After a second day not playing and not even wanting to play it got me to thinking why do I normally sign in every day.
What always drove me to log in all the time was grinding. I had to do dailies. I had to do mount runs. I had to farm for rare drops. I had to get materials for raid supplies. I had so many things to do that I always felt like missing a day set me so far behind.
Why has that changed for me? I can still do dailies, run for mounts, look for rare drops, gather materials, etc.
What changed for me was raiding. Simple as that. Raiding has ruined my solo game play.
How does a group thing ruin solo play? In wrath there was a crap load more raiding going on.
Because raiding was easier it meant there were pugs going 24/7 whenever you logged on. There were two lock outs as well. Which meant I could raid twice on my main, a hunter and was usually dragged into other raids to help fill out a healing spot or a tanking spot or even another DPS spot with one of my other characters. All in all it could mean I was in upwards of 8 different ICC lock outs per week.
Because there was also so much going on as far as raiding goes my time to do those solo things was limited, some times so much that I would actually fall behind on having the food and flasks I needed because I had no time to play the gathering and producing part of the game, which is big for solo players.
Because I was always raiding I could not squeeze in mount runs every day or sometimes not even every week. My solo content lasted longer because I had so many other things to do, like raid 10 and 25 man on at least three different characters.
This made my solo content last a lot longer. It made my solo content more enjoyable when I was capable of squeezing it in.
Now enter cataclysm. One lock out, no pugs because of harder raids or rare ones that sometimes break up on the trash before they even get to the boss.
No big deal. I'll just catch up on doing the solo things I never had time to do in wrath because wrath was always so busy with everything going on all the time.
After a few months of just doing the solo content I am burnt out on it. Solo content is fun when you are trying to squeeze it in to get it all done. It is not fun when that is all there is to the game.
So instead of running a 10 man group and a 25 man group (which you could bring the same character too) and many alts runs or pugs for everything under the sun all I have left to do is wait for that one or two nights a week we do raid and hope enough people show up to do it.
There is no use logging on hoping to find a pug in trade for something to do because there never are any. The last few pugs I managed to get into ended badly, all of them. One BoT broke up on the first trash pack. Not kidding. Another BoT broke up after the first boss. One BWD saw me doing 39% of the damage, in a 25 man, which can explain why I gave up on it after 1 boss attempt. Every firelands ends with people saying, I only wanted rep I did not want to down anything.
Being raiding is not all time consuming any more because of its difficulty level and the fact that no one even bothers to do them any more they need to add more solo content.
I used to log on for the solo content. Now I don't log on because I am sick of the solo content being all I can do. I want more. I want anything. I would be glad if they where still pugging 80 content for achievements. I would jump in on those if they where being pugged just for something to do, something different. But they don't pug those either, nothing gets pugged this expansion.
You can not just run randoms either for fun because they are not fun. There are no raid pugs. The dailies are the cause of major burnout for many people because that is all they have to do.
The reason I have felt no need to log in lately is because there is nothing to do. I have no solo content I want to do. Running for mounts is fun when you squeeze it in when you can. It is annoying when that is all you have to do.
I'll log in tonight because it is raid night. Going to start with going back to T11 stuff, ( maybe finally finish TotFW) to get the dust off for those people that are just coming back and then we can jump over to firelands. Tonight I will log on because there is something to do.
After that, it is back to forgetting about the game because there is no reason to log in.
They need to create more solo content or they need to make raids puggable and with two separate lock outs again. The solo content is not that different from what it was in wrath. The raid content is the difference.
In wrath the raid content kept me so busy that I had little time for the solo content so I enjoyed it and it was more then enough to keep me happy. Now, with nothing to do but the solo content, it feels lacking. It is not that there is less of it to do, it is just that when it is all you have to do it seems to get tiring.
PS: Reputation grinding will be a nice change to bring back too. Let me earn my rep with dailies and turns in and kills and then get my tabard as a reward for becoming exalted. Stop with this giving me a tabard at friendly so I can build rep doing dungeon I was going to do anyway BS. Rep grinding is something you can do solo and is fantastic for solo play. Bring back the BC style of reputation.
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Gauss' post recently made me start thinking about this, in particular, 1 word struck me; Bounties.
ReplyDeleteHow I would love, dearly, gleefully look forward to hard, tactical solo bosses to bring down. If they could make hand ins give VP/JP all the better. Make it a daily. Make it a weekly. Make the bounty target like the old Hunter quest demons, ie; must be solo'd. I wouldnt mind if it took hours to get it right - just give me a target I can solo and work towards for a tangable reward.
In other news, for something to do I've mostly been farming old raids for shiney gear and long forgotten chest/hand tokens for 4.3 Been fun doing things I never got the chance to at 70, and revisiting Kara for a good reason.
I often wished WoW would give me some incentive to grind mobs. But since WotLK, they rather want me to grind heroics. Well, why not both?
ReplyDeleteThe fallacy here is that Blizzard thinks that grind is bad. It not necessarily is! And, moreover, heroics are a grind, too.
At the end of the day, the grind is just the journey. If there are no (good) journeys towards worthwhile goals, there is no game.
(I'm anon from the previous post)
ReplyDeleteGo install LOTRO, seriously :). I guarantee you'll enjoy it for a while as at least a fun solo/casual diversion. As I said, it's absolutely free for the first 32 levels, which includes two fairly good instance clusters (at level 20 and level 32). And if you find you like the game, the F2P model means you can get most of the content permanently unlocked with a relatively minimal cash investment so you don't need an ongoing subscription to get the most out of it. The game isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and if you're a serious WoW raider there's quite a few things at end game that would probably annoy the heck out of you (minimal add-on support - and an associated reduction in complexity of raid fights because people don't have a DBM equivalent that they can rely on) but it's a rich game world with an interesting assortment of classes, pretty decent levelling content and an overall fairly mature community. Levelling's also quite a bit slower than in WoW, and will be getting even slower with the impending +10 level cap raise, so you wouldn't even need to think about whether the end game is something you'd enjoy for months if you play at a casual pace.
Oh and LOTRO also has skirmishes, which are scalable combat instances. They scale both with level and group size and can be done either solo or in 3, 2, 6 or 12 person groups. They offer tangible rewards at pretty much all level ranges (you get more and more of them opening up as you level up) and are basically lotro's answer to "what do you do on a level capped char when you're not raiding but want to do something fun". You always need more skirmish marks basically :).
If you do go this option then make sure to put up a post or two about your progress and I can give you some tips along the way :P
@PB
ReplyDeleteYou are an excellent salesperson. I might have to give that a try. Maybe this weekend being it is a long weekend for me and I do not see me spending much time on WoW.
@Raffles
That sounds like a good idea he has. The only issue I would have with this is some classes are just better designed to solo things. I am sure I could solo stuff on my hunter that other classes could never do and I am sure blood DKs can solo stuff others have no prayer at, look at the DK solo of LK.
If it were a class based quest, as suggested, then it would be awesome.
PS: I used to solo kara all the time, even back at 80, at least the first boss for the mount.