If anyone’s on the Thunderlord server group, I can help gear you up!
Wow, sorry man. That hasn’t been my experience at all. I even pug the vast majority of my M+.
DPS queues are around 15m. Do world quests while waiting for them to pop.
Well, duh, you’re pulling 6-8 mobs at a time while laughing at the DPS losers who die if they pull more than one.
Yeah solo content is great with a prot pally but if I get shat on in normal dungeons with a mage, imagine me trying to explain I’m a new tank.
Yeah, I loved the idea of M+ group content, and the actual dungeon runs were good, but the whole way it was structured made it super high pressure, which encouraged incredible toxicity when PUGging. I just wanted to do genuinely challenging single group content and get the occasional nice item.
I found the best option for guilds was to find a guild that did raid, but had a strong contingent of folks that didn’t. Not an ‘invite everyone’ guild though (the kind that advertise constantly in chat) - usually the better ones still had at least some minimal form of “application” process.
There are usually enough people in the guild trying to become raiders that you can find more groups for dungeons, but the guild doesn’t fall apart because they aren’t leaving to go somewhere else to raid. And a lot of times the guilds have “positions” (recruiter, event planner, etc.) that keeps some casual-based stuff going while the hardcore folk are off doing their thing.
Yes, it can be annoying to get into these guilds sometimes because of whatever vetting process they do, but it really helps to have at least a few consistent people around.
They also have Communities which you can join, cross-server. Just join one that does a lot of mythic dungeons or raid or what not and it’ll greatly expand your available player base.
Oh… never delved into those, so forgot they existed in WoW. Guess my advice is better served for ESO/GW2/FFXIV - communities sound like a nice solution though.
That sounds like fanfic to me. The “we’re trying to get a new expansion out in early 2022” part gives it away. Even if they had a new expansion up on the PTR today it wouldn’t launch in early 2022.
His obvious obsession with Asmongold is another give away. I don’t for a second think Blizzard is as preoccupied with him as this guy suggests.
A lot of what’s written might actually be true, but I do not believe that person has any actual insider information. It’s just good guesses based on what’s happening around the game right now.
I’m not so sure about that. People are talking about Asmongold all the time on the WoW forums, and that was before he tried Final Fantasy, Then Adam Holisky, who used to run WoW Insider and now works at Blizzard called him an asshole.
Plus, right now Asmongold and Belluar are banging the drum hard about the tough place WoW is in. It’s funny, too. I never watched any of Asmon’s videos because I just figured he was a typical YouTube/Streamer personality. I was watching one of his Zakk videos and it was about halfway through it hit me he was Asmongold and was making some damn fine points.
I don’t think the post is true, but I have to assume there is some element of that happening within Blizzard. Since the Hong Kong thing, it’s just been a mess all around. “You think you want it, but you don’t.” “Don’t all of you have phones?” etc. It feels like within the last 2 months, a lot of people have said (me included): WoW isn’t giving me what I want or like, but, hey, FFXIV is."
They’ve been beating that drum for more than 10 years. Seriously, this is not new.
Again, not that it’s not true. I certainly fell off the treadmill with Shadowlands. It just wasn’t at all interesting to me. And it’s also obvious that lots of people are leaving Blizzard.
The reality is that WoW may be dying. It’s a 17 year old game. It’s not shocking or weird or unusual that a 17 year old game might be on its last legs. The real problem is that there are lots of WoW players who are hopelessly addicted to the game but also don’t like it, and they still need to process those feelings and shake the addiction. Those are the toxic fans who pretend like their constant shitposting is about helping the game.
But don’t fool yourself: Diablo Immortal is going to be a blockbuster product. Diablo 2 remastered will sell really well, and Diablo 4 is looking good. The flubs you point out are long forgotten.
Path of Exile gave streamers priority queue and caused a ruckus recently at the launch of their last whatever content drop was called. Streamers have an outsized influence on games these days unfortunately.
This fatalistic, responsibility-free argument once again.
The reality is that WoW is dying due to poor direction.
The same reality that is making FF14, an 8 year old game even more technically constrained than WoW by having to run on old consoles, successful due to good direction.
Last FF14 expansion was a smashing hit. WoW’s was not. That’s all.
(and overall technically WoW is still ahead)
I hated Torghast so much before this patch that I cannot will myself to even try it in 9.1. Once we cleared the first raid and everyone maxed out their heroic gear, my guild just stopped playing for the most part. A couple of months later the new stuff comes out and there just isn’t much compelling to do. Yeah, new dungeon, new raid, we can sorta fly, but same old treadmill. I’ll probably spend this patch leveling alts and maybe get serious about crafting.
This doing repetitive stuff like Torghast over and over again to get relics, etc. in WoW has to end.
I mentioned them more of an indication of Blizzard’s corporate attitude towards its players. Now a lot of this is inevitable. The founders left, and the suits took over. They have some talent they are apparently wasting also. They hired Christie Golden, one of the better WoW authors, but she doesn’t have anything to do with writing the expansion plots etc.
Maybe it’s timed with me quitting and being more visible to these things, but it seems like since at least the Shadowlands launch, the animosity towards WoW and the developers is more. The PC Gamer article calling the cinematic a narrative disaster isn’t helping. AutomatikJak, who is involved with the MDI is critical of WoW on the last raid design, and raid design is supposed to be Ion’s strong suit.
I had pretty much pegged BfA as the worse expansion since Cata, but Shadowlands has taken that place. Which is too bad, since the idea of an afterlife-themed expansion was actually pretty neat.
“Retention trap” is a good phrase to describe World of Warcraft. With each expansion, the curtain falls away a little more, and the systems designed to keep players engaged - from day to day and week to week - become more and more obvious.
Not really. It’s a subscription MMO and the skinner box has always been plain to see. You’re just burned out on it.
Like I’ve said several times in this thread, the secret is to play each expansion for the leveling and exploration, mess around at max level for a bit, and then quit. Re-sub for major patches if you find them interesting, otherwise only play when a new expansion releases.
The problem is that when I play an MMO, I don’t want to ‘quit’. I want to have enough engaging content that I can continue to play with my guildmates (even if it ends up just being a glorified Discord) ‘forever’. Otherwise you’re better off finding some good single player games or lobby-style games (CoD/Apex/what have you).
I do know that FFXIV does, in fact, encourage this way of going about it so maybe it is my mindset that is wrong.
I mean, no MMO is going to have enough content to play current content and not start repeating/grinding after a couple of weeks, even with time-gates. That is a problem inherent to the genre. Even with hundreds of millions of players pouring in money like the Niagra Falls, the mythical man-month means you can’t just hire more people to keep content coming.
Or at least, nobody has successfully done it.
“Engaging content” doesn’t always have to mean “new content” though. Though in MMOs that’s what it usually boils down to, because outside of PvP I’m not sure what you could do. My CoD/Apex example ends up being a poor choice because those are inherently PvP and thus that’s the “engaging” part, even with a lack of changing content.