https://i.imgflip.com/pu5v9.jpg
Imo WoW is dying hard because of a few things. Pathetic woefully useless crafting, mythic epeen emphasis, disjointed and dead world with garbage story and whack factions. But the biggest fail would have to be all the catering to the instant gratification crowd. It was a great game once but meh, poor WoW.
But ffxiv has allways cattered to the RPG crowd first. Not the "casual", even tho, the later years oversimplification of jobs and how to exp your alt and crafting / gathering jobs is made way too easy for my "rpg" tastes sometimes.
You could say leaning to casuals but it's not really what it is when you get the rpg sense out of most final fantasy's , it's pretty close to the "vision", even tho i just wish for harder raids / and other types of challenges. Really curious about criterion dungeons (people say "oh no not the kind of mythic+ dungeon" but i would really like some type of variety in gear power levels, even if it ment this gear can only be used in criterion dungeons and also, these new ultimates.
And it seems they are going for more content for everyone, so i'm not sad about it.
Not really. The Final Fantasy crowd comes first, IMHO. I do not see much RPG elements in FF14. For me FF14 is more comparable to a third person loot/lobby shooter than a RPG. You have very little influence to the character progression. Higher itemlevel and some meaningless materia and nothing more. No talent trees, no items with special proccs, no items with special disadvantages, no weapon types aka blunt weapon, no weakness or immunities agains types of magic etc.
Cheers
I don’t think he’d be saying “go play other games” if the crafters, rp’ers and housing people left for long periods, unless the new player influx is huge and they stay for the whole msq.
I find it hard to even consider going back to WoW for a lot of reasons, but the gear is one of the major ones.
WoW just has this '' toy figure '' gear design it's hard to explain and I never thought much about it when I still played.
But I think this is especially true in more recent expansions, the armor sets have this weird fake and cheap look.
It's not just WoW tho I feel like this is a thing in most Western games involving loot and especially those that have ingame stores and the armor sets in WoW remind me a lot of skins you'd see in a store.
FFXIV is funnily enough regardless of all the '' lol weeb gaem '' comments significantly more '' grounded '' in the gear design department, not saying that as an inherently good thing but when I look at the gear it makes sense especially for the regions and context of where you get it.
In WoW it sorta feels like it's differently colored LED strips and like everything just has this enormous shapes.
It just looks like they were designed to be toys or like they come from the Warhammer 40k universe but pg-13.
There's also a very severe lack of variety in the actual diversity of types of gear.
As much as people want to whine about it every time we get it ( and it is a very small minority of the gear, people gotta stop pretending otherwise ).
Stuff like skirts and shorts and even heels and thigh-high boots add a lot of variety it makes the gear less homogenous and also allows you to better customize your character to how you imagine them and want them to be.
The types of gear just differs a lot more, even if we look at stuff like the Crystarium gear.
Where in WoW can you get chest pieces like that?
You can't.
The gear all follows the identical framework and there's no actual variety, it's the same with some different colors and shapes but it's ultimately the same at its core.
In WoW you're out of luck unless you want to play a burly warrior in full plate or a mage in robes etc.
There's only one caricature with very little variety and it has only gotten worse with time too.
You simply don't get the wide variety of gear like in FFXIV and it makes WoW very unappealing to me, it doesn't make me excited at all about going out to get gear for transmog.
IMO, every expansion since WotLK has been hostile to casuals. Cataclysm made dungeon difficulty on par with raids while downgrading the gear rewards signficantly for no reason. Players in my Cataclysm raiding guild who were decked out in full Firelands gear refused to run the troll heroics because they were too hard for them. The only reason I even started raiding consistently was that I was tired of being capped at 453 item level from troll heroics when the 378 gear was so much easier to acquire from the raid. They eventually relented and gave casuals reasonable item levels after an unprecedented exodus. In MoP they backslid again. Once again, they made the dungeon loot absolute crap, but this time they made the dungeons a complete faceroll. So once again casuals were capped at crappy gear levels, but from then on they justified it by saying, "Well, their content is easy." That would have held true, except that it was no fun to be running dailies in "casual" gear, pulling one mob at a time in order to not be decimated. In the meantime, some raider would swoop in, pull every single mob in the area, casually faceroll them, and fly off into the distance, leaving you to wait another few minutes for the next respawn. Was that "catering to casuals?" IMO, it decidedly wasn't. I don't know about Legion because I let my sub lapse the day they announced they were going to remove flying from the game to "make the world feel dangerous again." I came back at the end of BFA in anticipation of going hard in SL, but the problems had only grown more extreme, and the game was simply not fun. As an example, crafters at the end of BFA had to grind out mass quantities of a currency that was only available in raids. Grinding the currency through LFR (the equivalent of an alliance raid via duty roulette), the grind literally took years. Grinding it out in a Mythic raid took just weeks. How is that "catering to casuals?"
I love that in this game I deck out every newly capped job in 580 gear that I made myself despite not ever having set foot in Pandemonium. That's a strength of this game, not a weakness, IMO.
I think that your perception of a game's purpose is skewed. I put in effort at my job. If I wanted to put in more effort, I would be logging out of the game and back into work. Most players don't play a game because they feel like they need to put in more of an effort. They do it because it's an effortless activity that they can perform at the end of a long day's/week's worth of effort. Call me a boomer (even though I'm technically Gen X), but the idea that the average player should be expected to do extra curricular research outside of the game, download third party addons (against TOS, mind you), and baby sit every other player in their party is ridiculous to me. The average player in your static is in no way representative of the average player game-wide. I have no problems with players who set these insane expectations in their FC/static, but I get really irritated when they try to claim that the game would be better if it were imposed on everyone else. Contrary to the OP's claim, this is the mentality that brought WoW into decline.
The fact that I was in the most casual guild you can imagine and yet they still expected us to be clearing a mythic 10 every week is the very thing that prompted me to unsub from WoW. I'm sorry, but when a game considers that level of effort as the bare minimum for entry, it's gone too far off the rails. If FFXIV were to go that route, I would stop playing it, too. Thankfully YoshiP is a reasonable man.
So you had to clear mythic 10 every week to remain a member of this casual guild? I smell some bs some where. Probably the fact that about 95% of players in WoW do not touch mythic raids at all so a casual guild wanting everyone to clear what only about 5% of the players are even doing sounds off.
No. I had to clear Mythic 10 to participate in the weekly raid, which is pretty much all there is to do in WoW. If you don't raid or M+, there's no prorgression for you. Also, what does M10 have to do with Mythic raiding? M10 means a Mythic dungeon with a key level of 10. To put it in context, imagine that tomestone gear item level went no higher than 550, which is even worse than the gear you buy in old Sharlayan for finishing the MSQ. If you wanted anything higher than 560, you'd have to run Savage or Ultimate raids. There is no Mythic keystone in FFXIV, so there's nothing I can compare that to, but imagine that they cut the timers for all the roulettes to about 1/4 of what they are and they downscaled your rewards if you failed them. That was pretty much WoW's state when I let my sub lapse.
My work is very taxing and exhausting. I also play FF to have fun and relax. You know what I don't find enjoyable or relaxing? 15 minute runs taking 25 to 30 minutes. Carrying people who want to do the bare minimum because their fun is more important above all else.
You don't have to be in a static, download a parser, do research on optimization and perfect your rotation to be midcore. I don't partake in any of that. But having low expectations that are still higher than "healers dont need to dps and dps only need to press their 1-2-3" does not make someone hardcore or an elitist. If using your kit, not even optimally but just using it in general, is too much effort for you to put in, find some friends who are willing to carry you and don't subject the randoms you get paired with to your selfishness.
Also, if a healer not being expected to dps is midcore, by your own assessment, what would make them a casual?
Sorry you view more time in the game as more work. Our perspectives are clearly very different. If I'm playing 15 minutes or thirty minutes, I'm just happy I'm playing. That's what the game is all about: playing. If I'm in a fight and everyone else dies because I'm the only one who knows the mechanics, I'm happy to solo the boss and receive the commendations later. I'm even happy to provide tips to the other random players in the group so they can be more helpful next time around. I don't sulk and complain that I carried everyone on my back because they didn't "work" as hard as I did. I don't demand extra bonuses for my excessive effort. I don't insist that SE nerf everyone else's rewards to punish players with worse reflexes or that they increase the difficulty even further to get everyone to step up their game for the sake of an arbitrary baseline that I've established.
Well said! I'm glad we agree.
It doesn't make you hardcore, but it does make you elitist. If you don't like running MSQ roulette as White Mage, then do Astrologian. Or equip your best gear so that you can get into a higher level raid and manage lillies. You do you. Please quit insisting that SE force everyone else to do the same.
And now you're just putting words in my mouth. I never said that players shouldn't use their entire kit. I simply said that there's no need for SE to expand it beyond what it already is. I also said that there's nothing wrong with consolidating existing skills to make the kit easier to manage. Was I sad to consolidate three gunbreaker buttons onto a single one? I was not. According to the OP, however, it's dumbing down the game for everyone and "catering to casuals."
Again, midcore is casual. There's hardcore, midcore, and low skill. Midcore and low skill are typically casual. This video describes my feelings on what is and isn't casual pretty well:
https://youtu.be/ZGCFxHUsSGU
The community for this game tends to have a weird way they apply these terms tbh. It usually refers to the types of content you primarily interact with, rather than the amount of time you spend with it. I don't know why it's that way and I've always found it kind of odd myself, but its probably where some of the confusion in this thread is stemming from.
'Casual' usually refers to people who primarily just do roulette content, MSQ, crafting, roleplay etc. Doesn't matter if you have 2000 hours crafting or can recite every line of dialogue in the story, if it's all you really do you're still considered 'casual'
'Hardcore' is typically reserved for people who clear savage tiers on a scale of days or weeks, and clear current ultimates. You can spend 6 hours a week playing the game and still be considered hardcore by the community.
Regardless, if SE is catering to those people who just do roulette content, MSQ, and crafting, then I think they'll be just fine. The fact that they successfully cater to those guys while also throwing in Savage and Ultimate content with prestige items is great. My point is that WoW's decline is due to Blizzard completely throwing those players by the wayside and exclusively focusing on the high end content. To mix terminology between the two games, they've made all dungeons Savage-level, added a very tight timer to them, and downscaled the gear rewards (present and future) for any group that fails to clear the timer. I didn't mean to make this a conversation about casual versus hardcore. I'm just contesting the OP's assertion that Blizzard caters to casuals as well as the suggestion that continuing to cater to casuals will send the game into decline.
I like how this one comment has people going "B-b-but I've played even LONGER!"
ok for real here's my question: I didn't come from WoW (I'm a RuneScape/PSO2 player LMAO). Is WoW dead or not? I feel like even among current WoW players it's just a hard call to make. Is it in the "incoming maintenance mode" stage or what?
Dead? No. Dying? Yeah, without a doubt, but it could get a course correct if they make some meaningful changes with the next expansion. Shadowlands did more damage to the game than any expansion before it, and that says a lot given how Cataclysm and Warlords of Draenor turned out. Battle for Azeroth wasn't the greatest either but it still kept me playing. The ongoing drama and lawsuits played their part as well, but that had an affect on all of their products.
Dang, their only hope right now must be Microsoft or something to set things right lol. I only know WoW's recent expansion from the EW/Eternity's end comparison memes.. Whatever they're doing must be super underwhelming. Other than the lawsuits and I know for a fact Blizzard won't recover from that for a loooong time.
Have got to feel bad for WoW players honestly. I ride the "dying" boat of Jagex's RS3 and it sucks seeing your game go down in the dumps. It's like watching the world's slowest death by sock bashing
WoW was at one time my favorite game ever. It has fallen quite far on that list lately. Haven't touched it since...October I think? I had been gone for a while before that. Was playing one day and it just...dawned on me that I wasn't having fun anymore. So I left. Haven't been back since. I want to go back, but only when they've got themselves together. That may be weeks from now or never. My money's on never.
Sadly, I don't see them correcting course, either. Just now, there was outrage over the fact that they had only timegated flying for two weeks and then realized that players might actually start having fun in under a month, so they increased the timegate to four weeks for no apparent reason. Honestly, their decisions simply feel contemptuous. I may not agree with every decision that SE makes, but at least their decisions never feel straight up malicious.
Mythic 10 is dungeon content and reasonably puggable. It gives you a piece of heroic level raid gear every week so most players will clear it. Going beyond 10 is usually more serious players. I’d say the majority of players in WoW cleared mythic+ 10 every week.
I struggle to make good home-made pie crust too. It never turns out the way I want it. So I end up using pre-made crusts out of necessity.
Excellent idea, Conundrum.
I love key lime pie!
This is my go to recipe; but, I like to substitute a (pre-made) crushed oreo crust for the graham cracker crust. The chocolate sets off the key lime quite nicely!
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/...ecipe1-2011840
Since I'm diabetic, I can only eat a couple bites a day but that only makes the pie last longer. :D
Oh enough. Your time on forums is consistently promoting mediocre play while trying to shut down anyone who doesn’t want to have to carry another player that doesn’t want to put in an honest effort. Idk if it’s entitlement, selfishness or trying to cover up a self poor performance. But it’s ridiculous
I have a recipe that substitutes 1/4 cup of water with vodka. Gives the dough pliancy without adding too much water and making it super sticky. The alcohol cooks off and leaves no after taste. The recipe is the "fool proof pie crust" from Cooks Illustrated. Its never failed me.
People are allowed to have different means of enjoyment. Honestly, you're the one who is acting like an elitist. I don't expect perfection. You seem to expect everyone to conform to your way of thought and play. To say that I don't understand the purpose of the game is ridiculous. The game doesn't have 1 singular purpose, but I suppose you think that your purpose for playing is the only purpose.
You tell me not to put words in your mouth while stating that I am trying to force anyone into anything. I have not said once for SE to impliment anything, change anything, do anything. I don't cry when people don't want to play "my way". I was simply stating that different people have different concepts of what is fun and enjoyable. You, on the other hand, seem to think poorly of anyone who has a differing opinion. Screams "elitist" to me. Very "Better Than Thou".
Besides, Ronduwil, there is very much a huge difference between people who put in an honest effort but are subpar, and people who are perfectly content being subpar and refuse to try because that's "no fun". Don't conflate the two. I have no issue with the former. The latter, however, are entitled.