"Hey, are you running boosts? I'll pay to join your group."
I didn't hesitate.
"Sorry, but we're running to get some quests done out of our log."
"Oh."
When I mentioned it to the group, my Questing Buddy pointed out that:
- I am a Mage
- I'm L60
- I am in Maraudon
So, it made sense for people to think I was running boosts.
Which does make sense, but it kind of sucks. As I pointed out tonight when we ran Zul'Farrak with another friend, they had no idea I was a fresh L60 with absolutely no gear for running Frost Mage style boosts.
Or is it?
"I wonder if there's a Tacotip for Era. brb"
Sure enough, the dreaded GearScore app was available for Classic Era, and I quickly installed and restarted WoW.
"Yep, it's there. So there is a GearScore for Era."
"Oh great," my Questing Buddy grumbled. I could see why she'd be annoyed, as she had to deal with that enough in Wrath Classic.
"Well," I replied, "Era is a different beast. People here don't seem to care nearly as much about GS."
Which is a good thing, because unless you have a regular group to hang with, Wrath Classic pugging can be not a lot of fun. Another friend was complaining last night about a pugger being a real asshole in their Wrath Classic raid; he was complaining about the lack of DPS from people, and my friend was pointing out that she was taking care of the adds like she was supposed to, and here this pugger was shooting his mouth off implying they were all shit.
I could feel the heat from her words all the way up here in Cincy.
***
All this got me to thinking.
In my YouTube Recommended section, this particular video popped up:
I'm not a big Taliesin and Evitel fan, so I think he's kind of dancing around the problem that WoW has: it's player model of quickly leveling and then dungeon + raid (or as players in the Comments section pointed out that it's "Mythic+ and Raid") appeals to a small segment of the potential player base. I said 'potential' because I believe more people would play Retail WoW if the current model weren't so restrictive.*
A common theme in the Comments section was that WoW's Mythic+ pug scene is a toxic cesspool, and that perception --fair or not-- is going to drive people away from WoW if the alternative is to grind renown. And I can see that, because that was what happened to me in Wrath Classic. What I liked doing best in original Wrath, running heroic dungeons, was "enhanced" by Wrath's version of Mythic+ with the Heroic Plus (and Heroic Plus Plus) dungeons, which were all what people wanted to do once they came out.
But Taliesin saying that the Shadowlands 9.1 patch may go down as being the patch that eventually broke WoW is likely correct. It was bad enough that it broke the hold that the game had on enough people for the subs to likely plummet.**
And that leads right into another video, this time from Venruki:
Now, Venruki is a PvP player who plays Arenas, so he's got a different vantage point than I do. But the overall thrust of the video is that it takes far too much time and effort to get into playing Arenas if you're a new player, and all of the external systems --addons and whatnot-- are a major problem that keeps people from playing the game.
To illustrate his belief, he also points out at roughly 9:28 that damage rotations are far too complicated in Retail WoW, and uses the Arcane Mage raid rotation as an example.
Having played a Mage from late Wrath up through early Mists (and back again in Classic), I was floored by the complexity, which starts upwards of 10 seconds before the boss pull. Which to my mind, which sits in "I have to manage my mana" mode, is kind of nuts. When on top of it you have to also have situational awareness to move around and handle various aspects and mechanics of a boss fight, you're just asking for trouble.
Before anybody gets on a comment here saying "oh, it's not that bad, you only have to do that if you want to raid at a high level," let me tell you that perception is indeed reality. These videos are out there, and potential WoW players will see them. So commenters telling me "it's not that bad" are warring against that, not me, because those videos will tell people otherwise.
NOTE: After this post, Shintar was able to determine that the data listed above came from a survey dating from 2013. (See the comments.) Whether or not the data is accurate is irrelevant, as the date of the survey is 10 years old. Therefore I'm striking the data and leaving the strikethrough visible. Still, I do feel that WoW is far to complex for its own good: it's difficult to get started, the systems you learn while leveling don't apply once you reach the current expansion, and the sheer grind and complexity once you reach max level becomes an albatross when newer gamers want to load up a game and just, well, play. And if you step away for a period of time, the game makes it paradoxically easy and hard to return: easy to level up, but hard to freaking pick up on all of the details you need if you want to truly embrace Endgame content again. And the community does itself no favors.
#Blaugust2023
*I get that my main complaint, that the story and focus has gone off the rails compared to Vanilla (and to a lesser extent TBC) days, is something that only a small portion of the potential player base is concerned with. To the majority of people playing Retail WoW, story only becomes a concern when it is gated behind a certain amount of activity (or in-game timers); whether the story makes sense or whether it appears to be created by conspiracy theorists in the midst of an LSD-induced fever dream isn't high on people's agenda. I'd probably be less harsh about the story if I felt like I had a stake in it, but really, I don't. Blizzard's story team made that plain when it is obvious that we're basically the meat shields for whatever the faction leads (or whoever else is in charge) decide.
**No, I have no idea if it is the case, just all I've heard. Even if it wasn't as bad as people say, the perception was bad enough that it takes on a life of its own.
EtA: Corrected some word flow.
EtA: Corrected some grammar.
EtA: It was Zul'Farrak, not Zul'Aman. Wrong Troll instance, and wrong expac.
Just wondering did you ask the guy who was thinking to pay for a boost if he’d like to join your group for free? As far as PUGs in Wrath Classic, my experiences have been 98% good ones except in the cases where I tried out my mini tanks. Bad bad bad. Atheren
ReplyDeleteNo, I didn't, because we were all tired by that point and we just wanted to finish the instance; we were right around where we could take on Celebras the Cursed, so almost all of the mobs for boosting were already gone.
DeleteAs for pugs, I've discovered there is a real difference depending upon both the server you're on and the faction you're on. If you're on a higher pop server, such as Atiesh-US, the experiences are much worse than both Myzrael (before it imploded) and Old Blanchy. And that's once you even get into a pug, because in the case of my Ret Paladin I couldn't even get into a regular Heroic (or H+) instance at all for weeks before I simply gave up and started running Alterac Valley to get "gear".
I put gear in quotes because by Wrath's iteration PvP gear is often a poor substitute for PvE gear at the same iLevel. As I told my questing buddy, you have to kind of knock off about 50 points from PvP gear's iLevel to figure out what the equivalent in PvE gear is for running PvE content. That meant that I either had to wait hours for something to drop --yes, that happened a lot on Linna-- or you would try to put something together yourself and deal with people constantly throwing their GearScore at you and wanting to do H+ instances despite putting quite plainly in the Comment section "Regular Heroics Only".
Sure, I heard that Blizzard finally addressed the problem of people wanting to specify regular Heroics versus H+/H++ in the LFG tool with the current Phase, but in the six months of Phase 2 being out that they never instituted a hotfix to allow people to queue for the specific class of Heroic was the breaking point for me. They had to have known what their player base was like by now, so they should have built that option in from the get-go. Of course, it was likely the case that regular versus H+ wasn't the issue, but rather H+ versus H++ that drove them to change the tool.
And I can't stress this enough: if the "fix" was to pay Blizzard to move my toons to a lower pop server where people were nicer in general, I wasn't going to oblige. I had no real reason to stick around in Wrath Classic anyway, because like what Shintar experienced in TBC Classic I discovered that you can't go home again.
I am amused that my age puts me in the 0.5%. I may even have fun with that by declaring that I'm in the top 0.5% of the game since older players have higher age "scores'. ;)
ReplyDeleteThe rotation complexity is bad enough that even normal raiders (Normal/Heroic mode) will use a DPS rotation helper on top of boss mods and/or weakauras. :sigh: I've been commenting that us players are basically playing the mods / pushing the buttons we're told instead of actually playing the game. The only folks who really play the game itself are the ones at the initial bleeding edge and they use the addons as fast as they can develop them. I could say more, but Blizzard is riding the Addon Tiger and they don't know how (or want) to get off.
As it is, the retail version keeps reminding me that more formal organized group activities are basically pushing my participation out of the player pool. That's ok as I have enough stuff I can mess with in the older content and be satisfied. Plus there's Classic Era to still be fully explored whenever (if-ever) I feel the urge.
I have to agree about us playing the add-ons rather than the game itself. As WoW players, we're so conditioned to use add-ons as innocuous as GTFO (it makes a sound when you're standing in the bad, and the worse the "bad" is the louder and more obnoxious the sound is) to as ubiquitous as DBM to as powerful as WeakAuras, and if those were taken away we'd have serious trouble learning the cues in boss fights to make them manageable. Can you imagine Vanilla Naxx's Four Horsemen without either DBM or several WeakAuras to manage the complexity of that fight, let alone anything in the past 10 years? Probably not going to happen, because the game now has add-ons in mind when boss fights are created.
DeleteI still would like the "official" world first raid tiers to only count if no add-ons were used in the raid, however. I believe we're rapidly approaching the point where an external add-on --or an AI-- could beat anything that Blizz creates for a boss fight, and if it's an add-on that runs completely separate from the WoW engine that moves your player around by simulating mouse and keyboard activity it'll be close to impossible for Blizz to detect unless they create spyware of their own to snoop on your PC.
The most astonishing thing about those age stats - if they're accurate - is that 90% of the people playing a game made in 2004 are under 30 years old. Presumably that means most people now playing WoW weren't born when it came out.
ReplyDeleteThat completely flies in the face of my perception of WoW, which is an old game that no-one but old people care about any more (Defining "old people" as "over 30", which has been my go-to definition of "old" since I was 27.) Can it really be true that young people make up the huge majority of WoW's playerbase noiw and if so what the hell are those young people doing?! Can't they find better, newer games to play? Are they all still listening to their parents' favorite bands and watching their parents' favorite movies as well? If not, what's so special about WoW that makes young people like it when even the old people it was made for don't?
Also, cf. Runescape, I guess.
Well, if you started playing as a 15 year old teen during Wrath of the Lich King, at WoW's height in roughly 2010, you'd be 28 now. That's under that 30 age divider. But it also makes sense from a practical matter: trying to down bosses and progress in the game consumes a lot of a player's time, and who has that free time to do it? Percentage wise, that's going to be teens and young adults under 30, who don't have kids and families of their own.
DeleteNow, the one thing that graph does not say is what the total current number of WoW players there are. That'd be more impressive if the number were around 5 to 10 million subs, but the reality is that we're likely talking a total of 1-2 million players at best, so the breakdown looks a lot less impressive. Think of all of the people Blizzard could have kept in those 30+ age ranges if they made WoW such that you didn't have to dedicate so damn much of your time to the systems currently in the game? If there were a way to break free from this, Blizzard would not only benefit financially from an increase in subs but those graphs would look a lot closer to what you and I were expecting.
As it is, Blizzard is stuck because it's trying to get as much blood out of that turnip that is the perpetually young WoW player base. And that player base tends to leave the game just as their earning potential begins to increase, much to Blizzard's dismay.
if they're accurate
DeleteThey are not. I immediately thought "that's gotta be BS, what's their source for that" and a quick bit of googling revealed that the graph in the video is from this site, which declares it being the results of a survey of ~4000 people back in 2013, with no further details provided. For all we know it could've been a random reddit poll.
Whether or not it's accurate from the standpoint of actual participation surveys, it's 10 year old data. Therefore, it isn't relevant to the discussion. I am inclined to think that if you take that survey and bump everybody up by 10 years it'll be no better than examining Warcraft Logs or raider.io for relevant data to extrapolate to the larger WoW community.
DeleteI have stricken through the survey, but left the strikethrough in place so that it doesn't appear that I'm changing the contents of the post for my own personal benefit.
DeleteI don't get the complexity of things like the current Arcane priority. I understand it's "for those people who like this gameplay ceiling" but it had better be within 10% if I just cast in a simpler form. I know the video is a bit out of date (Rune of Power is gone), but the wowhead guide seems to be horrible, with a 5 or 8 step prepull and up to 28 total priority steps depending on if you have your 4pc (which is really easy to get). This is the reason I don't play Enahnce or Ele anymore. Too many buttons to get decent dps. This is in no small part what almost killed Warlocks in Cata.
ReplyDeleteI would guess that Frost and Fire reworks made them simpler because I actually seem mages now, but I don't think I see any Arcane specced ones.