Casualization is the biggest problem wow: True or false

[Queen of Hamsters]

Bullshit, casuals got fuck all, purely because everything that wasn't raiding was designed to funnel them into raiding in the vain hope of propping up the ancient concept of the "raid tier" for yet another expansion.

That's why dailies became soulless murderbars to fill up.

Trouble is, you can't make casuals into hardcores. Blizzard tried during Cataclysm, and it bit them in the arse because when they told players "become hardcore or stop playing our game," players stopped playing their game and Blizzard had to virtually beg them to come back for 4.3.

Casuals generally just stick with LFR. That your part of the game can't support its own existence is no fault of the rest of the community.

Exactly. They went with the mentality of "everyone loves gear, so the game is about getting gear to get gear just so you can spend time getting some more gear!!". Even if the gear had been 10 times slower to obtain, it wouldn't have made it a more compelling experience...

WoD failed because of shit content and development, not because it catered to "casuals" or "terribads"... And it has never catered to "terribads" more than at the stage when time was the biggest hurdle and you could be a windowlicker but still see the very top tier of endgame content because people needed your ass to fill up a raid spot I'd say...I'd LOVE to meet the windowlicker "terribads" that got spots on the top guilds progression Mythic runs...

Raiding, especially Mythic, aka the content for the 1% and even the 1% of the 1%, has been one of few redeeming factors of WoD.

[Blayze]

This is bullshit. You are conflating bads to casuals again. I am a Casual and I LOVED the pre-nerf 5 man content in Cata. They told people to stop sucking and the shitty players bitched and moaned.

I'm not conflating shit. Blizzard crippled healers by fucking with Spirit, put an arbitrary half-cap on weekly Valour that punished you if you dared to do the 'wrong' content first, and decided that fights like Magmaw, Omnotron, Halfus and Conclave were acceptable introductory raid encounters.

[primalmatter]

I'm not conflating shit. Blizzard crippled healers by fucking with Spirit, put an arbitrary half-cap on weekly Valour that punished you if you dared to do the 'wrong' content first, and decided that fights like Magmaw, Omnotron, Halfus and Conclave were acceptable introductory raid encounters.

Outside of conclave that I would agree was to much to coordinate what was wrong with the other three?

[Sansnom]

Exactly. They went with the mentality of "everyone loves gear, so the game is about getting gear to get gear just so you can spend time getting some more gear!!". Even if the gear had been 10 times slower to obtain, it wouldn't have made it a more compelling experience...

And you can hardly blame them. Looking at this forum and the official forum. Look about the quantity of post regarding the quality of gear from various sources that is NOT raiding. Look at the quantity of post complaining about LFR gear. During MoP it was too good, tier gear, compulsory etc. Even now, posters are still complaining, either it should be removed, further reduced, raised etc.

[Glorious Leader]

I'm not conflating shit. Blizzard crippled healers by fucking with Spirit, put an arbitrary half-cap on weekly Valour that punished you if you dared to do the 'wrong' content first, and decided that fights like Magmaw, Omnotron, Halfus and Conclave were acceptable introductory raid encounters.

The entry level raids from Cata were just fucking brutal on 10 mans. Coupled with the change to healing and coming off of a year of 25% buff icc it broke alot of guilds. That was the point I started to get exhausted after raids just mentally drained. I was healing on my paladin and not only was I learning to play the resource conservation game but they also three in holy power yet another thing to manage.

[SoBBeN1]

It heavily depended on your spec. On my hunter (1st character I got to 60) I died very rarely. It's not the leveling that was easy or hard, it's some specs that were broken to the point of uselessness.


Download any vid of a guild downing Mythic Archimonde for the first time. You can then tell from from the screams on TS how "unhappy" they are about that.

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It's even worse than that. It's like all WoW players somehow magically expect new players to learn everything by themselves and magically get up to speed with people playing their class for 10 years. Hence, a new player negativity that has a really heavy impact on the said new players.

I agree hunter was probly the easier one to level since your pet could tank, still much harder then currently is.
Right now were at the point were u run in dot everything loot and move on.

[Glorious Leader]

And you can hardly blame them. Looking at this forum and the official forum. Look about the quantity of post regarding the quality of gear from various sources that is NOT raiding. Look at the quantity of post complaining about LFR gear. During MoP it was too good, tier gear, compulsory etc. Even now, posters are still complaining, either it should be removed, further reduced, raised etc.

Yea I cam blame them because those complaints should have been ignored. Why should everyone else's reward be balanced against theirs?

[atredies]

If WoW got anymore casual you'd get raid loot for free from a Garrison or something hahaha imagine that free loot... oh wait.

I think post casualisation of leveling and the ability to hammer out and have 12 alts all in purplz means WoW has lost the RPG element.

When I first rolled my warrior back in 2006 or so I identified as a prot warrior for years, it is what I was, what i specialised in and what I played, I was known on the server for being a tank and willing to do dungeons for fun.

That aspect of the game has diminished somewhat, lost the RPG element, each extra removal secondary stats and gear complexity moves WoW one step closer and closer to the "RPG" style of Skyrim, basically not an RPG in the traditional sense just an open world adventure game.

I understand Legion is trying to get some of that feeling back with class halls, make a druid feel like a druid and they have a home etc but the damage has been done, it is simply too late.

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

Here is the thing though son...

Your wrong.

WoD was aimed at casuals it was blizzards love song to them. Garrisons,mythic dungeons,treasure hunting, rares, world mobs, invasions, weekly story quests, TJ and more.

Never before has more been given to casuals. They looked at this feast and said in one unified voice " I Want TIER from LFR"

You keep trying to strawman how wow has changed. No it wasn't some insane feat of skill to hit cap in vanilla. It was harder then getting ilv 700 in wod.

The game has declined. Things have been made utterly trivial hell I soloed heroic dungeons on my mage out of boredom and to see if I could. The game needs a tune up. Things are a bit better in legion at least in beta but I don't think it will last once people start to gear

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Wod was the expac with more content for casual players then ever before only raiders got snubbed

Garrison is basically tiller but way more overpowered to the point it makes profession and farming gold kind of pointless. We had all of that in Mist of Pandaria but Mythic Dungeons. We had treasures that gave experience points(a lot less than wod), rare mobs that gave unique loot, and world bosses. Mist had even more world bosses than warlord's. Invasions and weekly quest are cool but we had scenarios which were updated more frequently and were actually new content with their own unique stories. We lost brawler guild as well which was fun as hell and got updated with every major patch. Tanaan Jungle is a weaker version of Timeless isle and Isle of Thunder. Mist also launched with real daily quest and reasons to run dungeons outside of getting dungeon gear. We could even get raid loot from from running dungeons and we had valor point and justice point upgrades.

Garrison is horrible design and even casual hate it.

People are wrong to blame raiding because Warlord's had less raid bosses than Mist. Warlord's dropped the ball on all forms of content. Raiding got gutted the least but blizzard dropped the ball everywhere this expansion.

[Perkunas]

The entry level raids from Cata were just fucking brutal on 10 mans. Coupled with the change to healing and coming off of a year of 25% buff icc it broke alot of guilds. That was the point I started to get exhausted after raids just mentally drained. I was healing on my paladin and not only was I learning to play the resource conservation game but they also three in holy power yet another thing to manage.

Because 10 man raiding was never meant to be on par with 25. The balancing issues were never more apparent as they were in tier 11** forgot TOGC***. It took Blizzard 2 entire expansions to realize that you have to balance the most complex content to a single size. Another change that caused tons of people to quit that wasn't related to hardcore or casual...

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And the fact that you use the term "Loot for Retards" just show what kind of mentality we're dealing with here. I guess I'm simply not one of those people that plays for gear, so I don't understand this view based in "everyone just plays for gear and when gear is fast to get the game fails!!1!"...the game fails to ME when there's not enough content.

MoP had PVP, world content, regular patches offering both instanced and non-instanced content, different progression paths, several difficulties of Raiding, more casual options etc etc and it did just fine.

Gear is the tool that is used for progression content. You're talking to somebody who's worn the Pink Pally Ranger armor because of it's stats. I looked terrible but it allowed me to do tier 6. The problem is people want the rewards without doing the content.

[Blayze]

Outside of conclave that I would agree was to much to coordinate what was wrong with the other three?

Magmaw destroyed tanks. Utterly obliterated them.
Omnotron was a constant barrage of combinations of different mechanics.
And Halfus was different every week, so the next week even the people who'd showed up the last week were all learning the fight from scratch again.

[kary]

Magmaw destroyed tanks. Utterly obliterated them.
Omnotron was a constant barrage of combinations of different mechanics.
And Halfus was different every week, so the next week even the people who'd showed up the last week were all learning the fight from scratch again.

Yeah, these things were def hard to the unskilled.
But if you took the time and had all the rep gear/spec appropriate blues all of BWD/BoT was pretty cake.

I'd agree that bads, not casuals caused the "decline" of the game, but as someone that's always raided, I am perfectly content with WoD. I would kinda go back to sharing art assets for 5mans and just chuck them out with minimal rp or whatever just for the numbers. Toss out 5 dungeons with 3 wings at least. (think ssc/underbog/slavepens/steamvaults art asset sharing)

And regarding bads, there's a compromise that has to be made. You can either have everything easy, and alienate skilled players, have things hard, and alienate bads, or multiple difficulties and have people feel rewarded for doing nothing. There's no way for blizzard to win, people will always complain.

[pill8w]

What caused me to leave WoW was "Planned Obsolescence Progression". I raided Heroic and Mythic religiously. The only time I ever reached an ilvl peak was at the end of an expansion. By the time I got to, WoD I raided HM since day one and when BRF released.... after clearing HM on every lockout... not recieving one (&^@#&*%^ trinket at all for every raid from the beginning of the xpac..... I was not eager to contnue. It's been like this every content patch since they started making raids. You bust your ass to clear raids and gear up and you know the entire time that soon after you have fully geared you will be pursuing better gear and all of your accomplishments will become obsolete. It is the infinite power creep that is the problem, not the people who get sick and tired of that power creep.

All content rewards become obsolete in this game. What is fun is the initial accomplishment of clearing a raid at the highest difficulty. Once you do that, there is no reason to continue other than to make the next content patch easier to step into. All of your gear will become obsolete when the next raid drops. They could let you just upgrade everything gradually over time like they did with the valor upgrade system. Instead they just make your entire set of gear that you spent countless hours collecting less desirable with every patch. Some people just get sick of spending tons of time chasing fleeting rewards

[Blayze]

Remember, it was the raiders who wanted catchup mechanisms for their alts and replacement raiders. Catering to raiders destroys raiding. :P

[Thibble]

False. The whole discussion is stupid. An MMO is neither for hardcores nor for casuals only. Its for both. Grow up and have fun in your own way. If not, play something else. Cant imagine there are no mmos that focus more on raids and "hardcore" stuff.

[Dormie]

By the "logic" of the guy I replied to, the simpler WoW gets, the more people quit. So, still by that "logic" those quitting people are attracted to difficulty (among other things perhaps). Question is: where are they and why aren't there at least one hardcore game attracting all those people?

Same reason all the other MMOs fail, they aren't WoW.

False. The whole discussion is stupid. An MMO is neither for hardcores nor for casuals only. Its for both. Grow up and have fun in your own way. If not, play something else.

If only people would have done that from the beginning we wouldn't be having this discussion..

[Osmeric]

False. The whole discussion is stupid. An MMO is neither for hardcores nor for casuals only. Its for both. Grow up and have fun in your own way. If not, play something else. Cant imagine there are no mmos that focus more on raids and "hardcore" stuff.

An MMO cannot be for hardcores only, because there are too few of them. But an MMO could be for casuals only. The hardcores aren't needed. I'd argue a casual-only MMO would actually be more successful, if it retained the casuals better than a conflicted design that tried (and failed) to please everyone.

[primalmatter]

An MMO cannot be for hardcores only, because there are too few of them. But an MMO could be for casuals only. The hardcores aren't needed. I'd argue a casual-only MMO would actually be more successful, if it retained the casuals better than a conflicted design that tried (and failed) to please everyone.

Name a casual mmo that isn't free to play that has succeeded?

So far the only ones that have taken off have been those that have been aimed at players who invest either a lot of time or show a degree of skill. When blizzard changed from that well you know the saying...

"eight million subs later..."

[Osmeric]

Name a casual mmo that isn't free to play that has succeeded?

I don't know any that have tried.

[primalmatter]

I don't know any that have tried.

Think we are at thousands now...

They live and die by the day from indie to fairly well developed companies.

The thing people seem to forget is a mmo is a niche market. You can't sell it to everyone. The ones that do well are those that target the right crowd. WoW's folly was trying to compete with facebook. Had they remained on the path pf vanilla,tbc,and some parts of wrath they wouldn't be in the situation they find themselves in.