Is this really bannable??

[Hansomreiste]

The decision to implement zone scaling was clearly meant to slow down players, perhaps not in progress, as it was introduced during the last patch of legion, but in the pace at which the game was played. Now instead of 1-2 shotting the mob which was lower level than you, you had to fight a mob who had higher lvl, more hp, made you heal if your gear wasn't upgraded, it all slowed down players, like mobs in classic that healed or used potions or mobs that ran away to aggro even more mobs. The downtime between fights existed since classic as a way to slow you down too, there is no conspiracy here, just blizzard farming metrics, play session duration. Flying was meant to speed up traveling time at the cost of players farming gold to unlock it, including farming for alts, once it became easier to make gold fast they found a way to slow down the process of unlocking it by hiding flying behind pathfinder achievements, seemingly RP reason which coincidentally also affected metrics. Also, let's not forget about The Maw.

 

[Chops]

The decision to implement zone scaling was clearly meant to slow down players

The stated intention per blizzards own posts is what Conzil mentioned above. Players were outleveling zones before completing them, which was undesirable. So Blizzard experimented with and then fully implemented dynamic scaling that would allow you to complete a full zone while still leveling at pace... which not coincidentally, sped up leveling. Not slowed it down.

The history of WoWs degradation (as I see it) is a history of going from treating leveling as a major portion of the game to be enjoyed, to being seen as a timegate preventing players from getting to the "actual" game at top level. Blizzard AND the player base are mutually to blame for this.

 

[Hansomreiste]

In my opinion what would make leveling more enjoyable without remaking leveling system/rewriting quests is to let players complete zone chapters in any order they prefer, let's say you do 4/8 zone story chapters and you can move on to the next zone, that way if the blizzard was dissatisfied they made a number of quests nobody sees because players outlevel the zone before reaching them, now there is a choice to complete the quests that were previously skipped for those who care about it. The "complete quest X to unlock quest Y" type of leveling gets boring pretty fast if you level many characters.

 

[Rahn]

I mean if we're gonna take this subject seriously, I'd say the downfall of retail WoW started when they dumbed down itemization and the talent trees. Why do I say this point exactly? Because that was the beginning of the 'accessibility' age. They took a look at the "less than 1% of people were in the current raid" stat and decided "hey, maybe we should increase that number" and everything else happened was a result of that: Suddenly spec/class/role/fight specific talents/itemization disappeared from the game, and what soon followed after was LFG and LFR. Class homogenization began, destroying class identity. A whole mess of gearing catch up mechanics to render all past content pointless. Great for rolling alts, but terrible for the overall state of the game.

Then when everyone started participating in raids, they had a different problem: People were burning through the raids too quickly. Their solution? The introduction of more and more one-shot mechanics, and ramping up the general difficulty of the current raid. So what happened to the game meta? All the content was super duper easy, except for the current raid. So before you had a game where people had to work your way up the ladder rung by rung, going through the content step by step; now it's just spam the LFG until your item level is high enough to run LFR and tada, you've completed all the content. Does anyone care about the 'hard-modes' for raiding content? Player participation suggests not.

So because all the focus went on making the "raid participation" numbers go up pretty much destroyed every other aspect of the game, they turned it from "Open world" into "guided tour".

WoW has always been a 'solved' game, but that only mattered if you were a top end raider; and the vast majority of people aren't top end raiders. I'd argue most people aren't raiders in general, it's just that they've been funneled into that content with no where else to go. Either you raid or stop playing the game.

 

[Chops]

if we're gonna take this subject seriously

If we're doing that, I cant actually do better than Folding Ideas.

World Of Warcraft Classic And What We Left Behind and the much more relevant Why Its Rude To Suck At Warcraft are (long) video essays that serve as companion pieces to each other and capture quite well (i think) the myriad reasons that lead from WoW being a flawed but incredibly fun game to... well, whatever the hell it is today.

If you enjoy that type of thing, then these are really worth queing up, cracking a beer and enjoying. Dan Olsen is measured, intelligent and a great writer. these arent outrage merchant clickbait videos. Rather theyre deep dive examinations of where blizzard (and players!) not only went wrong but also understandably changed over time as incentives and culture changed around what is a single game thats maintained major cultural prominence for 20 years

 

[parry10359]

lol hijacked thread ftw

 

[Chops]

lol hijacked thread ftw

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