The last level is also where you spend the vast majority of your play time. I’m talking two years at level 80 during Wrath, punctuated by a week or two of leveling, and then another two years at 85. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the game. I won’t even insist that WoW is a difficult game at max level, but anything before max level is not representative of WoW.
Just idly curious about the world PvP experience, so please elaborate.
The OP’s looking for reasons not to play.
Again, it depends who you are and what you’re doing with your life, but the idea that getting to level 85 takes one and a half to two weeks is positively asinine to me. How on earth could I get a toon to level 85 in two weeks? I have a job, friends, a family. Even levelling as fast as humanly possible, without doing anything at all interesting in the game, getting to 85 in two weeks is not possible for me. I would have to take time off work and WORK at WoW, and that is very much missing the point of gaming, at least to me.
You do make a good point, though, in saying that raids can be amazingly hard - but that’s part of my point. The game is now aimed at people who evidently have the time to level a character to 85 in just two weeks and will put in the time to gear up and create macros so they can run raids practically as a second job. The game lacks balance.
To the casual gamer, this has limited appeal. I want to play for an hour a day, maybe. I’m not going to make 85 in two weeks. I’m not going to make 85 in two MONTHS. If there’s no challenge in it except the expenditure of time, it’s not a game, it’s a job.
No, Max, I understand the game fine. You just don’t understand where I’m coming from as a gamer.
I don’t want the game to start at max level. I want it to start at Level 1. Call me crazy, but I’d like Levels 1 through 84 to be an interesting gaming experience. Unfortunately, that is apparently not the way Blizzard’s going with this. And that’s why I think the OP shouldn’t bother.
Again, no hard feelings, they have just changed the game in a way that lost my interest, and the OP might be interested in knowing that they’ve done that if he is looking for reasons not to play.
Perhaps I should have said that anything before max level isn’t representative of the challenging part of WoW. I think that arguing over when “the game” begins (or should begin in earnest) can’t be productive because so many people disagree over what is the core of the game. Questing, dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, and arenas are all very different from one another, and people care about them to different degrees. I don’t do arena at all (tried in in BC and didn’t like it), but for some people that’s the core of their play experience.
I tend to roll my eyes at people who complain that the game isn’t hard, because it’s always couched in the attitude that challenge is the only possible source of validity for a game. I like questing. I will tell you in no uncertain terms that questing is not difficult. Not even a little bit*. But that doesn’t matter to me. It’s relaxing, the story lines that unfold in each zone are entertaining, and I can shoot the breeze in guild chat all the while. It’s enjoyable despite the lack of difficulty that so many haters tend to focus on. There are challenges to be found in WoW, but you won’t find them at quest hubs, especially before max level. However, that doesn’t mean that the game “doesn’t begin until max level” or that pre-85 content isn’t an interesting gaming experience.
*At least for experienced players. Leveling your first character is like the game’s tutorial (by the time you’re leveling alts you can find the path of least resistance by reflex). You may want to be able to start raiding on day one, but there’s a reason that nobody wants to raid with the guy who bought his character off eBay.
Wise up to the cheap tricks they use to trick you into playing.
Cracked Article: “5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted”
I don’t know about the revamped low level experience, but the 80-85 leveling isn’t exactly easy. They made the new mobs hit HARD, and using interrupts is now key to your survival. As a DK, at least, I used to be able to pull 4-5 mobs my level or above and hold my own relatively easily. It was hectic, but not very difficult. That does not fly anymore, even taking mobs a level or two below me is difficult if you get to about 3 at a time. Chaining mobs isn’t as hard, but I can’t do it anywhere near endlessly anymore, there’s an upper limit at about 5 or 6, or lower if it’s a particularly hard hitting mob (often a caster), to the point where making my ghoul offtank sometimes actually happened (I never even considered this option before Cat). And I had trouble with quite a few quests in Twilight Highlands at 85, these were early in the zone, so it’s easily possible to experience this while leveling if you skip a zone or leave it prematurely. It took some sitting back and observing the mechanics of the area to understand how to make it easy enough to be manageable, and even then it’s possible to get fubar’d if you’re unlucky enough. (For those in the know, I’m talking about the Thundermar Ruins quests, horde side at least).
I have a feeling that they may have just changed the learning curve at bit, lower level mobs are more trivial and higher level mobs are angrier. This is generally in line with Blizzard’s philosophy anyway, pre-Wrath they nerfed the hell out of everything in Outland, making quests that would previously devastate my characters incredibly easy, with a couple exceptions. Not that Wrath content was difficult by any means, but it was certainly average, compared to the nerfed Old World and Outland content. Even if it’s not truly harder, it requires more… attention now in my opinion. It’s probably around the same difficulty if you understand how to use interrupts or avoid pulling extra mobs, but that’s more than we can say for pre-Cat content.
Max, if your experience is different from mine there’s no problem with that. Not everyone likes the same thing in video games.
However, dismissing people whose opinions are different from yours as “haters,” as people who “don’t understand the game,” and as deserving of having “eyes rolled” at them is perhaps not an effective or even polite way of expressing what is nothing more than your humble and wholly subjective opinion.
You’re kind of contradicting yourself in this thread. You state several times that no challenge means no game (and apparently assume there’s no room for debate on this), and are dismissive of Arrogance Ex Machina when he tries to explain to you why you have an inaccurate impression of the current content. Then when you can’t back up your claims, you say we all have valid opinions and presume to lecture me about being dismissive. Not cool, man.
I have offered many qualifiers that demonstate my point is that the game was serving a market different from me. I’ve said it before and will again; if the gaming experience is fun for someone else, hey, that’s fine. But I’m not someone else. I’m offering my take on it.
And what claims have I made I can’t back up? What items of fact are we disagreeing on?
Except when you said things like:
You didn’t include any qualifiers. You repeatedly state that there is no challenge in PVE (except for virtually inaccessible raids), and that no challenge means no merit as a game. Only after Arrogance Ex Machina disagrees with you on the first point and I disagree with you on the second point do you begin to equivocate. Even then, it’s along the lines of:
…as though you’d rather forgive everyone for disagreeing with you than admit that your own opinion is unusual. From where I was sitting, it seemed like a very uncool way to backpedal.
For starters, there’s your assertion that lack of challenge means lack of merit. You seemed pretty adamant about that until I disagreed with you; rather than defend that position, you instead admonished me for being impolite.
Furthermore, you assert that there is no readily accessible challenging PVE content. Right after you said:
…Arrogance Ex Machina points out that heroic 5-mans at 85 are, if anything, too challenging for a large number of players. I would venture that most casual players would agree that heroic 5-mans are easily accessible content. In Wrath you could two heroics an hour, thanks to the dungeon finder. And yet, your reply to that post completely ignores this and instead focuses on how much dedication it takes to be a raider and how much of a hard slog it is to level (and even then you exaggerate).
Lastly, let’s not forget that you said:
…which is tantamount to saying that if the first 7% of a game isn’t hard, then the game isn’t hard. Arrogance Ex Machina corrects you on this, but you assume that he’s talking about super-hardcore players. The hardcore players got their mains up to 85 within a couple of days. For casuals, getting an 80 (and most casuals would have had at least their main to 80 when Cata launched) to 85 in two weeks doesn’t seem unreasonable to me; maybe three or four weeks if you don’t play more than an hour or so per day even on weekends.
I’m sorry if I’ve been impolite to you, RickJay, but your tone in this thread has really rubbed me the wrong way.
Did they majorly revamp the lower levels again? Because as of WOTLK, 0-80 was probably at least 150-200 hours worth of work with some idea of what you were doing and some mods designed for efficient questing. That may be a very conservative guess - but I don’t have an active subscription so I can’t log in to see my hours played.
The whole game has been revamped 1-60, all the quests have been redone. There are changes in Outland too but I don’t know how deep (I haven’t been playing there). Any Loremaster achievement you had stands, but you can play through all the “five years later…” new questchains, some of which are actually the old ones while others are very different.
There are “heroes wanted” boards in the capital cities which point you to the nearest area that’s appropriate for your level.
Whether that has made leveling faster or not, I don’t know. I know that in my case a lot of difference in leveling speed comes simply from having a pretty-clear idea of what to do, whereas with my first toon I was basically leading with my nose (got killed a few times by the process of “ooh, the landscape looks different over there, wonder what that place is like… ok, skull-level mobs are Bad For Little Dwarves”).
That doesn’t mean I think MattProle should play: if he used to play and stopped because it sucked him in too badly, he should stay away from it.
A friend of ours is playing and seemed to be having a lot of fun, and my wife looked at the new areas and the revamped low-level areas. They do look incredible–and our friend has a serious gaming rig, so the graphics looked amazing.
Then we remembered that, well, the only reason she was playing so much was because she was only working part-time, and she had to quit soon after getting a full-time job. And we couldn’t identify how we could carve out even four or five hours a week of play time, now that our lives have gotten so crazily hectic.
So, from a gaming standpoint, yeah Cataclysm looks great and could be a lot of fun. But WoW still is the world’s foremost time suck, and I doubt that’s ever going to change. The real question isn’t whether the game is good, but whether you have the time–all the debate on “they’ve nerfed this or buffed that or added an ‘I-win’ button there” is sort of irrelevant.
The only reason we keep playing is because of the tiny little rewards that Blizzard sprinkles throughout the game that loom just out of reach. Finish killing 10 of something (yeah!), then do it again with a slightly better weapon against a slightly better mob. Then again, than again.
WoW is a beautiful, well designed game and I loved my time with her but it must keep changing to keep the interest of the serious hardcore, 10 hour a day, gamer. Most of that change is riffing on the same theme.
I have watched a number of young men devote hours a day to WoW for years. By the time they look up and notice that their friends have gotten degrees, jobs and (gasp)! girlfriends in the meantime it is too late for them to catch up. Try some crack instead of WoW. You won’t even need to upgrade your system.
It’s a huge time sink. To me that would be the biggest reason not to play. Most of the rest of the reasons in this thread boil down to personal preference and what one likes or disliked about online games in general and WoW in particular. Personally, I like the fact that leveling isn’t the huge chore it used to be. I don’t mind going on my 100th kill quest, or picking up yet another variant of bones/berries/psudo-gazelle poop/etc. Since I only recently started playing again the novelty of flying still hasn’t worn off, nor am I much put off by the fact that PUGs are as bad as usual, and most of the people in them are trying to optimize every second to get out of the dungeon as quickly as possible while still getting credit and reward for whatever they were trying to do in there. I generally level alone or with one or two other friends, I’ll never raid again and doubt I’ll ever get back into PvP seriously again either (I’m not geared up for it, for one thing…and my reflexes aren’t what they used to be either).
No…the biggest down side and the real reason to stay away from WoW IMHO is that it will suck up your spare time, even if you try to minimize your time on. I basically play about 1-2 hours a day, and that’s still quite a bit of time that I could be using more productively to play Fallout New Vegas or surf for porn.
-XT