And that is a global trend in game that Blizzard had to follow. Why they suddenly didn't in Cata is beyond my understanding.
Maybe, but you can't prove it. What we do know however, is that a lot of players who never saw a raid previously could experience it. Too bad the raid in question was DS
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Why is that?
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Quite probably, yes. Add to that the guild collapses caused by 10/25 lockout changes, and we got a grim picture -_-
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
I swear we're going to need a class teaching WoW history. "And this Joe is called the great collapse of realm community".
Hey everyone
Sounds like cherry picking to me. And Blizzard has been smart, or rather they've been doing the right thing unknowingly. I don't know what happened in their office and what interpretation of data they're listening to but they fucked up. A fuck up will happen eventually, a bad design call will be made eventually, but that's what we're here to discuss.
-lack of advertisement
-lack of graphic updates
-lack of immersion
etc etc
You're obviously guilty of these by lashing out at hardcore players who wanted content to mean something again. So feed your bullshit to someone else, Nostradamus.
Would you then agree that making challenging PvE content in Cata was an "extreme" decision? If so then I'd argue LFR was an "extreme" decision. In a game of WoW's nature I'd consider both of these things as "extreme cases."While design choices can obviously impact subscriber retention, in all but the most extreme cases it's a much slower and more distant impact than grandstanding forum dipshits seem to imagine. Furthermore, while it's certainly possible to chase your customers away if you piss on them hard enough, it's much more difficult to make design decisions that magically keep people from just plain getting bored and quitting after playing the same game for years and years and years.
It's even more difficult and less realistic to expect any particular design decision to attract lots of brand new players to an old game that they've already been ignoring for years. If they couldn't be won over back when WoW was on South Park and the hype was at its peak, they're sure as hell not going to be won over just because you nerfed raids, or buffed raids, or whatever. They've never played the game and that shit means very little to them.
I'm sure you're one of those who feels sub losses at the start of Cata were mostly attributed to hard PvE content but the continual spiral (actually, the more severe spiral) just after the switch is attributed to "age" and the "natural life cycle."
It really just sounds like you won't accept being wrong unless you've changed your outlook since your flaming posts against the hardcore community.
Fine. At your insistence, I will now instead compare WoW to every MMO to ever exist. Ahem.
All the hardcores crying that WoW is losing subscribers because it's too easy are fucking idiots. As you can see by comparing it to every other game, WoW didn't begin to decline until long after the industry average age. Clearly the game's continuing casualization has been a massive success that has brought the game terrific longevity and financial reward. Thank you, HeedmySpeed, for pointing this out to everyone.
Happy? No?
I've compared WoW to the large market-dominating games most similar to itself. If you can think of some different games from the past that one can draw actual useful comparisons to WoW from, then go ahead and name them and tell me why. Quirky little indies and big underperforming games that crashed and burned in a year or two probably need not apply though, unless you've got some really brilliant reasoning on what they can say about World of Warcraft.
You won't though. You've been long on attitude and real fucking short on having anything meaningful to say.
You'll see me ripping to pieces all the dipshits who think their stupid-ass little raiding hobby and the tiny minority of players who seriously pursue it are somehow the core of the game, on which Blizzard's fortunes must inevitably rise or fall. There's a fucking lot of those on this forum, and boy are they sad about not being as important as they thought they were, and god are their tears sweet.You're obviously guilty of these by lashing out at hardcore players who wanted content to mean something again. So feed your bullshit to someone else, Nostradamus.
What you won't see is me trying to pin subscriber losses on my own pet design issues. The most you'll get from me is a thought that the harder heroics at the start of Cata were probably having a negative effect on retention, given the way Blizzard aggressively reversed themselves on the issue.
Even then, however, it was probably a relatively minor effect that you'd be hard-pressed to nail down without lots of precise internal numbers that we don't have. A decrease of 10% in the length of the average subscription, for example, would be more than enough to spur Blizzard to immediate action, but probably not enough to make a real dent in the quarterly sub reports unless the issue went unaddressed for a couple years. The idea that 3 million people all quit overnight because they were wiping in heroics too much is nonsense. The game had begun to plateau during Wrath and was always going to start losing subscribers around the start of Cata no matter what.
Neither of these is an extreme case by genre standards. The Star Wars Galaxies NGE was an incredibly extreme case that killed a game. The addition of Trammel to Ultima Online was an extreme case that worked out for the better. The stuff Blizzard does is mostly just evolutionary. Dungeons are hard, then easy, then hard again, then easy again as they fiddle with the knobs to min-max that subscriber retention percentage. Here's some raids, here's some really hard raids, here's some really easy raids, blah blah blah. Nothing drastic, nothing revolutionary.Would you then agree that making challenging PvE content in Cata was an "extreme" decision? If so then I'd argue LFR was an "extreme" decision. In a game of WoW's nature I'd consider both of these things as "extreme cases."
Last edited by Grimble; 2013-09-29 at 06:03 PM.
I quit during Cata, but before hitting cap. Were they really that hard? I mean I'm sure they were compared to late-Wrath faceroll heroics, which I fucking loved, but in early Wrath my little guild groups of new 80s in blues and greens were still marking targets and CC'ing and all of that. It wasn't THAT easy until everyone outgeared them by leaps and bounds.
I agree, and anyone who says its YOUR FAULT is totally way off. When the content isint relevant gear wise, less people do it. Guilds dont do it, they move on - They chase the perpetual loot rabbit, not to see the content. Without being required to do it they wont. I'm in the same boat as you, i came back in late WOTLK after the same thing in BC ( although i did do T5) and i never really saw naxx/ulduar.
Then, people will say but they need uber loots from 5 mans to make catching up easier, for ALTS yes, but for new players - no.
Also bred a new type of "bad" player wih their welfare epics cant even do 35000 dps.
For some added fun to my post, just did a Hscen where the paladin had full raid finder gear and a 528 weapon, gemmed to max stamina with no reforge/enchants and did 28000 dps.
Last edited by Daffan; 2013-09-29 at 08:26 PM.
There we go again.
Casual can perfectly be a HC raiding player. In fact, I know many casual players who raid in top guilds. They simply log for the raid + some daily quests or w/e.
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
You're right except for 2 things.
1. My name is spelt "God" not "Loucious-sama".
2. I'm not a man, because man is inherently flawed. I am in fact a being so far beyond your comprehension that archaic constraints like flesh, blood, time and consequently, gender, have no meaning to me.
An old quote springs to mind that sums up Casuals vs Raiders perfectly.
"I don't know the key to success but the key to failure is trying to please everyone."
Basically, casuals are responsible for the vast majority of Blizzards income from WoW, they cannot simply ignore Casuals and at the same time they cannot simply ignore Hardcore raiders either (even if they do account for maybe 1-2% of the entire player base) but all of this comes with a price - Hardcore raiders feel self entitled and believe Blizzard owes them something for nothing as far as constant streams of content goes just because they can do content the average joe cannot. A lot (not all) of casuals think the same about welfare epics, again believe they are owed something for nothing which is why a lot of people are happy by being spoon fed epics.
Blizzard can't keep everyone happy and constantly trying to do so is only going to damage the game in the long run, look at the numbers as a perfect example
During TBC: WoW player base was increasing but people were all running around in blues and generally envied guilds that could do harder content (SSC+ most guilds could barely manage Magtheridon and Gruul let alone SSC/TK+ until the end of expansion nerf patch came)
During WOTLK: WoW was at its absolute peak, the numbers were at such a stable insane level due to the easiness of the expansion and what it offered people who couldn't raid hardcore.
During Cataclysm: Seen a drastic drop in subs (the main excuse seems to have been "Bored of expansion!") when in actual fact the reality is it was more than likely a case of "No more welfare epics" or very few so game is boring.
During Pandaria: Again numbers are still falling (even if its slowly they're still going down) - LFR had some what an attraction to the casual base but I feel its still not enough to keep that sector of players happy, being able to buy epics for Justice (yes I said justice) points and get them from other sources rather than relying on coin rolls from LFR seemed a lot more popular among the casual player base than LFR has been.
TL;DR - Blizzard need to replicate WOTLK some what to start pulling numbers back in again - what they don't want is how easy most of WOTLK was (bar a few select encounters/instances the majority of WOTLK was easy)
What made them hard is people not used to the slower pace and having to do a good deal of cc, with the additional layer that healers, thanks to drastic across-the-board changes to the role, would generally need to stop and drink after every pull, and easily go OOM if a pull wasn't executed correctly. There were a few that were tougher than others (Ozruk and his trash were probably the least forgiving), but it was more about a required shift in the attitudes of players rather than outright difficulty. It didn't take all that long for people to smarten up a bit.
After experiencing them, everything from 4.3 onward has been a huge letdown as far as instances go.
IMO seriously toxic people rarely get into raiding guilds because people wouldn't deliberately recruit someone like that.
Again, plenty of casuals/LFR players are perfectly nice people. Hell I'm one of them now :P
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Game is 8 years old, almost anyone who was going to try WoW already has, there is nothing they could do to get 12 million people to pay $15 a month to play it anymore.
That really eclipses anything you may love or hate about the game in your personal experience.
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MoP deliberately designed the heroics to be easy. Personally I enjoyed Cata's heroics (and despite the current "consensus" that everyone hated them, I remember at the time that plenty of people said they loved the challenge on the forums).
There were a lot of reasons why Cata heroics were so hard - a big one is that they came after everyone had gotten used to doing Wrath heroics in full ICC gear (you could buy everything for badges and it had been out forever), like 6 tiers overgearing most of those dungeons. Players have such a short memory and ICC lasted so long. Then they walk into hard Cata heroics in shitty quest greens and BAM.
And I'd like to say that Cata heroics where legitimately complex. Even leaving aside how undergeared everyone was in the first few weeks (after Cata had been out a month or two, before the nerfs, dungeons had already gotten a LOT easier due to the average ILVL of players shooting up), think about how many mechanics each boss had and compare that to TBC bosses. Everyone bangs on about how hard TBC heroics were, but mechanically they were incredibly simple. The challenge was just the tuning - sheep this mob because otherwise the trash does too much damage. And tanks couldn't hold AOE threat. Basic stuff by today's standards. I'm sure it was "difficult" at the time though.
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-