World of Warcraft: The War Within

[Clint_L]

I more than did my time in WoW...but my kid, who was born after I started playing it, has just started college, so maybe I have time again...

 

[TwoSix]

I got through the campaign and unlocked earthen, but didn't feel like getting into the gear grind rat race again. Nothing to do with the expansion, I'm just not in the mindset for MMOs right now.

I will agree that Hallowfell might be the most beautiful zone ever added to WoW.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's a really solid expansion but WoW's current endgame just isn't super-appealing to me either right now. There's a real jump in dedication and skill required going from Delves and Heroics and even Normal raiding (let alone LFR) to M+, that the compression of the M+ levels has only exaggerated further, and in general it seems like Blizzard are pretty okay with this, and it means you kind of rather quickly dead end unless you have a friendly, active guild to play with (which seem to be hard to find these days, I mean, they have been for years), especially if you don't play on a regular schedule (I have enough time to play, but it's not always at the same time reliably).

So I've largely stopped playing for now. Probably come back later in the expansion at some point. I think there's also an element that a lot of WoW's gameplay is like, good, well-designed, but in a sort of anti-sweetspot where, for me, it's slow enough that it doesn't cause the intense focus action games can, but also way too fast to be particularly relaxing or comfortable to play (unlike, say, FFXIV). WoW's on-foot movement also feels increasingly outdated (something Pandaria Remix helped show up and I suspect they might have used that as a bit of a testbed for seeing what forms of movement people liked, with the special movement skill gem).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A really thoughtful talk by Senior Game Designer Ion Hazzikostas about game design in a live service game:

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's a really solid expansion but WoW's current endgame just isn't super-appealing to me either right now. There's a real jump in dedication and skill required going from Delves and Heroics and even Normal raiding (let alone LFR) to M+, that the compression of the M+ levels has only exaggerated further, and in general it seems like Blizzard are pretty okay with this, and it means you kind of rather quickly dead end unless you have a friendly, active guild to play with (which seem to be hard to find these days, I mean, they have been for years), especially if you don't play on a regular schedule (I have enough time to play, but it's not always at the same time reliably).

So I've largely stopped playing for now. Probably come back later in the expansion at some point. I think there's also an element that a lot of WoW's gameplay is like, good, well-designed, but in a sort of anti-sweetspot where, for me, it's slow enough that it doesn't cause the intense focus action games can, but also way too fast to be particularly relaxing or comfortable to play (unlike, say, FFXIV). WoW's on-foot movement also feels increasingly outdated (something Pandaria Remix helped show up and I suspect they might have used that as a bit of a testbed for seeing what forms of movement people liked, with the special movement skill gem).

High end delves have been what my wife and I have mostly done in War Within, and it's been great in that it's the exact right size grouping for us 99% of the time and allows us to do content solo when the other isn't available.

Ironically, it makes doing most raiding, especially LFR raiding, pointless, because we almost immediately leapfrog that gear. (It definitely helps playing in a hunter + priest duo with 20+ years of WoW experience, to be clear.) The new raid track in the Undermine raid, which is aggressively timegated -- it'll take five months starting from day one to get all the way to unlocking the sweet mecha-Tyrannosaur mount, and "only" 2.5 months later on -- keeps me doing the raid each week, but it feels more like a faceroll and more like homework with every passing week.

I'm not sure what the answer is, since I think having delves be their own endgame is good -- we're working on getting the seasonal mount for both of our characters, which has to be done in solo mode -- but there's definitely some friction in moving between PvP, delves, dungeons and raiding as one's preferred activity, as it's a lot easier to just go hardcore in one or two modes rather than have to do a song and dance to convince the player-gated higher end content in higher end PvP, dungeons and raiding to give you a chance.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm not sure what the answer is

I don't think there should be ANY 5-month timegated grinds that's for starters lol.

it's a lot easier to just go hardcore in one or two modes rather than have to do a song and dance to convince the player-gated higher end content in higher end PvP, dungeons and raiding to give you a chance.

The big problem here is that MMORPGs have repeatedly allowed utterly toxic player-gated communities to form and continue. The first MMORPG to go this way, was, bizarrely, GW2, which fell almost immediately into this kind of toxicity (well, in less than two years from release). WoW lasted a hell of a lot longer, but by 2020 it was heading that way, and it's simply because Blizzard is willing to make content that players perceive as "hard" (in reality it tends to just be fiddly, annoying, require tons of rote memorization or to have a high gear requirement people don't like to be real about) and then lock all the major rewards behind that, then act Surprised Pikachu when people are scumbags about letting people even access that content.

I think the real solution is, perhaps counterintuitively to some people, to make group content in general easier and more rewarding, and to focus on fun rather than difficulty or precision, and to have more difficult stuff which absolutely DOES NOT offer better rewards in terms of gear or "skins" (including mounts), but does offer titles and similar (maybe a recolour of a mount, but not a new mount). The game's peak popularity was always when it was, frankly, bloody easy i.e. Vanilla and WotLK - TBC, which was a lot tougher, saw massively less engagement with endgame content (Blizzard themselves said less than 0.5% of accounts with a max-level character in TBC even downed a single boss in the final raid, contrast with Vanilla where like 40% of accounts with a max-level character had killed most or all of the bosses in MC, and it was over 20% for BWL, but then sharply down to below 5% for original Naxx), and Cataclysm, which was a nightmare compared to WotLK, also saw a massive decline and then WoW's population crashed and has never recovered.

Blizzard live in this bizarre paranoid state when they believe people will finish everything and quit, but I know their metrics show absolutely nothing of the sort has ever happened (because it hasn't!). On the contrary, their metrics will show them that most endgame players (let alone ones not playing there) play for a month or two and then quit, sometimes coming back after a major .X patch.

I don't think anything will change without major changes to Blizzard leadership again though - the changes that happened after the sex abuse/bullying scandals caused a lot of improvements, but now those people seem to have got stuck in their ways.

 

[Scribe]

(Blizzard themselves said less than 0.5% of accounts with a max-level character in TBC even downed a single boss in the final raid, contrast with Vanilla where like 40% of accounts with a max-level character had killed most or all of the bosses in MC, and it was over 20% for BWL, but then sharply down to below 5% for original Naxx)

To be fair, that final raid was tuned much higher than everything other than...Vashj? With quite a few of the fights requiring some pretty strict raid comps.

I loved you Sunwell....

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Wow, I did not consider myself a hardcore TBC raider, but we did manage to clear Sunwell, so I guess we were. (EDIT: It looks like we didn't kill Kil'jaeden until we were well into WotLK. We got the rest of the place down, though.)

I think adding a renown track to raids is good in that it makes you want to go for rewards, even if it's not the traditional loot. Making it 20 steps long, and raising the cap one step a week, and only giving enough rep in a week to catch up two ranks, is way too long, though. The Liberation of Undermine is a pretty good raid (and does a hilariously good job of capturing a Vegas casino vibe in the way most games don't), but it's definitely not a raid worth going to for five months after you don't need the gear any more.

We are currently at week 13/20, for the record.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

To be fair, that final raid was tuned much higher than everything other than...Vashj? With quite a few of the fights requiring some pretty strict raid comps.

I loved you Sunwell....

All of the raids in TBC were frankly at least a little overtuned, and player numbers reflected that with how sharply they dropped off after the first few bosses in Karazahn. Sunwell though was just insanely overtuned and thus relied on you having geared the hell out of your raid, which was part of the problem, because it was hard "catch up" if you had lost people for any reason.

WotLK started off kind of the same way - initially Naxx was pretty overtuned, but it didn't take long for Blizzard to realize this was a losing proposition, nerfed Naxx into a range where more typical players could handle it, and then the rest of the raids had default difficulties which were fairly manageable, and Hard Modes in Ulduar and then Heroic in TotC (initially laughably undertuned as my incompetent guild of nitwits was able to down all of Heroic TotC the first day you could - we did get jammed up on the bullet hell fight on Heroic for a while but we'd learned it by the time they made the last Heroic fight available) and ICC.

Wow, I did not consider myself a hardcore TBC raider, but we did manage to clear Sunwell, so I guess we were.

Yes all but Kil'Jaden would probably put you in the top 0.1-0.3% of WoW players at that time.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think the real solution is, perhaps counterintuitively to some people, to make group content in general easier and more rewarding

Whilst this would make for a more appealing game for someone like me, there are those who see online gaming as a path to self validation. Which means if there is no really difficult content which they can use to show off how awesome they are they don’t think it’s worth playing. And as these are the people who are willing to shell out huge amounts of money in pursuit of displaying their awesomeness, the games companies are rewarded for pursuing that kind of player.