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  1. #981
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tomana View Post
    In a top guild, you have to do that 4 or 5 days a week during progress. Hardly qualifies as casual.

    - - - Updated - - -



    And the fall following two quarters of stagnation was of ~1 mil, and that was while APs were still active.
    Yes, the initial spike caused by the freebies fell away.

  2. #982
    I am Murloc! Tomana's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by NigelGurney View Post
    Yes, the initial spike caused by the freebies fell away.
    You can't prove the freebies caused that spike to begin with. We don't have the stats.
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  3. #983
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tomana View Post
    You can't prove the freebies caused that spike to begin with. We don't have the stats.
    Never said I could but I consider it a far more likely reason than an in game feature.

  4. #984
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    Quote Originally Posted by Zylan View Post
    An old quote springs to mind that sums up Casuals vs Raiders perfectly.

    "I don't know the key to success but the key to failure is trying to please everyone."

    Basically, casuals are responsible for the vast majority of Blizzards income from WoW, they cannot simply ignore Casuals and at the same time they cannot simply ignore Hardcore raiders either (even if they do account for maybe 1-2% of the entire player base) but all of this comes with a price - Hardcore raiders feel self entitled and believe Blizzard owes them something for nothing as far as constant streams of content goes just because they can do content the average joe cannot. A lot (not all) of casuals think the same about welfare epics, again believe they are owed something for nothing which is why a lot of people are happy by being spoon fed epics.

    Blizzard can't keep everyone happy and constantly trying to do so is only going to damage the game in the long run, look at the numbers as a perfect example

    During TBC: WoW player base was increasing but people were all running around in blues and generally envied guilds that could do harder content (SSC+ most guilds could barely manage Magtheridon and Gruul let alone SSC/TK+ until the end of expansion nerf patch came)

    During WOTLK: WoW was at its absolute peak, the numbers were at such a stable insane level due to the easiness of the expansion and what it offered people who couldn't raid hardcore.

    During Cataclysm: Seen a drastic drop in subs (the main excuse seems to have been "Bored of expansion!") when in actual fact the reality is it was more than likely a case of "No more welfare epics" or very few so game is boring.

    During Pandaria: Again numbers are still falling (even if its slowly they're still going down) - LFR had some what an attraction to the casual base but I feel its still not enough to keep that sector of players happy, being able to buy epics for Justice (yes I said justice) points and get them from other sources rather than relying on coin rolls from LFR seemed a lot more popular among the casual player base than LFR has been.

    TL;DR - Blizzard need to replicate WOTLK some what to start pulling numbers back in again - what they don't want is how easy most of WOTLK was (bar a few select encounters/instances the majority of WOTLK was easy)
    Raiding is completely irrelevent to sub numbers pre end of Wotlk, because of the lack of endgame players in general.

    Raiding was probably almost irrelevent in Wotlk - ofc since cata players have been rushed to endgame asap and the old levelling model has gone away. But this just means that you can't really compare the two eras all that well for these purposes.

  5. #985
    I've been keeping an eye on this thread, and I gotta say, I completely agree with Grimble. Raiding just isn't as important as it once was, and has been getting less and less so as the years and expansions go on. Which probably explains a lot of the dissatisfaction I've experienced with it these past few years (since Wrath).

  6. #986
    Quote Originally Posted by Grimble View Post
    I quit during Cata, but before hitting cap. Were they really that hard? I mean I'm sure they were compared to late-Wrath faceroll heroics, which I fucking loved, but in early Wrath my little guild groups of new 80s in blues and greens were still marking targets and CC'ing and all of that. It wasn't THAT easy until everyone outgeared them by leaps and bounds.
    No they were not hard even at entry level gearing. The only thing hard about them was the concept that you could not just face roll through them on day one like most of the wrath content that had preceded them.
    There is no Bad RNG just Bad LTP

  7. #987
    Quote Originally Posted by PrairieChicken View Post
    You are talking about realm first guilds perhaps.

    You can clear full heroics playing single day
    You can't clear full heroics in a single day until you've outgeared the content. Method is in the lead right now at 13/14H. If what you said was true, Garrosh would have been dead the day they released the final wing of SoO. Those guilds also pull tricks to come as close to outgearing the content as possible. They'll run through normal modes multiple times the first couple of weeks, bringing different characters to each raid in order to funnel all the tier gear to the "main" characters that they're going to run heroics with. Sure, a casual player can just show up to raid 2 hours a week at the end of the expansion when 20/25 members of their raid are fully decked out in full heroic gear for the current tier. For the first few weeks, however, even the best guilds are struggling to kill bosses. Unfortunately many players don't even bother to show up for progression. The pop in a couple of months after their guild has been raiding and then they piggy-back on their guildmates hard-earned gear levels. That's why they're under the misconception that raiding is faceroll easy and that raids can be cleared by good players in scant hours. If you have a group of hardcore raiders that's willing to carry you through content then you can raid casually in just hours a week. Otherwise you're not going to clear heroics until late in the expansion when everything's been nerfed to hell and back. Now that flex raiding is in the picture, however, I don't think heroics will be nerfed anymore. I doubt you'll see many casuals clearing heroic raids this time around.

  8. #988
    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    You can't clear full heroics in a single day until you've outgeared the content. Method is in the lead right now at 13/14H. If what you said was true, Garrosh would have been dead the day they released the final wing of SoO. Those guilds also pull tricks to come as close to outgearing the content as possible. They'll run through normal modes multiple times the first couple of weeks, bringing different characters to each raid in order to funnel all the tier gear to the "main" characters that they're going to run heroics with. Sure, a casual player can just show up to raid 2 hours a week at the end of the expansion when 20/25 members of their raid are fully decked out in full heroic gear for the current tier. For the first few weeks, however, even the best guilds are struggling to kill bosses. Unfortunately many players don't even bother to show up for progression. The pop in a couple of months after their guild has been raiding and then they piggy-back on their guildmates hard-earned gear levels. That's why they're under the misconception that raiding is faceroll easy and that raids can be cleared by good players in scant hours. If you have a group of hardcore raiders that's willing to carry you through content then you can raid casually in just hours a week. Otherwise you're not going to clear heroics until late in the expansion when everything's been nerfed to hell and back. Now that flex raiding is in the picture, however, I don't think heroics will be nerfed anymore. I doubt you'll see many casuals clearing heroic raids this time around.
    He simply meant that a group can clear all bosses on heroic mode within the lifespan of the tier by raiding a one day per week schedule. Not literally all bosses completed in a single raid (although that may be possible for those kinds of groups late in the tier).

  9. #989
    Quote Originally Posted by Glorious Leader View Post
    8/10 in those instances you can attribute the "go kill yourself" to how you phrased or stated the initial comment. If for instance you say "hey scrub here's how you get better" then your probably gonna get a sour response in return. The remaining 2 examples can be attributed to people either having a bad day and not feeling particularly nice (it does happen) or just trolls. In either case the content (in this case lfr) is not promoting it for those players. It's giving an avenue for jerks to jump in and be douches but I know of almost nobody who thinks their king shit because they completed lfr and should theirfor lord over everybody and tell them what's up. That is strictly or almost strictly a raider mentality.

    Do I have a chip on my shoulder against raiders? No not really at least I don't think so seeing as how I was one only a short month or two ago. I've played this game for almost 8 years now on and off. In every raiding guild I've seen the same usual high school drama bullshit. People going livid in officer chat but all silent on vent when one or two guys aren't performing or the group is wiping. Posts in the officer forums out of sight from the general chat. Excluding people on purpose and heated arguments and more drama then I care to remember. It got better as the game went on because I could easily avoid it by simple not running with that group and I got lucky and found a group of people who are relatively free from that (although not completely). It's usual cliquish high school bullshit that these guilds engender. In fact their very nature is that of a clique. That's not to say every single individual member is an asshole but that the overall system promotes cliques. Guilds do have redeeming qualities though. It's just when they devolve into cliques it becomes BS. Like it's good to be social in this game. The game should require you to be more social and meet people and chit chat and so forth. But when that aspect of the game becomes exclusionary then it becomes a bad thing I think. It's like nationalism. Nationalism isn't inherently a bad thing in and of itself. It's just when it becomes we're all Americans except for this minority group here (gays, muslims, etc etc) then it becomes a bad thing.
    Why is it cliquish or bad to want your whole group performing at its best? Most of the time that type of stuff is discussed in O chat because its easier to voice concerns and figure out a problem in there rather then outting the person in vent or G chat. I call that being thoughtful. If you make a habit out of being raid-unaware and/or doing sub par dps, then your damn right I will exclude you on purpose.

  10. #990
    Quote Originally Posted by Vindican View Post
    He simply meant that a group can clear all bosses on heroic mode within the lifespan of the tier by raiding a one day per week schedule. Not literally all bosses completed in a single raid (although that may be possible for those kinds of groups late in the tier).
    And I simply meant that no group can acquire the gear and skill required to clear all the heroic bosses by only raiding one day a week unless it's a marathon 6-hour raid. They can slow down at the end of the tier's lifespan, at which point they've already spent weeks and/or months raiding 4-6 hours a week to acquire the gear to reach that point. Just because after spending months repeatedly clearing a heroic raid a group can attain a gear and skill level that renders them capable of clearing it in a single day doesn't make it a viable play style for casual players. Casual players don't have the scheduling flexibility required to reach that point. Getting carried through a heroic raid in a day isn't going to appeal to casual players.

    My daughter was whining about having to add and subtract a bunch of fractions the other day. Having taken various calculus classes, that stuff is second-nature to me and requires very little effort whatsoever, so I was pretty amused. I still remember, however, being just as frustrated as she was when I was her age. Sure, it takes her two hours to do the work that I can do in five minutes, but I spent many hours myself working through those problems before I got to that point. I don't expect her and her classmates to knock that stuff out in five minutes the way that I can. Why do we set even higher expectations for a mere game?
    Last edited by Ronduwil; 2013-10-01 at 09:53 PM.

  11. #991
    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    You can't clear full heroics in a single day until you've outgeared the content. Method is in the lead right now at 13/14H. If what you said was true, Garrosh would have been dead the day they released the final wing of SoO. Those guilds also pull tricks to come as close to outgearing the content as possible. They'll run through normal modes multiple times the first couple of weeks, bringing different characters to each raid in order to funnel all the tier gear to the "main" characters that they're going to run heroics with.

    ...
    You may want to compare how long it took for world firsts in vanilla/TBC versus MOP. Not in a single day, but world firsts take much less time these days.

  12. #992
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    Quote Originally Posted by UnifiedDivide View Post
    I've never understood this argument of how long bosses took to kill in Vanilla compared to today. Why can't people understand that players have GREATLY increased amounts of information, are MUCH better at the game now and the game is FAR better balanced and isn't full of broken specs these days?
    Especially since Illidan, M'uru and KJ didn't last long. LK HM held up for longer than that.
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  13. #993
    Quote Originally Posted by gee View Post
    You may want to compare how long it took for world firsts in vanilla/TBC versus MOP. Not in a single day, but world firsts take much less time these days.
    That's because the tools are so much better and the competition is so much more intense these days. For one, there were no heroics in Vanilla/TBC. It was 10/25 man. Also, how many world first contenders were spending months clearing the raids in PTR before they went live? Yes, they took less time, but they also took less effort. Don't take my word for it. Take it from the horse's mouth: Exodus Disbanding Facebook Post

  14. #994
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by UnifiedDivide View Post
    Why can't people understand that players have GREATLY increased amounts of information, are MUCH better at the game now and the game is FAR better balanced and isn't full of broken specs these days?
    Although the flipside of your same argument says that the reason could just as easily be that the raids themselves are easier now than they were in the past. There is no way to prove that the skills of the raiders are better now than they were before.

    there have been some very good threads on these forums discussing how the vast majority of skilled raiders have left the game... The top guilds dropping from 25man to 10man is a STRONG indication that there is a serious lack of skilled raiders around right now for example.

    My point is that its only opinion which says raiders are more or less skilled now than in the past. U can never prove it one way or the other.

  15. #995
    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    And I simply meant that no group can acquire the gear and skill required to clear all the heroic bosses by only raiding one day a week unless it's a marathon 6-hour raid. They can slow down at the end of the tier's lifespan, at which point they've already spent weeks and/or months raiding 4-6 hours a week to acquire the gear to reach that point. Just because after spending months repeatedly clearing a heroic raid a group can attain a gear and skill level that renders them capable of clearing it in a single day doesn't make it a viable play style for casual players.
    With as many bosses as SoO has, sure, it wouldn't be possible in a single raid. But something along the lines of Firelands, or Dragon Soul, yeah, it happened (one raid day per week heroic clearing groups).

    However, this is no longer a discussion about gear and skill, but available time and scheduling convenience.

  16. #996
    Quote Originally Posted by Vindican View Post
    With as many bosses as SoO has, sure, it wouldn't be possible in a single raid. But something along the lines of Firelands, or Dragon Soul, yeah, it happened (one raid day per week heroic clearing groups).

    However, this is no longer a discussion about gear and skill, but available time and scheduling convenience.
    I know it happened in Dragon Soul. At the end of the expansion. However, Dragon Soul was first released at the end of November. Heroic Madness was first killed at the end of December. The guild who did that spent far more than one hour per week. Competitive guilds were raiding pretty much non-stop for that first month, employing tactics like clearing normal modes with multiple characters in order to funnel as much tier gear as possible to their main characters. Even once they got that first full clear done I'm sure their raids still took 2-4 hours per week. Once the majority of the group was decked out in full 410 heroic gear and the mobs were nerfed then the clears ran into the 45 minute range. That doesn't change the fact that those players running the 45 minute clears had been raiding for 2-4+ hours per week for weeks or even months before getting to the point where they could clear the raid in less than an hour. The only players clearing heroic raids exclusively on one hour a week were the ones who got carried through them.

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