Y'Shtola Rhuul lesbian moments

when you're designing an mmo that's intended to operate in assumed perpetuity, you have to weigh your options at every step about prioritizing the immediate experience versus the long-term

ffxiv prioritizes the long-term experience of the story, whereas WoW prioritizes keeping players in newer content and away from anything that doesn't match their current design values

e.g. there's a central character in the shadowbringers expac of xiv who turns out to be someone from way back in the 24-man raid series story of a realm reborn. it was optional content that was years old at this point though, so a large chunk of the playerbase would likely get to this big reveal and have no idea who this person is and why it's such a big deal. so that optional content was made mandatory for story progression to avoid that circumstance

(I was one of those people, but this didn't really bother me at the time. I just looked up who they were)

problem: now you have a lot of players needing to do that old content, weighing the lfg queue heavily towards it to where you will often play it when you wanna get your daily queue reward. this content has been massively out of step with the game's current design values for years now, and it's not uncommon to see even veteran players have no idea what the fight mechanics here are. world of darkness' first boss is an infamous hodgepodge of opaque mechanics that can be a big wall if not enough people know what to do

they made that tradeoff to maximize the impact of the story moment that content was setting up. I don't really agree with the decision to make people more regularly play bad old content just for the sake of making one point in the story better, but that's the choice they've made

WoW, in funneling people directly to new content, almost totally forgoes any kind of long-term story setup in favor of getting everyone on board the latest and greatest stuff in the game. the downside is that each expac has to be incredibly episodic with few story threads meaningfully persisting throughout

once the well ran dry of big threats to move each episode of the plot along, the writers tried to pursue more character-driven events in battle for azeroth and shadowlands (warlords of draenor could also be included here)

problem: the characters now needed to be vehicles to move the plot towards whatever setting they wanted for the expansion, which meant very obvious pivots in character motivations that were not ever really established in previous expansions. characters like garrosh and sylvannas were saddled with the weight of being central narrative players, and their infamous heel-turn arcs represent the story at its most farcical. while the villain of the new expansion is kind of an asspull, it does allow them to go back to having external forces move the plot where they want it to go

if you want to keep a game going for 5-10 years or more, you've gotta decide what you need to prioritize and make some decisions along the way that might alienate some players. that's the price of doing business

Hey all! I'm in an Arcadion blind static and we're progging M1S in about 10 minutes! Come hang out!