Why don't they return to the roots of the game in difficulty?

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

Why? You'd rather a mindless zerg than trying to actually play?
Here lies the problem with the game.

What is so bad with having multiple choices in how you can play? If you want to "try to actually play" then you can do that. If you want "mindless zerg" you can do that. What you want is to removed one thing and add nothing.

[Deleted]

No they made a horrible expansion and didnt scale the difficulty even remotely well.

Dont ever use Cata as a justification for any argument, its better if we all just forget that expansion existed.

But... we can never forget the horrors that took place.

Remember our fallen brothers, the players that will never return because of it...

[Deficineiron]

Because they would likely lose even more subscribers. The game has grown because of how accessible it is, taking that away wouldn't help.

actually the game quit growing around the various tuning issues referred to in this thread started happening. causality/correlation is an issue of course, but saying the game grew once they started releasing easily puggable content isn't accurate.

[M1r4g3]

What is so bad with having multiple choices in how you can play? If you want to "try to actually play" then you can do that. If you want "mindless zerg" you can do that. What you want is to removed one thing and add nothing.

because its not one living world then but a bunch of parallel universes.

[taylor20k]

raiding difficulty in wow : went from almost zero ( MC ) up trough BWL and AQ, then a big UP fro SSC and TK, and since then it's been downhill and downhill. It ended up in wotlk with karazhan as a total joke of a entry lvl raid.

Sure, mechanics got harder again, and if you do hardmodes the later bosses in the instances are actually quite tricky. But on average ( considering lfr, flex raid and normal modes being piss easy ) raiding difficulty has been going down and down since the release of Black temple.

wotlk + karazhan = huh??? karazhan was the entry raid for BC. maybe for you. not everyone is as badass as you. get off your high horse and go do heroics. just because the content is there doesn't mean isn't intended for everyone.

[Grocalis]

You say that, but making the game easier doesn't seem to be working. You say who would they gain? How about the people now playing classic/BC servers because they dislike what Blizzard has done to the game. It would bring back the people that left once the game became a big facerolling gimmick.

That assumes...

A) That people playing on private servers value in the millions. (They don't)
B) That said people would be willing to quit the free bootlegged game they are playing to go back to the subscription main game. (They won't)
C) That the reason they left in the first place had anything to do with difficulty. (It usually does not).

As for making the game easier is "not working", depends what you consider to be working. If Blizzard made the game hard tomorrow and lost 2 million players instead of 1 million, would you call that a success? Blizzard is never going to reach the point it did during WOTLK, it's too old now. The only process they can run with now is to reduce the bleeding as much as possible, and doing that is catering to the majority of the player base, which are not in any form "hardcore".

[Deficineiron]

That really isn't the point though. The point is that there should be, in theory, something that a player considers worth doing, and isn't immediately within reach.

Whether Blizzard doesn't currently have *that* formula down (but arguably did at one point), or there's simply a lot of players that probably shouldn't be playing an MMO to begin with (equally likely), removing all challenging content is probably the worst solution that could be arrived at.

I think in general terms this is a major issue with wow which has grown more and more over the last 5 years. Specifically excluding heroic raid content, virtually every single pve aspect of the game has been reduced to silly difficulty.

By this I include voluntary or self-directed player goals, such as frostsaber mount rep (and other reputations, such as timbermaw), 5-man content which remained challenging at appropriate gear levels and also took enough coordination and effort to complete that it would structure an entire night to complete an instance for most players, extended in-game player goals such as the dungeon set 1 questline (as well as other max-level extended quest chains, scholo for example), the quest to get exalted with various cities to access other mounts, and any number of other goals players DID use to structure their time.

basically, if I grasp current game together, the catch-all rejoinder which seems to be the only thing really beyond most players who want to try is heroic raiding, and even then there is a visceral difference on beating the big baddie on normal/nightmare and then trying on hell, versus having only one difficulty and one way to kill it, and making it something that takes work.

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wotlk + karazhan = huh??? karazhan was the entry raid for BC. maybe for you. not everyone is as badass as you. get off your high horse and go do heroics. just because the content is there doesn't mean isn't intended for everyone.

why not chill, he obviously means naxxramas lvl 80.

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That assumes...

B) That said people would be willing to quit the free bootlegged game they are playing to go back to the subscription main game. (They won't)
C) That the reason they left in the first place had anything to do with difficulty. (It usually does not).

folks playing on a 1.12 server or 2.4.3 server aren't playing there cuz its free, but because of the game version. I expect most if not all would pay to play on a blizzard server with proper instance and ability scripting quite happily.

[KungFuFanta]

WoW has never been difficult, just time consuming. Pre-BC it was time consuming because it took forever to get an upgrade, and you could only down "harder" bosses if you had the gear. BC was time because of the same reason. WOTLK was less time consuming, thus appeared "easier", but Algalon only appeared harder because of the same reason as BC and pre-BC, people just didn't realize it. Once you had the gear and learned the strat Algalon just required lots of focus, but it wasn't any harder than Yogg or Mimiron.

[Deficineiron]

To be fair, those long attunements usually weeded out many bad players

revered keys for heroics in bc were a wonderful mechanism for making sure anyone in a heroic at least had been able to presumably complete numerous level 70 normal instances (or had run an awful lot more failed runs per faction).

[Jakkhel]

revered keys for heroics in bc were a wonderful mechanism for making sure anyone in a heroic at least had been able to presumably complete numerous level 70 normal instances (or had run an awful lot more failed runs per faction).

I remember a lot of people in heroics being dumb as a brick, though. That's why I had a white, gray, and blacklist. I don't have one now because it doesn't matter, as I either queue with guildies or hop into a queue and get random people I'll never see again.

[tangers58]

They tried that in Cata. It was not appreciated by most.

Dude if you thought Cata was difficult you may want to go back to Hello Kitty Island Adventure

[Guyviroth]

Dude if you thought Cata was difficult you may want to go back to Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Or perhaps you should do a bit of research before opening your mouth...

True enough, Cataclysm's heroics were difficult and I expect were the "first attempt" at bringing back difficulty in a game where gameplay out-paced the AI of mobs and such. A shame it only lasted for two weeks, but it was a huge difficulty slope from Wrath's heroics.

That said, I strongly believe that the Timeless Isle, rare mobs, proving grounds, etc are all parts of the game where they are trying to ease the difficulty back into the game. And I welcome it.

[jbombard]

Dude if you thought Cata was difficult you may want to go back to Hello Kitty Island Adventure

If you don't think there are A LOT of bad players in the game, you are playing a different game.
Guild runs where you can guarantee the people you go with weren't idiots were always fun. The problem with group content and randomly thrown together groups is that the content may not be hard for you, but is certainly appears hard for the tank/dps/healer you go thrown in there with drooling on their keyboards. If you only got 1 bad player in your group you were lucky, but even with only 1 it was almost guaranteed to turn into a bunch of people screaming at each other at some point in the run.

[Findus707]

They tried that in Cata. It was not appreciated by most.

Haha, where was the difficulity in Cata? It was even easier then Wrath :P
And taking the Difficulty back up now would just make raiders QQ more as they already do, even about Flex raiding :P

[Dormie]

That assumes...

A) That people playing on private servers value in the millions. (They don't)
B) That said people would be willing to quit the free bootlegged game they are playing to go back to the subscription main game. (They won't)
C) That the reason they left in the first place had anything to do with difficulty. (It usually does not).

As for making the game easier is "not working", depends what you consider to be working. If Blizzard made the game hard tomorrow and lost 2 million players instead of 1 million, would you call that a success? Blizzard is never going to reach the point it did during WOTLK, it's too old now. The only process they can run with now is to reduce the bleeding as much as possible, and doing that is catering to the majority of the player base, which are not in any form "hardcore".

First of all, A, private servers were just an example of the type of players that have been lost.. B, go ask them, a lot of them play BC because it has what current WoW doesn't. C, again, go ask them. Because your wrong.. your argument is basically ignorance.

Your only argument is that more people haven't left, when you don't know if your right or wrong.

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Or perhaps you should do a bit of research before opening your mouth...

True enough, Cataclysm's heroics were difficult and I expect were the "first attempt" at bringing back difficulty in a game where gameplay out-paced the AI of mobs and such. A shame it only lasted for two weeks, but it was a huge difficulty slope from Wrath's heroics.

That said, I strongly believe that the Timeless Isle, rare mobs, proving grounds, etc are all parts of the game where they are trying to ease the difficulty back into the game. And I welcome it.

Hah, difficulty like recieving 20 epics in 60 minutes. Ok then..

[lawow74]

It proved that random queue systems do not work well when players looking for carries force themselves upon others and drag groups down and players who cannot handle the random factor of the random queue system refuse to take responsibility and form their own groups. By leaving Challenge modes and heroic scenarios out of the random queue system these features have been doing well.

No, it proved placing organization-required mechanics into random-queue modes was no longer wanted by the majority of the playerbase. They've since learned to split that off into an organized-queue system, and that is why HC scenarios and CM's do well. Just like 5-mans, normal scenarios and LFR do well, being tuned for disorganized groups.

It also proves how whiny elitist jackwagons are when they are no longer catered to as they once were and how they continue to try and delude themselves into believing playing a video game a certain way makes them better than the other people who also play it.

[Mosotti]

Because most people don't want it "that hard". Most of those that thought they want it hard were bitching like crazy in Cata. "Back then when the game was sooooo hard and awesome" when people hit the wall they were like "oh, man, that's my level, I'm never going to raid anything, let's farm some shit, maybe I can buy a mount in 3 months". That was because WoW was like the only online game it was worth playing. Now they will say "fuck this piece of shit game, I can do better things" and they will go an play one of the other 13 million online games, most of them free too.

[Deleted]

They tried going harder with the start of Cataclysm, and lost a lot of people trying it out.

They lost pople after LFR and nerf hammer. MOP shows it pretty much even more how casual form of MMROPG is nothing then harm for the game.

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Because most people don't want it "that hard". Most of those that thought they want it hard were bitching like crazy in Cata. "Back then when the game was sooooo hard and awesome" when people hit the wall they were like "oh, man, that's my level, I'm never going to raid anything, let's farm some shit, maybe I can buy a mount in 3 months". That was because WoW was like the only online game it was worth playing. Now they will say "fuck this piece of shit game, I can do better things" and they will go an play one of the other 13 million online games, most of them free too.

So why WoW lossing subs since wow becom more and mroe casual? Sorry but WoW alredy lost 5 mil subs. And after this fail 5.4 patch where blzz pretty much killed compettive PvP, destroyed several specs (forst mages, ferals druids) i only hope that thius game will drop even more subs so blizzard can finaly realize taht they fucked their most amazing game what they ever had. I pretty much quited after summer becous game isnt challenging anymore (and yes i finish every hc content what this game could offer since TBC) and is made for casual and like Kungen said ,,wow becom games for litle kids,,.

[Deleted]

Hmm i kind of agree i mean, i stopped playing a couple of weeks ago but i still tend to read some news when i got some time. I see the top guilds beeing 11/14 HC already, it was released this wednesday right ? HC content ( for EU wednesday , tuesday for US ) But still 3-4 days for 11 HC bosses? Seems abit under tuned tbh.

[CTwin]

Hah, difficulty like recieving 20 epics in 60 minutes. Ok then..

Except they aren't epic at all.

They have almost no gem slots. Thus a "timeless" geared 496i person is actually junk to someone who was accomplished in T14.

They might be purple, but the end result is blue.