Mists of Pandaria discussion

[Lissa]

I have NEVER seen a time during the life of this game where there wasn't a large portion of people bitching vehemently about talents, content, lore, leveling speed, gear itemization, length of dungeons, gear availability (it's too easy to get, it's too hard to get).

Yes, but those aspects have accelerated. During Vanilla and tBC, lore was consistent, there was some retconning going on, but nothing that truly detracted from the Warcraft Universe, now...it's like what happened in Warcraft, WC2, and WC3 don't matter anymore. In essence, Metzen has thrown the Warcraft Universe out the window. During tBC, "badges" existed there as well, but they were meant to get you gear equal to the prior tier to get you up to speed quicker (this was necessary after the way Vanilla went were you had to keep running old tiers to get people geared up).

Hunters for example have had MASSIVE play style changes with every expansion sometimes with just mid expansion patches. Same with paladins. Same very likely with most classes. I stopped paying close attentions because well things changed so much all the time with all the classes.

This goes to show how bad it's gotten, the people at Blizzard don't know what they're doing now with these massive swings. Likewise, they continue to ignore facts in other ares and have been hurt by it (WoW losing it's e-sport tag because of how imbalanced PvP is where Mages continue to be good no matter what because of their control abilities.

Lissa pointed out "oh and the new racials are overpowered again" which just says that hey everything is the same as it was before the last time there was a new race it was OP. The last time there was a new class it was OP.

That was Quark that pointed that out... =p

You can argue they have had 7 years to learn, but the numbers argue they have. They kept gaining subscribers for 6 years! Show me another game that KEPT GROWING for 6 years? Not staying stable, but GROWING.

It was growing up through Wrath, now it's declining rapidly. They lost 900k subscribers in the first 6 months of launch of Cataclysm. Next week, they will release their third quarter results (9 months out from Cataclysm launch) and folks think that they will lose another 300k to 500k subs, that means that they will have lost around 10% of their subscribers in just 9 months after a new expansion came out. That's very telling about the direction of the game with you can have 10% of your subscribers leave like that. It should tell management that whoever is in charge of WoW has fucked up royally to cause that drastic a slide in that short of time.

Blizzard's history clearly demonstrates that they are more than willing to try something new, aren't afraid to break something and re-invent the wheel and usually their changes result in them getting more money and gaining more fans.

Trying something new is fine, completely doing things that are just bad when your playerbase tells you as such and you ignore them and they were right will just cost you in the long run (as it's doing now).

The fact that some people have paid ~ $1200 (84 mo * $13 / per month average + ~$200 for the purchase of WoW, TBC, WotK, Cata) is actually pretty astounding. I've quit the game 4 or 5 times and come back and still had fun every time I came back even if I didn't stay. The fact people valued WoW enough to not buy 4 or 5 other games a year or not go to a movie that month, etc speaks a fair bit about how "awful" the game must have been.

Up until Cataclysm, I had minor complaints, but nothing to make me want to stop playing. When Cataclysm came out, the overall tone of the game completely changed. Many things became way too frustrating and when a game hits that, it's time to move on. Prior to Cataclysm, I looked forward to logging on and doing something, leveling alts, raiding, what have you, after Cataclysm, I felt a palatable dread logging in and I logged in less and less until I finally threw in the towel.

From the beginning Blizzard has demonstrated and outright said that they were making the game more and more and more casual and accessible as time went on. They haven't really blinked at any other MMO that came out, despite several of those games being a fair bit better. They managed their inertia. The fact that Diablo 3 actually has them worried enough to bundle it with WoW speaks volumes.

That's fine, except that Cataclysm, at least raidingwise, was the exact opposite and made it less casually accessible. 10 mans were way overtuned (there were bosses hitting tanks in 10 man for the same damage they were doing in 25 mans, there was damage being thrown out at the raid that just as damaging in 10 man as it was in 25 man), some dungeon bosses were stupidly overtuned initially (I'm looking at your Setesh), and some quests were horribly broken and took forever to fix (I'm looking at you Taking Down the Mountain). And it got worse with the troll dungeons Z'G having horribly tuned fights and Z'A being an absolute joke (the fights were hardly changed from the raid version, just fewer adds in some cases or little modifications here and there). The quality went way down in Cataclysm and that's a problem.