People constantly have talked about the death of World of Warcraft for years. Most would point to the latest MMO as being the thing that would end World of Warcraft. However, there really hasn’t been an MMO that has come close to putting World of Warcraft into the pasture. With Legion many people have cited it as the best expansion from Blizzard yet for World of Warcraft. Despite this, I’ve seen a real mixed bag when it comes to the responses from people regarding this expansion.
So to start, let me say that I haven’t played a single minute in Legion. When the pre-patch came in that eliminated a variety of skills and killed the zoom along with nerfed the gold return on Garrison missions back in Warlords of Draenor, I pretty much pulled the plug on my subscription. My gut instinct told me just in looking at the direction and tone set by that patch that the expansion would be highly polarized in terms of the target audience.
At first, with the pre-Legion release event, I thought I made a huge mistake. The leveling process was made better because of the more social aspect with the open world invasions. You could be of any level and join up with people to beat down on mobs and bosses for a good chunk of XP. People who were on the border of levels 90-100 could not only push all the way, but receive gear that would let them enter Legion prepared. The move seemed to bring the community back together in a very positive manner.
Then there was the XP nerf which is the typical trend in these situations. I know some people complained about leeches but you have to take those situations with a grain of salt. The most important aspect is the fact that people are somehow participating or being active, even if it means being lazy. For whatever reason, Blizzard listened to the complainers about the leeches and that seemed to tick off the casual crowd once again.
When Legion launched, from what I’ve heard, it was possibly one of the smoothest launches in Blizzard history. Part of the positive aspect was the way quests were handled along with the scaling leveling zones. So people didn’t have to be concentrated all in one spot and constantly fight for mobs. Instead, you could share the kills to gain credit. So these were more or less quality of life improvements that made me feel once again that I was missing out.
At level 110, the World Quest system would open up. Now, I’m not 100% certain of the details behind how it all works. From what I’ve been told, it’s limited in terms of how much you can do, which is good since its self-protective measure. Supposedly, with this system in place, there was plenty of content to last for quite a while.
Next, you have dungeons which were once again made meaningful through the Mythic+ system. So you could continue to grind to your hearts content to get gear and Artifact Power. Essentially, it was like mixing challenge modes and the older Heroic Modes with the ideas behind Greater Rifts from Diablo 3 in adding affixes to give the system more challenging content as well as ample rewards.
So while a lot of this sounds good on paper and maybe in some cases in practice, there’s a lot where it just falls flat and might be helping to kill World of Warcraft in yet another manner. First, the whole AP grind aspect seems to be taking its toll on people. While it might seem fun at first and act as a method for small progression, it’s still pretty mindless at the end of the day. Yes, the changing affixes each week and varying difficulty level does mix things up but at the end of the day, it’s still the same group of dungeons that you’re running over and over again. The only difference between this and say Wrath of the Lich King is that the increasing difficulty means you can’t faceroll things quickly. Some people might enjoy that challenge but it’s not really a challenge if you’re simply doing the same routine and have everything memorized through muscle memory. All that does in practice is elongate the time it takes to complete an exercise in time wasting.
For myself, once I saw that Legion was going to hinge a great deal on AP grinding through the Mythic+ system, I realized that the game was dead in the water for me. The system works for Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 because you do not require 4 other people to be present to achieve anything. Here, you need people and with the game grind exacting a slow breakdown of people, it makes the system incredibly unreliable over time.
Then you have the legendaries grind. Once again, this is a system brought over from Diablo to World of Warcraft. However, in my opinion, this system does not work in a game like World of Warcraft. I might’ve pointed out the flaw in a previous blog, but let me reiterate it here. Legendaries are dropped via RNG through a variety of mechanics in the game. But in truth, the main mechanic is centered around time. As long as you put in the time into the game, the legendaries will eventually drop for you, no matter the difficulty level (my old GM has two for his warlock and that’s more than a lot of other hardcore players that I know).
Now, the same system works for Diablo 3 because you kill things at a very fast rate. Diablo 3 is a far higher paced game than World of Warcraft. Combat can be finished in a second and you blast dozens of creatures within seconds. In World of Warcraft, killing a single mob can take anywhere between 10 seconds to beyond a minute (like a boss for instance). Because of the time factor and speed at which you kill mobs in World of Warcraft, your chances for receiving a legendary are decreased drastically (but mostly buffed through hidden failsafes supposedly, which I would never rely on). But the bottom line here is that you will receive these items depending on the level of effort you put in.
But it gets worse. I’ve watched streamers spend 8+ hours every day trying to get the best-in-slot items without seeing anything for quite a while. Some are on the borderline. And many of these people are hardcore raiders who do put in the effort. Yet the thing counting against them is this stupid RNG factor. On the other hand, someone like my GM who might do a few LFRs and BGs every week still can get better legendaries than these hardcore raiders. Something doesn’t add up.
Yet in all cases, I feel that everyone will just be frustrated by the fact that there’s these items out there just out of reach. Will they overbalance game play? Absolutely not. They’re designed just to give enough of a boost to help your game play but not making it one sided. Yet you still want them because they’re cool and have enough of an impact on the game where you’d like to at least give them a try.
Well, Blizzard says fuck you.
This to me is an absolute rubbish type of system. It’s absolutely pointless to put items like these in the game. It’s the worst type of carrot on the stick out there. You might as well go to Vegas and play Keno because you might actually have better odds and get something useful in your life than waste your time with this shitty system.
Nonetheless, people will be tricked into continuing these nonsensical grinds. The AP grind combined with Mythic+ gear grinds are stupid. AP has a cap which seems to defeat the purpose behind Mythic+ while the Mythic+ gear isn’t better than Mythic raiding gear. WTF!?!?!? This whole system is borked beyond belief.
I get the reasoning behind making Mythic+ gear not as good as Mythic raiding gear. But it’s an idiotic reason. They’re just saying “raiding still is the best way to gear.” In short, that’s where Blizzard puts all their chips, which is why this game fucking sucks and is killing itself.
Raiding is an act of futility. The whole concept is ass backwards as I’ve pointed out in numerous posts. You come into a raid and hit your head against a wall to get the gear to let you overpower the current content. How the hell does that make any sense at all? If you got supremely lucky and managed to get all the gear at every boss fight, the minute you killed the last boss, what’s the motivation anymore?
Of course, RNG kills this even further by making it so you roll on gold almost every fight. Obviously, the current environment is better than the past but it’s still shit. But it’s the invisible carrot that keeps the horse going.
I get that the title of the game is “War-craft,” meaning the art of war. Thus, raiding, dungeon grinding, PVP, etc. are what defines this game. But in its current form, it’s utterly the most boring and life sucking thing around. It’s fun the first few times but when you’re just redoing things without purpose outside of getting gear that will be outdated soon, it wears thin on you.
And that’s why the game is dying. It’s that whole flawed design. People are seeing it which is why MMORPGs will become obsolete. Other games and genres are filling that void because the time commitment for such an unsatisfying genre prevent people from lasting more than a few years. You can’t live inside of a game forever, even though there’s a small group of people who probably will deny this truth.
So if the game/genre is dying a painful death, what are ways to salvage the remnants?
First, kill the whole esports idea. It has to die. The whole idea of world first raiding is the dumbest thing around. Yes, we know that Method is going to be #1. So move on because everyone can’t be Method nor can they get in. And the game should not be designed around a small group of people who are more vocal than the vast majority who don’t give a damn enough to make their voices known.
Second, kill the whole instance thing. I think the idea of having a “world” means zero instances. Everything should be open. All fights should be accessible. You know where I would have the most fun in World of Warcraft? Open world bosses. Just grab a bunch of people and zerg down a boss. Sure, it’s brain dead but it’s easiest social activity and generally works. No one ever asks what your gearscore or ilvl is. No one asks whether you have the achievement to join. You just do it. They have the ability to scale content based on levels and number of people now. So this is the natural order of evolution with the game.
Next focus on the “get in, get out” mentality of the game. When I saw how this expansion would turn out, I realized it was the end of the line for me. This expansion isn’t alt friendly, which really means that to feel a sense of accomplishment, you have to spend a fair amount of time on a daily basis. I simply don’t have time for that. There’s far more in life than just sitting around, waiting for queues, slowly killing monsters and re-rolling on loot that never manifest.
Now, one area that they need to rethink completely are these clusterfuck encounters. I was watching quin69’s stream for the ToV raid. The last fight in particular made me cringe just because it was ridiculous. Just shit piled upon shit. How is that any fun? I really don’t consider any of these encounters “well designed.” Instead, it’s just tons of shit on the ground that you must avoid or be aware of and react in time. It’s fine for yourself if you’re aware but when you’re dealing with numerous other people, the whole situation just wears on you.
Wouldn’t a far better design be to cut the encounter time down to 1-2 minutes and then have far more encounters? That way people believe there’s more content available. Right now, it feels like the encounters have so much shit going on that the designers have to work 4x as hard just to balance them out on 4 levels of difficulty. It’s really a complete inefficient management of everyone’s time. If raids were fast, I think they’d be far more enjoyable. Do your shit, get in, kill things quickly, grab your shit, get out then move on. Instead, we just keep hitting 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-2-2-1-3-3-3-1-2….you get the point. At least, if you want to keep the instance thing going for whatever poor reason, you could at least make these encounters more concise. Then just add more zones to choose that way there’s this superficial feeling that there’s more “content.”
Make the world alive. The instance thing just kills the world. But on top of that, the world really isn’t much. There’s mobs and things you can right click. There’s question marks above people’s heads, or exclamation marks and people you can speak to. But the world is so fucking static. It’s so fucking controlled that Communist China has more freedom. You don’t really see schedules for NPCs, there’s no seasons, no crops you harvest. Nothing. Just mobs you attack if you feel like or those that interfere on your path to your destination. The only aspect of a world in the game is that it’s a 3-D rendered model of someone’s painting. That’s it. Big deal. It’s not like you can do anything with it so what’s the point? I can’t go around burning trees and houses unless there’s a quest or item for it. That’s pretty lame. Make the world useful.
But let’s be real here. There’s no way that Blizzard is going to change their formula. It’s set in stone. It won’t change unless a better MMORPG comes out that takes these elements and makes them into reality. But I think there isn’t any company out there willing to risk such a huge budget in building something better. Instead, rather than creating satisfying games, people are looking at short term, quarterly revenue reports. In that sense, the whole MMORPG genre will die out because there isn’t any guts left in this industry to change things.
Yet that’s probably a good thing as I reiterate that you don’t want to live in a game. The idea is compelling but it just doesn’t work out. Blizzard completely missed the mark after Cataclysm where they had a design for a “get in, get out” type of mentality for things (pointing out to the End Time instances). That should’ve been the model going forward. Not these ridiculously long 30+ minute fights or whatever where you want to shoot your brains out. Either way, I think World of Warcraft’s days are numbered. The streamers and youtubers can prop this game up all they want but the original novelty that made this game what it is has left. Either the game has to be courageous and change the core model/flaws, or just give up.