Where have all the hardcore players gone?

[Deleted]

the days of me raiding 6/7 & sometimes 7/7 are so far behind me & they will never return.
ive grown weary of raiding & to a certain extent the game itself for almost a year now, to the point of i havnt done anything for nigh on 6 months or so. whether i start raiding again come mop ive yet to decide, but im not going to be holding my breath

[Tharkkun]

In other words, you effectively didn't read and didn't care and just copy-pasted the same usual cliché answers because you couldn't be arsed
Love the hypocrisy here.

For emphasis. The same shit has been said in more than 15 different threads over the last 3 months. I read it. There's nothing new you brought to the table. This thread starts every week with a new title. It's the same idea and it breaks off into tangents after a few pages.

Did you bother to read all my responses in the other threads? No? Why not? Because it doesn't matter. I'm not going to quote a wall of text just to satisfy your psychological need for someone to "read" your post.

[Deleted]

They grew up.

It's easy to raid hardcore when you're 15-18 years old. Combining it with university/fulltime job is a different animal.

[Akka]

They grew up.

It's easy to raid hardcore when you're 15-18 years old. Combining it with university/fulltime job is a different animal.

Maybe you should read a thread before copy-pasting the same usual retardness that was specifically debunked in it.

[Sprucelee]

What happened to all the great football players and baseball players too. Basketball...

Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, Steve Young? Nolan Ryan? Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson?

Where did all the hardcore players go?Just like raiding, those sports just lost their appeal, and now only scrubs are interested..... Sad really, watching all these competitive activties become watered down.

[Grummgug]

The gear treadmill is awful game design. That's why I quit. I get gear to get better gear and then they add another tier so we get better gear again....just pointless. Back in vanilla, when everything was new and fresh, and you didn't see the gear treadmill coming, it was great. I quit raiding when black temple came out though, as i felt certain there was no point to gearing up all the time.

I don't know what Blizzard is doing. I think WoW is getting worse and worse. I think they completely missed the point of the popularity of Starcraft when they released SC2. After playing D3, I have to seriously ask if they ever even played Diablo 2 before.

Blizzard Entertainment is rapidly going downhill. Its not even an argument. SC2 and D3 have been disasters. WoW is losing subs.

I think they are WAY more focused on the notion of "making games easy" and ignoring the "making games fun" part.

[Holofernes]

i think the main reason is , that there is no hardcore content anymore.

u dont need to farm to prepare for raid, u just need to log in and fly to the instance.

In modern wow u know boss tactics and have addons with timers for its abilitys and mechanics, before the boss is even released. everything is testet on the ptr, and widely known in the well conected playercommunity.

Back in the days, u had to figure out how a boss works, what to do, how to cope with the mechanics.
U had to farm resistance gear for some encounters, or some unique items (onyxia cloaks). This way content lastet way longer, even so this block was artificial, it was a block.
U were working and farming as a grp to be able to go past this block, as a common effort of a whole raiding guild.

Sometimes u had to farm a few bosses in a raid instance, to be theoretically able to do enough dps for the "contentblocker boss".

Nowadays, u walk in and kill bosses , after meeting minimum gear requirements, that are no longer artificially infaltet, after a number of tries, that directly correlates to the raids skill /gear lvl.

They tried to get away from this philosophy in early cata, with hard heroics, and pretty hard raids. I personally loved t11 in 10s. i really enjoyed progressing the hms there. i liked the hard and challenging heroics, especially in very low gear. it reminded me of tbc heroics, and i had much fun doing them, fun i somewhat missed during wotlk.

but :
The result was a Shitstorm of the guys who wanted the easymode gear + epixs, and blizz saw itself forced to cater to them. I dont think the designers themselfes wanted this easymode, they actively tried to avoid it, but the players screamed in pain and agony. In wotlk, they became used to feel like demigoods, never ooming, never out of resources, killing everything in 2-3 hits.

That feeling was taken away, and loads of people did never realize, that playing the game should not feel like beeing a demigod at all.

Thats why there is nothing hardcore left in wow.
Its not a game for technophil students from the it / electronics branche any more, for longhaired tech freaks who listen to norwegian black metal and paint their faces and go wander in the woods at night, howling at the moon (im exaggerating, yep), it became a mass medium, and the mass is not very keen on beeing challenged. They want easy entertainment and the feeling of sucess.

Thats why facebook games are the most sucessful games in the world. and wow is slowly taking this aspects with it.

But i dont say its all bad. They still have challenge modes, to which i really am looking forward. Perhaps the knew pvp system will show to work out well and establish some arena balance, like it was back in s2/s3/s6/s7, which were the good times of arena pvp in wow.

And i dont abondon hope, that ghostcrawler realises, if they do 3 difficulties for a raid, that there is no need to nerf them by 5/10 /15 % per months. ever.
Nothing sucks more than progressing as a not hardcore player in hc modes, beeing halfway through, only to get the nerfs coming. it devalues the progress very hard in my opinion. It gives raiders the mindset "lets wait another week, next nerf, we will faceroll this boss than" instead of actually trying to progress.

Better gear helps. its legit. better playstyle, advanced tactics help, its legit. more practice helps, its legit.

boss stats -15%? this is a hack.

[judgementofantonidas]

I realize with wow becoming so easy you can play it with your penis (It's only a few patches away unfortunately I can see the youtube videos now) that it's scaring many of the old core players away. In fact, the only guilds who still exist that existed in vanilla are paragon and blood legion, the rest are gone to bigger and better things (and 70% of blood legion is new members since then).

But with all the negative changes there's millions of good ones too. Classes are extremely balanced now (People QQ about fire mages being OP in pvp still but let's face it, they're killable),

But with these nerfs and balances shouldn't it create MORE good core players and not more bad ones? An easier game should mean that it's easier for people to grasp it and excel at it.

Yet, all we get are casual baddies who don't give a fuck about pvp or pve progression and couldn't progress if they even tried despite blizzard making it so easy a 5 year old can rape pvp. Don't believe me? My niece is six and achieved gladiator last season.

So Why? Why do players not care about progression anymore? Vanilla we lived breathed and shit progression, ditto BC but now all of a sudden all the core players are absent and they're replaced with this puddle of people who don't know their dicks from their assholes?

Now, before you say "roll horde! They're totally different!", no they aren't. Horde is exactly the same amount of casual people who could care less if people down heroic ragnaros pre nerf or not. Or the guilds who have accomplished the impossible and killed twins and c'thun, illidan, heroic lich king, yogg, agalon ... etc.


And then we have all of the "Hardcore wannabe's" don't believe me play on illidan for more than 15 minutes. Blizzard has made the content so where are the players? Come on people down some freaking content or at least get a 2200 rating... it isn't rocket science.

The TRULY hard core players complete the content then unsub. They are currently finishing with beta testing/ptr and are ready for the next expansion to start the cylce over again.

[Sprucelee]

The TRULY hard core players complete the content then unsub. They are currently finishing with beta testing/ptr and are ready for the next expansion to start the cylce over again.

Um no.

They get BIS for mains and alts for the next tier....

[sweepdeepsPL]

The hardcore players realized that new games are providing much more challenging (and more importantly, newer) content for them to be a kitten with a ball of yarn with. From their perspective, World of Warcraft isn't worth the time anymore.

[Keren]

Yay, completed actual hc content on beta. Thus the game is already cleared for current content even befor it is released. hardcore race is laughable today

[deeyoueye]

A lot of the hardcore players are just relaxing right now waiting for the race in MoP.

[Farabee]

Do we really need this topic again? Most of the "hardcores" from BC/vanilla have long since quit. Time will do that.

The candle that burns the brightest burns twice as quickly.

[Deleted]

I realize with wow becoming so easy you can play it with your penis

And thats where I stopped reading.

[Dize]

Dawn of the Dead on Zul'jin-US
Been around since Vanilla. Do your research next time please. Loads of guilds are still around from "Old school WoW"

he means good guilds

[fangless]

The OP's point is that players suck nowadays?

Well, LFR sure isn't helping. Everyone thinks they're a raider.

The hardcore players from naxx40, or bc, or whatever probably aren't playing still. Whenever I make references to an old boss from AQ or Black Temple or wherever... people have no idea what I am talking about :P

[Toxigen]

We're here, but we've thinned out considerably. A brief history lesson will explain:

In the late '90s, the MMO community had a choice between 4-5 different MMOs, all with "hardcore only" aspects. Soft gamers like we see today simply did not survive. They simply could not figure out the game's mechanics, died a few times (and lost items, GOD FORBID ANY PENALTY FOR DYING), or simply ruined their character via poor planning and were unwilling to reroll. The MMORPG community was battle-hardened, intelligent, and would literally bash their heads against challenges for months and come back smiling for more.

Fast forward to 2005: WoW launches and slowly leeches all of the hardcores away from their old games. However, most new MMORPG players have exposure only to WoW, a much more beginner / casual / baddie friendly game.

As us hardcores quit, we're only being replaced by softies. Eventually, the entire MMORPG community will be a stagnant pool of folks that want everything now and for very little effort.

Have fun, I'll be playing Planetside 2.

[Deleted]

We're here, but we've thinned out considerably. A brief history lesson will explain:

In the late '90s, the MMO community had a choice between 4-5 different MMOs, all with "hardcore only" aspects. Soft gamers like we see today simply did not survive. The MMORPG community was battle-hardened, intelligent, and would literally bash their heads against challenges for months and come back smiling for more.

Fast forward to 2005: WoW launches and slowly leeches all of the hardcores away from their old games. However, most new MMORPG players have exposure only to WoW, a much more beginner / casual / baddie friendly game.

As us hardcores quit, we're only being replaced by softies. Eventually, the entire MMORPG community will be a stagnant pool of folks that want everything now and for very little effort.

Have fun, I'll be playing Planetside 2.

Pretty much what happens. MMO games will be unplayable soon :/

[Toxigen]

Pretty much what happens. MMO games will be unplayable soon :/

Oh, they'll be playabe...there will just be a complete and utter lack of challenge or time required to complete anything.

edit: I played Asheron's Call from '99 to 2005 - mainly on the Darktide (PvP) server. I was killed by folks WAY higher level than me while I was out leveling in my own little corner of a dungeon and lost critical weapons, armor, and other items that just about crippled my character. Did I quit? Nope, just make do with crappy items until you can find a suitable replacement.

It ended up being extremely rewarding once I acquired enough game knowledge and wealth to survive comfortably and weather the storm when PK challenges got tough. This mainly occured when opposing monarchies raided your XP/loot hunting grounds...you either fought them and won or were forced out to find another (and likely less desireable) spot.

Most folks wouldn't even contemplate playing in that kind of environment these days.

[Deleted]

I think there's just considerably more stuff to play now in the video game scene than there was before. In '05 when WoW hit EU shelves the industry was healthy but there still weren't as many AAA titles as there are now ... on a yearly basis ... with multi-million dollar budgets from internationally recognized studios that are able to obtain the investment needed to fuel that kind of commitment.

I know a lot of people just play more stuff now, so they don't have the time they used to for WoW. The "growing up" thing is still condescending btw, thanks for calling me a kid.