Blisteringballs posted:
Trigeminal posted:
My biggest complaint with any MMO (WoW included) is what do I do with my gametime once max level is reached. It is part of the reason I have a thousand alts. I've raided in every expansion but once I kill the "last boss" a few times, I get bored with the repetition. I can't bring myself to do arenas competitively. I find them boring. So I'm left with dailies. Once you get the TB mounts, do you keep doing them?
I'm glad they are recognizing the need for content.
My biggest complaint with WoW is how the current devs don't understand the nuances of the game and community they're serving. By their actions and words they allowed the situation to spiral out of control, to the point in which they now have a black eye, hundreds of thousands of customers fleeing, and are having to enact constant and erratic changes to try to keep up. 20% nerf across the board for an entire tier of content? They never had to do anything that crazy before. Chainsaw changes versus calculated and measured scalpel cuts. It's a multilayered problem:
The ramped up difficulty and grind caused a rift (no pun intended) in the playerbase. Wrath was successful, largely, because it created a caste of casuals that didn't have to even think about the meticulous details hardcore or elite players obsess about. They could PUG all day and care less about whether not someone had PvP gear on, what an iLevel even was, or visit sites to become content scholars to push their DPS/healing/tanking into the top tier of talent. You put in your twenty minutes to an hour and had fun completing content and getting whatever gear was important to you. Now that things are more difficult and progression slower, "bad" players are pretty much abandoned by good ones (when the more talented players used to effortlessly carry them). The community got segregated in that regard. Casual and bad players feel behind, got frustrated, and finally bored and are leaving. The hardcore raiders probably don't even notice much of a difference, but those inbetween the two camps of extremes got hurt by no longer having an endless source of players for heroics and raids, and also had to give more commitment to organized gaming (which is a no-no in game design if you want players to just keep subscribing while not investing much into the game).
This was all compounded by the sudden change in tone and attitude in regards to developer interaction with the community. They pretty much fostered the environment and by blaming the players for everything they gave the casuals even more of a reason not to bother trying. No light at the end of the tunnel, and all that. Suggesting that content changes are what people wanted and if they didn't they're just bad and can't get coordinated. Etc.
I could go on but I think my huge wall of text made its point. The current devs just didn't see the forest for the trees, refused to listen, and now don't appear able to elegantly correct their design flaws. So now they're even making their hardcore crowd frustrated and unsure how their characters will play next hotfix or question why they're investing so much time and effort.
Boy I really rambled there, sorry.
That was really well said.
