Legion: A Better Social Experience
by Hotstreak - 8 years ago show comments
It’s no surprise that after Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard would try to improve upon the social aspects of the game with Legion. There’s been a trend lately not just within WoW, but within the genre as a whole, Where the term “MMORPG” is now almost meaningless and is not an accurate way to describe the games in said genre. You have games like Elder Scrolls Online, The Secret World, Star Wars the Old Republic, and The Division that all seem to be categorized as MMORPGs even though they don’t at all feel like one. These aren’t bad games by any stretch of the word and I have actually really enjoyed some of them, but the problem is that they are either way too focused on delivering a good story narrative or they are just flat out missing the massive multiplayer portion.
MMO’s have been becoming singleplayer games with multiplayer elements that do a poor job of incentivizing players to socialize and actually work together. WoW has been one of the worst offenders in recent years and sadly took a huge leap in the wrong direction with WoD and it Garrison System, along with little to no meaningful reason to go anywhere outside of your Garrison unless you were raiding or doing dungeons. This has left a bad taste in a lot of peoples mouths and I don’t really blame them, but there is good news for WoW players. Legion has taken some good steps to not repeat WoD’s mistakes and the funny thing is, they didn’t even have to make any sort of sweeping changes to the games mechanics to make it more social and feel more like an MMO.
During my time in the beta I have noticed that the single best change in Legion is the improved monster tagging rules. Normal monsters can now be tagged by seven players regardless if they are in a group or not while rare spawns seem to not have a limit. It’s such a small tweak but it completely changes how players interact out in the game world. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve just seemed to naturally cooperate and work together with random players while questing or running around in the Broken Isles.
These changes along with the new World Quest system have made for a really enjoyable MMO experience so far and it’s a breath of fresh air for this game to be incentivized to actually go out into the game world and work with lots of other players to progress your character. Players also get a bit of voice acted context with each World Quest which makes them feel very similar to Guild Wars 2’s public quest system (which is a really good thing). A system like this when done correctly can seamlessly bring players together in a way that feels very natural. Even when you aren’t out doing World Quests or exploring, Legion does a good job of never really putting you in a place where you’re all alone.
Class Order Halls are pretty much social hubs for each specific class where you will also be upgrading your artifact weapon and sending your followers on missions. Yeah, they sound pretty damn similar to Garrisons but they don’t repeat the same offense to the social experience by phasing you out of existence. So why stop there with the improvements?
I would personally like to see LFR phased out of the game because it’s such a brain dead, toxic environment for any player and I would say it causes some players to have a bit of anxiety when doing group content. LFG is becoming less relevant at end game with the addition of Mythic and Mythic + dungeons so that’s definitely a positive. On the other hand, I don’t mind using the LFG system for non endgame stuff like leveling alts and previous expansion content.
Overall, Legion is shaping up to be the best social expansion that the game has seen in a long time. Does it offer the perfect solution and fix the problem entirely? No it doesn’t but it’s a damn good step in the right direction.
Do you think these are healthy changes for the game? Or would you like to see more? Let us know in the comments below!
I know LFR gets a lot of hate from hardcore players, but u gotta consider other types of players. LFR brought me personally to the game and kept me in it since its introduction. I had been a raider in Wotlk, but my work made it impossible for me to raid regularly. I am a player who cares the most about the story in most games, and a vital part of the story in WoW is told through raids. Not being able to raid meant not following through with the expansion story till the climactic end, and that just made me not interested in the game. Simply by having LFR all that changed for me, it provided me a way to feel like i’m part of this world instead of feeling irrelevant at the important turns of events.
So please stop asking Blizzard to remove LFR, consider other people not just yourself.
^^^ this guy get it.
My apologies if it came off as me being selfish. That’s not really the message I was trying to convey nor am I any sort of elitist. I’ve only cleared normal HFC. I simply just don’t feel like LFR is very good for the games overall health. But I understand your point of view. Maybe blizzard could look into the way SWTOR handles the raid content for people who want to see the story. You can simply solo the raids in a story mode.
Why do you call it LFR when its RF? So silly… (I know LFR means looking for raid which used to be called like that, but the important thing is USED TO BE. Now its called raidfinder, get used to it)
Its just a habit that I never could get rid of.
I agree that LFR can be bad at times and can put players off of raiding (between the ego fueled douchebags and some of the boss mechanics being overwhelming i tend to stay away from raiding altogether) Do i want the system to go back to what it was like before? Hell no because i remember how much of a pain it was to form up a raid and how elitist attitudes prevented a lot of people from ever seeing raid content.
I also agree that the garrison while sounding good in theory has been compared to a solitary fortress put in a void. (not to mention it doesn’t have nearly the customization that was hyped) Not only that but it killed professions in a big way.
My biggest gripe with not just WOD but wow in general is the content drought players go through between expansions. It bothers me that F2P MMO’s put out more content updates then this multi million dollar game. Why doesn’t blizzard have two separate teams. One for the main expansions content and one for the patches in between? I have noticed a worrying pattern of less and less patch content in between expansions. (keep in mind the time between expansions can be at least a year)
In the end my hope for this expansion is that it’s good and gives us players lots to do and encourages communication again. I tire of the feeling that this game now has more bots in it then people.
I don’t think that the elitist attitude would be as bad now compared to the past. The raids just simply aren’t nearly as hard as they use to be on the entry level difficulties. With the introduction of the flex raiding system, the raiding scene became a lot more flexible.
But I do agree with your other points and the content droughts are indeed a huge problem. 6.2 wasn’t a bad content patch by any means but it will always be remembered as the stale patch that lasted 13 months. Which is unfortunate.