I'm not saying it's a bad business decision at all. Just that I'm in the minority, so is the OP, and so are many Vanilla folk who are continuously griping these days. We griped when TBC hit and now we look back on it fondly. We griped hard when WotLK hit and with each patch within and continued to moan through Cata and MoP killed off quite a lot of Vanilla loyalists.
So what I suggest to those in the minority is to do what I do-- become the architects of your own reality. Make your own guild and surround yourselves with like minds. Pay no heed to the LFR crowd, the meta changes, and make the game your own on whatever terms available to you.
It's such a great game and even though decent people are hard to come by, they're out there. Assemble them and enjoy the content
The "free lvl 90 with WoD purchase" is exactly the type of thing that helps both convenience AND community. As long as they keep adding options for old players to pick the game back up easily and new players to learn quickly/catch up relatively quickly, I don't see why the two have to be at odds.
The three features you listed are all optional to use. You are more than welcome to find servermates to form dungeon/raid groups on your own. Blizzard did not force anyone to stop communicating on their servers, lazy players did. I do play on a med-low pop server even after a few mergers and usually have pre made groups for LFD, and can usually get 10-15 for LFRs. The convenience options have not stopped me or my friends from being a community.
Yes for any individual it is a choice, but I'm talking about the community at large and whether or not it damages it.
It does seem that people will chose convenience over what's best for them though.
"When asked about password protecting their mobile devices:
More than half of respondents said they do not use a password or PIN to lock their smartphone or tablet
44 percent who do not lock their mobile devices said that using a password is “too cumbersome"
30 percent who do not lock their mobile devices said they “are not worried about the risk”" http://confidenttechnologies.com/new...-over-security
"It's Convenience, Not Cost, That Makes Us Fat" http://www.forbes.com/sites/bethhoff...-makes-us-fat/
And the study they cite http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...y.2009.26/full
The thread has always been named "Convenience vs Community".
"Anyway, ..." as in "getting off that tangent", didn't seem to have been clear, which I've admitted.
yay for cynicism.
A potential solution to some of the botting may be to make PvP gear more accessible through PvE, i.e. If the intersection of viability for PvE/PvP gear were (much) more substantial. This may also help bring the community close together, as many PvP'ers would potentially be more willing to PvE if the gear wasn't so nearly worthless for PvP, and vice versa.
Also I'm sorry if my original post made it sound to others like "No convenience is good convenience".
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One of the problems with using data on a piece of art, is that you can't pin down any one aspect of it to guarantee success. Some basic quality things are objective, but not much else. And even that objective quality may not be contributing to popularity. i.e. Tech graphics, bugs, and performance are objective. Art style, gameplay, fun, are subjective.
And getting good data from polling the community is also another hurdle, as other's have brought up about why they have cancelled.
"It's something that's been really bothering us for awhile," a visibly befuddled Newell told The Noble Eskimo. "The odds of this happening are even less than a billion-to-one. In fact, this is without a doubt the least likely thing that has ever happened on this planet. 93% of our more-than 30 million users were born on January 1st. It's incredible." http://www.thenobleeskimo.com/steamusers.html
WoW is still a game in relatively uncharted territory. Never before or since has anything in the genre been nearly this popular. They have some examples of people chasing their coattails but not much of people just trying their best to be better and becoming serious competition. Blizzard has name recognition, and $. Promotion is easy with $, and certainly a huge factor in popularity.
Testing is also extremely hard for Blizzard. On PTR/Beta people know there is no investment in the game, and it's not very long-term (though I think it could be a little interesting of a test to see how people cope with not having the features). In a focus group, it may not even be the kind of person who cares/would play your game in the first place. If only Blizzard could do longitudinal studies on the matter. But then again, it's also art, and there's never going to be a theory of MMORPG success, just suggestions.
The first few months of Cataclysm with the giant slide started weren't noticeably more convenient than WotLK. So whatever your reasoning is, it doesn't take that into account.
Common sense though will tell you a couple of things:
1. Video games and other entertainment products are considered disposable by most people. In other words, they buy them, they play them a while, they move on to something else. WoW has had a good run. For a lot of reasons, increased competition and some serious mistakes reading their player/customers, it's now on a glide path from its peak which was improbably high to begin with.
2. Trying to convince anyone that the game needs to be less convenient to be more attractive to the average player of games is a non-starter. We're not talking about your 10% elite players here. Just the average kid or adult that has heard something and makes a purchase to see what's going on.
It's perfectly fine to have your opinions. You're on shaky ground when you start trying to connect cause-and-effect without any actual hard data to support your thesis. Blizzard thinks that just about the most popular thing to do during Wrath, running heroics which were easy and fast, suddenly became a real problem when random 5-man groups failed repeatedly on them in Cataclysm. They made an expansion which played precisely to elite players and lobbied the players hard with all of the usual BS about aspiring to play better and bring the player not the class and how dungeons should be hard. They were wrong. Damage was done, however and a lot of people found it easier to quit for those and other reasons.
I don't think for a minute that a great number of people sat at their computers every night watching their random heroics go down in flames after an hour or more of trying to finish them or trying to make adjustments to the healing they knew from Wrath and logged off angrily stating "The game is just too damn convenient!"
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
Of course not, but they were probably pretty surprised that after the game handing them everything else at every step of the way, they suddenly came upon challenges they had not been prepared for by any other portion of the game. Maybe they wouldn't point to convenience, but they were pointed to their fate by that convenience.
I'll take community
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people - Martin Luther King, Jr.
I'm not entirely sure of what OP's thread was meant to promote discussion about but I assume it concerns LFR/LFG. Frankly I think these were a big part of ruining WoW. They destroyed the community which is ultimately why people should be playing the game (that said there are a lot of casuals you just want to farm all day and ignore everyone else).
To put it shortly:
No LFG forced players on a server to work together. You made friends, you blacklisted dicks.
LFG means no community since pugs form which are often cross server. You likely won't see these people ever again, so who cares how you treat each other?
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
The number 1 cause of popularity decline is loss of novelty, the game isn't new anymore, the genre isn't new anymore, so people are used to it, and it loses a lot of its appeal.
The number 2 cause is over convenience which leads to immersion loss.
Loss of novelty isn't something that will kill WoW, although immersion loss may (eventually)
Huh? The only thing removed was Have Group Will Travel. What other convenience was removed? And what is worse... tell me about what kind of convenience was added in Cata. Cause that expansion was THE expansion with the most convenience ever until MoP.
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exactly - todays leveling is tedious because it is fucking boring.
it used to be mildy challenging, not because it was difficult but it took a long time and there was a danger to die to random mobs (and elites)
You're right except for 2 things.
1. My name is spelt "God" not "Loucious-sama".
2. I'm not a man, because man is inherently flawed. I am in fact a being so far beyond your comprehension that archaic constraints like flesh, blood, time and consequently, gender, have no meaning to me.
I don't get why so many people are slamming convenience here, the prime reason why they put 'boring' parts in games is because they need to pad games out to hit a certain play time threshold. When was the last time you decided you wanted less convenience in your life?
To tell you the truth, what this game has done is move the less 'convenient' parts of the game into the higher tiers of game play, namely heroic raiding. It is not convenient to wipe on a boss for 10+ hours, progression raiders have to deal with this all the time. Make the rest of the player base put up with what progression raiders do and you would have everyone quit.
I do not believe the majority of players really want to be challenged or inconvenienced, I believe what players want is compelling game play which is so engaging that players will overlook the sometimes necessary pacing mechanisms that you term as 'inconveniences'.
Most people would rather die than think, and most people do. -Bertrand Russell
Before the camps, I regarded the existence of nationality as something that shouldn’t be noticed - nationality did not really exist, only humanity. But in the camps one learns: if you belong to a successful nation you are protected and you survive. If you are part of universal humanity - too bad for you -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
But what Blizzard forgot(or ignored) is that there was no LFD in TBC. You didnt have the option to get teleported into a dungeon with 4 other random people and sprint through it. You had to be cautious even on the trash mobs, and plan the fights ahead. I dont think that is possible with LFD.
I remember when running hc dungeons were fun, and I also remember when it got really boring (to me at least). After LFD was implemented HCs devolved into just running through a dungeon as fast as you could only to get as many badges per hour as possible.