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Author Topic: Bitch Thread for Warlords of Draenor  (Read 484676 times)
Ingmar
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Reply #140 on: November 15, 2013, 10:31:24 AM

Of all the stuff they reuse, the troll stuff is probably the least awful frankly.

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Paelos
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Reply #141 on: November 15, 2013, 10:45:14 AM

Of all the stuff they reuse, the troll stuff is probably the least awful frankly.

Usually, the exception for me was the 4.1 patch of Cataclysm. We were promised a big raid update, and we got reused troll dungeons.

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Lakov_Sanite
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Reply #142 on: November 15, 2013, 11:02:03 AM

I completely forgot about that.  I think that may very well have been the shark jumping moment of wow.  Just blatantly re-using content with barely re-skinned mobs.

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Ingmar
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Reply #143 on: November 15, 2013, 11:09:06 AM

Was Firelands not in 4.1? I wasn't raiding anymore by then, though, so I wouldn't have cared about a missing raid.

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K9
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Reply #144 on: November 15, 2013, 11:12:33 AM

Where were the trolls in Burning Crusade? It's been so long I can't remember.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Zul%27Aman

Doh! Of course.

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Paelos
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Reply #145 on: November 15, 2013, 11:14:19 AM

Was Firelands not in 4.1? I wasn't raiding anymore by then, though, so I wouldn't have cared about a missing raid.

No it was 4.2, and what was worse they had planned it for release of the expansion. The actual Cataclysm xpac released with a redo of BWL, a completely forgettable set of raids with Cho'gall and a wind god, and Baradin Hold, the PVP thing.

It still remains as the worst expansion of all time in WoW. I mean looking back at what we know now, it still stands up as horribly offensive how little content they actually put in the game outside of the world redo.

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Nevermore
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Reply #146 on: November 15, 2013, 11:20:32 AM

The world redo, while it made the zones flow better, was so horde-biased that it killed the game for me.  It's the biggest reason why I quit.

Over and out.
Fordel
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Reply #147 on: November 15, 2013, 12:00:27 PM

What, you didn't enjoy being waffle stomped every zone?  why so serious?

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Reply #148 on: November 15, 2013, 12:22:53 PM

It still remains as the worst expansion of all time in WoW. I mean looking back at what we know now, it still stands up as horribly offensive how little content they actually put in the game outside of the world redo.

I actually liked the world redo, but everything else fell flat for me.  So I count the world redo as new content, and for me there was enough 'new' stuff.  But everything else bummed me out.  I went from someone with a BUNCH of level 80s in WOTLK (I honestly don't remember how many, but it was one of each class plus a second warrior, and a horde paladin, what is that, 10? 11?) to leveling three to 85 in Cataclysm and one of those was a dwarf shaman who started from 1 and had fun going through the redone zones (and then fuckin Outlands again).  Another character was in a duo, and the third was just ugh, why am I doing this?  Then I just basically quit.  I didn't even buy Pandaria.

It wasn't any one thing for me.  Part of it was the heroic instances that everyone complains about and part of it was the overly linear quests and part of it was the class homogenization.  I rarely gave a shit about the plot or the world situation or whatever.  Everything else, though, blargh.

When I hit Cataclysm land with my Chinese panda hunter, I dunno what's gonna happen.  Not sure if I have it in me to make it through those zones a fourth time.    Though I did get through Outlands with him, somehow.  At least it's educational now.


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Reply #149 on: November 15, 2013, 12:45:27 PM

The redo may have streamlined things. The downside was it became so linear that you know exactly what's coming, in the exact order, with no ability to skip a lot of it.

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Ingmar
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Reply #150 on: November 15, 2013, 12:46:35 PM

There was plenty of skipping of the second half of zones because the leveling outpaced the amount of content, actually. It was pretty rare that I wasn't in green or even gray quests if I stayed in a zone the whole time.

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Nevermore
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Reply #151 on: November 15, 2013, 12:52:15 PM

The redesign did give us 'The Day that Deathwing Came' and 'Welcome to the Machine' though, so at least there was that.

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Reply #152 on: November 15, 2013, 12:58:23 PM

There was plenty of skipping of the second half of zones because the leveling outpaced the amount of content, actually. It was pretty rare that I wasn't in green or even gray quests if I stayed in a zone the whole time.

All the way until 50 you could pretty much skip half of the zones completely (horde side).  There were really 2 distinct leveling paths.  

While I enjoyed the redo, my issues were that there was still a lvl 48-52 doughnut hole where there was a lack of good leveling options and some of the redone zones were redone pretty badly.  Ashenvale was a f'ing crime.  It was buggy and they just left a lot of quests in that made no sense given the rest of the redo.  

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Reply #153 on: November 15, 2013, 01:30:52 PM

You could skip the remainder of a zone. You couldn't skip to the end of a zone's story though.

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Rokal
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Reply #154 on: November 15, 2013, 02:00:06 PM

All the way until 50 you could pretty much skip half of the zones completely (horde side).  There were really 2 distinct leveling paths.  

There were really like 5-7 leveling paths since any one 30-35 zone would last you all the way to 40. I broke it down a while back, but it's still staggering how much time they wasted on older zones in Cata.

Between all the heirloom items, a smaller exp curve, and guild buffs, you blaze through 1-60 in a very short amount of playtime. With heirlooms and the guild buff you outlevel zones before you complete all the quests in them, and usually I found myself gaining about 10 levels per zone if I completed it to the quest achievement quota even if that zone was only supposed to support 5 levels.

Looking at this leveling chart, as an alliance player there are:

5 1-10 zones
5 10-20 zones
4 20-25 zones
3 25-30 zones
4 30-35 zones
3 35-40 zones
2 40-45 zones
5 45-50 zones
4 50-55 zones
1 55-60 zone (Silithus and Winterspring are still in the game, but they weren't redone)

This may seem like a decent spread, if not a little bulky, until you realize that with heirlooms and the guild buff one of those 20-25 zones will last you until level 30. It's actually more like 7 20-30 zones in function, and the same is true for 30-40, 40-50, and 50-60. By the time you reach level 60 with heirloom items, you'll have completed maybe 6/36 zones if you finish the quests in each, or about 17% of the redone content. There was no reason to remake that many zones, most players probably would have been happy with 2 different zones for each level range, not 3-5 (or 6-10 with this particular leveling speed). But instead of remaking half the number of zones they did and leaving the other half untouched, or putting fewer quests in each zone and expecting players to move to new zones faster, they remade everything (save Winterspring and Silithus)

A+ to the folks over there that approved those years worth of work for redundant zones. Instant-90s in WoD is the final admission at how big of a waste it all really was.

The actual Cataclysm xpac released with a redo of BWL, a completely forgettable set of raids with Cho'gall and a wind god, and Baradin Hold, the PVP thing.

I loved the 3 tier 11 raids, lots of creative fights and they fit well with the Cataclysm promise of tying up old storylines. Breaking them up into shorter zones sort of broke the fantasy of invading this deep lair of these old WoW villains though. The itemization for the wind god raid was awful too. Everything after T11 was awful.

It does make me sort of apprehensive about what they're going to do for WoD. As cool as tying up the Cho'gal and Sinestra storylines was in theory, the reality in raid is that they felt like any other raid boss. You had to read out-of-game resources to really figure out why those characters were cool/interesting. Are they just going to give us a raid against Guldan and assume we already understand why he's supposed to be a cool character? I liked the fresh villains/bosses that MoP used for end-game content because they naturally had to give us context for those characters since they were brand new. Plus it kept the game from getting bogged down with fanservice, where Blizzard writers bask in how cool their characters are.
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Reply #155 on: November 15, 2013, 02:19:10 PM

Given how many people quit the game, and the lack of LFR at the time, I honestly think you could put the first 3 T11 zones from Cataclysm back in an updated sense, and more than half the game wouldn't have seen them before.

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Merusk
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Reply #156 on: November 15, 2013, 02:31:18 PM

What, you didn't enjoy being waffle stomped every zone?  why so serious?
The world redo, while it made the zones flow better, was so horde-biased that it killed the game for me.  It's the biggest reason why I quit.

Simond must not be around today.  I was fully expecting another 15 post back and forth about how it was only equalizing the overly pro-alliance game that had come  before.  awesome, for real


Plus it kept the game from getting bogged down with fanservice, where Blizzard writers Metzen basks in how cool their only his characters are.

Fixed it for you.  No, I'm not falling in to the usual snark here.  The Lore Q&A at Blizzcon this year was tragic for multiple reasons and underlined just how true this is.

 1) Metzen is now "Executive Vice President of Storytelling" or something like that.
 2) The questions the Blizz fanboys threw at the panel displayed their utter lack of knowledge about the lore they're currently fucking with.  At one point Metzen said, "I don't know anything about that. Warcraft 1 was done before I started here."
 3) The team defers to Metzen on everything and he's fully immersed in just being Mr. 40-year-old-who-thinks-hes-cool guy.  Meaning no actual thought goes in to decisions, just what would be "awesome" as defined by a 40-year-old man-child.
« Last Edit: November 15, 2013, 02:42:26 PM by Merusk »

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Ingmar
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Reply #157 on: November 15, 2013, 02:56:31 PM

You could skip the remainder of a zone. You couldn't skip to the end of a zone's story though.

And that itself isn't a problem, unless you don't want narratives. That's a personal preference thing, though, not a good/bad design thing. The issue is their zone narratives were, generally speaking, too long for their XP curve.

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Modern Angel
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Reply #158 on: November 15, 2013, 03:28:29 PM


A+ to the folks over there that approved those years worth of work for redundant zones. Instant-90s in WoD is the final admission at how big of a waste it all really was.


This is such an odd sentiment to me. Everyone wants options in how they play. People who have been around for a long time want to skip things on that reroll or alt when the class balance deck gets shuffled. So now you have options. The content is still there. You can level through it or you can level to 90. Or both! The notion that's a waste is just beyond me. It's not an admission of anything, other than maybe that everyone in the MMO game realizing that leveling at all is starting to lose its luster. And if it's that, there's no real way for them to reverse engineer it into the game at this point. Or EQ2 or Rift or LOTRO, who are doing similar things.
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Reply #159 on: November 15, 2013, 03:56:10 PM

This is such an odd sentiment to me. Everyone wants options in how they play. People who have been around for a long time want to skip things on that reroll or alt when the class balance deck gets shuffled. So now you have options. The content is still there. You can level through it or you can level to 90. Or both! The notion that's a waste is just beyond me. It's not an admission of anything, other than maybe that everyone in the MMO game realizing that leveling at all is starting to lose its luster. And if it's that, there's no real way for them to reverse engineer it into the game at this point. Or EQ2 or Rift or LOTRO, who are doing similar things.

Extra options are great, but come at the expense of something else. I might like the option for extra hair styles on all the races in the game, but maybe not at the expense of a new race or new art assets somewhere else. In the case of the leveling content in Cata, the excessively-revamped 1-60 zones came at the expense of level-cap content, the expansion being released on time, and the patch content being released at a reasonable rate with reasonable amounts of content (they've said that the revamped 1-60 took them a lot longer than they expected, which also impacted how much work they had done on patch content when Cata launched).  Having so many options while leveling is neat, but not worth the cost IMO. They essentially revamped 3-5x as many zones as they needed to given the leveling curve of the game. Seemingly it wasn't worth the cost for them either since they've conceded to just letting new/returning players skip the leveling content options they worked so hard on.
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Reply #160 on: November 15, 2013, 05:09:15 PM

If every character could pop up to 90 regardless, maybe, but it's just one character on the entire account, right? Otherwise I think it's only an admission of "maybe people will be more willing to give this another look if they can just jump into the new shit with a character right away."

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Reply #161 on: November 15, 2013, 05:27:58 PM

I don't think the revamp can be construed as anything but a waste of time now, though. Not only are they letting people skip the content with a main, but with all the xp enhancements, I don't think there's a way you can make it through an entire zone anymore without wasting time on underleveled quests.

I mean if the back end of every zone is unnecessary now, and the fact there's several of those zones, the amount of manhours that could have actually gone into keeping customers with current content is just mind-boggling.

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Reply #162 on: November 16, 2013, 02:41:16 AM

That was my big annoyance with Cata.  They revamped the zones into theme parks. OK, some of them were pretty good.  But you out-level the zone before the 'ride' is over.  I'm not OCD, but I have a problem with that.  Your 'ride' isn't fun enough to keep me in a grayed out zone.

At this point, they need to go f2p.  Their content, IMO, isn't good enough for sub anymore.  Just use the STO model, not the LOTRO one.
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Reply #163 on: November 16, 2013, 03:11:42 AM

As others have noted, there's being a cheerleader, and then there's ... that. It wraps around from being excited about a new expansion into a creepy sort of desperation that this expansion has just got to turn shit around, that new character models are exactly what was needed to right the ship, and MARK THIS DATE DOWN, EVERYONE, EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED FOREVER.

Any new expansion at this point is just going to be a small speed bump in the road of falling subs. There's realistically nothing they can do at this point to rejuvenate the game. The idea that an expansion that simplifies things while adding few new features is going to give WoW a huge shot in the arm is ridiculous. "The problem with WoW is that it's just too damn complicated!" said nobody.
Actually the subs decline is pretty much bottoming out: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/blizzard-free-to-play-f2p-mmorpg-world-of-warcraft,25030.html
Quote
The news arrives after the company reported that the number of subscribers dropped 100,000 in 3Q 2013 to 7.6 million. That's good news despite the loss, as the MMORPG shed a whopping 1.3 million subscribers in the first quarter, followed by 600,000 subscribers in the second quarter.

That was my big annoyance with Cata.  They revamped the zones into theme parks. OK, some of them were pretty good.  But you out-level the zone before the 'ride' is over.  I'm not OCD, but I have a problem with that.  Your 'ride' isn't fun enough to keep me in a grayed out zone.

At this point, they need to go f2p.  Their content, IMO, isn't good enough for sub anymore.  Just use the STO model, not the LOTRO one.
"Welp, we're down to only seven and a half million paying subscribers. Time to go F2P!" said nobody ever.  awesome, for real

Simond must not be around today.  I was fully expecting another 15 post back and forth about how it was only equalizing the overly pro-alliance game that had come  before.  awesome, for real
Well as you said it I don't really need to, do I?  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

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Reply #164 on: November 16, 2013, 04:37:26 AM

All this whining her makes me wonder if they'll come up with "classic" servers...

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Reply #165 on: November 16, 2013, 05:12:59 AM

All this whining her makes me wonder if they'll come up with "classic" servers...

Miss the good old times? Want to see how it all started? Subscribe again and join our new vanilla servers!

Oh how I pine for the days of being an innervation and combat res bot.
Lakov_Sanite
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Reply #166 on: November 16, 2013, 05:26:16 AM

All this whining her makes me wonder if they'll come up with "classic" servers...

Miss the good old times? Want to see how it all started? Subscribe again and join our new vanilla servers!

Oh how I pine for the days of being an innervation and combat res bot.

Or having to be a holy priest because both other specs were completely worthless.

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Reply #167 on: November 16, 2013, 06:04:40 AM

I'd consider going back if they put in an LK-era server.

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Nevermore
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Reply #168 on: November 16, 2013, 07:01:16 AM

Lich King was the high water mark, yes.

Over and out.
Paelos
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Reply #169 on: November 16, 2013, 07:58:45 AM

Or having to have a Dwarf priest for fear ward.

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Margalis
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Reply #170 on: November 16, 2013, 08:24:06 AM


Some of those "subs" come from the way Blizzard recognizes subs in Asia - anyone who plays once in a 30 day period in an internet cafe counts as a "sub." I would guess that when subs drop they drop more due to losing actual subscribers than internet cafe players.

WoW could have zero actual subscribers and still recognize millions of subs. I suspect their sub numbers are highly propped up by those internet cafe players and that tracking actual paying subscriptions would look significantly more dire.

Quote
Welp, we're down to only seven and a half million paying subscribers.

They don't have 7.5 million paying subscribers. Nobody knows how many they have, but the number is likely far less than that.


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Lakov_Sanite
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Reply #171 on: November 16, 2013, 08:35:20 AM

Reminds of a Daniel Tosh joke about Brett Favre.

http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/7o5fig/stand-up-daniel-tosh--brett-favre-retirement

Let's say wow is down to a 'mere' 2mil, should they go F2P then? Their answer is likely "lol nope, still good"

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Paelos
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Reply #172 on: November 16, 2013, 08:38:20 AM

This last quarter was one of the worst they've had in a while. It's still not bad by video game standards, but their profit is about 25% of what it was in Q3 2012.

In Q3, the online revenue breakdown has gone from non-GAAP (non adjusted) 1.46B in 2011, to 1.05B in 2012, to 0.88B in 2013. Considering that also includes their sub numbers for other games like Call of Duty? That's a large falloff.

It's bad for ATVI because WoW has essentially been keeping the company afloat in between CoD releases. Considering they just bought out Vivendi, and put $2.2B of debt on the books as a result, it's not good news if subs fall to 2M. At all.

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Simond
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Reply #173 on: November 16, 2013, 09:23:31 AM

Take a look at those online 2012 & 2013 numbers again, Paelos.  Ohhhhh, I see.

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Reply #174 on: November 16, 2013, 09:41:37 AM

Point is that WoW probably could've still had like 6-7 million subs but they put the B-Team on WoW to go make apparently a shitty secret game they had to can.

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