As someone who quit the game during Vanilla due to friends stopping, when exactly did WoW go to shit?
The exact moment when they introduced cross-realm battlegrounds, raid/group finders and flying mounts.
>>345174172
Depends on who you ask. Some say TBC, WotLK, Cata, MOP, Draenor, or Legion's Beta.
>>345174172
WOTLK
Every patch note where they traded or introduced a feature for convenience of the mentally neutered masses.
When your friends stopped playing.
Only friendless turds cried about LFR and shit
Well, every expansion killed a bit of the essence of the game slowly.
TBC focused on instanced content in favor of outdoor open activities (you know, being an MMO and all), also daily cancer, and pvp-only stats
WotLK further focused on hard mode instances and started streamling roles/classes to a breaking point, then LFG shit.
After this point, it escalated much more.
There isn't a single point where WoW went to shit. The developers mentality of slapping in quality of life was a slippery slope that inevitably led to it becoming a facebook clicker. MMOs should have nuances, it should be difficult to achieve things. So that you have an incentive to be social and play with the server. That's the entire point of an MMO.
Blizzard mistook the point of an MMO being a daily grind, therefore making the grind more automated was an improvement to them.
>>345174172
When they introduced battlegrounds in the summer of 2005.
>>345174172
I still think its pretty good, but then again I have never been hardcore af
The heaviest shit I've done is heroic raids. I never PvP.
I level alts and use them to make gold and occasionaly do dungeons or quests with friends.
I find it fairly easy to gear up characters by pugging normal/ heroic and doing mythic dungeons.
My main is ilvl 725 and im happy with that until legion drops.
The time invested/ reward ratio severely drops after you've cleared normal and are ready to start grinding the next teir. I cant be fucked with spending time on that shit for very long.
>>345179563
>I never PvP
Opinion disregarded.
>>345179264
they did this so the server wouldn't go to shit so often because of all the major pvp battles in the world (namely around Hillsbrad)
so they just made everyone addicted to point farming in small scale zones instead of fixing their server architecture
>>345179686
Everyone I've met that's into PvP is either underage, a manchild or a bongrat.
>>345174172
The moment they expanded the level cap.
>>345179834
Arena faggots are shitters yes. Just don't let this generalization spread to other games pls.
>>345174172
WOTLK
It was roller-coaster, went from excitement to disappointment to hope then anger and lastly content.
>>345176397
That's arguable. WotLK was good before 3.3, hell when the expansion went live it felt just as good as passing through the dark portal as well.
I didn't really like how much of a hard on they got for phasing zones and the mini-game like scripting for some of the quests they implemented, and then they just amplified it during cata and made everything a joke.
>>345176920
Late reply but I agree with a lot of this post. Blizzard has removed three very important things that keep players playing in the genre, incentive, investment and reward.
WoW's potential went to shit when TBC came out with a level cap increase. I'm not saying vanilla was the most stellar time and everything was primrose and sunshine. But the bones were solid and the core was great. But this was the beginning of the end for content relevancy that steadily had gotten worse as the game has gotten older.
Sadly when you peel back the layers you realize everything they've done has been solely to push as many boxes as possible. Invalidate the previous content to force the player to buy the box.
>>345179934
all the facts prove you wrong
wotlk was the best expansion ever, closely matched only by tbc
everything went downhill after that, as the general quality wasn't on the same level of wotlk
At no particular point in time. Every expansion had its ups and downs. Even Blackrock Foundry in Warlords is a good raid.
when they added LFR, CRZ and welfare legendaries.
>>345180029
3.3 was good if you only look at ICC, which for a patch is all that would really matter.
A year and a half of it sucked don't get me wrong and while it was the beginning of the end, LFD was hardly a problem at that point.
>>345176920
holy shit.... everything you said....so true dude. Literally the ease of everything made it so that no one would have incentive to be social and play WITH the server!!! THIS!!!!!!!!
>>345180189
Yeah that Naxx reskin, Malygos and Obsidian Sanctum were terrific raids
>>345180325
>siege of orgrimmar: black edition
>followed by siege of orgrimmar: green edition
>>345180410
I can't prove you wrong because WOTLK indeed had a lot of lazy raids with just a boss in a single area or retarded reskins, but still it had two of the most beautiful raids ever made for the game.
>>345179563
You are the golden standard of the post-wotlk WoW userbase that changed the game. The game was rebalanced specifically for you.
If everyone is wondering why WoW changed, read that post. There's a ton of people who see an MMO as candy crush where you should just log in for 20 minutes a day and do some minor grinding then move on, with as little obstacles as possible and instant gratification.
>>345180425
Yeah those were awful but every single expansion plus vanilla had poor raids and good raids
>>345180352
I hated LFD. Hell I hated flying mounts all together. I still think if they didn't decide to do all these stupid quest scripting sequences and mini-games and gave Northrend a more classical approach to how they created the Plaguelands it would have been fantastic.
I have no love for 3.3, but when Wrath first went live? It was very impressive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85JLNFc4eT4
>>345180587
I hope you're not saying Icecrown was good because it wasn't
Basically it had the Lich King fight and everything else was a shitheap
>>345174172
When you left. Because you left.
>>345180704
It wasn't bad at all, considering that they really spent a lot of time making the whole stuff cinematic.
Still, Ulduar is elder gods tier, along Karazhan.
>>345180640
>they're pulling the same music\ambient vibe with the fucking vrykuls on the broken isles
FUCK YES
>>345174547
those things didn't happen at the same time
>>345180891
I love that track. Something about it is absolutely perfect in conjunction to the boat trip over to Northrend. Pulls you into the somber atmosphere of the new cold journey.
>>345175464
the correct answer is whatever expansion came after i played is when wow became shit
Cross realm everything
WoWfag since 2005 here and the general consensus and most popular answer seems to be by the end of the WoTLK expansion.
It was when the game peaked and subsequently lost it from there.
>>345181078
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwOciBsXEbQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXWaBUAj7Hs
The patch which added LFG Finder. I had spent months raiding Ulduar with my guild and I organised Malygos pugs which succeeded weekly before this patch. Then people who just bumbled through dungeons could get gear which was as good as mine for one fraction of the time and effort I had put in.
There was a mage with Tier 8 shoulders in my first heroic group for the patch. We were talking about our DPS before the dungeon started, and this is what he said.
"I don't care about DPS, I just want to finish this dungeon quickly"
I was at that new jousting place not long after. I had just finished getting a Sunreaver Hawkstrider. Then I realised that the game wasn't fun anymore and just logged out forever. Later I find out that a chinese gold farmer stole the account, ensuring that I could never go back. That is for the best, I think.
>>345180029
WotLK launch patch was literally the worst patch in WoW history and set the tone for everything to come
Ulduar was an anomaly and nothing more
>Wrathbabbies denying that WotLK killed WoW
>>345180590
(im the guy that wrote that post)
You have to understand why theyve done this though.
Ive been playing WoW on and off since BC and have almost 4000 hours on my main.
When I first subbed I was 15, im 22 now and have a fiancee, a career, professional and personal relationships I want to maintain. I would having a wild fucking guess and say a lot of people picked up WoW between the ages 14-16 and have grown up with it. Now that we are all older we have less time to play. Bliz knows this and wants to keep that veteran playerbase by making it easier to get rewards. Its not a scheme to snag new players but an attempt to keep oldfags interested.
>>345181289
That's more to do with catchup dungeons than LFG. I think Group Finders only on your server is a good function as it takes away the "Let me sit in Org spamming for an hour to find a tank" and lets you meet new people on your server quickly. When it becomes cross-realm though, you end up losing the attachment as you'll never see those people again.
>>345181629
cataclysm killed WoW you dumb ass piece of shit double nigger
>>345181078
That rushing wind noise that used to play at the dark portal for BC and the boat music for WotLK are easily two of my favorite pieces of music (if the former could even be called that, I suppose) in this game.
They both perfectly captured the feel of the new expac and set the tone for what was to come, I really liked them.
I don't even know if Cata, MoP or WoD have something similar. If they did they don't stand out.
>>345181749
The subs started tanking three quarters of the way through WotLK. While Cataclysm was shit the game started dying before that.
>>345180590
>>345181636
ps dont get me wrong, i would rather sit down and play for hours than 20 mins. I wouldnt even bother for 20 minutes.
At the moment I can play 3-4 times a week, roughly 12 hours hours a week in total
>>345174172
The gameplay was considerably cheapened by most things implemented in WotLK and Cata if that's what you're asking.
I played all throughout vanilla too. Even bought the vanilla collector's edition. Played from day 1 and raided Naxx40. Then saw some of TBC and some of Wrath.
My opinion:
1. Flying mounts fucked over the world. Fuck exploring the world. Fuck interacting with other players. Fuck any possible danger. Just fly over that shit.
2. Raid difficulty levels fucked over raiding. No, not everyone needs to raid. Casuals should not be raiding. It's too demanding and it just turns them off. And having all these easy versions just makes people give up on doing the hard versions. And then when you're just doing the easy versions, it all just feels like a chore anyway. You're not accomplishing anything.
3. Arena fucked over PvP by making it so incredibly competitive that it's taken all the fun out of it.
For PvP, that might've just been the inevitable way of things though. Nothing Blizz could do about it. For raid difficulty levels and flying mounts, Blizzard just fucked up.
>>345174172
It was always shit and slowly got worse with every patch and expansion. Once the novelty of babbys first MMO wore off its flaws were horribly obvious, yes, even in vanilla. It's just not a good RPG, never was, never will be. The popularity it achieved with MOBA faggots who played it just to watch numbers go up, giving no fucks about the world or the depth of the gameplay guaranteed it would only get worse (as an RPG) over time.
>>345174172
>when exactly did WoW go to shit?
BC Patch 2.1
>daily quests added
>attunements removed
>massive difficulty reductions across all instances
>PvP gear buffed at PvP to the extent that even high-end PvE gear is absolutely useless
>gimmicky flying mounts added
This was the patch that killed the vanilla game. When BC was first launched it still felt like vanilla WoW.
PVP died in BC too be quite honest.
Instanced PVP killed PVP as a whole, PVP should have stayed as a faction vs faction thing, it should have been a trophy, a mark of honor ,they should have focused on actual world PVP objectives, conquerable towns in contested zones, to really bring the "war" to "Warcraft", but instead we get battlegrounds because honor 1.0 was actually terrible for world PVP, even though BGs only made the grind worse, as it turned a system focused around hunting other players, into one that is just about grinding killing blows in a bland instance all day long
PVE on the other hand stayed strong all the way until WOTLK, namely TOC, while professions were definately gimped in BC, consumables removed, alchemy nerfed hard, ect, ect, the core end game content was never comprimised, though vanilla end game was definately overwritten, as well was BC's with Wrath, but the core content was the same "Gather your friends and slay great dragons for loot"
TOC however really is where the focus on adventure was lost, TOC was designed entirely around the loot treadmil, with 4 difficulties, 3 of which no one gave a fuck about outside of the gear grind, it was at this point that blizzard focused entirely on the gear grind, rather then the content itself. ICC stands out at the end of the expansion, because if blizzard fucked up with ICC like they did with TOC, that would have been the deathknell of WOW right then and there.
The final straw though, was dungeon finder, while welcomed at first in WOTLK, it was introduced late in the exansion, where everyone knew exactly how every dungeon was, all they wanted to do is get their daily chore of welfare badges out of the way so they could move on.
Dungeon Finder however, did have its flaws, it proved you can't create even remotely challenging, or even slightly involving content for randomly queued groups, it was apparent with Occulus and Halls of Reflection that you simply could not create callenging LFD content.
>>345182359
>The popularity it achieved with MOBA faggots who played it just to watch numbers go up
We just gonna start retroactively throwing buzzwords around now?
>>345182225
I didn't emphasize enough that raid difficulty levels ruined raiding.
It seriously did. It turned raiding into a chore like never before, because it just makes everyone give up and turn to the difficulty level that isn't really a challenge, just a chore to get right.
>cater to casuals
>the game dies
Really makes you think....
>>345174172
When they removed attunements. I can understand why they did it if you were late to join in some shitty dead server so it would be impossible to do anything beyond Kara, but the simple fix to that would just be to introduce the LFR cross server shit earlier. I know pugging shit like SSC and TK would probably be hard, same with hyjal, but they could've tried different shit instead of just letting people skip 90% of the expansions content for no reason when they released the sunwell dailies and its welfare gear.
OP here, one of the main reasons I lost interest in the game is even in Vanilla I could see Blizzard was adding/changing things that worked against Open World PVP. I loved Warcraft and one of the reasons I even played the game was the Horde vs Alliance setting. I wanted to kill Alliance, attack their cities, one of my fondest memories of the game was killing Tyrande in a big pvp raid.
>>345182651
It's been around for 12 years, the fact that catering to casuals is still getting them subs is amazing to me. I figured it would've died a while back.
>>345182540
Replace it with whatever you like, FPS fags, RTS fags, whatever. Point is people who had no interest in roleplaying whatsoever flooded into it for the sole reason that their friends were playing it and it was a Blizzard game with PVP. That killed it faster than anything else, though it could've gone the other way if they had never gotten into it. The game was originally designed for a much smaller neckbeard playerbase.
>>345181234
>that second one
>those vocals
>>345174172
Look at your picture. Remember before you got instagrouped with LFD then transported in front of the entrance? How you have to get to the instance which is it's own experience? How you can have experiences that you will always remember the instance before even getting to the entrance?
That's all gone.
>>345182225
Black Desert has shown me that flying doesn't matter. Even if you have a huge world to explore 90% of it will be empty, because everyone will want to be in the handful of actual farming zones for gear and money while ignoring 90% of the rest of the world and using 10% of the world as the game. MMOs are destined to die as progress happens and even if the world is static people will stick to the handful of areas that make the most profit and nothing more. Because mmos are not about fun for people anymore shit has to "matter" exploring doesn't matter to them, pvp for fun doesn't matter, pve for fun doesn't matter, if it don't matter for them it's not fun. The mmo community is the epitome of /v/ in the sentence that fun is a buzzword to them.
That's why WoW along with every single mmo in all of history is destined for failure from day 1.
>>345183179
So it's like FF14 where you just unlock the dungeon and can teleport there through a Duty Finder?
>>345183179
Nothings stopping you from going yourself. Just because the majority of the game uses it doesn't mean you have to. Get a group of friends and walk over there.
>Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
>Make it single player
>Take out RPG elements
>Add in grinding for the sake of grinding (Dailies, badges/valor/ilvl)
Its the same fucking problem with dablo 3.
It completely misses the point.
The game is supposed to be an adventure, a quest for power, sure you're metagaming to make yourself as OP as possible, but that required you to talk to other players, duel, interact, trade tips, raid together, share loot.
The game now focuses entirely on loot acquisition, but not on how to get players to work together and share experiences together, especially at a casual level.
Remember meeting that one guy in the world who was questing in the same area as you, where you'd group up, maybe do the quest chain together.
Remember that 4 man that brought you along and you added 4 more players to your friends lis.
Remember your first guild run where everyone is utter noobs but you still had fun even though you wiped all night long, because you left with some greens and blues.
That one nolifer in your guild who is actually a total bro and would carry you through low level dungeons to get the items you needed
All these elements have been stripped away from the game, replaced only by a pure, automated, guided, bland, boring, repetitive grind.
I mean, there is nothing wrong with a bit of grinding, but its better with friends.
The main problem with the game is the data-mining. Everyone knows everything before it even comes out and there is no air of mystery anymore. Get rid of that and all the mods out there these days and I bet people wouldn't be complaining as much.
>>345183369
Half of these points are just nostalgia posts. You can literally have the same thing happened today if you just now started. You've just outgrown the game and it's not new or interesting anymore.
Shadowfang Keep was the best low level dungeon.
>>345183605
>Half of these points are just nostalgia posts.
Except they aren't retard. He's right, by removing the social aspect of the game there is no reason to play. No community. Just log in, instant gratification, pug with people you don't talk to or even remember their names,etc.
>>345183605
>You can litterally have the same experiences today
Bullshit.
Except LFD, you never interact with another player until normal mode raiding.
I had all those experiences on Nostralius before it shut down, I even was the guy running friends through Deadmines and Wailing Caverns just because I had a stupid photo memory of those dungeons.
>>345183725
>Remember your first guild run where everyone is utter noobs but you still had fun even though you wiped all night long, because you left with some greens and blues.
>Remember that 4 man that brought you along and you added 4 more players to your friends lis.
>That one nolifer in your guild who is actually a total bro and would carry you through low level dungeons to get the items you needed
How are these not just nostalgia posts? You literally can have the same function in the game right now. There are social guilds out there, not everyone is fucking autists like half of /v/ seems to be.
>>345183874
>>345183605
Not him but I've played on private servers and live and the difference is fucking staggering with how much people group up and talk to eachother during questing.
Live is fucking dead and the people who are there are assholes
Vanilla private servers you have to group up and talk to people to get shit done. It's not nostalgia because I've never played vanilla when it was out.
>>345183843
>Nostalrius
Pure paradise for the first 6 months, and the chinese just ruined it
just took it, and ruined the whole thing
i hate the chinese
>>345181959
Yep, the pinpoint where WoW died was patch 3.2. ICC came after but I think that was actually what was supposed to come after Ulduar, but they stuck ToC in there to try to transition to the 'new' team. It was a pretty big taste of things to come. Liquid shit.
>>345183281
Yes. But people used to actually have to travel out to those places. And it felt like you were actually in some place far off, because you couldn't travel as easily. And you could PvP there without people just flying off and hanging 41 yrds in the air, completely invincible.
And while you're mostly right about the "fun is just a buzzword" phenomenon in MMOs, it actually does have a fix: People will do stuff that's fun that doesn't matter, if they can't do stuff that does matter. We saw this in Vanilla. Raiding was the only thing that mattered, but it was just too hard to coordinate for more than a few hours a night, and even then, you had to be pretty dedicated. The end result was people created their own fun.
Blizz fucked up by making raiding overly accessible. It made people do it too much and then burn out.
>>345174172
wow started its decline in cata.
they attempted to bring back challenging heroics, but people whined.
they tried to introduce unique zones like vashj'ir, but people whined.
they tried to have raids be a reward for people who put the work in, but people whined.
as a result, there's no more underwater stuff and they cut a whole raid, leaving plot open. heroics are braindead, and raid finder is a thing.I quit in MoP.
>>345183179
You have to walk there if you do mythic dungeons.
>>345184415
People didn't wine because heroics were hard
They wined because Dungeon Finder was full of shitters.
When Dungeon Finder was added, it was at the end of Wrath, when everyone already knew what the fuck they were doing in each dungeon, even then, Halls of Reflection and Occulus proved that you can't have anything remotely challenging as random PUG content.
Cata was a perfect shitstorm of many problems.
One, Dungeon Finder was not designed with hard dungeons in mind, and because of it the community that did nothing but dungeon finder became absolutely cancerous, vote kicking anyone who didn't outgear a dungeon, tanks taking dungeons hostage if they didn't get their ways because it was an hour long queue for tanks, and overtuning dungeons with raid style mechanics focusing around DPS in many areas, despite dungeons being intro end game content.
Also the mana change at the beginning of cataclysm made group healing fucking abysmal, but dungeon finder wasn't made with off healers or off tanks or CC in mind.
There will never be another mmo like vanilla wow, and that sucks.
>>345174172
Cataclysm, T11.
I'd rather sit in chat for 3 hours to find a group for a fucking 5 man.
I'd rather do BC raid attunements for fucking shitters every week.
Even fucking vanilla raids are better than the shit spewed out during cata.
>>345184415
>Heroics
>Challenging
The only heroics that were remotely challenging was fucking magisters terrace, halls of lightning, and the fucking occulus.
Every Nostralius gameplay video I've seen on youtube has no music, was BGM not in the private server?
>>345174172
Around the end of WotLK because of the cross realm queuing shit, any semblance of a community was officially lost by that point on every server.
>>345183615
It was my favorite dungeon then they fucking ruined it with that god awful revamp. Fenrus' howl when you pull him will forever be engraved in my head. Scholomance was another of my favorites that was destroyed. Fuck revamps
>>345180403
Nice shirt.
>>345174172
around it's launch
>>345186525
You must've looked wrong. There are PvP movies, world boss movies, all with music.
>>345184392
The last 15 years fucked the mmo scene and made everyone cynical as shit.
I don't think it solves itself, people are not willing to make their own fun they rather just quit the game if they can't be of relevance.
>>345174172
This thread again?
>Paid name changes
>Paid race/faction changes
>Paid server transfers
>Dungeon finder and LFR
>X-realms
Basically anything that destroyed server community and helped anonymity. As we've learned from 4chan and the internet...the more anonymous you can be the more of a fucking shit you can act like which kills gameplay and takes the fun out of everything.
>Not to mention the watering and dumbing down of everything taking a 'Massive Multiplayer' game and turning into a single player one.
OP here, what is "Garrison", I have heard people say you log in and never leave it.
At least there will barely be any reason to run Heroic Dungeons in Legion so they must have learned something. Can't even get the Dungeon Achivements without doing Mythic which can't be queued for with the Dungeon Finder.
>>345190419
A failed attempt at player housing where you had your personal little base that gave you free gold with a shitty facebook game and crafting reagents; Ore and Herbs, even if you didn't have those professions. You could upgrade it to also have an AH so in wod there was zero reason to leave it because everything you'd want to go out in the world to farm for would show up daily.
One thing I remember about Vanilla WoW is how UGLY the armor sets were. I think Rogue was the only class that had good looking dungeon/raid sets. Did that ever improve?
>>345190534
Yes and No
>>345181786
>you will never take the zeppelin to northrend for the first time ever again
wotlk
don't listen numales and cucks
>>345174172
I can pinpoint the exact moment.
WoW went to shit precisely at Cataclysm.
Several things came to head in that expansion.
They tried to do too many things at once. They introduced five or so new zones (par for the course as far as expansions go), two new races, in addition to a completely revamped Azeroth. The revamping was wholly unnecessary, and ruined what was a perfectly interesting questing world. They removed or truncated some classic quests and went completely overboard with phasing.
Having to completely revamp the old world meant less time spent on the rest of the expansion, namely the Worgen and Goblin themed areas. Gilneas was the greatest loss of potential, as it had great design, music and overall theme they could have done so much with. A high level Gilneas zone would have benefited the game greatly, instead we see so many unique designs used only for the first 20 levels of one faction and never again.
The time constraints can also be seen in the quest design of the higher level areas, which was some of the laziest writing I have ever seen. You are given 5 disparate high level questing zones with a tenuous connection if any that links them all together. Recurring NPCs keep appearing but you are never given the overall context of WHY you are adventuring in that zone. Deathwing is attacking, time to set sail into the ocean, oh look old gods enslaving giant underwater crabs, oh no NEPTULON got possessed! Then it's off to ancient Egypt, why you ask? Nobody knows why now let's explore tombs with harrison jones lolol remember him? Uldum was unfinished as fuck which showed from the lack of NPC voices, and even zone music.
So basically out of the three tasks they set out to achieve, only revamping the old world was really accomplished whereas everything else was half-assed, yet the revamped old world content is also the thing that got old the quickest.
The most important part of an mmo imo are the quests and the story of each zone.
>>345190534
I prefer vanilla's conservatively designed armor over today's EPIC SPACEMARINEZ SPAULDERZ AND POLYGONS.
legacy servers when
>>345174172
Generally accepted answer is around the cataclysm release.
Wotlk was reasonable, but it did damage to the core game by introducing stuff like dungeon finder and cataclysm took those bad ideas and ran wild with them.
>>345174172
After Vanilla, you didn't miss anything OP.
The instant they nerfed heroics in Cataclysm because babbies couldn't beat them
>>345193685
I think I want Legion...but I don't.
>>345194460
>you didn't miss anything OP.
I did actually. I didn't get to do BWL, Naxx or AQ. I only did half of Zul'Gurub.
>>345194518
No one did Naxx, I only did a tiny bit of BWL and Zul'Gurub once or twice. So I know the feel.
>>345174172
The game peaked during Burning Crusade.
WOTLK was great, but the game became too streamlined (and Naxx was way too easy).
Towards the end of WOTLK and during the beginning of Cata was where things really slid IMO. Too casual-centric, too streamlined, too easy. Plus, WoW's technical fundamentals started to show their age (of course this problem has only gotten worse).
>>345174172
When they nerfed cata heroics because of whiners it was all downhill from there.
>>345174172
>vanilla fags defending their shit game
>>345180807
>It wasn't bad at all
uhh yeah it was.
>Giant empty hallways with nothing but a few bosses a la VoA
>>345194913
>Not finding ways to autoattack and level up your shit with the game minimized
Fucking casuals.
>>345195640
>muh artifical longerivity/difficulty/assburgery
Nobody wants to spend his day auto-attacking a mob in 2016.
>>345195759
>YOU THINK YOU DO, BUT YOU DON'T!
Go away Blizzard
>>345174172
Extreme content trivialisation that began in WOTLK with badge gear being much better than in TBC. LFD wasn't too bad in WOTLK because you could blast through the HCs in the first place anyway but it helped create a poor community mindset towards HCs and how you communicate with other people in them.
That had a massive hit on Cataclyms's 5-mans which at launch were something you had to actually pay attention to and use some forms of short-cc or aoe-cc with co-ordination but guess what, nobody fucking talked, people leave after 1 wipe etc... all because of that end wotlk 5-man mentallity. So what did Blizzard do, they nerfed them.
That was the true beginning of the end imo with Dragon Soul being one hell of a nail in the coffin. I like the direction encounter design has taken since then but class design is bottom tier garbage.
I barely remember wow. Did warriors have to use shield to tank or could dual wield and two handed users tank aswell? I do remember respec was 60G which was expensive.
I remember a really amazing time in vanilla where the world and its secrets held some meaning. As an example you could go into a lvl52-60 dungeon and get a trinket that would never get outclassed. Fuck, some green items you picked up while leveling might hold some meaning in end game raiding for their seemingly worthless uses. After the first expansion it all came down to "What was released last, is the best" and revisiting content aside from the latest lost all its meaning. I remember my guild running low level instances to gather vital items for raiding like resistance gear. The so called meaningless grind actually held meaning when you knew your entire guild was working towards a goal, people helping each other gather reagents and combining their professions to craft consumables that were then shared to everyone to tackle a tough boss. That's fucking gone.
>>345198074
They went too far with Naxx
>>345195801
I dont even play Wow.
Just go play a better game and give up already.
>>345198230
I have to kind of agree with you there, although I think the main problem with Naxx was the absolutely ridiculous amounts of trash, if it was scaled down by roughly a boss per wing and at least 30% less trash, it would've been fine. They would've had more time to focus on the bosses then too.
>>345180029
>WotLK was good before 3.3
3.0 was shit, 3.1 was good and 3.2 was forgettable as all hell.
>>345180029
I am dumbstruck at how many people find WOTLK the peak of wow when wotlk largely sucked. First raiding tier was for the major part a cut and paste from vanilla.
Ulduar was great though, fuck the "iron dwarf medium rare" achievement, that still annoys me to this day.
Then they had the retarded idea of cutting hard modes as they were implemented in ulduar but rather, they had you select the difficulty before entering the instance. That meant you had to do the same raid 4 times per week if you wanted to be competitive.
Toc was shit though, the twin valkyrs though, was a nice fight.
ICC was largely forgettable with the exception of Putricide and LK, Sindragosa was not bad but not as interesting as the first two.
Some of the TBC fights were much more enjoyable and there were more great fights to remember. Kael thas and lady vashj were great fights to end T5 and Illidan was just an awesome end T6 Fight.
Almost every fight in SWP was good too, with the exception of the Felmyst and Brutallus
>>345198707
Ulduar was great until they nerfed every boss one by one because retarded shitbags didn't have the patience to take a few wipes.
>>345174172
2.1 when they introduced daily quests
>>345181629
>TBCucks implying that TBC wasn't where it all went wrong
Let's review.
>homogenized the factions
>made world pvp worthless
>made bgs worthless
>added an awful bg that was a clusterfuck of two previous bgs
>reputation grinds via dailies
>daily hubs becoming a thing
>flying mounts ruined the sense of scale and exploration the game once had
>SSC is still literally the worst raid in WoW, a decade later
>any raid that wasn't Kara or BT was mediocre to awful
>the lore was ruined beyond any repair
>at least two characters had their characterization dragged through the mud to justify being killed for loot
>greens off boars in Hellfire Penninsula are stronger than top-end raid gear from Vanilla, setting an ugly precedence for future content scaling
>Blizzard fully embraced the "holy trinity" idea, forcing hybrid classes to pick a role in the trinity and deal with it, as opposed to the niche roles they once brought to raids
>>345198387
>3.2 was forgettable
How could you forget the worst raid tier ever released
>>345199112
In which way did TBC homogenize the factions? I guess putting a faction or more per region with their respective turn ins kind of got old pretty soon but the vanilla ones also had turn ins and the ones that didn't were "kill raid mob to gain x rep".
>>345199429
I'm guessing he means giving each faction Shaman/Paladin.
>LFG
>LFR
>Guild perks
>Garrisons
They've been slowly killing the social aspect of the game for a very long time
>>345199475
Oh right, that sounds more like it. Yeah, that was a shitty move and a clear indicator that if kids cried loud enough they could get anything they wanted.
I hated how TBC was all about balance to be honest. Resilience was shit, I'm sorry but if you need to take pvp superseriously maybe just switch to a game where that's in the premises. Also I didn't like "heroics". All this stuff was a detachment from the world itself from one side my spells don't do as much to other players for... reasons and the dungeon stops being a dangerous well known place and becomes an arcade "stage" where you select the difficulty before entering.
TBC was nice but it basically killed the mood of the game.
>>345174172
Honestly the game itself isn't shit, but there has been shit expansions. MoP was one of the best expansions for WoW and WoD is by far the worst expansion.
>>345199798
>if you need to take pvp superseriously maybe just switch to a game where that's in the premises.
WoW is literally PVP before shits like you cried for carebear shit.
Fucking kids probably never even played WC3.
>>345199563
>LFG
Still need to find parties for the highest 5-man content like Mythic and Challenge Modes
>LFR
Weeds out the lazy casuals who don't even want to bother with flex/normal
>Guild Perks
Thank god they at least removed guild leveling, that fucking killed anyones chance of making a brand new guild to start raiding
>Garrisons
Essentially being removed, new class halls have a table but you don't go there often since you can only have a max of either 5 or 6 followers do missions.
>>345200005
What does a completely different genre have to do with pvp, especially since "competitive pvp" didn't exist until fucking BC.
wtf is LFR? looking for raid?
>>345174172
Personally for me it was Cataclysm. My guild fell apart before launch and when it finally came, the game just didn't feel the same. Resubbed during Panda and I honestly liked it more but it couldn't undo the damage.
>>345200113
Yes, there is a special lowest difficulty of a raid with significantly less mechanics and damage that you can just queue for.
>>345200085
Horde vs Alliance was a thing pre carebear nerfs like being able to fight your own faction in BGs and Arena. That started in BC.
The whole original vanilla story line is PvP...
You are what's wrong with the game. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
>>345174172
the game died for me when they added dungeon finders.... the friendly guilds just disappeared coz there was no need to get together anymore you could just get connected to five cross server persons that you never saw again and play like that a year. community wise a fucking stupid move
>>345200174
with the same reward?
3.2 was the breaking point for me. Dropped the game shortly after ICC hitI played WoD and the game is still pretty fun for a whileif you play it like a singleplayer sandbox adventure game
>>345200189
There are world PvP realms, they didn't remove that. What are you complaining about?
>>345182436
I had more fun in the back and forth open world PVP like Southshore vs Tarren Mill than I ever did in arenas.
Alterac Valley early on was awesome, it really felt like you were really in a drawn out war. Then over the patches they neutered it to the point were each sides' army was running right past each other to speed kill the towers and keep bosses.
But the best was open world PVE raids with the constant threat of PVP interference. We'd split the guild, half engaging a dragon while the other half provided security against enemy guilds. Nothing like the rush of dropping a kamikaze rogue just short of your main tank.
The best PVP is unscripted, the kind that players make for themselves. You PVP for the sake of PVP itself, the thrill of the kill, the comraderie. You start attaching points and rewards to it, as well as instance mechanics and rankings, players start playing to max out those metrics and game the system for the most efficient outcome. "We're 10 seconds behind the other side's tower capping, GG you fucking scrubs, I'm getting back in the queue".
>>345200210
No, the gear is weaker than the lowest tier of non-LFR raiding.
>>345174172
It was awesome in its time, because it was the first to do something like this on such a large scale and do it succesfuly.
The kept repeating the same trick for almost ten years now and it has gotten boring
>>345200254
>world PvP
Was dead in BC. Complexity wiped out in CATA when they added phasing.
You can't World PvP anymore. Not possible with the phasing.
>>345200005
Wow was everquest lite aka grouping to get shit done you sad idiot.
>>345200193
>mfw used to spend 30 mins-3+ hours just looking for faggots to raid with
I miss those days.
>>345174172
There wasn't a single moment, it was a slippery slope that sometimes looked good at the time.
For example, welfare loot was actually a pretty good idea at the time. The sort of things you got never outshone the loot it was preparing you for, and it cut down the ball ache of repeatedly combing areas you could do with both hands tied behind your back.
The problem came when the power creep set in.
PVP Gear allowed people to fight without being endlessly rofltstomped by those that had regular raid groups.
The problem came when PVP rofltsomping became the new norm.
LFG was incredibly useful for people that didn't want to spend ages holed up in a city looking for people that would inevitably flake.
The problem came when it became cross realm, meaning that you couldn't find some good people locally to hit up next time, and there were no consequences for being an antisocial dick and/or plain shit.
Dailies were useful for taking on the expense of Raiding/gearing up, allowed something new for people that were at the content ceiling and gave an alternative for dungeon/raid rep grinding.
The problem came when they simply used them as cheap content filler so they didn't have to think anything else up for end game.
heroics were fantastic in TBC for making the jump from dungeon to raid a lot more smooth, gearing up, showinjg that dungeons were more than tank and spanks and getting people into the right raid mentality (I have vicious memories of dumbass clothies thinking they could take the hit if they overaggroed, like they could in dungeons)
The problem came when they became an artificial padding for end game
>>345200361
I forgot dumb millennials like you who sit in Garrison all day playing facebook ignore the PvP story lines and nuthug Thrall aka laser Jesus.
people who complain about expac gear being better than Naxx gear, what did you expect and what did you want? Did you really want the other 99.99999% of the player base being forced to do Naxx to play the xpac?
>>345200451
Lol retard you're probably 22 thinking you're all grown up and shit. If you want competition play games designed for it not a dumbed down Everquest you snut nosed brat.
>>345183605
I really think there's something to that. If you could build the game in such a way that you really had to discover things and explore the world...
Thotbot and the like, all information datamined and cataloged with guides on the most efficient way to do anything, THAT's what killed WoW.
>>345174172
WoW was 'shit' from the beginning, but due to Warcraft franchise being gobbled up by PCucks back in the day, the fact they could make a character and walk around in the world of Warcraft was fucking mind blowing. The community had a bunch of like minded fellows that just loved Warcraft and it only made sense that a bunch of people that all like the same thing could get together and have fun playing in a universe they all loved. Game always had major problems though, it was the original community though that made it so amazing to play. Now, MMOs largely cater to grabbing as many people as possible for the money. The reason so many MMOs fail is because they are a new IP that nobody couldn't give a dicklicking shit about because they have no connection with that universe. You could say WotLK was when the game really became apparent that it was starting to decline because blizzard became to big for their britches and started to add too many features to cater to the whiners that just wanted to play the game with no difficulty because their friend played it, even though they had no fucking idea the game had a trilogy before it. The ones who never played Warcraft or gave a shit about are the ones Blizzard was listening to, because Blizzard is filled with a bunch of mongoloids that just wanted to suck in that easy cash instead of paying respects to their franchise and their actual fan base.
WoW mechanically though, has always been shit straight out of the gate. There were so many specs that were worthless for one reason or another, each class could only do one specific thing in a raid, BGs became a thing to instance off pvp, flying was introduced to make the world feel small and isolated and make sure any stragglers still doing Wpvp were killed off. LFD/x-server to kill off server community. I could go on, but I'm sure it was covered already in the thread and because of comment limit.
>>345200767
>competition is bad
>leave!!!
Kill yourself, kid.
The end of Lich King. It was also around the time everyone graduated from uni and entered the workforce.
>>345200840
You're actually one of the stupidest posted I've seen today and it's absolutely no surprised you PvP, you just fulfill the stereotype.
>>345182925
How many fedoras do I need to buy before I make an image like this?
>>345200968
>stupidest posted
>>345200968
>carebear shit supporter
No seriously. Kill yourself.
>>345184415
>they tried to introduce unique zones like vashj'ir, but people whined.
Wrath was a harbinger of that cancer.
Let's take 2 separate events and compare the community reactions.
Event 1: The corrupted blood incident
Entirely player driven event leading to bonepiles so thick you couldn't see the floor in many cities. People used every trick in the book to prolong the event, even finding hidden alcoves in the map to avoid it being actively purged by the devs.
Eventually ended by resets, but it was remembered fondly, except by people who just started, couldn't just bugger off to an isolated area to wait it out if they didn't like it, and were understandably a bit peeved.
Event 2: The scourge invasion.
Dev Driven event that many players had a lot of fun with.
Led to unprecedented amount of people whining about it, despite it being incredibly easy to avoid, even within a major city.
The community changed from people who wanted to fuck about, to people obsessed with the daily grind so much that they got triggered when something upset it.
The biggest thing is how the leveling experience is now shit.
Constant EXP buffs have made it so you rarely finish an area before leveling out of it, making the story abruptly end.
All the solo content is piss easy, even without heirlooms.
Dungeons are face rolls, due to 80% of the people having heirlooms.
This has drained all the fun and challenge out the early experience, a big reason why servers are dead now. If i had experienced this wow first, then I probably wouldn't have given it much of a shot.
>>345200840
Who said it's bad? Holy shit, nice reading comprehension. I bet WoW was your first MMO too and you go around calling people kids.
>>345201132
Telling someone to play another MMO becouse you dislike it?
I wasn't joking. Please kill yourself.
>instead of having the journey to max level be an experience that teaches you game mechanics and how to play your class its instead a matter of how fast you can get there while also being so braindead it can be done while naked and autoattacking enemies
I started playing when TBC came out, had lots of fun even though i played alone.
Then i started playing Wotlk with and without friends and had even more fun.
Played Cata with friends, was fun but wasn't fun at all while playing alone.
Recently played TBC again and it's pretty shit in my opinion.
So i guess i enjoyed Wotlk the most and while Cata was still quite fun it seemed like a wreck.
Can't tell anything about the newer expansions but from what i've heard they're all pretty shit, seems like they had ideas but they were realised poorly.
>>345201251
The thing is you never got what the game was about. And no, it wasn't raids either. I didn't say you have to play another MMO either, try again.
You're just slow in the head I guess, accept it and move on.
>>345200210
>>345200310
Even standard Mythic Dungeons in Legion will reward a higher base level of gear.
>>345200418
The good thing about the wellfare epics in TBC and Wrath was you still had to do specific content for it.
In TBC you still had to do a lot of Heroic Dungeons to even get a piece of gear.
In Wrath, even when they changed which badges you got to allow for catch-up you still had to put in a lot of effort to get the one awarding ICC's badge gear while you just from Heroics could only get TOTC's badge gear.I miss Badges
>>345201558
>>345201558
>I didn't say you have to play another MMO either
Orly?
>If you want competition play games designed for it
Sorry what does that say, kiddo?
Carebear shits like you need to off themselves.
WoW was the biggest competive PvP enviremnt there has been, when they did the arena tournaments.
it still is the biggest official tournament PvP mmo if you count Blizzcon.
I'm not going to reply again because I know you kids. All I can say is kill yourself and maybe by a small chance there will be one less carebear in the world.
What made WoW good was the Warcraft setting that was established and loved (till Blizzard raped it) and the community. The community of vanilla wow was amazing. Yeah there were assholes, but there were good people. The main point is people talked to eachother, people worked together and communicated.
These days mmos don't even have a general chat.
>>345174172
Late WoTLK and Cata was dogshit
>>345174172
Cataclysm is when they ruined pretty much everything fun about the game. Pandaria just made it even worse.
>>345201939
MoP was a great expac from what it was given to work with though
>>345174172
WoW died when flying mounts were introduced.
>Play an MMO that was casualized from day 1
>Complain about it getting more casual
This entire thread
>>345199112
but you could literally jump straight into karazhan if you had high end vanilla loot
>>345202115
Here comes the fag with the generic " everquest was less casual !!!1! "
>>345202115
>t. butthurt everfag
The game started declining since TBC.
TBC's introduction of flying mounts helped kill exploration and world PvP.
WoTLK introduced dungeon finder (which literally allows people to sit in cities from 1-80 and most of endgame just waiting in queues to get teleported to dungeons)
Cata was the fucking straw that made WoW go to shit however.
>>345202201
It was, and so was UO.
>>345202204
It's not just EQ man, there was more MMOs before WoW. At release WoW was easily the most casual MMO on the market.
>>345202323
because it required 1/10th the grind of everquest is the reason most people went to play it
>>345202401
Yep you're entirely right, not only was there less grind but it was an easier grind too. Casuals still make up the majority of the playerbase of WoW so it's unsurprising they cater to them.
God the graphics, animations and sfx are bad when you go look at it now
>>345174172
The game itself never actually went to shit. They continue to improve boss encounters, class balance, leveling/questing, pet collecting/battling, etc.
Mostly the reason that it has declined is that the game is 10 years old and people fully understand the expansion/patch/new gear treadmill that is the primary endgame.
When you reach max level, you can basically raid a couple times a week to collect better and better gear or you can do arena/RBGs and collect your pvp gear.
>>345203143
>>345203143
wow you contradict the hiveminds opinion
you should be fucking stoned to death with reaction images
>>345174172
MMO's are social by design. Introducing dungeon finder and cross-realm gameplay put the game on MMO life support. Yea it's numbers soared, but at what cost? Now you have millions subscribing to play a single player game.
And when they're done with the content they want to see? numbers drop. Community kept the game alive. Now it doesn't mean anything to have a guild or choose a server.
>>345203143
Disagree.
Certain things that the game introduced are what caused the community to change and the influx of new players "casuals", as well as causing old players to leave.
And wouldn't private servers go against that logic as well?
>>345203143
But it's due to changes in the game that lead to the community degrading.
>>345186427
Halls of Reflection was the only challenging heroic and only for the first room.
Oculus was only difficult because people didn't understand how to use the drakes very well.
i miss the permanence of having to choose a server and stick with it, otherwise level a character from 0 to max level on a different server.
transfers were strictly per server basis. you could only transfer if your server was full or Blizzard was offering transfers to a particular server.
i remember them opening up transfers to Frostmane from Frostwolf and all my friends came from Frostwolf. Frostmane and Frostwolf would go on to become Battlegroup 10, with Tichondrius and Blackrock, a BG really known for PVP.
>>345200840
Prime example of a MMO shitter with no critical thinking skills. What's that? Your spoonfed guide doesn't teach you how to do that? Aw, that's too bad.
>>345174547
There is literally nothing wrong with RDF
>>345174172
>when exactly
December 7, 2010 at 12:00pm PST
>>345179264
This.
It was exactly THIS point in time the game was to dead to me.
I would play Vanilla if they made a few changes.
Dual spec, or free respec. Let me change to dps when questing then change to tank/heal before raid/dungeon effortlessly.
No respawning trash in raids. Just stupid and annoying.
Those are the main two. There are probably a few other small QoL changes I would want, but I haven't played the game in 10 years so don't remember. But none of that dungeon finder trash.
>>345203415
>>345203493
Again, the game is 10 years old. There are people that started playing when they were 15 that are now 25 (or were 25 and are now 35), you don't think that changes the community around?
Are there any other games launched in 2004 that still have a large player base?
WoW has survived while gaming has changed dramatically. Most players won't accept games that make astronomical demands on their time. It may have been OK in 2004-2007 to expect that people would have to play for 2-3 hours at a time to accomplish anything, but that isn't the case now, especially not compared to MOBA games that let you sit down with friends and play a self-contained 20-40 minute game.
Ruby Sanctum. It showed that Blizzard was okay with lazy content to tide us over, rather working hard on something good. A lot of people hated the Trails patch citing the same reason, but I liked it. Sure, the raid and 5 man are boring 1 room things, but the fights themselves were fun, and the other content outside of them was solid.
I've played since launch, and Wrath gets a lot of shit, but aside from RS, I think it was the height of the game. There was lots of good and varied content, you had the option for hard modes in things, it finished the story from WC3, once they had some balance passes PVP was great, classes still felt different and every spec was at least viable for something. Because they didn't make old content totally piss easy yet, you could gather some friends and run old raids for fun still too.
Vanilla and BC were great, because I was a teenager. I had endless free time to grind and all that good stuff. But now? I'd hate to go back to that. Wrath on the other hand I feel like I could still play and enjoy, make some meaningful progress and not be a total slave to the game.
>>345204645
Again, private servers have proved that wrong.
Look at Nostalrius, thousands of players willing to put in hundreds of hours to grind out and essentially "no life".
Though I agree now for the most part the new generation of "gamers" would never be able to partake in old game traditions such as grinding in games like Everquest and vanilla
>>345204645
except that the level of grinding really hasn't changed from TBC era onward.
It just got moved to different areas.
Nobody is saying the game should have stagnated, but the ways in which it changed guaranteed a new community which would avoid contact unless absolutely necessary; a community which is the antithesis of an MMO
WoW peaked at wotlk. This is an objective fact.
The dungeon finder was as perfect as it could get: just dungeons, no raids. Before you would sit in a city and watch trade or lfg chat waiting to get into a dungeon group. After you would sit in a city and push a button and wait to enter. Saved a lot of wasted time.
Cross faction BGs weren't that good, but it meant you didn't have to wait hours to get into AV to get your welfare epics. And let's be honest, bg's were never that good and it didn't really matter if the people you were playing with were on the same server.
Blizz still understood (mostly) that everybody isn't a special snowflake and some people would have to grind more than others to progress, and that progression meant working well with others. Social interaction meant something.
>>345201003
>triggered because he's the brown one
