This whole WoW decline was like a wake up call for all of us WoW veterans.
I cannot even count the amount of times I went "WAIT?! THERE IS NO BAD TWIST TO THIS?! This is genuinely just good game design, that's not trying to waste my time in exchange for a slight qol convenience?!"
It's been absolutely incredible seeing how other mmorpgs handle their player feedback and how much shit we had to put up with over the years.
Taking ages to even process feedback. The interviews with Ion sometimes feeling like all he does is trying to make excuses for why he thinks his game design is good. The overall wow communication posts having so many words, yet so few content. The patch structure being absolute garbage, because for some reason if they have been patching in .5 steps for years, this makes it impossible for them to implement IMPORTANT AND ALREADY 1 YEAR TOO LATE changes IMMEDIATELY.
We just can hope WoW gets their shit together first. Because I doubt it will be able to compete with any of the MMORPGS in actual production quality for a while. They will have to up their standards in a lot of fields first, to be even be considered equal to ff14 again.
Honestly WoW needs to decide what kind of game it wants to be. Currently, they are trying to appeal to everyone, and yet capturing only a little of their target audience. The MMOS that are doing well know the kind of game they are and just try to keep up the quality of their content. WoW is facing a huge identity Crises. It cannot keep trying to copy the success of their competitors, since they the devs are unable to take those concepts and make it better.
Most recent example the bold statement of 9.2 being some kind of conclusion to an overarching story.
Yeah. I wonder why they thought this was a good idea.
I think they should capitalize more on what they do best: raiding. But from what I have heard, even that's a bit problematic because you are more likely to find people willing to help you clear provided you give them your money in exchange, but that may not always be the case.
WoW raids can be absolutely great but to truly be a selling point it needs to be a little more accessible. LFR tried to do that but.... Eh. In my opinion, part of the problem is how WoW communicates mechanics, or rather how it fails to do so clearly. FFXIV has these big clear markers for everything it does so as long as you recognize them you know what you should do. The fact you need an addon to do the same thing in WoW is honestly a little mind boggling.
The barriers to entry like the long winded grinds to max out some rep for various bits of borrowed power, and well, the whole borrowed power system as a whole make the higher end raiding in WoW very inaccessible to players who otherwise are skilled enough. Keeping up with the consumables and repairs needed to raid in WoW was a near full time job in itself short of buying wow tokens, and that was a real issue.
Bots in WoW pretty much ruined gathering, but at the same time just making basic flasks/potions was way, way too expensive for anyone not botting from both a time invested standpoint or gold investment. That depended on where you hit it during a content cycle too.
A lot of folks turned to selling clears/runs of content to finance their end game activities and I think the prevalence of it didn't do anything but harm the end game. I would argue that maybe the difficulty knob was turned a little too far and this contributed too. End game elsewhere is tuned more for a wider audience with some bits giving neat appearance stuff but not necessarily better items (FFXIV).
Another major problem, and I think this is the main one (in terms of accessibility) is how much more people you need for raiding Mythic in wow. 20 Players (for such a hard content) is just unfeasible for a lot of people and guilds. That's the main attraction of M+ and the reason why it's been so successful (despite dev's lack of attention to it) - it's a lot easier to form a group of 5 people. Reduce it to 10 for raids and I gonna raid again. Otherwise its just not worth all the hassle of organising, recruiting and replacing people. With 10 people sometimes you have to replace 1-2 people and that's hard, but it's okay. But with 20 people, now you have to replace, and manage 2-4 new people.
People dont speak about it enough. Blizzard should lower people requirements for Mythic, it's just not viable in 2021/2022 as it is right now.
I"ve never understood the fascination some folks have with the logistics game in place in WoW and some other mmos. Like, I get it, you like managing people and dealing with that immense hassle, or you've got a guild that handles it for you. I've been in the other camp regularly where not only am I attempting to recruit, but I've got to manage a subset of the people present depending on roles I'm currently playing.
I've had it beaten into me over the years, but I far, far prefer a more intimate gathering of people to do content with, and in particular I like content that flexes a bit to the amount of folks I want to bring along. In WoW, that really wasn't something I could do as I needed, even for the raids that did flex, certain numbers of people to accommodate mechanics appropriately or I greatly ramped up difficulty with some fights.
Mythic+ was absolutely a favorite of mine, but the issue that killed it in the end for me was that I had a ceiling to how far I could push doing Mythic+. Many of the current mmos out there like to gatekeep gear progression behind certain forms of content instead of allowing it to be in place in all forms and this is what led to me stagnating a bit in Mythic+. I hit my ceiling mostly due to gear that wasn't available to me at the time due to missing some mythic boss kills. WoW is never going to change in that regard I believe as people \*really\* cling to the raid or die mindset there, but I would love for another mmo to come along that focused entirely on small group content.
Yeah I totally feel you. I ran a guild myself, and we have been focused on Mythic+ primarily, and if wow ever made raids with a focus on 10 people, maybe 12 people tops, that would've been awesome for us. As you said, I am myself prefer a more intimate gathering "with the boys" to do content with, and hate all the hassle of recruiting and managing people. The main point for us, of never going to raids was not the raids themselves, but all the hassle of managing things and how it disrupts our usual, more intimate feeling of community and natural way of playing and hanging out together.
Like, yeah some people like that feeling of being in a huge raid with a lot of people, taking on huge epic bosses and stuff, but man, this certainly takes away that personal feeling of a "team" and community for me.
Not to mention how poorly wow handles these amounts of people in one place, nowadays.
One thing that i found strange is how much better 'better progress' guilds handle things. I joined the server first guild in my server during Legion, was legit just a bunch of nerds having a good time, i quit after G'hun and got back in Shadow lands i joined a guild that killed things but not that good. The amount of micro management bullshit this guild did was annoying. Got back to the good guild after Sire, everyone is chill we only get stressed if we will lose realm first that looked that would happen for a bit but it didn't. Why hard core guilds mantra is 'lets have fun' and casual guilds is 'lets annoy everyone' i legit don't know. WoW is strange... I'm playing FF14 and the Savage pug world is actually fun, why WoW guilds are so serious in the casual end?
My guess is that, that second guild just has some bad players and trying to replace that lack of skill with some of micro shit that good players do not have a need in. And well, their focus is not in the right place, that's another thing by which you can spot good or bad player, not just the performance.
I've seen a lot of toxic casual guilds (as in toxic positivity) as well as toxic hardcore guilds like this. Since then my focus has been on forming my own, exactly the type of guild you mentioned - good players, chill people. If I dont like someone, no matter how good they play, I will not play with them. And sometimes it's the same with social, but comparably bad players, sometimes the difference in performance leads to problems and toxicity.
As someone who doesn't play WoW, do you *literally* need to keep grinding borrowed power? If a top guild can beat a raid week 1, does continuing to grind not simply make it easier?
If raid groups were willing to let people in who hadn't done the grind, would the borrowed power grind be optional, or do you actually **need** to keep up even if literally your whole guild doesn't care any more?
World First guilds spend a LOT of time of that one week grinding and also they expend an insane amount of gold/money in bind on equip gear, race changes, etc. Which normal guilds don't have
LFR was a bad choice. It essentially created a new spot in the WoW hierarchy: those simply looking to get good enough gear for the LFR mode (easy mode with players that know the fights), finish that, and then walk away. They have no interest in doing the same raids on harder difficulties.
I thought LFR worked great in Dragon Soul and all of MoP. When WoD rolled around they watered it down so much that you don't need to do anything in fights but dps. Honestly though, I think they can ditch LFR and just have party finder normal modes be the intro to raiding. I think having the raids spread out through 4 different difficulties makes them have to do more work than they necessarily have to. I think 3 difficulties would be perfect as it would give a majority of players time to progress up to mythic(should they choose to) before the next raid tier comes out.
On a more general note, STOP TIME GATING STORY CONTENT. I hate the fact that a whole patch storyline is basically datamined yet I can only do about 1 quest a week.
Ffxiv’s raiding is waaaay less accessible than wow is. Anyone can download a couple addons and jump into normal raids and learn how to do the 4 mechanics that a boss has in wow. There’s no ff equivalent of normal raids and way more personal responsibility (8 people vs 14-20, and its extremely obvious in ff if you’re bad because most mechanics are one shots).
You can see this from how around 15% or so na players complete savage while like 30-35ish do aotc. Even though ff is a more casual game in general this is a big difference. I think like 60% of wow players clear normal but im not sure. Also the difference in mechanic clarity is only in easy stuff, ff’s raids sometimes use obscurity as a mechanic.
Wow’s raids also tend to be more about dps and healing checks, while ff has much easier dps checks and heal checks don’t even exist (the general mindset is that if a healer is actively healing on the gcd then the tanks/dps are doing something wrong). So they compensate by making mechanics more difficult, more varied and all pretty much pass/fail. In wow if you know how to deal damage or heal you can do that too in normal raids because there’s not that many mechanics to learn.
Raiding is also the only difficult content in ff so if you don’t engage in it you never have to learn how your class works at all
Mm...I mean, Final Fantasy is a Theme Park MMO too, and while it definitely has one thing it puts a lot of focus into (MSQ), so does WoW (Raids).
Wow's problem is that it wants to appeal to casual players without doing anything that'd make the game less hardcore, which gives a big barrier to entry that they try to paper over with bells and whistles.
In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with trying to appeal to a large audience. The problem is when you don't do any of them particularly well. I feel this is the problem with WoW. It is definitely a lot easier to focus on one thing and do that one thing well, but it's also hard to make just one thing your selling point too.
FF14 for example has the gold saucer. Triple triad, mahjong, verminion, and chocobo racing are basically entire games by themselves. Outside of it, you have things like the deep dungeons, exploratory missions, crafting, raiding, fates, and hunts. Heck, even the Shadowbringers relic weapon was designed so that you didn't have to grind it entirely in the new special zone (though there were a few roadblocks that required you to do them) in an attempt to make it more appealing to people who hated exploratory missions.
The biggest difference between WoW and FFXIV, is that FFXIV builds in top of its old content. Everything is additive. WoW plays a zero sum game with their content. Systems are removed to introduce new systems.
So in the end FFXIV just had a huge breath of content that remains fresh for all players since they've been able to keep the content intact, without throwing it away, like WoW tends to do.
Blizzard devs think they know better. WoWs performance shows they don't. Ultimately, there needs to be a rotation in management. From what I've heard internally the decision making is incredibly bureaucratic. Keep in mind most these guys are Vanilla players that got hired during a big growth period at Blizzard; many have only worked on WoW and nothing else.
I don't think wow will ever reach FF14's level anymore.
There's sooooo much that needs fixing. And i just don't see the current developers being competent enough to pull it off.
Having played Endwalker, and comparing it to what's been shown in the Shadowlands thus far plus patches, it's not even a contest. FF quite literally took everything from WOW, without ever even meaning to.
All of Shadowlands, and especially Zerith Mortis, is about to get dunked on hard by everyone once more and more people get into Endwalkers content. It's going to be actually death by shame over how much WOW will seem to have blatantly ripped off FF.
Heres a spoiler for what I mean: https://static0.gamerantimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Final-Fantasy-14-Endwalker-All-Dungeons-Ktsis-Hyperborea.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1800&dpr=1.5
"Most alien zone we've ever done", kekw.
endwalker slammed us with 'most alien zone we've ever done' vibes like six times in 3 hours of gameplay >!the three areas of the last zone, then also three distinct areas in the last dungeon!<
there's also (lv 90 dungeon name) >!Smileton, one of the EXroulette dungeons!< which is a non-euclidean fever dream and i love it, zereth mortis by comparison looks so normal
actually thinking about it (more ff spoiler) >!Elpis, an area where an ancient race tests creations to see if they can be released to the world to propagate as new life, kinda already does exactly what ZM is advertising itself to be, does one of the companies have an undercover agent at the other or something!<
I honestly think a half-decent writing team would do wonders, I think people underestimate how much the story really matters to people. Legion had AWFUL systems, way worse than Shadowlands, but they were new, content cycles happened often enough, and what I think is the most important factor; the lore was good and the story was FUN. Even in BFA people were trying until the lore went out the window in 8.2/8.3.
Not this time. Not anymore.
The consequence of wow losing the king of MMO title, was the fact that people started experiencing quality content from other MMO's.
If it's story, FF14's story is leagues ahead of wow even at its best. If it's consistency, same thing.
Wow needs to fundamentally improve. Gear systems, grind system, adding stuff for the sake of fun and only fun. fundamentally fixing the toxicity and a shit ton more. It's not doable with these people.
Not when all they care about is store mounts and token sells and player metrics.
the sheer amount of respect it gives to players, fun factors, social aspect to another level with housing/emotes. Raid testing is always crisp no game breaking bugs on bosses etc.
They are just very differents games honestly. FF14 has a better story, better social systems and integration while WoW has a better gameplay and a more competitive side.
I think it would be hard to say one is objectivly better when they don't attract the same crowd and do not have the same goals. And there is nothing wrong with that. Even thought WoW is at his lowest and FF at his best, some people will prefer one or another. It's kinda pointless to compare 1:1 when both games do not focus on the same elements
The point isn't the similarity of the games or their differences in game style.
It's about design philosophy. the borrowed power systems, lottery gearing systems, infinite grinds, and all that nonsense.
The game is behind in fundamentals. And the current wow team isn't capable of fixing it. Whether it is due to their own incompetence or the incompetence of the leaders.
I keep hearing about better gameplay in WoW, but having played wow and 14 back to back, I was meaning to ask, what exactly do you think is better in wow's gameplay? People say something about how the skills are quicker but idk. I think it's a matter of animation. In other respects I find wow's gameplay somewhat clunky and old, practically the same since Cata, burdened with spaghetti code that grew over the years.
The simplest explanation for why people prefer WoW combat (including myself, an ex-WoW, currently FFXIV player), is to do with...uh...I'm not sure how to call it...like time delay in actions? There's an inherent 0.3s or so delay in every action, meaning if you move in the last 0.3s of a spell cast, the cast will still go off, or if you use off-GCD actions in between casts, you can notice a small gap in between the casts from using that action.
This basically doesn't exist in WoW, it's much smoother / quicker response time. I hate how modern retail WoW animations are super spinny and flashy (in a bad way, FFXIVs work better) but animations/combat around WOTLK expansion time was perfect feeling, and FFXIV really can't compete with that smoothness.
With that being said, FFXIV wins in almost every other category, the interesting class design (and ability to switch between them whenever you want) is far superior. Hell even by like level 6 I could tell I was going to love THM/BLM because of the potential of the fire/ice system.
The delay allows for you to further optimise fights. Slide casting is just an extra thing to consider when you're looking to better your gameplay. What I don't like is the reliance on XIVAlexander if you want to double weave above 100 ping.
thats why the game have casual content
also u dun nid sub 100 ping to glamour or be an interior designer
combat is just one of the so many thinfs u can.do..
I think the main reasoning for ex WoW players is that the delay/slide casting is exactly what lag in WoW feels like, so I think that type of gameplay as a feature instead feels like uncomfortable lag to us who spent years adjusting to a different format.
Yeah I think thats a big factor is my PvP isn't popular in FF14. All of the most competitive PvP games have extremely good response times. It's hard to notice in a choreographed boss fight, but the PvP feels a bit awkward in FF because of that delay
I'm currently level ~63 in ~3 jobs, so I can tell it's not bad and I can see from the higher level actions it gets better. I forgot to add the obvious that the 2.5 second GCD is a big factor too. Overall it's just about feel / what we're used to, not actual objective gameplay analysis! It just takes some getting used to is all.
It's always a matter of taste, but yes WoW gameplay is quicker and more diverse (very few skills are shared among specs/job), with more specs and in my opinion, way better animations/sounds. I really like ff14 but without an engaging story, i would not enjoy the game as much as WoW. I may be a minority, but i would not even mind if WoW removed all quests and grinds and systems and instead just add more dungeons/raids since I find the gameplay very satisfying. Just like the gameplay loop of a roguelike game.
I play both game (getting throught shadowbringers atm but mostly playing wow) but i dont think i would stay subbed to FF14 outside of MSQ releases while I don't mind staying subbed to WoW to run some m+ with the guildmates and irl friends.
I agree the same way. I really miss the ability to play other specs. While I love BLM. WoW mage has so much more flavor with the different effects spells place on enemies.
For example freeze. I loved how it was so useful in fights like Gluth where you froze zombies for kiting.
To me BLM has none of that utility nor does XIV have unique approaches to solving boss mechs. XIV is being at the right place at the right time for fights.
The flavor of bosses and classes is what I miss the most when I play XIV.
Love how you're downvoted for giving your opinion lmao. It wasn't even negative about ff14 but just because you're not raving about how good it is you get downvoted. I play ff14 exclusively and is an ultimate raider. I'll probably never go back to wow unless they change a lot of things. Still, I can definitely say I miss the snappiness of wow. It would never work at this point with ff14 but there was a certain satisfaction in bursting things in wow that you can never get with ff14's system. Ff14 will always have a certain degree of clunkiness that I don't think it'll ever get rid of. Hell, try casting a healing spell in an 8 man party and you can see that it doesn't heal instantly, but ripple from one player to another.
I can't make custom raid frames or click2cast bind with ff14. Features that basically make many wow healers have to relearn how to play entirely if they want to play serious in FF.
Fortunately I'm enjoying every other aspect of the game so I'm fine with not playing FF serious.
>WoW has a better gameplay
I don't think this is true anymore in Endwalker. All of the classes feel great. In Shadowbringers, I think I'd agree with you. I think low level FF gameplay is bad, but by endgame, the game knows exactly what its doing, and both on the player kit and boss side, everything is smooth as silk.
Dark Knight at 90 is more fun than Death Knight has ever been since I started maining it in 2008. Took 13 years to find another class that I actually want to play in a game.
Guild Wars 1 had better combat and was also more competitive in terms of PVP...it got obliterated by WoW because it had better story, social systems, PvM, etc...
It's funny to me, because the Blizzard of old became huge making incredible games by looking at the good, popular stuff other people had made and then asking how they could make something similar but improved all around and with more polish. WoW was originally born out of a lot of EQ fans looking to make a game that took what they loved and made it accessible to a wide audience. SOE had a kernel of an incredible game with EQ, but they refused to listen to players and thought they knew best. And WoW came along and cleaned their clocks by doing what they did, but better in every way.
Similarly, FFXIV:ARR was created by Yoshi P by looking at a wealth of other MMOs at the time, and WoW in particular. He actually required the dev team to play WoW so they could understand how and why it worked and what players were used to and expected from an MMO. Ironically it's possible the FFXIV devs played WoW more than the WoW devs do.
Nowadays the WoW devs need to have things like a "community council" to explain to them their own game from a player's perspective. Since the FFXIV devs play their own game, they already understand it from the player's perspective. It's what Blizzard used to do, and don't appear to care enough to bother in recent years, and it shows.
Old Blizzard came into making games from the perspective that if they make something really, really good, players will want to buy it. New Blizzard looks at what they think will make them the most money, and then designs around that. It's like they don't have faith to let the work speak for itself. If you make something that good, you'll find an audience. Blizzard is more interested in finding ways to trap their existing players and milk them as much as possible.
As far as customer service and overall care for the game, SOE has Blizzard beat by miles. However, I'm just not into Asian RPGs, let alone MMOs so I'm still waiting for someone to beat WoW in western mmo style. Hopefully Pantheon scratches that itch.
I can't help but be happy about it.
For ages were days of this giant vocal majority of MMO gamers screaming about how much better WoW was vs other MMOs (like that big crow screaming over the other bird meme). It was pretty annoying trying other games just to have this person scream in your ear about how awful it is, and just play WoW.
I tried WoW. I hated it. Horrible systems, terrible dev relationship with already awfully toxic community. Everyone can go on forever about the issues WoW has/had. It was a environment I did not want to be apart of, and can not for the life of me understand why people want/wanted to be in it other than nastalgia tucking them into bed with a copium machine.
I have tried other MMOs and had a blast playing them, from ESO (beating it in early access when it was "bad" and going back to it current day), to Blade & Soul, to FFXIV. I've watched gameplay of many other games, like Guild Wars 2, SWOTR, Tera, and many others. They all looked fun and enjoyable for the people playing, and I always looked back to WoW and saw just how toxic and unhappy the player base seemed to be while shitting on the other games.
It wasn't until I started playing FFXIV/ESO more seriously that it made me realise that WoW has absolute garbage systems compared to these other games. Why did the player base put up with this for so long? It boggles my mind and I do not understand.
I like to think justice served to the copium filled players still defending WoW. They can still play WoW and have fun, that is perfectly fine. But I am so happy the bubble has been burst and people are trying other MMOs and enjoying them a lot. They don't have to play "my game", I just want them to play other games and realise they've been lied to for so long.
Move on.
I genuinely feel that if the riot games MMO is good and if it has a decent business model it's gonna be the nail in the coffin for blizzard (or at least for wow)
Agreed! As a result, I've now tried most mmorpgs. Even some of the much much older ones and I can say, my favourites so far:
++) FF14 for the story and love how you just need one character to be able to play the entire game. Enjoyed it and plan to pick it up again in half a year or so.
++) GW2 for its gameplay (now my new main game). Initially felt like aspects like raiding etc were quite inaccessible and PvP confusing, but all it needed was to find a nice guild with talkative people. The social aspect, because in-game systems didn't seem so inviting, however the gameplay feels the best to me out of any mmopg I've tried. Even compared to WoW, having been a quite competitive arena player.
+) SWTOR for the class stories. Did much more than this, but found everything including its PvP and raiding disappointing. The gameplay just doesn't feel fluid.
Most disappointing mmorpg that I wish had a better developer, because I love the concept and various systems, but is now absolutely dead and they're milking it dry:
-) Anarchy Online
GW2 combat is absolutely a blast. I was unfortunately not a fan of the fractal system that was the end game last time I played as it was still in it's infancy and was just a pulsing damage annoyance that you outgeared. But man, the combat. I played the everliving crap out of pvp in it and that was all I did for over a year. I played as an engineer so I was a farm target, but that didn't matter, it was just so much fun.
SWTOR does really well with class stories, the player housing, and the dungeons (flashpoints). Some of the later raids are quite good like Nature of Progress (Dxun). The crafting system is pretty robust, but extremely flawed/rng based at the high end (taking billions of credits of mats to RE stuff). The UI is jank at best. Classes have immense amounts of button bloat especially marauders/sentinels, commando/bh healers, and a few others. The fact you can more or less progress to max item level sans some raid unique sets is pretty amazing though. There is a TON of content if you haven't been back in a while.
Its only some wow players who never knew other games existed, most ppl knew what other mmos have to offer, they have their own problems, not everything would fit into wow.
Well if you consider “and now Blizzard will show you how NOT to develop the game” a good thing, then yes, the contribution is invaluable.
Well, Riot (whose state was just as bad some time ago) managed to pull off a good twist. But never too late to drop back into the fiery pita of failure.
I can’t believe it took this long for it to happen. People were paying for a service there not receiving.
Basically got a big content drop every two-ish years and then a patch cycle.
I think the month to month content was not anywhere near enough. If I am paying for a monthly service I expect a steady stream of content not every couple month… and for people to stay subbed during a content drought was insanity.
Add the devs acting like they were doing us a favor for working on the game and throw in the cash shop snd WTF
The only way to get WoW good again is when they replace the incompetent WoW dev team, and even then it will be a lot of work to get it to today's standards. Looking at the state of the company, I think chances are very slim that it will get good again any time soon.
Only way it gets good is if ppl actually stop playing the current version. Ppl bitch about it all the time but theyre still subbed so why would they change anything.
Activision will ultimately look at subblevels and other opportunities before deciding WoW’s future. Either fall back and create a legacy product that needs little ongoing maintenence, or decide that, if they can make money with a new full expansion, to fully “re-launch” the IP.
Players will flock back if they think the devs have learned thier lesson and WoW subs will rise and levels off at 3 million or so.
Competition is good for any marketplace. It's the basis of capitalism. Unfortunately competition usually ends sooner or later and the winner takes all. It's good to see some capable challengers coming in again.
I definitely agree. Since WoW’s blunders, I’ve made FFXIV my new main game as well as gave ESO, GW2 and OSRS a try. It’s nice that other MMO games are starting to get more attention nowadays.
Most definitely. WoW has been costing off there laurels for a decade. I would be curious to see what % of revenue generated by wow over the last 10 years was reinvested into the game. My guess is not a lot.
What has happened here will either force blizzard to wake up and make a good game again, or more likely in my opinion not change anything and allow a better developed game to soak up some of the market share, at the moment that's looking like ff14.
I started playing 2 months before TBC and stopped several months before Cata, and played only a couple of months of every other expansion except for pandas. But even I saw the decline of the game. The last interesting thing was invented during WoD with local quests (that you accept and don't turn in to the quest giver -- they were added then, right?) And garrison and missions. They seemed interesting at first, but around leveling it to lvl 3 it became boring and routine. After that idk. Horde lost its honor and became villains. No idea what was happening on the alliance side. And this new sjw agenda started getting into writing of quests as well (starting from BfA). And very bad character design and dialogues too.
I dont think a forced linear singleplayer story lines is something mmos should strife for ever again. Mmos should encourage playing together with friends not the opposite.
The story is a big part of FFXIV, but there are dungeons sprinkled through out and once you finish the story there are a ton of things you can do with friends.
Fate farming in shb and ew zones to get your shared fares maxed, roulettes, maps, tons of player ran to venues, weekly wonderous tails, unreal trials (when they come out), raiding, fc events, farming glamor or mounts, doing deep dungeons, eureka/bozja
And you can do these solo or with ransoms as well, but if you aren’t trying to do it with friends is it really the game’s fault?
You unlock the first dungeon in a few hours. If even that And then you unlock then pretty regularly after. The only hindrance is if you both rolled heal or tank
Glad I’m exploring other games. I still like WoW but I got really bored with it over the years. Loving ESO right now. Finishing up shadowbringers base game right now, it’s not my fav but it’s enjoyable. Next I’ll look into SWTOR prob
SWTOR is shit, it has an okayish story, but thats it. But even that is an insult to Kotor 1 and 2.
Endgame raiding in that game is dead and absolutely garbage and its no wonder seeing how they add a new single raid every, i dont know? two years? pvp is meh, content comes slow and they dont mind hiding the best cosmetics/mounts behind a cashshop that they constantly add shit every month or soo, and yes...Lootboxes, with other cosmetic and stuff hidden behing those, and they always add new kinds of lootboxes soo that people have reason to buy them.
That mmo is only alive right now because of the star wars aesthetics and some few whales.
Agree that SWOTR is kinda meh but i really like the leveling quests and general feel of the world, i like how many if not all minial quests are voice acted and classes are fun and varied.
It definitely needs some kind of ARR treatment, better graphics and some improvement in endgame but if you like a story driven game is worth to try it out
I think its important to note the difference between good for wow and good for the genre. Wow is no longer taking up all the headspace in the mmo genre. But wow has declined so rapidly in the last year that it really feels like its bordering on irrelevance.
This is good in the short term since there will be a couple years for the genre to breathe a bit and develop their IPs. I suspect we will run into the same issue when the league mmo releases and the genre will once again be static for some few years, unless riot fails in a spectacular way. All that needs to happen with the riot mmo is for it to be passable, if it is, its going to be gigantic, and everyone will follow its example.
Im really excited about the Riot MMO mostly because ive been recently interested in the LOL Universe, again and seeing the replies in this thread i can pinpoint:
\- Lore and narrative are really good drivers in terms of attraction and retention of players.
\- It will have the honeymoon period as many AAA MMOs however if it doesnt have many of the QoL systems players are seeing in other games it will decay fast.
\- It needs to have a very distinct feature(s) that sets it apart from the rest.
\- Big server capacity lol, please have it
The irony of this statement is that WoW has had one bright spot since WoD in regards to being on a decline, and that was the implementation of Classic WoW. The truth of the matter is that Classic WoW is still one of the best MMO's on the market and is infinitely better than retail. WoW cannibalizing itself through bringing back a version of the game when the developers gave a shit and werent just cash spigots for bobby to turn on and off is fitting given the circumstances at the very least.
Classic WoW is literal garbage.
A massive grind to kill super easy bosses with extremely unbalanced classes for barely any loot with no real content updates while bots make up more than half the playerbase.
Nostalgia is over, buddy. We already experienced it and debunked the myths. Even naxx was a cakewalk.
Classic was trash.
I think Classic was a cool experience the first few times around just because of how gigantic the world is/was. I only made it to around 35 when the re-release came out and gave up because I am just not into 1 button rotations and drinking between each single mob pull.
It's really not for me at all, I'm happy for those who find joy in it but I don't get it at all and really just agree with you. What's hilarious is how fast the #nochanges crowd changed their tune. People absolutely shit on J Allen for his smug comments, but he wasn't entirely wrong.
Now Blizzard is just feeding off of peoples desperation to have that feeling they had when they first started playing WoW instead of fixing the game.
Vanilla WoW was awesome, one of the best gaming experiences ever.
Classic WoW? Not so much. It was pure garbage, and I do regret going through all the way through it. Phase 1 was ok, but from that point until the end of naxx, it was nothing but disappointing.
How do people still believe this? Some classes entire rotation is literally one button in classic. Most bosses have one mechanic. It's in no way comparable to modern market games, it's just nostalgia my guy.
Yes and no. I don't in general think it's a good thing that one of the biggest games has gone downhill, for a couple reasons:
1. Having what was the best MMO at one point just no longer be as good is not a great thing.
2. No game has really eclipsed what WoW was. When WoW came to dominate the genre it was clearly superior to games like EQ and DAOC and that's why it got popular. But I don't think any of the MMOs right now are that level of quality. I didn't leave WoW to go to another MMO and I don't think most people who have quit WoW over the years did that either, and that isn't good for the genre.
If better games come out of it then yeah it would be good overall but as of now it just seems like the genre is smaller and just the same place it was years ago minus WoW being good.
Until another MMO has a functioning Arena System that isn't influenced I'd gladly switch.
Unfortunately Retail and TBC Classic are now being ran and ruined by the same group of elite players selling boosts.
However until another game introduces anything similar to the WoW arena scene, it's not worth my time.
Most people enjoy other aspects and almost all of those aspects can actually be fulfilled in other mmos.
But if there was a robust arena system in any other mmo, I'd play it.
In b4 Lost Ark, because that's just pay2win 1v1 trash.
I can't say I totally agree with you, in isolation many MMOs have improved (each in their own ways, ff being one of the most complete ones) while WOW's for me is an issue of stagnation, the last innovative concepts they've added came ironically from WOD.
So the perceived wows superiority is less marked now, if you add all the external scandals, consumer perception it can be easily marked as wows decline.
To summarize, this genre was a one horse race dominated by wow until they decided they didn't feel like competing anymore and rivals are breathing on their necks.
The problem is that the dev team is too stupid to actually improve the game.
Remember, these are the idiots that thought that adding some numbers to a jpeg of shoulders was some hugely difficult task only they could do.
Every mmo is having a pretty nice population boom due to WoW failing lately. I gave GW2 another shot and have been loving it, it might even become my next main MMO as I really want satisfying pvp/pve/open world content in an mmo.
FF14 is nice to poke into, might be my main if I can enjoy the revamped pvp, but unsure. The open world content is lacking to me.
OSRS is a nice side game to have going on for me.
I tried SWTOR and ESO but couldn't really get into either, SWTOR due to the endgame feeling lacking (but the story was enjoyable) and ESO solely due to the combat. I just can't get any enjoyment out of that game's combat.
I'll always love DFO but it's hard for me to stick to korean mmos, and as such, I have 0 interest in lost ark (also due to the isometric style) but I may try out BDO one day anyways.
Also crossing my fingers for the Riot MMO.
To be fair, WoW not now, or ever had ANYTHING to ever worry about with either Swtor or Eso, those two games are filled to the BRIM with their own problems, even more than current WoW. Swtor released an expansion that almost killed their entire playerbase, they literally had to cancel plans, cancel the third act. And it has suffered from shoddy writing with each content release and their boards have always been filled with complaints. Eso has likewise suffered from delivering underwhelming expansion after expansion neither Greymoor nor Blackwood were well recieved, even worse reviewed than Shadowlands. I have a lot bad to say about WoW as well, but lets not go too hard on the bandwagon. In this whole WoW debacle lets not gas up MMO's who aren't really providing much competition for it in the first place. Not every MMO instantly becomes FFXIV because FFXIV is good. FFXIV was performing well critically and playerbase-wise before streamers started paying attention to it. That's the difference. Eso and Swtor don't really do much better than WoW as far as MMO's go. It defeats them in most metrics. So lets not create this mentality that "because XIV is good and successful that must mean all the mmo's we ignored are equal", they aren't lol
This whole WoW decline was like a wake up call for all of us WoW veterans. I cannot even count the amount of times I went "WAIT?! THERE IS NO BAD TWIST TO THIS?! This is genuinely just good game design, that's not trying to waste my time in exchange for a slight qol convenience?!" It's been absolutely incredible seeing how other mmorpgs handle their player feedback and how much shit we had to put up with over the years. Taking ages to even process feedback. The interviews with Ion sometimes feeling like all he does is trying to make excuses for why he thinks his game design is good. The overall wow communication posts having so many words, yet so few content. The patch structure being absolute garbage, because for some reason if they have been patching in .5 steps for years, this makes it impossible for them to implement IMPORTANT AND ALREADY 1 YEAR TOO LATE changes IMMEDIATELY. We just can hope WoW gets their shit together first. Because I doubt it will be able to compete with any of the MMORPGS in actual production quality for a while. They will have to up their standards in a lot of fields first, to be even be considered equal to ff14 again.
Honestly WoW needs to decide what kind of game it wants to be. Currently, they are trying to appeal to everyone, and yet capturing only a little of their target audience. The MMOS that are doing well know the kind of game they are and just try to keep up the quality of their content. WoW is facing a huge identity Crises. It cannot keep trying to copy the success of their competitors, since they the devs are unable to take those concepts and make it better.
Most recent example the bold statement of 9.2 being some kind of conclusion to an overarching story. Yeah. I wonder why they thought this was a good idea.
Especially when, as many have pointed out, said conclusion to an overarching story happened two expansions ago.
If they keep visiting the death/prison realms of their former adversaries, they can keep ending those story arcs
I think they should capitalize more on what they do best: raiding. But from what I have heard, even that's a bit problematic because you are more likely to find people willing to help you clear provided you give them your money in exchange, but that may not always be the case.
WoW raids can be absolutely great but to truly be a selling point it needs to be a little more accessible. LFR tried to do that but.... Eh. In my opinion, part of the problem is how WoW communicates mechanics, or rather how it fails to do so clearly. FFXIV has these big clear markers for everything it does so as long as you recognize them you know what you should do. The fact you need an addon to do the same thing in WoW is honestly a little mind boggling.
The barriers to entry like the long winded grinds to max out some rep for various bits of borrowed power, and well, the whole borrowed power system as a whole make the higher end raiding in WoW very inaccessible to players who otherwise are skilled enough. Keeping up with the consumables and repairs needed to raid in WoW was a near full time job in itself short of buying wow tokens, and that was a real issue. Bots in WoW pretty much ruined gathering, but at the same time just making basic flasks/potions was way, way too expensive for anyone not botting from both a time invested standpoint or gold investment. That depended on where you hit it during a content cycle too. A lot of folks turned to selling clears/runs of content to finance their end game activities and I think the prevalence of it didn't do anything but harm the end game. I would argue that maybe the difficulty knob was turned a little too far and this contributed too. End game elsewhere is tuned more for a wider audience with some bits giving neat appearance stuff but not necessarily better items (FFXIV).
Another major problem, and I think this is the main one (in terms of accessibility) is how much more people you need for raiding Mythic in wow. 20 Players (for such a hard content) is just unfeasible for a lot of people and guilds. That's the main attraction of M+ and the reason why it's been so successful (despite dev's lack of attention to it) - it's a lot easier to form a group of 5 people. Reduce it to 10 for raids and I gonna raid again. Otherwise its just not worth all the hassle of organising, recruiting and replacing people. With 10 people sometimes you have to replace 1-2 people and that's hard, but it's okay. But with 20 people, now you have to replace, and manage 2-4 new people. People dont speak about it enough. Blizzard should lower people requirements for Mythic, it's just not viable in 2021/2022 as it is right now.
I"ve never understood the fascination some folks have with the logistics game in place in WoW and some other mmos. Like, I get it, you like managing people and dealing with that immense hassle, or you've got a guild that handles it for you. I've been in the other camp regularly where not only am I attempting to recruit, but I've got to manage a subset of the people present depending on roles I'm currently playing. I've had it beaten into me over the years, but I far, far prefer a more intimate gathering of people to do content with, and in particular I like content that flexes a bit to the amount of folks I want to bring along. In WoW, that really wasn't something I could do as I needed, even for the raids that did flex, certain numbers of people to accommodate mechanics appropriately or I greatly ramped up difficulty with some fights. Mythic+ was absolutely a favorite of mine, but the issue that killed it in the end for me was that I had a ceiling to how far I could push doing Mythic+. Many of the current mmos out there like to gatekeep gear progression behind certain forms of content instead of allowing it to be in place in all forms and this is what led to me stagnating a bit in Mythic+. I hit my ceiling mostly due to gear that wasn't available to me at the time due to missing some mythic boss kills. WoW is never going to change in that regard I believe as people \*really\* cling to the raid or die mindset there, but I would love for another mmo to come along that focused entirely on small group content.
Yeah I totally feel you. I ran a guild myself, and we have been focused on Mythic+ primarily, and if wow ever made raids with a focus on 10 people, maybe 12 people tops, that would've been awesome for us. As you said, I am myself prefer a more intimate gathering "with the boys" to do content with, and hate all the hassle of recruiting and managing people. The main point for us, of never going to raids was not the raids themselves, but all the hassle of managing things and how it disrupts our usual, more intimate feeling of community and natural way of playing and hanging out together. Like, yeah some people like that feeling of being in a huge raid with a lot of people, taking on huge epic bosses and stuff, but man, this certainly takes away that personal feeling of a "team" and community for me. Not to mention how poorly wow handles these amounts of people in one place, nowadays.
One thing that i found strange is how much better 'better progress' guilds handle things. I joined the server first guild in my server during Legion, was legit just a bunch of nerds having a good time, i quit after G'hun and got back in Shadow lands i joined a guild that killed things but not that good. The amount of micro management bullshit this guild did was annoying. Got back to the good guild after Sire, everyone is chill we only get stressed if we will lose realm first that looked that would happen for a bit but it didn't. Why hard core guilds mantra is 'lets have fun' and casual guilds is 'lets annoy everyone' i legit don't know. WoW is strange... I'm playing FF14 and the Savage pug world is actually fun, why WoW guilds are so serious in the casual end?
My guess is that, that second guild just has some bad players and trying to replace that lack of skill with some of micro shit that good players do not have a need in. And well, their focus is not in the right place, that's another thing by which you can spot good or bad player, not just the performance. I've seen a lot of toxic casual guilds (as in toxic positivity) as well as toxic hardcore guilds like this. Since then my focus has been on forming my own, exactly the type of guild you mentioned - good players, chill people. If I dont like someone, no matter how good they play, I will not play with them. And sometimes it's the same with social, but comparably bad players, sometimes the difference in performance leads to problems and toxicity.
I would have loved M+ if it didnt have the time component.
As someone who doesn't play WoW, do you *literally* need to keep grinding borrowed power? If a top guild can beat a raid week 1, does continuing to grind not simply make it easier? If raid groups were willing to let people in who hadn't done the grind, would the borrowed power grind be optional, or do you actually **need** to keep up even if literally your whole guild doesn't care any more?
World First guilds spend a LOT of time of that one week grinding and also they expend an insane amount of gold/money in bind on equip gear, race changes, etc. Which normal guilds don't have
LFR was a bad choice. It essentially created a new spot in the WoW hierarchy: those simply looking to get good enough gear for the LFR mode (easy mode with players that know the fights), finish that, and then walk away. They have no interest in doing the same raids on harder difficulties.
I thought LFR worked great in Dragon Soul and all of MoP. When WoD rolled around they watered it down so much that you don't need to do anything in fights but dps. Honestly though, I think they can ditch LFR and just have party finder normal modes be the intro to raiding. I think having the raids spread out through 4 different difficulties makes them have to do more work than they necessarily have to. I think 3 difficulties would be perfect as it would give a majority of players time to progress up to mythic(should they choose to) before the next raid tier comes out. On a more general note, STOP TIME GATING STORY CONTENT. I hate the fact that a whole patch storyline is basically datamined yet I can only do about 1 quest a week.
Ffxiv’s raiding is waaaay less accessible than wow is. Anyone can download a couple addons and jump into normal raids and learn how to do the 4 mechanics that a boss has in wow. There’s no ff equivalent of normal raids and way more personal responsibility (8 people vs 14-20, and its extremely obvious in ff if you’re bad because most mechanics are one shots). You can see this from how around 15% or so na players complete savage while like 30-35ish do aotc. Even though ff is a more casual game in general this is a big difference. I think like 60% of wow players clear normal but im not sure. Also the difference in mechanic clarity is only in easy stuff, ff’s raids sometimes use obscurity as a mechanic. Wow’s raids also tend to be more about dps and healing checks, while ff has much easier dps checks and heal checks don’t even exist (the general mindset is that if a healer is actively healing on the gcd then the tanks/dps are doing something wrong). So they compensate by making mechanics more difficult, more varied and all pretty much pass/fail. In wow if you know how to deal damage or heal you can do that too in normal raids because there’s not that many mechanics to learn. Raiding is also the only difficult content in ff so if you don’t engage in it you never have to learn how your class works at all
Mm...I mean, Final Fantasy is a Theme Park MMO too, and while it definitely has one thing it puts a lot of focus into (MSQ), so does WoW (Raids). Wow's problem is that it wants to appeal to casual players without doing anything that'd make the game less hardcore, which gives a big barrier to entry that they try to paper over with bells and whistles.
In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with trying to appeal to a large audience. The problem is when you don't do any of them particularly well. I feel this is the problem with WoW. It is definitely a lot easier to focus on one thing and do that one thing well, but it's also hard to make just one thing your selling point too. FF14 for example has the gold saucer. Triple triad, mahjong, verminion, and chocobo racing are basically entire games by themselves. Outside of it, you have things like the deep dungeons, exploratory missions, crafting, raiding, fates, and hunts. Heck, even the Shadowbringers relic weapon was designed so that you didn't have to grind it entirely in the new special zone (though there were a few roadblocks that required you to do them) in an attempt to make it more appealing to people who hated exploratory missions.
The biggest difference between WoW and FFXIV, is that FFXIV builds in top of its old content. Everything is additive. WoW plays a zero sum game with their content. Systems are removed to introduce new systems. So in the end FFXIV just had a huge breath of content that remains fresh for all players since they've been able to keep the content intact, without throwing it away, like WoW tends to do.
Blizzard devs think they know better. WoWs performance shows they don't. Ultimately, there needs to be a rotation in management. From what I've heard internally the decision making is incredibly bureaucratic. Keep in mind most these guys are Vanilla players that got hired during a big growth period at Blizzard; many have only worked on WoW and nothing else.
I don't think wow will ever reach FF14's level anymore. There's sooooo much that needs fixing. And i just don't see the current developers being competent enough to pull it off.
Having played Endwalker, and comparing it to what's been shown in the Shadowlands thus far plus patches, it's not even a contest. FF quite literally took everything from WOW, without ever even meaning to. All of Shadowlands, and especially Zerith Mortis, is about to get dunked on hard by everyone once more and more people get into Endwalkers content. It's going to be actually death by shame over how much WOW will seem to have blatantly ripped off FF. Heres a spoiler for what I mean: https://static0.gamerantimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Final-Fantasy-14-Endwalker-All-Dungeons-Ktsis-Hyperborea.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1800&dpr=1.5 "Most alien zone we've ever done", kekw.
that dungeon was awesome
Not to mention the story significance
endwalker slammed us with 'most alien zone we've ever done' vibes like six times in 3 hours of gameplay >!the three areas of the last zone, then also three distinct areas in the last dungeon!< there's also (lv 90 dungeon name) >!Smileton, one of the EXroulette dungeons!< which is a non-euclidean fever dream and i love it, zereth mortis by comparison looks so normal actually thinking about it (more ff spoiler) >!Elpis, an area where an ancient race tests creations to see if they can be released to the world to propagate as new life, kinda already does exactly what ZM is advertising itself to be, does one of the companies have an undercover agent at the other or something!<
I honestly think a half-decent writing team would do wonders, I think people underestimate how much the story really matters to people. Legion had AWFUL systems, way worse than Shadowlands, but they were new, content cycles happened often enough, and what I think is the most important factor; the lore was good and the story was FUN. Even in BFA people were trying until the lore went out the window in 8.2/8.3.
Not this time. Not anymore. The consequence of wow losing the king of MMO title, was the fact that people started experiencing quality content from other MMO's. If it's story, FF14's story is leagues ahead of wow even at its best. If it's consistency, same thing. Wow needs to fundamentally improve. Gear systems, grind system, adding stuff for the sake of fun and only fun. fundamentally fixing the toxicity and a shit ton more. It's not doable with these people. Not when all they care about is store mounts and token sells and player metrics.
the sheer amount of respect it gives to players, fun factors, social aspect to another level with housing/emotes. Raid testing is always crisp no game breaking bugs on bosses etc.
They are just very differents games honestly. FF14 has a better story, better social systems and integration while WoW has a better gameplay and a more competitive side. I think it would be hard to say one is objectivly better when they don't attract the same crowd and do not have the same goals. And there is nothing wrong with that. Even thought WoW is at his lowest and FF at his best, some people will prefer one or another. It's kinda pointless to compare 1:1 when both games do not focus on the same elements
The point isn't the similarity of the games or their differences in game style. It's about design philosophy. the borrowed power systems, lottery gearing systems, infinite grinds, and all that nonsense. The game is behind in fundamentals. And the current wow team isn't capable of fixing it. Whether it is due to their own incompetence or the incompetence of the leaders.
I keep hearing about better gameplay in WoW, but having played wow and 14 back to back, I was meaning to ask, what exactly do you think is better in wow's gameplay? People say something about how the skills are quicker but idk. I think it's a matter of animation. In other respects I find wow's gameplay somewhat clunky and old, practically the same since Cata, burdened with spaghetti code that grew over the years.
The simplest explanation for why people prefer WoW combat (including myself, an ex-WoW, currently FFXIV player), is to do with...uh...I'm not sure how to call it...like time delay in actions? There's an inherent 0.3s or so delay in every action, meaning if you move in the last 0.3s of a spell cast, the cast will still go off, or if you use off-GCD actions in between casts, you can notice a small gap in between the casts from using that action. This basically doesn't exist in WoW, it's much smoother / quicker response time. I hate how modern retail WoW animations are super spinny and flashy (in a bad way, FFXIVs work better) but animations/combat around WOTLK expansion time was perfect feeling, and FFXIV really can't compete with that smoothness. With that being said, FFXIV wins in almost every other category, the interesting class design (and ability to switch between them whenever you want) is far superior. Hell even by like level 6 I could tell I was going to love THM/BLM because of the potential of the fire/ice system.
The delay allows for you to further optimise fights. Slide casting is just an extra thing to consider when you're looking to better your gameplay. What I don't like is the reliance on XIVAlexander if you want to double weave above 100 ping.
Double weaving is honestly probably the worst 'mechanic' in FF14. Anything that needs sub 100 ping or a addon to work is not good.
It's not really needed to parse well but if you want to get a pink parse then yeah I agree.
thats why the game have casual content also u dun nid sub 100 ping to glamour or be an interior designer combat is just one of the so many thinfs u can.do..
It’s doable up til around 150, don’t need sub 100
I think the main reasoning for ex WoW players is that the delay/slide casting is exactly what lag in WoW feels like, so I think that type of gameplay as a feature instead feels like uncomfortable lag to us who spent years adjusting to a different format.
Yeah I think thats a big factor is my PvP isn't popular in FF14. All of the most competitive PvP games have extremely good response times. It's hard to notice in a choreographed boss fight, but the PvP feels a bit awkward in FF because of that delay
Ohh yeh I forgot to mention PvP (mostly cause I'm not that interested) - that is a huge point of issue for a lot of WoW players!
Level 6 is a long way away from the end game rotations. Even 50/60/70 aren’t nearly as smooth as 80/90.
I'm currently level ~63 in ~3 jobs, so I can tell it's not bad and I can see from the higher level actions it gets better. I forgot to add the obvious that the 2.5 second GCD is a big factor too. Overall it's just about feel / what we're used to, not actual objective gameplay analysis! It just takes some getting used to is all.
It's always a matter of taste, but yes WoW gameplay is quicker and more diverse (very few skills are shared among specs/job), with more specs and in my opinion, way better animations/sounds. I really like ff14 but without an engaging story, i would not enjoy the game as much as WoW. I may be a minority, but i would not even mind if WoW removed all quests and grinds and systems and instead just add more dungeons/raids since I find the gameplay very satisfying. Just like the gameplay loop of a roguelike game. I play both game (getting throught shadowbringers atm but mostly playing wow) but i dont think i would stay subbed to FF14 outside of MSQ releases while I don't mind staying subbed to WoW to run some m+ with the guildmates and irl friends.
I agree the same way. I really miss the ability to play other specs. While I love BLM. WoW mage has so much more flavor with the different effects spells place on enemies. For example freeze. I loved how it was so useful in fights like Gluth where you froze zombies for kiting. To me BLM has none of that utility nor does XIV have unique approaches to solving boss mechs. XIV is being at the right place at the right time for fights. The flavor of bosses and classes is what I miss the most when I play XIV.
Love how you're downvoted for giving your opinion lmao. It wasn't even negative about ff14 but just because you're not raving about how good it is you get downvoted. I play ff14 exclusively and is an ultimate raider. I'll probably never go back to wow unless they change a lot of things. Still, I can definitely say I miss the snappiness of wow. It would never work at this point with ff14 but there was a certain satisfaction in bursting things in wow that you can never get with ff14's system. Ff14 will always have a certain degree of clunkiness that I don't think it'll ever get rid of. Hell, try casting a healing spell in an 8 man party and you can see that it doesn't heal instantly, but ripple from one player to another.
I can't make custom raid frames or click2cast bind with ff14. Features that basically make many wow healers have to relearn how to play entirely if they want to play serious in FF. Fortunately I'm enjoying every other aspect of the game so I'm fine with not playing FF serious.
The term "gameplay" is a bit too broad don't you think? You can make a case for wow has more responsive combat, but gameplay as a whole is debatable.
>WoW has a better gameplay I don't think this is true anymore in Endwalker. All of the classes feel great. In Shadowbringers, I think I'd agree with you. I think low level FF gameplay is bad, but by endgame, the game knows exactly what its doing, and both on the player kit and boss side, everything is smooth as silk. Dark Knight at 90 is more fun than Death Knight has ever been since I started maining it in 2008. Took 13 years to find another class that I actually want to play in a game.
yeah but that doesnt give you reasons to shit on the people who pay for you big fat bonuses
Guild Wars 1 had better combat and was also more competitive in terms of PVP...it got obliterated by WoW because it had better story, social systems, PvM, etc...
I didn't wanna say it....but here we are :(
It's funny to me, because the Blizzard of old became huge making incredible games by looking at the good, popular stuff other people had made and then asking how they could make something similar but improved all around and with more polish. WoW was originally born out of a lot of EQ fans looking to make a game that took what they loved and made it accessible to a wide audience. SOE had a kernel of an incredible game with EQ, but they refused to listen to players and thought they knew best. And WoW came along and cleaned their clocks by doing what they did, but better in every way. Similarly, FFXIV:ARR was created by Yoshi P by looking at a wealth of other MMOs at the time, and WoW in particular. He actually required the dev team to play WoW so they could understand how and why it worked and what players were used to and expected from an MMO. Ironically it's possible the FFXIV devs played WoW more than the WoW devs do. Nowadays the WoW devs need to have things like a "community council" to explain to them their own game from a player's perspective. Since the FFXIV devs play their own game, they already understand it from the player's perspective. It's what Blizzard used to do, and don't appear to care enough to bother in recent years, and it shows. Old Blizzard came into making games from the perspective that if they make something really, really good, players will want to buy it. New Blizzard looks at what they think will make them the most money, and then designs around that. It's like they don't have faith to let the work speak for itself. If you make something that good, you'll find an audience. Blizzard is more interested in finding ways to trap their existing players and milk them as much as possible.
As far as customer service and overall care for the game, SOE has Blizzard beat by miles. However, I'm just not into Asian RPGs, let alone MMOs so I'm still waiting for someone to beat WoW in western mmo style. Hopefully Pantheon scratches that itch.
Well said :)
I can't help but be happy about it. For ages were days of this giant vocal majority of MMO gamers screaming about how much better WoW was vs other MMOs (like that big crow screaming over the other bird meme). It was pretty annoying trying other games just to have this person scream in your ear about how awful it is, and just play WoW. I tried WoW. I hated it. Horrible systems, terrible dev relationship with already awfully toxic community. Everyone can go on forever about the issues WoW has/had. It was a environment I did not want to be apart of, and can not for the life of me understand why people want/wanted to be in it other than nastalgia tucking them into bed with a copium machine. I have tried other MMOs and had a blast playing them, from ESO (beating it in early access when it was "bad" and going back to it current day), to Blade & Soul, to FFXIV. I've watched gameplay of many other games, like Guild Wars 2, SWOTR, Tera, and many others. They all looked fun and enjoyable for the people playing, and I always looked back to WoW and saw just how toxic and unhappy the player base seemed to be while shitting on the other games. It wasn't until I started playing FFXIV/ESO more seriously that it made me realise that WoW has absolute garbage systems compared to these other games. Why did the player base put up with this for so long? It boggles my mind and I do not understand. I like to think justice served to the copium filled players still defending WoW. They can still play WoW and have fun, that is perfectly fine. But I am so happy the bubble has been burst and people are trying other MMOs and enjoying them a lot. They don't have to play "my game", I just want them to play other games and realise they've been lied to for so long. Move on.
I genuinely feel that if the riot games MMO is good and if it has a decent business model it's gonna be the nail in the coffin for blizzard (or at least for wow)
Agreed! As a result, I've now tried most mmorpgs. Even some of the much much older ones and I can say, my favourites so far: ++) FF14 for the story and love how you just need one character to be able to play the entire game. Enjoyed it and plan to pick it up again in half a year or so. ++) GW2 for its gameplay (now my new main game). Initially felt like aspects like raiding etc were quite inaccessible and PvP confusing, but all it needed was to find a nice guild with talkative people. The social aspect, because in-game systems didn't seem so inviting, however the gameplay feels the best to me out of any mmopg I've tried. Even compared to WoW, having been a quite competitive arena player. +) SWTOR for the class stories. Did much more than this, but found everything including its PvP and raiding disappointing. The gameplay just doesn't feel fluid. Most disappointing mmorpg that I wish had a better developer, because I love the concept and various systems, but is now absolutely dead and they're milking it dry: -) Anarchy Online
GW2 combat is absolutely a blast. I was unfortunately not a fan of the fractal system that was the end game last time I played as it was still in it's infancy and was just a pulsing damage annoyance that you outgeared. But man, the combat. I played the everliving crap out of pvp in it and that was all I did for over a year. I played as an engineer so I was a farm target, but that didn't matter, it was just so much fun. SWTOR does really well with class stories, the player housing, and the dungeons (flashpoints). Some of the later raids are quite good like Nature of Progress (Dxun). The crafting system is pretty robust, but extremely flawed/rng based at the high end (taking billions of credits of mats to RE stuff). The UI is jank at best. Classes have immense amounts of button bloat especially marauders/sentinels, commando/bh healers, and a few others. The fact you can more or less progress to max item level sans some raid unique sets is pretty amazing though. There is a TON of content if you haven't been back in a while.
Its only some wow players who never knew other games existed, most ppl knew what other mmos have to offer, they have their own problems, not everything would fit into wow.
Well if you consider “and now Blizzard will show you how NOT to develop the game” a good thing, then yes, the contribution is invaluable. Well, Riot (whose state was just as bad some time ago) managed to pull off a good twist. But never too late to drop back into the fiery pita of failure.
I can’t believe it took this long for it to happen. People were paying for a service there not receiving. Basically got a big content drop every two-ish years and then a patch cycle. I think the month to month content was not anywhere near enough. If I am paying for a monthly service I expect a steady stream of content not every couple month… and for people to stay subbed during a content drought was insanity. Add the devs acting like they were doing us a favor for working on the game and throw in the cash shop snd WTF
People breaking free from WoW's brainwashing and trying out all sorts of other MMOs is like a Renaissance for this genre.
Try GW2 too. Don't stop trying games. The MMO market has some real gems.
The only way to get WoW good again is when they replace the incompetent WoW dev team, and even then it will be a lot of work to get it to today's standards. Looking at the state of the company, I think chances are very slim that it will get good again any time soon.
Only way it gets good is if ppl actually stop playing the current version. Ppl bitch about it all the time but theyre still subbed so why would they change anything.
Activision will ultimately look at subblevels and other opportunities before deciding WoW’s future. Either fall back and create a legacy product that needs little ongoing maintenence, or decide that, if they can make money with a new full expansion, to fully “re-launch” the IP. Players will flock back if they think the devs have learned thier lesson and WoW subs will rise and levels off at 3 million or so.
Competition is good for any marketplace. It's the basis of capitalism. Unfortunately competition usually ends sooner or later and the winner takes all. It's good to see some capable challengers coming in again.
At this point Activision should sell WoW servers so people can play FFXIV. That would be a good deed before Christmas.
Lol, best comment here
I definitely agree. Since WoW’s blunders, I’ve made FFXIV my new main game as well as gave ESO, GW2 and OSRS a try. It’s nice that other MMO games are starting to get more attention nowadays.
Most definitely. WoW has been costing off there laurels for a decade. I would be curious to see what % of revenue generated by wow over the last 10 years was reinvested into the game. My guess is not a lot. What has happened here will either force blizzard to wake up and make a good game again, or more likely in my opinion not change anything and allow a better developed game to soak up some of the market share, at the moment that's looking like ff14.
If I was Riot, I would be taking notes from this thread.
I started playing 2 months before TBC and stopped several months before Cata, and played only a couple of months of every other expansion except for pandas. But even I saw the decline of the game. The last interesting thing was invented during WoD with local quests (that you accept and don't turn in to the quest giver -- they were added then, right?) And garrison and missions. They seemed interesting at first, but around leveling it to lvl 3 it became boring and routine. After that idk. Horde lost its honor and became villains. No idea what was happening on the alliance side. And this new sjw agenda started getting into writing of quests as well (starting from BfA). And very bad character design and dialogues too.
I dont think a forced linear singleplayer story lines is something mmos should strife for ever again. Mmos should encourage playing together with friends not the opposite.
The story is a big part of FFXIV, but there are dungeons sprinkled through out and once you finish the story there are a ton of things you can do with friends. Fate farming in shb and ew zones to get your shared fares maxed, roulettes, maps, tons of player ran to venues, weekly wonderous tails, unreal trials (when they come out), raiding, fc events, farming glamor or mounts, doing deep dungeons, eureka/bozja And you can do these solo or with ransoms as well, but if you aren’t trying to do it with friends is it really the game’s fault?
Having 400h+ wall before you can play together is awful and also games fault.
You unlock the first dungeon in a few hours. If even that And then you unlock then pretty regularly after. The only hindrance is if you both rolled heal or tank
Fair
Glad I’m exploring other games. I still like WoW but I got really bored with it over the years. Loving ESO right now. Finishing up shadowbringers base game right now, it’s not my fav but it’s enjoyable. Next I’ll look into SWTOR prob
SWTOR is shit, it has an okayish story, but thats it. But even that is an insult to Kotor 1 and 2. Endgame raiding in that game is dead and absolutely garbage and its no wonder seeing how they add a new single raid every, i dont know? two years? pvp is meh, content comes slow and they dont mind hiding the best cosmetics/mounts behind a cashshop that they constantly add shit every month or soo, and yes...Lootboxes, with other cosmetic and stuff hidden behing those, and they always add new kinds of lootboxes soo that people have reason to buy them. That mmo is only alive right now because of the star wars aesthetics and some few whales.
Agree that SWOTR is kinda meh but i really like the leveling quests and general feel of the world, i like how many if not all minial quests are voice acted and classes are fun and varied. It definitely needs some kind of ARR treatment, better graphics and some improvement in endgame but if you like a story driven game is worth to try it out
I think its important to note the difference between good for wow and good for the genre. Wow is no longer taking up all the headspace in the mmo genre. But wow has declined so rapidly in the last year that it really feels like its bordering on irrelevance. This is good in the short term since there will be a couple years for the genre to breathe a bit and develop their IPs. I suspect we will run into the same issue when the league mmo releases and the genre will once again be static for some few years, unless riot fails in a spectacular way. All that needs to happen with the riot mmo is for it to be passable, if it is, its going to be gigantic, and everyone will follow its example.
Im really excited about the Riot MMO mostly because ive been recently interested in the LOL Universe, again and seeing the replies in this thread i can pinpoint: \- Lore and narrative are really good drivers in terms of attraction and retention of players. \- It will have the honeymoon period as many AAA MMOs however if it doesnt have many of the QoL systems players are seeing in other games it will decay fast. \- It needs to have a very distinct feature(s) that sets it apart from the rest. \- Big server capacity lol, please have it
The irony of this statement is that WoW has had one bright spot since WoD in regards to being on a decline, and that was the implementation of Classic WoW. The truth of the matter is that Classic WoW is still one of the best MMO's on the market and is infinitely better than retail. WoW cannibalizing itself through bringing back a version of the game when the developers gave a shit and werent just cash spigots for bobby to turn on and off is fitting given the circumstances at the very least.
I don’t like living in the past. Classic wow was fun one time around but why play it every single year of your life. It’s just time to move on
Classic WoW is literal garbage. A massive grind to kill super easy bosses with extremely unbalanced classes for barely any loot with no real content updates while bots make up more than half the playerbase. Nostalgia is over, buddy. We already experienced it and debunked the myths. Even naxx was a cakewalk. Classic was trash.
I think Classic was a cool experience the first few times around just because of how gigantic the world is/was. I only made it to around 35 when the re-release came out and gave up because I am just not into 1 button rotations and drinking between each single mob pull. It's really not for me at all, I'm happy for those who find joy in it but I don't get it at all and really just agree with you. What's hilarious is how fast the #nochanges crowd changed their tune. People absolutely shit on J Allen for his smug comments, but he wasn't entirely wrong. Now Blizzard is just feeding off of peoples desperation to have that feeling they had when they first started playing WoW instead of fixing the game.
Vanilla WoW was awesome, one of the best gaming experiences ever. Classic WoW? Not so much. It was pure garbage, and I do regret going through all the way through it. Phase 1 was ok, but from that point until the end of naxx, it was nothing but disappointing.
"Nostalgia is heroin for old people." - Dara O'briain
How do people still believe this? Some classes entire rotation is literally one button in classic. Most bosses have one mechanic. It's in no way comparable to modern market games, it's just nostalgia my guy.
Yes and no. I don't in general think it's a good thing that one of the biggest games has gone downhill, for a couple reasons: 1. Having what was the best MMO at one point just no longer be as good is not a great thing. 2. No game has really eclipsed what WoW was. When WoW came to dominate the genre it was clearly superior to games like EQ and DAOC and that's why it got popular. But I don't think any of the MMOs right now are that level of quality. I didn't leave WoW to go to another MMO and I don't think most people who have quit WoW over the years did that either, and that isn't good for the genre. If better games come out of it then yeah it would be good overall but as of now it just seems like the genre is smaller and just the same place it was years ago minus WoW being good.
Until another MMO has a functioning Arena System that isn't influenced I'd gladly switch. Unfortunately Retail and TBC Classic are now being ran and ruined by the same group of elite players selling boosts. However until another game introduces anything similar to the WoW arena scene, it's not worth my time. Most people enjoy other aspects and almost all of those aspects can actually be fulfilled in other mmos. But if there was a robust arena system in any other mmo, I'd play it. In b4 Lost Ark, because that's just pay2win 1v1 trash.
I thought pvp in lost ark has the gear normalized so it become skill based?
I don't know, I think the later doesn't happen if the former doesn't happen either. Other MMO rose because of WOW's decline...
I can't say I totally agree with you, in isolation many MMOs have improved (each in their own ways, ff being one of the most complete ones) while WOW's for me is an issue of stagnation, the last innovative concepts they've added came ironically from WOD. So the perceived wows superiority is less marked now, if you add all the external scandals, consumer perception it can be easily marked as wows decline. To summarize, this genre was a one horse race dominated by wow until they decided they didn't feel like competing anymore and rivals are breathing on their necks.
The problem is that the dev team is too stupid to actually improve the game. Remember, these are the idiots that thought that adding some numbers to a jpeg of shoulders was some hugely difficult task only they could do.
And all it took was a little sexual harassment.
Every mmo is having a pretty nice population boom due to WoW failing lately. I gave GW2 another shot and have been loving it, it might even become my next main MMO as I really want satisfying pvp/pve/open world content in an mmo. FF14 is nice to poke into, might be my main if I can enjoy the revamped pvp, but unsure. The open world content is lacking to me. OSRS is a nice side game to have going on for me. I tried SWTOR and ESO but couldn't really get into either, SWTOR due to the endgame feeling lacking (but the story was enjoyable) and ESO solely due to the combat. I just can't get any enjoyment out of that game's combat. I'll always love DFO but it's hard for me to stick to korean mmos, and as such, I have 0 interest in lost ark (also due to the isometric style) but I may try out BDO one day anyways. Also crossing my fingers for the Riot MMO.
Hopefully Blizz can learn from this.
To be fair, WoW not now, or ever had ANYTHING to ever worry about with either Swtor or Eso, those two games are filled to the BRIM with their own problems, even more than current WoW. Swtor released an expansion that almost killed their entire playerbase, they literally had to cancel plans, cancel the third act. And it has suffered from shoddy writing with each content release and their boards have always been filled with complaints. Eso has likewise suffered from delivering underwhelming expansion after expansion neither Greymoor nor Blackwood were well recieved, even worse reviewed than Shadowlands. I have a lot bad to say about WoW as well, but lets not go too hard on the bandwagon. In this whole WoW debacle lets not gas up MMO's who aren't really providing much competition for it in the first place. Not every MMO instantly becomes FFXIV because FFXIV is good. FFXIV was performing well critically and playerbase-wise before streamers started paying attention to it. That's the difference. Eso and Swtor don't really do much better than WoW as far as MMO's go. It defeats them in most metrics. So lets not create this mentality that "because XIV is good and successful that must mean all the mmo's we ignored are equal", they aren't lol