MMOs declined bellow "gear garming QTE/cooldown managing barbie dressing games"

[WaterMage]

Blizzard Version of Rotation Assist (Hekili) Coming to WoW in Patch 11.1.7 - WoWCast with Ion Hazzikostas

https://www.wowhead.com/news/blizzard-v ... ast-376648

In 90s, there was some interesting mmos like Ultima Online and Meridian 59, sadly nowadays and after two decades of endless gear farming cooldown managing. Now, players don't even need to do the QTE/cooldown managing part.

As Asmonbald said



I refer to "barbie dressing", because in this mmos, your character stats don't measure how storng, intelligent and etc your char is. It only serves to measure how fancy and fashion your look is.

[Statesman]

Might as well have the game play itself at this point.

[rusty_shackleford]

Result of having a game where you're expected to play guitar hero for combat. People laughing at this don't even realize what the issue is.

[WaterMage]

ASmonbald talked about it. Too much ""complexity"" ie - rotations become too complicated.

A solution for such problem is simple imo. NOT have a combat based around spamming the same rotation 24/7 and include more "situational" skills.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I already discussed this in the WoW thread, so to avoid repeating myself: the fundamental issue is that the game revolves around boss fights. The boss' HP pool is tuned so that the boss will survive for at least two minutes. In a dungeon, you have at least four players whacking on the boss. You can press a button to deal damage at least once every 1.5 seconds. (120/1.5 seconds) x 4 players = 320 button presses to kill the boss. Each button press deals 0.3125% of the boss' HP pool in damage, or 80 damage button presses per player. Obviously the game designers don't want a player pressing one button to do one sword swing over and over again 80x for two minutes. WoW's solution is to come up with cooldown rotations, where once you press a button it goes on cooldown and you can't press it again, so you instead have to press the next best damage dealing button. WoW and its clones do a terrible job of informing the player at a glance what is the priority of the buttons they should be pressing. The devs also add in RNG gameplay that further complicates this priority order, as if you proc some sort of buff, you will want to press a different button instead. Etc. And then the player has other responsibilities on top of this such as movement or handling special mechanics, or keeping an eye out on other players to heal or debuff them, etc. Also, because the player is constantly having to push buttons to deal damage, he can't stop to type in chat.

GW2 and FF14's PvP mode have already made steps towards simplifying this button bloat of having several different basic sword swing abilities, though the cooldown rotation nonsense and high freneticness is still there.

There is also conceptual issues with having a player make 80 button presses swinging his sword at a boss for two minutes to kill it. It is unimmersive. Contrast this with Final Fantasy XI, where most of the time your character is autoattacking and you only need to press a button once every 20 or 30 seconds to use a weaponskill, and then once every three minutes to use a damage buff like Berserk, and then situationally press a button like Third Eye to block an attack. It is not frenetic. The player has the free time to type in chat and ask questions or request other players to do things. Also, there is no cooldown rotation nonsense like in WoW and its clones, so you are usually only using one Weaponskill at a time, and then maybe you also cast a spell to detonate a skillchain.

[rusty_shackleford]

This is fundamentally not different than auto-attack. They turned the value of 99% of skills into that of an auto-attack, and now need to consolidate all of it into auto-attacks.
The bioware guy "when you push a button, something awesome has to happen" was completely right. If you're pressing a button, something awesome should happen. You shouldn't have 7 abilities for doing damage that function nearly identically and differ only in having separate cooldowns or somesuch.

[aimlesshealer]

Anyone claiming that damage-dealing in WoW consists of dumbly pressing the same sequence of buttons over and over until a health bar is depleted either never played at max level past Vanilla or was the terrible DPS who got kicked from the raid.

The most frustrating thing is that I only ever played healer, so I can't refute you in detail. I did dabble in shadow priest, and at least back then (after mind spike was introduced, whenever that was.. Cata?) skill and intelligence were required to be an effective damage dealer in higher-end content. Yes, you had a base rotation, but would you have to move soon? Should you refresh your DoT's so they keep ticking while you're busy dealing with the fight's mechanics? Were ads about to come out? Would the target die too rapidly to apply your usual DoT's? Should you use a mass AoE ability or apply DoT's to every target? Not to mention interrupts, clutch heals, etc. Each damage dealing spec, let alone class, had its own nuances and flavor baked into the mechanics, which you had better understand the nuts and bolts of if you wanted to play well. There was a palpable difference between a mediocre damage-dealing player and a skilled one. (Believe me, as the healer, I noticed.)

Of course it's mindless to sit still and hit a target dummy. But raid and dungeon fights are (were) complicated, even before factoring in the chaos created by your ******** teammates. You had to stay flexible and use your brain. And that extra drop of damage squeezed out through your mastery of the mechanics was sometimes the deciding factor between defeat and narrow victory. You lose all that engagement and adaption when it's just "push button to video game."

Admittedly, I jumped ship after Legion and never looked back. Now the game's made for the brown internet, not white nerds. Maybe it's all dumbed down enough to be distilled into one button without losing much.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The strength of WoW's battle gameplay is in the encounters/scenarios. Ie:

• The gunship battle in ICC when you need to have guys who jetpack to the other side to assassinate the enemy commander while other people remain behind to fend off their boarding party.
• The green dragon in ICC where combat players have to hold off incoming waves while the healers balance healing the party and the dragon.
• Parachuting onto Deathwing's back and having to take shelter underneath his armor plates to avoid being thrown off as he barrel rolls.
• Dark Animus where the group has to divide and each player tanks their own add and you have to delicately pour fluids from robots into the larger robots and prevent them from overflowing and wiping the raid.
• Galakras where the party has to split into three groups, with one group fending off the soldiers and catapults below while two other groups storm the two watchtowers.
• Siegecrafter Blackfuse where a party has to detach from the main raid to hop onto the conveyor belt to destroy one or two of the three random inventions that would appear on it, with the remaining invention(s) affecting the raid somehow like a magnet that pulls people into AoEs.
• Oregorger where the party has to run away through a pacman maze.
  Blackhand where it's like a battlefield with all of these enemy soldiers and tanks marching onto the field throughout the fight, and you need guys being thrown up into the rafters to kill the snipers, etc.
• Sylvanas when you chase her across the giant chains.
• Zskarn where he and the adds he summons are activating all of these different traps across the room, so you have to pick which adds to kill, disarm the traps you can, and move away as there is increasingly little fight space.
• Larodar where the room is being consumed in fire, people have to put out fires, and the healers have to heal the seeds. Etc.
• Tindral where the boss is constantly shifting forms, casting entangling roots and you need to free everyone ASAP, or the boss is throwing out lots of bomb seeds that have to be quashed immediately, or he flies away and you mount up on your dragon to chase him while dodging his projectiles.
• The penultimate dual boss fight of Nerubar Palace where you need to try to get one boss caught in the abilities used by the other boss.
• Queen Ansurek where you need to get knocked up to other platforms and climb really fast.

The fun is in the encounter/scenario design, not the actual moment to moment gameplay of playing your character to deal damage.

[rusty_shackleford]

Anyone claiming that damage-dealing in WoW consists of dumbly pressing the same sequence of buttons over and over until a health bar is depleted either never played at max level past Vanilla or was the terrible DPS who got kicked from the raid.

The most frustrating thing is that I only ever played healer, so I can't refute you in detail. I did dabble in shadow priest, and at least back then (after mind spike was introduced, whenever that was.. Cata?) skill and intelligence were required to be an effective damage dealer in higher-end content. Yes, you had a base rotation, but would you have to move soon? Should you refresh your DoT's so they keep ticking while you're busy dealing with the fight's mechanics? Were ads about to come out? Would the target die too rapidly to apply your usual DoT's? Should you use a mass AoE ability or apply DoT's to every target? Not to mention interrupts, clutch heals, etc. Each damage dealing spec, let alone class, had its own nuances and flavor baked into the mechanics, which you had better understand the nuts and bolts of if you wanted to play well. There was a palpable difference between a mediocre damage-dealing player and a skilled one. (Believe me, as the healer, I noticed.)

Of course it's mindless to sit still and hit a target dummy. But raid and dungeon fights are (were) complicated, even before factoring in the chaos created by your ******** teammates. You had to stay flexible and use your brain. And that extra drop of damage squeezed out through your mastery of the mechanics was sometimes the deciding factor between defeat and narrow victory. You lose all that engagement and adaption when it's just "push button to video game."

Admittedly, I jumped ship after Legion and never looked back. Now the game's made for the brown internet, not white nerds. Maybe it's all dumbed down enough to be distilled into one button without losing much.

Selection_027.webp

[rusty_shackleford]

I played a feral druid during cata, it is generally considered to have one of the hardest 'rotations'(at that time, anyways.)

I pulled up the DPS rotation(priority queue, w/e), this is for learning:

Selection_028.webp

Do you know what I got for mastering this?
…About 20% less DPS than a better, easier class.

Did I find it fun?
No.
Why would it be fun to be a human if-statement evaluator?


Healing is more fun because it is very unpredictable. There's a high element of randomness due to you reacting to what the enemy + your raid is doing. Unless you're doing something like resto shaman in TBC where all you do is spam chain heal. Which is what I did in Sunwell.

[WaterMage]

Yes. IMO one solution woudl be to make DPSing more unpredictable.

In D&D, some abilities like a dragon breath has cooldwons, but is like d4, the party don't know if it will come in the next turn or how many turns left. It makes things hard to predict.

Giving abilities with CDs a similar randomless would make finding a "perfect" rotation much harder. With DoT, making things predictable is easy. You make so for eg, Unstable affliction has a "range" of duration. Eg - corruption can lasts X seconds to 2X seconds. In wow and its clones, I only enjoy playing as a Affliction warlock due it. Is about maintaining DoTs and spamming shadowbolt, no QTE/same rotation spam.

[aimlesshealer]

The fun is in the encounter/scenario design, not the actual moment to moment gameplay of playing your character to deal damage.

Yes, but there's a second level of enjoyment to be had when the scenario mechanics intersect with your own damage-dealing (or healing, or tanking) abilities. It raises the skill ceiling and adds a level of personal decisionmaking. You have a toolbox and a problem: how can you make it work? And the problem constantly morphs depending on the status of the fight (including mistakes of other players), so you need to know your capabilities well enough to make that decision on the fly.

For argument's sake, suppose all DPS was nothing but auto-attack. Sure, that could still be a fun game, but wouldn't something be lost? Mastering the particularities of a class adds something vital to the MMORPG, even if the class mechanics aren't very fun if taken by themselves. But why do they need to be? They're not meant to be experienced in a vacuum.

Of course, none of this requires "rotations" per se. There's surely a sweet spot between busywork and none at all.

Healing is more fun because it is very unpredictable. There's a high element of randomness due to you reacting to what the enemy + your raid is doing.

I agree Could PvE DPS gameplay be raised to that degree of chaos and adaptability? Possibly not in the environment of a theme park MMO dungeon. Or maybe the problem lies with stuffing every other kind of combat role besides tank and healer under the broad umbrella of "damage dealer"?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Yes, but there's a second level of enjoyment to be had when the scenario mechanics intersect with your own damage-dealing (or healing, or tanking) abilities. It raises the skill ceiling and adds a level of personal decisionmaking. You have a toolbox and a problem: how can you make it work? And the problem constantly morphs depending on the status of the fight (including mistakes of other players), so you need to know your capabilities well enough to make that decision on the fly.

For argument's sake, suppose all DPS was nothing but auto-attack. Sure, that could still be a fun game, but wouldn't something be lost? Mastering the particularities of a class adds something vital to the MMORPG, even if the class mechanics aren't very fun if taken by themselves. But why do they need to be? They're not meant to be experienced in a vacuum.

Of course, none of this requires "rotations" per se. There's surely a sweet spot between busywork and none at all.

The problem with WoW combat as that for boss fights, there isn't really any interesting "toolkit" to use. It's all just different damage buttons, and a few utility abilities like placing down a demonic gateway for people to use to hop across the arena, or using your paladin blessing to help someone out. It's not like a boss becomes vulnerable to fire elemental damage so you use fire elemental attacks during that window of opportunity to massively hurt them. Crowd control abilities like fears or stuns don't work on bosses and their adds, only on dungeon trash. Turn undead is an ability you will never use. Hunters never have to use misdirection because aggro management isn't a thing, the tank just tags and the mob attacks them just like that. You don't need hunters using eyes of the beast to scout on ahead. Having people use invisibility potions or rogues use their group stealth ability is irrelevant when all of the mobs in the instance have to be killed in order to open the next door.

[buttfucker 3000]

"Some people don't want to play the game, so we've gone ahead and implemented a system that plays the game for you!"

JFC. WoW is so ******* cooked.

[rusty_shackleford]

"Some people don't want to play the game, so we've gone ahead and implemented a system that plays the game for you!"

JFC. WoW is so ******* cooked.

More like, "we recognize 90% of raiders use rotation bots and instead of doing something about it we're just making cheating part of the game"

[A Chinese opium den]

The thread title confuses me, strange wording.

[Tweed]

This is why combat in EQ2 sucks dongs. Tards complain that sandwich combat is boring so developers have to make it EXCITING and NEW for them so you end up with **** like this. Not that rotation didn't exist in EQ raids, but it still wasn't this gay. There was one class dedicated to this style of play, the bard and that's all it needed. Warriors didn't even start getting awesome buttons until they added disciplines and that starts at level 51, which used to take a long time to reach, but now isn't even a drop in the bucket.

I'd much rather hit auto combat and time my slams or kicks and taunt than have to hit a magical combination of keys to deal any real damage.

[Xenich]

Kind of my problem with modern MMOs and the crowds that push this design.

They want an action arcade game, but then get bored, move to another MMO, demand it be an action arcade game... then repeat. All games become action arcade games that people are bored with playing.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Kind of my problem with modern MMOs and the crowds that push this design.

They want an action arcade game, but then get bored, move to another MMO, demand it be an action arcade game... then repeat. All games become action arcade games that people are bored with playing.

The problem isn't the action combat. It's the lack of glue to keep people playing, which in the old days was 1. the long progression and 2. the gameplay facilitating the formation of friendships and guilds. But with retail WoW clones, you don't need anyone so you don't make friends and join guilds, and you reach level cap very quickly and then run out of meaningful progression ie things to do. So you unsub.

[J1M]

The future of the MMO is adding dungeons to Discord.

[mercerxiv]

WoW's been in a steady decline through nobody's fault but own since 2010 or even earlier than that. Which (oh, what a coincidence) times pretty well with Activision acquisition of Blizzard. I'd say the beginning of the declined could be placed around the time when they have cancelled Nerub and massively changed plans for the tail end of WotLK, culminating in nonsensical siege of the Icecrown citadel and the addition of an automated group finder. From there it was an uneven, but nevertheless downwards slide.

So not too surprised that the long slide is keeping on giving us pearls like this. The team currently working on the game is clueless, talentless, too concerned with leftist politics (aka look at the messages packed in Dragonflight story for example, or killing off/sterilizing most of the OG male characters). The game was really carried by the success and foundation in Warcraft 3, and as soon as they've killed off Arthas (sike, they brought him back briefly to desecrate even that heritage) they found themselves with a story that was more or less over but needed continuing. Hence we get an expansion with an absentee main antagonist, china pandering expansion, draenor memberberries expansion, 'member Illidan and burning crusade expansion, 'member there was war and it was cool expansion, girlboss Sylvanas kills the Lich King solo in 5 minutes flat expansion, scalies and good vibes with tribal girlbosses expansion. They are just ******* lost in the sauce. And it keeps getting worse. I think partially you can blame the harassment scandals for getting rid of some of the talent, and the climate established following it, but that would imply that the studio was not in a downward spiral prior to that (which it was for about 10 years by then). Blizzard was always known for having their head up their ***, but up to 2010 they could get away with it because they actually did put out good work. Since then it was just getting lodged deeper and deeper, as the veterans were leaving the game in droves after being ignored (most of us), or ridiculed (those of us who were asked to give alpha/beta feedback for upcoming expansions).

It's funny how I always said even before that time that the only WoW killer will be WoW itself. It still stands true. No competitive MMO has emerged, the only change in the market so far has been a steady decline of WoW to the point where it has degraded enough for meh games like FFXIV to take over a slice of that market share pie. IIRC there was a "mass exodus" of WoW players to that game around 2018-2019, but my hunch is that those players were not WoW vets but rather various degenerates the likes of which you would find on Moonguard in the Goldshire Inn, or perhaps they have followed soon after seeing how the playerbase in that game has shifted rapidly towards degeneracy. Not to say it didn't have any beforehand, but they mostly stayed closeted in their private linkshells/fcs, but after that influx the party finder and trade chat were flooded with degenerate stuff and we saw the increasing censorship and bans handed out for as much as suggesting a healer to contribute to doing damage in a dungeon.

I think at large MMO genre is pretty salvageable today due to how "mass audience" composition has shifted. Back in the early era it would be mostly geeks and nerds, but generally normative dudes (and maybe 1 in 10 gal). Today, queers and other deviants have basically claimed it as a sandbox for living out their fantasies, as well as a decent chunk of normie players who just roll with the current thing without thinking much and who want content that's easy to consoom so that they can "enjoy" it while getting sloshed and watching another season of Halo/Rings of Power/whatever Marvel/Disney/etc. slop exists out there. There will be no more MMO with such mass appeal and numbers simply because that now sizable chunk of audience will kick and cry until it gets changed to their liking. The only places where you may find good MMOs now is like very niche and likely toxic games with emphasis on PvP, and if that's not your kinda thing - tough luck, play singleplayer games from the turn of the century (or mod BG3 with brilliant RPGHQ mods and enjoy that).

[mercerxiv]

"Some people don't want to play the game, so we've gone ahead and implemented a system that plays the game for you!"

JFC. WoW is so ******* cooked.

More like, "we recognize 90% of raiders use rotation bots and instead of doing something about it we're just making cheating part of the game"

So you mean like "we recognize many of you buy gold online, so we're cutting out the middleman and from now on will be selling gold to you directly"?

[rusty_shackleford]

"Some people don't want to play the game, so we've gone ahead and implemented a system that plays the game for you!"

JFC. WoW is so ******* cooked.

More like, "we recognize 90% of raiders use rotation bots and instead of doing something about it we're just making cheating part of the game"

So you mean like "we recognize many of you buy gold online, so we're cutting out the middleman and from now on will be selling gold to you directly"?

Yes.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic, they did that long ago.

[Magick]

I just played a Fire Mage and pressed whatever I felt like at the time.
It was even more fun when Blazing Speed procced and I could just zoom around blasting whatever.

I stopped playing just as Cata kicked off though, and heard they rejigged everything after that, changing Fire Blast into some stupid spell that had to be used with other spells, or something.

Like many games, I get sick of the devs trying to play it for me. **** OFF and let me press the buttons I want to.

[mercerxiv]

The problem with WoW combat as that for boss fights, there isn't really any interesting "toolkit" to use. It's all just different damage buttons, and a few utility abilities like placing down a demonic gateway for people to use to hop across the arena, or using your paladin blessing to help someone out. It's not like a boss becomes vulnerable to fire elemental damage so you use fire elemental attacks during that window of opportunity to massively hurt them. Crowd control abilities like fears or stuns don't work on bosses and their adds, only on dungeon trash. Turn undead is an ability you will never use. Hunters never have to use misdirection because aggro management isn't a thing, the tank just tags and the mob attacks them just like that. You don't need hunters using eyes of the beast to scout on ahead. Having people use invisibility potions or rogues use their group stealth ability is irrelevant when all of the mobs in the instance have to be killed in order to open the next door.

Well, some people complained that pulling aggro off tanks is unfun and so they have trivialized aggro managment. Buffers complained that rebuffing is pita and having to manage buffs is pita and so we got 30-60min buffs with no reagent requirements. People have complained that getting resistance gear is a pita, so there's no more elemental resistances. At least back when I played some adds were vulnerable to CC, but I would guess people have complained that their dps horny damage dealers break the CC all the time and so the CC was removed from raids, hunters even when I still played were some of the most brainless players so I guess nothing has changed, dungeon skips were likely removed because again people bitched that it makes beating dungeons too hard/creates too much of a skill ceiling (right, using an invis pot is now higher skill ceiling ). You get the idea. Degenerate playerbase filled with lazy brainlets crying about the game being too hard. That's why you never ******* balance your game around the lowest, bottom of the barrel,common denominator.

[mercerxiv]

More like, "we recognize 90% of raiders use rotation bots and instead of doing something about it we're just making cheating part of the game"

So you mean like "we recognize many of you buy gold online, so we're cutting out the middleman and from now on will be selling gold to you directly"?

Yes.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic, they did that long ago.

Me? I would never dare be sarcastic with the reverend forum admin.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

WoW's been in a steady decline through nobody's fault but own since 2010 or even earlier than that. Which (oh, what a coincidence) times pretty well with Activision acquisition of Blizzard.

The game was declining as soon as TBC happened, which instead of increasing raids from 40 man to 100 man as rumored, instead shrank them down to 25, which destroyed many guilds and also changed the nature of guilds. With a 40 man raid, the guilds would be a lot bigger than 40 people, because you need lots of people who can fill in and also lots of support in crafters and gatherers. So it could be a 100+ man guild with two raids going, and you can associate with the people you like and ignore the rest. With 25 man, you can't do that. Also, you had a long road of progression ahead of you. It would take at least a couple weeks to reach level cap, and then you had multiple dungeons and raids to progress through. Raids did not become immediately irrelevant when a new raid came out. Even though Blackwing Lair was out, people were still doing Molten Core. Guildies further along would go back and help get new guildies or friends through the earlier content. You weren't spending 9 months doing the same current raid over and over again. There was a huge amount of different things to do.

TBC destroyed that. The Vanilla raids and dungeons were made irrelevant. Now you just continue solo questing by yourself past them until you reach 70, and then you do the TBC raids, shortchanging the progression and longevity of the game. And then the Isle of Quel'danas happened which added easily acquired catchup gear, so now only the latest raid tier matters. So the game becomes solo to level cap, go to the latest zone to get your catchup gear, do the latest raid, and then you're done and you unsub.

TBC also added flying which destroyed the difficulty of the game world, as you no longer had to fight your way through mob areas to reach a quest, or beware of enemy players. Now you can effectively teleport directly to the quest objective, or engage an enemy player you spot on the ground at your leisure.

You are right that LFR was the cherry on top, as it fully cemented that you no longer had to talk to other players on the server and be committed to raise your ilevel. You could just click a button to get teleported to the instance, run through it in 15 minutes with randoms, and then part ways never seeing each other again.

The team currently working on the game is clueless, talentless

Not talentless. Some of the artists like the person who did the Argus and Nazmir skyboxes and the person who did the Shadowlands magick VFX are pretty good. The game has generally been the most attractive looking WRPG for the past two decades. Some of the composers like Jake Lefkowitz and Leo Kaliski are good. And the raid encounters are generally much more engaging than scenarios I find in other RPGs and even SRPGs. However, there is definitely a knowledge transmission issue, where the lessons learned over a decade ago are not passed down to replacement game designers, who repeat the same mistakes as their predecessors.

I don't believe Ion Hazzikostas is dumb. I think that some of WoW's issues are too fundamental and ingrained in the game since the pivotal TBC and WotLK moments and it would be too risky to walk them back now. From WoD through Shadowlands, Ion tried really hard to walk back flying, but ever since TBC the playerbase had become too accustomed to flying and it was a nonstop complaint, so eventually with Dragonflight they just gave up and allowed people to fly anywhere from the get go with no requirement. The devs wouldn't be able to walk back LFR or the catchup gear/"only the current raid matters" design people have been used to WoW for the past decade and a half.

I do agree that the story has become flaccid, and not because there aren't good writers on the team, but rather because of the democratic nature of Western game developers and the format of the game. Metzen never had full authorial control over the franchise. He was frustrated during WC3's and early WoW's development that the devs didn't "get" the Forsaken faction storyline he was setting up. He was frustrated by the addition of Blood Elves to the Horde because the higher ups wanted to appeal to Asians who couldn't get their girlfriends to play Horde and thus fix the lopsided Asian faction ratio. Metzen didn't want playable Death Knights but got vetoed because the other devs thought it would be cooler. The original idea that the devs came up with for WoD was that Garrosh would gather up the C-tier races of Troggs and Kobolds and form a Mongrel Horde. We got lucky that the devs got convinced to instead do powermetal orcs. And then Metzen didn't get to make the Starcraft 2 he envisioned ("Gone with the Wind in space") because he wasn't an almighty JRPG director. He is in a heavily democratic American game company where the game is made by committee, and the other devs didn't want a JRPG-esque story experience. And then when Metzen came back, he said he was astounded by how much Blizzard had changed (read: powermetal and WAR in Warcraft is not in vogue anymore. We now live in the age of Friendship is Magic and tumblr scalie rainbow dragons). Also, while Metzen was away, Christie Golden joined the WoW team and was far and away the best writer they actually had, having actually published many books and short stories, and yet she couldn't salvage WoW's storytelling because ultimately the game is designed by committee, and the game also fundamentally does not present a good story experience with the zoomed out camera, paragraphs of quest text, flaccid player character, etc. Metzen coming back is not going to save WoW's storytelling.

they found themselves with a story that was more or less over but needed continuing.

WoW had setup an interesting storyline with Garrosh, which continued into Cata and concluded in MoP. I would say MoP is the natural stopping point of WoW's story, as all of the major storylines up until that point have been resolved except for the return of the Legion.

china pandering expansion

Samwise Didier had conceptualized the Pandaren even before WC3. MoP is unmatched in how it introduced brand new factions and races to the setting that were likeable and still felt appropriately Warcraft, rather than rehashes of things that had been done before like in most other expansions. Shadowlands was the only other WoW expansion that tried to do entirely brand new factions, but the current writers were unable to make them as attractive as the MoP stuff. MoP was also the last WoW expansion to have the involvement of Wei Wang.

draenor memberberries expansion

WoD hardly had any characters that WC3 and WoW players remembered, and by this point there were very few people who had played WC1 or WC2 who were still around. If anything its that people were finally getting to see characters they had read in the novels like Rise of the Horde get visualized. The expac is underrated but the egregious time travel and "one Legion for all timelines" retcon killed a lot of goodwill.

it has degraded enough for meh games like FFXIV to take over a slice of that market share pie. IIRC there was a "mass exodus" of WoW players to that game around 2018-2019, but my hunch is that those players were not WoW vets but rather various degenerates the likes of which you would find on Moonguard in the Goldshire Inn, or perhaps they have followed soon after seeing how the playerbase in that game has shifted rapidly towards degeneracy. Not to say it didn't have any beforehand, but they mostly stayed closeted in their private linkshells/fcs, but after that influx the party finder and trade chat were flooded with degenerate stuff and we saw the increasing censorship and bans handed out for as much as suggesting a healer to contribute to doing damage in a dungeon.

I remember on MMO-C that BFA was the last straw, and my friends on that forum were urging me to switch to FF14, which I did and became subbed year round to that game instead. Lots of people hopped over. The thing is though, that a lot of us weren't playing WoW just as an MMO, but as an RPG for the art and the story, and WoW had just been ******** the bed with the story after MoP. Whereas FF14 was more of a JRPG and provided a much more potent story experience, which satisfied a lot of people, at least until they reached Shadowbringers and got bait and switched when the story began to handwave away the grounded geopolitical conflicts that the game had been about for the first three boxes in favor of light vs dark kingdom hearts schlock, then a lot of people began ditching FF14's story. Now FF14's subscriber base has been in freefall ever since Endwalker and Dawntrail hasn't restored customer goodwill yet. The Second Life players are those who remain subbed because the game doesn't ban modding and you can buy a house you can decorate and use as a private space for certain activities...

or ridiculed (those of us who were asked to give alpha/beta feedback for upcoming expansions).

I will never forget how during the BFA beta, everyone knew that the Azerite Power system was awful, and yet Blizzard did nothing about it and launched the game with it anyway, and then months after the fact had the audacity to turn around and claim "we didn't know it was bad! If only beta testers had told us it was bad!".

There will be no more MMO with such mass appeal and numbers simply because that now sizable chunk of audience will kick and cry until it gets changed to their liking.

The MMO genre evolved into the Chinese 3D gacha game genre like Genshin. Same huge world and regular content updates, ongoing storyline, and enormous fandom. Just the business model has changed from subscription to slot machine for characters (which impedes the artist integrity of the game since the characters can't be killed off, changed, or retired. They must remain as they were sold as), and the multiplayer part is almost completely gone (though by this point a lot of people played Retail WoW and its clones as singleplayer games anyway).

[J1M]

Blizzard Version of Rotation Assist (Hekili) Coming to WoW in Patch 11.1.7 - WoWCast with Ion Hazzikostas

https://www.wowhead.com/news/blizzard-v ... ast-376648

In 90s, there was some interesting mmos like Ultima Online and Meridian 59, sadly nowadays and after two decades of endless gear farming cooldown managing. Now, players don't even need to do the QTE/cooldown managing part.

As Asmonbald said



I refer to "barbie dressing", because in this mmos, your character stats don't measure how storng, intelligent and etc your char is. It only serves to measure how fancy and fashion your look is.

Looking forward to 1-button tanking next!

[Norfleet]

What stands out most jarringly to me is that the Panda-people appear to be wielding Japanese weapons, even though Pandas are Chinese.

[Oyster Sauce]

What stands out most jarringly to me is that the Panda-people appear to be wielding Japanese weapons, even though Pandas are Chinese.

The Japanese are Chinese