But to a new player, it’s all new content. Why would they see it as a grind? You’re assuming that end-game raids are all anyone really wants to play, and that any gameplay before that point is tedious grinding.
That said, maybe Blizzard has simply accepted that there aren’t really new players, just old players that play for a couple months after each expansion and then cancel their account.
A new player today will essentially be playing a single-player game at the low levels. When WoW and EQ first came out, the low level areas were packed with people and you could easily find a group to join. But now a new player might be the only player in the whole zone and will have to fight through that content on their own rather than as part of a group. Games like WoW aren’t really setup as single-player games, so playing solo can be pretty boring.
That’s fair. Though even without raids, the bulk of players are going to be running those end content dungeons and events. For new players though, because old content can be a ghost town, their massive multiplayer online role playing experience really isn’t multiplayer. So the idea is to get them to the section of the game where the bulk of players are spending their time.
I think there are still some new players coming in. But resources are limited even for a company as large as Activision-Blizzard and they’ve got to chose where to concentrate their time and efforts. And they believe the best course of action for both them and the players is to send newbies packing to the end content as quickly as possible.
Many new players are coming to WoW at a veteran players request. They don’t want to spend months before they are able to play with their friend that asked them to join.
And many players who keep their accounts active for many, many years.
I haven’t played in a few years. Too little time more than lack of interest…
But I actually did enjoy quite a bit of the lower tier content. Deadmines was one of my favorite dungeons. (Also kinda my first so maybe I’m biased.)
When they came out with content a bit back(a few years at this point), they changed things so that everything is always at your level. I think it would be fun if they did that for all the content. That way, your new player can join a veteran player for a crawl through the Sunken Temple or Scarlet Monastery.
I can’t imagine there are very many people left who could be targeted as new players. “Kids these days” aren’t really into MMOs. Animal Crossing sold 31 million copies last year - almost three times WoW’s subscriber count at its peak. And there are vast swaths of adults who are like me: folks who gave it a genuine try at some point and have no intention of going back. That’s why they released the Classic stuff - it’s easier to engender warm nostalgic fuzzies in former diehards than it is to develop a new playerbase from a game nearly old enough to vote.
MMOs are a dying genre, and WoW is ancient by the standards of any game. It doesn’t have much to offer to anyone not fueled largely by a sense of nostalgia and community. And the window for a brand new MMO has probably closed at this point, so the odds of successfully transitioning your paying customers to an entirely new one are slim.
But hell, even if their playerbase is half of what it was in 2015, it’s still printing free money for Activision/Blizzard. They’ll probably keep the servers running for another decade, until it’s in the same boat as Heroes of the Storm - sunsetted and maintained by a skeleton crew, milking out the last vestiges of microtransactions from an ever-dwindling base of loyal fans.
I started playing World of Warcraft six months after it went live.
Trust me, it WAS a grind.
Even someone new to the game could recognize that. It was maddening, frustrating, and required huge inputs of time that I was able to do only because I was convalescing from a medical problem and had a 30 day leave from work (indeed, the spouse purchased it for me to give me something to take my mind off my real-world problems).
It’s a lot easier to get into the game these days.
Nobody enjoyed dying multiple times per hour of play.
Now, I can see an argument that maybe the beginning levels are TOO easy these days, but I definitely do not long for the “good old days”. They had plenty of suck.
Still, it’s a little strange that their solution to the old areas being a ghost town is to make them even more of a ghost town. Though I guess it doesn’t matter much if a zone has 5 players versus one. It still feels equally desolate.
You’d think they could come up with other solutions, though, like merging servers for low-level areas. Maybe each server only has a handful of people, but merge enough of them and you have a busy feel again.
I dunno, I played a fair amount of WoW back in the day but quit before even Burning Crusade came out. Realistically, there’s probably nothing that could attract me back, but hearing that it’s a desolate wasteland doesn’t exactly help.
That’s reasonable, and probably fairly common.
I was taking them as a given 
. I guess Blizzard, more than anything, wants to not piss them off.
I played WoW in, I dunno, 2006. Didn’t feel too grindy back then. EQ in '99 was pretty grindy, though the novelty of a graphical MMO made up for it I think.
I’m not even arguing about it being too easy/hard. I’m arguing against the idea that the 1-60 levels should be seen as just some tedious thing to get through before you get to the real content. Of course the leveling should be tuned to maximize fun, and if it’s too time consuming then it should be made a bit easier. It sounds like they hadn’t quite dialed things in at launch.
All that said, I think Johnny_Bravo is right. The MMO genre just isn’t that attractive to genuinely new players. So they cater to older ones.
Okay, so let’s distinguish between “difficult” and “time consuming”
If I gave you a very easy task - let’s say, every time your screen changed color, you had to click your mouse. Easiest task in the world, right? If I made you do that 5000 times in a row, is that hard now? No, it’s the same difficulty, it’s the same easy task, I’m just requiring you to do it a lot.
On the other hand, if I tell you to beat a boss in dark souls, it’s going to be pretty difficult, even if I ask you to only do it once and because you’re skilled at the game it only takes you 5 minutes.
Levelling in WoW consumes less time. You don’t have to kill 1000 rats, you kill 5. That’s not easier, that’s just less time consuming/less grindy.
It has always been weird to me that people mistake these concepts. I think it’s because they take a weird sort of pride in doing the same thing over and over again and they want to think that makes them skilled players rather than people who are just willing to do the same thing over and over again. I’m not saying this applies to you, but it’s a common attitude among “old school” MMO players.
Now - why is WoW less time consuming than it used to be? Several reasons.
When WoW first came out, there was only one continent worth of material, and everyone was new to the game. Most of the people who played the game were new to MMOs. There was no one playing the end-game and there was not a lot of end game content. Everyone was focused on the normal levelling/exploring process. So they wanted that process to last a long time. If people got to the end too fast, and there was little content, people would get bored and leave.
Now, 17 years later. There are very few new-to-MMOs players. Most of the new characters being created are alt-accounts by existing players, players who may have done The Barrens or Westfall 20 or 30 times by now. Additionally, there is a LOT more content. It’s not just that the top level is 120 vs 60 (it sounds like they may have reorganized this). That makes it sound like there’s twice as much content. But remember that levelling becomes logarhythmically more difficult. Going from, say, 90-100 under the old scale is probably like 10x the required XP as going from 40-50. There is probably 10x more content to level through, now, with a lot of expansions, than there was at the game launch. If they maintained the same rate of levelling up, it would take you 10x as long to go from a new character to the top level.
Additionally, there is a lot more content at the top level now, and a lot more focus on it. Lots of raids, lots of dungeons designed for top level players, lots of PVP - most of the content that people actually play from day to day is stuff you can only do at the top level. So that’s where most of the player population is. If they put a large barrier between a new character and getting to the top level, those people won’t have many people to play with, and they will take a long time - literally potentially years at the old WoW levelling up pace - before they can join everyone else to play the main content of the game.
You’re essentially applying the 2004 standards - where there’s very little end content, lots of new to MMO players, and only one continent worth of stuff to explore and do - to 2021 WoW, which has 10x+ the content, few new to MMO players, lots of top level players, and most of the game’s content focused on top level, and then, essentially concluding concluding “bah! casuals! they want it easy! new players should have to take 600+ hours to reach top level!”
Now - I’m not saying their solution is perfect. I haven’t played WoW in like 13 years. Maybe they could do a better solution, like, alt accounts level up really fast and new players level up slower. Maybe it’s too fast to get a good taste of the content. But using old WoW rates with the amount of content they have now, and the focus on end game, would be a daunting and mostly lonely task for new players.
Edit: What they really should do is operate a shard type system like Guild Wars 2, where there are no distinct servers (except for realm pvp), and instead it fills zones up with players, then opens a new instance of that zone, and fills that up with more players. That guarantees that you always have a good amount of players playing with you wherever you are in the game. It doesn’t become a ghost town because you live on a low population server or no one around your level is playing on your server at that time. It’s such an obviously better system now that I have a hard time imagining any MMO that doesn’t use it and who doesn’t just rush people so that they’re all the same top level working without it.
I know it has been mentioned in an early reply, but it didn’t seem to gain much traction, so I’ll repeat:
WoW Classic recreates (with modern technology) the 2004ish experience. As soon as Classic was released I dove in. It IS much slower-paced, by a mile. It’s both a grind, but a more rewarding experience when you do level up.
Your subscription entitles you to both.
Sure it is. My attention is going to wander, my arm and eyes might get tired. The difficulty of any repetitive task increases as the number of repetitions increase.
Tell an amateur cook to cut an apple and they’ll do a fine job. Tell them to do it 100 more times and with consistency? That’s much more difficult. Tell a guy at an assembly line that he has to pull a lever at a precise moment every so many seconds or else somebody’s finger gets chopped off? Somebody’s finger is getting chopped off if you leave him on that lever for too long.
Anyway, I don’t know anybody who has ever confused grinding with skill. That’s why the term exists - it describes a task that takes little skill but lots of time. Or, as in poker, it describes a task that needs to be done systematically and correctly over very long periods of time.
If somebody is talking about how good they are at grinding, they’re either talking about their consistency or their speed. They’re not talking about how good they are at doing any single instance of the task, they’re referring to the aggregate effort.
And if somebody wants to take pride in their grind, more power to 'em. They’re exhibiting a set of traits that I don’t personally possess and don’t care to develop.
I also think it’s a good thing to make the leveling process less time-consuming. Not too easy or two fast, but tuning it is a good thing. In Vanilla there were grinds that were just maddening that you absolutely HAD to get through to progress in the game. Now you don’t have to do that. If you want to level quickly you can do that. If you want to completely explore a particular expansion’s content you can do that. It’s optional. And for people who want to put the time in there are some VERY grindy items you can work for but it’s completely voluntary. You don’t need them to be a high-end raider or PVP’er. You don’t need them to progress to new content. There are a lot more options. Playing solo is more fun. You can still join a guild, but they have also made ad hoc groups a lot easier, too.
One big bonus is that by requiring less time to accomplish most goals in the game it makes it more accessible to people who don’t have a ton of spare time to devote to the game. Most of the late teens/early 20’s who were playing WoW 15 years ago have jobs and families now. They just don’t have as much time to devote to the game. Making it less time consuming makes it more likely those folks will continue to play, which means more subscriptions for Blizzard.
Now, for me, the long grind of Vanilla wasn’t a deal-killer issue because I like the leveling process - not everyone does. I like doing a lot of exploring - not everyone does. I like the in-game holidays - not everyone does. I don’t like PvP (a decision I came to after years of trying out various forms of it) so I’m just as happy to not need to do that anymore. But it’s still there for people who do like it.
WoW sort of has that - low population servers are joined up in various instances of the world, so, for example, those of us on the Thunderlord server will also see people form four or five other servers while we’re out in the world. They started doing that a couple of years after the subscriber population came down from its peak. So if I join the “group finder” to get an ad hoc group for a particular 5-man instance or raid I might be playing with people from five different servers. It works pretty well, especially given that the original world was never set up for that.
No one needs consistency or precision to grind an MMO. Your counter-examples imply that people are doing something skillfully, and there is generally no requirement to have such skills to grind an MMO. You could do a really bad job, but still put in 3000 hours doing it, and still have successfully grinded whatever it is you were trying to do. Almost none of the tasks are actually difficult, they just take a lot of repetition. Is being able to just do the same thing a million times in a row without getting bored a skill? I guess that’s a semantic game, but I would definitely not put that on the skill, or difficulty/easy spectrum. There are certainly people who take pride in their ability to do the same skilless, boring thing over and over again. If you recall, when WoW came out, people complained about how casual it was. It wasn’t like everquest where you had to kill 90000 whatevers or where you’d have to wait in one spot for 6 hours for some monster to spawn over and over again, and people got really snobby about how they were the true skilled MMO players vs these unskilled casuals because they weren’t required to grind out mindless work.
I have always understood “grinding” or “the grind” to mean gameplay that is tediously repetitive. So the content being fresh would only matter for, say, killing the first few rats, not the twentieth.
I first encontered the term when playing old school JRPGs. It was actually encouraged to grind a little bit to make the game easier.
I never was a huge fan of this, to the point that I was playing in a friend’s dorm room and having trouble with a game. I came back the next day and it was a lot better. It turned out my friend’s roommate loved to grind and took me up a few levels since I happened to have saved at a good grinding spot.
I think there are a lot more players like me than there are like him, hence how WoW and many other modern games work. It’s all about getting you those levels without it feeling like a grind.
At least WoW gives you the option to go okay the old version if you’d rather–just like you could just player older offline games if you wanted more grind.
I can find no fault in your post and am in total agreement with it. I didn’t mean to suggest that WoW was getting a lot of new players, but I’m sure some are still trickling in. It’s funny thinking back to all the MMORPGS developed over the years with people frequently asking, “Will this be a WoW killer?” Nope. It turns out the popularity of MMORPGS are waning.
I disagree with you there. Quantity has a quality all its own - just getting through the tedium of sitting there, clicking 5000 times makes the task harder. And if you scale it up enough, it becomes more apparent - clicking 5 billion times isn’t just harder, it’s literally impossible.
Granted, “They need to add more tedium to the game,” is a weird complaint, but I think there’s something to it.
I played WoW at launch, off and on up through Pandaria. I came back when they opened up the Classic servers. I’d forgotten how much “immersive” stuff they’d taken out - having to find class trainers to learn new skills, or doing special quests to unlock shaman totems. I kind of feel like that midlevel grind was part of the immersive content - killing 20 rats didn’t make me a badass, it made me a guy with too much time on his hands. But it made my character a badass - or at least, made it easier for me to emotionally invest in my character as a badass. Considering how light the actual roleplaying is in WoW, I really missed these token nods in that direction.
For me, these were quality of life changes I appreciated. I have a limited amount of time and having to take 15-30 minutes to stop questing, get to a class trainer, and then return to my questing really ate into my game time. Was it more immersive? Yeah. Was it more fun? Not really. At least not for me.
Pay me to do it, and maybe I will do a good job.
I don’t want to pay to do it as my choice of recreation/entertainment.
Me either. I’ve never been able to get into MMOs because all the quests are essentially rewrites of the same handful of tasks over and over again. The very standard “MMO quest as Skinner box” concept does not trigger the same satisfaction for me as it does for many folks.
But hey, I won’t yuck their yum.