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World of Warcraft - It's Been a Big Week Since the Launch of 7.3.5 - Let's Catch Up - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
World of Warcraft - It's Been a Big Week Since the Launch of 7.3.5 - Let's Catch Up - MMORPG.com
Last week, Blizzard launched the World of Warcraft 7.3.5 update for the game. That in and of itself is huge news. However, in the days between then and now, a lot of smaller, but very noteworthy, things have happened that you may have missed. We aim to remedy that today.
Comments
My 17 Priest did one run through Wailing Caverns, got like 1.7 levels just from the one run. Took like 15 minutes.
The changes to heirlooms are cool, at least it's worth it to check new blue drops to see if it's temporarily going to be more powerful than the heirlooms.
I do like that I can follow a single quest line to its conclusion and enjoy the story without worrying about wasting time on greens/greys.
Of course leveling had to be sped up with all the expansions of ages past. That adds more content, you have more choice which is a good thing, you shouldn't expect to be able to do them all on one toon without purposefully slowing down. If they forced everyone to go through every zone there is on the way to max level, only the most dedicated new players would ever reach max level and have a chance at competing before the next expansion comes out.
WoW is a game of alts. On your next toon, do the zones you skipped on the last, and skip the ones you did. Even now you won't be able to do every zone, probably no more than before because you were probably doing green quests (when you could have been doing yellow/orange) now you do the same zones for full exp.
You imagine a problem you create yourself and then approve of a solution that ruins the game for others. Now everyone is locked into a monotonous grind where every mob is the same middle of the road to low difficulty. Better to have green through red and let players choose. Good luck finding a challenge now outside of a dungeon, especially if you ever play with a friend.
Odds are if you try and step up to the next item level cap region it will be too high 50% or better of the time.
Yet Blizzard did it. Almost incredible. They must have faith in their game being able to survive, I'm not sure how, but they do, as this move requires balls.
Sadly unless they improve the engine to run properly on modern PCs and tame down the loot RNG back to Burning Crusade levels I'm never going to go back. I might play if I get invited into the Beta, but not subbing again, hell, I have enough gold to sub probably forever, but the game is just too far from the MMO I loved.
Have yet to see a single game being able to score a real comeback, especially after it killed all their "stars", like Gul'dan, Archi/KJ, Kael, Illidan, Magtheridon and the list is now too long to be worth it. The lore is now stretched too thin, and without that, what's left? Farming dailies? Farming the same boss on 3 difficulties for 4-5 months? Spamming arenas with rotating FOTM classes?
Nah, WoW has to cut even deeper if it's to make a real comeback. I would say however, the time is right. The MMORPG market is empty. People crave a quality, persistent world with a story that's engrossing and matters.
We shall see.
I'm not really sure I understand what you wrote. "Have yet to see a single game being able to score a real comeback." In what way? Numbers? Your personal wants? The perception of the vocal minority? Because nearly every expansion their subscription numbers from Wrath onward shot up to at least 10,000,000 at start, even though they reached the lowest of 5 million during the drought and massive failings of WoD. Yet again, though, the numbers shot upwards. The game significantly improved over the trash of WoD (which had only one real patch, and that patch contained what was promised for 6.0 along with a raid). Again, a major improvement overall.
Now, I'm not the type to defend WoW all that much, but I just can't understand what you're trying to say; the how or the why of it. Legion in itself was horrid. RNG everywhere. Broken Lore. Legendary disasters. Artifact failings. Alt treatment. Pretty much how they handled a lot of the new systems were horrendous. But people still come back like its no one's business. Even when it comes to money, they just keep on making more and more with stuff they put in that people eat up.
If you're just talking about a massive failure that comes back to be a massive success, then we still have something that is undeniably suitable -- even if one doesn't care for it personally. FFXIV 1.0 was an abyssmal failure with number ratings so low they had to bring in NASA scientists to quantify their value. Though they completely remade nearly every aspect of the game (including the engine) and from there have been enjoying spectacular success. Increasing servers, trippling their budget with Heavensward and then against with Stormblood. Acquiring new real estate for improved facilities, etc. They went from a game that struggled to hold only 1,000 subs to something that exploded in popularity with them still adding more servers to this day, even five years after -- unheard of for a subscription game in general, much less one five years old. A second phenom after WoW to have done this and not go F2P after a year like many others. It even provides a quality story with 8 year old lore, lorebooks, etc.
As for WoW, they were never strong at story telling. It was usually all delegated to books or WCIII or card games or board games, until they were officially made not canon. In fact, Vanilla and TBC had the worst storytelling of WoW's history, and they pretty much make fun of it nowadays in Legion. Not to mention TBC being the butt end of lore breaking jokes all around. Wrath was okay as a whole and did some good things in the end with the three dungeons. Cataclysm was (comparatively) great for story with all the zone revamps and making each zone have a storyline of its own. Mists also had a good story, even if many couldn't get past pandas. WoD is were they fell to definitively better than Vanilla and TBC in terms of base story (those zone storylines were amazing), but lacking in support. Where they shoved mounts in our faces without a damn patch worth a damn for over two years. They flat out gave up and just took out $410 for the two years and the expansion and gave us the middle finger. Honestly, a pile of shit would have been an improvement. Legion was prompt up to succeed no matter what.
A chore implies it being slower. And slower it was not. The longer it takes to level the more of a chore it becomes, like now. The story does not become more engaging because I kill enemies at a slower pace. As a veteran player that remembers how how extremely boring classic WoW was when it came to leveling this change (I remember I hated going to Arathi Highlands and Azshara to level) will not bring me back. Raids and PvP was fun, most of the time, leveling never was. But suddenly we now have lots of players on the forums that try to tell everyone that the end game is no longer about raids and PvP - it all about the road to highest level.
I left old WoW because slow leveling and never feeling like I was much stronger at higher levels than I was at level 1, like a peasant with a shovel. The changes that made mobs easy enough that I could 1-2 shot them and handle 5-6 of them at a time was great, I loved that. Now I hear they took that away. At least they could have kept the choice, made heirlooms much stronger to compensate but no, Blizz hates when we have too many choices.
I wish MMORPGs would once again adopt the design philosophy where progressing through levels was the main game that lasted months if not years, and had raiding as a bonus or filler content for hardcore individuals who reach the max level before an expansion is released. This may sound like a nightmare to a new generation gamer who think a game has to start at level cap, but if designed right it would offer a more complete gaming experience than the current design where you practically skip 90% of the game and end up running the same instanced content week after week.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
But the experiance boost more then makes up for it.
I wonder how much sub time Blizzard lost because the leveling game sucked.
Personally:
My hardcore raiding days were back in Vanilla. The first time I re-rolled after Vanilla was towards the end of Wrath. I rolled a blood elf pally made it to level 21 when I did a run in Razor Fen Kraul. After that run I promptly cancelled my account in disgust.
They destroyed all that content so that people could level to max faster. People who didn't want to do that content at all. Why not just give those people a fast forward/skip button, instead of destroying the whole leveling game?
Revenue earned from level boost -vs- Revenue lost from cancelled subs because of the nerfed leveling game.
Which one was bigger?
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
The world may never know
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
I've always really hated the idea of "endgame is the real game."
Hate to be cliche, but my experience with DAoC wasn't like that. Despite the frontier RvR, they had persistent level tier keep siege battlegrounds that were active. The ultimate dungeon of the game, Darkness Falls, had tiers of mobs that started much lower than max level, and you could get items worth your time at those tiers. All of those types of things seem to be gone today, and I've not seen a good reason why.
Your abilities were more based on the implants you could equip and less on your level. Equiping items was based on achieveing a pre-requisite stat. So you might need a sertain STAMINA level to equip a better implant, which gave you better stats. SO it beacme an art of using a series of implants and gear to boost ONE stat. But that one stat was the pre-req for a gear upgrade, then you'd swap out for others. "Twinking" into implants and gear that should normally be able to equip became and art and "laddering" up skills to use those upgrades was fun as hell. Players had lower level characters that could compete with much higher level characters. Obvious, there would be a limit since a 200 level character can always Twink into better gear than a 150 level. But certain zones were also level based.
In its day, before it became all about the cash shop and multiple accounts. It was the best MMORPG ever. (IMO)