I Asked 1,000 WoW Players What's Wrong With Midnight

[00:05] thing Midnight did for the game was and the responses have been pretty interesting depending on which platform you are talking about. This is not us [ __ ] on the expansion by the way because Midnight is statistically likely

[00:18] the best expansion we have had in the modern WoW era. And it's important to mention that because that makes it all the more obvious where the faults are. What do you think it is? The story? The vibe? The add-ons? Well, we put it up to

[00:35] a vote and we were hoping at least 1,000 people would chime in. Obviously, 1,000 people isn't the WoW player base, but a lot more have taken time to participate and that was only in two days. Not only that, we have hundreds of comments from

[00:51] people actually taking time away from farming crests to voice their feedback. And it's easily the most amount of responses and replies we have had for anything we have done on our public platforms.

[01:10] least consider that Midnight has done the worst? Some of the more specific dislikes have to be around the UI changes, particularly when they clash with a class pruning. It's no secret to say that healers have had it the worst

[01:24] [music] especially raid scenarios. It is close to impossible to see the frames and I just finished healing on my holy paladin, a stream rate that we did the other day, twitch.tv/marcelineflame.

[01:38] And I had a silly amount of difficulty figuring out who had the fear on them just from the frames. This is a good example of this issue and why it just doesn't match with the combat design of World of Warcraft. Your best argument

[01:53] against this is that the dragon does a massive breath animation and the player has a red arrow on top of their head. [music] And that's great if the breath wouldn't be a blue animation on blue floor texture shot by a dark blue

[02:07] dragon. Despite them clearly reworking circle animations with more defined outlines to really eliminate a large part of the same color bloat effect, it wasn't used on likely the single most important mechanic on that particular

[02:20] fight. Even so, that would still not be as bad if the game assumed that you as a healer are actively keeping track of your friendly raiders character models. class designers need to have a proper sit-down every tier and actually talk

[02:36] about these things before they ship them out. There isn't a single healer that's not a healer main for 15 years that doesn't keep their eyes glued to the raid frames with the occasional glances at their character to make sure they

[02:50] aren't strafing off the platform. Oops, that is Was that me I'm projecting? It's pools of fire or stacking an AoE circle on other people. Who the hell has time to also keep track of at least 10 to 30 other people's character models all at

[03:04] the same time as just finishing healing the circle mechanic with a lot of adds that need to be killed, CC'd, or interrupted all in the span of 5 seconds. None of these mechanics are difficult on their own, and I bet a lot

[03:16] of healers are fine with either one of them, but when they all happen in very quick succession while the respective healer also has to take care of their own rotation, demanding a quick response time, adding an overly increasing player

[03:31] action count, it quickly gets to a point where visual clarity plays an important role in player reaction time. And if the skill involved in clearing end game content has to deal with the capability of your eyes discerning

[03:45] between four different shades of dark blue with different levels of opacity and almost no contrast with the background, this becomes more of a color matching game than an RPG, MMO or otherwise. But no, this isn't the worst

[04:00] thing ever. Although, adjacent to this issue, very closely, is the add-on restrictions. The initial plan and purpose behind the movement was likely very admirable. And if some players don't agree, they might still agree that

[04:13] add-ons shouldn't be a necessity, but rather a choice. It becomes less of a choice when instead of making dangerous mechanics sparser, they just push them further into the end game, making more content less threatening rather than

[04:28] mechanically easier. What do I mean? Well, one example as to why add-ons felt mandatory in the past, if we take the healer route again, was that in dungeons and raids as well, but Mythic Plus predominantly, you wanted to know what

[04:43] type and how many defensives your party had. The reason for that was because on boss fights or a large pull in a key, there were, and still are, about three to four big mechanics that can either one-shot people or get them really close

[04:57] to dying. And because every single one of those mechanics needed an answer, coordination to make sure you don't overlap multiple defensives and leave yourself open afterwards was very necessary. Not everyone plays all of

[05:11] their dungeons and raids with voice comms. So, add-ons that showed people their defensives, interrupts and much more made planning and responding to dangerous situations doable. Making these dangerous situations just happen

[05:25] in keys over 16 instead of keys over 12 what Midnight seems to have done. Rather, it would be great if the mechanics that create the necessity of add-ons would be sparser enough where

[05:39] combat add-ons would offer very little to no additional benefit. But that's not add-ons being restricted, but the information required to be perceived by the player being more or less the same has made it almost necessary to have

[05:55] multiple add-ons instead, just so that they can bounce off each other and work around the restrictions, providing the same thing that one add-on used to do But no, this isn't the worst thing that Midnight did so far.

[06:13] be wrong as well, if we live in our own echo chamber little bubble thing. Both Marcelian and myself considered the slow leveling to be a big fault of Midnight. objectively worse than in past expansions, and minute per minute is

[06:27] likely way slower, the comments and reception to our poll has only in very small part agreed to our view. I think what might make leveling feel slow is the fact that questing is not that interesting this time around. Or maybe

[06:41] that is just me. The campaigns have potential on paper, but personally, outside Eversong Woods giving me big nostalgia kicks for The Burning Crusade and [music] Warcraft 3 blood elves, or Void Storm feeling like one of the best

[06:55] alien zones they ever made, both with music and pacing and story, the rest was bland, or at its worst, disappointing enough where I didn't feel like I wanted to take part in it anymore. Arator's quest line is one of the more unique

[07:10] approaches, and both Marcelian and myself actually enjoy his character arc, or rather, the existence of a character arc. The quests are just more of the same still. Kill X amount of guys, collect Y amount of stuff, and worse,

[07:25] reach a very predictable conclusion for Arator's evolution. If anything, I would have hoped to see this explosive part of his character actually get an explanation, become a part of his persona, of him rejecting or solving

[07:39] that side of him completely. But it feels like it's addressed only in passing, and the focus is more about Arator confronting his dad about the parental issues going around, despite it all starting from him stepping in front

[07:52] of his father's attack, and then kind of reluctantly blaming him for it. Or at least the narrative seems to do so. A good part of the quest is also undermining Turalyon's character in the story by criticizing his past actions in

[08:06] the Second War against the Horde, as well as his choice, which is a very modern and morally privileged thing to do, making light of his, Alleria's, and their party's sacrifice to go on Outland and close the Dark Portal from the other

[08:21] side for everyone on Azeroth to be safe. The Allerian and Arator stories feel a bit too safe to be exciting, and the Allerian zone and culture felt like what we enjoyed the most, which will come full circle when we discuss the actual

[08:34] agreed-upon worst thing Midnight did. And all of these just makes leveling kind of like I don't really want to do it.

[08:49] been around the story and the feeling of Warcraft being gone. The topic of Warcraft not being Warcraft anymore has been beaten to death by almost every content creator, social platform, or live stream, and there are definitely

[09:03] opposing opinions on the topic. We already went through these feelings in the housing cinematic that was released after the actual underwhelming Midnight after the actual underwhelming Midnight cinematic, but before the actual cool

[09:16] and epic Arator cinematic. All of these three cinematics are so different in terms of tone that it really paints a picture of how divided the WoW community is. Blizzard has been trying to fix this every chance they get, and the sentiment

[09:30] behind it is nice. It definitely feels like the WoW team wants to make everyone happy, but we all know this is not going to work. And the reason we do know that is because we live in the real world. You cannot make everyone happy.

[09:45] Definitely not like this. You just have to make them happy in turn. This has shown to work in past wow expansions or at least the optics of them did. Up until Mists of Pandaria, wow was a lot more serious. I tried to avoid saying

[09:58] darker despite a lot of people using that adjective because wow was never really dark. Never since Warcraft 3 when Arthas committed regicide and patricide in one glorious gut-wrenching cinematic. Sure, Varian

[10:12] dying sucked and Vol'jin withering away in the war chief seat was depressing. But come on, we all have seen actual dark stories whether they are fantasy, fictional or otherwise. But what wow had until Mists was at least a consistent

[10:27] tone which made the announcement of Pandaren all the more controversial at the time. People criticized it quite a lot back in the day and if we are being completely honest here, we can probably tell why they insisted

[10:40] on Pandaren being added to the game. With that being said, it was done right. Pandaren had a really cool backstory into being who they were. Their absence for the majority of the wow's timeline was really well explained by the mists

[10:54] casted by, I believe, the first Pandaren emperor. And after playing Mists, we also know that despite [music] Pandaren being a bit goofy, Garrosh being an absolute genocidal war criminal who was not. And the blend between the two vibes

[11:09] was done really well. However, the they were hidden this whole time and that's why nobody knew about them motif will wear out if you keep reusing it. Like for the Vulpera or the Ardern or the Haronnir. There's only so much of this

[11:24] concept that people can subconsciously accept before they don't care anymore for it which played a part into people disliking Haronnir being written into the story, retconning the ancestry of trolls and night elves. But funny

[11:37] thing. Or is it? has [ __ ] up on was not adding the Amani into the game as a playable race.

[11:52] Now, I'm not saying I'm super proud of the people seeing it this way because there might be some issue with the fact that our community will organically resonate with our opinions more because that's just how communities

[12:04] work. But we have seen people disagree with the Amani not being a race as well. We have this comment clearly stating in a very blatant way that they disagree with the premise. We cannot control really who replies to our polls, and we

[12:18] did try our best to reach a more diverse group of people. That is also in part why X as a platform is important. Our following there is very, very small with only 2.5k followers. We had our poll reach around 4,000 people instead. If

[12:33] you assume that not everyone that follows someone will see 100% of their posts 100% of the time, and some accounts being dead accounts as well, it might not be a stretch to say that 50% of the people that saw the poll and

[12:45] whatever percentage of them decided to vote were outside of our very own community with ideally different opinions. And of course, the disagreements on YouTube, which are very welcome by the way, also point out our

[12:58] question has reached outside of our own community, and that's great. This players think that Amani not being playable is the worst thing Midnight did, but it is a majority. And if you will allow my personal opinion into the

[13:11] matter, I think the Twitter and YouTube crowd might be saying the exact same thing. I believe that Midnight has a major flaw that WoW has been doing for a while, and it's not unique for our current expansion. However, Midnight has

[13:25] been more obvious with this issue because the expansion is so good in every other area. And that issue is that Warcraft isn't Warcraft anymore. As far as Midnight is concerned, you can probably agree that if you take the

[13:40] entire Warcraft franchise from the release of Warcraft 1 in 1994 to 32 years later today, the Amani are the most Warcrafty thing in the game right now. As much as the game has evolved over the years, it has started and been

[13:55] for the majority a game about a war between two factions that both have their reasons to hate the other part. You might have sympathized more with one or the other, but ultimately you had some pride associated towards your

[14:08] favorite faction for whatever reason and wanted that one to win. This has been dying ever since Battle for Azeroth and it's been such a long time since then that newer players that actively criticize this point of view have never

[14:21] really experienced the roots of Warcraft. And moving through the [ __ ] show of Shadowlands, nipple man orchestrating every Warcraft event was cringe level 11 out of 10. Dragonflight making the game legit Disney vibes

[14:36] didn't really help either to the point that the most amount of praise I have heard for the story vibe and tone of Dragonflight was the blue dragon aspect quest line and the Baine Bloodhoof versus Centaur

[14:49] revenge story. Side stories that focused on conflict and tragedy, which is what the Amani story versus the blood elves is. Then of was botched because too many opposing opinions worked on it. It never provided

[15:04] satisfying conclusion to both the earthen nor the nerubians, which is how it all started. On top of the fact that it was the start of the meme where is the horde? A meme that is perpetuating into Midnight still. We had

[15:17] an interesting comment on X as well from a person saying that the elf reunification should have been a story all on its own. For anyone that has been a Warcraft fan over the decades, you might understand why that might be true.

[15:32] The tension between all of the types of elves is pretty deeply seated and to presume that a few modern audience themed stories about a big baddie would be enough to erase thousands of years of culture clearly showcases people who

[15:48] have no sensitivity towards the culture of nations and how that can take a long time to adjust to the ever evolving social landscape of which wow has had none because despite the story morally shoving this in our face and making us

[16:04] feel like the bad guy, nobody has been able to actually write it in. Not to mention the discussion of whether that has even a place in a game and world like Warcraft. And when the developer that is most responsible for this

[16:20] and this and this and this is allegedly saying that they wish they didn't call the game Warcraft, it begs the question as to why are they even

[16:32] instead of choosing a different franchise or IP. Oh. I know. Cha-ching. So then when these things tend to build up over years and years about a game

[16:45] that has meant so much to so many of us, it's bound to come out eventually. Enter Midnight announced to have completely revamped the models of all of money, the zone entirely, and made their culture finally acclimate to the ever changing

[16:58] landscape of wow, how is nobody going to just think, oh, they are definitely becoming a playable race for sure. So when developers come out and say that they are not planning on making a money playable in the near future, let alone

[17:11] being a race released with the expansion in question and the patch that reworked their visuals, sound effects, story, and vibe, I'm no longer surprised that people not only voted like this, but actually come out more and more and

[17:25] say stuff like Warcraft isn't Warcraft anymore. And for those of you who are play a different game, I have a question. Does it feel nice when you come into an already established world,

[17:37] story, and IP where the work has already been done for you, and then you change it to fit your narrative because you didn't like it for how it was, and when other people want it changed because they don't like it for how it turned up,

[17:52] they should instead be the ones leaving? Hmm. But maybe these questions and polls are incomplete. It's never going to be perfect, and no matter how much we wanted a more diverse sample of answers,

[18:06] we are limited by our tools and means. If you believe differently, we would super appreciate you letting us know in the comments what your thoughts on all of this has been, and whether you think Midnight flopped the worst in another

[18:20] Meanwhile, you might be interested in a wild revelation Marceline and I had wild revelation Marceline and I had right here.