>Want to learn about World of Warcraft: why perceptions shifted, development history, the culture around it.
>Every writeup, video and blog I find is ads, eye searing clickbait, or talking about raid minutia.
>"Okay, maybe I need to go broader, look into Blizzard as a whole."
>It's the same shit, but also mocking their scandals.
Why is it like this? I don't even have this problem with massive studios like Treyarch or niche bullshit like Infinity co. (Battle for Olympus). What the frick?
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Just to be clear, the history of Condor/Blizzard North is the only aspect of this company post-console development I can find info worth a damn on, and that's because they were an acquisition. "Proper" Blizzard research just gets me
>"And Chris Metzen had a huge wiener."
instead of anything substantial.
The writing and quests went to shit.
You won't find dudebros with youtube channels talk about it or raid autists on Ganker talk about it but that's what happened.
99% of vanilla to wotlk players never raided or pvp'd so what changed didn't have anything to do with them.
The quests were great for their time but required a steady improvement over time. Instead it went backwards with Cataclysm.
Heirlooms and speed-leveling tools like dungeon finder also hastened the decline.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/
/thread.
What the frick is the problem, exactly? If you want to understand the game, start at the source and fricking play it.
Ideally, play a private server that is more likely to have the kind of community that everyone praises as the best part of the experience.
Look up "legacy of" videos on YouTube, those give good overviews of a bunch of content, classes, expansions, etc from the perspective of someone who gives a shit.
I'm doing that as well, but researching the culture around a game is pretty difficult for a deprecated online experience where most of that info is lost to long dead forum threads.
Definitely the best resource so far. Thanks. I've mostly been going through old patch notes and searching online for old discussions where people mention them.
>Wants to find something journalist could cover
>Journalist are so incapable they can't even do that
It's like pottery
You rarely find good info on game "journalism" sites. At best you'll get little nuggets here and there.
Yeah, with most games and companies you can start pretty broad and then drill down into specifics to get this stuff. I'm just flabbergasted how difficult it is to find stuff of substance when you don't have a good starting point, and the game is so long lived and massive that finding a point to build off of is difficult.
Again, this post
is probably going to help a lot. Sorry that I don't have specific questions at the moment, anon.
I think you already started too broad in the first line of your post tbqh OP.
If you have specific questions I can try to answer but you seem to be asking for a full blown essay book about the history of wow
Cata was probably the first major shift. Deathwing was not compelling as a villain. You can easily point out the numerous flaws around Arthas and Illidan in BC and WotLK but they were carried by nostalgia for WC3. Metzen let his personal issues at the time seep into his writing(you see this with SC2 as well). So we got Green Jesus. Much of the playerbase was conditioned for easy heroics in WotLK and were getting their shit pushed in hard by the cata heroics.
If you have 2 hours to spare, here is a video that pretty much goes trough everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BazitK-ZgDk
>Used to be an MMO that hit the accessibility sweet spot with not so punishing questing but needing friends to do it well and the endgame was exclusive enough to breed desire and stories
>first expansion came out and started trimming down the sizes of content but making it harder and making professions i.e. player interaction far more important for buffs
>despite the massively increasing sub numbers blizzard thought it was a mistake to have any exclusivity in the endgame and decided to make the game much easier and more accessible to the larger audience in Wrath
>suddenly content that took more than a month for the playerbase to beat for the first time was entirely cleared within 48 hours
>the high end content went from being done by <10% of the players to being done by everyone
>activision blizzard merge
>despite the flatline of new subs they double down on the accessibility front
>players now instantly queued with strangers and are teleported to content
>content turns from exploring a dangerous areas and fighting great challenges to speedrunning everything by wallhugging and climbing over shit to avoid every fight and nuke the boss with welfare purples before it can do anything
>because it was so easy to do and everyone was at the endgame activision blizzard starts to focus all of their attention on endgame content
>potential new players are left in the dust and forced to level a desolate wasteland of old content alone
>perception of the game went from a game where you become nerd gangsters to fight epic battles to a game where you collect boar asses in competition with antisocial morons/chinese bots
>to this day all changes made to the game only lean further into this to the point where if you are a new player it literally feels like you are the only person who plays the game at all until you hit max level
>even if that new player were to be near someone they wouldnt notice because of phasing/flying mounts once again thanks to the accessibility cult
Wrath "easier raids for wider audience" wasnt even the death point as newbies still had to go through Ulduar. Retcons that pushed the breaking point from near full of TBC to broken by ICC were.
Then cata beta nerfs also raped it for the hardcore progression challenge crew that remained.
The single and only moment raids became accessible to a "wider audience" is when LFR became a thing.
I'm not saying WOTLK NM raids were any hard, but the truth is that average WoW players are SO awful that many can only pull their weight in LFR. Hell, there are some LFR bosses that infamously still filter a lot of brainlets because Blizz allowed them to have ONE remaining punishing mechanic.
>Retcons that pushed the breaking point from near full of TBC to broken by ICC were.
I don't speak MMO, what does this mean?
I don't think that accessibility was that bad for the game, in the end of the day hardcore players are always a minority in every game, specially a game that had 10M players and was cosiderated the casual MMO of that time.
The real damage Blizzard did to WoW was making the game endgame focus only on instanced raiding/PVP, while letting the rest of the world to rot.
WoW is always at it's most popular during leveling when there are people doing quests and running around in the world. It also always starts to die and lose players once the meta of sitting in a capital city while waiting for the next raid reset settles in.
If you look through the patch notes of the vanilla beta and game proper, they spent most of their time working on the actual world. It wasn't until later that they spent most of their time and resources on the raids and grind treadmills.
anon you just reworded what i said
I just disagree on the point were you say that endgame raiding should be a exclusive thing for radcore players only. They could have sucess by making the raids so easy that everyone could clear it, as long as there were other types of content for players that didn't liked/cared about raiding. But they didn't, if you don't Raid or PVP then you only have enough content for you at the start and the end of a expansion. Blizzard laser focus on Raids/Arena/M+ is a complete waste of the great world that people fell in love with and is the worst part about the game.
turns from exploring a dangerous areas and fighting great challenges to speedrunning everything by wallhugging and climbing over shit to avoid every fight and nuke the boss with welfare purples before it can do anything
Somebody didn't play Mauradon or Dire Maul when it was new. Groups were making you jump off ledges and try to run past patrols in an era where video guides didn't exist and it was annoying as frick. I didn't get my Mauradon shortcut taff of my own or DM backdoor key until like 6 months after they were new.
You could probably find a lot of different opinions about when WoW was falling apart, but it's because of multiple different decisions across the expansions that caused people to feel this way.
Burning Crusade introduced Draenei and Blood Elves, and one was a mediocre addition while the other changed the Horde's identity for years.
Wrath had Northrend which was amazing, but they introduced the dungeon finder which also heavily affected the way the community interacts.
Cataclysm limited the talents and had lackluster raids and endgame content. And the content that was uniquely challenging was nerfed after the first patch.
Mists of Pandaria, even though it was generally a good class gameplay expansion, had a weird and fricked up talent system and this is where they introduced the first LEGENDARY FOR EVERYONE which made it feel like having other characters was an endless grind. Timeless Isle was good and fun to explore with friends, but then they reused the idea of it for the following expansions.
Warlords of Draenor had barely any content and also deleted a lot of the class abilities from the game. It was bad with both content and gameplay, and the story taking place in an alternate universe just made everything a boring clusterfrick.
Legion tries to bring back lots of characters and focuses on finishing a loose end they've been building up to for years (the fricking Legion of course). Unfortunately it brings its baggage from WoD. There's a unique weapon that had a hefty grind for it for each of your specs and you'd use this for the whole expansion. So many major lore characters that were carrying the Warcraft brand died during this expansion, and it all felt like bullshit. Grindy gameplay, alt unfriendly as frick, and the first major showcase of borrowed power mechanics.
I skipped BFA, but heard that was shit.
Shadowlands didn't have any fun content. Class design was shit, story was shit, the Shadowlands themselves were shit.
Oh and frick Kadgar.
>Draenei were mediocre.
Booooo.
Every time someone provides feedback on Blizzard's games, they are told "don't like it, don't play it"
We're just at the logical conclusion of such an attitude
>Blizzard puts a guy who doesn't do this in charge of Diablo 3 after they're forced to remove the RMAH.
>Actually turns the game around.
>They cut his funding and then sabotage his in-dev Diablo 4 so hard he gives up and leaves the company.
>A few years later, "You guys don't have phones?"
I want to play Turtle wow but I am really turned off of 3rd worlder private servers with hacking Trojans in it. Sucks. I love vanilla wow but I hate Blizzard. I can only pray Microsoft buys them. There is a small very very small chance they fix the warcraft universe. But it's better than what we have now
I feel like you'd know if turtle or Warmane were trojans by now.
Does Turtlewow not have an invasive software tied to it? I thought that was mentioned here. I don't know I miss vanilla wow though.
As far as I can tell people speculated that's why it was closed source. But no, it's just the devs being weird nerds scared people will "steal" their "hard work."
If you run it through a few forensic tools you'll find that it's a bit sloppy and could be exploited by actual malware.
I played Vanilla through Cataclysm. I raided very casually and wasn't interested in competitive PvP at all, so I believe my point of view would align with at least a decent chunk of the greater casual playerbase.
I played an MMO rather than single player RPGs for two primary reasons. One being attachment to the world/story, and the other being social interaction. As for the world, it changed, wasn't replaced by anything good enough to warrant the change, and the story trying to justify the changes had me utterly disinterested. From what I've seen, this hasn't gotten better since I stopped playing.
As for the social aspect, I went from making friends in every other dungeon, to dungeon runs in complete silence. Cross-server partying was part of the problem, but I think that the playerbase's overall attitude towards the game shifted dramatically as the game aged and people got better at it.
I do think though that part of the reason for the change in the game's image wasn't necessarily Blizzard's fault. MMOs are less special now. Players are less interested in experiencing a world together and are more interested in achieving their personal goals in silence. This is across the genre and not only WoW.
>to dungeon runs in complete silence
This one hurts.
I think you can blame them for creating an unfriendly atmosphere in social channels and not trying to encourage player interaction enough.
So is this just shitposting or are you actually just too moronic to do a basic google search?
I know all the answers to all your questions ask away
Why don't they just make cool content for the overworld?
They do, they just dont make meaningful or take longer then 30 seconds to do
Becuase it's easier to make another raid/arena/M+ affix, since they already have all the tools and frameworks already developed for that. This is also the same reason for why WoW doesn't have housing even tough every other big MMO in the market has it. The effort it would take to develop stuff like housing and other activities would demand more time and investment than just adding another raid tier/arena season/M+ affix.
>Why don't they just make cool content for the overworld?
They did, the outdoor troll city in the hinterlands was a great example of outdoor group content that took coordination and skill to do, with possible fights with the other faction... and it provided practically zero reward other than 1 or 2 obscure quest completions.
You see this with the Shadowlands endless dungeon in the Maw too, it's something you can do in a group or solo, but past the time gated legendary mats there is zero gear reward for doing something that takes certain tiers of gear/item level to do at higher levels anyways. You couldn't be an ungeared alt and get geared through runs of the various wings over and over. You couldn't do the highest tier difficulties of it unless you were raid geared. But what fricking incentive was there for a raid geared maxed out person to ever run Torghast at the highest levels? None. It was fricking stupid. They built a great idea but intentionally left out alternate paths of gearing/rewards because they thought people would abandon their precious raids, instead they just abandoned the dogshit game & the obstinate devs who refuse to think outside the box.
Good point. I think they should do more non-raid stuffand add more ways to interact with the game than endgame raiding. Shit, a proper level sync on old raids would help a lot.
people shit on Blizzard because they have this very arrogant rockstar dev culture where they know better than their players and they're extremely pigheaded and arrogant about everything. see: "you think you do, but you don't
>Every game launches with loads of basic mistakes that anyone playing the game for 5 minutes can point out
>Despite this it takes them years to fix even the most basic of things, meanwhile leaving huge holes of broken gameplay mechanics in.
Because despite how big and old Blizzard is most of the behind the scenes stuff stayed behind the scenes, and no Blizzdrone is going to risk getting their battle.net account shadowbanned by putting up a video talking about the company beyond the surface grifter shit you see on twitter. Also China wipes a lot of stuff off the internet.
>Why is it like this?
because if you say the real reason world of warcraft and blizzard as a whole went to shit you get put on a government watchlist and terminally online manwomen will try to ruin your life for knowing the truth
i will now be called a polcel or a chud
Why not just say it then, moron?
Draenei Girls(non-futa)
>non-futa
Culture changes are pretty easy to explain: the playerbase aged. The guys who came up with early memes like Leeroy and the arcanite reaper are all in their 40s now, they've all got responsibilities and can't play the game anymore.
Actually, if you're interested in the early culture of the game, a local alt-weekly interviewed the Leeroy guy way back in 2007.
https://www.westword.com/news/the-legend-of-leeroy-jenkins-5091880
it's funny that people keep insisting that only kids played WoW in 2005/2006, when Blizzard outright stated that the average player age in that time period was mid-20s
What went wrong with WoW? Putting it simply, the game just kept getting more and more casualized/streamlined, going from an MMORPG to a 3rd person shooter with light RPG elements. The sub counts dropped off hard after WOTLK and kept declining further and further, only seeing minor upticks at expansion launches before continuing downward.
Use wikipedia, one of the last good website if you want normie info
>As social media became more prevalent, people stopped using online games (like MMORPGs) as a means of communicating with others
>Game started off relatively casual compared to MMOs before it, but kept getting more and more casual as time went on; every single thing that required time investment got whittled down so that there was less and less grinding
>classes got simplified, gameplay as a whole got simplified as well
>with Activision taking over, they started monetizing the game more and more, stuffing it full of microtransactions
>all of these problems just continued getting worse as years went on
that's about it