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World of Warcraft: Joe's World - Waiting for the Lich King
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
In Joe Iuliani's World of Warcraft column this week, he discusses the feeling of futility that he is feeling in waiting for the new WoW expansion, and offers some suggestions to players of things to do in the meantime.
There is no doubt that WoW will always be looked at as one of the defining MMOs to ever hit the gaming world. Love it or hate it, there is no denying its impact on both computer games, and main stream culture. As great as a game WoW has been, I can’t help but think “Now what?”
With the announcement of Wrath of Lich King expansion the game feels like it has come to a bit of a stand still. In my opinion the announcement came far too soon. I understand it was Blizzcon, and Blizzard wanted to make a splash, but I do think it was a bit unfair to the players.
Expansion announcements always have a way of slowing the drive of many game players. It’s hard to motivate yourself to work toward items that will be rendered obsolete by future quest items and random drops. This was made evident when the Burning Crusade expansion was announced. Game advancement came to a halt. Remember Naxx? Count yourself lucky if you do. How many folks even stepped foot there, let alone progressed through it. Both The Black Temple and Hyjal Summit face the same danger as Naxxamaras, two great well thought out and designed instances that most players will never see.
Read the whole thing here.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
I just rolled a new toon, a class I haven't really explored too much (hunter), and a Dranei because I've never played through their opening two zones... and I'm really enjoying myself.
Coming back to the 'core' experience of the game is really quite fun. I have no interest in raiding or grinding rep/money, so I haven't touched my level 70 epix t4/5 toon, probably won't until Wrath of the Lich King comes out...
From what I've seen, just doing a /who every now and again with different level ranges, that a LOT of people are doing the same. Leaving raiding/grinding behind and messing around on alts.
I 'd bet that's why Blizzard sped up the 20-60 leveling speed, so new players could get to the Burning Crusade and then Lich King content faster, and to give the already maxed out players motivation to play alts instead of cancelling their subs until WoTLK comes out...
but it is very sad that so many don't get to experience the high end raid content.
I truly hoped Burning Crusade would soften the curve so that more people would be able to raid, and they did to some extent with the reduction in raid size from 40 to 25.... 20 to 10... etc.
I truly hope again that Wrath of the Lich King softens the curve even further, not in further party size reduction, in fact I don't know how they should do it...
maybe use the Heroic dungeon system and apply it to raiding? Tier 7,8,9 from normal difficulty and then repeat the same raids again for tier 10,11,12 on Heroic difficulty. That way, the "best" would still be the best, but more people would be able to experience the content?
I'm at that stage where I'm asking, What now? I think all mmo's get to that " What now" stage around the 3rd year anniversary and most of us move on to something new. The only game that I played for more than 3 years was UO and we all know why people played it so long because of the FREEDOM aspect of the game and the skill system "Early UO". I'd reccomend WoW to anyone that hasn't tried it but til lthey add open real world pvp on the pvp servers and remove the bg's from them then the veteran pvp'er will be bored and when I say pvp I mean pvp with a purpose instead of the direction woW is going ..Pimp yo character. I really hope Warhammer brings back world pvp because I liked DAOC but it needed work also and I could never understand why they never had a server that you could invade each realm and take over cities,
Personally i'm playing alts. It is indeed a breath of fresh air to play another class that i've never played before. I think that 2008 will be the year that WOW will face some real challenges in the MMO market place. This time next year people will either still be playing WOW or playing one of the 'next generation' MMO's. With that said, many players like myself are filling the void before the next-gen MMO's are released by continuing to play WOW.
Careful Joe, you don't want to start down this road. Once you do, you'll realize as I did once I found out the contents of TBC that with games designed like WOW, there will always be yet another expansion that will make all of your previous efforts worthless.
You have to play them to enjoy the content,and not attach any real value to your gear or accomplishments, as truth be told, you really don't accomplish much of anything in WOW except to get your certificate of completion.
Its not just a WOW phenomenon, all games that don't let the players impact the world in a significant way suffer from this basic design flaw. Its in their nature.
You need to just play the game as it stand prior to the next expansion and enjoy it for what you can complete....then when WLK comes out, you start over and do it again.
Or you do what I do and find a different game with an endgame that is centered on real player accomplishment and will actually let you individually dominate the world (in theory)
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I think the poster above me made a really good statement. But, I must say I find it strange from one claiming to be WoW free hehe..
I happen to be a casual player of WoW.. I've been in the game since before it went live and I actually thought I was leaving it when LotRo came out, so much so I bought a fully paid sub from them, aww well.. After playing to 50 I went back to WoW. I must say keeping it casual it has continued to stay fun for me.. I have been in a Hard Core Raiding guild but I found that work not fun and left.. True I don't have the best armor weapons and mounts but I do have FUN!! I also have the time to do other things and follow other interests and that keeps WoW fresh and fun everytime I log in..
Acceptance to the fact the upgrades to the game, kill your former hard work, will truly save your life.. Listening to my daughter rant over this same thing makes me LOL.. Just grow up find the world of Maturity and Accept the fact that EVERYTHING changes even WoW and the old passes away.. Oh!, and stay in the here and now, today is a new day so is your equipment.
Well I saw a bit of a flaw in your reasoning, even casual guilds such as mine are beating their way into SSC and TK with a relatively smooth pace. WOTLK won't be till at least Christmas next year. so I presume there will be many people who reach the higher levels of content.
As you mentioned Naxx didn't get much attention pre-TBC and Blizzard realized that as well; which is why Naxx is being rereleased as an introductory 25 man raid, sort of like today's Karazhan with only minor retuning of the encounters for 25 man participation rather than 40 man.
The only instance I feel will be at risk to the pre-expansion lethargy will be Sunwell plateau the next planned raid release slated for future development.
I personally still render much enjoyment from the current instances even though I know that my gear will be obsolete next expansion because gear is often not the real reason to be raiding. When I think back to BWL and MC I don't remember the loot I got I remember when a priest accidentally smite pulled Vael during the fight prep. Or when a mage blinked into Hakkar before our first downing. I remember the fun I had with my guild mates not the gear. And it's the enjoyment that stays with you.
So as a final note I suggest to anyone who wishes to play this game and make this phase of the game memorable and enjoyable: Find a guild that will stay together and has friendly people. My guild is what has kept me playing these last 2 years- not the expansion, or the gear.
Oh really? And what game might that be that lets you individually dominate the world?? Oh wait... ( in theory) LOL...
-----------------------------
Real as Reality Television!!!
The problem with wow is that it gives too much of the same. Blizzard assumes that since it worked once it'll work forever instead of adapting to the community and doing radicaly different things that people will be interested in instead of same exact things. That keeps the game fresh, or at least helps. FFXI is a good example, when fighting the Gods in sky became endgame, the added the "hell" of vanadiel, dynamis and that became a new endgame thing. Then then came besieged, campaign, limbus, ect. Wow needs to start offering different endgame content besides raiding because it's getting old fast.
When I heard about LK, in my mind I pictured blizzard the dungeon master mid-game wiping the table clean, erasing all our character's gear we spent so much work getting, and sitting back while telling us "Ok, I'll be nice and let you keep your levels, but you have to do everything else again and it's pretty much the same. Oh, instead of volcano bamo you're going to ice bamo, so it's "new". They'll be some mobs, some bosses that drop gear and require really easy strategies that require half a brain and good gear to implement. GO!"
I lost interest in wow after my third 70 and after running my own private server for a while. It's boring now, I'm bored, and from what they say LK will have it'll be bored again since nothing will really be the different.
Warhammer, age of conan, Aion, and spellborn are all coming out next year hopefully. I'm willing to beat at least one of them will offer a good solid next-gen mmo.
Most players wouldn't see that raiding crap even if they never released an expansion. Less than 20% of WoW's player base raids, let alone likes that kind of content. If their expansion put as much focus on solo and small group content as they do raiding, they might actually get record numbers of American and European subscribers instead of depending completely on Eastern players to bloat their counts. And I'm not just talking about quantity of casual content, but the quality of that content and the quality of the rewards.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
Oh really? And what game might that be that lets you individually dominate the world?? Oh wait... ( in theory) LOL...
EVE of course. Its theoretically possible for a player to create an alliance that he could lead that would sweep the galaxy..... the leader of BOB almost pulled it off.... but of course, now the empire is starting to crumble.
WOW (and most other games) have nothing like this....
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I think the issue here is the announcement of the expansion, but the announcement of it, what will likely be, more than a year ahead of its release. Maybe Blizzard should re-analyze the frequency at which new expansions come out. Only one major expansion for an MMO is pretty slow. Every other MMO released would have died from the lack of new content in that time. Why is WoW special?
In my opinion, while not on the way out, WoW is finally on the way down after over two and a half years of frenzied growth. That's just the nature of things: something different comes along, people get bored with the current fashion, etc. Blizzard just managed to balance good graphics that can run on almost any current computer with 3d accelleration (i'm not arguing the style, just quality), massive amounts of content, and game mechanics that have a fairly low learning curve (compared to other MMOs). Can any game developer ask for more success?
Also, why did Blizzard announce the expansion so early? I think it was to generate buzz to keep subscribers. How many people will hang on to their subscription now waiting for that next expansion in another year? (pure speculation there, but it could be true!)
The improved leveling curve was not only to help new players but also old players who were lagging on the level-cap or who rolled up Blood elves. But the reasoning it the same, Blizzard wants to make sure as many people as possible are level-capped otherwise they won't have any motivation to buy an Expansion that will only have 70+ level content.
It is sad that many don't experience high end raid content, esp. because most of the important storylines and quest arcs are connected to them. I could care less about the gear, but knowing I'll never get to see the storylines resolved because I refuse to be a raid-monkey doesn't make me want to play.
And don't expect any change in WoW as long as old-school EQ raiders like Kaplan and Chilton are in charge. WoW will always be a fundamentally raid-guild Instance game because of them.
I have to agree with a previous post about instances becoming phased-out; Pre-BC my guild was (and still is) one of the top U.S. guilds and is the top guild on Alextrasza today. However, when BC was announced we didn't just stop progression, we busted our asses trying to clear AQ, and later Naxxramas when it was released.
It's not just the gear, it's about the experience and becoming better players/raiders/and guild synergy. Not to mention, the Heigan dance rules!!
Now, having cleared ALL the BC instanced content -- yes, all of it -- we can enjoy our accomplishments and chomp at the bit for WotLK expansion.
Will it make those instances "useless?" Maybe, probably. But that, in my opinion, should drive people to work harder to obtain those "unique" drops that can only be found in those instances. Ashes of Alar, for example.
I wish new servers were released and the War Effort was starting again for opening of Ahn'Qiraj just so I could try and get the 1 per server mount at the end of the chain. Damn you Strawberry!!
Hell, I remember running Onyxia over and over again, just so I could have all 18 slot Onyxia Hide bags before BC. LoL. It's about having fun people!
Oh is it fun to rerun everyday the same content over and over and over just to get a few more space in your inventory? Or to get +1% more critical chance? I understand people that want to play it for the "lore" maybe, easy leveling and smooth controls, but I can't understand rational people to play it to nuke others everyday in the same battleground or to kill the same 10 boss day after day after day in the same dungeon. Hell there is much more variety even in DDo.
REALITY CHECK
I somewhat agree with Joe on this particularly article. I have been playing WoW since the beta, and I would be lieing if I told you I hadn't stopped playing for a month or so at a time. While I started playing casually again, with my real life friends it doesn't mean that I will make it to level 70 again.
I've gotten to the point where I take everything with a grain of salt. In order to change things up I decided to start playing on a PvP server with my buddies. When I first started playing WoW, I would become furious when a level 60 would come into a town like Astranaar and kill everything in it without blinking an eye, but those days are gone, I just grab my crap and move on as if he/she's not even there. You can always tell when the end-game/gear grinding is running thin by how many raids there are on the smaller cities in the game. It's not bad yet, but it will become terrible and hopefully I'll be level 70 on this server by the time that happens.
As far as anticipating the new expansion.. I'm not really looking forward to it all that much. I play casually and the content doesn't really appeal to me.
While I don't know exactly what all of the content will be, the stuff they have listed on the website is unimportant. I love the winter-like landscapes, but I've always loved that type of scenery. Grinding for gear from the lich-king.. It doesn't sound any different than what I've done a hundred times before. The deathknight sounds cool, but in a month there will be 800 deathknights on any given server. The options seem limited. 1 hero class, a tiny zone in the north (Tiny compared to Outland, which is tiny compared to Azeroth), new dances and hairstyles (This one should be a patch at best), and much, much more? I'm anxious to see what the much, much more is. Until then, I'm not going to stand in line for this expansion pack like I did BC, which really was a let down. Then again, if it had been it's worth in real money, I may have seen it differently. (We all paid the same price for the entire WoW game 1-60 and tons of content as we did BC, which was about a 1/10th of the content.)
Just my opinions, I truely hope that the WotLK will rock my face off, but I really doubt it. If a new game comes out before then, I'm sure that my friends and I will move on to that.
Ill agree it can all get old.
But for me nuking other people in the battlegrounds NEVER gets old :P
I totally agree. I have 2 70's and another about to hit 70 and almost all of the instances and raids, I have never even been in. I have no tier armor and I feel with the Lich King comes out, it's going to be needed. But even before BC, there were very few instances I had done. I basically used my 70's for farming.
Amen Brother. Too bad that I'm never going to see the inside of Black Temple or Hyal. With the annoucement of WOTLK my motivation for raiding came to a halt.
.: mmogle.com - the mmo question hub :.
I realy dont understand all the fuss about expansions for wow to early announce to late released, it dont matter what happen,majority keeps playing anyways and 80% or more dont even see half of the raid instance or game for that matter anyway, how many have full tier4 set or higher lol.
Expansions only are for a small percentage of players who realy play it to the full rest just meat to keep it going pay for left overs all are happy hehe.
Couple of million use wow as chat room:P.
This expansion only aply to a few, so this topic is in a way useless lol.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
That's just it, we 80% who foot the bill for all of this raiding crap are getting sick and tired of scrabbling for the left overs. It's long past time for developers to admit that casual play styles are just as deserving of epic rewards as any other. It's far past time that our money was, gasp, spent on endeavors that actually improve the game for us instead of the 20% of that greedy, narcisistic segment of the player base known as the raider.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
Wow it is interesting to have an example of my observations playing out so quickly right after writing about it. It may interest you or open your eyes. Anyhow human nature, don't ask for that carrot to be removed you will be bored.
http://mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/159577
The problem is that drop rates are too low to keep me interested. I played all normal instances from BC, and a few heroic ones. I´d say like 40 instances all in all. Seeing that those runs barely made me Kharazan ready and knowing from a friend how often his guild went to Kharazan without ever progressing, because so many members were in dire need of better equippment, made me quit.
With the expansion I´ll have new stuff for at least 3-4 months, if I´m lucky 6 months. After that I´ll quit again and wait for the next expansion. I don´t see any problem with the new expansion, because I simply decided against raiding. It makes things a lot easier.
I do like the idea of normal and heroic raiding instances though, because if I don´t have to play any raid more than 3 times to progress ist would be actually very tempting to make those experiences.
Well 3 level 70's and lots of instances and raiding but i left the wow game now. It was the longest i played a single game for though and i will say that the instances are really well designed and interesting but sometimes frustrating and require a lot of 'work' to get nice things which doesnt catter for casual players, and in all honesty taht is the games main player base.
I went over to LOTRO and found that to be quite fun to start with but once at the end game it offers less than wow and in a way its repeating. Now i think i am looking for a new game...not just new but very different. one of the reasons i am waiting for AoC is that its combat system is going to create a change for good players to shin....skilled, cause it has a lot more skill to the combos than a point and click. It better be good cause after 2 years of playing wow i am reluctant to try another fantasy swords and sorcery thing.......waiting for a Fall Out type mmo that would be great.
Well for those who stick with wow i hope you get more than a new colour of orge with the same annoying sound effects....you never know, there might be rainbow coloured murlocs too. I have great memories from that game though but as most my friends dont play there any more, or those who do, only on and off, i dont think i will return.
The improved leveling curve was not only to help new players but also old players who were lagging on the level-cap or who rolled up Blood elves. But the reasoning it the same, Blizzard wants to make sure as many people as possible are level-capped otherwise they won't have any motivation to buy an Expansion that will only have 70+ level content.
It is sad that many don't experience high end raid content, esp. because most of the important storylines and quest arcs are connected to them. I could care less about the gear, but knowing I'll never get to see the storylines resolved because I refuse to be a raid-monkey doesn't make me want to play.
And don't expect any change in WoW as long as old-school EQ raiders like Kaplan and Chilton are in charge. WoW will always be a fundamentally raid-guild Instance game because of them.
not sure about chilton. but kaplan and pardo will certainly stick to the raids until they're fired, no matter the cost to subs.
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
are you certain it's only 80% and not more like 98%?
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?