I truly doubt a pirate expansion is a good idea, in fact it sounds like a pretty crappy one, could it be cool yes but it would completely gloss over all the already missing plot holes. In this expansion Blizzard seems to aim for answering as many of them as possible. And I agree that there is one better expansion but it is the nagas and N'Zoth expansion, where we'd visit Zandalar and deal with the Zandalari once and for all. Besides if Kul'Tiras is supposed to be a continent how's it supposed to fit in between Khaz'Modan and Hillsbrad? A pirate expansion just seems like the weirdest accumulation of bullshit ever and would rather than answer questions only issue more of them.
I obviously didn't talk about an expansion
only about pirates. That would be stupid. But with all the established lore about Kul'Tiras, it's just weird that they insist of not letting us explore it.
Ok, here you might be overreacting more than a little bit, I'm pretty sure the removal of relics wasn't the trigger for WoW's decline in subscriptions.
Absolutely not. It was the endless recycling and sheer boredom of mashing buttons on fixed rotations to accumulate more stats after the always same recipe for over 10 years.
Besides in MoP cloak drops where useless as you already had your legendary and the same goes for one of the rings in WoD.
Don't even get me started on the cloak debacle. One would have thought Blizzard
learned their lesson from that. And cloaks were only a minor piece of gear nobody cared about as they look like crap anyway. Now we give everyone the same weapon. Woo-fucking-hoo.
I think Blizzard has already bitten of more than they can chew with the promises they've already made besides we have naval battles in WoD. And in case you want to know what they look like if we participate in them just look at the scenario in MoP which I for one at least did not care for at all.
Promises? Which promises? All I see is just more of the same. There is literally nothing that spices the core gameplay up in any way.
Call me spoiled, but after playing Tera, Rift, Archeage, Guildwars 2 and Wildstar, I just don't find tab-target combat and themepark-on-rails all that appealing anymore.
Also, what naval battle? You mean that joke of a glorified static PvE ship battle instance?
After seeing
real open world PvP ship battles in Archeage, that just feels like a lame joke.
I think this expansion is full of potential and so does pretty much everyone else both here and over at the WoW-EU forums. Whether or not the developers live up to those expectations I'm a bit more sceptical about.
That's probably because the remaining players don't actually want innovation. They are there to play their 10 year old game like they used to.
If Blizzard really wants to bring new players in, they'll have to do more than that.
To be fair several MMO's have already tried crazy stuff and they've all failed.
They never failed in their innovative aspects. They failed because of everything else and bad management:
SW:TOR: Failed because it only appealed to Star Wars fans. They fucked it up with boring fed-ex quests and a really bad F2P model. Nobody ever complained about what SW:TOR brought new to the table.
Rift: Failed because it was too much of a WoW clone and the engine was poorly optimized. The Rifts as open world PvE events were initially amazing, with entire quest hubs getting eradicated, but then got more and more static and WoW'ed.
The housing in Rift is ridicolously good. I'd go as far to say that the housing in Rift is the best housing system ever created. So good that I really wonder how Blizzard could fuck that up royally years after Rift established the right formula for it.
TERA Online: Never actually failed yet. It's still going pretty well with a decent F2P model. The weak points are the boring repetitive quests and some PvP imbalance (and the asian looks if you're not into it). However, the selling point of TERA is and always was the action combat. And
nobody ever left TERA because of the action combat. Because it's fucking amazing.
Wildstar: Failed because it wasn't F2P right from the get go. The housing (albeit not as good as Rift's) is great. The combat is extremely fun. It died from bad management, not bad gameplay.
Archeage: Proved that you can successfully merge the addictiveness of farmville with a themepark MMO. The naval battles are amazing. Trading was surprisingly fun aswell. The game died from a lack of themepark content and a lack of rewards for the open world PvP, not from the sandbox elements. Also, they screwed up the F2P model royally and didn't care fixing gamebreaking bugs in time.
ESO: Died from poor PvE content and bad monetization, such as bad game performance in PvP battles. The PvP battles were actually pretty amazing had the game been better optimized technically.
Eve Online: Never actually died. In fact, Eve is the only MMO that still
gains subscribers instead of losing them. Almost everything about this game gives any hardcore nerd a raging boner. The only downside is that it's friggin' inaccessable for anyone who doesn't have a degrees in economics.
Guild Wars 2: Fucking boring grind quests destroyed an otherwise amazing game.
So what do we see here? All of these games excelled in one or two things. Some excelled so hard that they still have a loyal fanbase (Rift, Tera).
They all failed for reasons that were pretty obvious. Mostly a lack of content or lack of money. WoW HAS the content. WoW has the money. They can
afford innovating the game. In fact, to innovate WoW, you don't even
have to be innovative at all. Just pick the concepts from the competitors that are stellar and copy them. Nobody would care about Blizzard stealing a thing or two, considering Blizzard basicly invented the modern MMO formula in the first place.
I just don't get why Blizzard just
refuses to steal from it's competitors.
It's so simple:
- copy Rift's housing. BOOM, instant epic win. And you know what's awesome? It's
completely cosmetical, yet people are
addicted to it.
- copy naval battle, the crafting system (minus the RNG shit) and open world trading system from Archeage. BOOM, instant extremely social game.
- copy TERA's combat mechanics. BOOM, dungeons are fun again! Playing healer or tank feels rewarding again.
- copy EVE's monetization model. Like, literally; what are you waiting for?
You can thank me later, Blizzard.
Einstein defined insanity as attempting the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Actually, there is no evidence that Einstein ever said this. Not that it matters, but that quote is so annoyingly persistent that I feel the need of pointing that out just to stroke my ego.
Besides the people who play WoW are clearly content with how it already is otherwise they wouldn't pay for it, so why change it? It seems idiotic to remake the game completely in hopes to change one fanbase for another.
Obviously, it works. But then they are losing subscribers left and right. A bit of innovation could actually bring players back that quit WoW for the boring repetitiveness. Players like me who played WoW since Vanilla Beta and dig the franchise. Players who quit because they don't want to be a rat in a treadmill when playing a game.
I've grown up. I just don't want to pointlessly spam the ever same skill rotations anymore. It's just getting old.
Wow... that was quite a rant. I apologize. It's just that this expansion - for me - symbolizes the thing that made me quit WoW: stagnation.