WoW seems to be going downhill for a lot of people fast. It's funny how the original game took people by storm, and the content lasted forever. People ran Stratholme and Scholomance probably 300 times (at least I did) and it didn't really get that old. Then people ran MC a ton until that started getting old. But people ran the same instances a lot. For some reason, that's just what people did. When they announced the expansion, the big thing was PVP to get the grand marshal gear. Now, in BC, I find myself very indifferent about the different instances. I don't know them like the back of my hand like I knew the level 60 instances. And yet I grow tired of them already.
There could be several reasons for this:
1. It took people a while to truly learn how to play their class, and so they spent more time running instances that slowly got better. Now in BC, people already know what they are doing, so mastering an instance takes no time at all.
2. The only way to get gear that totally made a run EZ-mode was to raid MC, ZG, or AQ20, all of which took a long time to achieve. Here, a few trips into heroics and Karazhan can achieve the same thing. Good gear is more easily accessible as well due to the drastic improvement of BG and arena gear, both of which are more easily acquired due to game-play time instead of learning how to play.
3. The second time around, the game isn't nearly as fun. To a point, doing the same things over and over is unavoidable. At some point, doing the same things, such as dailies and farming, becomes tedious and thus less enjoyable.
4. Fewer changes. There were patches coming out every 1-2 months back then with new content, or changes to a class, etc. We've been sitting on the same patch now for almost 3 months, if not longer. Without new additions or big changes, people get bored easily.
5. Higher expectations. We know how amazing WoW was the first time around. WoW reborn should be 50 times cooler. But remember, the dungeons are shorter, take less time to complete, and it takes less time to obtain good loot. As a result, you don't really grind for a piece of gear forever, quite like waiting 5 months for something out of MC that you really really wanted.
At any rate, I'm afraid that as time goes on, fewer and fewer people will keep interest in the game, and we'll start to lose some quality people. This will not only make raids harder to do, but it will also mean less enjoyment, since these are people we've spent a lot of time playing with.
I continue to play WoW because it's fun. But I do hope that some new content for casual's sake comes along. I look forward to SSC, but I hope that some newer things other than Zul'Aman come along as well. Because for 3-4 other nights in a week that I hop on WoW, running around doing dailies and heroics can get old quickly.
Feel free to comment with your opinions on this subject.
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4 comments:
I admit that the game has lost some of it's spice with frequent updates and tough to do stuff. I think you should spend some time running around on alt's. You have by far mastered priest healing. Better than anyone else I know. You should switch it up and play more on alts that's the gist of my rant. And definitely do horde side lot's of different quests that haven't been done before.
Content > Levels/Repetition
While the game has provided us with plenty of new dungeons, in order to get to the high end gear you end up grinding several factions and are already tired of those instances by the time you unlock heroic. Karazhan was great fun in the beginning but after farming it for months it starts to lose it's taste. 25 mans mean getting together with your friends to do essentially one thing, fight bosses to get loot to fight harder bosses to get loot. Rinse, repeat. That's about it. They game needs more variety. IE:
Star Wars Galaxies, while a failed attempt at dungeons was made, it did provide a ton of content. There were a variety of professions that served a purpose for everyone. You had Image Designers, Doctors who could give you buffs, Combat Medics, Dancers/Musicians who could give you special buffs, Rangers who could make gigantic camps. On top of this, you could build a house out in the middle of no where on a remote planet, hell if you set up a bunch of buildings out there you could form a town and elect mayors and taxes. It was very free functioning. Gathering wasn't tedious. You could set your reactors out where the good stuff was and start them up with some energy cells in them and let them go. Then you head out and pick them up so they can fill up again.
My personal experience from the game was that I was a musician/ranger. I could make the gigantic camps out in the middle of no where and give people buffs by playing music. I would hang out in the taverns and just chat with everyone. We formed our own city in honor of the empire and served it greatly. The only reason that game failed was class balance. They allowed everyone to become a Jedi and it fell apart. There was no way to stop a Jedi. A Bounty Hunter could pick up a quest to kill a player character (Jedi in this case) but he wouldnt' be able to do it because they were so overpowered.
Before, there were only rumors of Jedi hiding out on remote planets building armies to protect them. Back then, if you were to die as a jedi, it would be over. There was no coming back. It was epic. They even had the crafting professions enhanced more so than any other game I had seen. You could farm for the highest quality materials (which their location changed I think every week or so) and the higher the quality materials, the better the manufacturing. One gunmaker was famous because of his hard work. On our server, everyone owned a weapon made by him, if you didn't you were a fool! Leviathan dominated the weapon industries and he lived in a player made city called Syn City.
Content > Levels/Repetition
Alts are fun, and i am loving running around on mine. I'm sure that the thing that makes WoW fun for me is my friends. both my IRL friends and my TN friends make WoW worth playing. Experiencing things alone without someone to share the experience with is a bit boring. Add a friend and some crazy moonfire-spamming-everything-in-sight just to see how your friend will react, and to see if you two are really masters of level 12, is the funnest thing in the game.
Patricles
Another aspect of it is, the built-in drama and drag of transitioning from 40 person end-game raids to 25 person. Back when I was raiding MC, each person's contribution didn't have to be so pointed. A solid core of 10 for MC and 15-20 for BWL could pull a lot of slack. Granted it was a hassle getting 40 people to show up on time ready to go, but that also created opportunity for people who might not have been among the peak performers to join up.
I think doing away with 40 man raids was a smart move. I think doing away with attunements was a step in the right direction. But I think they didn't execute it properly because of a few factors:
1) 40 man -> 10 man to gear up for the 25 man raids doesn't work. It wasn't just TN that hit a bumpy road over this, LOTS of guilds did. Then to go from 10 to 25... the math doesn't work out quite right. If you have 2 raids progressed 100% through Kara, that's 20 people. Not enough. 3 raids is 30 people. Too many. 2 raids with 13-15 people swapping in and out takes longer and still suffers from the too many/too few problem, and probably won't progress as fast if the team isn't practiced working together and doing the fights, and the reset of a week makes the time commitment for training them all up to task too great.
Problem 2 is... just like Naxxramas and AQ40, not enough guilds are clearing Gruul and Magtheridon to hit SSC/TK, much less Hyjal and the black temple. The difficulty is too demanding for raiders who don't commit 40+ hours to the game, which is a further stressor on guilds as people who are ready to run the high-level content get stuck mucking around the same content week after week (in this case, the Karazhan Bottleneck) with people who can't clear the mid-level content (Gruul, Magtheridon, SSC and TK). Will Zul Aman help this? Maybe. Like Trys said about level 60 instances... the things you ran to gear up for MC were: Stratholm, Scholomance, UBRS, BRD, Zul Gurub... even with all that I think I'm missing some options. What do you run to gear up for Gruul? Karazhan. And now Z-A. Is that enough? Well...
Problem 3: They announced the next expansion too soon. The changes I hear about... New classes that will make my current characters irrelevant. New professions that will make my current professions irrelevant and my character even more irrelevant. With this looming over my head, it causes a drag. Why bother running Kara or even Z-A over and over? My character is going to be a thing of the past anyway come expansion time, and the changes they're proposing don't sound that great to me.
That's to say nothing of all of the balance issues they have created and not addressed while focusing on a PvP end-game with guaranteed rewards for time spent vs the age-old raiding problem of 25 people... 1 drop that nobody needs. Not everyone likes PvP or views participating in it as a worthwhile goal for the incessant grinding.
I'm not going to say WoW is doomed--I'm sure it will be with us for a long time--but I know I won't be playing it.
~Yim
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