Too many guilds, not enough players?

[Trapped]

20 man mythic being the only hard mode raiding available was the biggest mistake Blizzard has ever made in terms of the hardcore end game. Period.

Yup, it is. Bring back 10-man mode and I guarantee it'll breathe new life into the game.

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What a shame. A game being accessible to all types and skill levels of players. If they can't git gud they should just stop playing WoW and probably kill themselves while they're at it. /s

This is also coming from a hardcore player. Get your head out of your ass. This game isn't just for you, and in fact, if it weren't for the casuals you try to turn away from the game, the game wouldn't even still have live, updated servers.

Thanks for the constructive feedback, friend. You misinterpreted my words. If people want to see raiding content, they will rise to the occasion if they *have* to. With 4 modes, they don't have to. Period. It breeds laziness and the overall skill level of people has dropped considerably (imo of course).

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This is also coming from a hardcore player. Get your head out of your ass. This game isn't just for you, and in fact, if it weren't for the casuals you try to turn away from the game, the game wouldn't even still have live, updated servers.

Did you even read a word I said? Smh. In MY ideal raiding world, there would be TWO modes. One mode would cater to the casual crowd (normal mode that is a slight step up from LFR difficulty) and Heroic mode, which would cater to the semi-hardcore/hardcore crowd. Normal mode would be flexible 10-30 players, and heroic would have fixed 10/25 man raid sizes.

[Wingspan]

... If people want to see raiding content, they will rise to the occasion if they *have* to. ...

I think the core problem here is that when you are forced out of your comfort zone in WoW, it is far easier these days to simply leave the game (possibly for another decent quality game that might even be free) rather than rise to a challenge. And that really takes the "have to" out of the equation.

Cata heroics were a decent example of simply requiring more effort on people's part than they considered it was worth. People literally chose leaving the game over getting better.

As such, I don't know that reducing the number of difficulties would improve much.

[Trapped]

I think the core problem here is that when you are forced out of your comfort zone in WoW, it is far easier these days to simply leave the game (possibly for another decent quality game that might even be free) rather than rise to a challenge. And that really takes the "have to" out of the equation.

Cata heroics were a decent example of simply requiring more effort on people's part than they considered it was worth. People literally chose leaving the game over getting better.

As such, I don't know that reducing the number of difficulties would improve much.

That's a fair point, but we're comparing hard heroic dungeons to raiding. Seeing dungeon content really isn't appealing as seeing the story played out in raid form. Having hard heroics really gave the casuals nothing to do, so that, in my opinion, is why many people left in Cata. Also, normal mode raiding nowadays is by far MUCH easier than those Cata heroics were, and its really not asking a whole lot for people to get good enough at the game to clear normal mode raids.

Oh, and BC/Wrath both had 2 difficulties of raid, and we all see how well they did. If done properly, that's all we need.

[muto]

20 man mythic being the only hard mode raiding available was the biggest mistake Blizzard has ever made in terms of the hardcore end game. Period.

That is one thing I don't like. There is no hard content in the 6 to 19 player gap. It's either high Mythic+ with 5 people or 20 man Mythic Raids.

[Lumineus]

Many (like really many) people think that guilds are organisations that will take away their freedoms, rights and children, will force them into certain roles/classes/specs, etc.

I don't think that's an unfair assessment, really. Well, I suppose the actual truth is they won't recruit you in the first place unless you fit a very narrow classification (FotM ranged caster DPS, healer) so you'll be forced into that classification if you want to be able to raid sometime this year. Unfortunately melee DPS is the most popular role in this game and there are approximately negative one million slots for this role in most guilds, even if you're playing the FotM class.

[Deleted]

i think part of the reason is that guilds STILL expect people to fill in applications on a website, like youre applying for a job.
i was a recruiter for a guild in MoP & got some really good quality players in, just by talking to them in game. generally chatting & seeing what they were looking for & if it was the same as what the guild were trying to progress to.
im currently having a break from wow (WQ burn out/bordom), so i can only go on my past, but even before i stopped playing, people were expected to fill out apps & i think those days ended a long way back.

[tratra]

I have an explanation to the issue.

The population is definitely declining and you can see it in the game.

Another thing that really doesn't help AT ALL is how hard the game has become for new players and returning players.

I quit my main after a certain point in legion. Then I started a new main. Currently my main is just about to hit the level where he can be accepted into an actual mythic guild. Not a top progress guild, just a mythic guild.

AP etc makes it really hard to go up to the level where you can join a guild.

So atm my theory is that obviously people are quiting, due to having the game beeing at a very static point, and you have a few people that are returning etc that can't fill up spots cause of time gated content. Gear is not hard to gain I'd say in 3 weeks I went to 885/879 equipped. AP though is literally unreachable, where a DPS needs to gain at least 25 treats to perform the same as other people around him, and that would take at least month and a half at the current state of the game.

So i think your only solution of now OP since blizzard is ignoring the fact that AP is a badly designed system that favors people that overdo it by playing extensive hours in repeatable content, or people that joined since the start of the game and have stayed active, you have to merge your guild with another one etc and take it from there.

[Jarlhen]

Let's also remember that guilds are almost exclusively advertising for ranged characters. So that excludes like 60% of the pop?

[epLe]

There are a couple of major issues causing this.

1. Raid availability - With LFR to Heroic raid difficulties available to everyone, many are happy with pugging raids at their own leasure.
2. Raiders who only want to raid. - These who refuse to do emmisaries, lesser raid difficulties, m+, nightbane runs, or in general only show for raids where they expect kills or loot.

For me and most people I've actually know through the years ingame, it is usually not what Blizzard do, but what the guildies do that cause the turn-off.

[IceMan1763]

Well, I've been one of "those" people that says the game doesn't need 4 difficulties, and I'll tell you why. When raiding used to be 1 or 2 difficulties, people had to "git gud" at the game, learn their class, learn their rotation, and probably find a guild. There wasn't a babysitting mode and there wasn't a beer league mode. That's what dungeons used to be for. With all the modes available now, you no longer need to excel at your class to see content. You can run LFR, maybe find some normal mode pugs, and that's where your content ends. There's not a lot of incentives to go any further than that for a lot of people. What I'm basically trying to say is that I think the overall skill of players has declined since the addition of all these different modes to cater to every play style. I think, at most, raiding should be 2 difficulties. Normal mode, which would be slightly harder than LFR, and Heroic, which would be around where it's tuned at now, with maybe a "hardcore" end boss thrown in at the end for all the no-life world first chasers to fight over.

You do realize that Hard Mode bosses and then Heroic later on in Wrath were every bit as difficult skill wise as the current Mythic raid content, right? I mean as someone who put 300-500 attempts into both Yogg 0 and H LK during the early phases of tuning before downing them, I can tell you those fights rank right up there with the hardest ever conceived. Also, most specs had more complicated rotations than they do now IMO.

There is a big difference between Wrath heroic and Legion Mythic raiding though, and that's the addition of ridiculous but necessary practices like split raiding and now the unbelievable amount of outside or raid time grinding required to have the gear necessary to beat them. I think that is why the end game raiding community is dying so quickly this xpac (and split raiding has been killing it slowly for a while). In Wrath and even Cata it was possible to progress through the hardest content in the game playing just 15-30 hours per week (and that includes raid time). That's been thrown out the window now and not surprisingly, participation in end game raiding is probably at it lowest point in the history of the game.

I do agree with you that the lower skill cap difficulty raids don't lead to improve play but there are people with disabilities or just very minimal play time as well who pay the same amount of money.

[Teri]

Well, I've been one of "those" people that says the game doesn't need 4 difficulties, and I'll tell you why. When raiding used to be 1 or 2 difficulties, people had to "git gud" at the game, learn their class, learn their rotation, and probably find a guild. There wasn't a babysitting mode and there wasn't a beer league mode. That's what dungeons used to be for. With all the modes available now, you no longer need to excel at your class to see content. You can run LFR, maybe find some normal mode pugs, and that's where your content ends.

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This as well. I thought they mentioned more server mergers incoming, but maybe I was dreaming it.

Well said on both points, I started playing in US Beta and seen dungeons and raids evolve from many different incarnations.
- Vanilla 5 mans were very high tuned at the first versions, so hard even that I joined scholomance "raid" (dungeons had no player limit at first) to do the Barov Peasant caller quest you had to loot 4 scrolls I think, you could drop raid for a few sec to loot back then.

Anyway later that got patched multiple times over the expansion tuning the size/difficulty and adding blue gear with spellpower etc.

Raids were standard 40 man, the biggest size, and eventually we got 2x 20 man raids with ZG and AQ20.

Come TBC it started with 10 man karazhan (and later 10 man zul aman), into the 25 man system for the rest.

Wotlk they made all raids 10 man and 25 seperate, you could do both each week, it was 1 difficulty with a gimick activated heroic mode.
Then came along Trial of Crusade patch , we suddenly had 10 man 25 man, 10 man heroic, 25 man heroic, thus 4 clears each week.
Up until the end of Ice crown citadel (Cata pre patch) they decided to make shared lockouts.

So basicly it was either 10 man OR 25 man up to throne of thunder where I quit before the Flex system was introduced with Siege of Orgrimmar.

And I do agree there are too many low pop servers around on both US and EU.

There are a few huge server concentrations (10000+ on wow progress) for either PvE or PvP, either horde stacked or alliance stacked.
Just going by the English speaking realms here as that's the majority it's obvious if you sort by horde or alliance.
http://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/us/lang.en
http://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/eu/lang.en

Realmpop website shows more overall characters at 110 as of course not everyone raids, but even then it counts alts too :P

[Blur4stuff]

I agree with some above posts. A problem I've had with top end raiding and guilds for a long time is that it's a job instead of a game. Every step of the process is exactly like getting a job. And then when you're in the guild and raiding, you have to treat the game like a job.

Why would most sane people work all day and then go home to keep working? There's a reason why almost no popular game on the planet has this style of raiding and guilds. The ones that have anything close to WoW also have low subs and are dwarfed by games that don't have raiding at all.

[hyphnos]

You do realize that Hard Mode bosses and then Heroic later on in Wrath were every bit as difficult skill wise as the current Mythic raid content, right? I mean as someone who put 300-500 attempts into both Yogg 0 and H LK during the early phases of tuning before downing them, I can tell you those fights rank right up there with the hardest ever conceived. Also, most specs had more complicated rotations than they do now IMO.

There is a big difference between Wrath heroic and Legion Mythic raiding though, and that's the addition of ridiculous but necessary practices like split raiding and now the unbelievable amount of outside or raid time grinding required to have the gear necessary to beat them. I think that is why the end game raiding community is dying so quickly this xpac (and split raiding has been killing it slowly for a while). In Wrath and even Cata it was possible to progress through the hardest content in the game playing just 15-30 hours per week (and that includes raid time). That's been thrown out the window now and not surprisingly, participation in end game raiding is probably at it lowest point in the history of the game.

I do agree with you that the lower skill cap difficulty raids don't lead to improve play but there are people with disabilities or just very minimal play time as well who pay the same amount of money.

LOL, I love that your idea of a reasonable amount of time to put into the game is 15-30 hrs per week. That says in a nutshell why there's a shortage of players available to raiding guilds - if 15-30 hrs is the old reasonable, what kind of time is expected to be put into the game now. That seems to be the one question the devs never bother to answer: just what is reasonable to expect people to put in and maybe anyone willing to put in more SHOULD find the game to be too easy and run out of things to do.

[Daffan]

Should see the Oceanic servers. So many guilds recruiting all the time.

[zoned]

Yea I agree. I prefer 10 man myself, but at this stage, I am thankful to just have an active raiding team.

We aren't there yet but I think smaller group play will be the future of WoW and all MMO's moving forward. M+ dungeons have been a long awaited breath of fresh air and have clearly proven that small group content is overwhelmingly preferred. The logistical nightmare that we know as raiding today where guilds hold 20-40 man rosters is simply out of date. Were here to play a game and have fun not manage 20-40 people like it's a job. My hope is that Blizzard will soon come to this realization and introduce 10 or even 5 man raiding as the new end game content.

[Marrilaife]

If you're world top 200 guild or thereabouts enjoy your steady flow of apps and the joy of separating diamonds from trash.

If you're your average 7/7m 3/3hc guild all you're getting is people who think they're mythic raiders by killing nythendra mythic in a pug while lying dead in a corner and wanting a free run through farm content, then they'll get bored and you won't see them or hear from them again after 1-2 weeks.

I've seen such pearls in the apps: "why do you want to join our guild?"
"I'd rather be the worst player in a good roster than the best player in a bad roster."
"So the other players (of my class) can teach me to be a better (class)."

Also enjoy getting apps from people who openly admit they got banned in the recent bot ban wave and expect you to boost their new fresh account reroll.

Though recruiters have their flaws as well, the amount of guild officers that give you off-putting answer when whispered a question is astounding when guilds are so desperate to find players. If you behave as if every player who whispers you a question about the guild recruitment status and policy is a waste of your precious time, don't be surprised when you get no apps.

Stupid requirements are a thing too. No one wants to boost a character its owner put no effort into, but seeing a 5/7m guild, or heck 7/7 hc guild ask for 880+ ilvl & 35+ traits in artifact smells of "too noob to kill content without overpowering it".

And yes, raid design of Blizzard is also at fault here. With 20m mythic raid size and ongoing fight design raids require way too many ranged in comparison to every other role (melee / healer / tank). Therefore either you're a top notch guild that attracts the best of the best, or you just end up with crappy mages and hunters because those with half a brain are already snatched by the guilds above you.

Atm you might want doubles or triples of specific ranged classes while not even having a spot for specific melee classes at all, and apparently Blizzard finds it cool because melee have their place in mythic+ and pvp? Sorry I don't buy it.

[IceMan1763]

LOL, I love that your idea of a reasonable amount of time to put into the game is 15-30 hrs per week. That says in a nutshell why there's a shortage of players available to raiding guilds - if 15-30 hrs is the old reasonable, what kind of time is expected to be put into the game now. That seems to be the one question the devs never bother to answer: just what is reasonable to expect people to put in and maybe anyone willing to put in more SHOULD find the game to be too easy and run out of things to do.

In this xpac the amount of time required to clear Mythic raids at a reasonable pace is pretty much infinite thanks to three primary factors:

1) The necessity to get as many loot opportunities for legendaries as possible
2) AP for trait levels at least until they max them this month (yes most mythic raiders will have their primary weapons totally maxxed before new years)
3) Infinite M+ loot that's frequently better than mythic raid loot

And infinite is pretty much infinitely less reasonable than 15-30 hours per week.

[Trapped]

You do realize that Hard Mode bosses and then Heroic later on in Wrath were every bit as difficult skill wise as the current Mythic raid content, right?

I don't disagree with that, but those raids also had 10-man versions, and being able to do the hardest mode available with 10 people was the best time I ever had in WoW. Too many people nowadays think they "have" to do Mythic. Long-time hardcore players and people who strive to do the hardest content will probably always want to do Mythic. The fact of the matter is, unless you're on one of those high-pop mega servers (Tich, Sarg, Stormrage, etc), it will be very difficult. There's too many of these former heroic 10-man guilds left, all trying to fill to 20 people. It has taken me a lot of soul searching (ok, maybe an exaggeration, ha) but I've come to realize that Mythic just isn't worth it anymore to me. The game feels more dead right now than it did at the end of WoD. Good luck to the 20 "mythic" guilds on my server all trying to pull 5-8 Mythic raiders out of thin air to fill up their roster. Not going to happen.

I do agree with you that the lower skill cap difficulty raids don't lead to improve play but there are people with disabilities or just very minimal play time as well who pay the same amount of money.

People with disabilities shouldn't be counted in the same category as people with limited play time, though, unless you count laziness as a disability. And I just don't agree that just because you're a paying customer you're entitled to see the content that every other paying customer gets to see. People with limited play time should be fully aware of it, and know that when they play, they're probably not going to be seeing the same content as someone who spends 30+ hours a week on here. To each their own I suppose.

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LOL, I love that your idea of a reasonable amount of time to put into the game is 15-30 hrs per week. That says in a nutshell why there's a shortage of players available to raiding guilds - if 15-30 hrs is the old reasonable, what kind of time is expected to be put into the game now. That seems to be the one question the devs never bother to answer: just what is reasonable to expect people to put in and maybe anyone willing to put in more SHOULD find the game to be too easy and run out of things to do.

Is 15-30 hours a week unreasonable? That's roughly 2-4 hours a night (14-28 hours a week). While I do agree that there needs to be some sort of cap to which you're no longer gaining anything on people that don't play as much, I certainly don't feel like 2 hours a day is unreasonable.

[Benomatic]

I am desperate for a social raiding guild on Magtheridon EU, yet it just seems there are more guilds than players. Blizzard need to purge all inactive and under performing guilds

[Marrilaife]

Is 15-30 hours a week unreasonable?

That's basically comparable to taking a part-time job. So generally people are advocating WOW should demand commitment equal to part time or even full time job and that's healthy and fine? Full time job is 40h a week in EU (rest is overtime). 30h a week is 75% of that... If you want to take friday / saturday out like many players and even hardcore raiders do, that means you have to play up to 8h a day on other days if the commitment frame is what you described.

EDIT: Also do you mean just progressing your main should require that amount of time? If so, where is place for alts, things you do for fun like RP, casual pvp, achievements, transmog runs, mount farms, gold making etc.?

Personally I think if Blizzard designs their game to cater to 1) jobless people 2) people who only cycle work - WOW - sleep - repeat 3) people whose job is streaming WOW, they'll alienate the majority of their playerbase who doesn't function like that. The game is 12 years old, many players now have jobs and families but are still attached to the game and if they have steady work schedule don't mind saving 3 evenings a week for raiding, now when that becomes "every single evening every day every week all year round" that's completely another story.

Blizzard need to purge all inactive and under performing guilds

Best joke I've heard this week, now amuse us and pray tell how should they judge whether a guild is "under performing" and deserves a purge...