World of Warcraft

[Just Some Other Guy]

While that's interesting conceptually, they don't have the dungeons for it and they've already heavily invested in the overworld leveling (twice in fact).

They would need to steal from FFXIV to do that - in that the earlier dungeons are laid out in order of relative difficulty and represent a progression of learning.

WoW would have to retool a bunch of dungeons - and then abandon a whole lot more to facilitate it. They have a bad habit of earlier dungeons (Wailing Caverns, Deadmines) being substantially more complicated than ones that appear later (Stockades) and have no real interesting mechanics that differentiates them from one another. I know they tried to revamp some of them via Cataclysm but they're mostly gimmicks instead (Cookie's food eating, controllable cannons, etc) of real mechanics.

Leveling is conceptually fine in WoW - it just needs another pass. Primarily - they don't know what kind of content to put into it, they've got like 10 expansions worth of leveling content but a character only needs like 5% of it to hit max level. They want it to be a vehicle for the story but 90% of leveling quests are entirely disconnected from the story and could be called filler, and they have a lot of story in post-leveling content that never got recycled.

My ideal WOTLK newbie leveling experience would just be Icecrown and a mix of the leveling and post-game dungoens and raids, ending with the ICC raid. You could do a similar thing across each expansion in order that takes up 5-10 levels each.

Idk. It's pretty clear that both the devs and the main WoW playerbase really only care about getting into raiding asap. Why feed around the bush about it? There's not a newbie crowd to please because it's a dying game anyways.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Idk. It's pretty clear that both the devs and the main WoW playerbase really only care about getting into raiding asap. Why feed around the bush about it? There's not a newbie crowd to please because it's a dying game anyways.

If they put some effort into the new player experience, it may not be a dying game. It feels like near certainty that WoW is going to find itself on Xbox/Xbox Game Pass sooner or later (new UI tweaking, controller support, the pending acquisition) so they are going to get a new audience possibly.

Additionally - including some better dungeons and including raids into the leveling experience would be great for raiding long term, it would be a way to introduce the concept to players who might otherwise avoid it.

 

[GenociderSyo]

They just put out the roadmap until 10.2

 

[Well Intentioned]

https://twitter.com/LifeatBlizzard/status/1633520961311092736

Happy Women's Day!

<shot of a bestial male character riding a bitch>

The state of Current Year Blizzard. It's funny because it's accurate, not because they're being disrespectful.

 

[GenociderSyo]

 

[spacko]

GAMEPLAY FIRST

 

[YachieKicchou]

My take on WoW after playing for over a decade;
WoW was always at its best when Blizzard was willing to blatantly steal from its competitors and fuck them into the dirt. I remember the XP events when Wildstar went live and when it had its beta. I remember all the times some new MMO would come out with some new feature or take on things or some competitor would do something and you'd see it in the next patch. Blizzard would basically wield all the manpower they had and just come in and take whatever you made and then refine it and make it better.
The entire purpose was to maintain a captive audience through the logic of, "why would I ever play anything else and bother reestablishing myself in another game when my 'home game' will just copy the good stuff and give it to me?" with all the usual Blizzard polish added.
It's what Fortnite is doing right now and why it dominates. You can't really compete because if you do anything original, Epic Games is just going to take it, and you can't out-innovate them because they'll just match you at every step with billions of dollars of budget and a completely captive audience.

I've been going through Dragonflight again and it's really funny how you can tell how they're back to doing this, and also how much more fun the game is for it. We know now from current events that Blizzard crashed and burned between 5.4 and WoD and then couldn't recover and didn't have the ability to really sit there and copy and steal from everyone else. You really get the feeling Blizzard is mostly reestablished and has put themselves back into the position to just fuck every other game to death by sheer shamelessness again.

WoW won't die. It's just going to decline for periods of time. I genuinely think that if Blizzard keeps their current path, and keeps trending towards just outright taking from everyone else and putting their spin on it and can rebuild the captive audience they lost a lot of, they're going to overtake their position again. I don't even think it's wrong to do what they are doing. If it works it works, and they're actively competing, this is the exact thing you would be doing if you were trying to maintain your #1 spot. Every WoWkiller was basically trying to compete, but instead just handed Blizard fresh ideas and good spins on current ones that they just took. You weren't beating WoW, or even denting it, you were just making it stronger.

FFXIV only competed while Blizzard became a sleeping giant, I really don't think they can compete with Blizzard putting their full effort doing the dirty shit they do.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

That's some pretty hard coping, ngl.

 

[King Dead]

Got an email about being given a free level 60 character boost and a WoW free weekend. Even with fiber internet, I'm not gonna redownload the whole game for a couple days only to realize I still have no desire to play. They couldn't even wait until after the next patch drops in like a week and a half, so that's real nice of them.

I could be mistaken, but I seem to recall hearing about lapsed subscribers being given a week or a month of free gametime to get them to come back. This was years ago, so my memory might be fuzzy, but does anyone else remember that? If so, they're getting pretty stingy with return incentives. Either that, or they think that a couple days is enough to get a lapsed addict to get hooked again, so why bother giving more free stuff that they'll just get paid for?

 

[Lou's Sentient Backfat]

Got an email about being given a free level 60 character boost and a WoW free weekend. Even with fiber internet, I'm not gonna redownload the whole game for a couple days only to realize I still have no desire to play. They couldn't even wait until after the next patch drops in like a week and a half, so that's real nice of them.

I could be mistaken, but I seem to recall hearing about lapsed subscribers being given a week or a month of free gametime to get them to come back. This was years ago, so my memory might be fuzzy, but does anyone else remember that? If so, they're getting pretty stingy with return incentives. Either that, or they think that a couple days is enough to get a lapsed addict to get hooked again, so why bother giving more free stuff that they'll just get paid for?

I got a free week back during WoD that caused me to waste more of my time and money on the game. But At this point I have no desire to go back. Blizzard is only pretending to give a shit because of the supposed M$ buyout. And let's face it, the class that I loved is dead because the fuckwits put in charge of it have no idea what to do with the class.

 

[StacticShock]

I got a free week back during WoD that caused me to waste more of my time and money on the game. But At this point I have no desire to go back. Blizzard is only pretending to give a shit because of the supposed M$ buyout. And let's face it, the class that I loved is dead because the fuckwits put in charge of it have no idea what to do with the class.

my fat nigger, they have to recoup micro$oft with the purchase money they wasted on them just like minecraft did by releasing the minecoins compatible bedrock which microsoft jewed hard to get around notch's "i don't want minecraft with microtransacitons" talk some people mention every blue moon or so by also pointing out how bedrock was written from the scratch and is a different game having only the visuals of MC, it happens everystein singleberg timeowitz they buy shit which means doubling down on microtransactions... that's why i'm on the side of the niggers that ugrh the shit out whenever one of these billion dollar companies buy game studios.
there's also Gameloft being bought by Vivendi too which ruined dungeon hunter.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Every WoWkiller was basically trying to compete, but instead just handed Blizard fresh ideas and good spins on current ones that they just took.

I wonder what ideas you think WoW took from any other game - because outside of Everquest (where you can heavily feel the influence) I can't see any.

WoW was successful because it was super accessible, fun, and extremely polished and specifically because it did not take things from other games (no variable crafting, no XP loss on death, no item loss on death, no permadeath of NPCs, items crafted in stacks of 200 instead of 1, very few overworld raid bosses, no week longno 'time out' death penalty etc). It threw out a bunch of the tedium of other "hardcore" games of the time. It also had no real competition because the other games of it's time were very old and dated (EQ1, Ultima Online, MUDs) or new but janky and unfinished (Star Wars Galaxies, Tabula Rasa, Secret World, Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online) that copied more from WoW than the other way around.

WoW certainly didn't take any character customization from Rift, nor did it even attempt to take player housing/cities from SWG, and it never leaned into PVP control of the overworld like Conan or Warhammer.

Blizzard also cannot really "steal" or "refine" ideas for competitors anymore - because their competitors have perfected and integrated those systems in a brilliant way that really can't be copied in WoW's current state. New World has housing/territory/player control that can't be integrated into WoW as is. FFXIV has a presentation/story that can't really be copied by WoW - the WoW audience does not want an integrated story.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

I could be mistaken, but I seem to recall hearing about lapsed subscribers being given a week or a month of free gametime to get them to come back. This was years ago, so my memory might be fuzzy, but does anyone else remember that?

I think they did a week, and I remember it happening like once, a long long time ago. Periodically, they'll throw out weekends or some shit.

FF14 does something similar, where every now and then they announce returner campaigns or whatever to give people a few days to log back in. Yet it works better for FF on the whole because it's marketed as this whole little event, and there's a lot you can do in the game even if you don't have the most recent expansion. Whereas with WoW, like... the new expansion is the game. There's really nothing else you'd want to do with that opportunity to come back. You could... what, do leveling dungeons? Does anyone enjoy those? Like, if you could just skip the leveling process entirely, I really don't think anything of value is lost from the game's current iteration. So it seems like it's mostly just an effort to try to hook people who dropped but picked up Dragonflight.

I've seen a bunch of fucking ads for this game lately when I throw youtube on a phone or console, too. Normally I'm oblivious to when this shit happens because adblock, which tells me that for the dumb fucks out there without it, they're seeing like 8 ads for this stupid thing in a two-hour block of media.

 

[Well Intentioned]

FF14 does something similar, where every now and then they announce returner campaigns or whatever to give people a few days to log back in. Yet it works better for FF on the whole because it's marketed as this whole little event, and there's a lot you can do in the game even if you don't have the most recent expansion.

It's standard marketing strategy, period. You have all these email addresses and contact information for people who were previously interested in your product. Whip together an email, send it out through MailChimp, boom.

 

[ZMOT]

I've been going through Dragonflight again and it's really funny how you can tell how they're back to doing this, and also how much more fun the game is for it. We know now from current events that Blizzard crashed and burned between 5.4 and WoD and then couldn't recover and didn't have the ability to really sit there and copy and steal from everyone else. You really get the feeling Blizzard is mostly reestablished and has put themselves back into the position to just fuck every other game to death by sheer shamelessness again.

and steal from whom again? the time of WoW clones is long over, for everything else they'd need actual talent what to steal and how to adapt it.

you also forget WoW isn't the behemoth it once was. the exact same "why would I ever play anything else and bother reestablishing myself in another game when my 'home game' will just copy the good stuff and give it to me?" now works against it because those games either offer the same as WoW in a better package or scratch the OMG NUMBERS GET HIGHER itch better than WoW ever could.

I wonder what ideas you think WoW took from any other game - because outside of Everquest (where you can heavily feel the influence) I can't see any.

there were more, but the transmog system's final state was basically established by warhammer online/rift, as were other parts I already forget about (back then I could at least count a handful of them). remember blizzard tends to go through iterations where it's still somewhat crap, but since it's OMG NEW FEATURE and WoWtards don't play other games so have no clue anyway it's still seen as improvement. meeting stones will probably be the most notorious example ever where players have literally screamed at blizzard how retarded their first implementations were.

and don't forget the game is almost 20 years old - it might not have taken much "inspiration" from EQ initially (depending who you ask it's still a heavily casualized version tho), but blizzard is still desperate for new features to sell their expansions with besides higher numbers.

I think they did a week, and I remember it happening like once, a long long time ago. Periodically, they'll throw out weekends or some shit.

I think it's 10 days or so in FF14.
FF14 also has a much more lenient trial (for longer too iirc) if you just wanna get a taste of the game.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

you also forget WoW isn't the behemoth it once was. the exact same "why would I ever play anything else and bother reestablishing myself in another game when my 'home game' will just copy the good stuff and give it to me?" now works against it because those games either offer the same as WoW in a better package or scratch the OMG NUMBERS GET HIGHER itch better than WoW ever could.

Nah man, WoW is totally just a "sleeping giant". Any day now they'll be back with a bang! It's Blizz, afterall!

For real tho, some people still can't get over that WoW is just a shadow of it's former self. If you still enjoy it, more power to you. But it's been on a downhill slope for a while now, and no amount of new expansion hype will ever bring it back.

 

[Tanner Glass]

there were more, but the transmog system's final state was basically established by warhammer online/rift, as were other parts I already forget about (back then I could at least count a handful of them). remember blizzard tends to go through iterations where it's still somewhat crap, but since it's OMG NEW FEATURE and WoWtards don't play other games so have no clue anyway it's still seen as improvement. meeting stones will probably be the most notorious example ever where players have literally screamed at blizzard how retarded their first implementations were.

and don't forget the game is almost 20 years old - it might not have taken much "inspiration" from EQ initially (depending who you ask it's still a heavily casualized version tho), but blizzard is still desperate for new features to sell their expansions with besides higher numbers.

My impression was the Transmog system as well as Mythic+ dungeons were taken directly from Diablo 3, implemented by the D3 team directly.

I think it's 10 days or so in FF14.
FF14 also has a much more lenient trial (for longer too iirc) if you just wanna get a taste of the game.

FF14 free "return" promotions are typically a four day period that you can choose at any point in a month, as long as the account has lapsed for 30 days. They are pretty frequent and great for "I took a break but want to catch up on the new additions" stuff.

FF14's free trial is the entirety of the base game (A Realm Reborn) and the first expansion (Heavensward) that you can just play indefinitely with some restrictions (can't join a guild, use the market board, whisper players, etc). Meaning that not only can you get a taste, you can get a whole fucking serving and go nuts for a couple hundred hours if you so chose to.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

there were more

The whole of achievements had been done already before they threw it in, and world quests stretch all the way back to warhammer online's first implementation of public quests (probably better known now for shit like Rift's or GW2's implementation). TERA/GW2 was a big game around the time that pandas came out, which had action combat - and lo and behold, the monk had a weird mobility move that didn't really gel with the rest of the game's implementation at the time that seemed like it was just aping off of the action-RPG's dodge systems.

Rogue's shadowstep talent was lifted prettymuch straight from GW1 (even if it isn't a very unique idea tbh), and I feel like I remember them ripping something from Wildstar before that abortion collapsed in on itself. Man, it's wild to think that game even existed. Layering or sharding or whatever were also implemented by other games before WoW started to implement them, since I vaguely remember GW2 had megaservers before WoW started pairing you with players from your server cluster (to hide all the dead servers ofc). Even the idea of re-releasing a 'classic' variant of the game was something that first worked for OSRS before Blizzard was even remotely amenable to the idea.

Man, that's another one - Nostalrius was a chinaman-infested 500ms clusterfuck of a server, but it was so much more fun than classic proper. Someone's got to be cooking a proper pserver launch somewhere in the world, or at least I can hope.

 

[Übertroon]

FFXIV only competed while Blizzard became a sleeping giant, I really don't think they can compete with Blizzard putting their full effort doing the dirty shit they do.

Doubt. What FFXIV did required dedication from the writers and devs to keep a story going along for a decade.
Most MMOs will drop a particular arc whenever they change writers or the pushback against the current story becomes too great. None of the characters or themes in Dragonflight will matter in 5 years.
There will never be that moment for WoW where 10 years of storyline culminates in a satisfying manner.

 

[ZMOT]

My impression was the Transmog system as well as Mythic+ dungeons were taken directly from Diablo 3, implemented by the D3 team directly.

iirc you had to lug stuff around in MOP before it became the "final" version rift already did.

The whole of achievements had been done already before they threw it in, and world quests stretch all the way back to warhammer online's first implementation of public quests (probably better known now for shit like Rift's or GW2's implementation).

those were actually lifted from tabula rasa where stuff takes over quest hubs. can't remember if it had public quests.

Even the idea of re-releasing a 'classic' variant of the game was something that first worked for OSRS before Blizzard was even remotely amenable to the idea.

even rift that classic servers before WoW (apparently they sucked, but still). only reason classic exists because they saw the demand and how many people shat on retail. blizz can be retarded as they want with "you think you do, but you don't", but smarter people understood it was literally leaving money on the table.