The Honest Truth of Wizard101 and Its Community.

If you want to hear more from me, I Livestream on Twitch www.twitch.tv/tntosion Friday Nights American Timezone ^ Will try to stream something else if my wiz viewers allow me to. It's either WE CHANGE. OR THEY WILL NEVER CHANGE. 🚩

When kingsisle shuts wizard101 down there will undoubtedly be a wizard101 server relaunched and it will have classic wizard101. Maybe then will we be able to enjoy pvp again.

This video is totally accurate, we are all stuck in a loop, feeding our hard earned money to a greedy company who could give a shit about their community. This game will never feel the way it used to :(

You popped off. I have played on and off since 2010. I would have never expected KI to become this predatory when it comes to the Crown Shop/Pets or make gear so hard to grind that it's not reasonable for casual players to acquire anymore. If I only have time to run the Nightmare dungeon 3 times a week, that's over 2 months just to add 3 damage and 2 pierce to my character's stats. The only reason KI is still alive is because early players are now grown up and have jobs to afford to spend crowns.

Every now and then I think about returning to play, but then you can't even play without a membership and once you pay that premium, you eventually get stuck at a point where you can no longer progress through the game solo. This is my biggest annoyance. I always hate it when games require people to play with others to do certain aspects of the game, or in this case make battles so incredibly hard for anyone other than maxed out characters.

I miss having the level cap be 50. That was the most fun I ever had playing the game. Every school was actually different, milestones really meant something, and there wasn’t so much randomness

For me, I just want to play the main story and enjoy it for what it is and the in game history around it. I'm not a fan of gear grinding and I feel like that has become mandatory for the main quest.

I just reinstalled Wizard101 for the 6th time since starting the game in 2008. I was 7 years old when I started. I am now 22 years old. It's the nostalgic part of the game that keeps bringing me back. This game was my childhood. The game hasn't been the same since level 60 was the max. That's when things began to spiral downhill and be too much.

I sometimes want to go back and play wizard101, it's not as fun as it used to be. I was there when we had those school parties; 4v4 pvp was my favorite thing to do in wiz, right now it's non-existent. Every time I log back in wiz all I do is just garden and if we have free membership I just log in to lvl up. I don't see the point in buying a membership when I know I won't be playing constantly. The game go very complicated out of nowhere and it's huge energy trying to figure it out.

I think ppl need to understand what whaling actually is. whaling isn’t buying a few packs or mounts or cosmetics. That’s natural in every video game. But basically farming the crown shop is an issue. I’m guilty of it myself as I wanted spellements that wiz makes it NEAR IMPOSSIBLE to get in game. Most ppl aren’t even aware that they’re whaling. They feel desperate, they just want that mount or piece of gear or spell. Ofc at the end of the day it’s because the game makes them happy and this would add to their experience in their eyes. The issue lies with the fact that KI has made it impossible to NOT whale in this game. You want a good aoe that appears more than once in your deck as a life or death wiz under lvl50? Too bad! Gotta pay for those spellements or just have the most exhausting, tooth pulling, brain numbing time questing! I don’t think wiz is actually in too much danger of shutting down, and I also don’t think it’s solely the whales keeping it alive. Anyone with a membership is lining their pockets monthly to keep the ship afloat.. and well… you literally can’t play without the membership. I think to fix the overall experience of wiz, people just have to try their hardest NOT to blow too much cash in the crown shop. That way it sees less revenue and wiz feels (hopefully) compelled to make some “crown only” things viable after maybe some tedious grinding. Saw someone say “it won’t shut down due to lack of real competition” and they’re completely right. It’s got a fun story, charming art style, entertaining dialogue & soundtrack. Something would have to come along with all of those things AND the accessibility (since you could run w101 on a toaster basically), to make people abandon the game. Great video! I’ve seen lots of people commenting on the state of “pay to play” that wiz has fallen in to. I love the game, it’s fun for me to play after work with my boyfriend to just relax and have fun together.. but this has spiraled out of control and is def an issue that needs to be solved SOON.

Wizard101 doesn't trend. It's extremely niche too, to the point where ppl who actively support it are in their own vacuum, there own echo chamber. For all their corners cut, that won't stop ppl from buying/playing it and therein lies the problem. KingsIsle knows that if they just weather the storm, they'll come out just fine. The truth of the matter is that, so long as Wizard101 continues to make money hand over fist, they have no reason to change. They don't have to add development time because they have an army of seething, coping simps who will just shout down, harass and threaten and/all critical voices and they'll still make thousands anyway. At that point, adding development time would slow down profits and KingsIsle want their money now and they know that they don't have to produce quality work to get it.

I think Gamigo getting their grubby hands on it was my red line for this game. Especially after watching Josh Strife’s video on Gamigo and learning about their practices of buying up games, milking them, and then shutting them down or putting them on life support when they can no longer turn a profit from them. I went back to playing Wiz not too long ago and quit after finishing Azteca on my death. (Emily Nightshade) .

the community is feels VERY divided when it comes to preferred game difficulty. There's players who enjoy the more challenging aspects of the game (PVP, raids, challenge mode, etc.), while others much prefer your typical "blade, blade, AOE" style of gameplay. When the developers create difficult content casual players become frustrated that the game is becoming too hard & the rewards are too exclusive. When the developers release much more familiar & easy content then hardcore players get upset and call it "stale" and "too easy". Though both kinds of players can come together to admit that drop rates either way are ATROCIOUSLY low most of the time. If your gonna make long & difficult content.. make it worth the effort. 😔 Its obviously a tactic MMO games use to encourage longer play sessions & to purchase micro transactions.

I think, for me, a massive thing over the years is that it has felt like Wizard101 has not been the same family-friendly game it once used to be when it first came out. I genuinely miss the early days when there were so many kinder people; now, all I see anymore is an excessive amount of racism and toxicity. Some quests, as an example, have “shut up” in their dialogue and Wizard101 filters it in their chat filter. It may not be a big issue to some, but me personally, has bothered me seeing in multiple quest dialogues. I remember when a $10 membership or 5,000 Crowns was something so many of us wanted so badly to quest and progress through the game. New mounts were introduced and sold as a single product and not as a “bundle” with an outrageous price tag and other unwanted items. Today, and I agree entirely, it feels like a casino and not nearly as close to a kid's game as it has been marketed since the beginning. Many of these newer updates feel too difficult or confusing to do, and KingsIsle wanting us to do it a number of times to get a badge feels like a chore. I don't have that kind of time like I used to. I just hope many things change.

JamesTheAce made a really good video criticisng the game and the developers for not keeping the game fresh and basically devolving it. I think there is a way to fix the community problem with the community being stale and weird sometimes. All they have to do is extended the f2p part of the game from level 8 to at least level 40. In other words, make Arc 1 free. 90% of the people that play the game quit after the first hour because they hit a paywall and miss out on 99.9% of the game. By making Arc 1 free, you will keep a lot of the players, they will learn a lot more about the game and if they fall in love with it they will pay for membership and continue playing. It's not 2012 anymore where a lot of people stay in for the community and then keep playing and coming back because of nostalgia. The community is much older these days and it's difficult to be a new player these days. I know this because I met a few new players and they have told me this exact stuff. You mentioned the Hall of heroes fight. Ratbeard said that speeding up combat will make the game hollow, as if it isn't hollow right now. One of the biggest problems in my opinion is that schools completely lost the identity in both pvp and pve. Who cares about your HP or shields when most of the things can be killed in a few turns so why would you shield when you can blade and hit or support the hitter with blades and feints? Bosses have huge pierce anyways and with shields you're just wasting your time. And also the developers deserve every piece of criticism they get. The fact a greedy company and greedy devs got lucky and created an actual fun and original and an addictive game is the reason why the updates are so bad and the game is so overmonetized. And I do agree with you that whales are a part of the problem. I've seen people spend hundreds upon hundreds of bucks to get a stitch robe speaks enough of itself.

Hey, I like using Ice Krokomummy, too! Also, agreed on how interesting the Aeon boss is, the Rhoshambo Ramp is pretty fun when you achieve it. Though, I agree to have a video to watch on the side while doing it heheh

Even the expand backpack and friend space elixir, such a toxic way to make money when they make it so easy to get 80 items in your backpack

If KI wants to add a new gamemode, it REALLY needs a well made tutorial. Even the base game gives you a tutorial that teaches basic skills. Beastmoon just sort of spews tutorial vomit and throws players in to figure out the game better. I havent been able to do any raids cause I'm not in a guild, so I dont even know the rules of a raid either. I tried an advanced fight, and wasn't even told how it works and was destroyed until I found out it has PvP rules. PvP in PvE is annoying because; the difference of PvP banned cards in PvP is to (Supposedly) give players an even playing field in a duel. But with Advanced combat rules, you're already nerfed with enemies that already have an unfair advantage over a player. That's not a test of player skill, it's an annoying grind that forces a player to learn a niche way to play to exploit a boss. And to this day, there's STILL no basic tutorial on the accuracy stat, so new players get confused when spells fizzle. If basic, well made tutorials were made for the more niche gamemodes, more people might be more inclined to play them and be less toxic, maybe? Wizard101 does make you feel like an actual wizard though... In the sense you spend countless hours doing mindless tasks to get better, but if you got the gold, you can enhance your skills even faster!

TNT back at it!

While do agree that the people who keep buying into KI's dirty monetisation tactics (myself included) are to blame, It's impossible to look past the disgusting predatory schemes this company implements for the sake of profiting off a game they insist on advertising as a kid's game. Look at spellements for example, they're just a way to profit off of every single spell because the revenue from lore spells wasn't cutting it anymore. What is sad is that spellements could be interesting if not for the terrible implementation and the upgrade paths actually being based on school identity and not buff trades. I also think the game suffers from an incredibly ridiculous level cap. Constantly pushing it forward isn't the way to go, because questing is nothing but clicking two cards, as you've said, and then talking to npcs. In all honesty, you are right though. It's more than time for the game to close and KI to go bankrupt. We all need to pay for our sins. The players for their addiction to this stupid game and the devs for the abusive monetisation tactics.