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Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-11 02:40pm
by Civil War Man
TheFeniX wrote:Are current raids since Dragonsoul any more expansive than Firelands and before? While I bet the desires of the developers had a lot to do with it, they were devoting resources into an area few people were actually using. LFR opened up that story progression to the masses. The problem is that LFR became a crutch. WoW would have died years ago if raiding was the emphasis because the majority of the playerbase would never have seen it, because they either couldn't or wouldn't bother dealing with raiding guilds, thus would have had nothing to do.

But Blizzard loves this, like you said, "you're using it because we forced you to use it, so you must like it" style of bullshit with Garrisons and LFR. Since the success of Dragonsoul LFR, that's where they've wanted to push the game, so that's what they offered.
It's funny that you mention LFR opening up story progression to the masses, since Blizzard seems to have moved away from that philosophy. After all, the bonus boss for Mythic raiders in Highmaul is Cho'gall, and he gets killed off. So, for anyone who raids LFR, Cho'gall is this big-name villain who is established as one of Gul'dan's lieutenants in the opening zone, appears in Nagrand trying to steal the power of the Naaru in Oshu'gun, shows up at the beginning of Highmaul to attack the Ogres, and then just suddenly drops off the face of Draenor and is never seen or heard from again.

I sometimes wonder if the current lead devs dislike the idea of LFR, and have been quietly trying to sabotage it as a result. You can get better gear than LFR Highmaul from garrison missions, none of the bosses drop tier gear, you can't get any of the raid achievements beyond "completed this wing" (though that was also true in previous expansions), and the whole "Cho'gall's death doesn't even warrant a mention unless you raid Mythic" undermines the argument that LFR is a tourist mode for people who want to see the story. On the other hand, you can still get the legendary there, so if the devs are sabotaging LFR, it might be unintentional.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-11 03:03pm
by TheFeniX
Darmalus wrote:I've had virtually every friend who came back and later depart a few weeks after hitting level cap this expansion say basically the same thing, "This is it?" and a lot of them were actual raiders, but raiding alone was not enough it seems. The few who are still around seemed to fill their days with older content they never finished, having largely abandoned WoD except for raiding a few hours a week with their guild.
So, it's basically end-of-expansion boredom halfway through the expansion. No wonder I can't log onto a free-lowbie and not get instantly wrecked in any contested zone. If it's that bad for PvE, PvP players must be really bored.
Civil War Man wrote:It's funny that you mention LFR opening up story progression to the masses, since Blizzard seems to have moved away from that philosophy. After all, the bonus boss for Mythic raiders in Highmaul is Cho'gall, and he gets killed off. So, for anyone who raids LFR, Cho'gall is this big-name villain who is established as one of Gul'dan's lieutenants in the opening zone, appears in Nagrand trying to steal the power of the Naaru in Oshu'gun, shows up at the beginning of Highmaul to attack the Ogres, and then just suddenly drops off the face of Draenor and is never seen or heard from again.
That's shitty. Optional bosses like Algalon the Raid Destroyer shouldn't be part of the main story, maybe only mentioned in passing. Wasn't Cho'gal the last boss of BoT?
I sometimes wonder if the current lead devs dislike the idea of LFR, and have been quietly trying to sabotage it as a result. You can get better gear than LFR Highmaul from garrison missions, none of the bosses drop tier gear, you can't get any of the raid achievements beyond "completed this wing" (though that was also true in previous expansions), and the whole "Cho'gall's death doesn't even warrant a mention unless you raid Mythic" undermines the argument that LFR is a tourist mode for people who want to see the story. On the other hand, you can still get the legendary there, so if the devs are sabotaging LFR, it might be unintentional.
I just think they're opened up a doorway where they can tune the same content to different difficulties and save a shitload of money to keep stockholder pockets filled. It's the same type of laziness that lead to Diablo III having 3 different repeating leveling zones rather than a full game that took you from 1-50.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-11 04:54pm
by Darmalus
TheFeniX wrote:So, it's basically end-of-expansion boredom halfway through the expansion. No wonder I can't log onto a free-lowbie and not get instantly wrecked in any contested zone. If it's that bad for PvE, PvP players must be really bored.
WoD is currently where MoP was after a year long content drought, and everything I'm hearing out of the PTR is that 6.2 is basically a raid and a gear catchup zone so you can get into the raid quickly. The non-raid/catchup content is roughly a single energetic afternoons worth of stuff to do.

Funnily enough I enjoyed Trashcan (Ashran) when it first came out (I was playing enough that I could keep busy for the entire 3 hour queue). No one had any idea what they were doing, so activity consisted of two clusterfucks of players slamming into one another while trying to figure out how the hell the minigames worked. Good times.

Then we figured out how everything worked, and PvP dropped to zero as both sides avoided each other while completing objectives for maximum honor/conquest gains. Bad times, I got bored and left.

I'm really not a PvPer, so my only consideration in PvP is my personal fun, I know nothing of balance or rankings or whatever.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-11 11:07pm
by Highlord Laan
Yeah. WoW is really faltering for me. I want to like WoD, I want to enjoy the game, and I want to have fun. Sadly, the development being headed by hardcore Everquest raiders is really showing through now, and it's falling completely flat for me. I'm one of those damned "Ok. Saw the story portions and ran the dungeon/raid once, more story please" players. One of the dying breed that still remembers the "RPG" portion of the game genre.

If I want an endless gear grind, I'll go play Diablo.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-13 07:37pm
by TheFeniX
Huge ban wave went out today. People are crying a lot. I used a fishing bot way back in LK to get the coin out of the Dalaran fountain, but I actually looked into Honorbuddy today and Holy Shit, for $25 that thing will play the game for you and likely better than you could.

From what I can see, a lot of Mythic guilds got wrecked by the bans. Someone was saying the RBG ratings got cleaned out, but I can't verify this. Supposedly, the top ranked guy now is around 2000 rating due to all the bans.

This is comedy gold.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-14 11:43am
by TheFeniX
I need to quit going off all half-cocked, because the full story is hilarious and annoying.

Basically, Blizzard lost a legal battle against the creators of Honorbuddy WRT selling Diablo 3 gold. Conspiracy suggests that the banwave was in response to this, but there was a smaller wave that went out in March.

For those that don't know, as I didn't: Honorbuddy (and it's parts) is a subscription botting program the like I've never even heard of, much less seen. I probably should have known it exists, but I actually don't keep up with cheats. This program is capable of a tremendous amount of automation. It can PvP for you, treating Players like mobs with a "pull distance." It can move to hotspots, engage enemies, run a DPS/healing rotation, mount up, and move on to the next hotspot. Completely configurable at what it prioritizes, control points or HKs, whatever.

It can raid for you, completely handling your rotation while all you worry about is staying out of the fire. People claim it can't optimize your rotation, which I call bullshit on since there's more than a few rotations that aren't that hard to maximize and if weakauras can track procs and tell me what buttons to push, I'm sure having a program push that button isn't much harder to code.

It can run old instances and farm XP for you. Like I said in my earlier post: I can't see a single part of the game it can't automate. The idea that it isn't cheating is hilarious. I knew botting was an issue, but I had no idea it had become this sophisticated.

A couple of "well known" (I guess) streamers got popped. High ranked Arena PvPers who are said to have relied on kickbots and dotbots.

At one point, the HB forums had 10+ pages of people complaining about bans.

Some comments are just hilarious:
Taybox - "If I decide to keep playing WoW... I have to do everything manually now that HB is detected? like...

"leveling toons, grinding gold, raiding, grinding reps, farming mounts, etc?

"AW HELLLL NO. I havent played this game manually in a longggggggg time. HB was such a joy.

"Im not sad about my account, I'm sad that HB is not longer working...."
God forbid you have to play the game. And maybe if something isn't worth your time to do, it just isn't worth fucking doing at all.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-14 12:34pm
by Darmalus
Yeah, I've never quite understood why you would pay to subscribe to a game that is playing itself. That's the point when I would pack up and walk away.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-14 03:49pm
by Grumman
Darmalus wrote:Yeah, I've never quite understood why you would pay to subscribe to a game that is playing itself. That's the point when I would pack up and walk away.
Just because I use a duplication bug in Borderlands 2 doesn't mean I don't want to play Borderlands 2. It only means I want drop rates to be forgiving enough that grinding for cool legendaries remains fun and not a chore, and so would rather spend more time trying out a unique new gun and less time killing the same boss over and over and over and over because he and he alone sometimes drops the gun I want to try out.

I don't play WoW, so to me HonorBuddy is simply interesting, and seems like a potential learning experience:
1. There are parts of the game that people will literally pay money not to play, which suggests that the game would be more fun if either they were improved or not treated as roadblocks standing between the player and the content they want to play. (Then again, they might have already decided that as a subscription-based service, they're better off if you're mired in grindy prerequisites than actually having fun.)
2. Any AI that can play the game competently for players could potentially be repurposed to make PvE content better. The smarter you can make your NPCs fight, the less you need to rely on bullet sponges if you want to make the game challenging. It could be cool, for example, if bandits sent out low level NPC parties to hunt the local wildlife or to waylay travellers in the areas around their camps.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-14 04:34pm
by TheFeniX
I have no issue with cheating in single-player games, but in retrospect I realize how much botting was affecting my PvP experience and it was almost certainly the main reason I quit. As melee, I didn't have a lot of hard-casts, but those few I had can and were instantly interrupted by certain players. The few Monks I saw perfectly placing their healing bubbles on top of players most likely weren't skilled at all, just letting a program drop them for them. Battlegrounds would be a joke with half the raid sitting around doing nothing but getting as much honor as they could for a loss. I thought it was actual people just being lazy, but upon doing more reading into the "basic" battleground routines that would run, it makes perfect sense why certain players would just run back and forth between set locations.

What made it bearable is that I thought at least those assholes were wasting their time along with mine. Most likely, they weren't. And this really pisses me off.

This type of shit was why Diablo got stupidly boring and you couldn't game with pugs: training programs. Obviously, not as bad in WoW, but I want to know I'm losing because I was outplayed, not because someone spent $25 to make his character respond better and faster than I ever could. If I wanted that, I could go play against "Godlike" difficulty bots.

These types of programs make farming easier for botting players, who may just be farming mounts/whatever, but are also likely used by gold sellers and other types to order to influence server economies.

The thing is, without bots certain grinds might not be worth you time. I didn't mind Argent Dailies too much, but I also REALLY wanted the Charger mount. So I did it, but there were so many grinds I skipped out on because it wasn't worth the time. Even I'm guilty of botting, such as leaving my fishing bot running to get my coin. I justify that, even though it's wrong, as that was pretty much a single-player experience. But balancing around botting, even if included by Blizzard is already a thing: Garrison missions. You send NPCs out to do things for you and you get stuff from them.

WoD is centralized around this and I really don't want to see anymore.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-14 04:51pm
by Terralthra
Back in late Wrath early Cat, I farmed the dailies for months so I could buy every Argent mount I had access to (as a Warlock). The Sunreaver Dragonhawk was still one of my absolute favorite mounts (and I had well over a hundred).

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-14 05:07pm
by bilateralrope
Darmalus wrote:Yeah, I've never quite understood why you would pay to subscribe to a game that is playing itself. That's the point when I would pack up and walk away.
Worse still is when someone pays to get their character through the grind, complains about the lack of content because they never saw any of the levelling content, then leaves the game.
God forbid you have to play the game. And maybe if something isn't worth your time to do, it just isn't worth fucking doing at all.
Agreed. If you can't handle manually playing the grind and can't enjoy yourself if you avoid the grind, you should find another game.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-21 01:05am
by Darmalus
Grumman wrote:
Darmalus wrote:Yeah, I've never quite understood why you would pay to subscribe to a game that is playing itself. That's the point when I would pack up and walk away.
Just because I use a duplication bug in Borderlands 2 doesn't mean I don't want to play Borderlands 2. It only means I want drop rates to be forgiving enough that grinding for cool legendaries remains fun and not a chore, and so would rather spend more time trying out a unique new gun and less time killing the same boss over and over and over and over because he and he alone sometimes drops the gun I want to try out.
No one cares if you cheat in a single player game because the only one effected is you.

This is why people care about cheating and botting in an MMO.

Hilarious, yes, but still something that should be stamped out.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-22 10:05pm
by Civil War Man
So the hits apparently keep on coming. There's currently a bit of a shitstorm brewing after the lead dev revealed that not only were they not going to allow flying in Warlords, but they will probably not allow flying in any future expansions of the game.

Of course, they chose to make this announcement during an interview on a third party website, instead of their own website or even their Twitter feed. As some posters in the massive WOW forum thread about it have commented, their method of announcing it seems like they were hoping no one would notice.

As an added bonus, the announcement of no more flying ever came almost 10 days after they unveiled a new flying mount in their cash shop. For only $25, you too can not fly in the World of Warcraft!

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-23 04:06pm
by TheFeniX
They now have GMs popping up when you try to cancel. That isn't surprising, what is "surprising" is Blizzard's feelings on feedback:
GM: Why don't you go out in the world? Quests, Bonus Objectives, treasures - all can really fill the time:
Me: but it’s not your fault: D, did em all leveling, u see how many toons I have?
GM: Indeed. Is there any feedback you'd like to send along? What could we do to improve the game: even without flight?
Me: Sure, Add flight more content, Less Cash mounts and Listen to the Player base. And Stop with the bait and switch
GM: What about game: play stuff? Ways to make it more fun to ride your mounts on the ground?
And this is actually how Blizzard has always been. "Look, I get us beating you about the face with bats isn't fun. But that isn't feedback: tell us how to make beating you to death fun for you. They want the game to go their direction and they will push it that direction no matter what, using the most duct taped solution to make it "work." I deal with this a lot in my job: some idiot spent X dollars on a system that isn't really want they needed, but it's "keep hitting it with a hammer" to make it work as best you can because they'd rather spend X+Y money to "fix" it rather than ditching X and going with Z, even though Z<X+Y.

This is why it's Orcs, Orcs, Orcs and is always going to be that. They'll only ask you how they can make OrcCraft: Orcs vs Orcs fun for you.

Mythic guilds got hammered, this I hit on. But LFR hate threads have taken on a whole new direction. So-called hardcore raiders are fucking pissed their buddies got shit-canned for botting and are blaming it all on "filthy casuals" (used unironically). More than that, I've seen a few threads, gone now for some reason, that basically boil down to: "We fucking hate you, but our roster is busted so we need new recruits, have AOTC 2435234532564iLvL, be ready to get shit on constantly, and join up with us. Even though we fucking hate you and you will be replaced the minute our banned guys get back or level new characters."

Gee, I wonder why Mythic guilds are having issues recruiting.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-23 05:14pm
by Civil War Man
I feel sorry for the GMs. After over a week of having a new flying mount on sale on the Cash Shop, Watcher makes his "no more flying ever" announcement on a third party site at the end of the day on the Friday before Memorial Day (pissing off a lot of people because, as I said in my last post, the circumstances of the announcement feel like they were trying to bury the story), resulting in the GMs being left behind to bear the brunt of the community's ire while the lead devs all enjoy the long weekend.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-23 10:54pm
by Gerald Tarrant
What's astonishing about those LFR threads is how illiterate the Mythic raiders seem to be. Casuals are saying "If you don't like LFR don't run it." Mythic raiders are saying "I hate it because it's more content I NEED to run, and it's a face roll where pugs that don't deserve it get loot." Although not every Mythic is complaining about low skilled raiders getting gear. The vocal Mythic players seem to have no restraint when it comes to running stuff, their thought process seems to be 1. drops gear which could be an upgrade (maybe for an alt). 2. I must run.

I think I've finally figured out why WoW hasn't been as fun for me lately, dropping the skill tree removed a lot of the customization that turned made your toon, unique. Then removing all the gear customization turned every toon into every other toon. The only thing setting you apart was what racial you had to use in a fight. But back in MoP you could get completely different play styles out of being a Haste Paladin, versus a middle of the road haste/mastery blockadin, vs a classic stam heavy tank. Stat weights could be all over the map too for healers, which was a game in and of itself, it made your healer YOURS, as opposed to what blizzard wanted you to be. Now? If I want to try a different healing style, I need to level a different class. Every healer's gotten shoe-horned into their own style of healing and if you don't follow the style blizzard intended you won't be effective. It's just removed the fun, and replaced with a bunch of cookie cutter rotations that are slightly different for every class.

On the flying thing? I think I see where blizz is coming from, they're just taking it to extremes. Running through Draenor the first time: the canyons, and plains and mountains all seemed to impose a sense of scale that was awesome, it channeled you around, and made the world feel bigger and you feel smaller. It made the leveling experience actually pretty fun. By the second time through it was kind of boring. And when I got around to trying to polish off content on my main, it was just dumb. Of course I was never one of those people who spent a huge amount of time getting every single hidden thing on the Timeless Isle, or Thunder Isle. So all the hidden things you can find in Draenor don't matter to me at all, and If I felt like getting them, I'd just find a guide and copy it for the achievement not for the silly little Parkour-Lite puzzles that WoW tried to make. I can understand not wanting to waste all that effort they put into building some of their puzzles (if you can fly, you can reach any outdoor point) but I'm deeply annoyed how it's starting to impact the things I'd normally be doing lore wise. They basically catered to all the explorers by taking things away from everyone else. Honestly I just wish they'd made an Isle of OCD neck-beards with no flying (maybe release a new hidden thing a week), and let everyone else have a normal experience.

On the raid thing, I think the WoW community is the problem honestly, Raid Finder has been less and less fun (guilds are getting more elitist) , and smaller servers are a horrible experience for someone who wants to raid. People start leaving and less and less competent people raid, and the spiral continues.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-24 03:56am
by Broomstick
Sharp-kun wrote:My concern is that I suspect the buyers market will be smaller than the sellers market, but maybe I'm underestimating the number of people with fucktons of gold and overestimating the number willing to sell tokens.
You don't need "fucktons" of gold - I've never had more than 200k gold max at any one time, have less than that now, and just paid for three months of game time in gold - I may never pay real money for WoW ever again. Then again, I seem to have no problem making gold in WoW for whatever I want it for, even if I haven't ever been a millionaire in the game.

I do agree that WoD is disappointing in various ways, although I still manage to enjoy myself. Then again, what I play in the game changes over time. I have not, however, done any instances in WoD which is a bit odd given that that has long been one of my favorite activities. Maybe I just got tired of the hyper-competitive bullshit. When I do instance/raid these days it's almost always solo'ing old content, where I can go at my own pace, explore a bit, stop and admire the scenery, whatever.

I think the "no flying ever" is a big mistake on the part of Blizzard, especially given that they have so many flying mounts in the game. I understand the developers want people to approach certain things via the ground route, but they let the cat out of the bag way back in Burning Crusade, it's far, far too late to stuff it back in.

The botting thing I've never understood, why buy a game and have a machine play it for you? Then again, I'm not into dick-waving contests, either. I'm sure there's some relationship between the two. Honorbuddy is cheating, a bunch of people got caught at it, I have no sympathy for them. The game is probably better off without them.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-24 04:19am
by bilateralrope
Broomstick wrote:The botting thing I've never understood, why buy a game and have a machine play it for you?
For some, if there is content they enjoy that they can't do without grinding, it lets them avoid the boredom of the grind and stick to the parts they enjoy. That's the reason behind me cheating in a lot of single player games.
Gold sellers bot because it lets them get more gold than they could without botting.

For others, I have no clue. I've seen people pay others to power level them in a new MMO, then complain about the lack of content :banghead:
Honorbuddy is cheating, a bunch of people got caught at it, I have no sympathy for them. The game is probably better off without them.
Agreed. Bots cause plenty of problems for everyone else.

I wonder if there are MMOs where people using bots have caused developers to make grind worse, because the developers see the botters finishing content to quick so up the grind to delay them finishing the content and unsubscribing.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-24 05:05am
by Grumman
Gerald Tarrant wrote:(if you can fly, you can reach any outdoor point)
It's not hard to imagine hazards that could make it too dangerous to fly in a certain area, or just too dangerous to land, without writing flying off entirely. That could be anything from a territorial roc that will attack you if you fly too close to its nest, to just not having enough space that your mount's willing to drop below the treeline.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-24 11:23am
by Highlord Laan
Grumman wrote:
Gerald Tarrant wrote:(if you can fly, you can reach any outdoor point)
It's not hard to imagine hazards that could make it too dangerous to fly in a certain area, or just too dangerous to land, without writing flying off entirely. That could be anything from a territorial roc that will attack you if you fly too close to its nest, to just not having enough space that your mount's willing to drop below the treeline.
Something like that was done in MoP around the Alliance and horde bases in the warzones. Get too close to the areas while airborne, and AA guns would not only dismount you, but chop off half your health as you fell. Surviving the impact only meant that you'd die to all the elites you just fell into.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-24 04:34pm
by Minischoles
The no flying ever would be a deal breaker for me if i was actually paying money for the game any longer - but considering I have a stockpile of over 500k gold, i'm pretty much not paying for anything for years with the wow token.

Mythic raiders (speaking as one) couldn't care less about LFR - I can honestly say i've not touched LFR this expansion, I already run mythic and heroic on my main and an alt (thankfully my guild don't do more than one alt run).

Honestly for me what I hate about the game right now is the lack of content; if you're not raiding, there is really nothing to do in the game, and even with raiding I can say I log two nights a week (wednesday main run, thursday alt run) and for the rest of the week I log for 20 minutes a day to do my garrison missions and profession cooldowns. That is the game for me right now (unless i'm leveling another alt) - its incredibly boring and if I were paying money i'd have honestly quit, as much as I enjoy raiding with my friends it wouldn't be worth money right now.

Add in the fact that barring another major content patch, we may be stuck with 6.2 for over 12 months, another huge content gap before any possible expansion - Siege being that long damn near killed the game for raiding guilds, another gap like that might end the game altogether for mythic raiders.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-25 03:59am
by Kuja
Civil War Man wrote:So the hits apparently keep on coming. There's currently a bit of a shitstorm brewing after the lead dev revealed that not only were they not going to allow flying in Warlords, but they will probably not allow flying in any future expansions of the game.

Of course, they chose to make this announcement during an interview on a third party website, instead of their own website or even their Twitter feed. As some posters in the massive WOW forum thread about it have commented, their method of announcing it seems like they were hoping no one would notice.

As an added bonus, the announcement of no more flying ever came almost 10 days after they unveiled a new flying mount in their cash shop. For only $25, you too can not fly in the World of Warcraft!
It would genuinely not surprise me at this point if Blizz's next quarterly report has WoW down to 4 million or even less. Firstly, the last Q report covered up to April 1, but a bunch of people on multimonth subs let them expire with the last payment being in December or January, meaning WoD's big-ass drop almost certainly kept going on into April. A lot of resentment has been building up on the flying issue, especially with the cash shop continuing to determinedly release flying mounts for 25 bucks a pop. This announcement should really have come a long time ago, and from an official source - it wouldn't have salvaged the matter, but I bet a bunch of people who are now pissed off enough to be quitting might not have back then.

I think Blizzard has gotten to the point where they realize they can make more cash by monetizing the shit out of Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm and is now just letting WoW chug along under what steam it has left while the team does whatever the fuck it wants regardless of consequence, because what we've been seeing of Blizz out of the past year or so is basically the same thing that's been happening across the games industry as a whole - increased monetization from stuff like the cash shop and ftp's with things like hearthstone's buyable cards and hots' buyable heroes and skins, all of it being raked in with a fraction of the effort that goes into maintaining an mmo. Overwatch, when it comes out, is likely going to have a bunch of the same. WoW is now just the vehicle getting them to that point.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-26 11:49am
by TheFeniX
Minischoles wrote:Mythic raiders (speaking as one) couldn't care less about LFR - I can honestly say i've not touched LFR this expansion, I already run mythic and heroic on my main and an alt (thankfully my guild don't do more than one alt run).
Back in MoP, this would have held true. I trolled the forums pretty regularly, and LFR-hate threads were almost always made by guys who basically LIVED in LFR. Maybe they had a few Normal kills. Almost never even an end-boss killed of a current tier. Even back in LK, you never saw a Kingslayer complaining about LFD. They were too busy raiding.

But I've seen numerous LFR threads started and or responded to negatively by characters with multiple Mythic boss downs on current content. I think a lot of this comes from Mythic rosters getting blasted by the bans and the 20-man lockout. They're mad and taking it out on whatever is convenient.
Gerald Tarrant wrote:I think I've finally figured out why WoW hasn't been as fun for me lately, dropping the skill tree removed a lot of the customization that turned made your toon, unique. Then removing all the gear customization turned every toon into every other toon. The only thing setting you apart was what racial you had to use in a fight. But back in MoP you could get completely different play styles out of being a Haste Paladin, versus a middle of the road haste/mastery blockadin, vs a classic stam heavy tank. Stat weights could be all over the map too for healers, which was a game in and of itself, it made your healer YOURS, as opposed to what blizzard wanted you to be. Now? If I want to try a different healing style, I need to level a different class. Every healer's gotten shoe-horned into their own style of healing and if you don't follow the style blizzard intended you won't be effective. It's just removed the fun, and replaced with a bunch of cookie cutter rotations that are slightly different for every class.
FFXIV has less customization than WoW does and manages to be fun because there's still shittons of content to do. The difference is they never had any of the stuff, so you don't miss it. But more so is that Blizzard keeps pruning content, but offering nothing to replace it or bolster what they haven't pruned.

Also, the iconic status of the abilities is mostly gone and feel bland now. You know what's a perfect ability? Light's Hammer: You throw a hammer on the ground, it shoots holy lightning in an AOE, and looks cool while doing so. I don't care if it healed my enemies and damaged my allies: I'd still use it. Honestly, only class/spec I played at the end of MoP than made me feel like my class, even if only for short bursts. Maybe Frost Mage but wasn't the most interesting visually.

If you weren't stacking Haste to soft cap, then Mastery as Prot Pally in MoP: I fucking hated you. I don't know how anyone could play prot without Haste either way. The GCD would be worse than FFXIV. You also explode any time you have aggro.
On the raid thing, I think the WoW community is the problem honestly, Raid Finder has been less and less fun (guilds are getting more elitist) , and smaller servers are a horrible experience for someone who wants to raid. People start leaving and less and less competent people raid, and the spiral continues.
When raiding is all you've got, there's more incentive to cull only the best of the best. During MoP, there was still a lot to do without stepping into a raid. Older expansions, even more. But with WoD's Raid or Die mentality, more people want in on the action. Which means there's more talent, but even more people who really don't belong in that kind of environment. I can understand the blowback, but they've been given no other option.
Kuja wrote:It would genuinely not surprise me at this point if Blizz's next quarterly report has WoW down to 4 million or even less. Firstly, the last Q report covered up to April 1, but a bunch of people on multimonth subs let them expire with the last payment being in December or January, meaning WoD's big-ass drop almost certainly kept going on into April. A lot of resentment has been building up on the flying issue, especially with the cash shop continuing to determinedly release flying mounts for 25 bucks a pop. This announcement should really have come a long time ago, and from an official source - it wouldn't have salvaged the matter, but I bet a bunch of people who are now pissed off enough to be quitting might not have back then.
Or the deluxe edition containing a flying mount you can't use in current content? The flying issue is more the breaking of the camels back. It's being used as a crutch "YOU'RE ELAVING CUZ OF FLIYNG!?" when it's really "this is the last straw. It shows Blizzard gives no fucks about the community's desires."
I think Blizzard has gotten to the point where they realize they can make more cash by monetizing the shit out of Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm and is now just letting WoW chug along under what steam it has left while the team does whatever the fuck it wants regardless of consequence, because what we've been seeing of Blizz out of the past year or so is basically the same thing that's been happening across the games industry as a whole - increased monetization from stuff like the cash shop and ftp's with things like hearthstone's buyable cards and hots' buyable heroes and skins, all of it being raked in with a fraction of the effort that goes into maintaining an mmo. Overwatch, when it comes out, is likely going to have a bunch of the same. WoW is now just the vehicle getting them to that point.
Well, the only thing that could ever kill WoW was Blizzard. And they seem to be doing a good job at this.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-26 12:04pm
by TheFeniX
I came off as a dick with my Pally comment, but I ran with another Pally stacking Parry/Dodge/Stam in MoP. Holy shit, he took 1.5 times my damage while tanking and healed for 80% less. I could outheal our healers while tanking, mostly because they could take a break unless there was raid-wide damage. Meanwhile, he'd OOM them constantly even with me throwing him my excess Flames. God that guy was an extreme shitter. Only good thing was, since he was passing on all Haste/Mastery gear: I built up a badass Prot/Ret set in no time flat (we had no melee in that raid group). Same reason I got my Warforged Greatsword of Pride after we replaced him with a bear tank.

Re: WoW: Warlords of Draenor

Posted: 2015-05-26 06:07pm
by Kuja
TheFeniX wrote:Or the deluxe edition containing a flying mount you can't use in current content? The flying issue is more the breaking of the camels back. It's being used as a crutch "YOU'RE ELAVING CUZ OF FLIYNG!?" when it's really "this is the last straw. It shows Blizzard gives no fucks about the community's desires."
Ayep.

And now that a couple days have passed the blizzdrones are coming out in force. It would be funny if it weren't so cringeworthy; most of the attempted defenses are bog-standard "they don't have to cater to you" "shut up and quit" and "they never actually promised flying in Dranor why are you so upset" whining with the usual "OH MY GOD YOU BABIES ARE SO IMMATURE" crybabbing thrown in. Nobody can articulate a better defense of no-flying than they could six months ago, it's all just thrashing and shitflinging.

The hilarious part is, by making this a moral choice Blizzard's effectively trapped themselves. People are invested in the no-flying now. If blizzard sees big subscriber drops from this and decides to backpedal and put in flying on Draenor after all, not only will they not get a lot of people back (whether from inertia or mistrust of such two-faced policies) now they face the risk of upsetting and losing the people who have bought into the no-fly deal. Blizzard's set themselves up for failure no matter what.