I H8 WoW

[Porn Shop Clerk]

I wasn't implying that it was more or less of a time sink now, but rather that they've stripped everything away from the game except the time sink.

If they really wanted to do something "game changing" they'd add a 3rd faction. Its not like they don't have the time, money and resources to do that.

Hell, they could even keep on with their current fluffy puff trends and make the 3rd faction a "refugee" faction where every race and class was allowed!

Then we could have tauren rogues teaming up with gnome fighters and go ahead and take the game to levels of absurdity never before dreamed of.

[natty]

For what it's worth, because of their constant dicking around with game mechanics, 4 years (at the time) of class-imbalance problems, the rabbit-wheel-carrot time-sink mentality to the game, and lack of fixing just BASIC stuff (like flying mounts in Azeroth), when left, I left in disgust. Hence my departure for 3 years.

Flying mounts in a world not designed for it is FAR from basic. It's basically going to the world designers and saying 'hey you know all the work you did for the past 5 years? Throw it out and start over.' They shouldn't have introduced flying mounts in the first place, as they took away world pvp more than anything.

[blackcatgrowl]

I wasn't implying that it was more or less of a time sink now, but rather that they've stripped everything away from the game except the time sink.

If they really wanted to do something "game changing" they'd add a 3rd faction. Its not like they don't have the time, money and resources to do that.

Hell, they could even keep on with their current fluffy puff trends and make the 3rd faction a "refugee" faction where every race and class was allowed!

Then we could have tauren rogues teaming up with gnome fighters and go ahead and take the game to levels of absurdity never before dreamed of.

Good idea!!!

[blackcatgrowl]

The game was always a time sink, they just changed it up to make it more obvious with daily quests. In the original game you had to grind to get stuff for raiding or to make money but instead of going to daily quest hub X you had to go collect mats, farm for a rare spawn or rare drop, etc. The important thing is that put players out in the world. Some of the best pvp battles happened because I came up to a thorium node at the same time as someone else and we had to duke it out. Now most of the zones are void of players who aren't leveling because they're either at a city or the current daily hub.

Before dailies it just seemed more natural (for lack of a better term) - you made gold by collecting stuff others wanted and interesting things happened(interactions with other players). Now you just queue up for a dungeon or BGs and go do your insanely boring dailies.

Actually... everyone I know made gold by soloing or two-manning lower level instances, or grinding elite areas like Hearthglen/Tyr's Hand.

We only farmed mats to help the guild, or make stuff for each other.

Still your point is correct... there was more interaction between players because of farming needs. I agree that dailies sorta took the player out of the world.

[blackcatgrowl]

Flying mounts in a world not designed for it is FAR from basic. It's basically going to the world designers and saying 'hey you know all the work you did for the past 5 years? Throw it out and start over.' They shouldn't have introduced flying mounts in the first place, as they took away world pvp more than anything.

I missed this post for some reason...

Flying mounts in the old world might not have been a "basic" fix, but is conceptually "basic".

That being said, it wasn't technically impossible, nor would it require huge revisions... it COULD have been done with the old world... here's an example:

Sunwell Isle... you can take a Flight from a Flight Master to it. In fact, this is the ONLY way to it. I tried, recently, to swim over to it while getting some Exploration Achievements.

You can swim out to where your fatigue meter starts draining... but only barely... then bam! You hit an invisible wall. You can't move any closer to the island.

Now... I've used wall-jumping techniques to by-pass some natural borders to areas that were incomplete. There's some old world areas that are really badly designed that are missing some textures.... hell... missing some clean geometric structure in some points (like this sheer wall I found. I'll have to post it later...). Using potions and a Warlock Soulstone, I've been able to swim beyond Fatigue areas. There is a "border into nothingness" that surrounds the ocean.... It's all content you wouldn't want your customers to see.

But all of this could have been inaccessible by putting in some solid vectors with transparent textures. Aka.... invisible walls. It would have been possible.

So I have no doubt that the problem wasn't technical... but economic. Why fool around with existing stuff, when you can bundle it into an expansion pack and make money off of it?