Earlier today, I was watching one of Bellular’s videos talk about the problems within the WoW Development Team, and to a larger degree the community as a whole, and how the difference between them and say the likes of Yoshi P and the devs of Final Fantasy XIV, and it got me thinking of the reason why I don’t play WoW actively anymore, and why FFXIV has become my main MMO, and why I feel as if it should have been so since the game rebooted in 2.0.
1–I think one of the major differences that I’ve always found weird between WoW and other MMORPGs is that other MMOs don’t change their class system every expansion. I understand tweaking the system, adding new skills, subtracting or merging older ones, but to completing change how a class is played from one expansion to the next at some point becomes repetitive and frankly asinine in its own right. I can remember playing WoW before the Cataclysm expansion was released. Classes felt as if they were more diverse, and that each class’s mechanics mattered in terms of how they were played. Also, each class had more unique functionality within each of its specs. After the advent of Cataclysm ad moving forward, hybrid classes such as the Druid, Shaman and Hunter classes had much of what made them unique removed in an effort of homogenizing all classes into their basic archetypes with no real individuality among them. By the time of the Shadowlands release, all of the classes have been reduced to 3 – 5 buttons of doom that a player can use to get the job done, with no real individuality among them outside of the weapons they use or the gear they wear. They basically took away from all the classes what made them fun to play, and made players feel like the way they play the class is valid.
This leads to my second point…
2–The toxicity within the community. When I started WoW back in Vanilla, the community was new, fresh and full of hope for the future of the game. Now, the community is, I would say, about 85-90% toxic towards each other, and about 85% toxic towards the devs of the game. From what I ‘ve seen, there’s a couple reasons for this. Those being an tug of war between the complainers vs. the appologists of the community, the unwillingness of the devs to proactively listen to their community, the devs pure disdain for their consumers–the players.
So, being a WoW player from Vanilla, from the launch through The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, yes there were issues with the game from time to time–geodata, quests sometimes not working, the usual hickups, but nothing that was so big as to stop mass groups of people from wanting to play the game. As time went on though, with the addition of systems like damage meters and item levels, it seemed like the devs were moving towards players carrying less about the fun and immersion of the game, and more about how much gear a person was wearing. This caused a divide to form between the elitist and min-maxers of the game, and those players who really just wanted to have fun in the world of Azeroth playing with other, and not have to worry about whether they had the right type of gear on that’s considered best for their class. With each inssuing expansion, this divide has only gotten worse.
Today, from what I’ve seen from playing the game, and watching streams and videos, WoW has become more of a hardcores vs. casuals thing. While the hardcore players have mythic plus dungeons, raids and Pvp to keep them satiated, Castual players, like me, who like playing games for the story and may not be so into the grindiness of gear farming, because at the end of the day the story isn’t really driving the endgame the way it should. Though they tried to do better with Jaina’s story, and the story of both Alliance and Horde stories as a whole, it was kinda too little to late. All that casuals have to do outside dungeons, raids and PVP are world quests, and the world quests are boring, monotonous, and you want to talk about grind…Good Grief! In alot of ways, it’s lead to this hardcore “apologist” side, who see nothing wrong with the game, and just suggests that casuals “get good” at the game, and then maybe they’d want to do other things besides just the story and questing in the outside world versus the Casual “Complainers/Ranters/Ragers” many who have been playing the game for a long time, and have seen the way Wordl of Warcraft has devolved into a game that caters only to those that prefer the grind and repetitive gameplay of constantly runing the same content over and over again, with no real creativity and innovation.
On the other side of this whole thing are the devs of WoW, who in some ways perpetuate the toxicity, because somewhere along the lines with all the constant changes to the game, eventually both sides–the hardcore and the casual players began to complain about the grind among other things. At times, the complaints and debates about the devs would often become heated and downright insulting. I can understand feeling some animosity towards some of the members of the community, but having a wholesell view of disdain towards the whole of the communnity was really going too far. Many of the members of the WoW community, more times than not, had valid views on the way the game had been shaping up, and even gave alternative ways of how to resolve the issues. Yet, it was all to no avail–it would seem that the devs had taken a “We know what you want better than you do” approach to the community. It had gotten so bad that at one point some of the devs had taken to insulting members of the WoW community for simply disagreeing with the course the game is taking. Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but at this point, I’d already left WoW and started my road towards Final Fantasy XIV, but to know that at least some of the devs felt this way about the community that was paying for their service didn’t endear me towards going back to the game.
Which leads to my last point…
3–I don’t think that the devs actually play their own game–at least not the way a large portion of their community plays it. I’ve witnessed from other games such as Final Fantasy XIV, Warframe and others, that the devs of those game will actually get in game with their players on streams and off and actually play their games like an average player. No Godmode stuff, just an average player. When they do, they see the bugs, the pitfalls, the grind and repetitiveness, the bad spots of play that an average player can come across from day to day. This leads to them understanding, conversing back and forth with the community, and coming up with solutions and being able to implement them quickly, instead of having to wait for half, if not the whole life of an expansion for patches and hotfixes to come through.
I know that companies have QA Teams that they employ for this purpose, but if the devs don’t listen to said team as soon as those issues arise (during the Pre-Alpha, Alpha and Beta process), how are they going to fix them? I say this, because the devs at WoW are in a unique postion, in that there are members of their community that lives for taking part in all those processes including their PTR servers, so that they can spot bugs and others issues, so that those problems can be fixed before a major expansion or patches release. I, myself have been apart of many Alpha and Beta during the course of my time playing WoW. I can’t tell you how many bugs, glitches, geodata issues and the like that I’ve reported over the years that have gone widely unresolved until the expansion was through half of its lifecycle, and I think part of the reason why is because the devs make so many unnecessary changes to the core systems of the game, that they don’t seem to have time to work on anything else. I also think that it seems that what should be the main portion of an expansion (the coninuation of a competent storyline that keeps players engaged and immersed in an MMORPG) has become an afterthought. Also, I think that because of their current way of making dungeons, raids and PvP all that their is to endgame, and the constant drone of having to keep gear up to date and as powerful as possible for the content, has made it all but impossible to have any type of time for playing Alterative characters to any type of competence in terms of gear, unless you are a member of a highend raiding guild.
Ok…I know I said alot right there, but I’ll break it down. I think Shadowlands more than any other expansion has proven that the push of the devs is to get players to endgame as fast as possible, so they can gear themselves for dungeons, mythic plus and raids. Even with taking a couple of days from playing the game, once I bought a WoW token to try the expansion out, it took me only two and a half days to finish the main part of the Shadowlands initial storyline. While playing Elder Scrolls Online, it took me a couple weeks immersive and fun content to complete the last expansion I played, which was Dragonhold. When it comes to Final Fantasy XIV, it took me a few weeks to finish the first patch of Shadowbringers, because I was having fun playing other parts of the game besides just the Main Story/Scenario quest or MSQ. I honestly don’t see how the devs of WoW can justify a player/consumer (like me) paying them $40 for each expansion, let alone $80 for the Digital Collector’s (Epic) Edition, and I think therein lays the problem. I honestly don’t think WoW is geared towards what the community considers “Casuals” anymore. I love the story of Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy and Warframe. For me, they are a part of the whole of the game. In the case of FFXIV, the story is integral to the game, and is filled with such rich, immersive, thought-provoking and meaningful storytelling that the grind that there is in the game isn’t really felt, because players of the game want to know more of the story that permeates every facet of the game. I know that WoW has lost that in many ways, and I don’t know if it will ever get it back. After playing Shadowlands, even while going through each of the new areas of expansion while working my way to level 60, honestly Maldraxxus was the only zone that really felt like the story and motives behind each character in the zone was really fleshed out and kind of meant something. Honestly, Revendreth felt like the BDSM Pleasure capitol, Ardenweald felt like the Deep Forest that no one really wants to visit, and Bastion, the area that I really wanted to like (as my main is a paladin), felt like a bland and ultimately unimportant copy of Legion’s Stormheim. At least that’s the feeling I had while playing through the different stories and areas.
I don’t know. Those are my thoughts on the WoW currently. What do you think?
