Did casuals ruin WoW and if so how?

[Glorious Leader]

Why are you bothering with LFR, don't you have normal ToT down?

At one point i had to catch up in this game. Never mind playing an alt. It's hard to escape LFR believe me I tried. It's so god damn pervasive.

[Friskyrum]

Casuals have not ruined this game once, I have been playing it the same way I have for years.

[LeperHerring]

So without LFD and taking even longer to fill the group people would somehow enjoy being at the mercy of one player making a mistake?

It's a multiplayer game, you're supposed to be a team where everyone's actions affect everyone else. If you don't want to be at the mercy of one player making a mistake, you should not be playing an MMORPG, your should be playing an single player RPG. That's one of the things that LFD removed from WoW and it pretty much killed any depth from 5-mans by turning it essentially into a solo experience. They might as well not even bother with grouping real players and just give you NPC team mates who don't even matter.

There was plenty wrong with TBC heroics ranging from attunements to classes being excluded for lack of CC abilities.

The original attunements were harsh, I'll give you that. However, not every class and spec needs to be able to do everything. As long as the lack of CC is compensated by some other skill, there's no problem. And yes, you wanted to have CC in your group, but not every member needed to have it. It's another aspect where TBC 5-mans had actual depth that was later lost; you had to actually think about your group composition, not just get any randoms and zerg through.

Without a guild behind you it was unlikely that you'd ever get to see a heroic in TBC.

Utter and total nonsense. I did a ton of TBC heroics before I joined a guild. You didn't need a guild, you just needed to not be bad and build your own friends list.

[Pann]

It's a multiplayer game, you're supposed to be a team where everyone's actions affect everyone else. If you don't want to be at the mercy of one player making a mistake, you should not be playing an MMORPG, your should be playing an single player RPG. That's one of the things that LFD removed from WoW and it pretty much killed any depth from 5-mans by turning it essentially into a solo experience. They might as well not even bother with grouping real players and just give you NPC team mates who don't even matter.

You are missing the point and quite frankly your reply has little to do with my post. When a group of four players can play to the best of their ability and still wipe because one player makes a mistake this is bad design having to manually form a group, which from experience could take just as long as running the actual instance, does not change this.

The original attunements were harsh, I'll give you that. However, not every class and spec needs to be able to do everything. As long as the lack of CC is compensated by some other skill, there's no problem. And yes, you wanted to have CC in your group, but not every member needed to have it. It's another aspect where TBC 5-mans had actual depth that was later lost; you had to actually think about your group composition, not just get any randoms and zerg through.

If you were a DPS and did not have CC in TBC you did not run heroics unless you were with a bunch of friends/guild mates. Thinking about group composition usually came down to take the hunter, mage or rogue before other classes I would hardly call that depth.

Utter and total nonsense. I did a ton of TBC heroics before I joined a guild. You didn't need a guild, you just needed to not be bad and build your own friends list.

It would appear that your experiences differ from mine and many others'. If people were able to run heroics as easy as you were then there would not have been as many players using battlegrounds to gear up in TBC.

[DrSteveBrule]

Blizzard can't make players do anything. They can only provide players with things they want to do.

You seem to forgot we are the ones paying them.

Fine. Semantics aside I think it's very doable to provide such enticement to players they'll do things they wouldn't do otherwise.

And this attitude that's so pervasive in the community of "we hold the stacks" needs to go. This is precicely why entitlement became such a buzzword.

[Alphadruid]

So, you think someone asking Blizzard to do something that would be contrary to their business interests, and someone asking Blizzard to do otherwise, are equivalent?

Casuals are in the enviable position that their interests, and Blizzards, are in closer alignment than are the interests of the entitled elitists. So the casuals don't have to make a self-serving argument; they can get the same effect with a principled one.

Yet every time Blizzard designs the game around casuals, they lose subscribers, player activity goes down, ect. How is that in their best interest? A subscriber fee based game makes money by keeping subscribers.

The exact opposite of your post is true. The overwhelming market trend within PC games is away from casual gaming. Compare the success of LoL to the steady decline of WoW or the semi-flop of SWTOR when players reached the very easy end game. Even Eve Online is seeing minor growth despite being very old and having the least intuitive UI ever. The same trend is even repeating itself on the console market, with Nintendo's accessible,casual Wii getting spanked by the other consoles.

The "casual players" have an overwhelming sense of entitlement, not just to game rewards from content they are not playing, but also to control of the development direction of the game. If you don't believe that, go read the official WoW forums. It's filled with LFR players explaining why they cannot or should not be asked to anything before they get rewards from the most recent raid content. As I'm typing this I'm reading a thread where a casual player said that work in real life is their job and they don't want to have to demonstrate competency to defeat the most current raid content. And lots of other casuals are chiming in saying they agree...

Blizzard has been feeding that attitude for years with features like LFG and LFR and by maligning the more hardcore end of the player spectrum. But it's an approach to game design that can only lead to failure and has been failing since Tier 13.

[FluFF]

Yet every time Blizzard designs the game around casuals, they lose subscribers, player activity goes down, ect. How is that in their best interest?

The overwhelming market trend within PC games is away from casual gaming. Compare the success of LoL to the steady decline of very casual WoW.

How can u compare LoL to WoW or even say LoL strays away from casual play ?

It's a MOBA , it has 4 buttons to look for ( 6 if you include 2 high cd spells ) and it's as casual as it gets ( games vs bots , tutorial games, low ELO nubfests )
Only ''Hard'' thing about LoL are the events where pro teams battle it out, even soloQ ranked is just a bunch of Guido's dreaming to become pro.

Not to mention LoL will give you cancer after playing for 5 hours cause in that time your mum will have gotten flamed 680 times, someone told u to go die 560 times and you will have seen the word idiot or noob 890 times.

[Pann]

Yet every time Blizzard designs the game around casuals, they lose subscribers, player activity goes down, ect. How is that in their best interest?

The overwhelming market trend within PC games is away from casual gaming. Compare the success of LoL to the steady decline of very casual WoW.

Blizzard cater towards the casual because they are leaving the game, they are trying to stop this and slow down the rate they are leaving. If every single player that has killed the first boss in TOT left tomorrow it would still be less than the losses in each of the last two quarters.

[Osmeric]

Yet every time Blizzard designs the game around casuals, they lose subscribers, player activity goes down, ect. How is that in their best interest?

Clearly, they have failed to find a way to attract the casuals. Apparently Wrath wasn't quite enough, but when they swerved back toward a more hardcore focus in Cataclysm, the results were worse. And now the changes in MoP aren't good enough either. Casuals don't like grind, and they don't like being put into a raid ghetto. An MMO with multiple difficulty levels is inherently hostile to the average player, since it is constantly sending them the message "you suck!"

This doesn't alter their NEED to cater to casuals. That's where the vast bulk of their customers have been; that's where the money is; that's who they have to retain to sustain the game at anywhere near even the current level of cash flow. They have to do better at it. So far, they still focus on the tiny hardcore minority in the overall design of the game. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, and it isn't working.

[Malkazam]

well.. Its like a stairs.

TBC was a great evolution from Vanilla. The game was more easy but with a touch of the past.

If cataclysm was made just after TBC. This expansion would be a success.

But they made WOTLK and all those ''easy for everyone'' type of move and when they came back with a more harder model in the beginning of Cataclysm, everyone was raging that the dungeons was too hard for them

Casual don't ruin the game.. WOTLK ruins it. Great idea, great lore but all those new feature just make it suffocate.. and that why now we have MOP.

[Deleted]

Yet every time Blizzard designs the game around casuals, they lose subscribers, player activity goes down, ect. How is that in their best interest?

I think you've got that the wrong way around.

When Blizzard tailored wow to casuals in Wotlk with pugable raids and easy heroics, they gained more subscribers than ever before, yet when they made the game harder and less casual friendly in Cataclysm they started losing players.

Blizzard either needs to find a suitable compromise in difficulty and accessibility for players of all types, or continue with the trend of providing multiple difficulties.

[Osmeric]

Blizzard either needs to find a suitable compromise in difficulty and accessibility for players of all types, or continue with the trend of providing multiple difficulties.

I think multiple difficulties may actually be the problem. It reduces the psychological reward from the lesser difficulty levels and segregates the player population. It may not be a coincidence that WoW peaked at about the time they introduced multiple difficulty levels.

This doesn't mean a single difficulty level should be "hard", btw. Rift tried that, and suffered greatly for it.

[LeperHerring]

You are missing the point and quite frankly your reply has little to do with my post. When a group of four players can play to the best of their ability and still wipe because one player makes a mistake this is bad design having to manually form a group, which from experience could take just as long as running the actual instance, does not change this.

If what one person does in the group doesn't matter (i.e., they can't cause you to fail), then the content is poorly tuned. If it's a 5-man heroic instance, then it should require all 5 players to play well in order to clear.

If you were a DPS and did not have CC in TBC you did not run heroics unless you were with a bunch of friends/guild mates. Thinking about group composition usually came down to take the hunter, mage or rogue before other classes I would hardly call that depth.

That's not a problem with TBC model, it's a problem with Blizzard's class design. Classes without CC should've gotten something equally valuable to the group. And anyway, it's not as black and white as you say, players without CC did run heroics although it was definitely harder to get a group.

It would appear that your experiences differ from mine and many others'. If people were able to run heroics as easy as you were then there would not have been as many players using battlegrounds to gear up in TBC.

I don't know a single player who couldn't have done heroics, including you. It just didn't happen. Sure it was more challenging to get a group, but if you were an average skilled player with decent social skills, you could do heroics.

[Alphadruid]

I think you've got that the wrong way around.

When Blizzard tailored wow to casuals in Wotlk with pugable raids and easy heroics, they gained more subscribers than ever before, yet when they made the game harder and less casual friendly in Cataclysm they started losing players.

Blizzard either needs to find a suitable compromise in difficulty and accessibility for players of all types, or continue with the trend of providing multiple difficulties.

That's not correct though. Wow had 11.5M subscriber at the end of the Burning Crusades, which was the most hardcore expansion in the games history. WOTLK peaked the game at 12M.

All of that growth WoW had in vanilla and TBC pretty much stopped in Wrath of the Lich King. The game peaked early in the expansion at 12M, actually lost players, and then recovered the 12M number at the very end of the expansion by ICC/Arthas hype.

The contrast between WoW's incredible success during the Burning Crusades and the minor decline it saw during WOTLK is significant. There was even an article not so long ago where the lead designed for LoL publicly called out GC on these facts, saying how TBC had the casual/hardcore right and so on.

[FluFF]

WotLK actually peaked at 14.2M in the first 6 months, can't find the link but seen it posted on MMO Champ when I was waiting on my Naxx run in feb 2009

[LeperHerring]

When Blizzard tailored wow to casuals in Wotlk with pugable raids and easy heroics, they gained more subscribers than ever before,

Yeah, that didn't happen. Most of WotLK the sub numbers were around the same as TBC end numbers, while there were small peaks right after release and right before Cata. What is a fact, however, is that the sub growth trend that was strong through vanilla and TBC was stopped by WotLK.

[Queen of Hamsters]

No, obviously not. The game isn't ruined for a fact either so...subjective is subjective indeed.
Also, what's the use in "discussing" this silly topic over and over? The game will keep changing, they won't revert it and they won't stop it as long as it keeps being profitable. Play or don't. Simple.

[Alphadruid]

How can u compare LoL to WoW or even say LoL strays away from casual play ?

It's a MOBA , it has 4 buttons to look for ( 6 if you include 2 high cd spells ) and it's as casual as it gets ( games vs bots , tutorial games, low ELO nubfests )
Only ''Hard'' thing about LoL are the events where pro teams battle it out, even soloQ ranked is just a bunch of Guido's dreaming to become pro.

Not to mention LoL will give you cancer after playing for 5 hours cause in that time your mum will have gotten flamed 680 times, someone told u to go die 560 times and you will have seen the word idiot or noob 890 times.

It's more hardcore in that the game doesn't give you rewards because you choose not to play it.

There are no "catch up" mechanisms in LoL. Riot doesn't unlock champions for you because you post on their forums that you're to busy to play league.

[LeperHerring]

WotLK actually peaked at 14.2M in the first 6 months, can't find the link but seen it posted on MMO Champ when I was waiting on my Naxx run in feb 2009

Blizzard has never reported more than 12M subs.

[FluFF]

It's more hardcore in that the game doesn't give you rewards because you choose not to play it.

There are no "catch up" mechanisms in LoL. Riot doesn't unlock champions for you because you post on their forums that you're to busy to play league.

Spend all your paycheck on RP , buy all champs to catch up , profit ?

Also you are not taking a penalty for not owning X amount of champs... I know people who reached Diamond with a pool of 20 champs out of the 112.
Also what does WoW ''reward'' you exactly for not playing ? if anything it's a real time hog ( like any MMO )