The population rises and falls with the difficulty level. Over the years, wow has got progressively harder and harder and this is shunting more and more players out of the potential raiding population. Mystery solved.
You can't be in favour of harder raids AND also a larger pool of raiders to choose from, they are mutually exclusive. You have to pick one.
It's one of the reasons yes, the second one being the aging of the initial raiding population, as they get jobs and families. Hell, apparently even some top level guilds have trouble recruiting people these days.
So yes, unless some stuff is re-tuned, and most important, the raiders change some of their mentality, the numbers will keep on shrinking. And MOP, while being an awesome expansion overall, took a few steps in the opposite direction. Time will tell whether it was a mistake or not.
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
Its worse than that. Its not 30% of Normal raiding guilds failing, its less than 30% of them SUCEEDING. That means over 70% of normal raiding guilds couldnt finish T14, even after 5 months and with item upgrades nerfing the content.
THAT is why i say T14 was stupidly overtuned and T15 is even worse.
And now we come to the heart of the issue. Why people are defending this tier so vociferously. Because they want to be elites and lord over others and call them "deluded wannabees". That's so good and it sums up why normal raiding will only continue to shrink and become a niche thing. The sad part is that you don't see that this will only in the longer term begin to affect you.
It's because of dailies. Me and my friends quit wow because we feel that doing dailies is mandatory to remain raider and we don't like dailies.
Actually if you understand it from his perspective the raiding population generally stays the same. The only thing that has changed is the deluded wannabes have left and he probably doesn't count those as raiders anyway. Now his perspective is foolish and ultimately detrimental but yea you should understand his view on this.
Really? You bolded what I wrote but ignored it somehow. NORMAL RAIDING more accessible. Normal isn' "medium" by any stretch of the imagination. Not relative to any other time in warcraft or relative to what the overwhelming vast majority of the raiding player base will do, or even to other video games.
The range of skill has grown hugely. At the beginning, there were only newbies. Two years later, there were people who had killed some very crudely implemented raid bosses, and there were newbies. Now, eight years later, there are people who have killed some much more sophisticated raid bosses, and there are newbies. And there is a huge range in between.
But the game has trouble satisfying that range of skill.
If it were up to me, I would simply ignore the needs of the top 1-2% of players. But that's not how Blizzard does it.
the kind of pvp you seem to be talking about is comparable to lfr. and you can do lfr whenever you want, too. the kind of raiding that people talk about here is comparable to rgbs. you cannot do them "when i want, on my schedule".
i think one of the main reasons is the difference between 10 and 25 player raids. it produced a split in the raiding community, slimming chances of good raids in both formats.
I'm all for them having heroic modes. Honest I don't want them left out in the cold anymore than my friends or even myself are now. Their just needs to be a better balance struck. That's it. The second boss shouldn't be a massive cock block. I'm all for the final bosses being difficult and the heroic modes being difficult but the entire raid lacks any actual sense of progression. It's just a massive fucking cock block.