On the contrary, the story is far more interesting to me than the loot.
I referred to that earlier, the mythical man month, and I offered a solution to that problem.
Seriously, the story in wow? This is pretty much the mmorpg that trained gamers to auto skip all quest text and just show the objectives.
Have you perhaps thought of playing star wars the old republic instead?
I did for a while, but the gameplay in SWTOR is mindnumbing and their F2P offering severely hamstrung. WoW’s presentation isn’t quite as good as SWTOR but they’ve gotten a lot better over the years and it’s easily one of the most interesting things about the game. It’s no Secret World, but there’s room in my life for more than one game.
This is kind of like berating Everest for not changing the color of the snow on the peak every season. WoW has been tremendously successful and has changed drastically in a lot of ways since it came out. I was there for vanilla and BC and remember the grindy hell of the Onyxia chain, no portal stones, hardly any money, blah blah blah. They’ve made big strides in usability and entertainment since then. I don’t think it’s that WoW is bad, just that it’s…tired. Old. We aren’t talking a classic game that you go and play once or twice a year for nostalgia, WoW is a MMO. It’s designed to be played daily, or as near to daily as they can get you on. That it will make it more than 8 years and still have 7-8 million subscribers at the end of it after that kind of deep exposure is really remarkable.
I won’t say I’ve seen even a fraction of the content in Pandaria. I haven’t done much with the Anglers, haven’t finished the reps for the player factions, have hardly done any “normal” raiding, etc. So I’m not sure if people are really burning through all the content or just picking parts of content for specific gains.
The content creep I think is a victim of the improvements and extra rewards. In Vanilla my guild wasn’t able to really start raiding until a year after release. Lots of guilds never even saw the end of Molten Core. I can’t even tell you how many times I ran Strat/Scholo trying for that last blue drop. Pre-raiding, even regular mobs still weren’t trivial, just because you didn’t have the gear to make them trivial.
Think of it like this: The day I hit 90 with my first toon I ended up on the wrong end of 3 mogu while doing the Vale dailies. I barely survived. A few weeks later, with my gear level 25 points higher (overall) I clobbered 5 without breaking much of a sweat. As of Lich King, when you could get rep epics for the first time, you don’t have to raid to be badass out in the “regular” world. Quests that might take months to prep and complete in bad gear become the work of an hour or two in good gear. Dailies get done faster. Dual-spec means that tanks and healers don’t need guild effort to keep them in flasks and food. Content gets gobbled up. People get bored.
I agree they can’t really reboot it–they would risk too many subscribers. So they make incremental changes and improvements and hope for the best. The last time they went all revolutionary was Cataclysm, and that’s when the subscribers dropped by the millions. I doubt they’ll do that again.
I do think they’ll accelerate Titan, or whatever the MMO is. WoW is the bread and butter of Blizzard. They can’t just watch it fade out.
Gedd
1886
Sorry, my mind-reading helmet is on the fritz. Care to elaborate here at all?
Funny timing, but the day after I post here about alts being a pain in Pandaria they are now making it easier to level and equip alts.
they are reducing the XP needed to go from 85-90 by 33%. Also:
"Patch 5.3 will also reduce the price for the new heirloom items added in Patch 5.2 by 60%. Don’t forget that two new Heirloom shields that cost 2175 Justice Points each are also coming in Patch 5.3!
Heirlooms purchased with Justice points had costs reduced from 2175, 2725, and 3500 Justice Points to 870, 1090, and 1400 Justice Points.
Heirlooms purchased with Honor points reduced from 2175, 2725, and 3500 Honor points to 870, 1090, and 1400 Honor points.
Heirlooms purchased with Darkmoon Faire prize tickets reduced from 110, 130, and 160 prize tickets to 44, 60, and 64 prize tickets."
Gedd
1888
Yep, leveling alts will be quicker. And yes, the 5.0 and 5.1 reps aren’t necessary to get geared for MSV and ToES any more, but they were definitely part of the gearing plan before 5.2. I know because I started playing MoP in 5.1 and I believe pieces from Dominance Offensive and one other rep (not remembering what it was, maybe Golden Lotus) were a part of what pushed me to 460.
They are still leaving the massive rep grind that is life at max level though I assume?
Bluntly, I’m not convinced their tools are very good. Of course, I feel the same about most game engines. (I’m a true visual scripting nut, to the degree I’m trying to do a PhD on it. || to getting a studentship for it twice now)
That content still exists, but you don’t need to actually do it. Each patch adds a new faction/daily grind, but as of the most recent patch they only really give cosmetic rewards.
Gedd
1892
I’m not even sure what this means. Is there still lots to do at max level? Yes. Is it as much as there as much effort required at max level to raid? No. Can you jump into Throne of Thunder on the day you ding 90? Realistically, no. There’s a link somewhere in thread to a gearing up guide in 5.3 that Blizz put up recently that’s really good. You will likely need to do a few heroics and scenarios. You would be silly not to at least take the Isle of Thunder rep up to honored for the easy belt that costs gold (at least that’s what I think it is). Crafted epics should be much cheaper to acquire with the widespread availability of blood spirits.
You will still need to do MSV and ToES LFR to get geared for Throne of Thunder, but this is much quicker then at release, and should be even quicker come 5.3. I ran MSV the other night in LFR and dropped 6 bosses with bonus rolls. For the first 3, I was 5 for 6 (2 opportunities on each boss with the coin roll) in terms of winning an actual epic. On the last 3, I think I was at least 3 for 6, possibly higher than that.
I would be surprised if it took more than 3 weeks after hitting 90 to be ready for Throne of Thunder, and I don’t think that’s with massive amounts of valor/rep farming. If I do get around to leveling my warrior and decide to try for LFR with him, I’ll report back how long it took.
Syzygy
1893
Took two weeks for me with knowing how to farm the charms from the weekly scenario. I’m about to retry that on a warlock shortly after 5.3 hits
I’ve been assured (secondhand) that WoW’s engine is to some degree still based on Warcraft III code and that’s been why they’ve done some of the more tortured feature implementations they’ve done (like transmogrification instead of just introducing cosmetic item slots).
Transmog is pretty good for a retrofit. What amazes me is that other, new games fuck it up so badly. Just copy LotRO, if you’re not doing a super hero style system.
WoW ended the day Blizzard let us kill Arthas. You can’t let your ultimate badass be killed in your universe lore-wise.
From the standpoint of a lore junkie that day me being a “hero” in WoW ended and I stopped raiding / my guild stopped playing.
Now I only level to max, do dailies and unsub until new single player content comes out.
Tirion Fordring isn’t dead.
I always figured they’d run WoW for a few years till the engine got old, then put out WC4 for a big story advance/reboot, followed by WoW 2 that was designed around the updated world from WC4. WoW would either lose subscribers to WoW2 and be retired, or transfer characters to WoW2, and then be retired.
That didn’t happen, of course. It seems odd to me that the franchise they’ve made the lion’s share of their money from would be left running an updated version of a ten-year-old graphics engine. Also, the storylines don’t fit the locales any more. Jaina might have kicked the horde out of Dalaran, but once you finish the quests they are right back in there like nothing ever happened. In fact, my guess is that Blizz will find a way to get the Kirin Tor neutral again by the end of the XPAC, as it would disrupt everything else in the LK pack if that change happened in Dalaran. Legacy stuff like this builds up. It’s why I think a reboot is a good idea from time to time.
Wonder if they have the resources to make a truly dynamic world in Titan, or I guess using the phasing technology even more.
We can’t even make something like that in single player, no way out is possible in a mmorpg unless you count pure PvP.
