I think the problem of not upgrading content to the new game logic was there from the very beginning. Ammo pouch for hunters in the beginning gave you a buff on the ranged attack speed. In patch 3.1 this logic was removed, but for at least two expansions (dunno from MOP onwards) all the pouch and quiver were still in game, but useless. Why would you waste a bag space for a bag with no advantages? And this made some quest rewards, some crafted item etc. useless.
Hunter ammo did not exist in Cataclysm. I know because I mained a hunter during that time.
Good points but it's a lot of words just to say retail sucks.
It's a lot of words to say "retail sucks for very different and more important reasons than you think"
I agree with @teebling , your overarching point is still just a symptom of bureaucratic dysfunction over at Blizzard from them having been acquired by Activision. Priorities shifted over at the office ever since then — one of the original lead designers Mark Kern recently put out a long tweet about it:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1162375992624570368.html
Well, that's just a rant about "casualization". Appealing to casual players isn't necessarily a bad thing. What's bad is sacrificing internal consistency and sanity on the altar of casualization.
Like the general consensus that flying mounts were an enormous detriment to the game is still pretty new.
No such consensus exists.
Most of the issues you raised have very little impact on the game outside of the levelling experience, which has become a smaller and smaller part of the game as time goes on.
That is a problem in and of itself... the attitude of "f*ck old content, only the newest expansion matters, buy a level boost so you can skip the past 13 years of content and go straight to the newest stuff, we changed professions so you can get them to max level using only materials from the new expansion, blah blah blah..." and as much as I love MoP, I have to admit that Mop and its "nuggets" and ghost iron training recipes were what really got the ball rolling on that. Miners and blacksmiths should have to spend 5 hours farming cobalt in Borean Tundra like I did. Same goes for cooking. If you want to powerlevel cooking, you should have to farm scorpid stingers and jaggal clam meat and shit like I did, not just buy reagents from a panda. The one exception is Thanksgiving. You are allowed to powerlevel your cooking without any effort if you wait until Thanksgiving to do it, and even then, you can't go past 300.
attempts at 6-month subscription grabs...
I'm so glad I didn't get suckered into that. I got Mimiron's Head a few months later. F*ck your flying pirate ship lol.
Well, that's just a rant about "casualization". Appealing to casual players isn't necessarily a bad thing. What's bad is sacrificing internal consistency and sanity on the altar of casualization.
If retail were super casual but still consistent about it I probably still wouldn't play it. That profile must fit a lot of modern MMOs out there.
TBC was the last pure and legendary expansion :sad:
Edit: I had only glazed the OP's post before writing this, I thought it was about "how the game became more casual in time". Reading it again I now realize my response is not 100% related to his points.. sorry :eek: I'll leave it here anyway in case someone wants to contribute.
Sometimes I wonder whether Vanilla wow at its time was also seen as a "step-down" as an MMO genre.
It is no wonder that WoW was (and still is) the #1 most popular MMO of all times. That much is not an opinion, but a fact.
However if you look at the development of WoW, it was pretty much created to be casual / beginner friendly Everquest rival.
The list goes on and on.
What I mean to say is, here in Barrens chat we have a closed ecosystem of (predominantly) old school WoW fans. I think it's fair to say that a good deal of us do not like the current Retail WoW due to many design choices (flying, LFR, pruning of abilities, lack of RP elements). However I wonder how the "actual old school" MUD / EQ & UO fans originally reacted to the design choices of Vanilla WoW. I don't have proof, but I can assume that there would be some people who thought Vanilla to be way too easy, and probably doomsayers would be telling on IRC channels that WoW would make the entire MMO genre a casual, weak gaming experience. Similar to what we have been saying for the recent WoW expansions.
Almost all the changes that Blizzard introduced has been in favor of more casual gameplay. So probably in their mind, they have been doing what they always did; making the game more accessible to a wider audience.
I mean there are probably some 13 year old gamers who plays current WoW, who does not visit forums or other communities (do kids use forums these days even?), thinks that the current WoW is a masterpiece and Vanilla is some useless time wasting grind-fest; because his or her MMO experience would be mainly the recent WoW expansions.
Is this an endless cycle, I wonder? Similar to "back in muh day" old folks who youngsters just shrug, will the Vanilla WoW people be seen as such in 10 - 20 years...?
Disclaimer: I detest current WoW and bought a PC specifically to play Classic. Just so you get where I'm coming from. :mrgreen:
TBC was the last pure and legendary expansion :sad:
I sometimes say "BC was the only real expansion and MoP was the last sane expansion". I've already explained what I mean by sane expansion, but what do I mean by a real expansion? A real expansion should, as the name implies, expand the game, not just move stuff around, replace stuff, or expand the game in some ways while contracting it in others. Every other expansion has removed significant amounts of content, starting with the removal of Old Naxx and Old Onyxia, and all of the loot that drops from them, in Wrath of the Lich King. BC was the exception; the only expansion that did nothing but expand the game. It was the only expansion that cost us nothing. One of the major reasons why I give MoP high marks is that it made Tier 3 armor available again via the BMAH, partially undoing Wrath's big mistake.
The end image makes your argument 500x worse to the point where I don't even care to read it. You made so many argument points but then ended it with some MsPaint shit. :(
The end image makes your argument 500x worse to the point where I don't even care to read it. You made so many argument points but then ended it with some MsPaint shit. :(
You are very nice.
I agree that the decline of world cohesion has had a negative impact on the game, but I think a lot of the issues you're brushing off as superficial are actually far more significant problems.
So much this. Appears to be written by someone who doesnt quite understand the implications of those "superficial" issues and instead spends time highlighting inconsistencies with the game long after it was ruined.
I do not think that the problem has been the expansions, the flying mounts, the lfg, the pokemons, the pandas or any other addition that you can think that has destroyed the game. Each of us has enjoyed some of these changes or many of them. The problem is all those characteristics together, that desire to want to make everyone happy.
I think that in the case of a video game, as in the cinema or music, when the goal is to try to cover as much public as possible, it implies a loss of style, identity, authenticity. In the simple there is much beauty.
Wow began as a beautiful young woman with natural lips and breasts, and has become over time a gigantic and monstrous Frankestein. Maybe if you look at his feet or eyes you think they are lovely, but when you walk away and see it completely it is scary... and a little sad.
So much this. Appears to be written by someone who doesnt quite understand the implications of those "superficial" issues and instead spends time highlighting inconsistencies with the game long after it was ruined.
I understand the ALLEGED implications. I've been debating them for years. Some of them have more credibility than others.
So far I think this is the worst thread in Barrens Chat. It's nowhere near as bad as the threads that grace the official Blizzard forums on a daily basis, but it's clearly not up to par with what we expect of this great marketplace of ideas. The good news is that we can take comfort in this together, because my experience so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and statistically speaking that means it's very unlikely that we'll see another terrible thread in the near future, and that should give us all plenty of time to reflect before the next one hits.
Remember to hug your loved ones tightly tonight, for you may never know what tomorrow brings.
OP's argument is more complicated than "change bad!" and therefore I am mentally incapable of understanding it and this fills me with nerd rage
Fixed.