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The dumbing down being counter productive
Lord.Bachus
Member RarePosts: 9,686
When WoW released, there was a huge market with people that never played MMO and after its initial release WoW started aiming at those people, which meant they had to make certain thing easier to acces and to understand, for many years this worked well.
But in my humble opinion, this well of new players is quickly drieing up in those countries where people have enough income to support a subbed game. The MMO playerbase has slowly evolved from noobs to experienced MMO players, games that start with characters and having a single abbility with tutorial like gameplay are frowned uppon. In these current days the biggest market share is building games for those advanced players that are willing to invest time and money in a good game.
Blizzard must realise so by now that the current generation of mmo players want more depth and challenge in their games, but has WoW been easified to much, which would require a total breakdown of the game to get the leaving players back?
But then maybe WoW is meant to be the easy access entree to MMOs, while other games will funtion as the steup to more advanced games... But being the easy access to this genre does require the game to be free to play, which will initialy also bring a lot of players back, but not for long as they are done with this games easy accesible system.
Now this makes me wondering how blizzard will handle this dillema.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Comments
Blizzard will not do anything about it really. They still have millions of subscriptions to loose before that.
I present the question to you, How many subs do you believe would prompt a change?
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
I have to admit I enjoyed WoW up until the change in classes. I completely disagree with the developer's removal of class customization. All in all, WoW offers a lot, but the constant dumbing down left me no reason to be class #2346123 with only a handful of powers separating me from the thousands of others.
Cheers!
MMO Vet since AOL Neverwinter Nights circa 1992. My MMO beat up your MMO. =S
I present the question to you, How many subs do you believe would prompt a change?
Maybe when they drop below 3 million, but I wouldn't count on it.
Most likely they'll continue with WoW like they did during the last years until the game isn't profitable anymore, which would be somewhere around 200k subscriptions.
Look at EvE Online in that regard and how profitable even a small playerbase can be.
One thing that I believe is the silver lining to the dark cloud that is the current state of WoW is: the developers are learning what does, and does not work for Titan. Hopefully these lessons will result in a much better future project.
Cheers!
MMO Vet since AOL Neverwinter Nights circa 1992. My MMO beat up your MMO. =S
+1
I also think that Blizz made some mistakes in terms of catering to the "I pay $15 a month, I should get to experience all the content" crowd.
+2
On the history of downhillness, But I believe the reasoning of why was different.
Easy to cater to the five year olds and most important, to get everyone to buy the expansions faster....Box sales and digital downloads are the money makers, IT'S MEAT AND POTATOS....Monthly sub money is also nice, but up front sure thing money from the game it self is the sure thing.
Marketing !!!!!
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Passion Profit
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I installed WoW day before yesterday thinking to kill some time before FFXIV ARR and I logged on my level 32 druid and I joined a dungeon finder group and they ran like chickens with their heads cut off and I could not even look at where we were going as I was healing all the time. I did one more dungeon and I stopped playing. Have not touched it since. I am sad ,I really am .I was hoping for I do not even know what perhaps to recapture some of the fun vanilla days.
There is no one talking in the group even . I might as well go play SWTOR till FFXIV comes out even if I solo my companion will talk to me.
Eve online also makes money from GTC (=game time cards ) / plex sales , gametime sales acts like a cash shop store item and bring extra income , a player may buy gametime /plex and sell for isk = eve currency in game to players with CCP's permission . Pretty much cash shop like situation but players dont bother because game time and isk changes hand between players. Arenanet followed pretty much similiar way with gems in GW2
Same with me several months ago. I made a Priest. Well, dungeons sucked because they ran them like lightning, most of the tanks were bad but with great egos.
I could only use three abilities, fast,slow and group heals....Thats all the time I had to do. No one waited for any buffs, they were just gone, some would be three rooms ahead of the group.
How players could run so fast and talk shit so much is beyond me !
The game has been dumbed down alot, but the class system is still complex for most. It's not the most complex, but it's complex enough that half the population are bad players or sub par. I believe this is partly reason why everything has been made easier. Not saying that I want the class system to get dumbed down, but saying peoples inability to learn classes made the game easier.
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You are so right here. When you cant use the auction house, trade with people, or even use public channels your whole life changes. It truly becomes a rubix cube of events to figure out how to get an enchant on a piece of armor. Or get a piece of armor in general. And you dont pay a dime $ $
Great sites! Is there a way to set a current inactive account to a trial account?
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
Just add a trial WoW account to your battle.net account.
When you log into your battle net account, right under your link to the WoW page it says add starter account, click that.
My computer is better than yours.
This is an already overly debated subject and WoW will never have the hardcore base fan it had since the days of TBC.
In a time where players sought social online gaming communities that could provide enough challengeable content to make it worth spending your time in it, and they were given few choices from MMOs that existed at time, like EQ, Lineage, Vanguard, GW, etc, they have now a gamer base of new people that in their majority are just interested in bright lights, geting shinnies as fast as they can and a Q system for everything they have in the game and to make it worse all of that to be divided by all the MMOs available at this time...wich as you all know are more than you can count, wich makes players follow the flavour of the month and not stick to a given game. Not all of course...but many of them.
I can give you a good example if we look at WoW: many of the players that are now complaining that WoW has lost the great core gamers it once had are the same players that said "oh we can have a LGF tool and an auto Q system, that would be great and would save me alot of time". Now people just sit around in central hubs Qing for everything. And what you get: one of the greatest exploration maps in MMO genre completely empty, with empty cities, in a complete dumbed down game.
This from a game that i still call my greatest gaming experience ever, where everyone had to run the world map from top to bottom, where raids where formed just to reach a given dungeon or raid....
...yes its true, you actually had to ride your mount to do stuff...pfff..how sick is that??...
...and what you get now is just a playground for a player base that Blizzard knew at some point they needed to have, because you know, thats where the money is, and thats why you will never get it back again...it isnt profitable.
I had a similar experience myself. I resubbed and logged in but the zones and cities were empty compared to even 6 months ago. I queued for a BG but the mechanics have changed so much that pvp fights were not really fights but was instead whoever could target and click their 1 shot kill move before the other person. It's really sad seeing this game in the state it is now.
@ OP, my guess is they figure they've made their money from it and I doubt that they are gonna invest any funds/effort into it if they haven't done so already.
For me personally, downfall of WoW began with the patch in BC, when they made tanking super easy. I was warrior tank back in those days and I loved the challenge. You NEEDED some classes, you needed CC, you needed to mark targets, you needed to pull etc. After that patch all it came down to was AOE damage, rushing in all guns blazing. It was a fun change for a short while, but very quickly I grew tired of it. WoW was always easy, but I feel like that patch kinda marked the end of it all. Making casual super casual. Without risk, reward has no meaning.
Here's hoping for WoW 2, since I do have so many good memories from WoW. Remember the beta, I was blown away, I never had that much fun in a video game before. I met so many good people in WoW, I miss it all. But WoW as it is, it's long dead. Sadly.
EDIT:
@Clerigo holy crap, you put it so nicely. Couldn't agree more. It's just sad.
Thanks!
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
By chortling and calling for another truck to transport the dollars to the bank?
Same way they've handled all other "dillema"s.
Sorry, I never stop being amazed at how many people feel qualified to tell Blizzard how "ur doing it wrong"...your 30k salary vs. their GNP-level income...
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Well as much as I agree with statement about current LFG - all they really had to do was to modify old one to work cross server and / or remove some of its limitations. That would easily speed up things too while still forcing ppl into some social interactions (no auto invite).
But the truth is that LFG right now is the least problem. There are bigger problems that WoW has such as only instanced endgame, dumbed old content, heirlooms and in general everything granted for just logging in really. Just look at mounts - originally min lvl 40 and quite expensive so even basic mounts required some work. Now everyone has flying dragons for nothing. Same about equipment and as the matter of fact any kind of what was supposed to be a reward for some actions (field / grand marshal set in their original shapes - anyone remembers that?)
I actually believe that WoW will be around in some form or another for a very long time. Like comic book long time. I think, the rule set will ebb and flow and adjust.
I think the dumbing down phase is just that; a phase.
I think eventually they will find a nice solid balance which will solidify its rule set in the same way that chess, or monopoly did.
Right now its a rough-ish patch (pun intended) - but I think adjustments will be made.
I think we will see dramatic changes to the talent system, potentially the addition of player housing and maybe a graphics/avatar overhaul before too many more subs are lost.
I think with multiple times the number of subs of any f2p or p2p on the market - they have a lot of time before utter failure could happen.
They'd have to make bad mistakes for a very long time for the game to go belly up - and I think it isn't likely that will happen.
It may get worse before it gets better, but I think they have time.
My computer is better than yours.