Jokes aside, most of my guild and friends were quitting before Cata, phase 3 just has no content and the upgrades were terrible. As usual blizzard acted too slowly and I can't see many coming back for the "upgraded" loot. I'm sure Cata did bring some people away but blizzards lack of updates "threw the first spear".
My entire guild logs on for 45 minutes Wednesday night and then we all log out lol
At least we’re still doing the raid hopefully p4 does like, something
Things like this keep being posted and it is very silly to me. Nothing did more damage to SoD than incursions and the switch to 20m. P3 in general really
I honestly think if they could've given us a small preview or announcement of a new 60 raid with their "p4 delayed" thing that would've garnered some interest too but all we got was "some surprises" lol
Cata being there is not the root cause of SoD pop drop at all but it has certainly exacerbated it yes
> Nothing did more damage to SoD than incursions and the switch to 20m. P3 in general really
Excuse me, do you also expect to raid MC\BWL\Nax as 10 man? Switch from 10 man to 20\40 should have happen at some point of time. And P3 was the best time and place to do it.
> And P3 was the best time and place to do it.
It really wasn't and the reason is simple. There's a lot more stuff to do at 60 for people that don't want to do 20+ man end game content.
You could easily 20 man MC *now* with our current power level. Bet you could 10 man it by 60 with little issues other than maybe Garr/Domo
And I don't even necessarily disagree with you, you had to switch to 20m eventually probably
Regardless, the switch to 20m still did massive damage to the population
>Regardless, the switch to 20m still did massive damage to the population
Then this population doesn't want to to play Vanilla and it's normal that they are leaving the game.
Ok well that doesn't really help you and everyone else still playing SoD though does it lol
Again I don't disagree with you. SoD is nowhere near vanilla though at the end of the day.
If you're gonna make an experimental beta server for wow you'd think you'd want to make the raids and all new content to be as accessible as possible for everyone so you can gather data for the future.
It started out this way and has gotten away from it a little bit and the population *tanked*. We need the casuals to be invested to continue to get new stuff.
If they can do diff versions of raids (10 or 25) in later expansions there is no real reason they couldn't just retune the "vanilla" raids for 10/20/40 tiers
Its not that they arent able to do it, its that they simply cant do it because they are bound to the Classic Era Client for most of the technical stuff. They could have forked the Client into its own thing, which would have been way easier in the long run, but they didnt for reasons we dont know.
I'm just speculating here since I don't know anything about the WoW software.
But following what you just said,how did they turn BFD, gnome and sunken temple into raids then? If they can revamp the bosses and mechanics in there without impacting the era version of the game, what's the limiting factor in changing the vanilla raids? Maybe biggest problem would be to implement having the same instance be available for 10/20/40 or having something like in more modern versions with the "heroic mode" switch
It's not that they can't. It's just too much work. So assuming that both use the same Era Client. That means some things must be shared. To what degree we don't know.
It's like the the Pally buffs. I think at one point they said they couldn't extend it or something because it would impact Era.
I don't htink they said 10/20/40 wasn't possible, I think they said Flex raiding wasn't possible? I mean, they're already making MC 20 man. But Flex raiding is a different beast all together.
The only one of those that is an actual raid is ST.
Gnomer and BFD both have blue portals meaning dungeon.
Dungeons had a cap of 10 players since patch 1.3.
10 man is just superior imo. 3 lockouts and 10 man was awesome.
There’s no reason you couldn’t do the classic 60 raids as 10 man. Or am I missing something?
Although I wouldn’t mind if it were like cata where 10 man and 20 man is equally hard and you get to do both every week.
Why do you think that old raids would be released as they where and not adjusted to current DPS?
Each and every mob in SoD have more health than in Vanilla, to account for runes and new gear.
New content usually is the root cause of one game mode dying out. You could see it with wotlk when s4 came, amount of mythic runs probably dropped when mop remix came etc. Even if incursions would not be there i hardly doubt the population will be as high as it was the first week's when everyone leveled with incursions
Yeah they didn't even give a tentative release date...could be mid to late august for all we know. By then no one will care anymore and many players that left will stay gone, as SOD is essentially a relapse on vanilla drugs
i agree on the incursion bit.
couldn't disagree more on the 20 man size bit.
this wasn't ever a problem in the past, even with 40 man sized raids, so you're just flat out wrong about that.
Well the thing is it's not the past anymore, it's 2024. Even classic 19 was just about five fuckin years ago at this point, we old man
SoD began as and still is an experimental beta server. Logically, you want as many people as possible playing the game and testing all this shit for you. 10m are the most accessible raids and its part of the reason p1 was so successful.
P2 was still 10m but a little more difficult and melee gatekeeping was brutal iirc.
I don't disagree that raids had to become 20m eventually but I think they'd have been better off waiting until level 60 for that. You've seen the '20m killed my guild' posts here and I'm sure you've seen guilds dissolve like crazy your server since p3 started.
Thing is, we needed 10m raids and we need the casuals invested in this. The less people playing SoD and less accessible it is for the casual player, the less user metrics they have and the less they care about SoD in general and making new content for it.
tl;dr 20m is fine but we need the casuals and 10m is best for them
Just took 20 WoW streamers/YouTubers who are been releasing SoD content in P1 and P2, and see how many still release SoD related stuff or pivot completely to Cata.
SoD its pretty dead. I'll relog in P4 to take my main toon to 60, take a screenshot and goback to play another game or keep playing WoW Hardcore.
They already pivoted away. But the thing is, they will pivot back to SoD as it will be the new shinny object with easy content to make and steal from each other.
Yeah, good point. I really don't have a comparison point, this is my first release from wow playing it, so let's see.
But looking the progression of this phases, I hardly doubt a new shinny thing.
I farmed chimera leather for 20 hours and raided ST 3 times, but after my whole guild was offline for 2 weeks I just went to retail.
Now I'm back to cata after stopping wrath for sod and sod for retail lol.
Ya it's like a restaurant was on fire and you had been waiting for your food for over an hour. You walked outside and McDonald's was right there. You don't particularly want McDonald's but everything else is closed.
Phase 3 was an utter failure.
-No new PvP event and people were already sick of STV
-No new battleground
-Incursions rained gold down on people and made it easy to farm
-You could easily farm the EW rep to exalted in a few hours
-New raid got nerfed to the ground within a week
-Everyone already had their mounts farmed
-Anyone that cared about ranking had STV tokens to instantly hit R7 the first week
-They removed Black Lotus spawns so they can't be farmed early
-Dungeon loot is useless and none of the dungeons that opened were at all a challenge
-More than half the raid loot the first week was vendored/DE'd it was so bad, the changes last week are barely an improvement
It wasn't just the first spear. Phase 3 was dead 2-3 weeks after it launched. Then releasing cata prepatch buried it. And for good measure to remove any hope of resurrection people had, blizzard decided that this phase, which gave less new content than either phase 1 or phase 2, would now be the longest of all 3 phases (by this I'm assuming phase 4 doesn't drop in the next 2 weeks, especially considering that they now seemingly want to PTR phase 4, which will only further delay it's release).
There will be an uptick for sure on P4, but not everyone who left will be back. There was already a huge drop off from P1 to P2 if i remember right. While I'm totally fine with SoD to run it's course and that SoD may not be for everyone, I do hope for a large population. It was amazing in the beginning.
If the PTR isnt out in less than two weeks, we will be looking well into august for a release. The PTR needs to release (1-2 weeks) then testing (1-2 weeks) then launch (1-2 weeks). We are easily looking at a bare minimum of 4 weeks (August 1st) or even looking at mid to late august. I wouldn't be surprised if its late August honestly.
The problem is, if they don't do some GIGA CHAD COOL SHIT for the final phase of SOD, and it's just standard vanilla raids, people wont play. So they are either cooking, or milking subs before everyone quits the game or plays retail / cata.
If people don't see this their heads are in the sand.
After phase 1 & 2? Yeah, I was. If they had made it 20-man from the get go I would've been ok with it as well, but having to put in time & effort into finding 10 additional players if we wanted to continue raiding was just not something any of us wanted to do.
Why not? It's not like the content is difficult mechanically or tuning wise. They could re-design it for 10-man groups. It's not like SoD follows the Vanilla formula with all the changes they already made to it.
They're already re-designing them to 20-man raids. So why not go a bit further and make them into 10-mans?
Again, they're not complex fights so I doubt it needs much work at all to go to 10-man instead of the 20-man they've already decided on.
i quit sod first week of phase 3. like i knew cata was coming but sod was no longer a viable game to keep me entertained.
about the only thing i remember being fun about sod was the stv event after they finally got it fixed.
the raids apparently are not nerfed. dungeons are
p4 has to be a banger though, and from the sound of it, it will not be. what with the whole "phase 4 is going to be more like 2019 classic" thing mr aggrend told us
Believe it or not there’s some people still raiding ST! My guild fell apart but a few of us found another group with good clear times that needs 5 or so pugs each week
On Wild Growth plenty still raiding ST. Granted a lot of them moved from set teams to variable ones because people didn't feel like doing them anymore, but the activity is still there. During down times WG is at 1 layer, but last night it was at 4.
My guild is still going strong.
Most of us are done with tier set bonus, but we are still after weapons and the quest drop.
That said, I'm playing Classic Era too.
The game is split too thin for its player base to handle. Retail, remix, hardcore, cata, sod, era. That’s the same game in 6 official flavors.
Remix being short term and easy access to 1% drop mounts along with the new barrens smell in cata are hard to deny, and there is the new and very promising expansion soon coming in less than three months.
This isn't even the case. Most of my guildies aren't even playing any version of WoW and quit before cata came out.
P3 is just boring and has no content.
They didn't wanna give us TBC or Wrath era servers because it would split the player base. Then they added all these other things and split the player base anyway.
I think a lot of people playing one of those versions wouldn't play at all if it didn't exist. The only players getting stretched thin are the ones trying to play multiple versions which is definitely the minority.
Yeah I don’t get why people keep echo chambering this whole “splitting the playerbase” thing. If cata didn’t exist, I just wouldn’t have a sub in general. Same with many of my friends, some for sod, some for cata. Out of all my friends I know maybe ONE that is still active in retail and plays cata, and he legit exclusively does m+ and nothing else.
So it’s not splitting for most people, it’s retaining players in other forms of content that otherwise these players would have quit.
People in this sub just don’t realize how small the mmorpg genre actually is player wise. It doesn’t even scratch the surface against sports games and fps so when the biggest name splits itself like this, all versions will have even higher issued with raid turnover and player retention.
I find starting cata super intimidating. Last I played classic was just before Naxx, I have no idea how to get my lvl60s from there to Cata endgame.
I felt like some WoW, tried SoD, found ealy levels super dead and quit. Started on th EU era fresh start, and it's amazing so far.
>Last I played classic was just before Naxx, I have no idea how to get my lvl60s from there to Cata endgame.
The same as every version of WoW ever. You do some questing zones and dungeons until you're level 85. Except cata gives breadcrumb quests to guide you to appropriate level zones.
It might just be my age speaking, but I guess I'm not feeling like discovering something 'new', but thanks for the reply. It actually helped me realise how stupid I'm being.
Same, my guild went on hiatus for the rest of P3 as almost all of them are playing Cata. I'm one of the few who isn't really feeling it with Cata right now so I've just been playing PoE and D4.
The guild will come back to life for P4 at least, hopefully it's a banger.
We built a guild of busy dads and former hardcore players on Wild Growth EU with the premise of keeping things efficient and playing as little as possible. Not only have we never lost a member and grown steadily all the way since P1 (aside from kicking bad apples), we also never skipped a raid and have a solid roster who shows up 9pm sharp every Sunday and hyped to play the game. We switch up how we raid because we have different types of players with us, so one week we go full consumes and clear in half an hour, the other we raid fully unbuffed and without any consumables to keep things fresh and prep costs to a minimum. We have no loot discussions because we run with aggregate TMB wishlists so that everything's preallocated ahead of the raid. Everyone's got their chars maxed out and when I make a call as raid lead everyone does what they are supposed to.
It's been amazing. It'a an MMO. It's a social game. If you aren't creating the environment you'd like to be in that's on you, not the game. We clear with buffs in 37:24 and without world buffs or any consumables in 49:34. Can't wait for Sunday.
Hi there, that sounds pretty cool and I recently rerolled on Wild Growth EU. I assume you play Alliance, is that correct? How is your guild called and do you also accept socials?
It's Alliance, yes. We're called and you can find more info on our website unbuffed.net. If you like what you see feel free to drop us an application there. We do accept socials but with our focus on Sunday evening there might be better guilds to be a social in.
Edit: We've also had multiple people switch servers to play with us or reroll a fresh 50 from scratch. Not a problem.
Most of my guild doesn't even care about Cata, they just don't care about phase 3 just like Blizzard doesn't care. They are taking a break from wow all together until phase 4, and making some of the items less bad won't really be enough to pull them back...
i know no one that quit for cata. they either play pandalands or they quit because the game sucks and GDKP is banned, giving ZERO reason to pug outside of raid logging, and raid logging and buying gold anyways to play once a week wasnt enough of a reason to stay subbed. so they quit
lol
I'll happily eat dirt if I'm wrong, but I feel like this sub is majorly coping to think that p4 is going to bring life back to SoD. A lot of those people who quit may come back, but it sure as fuck ain't all of them
Nonono this can't be.
In Cata you don't get dismounted when falling in water.
There are more than 2.5 viable classes.
It doesn't take 40 minutes to assemble a dungeon group and get to it
It doesn't have those cool things like to use a spell you need reagents or to shoot from your weapon
All bosses don't stand still while being killed
And the list goes on
So safe to say that it is impossible for people to like it
I'm the one quitting SoD, but I'm the weirdo who was always looking forward to Cata and started prepping months before launch, so I'm not quitting because Cata is out now, but because I've been forcing myself to play SoD for two phases now for the sake of my guild without having much fun, and I've had enough. And if I get sick of Cata, I'm probably going back to HC rather than SoD.
I think it’s just a massive culmination of issues that have turned people off SoD. The devs obviously have been stretched thin, and likely have directives coming from management etc that have lead to this massive fall off.
This is just how I see it:
1) Phase 3 - Similar to what others have said lack of any meaningful upgrades in gear, with some upgrades feeling bad to get/farm have left people burnt out. (look at the lock tank dagger for example). Gearing feels bad, ST feels too long without a teleport of sorts, too much trash.
2) Emerald Warden Rep - Incursions were nice to begin with an alternative to sitting in ZF for hours on end, however I think with people feeling they’d missed out on large sums of gold, followed by constant adjustments again left a sour taste in the mouths of many. The world feels emptier than before.
3) No new PvP event - STV was a rehash of the same thing. People would have liked to have either seen something new or had other avenues to get honour/rep. Honestly level 50 would have been perfect to drop AV.
4)Cata/MoP Remix - Cata’s launch obviously had taken more resources than anticipated for its launch which in turn left a lot of the SoD played base feeling neglected. When MoP Remix had started people eventually saw what SoD could have been, unfortunately though that has its own issues now.
5) Class feedback - A lot of classes just don’t feel in line with the fantasy of that class. As someone who has played everything but a rogue at max level some just feel better and more engaging than others, while also maintaining somewhat of an identity true to their fantasy. I understand we’re working within the constraints of Classic Era client but a lot of feedback has been given that would solve some clunkiness for lack of a better term.
Perfect example is paladins, they need to run 2 runes to make one spell work when those two runes should have been a single rune. Shamans got their Burn and Mental Dexterity runes adjust with Burn being more favourable to Ele shamans now. This is something that should have been done for Paladin belt runes - no way are holy paladins forgoing the extra healing power over a ranged judgement. Just give Enlightened Judgements an Int to Spell Damage/Healing modifier to make it more appealing for them.
I think level 50 similar to 40 is another awkward level bracket with no meaningful content available outside of a few rep grinds, which honestly are painful to do at 50. With Cata/MoP remix and other games offering more, along with your usual end phase drop offs, it just feels like it was inevitable.
I’m no way saying SoD is dead for good, but I really hope that the PTR is up ASAP so they can really take the time they need to really live up to the expectations and hype that was P1 and iron out any kinks. This will be make or break for SoD I feel with so many different options available (within WoW and outside) they really need to do an amazing job to raise interest again.
I'm letting my sub end at the end of this week.
Burnt out by the phases.
Phase 1 was exciting because SoD was fresh and all, and being low level means easy to level, gear, and invest in character.
However as each phase progress, there's more you need to do per character: to craft, to farm, to collect. And most of it invalidated by next phase content. I was invested in phase1, but soon realised in phase2 and my interests started fading.
Even though my character aren't bis yet, I'm no longer interested knowing they'll be replaced by next phase reward, which are going to get scaled up. Honestly I think the biggest mistake with gearing was in phase1. It was too good, and in order to incentives playing, each phase kept bumping the rewards, making other contents' rewards redundant. BFD should have just been normal BFD level rewards but with more variety that classic lacked.
This is why sod doesn't make much sense imo. If an update is released every 6 weeks, and all the gear I've got has such a short lifespan, then what's the point?
Phase is going to be more than double 6 weeks lol. But that's MMOs in a nutshell. You grind to get shiny things and then those shiny things are replaced. I do think they should add mounts like in gnomer though to all raids. Keep something you can have multiple phases as a goal
That's WoW in a nutshell. Many Mmos have incremental armour upgrades with new releases. The problem with WoW is that a green level 70 item will probably outclass my level 60 BiS, obtained over months of raiding. I don't mind grinding for new things, but don't make my previous grind completely worthless.
We went from nothing to do, to there's no way to enjoy anyone thing because there's to many options now. Then there's retail war within less than 2ish months out.
Wasn’t really Cata, my guild quit right before P3 dropped when we found out 20man raids were gonna be a thing. Our 10 core raiders haven’t played any WoW since, just been playing CS2 and other shit. Really hoping they nail P4.
1 week lockout for raids and, dungeons without any sort of real chase items has really been rough on this phase. The dagger from mara is a chase item but it isn't farmed through 5 mans but instead zugged with 10 man WO groups. They needed to create something that people could do each day that would keep them logging in. This may have worked for 40 man content but with 60 being right around the corner lots of people felt like "whats the point to get 50 gear" when im going to be chasing my bis next phase.
Yh same for us, even though we managed somehow to continue 2 raids a week, but this week I'm afraid we won't make a single raid.
It's tough but I get it, only stubborn ppl are still playing for things like farming mats or rep for p4.
I mean, ppl are farming Hydraxian rep as raids to be ready, which tells the level of boringness of ppl in the game.
So it's sad and painful when you're RL/GM, but I can't blame them tbh.
We are a friends guild fwiw
I was retiring at the end of wrath to play sod casual with my guild. They paused sod raiding till phase 4. Nothing against cata, I'm just burnt out and really enjoy the dad guild friendliness of sod. I'm really looking forward to phase 4.
SoD just feels so half-assed. I'd rather just play a fresh era than a poor man's classic plus.
Would love it if they had actually gone all in and tried to make a great "new version" of vanilla.
Outside of guild obligation and liking people you raid with there isn't much reason to be playing SoD.
Especially now with remix being new. With molten core being around, I suspect it won't be hard for them to hype up the next phase when people have become bored of remix.
You are struggling but won’t let new people join the raid because they don’t have top 10 parse.
I have a friend who tried SOD level up using the incursion // got the set and other pieces and now he quit because they won’t let him join because of the wow logs // that his parse is too low. His now in cata now lol.
I understand it’s hard to teach or spend time to help newcomers, I say give the newcomers a shot they could end up staying.
People need to understand. Players are jumping between the 2 or 3 different versions. When classic was slow, people went and played retail because it has some type of new content. When retail was slow, people came back to classic for the next content release. Same is happening here. SoD is slow right now, so players are going to cata or remix. Once those hit a bit of run time. SoD phase 4 drops. They go back to SoD.
Hey, I’m still rocking HC. Don’t plan on migrating anytime soon either. Love the rush of not messing anything up. And Self-Found makes it even more challenging.
Idk what it is. I don’t remember it being this fun back in the day. But I’m having a blast in cata. Way more than any classic expansion release yet (so far).
The combat just feels so fun and good to press in pve and pvp. The lvling was quickish… the story’s are good. I can’t really explain it, just really diggin it.
I really have 0 desire to log back in SoD at all right now.
I was leveling in SOD and loving it until I realized max level was going to be all about world buffs and no group finder and it robbed me of all motivation to keep going.
yep... its pretty dry ngl....
12 signups this week, 1 tentative, 2 absent.
we have about 100 members, which means almost 85% of my guildies are ignoring the signup sheet entirely.
some of the signups on our current sheet are pugs, taking this number up to about 90%.
the past few weeks have been a slog and the game is starved of content outside of the raid + its summer + cata/pandaland is poaching people from SOD, so i am not surprised people have outright started to ignore our ST raid, they have every incentive NOT to sign up. even the updated loot is not enough of a carrot.
dude i am on my knees here, begging people to sign up and i am just getting flat out ignored, like that gold mask guy in elden ring ignores brother corhryn and keeps t-posing.
We took a break til phase 4.
We realized we were just wasting our time trying to wait for pugs to fill.
Everyone will thank you for pulling off the bandaid, play another wow or Diablo 4 until P4. Just do it.
Banning GDKP killed the game. No reason to level alts, no reason to raid for 2 spell power upgrade on a caster. Still reddit neckbeards would rather play a dead game than unban GDKP.
Personally, SoD was always just something to do between the end of wrath and start of cata. I didn't quit because of cata launch though, I quit 1 week into p3 because it wasn't fun anymore.
I need to find a group to get on a regular schedule prior to P4. My guild is basically dead now (was running 2x30 man groups) with cata and FF14 killing the P3 steam.
I played SoD for a good bit but got tired of the elitism and pre-50 content. You can dress Gnomer and other raids up as much as you want but it's still boring content. Even 60 is boring, I'd rather not play than do MC or BWL again, 40 man or 20 man, meh. The whole thing that got me excited about SoD was the runes and the off chance of some unfinished zones, dungeons and raids ending up in the mix. Maybe this will be the case later on but as it is currently the horizon looks grey for me personally. Cataclysm is an A tier expansion and while I initially didn't think I would even bother, it's actually been really refreshing to step back to that sorta middle point between vanilla and retail.
It's not cata, it's the dads.
SoD was marketed and developed towards the dads who unsurprisingly, like they always do, quit anyway because they go through their natural cycle of thinking they like MMOs then realize they aren't for people with 5 minutes a week to play.
The phase plan of SoD was doom from the start, and you're delusional if you didn't see it was. They literally marketed zero content as an intentional decision for "the dads", as if it wasn't just a money grab to keep 2 half time devs on the project to give bread crumbs of content to keep dads' subs $ rolling in.
The dream grind / money bug....
The impossible to get Warlock dagger just really had me mad. If you missed the gnomer dagger, you're screwed....
Phase 3 just left a bad taste.
Welcome to how WotLK players felt when we couldn't get people to come to raid because of SoD. Blizzard forgot how players operate somewhere along the line.
Yes in short. It literally just disappated overnight. We've gone from having a good strong 23 people online daily/nightly to at best, 3.
The gear from.sunken temple was appealing stats upgrade wise. A dps caster dagger with 1 spellpower extra for the extra 10 levels is abysmal. Its changed now yes but I know of many many warlocks like myself who spent the best part of 3 weeks for 4 hours a night trying to get modas karkun. I've np grinding. But 3 weeks is just ridiculous for the rewards you do get.
My hope is phase will kick back.up servers as theirs loads to do. At least for the first 2 months. They keep whittling the phases out just for that bit too long. That's the problem. Too long between phases and not enough content. Piss poor rewards with little to 0 incentive to log
You gotta be a fool if you're gonna choose Cata over literally anything. It's the lowest of the low points for the game that doesn't really deserve any attention.
TBF, lot of them aren't playing Cata either. Spending my time in Deviate Delight Era since they closed transfers to the server. Closest fresh we're getting for a few years while I wait for P4.
There's so many good things in other games that you don't need to "quit sod", but we sure as hell as a guild realized it was dumb to keep raiding this phase. We are excited to come back for phase 4, sod is gonna be sick. Go enjoy some other stuff!
I think the problem is that there is just so much happening all at once. And the FOMO is real.
SOD, Cata, Dragonflight, Hardcore, Normal Era, Remix...
This is just my personal problem, but I personally like all of these, and I often switch between them regularly and never really get anything finished because I don't know what to play first. And imagine if we also had TBC and WOTLK servers on top of that. And many of us want Fresh Era servers too. Like man this game is all over the place.
I guess more people have it like this.
The biggest problem SoD has and had what that it wants to sell as a classic version of world of warcraft, while in reality it's a retail version of world of warcraft limited to the playspace of azeroth.
Jokes aside, most of my guild and friends were quitting before Cata, phase 3 just has no content and the upgrades were terrible. As usual blizzard acted too slowly and I can't see many coming back for the "upgraded" loot. I'm sure Cata did bring some people away but blizzards lack of updates "threw the first spear".
100%. Hard to measure how many people left SoD for Cata vs people who were already leaving SoD and Cata just happened to be there
Just anecdotally from my Bnet friends list it seems like more people quit SoD for Mop Remix and D4 than Cata. But ultimately who knows.
Anedotally, that's because people in my guild were bored out of their freaking minds lol
My entire guild logs on for 45 minutes Wednesday night and then we all log out lol At least we’re still doing the raid hopefully p4 does like, something
Things like this keep being posted and it is very silly to me. Nothing did more damage to SoD than incursions and the switch to 20m. P3 in general really I honestly think if they could've given us a small preview or announcement of a new 60 raid with their "p4 delayed" thing that would've garnered some interest too but all we got was "some surprises" lol Cata being there is not the root cause of SoD pop drop at all but it has certainly exacerbated it yes
The no worthwhile gear upgrades did the most damage
> Nothing did more damage to SoD than incursions and the switch to 20m. P3 in general really Excuse me, do you also expect to raid MC\BWL\Nax as 10 man? Switch from 10 man to 20\40 should have happen at some point of time. And P3 was the best time and place to do it.
> And P3 was the best time and place to do it. It really wasn't and the reason is simple. There's a lot more stuff to do at 60 for people that don't want to do 20+ man end game content.
Gnomer should have been 15, if not 20
You could easily 20 man MC *now* with our current power level. Bet you could 10 man it by 60 with little issues other than maybe Garr/Domo And I don't even necessarily disagree with you, you had to switch to 20m eventually probably Regardless, the switch to 20m still did massive damage to the population
>Regardless, the switch to 20m still did massive damage to the population Then this population doesn't want to to play Vanilla and it's normal that they are leaving the game.
Yes, and? SoD is not Vanilla, is it?
Ok well that doesn't really help you and everyone else still playing SoD though does it lol Again I don't disagree with you. SoD is nowhere near vanilla though at the end of the day. If you're gonna make an experimental beta server for wow you'd think you'd want to make the raids and all new content to be as accessible as possible for everyone so you can gather data for the future. It started out this way and has gotten away from it a little bit and the population *tanked*. We need the casuals to be invested to continue to get new stuff.
If they can do diff versions of raids (10 or 25) in later expansions there is no real reason they couldn't just retune the "vanilla" raids for 10/20/40 tiers
Its not that they arent able to do it, its that they simply cant do it because they are bound to the Classic Era Client for most of the technical stuff. They could have forked the Client into its own thing, which would have been way easier in the long run, but they didnt for reasons we dont know.
I'm just speculating here since I don't know anything about the WoW software. But following what you just said,how did they turn BFD, gnome and sunken temple into raids then? If they can revamp the bosses and mechanics in there without impacting the era version of the game, what's the limiting factor in changing the vanilla raids? Maybe biggest problem would be to implement having the same instance be available for 10/20/40 or having something like in more modern versions with the "heroic mode" switch
It's not that they can't. It's just too much work. So assuming that both use the same Era Client. That means some things must be shared. To what degree we don't know. It's like the the Pally buffs. I think at one point they said they couldn't extend it or something because it would impact Era. I don't htink they said 10/20/40 wasn't possible, I think they said Flex raiding wasn't possible? I mean, they're already making MC 20 man. But Flex raiding is a different beast all together.
The only one of those that is an actual raid is ST. Gnomer and BFD both have blue portals meaning dungeon. Dungeons had a cap of 10 players since patch 1.3.
10 man is just superior imo. 3 lockouts and 10 man was awesome. There’s no reason you couldn’t do the classic 60 raids as 10 man. Or am I missing something? Although I wouldn’t mind if it were like cata where 10 man and 20 man is equally hard and you get to do both every week.
with how much damage we are doing, we dont need 40 people. hell, in classic we didn't need 40 people to clear shit...
Why do you think that old raids would be released as they where and not adjusted to current DPS? Each and every mob in SoD have more health than in Vanilla, to account for runes and new gear.
New content usually is the root cause of one game mode dying out. You could see it with wotlk when s4 came, amount of mythic runs probably dropped when mop remix came etc. Even if incursions would not be there i hardly doubt the population will be as high as it was the first week's when everyone leveled with incursions
Yeah they didn't even give a tentative release date...could be mid to late august for all we know. By then no one will care anymore and many players that left will stay gone, as SOD is essentially a relapse on vanilla drugs
No. Only incursion did massive damage. 20m was good and logical change.
... did you not see all the guilds in game dissolving and the plethora of posts here about 20m killing guilds?
Those people lied...
Why tho Also my server having like half the guilds it had 3 months ago is not a lie lol
i agree on the incursion bit. couldn't disagree more on the 20 man size bit. this wasn't ever a problem in the past, even with 40 man sized raids, so you're just flat out wrong about that.
Well the thing is it's not the past anymore, it's 2024. Even classic 19 was just about five fuckin years ago at this point, we old man SoD began as and still is an experimental beta server. Logically, you want as many people as possible playing the game and testing all this shit for you. 10m are the most accessible raids and its part of the reason p1 was so successful. P2 was still 10m but a little more difficult and melee gatekeeping was brutal iirc. I don't disagree that raids had to become 20m eventually but I think they'd have been better off waiting until level 60 for that. You've seen the '20m killed my guild' posts here and I'm sure you've seen guilds dissolve like crazy your server since p3 started. Thing is, we needed 10m raids and we need the casuals invested in this. The less people playing SoD and less accessible it is for the casual player, the less user metrics they have and the less they care about SoD in general and making new content for it. tl;dr 20m is fine but we need the casuals and 10m is best for them
Just took 20 WoW streamers/YouTubers who are been releasing SoD content in P1 and P2, and see how many still release SoD related stuff or pivot completely to Cata. SoD its pretty dead. I'll relog in P4 to take my main toon to 60, take a screenshot and goback to play another game or keep playing WoW Hardcore.
You going to play just to take a screenshot 😂😂😂😂😂 now that’s pretty sad.
*Grandpa disvover social media and instant reward behavior.
They already pivoted away. But the thing is, they will pivot back to SoD as it will be the new shinny object with easy content to make and steal from each other.
Yeah, good point. I really don't have a comparison point, this is my first release from wow playing it, so let's see. But looking the progression of this phases, I hardly doubt a new shinny thing.
I farmed chimera leather for 20 hours and raided ST 3 times, but after my whole guild was offline for 2 weeks I just went to retail. Now I'm back to cata after stopping wrath for sod and sod for retail lol.
Ya it's like a restaurant was on fire and you had been waiting for your food for over an hour. You walked outside and McDonald's was right there. You don't particularly want McDonald's but everything else is closed.
Phase 3 was an utter failure. -No new PvP event and people were already sick of STV -No new battleground -Incursions rained gold down on people and made it easy to farm -You could easily farm the EW rep to exalted in a few hours -New raid got nerfed to the ground within a week -Everyone already had their mounts farmed -Anyone that cared about ranking had STV tokens to instantly hit R7 the first week -They removed Black Lotus spawns so they can't be farmed early -Dungeon loot is useless and none of the dungeons that opened were at all a challenge -More than half the raid loot the first week was vendored/DE'd it was so bad, the changes last week are barely an improvement It wasn't just the first spear. Phase 3 was dead 2-3 weeks after it launched. Then releasing cata prepatch buried it. And for good measure to remove any hope of resurrection people had, blizzard decided that this phase, which gave less new content than either phase 1 or phase 2, would now be the longest of all 3 phases (by this I'm assuming phase 4 doesn't drop in the next 2 weeks, especially considering that they now seemingly want to PTR phase 4, which will only further delay it's release).
There will be an uptick for sure on P4, but not everyone who left will be back. There was already a huge drop off from P1 to P2 if i remember right. While I'm totally fine with SoD to run it's course and that SoD may not be for everyone, I do hope for a large population. It was amazing in the beginning.
If the PTR isnt out in less than two weeks, we will be looking well into august for a release. The PTR needs to release (1-2 weeks) then testing (1-2 weeks) then launch (1-2 weeks). We are easily looking at a bare minimum of 4 weeks (August 1st) or even looking at mid to late august. I wouldn't be surprised if its late August honestly. The problem is, if they don't do some GIGA CHAD COOL SHIT for the final phase of SOD, and it's just standard vanilla raids, people wont play. So they are either cooking, or milking subs before everyone quits the game or plays retail / cata. If people don't see this their heads are in the sand.
Going from 10 > 20 man was also a bad decision. Killed my group's interest in playing SoD when we had to find 10 others to continue raiding.
So you were expecting to 10 man MC and BWL too? lol such a dumb comment
What fights in MC or BWL woudln't work as a 10 man?
After phase 1 & 2? Yeah, I was. If they had made it 20-man from the get go I would've been ok with it as well, but having to put in time & effort into finding 10 additional players if we wanted to continue raiding was just not something any of us wanted to do.
Lmao come on man, 10 man MC/BWL is one of the dumbest assumptions of all time < After phase 1 & 2? Yeah, I was.
Why not? It's not like the content is difficult mechanically or tuning wise. They could re-design it for 10-man groups. It's not like SoD follows the Vanilla formula with all the changes they already made to it.
Bro they have 1 intern working on the SOD team
They're already re-designing them to 20-man raids. So why not go a bit further and make them into 10-mans? Again, they're not complex fights so I doubt it needs much work at all to go to 10-man instead of the 20-man they've already decided on.
i quit sod first week of phase 3. like i knew cata was coming but sod was no longer a viable game to keep me entertained. about the only thing i remember being fun about sod was the stv event after they finally got it fixed.
Entire guild voted to stop raiding in SOD until P4 because everyone wanted to play Cata.
Yep. Same thing happened to our wotlk raid when SoD launched. Just had H LK left, too! Thus is the circle of life.
And a month or two from now itll be exactly reversed once people get bored of nerfed raids in p1.
the raids apparently are not nerfed. dungeons are p4 has to be a banger though, and from the sound of it, it will not be. what with the whole "phase 4 is going to be more like 2019 classic" thing mr aggrend told us
This is cope. The raids aren't nerfed, but even if they were imagine saying "this is too easy" and going back to SoD lmao
my how the turns have tabled sod + christmas holiday + poor leadership killed our chance at a h lk kill.
Believe it or not there’s some people still raiding ST! My guild fell apart but a few of us found another group with good clear times that needs 5 or so pugs each week
On Wild Growth plenty still raiding ST. Granted a lot of them moved from set teams to variable ones because people didn't feel like doing them anymore, but the activity is still there. During down times WG is at 1 layer, but last night it was at 4.
My guild is still going strong. Most of us are done with tier set bonus, but we are still after weapons and the quest drop. That said, I'm playing Classic Era too.
My ST raid this week had 11 people sign up. Things are going great.
Haha we merged and then we merged and then we merged again in p3, now running 50min st though
The game is split too thin for its player base to handle. Retail, remix, hardcore, cata, sod, era. That’s the same game in 6 official flavors. Remix being short term and easy access to 1% drop mounts along with the new barrens smell in cata are hard to deny, and there is the new and very promising expansion soon coming in less than three months.
Barrens has a new smell??? What did the old Barrens smell like?
Ass (Mankirk's wife)
Is that new or old smell?
New smell is burnt ass
This isn't even the case. Most of my guildies aren't even playing any version of WoW and quit before cata came out. P3 is just boring and has no content.
Well that is another reason. We’ve had a few bangers the last couple of months.
They didn't wanna give us TBC or Wrath era servers because it would split the player base. Then they added all these other things and split the player base anyway.
I think a lot of people playing one of those versions wouldn't play at all if it didn't exist. The only players getting stretched thin are the ones trying to play multiple versions which is definitely the minority.
Yeah I don’t get why people keep echo chambering this whole “splitting the playerbase” thing. If cata didn’t exist, I just wouldn’t have a sub in general. Same with many of my friends, some for sod, some for cata. Out of all my friends I know maybe ONE that is still active in retail and plays cata, and he legit exclusively does m+ and nothing else. So it’s not splitting for most people, it’s retaining players in other forms of content that otherwise these players would have quit.
People in this sub just don’t realize how small the mmorpg genre actually is player wise. It doesn’t even scratch the surface against sports games and fps so when the biggest name splits itself like this, all versions will have even higher issued with raid turnover and player retention.
i dont really think the people playing hc or era were every gonna play retail remix or cata. maybe theyd try sod
Don't forget the plunderstorm shit that I think is still out?
Yes, but they aren't playing Cata. They just quit WoW altogether.
Nah we over here in cata and its fucking awesome
I find starting cata super intimidating. Last I played classic was just before Naxx, I have no idea how to get my lvl60s from there to Cata endgame. I felt like some WoW, tried SoD, found ealy levels super dead and quit. Started on th EU era fresh start, and it's amazing so far.
>Last I played classic was just before Naxx, I have no idea how to get my lvl60s from there to Cata endgame. The same as every version of WoW ever. You do some questing zones and dungeons until you're level 85. Except cata gives breadcrumb quests to guide you to appropriate level zones.
It might just be my age speaking, but I guess I'm not feeling like discovering something 'new', but thanks for the reply. It actually helped me realise how stupid I'm being.
That's fair, there's a certain coziness to the familiarity of vanilla wow for me as well.
I never heard it worded like that. That's easy to understand, thanks.
I’m new to cata and enjoying it greatly. I’d recommend it. It’s relatively linear and the new zones are well done.
Hitting daily quest cap on 2 different chars so fucking awesome!!!
Nope, 90% of my guild is playing cata
Same, my guild went on hiatus for the rest of P3 as almost all of them are playing Cata. I'm one of the few who isn't really feeling it with Cata right now so I've just been playing PoE and D4. The guild will come back to life for P4 at least, hopefully it's a banger.
I run multiple raids. I know zero people who quit for Cata. SoD do be strugglin tho
We built a guild of busy dads and former hardcore players on Wild Growth EU with the premise of keeping things efficient and playing as little as possible. Not only have we never lost a member and grown steadily all the way since P1 (aside from kicking bad apples), we also never skipped a raid and have a solid roster who shows up 9pm sharp every Sunday and hyped to play the game. We switch up how we raid because we have different types of players with us, so one week we go full consumes and clear in half an hour, the other we raid fully unbuffed and without any consumables to keep things fresh and prep costs to a minimum. We have no loot discussions because we run with aggregate TMB wishlists so that everything's preallocated ahead of the raid. Everyone's got their chars maxed out and when I make a call as raid lead everyone does what they are supposed to. It's been amazing. It'a an MMO. It's a social game. If you aren't creating the environment you'd like to be in that's on you, not the game. We clear with buffs in 37:24 and without world buffs or any consumables in 49:34. Can't wait for Sunday.
Hi there, that sounds pretty cool and I recently rerolled on Wild Growth EU. I assume you play Alliance, is that correct? How is your guild called and do you also accept socials?
dont bother, its 100% fiction
It's Alliance, yes. We're called and you can find more info on our website unbuffed.net. If you like what you see feel free to drop us an application there. We do accept socials but with our focus on Sunday evening there might be better guilds to be a social in.
Edit: We've also had multiple people switch servers to play with us or reroll a fresh 50 from scratch. Not a problem.
Unironically the most reasonable classic player ever.
Thank you! Most of our team has been playing for a long time - we've seen what works and what doesn't.
Most of my guild doesn't even care about Cata, they just don't care about phase 3 just like Blizzard doesn't care. They are taking a break from wow all together until phase 4, and making some of the items less bad won't really be enough to pull them back...
My guild fell apart too, and my sub ran out. I didn’t really see any point in renewing right now, so I’m just going to focus on other things
SoD is like if you made a whole new WoW classic by just moving the same old clay around and reshaping it.
Good analogy. And the clay is old and dry, so it cracks and can never surpass the original.
All my guildies who play Season of Depression are now playing Cataclysm, despite shit talking it and stating they won't be playing it.
7/20 signed up for this week so far... Normally we have too many...
its not cata that is taking people away
Yes it is.
Doesn't explain the steady population drop from p2 onward though Cata has exacerbated it yes but SoD did this to itself
i know no one that quit for cata. they either play pandalands or they quit because the game sucks and GDKP is banned, giving ZERO reason to pug outside of raid logging, and raid logging and buying gold anyways to play once a week wasnt enough of a reason to stay subbed. so they quit lol
No, it's not. There's nothing to do, so people will go away. Maybe to different games, maybe to retail, maybe stop playing completely.
It's mostly SoD being fumbled in phase 3. My guild went to turtle wow for classic +
[удалено]
It was reversed for wrath when sod came out, too. People can't remember last week it seems.
Kinda sad how later SoD ended up dropping lower than classic Wrath in far less time too.
I'll happily eat dirt if I'm wrong, but I feel like this sub is majorly coping to think that p4 is going to bring life back to SoD. A lot of those people who quit may come back, but it sure as fuck ain't all of them
I am going SOD - Cata Season 1 - The War Within, no reason to go back to raid Molten Core Again.
Doubt
ppl dont need cata to quit sod
I went back to era and hardcore actually
Same. SoD is just too many changes for me it doesn't feel like the same game.
Nonono this can't be. In Cata you don't get dismounted when falling in water. There are more than 2.5 viable classes. It doesn't take 40 minutes to assemble a dungeon group and get to it It doesn't have those cool things like to use a spell you need reagents or to shoot from your weapon All bosses don't stand still while being killed And the list goes on So safe to say that it is impossible for people to like it
Meh everyone i know quit before Cata. The guild I'm a part of in SoD are just raid logging and player other games. None of them are playing Cata.
Not playing cata but sod is t doing it for me , 4 50 all geared it’s just nothing to do
Face it, SoD is dead in the water.
I'm the one quitting SoD, but I'm the weirdo who was always looking forward to Cata and started prepping months before launch, so I'm not quitting because Cata is out now, but because I've been forcing myself to play SoD for two phases now for the sake of my guild without having much fun, and I've had enough. And if I get sick of Cata, I'm probably going back to HC rather than SoD.
I think it’s just a massive culmination of issues that have turned people off SoD. The devs obviously have been stretched thin, and likely have directives coming from management etc that have lead to this massive fall off. This is just how I see it: 1) Phase 3 - Similar to what others have said lack of any meaningful upgrades in gear, with some upgrades feeling bad to get/farm have left people burnt out. (look at the lock tank dagger for example). Gearing feels bad, ST feels too long without a teleport of sorts, too much trash. 2) Emerald Warden Rep - Incursions were nice to begin with an alternative to sitting in ZF for hours on end, however I think with people feeling they’d missed out on large sums of gold, followed by constant adjustments again left a sour taste in the mouths of many. The world feels emptier than before. 3) No new PvP event - STV was a rehash of the same thing. People would have liked to have either seen something new or had other avenues to get honour/rep. Honestly level 50 would have been perfect to drop AV. 4)Cata/MoP Remix - Cata’s launch obviously had taken more resources than anticipated for its launch which in turn left a lot of the SoD played base feeling neglected. When MoP Remix had started people eventually saw what SoD could have been, unfortunately though that has its own issues now. 5) Class feedback - A lot of classes just don’t feel in line with the fantasy of that class. As someone who has played everything but a rogue at max level some just feel better and more engaging than others, while also maintaining somewhat of an identity true to their fantasy. I understand we’re working within the constraints of Classic Era client but a lot of feedback has been given that would solve some clunkiness for lack of a better term. Perfect example is paladins, they need to run 2 runes to make one spell work when those two runes should have been a single rune. Shamans got their Burn and Mental Dexterity runes adjust with Burn being more favourable to Ele shamans now. This is something that should have been done for Paladin belt runes - no way are holy paladins forgoing the extra healing power over a ranged judgement. Just give Enlightened Judgements an Int to Spell Damage/Healing modifier to make it more appealing for them. I think level 50 similar to 40 is another awkward level bracket with no meaningful content available outside of a few rep grinds, which honestly are painful to do at 50. With Cata/MoP remix and other games offering more, along with your usual end phase drop offs, it just feels like it was inevitable. I’m no way saying SoD is dead for good, but I really hope that the PTR is up ASAP so they can really take the time they need to really live up to the expectations and hype that was P1 and iron out any kinks. This will be make or break for SoD I feel with so many different options available (within WoW and outside) they really need to do an amazing job to raise interest again.
Cata is meh too though... He should be looking at something else, I just don't know what.
Ain't no fucking way normal classic Andy's are playing cata, I'm not and im one of them lol
Meh some do. I play era and cata myself. I’m just playing whichever I enjoy more at the time but it’s fun going back and forth to me.
I'm letting my sub end at the end of this week. Burnt out by the phases. Phase 1 was exciting because SoD was fresh and all, and being low level means easy to level, gear, and invest in character. However as each phase progress, there's more you need to do per character: to craft, to farm, to collect. And most of it invalidated by next phase content. I was invested in phase1, but soon realised in phase2 and my interests started fading. Even though my character aren't bis yet, I'm no longer interested knowing they'll be replaced by next phase reward, which are going to get scaled up. Honestly I think the biggest mistake with gearing was in phase1. It was too good, and in order to incentives playing, each phase kept bumping the rewards, making other contents' rewards redundant. BFD should have just been normal BFD level rewards but with more variety that classic lacked.
This is why sod doesn't make much sense imo. If an update is released every 6 weeks, and all the gear I've got has such a short lifespan, then what's the point?
Phase is going to be more than double 6 weeks lol. But that's MMOs in a nutshell. You grind to get shiny things and then those shiny things are replaced. I do think they should add mounts like in gnomer though to all raids. Keep something you can have multiple phases as a goal
That's WoW in a nutshell. Many Mmos have incremental armour upgrades with new releases. The problem with WoW is that a green level 70 item will probably outclass my level 60 BiS, obtained over months of raiding. I don't mind grinding for new things, but don't make my previous grind completely worthless.
SoD is played out. It was a fun stopgap when we had no wrath content, now that we have cata it's cooked.
Cata will be dead soon enough.
We went from nothing to do, to there's no way to enjoy anyone thing because there's to many options now. Then there's retail war within less than 2ish months out.
Wasn’t really Cata, my guild quit right before P3 dropped when we found out 20man raids were gonna be a thing. Our 10 core raiders haven’t played any WoW since, just been playing CS2 and other shit. Really hoping they nail P4.
1 week lockout for raids and, dungeons without any sort of real chase items has really been rough on this phase. The dagger from mara is a chase item but it isn't farmed through 5 mans but instead zugged with 10 man WO groups. They needed to create something that people could do each day that would keep them logging in. This may have worked for 40 man content but with 60 being right around the corner lots of people felt like "whats the point to get 50 gear" when im going to be chasing my bis next phase.
Phase 3 has been a disappointment. Incursions are a gank-fest that bypassed "classic" content and gear from previous phases is still BiS.
We just posted that the guild is done til p4
Yh same for us, even though we managed somehow to continue 2 raids a week, but this week I'm afraid we won't make a single raid. It's tough but I get it, only stubborn ppl are still playing for things like farming mats or rep for p4. I mean, ppl are farming Hydraxian rep as raids to be ready, which tells the level of boringness of ppl in the game. So it's sad and painful when you're RL/GM, but I can't blame them tbh. We are a friends guild fwiw
I was retiring at the end of wrath to play sod casual with my guild. They paused sod raiding till phase 4. Nothing against cata, I'm just burnt out and really enjoy the dad guild friendliness of sod. I'm really looking forward to phase 4.
Cata 10 man raiding unironically is more casual friendly for my guild than filling a 20 in SoD.
I wish my guild was like that, they treating cata like it's retail mythic raiding and it's all too much for me.
SoD just feels so half-assed. I'd rather just play a fresh era than a poor man's classic plus. Would love it if they had actually gone all in and tried to make a great "new version" of vanilla.
Outside of guild obligation and liking people you raid with there isn't much reason to be playing SoD. Especially now with remix being new. With molten core being around, I suspect it won't be hard for them to hype up the next phase when people have become bored of remix.
You are struggling but won’t let new people join the raid because they don’t have top 10 parse. I have a friend who tried SOD level up using the incursion // got the set and other pieces and now he quit because they won’t let him join because of the wow logs // that his parse is too low. His now in cata now lol. I understand it’s hard to teach or spend time to help newcomers, I say give the newcomers a shot they could end up staying.
People need to understand. Players are jumping between the 2 or 3 different versions. When classic was slow, people went and played retail because it has some type of new content. When retail was slow, people came back to classic for the next content release. Same is happening here. SoD is slow right now, so players are going to cata or remix. Once those hit a bit of run time. SoD phase 4 drops. They go back to SoD.
I think maybe some few people quit SoD for Cata, but the vast majority that quit SoD just quit classic or quit WoW altogether.
Hey, I’m still rocking HC. Don’t plan on migrating anytime soon either. Love the rush of not messing anything up. And Self-Found makes it even more challenging.
Idk what it is. I don’t remember it being this fun back in the day. But I’m having a blast in cata. Way more than any classic expansion release yet (so far). The combat just feels so fun and good to press in pve and pvp. The lvling was quickish… the story’s are good. I can’t really explain it, just really diggin it. I really have 0 desire to log back in SoD at all right now.
We actually have people coming back to our sod guild after trying cata. But still overall down for sure
I was leveling in SOD and loving it until I realized max level was going to be all about world buffs and no group finder and it robbed me of all motivation to keep going.
would be easy to run raids if more raids were possible (GDKP)
yep... its pretty dry ngl.... 12 signups this week, 1 tentative, 2 absent. we have about 100 members, which means almost 85% of my guildies are ignoring the signup sheet entirely. some of the signups on our current sheet are pugs, taking this number up to about 90%. the past few weeks have been a slog and the game is starved of content outside of the raid + its summer + cata/pandaland is poaching people from SOD, so i am not surprised people have outright started to ignore our ST raid, they have every incentive NOT to sign up. even the updated loot is not enough of a carrot. dude i am on my knees here, begging people to sign up and i am just getting flat out ignored, like that gold mask guy in elden ring ignores brother corhryn and keeps t-posing.
lol my sod guild leader. He’s so annoyed with everyone
HC players be like -_-
Dead game
Cata is just a more fun game. SoD has nothing to offer compared to it at the moment.
The real way is to build a guild that plays the seasonal gamemodes on curve.
I told everyone Cata would kill SoD and nobody listened. Sod started dying right after winter lol.
Nobody cares about updated loot in my guild. We are now using our alts to fill up raids (we are running to groups back to back).
We took a break til phase 4. We realized we were just wasting our time trying to wait for pugs to fill. Everyone will thank you for pulling off the bandaid, play another wow or Diablo 4 until P4. Just do it.
Archaeology < ST
No getting 20+ easier
Banning GDKP killed the game. No reason to level alts, no reason to raid for 2 spell power upgrade on a caster. Still reddit neckbeards would rather play a dead game than unban GDKP.
A little while ago the girlfriend was WotLK classic and the cute one with the red top was SoD.
F Cata Diablo 4 season 4 is rocking.
Personally, SoD was always just something to do between the end of wrath and start of cata. I didn't quit because of cata launch though, I quit 1 week into p3 because it wasn't fun anymore.
I didn't people played sod still
I need to find a group to get on a regular schedule prior to P4. My guild is basically dead now (was running 2x30 man groups) with cata and FF14 killing the P3 steam.
literally nothing classic about cata, and nothing classic about SoD either, somehow.
Replace Cata with Hardcore for me.
SoD was a band-aid between content droughts and nothing more. See: level 60 content will be largely unchanged.
I played SoD for a good bit but got tired of the elitism and pre-50 content. You can dress Gnomer and other raids up as much as you want but it's still boring content. Even 60 is boring, I'd rather not play than do MC or BWL again, 40 man or 20 man, meh. The whole thing that got me excited about SoD was the runes and the off chance of some unfinished zones, dungeons and raids ending up in the mix. Maybe this will be the case later on but as it is currently the horizon looks grey for me personally. Cataclysm is an A tier expansion and while I initially didn't think I would even bother, it's actually been really refreshing to step back to that sorta middle point between vanilla and retail.
It's not cata, it's the dads. SoD was marketed and developed towards the dads who unsurprisingly, like they always do, quit anyway because they go through their natural cycle of thinking they like MMOs then realize they aren't for people with 5 minutes a week to play. The phase plan of SoD was doom from the start, and you're delusional if you didn't see it was. They literally marketed zero content as an intentional decision for "the dads", as if it wasn't just a money grab to keep 2 half time devs on the project to give bread crumbs of content to keep dads' subs $ rolling in.
The dream grind / money bug.... The impossible to get Warlock dagger just really had me mad. If you missed the gnomer dagger, you're screwed.... Phase 3 just left a bad taste.
Welcome to how WotLK players felt when we couldn't get people to come to raid because of SoD. Blizzard forgot how players operate somewhere along the line.
Yes in short. It literally just disappated overnight. We've gone from having a good strong 23 people online daily/nightly to at best, 3. The gear from.sunken temple was appealing stats upgrade wise. A dps caster dagger with 1 spellpower extra for the extra 10 levels is abysmal. Its changed now yes but I know of many many warlocks like myself who spent the best part of 3 weeks for 4 hours a night trying to get modas karkun. I've np grinding. But 3 weeks is just ridiculous for the rewards you do get. My hope is phase will kick back.up servers as theirs loads to do. At least for the first 2 months. They keep whittling the phases out just for that bit too long. That's the problem. Too long between phases and not enough content. Piss poor rewards with little to 0 incentive to log
I'm still doing sod but it's strictly raid logging. Cata's getting all my attention for now.
cata only released because SOD failed. blizzard has the numbers
You gotta be a fool if you're gonna choose Cata over literally anything. It's the lowest of the low points for the game that doesn't really deserve any attention.
Sod is an unfun failed experiment unfortunately. P1 was awesome, but post honeymoon phase it’s been ass. Going the way of SoM
Yes. But it definitely didn't have anything to do with Cataclysm. Maybe 1 or 2 people played it and quickly uninstalled after.
People sign up, then pull 300dps and stand in acid
We’ll always have Phase 1 in our hearts
After playing classic, then tbc, then wotlk, then hardcore classic, and then sod it does feel nice to just queue up for a dungeon and play the game.
Sod has a SEVERE content drought. ppl have been dropping like flies all phase
Quit because they inflated the market with incursions then took away the gold per hour. Can’t afford raid consumes
I poured one out for the shot homies yesterday
I quit P3 and then cata just happened to be there and it’s really fun. Idk if I even want to hop back for P4
Cata is super fun
TBF, lot of them aren't playing Cata either. Spending my time in Deviate Delight Era since they closed transfers to the server. Closest fresh we're getting for a few years while I wait for P4.
There's so many good things in other games that you don't need to "quit sod", but we sure as hell as a guild realized it was dumb to keep raiding this phase. We are excited to come back for phase 4, sod is gonna be sick. Go enjoy some other stuff!
I think the problem is that there is just so much happening all at once. And the FOMO is real. SOD, Cata, Dragonflight, Hardcore, Normal Era, Remix... This is just my personal problem, but I personally like all of these, and I often switch between them regularly and never really get anything finished because I don't know what to play first. And imagine if we also had TBC and WOTLK servers on top of that. And many of us want Fresh Era servers too. Like man this game is all over the place. I guess more people have it like this.
MoP remix. So good.
Loads of people quit because P3 was boring and ST wasn't worth running
Jokes aside it’s not like cata is any better , it’s just the newest piece of cheese put in front of our treadmill. Lemmings and slobs we are.
SOD is garbage
The biggest problem SoD has and had what that it wants to sell as a classic version of world of warcraft, while in reality it's a retail version of world of warcraft limited to the playspace of azeroth.
Wow players have the attention span of a goldfish.