Quote from retail player about it

[Regnam1]

Call me late to the party all you like, but I wanna say this. You've read it before, I suppose. People keep saying that Warlords of Draenor has no content. However, I disagree. This problem is VERY different. Warlords of Draenor has no relevant content. Warlords of Draenor has been made so convenient it has killed the game.

The Garrison is the #1 culprit of this. It represents by far the largest problem in the game. Whatever it is that you want, the Garrison gives it and you don't have to lift a finger.

Want some mats? No problem, got that in spades. Just walk a few meters and pick it all up - no problem.
Want some new missions and daily quests? Got them at your command table. For extra convenience, you don't even have to do them yourself. For extra convenience, only your followers need to see Farahlon.
Want some adventure on the open seas and some ship battling? Well, we thought we'd be doubly convenient here. Not only is it convenient for you that you don't have to do any actual sailing; it's also convenient for the developers that they don't have to produce any actual ship combat.
Want some raid gear? Don't worry about that, we've got garrison missions for you that'll give you some nice loot. Just step your feet inside the raid once and defeat the first boss (which is trivial) and you're good to go. No need to do a lot of inconvenient raiding.
And how about we put an auction house and your bank in here as well for good measure so you NEVER have to visit a capital city again with all these people you might've socialized with.

The problem with this is that the Garrison is instanced, so now you have no place where you see the rest of the server. This gives an overwhelming feeling that your server is dead, even though it isn't. This is a social disaster for an MMO, but I won't go into that here. This is about the convenience.

This problem gets worse now, because guess what? You can sit in your garrison and then you can press the I button. The I button opens a system that allows you to CONVENIENTLY:
Find a group to do any dungeon you want at any time you want, instantly and easily. You won't even have to go to the dungeon; you'll get teleported straight there.
You can also find a group to do any raid you want, because why not? Convenience is important, right?
And if you don't quite like these completely random groups, we've made a system that allows you to easily find the group you're looking for. This is actually a great system and I have no problem with it, except for the fact that you're opening it inside your garrison and probably never stepping out.
For PvP? Same thing. Just open the panel and instantly get teleported to any content you want with an appropriate group. No need to meet or socialize with anybody. There is no longer an NPC or a location that we can all gather around to exchange stories and duel one another, because we're all sitting in our garrison and conveniently being able to sign up for anything we like.

Also, why travel to and from your garrison when you can just have 8 teleport abilities, 5 portals activated on Draenor, a portal to Ashran, a portal to Tanaan, 2 Hearthstones, and even more misc. abilities for teleportation? God forbid you might have to go somewhere. And, of course, people didn't find travel convenient enough even when given THAT, so they all requested flying mounts as well because having to navigate around a cliff once a week is just too inconvenient.

So Blizzard wants to fix people not meeting each other. They figure that it'd be nice if we could gather the community around one particular activity every weekend by creating these holidays to get a lot of people doing the same thing. Great. Except we're still sitting in our garrison finding random groups for this, so it changed absolutely nothing anyway.

Even the quest design is all about convenience. I mean wouldn't it be convenient if, instead of getting a set of objectives that has a story behind it and makes a little bit of sense, you just have a bar that fills up when you do whatever seems most convenient at your time of arrival at the quest zone, lore and a feeling of accomplishment be damned? Welcome to "Apexis dailies" - a type of daily which is not hated for the fact that it rewards apexis crystals, but rather is hated for that blasted nonsensical meter that fills up - a meter which replaced actual objectives because it was convenient.

And why not take the convenient quest design one step further by getting rid of class quests and going to the trainer to understand, as a player, what the lore reasons for the spells on your action bars are? You have no idea and no justification for anything on your bar. It's just a row of buttons with no meaning. Why? Because it was too inconvenient to break up your questing with a little adventure about your class and your role within the world, of course.

Convenience has eaten up the entire adventure, the lore, the understanding of the world, the challenge. Everything.

And now we've got a shipyard. And, somehow, people found it too inconvenient to move for 30 seconds to get to their shipyard, so now the naval mission table has been moved into the town hall. I mean... why not? It's already so convenient it has removed all the adventure and all the challenge, so let's just take the last bit of inconvenience away while we're at it. Might as well.

By far the worst part, though, is if you at any point decide you want the game to challenge you, it will immediately shower you with such large quantities of loot that all open world content immediately becomes so irrelevant and so easy you can literally AoE solo everything you come into contact with. Because having to progress through an instance as your raid group slowly gets loot is, of course, too inconvenient. We wanna see the content now, blast it!

Blizzard, you've actually managed to polish the adventure out of an adventure game because the adventure was deemed too inconvenient, and you've managed to create so many raid difficulties, for convenience, that participating in any of the higher end challenges will instantly render the entire rest of the game trivial. By taking away the adventure, you've also taken away the social aspect from a massively multiplayer online game, because interacting with and playing with other players was apparently too inconvenient.

You've literally polished the game to death on the backs of feedback that just about anything is inconvenient and/or forced. And any time you try to add some adventure, people instantly start complaining that they're "forced" to do it and that's inconvenient, but if you don't add anything these same people will complain that there's nothing to do.

This is driving me insane. I gave Tanaan Jungle a chance, I really did, but it just doesn't work. Nothing you do will work until you stop trying to make everything so incredibly convenient that the threat, challenge, and adventure goes away. The problem here is NOT the lack of content. In terms of the sheer number of features, 6.2 is the largest content patch in WoW's history, but what does it all matter when there's no reason to do any of iti and no challenge if you do it anyway?

Well, at least I have Heroic and Mythic raiding and a guild to do it with. I found it through real life friendships though; there's no way in hell the game's current social structure would've let that happen naturally.

I'm done ranting. Sigh.


+1

[staggaz]

I just can't get into this rant.

If you've played vanilla or tbc, play here for 2 weeks and then come back to this thread.

The list of destruction was far before WoD. The spiral started in wrath for me.

Garrison? Nah. That was them shitting on your face for thinking player housing would be cool and actually buying the xpac.

[Chester]

The list of destruction was far before WoD. The spiral started in wrath for me.

Agreex10

[Bioness]

> F3 "convenient"

> 22 results

[Lompcent]

well ii actually liked the idea of garrisons. they give alot of mats thats true too much even. and you cant customize your own damned base very well:( imagine if you could choose styles from all races and shit. the missions arent a problem for me either they mostly are for garrison building materials and it kind of makes you feel like the q giver once. but there is no community, everything is a queue even guilds and raids now. the story sucks , we are timetraveling to a different timeline but it doesnt affect us. so basicly it is of very little interest to the story. and everything is easy mode, dont forget that. you can jsut put on looms and summon dungeons your own lvl

[Wrakt]

Wrath was WoW's glory peak, Cataclysm was it's fall. Seems things will only continue to go downhill. Good thing I don't have to deal with that ridiculousness. Kek.

[Cephilia]

I sort of agree with that post. Most of the changes made are really good by themselves, making things a bit more convinient for everybody, but lumped all together it seriously harms the game. LFR, "welfare epics", flying, LFG, garrisons - nothing by themselves is bad or a game killer. It's the combination of all of this that makes the game lacking.

[Lompcent]

I sort of agree with that post. Most of the changes made are really good by themselves, making things a bit more convinient for everybody, but lumped all together it seriously harms the game. LFR, "welfare epics", flying, LFG, garrisons - nothing by themselves is bad or a game killer. It's the combination of all of this that makes the game lacking.

that and gear is simply too op. retail you jsut put on heirlooms ( or some random greenies) and you solo dungeons. lfd or lfr means match me with afkers because the dungeons and raids are no challenge at all.

as someone who enjoys leveling alot, things were too easy. you outlevel zones even without heirlooms and you one shot everything you see. there is no challenge

[cmill78]

I've been playing Vanilla now for a little over a week and it has been a breath of fresh air for me. I have always loved WoW and tried everything in my power to avoid talking bad about the first (and only) MMO i have ever played. Hell, I have been playing it since March of 2005 with only a small break after Cataclysm (which I wasn't as down on as most). Cataclysm it often referenced as the start of the fall of WoW and Mists often gets a black eye, but to me Warlords has made them both look good.

I tried to give Warlords the same chance as I did the last two expansions but I guess I was just too burned out by what Blizzard is trying to do. They have changed so many things during and after Wrath that they can't even go back to any semblance of what the game used to be without large overhauls and losing their now precious 'convenient' player base. WoW is such a force that they don't even have to listen to the original players like us anymore to continue to sell their product. That is what saddens me the most.

The 'convenient' players have stomped their feet enough that Blizzard gives them what they want to sell product (and who can blame them, as they are a business) but no matter what, the Vanilla lovers are often forced to put up with it or 'violate the Blizzard terms of service' in order to play the game we love the way we want. That is why I am glad for this server. I can play this once great game the way I enjoyed it the most. And if they ever make a TBC server here, I will enjoy that as well.