk as that was the moment when the game was still lightweight enough to make sweeping changes to the overall design philosophy. Today its basically impossible because that would require them to essentially overhaul 18 years worth of content into something fundamentally different.

Hence why a hard reboot is the only viable path forward.

 

[Caim]

Every expansion makes the previous one obsolete aside from cosmetics. Final Fantasy does this better by having an actually good story and having all the dungeons in the random roulette, Guild Wars 2 scales you down to whatever area you're in to have all stuff be relevant and Runescape makes their game girthier with every update, even though some stuff becomes obsolete over time. But WoW? Every expansion has all the zones, quests, craftable gear and endgame rewards be reduced to an item on a checklist and a hurdle to the "current" stuff. WoW also suffers from the race to endgame making everything that's not endgame obsolete the moment you hit it, instead of adding to the game.

Making a WoW 2 could solve the issue, but that brings the risk of making everyone's progress so far obsolete. If you tell people who have spent thousands of hours on your game that the game's no longer getting updated, you're losing them forever. Having stuff carry over could work at the cost of having existing players gain a massive leg up compared to the rest, or just making the entire game the equivalent of an expansion. Of course, having the entire game be rendered obsolete when a new one comes out is just the expansion cycle cranked up to 11.