The user and all related content has been deleted.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
I thought the hallmark of a good pvp system was that a new player could come in and beat a player that had been in the game for a while. Level playing field and all that.
Now, it's a bad thing?
What you call randomness, I suspect, other players may call skill.
It sounds like she is talking about the exact opposite. Essentially a system where RNG takes priority over using the proper ability at the proper time.
Leveling the playing field is a good thing when it comes to character stats. Making it so a max level sword only does twice the damage as a new sword as opposed to 10,000,000 times the damage of a newb sword is a very good thing in my opinion for instance.
She's talking about something different. Say in an space fighter sim veteran players used expert tactics to avoid fire and increase their chances of landing critical damage on their enemies, allowing a skilled player to take on many veteran players even if they were using the same ships / equipment / character skills etc.
In this instance, imagine if in order to make it for newb players to win fights they slowed down the movement speed of all ships by 75%. Now dodging is less important and it's easier for everyone to land their hits. It's not about leveling the playing field in terms of character stats, it's about making the game easier so everyone can win.
This is bad. It takes away the reward of TRUE accomplishment (player skill as opposed to character skill) and hands victories to zerg guilds on a silver platter.
I can't speak too much about WoW because I never played it all that much and have barely played it at all in recent years, so I'm going solely off of her argument. But if what she says is true, then it is indeed a very bad change and others may call it "skill" but those people obviously have no concept of what skill is.
The user and all related content has been deleted.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
They made everyone the same which is boring to me and why I stopped playing WoW.
Vanilla WoW had huge gaps between well geared/skilled players and that is what made it fun imo because it gave everyone something to work towards. I remember a few really geared PVE players that sucked very badly at PVP that needed pocket healers to follow them around so they wouldn't die. I also remember open world pvp where a single player could kill 2-4 players solo but in Blizzard's grand attempt to have everyone be a winner they standardized everything leaving us with the game we have today.
Yeah that's the one thing I can say. Any game that standardizes builds by removing any kind of in-depth customization is a game for twitch monkeys and not any kind of strategic and knowledgeable veteran.
One large tactic I always use in PvP is designing and playing solid off-meta builds because when you play off-meta well, people don't know what your character is capable of and how to counter it. That's only possible in games with real customization. Not games where the developers pick your build for you because apparently you're a dunce and skill trees are "too mathy".
Time spent in game and player skill are separate due to the way gear now works. Prior to legion you could be a decent player that is jacked gear wise and rock 1 on 3 all day verse lesser geared players, even lesser geared players of greater skill. In legion you simply can not do that, the gear difference between someone who just started pvping and has maxed their points and gear is less significant. Now if you are destroyed by someone with less gear than you, they outplayed you with skill, likewise if you are destroyed by someone with better gear than you, they outplayed you with skill again, they did have a slight advantage via the gear, but it is nowhere near as significant as it used to before the max 10% difference legion brought.
The people complaining about how gear works now are folks who are not interested in the skill side, they are interested in out gearing everyone else and dominating a 10v10 bg by themselves, topping the charts, and basically carrying a team on their back like a hero. It used to be so nice to outgear your opponents, hit like a mack truck and mitigate all the damage due to your superior defensive and armor stats. You hit for 10k, the opponent uses the same skill and hits you for 2k, not only was that skewed, but your health pool is doubled up as well, so your 10k hit vs the 2k hit is actually more like 20k vs 1k or less. or 20% vs 1% however you want to look at the differences.
In those cases, it's very hard to say the better geared person is the person the greater skill set, they simply have more room for error offensively and defensively, likewise it's hard to say the person with lesser gear is the less skilled.
You never played any of the heroic/mythic dungeons. Let alone participate in the competitive WoW scene.
I was max level 8 hours into Legion launch & had Legion Dungeon Hero unlocked in less than 1 day on September 1st (xpac launched Aug 30th) I did Mythic dungeons besides the two that required rep because I refuse to rep farm.
I've done 2's & 3's up to 2600 MMR & was highest rated on my server for 2s, 3s & RBGs (getting hero of horde/alliance) and even in Legion which I have 9 days played at 110 on my main, I was at 2400 CR in 3s in Season 3 resulting in Duelist without a serious team and hardly any matches played.
Also raided mythic (heroic back then) SoO with a top 100 guild & afterwards was recruited into the #1 US 10 man guild during tier 16.
I don't claim to be the best player, especially now since I haven't played in a year (not that Legion is difficult to learn by any means), but I know what I'm talking about when it comes to WoW.
The game has been shifting into casual territory slowly for awhile now, but Legion in every way, was catered towards new players & casuals, PvP gear went from brand new cool looking sets to recolored trash, to now where they don't even have transmogs, tabards, cloaks, elite gear, enchants, anything besides a mount and a title for Gladiator/R1.
And PvE, while the actual content seemed fairly well made, the combat, and any sort of serious competition has been completely removed from the game.
I'm not saying whether what WoW has turned into is a good or bad decision, I'm just saying what I've noticed happen to the game, and why I have no desire to play it anymore.
There's a reason why SO MANY skilled world first, top tier guilds & players who have been competing for years on end left the game for Legion, there's a reason why pretty much every multi glad/R1 PvPer has quit playing, and why there's no serious RBG competition anymore. It's because of Legion, plain & simple.
Leveling to max means nothing in terms of skill. 2600, doubt it, link your character. raided mythic (heroic), link your character. Game is just as "skillful" as it always was.
The real reason is that you're burnt out on the game. The difficulty in raiding is just as hard as always.
PvP became more balanced and you complain about someone stomping your "2600" GS character into the ground because they don't need to grind for super overpowered PvP gear? Sounds like you got carried and Legion allows for the truly skilled PvP players to shine without having to deal with gear grind.
MMORPG's have never been mechanically difficult enough to require precise timing and command inputs like a fighting game. Even at the bleeding edge of progression that kind of precision does not exist. They're more about group coordination.
I don't think WoW is any easier now than it was in Vanilla or any other time during the game's lifespan. Boss encounters are way, way more challenging now. Things generally took longer, and were more inconvenient, but it wasn't more mechanically challenging in the past.
The skill gap between the random LFR raider and a Mythic raider is huge. Same for PVP. A 1200 rated player is not even remotely close to a 1800+ rated player.
Pre-Legion, we had more skills than we do now. More choices in talents. More choices in gearing. DoT duration ended if applied too early, they didn't just stack on top of each other to a certain point (if you DoT'd too early, you wasted overall damage done & DPS, using that GCD wasted a cast you could have done). Snapshotting existed in all DoTs, rewarding observant & knowledgeable players (reDoT during the start & finish of CDs & trinket procs). Gear carry modes didn't exist (LFR, Flex, making PvE content easier by giving nearly the same ilevel gear away from something that took 0 understanding of mechanics). You didn't have just 1 basic secondary stat that Blizzard tells you to focus on (mastery, ect). You had to test that yourself (or read a guide, but most of them were incorrect because of a lot of different variables). Haste caps being removed & instead being blended all together. Removing glyphs just removes another layer of depth & intelligence the game required. Removing the "overly complicated *sarcasm*" old talent system, into a 5 row, no thinking required mess.
PvE in WoW right now revolves around 3~ main attacks doing 90% of your damage. Most of those attacks light up even telling you what to hit.
PvP in WoW has too many problems to type, a lot of it is similar to PvE.. the gap between a bad player & a good player is almost non existent. Not because the good player has gotten worse, but because important mechanics were removed, or merged into basic gameplay.
All in all, the game is definitely already closing the gap between good & bad players. It's undeniable. For people like me, who put in a lot of hours doing sims at different haste caps, with different trinkets, all of that, it's gone now. You do very basic simming with maybe different trinket setups, and that's about all there is to do. Talents are pretty much self explanatory, gearing is straight forward, you have very little room to mess up a rotation, you can hardly mess up DoTs.. the only thing left is what? Figuring out positioning.. when to use CDs.. and boss mechanics?
Like I said before, the best players & guilds have quit. Literally, the #1 guild, in the past few years, and multiple top players. If Legion had nothing to do with it why did all these guilds that have been running & competing for multiple expansions all leave at the same time?
I'm not really gonna beat a dead horse here.. if you've been around WoW and did some basic raiding & PvP you already know it's undeniable.
Just to close, I'm not saying the game is not bad, or dead, or whatever. I'm saying personally, for me, the game is heading towards a direction I'm not interested in sinking my time into anymore. It's less thinking, testing, trial & error, messing up, learning. And more dailies, mindless button mashing, and grinding for AP.
By the way, I could easily get into advanced class mechanics, like the Balance Druids energy system rework which required absolutely no thinking, but I won't, because this isn't the place for it.
And don't get me started on how forcing Mythic guilds to do 20m raids when it was hard enough finding 10 competent players was a good plan..
Post edited by OhhPaigey on
When all is said and done, more is always said than done.
Came across this video from a friend and while I don't like fighter games, this is literally spot on the biggest reason why I stopped playing WoW for Legion & probably beyond.
A game I put thousands of hours into, being my most played game ever, and slowly within 2 expansions it is now a game I haven't a touched in nearly a year.
I mainly PvP'd but it's to a point now there's so much randomness & luck a brand new player can beat veterans without having to use any form of conscious thought, just popping CDs and mashing a few attacks.
There used to be a time in WoW where if you used your CDs at the start of a match when you weren't on DR you wasted that CD, not anymore.
Thoughts?
They been shifting away from unbalanced gear centric pvp and the best you can come up with is randomness & luck. They leveled the playing field and you just lost to a new player? Or an old WoW veteran returning to the game? How bout just an old veteran mmo player who has been around the blocks a few times?
Bragging about sitting all day in front of your computer and sharing achievements in a VIDEO GAME is hardly to be proud of.
You could farm PvP gear in 2 days on the old system, but whatever, that's such a non issue for me.
The problem with PvP now boils down to a couple of things, besides the complete lack of attention & thought from the developers themselves. No rewards for anything, no nothing...
Just like everything else, they blended everything together. Instead of having to worry about positioning, saving interrupts, timing interrupts even, knowing when to trinket, you have 1 big pool of DR. You get CCd once or twice and that's it. Things like hunters old interrupt? It's now just a blanket CD (a blanket CD is when you silence someone without actually having to time an interrupt), basically, much less thinking involved.
Hybrid healing? While it was probably too strong in MoP, it's literally worthless now in Legion, what does this mean? Pop CDs, blanket silence healer, win.
Again, pointing out the problems with PvP is harder than it is for PvE, because it's so many little things combined.. but pretty much if you go through the early patch notes on classes, everything there was done for 1 reason, to simplify the game, and in my opinion, oversimplify.
When all is said and done, more is always said than done.
i feel that the OP is kinda right as far as PvP is considered
when i was playing legion pvp felt pretty soul less compared to earlier iterations. it felt so homogenized that it got to the point i could predict outcomes solely based on team/class comps with significant accuracy before the fighting even started.
i don't think its an issue with lack of gear disparity thou. i think the problem has to do with role types bleeding into one another way too much.
MMORPG's have never been mechanically difficult enough to require precise timing and command inputs like a fighting game. Even at the bleeding edge of progression that kind of precision does not exist. They're more about group coordination.
I don't think WoW is any easier now than it was in Vanilla or any other time during the game's lifespan. Boss encounters are way, way more challenging now. Things generally took longer, and were more inconvenient, but it wasn't more mechanically challenging in the past.
The skill gap between the random LFR raider and a Mythic raider is huge. Same for PVP. A 1200 rated player is not even remotely close to a 1800+ rated player.
Pre-Legion, we had more skills than we do now. More choices in talents. More choices in gearing. DoT duration ended if applied too early, they didn't just stack on top of each other to a certain point (if you DoT'd too early, you wasted overall damage done & DPS, using that GCD wasted a cast you could have done). Snapshotting existed in all DoTs, rewarding observant & knowledgeable players (reDoT during the start & finish of CDs & trinket procs). Gear carry modes didn't exist (LFR, Flex, making PvE content easier by giving nearly the same ilevel gear away from something that took 0 understanding of mechanics). You didn't have just 1 basic secondary stat that Blizzard tells you to focus on (mastery, ect). You had to test that yourself (or read a guide, but most of them were incorrect because of a lot of different variables). Haste caps being removed & instead being blended all together. Removing glyphs just removes another layer of depth & intelligence the game required. Removing the "overly complicated *sarcasm*" old talent system, into a 5 row, no thinking required mess.
PvE in WoW right now revolves around 3~ main attacks doing 90% of your damage. Most of those attacks light up even telling you what to hit.
PvP in WoW has too many problems to type, a lot of it is similar to PvE.. the gap between a bad player & a good player is almost non existent. Not because the good player has gotten worse, but because important mechanics were removed, or merged into basic gameplay.
All in all, the game is definitely already closing the gap between good & bad players. It's undeniable. For people like me, who put in a lot of hours doing sims at different haste caps, with different trinkets, all of that, it's gone now. You do very basic simming with maybe different trinket setups, and that's about all there is to do. Talents are pretty much self explanatory, gearing is straight forward, you have very little room to mess up a rotation, you can hardly mess up DoTs.. the only thing left is what? Figuring out positioning.. when to use CDs.. and boss mechanics?
Like I said before, the best players & guilds have quit. Literally, the #1 guild, in the past few years, and multiple top players. If Legion had nothing to do with it why did all these guilds that have been running & competing for multiple expansions all leave at the same time?
I'm not really gonna beat a dead horse here.. if you've been around WoW and did some basic raiding & PvP you already know it's undeniable.
Just to close, I'm not saying the game is not bad, or dead, or whatever. I'm saying personally, for me, the game is heading towards a direction I'm not interested in sinking my time into anymore. It's less thinking, testing, trial & error, messing up, learning. And more dailies, mindless button mashing, and grinding for AP.
By the way, I could easily get into advanced class mechanics, like the Balance Druids energy system rework which required absolutely no thinking, but I won't, because this isn't the place for it.
And don't get me started on how forcing Mythic guilds to do 20m raids when it was hard enough finding 10 competent players was a good plan..
DOT snapshotting was handled by an addon just like stat weights were handled by the .01% of the population that calculated them, made spreadsheets, and later, wrote the sims. Unless you were one of those theorycrafter/developers, there wasn't any skill required. Talent choices were an illusion of choice, and again, everybody followed a guide written by someone who had already figured it out. "Go to EJ and read Vulajin's guide to Combat Rogues." It was just as brainless back then for the majority of players. There were a lot of classes that had one button rotations during the pinnacle of raiding i.e. Sunwell.
PVP has always been hot garbage.
The raids have gotten mechanically more difficult minus a few notable exceptions.
I've been playing since Vanilla, and have seen everything the game has to offer from casual PVP to 5 and 6 hour a night progression pushes. I agree that the skill gap has become smaller, but I don't agree that it's bad for the game. It gets more people into content, and there is still content that challenges the best players and guilds in the game.
Seems like you have a case of rose-tinted-glasses. Nothing wrong with that. I wear a pair whenever I think about FFXI. The game was grueling, and felt hard as hell when I played. Thinking back on it objectively though, I know the difficulty was artificial. There was a large gap between the top end and average player there, and when they toned it down, I felt the same way - it was good for the game as a whole, and there was still plenty of content to smash my head against.
Came across this video from a friend and while I don't like fighter games, this is literally spot on the biggest reason why I stopped playing WoW for Legion & probably beyond.
A game I put thousands of hours into, being my most played game ever, and slowly within 2 expansions it is now a game I haven't a touched in nearly a year.
I mainly PvP'd but it's to a point now there's so much randomness & luck a brand new player can beat veterans without having to use any form of conscious thought, just popping CDs and mashing a few attacks.
There used to be a time in WoW where if you used your CDs at the start of a match when you weren't on DR you wasted that CD, not anymore.
Thoughts?
The amount of competitive WoW pvp players make up less than 1% of the user base. It should come as no shock the game was never designed with you in mind, including Vanilla.
I see people keep pressing on "Well you didn't do this mode of the content, so you dont know what you're talking about in regards to what the game has to offer" but look at what was just said in that statement and honestly think if its real content or not. The break down is that there has to be a specific content (not even type of content) that has to be accessible for everyone at different levels. Why? Why can't Mythic be the only "mode" and you need to clear through certain dungeons and so on in order to get to that point. If you can't then you just have to get better. A decade or more ago thats how things worked. There wasn't this "easy" mode > normal mode > hero > etc. You went through specific separated types of content and then it all culminated to that raid of the one mode. Earn the story, not get it handed to you. That's pretty much the problem with all games, not just wow. People have no reason to push themselves because they know content will be handed to them in 3-4 months after release so why bother doing more than the minimum. And then yes complain that there is nothing to do, not because there isn't actual stuff to do but because nothing synergizes. Its great that you can run the LFR version then the normal then heroic then mythic, but you forget that its literally running the same thing on a single character multiple times a week, which of course will burn out anyone. But all this mode garbage is just because game devs are cheap tbh. It honestly doesn't cost that much to make 4 modes of one piece of content in comparison to making 4 separate types of content that appeal to 4 different skill levels.
Came across this video from a friend and while I don't like fighter games, this is literally spot on the biggest reason why I stopped playing WoW for Legion & probably beyond.
A game I put thousands of hours into, being my most played game ever, and slowly within 2 expansions it is now a game I haven't a touched in nearly a year.
I mainly PvP'd but it's to a point now there's so much randomness & luck a brand new player can beat veterans without having to use any form of conscious thought, just popping CDs and mashing a few attacks.
There used to be a time in WoW where if you used your CDs at the start of a match when you weren't on DR you wasted that CD, not anymore.
Thoughts?
They been shifting away from unbalanced gear centric pvp and the best you can come up with is randomness & luck. They leveled the playing field and you just lost to a new player? Or an old WoW veteran returning to the game? How bout just an old veteran mmo player who has been around the blocks a few times?
Bragging about sitting all day in front of your computer and sharing achievements in a VIDEO GAME is hardly to be proud of.
You could farm PvP gear in 2 days on the old system, but whatever, that's such a non issue for me.
The problem with PvP now boils down to a couple of things, besides the complete lack of attention & thought from the developers themselves. No rewards for anything, no nothing...
Just like everything else, they blended everything together. Instead of having to worry about positioning, saving interrupts, timing interrupts even, knowing when to trinket, you have 1 big pool of DR. You get CCd once or twice and that's it. Things like hunters old interrupt? It's now just a blanket CD (a blanket CD is when you silence someone without actually having to time an interrupt), basically, much less thinking involved.
Hybrid healing? While it was probably too strong in MoP, it's literally worthless now in Legion, what does this mean? Pop CDs, blanket silence healer, win.
Again, pointing out the problems with PvP is harder than it is for PvE, because it's so many little things combined.. but pretty much if you go through the early patch notes on classes, everything there was done for 1 reason, to simplify the game, and in my opinion, oversimplify.
Poor continued effort glorifying how elite of a player you are. You call it oversimplified and yet it's difficult for you.
Came across this video from a friend and while I don't like fighter games, this is literally spot on the biggest reason why I stopped playing WoW for Legion & probably beyond.
A game I put thousands of hours into, being my most played game ever, and slowly within 2 expansions it is now a game I haven't a touched in nearly a year.
I mainly PvP'd but it's to a point now there's so much randomness & luck a brand new player can beat veterans without having to use any form of conscious thought, just popping CDs and mashing a few attacks.
There used to be a time in WoW where if you used your CDs at the start of a match when you weren't on DR you wasted that CD, not anymore.
Thoughts?
They been shifting away from unbalanced gear centric pvp and the best you can come up with is randomness & luck. They leveled the playing field and you just lost to a new player? Or an old WoW veteran returning to the game? How bout just an old veteran mmo player who has been around the blocks a few times?
Bragging about sitting all day in front of your computer and sharing achievements in a VIDEO GAME is hardly to be proud of.
You could farm PvP gear in 2 days on the old system, but whatever, that's such a non issue for me.
The problem with PvP now boils down to a couple of things, besides the complete lack of attention & thought from the developers themselves. No rewards for anything, no nothing...
Just like everything else, they blended everything together. Instead of having to worry about positioning, saving interrupts, timing interrupts even, knowing when to trinket, you have 1 big pool of DR. You get CCd once or twice and that's it. Things like hunters old interrupt? It's now just a blanket CD (a blanket CD is when you silence someone without actually having to time an interrupt), basically, much less thinking involved.
Hybrid healing? While it was probably too strong in MoP, it's literally worthless now in Legion, what does this mean? Pop CDs, blanket silence healer, win.
Again, pointing out the problems with PvP is harder than it is for PvE, because it's so many little things combined.. but pretty much if you go through the early patch notes on classes, everything there was done for 1 reason, to simplify the game, and in my opinion, oversimplify.
Poor continued effort glorifying how elite of a player you are. You call it oversimplified and yet it's difficult for you.
If you take Neo, Roland (From the Dark Tower), or any other legendary gunslinger put them in a suit that holds them so they can't move with the gun aimed at their opponent and have them play Russian Roulette then it will be difficult for them to perform even slightly above average.
Extreme example but yes. Oversimplified systems do make it difficult for exceptional players to stand out.
So simply saying "yet it's difficult for you" is a poor argument in this scenario based upon the claims she is making. Rather your argument should focus on some more concrete examples of how skill is still involved.
Came across this video from a friend and while I don't like fighter games, this is literally spot on the biggest reason why I stopped playing WoW for Legion & probably beyond.
A game I put thousands of hours into, being my most played game ever, and slowly within 2 expansions it is now a game I haven't a touched in nearly a year.
I mainly PvP'd but it's to a point now there's so much randomness & luck a brand new player can beat veterans without having to use any form of conscious thought, just popping CDs and mashing a few attacks.
There used to be a time in WoW where if you used your CDs at the start of a match when you weren't on DR you wasted that CD, not anymore.
Thoughts?
They been shifting away from unbalanced gear centric pvp and the best you can come up with is randomness & luck. They leveled the playing field and you just lost to a new player? Or an old WoW veteran returning to the game? How bout just an old veteran mmo player who has been around the blocks a few times?
Bragging about sitting all day in front of your computer and sharing achievements in a VIDEO GAME is hardly to be proud of.
You could farm PvP gear in 2 days on the old system, but whatever, that's such a non issue for me.
The problem with PvP now boils down to a couple of things, besides the complete lack of attention & thought from the developers themselves. No rewards for anything, no nothing...
Just like everything else, they blended everything together. Instead of having to worry about positioning, saving interrupts, timing interrupts even, knowing when to trinket, you have 1 big pool of DR. You get CCd once or twice and that's it. Things like hunters old interrupt? It's now just a blanket CD (a blanket CD is when you silence someone without actually having to time an interrupt), basically, much less thinking involved.
Hybrid healing? While it was probably too strong in MoP, it's literally worthless now in Legion, what does this mean? Pop CDs, blanket silence healer, win.
Again, pointing out the problems with PvP is harder than it is for PvE, because it's so many little things combined.. but pretty much if you go through the early patch notes on classes, everything there was done for 1 reason, to simplify the game, and in my opinion, oversimplify.
Poor continued effort glorifying how elite of a player you are. You call it oversimplified and yet it's difficult for you.
If you take Neo, Roland (From the Dark Tower), or any other legendary gunslinger put them in a suit that holds them so they can't move with the gun aimed at their opponent and have them play Russian Roulette then it will be difficult for them to perform even slightly above average.
Extreme example but yes. Oversimplified systems do make it difficult for exceptional players to stand out.
So simply saying "yet it's difficult for you" is a poor argument in this scenario based upon the claims she is making. Rather your argument should focus on some more concrete examples of how skill is still involved.
Laying out the outcomes and scenarios doesn't change the fact as he/she claims that the changes to the game have been made EASY it for everyone else.
Changes have been made. You learn. You adopt. THATS SOME FUCKING SKILL!
It's never been nor will it ever be the last time any game has gone through PvP or PVE Class changes.
I am pretty sure a lot of folks have played enough of these games to know this.
MMORPG's have never been mechanically difficult enough to require precise timing and command inputs like a fighting game. Even at the bleeding edge of progression that kind of precision does not exist. They're more about group coordination.
I don't think WoW is any easier now than it was in Vanilla or any other time during the game's lifespan. Boss encounters are way, way more challenging now. Things generally took longer, and were more inconvenient, but it wasn't more mechanically challenging in the past.
The skill gap between the random LFR raider and a Mythic raider is huge. Same for PVP. A 1200 rated player is not even remotely close to a 1800+ rated player.
you are kidding right? did you raid in BC or vanilla? when CC was actually necessary? now its just a race through dungeons..... raids are pretty basic but its still a challenge to get 25 people to cooperate with each other, I dunno about the pvp but the pve is very dumbed down. wouldn't be surprised if the pvp was also. I know one thing, you did NOT play BC or if ya did, you forget what it was like
MMORPG's have never been mechanically difficult enough to require precise timing and command inputs like a fighting game. Even at the bleeding edge of progression that kind of precision does not exist. They're more about group coordination.
I don't think WoW is any easier now than it was in Vanilla or any other time during the game's lifespan. Boss encounters are way, way more challenging now. Things generally took longer, and were more inconvenient, but it wasn't more mechanically challenging in the past.
The skill gap between the random LFR raider and a Mythic raider is huge. Same for PVP. A 1200 rated player is not even remotely close to a 1800+ rated player.
you are kidding right? did you raid in BC or vanilla? when CC was actually necessary? now its just a race through dungeons..... raids are pretty basic but its still a challenge to get 25 people to cooperate with each other, I dunno about the pvp but the pve is very dumbed down. wouldn't be surprised if the pvp was also. I know one thing, you did NOT play BC or if ya did, you forget what it was like
If you take Neo, Roland (From the Dark Tower), or any other legendary gunslinger put them in a suit that holds them so they can't move with the gun aimed at their opponent and have them play Russian Roulette then it will be difficult for them to perform even slightly above average.
Extreme example but yes. Oversimplified systems do make it difficult for exceptional players to stand out.
So simply saying "yet it's difficult for you" is a poor argument in this scenario based upon the claims she is making. Rather your argument should focus on some more concrete examples of how skill is still involved.
Laying out the outcomes and scenarios doesn't change the fact as he/she claims that the changes to the game have been made EASY it for everyone else.
Changes have been made. You learn. You adopt. THATS SOME FUCKING SKILL!
It's never been nor will it ever be the last time any game has gone through PvP or PVE Class changes.
I am pretty sure a lot of folks have played enough of these games to know this.
Illogical argument. Yes changes will be made. That does not mean that changes cannot be made that dumb a game down so sufficiently that there is no longer room to stand out as an exceptional player. You don't just implement a speed limit in a race and then tell people to adapt.
Like I said I'm not a WoWer, but if they did with class abilities what they did with skilltrees then WoW has been trying to keep anyone from standing out as an exceptional player for a long time. The game is getting progressively dumbed down over time.
That's going to lead people who are exceptional to get pissed off an leave. Honestly from what I hear of WoW evolution it sounds like most skilled players ducked sometime around the Panda expansion. Legion is actually a little bit late to the party.
WoW has been a joke to PvP community for many, many, years now.
Never looked back, no point in spoiling a good memory of the best iteration of the game.
If buggy, unplayable for weeks, unbalanced mess is best for you...
There were issues but not that extreme - unplayable for weeks? hyperbole much?
Still for me miles better than the shit show it became over the years - people just standing in towns waiting for instances to pop..... lol
What's the point of having all these zones and a world to explore?
One of the biggest problems, and probably one of the main defining factors of a themepark MMO, is the level based areas, how do you prevent them becoming redundant once players have levelled through them?
Never looked back, no point in spoiling a good memory of the best iteration of the game.
If buggy, unplayable for weeks, unbalanced mess is best for you...
There were issues but not that extreme - unplayable for weeks? hyperbole much?
Still for me miles better than the shit show it became over the years - people just standing in towns waiting for instances to pop..... lol
What's the point of having all these zones and a world to explore?
One of the biggest problems, and probably one of the main defining factors of a themepark MMO, is the level based areas, how do you prevent them becoming redundant once players have levelled through them?
Oh, I dont know ....how about a system whereby the zones are automatically adjusted to your level so you can not out-level them, only out-gear them.
Then, create a system that sends you to every zone to complete daily quests.
While we're at it, how about on top of all that a system that randomly selects a zone and invades it with harder enemies and daily quests.
But, we'll probably never see anything like that in WoW.
You see a lot of these type of posts. They always, always, turn into a battlefield of people who like the game, and people who don't. It turns into another excuse to defend or trash the said game. Many a time these posts end with a lot of name callings and suspensions and bans.
My advice? Well, since OP is not trolling--because many times people make these posts just to troll and we all know this perfectly well that it is cooler to hate games these days--and is actually trying to discuss a problem which I too believe it exists, steer clear of game's name, and write about the problems you see with this concept, mechanic, experience whatever.
In your case: The Consequences of Reducing the Skill Gap
This is a great topic for debate. I bet if you went and just wrote about that, we'd be having a much more greater discussion rather than personal attacks or calling stuff "shit". Of course later on you could talk about your experiences in certain game(s).
When you start a topic with "Why I quit <game_name>" it translates as I am venting, I am trashing, or even worse, I am whining. Which I believe OP ain't doing any of those, although she is a bit frustrated which is fine. We can't all shit rainbows all the time.
Just my 2c
Constantine, The Console Poster
"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Carl Jung
Comments
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Leveling the playing field is a good thing when it comes to character stats. Making it so a max level sword only does twice the damage as a new sword as opposed to 10,000,000 times the damage of a newb sword is a very good thing in my opinion for instance.
She's talking about something different. Say in an space fighter sim veteran players used expert tactics to avoid fire and increase their chances of landing critical damage on their enemies, allowing a skilled player to take on many veteran players even if they were using the same ships / equipment / character skills etc.
In this instance, imagine if in order to make it for newb players to win fights they slowed down the movement speed of all ships by 75%. Now dodging is less important and it's easier for everyone to land their hits. It's not about leveling the playing field in terms of character stats, it's about making the game easier so everyone can win.
This is bad. It takes away the reward of TRUE accomplishment (player skill as opposed to character skill) and hands victories to zerg guilds on a silver platter.
I can't speak too much about WoW because I never played it all that much and have barely played it at all in recent years, so I'm going solely off of her argument. But if what she says is true, then it is indeed a very bad change and others may call it "skill" but those people obviously have no concept of what skill is.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Vanilla WoW had huge gaps between well geared/skilled players and that is what made it fun imo because it gave everyone something to work towards. I remember a few really geared PVE players that sucked very badly at PVP that needed pocket healers to follow them around so they wouldn't die. I also remember open world pvp where a single player could kill 2-4 players solo but in Blizzard's grand attempt to have everyone be a winner they standardized everything leaving us with the game we have today.
One large tactic I always use in PvP is designing and playing solid off-meta builds because when you play off-meta well, people don't know what your character is capable of and how to counter it. That's only possible in games with real customization. Not games where the developers pick your build for you because apparently you're a dunce and skill trees are "too mathy".
Time spent in game and player skill are separate due to the way gear now works. Prior to legion you could be a decent player that is jacked gear wise and rock 1 on 3 all day verse lesser geared players, even lesser geared players of greater skill. In legion you simply can not do that, the gear difference between someone who just started pvping and has maxed their points and gear is less significant. Now if you are destroyed by someone with less gear than you, they outplayed you with skill, likewise if you are destroyed by someone with better gear than you, they outplayed you with skill again, they did have a slight advantage via the gear, but it is nowhere near as significant as it used to before the max 10% difference legion brought.
The people complaining about how gear works now are folks who are not interested in the skill side, they are interested in out gearing everyone else and dominating a 10v10 bg by themselves, topping the charts, and basically carrying a team on their back like a hero. It used to be so nice to outgear your opponents, hit like a mack truck and mitigate all the damage due to your superior defensive and armor stats. You hit for 10k, the opponent uses the same skill and hits you for 2k, not only was that skewed, but your health pool is doubled up as well, so your 10k hit vs the 2k hit is actually more like 20k vs 1k or less. or 20% vs 1% however you want to look at the differences.
In those cases, it's very hard to say the better geared person is the person the greater skill set, they simply have more room for error offensively and defensively, likewise it's hard to say the person with lesser gear is the less skilled.
PvE in WoW right now revolves around 3~ main attacks doing 90% of your damage. Most of those attacks light up even telling you what to hit.
PvP in WoW has too many problems to type, a lot of it is similar to PvE.. the gap between a bad player & a good player is almost non existent. Not because the good player has gotten worse, but because important mechanics were removed, or merged into basic gameplay.
All in all, the game is definitely already closing the gap between good & bad players. It's undeniable. For people like me, who put in a lot of hours doing sims at different haste caps, with different trinkets, all of that, it's gone now. You do very basic simming with maybe different trinket setups, and that's about all there is to do. Talents are pretty much self explanatory, gearing is straight forward, you have very little room to mess up a rotation, you can hardly mess up DoTs.. the only thing left is what? Figuring out positioning.. when to use CDs.. and boss mechanics?
Like I said before, the best players & guilds have quit. Literally, the #1 guild, in the past few years, and multiple top players. If Legion had nothing to do with it why did all these guilds that have been running & competing for multiple expansions all leave at the same time?
I'm not really gonna beat a dead horse here.. if you've been around WoW and did some basic raiding & PvP you already know it's undeniable.
Just to close, I'm not saying the game is not bad, or dead, or whatever. I'm saying personally, for me, the game is heading towards a direction I'm not interested in sinking my time into anymore. It's less thinking, testing, trial & error, messing up, learning. And more dailies, mindless button mashing, and grinding for AP.
By the way, I could easily get into advanced class mechanics, like the Balance Druids energy system rework which required absolutely no thinking, but I won't, because this isn't the place for it.
And don't get me started on how forcing Mythic guilds to do 20m raids when it was hard enough finding 10 competent players was a good plan..
You could farm PvP gear in 2 days on the old system, but whatever, that's such a non issue for me.
The problem with PvP now boils down to a couple of things, besides the complete lack of attention & thought from the developers themselves. No rewards for anything, no nothing...
Just like everything else, they blended everything together. Instead of having to worry about positioning, saving interrupts, timing interrupts even, knowing when to trinket, you have 1 big pool of DR. You get CCd once or twice and that's it. Things like hunters old interrupt? It's now just a blanket CD (a blanket CD is when you silence someone without actually having to time an interrupt), basically, much less thinking involved.
Hybrid healing? While it was probably too strong in MoP, it's literally worthless now in Legion, what does this mean? Pop CDs, blanket silence healer, win.
Again, pointing out the problems with PvP is harder than it is for PvE, because it's so many little things combined.. but pretty much if you go through the early patch notes on classes, everything there was done for 1 reason, to simplify the game, and in my opinion, oversimplify.
when i was playing legion pvp felt pretty soul less compared to earlier iterations. it felt so homogenized that it got to the point i could predict outcomes solely based on team/class comps with significant accuracy before the fighting even started.
i don't think its an issue with lack of gear disparity thou. i think the problem has to do with role types bleeding into one another way too much.
DOT snapshotting was handled by an addon just like stat weights were handled by the .01% of the population that calculated them, made spreadsheets, and later, wrote the sims. Unless you were one of those theorycrafter/developers, there wasn't any skill required. Talent choices were an illusion of choice, and again, everybody followed a guide written by someone who had already figured it out. "Go to EJ and read Vulajin's guide to Combat Rogues." It was just as brainless back then for the majority of players. There were a lot of classes that had one button rotations during the pinnacle of raiding i.e. Sunwell.
PVP has always been hot garbage.
The raids have gotten mechanically more difficult minus a few notable exceptions.
I've been playing since Vanilla, and have seen everything the game has to offer from casual PVP to 5 and 6 hour a night progression pushes. I agree that the skill gap has become smaller, but I don't agree that it's bad for the game. It gets more people into content, and there is still content that challenges the best players and guilds in the game.
Seems like you have a case of rose-tinted-glasses. Nothing wrong with that. I wear a pair whenever I think about FFXI. The game was grueling, and felt hard as hell when I played. Thinking back on it objectively though, I know the difficulty was artificial. There was a large gap between the top end and average player there, and when they toned it down, I felt the same way - it was good for the game as a whole, and there was still plenty of content to smash my head against.
Extreme example but yes. Oversimplified systems do make it difficult for exceptional players to stand out.
So simply saying "yet it's difficult for you" is a poor argument in this scenario based upon the claims she is making. Rather your argument should focus on some more concrete examples of how skill is still involved.
Changes have been made.
You learn.
You adopt.
THATS SOME FUCKING SKILL!
It's never been nor will it ever be the last time any game has gone through PvP or PVE Class changes.
I am pretty sure a lot of folks have played enough of these games to know this.
you are kidding right? did you raid in BC or vanilla? when CC was actually necessary? now its just a race through dungeons..... raids are pretty basic but its still a challenge to get 25 people to cooperate with each other, I dunno about the pvp but the pve is very dumbed down. wouldn't be surprised if the pvp was also. I know one thing, you did NOT play BC or if ya did, you forget what it was like
Are you talking about LFR?
Like I said I'm not a WoWer, but if they did with class abilities what they did with skilltrees then WoW has been trying to keep anyone from standing out as an exceptional player for a long time. The game is getting progressively dumbed down over time.
That's going to lead people who are exceptional to get pissed off an leave. Honestly from what I hear of WoW evolution it sounds like most skilled players ducked sometime around the Panda expansion. Legion is actually a little bit late to the party.
WoW has been a joke to PvP community for many, many, years now.
Then, create a system that sends you to every zone to complete daily quests.
While we're at it, how about on top of all that a system that randomly selects a zone and invades it with harder enemies and daily quests.
But, we'll probably never see anything like that in WoW.
My advice? Well, since OP is not trolling--because many times people make these posts just to troll and we all know this perfectly well that it is cooler to hate games these days--and is actually trying to discuss a problem which I too believe it exists, steer clear of game's name, and write about the problems you see with this concept, mechanic, experience whatever.
In your case: The Consequences of Reducing the Skill Gap
This is a great topic for debate. I bet if you went and just wrote about that, we'd be having a much more greater discussion rather than personal attacks or calling stuff "shit". Of course later on you could talk about your experiences in certain game(s).
When you start a topic with "Why I quit <game_name>" it translates as I am venting, I am trashing, or even worse, I am whining. Which I believe OP ain't doing any of those, although she is a bit frustrated which is fine. We can't all shit rainbows all the time.
Just my 2c