Pitfalls of World of Warcraft (A List of Things I do Not Wish to See in SotA)

I played World of Warcraft (WoW) for around ten years, give or take, because of its polish and plentiful content. However, it was never my kind of game. In an effort to appeal to a wider audience and in turn gain more money, Blizzard simplified their MMORPG to what they thought were the essentials. Unfortunately, they went too far. It feels more like a MMO than a MMORPG. It is flavorless. Call of Duty multiplayer with spells, swords, and crafting. By the way, there is nothing wrong with Call of Duty in itself. It is just not the best blueprint for a massively multiplayer role-playing game. It is sad to say, but it has been my experience that most other games in the genre are poor copies of WoW, unpolished, barely populated, or do not possess enough content.

The type of game I am looking for is a virtual world: immersive, consequential, facilitates communities, responsive, and possesses interesting lore, stories, and dialogue. I believe most will understand what I mean with that list. Regardless, without further ado and in no particular order, I will present to you my list of how WoW failed; a wish list of things that I do not want to see in SotA.

1. Dungeon Finder. Later in the career of WoW, Blizzard introduced a feature called Dungeon Finder, which allows players to enter a matchmaker system that automatically assembles a group (1 healer, 1 tank, and 3 DPS), and then teleports them to the group’s chosen dungeon. I can see the pros of this system, but I feel like the cons far outweigh them. After the introduction of this feature, players stopped exploring and interacting with the world. Instead, they would stand somewhere (normally a city), "queue up” for a dungeon, and then wait. As a result, the populations in lower level zones dwindled and immersion as well as the community were negatively impacted. All of a sudden, players no longer needed to go out into the world to recruit and interact with players, or to journey to their destination. This was all automatically done through Dungeon Finder.

2. Heirlooms. Blizzard introduced something called Heirlooms into the game, which are account-bound items (i.e. shared between characters on an account) that grow in power as one levels. They also give a bonus to experience gained (up to 35% I think, but do not quote me on that). I guess the idea was that if one already had a level-capped character, then they should be allowed to buy these types of items, so that when they decided to level another character, then they would not have to suffer as long with content that they have already seen. The issue with this is Heirlooms are too powerful. If a toon is fully equipped in Heirlooms, then they can very easily run through anything relative to their level and get a bonus to experience gained while doing it! The result is players leveling quickly and breezing through any content relative to their level. Consequently, the populations in lower level dropped even more so and the community was further eroded. Players can literally just sit in a city with their heirlooms and use Dungeon Finder until they hit level cap.

3. Instanced PVP (i.e. Battlegrounds and Arena). The PVP in WoW comes in two general categories. Instanced PVP and World PVP. Instanced PVP is when players enter into a matchmaker system (just like Dungeon Finder) that automatically assembles two opposing teams, and then teleports everyone to an area that is apart from the static world where they battle each other over objectives. For example, one objective may be capture the flag. World PVP is when people battle each other in the static world for reasons that they’ve created. Maybe somebody ganked your low level (or somebody else’s). Maybe you’re at odds with a certain guild. Maybe you want to raid a town. Things like that. My main issue with instanced PVP is that Blizzard decided to give a lot of reward for participating in this kind of PVP and very little to no reward for engaging in World PVP, even if you’re a player on a “PVP server”! The result? You guessed it. World PVP dropped significantly and when one participates in World PVP their progression is nonexistent compared to the progression they would have received if they had entered into a Battleground or an Arena.

4. Flying mounts. You may be asking yourself, “What’s wrong with flying mounts? That sounds cool.” I used to think the same thing until I realized what it was doing to the game. It allowed players to breeze through content even quicker and to even more easily avoid player interaction. And Blizzard recognizes this! This is why in their two latest expansions they initially prevented players from using flying mounts because they didn’t want them to skip/breeze through the content that they had worked so hard to create! Their words.

5. Attempting to balance PVE and PVP simultaneously. Let’s say you have skill A and it is found out that skill A needs to be changed or nerfed in some way to solve a PVE issue. The PVE issue may be solved, but then the PVP context for skill A would also be shifted, which may cause PVP imbalance! And the opposite may happen as well. This is what Blizzard has been dealing with since 2004 and they’ve only just realized that this is a futile game design philosophy. In their next expansion they’ll be introducing PVP-only skills. Thank goodness. My suggestion is for each skill in SOTA to have a PVP and PVE aspect to it. So one aspect can be changed without the other being effected.

6. Weak penalty for dying. I feel like the penalty for dying in WoW is far too weak. When you die in PVP you turn into an immune ghost with a speed buff and then run to your corpse which usually takes about 15 seconds. That’s it. When you die in PVE the same is true except you get a 10% durability hit to all your equipped items. There are people who will disagree with me, but I like a good penalty for dying. It doesn’t have to be crazy (although I wouldn’t complain, I’m a former Diablo 2/3 hardcore player. When you died in Hardcore mode your character would be deleted). I can’t put my finger on it but I feel like ones actions, items, and character have more significance when there is a good penalty for dying.

If you hadn't noticed numbers 1 - 4 are interrelated. They cause and exacerbate the same problems. And if you're a fan of World PVP, community, immersion, and challenge; well, this list pretty much sums up what you shouldn't do.

Thank you for reading.

 

Amazing post very well written... welcome !

 

It calms me to see I am not the only one.
WoW vanilla was a good game. I am not ashamed to say that. It was actually a brilliant game.
Then the add ons started and they streamlined it to death.

Very nice sum up of the reasons I finished with wow years ago.

And welcome to SotA ofc ;-)

 

I never played WOW, but your post was very well written and a very interesting read. We already know that SotA will be different in many ways, and I hope it will be better. Currently there is no real penalty for death in PVE and a looting system has just been introduced in PVP which players are now giving feedback on. I don't have previous MMO experience (before SotA), but I can imagine that skill nerfing affecting PVP/PVE differently is probably a hard problem to solve.

 

Wait. You mean no mmo experience like in 'not at all'?
A rare specimen you are .
Welcome to the thunderdome ;-)

 

Yes, not at all A fan of all the old Ultimas, friends warned me off UO when it came out because of the newbie griefing, so I never played it. I backed SotA with a view to playing Single Player Offline, but the online mode (the only mode available to play in the pre-alpha) won me over.

 

Ah the first mmo is an experience you are unlikely to forget.
Still remember mine. Mankind. Terrible game hehe.

 

Hi and welcome to Shroud of the Avatar. So nice to hear a discussion about World of Warcraft even though it was things that you feel are wrong about it. Sometimes it seems the game is like a Dirty Word, especially to say oh we don't want it be like WOW comments I hear lol. I'm always amazed because I have some very good memories of some time spent on that game. Just because a game doesn't do everything right does not mean I can't have fun with it and experience the newness of it. Ok lol my rant a little about that. So I'll let you discover and explore the world of SOTA as it develops, and please let me help anytime if you need help. I am majoria in the game.

 

Welcome Sleepwalk!

 

Well written post and I agree with most of what you say. WoW was pretty great from vanilla to Burning Crusade. Actually, for the time BC was beautiful. I remember logging in for the first time after the expansion and being awed by the scenery and the music for the blood elf and draenei starting zones. Questing was sort of blase but you could look past the grinds and collection quests because of how you were flowing along in such a rich, lore-driven storyline. Dungeons hadn't been nerfed yet. The LFG dungeon finder hadn't been brought online yet. There were certain things that were actually still challenging.

But in my mind what really destroyed WoW, for me personally and most the people I played with, was how they standardized the skill trees. They used to be customizable. You could pick skills from different specs and build your character the way you wanted. And then wham...came conformity. Cookie cutter skill trees. You can go through door 1, 2 or 3. And that was it. Every spec had a specific ideal rotation to maximize DPS and you either used that one or you sucked. Each patch you were either this class and this spec...or you sucked. It became so standardized and dumbed down there really was absolutely nothing interesting about builds anymore because the path was defined for the player. With each expansion the skill tree seemed to become more and more simplified.

And then with WoTLK expansion came LFG and the gimmicks. Oh, the gimmicks. Things like really poorly designed "vehicle combat". Where you basically get in a vehicle, aim somewhere and hit the 1 or 2 over and over again to launch projectiles at enemies with very little danger ever to yourself. I suppose this really appealed to the much, much younger crowd. Each xpac seemed to try and appeal to the younger generation more and more by introducing incredibly simple game mechanics and doing away with things that required any semblance of patience. It's a shame because they had a really wonderful world going on and most of the kickass places became obsolete ghost towns because of the LFG and things the OP mentioned like heirloom gear. Ah well. /endrant

I should say...as much grief as some folks give WoW and like I just did..lol...there ARE some really positive aspects to take away from it. I'll just make a list:

1. Barber shops= Change your character's hair, facial hair, color etc in-game.
2. Transmog= Change the appearance of same-material gear.
3. No loading zones except dungeons and changing continents.
4. Very lengthy, detailed lore and one on one interaction with heros of the lore like Thrall. They truly made you feel like the hero of the story and that you directly were helping these important figureheads. Everyone else running around was just sort of there to help.
5. A huge variety of mounts, combat and non-combat pets. (I actually like the Pokemon-esque non-combat pet taming stuff they introduced.)
6. Cinematics.
7. Voice-overs.
8. Lots of guild features including later on, guild reputation and rewards.
9. Druids.
10. And did I mention druids?

 

The flying mounts are also another reason why there is no more open world pvp. Nobody meets. You just "teleport". About the dungeon finder... I understand your point, but in the opposite sometimes you just enter to a game to play a dungeon to stay static spamming in the city to find a healer and log-out of the game one hour and a half after because you are bored is also not that funny (and I dont want to speak about raids). It was like that system of "dungeoneering" there was not funny anymore, with finder or not. And every expansion just reset.

 

Agree with everything but this. Anyway in Diablo/Wow actually it makes sense.

 

I should clarify that list doesn't reflect things I would like to see in SoTA. Some of them, sure. But that is just a list of items I enjoyed specifically about WoW.

 

5 is very true. Every game that I've played that tried to balance for PvP and PvE simultaneously always unintentionally caused ripples in one or both. I've asked about which aspect of the game SotA was being balanced for a few different times and have not received any form of answer. This solution is the only one that makes sense if they refuse to pick a side.

 

I'm worried 5) and 6) will become concerns here too. And while it will be easy to turn death into a "meaningful loss" - eventually without overdoing it - I can already see the risk of trying to balance PVP and PVE at once, also due to lack of time/resources.

 

Maybe I'm just ultra negative, never liked WoW not even vanilla.
Got it first day of release played for 1 week then went back to UO freeshards that was mostly due to me not liking the art style of it so not really a 'fault' with blizzard.

Came back some years later to try out the pvp ended up in a 1hour fight with a Paladin and I was enhancement shaman..
big turn off

 

Great post, I agree with all your points made....

 

The best parts of WoW...

1. Vanilla
2. Ambush
3. Cannibalize

 

Wow was good in it's early days before everything became one button win. LFG Flying ect. All things that made the game what it is now made it shitty. It is not a Social MMO anymore. It's a I enjoy sparkles shitting outta my head game. It makes me feel accomplished.

It did do a few good things though. It introduced ALOT of people to video games, which helped boost the entire industry which I cannot say is a bad thing. There have been alot more motivation now to bring in new games. Some were even good.

There is of course the down side... It brought in alot more people. Including the new word... Casuals... Filthy casuals... With their cell phone games and addictive fruit ninja's....

 

So the topic of this sub-forum is titled Shroud of The Avatar Wish List and Stretch Goals. This is my list of things that I do not wish to see in SotA.