The Forgotten Prince walks Tamriel, and chaos follows in her wake. Investigate the emergence of Ithelia and explore the Colovian region of West Weald in The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road. wehy.pe/y/2/MetaGoblin
I think sod players were generally pretty casual tbh. I think a big issue is that you have to invest so much into a character to be able to have fun. Getting runes in p1 and p2 was kinda alright, but in p2 it became a bit tedious already. Doing it on 1 character was fine, but after being level 25 for a couple of months, we leveled many alts that in coming phases also needed a lot of runes to be functional. The game went from being super alt friendly to being almost hostile to alts. It was also absolutely insane with the number of bots on some servers. This seems to have been somewhat tackled tho.
Honestly my biggest problem isn't the changes in SoD, its the community. It's like you took the most toxic parts of the original Classic community, refined it until you have people actually trying to parse WHILE LEVELING.
The SoD community was horrible and don't let people gaslight you about it! I quit in phase two because the community was giga cringe gatekeeping Pugs. People were requiring three weeks of 93+ parses to get into Gnomer. It became a meme amongst my friends that you needed to show credit score and blood type to do Pugs. SoD had its problems, but the community is filled with total losers that have no self worth outside the game.
Yup, this 1000% I quit at the beginning of P3. I also hated the BM event, as it was such a lag fest. I also mained Feral Dru, and P1 was great, but P2 didnt excite me at all, and seeing P3 runes killed my hype. There were other reasons, but these were the main for me. Was fun while it lasted tho
Nightmare Incursions single-handedly nuked any interest I had in SoD. I leveled every class to 25 in P1, stayed on the cutting edge in P2, and was fully prepared for P3. I could have just played normally and ignored that they were there, but it was such a disadvantage that it made playing how I wanted to feel awful. As soon as I realized how necessary they were, I just moved on to a different game and haven't looked back. P4 is out, which I was excited for before, but now the entire experience just feels tainted and I have so much less interest in it.
1000%. I grinded that shit for like 2 days, and it was the most braindead lazy content I have ever experienced. You didn't even kill mobs or interact with the game in any meaningful way. Just run the same meta path, click the meta turn ins. Shit was horrid.
As a casual player who has very limited time to play I will say this, Phase 1. Brilliant, fun, exciting could do everything put in the game in the time I had to play. Phase 2 - Was good, Enjoyed most of it, started finding it harder to be able to do group content. Phase 3 - Not good, Elitism became too rampart, Could not do anything without a catalogue of logs for Sunken temple, could get into raids to get said logs. Incursions became a bigger chore than going to work (Would rather I went to work than do them) Phase 4 - Logged in for half an hour, saw the same elitism carrying on in trade chat, logged off and went back to cata.
_I don't know if there is anything "Modern" about our countries (U.S, Canada or Britian) today. I would argue that we an "unimaginative" and "degenerate" society were people are becoming more uneducated and brainwashed. Where Stupidity, Entitlement, Opulance and Materialism is glorified by Parents, Social Media, Teachers and our Public Education System._
Season of Discovery went wrong... When it stopped being about Discovery. Going out to find class specific runes and do all sorts of riddles to figure it out was a neat concept that they did in the first phase and never again. Then it fell into the same trappings a lot of other post-vanilla versions have, the world became less important than making more difficult Raid and Dungeon content.
One of my biggest gripes with SoD was that discoveries were in many cases built from the ground up to be practically impossible for one person to discover on their own. They were made to be crowdsourced, as "community" discoveries, but what it actually meant for the individual player was that they had no hope of finding it on their own, and they would be forced to look it up. Don't get me wrong, there were some that were amazing solo discoveries (the Seal of the Martyr rune for paladins for example), but there were just too many that a person wanting to play the game blind would just have 0 chance to ever find on their own.
SoD became retail trash and the retail children came with it. Playing on Deviate Delight/Cata now and unreal how different the DD community is. People go out of the way to help eachother and reminds you LEVELING IS THE GAME. Endgame is a minor minor fraction of it
lol You just started Cata. People had rose tinted glasses on with P1 in SoD. Cata has just as many elitist pricks as any other version of WoW. You're just pissed at SoD so you're coping by thinking that ANY version of WoW you play doesn't have the exact player base that you describe.
@@mattyeager7679 lol. Agreed, Cata will be just as bad. Used that as a comment for others to understand my experience and hence why I spoke specifically to the Deviate Delight community. If I don’t know what retail is, sure, but I do know what Vanilla is, and SoD is not it or even remotely close to a “+” experience. Core principles of gameplay thrown out the window
I thought it was awful to require groups to get runes. Greenfield just had it wrong when he said that players need substantial friction in the game. You can make getting a rune challenging without making it impossible for some players to acquire. They heard about how they screwed it up when they tried to put that stuff into the raid. Learning from mistakes should be a thing. Thumbs up for the video and healthy discussions about game design and philosophy.
@@chrismcaulay7805 I agree with you in a general sense, but it has become increasingly difficult to find rune groups for older runes, or people just generally willing to help. Given that it's a seasonal server with an endpoint, I believe they should add in easier ways to get older runes, say maybe phase 1 to 3 type stuff. If it was a permanent server, I think I'd agree with your stance across the board.
I don't mind needing a group to get certain runes, much like elite quests out in the world. But it would also be cool to design it to be soloed specifically based on your class and using all ur abilities. Just like that Hunter quest chain for the bow where u fight 4 different demons but need to use specific hunter abilities to counter their special attacks, otherwise they are too hard to kill.... like a demon caster who can be silenced with a scorpid sting or something like that. That could have been cool.... play ur class and find a way to use ur spells in a unique way meant to weakend the enemy elite mob.
Same, now I have to do BRD and Strat again to get my pre-bis an I simply just don't have enough time to sink 3 hours into a full run. Not enough time and too easy to fall behind
@@Deszigames yeah plus the community just didn’t seem like they wanted to help. The amount of time I wasted just trying to get the first couple group required runes just ruined the who experience
sounds like a personal problem because runes are soo easy to get!! not that fucking hard look up runes in y youtube they tell you what to do its soo fucking easy
Blizzard just went the wrong way, we just wanted Classic with New Zones/Dungeons/Raid not dungeons changed into 10/20 raids.... Noone asked for runes..
It's not that it went wrong, it's just many yearn for full Classic+ this is more like Classic Remix with some nice additions, I wanna see new zones, more early and mid level dungeons, but all within the design philosophies of vanilla wow.
@@George-xb5ey I love seeing what the turtle wow team has cooked up, but I am also interested in seeing what Blizz is capable of if they threw their resources at a legitimate attempt as well.
Ironically, vanilla's design philosophy would kinda defeat the point of adding new leveling dungeons. the effort put into the dungeons would be thrown out once you out level them. That is why there is no "level up raid" in vanilla. (source, that one blizzcon panel from 2005).
Phase 1 of SoD was a BLAST. I never planned on going back to the classic setting because I was able to do all the raids last summer during classic era and felt like I was able to close the classic chapter of my life for good, but the one thing I never liked about vanilla is that I played the meme classes that did poorly (or just not allowed) in raids, so the idea of all the class changes coming to SoD, especially for meme classes, was thrilling to experience since I otherwise love classic. Phase 2 had wins and loss for me. I loved the quality of life stuff we got for classes from 5mans such as the warlock summoning closest, longer buff times and less mana cost (which I wish they just gave in phase 1, buffing as a priest sucked!) And the big one for me is that Gnomer was NOT pug friendly like BFD was post kelris nerf. The last 3 bosses of gnomer really needed everyone on discord voice comms and especially the last boss you really needed people knowing what they were doing with little room for error. BFD was much more forgiving. I wish they just gave two modes of difficulty or introduced a nerf after 2-3 weeks in that made it easier for pug groups to get together if you had alts and didn't want to find a guild for every one of them... Phase 3 was when I quit the game. ST raid was not only not even close to being pug friendly, but even some of the guilds I went with struggled with the last half bosses. Hakkar wasn't too bad once you realized how it worked, but the 2 bosses before Hakkar (and the holy troll week) were a pain in the ass. Thankfully I was there at the beginning of the emerald nightmare release so I was able to quickly get to high rep and easy gold. Other reasons why I quit the game: Yes, I am a minority player when I say this, but I play Horde on the ONE pve server we got which is of course Alliance dominated. So during phase 1, I just didn't even bother with Ashenvale PvP as Alliance would win them all unless Horde focused on just one of the layers, so Alliance had easy wins and faster achievements. Also, during phase 2 and 3, the STV pvp event, while it did seem like Alliance players didn't focus down only Horde groups, after the event, all the Horde would be wiped out and have to wait 5mins in spirit form until we were untag before we could do anything as Alliance basically controlled the entire STV map and kill us on sight. UNLIKE all the PVP servers that had a FACTION BALANCE IN PLACE, blizzard should have either given us two PVE servers so horde and alliance could just split like they did in classic 2019 release, OR introduce some other things for that one server like untagging all players at the end of the event or something. It just got very annoying. Also, some of the emerald nightmare quest bosses would only give credit to the faction that tag them and it was hard for Horde at times to tag them before another wave of Alliance players arrived to camp the respawn and win the tag again, basically making me give up on those bosses many times unless I happened to find another horde group that were fighting them in passing after a rare tag win. I couldn't imagine what else in phase 4 would come out that would be a pain in the ass for playing a Horde player, I felt like we were at a loss from the start of picking Horde on a PVE server.
They went wrong by listening to the wants and desires of the modern gamer, and thinking that these gamers actually know what they want. The second these companies start caving to the desires of the masses of modern humans who will always pick the path of least resistance (which in our modern age is a path of ZERO resistance), they’ve created the path of least reward.
I missed out on the launch of the encursions and that was a let down. Seeing how much gold and xp everyone got before it was nerfed lost my interest in that phase. I felt far behind already and that removed the rest of my interest. I thought about coming back for last phase but I doubt I will at this point.
Same. I had a busy work week so i didn't play. Everyone that could got a shitload of gold inflating the economy. After that i just felt like i was at a permanent disadvantage.
Ultimately I hope that Blizzard take what they learn from listening to the player base for Season of Discovery and use it for an improved Classic Plus experience. I think Phase 1 of SoD was so effective because it seemed like something that Blizzard would never have done previously but alas it still wasn’t as good as it could’ve been. Next time I hope they listen to the players more and skip out on the Nightmare Incursion style events and focus more on refining class fantasy and adding new content instead of replacing old content. If players wanted replaced old content, they can just play retail lmao😉
It's too late, they jumped the gun with SoD because classic was popping off due to Hardcore. There is a vocal minority of people who like SoD or thought P1/2 was good. The majority of ppl were gone by end of P2. Total trash and many veteran players are done with blizzard
the community is not the problem with SoD. The devs build the world and the rules. A good dev designs the game in a way that understands what the community needs instead of what they want.
SoD has been incredible for me and my guild. We have had nothing but a blast. We also understand that this is temporary and was never meant to be perfect but an experiment for future wow creations. We also didn’t stress out with min max but took our time and played the way we wanted. No parsing, no real requirements. We have finished all content as a group and had a really good time.
I think another way they "went wrong" was in managing expectations and communication, which is actually kind of ironic, given how vocal and open the SoD team has been with the playerbase. I think a lot of people saw this as the start of classic+, when in reality, it's probably more of a beta/alpha for classic+ to see what sticks and also see where on the spectrum from classic ------ retail, the potential classic+ playerbase would be. I think if they had communicated this from the start, people would understand that this is kind of like a persistent PTR for a classic+ game type. I think a lot of people are amenable to stealing a few ideas from retail, if just to make some of the offspecs more viable, but as you mentioned, they went wild with class changes and roles that no one ever asked for. For example, as a melee hunter main on SoD, I find some of the P4 changes makes the class fun to play, and the rotation is much more fun now, than P2/P3 where it was literally a 2 button "rotation"
The thing that gets me is, like the comment Meta highlighted said, they already have a great starting point for what people want from Classic+ in Turtle WoW. How do you have a good blueprint laid out for you and just ignore it?
Yes, that is basically what it is.... a ptr or testing ground for vanilla+ or some alternateive version of WoW. And I think from that perspective it works well..... the runes let you upgrade and experiment with new spells or roles, and better itemized gear tries to fix some problems with hwo gear worked in vanilla (like combining melee spell hit or crit, same with spell dmg/healing). The SoD mode might nto be perfect but its still cool to play and try out, and I personallly love the idea of new roles via runes (even if they are far from perfect).... I mean the only thing I wanted was a Shaman tank, which I hope they make possible even on retail, and the only other role that kinda made sense was the warlock tanks...... mage healers like a chronomancer is something people have talked about as a possiblity but was never a huge desire to see it in game. And the rogue tank no one really asked for..... but hey its worth experimenting with or discovering new playstyles and stuff.
SoD was awesome! The only thing that made me quit SoD and right after WoW is RMT and Bots. I don't care how degenerate people get with parsing, i'll just improve and also have 99+ on all chars. I lose all motivation when the skill in the game swaps from practice to how many hours you can either farm in game to afford stuff or how much you can swipe.
1. Runes without buffing enemies making game too easy 2. Xp boosts making it even easier 3. Boosting gone wild 4. Gold farming and selling 5. Dungeon spamming no daily limits
I started playing not long ago and for me the worst things about SoD are xp boosts and toxic min-max players who want to rush everything and ruin the fun of exploration. For example yesturday I was in gnomergan raid first time and a dude needed an item I needed and he dischanted it infront of me, when I complained in the raid chat they told me to shut up because im getting free xp boost by lvl 60ties. When I argued that I don't care about xp (which you already get too much) and that I came for loot and quests/story I got kicked from raid.
To add onto what meta was saying at the end yes he's absolutely right. Other communities that are just as big as wow even for mmorpg's (yes there's still a few that can compete and have been for a long time) do have respect for each other. I think the most prevalent example of this is the Runescape community. Mainly the oldschool runescape community. I think this is largely in part due to jagex learning to work with the community well before blizzard. Jagex takes the time to get community opinion on if something should be put in or not.
When tryhards tried to turn SoD raids into retail. The 20 man and 7 days lockout change killed so many guilds. They had the winning formula and still screwed up.
Those were legitimately good changes. They had the same style of change with raid size from vanillas transition into BC and people still loved BC. 40 man’s are a hassle to get together, and 10 doesn’t feel enough like a raid to most people. I understand it was hard on guilds but those changes were not what killed the population in p3 it was a lot of other stuff, mainly lacking content and meaningful progression, something the current phase has loads of, and yet no one’s complaining about raid size now.
@@trevorburton3290 no one complain about raid size because everyone left. I can't even start to number the amount of guilds that crumbled just because of this change and with each fallen guild 50-70% of players straight up stopped playing. I'm not saying that your point is false, there are plenty of reasons why P3 sucks, but on my experience the nail in the coffin was the raid size change.
@@SacredBlazeXxX ok my point stands, how many guilds broke down throughout the life span of vanilla wow from 2004 until BC? Probably countless and people just joined new guilds and continued to make it the most subscribed MMO ever. It’s a temporary game mode and if people wanted to play it they WILL find a new guild if theirs broke down. Those guilds broke down because some of their players weren’t enjoying the state of the game it’s a symptom of the problem not the problem. My guild went from 6 raid groups to 3 during phase 3. People stopped playing in those groups because they weren’t enjoying the game and by the end of phase 3 we dropped to 2 raid groups. Now that phase 4 is here we are back to 3 raid groups just like we were in phase 3. We have had to recruit a few more people because the core problems in phase 3 caused a portion of players to quit but we are having a blast and love the 20 man raids universally.
@@trevorburton3290 I celebrate the fact that you are enjoying yourself. The TBC comparisson isn't all that accurate since there months/years of transitions and is a trans expansion matter while here in SoD we start the game with 2 succesful 10 mans and all of a sudden boom now there are 20 man. Couldnt we keep at least the option for 10 man or 20 man? Everyone is happy.
@@SacredBlazeXxX sure but when BC came out it had the same effect, a lot of guilds shut down or were forced merged to deal with the change that having both 10 and 25 man’s brought to the game. My point is if people are having fun they will play the game regardless of social hurdles because WOW has went through them countless times and yet people still play the game when there’s good content. P3 was just bad point blank. There was nothing to do compared to the state that phase 4 is in, and I would put my money on it that the longevity of guilds and player base will get stronger now that people want to play the game.
Turtle wow is classic plus done right. They rebalanced the specs, fixed some annoying vanilla jank, added a bunch of new quests that are very balanced & blended into the world (seriously, I've only been able to differentiate between their quests & blizz's with an addon lol), added a couple new races that fit the period (High elf's starting zone is unreal), have fun little community events & daily quests to keep things fresh, & added an unbelievable amount of unique items throughout the world that blend in seamlessly to vanilla. Not to mention all the different ways to level - war mode, hardcore, & several others. They went in with a very light touch, trying to refine, modernize, & build onto the game while maintaining the spirit of vanilla. Not completely change the experience like SoD. Great moderation, amazing community, no pay to win, no layering, no sharding, & great plans for the future of the server.
Personally I very much have enjoyed SOD. Phase 1 and 2 were great. Phase 3 was good for taking a break, and now me and a lot of my friends are back for phase 4 and we're enjoying it. Sure, it isn't perfect, but I very much am enjoying it.
The sad thing is that Blizzard cannibalized it's own player base... HC WoW was doing fine, people were really enjoying it and in my opinion was the most satisfying version of Classic WoW we ever got. Not even a few months into Classic HC, SOD released instantly killing all the servers on Era... Also yes the SOD community was absolutely toxic I agree with the other comments.
Glad you didn’t take that break @MetaGoblin, came back to WoW after taking time off since I didn’t like SOD, but I’m playing HC again on Skull Rock and it’s still in a great place, surprisingly alive considering how many options WoW players have
Nightmare incursions were absolutely not required, in fact I was the only one in my guild of close to 50 people doing them as the rest were dungeon grinding and ST gear was easy to get. The real killer of SoD was literally nothing to do between raids.
Here's why I dropped SoD (not like my opinion matters) - Phases released with too big of gaps in between. - Some runes that were required to play a spec were gate kept behind high costs - Hard to organize raids with high cliff to pug, lack of time to sit around - Lack of content after farming runes and doing the new raid.
Well….to be fair…how many of us enjoy the first 20-25 levels and do it over and over again, especially in Hardcore. The early levels just hit different. I think SoD is evidence of this behavior.
Charlie, your content is great and please say what you believe is right to say. Although Blizzard f*caked up hard on SOD I’m mostly mad with players which to a major extent are the same people who write comments to you. Did Blizzard start demanding gear score on super easy content? Did Blizzard force horde to gather lvl 50 raids and camp Ashenvale? Did Blizzard start to push for “meta” when players do TBC/Wrath dps on Vanilla content?
The decrease of raiding days per week and the increase of the amount of players in the raid in P3 killed my guild. We had a small tight group of reliable players but we couldn’t fill the remaining 10 slots with the same type of people. Our raid start times were dragged out every week as we tried to find people through LFG enough times to where people wouldn’t be around for the full raid and then just stopped showing up. Also, the drastic increase of gold prices for items/enchants, thanks to incursions, made our casual guild unable to come fully prepared. Of course we were able to clear the raid just fine but it was just no longer fun. Also, our alt runs just died because of the game not being alt friendly.
And P.S. your honesty and integrity on your opinion about the state of world of Warcraft and the playability of their updates like DoS. Is extremely important. Keep up the good work. There are more of us that appreciate you than the haters out there.
In addition to the crap shoot that was P3 launch. I realized it was becoming a chore to keep grinding an entire new set of gear each and every phase. By p3 i had no motivation to run sunken temple to gain 3 additional spell power per item slot.
I started playing SoD at the end of Phase 3 and I've had a blast so far. There are some hiccups here and there, but overall I love the experience. I disagree that SoD feels like retail or that it "mutated". I feel like I'm still playing good old Classic, but with a set of new skills, a different play style (tanking as a Warlock) and many new fun things to do. I've never done incursions and I haven't raided in SoD (got enough of raiding in 2019 re-release). So I'm playing it very casually and just running around exploring new runes, quests and talking to people in dungeons. I'm on a EU PvE server Wild Growth and though I stumbled into some toxic guys, 90% of the people are very nice and chill. Of course, Blizzard could have done a lot more with SoD, I would be excited for new zones, dungeons and so on. But I think it's just how MetaGoblin said - they're testing the waters to see if there's enough demand for Classic Plus. Fingers crossed they will continue in this direction, because just re-releasing old expansions isn't as exciting anymore.
I wholeheartedly agree. I started Season of Discovery with the hope that there would be this epic fresh launch level of world PVP encounters in STV, badlands, and the best of the other contested zones. Instead, I got to level 30 to learn that everyone was just mashing these nightmare incursions over and over again. I gave in, figured I'd do it to get to where I needed to find world PvP, but then I was met with literally days of forming incursion groups, then getting camped by a max level rogue. It was so bad. I'd log in after work, form a group, start incursions, we'd all get killed, sneak away, killed, group disband, reform, killed. Log off for supper and come back 3 hours later, same guy camping the zone and just having the time of his life griefing. The incursions were so much faster to level, that it made you feel stupid for leveling any other way. After that experience, I snuck off to make a fresh classic era toon on the opposite faction, and its been pretty fun!
I play on Wildgrowth - Horde. Leveled a shaman the last 3 weeks. First Dungeon Group I found was yesterday Zul Farrak and we couldn't even end the dungeon, because the stairs event bugged. I gonna quit 2nd tine again this month after I saw everyone leveling up from 40 to 50 months ago in one day.
please don't stop, blizzard needs more shade thrown at them, I've supported this criticism from day 1 we asked for Classic+ and Blizz 100% chose retail content and retrofitted it this is 100% blizzard saying you think you want classic+ but you don't all over again, blizzard are micro managing everything instead of letting devs make new content without a micro transaction scheme in mind, id rather pay for new zones then skins and boosts to skip the content i want to play
I wish they took a Turtle WoW approach. New leveling zones, quests, dungeons and raids. Expand on the world we already have. Not just add some retail abilities and molten core heat levels
I wasn't forced to do incursions. You just have to play the game as usual and simply NOT go. You don't HAVE to go. You saw a quicker way and made yourself do it. You had the option to level normally.
People saying min/max need to realize that this happens because content is hard. If you took bad classes/players to Gnomer, you didn’t clear. So the answer, is to make shit less randomly punishing as menagerie/thermaplugg/eranikus were
When I had to post that I had 8/8 exp with consumes and logs at 25 I knew I was good and wouldn't play past phase 1. Even though I could participate, it was taken so seriously it took the fun out.
SOD was good at the beginning, but I felt like the Devs played it too safe. The most interesting changes were new class archetypes - mage healer, rogue tank. But imo, they really didn't flesh these changes out. They also didn't make the rest of the game interesting. I would like to see them explore and build out more of the world, as opposed to changing existing content. The world also died when the most viable way to level from 25-40 in P2 was to grind SM, and then it got even worse when incursions were introduced in P3. It took the world out of world of warcraft, and funnelled people into either dungeon grinding or incursion grinding.
What went wrong is that they tickled our fancy with new content and failed. They only gave us leveling raids, loot, and over did it with runes. We wanted new zones,quest chains, dungeons, and end game raids.
Combination of worsening toxic community and then the P3 Nightmare incursions did it for me. Bring back either WoW TBC classic fresh realm or the Unreal engine and I'll consider returning one winter.
The incursions were like that one slayer cave in osrs for a while. Context, a cave that had basically every monster you would need to kill for slayer quests with an npc outside that would give you quests. It killed the world for that type of leveling. but the difference is, incursions were also braindead boring. The runes feel like they are trying to patch class problems that vanilla had. Like no stat giving spell power for shamans/paladins, hunters traps not having any scaling and themselves not scaling well with gear. Sure, crusader strike and hammer of rightousness fixed things for paladins in terms of dps and tanking rotation, but the runes got so bloated . Some were just % increases like for warrior or warlock. Like one of the runes, T.n.T felt dumb in phase 3 as it only increase a hunter's fire damage sources by 10% and what felt like the finished rune came in phase 4. Then there are other abillies that had way too good scaling for what they were like starfall (or whatever the instant 6 sec cd druid abillity). Another issue I had was the level caping of each phase. outside of phase 1, the dungeons did not feel relevant as much to that phase's pre raid bis as the dungeons were either too low level to give meaningful upgrades or had very few pieces as the dungeon's loot tables were not meant for being pre raid bis. It does not help that the previous raids would also have very good gear even at level (minus a few non caster weapons), also killing off dungeon gearing.
I never really played SoD. I didn't like the idea of having to obtain runes to get specific skills, but I also found the issue of not finding any help looking for runes during phase 2. I hope they return to the idea of SoD as regular server (not seasonal) and do what you've said about a more vanilla+ type server. I hope SoD and private servers helped Blizzard learn people are willing to wait for updates, as long as they are worth their value lol
SOD is not perfect, and Blizzard did make mistakes with Phase 3 lasting too long, incursions etc. But still it's a fun experiment, me and my friends enjoy it and if you don't enjoy it that is fine. However, saying that Vanilla really allowed you to play how you want is just nonsense. You had one spec per class and that was it. You think your paladin is going to be a bad ass with a big hammer? Nah you're going to wear a dress and heal.
Played until the first raid, took only one raid to see how sweaty and min/max obsessed this whole game is. Wow players have become so efficient that they weeded out any inefficient fun. Who needs to have fun when you have raid logs?
I hated runes specifically for the reason you mentioned. I would rather not have key aspects of my character locked behind extremely specific crap that you need to do on every single character. The actual rune quests and activities would have been fine if all they rewarded was a piece of equipment or something else you can afford to skip if getting a group for the quest is too inconvenient but when it's an ability you NEED to be able to properly play your character you can't just skip it, you can't even just do it later, you need to get it before you can do raids or other group content, so you're just stuck waiting for someone willing to help you.
I quit in p1 because I fell behind due to having a life. I needed a rune from the elite part of Redridge and I was an undead priest. For a week I tried to find someone to help me and nobody would. I managed to solo deep into the area near the castle by kiting elites, using consumables, and cheesing the AI. I was barely staying ahead of respawns. I had the elite who had my rune down to 10% before I died. I died multiple times trying to rez due to respawns and got to him again, got him to 10% only to die to a geared rogue. This is not fun.
I played for P1 for its final 2 weeks, got 2 characters to max level and 1 of the fully raid geared (the other pre-raid bis), while maxing out profs/weapon skills, getting all runes, WSG to revered, etc. I did everything P1 had to offer in 2 weeks, twice over... how the fuck did you fall behind?
There were about 50000 groups each day, falling behind has nothing to do with P1 but entirely with you. You either lack the intelligence or really only have 3 hours a week to play. Then you def shouldnt play wow...
I think most people wanted classic+ over the amount of changes that are in SoD. They should have just made new tier sets for off specs that are weak, add some new raids, and give each spec one or maybe two new spells/talents max. I think that's what most people were imagining. They did a huge rework where most specs are completely different than they were in classic. What I really would want them to do is release servers with the original build for the expansion. All these are releasing on the final patch instead of the first one. If they could spend some time rebuilding patch 1.1 it would be fun to play. Same with other expansions like WOTLK before all the DK nerfs. I'd personally really like if they did this.
I think they need to let the original dev ideas be completed and allowed to flesh out the empty zones and just add new class specific quests and world quests that lead in foreboding leading into the expansions.
I got pretty down bad when they announced the weapon skill runes, i chose a human rogue only for the weapon skills, as soon as they said it would not stack with passives i got demotivated and felt like i made a wrong choice, that got me feeling so bad that i quit SoD.
i actually think this was one of their best changes, so that everyone can play whatevr they want. entire world isnt just humans and orcs with this change. i liked it
They did give us a warning at least at the very beginning, Aggrend said the weapon skills would be addressed and specifically said to not pick races solely based off weapon skill, play what you would prefer instead
Your true fans love you mega goblin don’t forget that, I have never really read the comments on TH-cam videos. I just watched the content. I’ve been watching you for roughly 4 to 5 years and I have always loved your presentation and perspective on things. Say what you feel to be true.
I remember there was this huge thread at the start of P3 and saw people genuinely reply to issues people had with “don’t be negative” like, sorry that you just wanna uncritically enjoy everything and act like all ideas are the best over of Warcraft is stamped on it but we had problems with the game lol. Edit: I think what people are actually looking for is “wrath” and not “retail” SoD reminded me more and more of Wrath Classic as time went on. To the point that I would’ve been totally unsurprised to see a token added in P3.
Wrong. Wrong on so many levels with the we statements. There is no we. There is no "we wanted." This is what players will never understand. And it is the most fundamental thing to understand. It's something game designers understand, but someone who's never had a game designer's perspective will never, ever, understand. You wanted. You. Someone else wanted something else. Players, you all want something different. That's the issue with trying to make Classic Plus. Some of you want class balance changes, some don't. Some of you only want new quests, while some want new races and zones. Some of you want an increased level cap, and some want new abilities. Some want flying, some want arena, some don't. Some want new raids and dungeons, some don't. Some want new lands, others prefer to stay on Azeroth. Some want pet battles, and you guessed it, some don't. Even at that, the majority is NOT ALWAYS RIGHT. The people that clamored for Classic Plus are NOT a unified community of like minded individuals, you are a group of disparate, rival factions, and largely agree on NOTHING. You fussed and made noise until you got what you wanted, and now it's not what you'd though it'd be. All you managed to do was sap development resources from the other Classic products. Was it worth it? Because the dev team is being ran ragged... to the point that they're unionizing...
Parses were good for P2 and P3, but gm decided that he wanted better parses for P4. Day 1 of P4 he messaged and kicked us all who didn't meet the cut. Said fuck it, and stopped playing, gonna enjoy my summer IRL instead.
With limited time, It came down to continuing to play SoD P3 or transition to Cata raiding for more engaging content. Cata was just the right call for me personally. SoD has just felt like a mess from P2 onward. It was fun, In small doses, but P3 was just incredibly bland. Now that my guild has all the tier 11 Cata raids on a 1 night clear, time opens up to maybe dabble in SoD P4 but I can’t even say how much I’ll actually invest into it.
I just recently downloaded ESO again to try it out, but once I played I was reminded how limiting the actionbar there is. I heard that group content is more fun, and I get that. But I also want to wander the world and mine deposits;D needless to say, the solo content was absolutely dry paint. If the game was an actual PC game, and not limited to the boundaries of cross platform things like the very tiny options you get with the actionbar I would have absolutely loved it. It is also the reason Diablo does not speak to me.
The Forgotten Prince walks Tamriel, and chaos follows in her wake. Investigate the emergence of Ithelia and explore the Colovian region of West Weald in The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road.
wehy.pe/y/2/MetaGoblin
Players min/maxed the fun out of it
And the devs helped them.
players will always go path of least resistance, up to the devs not to fuck us over!
Players were min/maxing all of TBC and Wrath as well and the population stuck around
I think sod players were generally pretty casual tbh. I think a big issue is that you have to invest so much into a character to be able to have fun. Getting runes in p1 and p2 was kinda alright, but in p2 it became a bit tedious already. Doing it on 1 character was fine, but after being level 25 for a couple of months, we leveled many alts that in coming phases also needed a lot of runes to be functional.
The game went from being super alt friendly to being almost hostile to alts.
It was also absolutely insane with the number of bots on some servers. This seems to have been somewhat tackled tho.
Or many people realized classes additions and balancing was shit - whole design philosophy around classes and runes so flawed. Hard pass
Honestly my biggest problem isn't the changes in SoD, its the community. It's like you took the most toxic parts of the original Classic community, refined it until you have people actually trying to parse WHILE LEVELING.
In a game as simple as Classic WoW, parsing is the only thing to do. Rise to the expectations or join/create a sloth guild
So youre upset people are good and expect you to be? Lmao
@@t9t9t9t9t9 .... But tryharding while leveling? The most casual content that exists?? Lol get a life nerds
@@H41030v3rki110ny0u Exactly, this twat proves my point.
@@GojieeTV Not while leveling, time and place -_-
The SoD community was horrible and don't let people gaslight you about it!
I quit in phase two because the community was giga cringe gatekeeping Pugs. People were requiring three weeks of 93+ parses to get into Gnomer. It became a meme amongst my friends that you needed to show credit score and blood type to do Pugs.
SoD had its problems, but the community is filled with total losers that have no self worth outside the game.
Yup, this 1000%
I quit at the beginning of P3.
I also hated the BM event, as it was such a lag fest.
I also mained Feral Dru, and P1 was great, but P2 didnt excite me at all, and seeing P3 runes killed my hype.
There were other reasons, but these were the main for me. Was fun while it lasted tho
Yeah 100%
Literally the same on era xD
exactlyyyyyy
i found the exact opposite was true for phase 1. no one gave a shit about ilvl. the content was just terrible.
Nightmare Incursions single-handedly nuked any interest I had in SoD. I leveled every class to 25 in P1, stayed on the cutting edge in P2, and was fully prepared for P3. I could have just played normally and ignored that they were there, but it was such a disadvantage that it made playing how I wanted to feel awful. As soon as I realized how necessary they were, I just moved on to a different game and haven't looked back. P4 is out, which I was excited for before, but now the entire experience just feels tainted and I have so much less interest in it.
Yes! Exactly this
100% the same for me.
Same. Nightmare Incursions ruined it all
1000%. I grinded that shit for like 2 days, and it was the most braindead lazy content I have ever experienced. You didn't even kill mobs or interact with the game in any meaningful way. Just run the same meta path, click the meta turn ins. Shit was horrid.
100% incursions broke the Azeroth matrix.
As a casual player who has very limited time to play I will say this, Phase 1. Brilliant, fun, exciting could do everything put in the game in the time I had to play. Phase 2 - Was good, Enjoyed most of it, started finding it harder to be able to do group content. Phase 3 - Not good, Elitism became too rampart, Could not do anything without a catalogue of logs for Sunken temple, could get into raids to get said logs. Incursions became a bigger chore than going to work (Would rather I went to work than do them) Phase 4 - Logged in for half an hour, saw the same elitism carrying on in trade chat, logged off and went back to cata.
You're funny if you think that Cata doesn't have "elitism".
Welcome to modern society, where people hate you for having different opinions.
This is actually way worse. In the real world, different opinions can have real consequences for people. This is just a video game.
Saying truth in 2024 = being toxic
People don't hate me for my opinions though. I don't get your comment.
_I don't know if there is anything "Modern" about our countries (U.S, Canada or Britian) today. I would argue that we an "unimaginative" and "degenerate" society were people are becoming more uneducated and brainwashed. Where Stupidity, Entitlement, Opulance and Materialism is glorified by Parents, Social Media, Teachers and our Public Education System._
I wonder what political movement created that. You know...where you can't have another opinion or you're some kind of "ism".
Other people killed it for me, you either play the determined meta or not at all..fuck that noise
I loved p1 and p2. I didn't get to start p3 at the start and by the time i was ready to lvl during p3 all of my friends had quit.
Season of Discovery went wrong...
When it stopped being about Discovery.
Going out to find class specific runes and do all sorts of riddles to figure it out was a neat concept that they did in the first phase and never again.
Then it fell into the same trappings a lot of other post-vanilla versions have, the world became less important than making more difficult Raid and Dungeon content.
One of my biggest gripes with SoD was that discoveries were in many cases built from the ground up to be practically impossible for one person to discover on their own. They were made to be crowdsourced, as "community" discoveries, but what it actually meant for the individual player was that they had no hope of finding it on their own, and they would be forced to look it up.
Don't get me wrong, there were some that were amazing solo discoveries (the Seal of the Martyr rune for paladins for example), but there were just too many that a person wanting to play the game blind would just have 0 chance to ever find on their own.
I still want my god damn scarlet monastery raid >:(
SoD became retail trash and the retail children came with it. Playing on Deviate Delight/Cata now and unreal how different the DD community is. People go out of the way to help eachother and reminds you LEVELING IS THE GAME. Endgame is a minor minor fraction of it
Tell me you haven't touched retail in years without telling me you haven't touched retail in years
lol You just started Cata. People had rose tinted glasses on with P1 in SoD. Cata has just as many elitist pricks as any other version of WoW.
You're just pissed at SoD so you're coping by thinking that ANY version of WoW you play doesn't have the exact player base that you describe.
@@mattyeager7679 lol. Agreed, Cata will be just as bad. Used that as a comment for others to understand my experience and hence why I spoke specifically to the Deviate Delight community. If I don’t know what retail is, sure, but I do know what Vanilla is, and SoD is not it or even remotely close to a “+” experience. Core principles of gameplay thrown out the window
In case you don't hear it enough, great video and content man. Keep up the excellent work.
I just never did any inc. Leveled the normal way to 50 and now 60. Having a blast while doing so.
I thought it was awful to require groups to get runes. Greenfield just had it wrong when he said that players need substantial friction in the game. You can make getting a rune challenging without making it impossible for some players to acquire. They heard about how they screwed it up when they tried to put that stuff into the raid. Learning from mistakes should be a thing. Thumbs up for the video and healthy discussions about game design and philosophy.
sorry man, but its an MMO, not a single player game. You can get someone to help you get a rune, all you have to do is ask...
@@chrismcaulay7805And just like that I regret my purchase
@@chrismcaulay7805 I agree with you in a general sense, but it has become increasingly difficult to find rune groups for older runes, or people just generally willing to help. Given that it's a seasonal server with an endpoint, I believe they should add in easier ways to get older runes, say maybe phase 1 to 3 type stuff. If it was a permanent server, I think I'd agree with your stance across the board.
@@dudeshamus1451 If your guild wont help you with that stuff then you need a new guild.
I don't mind needing a group to get certain runes, much like elite quests out in the world. But it would also be cool to design it to be soloed specifically based on your class and using all ur abilities. Just like that Hunter quest chain for the bow where u fight 4 different demons but need to use specific hunter abilities to counter their special attacks, otherwise they are too hard to kill.... like a demon caster who can be silenced with a scorpid sting or something like that. That could have been cool.... play ur class and find a way to use ur spells in a unique way meant to weakend the enemy elite mob.
I fell behind leveling and runes in SoD because of irl stuff and never felt like trying to catch up
Same, now I have to do BRD and Strat again to get my pre-bis an I simply just don't have enough time to sink 3 hours into a full run. Not enough time and too easy to fall behind
@@Deszigames yeah plus the community just didn’t seem like they wanted to help. The amount of time I wasted just trying to get the first couple group required runes just ruined the who experience
sounds like a personal problem because runes are soo easy to get!! not that fucking hard look up runes in y youtube they tell you what to do its soo fucking easy
Runes are so easy to get. You’re fell behind what? Who’s chasing you? You can literally run random dungeons once a day and get full geared in no time…
That’s not a problem with Sod.
Sod had breakpoint phases. And massive boosting buffs. Not catching up was not it’s problem.
Literally nobody asked for SoD. Anyone who actually wanted Vanilla + wanted a few spell changes and more raids at 60. Not this abomination
Blizzard just went the wrong way, we just wanted Classic with New Zones/Dungeons/Raid not dungeons changed into 10/20 raids.... Noone asked for runes..
💯
It's not that it went wrong, it's just many yearn for full Classic+ this is more like Classic Remix with some nice additions, I wanna see new zones, more early and mid level dungeons, but all within the design philosophies of vanilla wow.
That would be turtle wow
@@George-xb5ey I love seeing what the turtle wow team has cooked up, but I am also interested in seeing what Blizz is capable of if they threw their resources at a legitimate attempt as well.
+1 for turtle wow
@@feragon430 Blizzard isnt capable of making good games anymore. That much is very clear now.
Ironically, vanilla's design philosophy would kinda defeat the point of adding new leveling dungeons. the effort put into the dungeons would be thrown out once you out level them. That is why there is no "level up raid" in vanilla. (source, that one blizzcon panel from 2005).
Phase 1 of SoD was a BLAST. I never planned on going back to the classic setting because I was able to do all the raids last summer during classic era and felt like I was able to close the classic chapter of my life for good, but the one thing I never liked about vanilla is that I played the meme classes that did poorly (or just not allowed) in raids, so the idea of all the class changes coming to SoD, especially for meme classes, was thrilling to experience since I otherwise love classic.
Phase 2 had wins and loss for me. I loved the quality of life stuff we got for classes from 5mans such as the warlock summoning closest, longer buff times and less mana cost (which I wish they just gave in phase 1, buffing as a priest sucked!) And the big one for me is that Gnomer was NOT pug friendly like BFD was post kelris nerf. The last 3 bosses of gnomer really needed everyone on discord voice comms and especially the last boss you really needed people knowing what they were doing with little room for error. BFD was much more forgiving. I wish they just gave two modes of difficulty or introduced a nerf after 2-3 weeks in that made it easier for pug groups to get together if you had alts and didn't want to find a guild for every one of them...
Phase 3 was when I quit the game. ST raid was not only not even close to being pug friendly, but even some of the guilds I went with struggled with the last half bosses. Hakkar wasn't too bad once you realized how it worked, but the 2 bosses before Hakkar (and the holy troll week) were a pain in the ass. Thankfully I was there at the beginning of the emerald nightmare release so I was able to quickly get to high rep and easy gold.
Other reasons why I quit the game: Yes, I am a minority player when I say this, but I play Horde on the ONE pve server we got which is of course Alliance dominated. So during phase 1, I just didn't even bother with Ashenvale PvP as Alliance would win them all unless Horde focused on just one of the layers, so Alliance had easy wins and faster achievements. Also, during phase 2 and 3, the STV pvp event, while it did seem like Alliance players didn't focus down only Horde groups, after the event, all the Horde would be wiped out and have to wait 5mins in spirit form until we were untag before we could do anything as Alliance basically controlled the entire STV map and kill us on sight. UNLIKE all the PVP servers that had a FACTION BALANCE IN PLACE, blizzard should have either given us two PVE servers so horde and alliance could just split like they did in classic 2019 release, OR introduce some other things for that one server like untagging all players at the end of the event or something. It just got very annoying.
Also, some of the emerald nightmare quest bosses would only give credit to the faction that tag them and it was hard for Horde at times to tag them before another wave of Alliance players arrived to camp the respawn and win the tag again, basically making me give up on those bosses many times unless I happened to find another horde group that were fighting them in passing after a rare tag win. I couldn't imagine what else in phase 4 would come out that would be a pain in the ass for playing a Horde player, I felt like we were at a loss from the start of picking Horde on a PVE server.
They went wrong by listening to the wants and desires of the modern gamer, and thinking that these gamers actually know what they want. The second these companies start caving to the desires of the masses of modern humans who will always pick the path of least resistance (which in our modern age is a path of ZERO resistance), they’ve created the path of least reward.
dead on!
Phase 1 was pretty "good", though. Lots of new fun things to do and discover. For me, it just started to feel like a grind after Phase 1
I missed out on the launch of the encursions and that was a let down. Seeing how much gold and xp everyone got before it was nerfed lost my interest in that phase. I felt far behind already and that removed the rest of my interest. I thought about coming back for last phase but I doubt I will at this point.
Same. I had a busy work week so i didn't play. Everyone that could got a shitload of gold inflating the economy. After that i just felt like i was at a permanent disadvantage.
P3 launch killed it for me and my homie....and making me change server to a streamer server was the cherry on top..
Sod is great. Loving it to bits. Couldn't go back to 'vanilla' style wow again after.
Vanilla is not for you, stay out of this beautiful 20 year old game with your shr changes and go play cata bye bye kid
D4 into SOD was enough to make me go outside, and I'm grateful for it. All good things come to an end.
Ultimately I hope that Blizzard take what they learn from listening to the player base for Season of Discovery and use it for an improved Classic Plus experience. I think Phase 1 of SoD was so effective because it seemed like something that Blizzard would never have done previously but alas it still wasn’t as good as it could’ve been. Next time I hope they listen to the players more and skip out on the Nightmare Incursion style events and focus more on refining class fantasy and adding new content instead of replacing old content. If players wanted replaced old content, they can just play retail lmao😉
It's too late, they jumped the gun with SoD because classic was popping off due to Hardcore. There is a vocal minority of people who like SoD or thought P1/2 was good. The majority of ppl were gone by end of P2. Total trash and many veteran players are done with blizzard
the community is not the problem with SoD. The devs build the world and the rules. A good dev designs the game in a way that understands what the community needs instead of what they want.
SoD has been incredible for me and my guild. We have had nothing but a blast. We also understand that this is temporary and was never meant to be perfect but an experiment for future wow creations. We also didn’t stress out with min max but took our time and played the way we wanted. No parsing, no real requirements. We have finished all content as a group and had a really good time.
Sold us a dream, shipped us a lie. And then raised the barrier to raiding and destroyed guilds.
Lost interest after p1
Lost interest during part 1
Never had interest in p1
wow so cool
Low T
I think another way they "went wrong" was in managing expectations and communication, which is actually kind of ironic, given how vocal and open the SoD team has been with the playerbase. I think a lot of people saw this as the start of classic+, when in reality, it's probably more of a beta/alpha for classic+ to see what sticks and also see where on the spectrum from classic ------ retail, the potential classic+ playerbase would be.
I think if they had communicated this from the start, people would understand that this is kind of like a persistent PTR for a classic+ game type. I think a lot of people are amenable to stealing a few ideas from retail, if just to make some of the offspecs more viable, but as you mentioned, they went wild with class changes and roles that no one ever asked for.
For example, as a melee hunter main on SoD, I find some of the P4 changes makes the class fun to play, and the rotation is much more fun now, than P2/P3 where it was literally a 2 button "rotation"
The thing that gets me is, like the comment Meta highlighted said, they already have a great starting point for what people want from Classic+ in Turtle WoW. How do you have a good blueprint laid out for you and just ignore it?
Yes, that is basically what it is.... a ptr or testing ground for vanilla+ or some alternateive version of WoW. And I think from that perspective it works well..... the runes let you upgrade and experiment with new spells or roles, and better itemized gear tries to fix some problems with hwo gear worked in vanilla (like combining melee spell hit or crit, same with spell dmg/healing). The SoD mode might nto be perfect but its still cool to play and try out, and I personallly love the idea of new roles via runes (even if they are far from perfect).... I mean the only thing I wanted was a Shaman tank, which I hope they make possible even on retail, and the only other role that kinda made sense was the warlock tanks...... mage healers like a chronomancer is something people have talked about as a possiblity but was never a huge desire to see it in game. And the rogue tank no one really asked for..... but hey its worth experimenting with or discovering new playstyles and stuff.
I will forever remember 40 man raids in Ashenvale at level 25. It’s the most fun I had with WoW in a really long time 😢
SoD was awesome! The only thing that made me quit SoD and right after WoW is RMT and Bots. I don't care how degenerate people get with parsing, i'll just improve and also have 99+ on all chars. I lose all motivation when the skill in the game swaps from practice to how many hours you can either farm in game to afford stuff or how much you can swipe.
1. Runes without buffing enemies making game too easy
2. Xp boosts making it even easier
3. Boosting gone wild
4. Gold farming and selling
5. Dungeon spamming no daily limits
I started playing not long ago and for me the worst things about SoD are xp boosts and toxic min-max players who want to rush everything and ruin the fun of exploration. For example yesturday I was in gnomergan raid first time and a dude needed an item I needed and he dischanted it infront of me, when I complained in the raid chat they told me to shut up because im getting free xp boost by lvl 60ties. When I argued that I don't care about xp (which you already get too much) and that I came for loot and quests/story I got kicked from raid.
To add onto what meta was saying at the end yes he's absolutely right. Other communities that are just as big as wow even for mmorpg's (yes there's still a few that can compete and have been for a long time) do have respect for each other. I think the most prevalent example of this is the Runescape community. Mainly the oldschool runescape community. I think this is largely in part due to jagex learning to work with the community well before blizzard. Jagex takes the time to get community opinion on if something should be put in or not.
When tryhards tried to turn SoD raids into retail. The 20 man and 7 days lockout change killed so many guilds.
They had the winning formula and still screwed up.
Those were legitimately good changes. They had the same style of change with raid size from vanillas transition into BC and people still loved BC.
40 man’s are a hassle to get together, and 10 doesn’t feel enough like a raid to most people. I understand it was hard on guilds but those changes were not what killed the population in p3 it was a lot of other stuff, mainly lacking content and meaningful progression, something the current phase has loads of, and yet no one’s complaining about raid size now.
@@trevorburton3290 no one complain about raid size because everyone left.
I can't even start to number the amount of guilds that crumbled just because of this change and with each fallen guild 50-70% of players straight up stopped playing.
I'm not saying that your point is false, there are plenty of reasons why P3 sucks, but on my experience the nail in the coffin was the raid size change.
@@SacredBlazeXxX ok my point stands, how many guilds broke down throughout the life span of vanilla wow from 2004 until BC? Probably countless and people just joined new guilds and continued to make it the most subscribed MMO ever. It’s a temporary game mode and if people wanted to play it they WILL find a new guild if theirs broke down. Those guilds broke down because some of their players weren’t enjoying the state of the game it’s a symptom of the problem not the problem.
My guild went from 6 raid groups to 3 during phase 3. People stopped playing in those groups because they weren’t enjoying the game and by the end of phase 3 we dropped to 2 raid groups. Now that phase 4 is here we are back to 3 raid groups just like we were in phase 3. We have had to recruit a few more people because the core problems in phase 3 caused a portion of players to quit but we are having a blast and love the 20 man raids universally.
@@trevorburton3290 I celebrate the fact that you are enjoying yourself.
The TBC comparisson isn't all that accurate since there months/years of transitions and is a trans expansion matter while here in SoD we start the game with 2 succesful 10 mans and all of a sudden boom now there are 20 man.
Couldnt we keep at least the option for 10 man or 20 man? Everyone is happy.
@@SacredBlazeXxX sure but when BC came out it had the same effect, a lot of guilds shut down or were forced merged to deal with the change that having both 10 and 25 man’s brought to the game. My point is if people are having fun they will play the game regardless of social hurdles because WOW has went through them countless times and yet people still play the game when there’s good content. P3 was just bad point blank. There was nothing to do compared to the state that phase 4 is in, and I would put my money on it that the longevity of guilds and player base will get stronger now that people want to play the game.
Turtle wow is classic plus done right. They rebalanced the specs, fixed some annoying vanilla jank, added a bunch of new quests that are very balanced & blended into the world (seriously, I've only been able to differentiate between their quests & blizz's with an addon lol), added a couple new races that fit the period (High elf's starting zone is unreal), have fun little community events & daily quests to keep things fresh, & added an unbelievable amount of unique items throughout the world that blend in seamlessly to vanilla.
Not to mention all the different ways to level - war mode, hardcore, & several others.
They went in with a very light touch, trying to refine, modernize, & build onto the game while maintaining the spirit of vanilla.
Not completely change the experience like SoD.
Great moderation, amazing community, no pay to win, no layering, no sharding, & great plans for the future of the server.
Personally I very much have enjoyed SOD. Phase 1 and 2 were great. Phase 3 was good for taking a break, and now me and a lot of my friends are back for phase 4 and we're enjoying it. Sure, it isn't perfect, but I very much am enjoying it.
The sad thing is that Blizzard cannibalized it's own player base... HC WoW was doing fine, people were really enjoying it and in my opinion was the most satisfying version of Classic WoW we ever got. Not even a few months into Classic HC, SOD released instantly killing all the servers on Era... Also yes the SOD community was absolutely toxic I agree with the other comments.
Glad you didn’t take that break @MetaGoblin, came back to WoW after taking time off since I didn’t like SOD, but I’m playing HC again on Skull Rock and it’s still in a great place, surprisingly alive considering how many options WoW players have
Nightmare incursions were absolutely not required, in fact I was the only one in my guild of close to 50 people doing them as the rest were dungeon grinding and ST gear was easy to get. The real killer of SoD was literally nothing to do between raids.
Here's why I dropped SoD (not like my opinion matters)
- Phases released with too big of gaps in between.
- Some runes that were required to play a spec were gate kept behind high costs
- Hard to organize raids with high cliff to pug, lack of time to sit around
- Lack of content after farming runes and doing the new raid.
having my favorite time playing wow since 2004
Well….to be fair…how many of us enjoy the first 20-25 levels and do it over and over again, especially in Hardcore. The early levels just hit different. I think SoD is evidence of this behavior.
Charlie, your content is great and please say what you believe is right to say.
Although Blizzard f*caked up hard on SOD I’m mostly mad with players which to a major extent are the same people who write comments to you.
Did Blizzard start demanding gear score on super easy content? Did Blizzard force horde to gather lvl 50 raids and camp Ashenvale? Did Blizzard start to push for “meta” when players do TBC/Wrath dps on Vanilla content?
The decrease of raiding days per week and the increase of the amount of players in the raid in P3 killed my guild. We had a small tight group of reliable players but we couldn’t fill the remaining 10 slots with the same type of people. Our raid start times were dragged out every week as we tried to find people through LFG enough times to where people wouldn’t be around for the full raid and then just stopped showing up. Also, the drastic increase of gold prices for items/enchants, thanks to incursions, made our casual guild unable to come fully prepared. Of course we were able to clear the raid just fine but it was just no longer fun. Also, our alt runs just died because of the game not being alt friendly.
And P.S. your honesty and integrity on your opinion about the state of world of Warcraft and the playability of their updates like DoS. Is extremely important. Keep up the good work. There are more of us that appreciate you than the haters out there.
In addition to the crap shoot that was P3 launch. I realized it was becoming a chore to keep grinding an entire new set of gear each and every phase. By p3 i had no motivation to run sunken temple to gain 3 additional spell power per item slot.
Ultimately it’s 2024 devs working at 2024 Blizzard. Even if they try to avoid it, they will always come up with new systems more in line with retail.
Guess its because modern is cool and new devs must stand out so they can level in the company.
I started playing SoD at the end of Phase 3 and I've had a blast so far.
There are some hiccups here and there, but overall I love the experience. I disagree that SoD feels like retail or that it "mutated".
I feel like I'm still playing good old Classic, but with a set of new skills, a different play style (tanking as a Warlock) and many new fun things to do.
I've never done incursions and I haven't raided in SoD (got enough of raiding in 2019 re-release). So I'm playing it very casually and just running around exploring new runes, quests and talking to people in dungeons. I'm on a EU PvE server Wild Growth and though I stumbled into some toxic guys, 90% of the people are very nice and chill.
Of course, Blizzard could have done a lot more with SoD, I would be excited for new zones, dungeons and so on.
But I think it's just how MetaGoblin said - they're testing the waters to see if there's enough demand for Classic Plus.
Fingers crossed they will continue in this direction, because just re-releasing old expansions isn't as exciting anymore.
Even if blizzard did everything perfect (which is impossible ofc), the players would find a way to suck fun out of anything.
I wholeheartedly agree. I started Season of Discovery with the hope that there would be this epic fresh launch level of world PVP encounters in STV, badlands, and the best of the other contested zones. Instead, I got to level 30 to learn that everyone was just mashing these nightmare incursions over and over again. I gave in, figured I'd do it to get to where I needed to find world PvP, but then I was met with literally days of forming incursion groups, then getting camped by a max level rogue. It was so bad. I'd log in after work, form a group, start incursions, we'd all get killed, sneak away, killed, group disband, reform, killed. Log off for supper and come back 3 hours later, same guy camping the zone and just having the time of his life griefing. The incursions were so much faster to level, that it made you feel stupid for leveling any other way. After that experience, I snuck off to make a fresh classic era toon on the opposite faction, and its been pretty fun!
I was a sub in the early days, and I'll stay subbed till the day you quit. You do you bro, you always have top notch quality and integrety.
I play on Wildgrowth - Horde. Leveled a shaman the last 3 weeks. First Dungeon Group I found was yesterday Zul Farrak and we couldn't even end the dungeon, because the stairs event bugged. I gonna quit 2nd tine again this month after I saw everyone leveling up from 40 to 50 months ago in one day.
I would have loved to raid Molten Core with the phase 1 changes but after that there where too many changes
please don't stop, blizzard needs more shade thrown at them, I've supported this criticism from day 1
we asked for Classic+ and Blizz 100% chose retail content and retrofitted it
this is 100% blizzard saying you think you want classic+ but you don't all over again, blizzard are micro managing everything instead of letting devs make new content without a micro transaction scheme in mind, id rather pay for new zones then skins and boosts to skip the content i want to play
I wish they took a Turtle WoW approach. New leveling zones, quests, dungeons and raids. Expand on the world we already have. Not just add some retail abilities and molten core heat levels
It’s a Frankenstein game. No cohesion at all
I wasn't forced to do incursions. You just have to play the game as usual and simply NOT go. You don't HAVE to go. You saw a quicker way and made yourself do it. You had the option to level normally.
SoD honestly was done worse than the open server Ascension.
Great video, glad you stuck with it as I really do enjoy your content.
I was hoping for something like Turtle WoW. New locations, spells, talents, dungeons, raids, items, sets, but still retaining the vanilla atmosphere.
People saying min/max need to realize that this happens because content is hard. If you took bad classes/players to Gnomer, you didn’t clear. So the answer, is to make shit less randomly punishing as menagerie/thermaplugg/eranikus were
It's nice to have alternatives as ads before video. Got ad for Ascension here and last rant i watched on other channel.
When I had to post that I had 8/8 exp with consumes and logs at 25 I knew I was good and wouldn't play past phase 1. Even though I could participate, it was taken so seriously it took the fun out.
SOD was good at the beginning, but I felt like the Devs played it too safe. The most interesting changes were new class archetypes - mage healer, rogue tank. But imo, they really didn't flesh these changes out.
They also didn't make the rest of the game interesting. I would like to see them explore and build out more of the world, as opposed to changing existing content.
The world also died when the most viable way to level from 25-40 in P2 was to grind SM, and then it got even worse when incursions were introduced in P3.
It took the world out of world of warcraft, and funnelled people into either dungeon grinding or incursion grinding.
It didn’t go wrong, mate
What went wrong is that they tickled our fancy with new content and failed. They only gave us leveling raids, loot, and over did it with runes. We wanted new zones,quest chains, dungeons, and end game raids.
I enjoyed p1 and p2 a lot. But p3 and incursion were a huge turn of for me. I still love SOD because it got me into vanilla again (hardcore).
Did a 360 and walked away during P1
I loved phase 1 and the Ashenvale event, good times only was buggy first week for me.
Combination of worsening toxic community and then the P3 Nightmare incursions did it for me.
Bring back either WoW TBC classic fresh realm or the Unreal engine and I'll consider returning one winter.
The incursions were like that one slayer cave in osrs for a while. Context, a cave that had basically every monster you would need to kill for slayer quests with an npc outside that would give you quests. It killed the world for that type of leveling. but the difference is, incursions were also braindead boring.
The runes feel like they are trying to patch class problems that vanilla had. Like no stat giving spell power for shamans/paladins, hunters traps not having any scaling and themselves not scaling well with gear. Sure, crusader strike and hammer of rightousness fixed things for paladins in terms of dps and tanking rotation, but the runes got so bloated . Some were just % increases like for warrior or warlock. Like one of the runes, T.n.T felt dumb in phase 3 as it only increase a hunter's fire damage sources by 10% and what felt like the finished rune came in phase 4. Then there are other abillies that had way too good scaling for what they were like starfall (or whatever the instant 6 sec cd druid abillity).
Another issue I had was the level caping of each phase. outside of phase 1, the dungeons did not feel relevant as much to that phase's pre raid bis as the dungeons were either too low level to give meaningful upgrades or had very few pieces as the dungeon's loot tables were not meant for being pre raid bis. It does not help that the previous raids would also have very good gear even at level (minus a few non caster weapons), also killing off dungeon gearing.
I never really played SoD. I didn't like the idea of having to obtain runes to get specific skills, but I also found the issue of not finding any help looking for runes during phase 2. I hope they return to the idea of SoD as regular server (not seasonal) and do what you've said about a more vanilla+ type server. I hope SoD and private servers helped Blizzard learn people are willing to wait for updates, as long as they are worth their value lol
SOD is not perfect, and Blizzard did make mistakes with Phase 3 lasting too long, incursions etc. But still it's a fun experiment, me and my friends enjoy it and if you don't enjoy it that is fine. However, saying that Vanilla really allowed you to play how you want is just nonsense. You had one spec per class and that was it. You think your paladin is going to be a bad ass with a big hammer? Nah you're going to wear a dress and heal.
I couldn't get into raids because of my low credit score
Played until the first raid, took only one raid to see how sweaty and min/max obsessed this whole game is. Wow players have become so efficient that they weeded out any inefficient fun. Who needs to have fun when you have raid logs?
I agree with most of your sentiment here, but I would argue that some of the rune acquisitions could be looked at as open world quests.
I hated runes specifically for the reason you mentioned. I would rather not have key aspects of my character locked behind extremely specific crap that you need to do on every single character. The actual rune quests and activities would have been fine if all they rewarded was a piece of equipment or something else you can afford to skip if getting a group for the quest is too inconvenient but when it's an ability you NEED to be able to properly play your character you can't just skip it, you can't even just do it later, you need to get it before you can do raids or other group content, so you're just stuck waiting for someone willing to help you.
I quit in p1 because I fell behind due to having a life. I needed a rune from the elite part of Redridge and I was an undead priest. For a week I tried to find someone to help me and nobody would. I managed to solo deep into the area near the castle by kiting elites, using consumables, and cheesing the AI. I was barely staying ahead of respawns. I had the elite who had my rune down to 10% before I died. I died multiple times trying to rez due to respawns and got to him again, got him to 10% only to die to a geared rogue. This is not fun.
I played for P1 for its final 2 weeks, got 2 characters to max level and 1 of the fully raid geared (the other pre-raid bis), while maxing out profs/weapon skills, getting all runes, WSG to revered, etc. I did everything P1 had to offer in 2 weeks, twice over... how the fuck did you fall behind?
There were about 50000 groups each day, falling behind has nothing to do with P1 but entirely with you.
You either lack the intelligence or really only have 3 hours a week to play.
Then you def shouldnt play wow...
Its always amazing to me that people playing a game rooted in socialization and cooperation will go out of their way to be so incredibly hostile.
@@vitanus Not on my server there weren't. You should go outside sometimes. You seem quick to be hostile and agitated.
@@JohnSmith-rr3jt because I'm not a child with too much free time like I was during original wow? Good for you though.
I think most people wanted classic+ over the amount of changes that are in SoD. They should have just made new tier sets for off specs that are weak, add some new raids, and give each spec one or maybe two new spells/talents max. I think that's what most people were imagining. They did a huge rework where most specs are completely different than they were in classic. What I really would want them to do is release servers with the original build for the expansion. All these are releasing on the final patch instead of the first one. If they could spend some time rebuilding patch 1.1 it would be fun to play. Same with other expansions like WOTLK before all the DK nerfs. I'd personally really like if they did this.
I think they need to let the original dev ideas be completed and allowed to flesh out the empty zones and just add new class specific quests and world quests that lead in foreboding leading into the expansions.
I got pretty down bad when they announced the weapon skill runes, i chose a human rogue only for the weapon skills, as soon as they said it would not stack with passives i got demotivated and felt like i made a wrong choice, that got me feeling so bad that i quit SoD.
i actually think this was one of their best changes, so that everyone can play whatevr they want. entire world isnt just humans and orcs with this change. i liked it
They did give us a warning at least at the very beginning, Aggrend said the weapon skills would be addressed and specifically said to not pick races solely based off weapon skill, play what you would prefer instead
I mean, if THATS what you got demotivated over, there’s an underlying/deeper discontentment.
Your true fans love you mega goblin don’t forget that, I have never really read the comments on TH-cam videos. I just watched the content. I’ve been watching you for roughly 4 to 5 years and I have always loved your presentation and perspective on things. Say what you feel to be true.
Phase 1 bots soured my experience. Felt like I was behind if I wasn't farming gold living flame boosting
I'm still enjoying myself in SoD 🤷♂️
Edit: but I still like your video 👍
I remember there was this huge thread at the start of P3 and saw people genuinely reply to issues people had with “don’t be negative” like, sorry that you just wanna uncritically enjoy everything and act like all ideas are the best over of Warcraft is stamped on it but we had problems with the game lol.
Edit: I think what people are actually looking for is “wrath” and not “retail”
SoD reminded me more and more of Wrath Classic as time went on. To the point that I would’ve been totally unsurprised to see a token added in P3.
Wrong. Wrong on so many levels with the we statements. There is no we. There is no "we wanted." This is what players will never understand. And it is the most fundamental thing to understand. It's something game designers understand, but someone who's never had a game designer's perspective will never, ever, understand. You wanted. You. Someone else wanted something else. Players, you all want something different. That's the issue with trying to make Classic Plus. Some of you want class balance changes, some don't. Some of you only want new quests, while some want new races and zones. Some of you want an increased level cap, and some want new abilities. Some want flying, some want arena, some don't. Some want new raids and dungeons, some don't. Some want new lands, others prefer to stay on Azeroth. Some want pet battles, and you guessed it, some don't. Even at that, the majority is NOT ALWAYS RIGHT. The people that clamored for Classic Plus are NOT a unified community of like minded individuals, you are a group of disparate, rival factions, and largely agree on NOTHING. You fussed and made noise until you got what you wanted, and now it's not what you'd though it'd be. All you managed to do was sap development resources from the other Classic products. Was it worth it? Because the dev team is being ran ragged... to the point that they're unionizing...
Love SoD right now.
Some people thought SOD was supposed to be vanilla and it wasn't. So y'all are crying.
Tbh i really enjoy the SoD and also comminit on wild growth alliance is really helpful
When a shaman 1v8s entire squad in WSG.. ye Id say its a Season of Disappointment
"If that vast majority says - something is good - then it is good! --- lol
Parses were good for P2 and P3, but gm decided that he wanted better parses for P4. Day 1 of P4 he messaged and kicked us all who didn't meet the cut. Said fuck it, and stopped playing, gonna enjoy my summer IRL instead.
With limited time, It came down to continuing to play SoD P3 or transition to Cata raiding for more engaging content. Cata was just the right call for me personally.
SoD has just felt like a mess from P2 onward. It was fun, In small doses, but P3 was just incredibly bland. Now that my guild has all the tier 11 Cata raids on a 1 night clear, time opens up to maybe dabble in SoD P4 but I can’t even say how much I’ll actually invest into it.
Phase 4 sod is hype
Yeah man molton core and some shit pvp event out side 😂
@@williamwilliam5632 you been crying and up about about sod since phase 3 it’s not that serious little boy, get a life
@@lookherelooklisten3078 numbers don’t lie enjoy you shit dead game
@@lookherelooklisten3078 the true face wow community summed up in one comment lmao
@@felttippen4294 speak English please
I just recently downloaded ESO again to try it out, but once I played I was reminded how limiting the actionbar there is. I heard that group content is more fun, and I get that. But I also want to wander the world and mine deposits;D needless to say, the solo content was absolutely dry paint. If the game was an actual PC game, and not limited to the boundaries of cross platform things like the very tiny options you get with the actionbar I would have absolutely loved it. It is also the reason Diablo does not speak to me.