AT THIS POINT in World of Warcraft

[Donoman]

Tell me you haven't played casually over those expansions without telling me you haven't played casually over those expansions.

What came out at the same time as M+? Some of the largest degrees of casually-accessible catch-up gear, a granular and infinite means of progression available to all stratums of engagement with content and which with decay in value as gear advantage increased, content additions disproportionately of use to casual players (4 post-cap zones in Legion, World Quests being added to the game), purely for fun side-content (an entire chapter of the main storyline via Suramar, Wretched Training, etc.)...

The breadth and depth of content available to players who enjoyed more combat-gameplay-centric content increased, yes... but so did the content available to those who more enjoyed the open world, puzzles, questing, soft progression, etc., in equal measure.

In the same expansion, they made profession recipes drop in dungeons, introduced borrowed power in the form of artifact weapons and legendaries, and gutted PvP customization with the introduction of templates. The thing is, if hardcore players are playing a grindy mess, it's even worse for casual players who don't want to grind because there's no way they'll ever catch up, and that's exactly what Legion's release was. Yes, they "fixed" some of the grinds on the last content patch, which is what they have done for years, and that is why so many people quit because they were getting sick of Blizzard's formula of releasing crappy content and then "fixing" it as the expansion progressed. WoW just has the illusion of better and longer-lasting casual content because it's so grindy, but it's not even close to what FFXIV has to offer. The endgame is a different story, however.

[MonsutaMan]

WoW was able to milk the community for nearly 20 years.....

......No MMO in history will be able to accomplish that feat imo.

XIV's rise started, when? 2019-ish? Nearly 20 years from then, the League of Legends MMO will probably be dominating the landscape......or WoW 2, maybe that Warframe title as-well. XIV has been losing players now; WoW was dominate with BS content for nearly 2 decades.

I have no idea how they did it......

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

WoW was able to milk the community for nearly 20 years.....

......No MMO in history will be able to accomplish that feat imo.

XIV's rise started, when? 2019-ish? Nearly 20 years from then, the League of Legends MMO will probably be dominating the landscape......or WoW 2, maybe that Warframe title as-well. XIV has been losing players now; WoW was dominate with BS content for nearly 2 decades.

I have no idea how they did it......

Because WoW has been around for a VERY long time. To the point its become a Full On Culture.
I dont think any other MMO will ever match that Feat. I guess the only way FFXIV could meet that energy and Fan-Loyalty, is if they made books to tell stories that arnt explained in the game.
I think Garlamald and Acsian Stories would sell pretty well.

Maybe even Lore-Dives, or even Tales of the 1st Shard.
Explore other stories separated from the WoL and characters of the Source.

[Shinkuno]

WoW was able to milk the community for nearly 20 years.....

......No MMO in history will be able to accomplish that feat imo.

XIV's rise started, when? 2019-ish? Nearly 20 years from then, the League of Legends MMO will probably be dominating the landscape......or WoW 2, maybe that Warframe title as-well. XIV has been losing players now; WoW was dominate with BS content for nearly 2 decades.

I have no idea how they did it......

Dont think we should call out other games for BS content when we constantly get dead-on-arrival content like Island Sanctuary and Variant Dungeons. FF14 is probably the most "put minimal effort" MMO on the market.

[Alleluia]

WoW was able to milk the community for nearly 20 years.....

......No MMO in history will be able to accomplish that feat imo.

XIV's rise started, when? 2019-ish? Nearly 20 years from then, the League of Legends MMO will probably be dominating the landscape......or WoW 2, maybe that Warframe title as-well. XIV has been losing players now; WoW was dominate with BS content for nearly 2 decades.

I have no idea how they did it......

Psychology.


Also, I will definitely be playing FF14 20 years from now if the story is good. I still play the mainline entries when they come out if the story is good. The franchise itself has been going for 30+ years. 14 will eventually reach a point where it can't update its mechanics to "stay current" enough for a lot of people, but WoW does demonstrate both that you can stretch an old engine more than you think you can, and also that being the next hot new thing doesn't have to matter when you actually do the thing that people liked about you well. They've only gotten in trouble when they stopped doing the latter.

[TheMightyMollusk]

WoW was able to milk the community for nearly 20 years.....

......No MMO in history will be able to accomplish that feat imo.

XIV's rise started, when? 2019-ish? Nearly 20 years from then, the League of Legends MMO will probably be dominating the landscape......or WoW 2, maybe that Warframe title as-well. XIV has been losing players now; WoW was dominate with BS content for nearly 2 decades.

I have no idea how they did it......

Compared to its contemporaries when Vanilla WoW was released, it was a massive step forward in what an MMO could do. Look up some of the really old MMOs to see what they were like. Unfortunately, WoW has never really moved on from that stage, it just has so much inertia that it stays around.

[R041]

Compared to its contemporaries when Vanilla WoW was released, it was a massive step forward in what an MMO could do. Look up some of the really old MMOs to see what they were like. Unfortunately, WoW has never really moved on from that stage, it just has so much inertia that it stays around.

That's crazy talk, WoW is so ahead of every MMO in terms of server/instance and coop tech - I don't know if anyone's catching up anytime soon. XIV especially is still 10 years behind there.

They've made it feel like no matter what you're doing there's always people around, and the systems are extremely casual friendly and open ended.

We can sit here and blame it on it being an old MMO, but it doesn't feel old in Dragonflight.

[Shurrikhan]

In the same expansion, they...

made profession recipes drop in dungeons

Dungeon recipes also dropped from world quests and rep. It was also far from the first time dungeons dropped recipes; the difference was merely that it affected upgrades rather than even the base item being restricted to the dungeon-dropped recipe, etc.

introduced borrowed power in the form of artifact weapons and legendaries

First off, let's not pretend borrowed power is any different in itself from any other sort of temporary power (which is, of course all of it... from Tier Sets to Blessed Blade of the Windseeker to WotLK's ICC catch-up legendary sword) except in that they tend to offer less RNG-dependent customization by taking some power from gear alone to sub-systems akin to talents. It's not as if you're going to hold onto the previous expansion's tier sets over gear from the next expansion's first raid, or even take the first raid's tier over the second unless the latter is cripplingly bugged.

Artifact Weapons and Legendaries (which were disproportionately dropped by open world content; to the point I got my second just doing Argos before my Maw-spamming friends got their first from M+), as a form of gear inflation, helped equalize ilvls across stratums. Both increased the relative power available to players who did only casual content as the rewards scaled poorly with increased difficulty. The only groups to lose out from Artifact Weapons were those who simply played very few hours.

The thing is, if hardcore players are playing a grindy mess, it's even worse for casual players who don't want to grind because there's no way they'll ever catch up, and that's exactly what Legion's release was.

Let's not confuse a massively diminishing returns to the point of basically soft-capping progress with if someone wants to milk a 0.2% advantage over others for 300x the AP of the same flat bonus (at the time, a hugely larger relative bonus) at earlier times... with a necessarily "grindy mess" for all.

If XIV gave you means to, for infinitely upgrade your relic weapon at 1 item ilvl at a time, but for double the work every item level, would the game instantly become a "grindy mess" just because a few might take the game up on that opportunity well beyond any time-efficient extent? When it takes 5% of the grind to get 80+% of the bonus held by any no-lifer, how is that "even worse for casual players"?

You can dislike that the carrot is being hung there at all (rather than catch-up mechanics being included at fixed item levels and on a fixed release schedule whereby casual players are encouraged and then, in relative terms, discouraged from playing based on the recency of their release), but it at worst that system only hurts the truly obsessive min-maxers; by itself, because AP's resultant power growth diminished sharply with height of said power, far more so than M+ or weekly raid farms even when considering the relative waste faced in nearing BiS, AP was largely a catch-up mechanic. You can call it grindy, because it always gave people something to do, but at its core it was not "unfriendly" to those who didn't care to do the harder parts of combat content; it just gave everyone a lot more available to do.

By all means, there's a ton to criticize, but those reasons don't particularly pan out.

Yes, they "fixed" some of the grinds on the last content patch, which is what they have done for years, and that is why so many people quit because they were getting sick of Blizzard's formula of releasing crappy content and then "fixing" it as the expansion progressed.

Now that is a good point. Trying something new every expansion from Legion until Dragonflight meant that the new things usually started off very flawed. I'm still not sure though that I'd consider that worse than literally just never trying in the first place, though.

WoW just has the illusion of better and longer-lasting casual content because it's so grindy, but it's not even close to what FFXIV has to offer. The endgame is a different story, however.

It doesn't even any attempt any such illusion until endgame, though? Leveling takes only 5-10 hours and gives you complete freedom to go for whatever expansions/storylines one wants until reaching the newest expansions' levels. If anything, it's a plethora of content that pretends to be next to nothing.

And at endgame, even if we ignore M+, WoW has just as high a release rate of boss fights (e.g., combining ARs, NRs, SRs, and Trials), atop typically including whole new zones each major patch, something we haven't seen here since Stormblood with Anemos. Like Eureka, they haven't all been great, but it's difficult to point any particular XIV metric, fairly compare it to WoW, and say "yeah, WoW's just producing way less content," even when ignoring a M20 does indeed feel very different from a normal dungeon.

[Atelier-Bagur]

WoW was able to milk the community for nearly 20 years.....

......No MMO in history will be able to accomplish that feat imo.

XIV's rise started, when? 2019-ish? Nearly 20 years from then, the League of Legends MMO will probably be dominating the landscape......or WoW 2, maybe that Warframe title as-well. XIV has been losing players now; WoW was dominate with BS content for nearly 2 decades.

I have no idea how they did it......

It was released at the right time, at the right space in the gaming genre, whereas previous MMOs were complex, hard and not very casual friendly. Vanilla WoW was the first of its kind to offer a friendlier take on the genre with streamlining a lot of core aspects of MMOs. Also the fact that the game served as an easy and fun way to communicate and socialize with friends and other people compared to previous MMOs made it have such a strong staying power.

[Rhysati]

What's really funny is how all of the WoW type complaints started happening with XIV when everyone left WoW and migrated to this game. Would be really interesting if someone could pull forum data and correlate complaints about savage, ultimates, and high-end raiding content with the WoW exodus. I'd expect there's some kind of statistically significant correlation.

XIV's never been about having max. ilvl for end game content. It's always been accessible to a wide range of skillsets and players, but there's been such an emphasis on that stuff in the forums ever since ShB/EW.

Oh that's just silly. People have been saying that the expansion cycle is extremely formulaic and boring for several expansions now. It has only gotten worse with time.