Did casuals ruin WoW and if so how?

[Sharein]

And nobody claims the game was crap before WLK, it was good at the time. But what the game was back then is not good enough today.

Exactly this.

The game would've been dead by now if we hadn't got any crossrealm functionalities and sticked to the TBC model. You can't stop servers from emptying out after all.

[Deleted]

I have played since release and I fail to see how the game is ruined? It is still the best mmorpg on the marked. Soon 9 years old.

[Sharein]

Agreed completely. Granted, I'm more of a PvP person, but it's still the same principle. I'm tired of gear being a constant constraint to my fun.

Same. I liked S11 because i could get competitive gear without having to join RBGs or arena teams. Placing too many restrictions on how people play the game makes them frustrated and bored. Raiders are actually the cause of these restrictions.

[Tomana]

The current state of wow is what you "90%" casual crowd wished for and begged blizz for all these years. And yes its dry and dying.

Because early MOP was anything but casual time-wise , which - surprise - made casual players run away.

The casuals and here i mean the "carebears" that get offended if someone criticizes their play in any way, the people that cba to learn the class and the game altogether and lots of other issues

Yeah, because in BC, everyone did that. Which is why I ran into strength-gemming mages in BC... oh wait.

I'm glad I played in the times when everything wasn't dumbed down and thrown in your face, when I couldn't see all the content so easily but that pushed me more to get better at the game to reach that.

Yet BC was simpler to play for me than MOP. Healing? Hurr, 2 buttons (both single-target) and I'm good, whoop-de-doo. Now I have a lot more tools to play with. Talk about dumbed down.

The point where the train derailed must have been wotlk because I really can't remember in tbc tons of people complaining about the game. Most people where too busy playing it and enjoying what they wanted. Tons of guilds only managed to clear Kara and that was enough and quite the amazing experience in itself.

Which is why you had guild poaching and associated drama all over the place. Clearly it's because people enjoyed raiding only Kara /sarcasm

[Sharein]

This. The wannabes talk way, way, way more shit about "bads" and such than actual hardcore elite types do.

Indeed.

And these wannabes are actually the ones who want to remove content from other players because of their entitlement issues and think the game should be catered to them and them alone.

[Vorkreist]

Dunno on what private servers you played but people did enjoy raiding only Kara because that was the best they could manage until the 3.0 nerfs.

I won't even bother responding to the previous points because they are plain stupid. If healing was easy to you back then you must have only run normal dungeons and bgs.
From a tanking point of view, tbc was the most challenging period for me. Back when you actually had to pay attention to threat and not smash your face on the keyboard and boom all mobs/bosses stick to you until the end of time.

[Osmeric]

The numbers are not made up those are numbers taken from Blizzard in the TBC era, where Heroic raids didn't exist. The best example would be Naxxramas Vanilla, why do you think they recycled it in LK?

The devs stated that, worldwide, only about 3000 people killed the final boss in original Naxx before BC released.

[MrSaggins]

No casuals didn't kill wow, they paid for it. There's more hardcore content now than ever and ways to distinguish yourself from them. If it upsets you that they get to have pretty gear too then you're not. Superior player, you're just an ass.

[Osmeric]

I played at the start of Cata, and I saw many players leave. They typically mentioned something like, "The difficulty in this game is just too insane for me to deal with at the end of my day. I'm going to check out SWTOR for a bit and then come back. Then again I may not."

SWTOR didn't come out until nearly a year after Cata released. Perhaps you meant Rift?

[Annu]

I don't think it's casuals who killed WoW.

Of course, casuals complained when they did not manage to get through the content within the patch cycle. However, the majority did not ask for a super easy mode where you simply run brain afk through the content without any effort.

In WotLK progression meant to see the content. For me, this was the biggest reward in the game and good gear was your tool to progress further into it. Today, you queue for LFR and you do not just see the content slowly, you run through it. So all that is left as progression is the gear. That's why so many people are complaining about the gear grind. It's all that is left for motivation.

Today WoW seems to me like a single player game where you download a trainer and switch to god mode. Funny for the moment, but no long term motivation. That's just bad game design and neither requested by the casuals nor the hardcore gamers.

[Osmeric]

OK, so most people playing the game are bad.

What's amusing is when you see comments of the form "if you haven't done X by time Y, you are bad" on the forums, then go look up the stats, and discover this means that poster considers 90+% of the players to be "bad".

[Pann]

The devs stated that, worldwide, only about 3000 people killed the final boss in original Naxx before BC released.

It is crazy that armed with information, especially when SWP saw similar levels of completion, they have continued with raiding as the premier content for so long and have done so little to cater to the majority of players.

[Saffa]

Sup everyone so ive been playing WoW since about the start of BC and I know back then it was harder trying to clear content and the game in itself was a lot harder since there was no LFR or group find for anything plus you had to flyout to the actual instance. So basically if you werent in a hard core raiding guild you werent going to see any content. Ive seen a lot of posts on other forums talking about how WoW has been dumbed down to the point where its unplayable now and everyone is blaming the casual player for this. My question is how exactly did the casual "ruin" WoW?

Remove the 7 million casuals and the less than 1m players would lose rather a lot of content. Remove the hardcore players and who would notice.

[Vinno]

Casuals (LFR) = Happy

Wannabie Hardcore (Normal) = Unhappy

Real Hardcore (Heroic worlds first guilds) = Happy


It's the wannabies that ruining the game, I notice its them that want to get rid of LFR, because they watch youtube videos from the real hardcores, showing everystep and still cant beat every boss in normal mode even when they go into LFR them selfs to get gear to beat normal LOL.

So they upset and need attention. Usually its the ones that a lacking that need to tell other people are "bad" "lfr ban please"

[Osmeric]

Remove the 7 million casuals and the less than 1m players would lose rather a lot of content. Remove the hardcore players and who would notice.

Yup. Only about 5% of players have downed even J'R in heroic ToT. Maybe 1% have cleared heroic ToT at this point.

- - - Updated - - -

Casuals (LFR) = Happy

Many obviously were not. The sub losses have been large and most of them must have been "casuals".

Personally, I had no interest in doing normal modes this expansion, due to how they were going to be tuned. So I'm in that category, and I'm not terribly happy. I will likely be cancelling my sub after the next renewal cycle and walking away from the game in early November. Why should I, as an LFR-only player, be expected to have any interest in clearing SoO LFR more than once?

[Tomana]

What's amusing is when you see comments of the form "if you haven't done X by time Y, you are bad" on the forums, then go look up the stats, and discover this means that poster considers 90+% of the players to be "bad".

Yes, it's a little bit ironic. Even more so when I see that some of those people didn't even actually finish e.g. BC content.

- - - Updated - - -

It is crazy that armed with information, especially when SWP saw similar levels of completion, they have continued with raiding as the premier content for so long and have done so little to cater to the majority of players.

Well, first, they altered the model in WOTLK - Naxx and the corresponding tier saw far better rates of completion.
Second, there is a very thin line between respectively catering and not catering to the casual players. If you go overboard, people will complain about having nothing to do, if you go the other way, people will have too much to do and quit. The above problem is aggravated in the sub model by the fact that you have to keep enough casual players to make the game bring money, but at the same time make sure they don't run out of casual content. It's a very complicated thing to do and I'm not aware of any sub-based game that managed to pull it off.

[melodramocracy]

What's amusing is when you see comments of the form "if you haven't done X by time Y, you are bad" on the forums, then go look up the stats, and discover this means that poster considers 90+% of the players to be "bad".

Even more humorous is when this comment comes from folks who are in favor of an incoming raid nerf. ie, "if you haven't cleared this by now, you were never going to".

[Vintersol]

No, it's "finance breaker". BC raiding model was hideously inefficient from a financial PoV. Which is why they changed it for LK.

10m subs before WotLK Release. /thread

We talk about 10m people that played the game at a time, where the game wasn't accessible or convenience oriented. We don't talk about a game that had failed in the first months and has start to grow after the ultimate "casual patch".

It was not a stupid decision, because prior to that, a lot of people quitted before lvl 10. I remember the Tauren starting zone in vanilla and I understand how it made some players run away, especially when playing weaker classes.

And now? Subs still dropping, that means people still run away or the game got some bad reputation that avoids new players from testing the game out.

[Deleted]

Wows popularity was at it's height when levelling took weeks of /played and raids were irrelevent to 95% of the playerbase.

Raiding has been made the centrepiece of the game and levelling is measured in hours.

Both the raiding as the only thing to do endgame and the extremely fast levelling paradigm were put in because of forum whinging by hardcore raiders wanting to have raid ready alts and to justify the huge budget spent on raids no one ever saw.

Either of those sub eviscerating changes caused by casuals? Nope.

[Tomana]

10m subs before WotLK Release. /thread

And about 20 million who didn't stay /thread².

We talk about 10m people that played the game at a time, where the game wasn't accessible or convenience oriented. We don't talk about a game that had failed in the first months and has start to grow after the ultimate "casual patch".

We're also talking about a period where there were no MMO competition worth mentioning (except stuff like EQ/LA2 which were even more hardcore), almost no MOBAs, and no F2P games. WoW spearheaded the casual MMO segment from the start, but the market was not the same in 2004 and in 2008. Not to mention the whole MMO market was running close to saturation point, as the total number of subs from all MMOs combined clearly shows.

And now? Subs still dropping

Subs still dropping in a 9 year-old game? Who would have thought that? Heck, original WoW devs probably didn't even expect the game to last this long, much less be the leader on the market after 9 years.

that means people still run away or the game got some bad reputation that avoids new players from testing the game out.

Of course it has bad reputation. 90 levels to go through and reports of huge time commitments required to experience end-game make today's gamers run away. Not to mention the sub cost. They would rather go play LoL/DOTA or some kind of shooter or a F2P game. Big time commitment is soooo '90s-'00s today