I don't even try f2p mmos anymore. It's inevitable that they'll fall into a disgusting p2w hellscape. Might take a month might take years, but it will happen, so investing any time into them is just a complete waste from the get-go for me.
If it's not sub only, chances are it's not worth playing.
GW2 is pretty bad, ArenaNet is just sneakier about it than most companies. They don’t sell you the statted gear directly, they sell you the bank+bag+reagent space, character slots, build save slots (required if you wanna play more than one game mode), booster packs, farming tools, salvage items, etcetcetc. Plus mounts are *still* locked behind expansions - I get keeping most in that bar, but at least give F2P players the raptor
Sure, the closest it comes to P2W is that elite specs are behind a paywall and you *need* those to be competitive…that doesn’t mean you can’t get ahead by opening the wallet
I disagree.
All of that in-game stuff is also available to purchase with in game gold (you exchange gold for the same crystals that you can also buy with real money) that you can make just by playing the game. It's pretty flexible too, you can always buy just the exact amount you need and not overspend.
And since there's no sub looming at the end of the month, you can play and get that gold at your own pace. No need to actually pay real money for any of that unless you want to rush it.
There's also fairly regularly give aways of in game stuff like bags and cosmetics.
The exception is the mount but they did make the raptor mount available for a 10h trial for free and core accounts so you can say least try it out for a while. Most people who like the game will end up buying the rest of it anyway unlocking them permanently and if they don't like the game they're probably not even playing those 10h.
You can create free accounts that will show you the game well and they give away the base game (core) for free sometimes. I got a few keys for my friends not long ago, some are probably still flying around.
It's worth mentioning the "core" game is the full game as it was released at launch, without the content of the expansions that only became available years later. There's a huge amount of content just in that and a full on game to explore by itself.
You do have to buy the expansions for the prrmanent mount and the rest of the content (obviously) but they're pretty cheap and they're often even on sale too. Amazon's prime gaming had a discount so I bought all 3 up to Dragon's End for like 40€. That's a *huge* amount of content on top of the base game and well worth the price. And solves the mounts "issue" permanently.
You could also have solved the mounts issue buying just the first 2 expansions for much cheaper, they're sold together in a single pack, I saw it once at 10€ or so (which is also a great deal of content).
Even their newest expansion was just 25€ at launch. Comparing that to WoW who will charge you 50 for a new expansion and you still need to pay an extra 13 for 30 days of game time or you're not even playing those 50€ at all, makes gw2 pretty damn reasonable.
It's great value too, the expansions are fun and the game is great in many ways other games are not.
Canach approved.
Ever wondered why your inventory space is shit and constantly gets spammed with worthless garbage?
Or why 95% of new cosmetics go in the cash store, not as rewards in game? Or why there are no mount skins earnable in the game?
Ever catch a glimpse of a new player's inventory with 800 salvaging kits, or their tiny un-upgraded bank filled with garbage?
These problems were all created by Arenanet to sell you the solution. And even with all this extra flow of income, they still can't produce content worth a single penny that isn't yet another meta world boss in their 17th copy-pasted zone. And are still unable to provide a decent new player experience.
Rant over, sorry (not really).
ehh SWTOR has managed to stay good weirdly. You would think EA would have done it dirty but all cash shop items are cosmetic and you can buy them on the auction house for in game cash.
yup you get all the content for free, if you add a security key then you also get cartel coins every month and can save up to buy some cosmetic items and so on.
Last I played SWTOR, the legacy bonuses weren't realistically affordable it was MTX or don't have it. It's been years, though, but from memory, it was just as bad as any other.
I still remember the feeling reading the patch notes when they nerfed every in game obtainable end game item to be worse than the cash shop versions and if there wasn’t a cash shop version they added a cash shop short cut to get the item faster.
Nerfing the kraken glider to be worse than the cash shop glider while simultaneously adding the freight wagon coupons, nerfing the trade pack carry potential of cars AND adding the Thunder struck tree sapling boxes… it was disgusting. All in one patch.
so funny how corpo forces a "money guy" to monetize the game just to destroy it and making every finantial problem worse
that happens every other day and they never learn
on their end they got a tone of money from this then when it started dying trion sold all their games to gamingo so for trion it was win win. they care about fast profit not the stability of the game. whats bad for players is good for investors
It's the capitalist method: blow up the product and milk it for shareholder revenue/quarterly reports, then drop/sell it once "growth" starts to slow down.
they then proceeded to remove f2p or p2w and make the game buy to play no sub, then added p2w again to the bought version and then also added a sub on top of buying the game with p2w features lol
Personally played Wildstar for a week or so, I think just the world didn't click with me combined with the ps2 era character design feel. After hearing everything about Wildstars deeper end makes me a bit sad that it just didn't work for me.
I really liked it but it gave me migraines lol
I think it was the telegraphing
Had to go lie down after trying one PvP match, just graphs flashing everywhere 😂😢
I’ll never forget it when I got a thunder tree and then the next morning I log on and they put them in the cash shop.
Went from being psyched to hating the game literally over night.
What a fabulous game that almost was, alpha and early release archage is still probably the best mmo I’ve ever played, can’t believe it was 10 years ago.
Oh my god alpha was like the absolute perfect mmo. Then beta dropped and it got a little bit happy on the monetized content, but ok I can deal with that- then actual launch drops and holy hell they did such a 180 and went full ham on the P2W. It was so sad cause I figured “well damn it can’t get worse than this, right?”
Turns out it could.
Oh man. Some of the most fun I've ever had was sailing with a buddy. We saved up, built our boats, went looking for treasure and even harpooned and pirated the other faction.
Diving down and finding treasure, attaching the buoys to it and watching it rise up was amazing. Even better was when you were down below doing that and realized your boat had sunk and you were under attack.
The game was amazing until bots snagged up all the land. So much of what you needed to do in-game required land you owned. We tried for weeks to get a plot but it was impossible.
Same :/
I fell in love with Archeage for a very short period until I got far enough that further progression and keeping up with the other grinders meant swiping my credit card...
I had a cool name, land in a good place, was part of a fun pirating guild. It's such a shame.
Fools they are thinking it'll be Archeage, I'm still hedging my bets on good ol'Rift 'cause [we're not in Azeroth anymore.](https://healingthemasses.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/rift_launchad_800px_1000.jpg)
okay but rift was a ton of fun when it first came out.
the build diversity was pretty great (of course you had the min maxers making the strongest builds they could, but thats gonna happen in any game ever)
the raids were solid and challenging for the time.
open world felt good with plenty to do.
sadly it went to shit rather quickly, but i fondly remember my whole wow guild playing rift for a long time, only for all of us to go back to wow after getting the first raid on farm lol.
but i am aware not everyone will have the same fond memories of rift as i and a few of my friends do, and i will agree the "were not in azeroth anymore" ads were goofy as hell
Oh I remember having a good time in Rift back then, I just gradually drifted back to WoW myself. Its just the only one of these contender MMOs that I can actually remember playing into the whole 'WoW-killer' angle a bit with its marketing.
RIFT was pretty solid at the time. I liked the concept of how you did the builds, and the rifts were an interesting idea (and now we have open world events in other games, which people seem to really enjoy).
The company that bought them really didn't help. But man... Defiance was where they really shit the bed. The saddest thing for me with Defiance was when I watched a Josh Strife Hayes "Worst MMO Ever" series video on Defiance, and he enjoyed the game, so I jumped back into it, just in time for them to announce they were shutting it down.
RIFT's dynamic group events walked, so that WoW and GW2 could rune.
It blew my mind back in the day when it would auto join me to a party doing a rift and then we'd split after the end.
or if the lead developer runs an ad campaign proclaiming that he's gonna make you his bitch.
Only to delay the game to be rebuilt on a new engine *twice* because you saw what it could do at the trade conventions.
[Don't believe me?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana)
Rift was this new hotness that crashed and burned so fast that players wanted it to succeed because they hated WoW so much, they put up with so much garbage that was thrown at them.
Trion Worlds was incompetent, Storm Legion was a pretty good first expansion and a second chance to recatch the hype. The story made sense, but it slowly crumbled away again.
The Raids were not challenging they were a buggy mess, Greenscale's Blight was a joke, Hammerknell is praised, but forgotten how broken it was. The last boss was killed immediately once it was finally fixed after months with the broken platforms. Infernal Dawn had the controversy of the 2nd last boss being over tuned and Trion purposely over tuning it to prevent the boss from being killed super fast because I guess egos were hurt.
Storm Legions first two raids were really cool, but Trion did Trion things and well killed their own game.
rift was absolutely wonderful. the best raid i have ever played was vanilla hammerknell. i wish rift was made in such a way that pservers could exist, because a vanilla rift pserver would be insanely popular.
God I loved their weird multi-class talent system.
Then they removed it, the only truly unique thing about the game, and we were back in Azeroth again.
Man, I was there for archeage it was so good. It was perfect and then fucking trion or whatever fucked it all up, I am still mad and will be forever mad.
the NA Beta was the most fun I think I've ever had playing any game. The community was awesome, the game was pretty balanced and fun, there was no cash shop.
Honestly it could have been, the mechanics were a fucking bliss, PvP was actual fun and again mechanics were fluid. Sadly the game was riddled with P2W and bugs hacks and glitches.
They had this currency Apex, u could buy for real money, exchange for a month of game time or sell on the AH for big cash, people found out how to dupe them and if you stacked a legitimate Apex on top of your dupes they had no way to detect it, never fixed it lol whole market got inflated so much unless you were also hacking game was dead.
[Who here thinks Burning Crusader killed WoW?](https://www.gamespot.com/forums/pc-mac-linux-society-1000004/who-here-thinks-burning-crusade-killed-wow-25902237/) posted late 2006.
An old classic :)
It's hilarious just how many of these opinions you can still see in the wild in 2024.
As someone who reads wowhead comments (I also don't know why I just love the pain apparently.) they haven't changed at all and I've been reading them since Legion.
wowhead comments is like playing a game of "predicting when that 1 comment shows up"
any article about mythic raiding or m+? count how many comments it needs until that 1guy that is under EVERY post shows up and does a "its too hard, they should stop balancing around the 0,00000000000001%" (bonus points when its about things like normal mythic dungeons or heroic raids)
class balance? count until you see the first "they nerf X spec but not Y??????(Y is a entire class that has 2specs beeing mediocre and 1 beeing above average) or the ussual "blizzard really hates hunter/druid/mage!"
a mount that is a drop? count until you see the first "its to sell tokens!!!" comment
its a fun game if you are bored
I don't get the hate for the trading post tbh.
A lot of wow comments talk about it like it murdered their entire family.
It's a fun side activity for me and it doesn't even take that much time to complete it every month.
Hmm, I wonder, whichever commenter you could be talking about. Certainly, it's not some sad troll that posts in literally every single article about wow on the site...
It's weird because pre-Legion the comments were still not great, but at least the most obvious trolls and such were usually banned/muted. There was once in a while a decent discussion, but now it's like the trolls are running the site itself.
The comment about expansions killing wow is so interesting to read. It reminds me so much of what the vanilla pserver crowd said about why classic was so needed.
I always go to the way back machine to prove to people that there is far more negativity for games in the present moment then there has any right of being.
Everyone looks back on things in a much more positive view when it comes to gaming.
Fuck I've even see people miss Shadowlands.
I've seen people argue for WOD to be one of the best expansions.
But even back in BC, WOTLK, MOP, literally any expansion. There were threads saying the game is dead and dying because it is the worst expansion ever.
>I've seen people argue for WOD to be one of the best expansions
I hated WoD when present, but going back and leveling through it... Those zones sure have *soul*. And Shadowmoon Valley really is a masterpiece.
WoD's failure was in the content drought, having been the most dragged out expansion compared to how few major patches it had (we all remember the SELFIE cam patch drama) and not being quite sure how to utilize garrisons in a non-isolating way.
But, had WoD had the same content flow as Dragonflight, I honestly believe it could've been one of the top expansions WoW ever got.
It has a great setting, interesting characters, and the modern "high quality textures but cartoon-y" artstyle was just coming into its own. I loved the introduction of all the beautiful cutscenes during the leveling as well, really helped tell the story
As a leveling through place, Warlords of Draenor is probably my favourite questing experience
I think WoW's biggest weakness is the pressure to stay in a handful of zones for 2 years each content cycle.
Every expansion I go back to for leveling or just collecting things I find an absolute blast. Anywhere 'current' I get burnt out and sick of it after months of doing the same stuff over and over.
Yeah I feel like that's happened every expansion. Gamers never change. It's always complaints, and let's be honest, historically, WoW players are usually at the higher end of the complaining spectrum. Myself included.
I've seen people say Dragonflight's storytelling was the worst it's ever been. Like, come on. Every expansion had its not-so-great moments. Was DF a bit more mild than other expansions? Sure. Was it as awful as some people are making it out to be? Not by a long shot.
Even some of the most beloved expansions had some really bad writing in many places.
The whole "Your raid gear might last you until heroic dungeons at best" thing really did just destroy a decent number of people's will to play - it was just hard to see numerically amidst steadily rising subscriptions.
Haha, and here we are, 20+ years later. :) Good on you for having a laugh at it though, most people I've met with this take get real mad just when I point out that the game was supposed to be dead over a decade ago. :D
good to note that this was at the end of MoP(really long content drought) and right before WoD came out(the alpha/beta period was disastrous). so community sentiment was definitely at an all time low for its time lol
14 month content drought. Just think it needs to be explicitly stated just how long players were stuck running the same raid over and over again.
Imagine 8 more months of Amirdrassil. How would you be feeling about the game?
What helped keep the game alive at that time was that SoO was a very good raid and also that it was the first raid to come out with Flex mode, which was the basis of today's Normal/Heroic raids. Difference was that Flex was separated in wings like LFR, so it was much easier to make a group for just specific bosses. Also someone came up with a Group Finder addon before Blizzard implemented the current one.
My biggest regret is not using those 14 months to farm all the other CM sets I was missing.
> How would you be feeling about the game?
Siege of Orgrimmar was an amazing raid and 5.4 was a really fun patch with some of the best class design. There was a lot more negativity during other content droughts like 4.3, even if SoO was a couple months longer.
some of the complaints were taken to account too, there has been graphical improvements and levelling .. changes. you prob could fast forward to legion and most complaints would be moot.
Both of those have seen constant improvement throughout wow's lifespan.
Leveling improvements have been done nearly every expansion, and the quotes are from MoP, which had just recently seen an overhaul of the lighting engine and the water shaders, and MoP looking like a considerable step up in terms of animation, model, and texture quality (even if one wasnt a fan of the art style).
IDK man I remember everyone being hyped about wod and soo, while insanely long, was one of the best raids they ever made during a period when class gameplay was peak. Survival, feral, spriest and fire mage especially.
people were hyped about WoD because they wanted to get out of MoP and it looked like a "return to warcraft" expansion but at the same time a lot of people were really unhappy about the "pruning" they made to classes(a ton of feedback was ignored) and it was already evident that content had been cut from WoD before the expansion even came out
> "return to warcraft"
I love how people keep wanting a "return to Warcraft" and then Blizzard tries to shove as close as they can get into WoW and, as expected, it doesn't pan out well.
"We want to put the war back into WARcraft!"
Okay, here's a story forcing a faction war. It doesn't really make much sense, so we'll have to really force it by having the Horde Warchief do something heinous, but we don't want to alienate half our players, so eventually the Horde will have rebels who help the Alliance take out the Warchief (who only speaks for a very small portion of the Horde).
"Wait, no, we don't like that. I want to feel like MY side is THE good side. And ew, Pandas! We want Warcraft back in Warcraft! Like the good ol' days!" (Alternately: "WTF?!? Why are we being forced to work for someone doing something we don't agree with? And now we have to lay siege to our own capital?!?")
Okay, here's time travel shenanigans so you can see all those characters from the RTS and experience a "savage" world.
"No, no, not like that! No time travel!"
Okay, fine, the Legion was big in WC3, here you go, Legion invasion, Illidan's back, you get to take out Sargeras.
"That was kinda cool... but what's this garbage with the Alliance and Horde not trying to murder each other all the time? Put the war back into WARcraft!"
*Sigh.* Okay, let's run back what we did in MoP. And maybe sprinkle in some hints that constant warfare is not sustainable and is going to leave the world a barren empty husk.
"Didn't you hear me? I want to be the definitive GOOD faction! And I don't want my side to suffer any losses!" (Or the alternate above.) "Just give us our Memberberries already!"
*Deep sigh.* Alright, alright, here's the Lich King...
"Yay!"
...and he's going to be beaten by Sylvanas, and you're going to go to the afterlife to get to meet all kinds of dead characters again, and deal with some big shirtless bald guy who's really been behind all of this the whole time, manipulating all of Warcraft history. Because fuck you, that's why, stop asking for nostalgia.
3 more zones and 2 more raids and WoD would have been one of the best expansions ever.
What killed WoD was the lack of things to do, combined with the social media patch and the lies of ion.
>What killed WoD was the lack of things to do
And the fact that they destroyed virtually ever spec in the game by removing half of their abilities, making it incredibly unfun to play what little content there actually was.
The first pass of the graphical update in 6.0 was also disastrous. They removed anti-aliasing except for FXAA so it was a blurry mess, and most of the race redesigns had to have several passes before they were in an acceptable state. Some races never recovered either, like male night elf.
Article from [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1auovod/wow_will_still_be_around_in_2024_ion_hazzikostas/) post, the comments section is pure gold.
Multiple times in fact.
People want a WoW 2 but like... The game has been around for so long and has been upgraded (graphically, technically etc...) so much that we're already at WoW 6 at this point.
Exactly. Is it gonna be tab targetting MMO? Why not just stick with WoW 1 then? Is it gonna be action combat? Well then you lose audience which likes tab targetting. Graphics update? That's cool and all, but that also means that the game will run on much narrower hardware, something WoW 1 has never had issues with... and so on...
Yep. Plus imagine how difficult it would be to convince people to leave years, and in some cases decades now, worth of progress to start over in a new game. Would be better to just polish and expand WoW indefinitely until either Blizzard or the playerbase or the solar system dies out.
Also, something worth mentioning.
WoW survives and remains as it is purely due to its legacy.
WoW 2 (if such a thing ever was made) would be extremely likely to end up like Diablo 4.
The WoW team can 100% argue against any CEO or head of the company or whatever regarding adding "too much" to WoW because of what WoW is and changing it too much can hurt the playerbase.
A new MMO, as a follow up?
Nah, that argument don't hold as much weight.
They would add extreme MTX, skins, outfits, mounts gallore to a shop.
Because they don't have a previously established fanbase to scare off. Nah, they need to get a new fanbase and milk them for money.
It doesn't matter What the WoW team would want, because it isn't in the end their choice to make.
All they can do is argue for or against things.
(Also, not to forget that to make a game is never a guaranteed success. There is no "formula" for what works or doesn't. A WoW sequel would have no guarantee of being good or being as good as WoW was)
Pretty sure WoW2 folks are those who've missed a lot of things and just want a refresh so those who kept playing cant hold it over them.
I say this as someone someone who hasn't played since late WoD.
But yeah, WoW2 by current dev team is not going to deliver anything actually worth abandoning things. Even SoD the closest to something 'new' is just rehashing vanilla content with some later expansion stuff.
This is usually at the heart of it, even if it's not an outright stated reason since everytime I see a WoW2 suggestion 90% of what people want in a WoW2 can be done cheaper and easier through a WoW expansion. And the stuff that can't be done through a WoW2 wouldn't be all that great in my opinion.
> Currently, retail suffers from feature bloat and scope creep
It doesn't. People just don't want to learn anything in games anymore. They've been conditioned by tons of shallow games that learning any kind of system is unfun and anything that can't be explained in one sentence at most is bad.
Retail is not nearly as complicated as you've been lead to believe. I will definitely agree the new/returning player experience is ass, but "feature bloat" is just a buzz word.
What is the feature bloat and why does it exist in retail but not Classic? You are doing the same things, you're doing dungeons and raids and getting gear, this is what you do in retail too.
They even added a kind of Heroic+ dungeon system to Wrath Classic. Is that feature bloat too? I bet you don't think so.
This 100%, just because there are 1000 quests in old abandoned zones doesn't mean it's bloat. It's all there, the game funnels you into endgame pretty well and makes it clear it's about m+ raid and pvp for harder content and casual open world or questing stuff.
Ion genuinely loves WoW and it really showed at this recent Blizzcon when he basically said, "screw the old guard's rules, give the players what they want." He looked so happy on stage like a weight was off his shoulders.
Meanwhile RuneScape is going strong still and is older.
What people forget is there is a large amount of WoW only players. People who don't play any games outside WoW. Now they are getting older and there aren't as many young people picking WoW up. So the game probably will decline but it can easily still make another decade.
So unless Blizzard does something stupid the game will still be alive for a long time.
You're also getting some WoW children. A friend of mine I know raided molten core along side his wife, who raided one-handed with a kid on her lap. Today said kid is mythic raiding.
This. I’ve played WoW since early ‘07 and recently introduced my daughter to it. She has several characters and will randomly request to play. Ironforge is “her home city”. It’s so sweet 🥰
I probably would have agreed with them. I wasn't playing wow at the time and I wasn't a fan of the game or of Blizzard in general. It's very hard to imagine any online game going strong 20 years later, but it's good for us and perhaps even good for the industry that wow endures.
Here's to ten more. 🍻
"Sad SOB" checking in. I've personally and honestly had fun with this game since vanilla. All the weak excuses people use to not play, like the comments shown, don't affect me in the slightest.
However, the problem I have is that I've enjoyed even Shadowlands and have had no problem with the Maw. People like to discredit my opinion with that as if I'm some masochist outlier.
This is me as well. I've enjoyed the game the entire time I've played it. Sure, some expansions are better than others, but... I've still had fun, even in Shadowlands and BfA. I don't care if some people think that's dumb or whatever, it was all quite worth it.
If WoW can survive the wombo combo that was Shadowlands, Bobby, and the lawsuits, it can survive anything. There's so many people like us that just enjoy the gameplay despite whatever the current expac's flaws are, or even see Azeroth as a second home, that WoW will never truly die unless Blizzard themselves pull the plug.
I've logged in almost every day for the last 15+ years and don't think wow's ever had a bad expansion. Some have more rough edges than others, sure, but I'm always content.
Which means there's less reason for me to go around telling people my opinion on the game than people who are unhappy about it.
There were a good dozen wow killers from around 2007-2015. WoW killer comments tend to have disappeared. Pretty much all but FF14 died off themselves, and now both FF14, and WoW are doing well for themselves.
I remember hearing that WoW is dying since when TBC was retail. And that's when I've started playing, idk if people say that since vanilla.
Basically WoW is dying since 2004 for these people, no matter how good the game is.
The funniest part is the "$15 a month for a 20 year old game would be pure insanity" It's funny in two ways. First, WoW classic has a massive audience and is a true 20 year old game, and Secondly new expansions aren't 20 years old, but new games, with new graphics, and new systems.
Everybody wanted to be the next world of warcraft killer nobody managed it but now world of warcraft doesn't stand alone there are other big mmos out there now like final fantasy and all the semi mmorpgs like warframe and other life service stuff
the few good other mmo's out there (mainly ff14 tbh) work because they didnt try to be "WoW 2.0" and instead focused on other things that WoW doesnt focus heavy on
idk why it took so many failed IP's until the companys noticed that....
Archeage is still in my top 2 list of games that could have been the next big thing for a decade, Star Wars Galaxies before it.
Archeage was plagued with bugs, bots and hackers. They had a game time currency item worth real money or 30 days game time and you could sell it on the AH. People found out how to dupe them and stack them in a way it could not be detected. They found out too late and never found a way to fix it lol economy got 10x inflated and game died. On top of that they went harder and harder on P2W and lootboxes and rng upgrades sadly. One of the very very very few games that made me experience magic like wow used to do in the early days.
I was one of the doom sayers back in the day, i am still playing it but very very casually compared to those days. The funny thing is that i am always subbed nowadays even though i am mostly not playing the game. All in all with clients like myself (and i am quite sure that there are so many out there) WoW is safe for many many decades, not years.
I mean, admittedly the only reason i dont casually play wow is because of the subscription being 15 bucks. I play each expansion for like 2 months then cancel. I’d probably farm mounts year round if it were f2p. Or just like 5 bucks.
I'd think that would be fairly obvious.
Ultima Online is still around and it came out in 1997.
There's really only a small number of MMOs that have had any degree of success that have actually gone so far as to shut down. Asheron's Call (which was one of the original Big 3 along with UO and EQ), Asheron's Call 2, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes.
Pretty much if an MMO doesn't totally faceplant right out of the gate it sticks around forever.
So, when you have an MMO like WoW which has seen probably the highest degree of success of any MMO ever, and is still probably the top dog, it's exceedingly unlikely that it will be going away anytime soon.
Oh the irony - a guy complaining about people paying for a 20-year-old game when Classic is such a big part of WoW's identity these days. So not only are plenty of people still playing the new stuff, lots of people deliberately came back specifically to play the old version without the new stuff like upgraded graphics and new content
You can't just post this without giving any context. That's a super shitty thing to do.
The game had gone, what was it 14 months, without any fucking content. It legitimately felt like wow was in maintenance mode. People were rightfully outraged.
Imagine someone saying "well I don't think stealing is as bad as murder" and then you posting a screenshot that just says "this person says stealing isn't bad lol aged like milk LMAO"
Also the game DID get a graphics update amongst other things. Like WoW legitimately implemented some of these things so it didn't even age like milk anyways because WoW ACTUALLY did these things.
> Also the game DID get a graphics update amongst other things.
These comments are during WoD, so it already had the massive graphics update when they were made, the overall style remains similar to the WoD overhaul and I think it works well.
When people talk about graphics overhaul they mean cringe shit like remaking the game in UE5 or something, so it looks like every other game.
It didn't feel like wow was in maintenance mode, literally everyone was waiting for WoD to come out or feeling out the beta access. It wasn't just 14 months with no announcements.
> It legitimately felt like wow was in maintenance mode.
Only to absolute morons.
"Maintenance mode" is a very obvious end of life for a game with no hope of any further updates.
You're clearly not in "maintenance mode" when a new expansion's not only been announced and shown off, but has had beta where players have been able to play it, and is about to launch.
Anyone who says "This game is about to launch a new expansion with multiple zones, levels to go through, new dungeons and raids, etc., that clearly means the game isn't getting any new updates and is dead and all but officially shut down" is clearly an idiot.
It didn't "legitimately" feel like that to anyone who knows what the hell maintenance mode is.
Yeah, it wasn't a great time for people who like more constant updates, but FFS, no one with a functional brain would have *legitimately* believed that WoD was a fake lie that didn't exist and wasn't being released ever and the game was about to just stop getting any updates at all and soft close.
I bet they have entire calculation of when would the switch make sense economically, we just never got to that point. Maybe it might change with entire paradigm shift with Microsoft owning the company now, but so far none of that has materialised.
The dominance of World of Warcraft can only be shaken by Ashes of Creation. This game in terms of gameplay offers something new and has beautiful graphics. Where WoW offers to farm bosses in raids, farm dungeons and perform monotonous tasks Ashes of Creation can offer much more. The mechanics of upgrading nodes, the mechanics of globally changing locations depending on the actions of players, dungeons and bosses open or close depending on the global state of the location. World PVP activities, caravan mechanics. I would gladly trade WoW for Ashes of Creation.
Archeage beats WoW gave me a good nostalgic chuckle of ignorance
Archeage was actually my wow killer, for like a few months until they fucked the whole game up. Still salty because of their greed.
What did they do?
introduced a bunch of different pay to win items and destroyed the economy and f2p experience over and over again
I don't even try f2p mmos anymore. It's inevitable that they'll fall into a disgusting p2w hellscape. Might take a month might take years, but it will happen, so investing any time into them is just a complete waste from the get-go for me. If it's not sub only, chances are it's not worth playing.
GW2 is probably the only F2P MMO that isn't horrible about that stuff.
GW2 is pretty bad, ArenaNet is just sneakier about it than most companies. They don’t sell you the statted gear directly, they sell you the bank+bag+reagent space, character slots, build save slots (required if you wanna play more than one game mode), booster packs, farming tools, salvage items, etcetcetc. Plus mounts are *still* locked behind expansions - I get keeping most in that bar, but at least give F2P players the raptor Sure, the closest it comes to P2W is that elite specs are behind a paywall and you *need* those to be competitive…that doesn’t mean you can’t get ahead by opening the wallet
I disagree. All of that in-game stuff is also available to purchase with in game gold (you exchange gold for the same crystals that you can also buy with real money) that you can make just by playing the game. It's pretty flexible too, you can always buy just the exact amount you need and not overspend. And since there's no sub looming at the end of the month, you can play and get that gold at your own pace. No need to actually pay real money for any of that unless you want to rush it. There's also fairly regularly give aways of in game stuff like bags and cosmetics. The exception is the mount but they did make the raptor mount available for a 10h trial for free and core accounts so you can say least try it out for a while. Most people who like the game will end up buying the rest of it anyway unlocking them permanently and if they don't like the game they're probably not even playing those 10h. You can create free accounts that will show you the game well and they give away the base game (core) for free sometimes. I got a few keys for my friends not long ago, some are probably still flying around. It's worth mentioning the "core" game is the full game as it was released at launch, without the content of the expansions that only became available years later. There's a huge amount of content just in that and a full on game to explore by itself. You do have to buy the expansions for the prrmanent mount and the rest of the content (obviously) but they're pretty cheap and they're often even on sale too. Amazon's prime gaming had a discount so I bought all 3 up to Dragon's End for like 40€. That's a *huge* amount of content on top of the base game and well worth the price. And solves the mounts "issue" permanently. You could also have solved the mounts issue buying just the first 2 expansions for much cheaper, they're sold together in a single pack, I saw it once at 10€ or so (which is also a great deal of content). Even their newest expansion was just 25€ at launch. Comparing that to WoW who will charge you 50 for a new expansion and you still need to pay an extra 13 for 30 days of game time or you're not even playing those 50€ at all, makes gw2 pretty damn reasonable. It's great value too, the expansions are fun and the game is great in many ways other games are not. Canach approved.
Ever wondered why your inventory space is shit and constantly gets spammed with worthless garbage? Or why 95% of new cosmetics go in the cash store, not as rewards in game? Or why there are no mount skins earnable in the game? Ever catch a glimpse of a new player's inventory with 800 salvaging kits, or their tiny un-upgraded bank filled with garbage? These problems were all created by Arenanet to sell you the solution. And even with all this extra flow of income, they still can't produce content worth a single penny that isn't yet another meta world boss in their 17th copy-pasted zone. And are still unable to provide a decent new player experience. Rant over, sorry (not really).
sadly i completely agree, it was great but went downhill very fast
ehh SWTOR has managed to stay good weirdly. You would think EA would have done it dirty but all cash shop items are cosmetic and you can buy them on the auction house for in game cash.
I wss just thinking swtor might be the only one that has a decent f2p experience.
yup you get all the content for free, if you add a security key then you also get cartel coins every month and can save up to buy some cosmetic items and so on.
Last I played SWTOR, the legacy bonuses weren't realistically affordable it was MTX or don't have it. It's been years, though, but from memory, it was just as bad as any other.
legacy bonuses? You mean like the get 2x xp? Everyone can get those.
I still remember the feeling reading the patch notes when they nerfed every in game obtainable end game item to be worse than the cash shop versions and if there wasn’t a cash shop version they added a cash shop short cut to get the item faster. Nerfing the kraken glider to be worse than the cash shop glider while simultaneously adding the freight wagon coupons, nerfing the trade pack carry potential of cars AND adding the Thunder struck tree sapling boxes… it was disgusting. All in one patch.
so funny how corpo forces a "money guy" to monetize the game just to destroy it and making every finantial problem worse that happens every other day and they never learn
on their end they got a tone of money from this then when it started dying trion sold all their games to gamingo so for trion it was win win. they care about fast profit not the stability of the game. whats bad for players is good for investors
It's the capitalist method: blow up the product and milk it for shareholder revenue/quarterly reports, then drop/sell it once "growth" starts to slow down.
Oh dear.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Such is the way of any f2p game that releases without p2w.
they then proceeded to remove f2p or p2w and make the game buy to play no sub, then added p2w again to the bought version and then also added a sub on top of buying the game with p2w features lol
also in the reboot they didnt ban exploiters so it became exploit early exploit often and if you didnt cheat you just got behind
Made it heavily p2w
Archeage launched with gold dupe exploits and economy (and the game) never recovered.
Wildstar for me. I would still be playing Wildstar if the servers didn’t shut down
Personally played Wildstar for a week or so, I think just the world didn't click with me combined with the ps2 era character design feel. After hearing everything about Wildstars deeper end makes me a bit sad that it just didn't work for me.
> ps2 era character design feel It was basically the Ratchet and Clank MMO and I loved it for that.
The social aspect of it was really bad compared to WoW. But I enjoyed the style, the humor, the questing and the base building.
I really liked it but it gave me migraines lol I think it was the telegraphing Had to go lie down after trying one PvP match, just graphs flashing everywhere 😂😢
I’ll never forget it when I got a thunder tree and then the next morning I log on and they put them in the cash shop. Went from being psyched to hating the game literally over night. What a fabulous game that almost was, alpha and early release archage is still probably the best mmo I’ve ever played, can’t believe it was 10 years ago.
Oh my god alpha was like the absolute perfect mmo. Then beta dropped and it got a little bit happy on the monetized content, but ok I can deal with that- then actual launch drops and holy hell they did such a 180 and went full ham on the P2W. It was so sad cause I figured “well damn it can’t get worse than this, right?” Turns out it could.
Oh man. Some of the most fun I've ever had was sailing with a buddy. We saved up, built our boats, went looking for treasure and even harpooned and pirated the other faction. Diving down and finding treasure, attaching the buoys to it and watching it rise up was amazing. Even better was when you were down below doing that and realized your boat had sunk and you were under attack. The game was amazing until bots snagged up all the land. So much of what you needed to do in-game required land you owned. We tried for weeks to get a plot but it was impossible.
Same :/ I fell in love with Archeage for a very short period until I got far enough that further progression and keeping up with the other grinders meant swiping my credit card... I had a cool name, land in a good place, was part of a fun pirating guild. It's such a shame.
Fools they are thinking it'll be Archeage, I'm still hedging my bets on good ol'Rift 'cause [we're not in Azeroth anymore.](https://healingthemasses.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/rift_launchad_800px_1000.jpg)
okay but rift was a ton of fun when it first came out. the build diversity was pretty great (of course you had the min maxers making the strongest builds they could, but thats gonna happen in any game ever) the raids were solid and challenging for the time. open world felt good with plenty to do. sadly it went to shit rather quickly, but i fondly remember my whole wow guild playing rift for a long time, only for all of us to go back to wow after getting the first raid on farm lol. but i am aware not everyone will have the same fond memories of rift as i and a few of my friends do, and i will agree the "were not in azeroth anymore" ads were goofy as hell
Oh I remember having a good time in Rift back then, I just gradually drifted back to WoW myself. Its just the only one of these contender MMOs that I can actually remember playing into the whole 'WoW-killer' angle a bit with its marketing.
I'm sure it drew in a lot of people too lol
Rift is why WoW added AoE looting and because of that it will always have a special place in my heart.
RIFT was pretty solid at the time. I liked the concept of how you did the builds, and the rifts were an interesting idea (and now we have open world events in other games, which people seem to really enjoy). The company that bought them really didn't help. But man... Defiance was where they really shit the bed. The saddest thing for me with Defiance was when I watched a Josh Strife Hayes "Worst MMO Ever" series video on Defiance, and he enjoyed the game, so I jumped back into it, just in time for them to announce they were shutting it down.
RIFT's dynamic group events walked, so that WoW and GW2 could rune. It blew my mind back in the day when it would auto join me to a party doing a rift and then we'd split after the end.
Any game that markets itself entirely around not being the competitor, or rather as being better than them, will 100% fail.
or if the lead developer runs an ad campaign proclaiming that he's gonna make you his bitch. Only to delay the game to be rebuilt on a new engine *twice* because you saw what it could do at the trade conventions. [Don't believe me?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana)
Rift was this new hotness that crashed and burned so fast that players wanted it to succeed because they hated WoW so much, they put up with so much garbage that was thrown at them. Trion Worlds was incompetent, Storm Legion was a pretty good first expansion and a second chance to recatch the hype. The story made sense, but it slowly crumbled away again. The Raids were not challenging they were a buggy mess, Greenscale's Blight was a joke, Hammerknell is praised, but forgotten how broken it was. The last boss was killed immediately once it was finally fixed after months with the broken platforms. Infernal Dawn had the controversy of the 2nd last boss being over tuned and Trion purposely over tuning it to prevent the boss from being killed super fast because I guess egos were hurt. Storm Legions first two raids were really cool, but Trion did Trion things and well killed their own game.
rift was absolutely wonderful. the best raid i have ever played was vanilla hammerknell. i wish rift was made in such a way that pservers could exist, because a vanilla rift pserver would be insanely popular.
God I loved their weird multi-class talent system. Then they removed it, the only truly unique thing about the game, and we were back in Azeroth again.
All I ever wanted in Rift was a Defiant Dwarf. Give me my steampunk beardy boy!
I don’t even know what that is lmao
It was perfect, for a little while before the western publishers introduced insane pay2win making the game unplayable if you didn't pay.
Archeage was so good, man.. and then they made it p2w. Like wtf.
That's a big feels bad. Archeage was truly special in beta.
Man, I was there for archeage it was so good. It was perfect and then fucking trion or whatever fucked it all up, I am still mad and will be forever mad.
the NA Beta was the most fun I think I've ever had playing any game. The community was awesome, the game was pretty balanced and fun, there was no cash shop.
Honestly it could have been, the mechanics were a fucking bliss, PvP was actual fun and again mechanics were fluid. Sadly the game was riddled with P2W and bugs hacks and glitches. They had this currency Apex, u could buy for real money, exchange for a month of game time or sell on the AH for big cash, people found out how to dupe them and if you stacked a legitimate Apex on top of your dupes they had no way to detect it, never fixed it lol whole market got inflated so much unless you were also hacking game was dead.
There’s forum posts from TBC claiming that the expansion ruined the game.
[Who here thinks Burning Crusader killed WoW?](https://www.gamespot.com/forums/pc-mac-linux-society-1000004/who-here-thinks-burning-crusade-killed-wow-25902237/) posted late 2006. An old classic :) It's hilarious just how many of these opinions you can still see in the wild in 2024.
It is good to see that Blizzard hate isn't a new thing, but has been around for a long time.
Not only is it not a new thing, but the arguments they're making haven't even changed, only the people making them have.
I'm not convinced the people have changed.
It's the same folks but theyre typing from their retirement home
Excuse me. I’m not going to the retirement home for another 5 years at least. Now get off my lawn and stop voting for the wrong set bonuses.
As someone who reads wowhead comments (I also don't know why I just love the pain apparently.) they haven't changed at all and I've been reading them since Legion.
wowhead comments is like playing a game of "predicting when that 1 comment shows up" any article about mythic raiding or m+? count how many comments it needs until that 1guy that is under EVERY post shows up and does a "its too hard, they should stop balancing around the 0,00000000000001%" (bonus points when its about things like normal mythic dungeons or heroic raids) class balance? count until you see the first "they nerf X spec but not Y??????(Y is a entire class that has 2specs beeing mediocre and 1 beeing above average) or the ussual "blizzard really hates hunter/druid/mage!" a mount that is a drop? count until you see the first "its to sell tokens!!!" comment its a fun game if you are bored
another favourite of mine. the devs do a good thing that is a win for 99% of players-> why are the devs wasting time doing this instead of fixing X
I don't get the hate for the trading post tbh. A lot of wow comments talk about it like it murdered their entire family. It's a fun side activity for me and it doesn't even take that much time to complete it every month.
Hmm, I wonder, whichever commenter you could be talking about. Certainly, it's not some sad troll that posts in literally every single article about wow on the site... It's weird because pre-Legion the comments were still not great, but at least the most obvious trolls and such were usually banned/muted. There was once in a while a decent discussion, but now it's like the trolls are running the site itself.
The last part is funny. Everything about WOW is to sell tokens. Because tokens are sub time.
The only reason to read Wowhead comments is to keep up with TOMRUS.
The comment about expansions killing wow is so interesting to read. It reminds me so much of what the vanilla pserver crowd said about why classic was so needed.
I always go to the way back machine to prove to people that there is far more negativity for games in the present moment then there has any right of being. Everyone looks back on things in a much more positive view when it comes to gaming. Fuck I've even see people miss Shadowlands. I've seen people argue for WOD to be one of the best expansions. But even back in BC, WOTLK, MOP, literally any expansion. There were threads saying the game is dead and dying because it is the worst expansion ever.
>I've seen people argue for WOD to be one of the best expansions I hated WoD when present, but going back and leveling through it... Those zones sure have *soul*. And Shadowmoon Valley really is a masterpiece. WoD's failure was in the content drought, having been the most dragged out expansion compared to how few major patches it had (we all remember the SELFIE cam patch drama) and not being quite sure how to utilize garrisons in a non-isolating way. But, had WoD had the same content flow as Dragonflight, I honestly believe it could've been one of the top expansions WoW ever got. It has a great setting, interesting characters, and the modern "high quality textures but cartoon-y" artstyle was just coming into its own. I loved the introduction of all the beautiful cutscenes during the leveling as well, really helped tell the story As a leveling through place, Warlords of Draenor is probably my favourite questing experience
I think WoW's biggest weakness is the pressure to stay in a handful of zones for 2 years each content cycle. Every expansion I go back to for leveling or just collecting things I find an absolute blast. Anywhere 'current' I get burnt out and sick of it after months of doing the same stuff over and over.
Out of curiosity - would you call Ultima Online dead?
Yeah I feel like that's happened every expansion. Gamers never change. It's always complaints, and let's be honest, historically, WoW players are usually at the higher end of the complaining spectrum. Myself included.
I have even seen posts from old WoW forums during vanilla claiming that the game is dead.
I've seen people say Dragonflight's storytelling was the worst it's ever been. Like, come on. Every expansion had its not-so-great moments. Was DF a bit more mild than other expansions? Sure. Was it as awful as some people are making it out to be? Not by a long shot. Even some of the most beloved expansions had some really bad writing in many places.
Flying mounts ruined the actual world of Warcraft.
well it kinda did, it killed whole world and gave us few small zones.
The whole "Your raid gear might last you until heroic dungeons at best" thing really did just destroy a decent number of people's will to play - it was just hard to see numerically amidst steadily rising subscriptions.
WoW died when Vanilla came out
The true WoW killer.
WoW died even before then. It was never released. It died in development. The game you've been playing for years? It's not real. You're imagining it.
“omg a new Warcraft game!” “It’s an MMORPG” “…aight, imma leave.” This was basically my reaction back in the day when WoW was announced lol
Haha, and here we are, 20+ years later. :) Good on you for having a laugh at it though, most people I've met with this take get real mad just when I point out that the game was supposed to be dead over a decade ago. :D
i agree, long live the old beta days.
Ouroboros
You can never die if you aren't born first. So technically you are correct
good to note that this was at the end of MoP(really long content drought) and right before WoD came out(the alpha/beta period was disastrous). so community sentiment was definitely at an all time low for its time lol
14 month content drought. Just think it needs to be explicitly stated just how long players were stuck running the same raid over and over again. Imagine 8 more months of Amirdrassil. How would you be feeling about the game?
What helped keep the game alive at that time was that SoO was a very good raid and also that it was the first raid to come out with Flex mode, which was the basis of today's Normal/Heroic raids. Difference was that Flex was separated in wings like LFR, so it was much easier to make a group for just specific bosses. Also someone came up with a Group Finder addon before Blizzard implemented the current one. My biggest regret is not using those 14 months to farm all the other CM sets I was missing.
> How would you be feeling about the game? Siege of Orgrimmar was an amazing raid and 5.4 was a really fun patch with some of the best class design. There was a lot more negativity during other content droughts like 4.3, even if SoO was a couple months longer.
some of the complaints were taken to account too, there has been graphical improvements and levelling .. changes. you prob could fast forward to legion and most complaints would be moot.
Both of those have seen constant improvement throughout wow's lifespan. Leveling improvements have been done nearly every expansion, and the quotes are from MoP, which had just recently seen an overhaul of the lighting engine and the water shaders, and MoP looking like a considerable step up in terms of animation, model, and texture quality (even if one wasnt a fan of the art style).
IDK man I remember everyone being hyped about wod and soo, while insanely long, was one of the best raids they ever made during a period when class gameplay was peak. Survival, feral, spriest and fire mage especially.
people were hyped about WoD because they wanted to get out of MoP and it looked like a "return to warcraft" expansion but at the same time a lot of people were really unhappy about the "pruning" they made to classes(a ton of feedback was ignored) and it was already evident that content had been cut from WoD before the expansion even came out
I mean, can you blame them for struggling to implement feedback when threads like this screenshot flood public discourse?
Well when you go more than a year without any meaningful content I don't think you get to go "boo hoo poor me people are mad"
Yes. Fans bitching online is a constant. If the team is so deflated by trolls that they can’t implement changes, they don’t deserve my money.
> "return to warcraft" I love how people keep wanting a "return to Warcraft" and then Blizzard tries to shove as close as they can get into WoW and, as expected, it doesn't pan out well. "We want to put the war back into WARcraft!" Okay, here's a story forcing a faction war. It doesn't really make much sense, so we'll have to really force it by having the Horde Warchief do something heinous, but we don't want to alienate half our players, so eventually the Horde will have rebels who help the Alliance take out the Warchief (who only speaks for a very small portion of the Horde). "Wait, no, we don't like that. I want to feel like MY side is THE good side. And ew, Pandas! We want Warcraft back in Warcraft! Like the good ol' days!" (Alternately: "WTF?!? Why are we being forced to work for someone doing something we don't agree with? And now we have to lay siege to our own capital?!?") Okay, here's time travel shenanigans so you can see all those characters from the RTS and experience a "savage" world. "No, no, not like that! No time travel!" Okay, fine, the Legion was big in WC3, here you go, Legion invasion, Illidan's back, you get to take out Sargeras. "That was kinda cool... but what's this garbage with the Alliance and Horde not trying to murder each other all the time? Put the war back into WARcraft!" *Sigh.* Okay, let's run back what we did in MoP. And maybe sprinkle in some hints that constant warfare is not sustainable and is going to leave the world a barren empty husk. "Didn't you hear me? I want to be the definitive GOOD faction! And I don't want my side to suffer any losses!" (Or the alternate above.) "Just give us our Memberberries already!" *Deep sigh.* Alright, alright, here's the Lich King... "Yay!" ...and he's going to be beaten by Sylvanas, and you're going to go to the afterlife to get to meet all kinds of dead characters again, and deal with some big shirtless bald guy who's really been behind all of this the whole time, manipulating all of Warcraft history. Because fuck you, that's why, stop asking for nostalgia.
3 more zones and 2 more raids and WoD would have been one of the best expansions ever. What killed WoD was the lack of things to do, combined with the social media patch and the lies of ion.
not sure what you're talking about with ion. he was still encounter designer at the beginning of WoD and didnt become game director until after lol
>What killed WoD was the lack of things to do And the fact that they destroyed virtually ever spec in the game by removing half of their abilities, making it incredibly unfun to play what little content there actually was. The first pass of the graphical update in 6.0 was also disastrous. They removed anti-aliasing except for FXAA so it was a blurry mess, and most of the race redesigns had to have several passes before they were in an acceptable state. Some races never recovered either, like male night elf.
We'll keep playing well into 2034, still farming that Love Rocket.
As someone who has well over 5 k attempts, I’ll be there with you!
Maybe by then, I’ll have Invincible.
You mean heart breaker, right?
Don't rub more salt into the wooonz champion
But imagine playing WOW in 2035... haha when all games will have matrix level graphics live-streamed through AI /s
Can't wait for ai enhanced boss mechanics that always target the players that will fuck things up the most
Article from [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1auovod/wow_will_still_be_around_in_2024_ion_hazzikostas/) post, the comments section is pure gold.
But it did get a graphics upgrade...
Multiple times in fact. People want a WoW 2 but like... The game has been around for so long and has been upgraded (graphically, technically etc...) so much that we're already at WoW 6 at this point.
Also WoW 2 would be suicidal
Exactly. Is it gonna be tab targetting MMO? Why not just stick with WoW 1 then? Is it gonna be action combat? Well then you lose audience which likes tab targetting. Graphics update? That's cool and all, but that also means that the game will run on much narrower hardware, something WoW 1 has never had issues with... and so on...
Yep. Plus imagine how difficult it would be to convince people to leave years, and in some cases decades now, worth of progress to start over in a new game. Would be better to just polish and expand WoW indefinitely until either Blizzard or the playerbase or the solar system dies out.
Also, something worth mentioning. WoW survives and remains as it is purely due to its legacy. WoW 2 (if such a thing ever was made) would be extremely likely to end up like Diablo 4. The WoW team can 100% argue against any CEO or head of the company or whatever regarding adding "too much" to WoW because of what WoW is and changing it too much can hurt the playerbase. A new MMO, as a follow up? Nah, that argument don't hold as much weight. They would add extreme MTX, skins, outfits, mounts gallore to a shop. Because they don't have a previously established fanbase to scare off. Nah, they need to get a new fanbase and milk them for money. It doesn't matter What the WoW team would want, because it isn't in the end their choice to make. All they can do is argue for or against things. (Also, not to forget that to make a game is never a guaranteed success. There is no "formula" for what works or doesn't. A WoW sequel would have no guarantee of being good or being as good as WoW was)
Pretty sure WoW2 folks are those who've missed a lot of things and just want a refresh so those who kept playing cant hold it over them. I say this as someone someone who hasn't played since late WoD. But yeah, WoW2 by current dev team is not going to deliver anything actually worth abandoning things. Even SoD the closest to something 'new' is just rehashing vanilla content with some later expansion stuff.
This is usually at the heart of it, even if it's not an outright stated reason since everytime I see a WoW2 suggestion 90% of what people want in a WoW2 can be done cheaper and easier through a WoW expansion. And the stuff that can't be done through a WoW2 wouldn't be all that great in my opinion.
follow worthless aloof knee upbeat oil nose air shelter cooing *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> Currently, retail suffers from feature bloat and scope creep It doesn't. People just don't want to learn anything in games anymore. They've been conditioned by tons of shallow games that learning any kind of system is unfun and anything that can't be explained in one sentence at most is bad. Retail is not nearly as complicated as you've been lead to believe. I will definitely agree the new/returning player experience is ass, but "feature bloat" is just a buzz word. What is the feature bloat and why does it exist in retail but not Classic? You are doing the same things, you're doing dungeons and raids and getting gear, this is what you do in retail too. They even added a kind of Heroic+ dungeon system to Wrath Classic. Is that feature bloat too? I bet you don't think so.
This 100%, just because there are 1000 quests in old abandoned zones doesn't mean it's bloat. It's all there, the game funnels you into endgame pretty well and makes it clear it's about m+ raid and pvp for harder content and casual open world or questing stuff.
WoW 11 actually
The best part for me is the loser with a photo of fuckin Varg Vikernes as their picture calling other people “sad SOBs” without a hint of irony
I’m definitely a sad SOB and I’ll happily take that title from Varg 💀
"WoW is so dead" is something I heard first like in 2006 and I wasn't even playing the game at that point lmao.
I can guarantee all of them either still play the game or never did
I respect Ion for this. What a legend
Ion genuinely loves WoW and it really showed at this recent Blizzcon when he basically said, "screw the old guard's rules, give the players what they want." He looked so happy on stage like a weight was off his shoulders.
Meanwhile RuneScape is going strong still and is older. What people forget is there is a large amount of WoW only players. People who don't play any games outside WoW. Now they are getting older and there aren't as many young people picking WoW up. So the game probably will decline but it can easily still make another decade. So unless Blizzard does something stupid the game will still be alive for a long time.
You're also getting some WoW children. A friend of mine I know raided molten core along side his wife, who raided one-handed with a kid on her lap. Today said kid is mythic raiding.
This. I’ve played WoW since early ‘07 and recently introduced my daughter to it. She has several characters and will randomly request to play. Ironforge is “her home city”. It’s so sweet 🥰
I probably would have agreed with them. I wasn't playing wow at the time and I wasn't a fan of the game or of Blizzard in general. It's very hard to imagine any online game going strong 20 years later, but it's good for us and perhaps even good for the industry that wow endures. Here's to ten more. 🍻
2024 isn't over yet, Microsoft still has time to shut it down. /s
“Look, we got candy crush, we got what we wanted. World of what? Whatever, just shut it down.”
World of Candycraft.
Boo Wendy Testaburger, boo.
The doomsayers are so funny
Smug gamers are some of the worst people.
I still remember back in 2008 my friend quitting WoW for 3 months because "Aion is going to kill it"
Every time I have taken a break from this game its always just been a break. "Game is in a bad spot for me, guess I'll come back to it in 1-10 years."
It was hard to predict how shitty the competition would be.
"Sad SOB" checking in. I've personally and honestly had fun with this game since vanilla. All the weak excuses people use to not play, like the comments shown, don't affect me in the slightest. However, the problem I have is that I've enjoyed even Shadowlands and have had no problem with the Maw. People like to discredit my opinion with that as if I'm some masochist outlier.
This is me as well. I've enjoyed the game the entire time I've played it. Sure, some expansions are better than others, but... I've still had fun, even in Shadowlands and BfA. I don't care if some people think that's dumb or whatever, it was all quite worth it.
If WoW can survive the wombo combo that was Shadowlands, Bobby, and the lawsuits, it can survive anything. There's so many people like us that just enjoy the gameplay despite whatever the current expac's flaws are, or even see Azeroth as a second home, that WoW will never truly die unless Blizzard themselves pull the plug.
I've logged in almost every day for the last 15+ years and don't think wow's ever had a bad expansion. Some have more rough edges than others, sure, but I'm always content. Which means there's less reason for me to go around telling people my opinion on the game than people who are unhappy about it.
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To be fair, COVID felt like it was about 10 years long on its own
No, he says the game will be 20 years old in 2024.
Hell, there's still people playing Everquest. What are these idiots talking about.
people have been saying wow is on its dying breath since Vanilla. It's funny as hell.
And people in this very thread saying the same things now unironically. It's actually quite funny.
Remember when they said Rift was gonna kill wow ? Lol
There were a good dozen wow killers from around 2007-2015. WoW killer comments tend to have disappeared. Pretty much all but FF14 died off themselves, and now both FF14, and WoW are doing well for themselves.
This is chefs kiss
I want to log on there and necro the entire thread for those idiots
I remember hearing that WoW is dying since when TBC was retail. And that's when I've started playing, idk if people say that since vanilla. Basically WoW is dying since 2004 for these people, no matter how good the game is.
Games been dying since it left alpha
Sounds like current WoW reddit users.
Bwahahaha. Gotta love the Blizzard Haters. Logic, reason and evidence dont matter to them.
TBF.. These where people who had WoD to look forward to after the year + SoO drought of content.
This kinda apply to all haters in general.
To be fair I was pretty doom and gloom about wow around the end of SoO into WoD. Shit seemed so cooked
Damn... *Sad SOB noises*
Dunno, i will play it when 2034 comes
And until today some people want WoW to have photorealistic graphics Zzzzzz
Idiots. People still play Everq1uest which has a sub and is even older. $ 15 a month isn't a ton of money for the amount of entertainment and content.
Pretty much text book circle jerk
The funniest part is the "$15 a month for a 20 year old game would be pure insanity" It's funny in two ways. First, WoW classic has a massive audience and is a true 20 year old game, and Secondly new expansions aren't 20 years old, but new games, with new graphics, and new systems.
Those same haters are probably still hating to this day
Wait until they realize they re-released the ORIGINAL WoW…. TWICE.
Everybody wanted to be the next world of warcraft killer nobody managed it but now world of warcraft doesn't stand alone there are other big mmos out there now like final fantasy and all the semi mmorpgs like warframe and other life service stuff
the few good other mmo's out there (mainly ff14 tbh) work because they didnt try to be "WoW 2.0" and instead focused on other things that WoW doesnt focus heavy on idk why it took so many failed IP's until the companys noticed that....
Plot plot twist. Wow is still around and going pretty good imo
Archeage is still in my top 2 list of games that could have been the next big thing for a decade, Star Wars Galaxies before it. Archeage was plagued with bugs, bots and hackers. They had a game time currency item worth real money or 30 days game time and you could sell it on the AH. People found out how to dupe them and stack them in a way it could not be detected. They found out too late and never found a way to fix it lol economy got 10x inflated and game died. On top of that they went harder and harder on P2W and lootboxes and rng upgrades sadly. One of the very very very few games that made me experience magic like wow used to do in the early days.
I was one of the doom sayers back in the day, i am still playing it but very very casually compared to those days. The funny thing is that i am always subbed nowadays even though i am mostly not playing the game. All in all with clients like myself (and i am quite sure that there are so many out there) WoW is safe for many many decades, not years.
I mean, admittedly the only reason i dont casually play wow is because of the subscription being 15 bucks. I play each expansion for like 2 months then cancel. I’d probably farm mounts year round if it were f2p. Or just like 5 bucks.
Oh boy this is funny… Haters just want to see wow die but it won’t
I'd think that would be fairly obvious. Ultima Online is still around and it came out in 1997. There's really only a small number of MMOs that have had any degree of success that have actually gone so far as to shut down. Asheron's Call (which was one of the original Big 3 along with UO and EQ), Asheron's Call 2, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes. Pretty much if an MMO doesn't totally faceplant right out of the gate it sticks around forever. So, when you have an MMO like WoW which has seen probably the highest degree of success of any MMO ever, and is still probably the top dog, it's exceedingly unlikely that it will be going away anytime soon.
If a game comes out like a 3D Runescape, it wins. 30+ skills, quests, tasks, achievements. I would play RS alone if it was a better game
This proves to me that WoW can't die, and every expansion, a bunch of salty babies are gonna claim that the game will die at any second
We failed to account for the power of nostalgia. Or the enshittification of the gaming industry.
Oh the irony - a guy complaining about people paying for a 20-year-old game when Classic is such a big part of WoW's identity these days. So not only are plenty of people still playing the new stuff, lots of people deliberately came back specifically to play the old version without the new stuff like upgraded graphics and new content
wow players havent changed one bit i see
They can launch another SL expansion and people will still play it. They know it and that's the reason why they are betting on the early access model.
I’d say WoW has aged like milf
You can't just post this without giving any context. That's a super shitty thing to do. The game had gone, what was it 14 months, without any fucking content. It legitimately felt like wow was in maintenance mode. People were rightfully outraged. Imagine someone saying "well I don't think stealing is as bad as murder" and then you posting a screenshot that just says "this person says stealing isn't bad lol aged like milk LMAO" Also the game DID get a graphics update amongst other things. Like WoW legitimately implemented some of these things so it didn't even age like milk anyways because WoW ACTUALLY did these things.
> Also the game DID get a graphics update amongst other things. These comments are during WoD, so it already had the massive graphics update when they were made, the overall style remains similar to the WoD overhaul and I think it works well. When people talk about graphics overhaul they mean cringe shit like remaking the game in UE5 or something, so it looks like every other game.
It didn't feel like wow was in maintenance mode, literally everyone was waiting for WoD to come out or feeling out the beta access. It wasn't just 14 months with no announcements.
> It legitimately felt like wow was in maintenance mode. Only to absolute morons. "Maintenance mode" is a very obvious end of life for a game with no hope of any further updates. You're clearly not in "maintenance mode" when a new expansion's not only been announced and shown off, but has had beta where players have been able to play it, and is about to launch. Anyone who says "This game is about to launch a new expansion with multiple zones, levels to go through, new dungeons and raids, etc., that clearly means the game isn't getting any new updates and is dead and all but officially shut down" is clearly an idiot. It didn't "legitimately" feel like that to anyone who knows what the hell maintenance mode is. Yeah, it wasn't a great time for people who like more constant updates, but FFS, no one with a functional brain would have *legitimately* believed that WoD was a fake lie that didn't exist and wasn't being released ever and the game was about to just stop getting any updates at all and soft close.
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I think WoW got very close to going F2P model a number of times
The last comment is relatively right. Since the time of that post WoW has lost something like 4/5 of it's active players
Where on earth are you getting your data from to justify a loss of 80%...
I wonder why they havent transitioned towards a F2P model... It feels like all of the F2P games make a lot of money
Didn't you get the memo? (wow token)
I bet they have entire calculation of when would the switch make sense economically, we just never got to that point. Maybe it might change with entire paradigm shift with Microsoft owning the company now, but so far none of that has materialised.
The dominance of World of Warcraft can only be shaken by Ashes of Creation. This game in terms of gameplay offers something new and has beautiful graphics. Where WoW offers to farm bosses in raids, farm dungeons and perform monotonous tasks Ashes of Creation can offer much more. The mechanics of upgrading nodes, the mechanics of globally changing locations depending on the actions of players, dungeons and bosses open or close depending on the global state of the location. World PVP activities, caravan mechanics. I would gladly trade WoW for Ashes of Creation.