Your babble here indicates that those players had nothing else to do, and that raiding was the only end game content to play with. You indicate that it was not economically smart for them to "exclude" millions of players, yet you cant explain why players continued to shell money at blizzard into the hundreds of millions as subscriptions continued to rise.
I have a hard time coming up with a justifiable reason to deny large portions of a game from the people that have purchased it. That's reason enough for me.
I don't have an issue with giving minor perks to the people who display higher skill, commitment and/or time investment, but I am talking about small things like single bosses or unique titles or higher quality gear. Other players will eventually be able to get even those things, but not until after the best have had their special period of exclusivity.
There is no return on investment. Stop talking like its the stock market or something. Its a matter of do I get sub revenue or not. When someone pays their subscription, it does not matter where that money goes into the game in terms of development.
I argue it was blizzards shift in philosophy that screwed them on the subscription front. They decided to cater to a completely different demographic than what it was originally aimed at, and because of that, it shifted the player expectations and philosophy of how the game should continue on course.
Now, lets just see if this flex raiding will patch some of the bleeding, or if it will just continue to add to the flames already present.
Look at Firelands, Abyssal Maw's cancellation, Well of Eternity's redesign into a 5-man, and Dragon Soul. That's what a restrained raid design budget can do to raiding while Blizz shifts their development funds toward their majority audience and the next expansion's development.
Be seeing you guys on Bloodsail Buccaneers NA!
Well, thanks for that Jay. Pre-LFR raiding as a percentage of the player base doesn't explain the subscriber losses in any way at all. There simply have never been enough normal/heroic raiders in the game to explain 4,000,000 people leaving. So whatever reasons you want to think about for declines raiding is only a piece of the answer and not a very large piece at that. The argument that raiding is the primary driver of subscription numbers is clearly false and I wish people would come to their senses and realize that the game simply does NOT revolve around their favorite thing. It's a package and stands or falls on its merits as a package.
Sorry to get into the business of the game being old but it probably does apply here. 2008-2009 isn't the same as 2013. The sort of growth seen in the early years was never ever going to continue and considerably flattened out during Wrath. Normally what happens after a growth curve flattens out? It goes down. Cataclysm as an expansion had an effect that's still lingering as people still can't seem to get past it in one way or another. I haven't worked it out but Cataclysm feels to me like some sort of dividing line between WoW then and WoW now. Why that is is probably a good thing to think about for companies that experience rapid growth and then need to deal with the future afterwards.
What goes up will come down. The notion that the game would forever continue to grow and never ever shrink isn't even close to common sense.
EDIT: Just be sure I brush up against the topic there's nothing at all wrong with content layers that are more or less exclusive. There's nothing particularly wrong with even charging for that as some games do. WoW as well for that matter since you have to buy the expansion to play in it when new. That's a perfect example of content exclusivity that people rarely talk about.
What's wrong and what is a serious issue with a lot of people is the attitude that is frequently seen that players think they somehow own that content and have a right to say who gets to play in it or not. They don't. Blizzard does. It's their call, right or wrong.
Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2013-06-07 at 10:40 PM.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
Because then the people who want to keep looking super fly and fresh have to bust their butts and get the new mounts/cosmetic rewards blizzard releases with each new patch, instead of relying on old stuff they did to convince other people they're "cool."
What you do speaks more than what you've done.
Because people were trapped in a nebulous space of running heroic dungeon pugs and grinding up reps for the sake of doing them. Blizzard has tried those things recently, and subscriber numbers have shown that people don't like those things any more.
2) Raiding with only 1 mode of difficulty, and 1 form of raid. Yes im looking at you TBC. Why is it a bad thing to have this content aimed towards players who are on a higher echelon of playing or commitment? Even though only "1%" (insert any other low percentage from thin air here) of the player base raided, the game substantially grew in subscriptions. What was keeping people subscribing, when they "never got to see end game"?
I answered this question. It's just impossible to return to that now.Last point:
The game is here for you (us) the players to have fun. Now if all you consider fun is "raiding" in whatever difficulty you "raid" in, then perhaps the game would lose your subscription. This is not however the case with World of Warcraft at all. In fact, even though more characters (not players) have seen "end game" content, it is still a minuscule number of people "raiding" compared to the population of WoW. I guess though since blizzard has trained players to think that all end game consists of is raiding, the problem lies in their own court. The real question you have to ask yourself.. what did end game consist of for all those players in Vanilla, TBC, and early WoTLK if only "1%" of them raided?
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
Threads like this are pointless. You can't change the mentality of the community.
It's like if they didn't make a raid in 5.4, we would get all this other fantastic content. Like... more dailies? Or ... more pet battles? Yeah, that would keep us entertained for months!
... whelp, I liked Firelands and Dragon Soul, and I really liked Well of Eternity as a 5-man... can't say I cared about Abyssal Maw because I hated the underwater zones as a whole.
So... yeah. I didn't do any raiding in Mists of Pandaria, but I loved having stuff to do at level 90. I only stopped playing because I ran out of time IRL.
Nothing ever bothers Juular.
They want to spend the budget on things most players get to see.
In ask you, why should they spend most of the budget raids, just to cater towards the 10%? When they could just be spending the budget on tthe non-raiding aspects of the game?
It really makes no logical sense to spend a lot of time/budget on something only a minority of your customers only do. Its better to spend that budget to keep the other 90% happy.
---------- Post added 2013-06-08 at 12:34 AM ----------
Which is why they went with LFR. That way they can justify spending so much of the budget on raid encounters.
No... But you're entitled to play the game through. And you wíll play it through, unless you grow tired of it before that point.
An MMO is different. (PvE) Content at end-game demands not only that you play the game through (by levelling), but also that you invest time to get the gear. This is NOT a skill-based game; it is a GEAR-based game. And the reason it is gear-based is simple: It's an MMO; people need to keep playing it, and the only reason people keep playing is if people continue to feel (and require to attain) progression. Time invested, then, is a secondary 'cost' that you are expected to 'pay.' You're not playing the game; you're paying for the chance to get to end-game.
Truth of the matter is: It's a game. It exists for entertainment purposes. And that means that time invested should be rewarded by fun. The fun of playing the game should be the reward of spending the time playing it. However, what YOU suggest is that the sense of achievement of getting epics after grinding for a hellishly long time is the pinnacle of the game. To achieve, rather than to enjoy. The two are NOT the same, however.
People who do not have the time to invest in this game to get to the highest tier of play should still see all content. Content should be readily available on the lower tiers in order to appease those customers who play casually, purely for fun. Overachievers are already awarded with hard-modes and challenge modes, as well as title- and petgrinds; they have all the opportunity to gain satisfaction from achievement.
Lower tier end-game should, then, be aimed at lower-tier itemization. So that people who have less time to invest can run 'easier' content that is tuned for lower item levels. Now; the challenge modes actually do have something to offer, especially for the casual gamers. Challenge modes themselves might be too demanding for the non-achiever, and that's fine, but the way difficulty and item-level are handled within the systematic confines of the challenge mode dungeon might set a great precedent for 'casual' raids: Raids where item-level contribution is simply capped. That means that casuals can have challenging content, difficult content, even, while achievers can't simply walz in there and trivialize any difficulty through higher item level values.
Basically: Your argument is that people should be content with the stuff they get to do because of their available time, rather than their choices within the game. You wish to artificially limit people's ability to play the game just so that you, personally, can enjoy showing off your achievement. Your argument is based on an egotistical desire for recognition rather than anything resembling game theory.
The best thing you can do is ask yourself: Why do I begrudge other people having fun and exploring this game I enjoy?
Quick thought experiment. You're a bean counter in charge of the guys running the world's most successful online game. You're looking at where your company's money is going compared to what people are doing. You see a massively disproportionate amount of money going into raiding when it sees barely five percent of the audience using it. Do you a) continue to greenlight the devs shoveling your money into a furnace, or b) tell them to redistribute the money elsewhere where it will get more mileage? That's what the raid design team was contending with in Cataclysm.
Their philosophy has always been to produce the most accessible MMO on the market, and they did that in Vanilla and BC--just compare their competition at the time. When Wrath was in development, however, the gaming industry as a whole took a massive turn toward the casual gaming market with Nintendo leading the charge and making money hand over fist for it. Now, we're looking at this from a design and development viewpoint, which means you're that beancounter looking at where your money's going now, versus that massive casual audience you've been putting in the corner, and how Nintendo is basically just fuckin' printing money by focusing on them.I argue it was blizzards shift in philosophy that screwed them on the subscription front. They decided to cater to a completely different demographic than what it was originally aimed at, and because of that, it shifted the player expectations and philosophy of how the game should continue on course.
I like the idea, myself, and think it'll be a good middle ground between Normal and LFR for social and friends/family guilds, and for guilds that want to gear up new 90s (like if Dude McRaidster rerolled a healer and brought his buddy Jeffery Raidhopeful, a pretty solid tank from another server, in for a test run).Now, lets just see if this flex raiding will patch some of the bleeding, or if it will just continue to add to the flames already present.
Be seeing you guys on Bloodsail Buccaneers NA!
Read the rest of my post and you find your answers there. Selective quoting is what trolls do. Or are you one?
The math how raid ROI works and how Blizzard prioritizes stuff works somewhat like this:
All these numbers are fictional and here just to illustrate a point
Blizzard adds a feature 1 million players use 20 times each, let's say heroic instance which costs 100 designers' salary for one month, they also add a feature 200k players use 30 times each, let's say raid tier which costs 100 designers' salary for two months.
The raid will have cost Blizzard approximately 7 times more per use to do than the heroic instance. Which means raiders are 7 times more expensive to keep happy than non-raiders. Which in turn means Blizzard can afford to lose 7 raiders for each non-raider.
Last edited by vesseblah; 2013-06-07 at 10:41 PM.
Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.
Because at the time, there was plenty of stuff for the rest to do. There was still the whole progression through leveling, dungeons, 20mans, and the older 40mans. Those things still existed for people to do and progress through. Adding new stuff for people who finished all of that didn't take anything away from people who hadn't finished what was available to them. I never got to see Naxx40 (even though I personally was geared/attuned for it), but my guild was fine progressing on the content we were working on. There was something to do at every level of progression.
This changed in WotLK, when they added the accelerated catch-up systems. Adding a new tier diminished progression on older stuff as it became obsolete. The only progression that happened was at the newest tier. Anyone not doing the newest tier was just grinding badges to catch up.
And that's the key difference in philosophies. Before, new tiers were for people who finished everything so they'd have something new to do. Now, new tiers are for everyone regardless if they finished what was out before. If they hadn't finished, they'd get boosted to the new stuff.
Last edited by Aquamonkey; 2013-06-07 at 10:43 PM.