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  1. #181
    Quote Originally Posted by Holtzmann View Post
    Read the argument again. Burning Crusade was losing subscriptions at the normal rate, but it was gaining subscriptions at a huge pace because the game was new and exciting and a lot of people hadn't played World of Warcraft yet. That's what made the game grow all the way to Wrath of the Lich King. At 12 million subscriptions (which probably meant at least 15-18 million people had tried it at some point) World of Warcraft became big enough to start to deplete its pool of potential new players, which made it difficult to recoup the losses from player attrition. Specially after the fiasco that was Cataclysm's "let's get people to use crowd control!" heroic dungeon system early on.
    Why do people think that player pool is dried up? Gaming has become more accepted over the years so older players are getting in to games and as kids grow up, they get in to gaming more than ever now with how accepted it is at a lower age level. Gaming as a whole is bigger than its ever been with numbers of people doing it and how much coverage it gets. There is no reason for "we are out of players" to be an excuse.

    I'm sure most people to this day still try WoW at some point who have an interest in gaming, they just don't stay around because of how the game is now.

  2. #182
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    Quote Originally Posted by Srg56 View Post
    I would go back. I read the whole screenshot and he summarized everything i didn't know i needed. Now that i look back on TBC and vanilla the game DID seem huge and endless, every moment spent in it gave the impression that i was climbing huge stairs and when looking up, i saw the mists of the unknown and of huge potential adventure. I guess the lack of datamining helped allot as well. They should make datamining against the rules. This isn't an RTS or FPS, it's supposed to be a world of unknown.
    Don't read the datamined information then? Don't watch streams or play on the PTR either while we are at it. AND for the love of god... don't use LFR... its just mind numbing and it removes the feeling of achieving any kind of goal once you finish it

  3. #183
    Sub numbers rose during BC when raid content was exclusive, but they rose even faster during WotLK when raid content was the most inclusive and accessible its ever been. Sub numbers began to fall for the first time in Cataclysm when content was made exclusive again (pre-LFR). They have continued to fall in MOP where Normal raiding remains exclusive while average players are granted the possibility of seeing content via LFR.

    I don't think we can determine causality though. There are too many other factors. We also don't have any other game of its size/kind to compare it to, so any explanation for drop in subs is really just speculation.

  4. #184
    Quote Originally Posted by SamR View Post
    He can give his opinion on the best recipe for Sangria if he wants to. I'm just saying that the fact that he does the exact opposite of what he says is good game design makes his opinion worth less than a random forum poster.
    I just want to point out that this line of thinking is rubbish.

    There is no comparison between League and WoW. They are two completely different genres that have completely different formulas for success.

    My two cents on Morello's post: I agree, on the whole. As a few other people have said already, he sees things from a perspective I didn't have, and I respect his input. It was logical and rang true to me. The game is missing something now that it had in the past.
    Last edited by Henako; 2013-06-08 at 03:50 AM.

  5. #185
    I don't care about exclusive content or not, but I would like some content to strive for. Personally, I don't believe that Blizzard is at fault for this, but the community.

    I know my place in WoW. I am a decent player who can handle a challenge. I know that I don't belong in a top progressive guild, but I am capable of running normals and even heroics after a nerf or when i get better gear for the content.

    The problem is not the raiding, but finding 10 like minded people who's schedule's work out. I don't believe that I hold high standards, but I look for a few key qualities in a group, which is hard to find.

    1. This is a game, I am here to have fun.
    2. I don't mind wiping, but we need to learn from our mistakes.
    3. I don't care about gear. I just want to pew pew internet dragons.
    4. If you are not in a progressive raiding group, then I am not applying to your guild and pretending to be a progressive raider.
    5. Once the group is established, I expect consistent attendance.
    6. To reiterate, have fun, and be willing to learn (myself included).

    The problems I run into, is that often raiders:
    1. drama - either over personality or over gear/cosmetics
    2. ego - and this is probably the BIGGEST turn-off. I can't tell you how many guilds out there are ranked 2,000+ who think they are hardcore progressive raiders
    3. not being committed - you need consistent raiding and if one or three people do not show up on a consistent basis, then it wrecks havoc, especially on low to medium populated servers.

    Personally, I think the LFD was one of the best implemented features in this game. It did what exactly it was supposed to do - make the content more accessible to people. Why? The community. The community was filled with elitist assholes who would spam trade-chat for hours looking for overgreared players to run heroic 5-mans. All Blizzard tried to do was correct for a community problem.

    Now, do I think that they took it took far to make heroics, LFR, and scenarios face-roll easy? Absolutely.

  6. #186
    Quote Originally Posted by hablix View Post
    Sub numbers rose during BC when raid content was exclusive, but they rose even faster during WotLK when raid content was the most inclusive and accessible its ever been. Sub numbers began to fall for the first time in Cataclysm when content was made exclusive again (pre-LFR). They have continued to fall in MOP where Normal raiding remains exclusive while average players are granted the possibility of seeing content via LFR.

    I don't think we can determine causality though. There are too many other factors. We also don't have any other game of its size/kind to compare it to, so any explanation for drop in subs is really just speculation.
    You are so wrong it is amazing. Wrath started, ie TBC ended, with 11.5 million players. There are huge posts about it all over the place. The HIGHEST the population got during Wrath was a touch over 12 million. Wrath gained at most 1 million players, at most and that is a generous number.

    I didn't mind wrath, miuns ToC and different items 10/25s. I would love to see it come back. I would just love TBC back more.

  7. #187
    He shares most of my thoughts, if not mirror them exactly. But his opinion on the matter and views upon it have been apparent and well known for awhile now. I don't see how anyone who hasn't followed WoW and what made the past more successful when compared to the present didn't see his view. Maybe I took it for granted since I follow a lot of these threads myself.

  8. #188
    I'm not sure I agree with him. I think successful games generally have a range of difficulties that suit a wide range of people. Games that are too hard will have few players because they cant finish them or even do them at all. Games that are too easy are boring, completed too quickly, and discarded. Those levels are different for everyone so to keep everyone playing there has to be more difficulty levels.

    The difficulty levels in BC were just different. They were leveling, dungeons, and raids. Now its LFR,normal raids, heroic raids since raiding has taken over as the perceived representation of the game. And theres content that is more exclusive now than raiding was in TBC: heroic raids.

    So Wrath, successful, many raid difficulties(after Ulduar which had 10 and 25 mode HMs) 10man, 25man, 10 heroic, 25 heroic.
    Cata, not so great, not as many difficulties: normal, hard and the new LFR basically saved the expansion

    I agree somewhat about whether to listen to the players about what they want or not. A lot of the time people don't say what they want but something else or they don't even know what they want. Using data to see them show what they do or like in the game might be better than reading forums.

  9. #189
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    Quote Originally Posted by Destil View Post
    Jesus Christ I just gained a lot of respect for that guy.

    He's one of the most logical people I've seen talk about WoW from a neutral standpoint and defend it properly.
    I don't think he really has a neutral standpoint. He clearly has a particular preference. However, he's clear and not condescending in articulating it.

    But the fact that he states what he believes in a levelheaded manner doesn't make his the best strategy.

    The most obvious thing is that WoW is a monthly subscription based game, and people want something for their $15/month. And they should have it, and with some respect to egalitarianism.

  10. #190
    Can someone explain to me why not participating in content that is available to everyone is being confused with exclusion? Is there any other game that this mentality applies to?

  11. #191
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    Quote Originally Posted by adorich View Post
    This could be true. Wow has less of a journey than it once had, but putting the journey or "the carrot on the stick" back into Wow doesn't have to mean creating content only 1% of the community will access. People loved Vanilla because it was new and people loved BC because it released tons of content (zones, dungeons, raids, arena etc.). Saying, 'people loved vanilla or BC because they couldn't access content' makes no sense.

    Mr. Morello is an expert on LOL, not Wow. Greg Street is an expert on Wow and I doubt he knows what Wow needs. If he did, Wow wouldn't be bleeding subs. Experts have opinions that are wrong and can make bad decisions. Being a lead designer doesn't make everything you say true.
    I love TBC becous content wasnt accessable. You mad?

  12. #192

  13. #193
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    Just saying, LoL isn't as active as it used to be aswell.
    On website that had the amount of hours tracking from each gamer that was logged in, Example xFire, LoL used to be far #1 with like millions of hours ahead from every game, it was even the first game that surpassed WoW.
    But since a while, WoW surpassed LoL once again.
    LoL is from #1 active game to #4.
    Quote Originally Posted by Shekora View Post
    Goddamn it, Gimlix, why do you keep making these threads?
    Quote Originally Posted by Sam the Wiser View Post
    Goddamn it, Gimlix, why do you keep making these threads?

  14. #194
    Love Riot, and now love Morello. His stance is perfectly accurate and explains in a few sentences what WoW has gone through over the years.
    "I realized it is the struggle itself that is the most important. We must strive to be more than we are. It does not matter that we will never reach our ultimate goal. The effort yields its own rewards." -Data

  15. #195
    This is my opinion on the whole issue of exclusivity and, on a larger scale, what Blizzard has done with WoW.

    First I'll say I can understand why they would want to let a lot of players see all the content they make. Perhaps not at every difficulty, but all of the content, dungeons and story that they create. This makes sense from a point of view of a business, which is what Blizzard is, and when you look at it from one perspective it looks like it is the best route to go: more people see content, they beat it, and then want more. It grabs those who weren't able to get into raids before and makes them feel like, for the most part, something new will be available either shortly in the future, or just after a while of waiting.

    The problem is that, in my opinion, the stance has extended its reach beyond what kept WoW feeling like a game.

    There has been an absolutely massive focus on convenience instead of on making the world of warcraft feel like a world you would want to be immersed in. Things like LFG, LFR, (to a somewhat lesser extent) cross-server battle grounds, and other things implemented for convenience purposes detracted from WoW feeling like a game.

    It would be like if you were playing Skyrim, and every single dungeon in that game were already on your map, and you could instantly teleport to it without having to find it or go out and explore it. Then, when you arrive, you enter the dungeon, are told what boss is ahead of you, what moves they know, and how you can kill it best. It will also tell you exactly what loot CAN drop, provides you with in your face notifications of what spell a boss is casting, and when any other opponents could come out and attack you.

    World of Warcraft stopped being a game for me. Instead, it became something more of a grind. The game lost its enchantment by having everything be simplified, made extremely efficient, and by having content consumed at such an enormous pace that it's like eating a meal filled with MSG. You'll just be hungry again in a little bit. I felt like dungeons and even raids, up until about Wrath or so, were like a huge meal, with a giant turkey leg, huge amounts of stuffing, and just so much you would need to take your time to get it all done. You would need to get through earlier content to reach the new stuff, but that was okay because that content was not only new, but that gear that was available then was the best you could get until you could work your way up. The content had a real sense of progression, and it gave you a feeling like you could constantly improve yourself and earn your way to seeing more content.

    I know not everyone is going to agree with me, but I look at WoW, and I talk with my friends, and we all just wonder what happened. It just stopped feeling like a game after a while. It stopped feeling like it was this immersive world, and instead it was this streamlined, breakneck speed game to rush through everything and see everything in the shortest amount of time possible.

    I really, really miss what World of Warcraft was, but it won't change. A guy can always hope though.

  16. #196
    have to mean creating content only 1% of the community will access.
    All people can access raids, in vanilla era too. The problem was that the LAST patchs before an expansion (naxx, sunwell, ruby sanctum, Dragon Soul and the incoming SoO) had always problems:
    -Naxx40: Hard to get 40 users that could afford all naxx (16 bosses) in less than 4 months (why 4 months?, because the player-base moved to BC)
    -Sunwell: Hardest content ingame and some problems in boss monsters.
    -Ruby sanctum: Nobody care about that raid, for player-base, ICC was the las raid.
    -Dragon soul: They changed from hardest content to easy content, If you want difficult, just do heroic modes. And look what happened, all player-base agree that this is the worst raid of WoW.

    Do you think that, with more time to spend in finishing the attunements/raid gear/improves, the player-base could reach the end-game (with some nerfs like ALL patches before)?
    I'm the only one that have faith in the player-base? Really?

  17. #197
    As I've said in the past, "the anticipation of a great reward is greater than the actual reward". That said I agree with the LOL designer and disagree with the path WoW has chosen.

  18. #198
    Quote Originally Posted by Merite View Post
    No, it shouldn't change your opinion, but it's a stronger opinion than yours. As in, while you may disagree with Morello Scott (I do on some points), his expertise simply makes his opinion worth more than yours, maybe not to you, but to anyone else.
    But again in what regard is his opinion stronger ? To go back on the example, if you go to a bookstore and see a book and your friend tells you that the book is really boring and badly written but on the book cover you see "Stephen King : Best book i ever read". So will you buy it because of the more educated opinion ?

    Quote Originally Posted by Brodeo View Post
    Can someone explain to me why not participating in content that is available to everyone is being confused with exclusion? Is there any other game that this mentality applies to?
    Have you ever heard of the concept of difficulty ? Not everybody can do anything, no matter how much they train.

  19. #199
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    I find his comments to be at least reasonable, but I can't help but to notice that he is talking about two completely separate types of games and that his design philosophies as a developer for a MOBA game do not necessarily apply to WoW, even back in TBC times.

    TBC messed a lot of things up that I think Vanilla did better (not necessarily raiding content and the like). It may have been the most popular expansion among the players that were into raiding at the time, but it came at a cost of how the rest of the game was experienced, which is what made me start playing WoW in the first place.

    The game's focus on max level and end game are what truly made the game lose a lot of its original flavour and TBC started this giant snowball by how so much focus was put on end game, which made low level zones a lot less attracting and much less rewarding to progress through compared to how max level was shaping up to be. It also did not help that TBC raiding was very inaccessible because of its attunements and such, which ironically was not necessary for lower level content to feel very rewarding back in Vanilla.

    That's not to say that TBC did not bring some good to the table, but its raiding and dungeon content philosophy was not sustainable in the long run, and the features and ideas that came into fruition during that time are things that are highly despised to this very day, which always makes me highly question how "good" this expansion truly was for WoW's future.

  20. #200
    Quote Originally Posted by Gimlix View Post
    Just saying, LoL isn't as active as it used to be aswell.
    On website that had the amount of hours tracking from each gamer that was logged in, Example xFire, LoL used to be far #1 with like millions of hours ahead from every game, it was even the first game that surpassed WoW.
    But since a while, WoW surpassed LoL once again.
    LoL is from #1 active game to #4.

    That's pretty interesting. Last time I looked at Xfire was about a year ago. At that time, LoL kicked every other game's ass and was way ahead of WoW with several times more users. Pretty surprising that it's below WoW now.

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