Thread 717876475

Was this the beginning of the end?

>>717876475 (OP)
It's really obvious that Wrath was the beginning of the end. The oldfags were always right.

it is funny to me when ppl who spent their lives playing baby games suddenly pretend they have standards and act like their game got too baby. u are the source of ur own downfall.

cata enjoyers shit on lktrannies and tbc boomers

>>717876475 (OP)
that would be wrath

after ulduar everyone went to work on project titan and the year long droughts began which pissed everyone off

>>717876475 (OP)
nope, TBC was. Wrath was where it started becoming really apparent, and Cata was the final nail in the coffin, but all of the design decisions that ultimately led to the end can be traced back to TBC.

other than the old world being destroyed cata isn't all that different from wrath desu

>>717876643
This. I'm a Wrathbabby and replaying it on a private server destroyed any delusions I had about it. Catchup gear ruined that expansion.

>>717877753
You're not wrong, desu. Cata was basically Wrath's systems but with more sparkly lava and flying mounts everywhere. The core rot was already there: dungeon finder, gear inflation, chasing metrics. They just gutted the world for flavor. Same soup, just served in a cracked bowl.

>>717876475 (OP)
After playing it all up to this point of mop on the 2019 servers, I think the downwards trend started in wrath but cata was the nail in the coffin

>>717876643
The causalfags disagree with this, and that's why shitaclysm nerfed every heroic dungeon and tier 11 into the ground because they fucked up so bad. The player counts don't lie either.

>>717877753
heroics were too hard for the boomers

>>717877753
They just fucked up every stat in the game for no reason and alienated all the casuals that they're now constantly groveling to with no player count increases in return. You can't have a functional game when your audience is the top 1% of retarded faggots, and the bottom 1% of the subhumanity that logs on for 10 minutes.

>>717876475 (OP)
No, this was

Just two more weeks until WoW is over

>>717877753
The old being destroyed the biggest offense, and a sign of Blizzard's total arrogance. "Old is always worse. We are always getting better. How can you like what we previously did?" Wrath was Wrath. It was up in Northrend. Cata's a plague that infects every retail player who tries to start in a normal leveling zone.

what are the odds they hold anniversary servers at wotlk this time around :) or at least let people pick and chose dont force people to next expansion idk

>>717879956
People would rather play on a pay to win private server hosted in Russia than play Blizzard's wrath custom funserver.

>>717876475 (OP)
No.

The beginning of the end started with the beta of the game, and each iteration of their MMO mechanics only got worse.

Instances were a mistake, capping instance sizes was a mistake, lowering raid sizes was a mistake, 10-25 split was a mistake, heroic dungeons were a mistake, heroic raids were a mistake, dungeon finder was a mistake, raid finder was a mistake.

MMORPGs is a social game genre, its about working with others to achieve a goal, in sandbox MMOs its about building the biggest castles and knocking down your enemies, in themeparks its about exploring the world and killing the super boss.

What WOW did was it focused so hard on sweaty poopsockers that they forgot about the rest of the world, they streamlined everything to get people into end game raiding ASAP, but then realized that end game raiding doesn't have a lot to offer and once people beat the raid, they have no reason to stick around, especially when they made PVE gear worthless in PVP.

Vanilla WOW was a happy accident of great things, and the first seemless open 3D MMO without loading screens between zones, just continents, and TBC/WOTLK was compelling to play because it continued storylines that began in WC3.

But by the time Cataclysm hit it had no compelling story to keep people around, PVP at this point was completely abandoned and adding flying to the Old World was the last straw that killed PVP servers so players couldn't make their own fun anymore.

Dungeon Finder is also incredibly damaging to any MMO, pre-raid PUGs are where players are supposed to engage with other players, and where communities would naturally form, instead Cataclysm's PUG scene was dead due to dungeon finder, and the only reason people joined guilds was because cataclysm added in free gold generation for active guilds, so every single person without a guild on the server was spammed to death with spambots that to this day still haven't been banned even if the free gold generation was removed

>>717880303
Because WOW removed all of its social elements out of the game for everything except end game raiding, they had to start timegating the playerbase, When you have a game that you want people to play for months, but you turn a 200+ hour adventure to 'end game' into a 2 hour dungeon blitz with hierlooms, you force people to the end game, at which point you're stuck raidlogging.

Raidlogging, Timegates, are the biggest crutch, and makes the social aspects of the game even worse, not only are you competing with your fellow players for limited raid slots, you're now competing with them over the limited amount of slot machine rolls per week that actually gives you incentive to even play the game in the first place.

Then after all of that, all your raid gear gets replaced by welfare catch up gear in a single patch, meaning spending months wiping on bosses because billy the guild retard keeps dying to groundfire, forcing wipes because you can't beat an enrage timer without a full DPS roaster

>>717876475 (OP)
never played cata but supposedly when it launched they made it way harder than wotlk to compensate for how easy it was and to appeal to the more hardcore crowd. then when it launched all the wrathbabies cried on the forums and they eventually nerfed and dumbed everything down

>>717879459
Heroics weren't hard, its heroics+dungeon finder and the fact most players only queued to do their daily valor chore, they just wanted to get that shit over with, they weren't there to carry a newbro who actually needed gear

>>717880819
It wasn't hard, it was just pre-raid gear+dungeon finder, once tanks were geared they were soloing dungeons just like WOTLK