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  1. #501
    Quote Originally Posted by Grimble View Post
    Here's the thing: What you think doesn't matter. You're not a participant in a spirited debate, you're a target dummy. This battle is over, and the hardcores lost. LFR is never going away, TBC is never coming back, and you know it. You can piss and whine a bunch of bullshit about how a nine-year old subscription MMORPG could ONLY be losing players due to your idiot pet issue, but nobody takes it seriously. We don't, Blizzard doesn't, and neither does anyone else in the industry.

    Where are the games, jackass? Where are all the super hardcore raiding games stealing Blizzard's thunder? Why has all this bullshit about casualization harming subscriptions apparently not occurred to anyone else anywhere in the entire MMORPG industry? Maybe because you're just some crybaby jackass irrelevant hardcore pitching a bitchfest from the trash heap of history.
    Oh, an internet tough guy! Honestly, I don't really care. I haven't been Blizzard's customer for a long while, and I doubt I'll ever be again. However, it's you who's got his head in the sand. The game has been losing 2 million subs per year on average since late 2010. None of the changes Blizzard has made to "increase accessibility" have done anything to change that trend (and one could speculate that it's in fact the cause of the trend). How long do you think ATVI shareholders are going to sit and watch one of their key properties crash and burn before they force action? But that action won't fix the game though, it's going to be WoW going f2p with microtransactions and pay2win through the nose. I hope you'll enjoy it, because it's inevitable. And with Titan indefinitely postponed there's not going to be anything coming out from Blizzard to take WoW's place for a long time.

  2. #502
    Quote Originally Posted by taurenguard View Post
    I will never understand why people prefered to have to: feed pets with shit, buy vials and poison mats, buy arrows, buy runestones for portals, symbols for paladin buffs and all that crap. I hated all of that stuff...
    Well, if you continue to remove things like that if the new instant gratification crowd does not like it, all that will be left at some day is instant max level and a chest of loot as soon as you log in.

    All of the things people complain were part of a game. Reaching a goal in a game is cool but if the way to the goal is too short because everything in between gets removed it gets old way too fast...

  3. #503
    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    That argument falls completely apart when you consider how this game played while it was growing, and how it plays now while subs declining. Unless you've deluded yourself into thinking that Blizzard is making all the right moves now, it's simply that nearly half the playerbase has left because of 'it's old' or 'other games are f2p'. That's a splendid way of deflecting any blame or shortcomings on the product itself.
    So where are all those highly successful hardcore raiding games again? Where is all the competition gleefully profiting from Blizzard's foolish mistake? Pretty sure RIFT and those other games still don't have an LFR, why haven't any of them gone up a few million subscribers in the last couple of years?

    Spoiler Alert: It's never going to happen. Back when Ultima Online nerfed its unrestricted full-loot PVP, all the gankers crashed the forums for the next few years and screamed about how subscribers were down and it was all because their noisy disliked minority got shafted. It was exactly like this LFR stink. Big surprise, no new "PVP EVERYWHERE" games became big hits, UO continued to chug away to this day, and a minority of disenfranchised hardcores kept shitting up the forum because they had nowhere else to go.

    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    Oh, an internet tough guy! Honestly, I don't really care. I haven't been Blizzard's customer for a long while, and I doubt I'll ever be again.
    Don't worry, I'm sure some hardcore poopsock raiding game will come out any day now and do 12 million subscribers. Yep. Any day now. It's only a matter of time until everyone catches up to your genius and realizes that catering to you is the path to success. Any day now. LOL.
    Last edited by Grimble; 2013-09-06 at 07:16 PM.

  4. #504
    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    I never said that you should simply be awarded gear without even playing.
    You said, and I quote: If you want to work for rewards get a job. WoW is a game.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    I simply said that Blizzard needs to offer diverse content if they want to attract a diverse crowd. If all they offer is raids all they're going to get is raiders, and raiders have historically been a very small segment of the in-game population. If I don't like raiding why should I pay for access to raids?
    Blizzard does offer more diverse content now than ever before. Lots of it for very occasional players And while raiders have always been a minority, raiding has always been THE culmination of PvE gameplay here. This is not some new occurrence.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    In WotLK we had 16 different Heroic dungeons, and I could run one every single night with the expectation of repeating instances maybe twice a month (if that). I had to save up a month's worth of badges to get an upgrade but I was OK with that.
    You will get no argument from me that 5 mans have taken a back seat. MoP's are the most forgettable of any expansion.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    In Cataclysm we started with six new dungeons and two rehashed ones. I could save up justice points, but there was no chance in hell of getting anything better than what had already dropped from those dungeons. If I ran just one dungeon every day I could expect to repeat dungeons weekly. Let me put it another way. As a casual player I only got a third of the content that WotLK had been giving me. If you exclude the rehashed instances that goes down to 1/4 of the content. I was OK with that for a bit because I thought the situation would get better.

    Then the troll heroics hit. Both of them were rehashed raids, gave higher rewards, and had to be queued for separately. So now we're down to only two dungeons to pick from. Now I'm at 1/8th of the content that WotLK provided! Blizzard made some concessions by offering the current tier's gear for VP, and now that I could now reasonably valor cap through dungeons I could purchase raid gear. That didn't change the fact that I only had two dungeons to run and you can only run them so many times before getting bored. So I started to raid FL.
    Again, no argument. Lots was wrong with Cata in regards to 5's rewards (oh hi, chaos orbs), as well as troll heroics.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    My first observation: Shannox and Beth'tilac were easier than Jin'do. Why were their drops 25 ilevels higher? That's kind an an arbitrary "f u" to non-raiders to me.
    This probably had a lot to do with who you were with. I had done several attempts at both of these, and my groups had a lot of trouble with them.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    My second observation: Raiding is boring as hell. Raiders are constantly running one and only one instance on any given week. That gets old fast. The content is consumed in two phases: first you bash your head against the boss repeatedly, imploring everyone to avoid bad things and/or perform their role better. At some point the magic line is crossed and everything becomes second nature. From then on that boss is "on farm" and you're mindlessly hitting them up for gear. The middle ground where you participate in a suspenseful battle to see if you can take down the boss in time lasts maybe two weeks, but outside of that you're either experiencing extreme frustration or extreme boredom. Unlike dungeons, you can't even switch out players or bring in alts to spice things up a bit because one ungeared character derails the whole raid.
    Well, yeah, it's a whole different experience, not always a positive one. If you find it boring, that game element simply isn't for you then. I personally get burned out on raiding far quicker than a lot of players... once a boss is defeated, it's rare for me to really be inclined to go back, even if it means missing out on gear (when I was raiding in a guild back in Wrath, and we finally got LK down, I never set foot in the place again, I was so sick of it)

    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    Blizzard is failing to engage casuals because this is the casual experience that WoW offers now: raid or be bored out of your mind. If you don't like the raiding experience then it boils down to: be perpetually frustrated or be bored out of your mind. LFR doesn't help the casual experience very much, but blaming it for killing raids is overstating the situation. Without LFR the casual experience would suck even more than it already does. No one ever whined for raids. No one ever put in tickets demanding better gear or instant levels. Most players were simply less optimistic than I was. When Blizzard first made their opinion of casuals clear via their early Cataclysm design decisions many casuals saw the writing on the wall and split. The rest of us have just taken longer to come to the realization that it's probably never going to get better. WoW is now a raiders' game that is best left to raiders. I doubt that I'll change your mind, though. Keep believing that casuals won if it makes you feel any better.
    Well, that's the thing. Raiding itself is far far more accessible now than ever before. Even if a person decides to not consider LFR to be 'tru raiding', the mode still prepares people far better for a given boss fight than anything prior in the game, if they should decide that they enjoy it. Beyond that, there's pet battles. More pvp modes and more maps. There's challenge modes. There's world bosses. An expanded DMF. Farming. The Brawlers Guild. On and on. This is the approach they've taken in terms of trying for more variety, for a wider audience. Folks can say 'I don't like it', and that's fine, but it's another thing to simply pretend that the effort towards more casual content doesn't exist.

  5. #505
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  6. #506
    Quote Originally Posted by Grimble View Post
    Don't worry, I'm sure some hardcore poopsock raiding game will come out any day now and do 12 million subscribers. Yep. Any day now. It's only a matter of time until everyone catches up to your genius and realizes that catering to you is the path to success. Any day now. LOL.
    I have no idea why you keep talking about hardcore raiding. I was never a hardcore raider, just a progression raider for 2-3 nights (and a casual in vanilla). The way the game is today does not appeal to me either as a casual nor a progression raider. Just out of curiosity, who do you think the 2 million people leaving the game every year are? Hardcore? No, they're players from all background, all of them finding the state of the game not worth their money or time. Casuals are not happy with the state of the game, bads seem to be though.

  7. #507
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    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    Casuals are not happy with the state of the game, bads seem to be though.
    Of course they are not happy, they got 5.0 with a bajillion dailies after Cata 4.3 and yeah, that caused a massive exodus. But if you think the solution is to return to TBC, you're delusional.
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  8. #508
    Quote Originally Posted by Grimble View Post
    So where are all those highly successful hardcore raiding games again? Where is all the competition gleefully profiting from Blizzard's foolish mistake? Pretty sure RIFT and those other games still don't have an LFR, why haven't any of them gone up a few million subscribers in the last couple of years?
    Seeing that raiding in this game has always been a minority participation activity, I'm not sure what your argument here is (or that you even know what it is, aside from shaking your fists angrily at the screen).

  9. #509
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    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    Seeing that raiding in this game has always been a minority participation activity, I'm not sure what your argument here is
    The argument is: if a more hardcore (or less accessible) game has a potential for gathering millions of subs, why aren't there at least one MMO like that on the market. Except EvE that is, which is crawling in its niche for years now.
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  10. #510
    Quote Originally Posted by Archangel Tyrael View Post
    If something takes more time, it is by definition, harder.

    Also, I take it you never actually tried 4 horsemen back in Vanilla, or KT, or M'uru, etc etc.
    Ummm not at all lol

    By definition if something takes more time its more time consuming and that is all lol

    time consuming does not mean hard at all.

    The rep grind for exalted timermaw reputation for the rep rewards was not hard ... its was mindlessly easy but stupidly boring and took absolutely ages ie took a lot of time, the winterspring sabre mount the same.

    Your naming the few exceptions not the general rule. And even those things that were hard involved daft amounts of grinding to do the prep for them.
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  11. #511
    Quote Originally Posted by Tomana View Post
    Of course they are not happy, they got 5.0 with a bajillion dailies after Cata 4.3 and yeah, that caused a massive exodus. But if you think the solution is to return to TBC, you're delusional.
    It's not about one patch. Go look at the sub graph, there's a very clear -2M/year trend starting in late 2010. Sure you get peaks with xpac releases etc., but the underlying trend is very clear.

  12. #512
    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    I have no idea why you keep talking about hardcore raiding. I was never a hardcore raider, just a progression raider for 2-3 nights (and a casual in vanilla). The way the game is today does not appeal to me either as a casual nor a progression raider. Just out of curiosity, who do you think the 2 million people leaving the game every year are? Hardcore? No, they're players from all background, all of them finding the state of the game not worth their money or time. Casuals are not happy with the state of the game, bads seem to be though.
    Every single market-leading MMORPG since the dawn of the genre has begun to decline in subscribers around the six or seven year mark. Every. Single. One. American ones, Asian ones, all of them. Every single time it happens, some slobbering dipshit thinks he can blame it on his pet idiot design issue.

  13. #513
    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    You said, and I quote: If you want to work for rewards get a job. WoW is a game.
    My point was that gear is not a reward. It's just part of the game. It goes without saying that if you want to experience parts of the game you have to actually play the game, but you're going further than that. You're saying that players need to engage in repetitive in-game tasks for a certain amount of time to experience the "privilege" of accessing parts of it. At that point you're not playing any more. You're working. The sooner you quit viewing gear as a reward for your "hard work" the sooner the rage will subside.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    Blizzard does offer more diverse content now than ever before. Lots of it for very occasional players
    Here are your examples of content that appeals to occasional players and why they don't actually appeal to occasional players:

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    Well, that's the thing. Raiding itself is far far more accessible now than ever before. Even if a person decides to not consider LFR to be 'tru raiding', the mode still prepares people far better for a given boss fight than anything prior in the game, if they should decide that they enjoy it.
    Raiding doesn't appeal to casual players. LFR wasn't a concession to casuals. It was Blizzard justifying their decision to focus on hardcores by claiming that the content is now for casuals too. The fact that it prepares casuals for real raiders is a boon for real raiders, but not for casuals. If casuals wanted to raid they could have done so prior to LFR. The reason LFR is so popular is that there's nothing else to do.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    Beyond that, there's pet battles.
    That's solo content, and my I own just about every Pokemon game there is because daughter was a huge Pokemon fan (and probably still is). That's not worth $15 a month to me.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    More pvp modes and more maps.
    WoW is not a PvP game. It's seldom properly balanced. If I want to PvP I'll play an RTS or a FPS. League of Legends is free to play as well. I'm sure that WoW PvP appeals to some, but it certainly doesn't appeal to most casuals.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    There's challenge modes.
    I tried. Getting a team together for challenge modes was even harder than trying to get a raid going. I might add that this feature was not targeted at casual players either. It was intended to be a competitive activity.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    There's world bosses.
    That's fun once or twice. I'm not going to remain subscribed just so I can faceroll world bosses once a week.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    An expanded DMF.
    DMF is one week a month and amounts to just another set of dailies. It's also a solo activity.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    Farming.
    Solo activity.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    The Brawlers Guild.
    Solo activity with DPS checks that give huge advantages to players in raid gear.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    On and on.
    By which I assume you mean dailies. Solo activity.

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    This is the approach they've taken in terms of trying for more variety, for a wider audience. Folks can say 'I don't like it', and that's fine, but it's another thing to simply pretend that the effort towards more casual content doesn't exist.
    The effort exists but it has been minimal. Challenge Modes are just speed runs on existing content that was tuned to be harder than its default faceroll difficulty. The other stuff you mentioned is aimed at two other groups of players: PvPers and solo players. That's not a very diverse crowd. At least in Cataclsym you could get casual guild members fired up about a bear run. Now what are you going to do? Kill a world boss with the first 35 strangers who consent to join your group? Faceroll a 466 ilevel dungeon for the 100th time in your 500+ LFR gear?

    Quote Originally Posted by melodramocracy View Post
    And while raiders have always been a minority, raiding has always been THE culmination of PvE gameplay here. This is not some new occurrence.
    For you, maybe. I knew plenty of people in WotLK who were perfectly happy with Pit of Saron, Halls of Reflection, and Forge of Souls as the culmination of their experience. Just because you always view raiding as the culmination of your PvE gameplay doesn't mean everyone else did. I'm sure you weren't alone in that view, but you were far from the majority.

  14. #514
    "Hey look guys, a subscription fantasy MMORPG has mysteriously begun losing subscribers about six or seven years after release! This is new and exciting and must be because of some design decision I will now comment upon!"

    You can fucking tell which "hardcores" never played an MMO before WoW.

  15. #515
    Deleted
    Please guys lets use words like hardcore or casuals in the right way. Í read here from alot of people that theyre playing wow kinda hardcore. The only people playing hardcore wow are top 5-10 Guilds. They play in progress 12-15 hrs a day for sometimes weeks. Guilds playing 5 hrs 5 time a weeks still seems hardcore for casuals but compared to other hardcore games thats nothing.
    And the word Casual says nothing about the quality of players just about their time effort. And dont get fooled, noone at blizzard listens to either casuals nor nolifers, they just look at statistics and want to keep as much players as possible to earn more. Every game change is an attempt to get new players and keep old subs.

  16. #516
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    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    It's not about one patch. Go look at the sub graph, there's a very clear -2M/year trend starting in late 2010. Sure you get peaks with xpac releases etc., but the underlying trend is very clear.
    No it's not about one patch, it's about a series of blunders. Just prior to Cata, WOW was at maximum. Then we have idiotic Cata (harder 5-mans, not so accessible raiding, esp. 10 man). Then 4.3 comes out and LFR as well, the fall slows down. Then we have a year of DS (because so much effort was put into redoing the old world) and then we have MOP.
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  17. #517
    Casuals didn't ruin WoW, Blizzard did by making everything accessable to anyone who bothered to press "join queue" with the raid finder.

  18. #518
    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    Don't you think that if you actually could do that, then people wouldn't be here complaining? In theory, sure, you can do anything. The problem is that the practice is very different from theory. On my realm we had dozen solid 25-man end-game guilds on both factions from TBC to Cata. Now there are none. Zero. I'd like to do 25 man progression raiding, but I cannot.

    The root of the problem here is that they try to use the same content for everyone. Create different sets of content for different groups and bulk of the problems disappear. Sure there will be some kids whining that someone else has some toys they don't, but that's unavoidable in a game full of kids.

    Let's see:

    Bliz introduces the ability for entire guilds to transfer off servers and next thing you know a majority of the raiding guilds on my server transfer off.
    Bliz has a half off sale one weekend and the next thing you know your server is pretty much dead.

    Funny part about all of this? Just about every person I know that left my server for the mega servers still aren't raiding.


    Did LFR cause either one of these issues? No.

    Know what the biggest gripe I hear from my friends that have transferred to mega servers is? People expecting everyone to already have a full clear of normal in order to run normal mode.

    LFR isn't the problem, the problem that has existed since BC: you must outgear the content in order to run the content.

    Not everyone looking for people for a group is like this but there's enough that are. And then people bitch because "OMG, people don't have to meet stupidly high requirements anymore to run the current tier."

    ------------------------------------------------------------------
    Let's go back an expac or two:

    BC: in all heroics you had to use CC etc. Heroics were "hard".

    LK: Did you know that hunters finally got a flying frost trap back then? Do you know how often I used it in any heroic dungeon? Never. Heroics were faceroll from the beginning. This is also when WoW hit it's peak.

    Cata: because people bitched because of faceroll heroics, Bliz decided to start requiring CC again ON TOP OF changing the healing model. What made things difficult here: 1) you have part of a player base that has never had to use CC before because they had started in Wrath and 2) a lot of healers did not like the healing model. To top that off, 10/25m raids shared a lockout and gear. People started leaving in early Cata. Entire raiding guilds were breaking up due to the difficulty of tier 11. To help with the hemorrhaging, Bliz implemented LFR.

    MoP: the heroics are more faceroll than any of the Wrath ones were, but then you hit a brick wall stepping into MV.

    But no, let's keep blaming the casuals. The nostalgic "BC was better raiders" had no part in any of the reasons why people left.
    Last edited by taheen74; 2013-09-06 at 09:04 PM.
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  19. #519
    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    For you, maybe. I knew plenty of people in WotLK who were perfectly happy with Pit of Saron, Halls of Reflection, and Forge of Souls as the culmination of their experience. Just because you always view raiding as the culmination of your PvE gameplay doesn't mean everyone else did. I'm sure you weren't alone in that view, but you were far from the majority.
    The game itself wraps up nearly every major story arc through the raid experience for as long as there's been expansions. I don't need my anecdotal experiences to prove this, that's how the game is, and has been, designed for anyone interested in the PvE side of things.

  20. #520
    Quote Originally Posted by Tomana View Post
    No it's not about one patch, it's about a series of blunders. Just prior to Cata, WOW was at maximum.
    If you're looking for where the blunders started, you need to look at where the subscriber trend changed significantly. That would be the very beginning of WotLK. Subs grew quickly and steadily all through vanilla and TBC. In WotLK they peaked just after release and just before Cata, but those peaks were not significantly above TBC end numbers, and basically the sub count remained at the TBC end levels throughout. And Cata was not some return to TBC style. It still had LFD, it still had easymode and 10 man raids, it still had badge gear. It wasn't fundamentally different, a slightly more tightly tuned but then again you couldn't have any lower tuning than the end of WotLK where you literally just ran through stuff non-stop spamming your aoe.

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