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What do you think could save World of Warcraft ?
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
Blizzards WoW,
It appears to me World of Warcraft is finally going into decline.
I despise what every expansion did to the game but thats on me. Putting that aside I actually feel bad for the extremely lucrative company...... Not that our opinions count for anything, what would you do to save this game ?
My opinion:
First, take a look at what happened.
- Age, it's old
- Expansions, however important to survival they will cause a perpetual spiral down hill in all cases.
- Demographic changes from the original product.
- Long term cater to end game players. You can't keep them forever.
Second, my solution.
Take Vanilla, DON'T make an expansion, but add more levels, classes, more starting, mid level, and end game AT LEVEL 60. Keep the original difficulty and resell it as new.
Be a humanitarian company for awhile and give "extra" something back to the public against the nature of Big Business Practices. For survival long term this must happen. Later add expansions and start the process over again.
Working on both greed and offering a quality product together will cause greed to prevail eventually... Hence deterioration.
It appears to me World of Warcraft is finally going into decline.
I despise what every expansion did to the game but thats on me. Putting that aside I actually feel bad for the extremely lucrative company...... Not that our opinions count for anything, what would you do to save this game ?
My opinion:
First, take a look at what happened.
- Age, it's old
- Expansions, however important to survival they will cause a perpetual spiral down hill in all cases.
- Demographic changes from the original product.
- Long term cater to end game players. You can't keep them forever.
Second, my solution.
Take Vanilla, DON'T make an expansion, but add more levels, classes, more starting, mid level, and end game AT LEVEL 60. Keep the original difficulty and resell it as new.
Be a humanitarian company for awhile and give "extra" something back to the public against the nature of Big Business Practices. For survival long term this must happen. Later add expansions and start the process over again.
Working on both greed and offering a quality product together will cause greed to prevail eventually... Hence deterioration.
Post edited by delete5230 on
Comments
I don't think it will ever be as great as it once was. The market is too saturated. They did the right thing by branching out with different types of games.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
1. Old but modernized just fine. WoW expansions look/play better than most newer MMOs
2. Stating expansions are inherently a descending spiral is absurd. Legion was a pretty strong expansion for a game that had been out since 2004. Expansions are only bad when the expansions are bad. Instead of building on the success of Legion BfA was an uninspired, shallow attempt at an expansion.
3. You can't keep end game players forever? Ummm….you don't stay the #1 played MMO every year since 2004 without keeping those players.
But at the same time it is worth considering that wow in it’s sunset has more players than some mmo’s had at peak. So it will go away very slowly and with grace.
But nothing will really turn the tide.
This have been a good conversation
The universal 'one game for everyone' became a niche game that currently is neither fish nor fowl. The game is beyond repair. It's like a patchwork quilt made of features taken from different gaming genres, which are sowed together to resemble an MMO game.
The best they can do is to open expansion specific servers and let their players choose which iteration of the game they would like to play. Each and every 'expansion' is like a game of its own with very little in common with the game it's suppose to expand. The extremes are so far from each others there's no way a player that enjoyed vanilla/TBC game would even consider playing Legion/BfA era WoW.
But after all, does the game really need a salvation? WoW has been around for almost 15 years, which is amazing achievement for a video game. Why wouldn't we let the old timer rest in peace and find new games for replacement? Eventually a game that exceeds our expectations will emerge pushing WoW to where it belongs - a distant past in our gaming life.
They could also just re-release BC & Wrath in the next 2-5 years. Bottom line I don't see them salvaging retail, Its a bloated mess at this point. Classic is their best bet
Aloha Mr Hand !
Next Expansion:
World of Warcraft Battle Royale!!!
100 players drop randomly from an airship and fight to be the last remaining survivor.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Aloha Mr Hand !
yep, and that is EXACTLY the prob, you guys have no idea whatr you want.
"take vanilla, add more levels, and end game at 60" are you fucking drunk?
so you want end level to be lower than max level?
uh and for the record, why would someone want vanilla, vanilla had one raid and like 3 dungeons. great, you finish those after like 4 month. 3 of them will be used to actually farm waterlords.
yep right, takes 3 months before you could even TRY the final boss in that one raid.
incase you find out what you want some day, let us know.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Right now, WoW is still king of the hill, and 12 years after launch it still remains what all other MMO's hope to become as far as success goes.
I think some people just want to return to nostalgia, but.. to quote a song "The good old days weren't always good" - Billy Joel.
/sarcasm
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
John Lennon
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
I'm definitely not an expert/pro player in this game, but I still sub and have been playing with family over the past few weeks. We usually do this whenever a new expansion or big patch comes out, then after about 2 months, we grow bored of playing and move on to something else. This has been going on since 2004.
I basically feel, and have felt that Blizzard itself is an extremely lazy company. And over the years, the focus on art design and CG have taken precedence over any type of real gameplay improvements. I call the company "Blizney" now due to the fact they are so obviously trying to copy Disney with these in-game CG movies and basic stories. Not that is inherently bad, it's just not what I personally would like.
Let me further elaborate....
<Game Design>
When WoW was launched in 2004, it was to be an "evolution" of the Everquest formula. And it was exactly that. Having removed the things that a lot of players hated about EQ like dropping your gear when you die, harsh death penalties, mob camping, very long leveling process, twinking, etc., they were able to get a lot more people onboard to play the game than EQ ever did. They improved on a ton of other stuff from the EQ formula as well. It's obvious the game was definitely an improvement to EQ, at least for most people. (I have/will always love EQ though).
<Graphics>
The graphic design (cute, cuddly, colorful, and simple) when released was actually above anything else in the mmo market. And thankfully they have somewhat tried to revamp and upgrade the graphics of the game to keep up. And honestly I think it looks great in 2018.....to a point I'll get to later.
So what happened to WoW then?
Again, this is just my opinion, but I think it is laziness and age. Let's break down each one a bit more....
<Age>
Wow is 14 years old. The engine still works, mostly. But expecting to retain your fanbase and customers without serious rework of the engine and maybe even game design can be hurtful to your subs. A lot of the playerbase play other games as well as WoW, and have been for the past 14 years. We have seen innovations (whether graphics or gameplay) in the gaming industry, that just isn't coming to WoW, or when it does come it's extremely late (see the "lazy" part).
<Lazy>
I have always felt Blizzard was a lazy company. Oh, they are fantastic at what they do usually, but extremely lazy still. To begin with, they are copycats. Nearly every game they have released has been a copy of something else. They are very good at it though, and tweak and change enough of it (usually by making it more simple) to draw in more customers than what the "original" did. WoW was a "copy" of EQ (we covered that above), but Warcraft and StarCraft itself are copies of Warhammer. Hearthstone was a copy of card games. HoTS was a copy of Dota. Overwatch was a copy of TF2. I do think though that Diablo was original....funny how they messed that game up.
Again, these are all great games, and a lot of the time I personally find them more fun than their originals. But a copy is a copy. I know this happens in the game industry a lot, but we usually give credit where credit is due. Blizzard gets all the credit, without the scrutiny that it deserves for this tactic though.
Back to WoW laziness....
Let's see, 2004 there were 8 classes I think? 2 of those classes were faction specific (Shaman and Paladin). An mmo's main component of connection between the player and the game is what "avatar" they choose to play as, their class and race. Since races don't mean much other than cosmetically being an elf or dwarf, class is the most important choice the player can make. Well, 14 years later, and 7 expansions later, and we have 1 actual new class (monk) and 2 lazy attempts at new classes (DK and DH). I call them lazy because the DK starts at level 50 and the DH at level 100. That means that all content below 50 and 100 doesn't need to be adjusted to account for them. "Oh that's great, I don't have to level up from level 1 again", true, but the developers are also saying, "Sucker, that just means I don't have to go back and itemize and balance all of the previous content." Still, though, 3 classes in 14 years??? The most important and gameplay altering experience you can make in an mmo, and we get 3 in 14 years? Do you want to know why? IMO it's because they are lazy. Not from a class design point, but from a balance point. They are too lazy to work on balancing the new class into the content.
Graphics (which boils down to art, animation, and the tactics used to implement them). I love/hate WoW's graphics. Really. At times I think they are awesome, others, I just cringe. The worlds they create can be incredible. But lately I've been cringing a lot. It's not just the art design, although that aggravates me too sometimes (so tired of everything being so "cute" - maybe it's my recent time spent in the Dark Souls universes), it's the inherent laziness that I've been noticing.
Let me give an example....
Character armor. Back in the early days of WoW I can understand this decision due to wanting to keep polygon counts low so the system requirements could stay low. But with today's powerful computers, this is unnecessary. I am talking about the "painted wetsuits" that everyone wears. In today's WoW, you have a couple of pieces of armor that I call "chunky". I call it that because it sticks out from the character. Helmets and Shoulders have always done this. And they have recently (in the past couple expansions) started adding gloves, belts and boots to the list. And finally in Legion and Bfa, we got a couple of pants and chests that do as well. However, only a couple of armor models do this. Mostly when you look at a character, their chest and pants are skin-tight but painted to appear to have more depth (more going on). Again, I get this for 2004. But they even went as far as to show it isn't an engine thing and did make some actual armor on later stuff. Well, go back and make ALL the armor do that? No, that would be too much work....(lazy).
<cont.>
Tradeskills - What happened to gems? Or glyphs? Or cool engineering tricks? Or enchantments to armor? Removed for "balance"? Or was it just "removed because I can't be bothered with balancing it"?
Tier Sets (class armor) - I'm fine with removing the "set bonus" stuff. But come on. Since 2004 we have always looked forward to new class-defining looks on the tier sets. Specific to each class, with their own look. Mage looks different than Warlock, even though they both wear cloth. But they dropped that in BfA. Now it's just a different set for each armor type, with a shader applied to whatever difficulty that armor comes from.
Copies of armor/weapons for new content - Again, with BfA...but now we have "new" stuff, that are just reshades of previous expansion's assets.
This happens with world design also, well specifically buildings. For example, still using the same ship designs from the first 2 or 3 expansions (remember that's still 10 years).
The removal of talent trees - I get it. I didn't understand then, but I get it now. I don't mind it anymore that they removed the awesome freedom and potential gimping of your character. BUT, to not add anymore tiers to the 100-120 bracket is just incredibly lazy.
Spells/Abilities - Still nothing new to look forward to...years and years now (at least 4) we have waited for new abilities for our classes. Still nothing. Oh, we get balance changes from time to time that does "change" the way they behave, and rarely they add in a new one for a specific class but they also remove some too. All in the name of "balance".
To sum it all up
WoW began well, with good ideas. I think they lost their footing along the way though. They forgot why it was considered so great in it's earlier days (no, I'm not a supporter of "Classic" - I loved it, but I don't want to replay it).
Mages actually had to polymorph stuff in dungeons. You had to work hard to stay alive and quest so you could level (nothing like EQ, but still ALOT harder than today's WoW) which gave a sense of accomplishment to the player. Gold wasn't easy to come by, you had to strive to save enough to unlock game-changing abilities like epic riding skill or flying. Lots of other reasons.
Today's WoW is all about end-game. I don't despise the End-game model currently. I mean I really enjoy the raiding and mythic dungeons and world quests sometimes. But the reward systems will suck the life out of you, and is like a spotlight on Blizzard, showing how they want you to take a LONG time to advance so that you have to keep subscribing. Time-gated content (dailies and weeklies) were ridiculous when they were introduced to the game a decade ago, and they are even worse now.
Whatever happened to Blizzard's motto of FUN being the most important factor? I remember when their excuse for removing something from the game was because, "we just don't think players find this to be fun overall". Like the development of Diablo 3, and them removing or changing some abilities around because they just were not "fun to use".
When did they ever come to the conclusion that time-gated content, no new class abilities, no new class armor, no new talents, was "fun"? When did they determine that getting Artifact Power was "fun"? (oooo a "rare" mob, Ima go kill it to get some loot.....and you get.....a tiny amount of AP). This game needs a super injection dose of FUN back into it, and the removal of systems that are not "fun".
I feel the game is being entirely led by the Art design team at this point. It's the only area the game seems to be in a constant state of evolution with.
20% nostalgia
30% community
50% the game itself
What, that isn't what you meant? From a commercial perspective, WoW has been spectacularly successful and doesn't need saving. What it does need is to keep the existing playerbase happy. Don't go all New Game Experience and dissolve the existing playerbase in hopes of finding another, better one. Whatever other playerbase you could find would surely be much smaller and less lucrative than the one they have now.