Saiba 💾👾 Warcraft VTuber

This last week I've seen so many clueless opinions about what retail is and what should happen to it Retail diverged from being an MMORPG into what I would say is both a 'social pve challenge game' and a 'collection game' Why? Because it's not possible to keep a MMORPG alive after 22 years. Over enough time, everything will be solved, a correct way to play the game will develop, and the campaign will become so long and convoluted that it is impossible to catch up without story skips. Eventually the endgame becomes the default state to play the game in, and updates must focus on the endgame so as to retain dedicated players. Power creep and 'qol' is impossible to avoid and I can't think of any game that has ever successfully done patches making it slower. The 'RPG' part ends up getting pushed out. You can see it now with the current state of retail patches, where every grind they add receives heavy pushback (eg. AP, or more recently venomstones). There are only so many ways to repackage grinds before they are just considered chores. The current season took a step towards more meaningful gear and it backfired. Retail being alive after 22 years is actually a testament to what went right, being able to consistently organize groups of 20 people for challenging content is something that's not present in any other game, FFXIV is the only other popular game that's moderately similar and its groups are only 8 man. But anyone who was playing wow because it was an MMORPG would feel disenfranchised as a result of all this, so that's the hole that Forever is trying to fill (and it seems to be successful so far). I doubt Forever will have a real long-term impact on the Retail playerbase. I've seen so many of these posts from people who probably don't even play wow suggesting they abandon or sunset Retail for Forever when the games are basically different genres. It's almost like saying they should abandon Overwatch to work on Forever (ofc retail is not perfect, there are a lot of criticisms to be had, but these people are just crazy)