To those saying "I took a ______ hit"
Remember, your artifact adds core ability/abilities. what we have today is not what we will have once Legion rolls out. This is a preview at best.
The problem is that you shouldn't
feel bad about your class for 110 levels because the one thing that makes it all come together is locked until you've invested hours and hours into the character. Designing around final builds
exclusively has always been an issue with large scale RPGs. If your character doesn't feel good at level 10, 20, 90, or any other level before you reach the 'end game' then there's a good chance that player will never reach the end game because they aren't enjoying their leveling experience.
It's funny to remember that night we wiped non-stop to the same boss for 4 hours straight because of poor mechanics.. it was NOT funny 10 years ago when it was happening. It was frustrating and people logged pissed and threatening to cancel.
And yet, that was the only time in the game's entire history where the player base grew
between expansions rather than only spiking during their release. And while you remember
'the struggle', at least you actually remember something. Tell me something that's readily memorable about your time in Pandaria or WoD that remotely compares to the burned in memories of Vanilla and BC? Most players don't have any because those memories are built around
the other people you were playing with. Without a strong community, you are relying on
content to provide those moments. And that's a losing proposition for both players and content designers.
I mean this is total armchair quarterbacking here. "There are plenty of ambiguous, untried or failed ways to do something to fix this. I'm not going to say any of them but they're there."
It's not really armchair quarterbacking when you're an actual quarterback.
(MMO dev for 8 years in systems design) I didn't list a bunch of examples because I didn't want to have the inevitable nitpick fight - which is what always happens when a developer attempts to explain anything to a player.
(EDIT: I realize this sounds way more condescending than I meant it to, sorry about that.) The solutions Blizzard provided, and the rest of the industry wholesale copied because most of them are creatively bankrupt, are just
one solution. It's not inherently the best solution just because it was implemented in the most popular game. WoW has had a ton a missteps over the years. Missteps that other games have copied. Missteps that other games have had success with when WoW hasn't. LFG, Raid Finder, and Cross-Realm features aren't
inherently bad, nor are they inherently good. It depends on the game they are implemented in and the details of their implementation. That said, convenience features like those can and do erode at the base of a server community. And the community is what keeps people playing the game - not a $40 box that makes all the numbers a tad bigger than they were last time.
Trust me, every MMO designer worth a damn knows this. And they do everything they can to try to build a community around their game and within their game. Because that's ultimately what decides whether you are successful or not. You can have garbage gameplay and garbage content compared to another product; but if you establish a community of core players, you will always have steady MAU. Hell, this is true in just about every other genre as well.
But really at the base of it there is a direct contradiction in what you are saying. "Community existed because things sucked. They changed the things that sucked and the community dwindled so now it sucks. The answer was to not make things as good as they are so that the community can suffer together and be stronger."
You are literally creating a no win scenario. Leave the mechanics lacking, create comrardre in the pain. Make the mechanics even better, alter the community/comradre.
You are confusing mechanical refinement of core gameplay with introduction of convenience features. Class changes, combat changes, gameplay changes, etc. don't break your community. They get people all worked up about
their character,
their class, and
their game experience. But they don't encourage people to play solo. They don't encourage people to forego building guilds. They don't encourage people to ignore their server community or reputation. They don't encourage people to refrain from communicating with other players because why bother, you won't ever see them again.
Do you see the difference I'm talking about?