Why was World of Warcraft dumbed down that much?

06/02/2013 21:46Posted by Haerdalish

Complexity gives people more to learn, thus prolonging the life of a game because every time you think you've mastered something, there's always something new to learn.

Throw too much complexity to a game, and then suddenly you're not prolonging its life, but rather, overwhelming newcomers.

06/02/2013 21:46Posted by Haerdalish

The people that are usually the most adamant against complexity are the ones that don't have the patience to learn something properly and demand that it be lowered to their level so they can "enjoy everything right off the bat".

As long as you have a challenge at some level on the game (for some it will be Heroic Sha of Fear, for others it will be Shado-Pan Monastery Challenge Mode trying to get gold, for others it'll be Garalon Normal, for others getting to 2.5k rating on PVP... I could go on) what's the harm if things are made more accessible to other players? (As long as you have your challenge)

The LFR is a great example of this, instant gratification with absolutely no commitment required. No preparation required, no need to know what the bosses do, no nothing. Just go in, spam 3-4 buttons and you're done.

And you want this to be encouraged? Christ, modern gamers make the mind boggle.

It's not quite instant gratification (you have to defeat the boss, do the whole run, etc etc), neither on the same level of rewards that players get for completing Normal of Heroic content.

I disagree.

Lets look at raids (I didnt do any at MOP, but know them quite well).

At Vanilla it took a good guild to clear a new raid several weeks. A medicore guild or casual, some months.
Today you join the LFR and a few hours later you have finished the content.

Do you see the big difference there? In vanilla you were busy for many weeks, today for several hours.

Lets look at pvp

In vanilla you had a real competition within your faction. You always had to be better than the other players, you had to win a lot and these BG´s did last 1 or 2 hours.

Today you have 5 min arena games where a fotm wins. But even if you dont win, you will be a winner at the end of the season.

Again, its missing the depth.

That's not depth. Content in vanilla required more preparation, but bosses were much, much easier than today's Heroic content.

The duration of the content doesn't have much to do with the depth of the game. In fact, there's much more depth and complexity in overcoming your opposition on a Rated Battleground today (as strategies keep evolving as the community does and teams can be very coordinated) as opposed to trying to cap Lumber Mill for the 100th time with a bunch of strangers that refuse to stay in their bases and would rather camp the roads.

07/02/2013 16:06Posted by Ráchel

I dont deny that you can do more things today, but the "how" is what matters and there wow has lost a lot of its depth and fun.

Many of the things that have been mentioned on discussions like this have to do with "the grind" more than the activity itself.

Was Battleguard Sartura a fun encounter in Ahn'Qiraj? Sure, it was.
Was it incredibly fun to farm the resistance sets required for some bosses back then? I'm not so sure there's going to be a common agreement there...

That's not depth. Content in vanilla required more preparation, but bosses were much, much easier than today's Heroic content.

BUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

thanks for showing your ignorance :)

Ah, you're welcome, I'll educately bow down my head in a sincere apology, as you have eloquently, elaboratedly and irrefutably proved through facts and your own experience that I am completely wrong about this affirmation.

PS: NO.

If you want to say I'm wrong, at least go on and elaborate why. We all might be missing an interesting point of view just because you decided to take a shortcut that didn't add anything to the discussion.

08/02/2013 14:14Posted by Naq

Most of current encounters are just combination of total randomness that decides will you wipe or not (sunbeams spawning on top of the adds on Tsulong as example). It's not hard, it's just random.

So, a boss that you can predictably determine which ability is going to cast next (any vanilla boss with a DBM-like addon) is harder than a boss with more room for random abilities? Random sounds actually like a good reason to define something as hard. If you can't control it, you can't just yawn through it.

08/02/2013 15:47Posted by Nessaya

Why do you think that making the game less accessible again would bring back the old times?

This is an interesting question, especially for those of you that do consider reducing the accesibility of the game would bring back players. (As a side related note, since we're mostly talking about raiding content, remember that Patch 5.2 introduces a Heroic only boss, Ra-den).

Okay, so at this point anything I say you can easily reply with, that's not about accessibility.

Pet management was removed, pets changed to be a vanilla set that all share the same three talent trees, and ammo removed. Call it what you want, I call it dumbing down.

Has the mechanic of the hunter (requiring an appropiate pet to be used at every time if you want to maximize your dps output) and its damage (you're insane if you weren't using the strongest ammo available to you) become simpler just because now you don't have to feed your pet or pick the highest dps available ammo?