First time I played WoW I liked that you were given a guided tour of your races homeland as it explained the world. The last time I played WoW I had to to a tutorial island that explained nothing about the world and then dumped me in an expansion with characters I had no fucking idea who they were and why I should care about them. Even ESO doesn't prevent new players from playing the base storyline and FFXIV still requires you to complete ARR before moving to the first expansion. I dropped WoW pretty quickly again because I felt too lost.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Correction: final fantasy xiv requires you to play ALL of the story to get to the rest of the playerbase, which is, and I'm not exaggerating, probably 700 hours
Oh yeah it's a slog, the great divider that everyone has to overcome. They need to do another pass on reducing the amount of stuff and one of the problems is that buried in the trivial ARR stuff is some important information for later. It's sadly in a state of "just wait, it gets good after the first season".
I know. It's the only MMO I stay actively subscribed too. I pre-ordered endwalker digital collectors edition and will be doing the same for dawntrail. It's one of my favorite games.
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It's not a game for people that care about story or even the setting past the visuals and superficial vibes.
I started playing recently ish having never played WoW before, and good god the intro feels practically designed to drive new players away. The tutorial was so tedious and boring and taught me so little about how to actually play that I’m still not even entirely sure what I’m really supposed to do or how to even begin to understand the story/timeline. The game as a whole just feels so needlessly difficult and obtuse, I’ve ended up really just logging on every once in awhile for events to grab any cute pets or whatever mounts the game will graciously allow me to get without buying a sub
Wait, they just give you mounts now? You used to have to wait until level 20 to buy a mount. Level 20 took forever, and then you could only buy the slow mount for your race. You didn't get a fast mount until level 40, which took a very long time. Then you had to grind reputation for different factions to buy their expensive mounts. Some rare mounts could be found through seasonal events or in raids. I ran Tempest Keep every week for 2.5 years before I finally got Ashes of Al'ar to drop for me.
You used to have to wait until level 20 to buy a mount. Level 20 took forever, and then you could only buy the slow mount for your race. You didn't get a fast mount until level 40, which took a very long time.
Ha, rookie numbers. In my time you had to wait for level 40 to buy your slow mount. Fast mounts were bound to level 60 I believe and were insanely expensive (I sold so much stuff in the auction house to get the money together in those days). Around level 20 or 30 Hunters got an aspect which increased their running speed and druids could shapeshift to travel form.
Yeah, I started playing at the beginning of Lich King. I started with a mage, but my first level capped player was a hunter.
Holidays and events have mounts available as rewards and have for quite a long time. The headless horseman mount for example.
Same for me, I wanted to introduce someone into WoW during COVID and for nostalgia reasons, only to see that they took away the adventure and exploration and transformed it into a soulless husk. I dropped it immediately.
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It's definitely still chugging along, although I will point out that the sub numbers now include not only modern WoW players but also Classic players. If the 7 million number is accurate, that's 7 million across all WoW versions, not just modern WoW.
I have a number of friends and former guildies who went back to play the classic game. I can't say that I wasn't a little tempted because I loved it back then, but I really wish that they would just stop beating this dead horse.
I joined back up for TBC classic. WotLK was my fucking jam so I wanted to prep a little bit. I chose the wrong server. So I was on a server of thousands that could barely manage double digit concurrent horde population. Obviously this is not tenable. Talk of realm transfers and multiple low population servers kept me hanging around a bit. Then came two incompetent decisions. They opened up free realm transfers from low pop servers. Unfortunately mine was only low horde. Overall it was classified as medium pop and therefore not included. Then they revealed once WotLK dropped they would not implement dungeon finder (saying nothing of cross realm dungeon finder). Within days I'd canceled my account. I now have a few 80s on a private server that scratches every itch I need. I haven't given the private server a dime. I need to give them a little money for their effort.
Fuck blizzard.
Which server are you on?
Warmane.
Because the MMORPG market is mostly dead, with rare exceptions that still can't beat WoW and the rest is free2play pay2win gatcha skin fest fomo garbage.
I'm not surprised at all.
I thought Black Desert and GW2 were doing okay. I know two people who play one of each respectively.
As someone who's played a lot of GW2 over the past couple of years, I can confirm that it's still fantastic. It doesn't get anywhere near the amount of content that WoW gets, but it's on a good cadance these days and outside of buying expansions, is absolutely playable without spending a penny.
FF14 has another expac coming out soon, so that's gonna blow up. ESO was doing pretty well last I checked, too.
ESO Financials were part of the Microsoft leak. They do pretty dang well. Downward trend but what ten year old game constantly only sees number go up.
I mean even in the past when WoW didn't have much competition this never really happened before. It would always go down over the expansion then spike up again with a new expansion. While this is definitely in part due to the fact that WoW has multiple versions now and new ones of those have been coming out helping this is definitely still a good sign that what they've been doing recently has been working to keep players around.
TIL: People still play WOW
still the king of mmos
I'm happy, I finished the burning crusade story and got out. No more blizzard from me, probably ever.
WotLK was pretty great. Cataclysm was okay, the beginning of the end IMO.
I know I'm in the minority, but I absolutely loved MoP. It's probably my favorite expansion.
Same! The music, the lore, the fact that the factions were starting to realize their conflict is manufactured and doesn't make any sense anymore.
Also, I really liked some of the qol changes.
I haven't played in years. Hopped on again when they brought wow classic in just to try it bcz I started around the time of the cataclysm expansion. But once they banned that Hong Kong player from a tournament back in 2019 over the protest crap, I haven't been back.
I can't believe the game is still going. The expansions just got worse as time went on. How they're still churning out content people want to play is beyond me.
Even the original EverQuest is still churning out expansion after expansion. The game's going to keep going until they turn the lights off.
I mean, I guess if people are still playing, why would you stop, even if the content quality isn't that great.
Dragonflight is actually good 👍
Content quality is very subjective, as in that's just your opinion. Other players may think it's good.
Everyone knows Ultima Online is the real MMORPGOAT
Everquest checking in!
sow plz
Where were you when British got kill
What any good citizen do and call "Guards! Hi vendor buy bank recdu recsu"
I loved these stupid binds. I was part of an RP server and each time I saw one my stomach churned. Lots of newbies talking up the big bad red in mystic armor, and the dude just ignores them, yells at the banker and fucks off with a Kal Ort Por. Better yet, a random blue casting a portal for a friend into the heart of Britt, the guy that's running gets in and starts yelling his banker binds while standing on the other side of the portal. Baddies go through, suddenly lots of shit on the floor that you can grab since yoinking reds didn't set crim.
Honestly I don't even know what was modded / added in and what was in the actual game. Them going open source with Modain's Legacy was such a boss move.
I think this says just as much about the relatively poor release sales of Dragonflight as it does their successes with retention and attracting former (and possibly new) players.
Dragonflight's generally positive word-of-mouth and what they've done with Classic has also contributed, I'm sure.
I picked it up for a little bit during Dragonflight. Mechanically, playing your character is the best its been in years as they got rid of a lot of the restrictive and boring spec building. Everything else is an passable meh.
The community is 1 dungeon or raid wipe from more being toxic than a League match making all endgame content not fun. Feels like they started going in the right direction, but I had this hope crushed too many times.
Yeah, I didn't comment on the quality of the expansion itself because I'm actually the lowest on the game I've been in years. I'm in full tourist mode and have been since Legion. I'll come in for a month or two for expansion launch (three for Legion, I really liked that one), and then again in the last patch for one more month, and that's it. Now that I've been playing different games over the past few years, WoW is really starting to show its age and I'm less willing to let its flaws slide, such as the extremely toxic community you mentioned. There's a global community called WoW Made Easy that started up at Dragonflight launch with a mission statement of being patient in pick-up groups. Considering how massive it got, clearly the playerbase is fed up with the traditional PUG experience.
What's really soured me on the game is Blizzard's continuing divestment in customer service. Toxicity itself is a customer service problem and it takes actual eyeballs to fix it. And they aren't hiring. Meanwhile, enjoy your 30-day ticket times when major issues develop. Just as bad is their newest approach to overcrowding, especially on Classic. Last I checked, their solution to crowded servers is "nothing we can do about it, it'll sort itself out when enough of you give up. no refunds btw."
I'm going to need some convincing to pickup The War Within.
Being a social game you can't solo, the community actually makes it impossible for me to progress. I don't know if I even want to go back if they get everything else perfect. It just feels lonely and unwelcoming.
Knowing how blizzard managed to ruin every other franchise they own, I can see the reaper at WoWs door as soon as the money gets tight again. I was holding out hope Microsoft would have saved them from themselves but seems there happy to milk wow subs till they drive everyone out.
There seems to have been a major righting of the ship with Dragonflight. The live retail game is in a very strong place right now, and players are now actually anticipating an upcoming expansion rather than dreading it. Season of Discovery was also an especially inspired idea, injecting a lot of new life into vanilla. Assuming there isn't too large a shake-up with the team after the Microsoft acquisition, this might be a new golden era for World of Warcraft.
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