> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
The latest systems encourage time sinking less than they did in Legion, where there were infinite diminishing returns for playing, now there is just a full-stop end to your week. Legion was the most abusive expansion with regards to a player's time. The latest expansion fixed a lot of that for me and others, but it isn't enough to keep me sustained.
WoW Classic actually kept me enthused and is extremely enjoyable, however if you were on a streamer server, there were artificial queues for ages and it was exhausting living around a queue when trying to be competitive at that top tier of play.
If TBC fixes that (doesn't have the queues at release), I will be a lot happier with it.
Note that I don't think this stuff is casual friendly. As a casual, my problem with the way Blizzard does these systems is you want to do something every day/week/etc.
Quite frankly, it turns the game into a chore. It tells me that not only how much time I spend, but also when I spend that time significantly impacts my rate of advancement.
Disclaimer: I haven't played Shadowlands at all.
Not to mention they seem to hate flying yet keep creating terrible zones unless you can fly. There aren't clear routes between common locations like roads in Skyrim. That can be ok, but in that case they really need to have a flatter level design like in Oblivion.
Yes, this is just an ongoing disaster. My sense from their communications over the years is that, when players fly through zones, that hurts the feelings of the artists, which Blizzard doesn't like.
> There aren't clear routes between common locations like roads in Skyrim.
I actually really liked how roads were handled in original WoW. They twist and turn, and yet somehow they're always faster than going offroad. And they were reliably safe -- until in Duskwood there's a wolf right on the middle of the road, which added to the atmosphere for me.
For the latest expansion, my main complaint is that they provide a bunch of cosmetic features, which they know are a draw -- but you can't use the cosmetics on your other characters. All shadowlands cosmetics are restricted to characters who belong to the particular faction. (Which is, overwhelmingly, just the specific character who unlocked it.) I characterized this once in guild chat as "welcome to Shadowlands! To enjoy this expansion's new content, please wait for the next expansion to release", and got many pained agreements.
You can't use your mail-wearing toon to unlock plate cosmetics, either. You need to go through the entire rep grind, again, if you want two sets of cosmetics from the same vendor.
Flying should never have been allowed in WoW, period.
Beyond the whole issue of players skipping content in zones artists spend months building, the mechanism severely distorts gameplay. A player being able to hover, descend to the ground, pick up an item, then immediately remount and rise back up—avoiding monsters—is ridiculous.
If flying had to be introduced, it should at least have been done with some sort of meaningful takeoff/landing process.
With some tuning not only would it prevent complete flyovers, it could actually be really fun and add another option for progression. Like a basic mechanic where climbing altitude quickly consumes stamina, while gliding consumes it slowly. Add thermal drafts to strategic locations and let the player improve their flying stamina over time.
Now you can limit how much a player can fly and when, and create fun game moments with crash landings in hostile areas when you misjudge your stamina.
I like the suggestion. I suspect, however, that making flying harder could only have happened before flying first appeared in the game, and that Blizzard has calculated that any such move now would cost too many players to be worthwhile.
I do not give a rat's ass about the "artists spend months building" anything, I just need to be there, pick something up or kill something and I am out.
With all respect for those who enjoy the "zones artists spend months building", I am here (WoW) just to beat stuff up in a repetitive & predictable way. Until today, I have NO idea in what zone what dungeon is, or what the background of the story is of that particular monster that lives there. I have never seen a cinematic in full, turn off the sounds and run graphics at to the lowest level possible so I see stuff that is relevant (fire) and am not bothered with cosmetics (grass). And I have been p[l] aying this game (on and off) since over 10 years.
It is just a nice time waster which allows for easy & cheap boosting so I can show up with the same gear as the addicts.
Those things are the game though and pretty much always have been. Raids, dungeons, or PvP. If you don't want to do any of them why would you have ever picked up WoW.
That is, content that provides new/better gear, more challenging fights, etc. That is: content that heavily rewards a hardcore from day one play style.
They consequently are in something of a race against time: the current game is hostile to casual players, who quickly give up and leave when it takes hours to find groups for leveling, and stale to hardcores that “beat” it quickly.
So one can intend to play casually or hardcore and be poorly served in both cases.
There's not even a "You'll have to put in a lot more time." It's just a lockout.
Their WOW playerbase are getting older and if you don't treat them will respect even more will be lost. There are so many games out there right now, sure not of this genre, but they provide options for someone who wants to pick up gaming and not necessarily invest in WoW.
May I ask why you don't just simply let these brain dead grinds be done by someone else?
This is basically Goodhart's Law.
Further, one of their most cherished metrics is how much time people spend doing a certain activity. Instead of making those activities more fun and rewarding, they made them take longer to complete and with fewer rewards.
To top it all off, they are nearly completely deaf to their player's concerns, and instead focus on metrics instead of gameplay or fun activities.
People at Blizzard certainly have forgotten that games are supposed to be fun.
They try to cloak their declining userbase by saying they have the highest number of logins ever, but they quit reporting individual subscribers a long time ago. One of them is a completely worthless metric and the other keeps the lights on.
The last of the original WoW dev team quit Blizzard last year, and they are running with a crew that don't have the chops to make engaging games.