World of Warcraft

[King Dead]

The trick for FFXIV isn't that it's easy to stop - the trick is that it's really easy to get back into when a new patch drops. WoW is a lot harder to stop if you're invested in it, but once players are "out" they typically are hostilly out and are reluctant to come back.

That was me, yep. For years, I kept playing WoW, staying on the treadmill despite never really having an active guild, so I was playing by myself or in pugs the whole time. It was only when BfA launched in such a disappointing state after the relatively decent expansion Legion was that I finally broke the habit. I came back only once to do the 15th anniversary content, and when I saw that enhance was still as bad as I remembered it being, I left and didn't look back. With the state the game's in now, with troons and furries running amok at Blizzard with no tard wranglers, the thought of returning sickens me.

I've thought about giving FF14 a try sometime, maybe I will at some point. It's just hard to really work up the motivation to give another MMO a try, especially when I get my loot fix elsewhere anyway.

Legit question: how is there 'nothing to do' in a game with 20 years worth of content? This complaint baffles me, because I have a bucket to-do list that looks like Santa's naughty/nice lists from old content, whether that be rounding out my collection of nifty Order Hall stuff, snagging set appearances from old raids, getting the Sandstone Drake recipe on my alchemist... I mean maybe you've been playing since Vanilla and already have all this stuff hammered out, but I just don't see the backlog of content and think "well, nothing to do since I'm caught up for the moment."

There's two things that people mean when they say they have nothing to do:

• "I don't have anything to do to meaningfully progress my character for current content." This kind of happens to everyone at some point. You've finished leveling, you've gone through the stories, you've geared up...but now what's left? Various odds and ends exist, sure, but there's not much of a reward to do them, so they won't appeal to everyone. You could always level an alt, but that too won't always be appealing. Mostly it's just twiddle your thumbs waiting for a new patch to give you some better gear to farm for.
• "I legitimately have nothing to do because I've already done everything else." This is the player that's been around so long that they really don't have much else to do besides new stuff. They've farmed every transmog, collected every rare pet and mount, knocked out every achievement, and done basically everything they care about. The things you're working on now are things they finished years ago, so if they run out of new stuff to do, there's really nothing for them in the game anymore. It's the above problem, magnified significantly.

There's also the fact that RNG can really dampen your spirits if you've been farming for a long time without getting the thing you want. In my nearly eight years of playing WoW, I never got the Horseman's Reins or the Big Love Rocket (fuck you Blizzard, that's what it will always be), despite some years running those damn holiday bosses on at least a dozen alts every day of the event. That sort of shit can drag on you and make you abandon certain activities, giving you less you want to do.

But as mentioned above, you still feel the need to stay subscribed and keep doing what little content there is because you know it'll be a pain if you fall behind.

 

[74164978231]

Legit question: how is there 'nothing to do' in a game with 20 years worth of content?

Because unless youre autistic or really love playing barbie dress up, the content from the previous patch is 100% worthless to you. Achievements and cosmetic#8951231 isnt genuine content.

 

[DrearyDoomguy]

There's two things that people mean when they say they have nothing to do:

• "I don't have anything to do to meaningfully progress my character for current content." This kind of happens to everyone at some point. You've finished leveling, you've gone through the stories, you've geared up...but now what's left? Various odds and ends exist, sure, but there's not much of a reward to do them, so they won't appeal to everyone. You could always level an alt, but that too won't always be appealing. Mostly it's just twiddle your thumbs waiting for a new patch to give you some better gear to farm for.
• "I legitimately have nothing to do because I've already done everything else." This is the player that's been around so long that they really don't have much else to do besides new stuff. They've farmed every transmog, collected every rare pet and mount, knocked out every achievement, and done basically everything they care about. The things you're working on now are things they finished years ago, so if they run out of new stuff to do, there's really nothing for them in the game anymore. It's the above problem, magnified significantly.

Then there's the third option:

• There's nothing to do in the game that doesn't bore me out of my skull.

Sure, you could always farm for invincible or finish old questlines, but if you don't enjoy grinding away at a freshly released skinner box why would you revisit an older, deprecated skinner box? The reality is not much has changed about the WoW formula over 20 years and the latter day content has really torn away the curtain on just how fundamentally unentertaining it all really is. WoW is the kind of MMO that's better at being addicting than it is at being fun, and this becomes increasingly obvious with each iteration.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Legit question: how is there 'nothing to do' in a game with 20 years worth of content? This complaint baffles me, because I have a bucket to-do list that looks like Santa's naughty/nice lists from old content, whether that be rounding out my collection of nifty Order Hall stuff, snagging set appearances from old raids, getting the Sandstone Drake recipe on my alchemist... I mean maybe you've been playing since Vanilla and already have all this stuff hammered out, but I just don't see the backlog of content and think "well, nothing to do since I'm caught up for the moment."

I guess a small clarification would be in order - there's 'nothing to do' that's compelling/challenging to do.

You can do stuff like run Setthek Halls (Heroic) once a day, every day, once per character for a 1 in 100 chance at the mount drop - but it's not actually fun. You just (per character) take the long trip to the instance, run through the dungeon effortlessly - killing the bosses in ~10 seconds and then hearthing back and doing it again - because the drop chance is 1%.

The content needs to be challenging or engaging to be actually worthwhile. It's pretty effortless, boring, and also extremely long. The game has a lot of arbitrary barriers (raid lockouts, instance limits, rare crafting BoP drops, crafting etc) to stop you from engaging with it as well. On top of that - the reward structure is pretty barren - it's mounts, achievements, transmog, and titles - and not even a varied amount of them. A lot of them have insane requirements also (100,000/250,000 HKs, rare 1% drop from a weekly lockout, 3,000 quests, all X battle pets, etc) that most people just bounce off of.

Even worse is the frustrating difficulty of engaging with some of these systems - even if you wanted to. Transmog hunting is severely hurt by the restrictions on it - AKA you can only "learn/collect" an item if it's "meant" for your class. Find a rare spawn that drops a rare cloth robe while herbing on your Warrior? Fuck you, eat shit, doesn't count. Farming an old raid and get an extremely rare drop (Eye of Sulfuras, Binding of Windseeker, etc) on the wrong class? Welp that sucks, etc. Mounts are fine in theory - with the exception that a lot of them are really samey/lazy/reskins. White Horse/Black Horse/Fire Horse/Fel Fire Horse, etc.

Even worse(er) is the content that was removed and never updated. A lot of rewards in later expansions (Legion, BFA, Shadowlands) rewarded currency specific rewards (Artifact Power, Heart of Azeroth juice, etc) and were never updated when those systems were removed - so a fair bit of content with no actual rewards on top of it.

Like there's nothing wrong with being a collector - but the game makes it as unfun and tedious as possible and it quickly becomes an unfun exercise in "I would rather do something else" until you are literally doing something else/playing a different game.

 

[King Dead]

I guess a small clarification would be in order - there's 'nothing to do' that's compelling/challenging to do.

You can do stuff like run Setthek Halls (Heroic) once a day, every day, once per character for a 1 in 100 chance at the mount drop - but it's not actually fun. You just (per character) take the long trip to the instance, run through the dungeon effortlessly - killing the bosses in ~10 seconds and then hearthing back and doing it again - because the drop chance is 1%.

The content needs to be challenging or engaging to be actually worthwhile. It's pretty effortless, boring, and also extremely long. The game has a lot of arbitrary barriers (raid lockouts, instance limits, rare crafting BoP drops, crafting etc) to stop you from engaging with it as well. On top of that - the reward structure is pretty barren - it's mounts, achievements, transmog, and titles - and not even a varied amount of them. A lot of them have insane requirements also (100,000/250,000 HKs, rare 1% drop from a weekly lockout, 3,000 quests, all X battle pets, etc) that most people just bounce off of.

Even worse is the frustrating difficulty of engaging with some of these systems - even if you wanted to. Transmog hunting is severely hurt by the restrictions on it - AKA you can only "learn/collect" an item if it's "meant" for your class. Find a rare spawn that drops a rare cloth robe while herbing on your Warrior? Fuck you, eat shit, doesn't count. Farming an old raid and get an extremely rare drop (Eye of Sulfuras, Binding of Windseeker, etc) on the wrong class? Welp that sucks, etc. Mounts are fine in theory - with the exception that a lot of them are really samey/lazy/reskins. White Horse/Black Horse/Fire Horse/Fel Fire Horse, etc.

Even worse(er) is the content that was removed and never updated. A lot of rewards in later expansions (Legion, BFA, Shadowlands) rewarded currency specific rewards (Artifact Power, Heart of Azeroth juice, etc) and were never updated when those systems were removed - so a fair bit of content with no actual rewards on top of it.

Like there's nothing wrong with being a collector - but the game makes it as unfun and tedious as possible and it quickly becomes an unfun exercise in "I would rather do something else" until you are literally doing something else/playing a different game.

It reminds me of when people complained so much about portals to old continents and how much smaller it made the world feel, to the point that Blizzard eventually removed them from Shattrath and Dalaran. I just couldn't help but think at the time, "you mean you want to spend a good five or ten minutes getting to where you want to go?" They reversed course by adding portals to the Pandaria shrines and never removing them, at least, same with all future capitals.

I enjoy a big open world as much as the next guy, but WoW has never had an engaging world that you want to spend a lot of time in. When I was playing, all I really wanted to do was get to my destination so I could actually play the game. In your Raven Lord example (never did get that one either), most of the time would be spent just getting there, while the actual "gameplay" would take less than a minute of just zipping through and one-shotting everything. Doing that once isn't so bad, but doing it over and over trying to farm a rare drop will slowly grate on your sanity, and you feel every extra second it takes for you to get there.

Same with Have Group, Will Travel. Yeah, I know, warlocks bitched about one of their utilities being handed out to everyone, but it was so useful in letting you actually play the damn game. One player could head out to the raid portal, press a button, and everyone could be there and ready to go in seconds. Need a friend to help you with something? You could summon them just like that. And its convenience was offset by its two-hour cooldown, so you couldn't just spam it all the time.

But once again, the same complaints killed off a good thing. Blizzard never even made improvements to meeting stones/warlock closets, which still require at least two people to use and force you to manually summon each party member individually. Absolutely asinine.

Like you said, it's the little things that slowly build up over time, and eventually you reach the point where it doesn't matter how good the carrot looks, you just don't care enough to chase it anymore.

 

[Tanner Glass]

It reminds me of when people complained so much about portals to old continents and how much smaller it made the world feel, to the point that Blizzard eventually removed them from Shattrath and Dalaran. I just couldn't help but think at the time, "you mean you want to spend a good five or ten minutes getting to where you want to go?" They reversed course by adding portals to the Pandaria shrines and never removing them, at least, same with all future capitals.

I enjoy a big open world as much as the next guy, but WoW has never had an engaging world that you want to spend a lot of time in. When I was playing, all I really wanted to do was get to my destination so I could actually play the game. In your Raven Lord example (never did get that one either), most of the time would be spent just getting there, while the actual "gameplay" would take less than a minute of just zipping through and one-shotting everything. Doing that once isn't so bad, but doing it over and over trying to farm a rare drop will slowly grate on your sanity, and you feel every extra second it takes for you to get there.

Same with Have Group, Will Travel. Yeah, I know, warlocks bitched about one of their utilities being handed out to everyone, but it was so useful in letting you actually play the damn game. One player could head out to the raid portal, press a button, and everyone could be there and ready to go in seconds. Need a friend to help you with something? You could summon them just like that. And its convenience was offset by its two-hour cooldown, so you couldn't just spam it all the time.

But once again, the same complaints killed off a good thing. Blizzard never even made improvements to meeting stones/warlock closets, which still require at least two people to use and force you to manually summon each party member individually. Absolutely asinine.

Like you said, it's the little things that slowly build up over time, and eventually you reach the point where it doesn't matter how good the carrot looks, you just don't care enough to chase it anymore.

It was always something.

The more shocking thing that WoW doesn't do is incorporate or modernize any of the "collection" stuff. Even just simple, no effort things like FFXIV does - upping the drop rate of extremely old mounts (most old mounts in XIV have a drop rate of like 30/50%) and removing instance lockouts for old instances would go a long way on not having the "collector" meta be having a fuck ton of Alts that just live to try and get Al'ar once a week.

It would take a bit more effort - but they could just try and have some of those items show up in some type of "Ancient Great Vault" - similar to the game's current "Great Vault" system. Just load it up with "old" rewards and have it filled with objectives that pretain to fun objectives (aka do 2/4/6 dungeons as a "Role in Need", Kill 2/4/6 Rare Creatures, something tied into their version of the mentor system) - anything that would shift the effort to reward ratio back to doing relevant content on a character you enjoy instead of alt grinding non stop. Same with tradeskills too, tbh.

 

[GenociderSyo]

Looks like that trading post thing will be used for that since people are datamining rarer mounts and stuff on it.

 

[Abradolfus_Linclerson]

Thanks for the answers. I totally get resenting RNGesus because I get screwed routinely, to the point I don't even bother trying for the holiday rewards cuz I know I'm never going to get them. That said, mog hunting is enjoyable and lucrative...or at least, marginally lucrative. I don't play the AH game because that's too much like work, and quest rewards were only a one-time thing. I guess I am possessed of the type of 'tism that's good for Blizz. I do like the world and the races and the aesthetics, so to a degree I am willing to go through the grind even if it's not the most stimulating just because I find the abilities enjoyable. Yes, yes, filthy casual scum. I know, I know.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Looks like that trading post thing will be used for that since people are datamining rarer mounts and stuff on it.

It looks like a battle pass/retention thing more than a great vault copy I was describing, but it's at least something. The mount farming meta is still going to be "make a fuckton of alts and grind yourself retarded".

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/23877463/introducing-the-trading-post

One part of it, if it goes live, that's going to generate tons of salt is this.

On the first of the month, the traders will obtain new items and update the activities in the Traveler’s Log for the new month. Items that are rotated out of their inventory won’t be gone for good though—they’ll rotate back into the inventory in future months—giving players who missed them the first time another opportunity to add them to their collections. The Trading Post will also include cosmetics from promotions that are no longer available as well as items normally available for cash purchase on the in-game store as purchasable items with Trader’s Tender instead. This provides an alternative way for players to obtain these items.

The bolded part sounds like they're going to rotate in all of the FOMO/Promotional/Discontinued mounts over time so players can get them without doing ridicilous shit. I actually think it's an extremely good idea because having rare items locked behind concepts like "You didn't buy enough booster packs for the few years we had a TCG" or "You didn't get it to drop that one year we changed Brewfest mounts" is absurd.

Swift Spectral Tiger, the lost Brewfest ram colors, and Tyreal's Charger all come to mind. All of the people who were extremely mad about the Feldrake (also from the TCG) being given out as a Twitch drop are about to lose their fucking minds over this one.

 

[Agarathium1066]

Swift Spectral Tiger, the lost Brewfest ram colors, and Tyreal's Charger all come to mind. All of the people who were extremely mad about the Feldrake (also from the TCG) being given out as a Twitch drop are about to lose their fucking minds over this one.

MMO rare items are a thing I can vaguely understand, it's a proof you did something particularly interesting or unique. Yet you can 'fix' it by having the new Feldrake a slightly different color or something very fucking simple if you want to "preserve" the value of the unique item or mount.

Or just not be a turbo-sperg and have it be available if they are willing to pick it to pay, play whatever trading post stuff might be there, or what have you.

 

[King Dead]

MMO rare items are a thing I can vaguely understand, it's a proof you did something particularly interesting or unique. Yet you can 'fix' it by having the new Feldrake a slightly different color or something very fucking simple if you want to "preserve" the value of the unique item or mount.

Or just not be a turbo-sperg and have it be available if they are willing to pick it to pay, play whatever trading post stuff might be there, or what have you.

Ironically, I feel like the value of certain rare items can end up being lower over time, especially in a game like WoW where they're bound to a player's account. As older players that did these old prestigious things like getting arena mounts slowly quit the game, you eventually stop seeing those old mounts and pets and such entirely, to the point that a new player might never see them at all. And if one day they did run across a player on one, they might not even be aware that there's any prestige to it at all, so they don't associate it with having a high value.

I get that it's fun to show off and all, but if given the option between keeping my personal unique shit to myself and letting others have access to it, I'd take the latter every time because then I'd have a chance at getting the things I missed out on. Besides, if you're such a good player, surely you'll have new things to show off, right? You're not just clinging to past glories from a decade ago, are you?

 

[Agarathium1066]

I get that it's fun to show off and all, but if given the option between keeping my personal unique shit to myself and letting others have access to it, I'd take the latter every time because then I'd have a chance at getting the things I missed out on. Besides, if you're such a good player, surely you'll have new things to show off, right? You're not just clinging to past glories from a decade ago, are you?

I agree with you there, I'd rather it be something that others can get since it shows off something to it. If anything I'd think they could slightly upgrade the old items. Maybe a different effect while you summon a mount or a slightly different item frame or whatever. In the end it doesn't matter but its just a small tip of the hat to someone who had the original. I just don't have faith in Blizzard ever bothering.

A lot of the outcry is exactly what you said, it's clinging to an old memory and glory. What matters more is the good memory or feeling like you did something personally. Veterancy in an MMO isn't all that useful given they have to make frequent changes and upgrades lest their userbase leave.

Some have just clearly realized they sunk a ton of time or real life money into an item only to get egg on their face afterward. Someone absolutely dropped a wad of cash on an ebay code of one of the rarer mounts and is asspained now.

 

[Fag Albert]

I've never really been one to get the fear of missing out, On one hand I think it's retarded to get bent out of shape over & okay to have some things stay exclusive, it is that exclusivity that makes these things so desirable to a lot of people in the first place. On the other hand as we've moved away from the more tight-knit communities and into quartered off discords, who cares? I'm not invested in these people. What used to be a cool conversation starter & a story to swap has devolved to "this retard has a thing and i don't". So why not just make it available?

 

[trent]

Every MMO eventually reaches the point where the "super dooper rare special premium edition!!!!" stuff ends up available to the masses in an attempt to get people to re-sub to get that one Walmart-exclusive Slightly Different Dragon that they missed out on years ago.

 

[Tanner Glass]

MMO rare items are a thing I can vaguely understand, it's a proof you did something particularly interesting or unique. Yet you can 'fix' it by having the new Feldrake a slightly different color or something very fucking simple if you want to "preserve" the value of the unique item or mount.

Or just not be a turbo-sperg and have it be available if they are willing to pick it to pay, play whatever trading post stuff might be there, or what have you.

I agree with you conceptually, but a lot of the "rare" wow items are usually not associated with skill or any interesting/unique stories.

The Feldrake and Swift Spectral Tiger are just "rare drops" from the defunct TCG game. You either just spent money on card packs in ~2005-2010 or bought it from someone else who did. Because the card game died in 2010 and was out of print for a long time - the prices for the rare items skyrocketed. Prices of $3,000 to $10,000 were common and they became the "too much fucking money" mount.

Tyrael's Charger was a limited time 2011 promotion around Diablo 3. You just paid for a full year of WoW and got the mount, some other small stuff and Diablo 3 added to your account.

The rare Brewfest Ram is from the 2007 version of the event - so if you weren't playing in 2007 and weren't available during the week or so it happened - tough break.

There's a lot of stuff like that in WoW. Glitches that make some items rare, items removed from the game, special items/colors of armor/weapons during extremely limited events and so on. Not many of them are testaments to skill or unique events.

I doubt that the "prestige" mounts (aka Gladiator PVP mounts, Raid achievement mounts, profession mounts, etc) will make it to the Trading Post. I also doubt "farmable" mounts will make it either (Midnight, Al'Ar, Invincible) - seems like a way to cycle in unobtainable items and other items from crossovers that wouldn't make sense to include in the "normal" game - the wording makes me thing of crossovers with other games/series.

 

[Bob_]

The only reason I play classic wow is due to the guild I am in, it's 30 people having fun pushing content. Naxx is brain-dead but the social aspect is awesome and the continual pruning of dead weight by officers means everyone is trying.

This is going to sound melodramatic, but I had to stop raiding in Legion as guild after guild broke up around me and it broke my fucking heart. Retail just seems to have shocking drop off for players doing mythic content.

 

[Marissa Moira]

I've never really been one to get the fear of missing out, On one hand I think it's retarded to get bent out of shape over & okay to have some things stay exclusive, it is that exclusivity that makes these things so desirable to a lot of people in the first place. On the other hand as we've moved away from the more tight-knit communities and into quartered off discords, who cares? I'm not invested in these people. What used to be a cool conversation starter & a story to swap has devolved to "this retard has a thing and i don't". So why not just make it available?

If you ever played around with private servers, every item in the game is assigned a number. That number can be entered with a gm command and will spawn in your inventory. Any type of exclusivity is arbitrary.

 

[Fag Albert]

If you ever played around with private servers, every item in the game is assigned a number. That number can be entered with a gm command and will spawn in your inventory. Any type of exclusivity is arbitrary.

Well aware. Hence "Who cares?"

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

So in order to get past 800 rating in Solo shuffle you'll need to get at least four wins per. Fat chance of that happening for the majority of the groups out there. I've been able to do that twice out of 60 games. On average I get two.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

Never mind. won 3 out 6 this match, still lost 40 points when I dropped down to 650 (going to 610). There is no rhyme for the way this is set up. Must have their trannies working on it.