Originally Posted by
Maleric
Subscriber loss was 600k in Q1, 300k in Q2, 800k in Q3, and 100k in Q4, meaning that fully half of the people who quit in Cata quit during tier eleven. And most of the remainder quit during the first few months of Firelands, before the 20% nerfs. So the mass quitting happened when everything was hard.
That said, I doubt there's a causal connection between subscriber loss during a given raid tier and that tier's difficulty. But if there were such a connection, then the last year would indicate that people quit when the game is too hard, and not when it's too easy.
Also, while I agree that hard encounters are generally good, the problem with tier eleven wasn't that it had hard encounters. The problem was the amount of encounters. Many guilds, even decent ones, had little hope of getting to the end, due to the number of encounters. Maybe this was fine for the members of said guilds who were raiding solely for the challenge, but it wasn't fine for the members who were also raiding for the thrill of "beating" the tier.