Are you buying WOW Legion before launch?

I am just curious as to how many people are going to be buying Legion before the official launch date.

This is probably the end of WOW for me, because this is the first time I am not pre-ordering the expansion way before launch. The questing in WOW is fun, but for this expansion I am probably just going to wait until Legion is discounted, then subscribe for a month or two and get a couple of characters up to max level.

 

I know WOW was having issues before, but I think this is the expansion where we will see the huge drop-off. I just don´t see anyone on any forum excited about this expansion, even on the WOW forums I hear a lot of people talking about waiting to play.

 

I think that is what I am going to do. Wait until the price-drop, then play for a few months just to get my main and maybe an alt or two up to level cap and play through the dungeons a few times. Really right up until I have to any type of grind to advance my character. That has been my biggest problem with WOW the last two expansions.. the actual journey is so short, and then you get quickly to the point where everything is weekly or daily grinds that are so obvious. I want to play my main character without doing repetitive content for more than the first week of an expansion.

 

I was actually a few weeks late buying WoD, it made a huge difference in questing. The world felt ´normal´ if you are not questing in every small area with 10 other people. The problem with doing that and being a month behind everyone else when you hit level cap is that you get less ´talented´ people when doing the intro endgame content. The hardcore people had already moved up, so you are left queuing with people who are less skilled. In a way, it is like doing LFR near the middle of a patch cycle.

 

A lot of the early MMORPGs had that problem, EVE still has it for example. But nowadays, most games with PVP have gating mechanisms for early players to keep them from getting too far ahead, and catch-up mechanisms for new players. WOW does this by using seasons, basically every 6 months or so, gear completely resets, so the most hardcore people only ever get a few months ahead of everyone else.

UO was basically ruined early on because of what you described. There was the ability to kill other players, and large amounts of players would wait outside of the cities and newbie areas to kill new players with their fully developed characters. The object they said was that older players that did not want to kill new players would run to defend the new players against the bad players.. but that never helped often enough, and new players were quitting in droves because they were being treated like sheep within the game.

 

Ultima Online was a pioneer back in those days. It was a huge social experiment. The creator said he had no idea people would want to play as player-killers, and thought they would be very rare and on the fringes.

It really ruined the game in a way because many of the early years, the dev team wasted all their time chasing their tails trying to reign in PKing. They created penalties for killing players, if you were a PK and were later killed, you would lose a big chunk of your stats and have to retrain. But then players learned how to cheat the mechanism and trick the sheep into being the aggressor.

I know it is considered wimpy, but I am of the opinion that a game should either decide it is centered around pvp ( Like MOBAs and Eve) or else not have pvp at all. WOW is another example of a game that wasted huge amounts of dev time chasing pvp in a mainly pve game. think about the history of PVP in WOW and how many changes, reversed changes and systems that were created to make pvp fun, and I think many people would rightly argue that today, pvp is really no better than it was a launch and has less participation.