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| Work harder scrubs! Old school style! |
I remember when I first started gaming, how I looked upon raiders and wished I could do that content one day. Eventually I did but it took a very long time and in the end it was too much of a time sink to want to do on a continuing basis. Now today, 10 years later, I like how things are in WoW. I can catch up fairly easily if I need to, I can raid a few nights a week, do heroics. It's nice, a nice pace a nice medium. A far cry from that out of reach content I remember wishing to experience years ago. Somewhere along the line this game evolved into something that made the game accessible to many more people, something a lot of games failed in doing. This game flourishes because of this in my honest opinion.
Let me start off by pointing out the 'GO GO GO!!' groups we have now. In Cataclysm I think this will be a thing of the past, for quite some time. This will be a hard transition for a lot of people. Pugging, people are not going to be understanding they will be abusive. They already are. I am starting to worry if this fun nostalgic type of WoW is really much of a future to look forward to. I have painful flashbacks of TBC. It seems like a mess I don't want to bother with after of reading much of the beta feedback that's floating around as well as the developers input. It's still early and things can change but honestly how much do you see changing? Keep in mind the goal for this expansion. Work harder to get your epics scrubs! Work harder to heal! Work harder to keep aggro!
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| I'm not your whipping post Mr. Pug... |
In Everquest Clerics were the healing class for so long. Some of them took a power trip in being so needed. While their heyday is over and mercs replace them in groups the memory is still there. I thought WoW fixed this. We don't want to make healing so painful it becomes not fun which causes it to be harder to find healers again. Blizzard states they want healing to be fun. Healing is fun now, why would making it tougher make it more fun? Challenge? Leave that to raids. I don't want my MMO to become a J-O-B.... I'm paying you guys to do the work so I can play.. not work.
Lately though I think some of these developers working on Cataclysm are wearing rose tinted glasses trying to recapture some nostalgia that is unobtainable. I think this expansion could seriously cause a Cataclysm for the game. I don't want easy mode, I would like to see the game stay much the same as it is.
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| ''Not again! |
Some of this may be changed by the time things go live. I don't have the highest hopes after the developers seem to go all cloudy eyed at the thought of this expansion being such a change. Just some thoughts that have been sitting in my mind bugging me. Thoughts? Feel free to add them.
-kaozz
To be honest, a part of me thinks Blizzard is only saying these things to appease the more hardcore people who are calling for WoW to become more like it was in the "good old days". Like you said, making the game more casual was probably what made it continue to grow and be so popular, and Blizzard knows it so I really can't see them reversing their strategy now.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny, because I was just talking to another blogger about this the other day. I know you have painful flashbacks from TBC, but I sort of miss those days (and from before). Well, okay, I do and I don't. In my conversation, I was using the example of heroic Shadow Lab to explain how I missed the challenging gameplay where CC, timing and skill were all important to success. What I don't miss, is the hassle of trying to put together a balanced group with enough CC as well as the looooong hours it took to clear that place, which became worse when you didn't have the ideal set up. Friends who played classes that were deemed un-CC worthy were excluded and I just hated that. And needless to say, PuGs were a nightmare and were utterly and completely unreliable.
OR...maybe Blizzard is just trying to say that they want to get rid of the AoE spam. That I won't mind at all, because that actually gets on my nerves. AoEing entire dungeons was fun while it lasted, but now it's just getting stale, boring and mindless.
Anyway, I agree if Blizzard decides to change their direction for WoW we'll have a lot of people receiving rude awakenings when the game suddenly starts to feel so much harder (I wonder how many new hunters actually know how to effectively chain trap nowadays). But this doesn't have to mean doom :D If they can figure out a way to implement some challenge and strategy into their instances again, without the hair-ripping frustration of pre-WotLK, I'd be all for it.
I'm just thinking about the big picture for everyone. I use LFD a lot with my husband who plays extremely late. It could push people like him away. No friends are on then, no guild members it's just us and the LFD... That is if I am up for it. If not it's just him and the puggers.
ReplyDeleteTBC was good if you had friends to run things with. Pugging was a nightmare. I healed and played a hunter and I got the brunt if people didn't do their job- I had to keep them up. If someone broke my trap it could turn into a really hellish pull. Even with my guild we had some bad runs more so than not.
Ghost Crawler making quotes like the one below just makes me wonder what is really going on. Catering to harcore? Trying to go back in time? Let's all just go play those games we were 10 years ago if we want to run OOM...
"Prior to LK, healers could run out of mana, and for the most part it worked. They didn't just use their efficient heals, because sometimes their group would die if they did. They didn't just use their big heals though, because they'd run out of mana (and then the group would die).
I think of healing like a cross-continental road race. If you go too slow, you'll lose the race, but if you just floor it the whole time, you'll run out of fuel a lot and waste time stopping to fill it up again. There is a happy medium somewhere in between. However the encounter specifics push you out of that medium, sometimes asking you to choose big numbers over efficiency and sometimes vice-versa.
I know it sounds like we are picking on healers all the time, but once you can run out of mana again, I think everything will just feel better, your choices about what spell to cast next become more compelling, and the healing game overall will be more engaging."
As far as hardcore and casual go I think that currently the top end heroic content it's really offering much better rewards than what the casuals are getting. Those hardcore players do reap better rewards. The problem is not the content. It is a happy medium for everyone. It's the pace of the content. It's too slow. People get burnt out with these heroics because we've been doing them for two years. Raids... Don't get me started on that lol. The content is used up and people start to stagnate.
When you have the best of the best everything becomes trivial. It wasn't so trivial at the start of the expansion but they've band-aided the content problem with emblems and more heroic gear. What now? How do you ever go back? People think they remember TBC as fun but would you really go back if you could? Not me.
On another note I am so excited about the new races. I guess I will focus on those for now!