World of Warcraft

[Tanner Glass]

Like, dude thinks scribbling furiously in a notebook, being a retard who doesn't understand story and having an obnoxious personality entitles him to streamer moolah. It's the same shit with Lowtax: bare minimum of effort while expecting the fucking world.

Here's hoping it ends the same way.

 

[Bob_]

Yeah I watched the Preach video, it was a mildly interesting look at blizzard, but all it achieved for me was strengthen my resolve to never play retail again.

As soon as Ion shows up it just became the same old same old "oh trust us we listen and will make the changes you want to 'fix' the game". At this point it is just nauseating.

 

[Smug Chuckler]

As soon as Ion shows up it just became the same old same old "oh trust us we listen and will make the changes you want to 'fix' the game". At this point it is just nauseating.

Never trust a lawyer.

 

[pursuitsnail]

Source

Spoiler: Full text

It might sound absurd to compare WoW’s GD forum to current western society, but the mind boggling obsession with LGBT topics is a preview of the cracks beginning to form in the psyche of the public. This isn’t just the work of persistent trolls, because every shoehorned thread about this subject is simply a symptom of a disease that spreads far beyond our fantasy world.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being born a certain way, but there’s a societal madness that’s snowballing right now. I apologize if you don’t consider western society part of your own, but the whole world is being gripped by overly politically correct forced diversity and pandering, and it’s fraying the fabric of our everyday lives.

How does this relate to WoW? Because as a natural extent of being so influential as to threaten people’s lives for resisting it, the madness has now even infiltrated fantasy worlds and is currently the main dividing factor even on this forum.

Some people notice the elephant in the room, and some people do everything in their power to ignore it.

This isn’t equity or equality. This is a hostage situation. We’re being force fed this ideology which is obsessed with division, racial hierarchy, and sexual importance. And people are sick and tired of it.

Whoever is running the world into the ground uses division to wear the public down. They’re really good at what they do.

Total dumpster fire.

Source

Spoiler: Text

Should seem easy enough for Blizzard to change a few words from like husband to friend, battle buddy, or something with a setting in the options. In that way everyone is happy. I mean if Blizz has to make different versions of WoW for different parts of the world can’t be a huge stretch. Be safe out there Folks!

Mostly what's interesting to me is the number of likes given the general mood of the forums.

People here would call me a normie, probably, but when I'm reading/playing/watching fantasy media I don't want the real world reflected back at me. And I certainly don't want Tumblr reflected at me. Online identity morality doesn't actually translate into quality characters or stories because of how that worldview treats individuals. It doesn't help that WoW already starts with a terrible story that is poorly told with flat, boring characters.

Maybe I just need to be stewed in a gay shipping Discord almost entirely populated by fandom obsessed 14 year old girls until my brain melts.

 

[Kier Starmer]

The majority of wow is just heterosexual men but as I say everyone has a limit. most people who work play games for experience and escape. If you look at the definitive titles like Silent Hill 2, Metal Gear, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro diablo 2, and countless others. There is a running theme that nothing interjects with our human experience, there are a few exceptions like MGS but they stay away from the world.

We all as most of us are gamers remember the pivotal scenes in games we played. I remember Sniper Wolf dying and Hal saying goodbye. The whole of silent hill 2, rage quitting crash remaster. Being terrified of Mr. X in the ReMake. Americans and Europeans are force-fed politics daily and they just want to play some games.

Blizzard's "new" approach demotes some of the core reasons why people play games and they even overstep the mark on fantasy writing. They did this to themselves though and it will cost them. If they do this shit to Diablo 4 they are fucked entirely because all their other IPs are in the gutter.

I would play the game but I cannot stand the art direction, it looks like Tumblr vomited over the screen. The models are worse than EQ2, they are trying to push their degenerate ideals on people but people will fight back over time. I see people like Az and Preach who have no integrity whatsoever, i still cannot gather why Zack has one of the biggest Twitch followings.

 

[Dave.]

So I've played it for a while and my impressions of this expansion so far has been a bit warmer than other people in this thread which is understandable given that this expansion is radically different from vanilla and prior expansion so far and for reasons I'll explain later. To me, it's an alright expansion so far. Not terrible, but also not great, just kind of average. Fun, but not breaking new ground essentially. I'll go ahead and go over the pros and cons of this expansion right now:

Spoiler: Long Post Ahead

Pros:
-Dragonriding is genuinely fun and I've enjoyed it as a way of transportation around the maps in Dragonflight and it's made flight paths essentially useless and made questing actually fun and enjoyable. I'll admit that sometimes the maps get a little too hilly and the verticality of the maps get way too extreme at moments making climbing them with your mount pretty difficult to borderline impossible, but those moments are fortunately not very often so it's not something that I can really complain about that much.

-Dracthyr Evoker has been a fun class with preservation being my personal favorite spec that surprisingly stays relatively balanced in Mythic dungeons and doesn't have the biggest AOE potential like Druid or Mistweaver. It does, however, break PvP a lot though because they have way too many "oh shit" buttons they can cast on themselves making geared evokers (which I am right now) almost immortal. It's simply not fair at the moment and it needs a rework because holy god even with a large group of horde, I can still survive and maintain myself no problem.

-Dungeons have been fun, but there's not much to say on this topic. Usually dungeon content has been fun, but my least favorite so far has been Brackenhollow. Way too much shit to purge and on evoker, you have a dispeller that has a relatively long cooldown. Other than that one, they've so far been decent, nothing too offensive.

-I can't comment too much on class design because I've only played evoker and rogue this expansion, but the class design, from what I've heard, has been pretty decent. Some specs are still a bit win/lost, but I haven't heard anyone complain about the overall class design or balancing yet. Again, not much to say on this, so I'll just leave it at that.

Mixed:
Unfortunately I'm running out of praise and nice things to say about this expansion so mixed and cons is probably going to be a bit longer than pros. These will definitely be deal breakers to people who are lukewarm about retail right now depending on how much scrutiny they gave it in previous expansions.

-The artstyle has been utterly schizophrenic this expansion. There's some bits that look really good, but at least a decent majority of the zones and design has been underwhelming at best. They just look so average. Even more average than FFXIV which is a game that usually moderates itself between realistic and high fantasy. The azure span and the archives are probably my biggest highlight of the best the artstyle has to offer which gives me deja vu with the nexus from Wrath of the Lich King. The overall designs of the aspect dragons have looked cool and I'm personally pretty okay with the tuskarr and gnoll designs as well, but everything else has looked either average and inoffensive to just bland. The worst example is the centaurs which are ugly as hell to look at.

-The story has been... okay. Aggressively woke, but average at best. Razageth (I have no idea what her name is) has been the most barebones basic villain so far. Call me a pretentious hipster, but I'd like at least a shred of nuance while I'm witnessing story events unfold, but so far it's been a pretty shallow story and Razageth has just not been an interesting villain at all and her chemistry with the aspects has been extremely hard to be invested in. The aspects themselves, however, have been tough to like because the leaders themselves are either total bitches or utter pansies. Kalecgos is a little bitch, Wrathion is a cartoon character that was lifted from a cartoon for 11 year olds, Alexstraza is a bitch throughout the expansion who treats anyone who isn't within her circle like shit, and the only character who hasn't been completely unlikable and actually kind of interesting is Nozdormu.

-No new BGs, arenas, or any new changes to PvP or PvP playstyles this expansion. Whether you think that's a good thing or bad is up to you. I'll leave it in mixed.

Cons:
Oh lord, I'm going to be really cynical in this part, so get ready for some strongly worded complaints because I do actually have a bit to talk about.

-The centaur homelands is a black mark on this expansion. It is easily the worst zone story wise and art wise. The centaurs have probably the worst writing in the entire expansion and they are probably where the insanely woke writing is concentrated. A deaf and mute Khan? Really? A fucking interpreter to boot as well? It's also matriarchal as well. Men are relegated to useless positions while the women are taking charge and making the tough decisions with the only male centaur in leadership being the one who betrays you and the aspects... for seemingly no reason. No really, I cannot find a justifiable reason why he betrays the aspects alliance with the centaurs. In all honesty, my memory of this part of the expansion is limited. It was so forgettable and boring that I could barely pay attention to anything going on with it so I'm just going to leave it at that. In short, worst part of the expansion by far.

-The fucking wokeness. Seriously, does every couple in this expansion have to be gay? I wouldn't care that much about it if there was at least portrayals of straight couples as well, but those are, surprisingly, extremely rare. I never hear men talk about women, nor women talk about men rather men talking about men and women talking about women for the majority of the expansion.

It's also condescendingly portrayed. Majordomo Selistra goes into a sanctimonious explanation about being non-binary and being two different species at once in response to probably the stupidest and forced question of "so are you actually a vulpera?" when you can clearly see they are a dragon within the first minute they enter the scene.

In fact, every bit of woke writing in this expansion is so emotionally manipulative like the dracthyr in a wheelchair as seen in that screenshot posted previously in this thread, the gay couples (which are overly described as well and socially inept because people don't normally talk about their partners in flanderizing language often), and the stronk women who treat anyone with a dick like shit. I really do believe that Danuser is a "step on me" mommy individual who probably lives in a shed with his wife. Wouldn't be shocked if his wife cheats on him constantly either.

-Music is forgettable and uninteresting. Sounds incredibly phoned in and lazy.

-The voice acting is fucking abysmal in this expansion. Easily the worst I've heard so far and even worse than Shadowlands (which to its credit had some decent voice acting mixed in). Everyone either sounds lifeless and half-asleep or they have shrieky, nails on chalkboard voices that are impossible to listen to without having the urge to strangle whoever is behind the microphone. Razgeth sounds inexperienced and is just screaming her lines everytime she talks, Kalecgos sounds like he's trying not to doze off behind the microphone, Alexstraza sounds like she just wants a paycheck and then get out, and Steven Blum is just uttering gutteral sounds and calling it good. I've only heard about three decent performances thoughout the expansion but every one of them has been just unpleasant to listen to and in many cases distracting to the point of not even really knowing what was going on in the story at times.

But the worst by far has to be Majordomo Selistra. I don't think the person who voiced this character is a professional actor, but after listening to him for more than half an hour, I don't even think this person is even human. He puts on probably the most alien vocal performance in the entire expansion with a voice that is so annoying and irritating to listen to, that it eventually became the catalyst for why I muted the voice audio. He sounds emotionally retarded many moments and he talks with an exceedingly annoying lisp that will make anyone listening to it want to go out and rip this person's vocal cords right out of their neck in a game of minecraft.

But yeah, that's Dragonflight. Take it as you will. If you think all I've said before is a deal breaker, then you are going to hate this expansion. As for myself, I'm moderately enjoying myself, but then again that's because my expectations of his expansion are moderate at best. I usually don't go into these expecting anything more than just moderately decent mainly because the old guard left a long time ago. Will I continue playing this once I beat the raid on mythic or reach +20 mythic+? I don't know. Is it as good as Legion? My answer is I don't know. Will it be a good expansion for the entirety of its lifespan? I don't know. But there you go, those are my thoughts. Take them as you will.

 

[pursuitsnail]

Maybe that's why the Tumblr/AO3 is hitting me so badly: None of the issues that social justice and identitarianism claim to address exist in Warcraft or if they do are solved by magic. People are too busy fapping to representation porn to think about what trans even means in a world where a wizard will change your sex for a handful of silver.

 

[That Chris Guy]

Maybe that's why the Tumblr/AO3 is hitting me so badly: None of the issues that social justice and identitarianism claim to address exist in Warcraft or if they do are solved by magic. People are too busy fapping to representation porn to think about what trans even means in a world where a wizard will change your sex for a handful of silver.

I'm sure they do know and are ignoring it, much like how they want a "trans" designation in video games when nothing is stopping them from just choosing the opposite sex.

 

[Haramburger]

I miss playing so much. Hearthstone is still my nicotine patch. I do not own Dragonflight.



Does anyone remember Fiona's Caravan? In the Eastern Plaguelands? It's seventy quests(45 direct in the questline, though the zone-wide acievement asks for 70 involving the sub-characters to meet riding with her) revolving around a female worgen(who never shifts to human form) who has two friends(a dwarf and a blood elf) and they travel around the zone picking up more allies, culminating in an undead slaughterhouse fight where they all raid an undead elite in a neat, tidy plotline. In those seventy quests, you are not given any hints at Fiona's sexual orientation, marital status past or present, or deep identity cues. She reappears as a garrison follower in WoD, and her stagecoach appears with her by it in Boralus in BfA. She's a popular, recurring character for both Horde and Alliance players across multiple expansions, and you don't know who or how she fucks.

And when you compare this to modern horseshit where you're immediately told by NPCs now, "I'm gay, I was born a girl but got to change into a boy in the afterlife, let's talk about my gay marriage" it's REALLY FUCKING JARRING. When people on the forums or social media say "I think the writing is woke and bad right now," it's not a baseless argument. There's precedent, examples, and layers of previous content that people ought to be citing and articulating but can't clearly remember or raise the argument right. I went through the Eastern Plaguelands many many times on alts and love the adventure, the cast of characters, the completeness of it all & do not have those characters' sexuality and identity issues shoved in my face for the length of it. I want to log in and go through it again! And it's really strange that Blizzard yanked 50+ voice line emotes about sex or sexuality, and paintings showing "too much skin" of human and blood elf females in the middle of Shadowlands, only to shove sexuality and gay relationships into my face a year later.

The fact that new content meetings don't pull all the developers into a room and point to Fiona's Caravan and several other arcs, characters and segments of WoW and say "study this, recreate this, this is what players like and want more of," is mind-blowing to me. You have blueprints for success in the game already, and you let them rot on the vine. And this rainbow retards deserve every piece of criticism for ignoring it.

 

[Well Intentioned]

And when you compare this to modern horseshit where you're immediately told by NPCs now, "I'm gay, I was born a girl but got to change into a boy in the afterlife, let's talk about my gay marriage" it's REALLY FUCKING JARRING. When people on the forums or social media say "I think the writing is woke and bad right now," it's not a baseless argument. There's precedent, examples, and layers of previous content that people ought to be citing and articulating but can't clearly remember or raise the argument right. I went through the Eastern Plaguelands many many times on alts and love the adventure, the cast of characters, the completeness of it all & do not have those characters' sexuality and identity issues shoved in my face for the length of it. I want to log in and go through it again! And it's really strange that Blizzard yanked 50+ voice line emotes about sex or sexuality, and paintings showing "too much skin" of human and blood elf females in the middle of Shadowlands, only to shove sexuality and gay relationships into my face a year later.

There's a video essayist on YouTube whose content I discovered via autoplay. While I don't think he'd get a great reception on here, he did a nearly 2 hour long dissection of the entire Baldur's Gate series, including the new, controversial Siege of Dragonspear expansion and the much-maligned trans snowflake character.

He raises the point that folks bitching about a trans character in and of itself is stupid, but then challenges people to question what exactly is it accomplishing, using a quote from the writer who said that they "consciously choose to add as much diversity as possible" in the content they write, saying that it's more self-congratulatory to pat yourself the back for what was effectively a blink-and-you'll-miss-it throwaway line.

It raises an interesting point for content like this. Is this authentic? Is this real? I'd say that this sort of shit isn't and does a disservice.

One of the easiest writing tests you can do to see if your writing is 'good' is to read it out loud. If what they're saying sounds normal and conversational, like what an actual human being would say? You're probably on the right track.

As a hetero dude, I don't go up to people I just met and say "Hello, how do you do? As someone who quite enjoys the pleasure of the opposite sex I can't help but remark that it sure is rainy today." Just as any normal person, gay or otherwise, would.

I literally don't give a fuck if there's a gay character or whatever in media. I do give a fuck about writing/presentation not being shitty as fuck and will point out the issues with such.

I know a lot of folks got the buttpains over Tracer being made into a lesbian or whatever, but the reveal and it being part of her character was handled just fine. There was no dramatic reveal moment, there was no Defining! Character! Monologue! where she extolls the virtues of rug munching. She walks in to her apartment and her girlfriend is there. No fanfare, no pedestal, it just fucking is.

It's the same thing for shit like X-Men and why the resonated so hard with so many different people while shit like the New New Warriors went over about as well as telling Gary Plauche you just deflowered his son.

If that shit is interesting or naturally baked in or has enough room for people to imagine what they want, no one is gonna give a shit.

But if you have characters that speak in awkwardly phrased monologues and drag people out of the narrative by hitting them over the head with a hammer and taking them out of the experience, you're gonna have a bad time.

That's why this shit rubs so many people the wrong way. It's no different from a bad/cheesy ad that comes off as fake/trying too hard/inauthentic. Or older Golden Age comics where characters would have thoughts like "What Sue, my wife of 15 years, said to me, Reed Richards, leader of the Fantastic Four makes sense!" and is rightly mocked for being horrendous dialogue.

Bad writing is bad writing. And pointing out that it is bad writing doesn't make someone racist/transphobic/whatever.

 

[Dave.]

I miss playing so much. Hearthstone is still my nicotine patch. I do not own Dragonflight.

View attachment 3978897

Does anyone remember Fiona's Caravan? In the Eastern Plaguelands? It's seventy quests(45 direct in the questline, though the zone-wide acievement asks for 70 involving the sub-characters to meet riding with her) revolving around a female worgen(who never shifts to human form) who has two friends(a dwarf and a blood elf) and they travel around the zone picking up more allies, culminating in an undead slaughterhouse fight where they all raid an undead elite in a neat, tidy plotline. In those seventy quests, you are not given any hints at Fiona's sexual orientation, marital status past or present, or deep identity cues. She reappears as a garrison follower in WoD, and her stagecoach appears with her by it in Boralus in BfA. She's a popular, recurring character for both Horde and Alliance players across multiple expansions, and you don't know who or how she fucks.

And when you compare this to modern horseshit where you're immediately told by NPCs now, "I'm gay, I was born a girl but got to change into a boy in the afterlife, let's talk about my gay marriage" it's REALLY FUCKING JARRING. When people on the forums or social media say "I think the writing is woke and bad right now," it's not a baseless argument. There's precedent, examples, and layers of previous content that people ought to be citing and articulating but can't clearly remember or raise the argument right. I went through the Eastern Plaguelands many many times on alts and love the adventure, the cast of characters, the completeness of it all & do not have those characters' sexuality and identity issues shoved in my face for the length of it. I want to log in and go through it again! And it's really strange that Blizzard yanked 50+ voice line emotes about sex or sexuality, and paintings showing "too much skin" of human and blood elf females in the middle of Shadowlands, only to shove sexuality and gay relationships into my face a year later.

The fact that new content meetings don't pull all the developers into a room and point to Fiona's Caravan and several other arcs, characters and segments of WoW and say "study this, recreate this, this is what players like and want more of," is mind-blowing to me. You have blueprints for success in the game already, and you let them rot on the vine. And this rainbow retards deserve every piece of criticism for ignoring it.

View attachment 3978903

Maybe I'm socially dumb or maybe I'm just not socially adjusted to society as a whole so I don't how people handle personal relationships, but I don't divulge stuff going on in my relationship with my irl girlfriend. That just seems weird to do out of nowhere. It feels even more weirder when I talk about it with people I don't even know. The popular counter argument is that if someone did the same woke writing does with straight couples people wouldn't bat an eye and the answer is no. There's a key difference between this:

"Molly's in the other room with your artifact ready in hand. Oh and.." She winks. "Tell her to make mine extra rare tonight. I'll be bringing strawberry wine, her favorite."
"What?"
"It's our anniversary, we usually make steak dinner this time of night."

And this:

"Molly, my special partner, is in the other room with your artifact ready! I always knew my wife was the best. I have no regrets marrying her!"

 

[Local Degenerate]

Maybe I'm socially dumb or maybe I'm just not socially adjusted to society as a whole so I don't how people handle personal relationships, but I don't divulge stuff going on in my relationship with my irl girlfriend. That just seems weird to do out of nowhere. It feels even more weirder when I talk about it with people I don't even know. The popular counter argument is that if someone did the same woke writing does with straight couples people wouldn't bat an eye and the answer is no. There's a key difference between this:

"Molly's in the other room with your artifact ready in hand. Oh and.." She winks. "Tell her to make mine extra rare tonight. I'll be bringing strawberry wine, her favorite."
"What?"
"It's our anniversary, we usually make steak dinner this time of night."

And this:

"Molly, my special partner, is in the other room with your artifact ready! I always knew my wife was the best. I have no regrets marrying her!"

NGL, Both are pretty cringe. Like you said, it's weird to just bring up your personal life in such an obviously expositional manner.

"My wife is in the other room with your artifact ready." Done. It's simple, neat, tells you what you need to know, and sounds more real. And as a personal note, I find it to be the best way to write gay characters. I remember the 90's, when gays entire thing was 'we want to be treated like everyone else. We're normal, we just fuck the same gender. Leave us alone.' Which is what that kind of writing achieves. It treats a gay couple as literally anyone else, like Well Intentioned is saying.

I'm sure they do know and are ignoring it, much like how they want a "trans" designation in video games when nothing is stopping them from just choosing the opposite sex.

I actually have a troon friend who is 110% fucking disgusted by adding transexuallity to games. Gal's pretty based, which is one of the reasons I choose to go with her mental delusions.

To roughly quote: "You know wants to be called 'Trans' when they play a game? Dipshits who want attention. Actual trans people hate that shit, because we hate being trans. If the world was perfect, we'd be born into the gender we present as, and transexuality wouldn't exist. So why in the actual fuck would I put that on myself, or my character, in a world that's meant to be my fantasy world? I'm just going to play as a woman, who is a born woman, and never had to even think about this shit."

That shit has always stuck with me, and it's why I turned so hard on adding the trans option to games. I always agreed with you Chris, edit: I'm just an 'options are never bad' faggot, and it'd take no dev time at all to put in a toggle to use male pronouns with a female model, but hearing that made me fully commit to telling these people to go fuck themselves.

 

[Agarathium1066]

There's a video essayist on YouTube whose content I discovered via autoplay. While I don't think he'd get a great reception on here, he did a nearly 2 hour long dissection of the entire Baldur's Gate series, including the new, controversial Siege of Dragonspear expansion and the much-maligned trans snowflake character.

Caldwell-Gervais? Sounds like it from what I recall of his video on it. He can be enjoyable but he takes that very weaselly 'What's the haaaarm' tack on a lot of things. Though he at least puts some effort into explaining it and may actually believe it.

The reason why this kind've writing is a problem is how it so quickly spiraled out of control to see shit like the "characterization" of NPCs in WoW and other video games hoping to suck up for twitter praise. It's all politically motivated and in many cases spiteful towards the original playerbase. ..But at this point its a heavily beaten horse so I'll leave it at that.

 

[Dave.]

NGL, Both are pretty cringe.

Objective proof I cannot write fiction to save my life.

 

[Protistology]

And it's really strange that Blizzard yanked 50+ voice line emotes about sex or sexuality, and paintings showing "too much skin" of human and blood elf females in the middle of Shadowlands, only to shove sexuality and gay relationships into my face a year later.

Normal human sexuality is dirty. Homosexual sexuality is pure and normal. It's just leftist antinomianism.

 

[Well Intentioned]

Caldwell-Gervais? Sounds like it from what I recall of his video on it. He can be enjoyable but he takes that very weaselly 'What's the haaaarm' tack on a lot of things. Though he at least puts some effort into explaining it and may actually believe it.

Yeah, that dude. I'd say he's a little more encouraging/forceful rather than trying to fence-sit. Which is fine. He at least is able to be critical of that shit rather than just mindlessly lavishing praise on it, no matter context/quality/etc.

The reason why this kind've writing is a problem is how it so quickly spiraled out of control to see shit like the "characterization" of NPCs in WoW and other video games hoping to suck up for twitter praise. It's all politically motivated and in many cases spiteful towards the original playerbase. ..But at this point its a heavily beaten horse so I'll leave it at that.

It 100% is. The only real reason why businesses are latching onto this shit is because they could be the ones that'll untap an otherwise unknown demographic and start reaping the rewards of such. It's the same logic as carving out money for MCU fans or Star Wars fans or whatever. Consume product/get excited more product/etc.

Unfortunately, as has been borne out again and again and again and again catering primarily/exclusively does very little in the way of pushing the financial needle and is seen by savvier businesses more as a tax dump than anything since there's so many non-fucking-profits out there (who probably should get a level of scrutiny that's usually reserved for orgs like the Salvation Army) and is of questionable quality/sincerity.

Like Local Degen said above, folks just want to live and let fucking live. They don't want a real life version of what is ostensibly the Office episode where Michael finds out Oscar is gay and have a big production made about it. Like, how do you feel 'comfortable' and 'living your own life' if someone is constantly yelling and pointing at you (but in a totally good way, though)?

 

[Corn Flakes]

I think part of the issue with people being sick of the woke questing/dialogue system already is that the devs think they're actually writing an RPG. Nobody in WoW is talking to questgivers in order to know more about them. They want their quests. If you want to give people information about the NPCs, seamlessly bake it into the quest text, don't just give people a wall of text, followed by dialogue options.

IIRC, the Darrowshire questline back in the pre-Cataclysm told a story that tugged at a lot of players' heartstrings with... pretty simple quest text. There were no exposition dumps, barely any characters talking about themselves, and the quest text was never longer than three paragraphs. Those little bits of text, combined with what was going on with the world, told the story just fine. All we knew about the characters was what we needed to know for the quests we were picking up to make sense.

For some reason Blizzard thinks we're all really interested in the NPCs themselves, as opposed to their quests. But all we want to know is what we can do for them and what they can do for us. NPCs aren't our friends. At most they're just plot-forwarding devices: we might like or dislike some of them individually, but their purpose first and foremost should be to help with the worldbuilding. There was some of this more NPC-centric quest design pre-Cataclysm, like with the Hemet Nesingwary quests (which were pretty memorable at the time), but post-Cataclysm redesign they really went ham on trying to make us care, to the point of letting NPCs completely steal the thunder from us (hi, Thrall!). Even though it's a MMORPG: NPCs aren't and shouldn't be our friends. That's what guildmates are for!

 

[ZMOT]

Spoiler: more faggotry

View attachment 3968928

I want to ask this guy why he feels the same about small white rural towns populated by nuclear families but I'm banned for 999 years for yelling at Jeff Kaplanstein.

someone tell him that if you have to normalize something, it's not normal.

Highmaul was an 'appetizer' raid like MSV. Those were something they started doing in order to bridge the gap between heroic dungeons and the first tier of raiding, which turned into a ridiculous chasm in Cata.. A problem they brought on themselves by deciding that heroic dungeons were THE end game content for casuals, and thus should not drop better gear, and that ten man raids were going to drop the same loot as twenty-five mans, which were for real players who deserved purples. It's why ZA and ZG ending up becoming that stepping stone, though I don't remember what they had originally planned for the re-releases. I do remember that Greg "Dungeons are Hard!" Street was awfully salty that people didn't git gud, and instead just left since the instanced content was so punishing.

And it's easy to forget that pretty much all WoD had after leveling was a daily quest to grind mobs and running eight dungeons that all dropped the same loot. Not jumping into Highmaul? No reason to stay for the intentionally miserable overworld and completely broken Ashran.

WoW always had a shizo progression design, where blizzard tried to balance rewards versus both time AND difficulty, in a linear progression. tell my, how would you make dungeons difficult for people with raid gear that's like hundred+ ilvls higher than what you get outside of it? the same raiders who don't want anyone else have that ilvl unless you raid, because in their mind "if you don't raid you don't need the gear". one obvious solution would be to straight up tell those fags they'd have to run dungeons in dungeon gear then, but that's not gonna happen, and blizzard being the inept retards that they are just settled on MUH HIGHER NUMBERS mythic+, which only makes the situation and everything around it worse (gating by numbers and performance, which is the opposite of casual, and not to mention blizzard was always notoriously shit, so some specs are simply excluded the higher you go. combined with WoW's shit support for alts makes rerolling even more of a punishment).

I'd unironically say WOTLK was the last time they made somewhat smart decision in the regard (this will get me stickers). as much as people shat on the braindead aoe-spam dungeons to grind for tokens, it just meant that people have to spend a certain amount of time (not challenge) to get on a competitive ilvl. the same raidtards that shat on it were at the same time complaining that having to gear replacements in vanilla/bc meant weeks if not months (because weekly lockout, not sure if that still a thing, but wouldn't surprise me) running old shit to gear those people - unless you cannibalized someone from another raidgroup, but that's just dropping the problem on someone else's head.

ff14 for example follows that logic by giving you tokens to catch up, ESO goes one step further and removes the linear progression and lockout shit completely (meaning dungeons are still hard and you can farm the raid gear in one day if you got the group, veteran gear has slightly better stats, but ESO is built around sets first, not stats, so even those non-vet raid sets are competitive), this way you can "endgame" as soon as possible - if you want - and do the veteran hardmode stuff (think ulduar) as a challenge. which has the added side effect you mostly get people who WANT to be there, not think they HAVE to be there so they have a higher number on their charsheet. everybody has their own little playground to play and progress in, something WoW never figured out or even bothered with the last few years.

The majority of wow is just heterosexual men but as I say everyone has a limit. most people who work play games for experience and escape. If you look at the definitive titles like Silent Hill 2, Metal Gear, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro diablo 2, and countless others. There is a running theme that nothing interjects with our human experience, there are a few exceptions like MGS but they stay away from the world.

the irony is that MGS (and other games like deus ex) work because everything else stays away from real-world references and politics. simple exception to the rule, if every game would be deus ex anything not going full politics would get the same bonus - which is an effect you can see right now where lot of people simply opt out and go for content that provides what they want.

 

[Cats]

lol there are so many faggot NPCs in this expansion

 

[Lou's Sentient Backfat]

lol there are so many faggot NPCs in this expansion

Well since at the end of Cata they made the dragons all infertile they've decided that being gay is the way to go.