I actually still like WoW, but mostly because I have a crazy amount of greenies and artifacts I never get rid of and I like to shuffle stuff around characters. I'm almost ashamed it has some truth to it.
No but serious, the garrison could've been a neat idea, but it wasn't (and I'm not even touching the subject of how it fudged up crafting even more) so it'll just rot away into nothing. And I can honestly say I miss Pandaria. I've had my Hearthstone (Innkeeper's Daughter BTW yay!) set to the farm there for the entire duration of WoD, and every time I go there all this .... niceness flows over me. Draenor is hard and warmongering and gritty and annoyingly so. And I'm sick of saving worlds, and entire timelines, and stupidly dramatic crap, which is why I liked Pandaria so much. It was a bunch of dudes who happened to be cuddly and fat and beerguzzling (IE sympathetic in the extreme) nice guys who got crapped on by most other civilizations on the planet, and they just want to go back to their beerswilling, storytelling, ways. I don't know, it was just nice. The music was calm, the sceneries filled with farmers fighting rabbits instead of you vs RRRAAARRRGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH IIIIIRRRROOOOOOONNN HHHHHOOOOOOOORRRRDDDEEEEEEEE [battle music battle drums battle battle battle are we gritty yet] ARRRRGHGHGHHGHHHHHHHHHHH. There where other elements there too, but the world was just so nice to be in. And the stories made a whole lot more sense than WoD, and probably Cata too. Apart from that whole Garrosh going insane thing and everyone are selfish dicks thing.
The older I get the more I appreciate nice things. You know one of the worst moments (well if you can call it that in a game with cartoonish graphics) in WoW for me was? I'm a highly casual player, and I usually play a few months around the release of a new expansion and maybe some months more, so I was off doing LifeTM things and came back to a destroyed Vale of Eternal Blossoms. I had the orc hunter I've had since vanilla (with my trusty lizard Myrddin by my side and anyway technically it was a few months before the release of TBC so it wasn't right from the start), and right there and then I truly felt like an old man.
Then we got WoD and blergh. The nicest thing there was the piano music you sometimes got in Frostfire Ridge. Also I've wanted to play an Ogre since the first day. IT'S OGRE COUNTRY, WHERE'S MY OGRE? Not to mention the lore gets worse and worse for each expansion.
In short, yes, make something else. This is my End of WoW timeline:
- Blizzard comes out with a short blog post saying "In two months we'll kill all servers. Expect strange things." The subscription price is dropped to €5 for the duration of the game.
- A month later, servers are mashed together (if possible), filling each one to the brim with players.
- Bosses besiege the capitals. I mean real bosses that require all the players to defeat. Chaotic drops, items of massive power that alter the characters. These drops goes out totally randomly, and the alterations are also quite random, and any character on the server can get the item even if said character did not participate in the fight.
- Some characters become Game Masters, with game altering powers. I'm talking straight up sourcery here.
- Said Masters are by default hostile to everything. Everything, including critters, will attack them, any player can attack them.
- A Game Master will not remain so for longer than 36 hours. The powers will at a totally random time pass on to a new character.
- After a week of that, mobs are randomly altered as well. Some become mega-bosses. With new, unknown and hilariously random powers, which they pass on randomly to characters when they die.
- The rules of the game will at this point start to deteriorate ie becoms a whole lot buggier. This include things like, say, mob pulling distance and who exactly pulls them.
- Hardcore mode, ie permadeath.
- After a week of that, graphical glitches. More bugs. More randomness. I mean boiling clouds stuff and melting eyes, seas of blood and wailing from the ground.
- A week after that, a megaboss appears. Blizzard announce cash rewards for the survivors. And no, you cannot get away from this boss. You have to do something, but what that thing is is not random but not very clear either.
- At the beginning of the last week, if there are any survivors, unexpectantly shut down the servers premature.
- Announce the release of the code under some sort of Absolutely No Way In Hell Can Anyone Make Money On This Ever Again Not Even If They Mod It-license. The players can have their character files or whatever back so they can import them onto a private server. Including tools for simple setting up of servers and adding characters and so on.
- Twist: The code is somehow made so that no server can house more than a few hundred players, and should be essentially impossible to change.
- Blackthorne II is revealed.
Or a Warcraft IV, but at this point ... probably not. They'd make a boatload of money anyway, but it will probably not be what the old games were (coherent storytelling).
no, scaling is for people who can not and want to play harder areas. They are once again bending to kiddies who just want to blow thru as much content as possible and be done. Do not scale the game or levels and go back to the days of vanilla and burning crusade wow, where if you were not of level and geared high enough you got your face chewed off. The cookie cutter approach and start of scaling with panda land is why I stopped. If you can not build a character and play with the big boys you stay home.
man im glad i never managed to get into WoW. given tis user base if even 20% of them have the elitest douchebag attitude you do I wouldnt be able to justify paying for it monthly.
You are both right. I absolutely found the old times a whole lot more fun even as a vastly casual player. Part of that is logistics, that everything was so much harder to do so it took more time doing it. But on the other hand it was Warcraft and I've always loved Warcraft and it was coherent so it made sense for it to be difficult. Crafting was more rewarding because you had to work for it. Just the simple task of exploring was a dangerous journey, riding was slower and actually took effort to get to, so the world was so much bigger and so much more interesting.
OTOH, that was some time ago. I did play Nostalrius for a bit and it was very nice indeed ... but I probably wouldn't pay for it and even if I remember I actually liked grinding all that leather with my hunter, it probably wasn't very fun. And the elitists are always annoying, even when I'm among them.
EDIT: As for scaling, that is the devils work.
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