Minischoles wrote:Mythic raiders (speaking as one) couldn't care less about LFR - I can honestly say i've not touched LFR this expansion, I already run mythic and heroic on my main and an alt (thankfully my guild don't do more than one alt run).
Back in MoP, this would have held true. I trolled the forums pretty regularly, and LFR-hate threads were almost always made by guys who basically LIVED in LFR. Maybe they had a few Normal kills. Almost never even an end-boss killed of a current tier. Even back in LK, you never saw a Kingslayer complaining about LFD. They were too busy raiding.
But I've seen numerous LFR threads started and or responded to negatively by characters with multiple Mythic boss downs on current content. I think a lot of this comes from Mythic rosters getting blasted by the bans and the 20-man lockout. They're mad and taking it out on whatever is convenient.
Gerald Tarrant wrote:I think I've finally figured out why WoW hasn't been as fun for me lately, dropping the skill tree removed a lot of the customization that turned made your toon, unique. Then removing all the gear customization turned every toon into every other toon. The only thing setting you apart was what racial you had to use in a fight. But back in MoP you could get completely different play styles out of being a Haste Paladin, versus a middle of the road haste/mastery blockadin, vs a classic stam heavy tank. Stat weights could be all over the map too for healers, which was a game in and of itself, it made your healer YOURS, as opposed to what blizzard wanted you to be. Now? If I want to try a different healing style, I need to level a different class. Every healer's gotten shoe-horned into their own style of healing and if you don't follow the style blizzard intended you won't be effective. It's just removed the fun, and replaced with a bunch of cookie cutter rotations that are slightly different for every class.
FFXIV has less customization than WoW does and manages to be fun because there's still shittons of content to do. The difference is they never had any of the stuff, so you don't miss it. But more so is that Blizzard keeps pruning content, but offering nothing to replace it or bolster what they haven't pruned.
Also, the iconic status of the abilities is mostly gone and feel bland now. You know what's a perfect ability? Light's Hammer: You throw a hammer on the ground, it shoots holy lightning in an AOE, and looks cool while doing so. I don't care if it healed my enemies and damaged my allies: I'd still use it. Honestly, only class/spec I played at the end of MoP than made me feel like my class, even if only for short bursts. Maybe Frost Mage but wasn't the most interesting visually.
If you weren't stacking Haste to soft cap, then Mastery as Prot Pally in MoP: I fucking hated you. I don't know how anyone could play prot without Haste either way. The GCD would be worse than FFXIV. You also explode any time you have aggro.
On the raid thing, I think the WoW community is the problem honestly, Raid Finder has been less and less fun (guilds are getting more elitist) , and smaller servers are a horrible experience for someone who wants to raid. People start leaving and less and less competent people raid, and the spiral continues.
When raiding is all you've got, there's more incentive to cull only the best of the best. During MoP, there was still a lot to do without stepping into a raid. Older expansions, even more. But with WoD's Raid or Die mentality, more people want in on the action. Which means there's more talent, but even more people who really don't belong in that kind of environment. I can understand the blowback, but they've been given no other option.
Kuja wrote:It would genuinely not surprise me at this point if Blizz's next quarterly report has WoW down to 4 million or even less. Firstly, the last Q report covered up to April 1, but a bunch of people on multimonth subs let them expire with the last payment being in December or January, meaning WoD's big-ass drop almost certainly kept going on into April. A lot of resentment has been building up on the flying issue, especially with the cash shop continuing to determinedly release flying mounts for 25 bucks a pop. This announcement should really have come a long time ago, and from an official source - it wouldn't have salvaged the matter, but I bet a bunch of people who are now pissed off enough to be quitting might not have back then.
Or the deluxe edition containing a flying mount you can't use in current content? The flying issue is more the breaking of the camels back. It's being used as a crutch "YOU'RE ELAVING CUZ OF FLIYNG!?" when it's really "this is the last straw. It shows Blizzard gives no fucks about the community's desires."
I think Blizzard has gotten to the point where they realize they can make more cash by monetizing the shit out of Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm and is now just letting WoW chug along under what steam it has left while the team does whatever the fuck it wants regardless of consequence, because what we've been seeing of Blizz out of the past year or so is basically the same thing that's been happening across the games industry as a whole - increased monetization from stuff like the cash shop and ftp's with things like hearthstone's buyable cards and hots' buyable heroes and skins, all of it being raked in with a fraction of the effort that goes into maintaining an mmo. Overwatch, when it comes out, is likely going to have a bunch of the same. WoW is now just the vehicle getting them to that point.
Well, the only thing that could ever kill WoW was Blizzard. And they seem to be doing a good job at this.