Combination of CATA and applying for graduate school. I was all excited about shattering and stuff and LOVED exploring the changes. But trying to level up I felt such a huge gear gap and it was just frustrating to have every zone SWARMING WITH EVERYONE. So I gave up. =shrug= I actually had Collector's Edition of everything including Cata. Didn't even buy Panda.
The fact that every time I look into the Pandaria thread (I got out for a second time after Cataclysm) everyone is only talking about doing dailies.
But that's always been a big topic since daily quests were put into the game. I don't hate the dailies themselves because they at lease give you something else to do at the level cap and the design of the quests isn't too bad. But I do hate the way Blizzard has chosen to put gear I need for raiding behind several rep grinds as well as requiring currency only acquired through raiding and/or running lots of heroic 5-mans. The devs keep saying "well, dailies aren't the only way to get gear", which is technically true. But for instance, I haven't gotten a single helm upgrade from a raid since the expansion came out. So my options are to either just keep hoping one drops in the raid and I win it or to spend several weeks grinding out the required faction and valor points. So no, you don't have to do dailies, just like you don't have to do anything at all in the game. But come on.
All that, and heaven help you if you decide to hear up an alt. I know they made rep grinds 'easier' for alts but its still annoying.
Yeah, it's twice as fast now for alts, which just balances out the fact that it's twice as annoying to do the grind a second time. To be fair, it only takes 30 or 40 minutes to finish all the dailies on my warlock alt, so it's not that big a deal. It's just one of those things that feels mandatory, so even though I'm playing a video game it's not the most enjoyable use of video gaming time.
Just to point this out if it wasn't obvious. I disliked the whole concept of dailies immensely ever since they were introduced. It's grinding covered with the veneer of content.
The Operation: Shieldwall dailies are genuinely interesting. You get a different set of dailies every day interspersed with regularly occurring lore quests to keep things interesting. The other mop dailies? Fuck 'email in the ear hole. As pants mentioned, VP gear is locked behind factions, which are locked behind tedium. But there's two factions that are themselves locked behind a rep grind. You can't even START grinding rep for these factions until you've finished the grind for a different faction. Lord help you if that helm you need that never drops is locked behind Shado-Pan revered.
At least Shado-Pan has some non-daily quest lines in Townlong Steppes so you can get some rep while leveling. August Celestials is the worst by far.
Yeah, they made a mistake when they took reputation gain away from heroics. I understand they felt it was making everyone sit around the cities waiting for a group to pop, but they could have just reduced the amount given for a typical run. That way the optimal way to progress would have been dailies and dungeons, which is a much better mix. My solution to the reputation grind is to not do them, but I'm not raiding any more either. I'm progressing through the Shieldwall dailies because they aren't so bad, but otherwise I'm just playing casually. My big thing right now is trying to get one of my alts from 1 to 600 blacksmithing. Good grief the mats are expensive these days, especially from the old expansions.
Got all the fun I was going to get out of WoW this expansion, cancelled again in favor of my expensive new hobby.
Because it went from a game about being some adventurer in an interesting but ultimately uncaring world to a self-indulgent theme park that catered to YOU, the only possible savior of the universe.
Until you hit the cutscenes wherein you're nothing but a bystander and/or cannon fodder for the real heroes of the story. And by real heroes I mean Thrall.
I have actually been debating that whole we are the only hero in the universe routine, they really pushed that in Wrath but its been sliding somewhat. What I encountered Blue side on the intro to panda land was mostly the .. hey we are elite people you are elite people we are all doing these elite military things .. will you go do this Wile I stick my thumb in my behind because I am elite and higher rank than you bub. Now I haven't gotten much further in, I just hit the ..hey help every single panda ever point that bliz says is supposed to make me give a damn. I don't but I do about other things that this is on the path to.. yay. So tell me again how the dailies behind other dailies is in any way worse than grinding say Ogrila rep? That is STILL ridiculously LOW on the per quest , and there are only 3 that give them. One of which is the damned simon music game.
The August Celestials rep wasn't bad at all for me. I didn't grind it like I did Golden Lotus or the Serpent one, and as such I just completed it a few days ago. I mostly stuck to days when it was the crane or tiger areas, as they were the least amount of effort. The crane ones close proximity to the new faction quests didn't hurt. As a set of dailies... Shado-Pan is easily the worst. I haven't even hit revered with them yet. And yes, the 5.1 faction (Dominance Offensive for me) was great. The interspersed quests were really well done.
LOL I have some amazon gift cards piled up...I am considering grabbing Panda and checking it out. I am sure I can have a few months of fun...right?
That depends if you're the sort of ex-player who burnt out from WoW like white phosphorous in pure oxygen and hate Blizzard with a fury that shames any appreciation you once had for them, or if you just got bored a while back and wandered off. As long as you're not the former you'll get a box-worth of fun out of it. Just don't decide to grind all factions simultaneously as soon as you hit L90. The MoP faction treadmill mostly unlocking all at once was one of the more boneheaded decisions in the design of the expansion.
You'll probably love questing from 85-90. The end game at the moment is a bit of a treadmill but that's changing fair bit in the next patch ( 5.2 ).
This is not necessarily true. I didn't flame out gloriously, nor do I hate Blizzard, but I played MoP for about three days before I got completely bored and wandered back off. Sometimes you're just done, even if the game didn't really do anything "wrong." The pet battle stuff IS fun, though, I spent probably one of my three days just doing that. :P Then I tried to level one of my level 85 people and it felt like a) everything takes forever to die and b) it takes forever to level. Knowing there were a kajillion dailies waiting for me at 90 did not help, though.
Raiding is dumb. I would rather the greatest of rewards hide behind a test of skill other than my ability to herd catassing shitheads. At one point, WoW resembles a game. Beyond that point, the awful majesty if its fixed/variable/reward rises from the depths like a massive erect penis shadowing brave Helios himself. And so we breathe deep the gathering gloom, social plans fade from every room, catassing people lean back and lament, another day's useless dkp spent. Pissed off guildmates complain as one, sad ass random cries for loot and gets none. Newb cleric pointlessly shields her rl friend, level 90's regret reaching game's end. Cold hearted raidmaster that rules the night. Removes the challenge from our fight. Red is grey and yellow white, but we decide which has good loot. And which is a trashmob.
Spoken like someone who's never raided hard content with a competent Guild not filled with shitheads. :)
Spoken like I don't give a fuck enough to sift through the piss filled wading pool that is an MMORPG to find fifty people with the right work schedules in order to have a one in six chance of collecting one out of eight pieces of digital armor the usefulness of which is effectively restricted to allowing me to attempt the next dungeon wherein I have a one in eight chance of collecting one out of six pieces of equipment. Don't be proud of that, you goddamn weirdo. You can be a lot of things on this forum, you can be a crazy right winger who never reads anyone else's posts, you can be a tech snob who loves Windows phones, you can even be someone who plays Japanese masturbation games and tells everyone about it who wants to play Japanese masturbation games but can't read Japanese well enough yet. But for the sake of all that is right and good in this world, I beg of you, do not be the guy who is proud of his online guild. Also, scripted encounters are not actual game difficulty. Winning a" stand here, stand here, don't shoot now, yada yada yada", fight because you have read on the internet the order and the nature of the one hit kills doesn't mean you have a competent guild, it means you are running an online dance troupe. Nobody, in the however many months this poll has been up, said the game was hard. The majority of the people who quit pointed out that the game was boring.
Yes, Flowers, I'm aware of the vast depths of ignorance from which you speak with the pretense of certainty. If you need some space to go masturbate, can you please go do it in the Sanctum Santorum? It's not appropriate in this venue.
I read that as saké WoW was far from difficult. However, I can tell you truthfully I've never encountered the type of teamwork needed to do down new encounters anywhere else but in WoW. Getting 30 people to sit at their computers for 12hrs a week to follow instructions and have their shit together to actually complete challenges down raid bosses. Being a raid leader is hard work and it can be rewarding to all involved.
Flowers if you actually believe all that stuff you posted, you have absolutely no idea what goes into raiding in a guild in WoW.
There are raid encounters like what you described, and certainly a LFR run doesn't' require any skill to master. Something like downing Kael'thas in the TBC expansion though, at a time when no one over-geared it and only a few other guilds on the server had done so - that required skill, coordination and a lot of time spent mastering it. Sure, we read the strategies and watched the videos, but actually completing the phases and downing the boss was a lot more than just copying what we saw. Doing so with 24 other people, each with strengths and weaknesses and a whole lot of quirks, was a unique experience in gaming. Raiding got old for me, definitely, but the high points were ones to remember.
I get the feeling you're just looking for reactions, but I'll bite anyway. Why would you say this sort of thing on a gaming forum?
I don't consider WoW to be much of a game, or if it is a game, fun. I think it masquerades as fun, and the people that designed that horseshit ruined Diablo 3 through treadmilling itemization. And I did raid successfully for a couple months, but being locked into your computer for seven hours at the mercy of thirty-nine other people's schedules and internet connections in order to get a minor upgrade struck me as a waste of time. So I stopped throwing good money and time after bad and I quit. And the reason I said it is because this is a thread about why someone would quit playing WoW. And I still do not consider gradually collecting the required number of competent players to be a gameplay plus when it is that many goddamn people. A good team is a plus in a MOBA match, and teamwork there is a skill. Teamwork in a raid is just waiting until it's your turn to sing the next line in the most drama and greed filled rendition of row-row-row your boat ever sung, and the fact they take almost fifty people and six hours is just a way to make you have to stick around longer before you move to the next dungeon that has nothing to do with the challenge or enhances the experience.
And again, at this point in the thirteenth hour of the first day of the second month of the two thousand and thirteenth year of our Lord there be by my count; eighty one votes - boring, twenty one votes - the people sucked, twenty one votes - Cata Sucked, Zero votes? Hard.
I guess the problem is you treated the gear treadmill as the sole reason for raiding. If you had had the mindset that getting gear upgrades is not the end goal but merely a tool that will allow you to be a more effective raider, then you might have enjoyed it more. My most thrilling and memorable moments in MMOs were never when I completed my best-in-slot gear set for a particular tier but rather the times when my guild finally triumphed over a particularly challenging boss. Also, it's been possible to raid all the content in WoW with a 10-player group since 2009. I agree with you completely that the days of 40-player raids sucked, but that hasn't existed in WoW for years.
I quit because my guild went from super awesome people to raid freakshows in about a two week span. Wonderful, friendly people that would give you the shirt off their back, until they got a purple gleam in their eye. Instead of waiting a week for me to bust up a LFR, they decided to just recruit two teenage dumbasses that played mages too. Told me to just 'suck it up and like it'. Quoted. Instead, I sucked it up and looked around MoP and just quit instead.
Again, please stop shit-posting just for the masturbatory sake of stirring shit in this thread. You have neither any idea what you're talking about nor any desire to engage on the subject in good faith; leave it for the Sanctum and get the fuck out.
I have no doubt your raiding experience sucked, Flowers, and that you quit playing the game because of it. But saying everyone else should be ashamed to enjoy their own raiding guild? Come on.
I am expressing discontent with a videogame in a thread that is expressly about discontent with that specific video game. I will direct you to a longer explanation of why raiding sucks, typed by someone other than me, so that you can read it without hyperventilating. http://surlygamer.net/2012/06/05/raiding-sucks-why-guild-wars-2-doesnt-need-this-endgame/ And MrPants, I didn't say that anyone should be ashamed of it, just not proud of it such that one waves it like a magic wand to dispel other people's opinions. Aaron was so proud of his raiding guild that he thought if I express a contrary opinion then necessarily I must never have tasted the champagne dreams and caviar enemas that come with such heights of interpersonal excellence. I have. I was less than taken with the prospect of sitting around six nights a week trying to get new shoulderpads. And I don't say this as someone who sees online guilds as useless or hates teamwork, I say it as someone who was the GM of a successful playerkilling guild in Ultima Online. See how that last thing was nothing to brag about? I will say this, if you can do most of the stuff with ten people now, that's not so bad. Ten's a good number. My remarks pertain to the large, time locked, massive party raiding instances that made up the totality of the endgame when I played. I will contrast that information, supplied by Marchhare, with the entirety of all comments of Aaron Sofaer, who says that I am not contributing anything to, or rather, shitting up, the thread that was inactive for an entire week until I posted. I ask you, Aaron Sofaer, what am I supposed to take from that? What facts did you allege to the contrary of any assertion of mine? Did you offer any points, or any updates on the state of the game? Or were you maybe, just maaaybe, being a dick? But by all means, continue to lose your goddamn mind over a post I made that consists mostly of a parody of the poem from the 1967 Moody Blues magnum opus, "Days of Future Passed."
