Failure, challenge, and the decline of WoW

R

RunningWolf

Veteran XV
Failure, Challenge, and the Decline of WoW « Flavor Text

Great article written by Wowhead CM Perculia and Hamlet from Elitist Jerks.

Summary:
Spoiler
 
large part of why I stopped playing

While I appreciated not HAVING to play 15 hours a day to prep for Molten core raids... Farming Whipper root Tubbers and Night Dragon's Breath... all the PVP that would occur in the zone to get the timers on cooldown, then having guild groups dominate the zone when MC was the beast it originally was. I missed the challenge, the largeness of overcoming Lucifron for the first time after trying for hours every night. The awe of getting Tier 2 loot from MC and the respect you would get because of the sheer rarity of it.

I quit after beating Lk, getting burnt out on endless raids with mains/alts/ alt pug raids and how the finesse of playing was gone (played a warlock since before nerfcoil) just showing up with little to no prep, no difficulty in getting prep'd for hard bosses... just watered down snorefest.

I am still nostalgic for the old-days.

*edit*
Especially the guild combination faction battles over Blackrock mountain starting at 6pm, and the poor bastard low lever ppl trying to quest during that time period.
 
Last edited:
in before the usual wow apologists defending the all-mighty blizzard that can do no wrong

(<-- happy, using smurf till im unbanned lol)
 
Last edited:
There are no WoW apologists you idiot. The bulk of us play for lack of a substitute game to play, a portion of us are waiting on TOR and the other portion is waiting on GW2. With a small sprinkling of Diablo3 waiters.
 
ThUnda said:
large part of why I stopped playing

While I appreciated not HAVING to play 15 hours a day to prep for Molten core raids... Farming Whipper root Tubbers and Night Dragon's Breath... all the PVP that would occur in the zone to get the timers on cooldown, then having guild groups dominate the zone when MC was the beast it originally was. I missed the challenge, the largeness of overcoming Lucifron for the first time after trying for hours every night. The awe of getting Tier 2 loot from MC and the respect you would get because of the sheer rarity of it.

I quit after beating Lk, getting burnt out on endless raids with mains/alts/ alt pug raids and how the finesse of playing was gone (played a warlock since before nerfcoil) just showing up with little to no prep, no difficulty in getting prep'd for hard bosses... just watered down snorefest.

I am still nostalgic for the old-days.

*edit*
Especially the guild combination faction battles over Blackrock mountain starting at 6pm, and the poor bastard low lever ppl trying to quest during that time period.
Click to expand...

Of course the ones that refuse to remember how it used to be will say you're using rose tinted glasses. I miss the old days myself. I came from UO to WoW and my nostalgia wasn't because it was a new or fresh experience. I already had years of experience playing MMO's. There was just a sense of accomplishment because of how challenging it was. It's a shame that Blizzard has turned the game into a type of Facebook app.

Feannag said:
There are no WoW apologists you idiot. The bulk of us play for lack of a substitute game to play, a portion of us are waiting on TOR and the other portion is waiting on GW2. With a small sprinkling of Diablo3 waiters.
Click to expand...

I think the majority of Wow players are like this. I'll be trying out SWTOR, but I haven't been to impressed from what I've seen. GW2 and Archage look promising. Even if I don't play anymore MMO's, It would be nice to see them succeed. WoW's rise and fall have really put investor's on edge. That's not good for PC games overall.
 
The old style of play was definitely fun at the time, and provided a great sense of accomplishment. But there is no way it would have survived.

I can clearly remember raiding BWL, and being extremely angry that I had to go farm MC for the 40th time just because an experienced member left and we had to gear up a new player. The more we had to farm old content, the more experienced players we lost. It was a total downward spiral.

I'm glad that each content patch is a gear reset. I don't need to ever step foot in old content ever again. Instead, I can concentrate on new content.

There is absolutely no way I would still be playing if the game continued with the old model.
 
i really dislike the recent nerfs in FL, so many guilds got 6/7 hm over night and it felt like blizzard took the wind out of our sails to speed up progress on rag.

despite that, you cant tell me defeating heroic rag wouldnt be a victory. how is that fight not like a prince or vashj, i dont know. ive just started and the fight is pretty fun/challenging. i dont think things are all that different these days, its just that mentality of the "good old days" blah
 
Slurp said:
I don't need to ever step foot in old content ever again. Instead, I can concentrate on new content.

There is absolutely no way I would still be playing if the game continued with the old model.
Click to expand...

Except if you want the look of the old gear, you're going to have to farm the old instances from what I'm understanding.
 
Super Cliffs

- Back in the day, games offered challenges that included failure.
- Failure lead to learning to play the game better, and thus a sense of accomplishment.
- WoW over the years lowered the difficulty of the game to open up the game to more people.
- The lowered difficulty led to less "failure" in playing the game, and thus robbed games of any sense of accomplishment in playing the game.

It should also be noted they aren't the first. The game industry has been leaning this way for years, working to ensure failure never happens. Because they are afraid if people fail, they will stop playing the game and hence lose money. If you don't believe me play a few games. A lot of them are geared so that even if you fuck up they will offer to lower the difficulty without any repercussion. And even then a lot of them are more like "rail rides" where you are herded through preset paths.
 
eliminating failure leads to boredom and people will stop playing anyway

problem is game companies cater too much to the american demographic of downy special ed retards
 
Players are by far better on average today than they were in Vanilla and TBC as well. Factor that in with gradually-nerfed content and it's what we have today. The people you bitch about in your 10 and 25man raids today would have probably been considered amazing back in the day.

More people were around back in the day because the game was still considered new and fresh. It's been nearly 7 years now I think and that's a long ass time to continue playing one game. You can only rehash the same ideas so many times and maintain interest from players. At least this expansion has had a lot of unique encounters so it's been fun (for me), but if I didn't have incentive to play beyond gear upgrades for myself I don't think I'd still be playing today.
 
The average player is only better because of gearing. Back in classic/TBC you HAD to do the older content for the gear to do the next tier in the content. But now anyone can cap-out and grind heroics for JP to get geared straight to the present tier without any raiding experience whatsoever.

If you made it so you HAD to get all your gear from BWD, BoT, and Tot4W before you could step into Firelands the average raider would be more competent but there would be less people because the average player now would just quit because "it is too hard".
 
Finding a guild is the biggest challenge in this game. Having left for quite a few years and returning its nearly impossible to find a group that doesn't suck to play with.
 
TOR is very impressive. I was impressed in the beta. The storyline is immersive, the abilities made sense. There was nothing that was a reach in the game. The graphics were the biggest disappointment, but the environment and the sabre animations were good.

While I don't think it will be revolutionary, it should be fun.
 
WoW became a boring slippery slope for me. I used to PvE, so I can have an advantage in PvP. PvE was also challenging. These days, the PvP sucks because the balance shifts every season to a new comp. They perpetually keep this revolving so subscriptions stay active, you roll a new character. The PvE lacks any real challenge, and screwing up is a factor of boredom: eg. Arcane Mage. In other words, there's literally nothing left to do in the game. Stopped about 2 months ago and I don't miss even just a little of it.

Looking forward to BF3 in a week.
 
Back
Top