Can we save World of Warcraft?

[Eddie the head]

anc[is]Warcraft 4 anyone? You can keep the space goats and werewolves as long as the plot goes back to being more than "players slaughter everything"

My only hope would be that any story stuff in WoW (As I'm not an MMO person and haven't played it) is retold in the RTS format for Warcraft 4, because otherwise there may be this giant gap where some people just don't know what's up.

Next question, is there much plot in WoW? To do with Thrall, Arthas etc?

Not one worth fallowing. At least not as good as Warcraft 3, and I didn't think it was good in Warcraft 3. Anyway WoW has always been like a prono there might be a few people who care about the story, but that's not why most people are there.

 

[Ferisar]

anc[is]Warcraft 4 anyone? You can keep the space goats and werewolves as long as the plot goes back to being more than "players slaughter everything"

My only hope would be that any story stuff in WoW (As I'm not an MMO person and haven't played it) is retold in the RTS format for Warcraft 4, because otherwise there may be this giant gap where some people just don't know what's up.

Next question, is there much plot in WoW? To do with Thrall, Arthas etc?

I can provide you with lore information that WoW has covered; just understand that the amount is absolutely insane. The basic premise of all your favorite WC3 characters are that if they even slightly leaned toward the neutral affiliation they are dead.

This is me not knowing spoiler tags by the way (THESE ARE SPOILERS HE-YOOOO)VVV

Illidan is dead. Arthas is dead. Thrall is the most overpowered piece of shit on Azeroth now. Uther is -still- dead, comes back as a ghost at some point or another. Maiev pops in for a second and disappears forever. Akama is a guirella fighter turncoat. Kil'jay is dead. Archimonde still dead, you get to see it again DOH. Let's see... Oh yeah, dragons were OP, not anymore, because D-Wing is dead... But they seriously were (I hate Knaak for doing this to warcraft. The man needs to seriously calm his dragon boner). Uhm... What else. Oh yeah, Cenarius is alive again for... reasons. Malfurion went back to sleep and woke up in Cata. Naga are purely evil now, but no surprise there. Kael'thas is dead, twice. Anub'arak is dead, twice. A couple Old Gods are dead (the cthulu monster from the TFT mission with the dungeon and Arthas/Anub'arak). Cairne is dead, killed by Grom Hellscream's son in a duel for the title of Warchief. Sylvanas is... Sylvanas. Jaina is not at all important anymore. Ho hum... Tyrande stays essentially the same. Grom stayed dead. Deckard Cain is dead. You are nephil-- oh wait, wrong game.

Other than that, most of the lore is self-contained within WoW, which isn't to say it's small by any goddamn stretch of imagination. It's fucking huge. The quality is debatable though.

EDIT: Oh yeah, lady Vashj is dead... The dreadlords can't die unless the force of the killer is over 9000, so Mal'ganis is alive, but is a huge wuss and is hiding. Kel'thuzad is dead. Tichondrius is dead. That one dreadlord who served Sylvanas is presumed dead (I used to know the name but can't be arsed to look it up in a "summary"). I might come back to this as I recollect some more information.

OH, BRONZEBEARD IS ALIVE. He just had Amnesia THE WHOLE TIME! Not making this up.

But yeah, warcraft 4... I want it. I really do. I like the RPG/RTS format much better than I like WoW. Mostly because in WoW for anything to be important it has to be raid content, and everything dies in raid content and underplays individual achievements of certain characters while making the players have all the power, WHILST STILL TELLING YOU that you as a player character individual are weak as all bananas. Which is, you know, fine, but then why are you thwarting, like... Kil flipping Jaiden. etc...

Rant over.

OT:
I want WoW to be good again, but as someone pointed out the game simply has lost its edge. It's older, it's painfully obvious that it's older, and once you've played enough of it you know everything there is to know about it. The second your class makes sense to you is the second the game becomes linear, and linear MMO's do not work.

Also, what you are describing is bad MMO design. Making content too accessible (what it is right now, in fact) underplays player achievement and the idea of striving for something. As it stands now, all you have to do is spend upward of two weeks efficiently finding gear and you can do the current content raid whilst bypassing all of early Cata completely. That, by itself, instantly burns you out, because you don't -HAVE- to do anything to earn your place, you just get candy handed to you.
This is why many people say vanilla WoW was better. The content was harder, and it kicked your ass. When you got an epic item, it was a sight to behold. When you get one now, it's just a toss-away half the damn time. There's no fun in that. When you see someone decked out in purple gear you don't go "aw man I wanna be like 'dat guy" you just walk by because EVERYONE IS WEARING PURPLES ALL THE TIME.
The other (perhaps more personal) problem with WoW is zero motivation for players to do anything in the world anymore. No one does world PvP much anymore. Hell when you go to grief lowbies it isn't fun anymore, because all of them die too damn fast because of progression gear spikes. A level 85 will always beat everything below his or her level, regardless of skill 99% of the time. ETC ETC.
When you give a bunch of people a huge world, and those people never want to revisit it or do anything in it other than "end-game content" there's a problem.

/takes a breath

 

[TK421]

I enjoyed WoW quite a bit the little that I played it. I never got as far as the end-game, so I can't comment on what you said. My favorite Character was my Troll Druid, but I only ever got to level 40. I didn't have much time to play (uni/work/etc) so paying $15/month was too expensive for 15-20 hours of play. The only thing that would get me playing again would be going Free to Play.

 

[Kyoufuu]

Personally, I'd like to see any MMO change up the MMO formula. The end-game centric gear chase is as obnoxious as it is boring. This is what ultimately drove me away from WoW each time I stopped playing between expansions. I just got so insanely tired grinding out the same heroic dungeons repeatedly, knowing full well when the next expansion hit everything I had done would be worthless and I would have to do it all over again.

EVE. RuneScape. When it comes out, The War Z.

 

[kortin]

This place wasn't the best place to post it.

People around these parts hate WoW. They even consider it a "waste of [x] years" which just disgusts me.

 

[A3sir]

The problem isn't getting gear, you just have bad luck, gear is so simple to get, that's the issue. In pre-BC and TBC, for my guilds, gear was always secondary, getting the kill was the fun. I mean, hell in MC days, getting a boss down another 10% than the previous week was progression. Now you can truck through the top end endgame raids in a matter of hours and they throw gear at you.

End game used to be about downing bosses and getting loot was a bonus that helped you get the next boss. No one wanted loot to "haev ful epix", they wanted loot so they could perform better in the next raid encounter. Now bosses are just loot pinatas, I mean, Ulduar excluded, and Naxx because that was pre-BC, I can name MAYBE 3 bosses from any raid starting from Wrath til now because I just don't care anymore, the raid encounters are nothing special, you just go for the loot.

 

[MetallicaRulez0]

People like to say WoW is too easy now, but that's not really true, it's about as difficult as it was in BC, but with quite a bit of the grind removed, so it's WoW but far less time consuming.

Which is part of the problem that old school players like myself talk about constantly. In Vanilla and BC we spent all day before a raid grinding mats and gear for that night's raid. Now, everything is basically taken care of on it's own. No need to grind consumables, or gold, or gear. Just go do the raid, do your 5mans every week, and profit. There's no reason to log in except to raid anymore. In Vanilla and BC there was ALWAYS more to be doing.

MOP supposedly fixes this problem with an abundance of dailies and interesting solo activities, so we'll see if it's better than Cataclysm in that regard.

I think the Cataclysm period of WoW will go down as the single least grindy MMO experience of all time. You could maximize 1 character's potential in 2-3 hours playtime a week, which is less than half the time it took in previous expansions.

 

[Kopikatsu]

No. I just want it to plummet to under a million subs so other developers would stop copying it.

But who am I kidding, as soon as that happens the geniuses who brought us WAR, AoC and SWTOR will think "Perfect, if we make a rebranded WoW clone now, it'll have no competition! $500 million budget! Fuck innovation in the ass!".

Every new MMO is a copy and past of WoWs combat system, which in turn turns me off of MMOs. Which ironically might not be a bad thing. Seriously they wonder why so Many MMOs fail when people who leave WoW are usually sick of the system and people who aren't don't usually leave WoW.

If there was an MMO with Demon Souls type combat I'd pick it up in an instant.

Have you tried Vindictus?

I lost interest in Vindictus for a couple of reasons a while ago, but the combat system most certainly was not one of them.

 

[Lunar Templar]

Can we save World of Warcraft?


I think the real question is do we really want to?

bam, what i was gonna say right there

 

[WaReloaded]

Snip

This is why I became cynical towards the game. During Vanilla (and BC to a lesser extent) it was quite difficult to properly gear your characters, but the sense of satisfaction you got from finally acquiring that one piece of gear you needed was incredible. Then with the introduction of the raid and dungeon finders it became much easier to access endgame content, etc, and I felt that a lot of my accomplishments weren't as meaningful or powerful as they once were. However, I'm not entirely opposed to either system, as making gear easier to obtain is better for the community as it allows everyone to experience the endgame content as opposed to the select group of people that join raiding guilds and dedicate a lot of time to clearing content.

 

[Lunar Templar]

This place wasn't the best place to post it.

People around these parts hate WoW. They even consider it a "waste of [x] years" which just disgusts me.

if it makes you feel better, i hate WoW and i might have little a days worth of playing time in it XD

 

[kortin]

if it makes you feel better, i hate WoW and i might have little a days worth of playing time in it XD

It's all the morons who continued to play it despite their apparent "hatred" of the game. If you don't like the game and haven't put in 1+ years into it, I don't really care, it's your opinion. I just have issues, like I said, with the dumbasses who continued playing the game.

Hm, so what your proposing is...SOMETHING THAT EXISTS!! Sorry for caps lol, it's called LFR and it is almost exactly what you described. I think whats wrong with WoW is the utter ease of obtaining this top tier gear. I want WoW to go back to building up your gear from high-lvl dungeons to heroics to first tier raids and eventually to the end game raid. This way you're not grinding the same heroics but it still takes some accomplishing to get to the top.

Yes, let's go back to standing around in trade begging for a tank or healer for two hours. I loved that.

Edit: Misread. Thought you said LFD. Disregard.

Anyways, unlike LFD, raiding without LFR is completely viable. There's no real reason to complain about it.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

anc[is]Warcraft 4 anyone? You can keep the space goats and werewolves as long as the plot goes back to being more than "players slaughter everything"

Snip

Thanks for answering my question, that was a lot of typing, I appreciate it. So it more or less looks like it would wipe the slate clean for the next one anyway...

I'm a bit disappointed.

Not one worth fallowing. At least not as good as Warcraft 3, and I didn't think it was good in Warcraft 3. Anyway WoW has always been like a prono there might be a few people who care about the story, but that's not why most people are there.

Cheers for that, more or less backs up what I was thinking after the above guys answer for me. I liked the Warcraft story, it was nothing ground breaking, but it was a great fantasy rts game and I haven't found any that match up in a long time.

 

[Sean951]

I played from around the beginning of Sunwell through the beginning of Lich King. Basically, I remember Seal Twisting being a thing that I had to learn as a Pally and having amazing amounts of fun in the Plague Invasion. I never had more fun than at the end Lich King. My guild was not good at progression. But by the end of June after the ICC patch, we had everything up to Sindragosa on farm and it was a blast. We had 5-7 core members and would often have to grab a few others from Trade chat, but we would spend 2 hours, kill 10 bosses, and then throw ourselves at the wall that was named Sindragosa until we had to quit. Downing her was one of the funnest experiences of my WoW days.

 

[Barry93]

People make too much of a big deal about gear. The item level requirements for raids are much lower than what most think. What they need to do is stop ruining their raids with nerf after nerf and just leave them alone.

 

[Ferisar]

This is why many people say vanilla WoW was better. The content was harder, and it kicked your ass. When you got an epic item, it was a sight to behold. When you get one now, it's just a toss-away half the damn time.

As someone who was there in Vanilla, NO. IT. WASN'T.

Purples were just as throwaway the minute people started finishing off Molten Core on a regular basis.

There's no fun in that.

Because constantly grinding Naxx40 or AQ40, and being called a "noob" if you weren't, THAT WAS FUN.

I hate to say it, but the only bright spot in vanilla was Southshore vs Tarren Mill. That was a toybox, man.

When you see someone decked out in purple gear you don't go "aw man I wanna be like 'dat guy" you just walk by because EVERYONE IS WEARING PURPLES ALL THE TIME.

Yea I'd love to see that server, cuz it sure as shinola wasn't any I ever played on.

Hell when you go to grief lowbies it isn't fun anymore

The fact that you found it fun to grief people in the first place speaks badly of you. Yea, you complain about things being too easy, yet you relish fights you can't possible lose and now you're mad because you can't torture them longer. You disgust me.

When there is no sense of accomplishment in a game, there is no sense of progression, when there is no frustration, there is very little joy to be had. Even if not frustration, ignorance or a "downside" is a necessity to stick with a game like WoW to the very end. Right now it is a fun questing experience on rails which holds your hand all the way through, and an okay end-game which doesn't merit revisiting. There's simply less to do. Either that, or the community itself has gotten too stale to want to do anything outside of what has been provided by in templates.

As to the gear, any server. I'm currently on Mal'ganis, which is uh... Not noob friendly, to say the least. Previously I was on The Scryers, an RP server with little to no good "progression" even up until the end of Wrath, and people had a full set of purple gear very -very- fast with pretty much every 80 or 85. The game, as it stands now, hands them out to you. Wrath heroics at release just threw gear at you. And this is coming from someone who loved WOTLK. I hated the gear progression.

This -might- come down to jealousy in some degree. When you as a player had to go through loops to get anything worthwhile in vanilla and BC as an inexperienced dit, it feels bad to see someone with no knowledge of the game strike at 80 and just deck themselves out in shinies within a day or two of reaching max level. This is reinforced by myself being said dit until the end of BC.

To be completely clear, I never did grief underleveled characters intentionally. The worst offense I've done is see meager attempts at taking objectives in BC by someone who was level 65> and handing out divine justice.
Perhaps that was actually a statement on current stat trends more than anything else, actually. Let's just roll with that. The stats are too damn high. When I level and someone decides to gank me now, I know I have to call in someone and sigh to myself. At least prior I could take one or two hits before hitting the ground. Now, especially with mists, I foresee a lot of "is that a paladin running toward m-AVENGING WRATH REPENT HAMMER DEAD" "Oh."

Also, to be fair, "griefing" needs to exist. Assholes need to exist. If everyone is sort of kind of nice to each other and just run around picking flowers together in PvP servers, what the hell is the point? Aren't I supposed to be in danger of constantly being ganked 24/7?

Again, this is coming from someone who played on an RP server and is now on... Mal'ganis. The "Alliance lost" server, essentially.
(Seriously, look up the population discrepancy)

 

[tendaji]

In my opinion, one of the problems with WoW is that its lore is starting to be stretched thin. Where all those pre-setup baddies are now falling with every raid to the point that you don't even know a big baddy who comes in the next raid because there is nothing on him other than maybe 3 quests about him. To me, WoW is just exhausted, there is too much stuff that they are trying to expand upon but end up doing more damage than good by altering the lore constantly to fit in the new pieces of it.

 

[Ferisar]

In my opinion, one of the problems with WoW is that its lore is starting to be stretched thin. Where all those pre-setup baddies are now falling with every raid to the point that you don't even know a big baddy who comes in the next raid because there is nothing on him other than maybe 3 quests about him. To me, WoW is just exhausted, there is too much stuff that they are trying to expand upon but end up doing more damage than good by altering the lore constantly to fit in the new pieces of it.

This is partially constraint of the genre which the game takes.
Think about it this way:
You progress, thus attaining strength. Thus, the enemies you face become bigger and bigger.
Eventually you catch on to that, and realize that the lore is being manipulated to have a linear progression upwards. Eventually, everything is overpowered, like DBZ's story, and it becomes less and less meaningful because it isn't even remotely relatable. There are other issues, but that one drives the game forward, so it's worth looking at. On the bright side, Mists, from what I know, has no "main antagonist". I mean, yeah, Garrosh or whatever, but Garrosh is nowhere near what Deathwing was.

But on the other hand it is also just an ever-decreasing roster of WC3 throwbacks, which is, to put lightly, too bad.

Welp, this is an excuse to go back to the WC3 campaign once I replay SC2 again.

captcha: step back.

Yeeeeah, I should. God knows I have way too much sentimental value with Blizzard games.

 

[Terminate421]

Pvp is relatively fun and there are 9 million online, with a new expansion coming. It'll be around for quite some time.

 

[Gamergeek25]

I see no reason to save a game that does not need to be saved. Tried beta, and was quite pleased with it.