Why don't they return to the roots of the game in difficulty?

[Deleted]

The game is losing popularity anyway, why don't they return it to something like "Algalon being hard for the whole of the expansion", no nerfs at all? I know, WoW vanilla wasn't technically "hard", but why not anyway?

[lettuce]

They tried that in Cata. It was not appreciated by most.

[Xalzel]

They haven't nerfed bosses during tier this xpack unless the boss is way overtuned.

[Rankin]

They tried going harder with the start of Cataclysm, and lost a lot of people trying it out.

[HeedmySpeed]

They tried that in Cata. It was not appreciated by most.

They reversed it since and it wasn't appreciated by even more than most.

[lettuce]

I loved it. But doing heroics with non-guild groups took a while. Had to wait til you had people willing to do tactics and/or listen AND not give up because of a death or ten.

[EnclosedOne]

they implemented it way wrong in cata though by making the beginning way too hard for even experienced and well geared players. It should have ramped up in difficulty slowly but instead it was crammed down everyone's throats right from the get go. I'd been playing since the beginning at that time and I considered myself a decent player and was well geared from doing 10/25 lk but it was so bad that I had to switch specs just to be able to continue playing. Not only was the difficutly too hard for the average player but druid got all fucked up and people basically had to relearn the class from the ground up which only added to the difficulty they faced and made them get a shit storm of abuse from shitty/impatient players because they actually had to sit and drink again between every pull.

Anyway, they won't return to vanilla/bc difficulty because too many people want to have everything handed to them on a silver platter using the 'i'm a paying customer' line when in reality they're just too damned lazy to put in the effort to reach a goal.

[Splatter]

LFR is a return to vanilla boss difficulty for the most part. There were exceptions in Naxx and AQ40 ofc but MC was faceroll like LFR is these days.

Normal raid modes are more challenging than normals were in ICC these days as well imo. 10 mans have made things much more tightly tuned with less room to carry people who are busy licking windows.

Personally I think blizzard have branched out more and are offering more content for those who like a challenge (endless proving grounds, heroic raiding, challenge modes etc) as well as more content for those who are not as skilled or prefer a relaxed approach (LFR, Flex raids etc). The community is just full of idiots who can only focus on one thing at a time and like to jump on the bandwagon and complain about anything and everything. The worst thing about wow is by far the community.

[Aesyx]

I think the problem Blizzard faces is that since they have such a large subscription base (it's around 7.5m now if I'm not mistaken?). There's always going to be people who complain about something, large or small. When it comes to this question there's ultimately two big camps. There's the people, mainly active and fairly hardcore (by today's standards), who think bosses are way too easy and that they should be harder. When that group of players have it their way the other group, the more casual players, complain about content being too hard and not being satisfied with having to do LFR.

WoW had it's glory days in WotLK (when it comes to amount of subscribers, around 13m I think?) and it's been on decline since then. Not quality-wise, at least not for me, I'm having as fun as ever, but there's only so much you can do with a game after it's initial release which means there's going to be some recycled fights and so on.

[lettuce]

Cata was fun at release. It was a very weak expansion afterward, yes, but 4.0 was a fun patch.

[Shelly]

The game is losing popularity anyway, why don't they return it to something like "Algalon being hard for the whole of the expansion", no nerfs at all? I know, WoW vanilla wasn't technically "hard", but why not anyway?

Bolded the important part.

The hardest parts of Vanilla and which remained through BC mostly had to deal with travel times and coordination. Other than that actual raid mechanics back then were FAR weaker than what we have now. In most cases where there was a large amount of difficulty it wasn't in the bosses but mob-saturation. Stratholme is a good example of this, where you just had mobs upon mobs walking and patrolling everywhere and so when doing it under duress (timed run) with 9 other people (it used to be a 10-man dungeon) it was flippin' hard not to aggro everything by accident!

Now days bosses are much harder and raiders are much smarter. WoW has not and NEVER HAD lost their core gameplay experience of offering platformer style battles in a group setting.

What WoW has lost over LK through Cat and MoP is a sense of community. Some mechanics they've dumbed down to the betterment of the game - defense level for uncrittable and crushing blows being two major pains in the asses that just didn't matter. But these mechanical changes are paltry compared to the loss of community that got sacrificed to convenience.

No real need to zone broadcast to gain a dungeon group that may turn into a guild, no real server PuGing, very little need to actually populate your friend's list, removal of elite mobs in the open world that questing directs you into that would encourage PuGs.

Now we're seeing the hopeful return of the PuG with Flex raiding. The PuG as often reviled as many people make it out to be is the true proving ground for friends and guildmates. It's how you learn how others play, it's how you get impressed with someone pushing their gear hard and it's how you make real lasting friends. Something that LFR was never able to accomplish, as is it's seldom you see anyone even type hello.

If Flex works in their favor that's what will keep the population stable because PuGs turn into guilds, guilds turn into a social event, social events turn into you inviting real life friends into games which equals higher subscription numbers.

[Terahertz]

They tried going harder with the start of Cataclysm, and lost a lot of people trying it out.

And now they're going the "easy and everyone can get everything"-route and are losing millions of subs.

[Travio]

LFR is a return to vanilla boss difficulty for the most part. There were exceptions in Naxx and AQ40 ofc but MC was faceroll like LFR is these days.

Yeah... people saying MC was hard... probably didn't actually do it or are stuck in rose-coloured glasses mode. The only reason is took any length of time to clear was getting 40 people their fire resist gear.

[Trakanonn]

The game is 8+ years old now, people have a lot of other games to go play if they get bored of WoW. WoW may be the King of MMORPGs still, but we all know which way the trend is going. If they make it hard now adays, itll be a huge deviatrion from the norm and cause people to quit. No going back now without a massive backlash and quitting.

If it were up to me, just stick to Normal modes and ditch the other 3 versions, make expansions come with 3-4 raid zones, each one being harder than the previous, like vanilla. But even then, they cant just do this due to backlash. Everything has consequences, you know?

WoW is a cash cow and will be for a very very long time, Blizzard doesnt need to take huge risks with it. It's an 8 year old game raking in hundreds of millions of dollars.

[Rankin]

And now they're going the "easy and everyone can get everything"-route and are losing millions of subs.

Except they're not really doing that. That's just a massive oversimplification of the game and you know it.

[Plutarch78]

And now they're going the "easy and everyone can get everything"-route and are losing millions of subs.

Right so....damned if you do, damned if you don't. Basically the drop it subs can't be tied to how easy or difficult the game is.

[Deleted]

Seriously...if it was so easy to make a game that attracts people..why isn't it done? Why with all the clever shit you people spout on the forums can a company like Bioware with a franchise like Star Wars NOT compete with WoW?

Why does Rift et al sink to F2p? That is THE ONE question that nobody can answer me.

swtor core concept was bound to cause longterm decline -you can't produce story as fast as people consume.
Rifts target market never gave it a chance. If you ask the wow playerbase you will find out that many are uninformed in terms of the mmo market and wont try others even if disgruntled.


@Op
wow will never be challenging in general cause if you make it challenging to the top 10% you're leaving 90% of the customerbase behind...

[Airwaves]

Vanilla? Hard? Broken maybe but not hard. Heroic raiding now is harder then anything that has ever been in the game besides a few select bosses (pre nerf heroic rag ect.). If you want hard content there is more then ever in the game right now.

[jbombard]

People often confuse difficulty with being time consuming. Leveling was slightly more difficult in vanilla, instanced content not really. Most of the difficulty in vanilla relates to how time consuming the preparation was. Mechanically it wasn't very difficult.

I do think WoW has made a mistake with the super accelerated leveling in the game, and the speed at which you can do things now, it makes it all feel trivial. It took a lot of time to get a full resist set together in vanilla, if you need to pick up gear to run some specific content now it doesn't take very long at all.

[hrugner]

I'd rather them focus on going back to their roots on open world game play, character personalization, progressive content, and resource use. Making stuff hard without making the victory conditions involved is goofy and people hated it last time they tried it.