wtf happened to WOW?

What I think happened...

It was probably around the first content patch into MoP. It was a job well done (despite the whining the release content was well-made), most of the content was mostly done and they were working on WoD. Pretty sure Hearthstone was just ramping up and Heroes of the Storm was fleshing out enough to be ready for a closed beta. So they take some people from the WoW team, add to and make teams for those games (I'm sure hearthstone started out with two people, a team wasn't in place yet). It came slowly to the realization the deadlines were screwed up. WoD work slowed down as they focused on MoP patches, and it wasn't until the last patch did they realize WoD wouldn't be ready. And even by then more people were taken to work on Legion, and while they did hire more people they weren't yet brought up to speed. So that took time and even then some of those new people went immediately to Legion. So Warlords was behind in a very bad way, which is why the last MoP content patch went on as long as it did.

And even in that time it was obvious Warlords had to be rushed. They made a new 2-patch/yearly expansion model and they were already behind. So Warlords was chosen to bite the bullet while more resources were devoted to Legion. You can see some evidence most of the levelling content was already done as well as the cinematics, but end-game took the axe. They scaled the XP to speed up the 90 - 100 level process and threw into end-game, cutting and piecing together a concise enough story. The big plot points were intact, but they had to cut some of the in-between material. And Taanan jungle was locked out and saved for later. 6.0 and 6.1 and the small patched in between were poorly executed as they had no time and no resources and they cobbled what they could together.

The plan was made with Warlords to take the fall to "rebound" back with Legion which they were putting more resources into, and be a more full expansion overall. The problem was the Burning Legion. Again. To be fair my gripe ISN'T just the Legion, but the SAME Legion plot. They're taking over again, they found another way in, onos... There's naga, you could have redone those Cata water zones and expanded them as you were banking on before. There's an old god still under Tirfisal Glade, You could do Nerubian as a vast underground area. You can recycle those assets and still make a decent story. Hell how much material in assets were thrown together over the years that didn't make the cut for expansions? You could have recycled that for less and it would be new to us. You didn't have to do TBC2.

I won't argue Legion will be good, great, awesome of a steaming pile but I just can't bring myself to feel like I WANT to experience that. They are throwing the Vrykul back from Wrath, they are bring Dalaran to the new continent, they are bringing back Illidan, they are also doing much fan service like Alleria and the Emerland Nightmare just feels like they are just trying to cater to old lore simply because they could be out of newer ideas.

And let's be honest PvPers got jack shit for Warlords. They got re-skinned gear, no new modes nor battlegrounds.
 
Well it's worth pointing out that a big part of their problem is that the teams they had in past expansions, you know, the ones that weren't complete dog shit, have left to work on other unrelated projects, and several of the head people that were driving the work schedule have quit.

Rob Pardo and Jeff Kaplan are probably two of the biggest people to leave the development of WoW since it started.



You compare some of the things that Jeff says during their time spent developing vanilla WoW and there's such a difference of how best to handle things.
 
Ickz said:
The pvp changes interest me. I also like that they're trying to de-homogenize the classes. Look forward to more info.
Click to expand...

good luck dehomonizing the horde. nobody played horde until blood elves were added
 
I played for several months on the latest xpack after not playing for years. I stopped again a few months ago.

I was able to raid and kill all the bosses that were released at that point, Looking for Raid feature makes it easy, you don't even need to know the the mechanics for most fights.

Being able to respec whenever at an insignificant cost made it easy to try other specs.

Leveling was extremely fast with Looking for group, questing seemed to be pointless. Cataclysm levels were done in probably 4 or 5 instance runs, pretty much a couple of hours or less. I played every class in the game, some didn't make it past level 30. I played whatever I felt like, they all played well but some specs and classes got boring faster than others.

It was good time waster for a few months, played casual and joined guilds for bonuses but nobody talked in any of them. Game is much more antisocial now, you don't need a guild to see raiding content or to do an instance. You just join a queue and in a few minutes you are in a full team killing stuff.

The game isn't the all consuming life style choice it once was, it can be as casual as you want it and has a massive amount of content, I didn't even do more than a hour of pvp, and they have some sort of Pokemon pet battle game that I never touched and had no interest in playing. I didn't do dailys unless they were instance dailys, nothing is required to do and gold just pours in even without putting anything on the AH.

The game will keep going for as long as blizzard feels like adding content.
 
I quested in WoD because I could only take running the same 2 dungeons from 90 - 94 or so for so long. Even then there's even less variety (four of them are locked to 100 and heroic) so I just did quests. I didn't think they were too bad, most were concise stories with reasonable hubs, though some were clearly fluff. Those world objectives generally gave you a substantial amount of experience for what they ask, and once you hit Gorgrond at 92 you got a hefty boost from all of those. By the time 96 - 97 rolled around I was in the Spires just picking up treasures. The place was chock full of 'em, including archaelogy fragment caches, and each of them gave you nearly a quest's worth of experience. You kind of repeated that at 98 when you got to Nagrand, except there you could kill rare spawns for gear and gear up a bit before dungeons. You'd get goo experience for that as well and soon enough you were 100.

I think the most hilarious part of WoD was the Proving Grounds. In order to be allowed into heroics you had to earn a silver trial for each role you wanted to queue in for. And it seems there was a sizeable portion of players who literally couldn't do this, and they cheated their way into raids using crafted gear and BoEs.

The difficulty of getting that silver trial done varied from class and spec. I know someone made a video showing how you can do it on a rogue completely naked with green daggers. But I know gear level made a huge difference at times. My struggled on my shadowpriest when his gear was still sub-par, but once I got to the 600ish level you needed to be it wasn't that difficult at all. Tanks were generally pretty easy, usually because the timer didn't matter as long as the NPC healer survived. So if you knew when to pop your CDs it was easy. Healing was more difficult for me because your little NPC party would all take substantial damage and even if one of the DPS died the trial would fail.
 
The Nostalrious server is awesome, pretty much vanilla WoW in every way with some good improvements. Multiboxing appears to be forbidden though, which is lame.
 
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