Tobold's Blog
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
 
Putting the cart before the horse

Since I have resubscribed to World of Warcraft, it very much dominates my gaming time. That is the one thing I always hated about subscription games, you feel like you are wasting your money if you don't play. So you're taking it for granted that you will play, and then decide what exactly you want to do in the game. More and more I am getting the impression that this is putting the cart before the horse. Shouldn't I first look what exactly there is in the game that I really want to do, and then decide whether I want to play this or rather something else?

While the garrison sub-game is interesting for a while, it does get repetitive after some time. Yes, I got my main character to item level 634, somewhere between heroic and LFR without having ever done either. But as I am not doing dungeons and raids, I don't actually need that epic gear anyway. So I ticked the "I'm not doing dungeons and I've run out of things to do" check box on the WoW cancellation form and quit.

Well, I can still play until the end of the month, which should give me enough time to finish the Shadowmoon Valley quest lines with my one alliance character. It appeared to me that much of the content in the other zones was faction-neutral, except for the parts related to building outposts. So even if I don't make it with a third character to level 100, I won't have missed much content.

One can perfectly well play the WoW garrison game by just logging in twice per day for a short time to start work orders and send out followers. But I'm sure not going to pay $15 a month for that. The garrison doesn't really solve WoW's problem of every expansion providing 2 months worth of content every 2 years. At this point in time I would be more interested in a Free2Play version of WoW.

Comments:
I am on the same boat, I mostly login to check my followers + daily battle pet and logout. But we can't say there aren't interesting things "to do" in this game. There are tons of things to do, actually. It's just we don't like them anymore, because we're seasoned players and we pretend more, and more, and more.

As a player wrote on the official forums (and I agree 100%), here is a short list of "doable" things in WoW:

Leveling up alts (leveling is relatively fast in WoD)
Organized Raiding (Normal, Heroic, Mythic)
LFR raiding.
Battlegrounds (unrated)
Rated Battlegrounds
Arenas (2v2, 3v3, 5v5)
Ashran (Nemesis quests adding a big task here with Gladiator's Sanctum)
Highmaul Coliseum FFA deathmatch scenario (Gladiator's Sanctum requried)
Normal / Heroic Dungeons
Challenge Modes (Bronze, Silver, Gold)
Proving Grounds (Tank, Healer, DPS; Bronze, Silver, Gold, Endless)
Brawler's Guild
Reputation grinding for rewards
Apexis Daily
Fishing (hey, some people like it)
Archaeology
Pet Battles (Collecting)
PvP Pet Battles
Primary Professions (Barn makes a big difference here in adding work to do)
Garrison chores (picking up work orders, harvesting herbs / ore)
Follower Missions (potentially highly involved)
Leveling up Bodyguards (some neat rewards for this)
Collecting transmog gear (War Mill / Dwarven Bunker adding more here)
Collecting mounts (including rares in WoD, such as poundfist)
The Toy Collection (new for WoD)
Garrison Invasions
Achievements (which open endless possibilities)

The truth is... we're bored with WoW. We would LOVE to get hooked again but we can't. Because it's a 10 years old game and we have been there since the very first days (almost). It's hard to keep up the interest year after year. We change, we focus on different games... I think we're just "done" with wow, apart from some sporadic comebacks with new expansions.

Original post: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/15699784744#1
 
Despite Rugus's list, WoD seems to provide by far the least amount of content outside of raiding of any expansion so far. Garrisons and follower missions turned out to be a shadow of what they could have been. All forms of crafting feel like they were gutted, I don't think anyone likes what they are now. There are only a few factions you can gain reputation with, and they are all just straight grinds. The Ashram PvP zone is in discussions for "worst content WoW has ever released."

All that is left is Blizzard's obsession with pushing every last player into raiding. It really feels like they had a meeting where they decided the reason not everyone raids is there is too much other content, so they need to cut the other stuff out.
 
All forms of crafting feel like they were gutted

I agree, especially the gathering professions. I used to have some fun traveling around gathering herbs or metal nodes, now it's just a boring collection in my garrison.
 
"That is the one thing I always hated about subscription games, you feel like you are wasting your money if you don't play."

Not really. I always think of it as a club membership fee. It's very common for people to belong to clubs and pay membership fees and yet only use the facilities of the club a handful of times a year if that. I've never felt that just because I'm paying for something I'm obligated to use it. I'm paying for the right to use it, at any time, without further notice or procedures to prevent me doing so. That's good value in itself.

 
To be fair, crafting and gathering was always pretty crap.

Oooh, there's a menu of things I can make. Now I get to watch a timer go while I stand near some super important tool that I don't interact with at all.

Gathering: run around looking for dots on my mini map. Click nodes. Profit. I never played Tales in the Desert but your posts made it sound a hell of a lot more interesting on the crafting front.

I can see farming that out to a garrison. They're trying to get rid of the tedious crap that makes normal people quit. I can kind of respect that.
 
Oy, before you run out of game time, grab your main and go solo Ulduar, Naxxramas, Kharazhan, and Black Temple.

Even if you don't particularly have nostalgia triggers, these are still worth running through one last time, for the great music and visuals.
 
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