I’ve trawled through the gripefest to discover whats been pissing people off this week and boy, do we have some good-uns.

 

This post was literally an ‘I hate Operation: Mechagon’ thread that kinda echoed the feelings of half the playerbase that were posting on the forums at the time.

It also had a spicy click-bait title so I’m naturally going to steal it.

The gist in this now deleted post (I certainly can’t find it anymore) was that the Mechagon dungeon was too hard for the group that this person was in. “overtuned as hell” was the direct quote and used as further proof that he and the Devs only care about the elite end game raiders.

The grumble also turned to “bootstrapping profession items” (which I can only assume to mean that they don’t like tidalcores and the like) and having key story quests linked to mythic only events.

There’s been quite a few shitposts about mythic only dungeons as Mechagon came out.  With the opinion swinging between it’s fine and it’s hard but also between let us just queue for it and keep it locked for now.

However, the gripe here fell into the former pendulum swing of it’s too hard/it’s fine.

Operation: Mechagon has a hard mode, now the OP didn’t go into detail on what made it too hard for them so it could have been that this mode was inadvertently activated but even so. Is it enough to demand that Ion is fired? He’s one of a team and just happens to be the one that faces the camera the most rather than just getting a monitor tan.
This smacks of shooting the messenger which doesn’t help to address any of the issues that the OP feels are there.

What is clear is that all instanced content is usually nerfed on the reset, and then nerfed again and again until the tuning is deemed to be in that sweet spot. So to have difficulty in the first week is not unheard of. Hell, if everything was comfortable on release we would have way more guilds in the world first race for raids…
And surely the point of mythic is that it should be fucking hard the first time you experience it, not a faceroll on the keyboard loot pinata. Mythic dungeons are the 5 man version of mythic raids, the cream of the crop. A place to really test yourselves. Maybe if it was a pug rather than an actual guild group that might also cause some more frustrations…

Are professions bootstrapped? Maybe? Are those items hard to get? Not really? Do you really need them to level your profession up? Nah.
I get that it’s annoying that these things are soulbound rather than bind to account, your ability to get some of these are capped per week which sucks ass more than they are tied to specific content.

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So this one kinda follows on from the first one but ramps up the anger for BfA and 8.2 to 11.

To summarise the ‘issues’, here they are…

• Zones look crap. Last huge good looking zones were Northrend
• Lame quest writing
• Lore is a joke
• Professions might as well be removed
• Classes are disgusting to play
• No end game stuff for non-mythic raiding
• Mythic raiders just get a mount as a reward
• HC cleared in a week by pugs
• No end game for small guilds
• Islands and warfronts are the lamest things ever
• Whole Dev team should be removes as they did nothing right
• Devs lack a vision for the game, if they had decency or common sense they would resign.

Ho-lee-shit.
That’s a lot to unpack.

To get some of the little gripes out of the way, This OP shares their dislike of the current professions with the OP above. Yes they don’t seem to have equal worth. Those who craft gear are falling by the wayside, possibly due to loot being thrown at you. Alchemists and herbalists are in the money and demand. Inscription had a plus with the ability to unlock things and also Vantus Runes. Engineers with the scrapbots etc have a niche usefulness. But on the whole, professions don’t have as much to bring as they maybe once did. Is that to say they should just be scrapped? I don’t think so. Reworked maybe but scrapped, no.

Zones look crap?

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Zones look crap????????

Comparing this to ‘big zones’ of Northrend? I understand that the zones have some iconic music but it also seems apparent that the dead areas of those zones that have shit all in them but a few trees and some neutral mobs. Here, that dead area has been cut out and the areas that have got action and interest brought together. Meaning that travel is doable on foot but you don’t have areas that are just void of anything relevant.

 

Then OP has issues with the immersion with regards to the zones lore and quests.
Now I cant really comment on the Horde side because eww but the Alliance side I will forfeit had some misses for me but it was more with how the quests were executed rather than the writing of them.
I will hold my hands up and admit that I’m not the best one for reading quest text and on my Hunter I did blast through to hit max asap. My priest however, I read everything and even on the third and fourth time on that rodeo I read everything. I was excited to do the quests because on the whole I found them fun.
There was a bit of comedy in every zone, even Stormsong Valley with the pirates and Sergeant Calvin. Maybe it was the voice actors that had stepped it up but the quests felt truly linked to the zone and the atmosphere in them while also keeping you aware of the main story arc.

Drustvar and Tiragarde Sound  I felt had great quest lines, more so if you took the time do do the side quests. I don’t think that anyone will forget the Abby Lewis questline anytime soon and the questchain with Flynn Fairwind showed characters in a true perspective. It gave us the reality of the “I’m doing this because I’m going to get paid” without the ‘saint’ status that a lot of NPC’s are given where they’re doing things out of the goodness of their heart. He’s helping because it’s profitable and it’s the lesser of two evils. The meta of the ‘drunk Flynn’ chastising you for doing a side quest was (personally) hilarious. Blizzard even managed to make a transport quest fun with Arthur Tradewind talking to you constantly on the way to see the big ol’ bear Thronspeaker.
More importantly, the whole ‘get 10 brains’ ‘get 20 livers’ ‘kill 50 mobs’ that were prevalent (remember Wetlands???) were toned down but also, when they included them it was either alongside another quest that asked you to venture into an area so clearing it naturally completed it or the reason for actually doing it were fleshed out and gave you more incentive to do it.

You also have to remember that there were quests that were affected by player actions from Legion. You DKs will recognise what I’m going on about here if you have done the side quests in Drustvar.
There’s a Red Dragon that everyone can help out, she needs to do a ritual and needs protecting and there are some dragon bones that are about to be plundered for a mount (lel)

But if you are a DK she not happy with you at all. The writers have remembered what you did in Legion and wrote the quest specifically for you to address those actions.

That’s not a team that’s doing bad writing, that’s a team that’s doing great writing. I just wish that everyone was able to experience something like that.

Issues with content is a reoccuring theme, see above and below.
Are warfronts and islands shit? I don’t think so, Warfronts give you something to do where you can get some loot but also you can play it how you want. Just want to chill out gathering resources? Go for it. But you can either gather resources safely or go for the risky ones around the horde camp. Want to tackle the mobs? Go for it. But you can join the masses pushing or go off and pick off the patrols, help take and then retain the side bases, do all of the above. But what you do can be affected by the comp of the group you have there. A fair few healers can aid you in pushing smaller groups than if you only have two or none. Things need to be decided on the fly which keeps the interest up.
Islands have the same kind of thing. Depending on the comp you find yourself in (an the class you play) can change how you play an island. As a Hunter I don’t have to stick with the other two players, but if there is a healer and another clothie then more often than not I’m stalked as Fluffy will be our tank. If there is a tank and another DPS, I go out solo. There is never the same kind of comp on the same island. Plus they are super quick to do.

End game content is really a separate issue.
Small guilds not having end-game content. Well, they kinda do and kinda don’t. The ability is there but if they don’t have 20 players then Mythic raiding is possibly out of the window at the start but there is the M+ for the dungeons and the constant pushing that is available there. Especially when certain classes are better on certain fights and certain affixes.
I can understand that it sucks being a small guild and wanting to raid as you are forced to pug to do it. And it is especially hard for those tiny minority factions on certain realms, where there just isn’t the players on the guild to actually find suitable candidates for your raid team. (This is discussed next week)

The rewards for Mythic being a sore point? Does it matter if you ‘just get a mount’? The reward is that you fucking killed it surely?

Classes being disgusting to play? Well, a lot of people seem to manage just fine. Yes they have changed but what happened to adapting? You wanna have the same playstyle for almost 15 years? Push those same 5 buttons?
The complaining always seems to come from those who are at the bottom of the DPS/Tank/Healer boards. Those at the top are fine with how the classes play. My hunter plays nothing like when I first started and I have changes specialisations all over the fucking place, learning how each one operates every expansion as they have changed. Have I whined? Well, maybe a bit about SV going Melee but pretty much no. I have classes I don’t like because I just don’t like them, not because I find that class ‘disgusting’ to play. Drama 101 going on here…

In fact, while this could have had some good points and generated some good discusssion, the title along with the toys out of the pram attitude that resonated through the OP’s post meant that it was just dismissed as ‘crybaby’ ‘wants everything spoon fed’
And I just couldn’t find much to redeem this post. Especially saying they feel the Devs are pretty much shit and should quit if they had dignity.
You know that the Devs have a fucking boss, right? They might be in on the brainstorming but they do get told what the plan is and then they go and flesh it out.
This isn’t just a group of five people sitting in front of monitors scheming ways to make your in game life as shitty as possible.

If the OP wants the people who were resomnsible for BfA removed due to ‘lack of vision’ then that’s going to be all the staff gone in pretty much every department. Bye Bye to OP being able to even play WoW when there’s none left to work on it…

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This post was pretty much the OP saying that if content comes out that requires players to make their own groups for it, it might as well not exist to them.
They just want to hit the queue button and not need to ‘people-skill’ their way into being able to do content.

They also discussed that they believe that LFR is one of, if not the top played part of WoW and this shows that solo player content is what Blizzard should be focusing on rather than being elite raiding obsessed.
It even went as far as to say that if the content is there but the way to access that content is not how they would like to access it, then there is a lack of content.

Naturally this brought a deluge of comments that were, lets say, in keeping with the tone of the first post and the subsequent replies by the OP.

But…
Stepping back and looking at this objectively. Is keeping content back behind one particular type of ‘access’ shall we say effectively keeping content away from players?
Many pointed out that the OP’s argument that you need to ‘people skill’ your way into groups is pretty much not a thing. There are groups looking for chill runs (I joined one for the Mythic SoB where I had no clue on any of the bosses so was just looking for a happy-go-lucky group) and their are groups looking for zergs. At the most, if people don’t say what type of run they are looking for is just ask them, that’s not people skilling your way in, you hear what they have to say and either agree or move on. Others quite rightly point out that applying to player made groups doesn’t require talking to anyone aside from maybe discussing who is doing what in the fight. Much like what you would do if you joined a LFD/LFR group.
Waiting for your ideal group is no different than waiting for the LFD queue to pop, which can end up with all sorts of cancerous people in there, at least with player made groups you can vet them.
People also pointed out that types of content being player made groups only has always been a thing but this requirement gets relaxed and then you can just click a button and wait.
More importantly, as people pointed out, if you don’t want to ‘people skill’ your way into a group, make your own.
That would be exactly the same as being shoved in a random queue, just click invite to whoever pops up first that would complete the Tank/DPS/Healer comp. You have to click six buttons instead of one, that’s the only difference.
That was met with a flat no by the OP.

So while the OP seemed to be unreasonably objecting to anything that would let them be able to experience content, even allowing them to control how much talking they needed to do. It begs the question, are solo players this isolated in how they play WoW and do Blizzard need to take them into account more?
The OP is in a guild, so I’m unsure how ‘people skilling’ can be that much of a deterrant. “Anyone wanna do Mecha dungeon?” is pretty much all that needs to be asked in a guild. But then a guild kinda isn’t solo play, surely? That added to the OP saying that they used to do the whole player created groups and all that makes me wonder if they are just being obtuse for the sake of it. (plenty people did comment that it was another one of their ‘whine’ posts, so it might be a correct assumption here)
Solo players in a MMO are not all going to be here for the completely silent, don’t talk to anyone playstyle that the OP goes onto insist is the most played part of the game. Some might, but not all.

Personally, if I had to go for LFD for heroics or going into a player created Mythic dungeon group I would go for the LFD. But not because I don’t want to talk to people. I just prefer the faceroll, because lets face it, if I’m not pushing M+ but I’m in a dungeon its because I don’t want the gear I just want the speed. I still talk to people in there. I’ll even go on a Healer, the most flame inducing role there is! Jesus, playing a Healer in a Rando PuG is the role that needs the most people skilling out of any possibly group…

So, what can I say about the OP’s feeling that content is being gated by how they are accessed? Does it equate to a lack of content for what is described at the majority play style?

Lets face it, no. We have an extreme case here. To say that content is lacking because you refuse to queue for a group created by players is just you tilting your own gameplay experience. Refusing to do something because Blizzard doesn’t spoon feed it to you, that’s on you, not them. You can fully enjoy every single bit of the content that is available while still being a ‘solo-player’.

If solo players are the majority as implied by the OP, then they are spending a large amount of time in player created content in the form of Mythic+. Which just defeats the OP’s arguments on so many levels…

Content is there, and as it’s always been, Blizzard does not have to hold your hand fully for you to access it, the player created groups are so close though it hurts. If you choose to cut off your nose to spite your face then, there’s not much anyone can do for you…