World of Warcraft

[Stab You in the Back]

Every "major innovation" the game has is almost entirely focused on high level, current players (new zones, raids, <EXPANSION GIMMICK>, etc) and they're somehow shocked that a player who tried the game and bounced off a few years back would just bounce off again - but the game from that perspective has never changed.

I don't know if you are LITERALLY retarded or just pretending to be retarded. Every expansion since Legion has fucked over long-term players to cater to newbies. Stat squishes. Ability squishes. System squishes (rip Glyphs). Fucking LEVEL SQUISHES. New starting zone. New leveling experiences. Faster leveling. Slower leveling. The game is a lot less fun for long-term players because the goddamn brainlets at Blizzard shared your retarded thought that they needed to cater more to new players.

I agree to the extent that the new player experience is not fun. The Dragon Isles SUCKS because it fucking railroads the player and drains any and all fun you might have from playing the game for the first time. New players also don't get that tour of azeroth I got when I leveled for the first time. They get to choose from ONE out of several expansions to level in. Its a fucking weird, disjointed experience. Imagine being a first time player, you get railroaded for two hours in the Dragon Isles, then level from 20-50 in DRAENOR of all places. Who the fuck would ever stick around after that?

WoW's biggest asset is that it has eight expansions worth of content for new players to play through. That's an attractive prospect to people picking up the game for the first time. But instead of nuturing and preserving old content, blizz constantly shits on and undermines it to cater to the "new player" who they believe, like you, stupidly, that too much content would scare off new players.

In short, fuck you.

 

[GenociderSyo]

Already found a glaring issue with the new talent system. Just realized I had a NEW talent that i had no way of knowing was not moved to my bars. Used to highlight talents which were not moved to any bar. Now I can happily put more then 6 debuffs on bosses

 

[Bob_]

A few people from my classic guild dipped into retail this weekend. The overwhelming feedback was "what the fuck is going on here?"

 

[Tanner Glass]

I don't know if you are LITERALLY retarded or just pretending to be retarded. Every expansion since Legion has fucked over long-term players to cater to newbies. Stat squishes. Ability squishes. System squishes (rip Glyphs). Fucking LEVEL SQUISHES. New starting zone. New leveling experiences. Faster leveling. Slower leveling. The game is a lot less fun for long-term players because the goddamn brainlets at Blizzard shared your retarded thought that they needed to cater more to new players.

I agree to the extent that the new player experience is not fun. The Dragon Isles SUCKS because it fucking railroads the player and drains any and all fun you might have from playing the game for the first time. New players also don't get that tour of azeroth I got when I leveled for the first time. They get to choose from ONE out of several expansions to level in. Its a fucking weird, disjointed experience. Imagine being a first time player, you get railroaded for two hours in the Dragon Isles, then level from 20-50 in DRAENOR of all places. Who the fuck would ever stick around after that?

WoW's biggest asset is that it has eight expansions worth of content for new players to play through. That's an attractive prospect to people picking up the game for the first time. But instead of nuturing and preserving old content, blizz constantly shits on and undermines it to cater to the "new player" who they believe, like you, stupidly, that too much content would scare off new players.

In short, fuck you.

Whoa there sailor - I get you're defensive about the game but no need to get that hot and bothered about it. We don't even disagree.

That said - nothing you outlined is good for new players. Stat, Level, Abilitiy, Item, System squishes aren't done to benefit new players - they're done exclusively for the benefit of Blizzard's design team. New and High level players do not care about DPS numbers as raw numbers - meaning that a player would be really excited to do 1,000 DPS if 1,000 DPS was the norm and would not care if they were doing 1,000,000 DPS if the norm was supposed to be 1,500,000 DPS. Blizzard designed themselves into a corner and had to squish numbers just because they were getting too huge (and then backed themselves into the same corner two or three more times).

The "choose your leveling expansion" you outline is really bad - but actual new players do not have access to it. Chromie Time unlocks once you've got a Shadowlands character - so new players (including free trial players) are actually instead railroaded into Exile's Reach from 1-10 and then 11-20 is Warlords of Draenor I MEAN BATTLE FOR AZEROTH. That's the "best foot" that Blizzard is putting forward for the last few years. You say "Who the fuck would ever stick around after that" and I 100% agree - which is why it's more baffling that it's unavoidable new player experience. I think that BfA is just as bad, if not worse, than WoD.

I also agree with you that WoW has a lot of content that new players haven't hit and do not - I only disagree that the leveling content is in any way "good". Most leveling content in every expansion (aka all 8 of them) is just lazy quest hubs and "Collect 'X' Item". My suggestion is to find a much better way to incorporate old dungeons/non-leveling areas/ and most importantly raids into the leveling experience.

WoW's problem isn't "too much content" - it's "too much bad content that we still force on new players for no reason". Even Molten Core would be a drastic improvement over a Warlords of Draenor quest hub - but there's like ~24 entire raid zones you could use. You could even just make a single, well thought out leveling experience that takes a player through several (albeit tweaked/nerfed) actual pre-raid zones and actual raids. Like a small WOTLK campaign in ICC that ends with the ICC raid and so on - which was my suggestion.

Blizzard's bad design decisions aren't based on player groups and there's no reason to be tribal about them. New players don't make the game worse for Existing players and vice versa - every dumb change Blizzard makes is just because they think it's a good idea. You can't really look at the new player experience and think "Yep - this is the best they can do" or think that Existing players had to give anything up for it.

In short, no need for "fuck yous" here. We both seem to think that WoW has better content for newbies than what it gives them currently and that the New Player experience drastically needs to be improved for the game to be attractive and that it needs new players to actually survive (doubly so now that the Chinese market was just lost).

EDIT - I confused BfA and WoD

 

[Frosted Snowflakes]

This part of the recapped Dragonflight interview from Ion Hazzikostas got my attention and thought I'd share it. He's admitting that he's too stressed and doesn't want to accept criticism from the fans' feedback that the current modern woke devs don't give a shit, when truthfully they're too busy on Twitter all day shitting on the fans AND shitting on the lore.

From Raider Dot Io

From MMO-Champion

 

[Übertroon]

I don't know if you are LITERALLY retarded or just pretending to be retarded. Every expansion since Legion has fucked over long-term players to cater to newbies. Stat squishes. Ability squishes. System squishes (rip Glyphs). Fucking LEVEL SQUISHES. New starting zone. New leveling experiences. Faster leveling. Slower leveling. The game is a lot less fun for long-term players because the goddamn brainlets at Blizzard shared your retarded thought that they needed to cater more to new players.

I agree to the extent that the new player experience is not fun. The Dragon Isles SUCKS because it fucking railroads the player and drains any and all fun you might have from playing the game for the first time. New players also don't get that tour of azeroth I got when I leveled for the first time. They get to choose from ONE out of several expansions to level in. Its a fucking weird, disjointed experience. Imagine being a first time player, you get railroaded for two hours in the Dragon Isles, then level from 20-50 in DRAENOR of all places. Who the fuck would ever stick around after that?

WoW's biggest asset is that it has eight expansions worth of content for new players to play through. That's an attractive prospect to people picking up the game for the first time. But instead of nuturing and preserving old content, blizz constantly shits on and undermines it to cater to the "new player" who they believe, like you, stupidly, that too much content would scare off new players.

In short, fuck you.

The awful leveling and new player experience exists as it does to get players to max level as fast as possible. Blizzard has conceded that they've made everything before the endgame a waste of time, but rather than fix it they just want players to speed through it as fast as possible.
Meanwhile in FF14 you can be playing vanilla content for months because the patch 2.3 raid is still relevant content, and will reward you with level appropriate rewards even up to max level. So you can be doing a Heavensward dungeon at lvl 90 and get endgame tokens, and you still have three expansions left to go through

 

[Smug Chuckler]

This part of the recapped Dragonflight interview from Ion Hazzikostas got my attention and thought I'd share it. He's admitting that he's too stressed and doesn't want to accept criticism from the fans' feedback that the current modern woke devs don't give a shit, when truthfully they're too busy on Twitter all day shitting on the fans AND shitting on the lore.

From Raider Dot Io
View attachment 3903075

From MMO-Champion
View attachment 3903105

So whatever happened to the Community Council?

 

[Cats]

had my DK on an RP server back in the day bc my friends played there, just logged in to see if worth transferring to my main realm and gearing with the new Frost changes

:[

 

[pursuitsnail]

The "choose your leveling expansion" you outline is really bad - but actual new players do not have access to it. Chromie Time unlocks once you've got a Shadowlands character - so new players (including free trial players) are actually instead railroaded into Exile's Reach from 1-10 and then 11-20 is Warlords of Draenor. That's the "best foot" that Blizzard is putting forward for the last few years. You say "Who the fuck would ever stick around after that" and I 100% agree - which is why it's more baffling that it's unavoidable new player experience.

Thought new players were sent to BFA for 11-60... On the assumption that the new player doesn't know/realize the rest of the expansions are accessible to them. There's some limited scaling, but you can go through Cata 'old' zones, then pick from BC, Cata new zones, Wrath, and MoP before heading to WoD, Legion, and finally BFA. But I'm not sure how easy it is for a new player to find that out after being ushered to BFA to start questing.

 

[GenociderSyo]

had my DK on an RP server back in the day bc my friends played there, just logged in to see if worth transferring to my main realm and gearing with the new Frost changes

:[

View attachment 3903183

That is somehow better that thats a drakthyr asking.

 

[Bob_]

Ion can cry all he wants, its just bullshit. Sure, his little team cares about the game, but his team isn't in control. The game is run by the mbas and accountants now, who only care about screwing the last little penny out of us losers who still play.

They monetising whatever they can and continually push out poor, unfinished content. The focus is to make money off box sales every 2 years (sooner if possible), sell as many services/pixels as possible for fucking outrageous prices, and sell as many 6 and 12 month subs as they can. Fuck the game play, fuck any form of support; the players are only viewed as targets to extract the most money out of as possible.

Legion was great, but that was their swansong. The game is never getting better.

 

[Radola Gajda]

Can confirm. It was a free weekend, so I thought "what the heck, why not, it's been [insert very large number of years] since I've played, how bad could it be?" Man, what a steaming pile of hot garbage. The "social contract" you have to agree with before playing was foreshadowing. "we are going to monitor all your chat, and voice logs for mean words."

Spoiler: autistic rant

The cross-realm stuff is bad, I don't want to play with Brazilians. A guy somehow invites me to a party from another server, and we group up, he's max level, he gives me some bags and stuff, nice gesture, I type my jokes and thanks in party chat. But he doesn't respond, I do this for 10-15 minutes as he follows me around skinning my leftovers. This is because he cant even see party chat even though we're in a party. What tranny coded that?

Questing is different, the default is this beacon thing that tells you how far you are to the quest objective, because apparently thats more fun, walk to the diamond, press the button walk to next diamond. I turned it off.

Who designed that new instance system? It was so nice to be in a region, and seeing in general chat people forming an instance group, then you'd meet up and do the dungeon, this does not exist anymore. Now I get matched with other people of wildly different level in some Godforsaken "Temple of Sethralis" with two level 55s and a 28, and im the level 18 healer. Nobody speaks in the group, zero. It takes what feels like ages to burn down a single group of mobs, we make it through the first boss, easily enough, takes ages to kill it. The second giant snake boss covers the entire floor with AOE poison shit (the entire floor im not joking), it also periodically blinds you, and now the game yells at you "incoming ur gonna get blinded lmao" by the end of the fight everyone is dead but me and the tank, because there is nowhere to walk that isnt poison, and people are 40m+ away from me dying. The third boss just did a ton of aoe damage, and people kept getting hit with these slow deploying floor spears and taking tons of damage, and I don't think I have the talents to mitigate it at level fucking 18. We wiped twice and I knew there was no way I was healing through that so I left out of courtesy (I'm sure I would have been kicked anyways). I got zero XP for doing 2/3s of the instance, and zero loot, you don't get items when you kill bosses, you get some gold. I enjoyed almost lagging out 6 times during play, that was fun. We lost one guy from disconnection, seems like these instance servers have conection issues. I wanted to do a simple instance cause im rusty as shit, but nope, cant do those. I wanted to do deadmines, but nah these new ones are the only ones you're "allowed" queue for. It also makes the world seem very disconnected, as you don't actually run into the dungeons anymore, or travel to them at all.

Some of the new spell animations are good, some of them are not so good. Some of the old ones were more visible, and I think they may have even assisted people in seeing if they are getting hit with them, and thereby hinting that they are standing in the correct area.

Why do they constantly nag me about the pet window, why do I care about 'hoppy the elephant limited edition TM pet?' They even have certified "guides" to answer your "newbie questions" in a special quarantined newbie chat, and they give these people a special badge to show they are "doing it for free." One of the guides informs me that the instance system is "the new streamlined WoW experience" What does that even mean? Streamlined to what? I don't recognize the game.

Good for you that you quit last boss in temple of setraliss is healing boss. You know healer must heal npc while rest of the group deals with adds.
ToS is one of BfA dungeons.
blizz after success of Legions mythic+ dungeons (they even had/have esport event for m+) tried to make dungeons more "competetive". So they are pain in the ass especially if you dont have specific ability to counter mobs/bosses.
OH there are ghosts they have only 10hp , but they also have 1 million hp of absorbtion shield . I hope you brought mage with mass dispel .

Back in legion unless you pushed ultra high keys all you needed is good tank and four random dps, healer was nice but not necessary.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Thought new players were sent to BFA for 11-60... On the assumption that the new player doesn't know/realize the rest of the expansions are accessible to them. There's some limited scaling, but you can go through Cata 'old' zones, then pick from BC, Cata new zones, Wrath, and MoP before heading to WoD, Legion, and finally BFA. But I'm not sure how easy it is for a new player to find that out after being ushered to BFA to start questing.

Yeah I said 11-20 as in referencing the free trial (which caps you at 20). But new players are send to WoD I mean BFA for as long as possible. Actual new subscribed players will be in BfA the entire time.

Also there's limited scaling as in just a lazy math scaler for enemy HP/Damage. A new player wants to level in BfA because the drops aren't scaled. BfA trash drops still sell for like 5-100g where as 'Classic' trash drops are still like 9s 15c - over the 20 trial levels it adds up to a few thousand gold that a new player could really, really use.

 

[GenociderSyo]

Yeah I said 11-20 as in referencing the free trial (which caps you at 20). But new players are send to WoD for as long as possible. Actual new subscribed players will be in WoD the entire time.

Yep in newcomer chat we have macros to help cause most of the day sometimes is people typing wave to try to wave at the one wod guy.

 

[Lichen Bark]

WoW's biggest asset is that it has eight expansions worth of content for new players to play through. That's an attractive prospect to people picking up the game for the first time. But instead of nuturing and preserving old content, blizz constantly shits on and undermines it to cater to the "new player" who they believe, like you, stupidly, that too much content would scare off new players.

In short, fuck you.

This make absolutely no sense, The level cap should be like 160 now or something, It would be very fun to play through everything, and in a game where you playing more = mo money, you'd think they'd go this route. I just wanted to play in the old starting areas, and work my way through the content, but instead I'm innudated with things telling me to the "scalie" starting area, and instance queue for content that has no relevance to the area I'm currently playing in.

A few people from my classic guild dipped into retail this weekend. The overwhelming feedback was "what the fuck is going on here?"

That was overall feeling to be honest. You know the game has strayed so far away from it's roots that they needed to release a complete other game called "classic."
I felt like the Chinese guy from the Empire of Dust documentary "You've neglected the things others had left you" It used to be such a good game.

Spoiler: Clip from documentary.

had my DK on an RP server back in the day bc my friends played there, just logged in to see if worth transferring to my main realm and gearing with the new Frost changes

:[

View attachment 3903183

I saw one of these "things" walking around and immediately had to resist my urge to call them a disgusting furry. (Yes I know Tauren, but they weren't introduced to cater to furries.)

Good for you that you quit last boss in temple of setraliss is healing boss. You know healer must heal npc while rest of the group deals with adds.
ToS is one of BfA dungeons.
blizz after success of Legions mythic+ dungeons (they even had/have esport event for m+) tried to make dungeons more "competetive". So they are pain in the ass especially if you dont have specific ability to counter mobs/bosses.
OH there are ghosts they have only 10hp , but they also have 1 million hp of absorbtion shield . I hope you brought mage with mass dispel .

Back in legion unless you pushed ultra high keys all you needed is good tank and four random dps, healer was nice but not necessary.

The last time I played was in Wrath of the Lich King, I like how I can go from playing in Westfall to somehow knowing that this asshole last boss has all these special conditions. How was I supposed to know that? I haven't played in ages, I wanted to fight stupid captain cookie, not have a "raiding light" experience, I don't have Grid installed it's a pain doing something like that without that addon. We had two shadow priests, and a huntard dps. Do they actually play the game they have people download? Ever since blizzard became "Activision-Blizzard" you knew things weren't ever going to be the same again.

 

[pursuitsnail]

Yeah I said 11-20 as in referencing the free trial (which caps you at 20). But new players are send to WoD for as long as possible. Actual new subscribed players will be in WoD the entire time.

Also there's limited scaling as in just a lazy math scaler for enemy HP/Damage. A new player wants to level in WoD because the drops aren't scaled. WoD trash drops still sell for like 5-100g where as 'Classic' trash drops are still like 9s 15c - over the 20 trial levels it adds up to a few thousand gold that a new player could really, really use.

We're having some weird autistic miscommunication- New players are not being sent to WoD at all. They're being sent to BFA. It's not even 'as long as possible'. Once they get a character to 60 they're released from that hell.

I wish Blizzard would do themselves a favor and make a 'newbie' dungeon finder category for players stuck in BFA so they can get a sane introduction to group content with Stocks and RFC instead of being shoved into Freehold with no idea what's going on.

 

[Tanner Glass]

We're having some weird autistic miscommunication- New players are not being sent to WoD at all. They're being sent to BFA. It's not even 'as long as possible'. Once they get a character to 60 they're released from that hell.

I wish Blizzard would do themselves a favor and make a 'newbie' dungeon finder category for players stuck in BFA so they can get a sane introduction to group content with Stocks and RFC instead of being shoved into Freehold with no idea what's going on.

Ah - we aren't having any autistic miscommunication, just me. I mixed up WoD and BFA in my head for some reason. I'll go ahead and clean that up in the posts above, but my bad. I'd still say that "getting a character to 60" is as long as possible, as in they have to have the entire experience inside of BfA.

But to your point - yes - having a 'newbie' dungeon finder with maybe a curated selection of ~30 dungeons as a "best of" pre-expansion dungeons to level through would be way better than the current setup. I think that Chromie Time players are locked into their own expansion's dungeon list and will be stuck LookingForGroup in that special queue for 30 minutes until the duty finder tries to put them into other expansions, unless that changed that somewhat recently.

I'd put cleaner/shorter/simpler dungeons in there just for new players to cut their teeth on and save a lot of the weird/hard ones for a separate queue entirely.

 

[pursuitsnail]

Ah - we aren't having any autistic miscommunication, just me. I mixed up WoD and BFA in my head for some reason. I'll go ahead and clean that up in the posts above, but my bad. I'd still say that "getting a character to 60" is as long as possible, as in they have to have the entire experience inside of BfA.

But to your point - yes - having a 'newbie' dungeon finder with maybe a curated selection of ~30 dungeons as a "best of" pre-expansion dungeons to level through would be way better than the current setup. I think that Chromie Time players are locked into their own expansion's dungeon list and will be stuck LookingForGroup in that special queue for 30 minutes until the duty finder tries to put them into other expansions, unless that changed that somewhat recently.

I'd put cleaner/shorter/simpler dungeons in there just for new players to cut their teeth on and save a lot of the weird/hard ones for a separate queue entirely.

Don't expansions all come with boosts still? If so, clicking that button gets you out of BFA and into DF. Honestly, sometimes I think WoD might be better for newbies, but after MoP they all have expansion-encompassing widgets that will probably aggravate/frustrate newbies their first time through.

A curated newbie section of dungeon finder should be level-aware, so new players aren't just shoved into new situations without a knowing what to do without making sure they're progressed enough to have the class/spec skills to handle it. And the duty-finder is 5 minutes before asking to expand the search, if I remember. Queue hell is (usually) not that awful. They really ought to add a way to select expansions to queue for independently of Chromie time if they haven't already.

The real queue-trap is silently switching from classic dungeons to Cata at 30. Unexpected Stonecore is a way to make sure players are in for a shit time.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Don't expansions all come with boosts still? If so, clicking that button gets you out of BFA and into DF. Honestly, sometimes I think WoD might be better for newbies, but after MoP they all have expansion-encompassing widgets that will probably aggravate/frustrate newbies their first time through.

A curated newbie section of dungeon finder should be level-aware, so new players aren't just shoved into new situations without a knowing what to do without making sure they're progressed enough to have the class/spec skills to handle it. And the duty-finder is 5 minutes before asking to expand the search, if I remember. Queue hell is (usually) not that awful. They really ought to add a way to select expansions to queue for independently of Chromie time if they haven't already.

The real queue-trap is silently switching from classic dungeons to Cata at 30. Unexpected Stonecore is a way to make sure players are in for a shit time.

Expansions come with boosts if you buy the expansion - if you get it for free when it's rolled into the "normal" subscription - you do not get a boost with it. So a new player will not get a boost unless they but <CURRENT EXPANSION>. Currently that would be Dragonflight for $70 USD (the $50 version of Dragonflight has no character boost lmao). $70 + a recurring subfee is going to put off a lot of new players

Warlords is a terrible expansion for newbies (although to be frank, they're all bad pre-WOTLK) just because narratively it would be extremely confusing. It's a time travel/alternate time line plot based on events from the previous expansion (which new players won't have played) that is centered around interesting changes to the established lore (which new players will have no reference of/or to). As far as a new player can tell - Garrosh seems to be the "good guy", as he's going back in time to prevent the Burning Crusade/Fel Orcs from being enslavement with the plot being "What about all those bad things he did in Mists of Pandaria (an expansion a new player would have not played)"?. Battle for Azeroth is pretty bad for a lot of reasons, but at least a new player can understand "Your faction and the other faction are at war and your faction wants to send you to secure new alliances". It still feels too important to send someone who only did Exile's Reach but it's at least followable.

It's one of the things that really demonstrates to me that World of Warcraft is basically built around existing players only - there's not even a token effort to include new players in the story, any story, ever. The closest they get is through hero classes - with those classes having a somewhat accelerated "here's what's going on with your character" arc but everything they put into the game is built on the assumption that the player is familiar with everything that came before.

 

[Retink Retunk]

So whatever happened to the Community Council?

It gave them the wrong answer when asked if everything was going good with the game.