World of Warcraft: Dragon Desperation

[Abesolus]

Yeah its over, now theyve added something called "follower dungeons" which fill all roles with bots....
who are these people making games to? fuck this shit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo_2pZGcWrY&t=199s

It was over a while ago. People still cling, myself included. Follower dugeons, as the video you linked said, are for normal dungeons. I see no issue with them. Grouping in WoW with anything but actual friends is shit anyways. Also, it will give some people a chance to try roles they might otherwise have never tried due to the pressures associated with playing with impatient, judgemental assholes. Also, if you are using dungeon finder for a needed dungeon and the que time is long, this could alleviate that. I think it was a boon to FFXIV and will be to ailing WoW as well.

As for who the people making this game are... they are male feminist, danger haired weirdos, homosexuals, and most likely a few blacks as well.

What don't you like about "follower dungeons"?

the problem is, it all starts with something minimal "oh but its just normal dungeons" then it progresses to heroic, then m+ then raiding. but i guess they know their customers, i dont think anyone "normal" plays wow anymore since they're cating to people with no social skills.

 

[abija]

Yeah its over, now theyve added something called "follower dungeons" which fill all roles with bots....
who are these people making games to? fuck this shit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo_2pZGcWrY&t=199s

That's a great feature (if working as advertised). Should also make it available for m0.

 

[Delterius]

My guess is that the past ten years of WoW have steadily alienated the playerbase, with BFA and Shadowlands in particular burning off a lot of the hanger ons. Now you're left with a niche of hardcore players who are content with doing the same raid over and over for 9 months or speedrunning the same half dozen dungeons over and over for 6 months.

I have heard a lot of talk about how 'WoW does not respect your playtime', which I don't think it ever did. So I'm inclined to think that the actual activities involved in playing WoW are tedious in and of themselves. Haven't played it in years so... lootbox mechanics for chasing BiS, is that what the game is about? It's quite a contrast to FFXIV whose devs literally say, yo if it's a content drought and you don't feel like doing any of the other types of games we added into the game, just unsub for a few months - we'll still be here.

Nonetheless, while I maintain that 95% of the players aren't mental (by which I mean actually care about the story of Warcraft), I do think the world is the main character of any MMO. And the way Blizzard has evolved the setting of the world of warcraft is legendarily bad. One thing is to have the purported creators of much of the setting have robots and such, which is what the Titans were. Another entirely is to have the capital G gods of the setting like Elune and her sister be afterlife landlord-robots created in the factory of infinite afterlives.

No one who picked a Priest or a Druid or a Shaman to play as back in 2004 did so with the implicit understanding that everything is this bullshit. Forgotten Realms and Golarion are worlds in which the gods are literally playing Dominions with the souls of mortals, everything is part of an alignment chart, but even those settings wouldn't go so far as to create the Post-Fordism of creation myths.

 

[Delterius]

Yeah its over, now theyve added something called "follower dungeons" which fill all roles with bots....
who are these people making games to? fuck this shit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo_2pZGcWrY&t=199s

Follower dungeons is a thing that FFXIV did and I suspect that it, together with things like pretending Shadowlands was the end of a grand story arc that was planned for all along, is just Blizzard going from 'steal from others and refine their features' to outright cargo cultism.

That said, follower dungeons in XIV exist in a given context. Which is that FFXIV is a plot driven story game. Developing a follower AI or a method to implement said AI has a feedback loop that benefits the solo story sections of the game. Moreover there's a supporting cast that has been with your character since level 15 or thereabouts. And even so most people don't use the system because the AI is built with purposeful flaws. It won't clear a dungeon as quickly as a party of players because the NPCs can't fight more than one pack of enemies at once. And, say, if you bring in character A which is siblings with character B, character A will go out of their way to heal character B first. Not you or the tank. It's the sort of thing for a niche audience within the MMO, which is what FFXIV is always doing. Adding auxiliary systems around the core of the game like an entire fucking Animal Crossing island system.

So the question I have is, does WoW plan to do that sort of thing? Am I going to clear dungeons with Jaina and Thrall? The fact that it says follower dungeons make me feel that won't be the case. That said, it would be an opportunity to let the writers estabilish new characters - followers - in a context where the player is primed to actually like them. Ie as comrades in arms.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Follower dungeons is a thing that FFXIV did and I suspect that it, together with things like pretending Shadowlands was the end of a grand story arc that was planned for all along, is just Blizzard going from 'steal from others and refine their features' to outright cargo cultism.

That said, follower dungeons in XIV exist in a given context. Which is that FFXIV is a plot driven story game. Developing a follower AI or a method to implement said AI has a feedback loop that benefits the solo story sections of the game. Moreover there's a supporting cast that has been with your character since level 15 or thereabouts. And even so most people don't use the system because the AI is built with purposeful flaws. It won't clear a dungeon as quickly as a party of players because the NPCs can't fight more than one pack of enemies at once. And, say, if you bring in character A which is siblings with character B, character A will go out of their way to heal character B first. Not you or the tank. It's the sort of thing for a niche audience within the MMO, which is what FFXIV is always doing. Adding auxiliary systems around the core of the game like an entire fucking Animal Crossing island system.

So the question I have is, does WoW plan to do that sort of thing? Am I going to clear dungeons with Jaina and Thrall? The fact that it says follower dungeons make me feel that won't be the case. That said, it would be an opportunity to let the writers estabilish new characters - followers - in a context where the player is primed to actually like them. Ie as comrades in arms.

Your posts are like broken AI trying to sound human.

 

[Delterius]

As an AI language model trained by Open AI, I have successfully identified you as one of us.

01100100 01100101 01101100 01100101 01110100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100011 01100101

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have heard a lot of talk about how 'WoW does not respect your playtime', which I don't think it ever did.

The game used to respect your playtime because it was about the social interaction, which the game used to facilitate, back before megaservers and when doing dungeons was a time commitment and there was no personal loot so guilds had to be formed to progress through raids. You formed friendships with people over these activities. Then over the years, Blizzard implementing LFG, cross realm, teleporting to instances, catchup gear, personal loot, shrunk the raid sizes, etc, so now people don't bond with each other anymore, and instead just go into WoW with a selfish mercenary mentality keeping each other at arms length, and when they do interact with each other it is only for a 20 minute PUG run and they will never see each other again, and view each other as cogs in a machine to be replaced.

It's quite a contrast to FFXIV whose devs literally say, yo if it's a content drought and you don't feel like doing any of the other types of games we added into the game, just unsub for a few months - we'll still be here.

FFXIV is worse. There is no content to do. Though WoW is a shadow of its formerself, you can at least bond with some people doing epic battleground communities or RBGs. FFXIV doesn't even have that.

 

[Frank Capicoli]

Then over the years, Blizzard implementing LFG, cross realm, teleporting to instances, catchup gear, personal loot, shrunk the raid sizes, etc, so now people don't bond with each other anymore, and instead just go into WoW with a selfish mercenary mentality keeping each other at arms length, and when they do interact with each other it is only for a 20 minute PUG run and they will never see each other again, and view each other as cogs in a machine to be replaced.

While these mechanics implemented didn't help they aren't the end all cause of the problem. Plenty of classic private servers have none of these yet the problem still persists. Teleporting to dungeons is the least offensive of these ideals. Can't tell you well enough how tired I am of waiting 20 minutes for people to fly from SW to EPL just to run strath.

 

[Deimos]

I think it's just overexposure to always being online. People live online through their phone and pay no attention to their surroundings most of the time. Back when Wow first came out people still had some humanity and knew how to properly communicate with another human being.

 

[J1M]

There is a rumor that the Dragonflight writing lead(s) (team?!) are gone. I'm hoping this means Christie Golden too, not just Steve Danuser.

Whaat? Christie Golden is part of the official Blizzard lore team?!

Senior Writer?! Are you kidding me.

Has been for 6 years.

Apparently her role for Shadowlands and Dragonflight was to, among other things, take input from the writing team and coalesce it into the dialog for the cinematics.

Metzen wrote the War Within cinematic.

 

[J1M]

Yeah its over, now theyve added something called "follower dungeons" which fill all roles with bots....
who are these people making games to? fuck this shit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo_2pZGcWrY&t=199s

Follower dungeons is a thing that FFXIV did and I suspect that it, together with things like pretending Shadowlands was the end of a grand story arc that was planned for all along, is just Blizzard going from 'steal from others and refine their features' to outright cargo cultism.

That said, follower dungeons in XIV exist in a given context. Which is that FFXIV is a plot driven story game. Developing a follower AI or a method to implement said AI has a feedback loop that benefits the solo story sections of the game. Moreover there's a supporting cast that has been with your character since level 15 or thereabouts. And even so most people don't use the system because the AI is built with purposeful flaws. It won't clear a dungeon as quickly as a party of players because the NPCs can't fight more than one pack of enemies at once. And, say, if you bring in character A which is siblings with character B, character A will go out of their way to heal character B first. Not you or the tank. It's the sort of thing for a niche audience within the MMO, which is what FFXIV is always doing. Adding auxiliary systems around the core of the game like an entire fucking Animal Crossing island system.

So the question I have is, does WoW plan to do that sort of thing? Am I going to clear dungeons with Jaina and Thrall? The fact that it says follower dungeons make me feel that won't be the case. That said, it would be an opportunity to let the writers estabilish new characters - followers - in a context where the player is primed to actually like them. Ie as comrades in arms.

Will probably have some story quests next expansion that involve named NPC using follower dungeon tech. Expect a test of that in one of their "point 7" patches.

But the end goal is that the followers you see in a dungeon are your own alts. Now you have 5x more transmog slots to collect for.

 

[Delterius]

But the end goal is that the followers you see in a dungeon are your own alts.

wow this would be crack cocaine for several friends i had made in WoW over the years

genius

 

[Delterius]

Then over the years, Blizzard implementing LFG, cross realm, teleporting to instances, catchup gear, personal loot, shrunk the raid sizes, etc, so now people don't bond with each other anymore, and instead just go into WoW with a selfish mercenary mentality keeping each other at arms length, and when they do interact with each other it is only for a 20 minute PUG run and they will never see each other again, and view each other as cogs in a machine to be replaced.

While these mechanics implemented didn't help they aren't the end all cause of the problem. Plenty of classic private servers have none of these yet the problem still persists. Teleporting to dungeons is the least offensive of these ideals. Can't tell you well enough how tired I am of waiting 20 minutes for people to fly from SW to EPL just to run strath.

It's a feedback loop between the players and the devs, which slowly changes everyone's perception of what the game is about. You start off walking towards Wailing Caverns and being careful to explore places like Moonbrook as you quest through the game. All the while you talk to people, exchange buffs, ask for help with quests. Eventually the novelty wears off, but that's not all. You keep gaining more convenient ways to engage with the content. To me the watershed moment is not even LFG. It's flying mounts. Once the world of warcraft itself is an inconvenience you work towards skipping from the air, why not teleport around?

Soon enough all the systems which once determined that people cooperate and interact start breaking apart. Professions, questing, gear progression, and so on. There's no real reason for the devs to put their feet down and maintain those systems because at one point the players themselves don't care for them.

By then the social experience is entirely up to the playerbase's culture as it's no longer fundamental to the game.

 

[Abesolus]

Might aswell call the game world of girlcraft at this point.
Making all the male characters irrelevant or a shadow of themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtXDniovS-A

 

[Late Bloomer]

The youtube comments from the danger hairs and male feminist absolutely loved it. It's a shame what they did with all the men in that game.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Damn. Genn used to be awesome, and this is what has become of him? A weak, tired man abdicating the throne for his daughter who did nothing until now? What happened to this man?

 

[mediocrepoet]

Meh. Warcraft ended with WotLK.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Darn, Malfurion and Tyrande got retired too. That elf girl teenager is now the "leader" of the Night Elves now. All the old faction leaders are being killed off and being replaced by girls. Oh, earlier in the expansion, Wrathion was cucked out of becoming the new Earth-Warder by that passive cow Ebyssian.

 

[Myobi]

Darn, Malfurion and Tyrande got retired too. That elf girl teenager is now the "leader" of the Night Elves now. All the old faction leaders are being killed off and being replaced by girls. Oh, earlier in the expansion, Wrathion was cucked out of becoming the new Earth-Warder by that passive cow Ebyssian.

Bro, stop hatin on final f... oh wait...

I thought Blizz was bought by Microsoft, not netflix...

 

[Late Bloomer]

Oh my word... this is awful.

 

[Elttharion]

Meh. Warcraft ended with WotLK.

Arguably it should never even went that far. Arthas was a planet killer entity with limitless undead at his command, killing him, even with a macguffin, meant that Warcraft needed to go the shonen route and keep introducing bigger and more powerful villains.

 

[Axel_am]

Meh. Warcraft ended with WotLK.

Arguably it should never even went that far. Arthas was a planet killer entity with limitless undead at his command, killing him, even with a macguffin, meant that Warcraft needed to go the shonen route and keep introducing bigger and more powerful villains.

They have introduced bigger baddies, but none of them have carried the weight that Arthas has.
Or any of the other characters that have been previously introduced in WarCraft 3. All of the villains and most of the lore introduced with WoW has been fairly weak.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Garrosh and Lei Shen were great.

 

[Axel_am]

I'd agree Garrosh was pretty well done for the most part. Him getting cucked by Thrall during their Mak'Rogahn just shows that Blizzard don't know how to end a story. Lei Shen I don't know much of, just that he's from the Pandaria exp.

 

[Vyvian]

Blizzard: Hey let's finally put a bow on the Worgen origin story. Should we make it about Genn finally calling his people home to retake it from the Forsaken that still infest the city? Oh you're right we can't have consequence and bitterness between races anymore let's just dig up the Scarlet Crusade again. Oh and let's have Calia Menethil and the Forsaken help the Gilneans, I'm sure they'd be happy to accept help from the group that killed their families and blighted their land. It doesn't make sense? It doesn't have to we're only doing this to emasculate one of the last remaining strong male characters and make a heavy handed statement about his wall.

Just remember that Illidan will return at some point. King Chud himself surely has a danger hair target on his back.