WOW is apparently finally starting to decline in its subscriber base; I have now officially joined that group. I hadn’t played for a few months but fired it up last night, and found out two things pretty quickly:
In an attempt to get more subscribers, they are soon to add an expansion that will include kung fu pandas. I’m not joking. I don’t know if Dreamworks in planning on suing.
PVE is even easier than before.
They had already made PVE easy, but I went out and completed five or six quests in ten minutes by myself and was never below 90% health, this despite the fact that I had to re-remember what the buttons were and they’d changed the holy power mechanic.
So that’s it. I logged out and cancelled my account; it’s still paid through November so I might play it again when I visit my buddy in California in November, but then again, probably not. The game was turned into a game for the ultra-dedicated raid player/PVP master, and I just don’t have the time to do that and hold a job and raise a kid and lead a life that includes other interests; I liked it when I could play for an hour or two each week and the game was still challenging. It no longer is, because it’s for different people, and hey, fair enough. I’m not their market anymore.
I wonder if I’ll ever play another MMORPG. Likely not.
Weird. I’d say pretty much the exact opposite is what’s happened to the game. The game started out as some horrible hardcore raiding game like Everquest and over the last two years they’ve completely changed it around so it’s closer to an action RPG. That is, it’s gone from a gear grind and 40 APM to today’s looser-tuned juking-based gameplay. It most certainly turned away from the hardcore PvP crowd after it became apparent the fundamental mechanic changes weren’t going to happen, like a hard separation between PvE and PvP for balance. Certainly players have more to do now without investing effort than ever before.
The “Kung Fu Panda” stuff is dumb. The damn pandas have been around since like 2002 and people were constantly asking for them. Probably the only reason they did it now instead of TBC is 'cause they figured out how to appease both horde and alliance players (by saying, “Nuts to it” then enabling them for both sides.)
Appropriately enough, the upcoming expansion seems to have pretty much exactly what you’re asking for with its dungeon challenges and PvE scenarios. They’re some more challenging activities that don’t require a huge time investment. Not that you should re-sub, since there are tons of better games to play, like BF3, which may as well be an MMO given its scale and progression mechanics.
Heh, I logged on after several years of not playing the other day just to see if the free version would let me play a kung-fu panda (I misunderstood a friend who told me about the expansion and though it was something they’d already implemented). I kinda like the idea, its certainly not anymore goofy then a lot of the other things in WoW, the whole world is basically a cartoon.
But sadly, I couldn’t play a panda yet, so I started a new character just to see what they changed and holy crap your right about PvE being easy now, at least in the first 20 levels. I guess it sort of makes sense, they keep adding more levels, and they want people to keep making new characters to level up and not get sick of the beginning game. But it almost seems kinda pointless, they mind as well just let you start a character at level 40.
But then I realized I’d been playing for 8 hours, and remembered how much of a time sink it was and took it off my computer. So apparently they still have the addictive quality that’s made them last this long. I suspect they’ll outlive the new Star Wars MMORPG.
What, you mean it wasn’t the announcement of Pokemon pet battles in the next expansion that drove you over the edge? WoW is starting to remind me of KFC’s Famous Bowls: “Fuck it, let’s just take everything we can think of and put it in a game.”
Gah. No, Warcraft had Kung fu pandas long before that dreamworks movie came out. This is like the people who said WoW should sue Warhammer for copying them. And the reason the subs are declining and cataclysm is seen as a favor was because the pve was made harder, undoing that is certain to help their declining numbers. Also i’m sure a lot of people will bite on their “buy a year subscription of wow and get D3 for free plus access to the new expansion beta”.
They almost do. Given thow short the 1-20 “grind” is, the game effectivoely does begin at 40. I do wish they’d let you make a character with decent gear at 40 once you’ve learned the old fashioned way. Levelling characters gets dull. Like the Death Knight, they could have instanced a progression to get you used to your abilities quickly.
Suffice it to say, however, that the early-game killfrenzy does not keep for long.
I don’t see this at all, to be honest. I started playing during Wrath, but I don’t see anything harder about current PvE than Wrath PvE outside of hard-mode raiding. Solo play and 5-man play is just as easy as it was back then (even easier when you consider that you can do 5-mans solo now with RDF). Leveling is substantially easier. 10-man raids are just about the same, IMO. And I say that as someone who has killed every normal-mode boss since Wrath Naxx while it was current.
The problem I see (beyond the stupidity of centering an entire expansion around a comedic break) is that they have divided the player base and are now trying to serve two masters. And, as they recently pointed out, the skill gap is much larger than most casual players are willing to acknowledge. So they have to make the “mass appeal” stuff (quests, 5-mans, normal-mode raids after the first month or so, and the upcoming Raid Finder) really easy. And they have to make the “hardcore” stuff (hard-mode raids) really hard.
So for me, a casual raider that has a done a bit of hard-mode stuff, there is not a comfortable home. The casual players I play with will be split (and have been, tbh) between the easy-mode rewards and the few that want to be challenged.
That said, as long as they keep the old BGs, and PvP is still relatively fun, I’ll probably keep my sub for a few hours of entertainment a month - we’ll see.
Blame Kung Fu Panda and Wanchai Ferry (sp?) Chinese food commercials for making pandas ridiculous. Not to mention that the only view that the vast majority of WoW players have had of pandaren is with the mini-pet. Oh, and the cracked-out Bugs Bunny “kobolds” that they showed concept art and early models for. Ugh.
I actually quit in April or so. Monks might have brought me back - I adored them in EQ - but nothing else appeals to me in the upcoming expansion.
Yeah, the Pandarians sound a bit cheesy…but so what? It’s a video game…
All of the talk surrounding the expansion has centered around the ‘Kung Fu Panda’ issue, but there’s a lot of other stuff that was announced that sound pretty cool, actually. Talent changes, scenarios, the return of World Bosses, all sound intriguing. Heck, even the Pet Battle System sounds like fun. Not “srs bsns”, just “fun”.
I don’t quite understand you here, but are you saying PvE was made HARDER? Er, when did this happen?
As I mentioned in the OP, I find PvE is now pointlessly easy. You practically have to try to get killed to get killed. It has never, in my experience, been this easy before, and to be honest I do not ever remember there being a time when PvE was made harder than it had been at any previous time.
I was talking about raiding, i didn’t even consider leveling. Leveling is not something that has any inherent challenge, it can become faster but you can’t make it easier when it had no difficulty to begin with.
Single player PvE is not. Heck, they took group quests out of the leveling experience, for the most part. Raids and dungeons (when your group doesn’t completely outgear them) is significantly “harder”, although I think some of that feeling might be a result of gear levels at the end of wrath outpacing the mechanics of the fight very quickly. At Cata launch, a single mistake by any of the players in a 5-man heroic could wipe the group easily.
Blizzard seems to have done some research that led to the philosophy: “Dying alone - boring and frustrating; Dying in a group of friends - fun and challenging”
My subscription ran out in September, but I had actually quite playing back around March or April. What did it for me was the fact that I worked my ass off for the “The Exalted” title (back when it required 40 revered factions), prior to Cataclysm. Then, when they added an extra tier to the achievement, they stripped the title away instead of making an additional title to go with the added tier. Since it was then clear that what was “mine” wasn’t really mine, I decided there wasn’t any point in playing further.
It was fun and all while it lasted, but there’s no point working towards anything when it can just get taken away on a whim by the developers.