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WoW is Dumbed Down now? I disagree.
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Post by
235245
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Dragalthor
It's nice to see someone put a few numbers together on the subject as I agree with you, Scrump, that the end game hasn't gotten any easier over the years.
Pre-level cap over the years things have been greatly improved upon and what was once seen as difficult to the majority of players is now less so but in a lot of cases this is just due to the sheer amount of external resources available to players nowadays.
Some things are undeniably easier these days: the inbuilt quest helper (the fact that so many players were running the addon made this introduction a no-brainer for Blizz), riding available at level 20, automatically learning new spells and no need to keep visiting a class trainer all the time, stream linging of quests etc etc etc. I do not, however,see these things as necessarily bad.
Post by
Rankkor
I agree.
I said previously on a different thread how your average boss in vanilla would have 3 abilities at most. Seriously, there's this boss in Blackwing Lair who's only abilities are Cleave, charge, and mortal strike. That's it. That's seriously it.
Its not the same to compare now and then, because back then, the main reason few people got to raid was NOT the difficulty, but the time-sink in the way. Gearing up so you could ENTER the raid took forever, and then there was the attunement process. And you had to do this for 40 people. And if any of them, even a single on of them stopped playing for whatever reason (and there were plenty of reasons, they got tired, they got bored, they got poached by another guild, etc) you had to suspend progress for months while you groomed a replacement. God help you if you had to groom many.
Back then, we didn't had the tools we have today like recount, LFR, Healbot, Grid, World of Logs, Ask Mr Robot, etc. All of these are taken for granted these days, and people forget how gamechanging they can be.
To everyone that ever tells me how easy raiding has gotten, I always give them the same reply: "Go clear all 14/14 Heroic SoO in 25man mode with zero addons in the entire raid, and with none of your raiders geared with heroic gear. Then come back here, show me a video of you doing all that and tell me again how easy it was"
As a raider currently struggling on Heroic Malkorok, I can say without hesitation on my mind that raiding has NOT gone easier.
To put this in perspective, one would think building a castle was A LOT harder back in the year 1200 given that it took them decades to finish them, whereas today, skyscrapers are finished within a year.
Ohh but back then they lacked all the modern technology we have today, so its not fair to say that the masons and builders back in the old days were better at their job, and that old medieval castles are more complex and elaborate structures, just because it took them 20 years to finish a tall building and we can do it in a single year. In fact, modern buildings are FAR more complex and far more detailed than old medieval castles, and if we had to build skyscrapers today, with the level of technology we had in the 1200, we'd probably take a century or more to finish them.
On the matter of the pruning of abilities, I can understand why blizzard did it, if you look at your average class today, by the time you hit 90, your bar setup looks like a damned piano keyboard.
Sometimes less is more, just look at Diablo 3. Each class has dozens of skills, each of them customizable with 6 different modifications. But you can only use six at a time.
Wildstar is the same, with over 30+ skills per class, yet you can only use six at a time to prevent the whole "Piano Syndrome"
Rather than pruning, I wish blizzard could take this approach with wow, but I guess the pruning will have to do.
Post by
235245
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Interest
I will say I agree, though I think it may be worth pointing out content has gotten more accessible over the years due to say, more linear gear progression paths, a good chunk of which a player can effectively do alone nowadays (technically LFR and Dungeon Finder are both group activities but can be queued for alone alongside anonymous players). Also, because the game is aging, a larger quantity of players have an improved understanding of the game. I can't speak for percentage of playerbase, though with the dwindling number of subscribers overall, it's fair to say it's highly probable the percentage of knowledgable WoW players might have increased over time (at least since Wrath of the Lich King).
The game, however, has also evolved, particularly in the mechanical sense to account for improve playerbase intellect. While some of the revamped quests and dungeons help newer players understand some of these mechanics, they definitely have a lot more to learn in that sense :(
Post by
TickleMeThrall
The game isn't dumbed down, Blizz just took the dumb stuff out. Thank Elune.
Post by
Maurvyn
Well considering that the Devs have said on several occasions that they will not make raiding as difficult as it was in the past I think it's thread over.
Any specific quote?
I have seen Dev editorials on this, and I seem to remember that their intent was to not make raiding as difficult
to access
. The goal was to make raiding easier to become involved in as an activity; not necessarily that the raid environment itself would be easier.
Again, there are separate definitions of " difficult". Is a particular fight a difficult thing, with nasty mechanics and trigger events, etc? Or is the raid itself challenging to enter, through gear reqs, attunement, etc.
I agree with Scrump et al. {BTW, great OP, Scrump}
The raiding environment, especially the "endgame" , is at least as difficult now as it ever was; and probably more so.
On the other hand, there are a lot more people involved in the earlier tiers of raid content than ever before, so the illusion is that somehow "raiding" as a whole must be easier to accommodate all of us scrubs.
Post by
voodoopimp
Some things are undeniably easier these days: the inbuilt quest helper (the fact that so many players were running the addon made this introduction a no-brainer for Blizz), riding available at level 20, automatically learning new spells and no need to keep visiting a class trainer all the time, stream linging of quests etc etc etc. I do not, however,see these things as necessarily bad.
But aside from the built-in quest helper, none of those things really make the game
easier
. Earlier riding makes the game
faster
(a very good thing IMO), but doesn't help you do anything other than having a better shot at running through a high-level area. Automatic spell learning makes things a lot less tedious and means you don't have to forget to get your new ones, but that just protects you from dumb mistakes rather than removing any sort of actual challenge from anything.
Post by
Dragalthor
Some things are undeniably easier these days: the inbuilt quest helper (the fact that so many players were running the addon made this introduction a no-brainer for Blizz), riding available at level 20, automatically learning new spells and no need to keep visiting a class trainer all the time, stream linging of quests etc etc etc. I do not, however,see these things as necessarily bad.
But aside from the built-in quest helper, none of those things really make the game
easier
. Earlier riding makes the game
faster
(a very good thing IMO), but doesn't help you do anything other than having a better shot at running through a high-level area. Automatic spell learning makes things a lot less tedious and means you don't have to forget to get your new ones, but that just protects you from dumb mistakes rather than removing any sort of actual challenge from anything.
I'm not going to disagree with you on this and to be honest I was mainly being facetious when I made this list as these are the, in my experience, most brought up points by people claiming that the game is too 'easy' now.
Post by
235245
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Jkpman
@Scrump
100% in agreement, I've been saying the same thing for years.
I think the term "dumbed down" is stupid, and often used by butt hurt people with rose tinted glasses who for some reason feel that Blizzard making the game more accessible is a bad thing.
Post by
Umbriere
i would personally like to see some kind of level squish. i think getting from level 1 to level 90 thrice as fast would be a better benefit than spending money to boost a character to level 90 by whipping out your credit card. at the same time, i would like to see the 40-90 zones streamlined, especially the 55+ zones. because Sillithus is both mostly inaccessible and abandoned and because nobody quests in outland or northrend anymore, it's just basically do dungeons for 20 levels. and well, people pretty much do a marathon of dungeon runs starting at around 15-20 because they cannot be bothered to travel. in fact, i ran into level 90 players who didn't know how to access Tanaris but had LFR Garrosh gear.
Post by
Jkpman
i would personally like to see some kind of level squish. i think getting from level 1 to level 90 thrice as fast would be a better benefit than spending money to boost a character to level 90 by whipping out your credit card. at the same time, i would like to see the 40-90 zones streamlined, especially the 55+ zones. because Sillithus is both mostly inaccessible and abandoned and because nobody quests in outland or northrend anymore, it's just basically do dungeons for 20 levels. and well, people pretty much do a marathon of dungeon runs starting at around 15-20 because they cannot be bothered to travel. in fact, i ran into level 90 players who didn't know how to access Tanaris but had LFR Garrosh gear.
A level squish won't solve that, in fact Blizzard do boost XP gained pretty much every Xpac making leveling faster.
Some players simply prefer dungeon finder and/or battlegrounds as a way to level. I do so myself but I do have 15 level 90 toons now, and have leveled via questing many many times.
Post by
Umbriere
i would personally like to see some kind of level squish. i think getting from level 1 to level 90 thrice as fast would be a better benefit than spending money to boost a character to level 90 by whipping out your credit card. at the same time, i would like to see the 40-90 zones streamlined, especially the 55+ zones. because Sillithus is both mostly inaccessible and abandoned and because nobody quests in outland or northrend anymore, it's just basically do dungeons for 20 levels. and well, people pretty much do a marathon of dungeon runs starting at around 15-20 because they cannot be bothered to travel. in fact, i ran into level 90 players who didn't know how to access Tanaris but had LFR Garrosh gear.
A level squish won't solve that, in fact Blizzard do boost XP gained pretty much every Xpac making leveling faster.
Some players simply prefer dungeon finder and/or battlegrounds as a way to level. I do so myself but I do have 15 level 90 toons now, and have leveled via questing many many times.
even if it won't solve the lack of questers, it will give new players a reason to actually level the content rather than pay for a 60 dollar per character skip. they would have to triple the leveling rate from 1-90 to make it competitive with the guy whom can whip out his credit card and spend the money on the free boost. if world content was actually exciting and engaging compared to dungeons. people would play them more. another thing i asked for. my problem with the 7 day 90 is it requires a full set of heirlooms, a level 25 guild and a recruited friend leveling alongside you while requiring you both to have a hard core knowledge of the game itself. it takes me a month to get a horde character to 60.
Post by
Adamsm
That's not the game's problem. If it's taking you a month to get to 60 while leveling, you aren't 'doing' it properly. Even without looms, you usually hit the level cap of a zone fairly quickly and still have a crap ton of quests left over.
My last non-loomed character hit the Cata max in about a week to a week and a half, with my work schedule(full time); and that was with only doing the dungeons once for the quest exp from the first time through, and as a DPS, I was still looking at 10-30 min queues depending on which section of content I was one. Though really, back in the day. I hit max level in Wrath(going from 70-80) just from doing all of the quests in Borean Tundra, the Fjord, Dragonblight and half of the Hills; and this was before Looms were introduced.
Post by
Dragalthor
Personally, having just levelled a new character, I found that the only time levelling has seriously slowed down for me was once I hit Pandaria at 85. Up until that point I was flying through the levels even in Silithus/Outlands/Northrend/Cata. This was mostly without 'looms and pre-guilding.
Post by
Adamsm
Personally, having just levelled a new character, I found that the only time levelling has seriously slowed down for me was once I hit Pandaria at 85. Up until that point I was flying through the levels even in Silithus/Outlands/Northrend/Cata. This was mostly without 'looms and pre-guilding.
Well yeah, because there is no Exp boost for Pandaria yet so it's the standard frame of leveling for that.
Post by
Dragalthor
Personally, having just levelled a new character, I found that the only time levelling has seriously slowed down for me was once I hit Pandaria at 85. Up until that point I was flying through the levels even in Silithus/Outlands/Northrend/Cata. This was mostly without 'looms and pre-guilding.
Well yeah, because there is no Exp boost for Pandaria yet so it's the standard frame of leveling for that.
My bad for not making it clear in my post but I was expecting to to slow down once I hit Pandaria and was replying to @Umbriere but being to lazy to make a quote pyramid out of it.
Post by
Umbriere
i am only allowed so many hours of WoW per week due to family issues. about 10 hours a week, on a shared computer, and well, i have so many IRL things going on due to my schedules and my disorders that i often don't get all 10.
plus i get lost easy, even with quest helper and having played since the ending raid tier of BC
Post by
lankybrit
Well, it's clear that WoW has been 'dumbed down' over the years for most of its content. But of course Heroic Raiding wasn't. So saying that one small part of WoW is not dumbed down means that WoW isn't dumbed down is a bit off.
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