I think it was about 10-11 years ago that I started regularly playing Blizzard’s seminal MMORPG, World of Warcraft. Back then, I had enormous amounts of free time (that seem mostly wasted, in retrospect) but I did have a lot of fun playing WoW during that time. Of course, as time went on, my life changed significantly for the better but I still tried to fit in playing whenever I could. Eventually, though, I found that it wasn’t worth the time and I wasn’t really having fun anymore. I didn’t really know anybody anymore either; it was mostly like playing a single player game vs. how it was back in the Burning Crusade expansion when I started so it was easy to step out. It does make me wonder, though..did this happen because the game changed, my life circumstances changed, or both?
Like any MMO, the game itself goes through massive changes with every expansion. Since the BC era when I started, there have been the following expansions: Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK), Cataclysm (Cata), Mists of Pandaria (MoP), Warlords of Draenor (WoD) and Legion. The forthcoming expansion is entitled Battle for Azeroth (BfA), and it’s the first one since I started playing that I have no interest in and won’t be buying. As aforementioned, back in the BC days, I was able to meet and play alongside other players for that and the WotLK expansion; that was the most fun I had playing the game, overall, as it was also a useful social outlet for a massive introvert such as myself. When Cata came, though, the guild I was in scattered to the winds mostly due to how radically that expansion changed the game and I ended up playing pretty much alone through that and everything up until Legion. Starting with Cata, it was a lot easier to grab random people to do dungeons with thanks to the Dungeon Finder (which started during WotLK) and also have the option of experiencing scaled down raid content as part of a randomly selected group of 25 with Looking for Raid (LfR). This, along with the toning down/phasing out of the difficult group quests of the previous expansions, helped make WoW something you could play solo and still experience a great majority of the content. During the time of the original game (Vanilla)/BC/WotLK, you either grouped up or you missed out; there were no shortcuts.
I definitely still had fun during the Cata to Legion eras, but it felt almost like a different game entirely. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my favored characters, instead of being healers, (mostly paladin/priest) became rogues, who also became more and more self sufficient over time and lent themselves more easily to a solo playstyle. It was super easy to just jump in a dungeon queue, quest, go into the dungeon when the queue was ready, go through the same steps I’d learned from experience (or watching a video about it since making mistakes even during a random run isn’t allowed anymore), maybe get some better gear, and then it’s back to questing. Rarely was there any conversation between me and the other dungeon runners and when there was, it was rarely positive. Dungeons became something to run ASAP and then get back to doing something else, instead of being the main focus of your session. One factor in my leaving was that it was getting difficult to run a dungeon without being screamed at by the tank to go faster while they’re going 500 MPH, pulling everything in sight and still surviving easily. (And when I tried tanking, I was yelled at for going ‘slow’, even though I was handling things fairly well..most of the time.) One barely has enough time to loot the fallen enemies, let alone admire the scenery let alone do a quest objective let alone stop to think about how to approach the next encounter. LfR is much the same, though you can play very sub-optimally and still get some gear; as I remember, it’s handed out completely randomly without any ties to performance. The game itself is not only much faster paced, but it also started feeling like you had to log in every day or you’d miss out on obtaining the maximum amount of profession materials or somesuch and fall even further behind ’the pace’.
Leveling a character, at least, is something that has (mostly) improved over time. This also has always had the feature of rested time (the more time a leveling character is rested, the more time they’ll get double experience, up to a level and a half) allowing a player to take extended breaks and leverage that when they return. I do miss the long quest chains that had your character do a lot of traveling to various zones..they were time consuming but it definitely made Azeroth seem more like a living, breathing world where everything was being affected by everything else. Now, a zone is 99.99% a standalone level; get in, do your questing within the zone, then move on to the next one and return maybe once or twice if ever; it’s much more like a level in a platformer than an RPG. Overall, though, leveling is by far the part of the game that I’ve enjoyed the most since Cata. Endgame, though (once a character reaches level cap)..
Yeah, endgame is where my personal experience has faltered expansion after expansion. Blizzard has a reputation for drastically overtuning aspects of WoW during every expansion before finally hitting the happy medium it should have been at all along and the endgame is usually where these issues lie. In Cata, the main problem was that random dungeons had gone from easy to horrifically difficult overnight and while this was somewhat alleviated in a later patch, the damage was done. In the next expansion, MoP, random dungeons hit a decent middle ground in terms of difficulty and length but the aforementioned gogogo mentality had taken over. Also, Blizzard ratcheted up both the difficulty, time required and amount of daily quests needed to obtain the necessary reputation levels with various factions in order to have one’s character at an optimal level for raiding. It’s an unspoken rule that, in order to even be considered for raiding by a serious guild, one must demonstrate one’s commitment by jumping through whatever hoops Blizzard puts as the entry level endgame no matter what. (And it’s either go through all of that or get labeled a ‘casual’..yeah, I don’t miss any of that foolishness one bit.) Since I was actively avoiding direct contact with other players at that point (definitely not a great move on my part), I didn’t care but I could see that mentality becoming quite prevalent in the forums/fansites.
WoD changed the endgame up again by not requiring nearly as many dailies but instead focusing on a garrison, which was a private zone that was meant to be a homebase a player would start and end their sessions at but instead (especially at first), it had so many resources/convenience factors that players hardly ever had to leave. Even if you wanted to go out and explore the world, it was too easy to have your session turn into a resource gathering mission for items that would then be converted into powerful crafting materials at the garrison after a certain length of time. It started to feel like a second unpaid job and that’s exactly what any game should never feel like.
Legion took the garrison concept and made it class specific (they toned down a lot of the micromanagement/resource gathering mechanics, fortunately) so that you’d still have a base to utilize but only other members of your class would be there. That was a much better idea on paper; being a mostly single player game now, how many players actually socialized/formed or joined guilds based on meeting other members of their class? That might have worked much better in the early days, actually, before everyone was just racing to get everything done due to..I don’t know, unspoken rules/peer pressure? (I’m still not sure about this, this aforementioned ‘pace’..is it just me?)
The other main aspects of the various endgames that I noticed were just in terms of overall things to do..my main issue with Legion was that they gave players way too much to do once they hit max level, which was an overcompensation from WoD. When questing from 100 to 110 (in any zone order you want, a welcome innovation vs. the level brackets of the past), things are fairly straightforward, story beats are hit, each zone has a beginning, middle and end, and you can stop/start whenever you want and not feel like you’re missing out on anything. But once your character reaches 110, your quest log explodes and you’re not given any real direction as to what to do. There’s a very long zone for 110s, there’s long quest chains here, there, everywhere, world quests all over the map, profession quests, class quests, all the new zones/quest chains in the newer patches..it was completely overwhelming. Instead, they should provide an option for casual players that only have 30-60 minutes to play or so and give said players a set of quests they can probably do in that time. Then, the player logs off feeling like they accomplished something and they’d like to play some more when they get a chance..instead of “Screw this, I can’t even begin to do any of this content.” If the early expansions had been like Legion, yes, I probably would have done all those quests (it also likely would have been a raiding requirement) and wanted even more but I can never remember feeling like I had done all of the current content. Now, I feel like the endgame in WoW is only for hardcores and casuals should just declare victory once they hit max level and then roll another character..or just stop playing until the next expansion.
As for BfA, they are making some changes that I am all in favor of..namely, doing away with the concept of player vs. player (PvP) realms (where the flag that makes your character fair game for any player on the opposite faction to attack is automatically set) and also streamlining questing from old expansions in a more Legion-like style. (I have heard that they tried to make leveling more challenging so they overcompensated (yet again)…) I do think it’s odd that this seems to be another “It’s all about Horde vs. Alliance and putting the WAR back in WARcraft!” expansion (I’d much rather have the “There’s a huge threat and we must put aside our differences for now” type) but then they make PvP completely optional no matter where you’re playing. Even though you’d think this alone would bring someone like me back, it would have had to happen a long time ago. It was my misfortune to start on a PvP realm and then eventually finally decide (mostly due to having far less time to play) to start over on a player vs. environment (PvE) server where the flag has to be set either by attacking an opposing non-player character (NPC) or by player choice. (Note: leveling with PvP enabled will give characters more experience/better rewards, so of course there will be lots of peer pressure to do it along with shaming those who don’t..“The more things change…”)
When I played on a PvP realm, I remember mostly losing enormous amounts of time due to getting jumped while questing/gathering resources, forcing me to either play another character or wait until they went away; I could have been the best PvP player in the world but there’s no defeating a gang of players, especially if they have superior levels and equipment. And even if I had somehow pulled it off, they would have taken it as an affront and then tried to jump me again with even greater numbers. 99.9% of the time, they proceeded to ‘camp’ me and completely disrupt anything that I was trying to do. That kind of PvP is the definition of pointlessness, wasted time and it is only ‘fun’ for sociopaths. I firmly believe that PvP should stay only in the games oriented around it (which are exceedingly popular these days) because at least then, you know exactly what you’re in for and the entire point of the game is to defeat the other players/team. I see WoW’s point as questing/gathering/powering up/following storylines/dungeons/raids..all PvE activities and all of which were susceptible to being disrupted by trolls.
It’s true that dungeons/raids are completely separate instances where other players can’t follow, but the problem is that the trolls camp out near the entrances to these instances and just getting inside becomes a massive PvP battle when you and rest of your party members are equipped and ostensibly optimized for raiding. Here’s a typical rundown, using the famous Karazhan raid as an example: (something like this happened almost every time I ran it back in the BC era.) After getting my character prepared, I would arrive at the closest town, mount up, and head for Karazhan, watching for enemy players all the while. When I arrived, most of the raid would be engaged in PvP, so I’d try to heal when I could (and then immediately get clobbered); the only way for us to get in was to kill enough enemies so that we could all stand by the entrance, wait for the player with the key to the instance to come and raise the gate long enough for us to get inside to safety (or get killed close enough to the door so we could resurrect our characters on the other side of the gate; there was just enough room to do so.) This process would take half an hour at best. After we were all finally in, everyone’s miffed at having to waste so much time and then we had to refocus on starting the raid. Once it got going, things were fine, but after defeating several bosses and reaching a certain point, the raid leader would always elect to go back to the entrance, go outside, and then go to a side door to access the rest of the raid. This entrance was actively camped as well and thus it would usually take an hour just to start raiding again (it was usually called off after going back outside due to how much time all that idiotic PvP wasted, anyway.) Imagine my chagrin when I found out years later that we could have stayed in the instance and just fought through a bunch of enemies..yeah, it would have been fairly difficult in all likelihood but how could it have been any worse than having to go outside again and get jumped over and over?
This continued all throughout BC and WotLK, with the exception of the Trial of the Crusader raids, which took place in a neutral zone which prevented PvP both in the storyline and gameplay. The Crusader raids themselves are not all that fondly remembered now but at the time I was beside myself at the idea of being able to spend my time playing the game instead of waiting on the whims of sociopaths. What I think made me give up raiding completely was how this behavior resumed for the final raid of the expansion, which involved storming the Lich King’s stronghold and putting an end to him. In the storyline, the adventurers are told that any and all cross-faction warfare strengthens the Lich King’s armies as he just raises the slain as undead minions. (So then, of course, the faction leaders go right ahead and do just that../facepalm) While at this point I was sadly used to this, a new complication was that, due to phasing (where different events could happen at the same place in the open world depending on how far along was in a quest chain..i.e. after completing a chain, one would always see a fortress as being destroyed while other players would see it intact) it was very common that guilds would show up to try to defend one of their members from getting camped and find an empty field in front of the gates since they were all in another phase, thus making an already difficult, futile situation completely impossible. Of course, any complaints about this were met with derision from the community. While I did eventually get to participate in taking down the Lich King and getting a sense of closure on the expansion, I was totally done with raiding and playing on PvP realms in general.
So yes, even with the PvP changes/new content/new level cap/etc. I have no interest in BfA. All I would do if I did play was level my favorite characters to the cap and not bother with any of the endgame at all..although I suppose it would be nice to play the old PvP realm characters again, there’s just not enough time these days. What I do see myself playing in some form is the forthcoming (and long, long wished for) release of “World of Warcraft Classic”, which will be a separate game based on patch 1.12 (which was released about a year before I started and was the last of the major “Vanilla” patches). Of course it would be a nostalgia bomb for me and a lot of other players, but I think it would be refreshing to play a version of WoW without so many other things piled on top of the core game. Also, the player characters don’t have to be prominent leaders of their faction/champions of their order/saviors of the universe/etc; we can go back to just being adventurers making their way in the world without the weight of said world on our shoulders. Of course, it won’t be exactly the same since a lot of the fun of discovery/exploration/problem solving is gone as a lot of players will remember where things are and there will be many websites/YouTube videos/etc. to provide refreshers on quest and dungeon/raid strategies. Still, I think having a much slower pace of play along with (hopefully) a much stronger sense of community/being able to hold players accountable for their actions/being rewarded for being helpful/kind will ultimately be so much more rewarding both short and long term. I wouldn’t play on a PvP server, of course, and I’d probably only be able to drop in every now and again to do some questing and probably not hit the endgame much (if at all), but just that by itself would likely be quite satisfying.
Overall, I think it was both the game changing along with my life that made it not nearly as much of a significant factor for me as it used to be. I’m glad that it was there in the form that it was in at that particular time when I badly needed a diversion but even if WoW Classic is a tremendous success and (mostly) brings the game back to the way it used to be, it’s not going to be the same; the saying “You can’t step into the same river twice” comes immediately to mind. I don’t actually remember making a conscious choice to either start or stop playing it, it just sort of..happened. Much like most of life itself.