Do you think blizzard will react to the massive wish for a return to tbc style?

[Low Hanging Fruit]

TBC was magical because of the times. It was the first expansion experience and it reintroduced a lot of people to the WC3 storyline which was pretty beloved and where a lot of WoW players then came from before WoW with Warcraft. You had a massive and still somewhat productive community in WoW which made up for the issues everyone else will complain about in this thread. These days the game itself is far superior in just about every way minus maybe difficulty, and I would find it hard to argue that heroic modes aren't at least a close equal TBC bosses (a lot of times harder). But what made TBC harder wasn't mechanics it was just players honestly weren't as good then due to not being as experienced with the game.

[Quanille]

They already passed the point of no return down the path they've chosen to follow... sadly..

[Chrysia]

Blizzard did release the content updates faster in Cata than they did in WoTLK, every single release came out 1 or 2 months ahead of the same release for wrath. Between 3.3 and Cata was 1 entire year, and between 4.3 and MoP is 7 months. They shaved 4 months off WoTLK's lifetime. With the exception of DS I'd say that most releases in Cata were quality releases which included firelands, dungeon finder, transmogs, reforging, guild finder, ect. Problem is that DS left a bad taste in peoples mouth and people only remember the last thing they tasted. If you ask the average American who was the greatest president of all time; George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or a current president (Ronald Reagan, Bill clinton, what ever) they will almost always choose the most current president even though Washington forged an entire nation and Lincoln freed the slaves.

I also consider LFR to be a quality release, which allowed casuals to get end game content accessibility, the mistake was nerfing the regular and heroic raids. Those are suppose to be hard, if you need tier tokens for transmog or to see end game content without having the guild to finish the DS raids then thats what LFR was for.

4.3 and MOP will be a 9 month window, not 7 months. We're still a month and a half from MoP, and DS came out in December.

3.3 also had a filler raid to tide us over, we got no such thing for the much smaller DS.

Also, I never spoke of the quality of the releases, only the quantity. WotLK saw an additional 34 bosses, not including the PVP bosses, after it's initial release. Cata saw only 15, all for a saving of 3 whole months on it's life. That's a huge loss in quantity of content for a very small gain in development time.

Also worth mentioning, the first content patch of WotLK gave us an entire raid of 14 bosses. The second, 5 or 6 (can't remember, wasn't fond of TLC) raid bosses and a 5-man. The third, 14 more raid bosses and 3 5-mans. We than got a one boss filler raid to tide us over when they realized ICC was going to be out for an absurd amount of time.

Cata gave us 2 5-mans, then a 7 boss raid, then an 8 boss raid and 3 5-mans.

Are you honestly telling me that saving a month per patch is worth the loss of a total of 19 raid bosses?

[Seriss]

*snip* But what made TBC harder wasn't mechanics it was just players honestly weren't as good then due to not being as experienced with the game.

That's the point that many people will simply not understand. It is THE point though.

[araine]

They brought it back for early cata (CC needed in Heroics, no epics unless crafted or you raided) and they lost subs.

And they never recovered from it in Cata, the damage was already done. at release of cata, very soon after it came out we started to see the decline and it went on thru out the expansion. even if you nerf teh content currently by 90% it still wont change the facts that the initial threshold created a lot of problems down the road in Cata.

[voidillusion]

And they never recovered from it in Cata, the damage was already done. at release of cata, very soon after it came out we started to see the decline and it went on thru out the expansion. even if you nerf teh content currently by 90% it still wont change the facts that the initial threshold created a lot of problems down the road in Cata.

So you establish a direct relation that all subs lost during Cata are due to at the start being "hard"?

[razski]

How arrogant can you people be to claim to know why 2 million people quit?

Some may have been unhappy with the nerfs but I'm betting that a very small amount quit as a direct result of the nerfs.

Here's what people don't get. People stop playing for various reasons, and chief amongst those reasons is that they don't get the enjoyment out of it that they once did. Why? Because its how THEY feel.

I would bet my life on it that less than 100,000 people quit as a direct result of nerfs. I would also bet that more quit at the start of Cataclysm, than later because they tried to bring TBC style difficulty back and it was too hard.

Edit: "Too hard". My meaning here is not that it was impossible to do, but time consuming and seeing as time is your only commodity in this game, it was too valuable to waste on something that was not going to reward you sufficiently for the amount of time spent. (I don't like it but there it is. I played WoW before the "welfare" epics and IMO Blizz made a mistake in allowing too high a reward for less time, meaning when they tried to reverse that, people raged.).

[DeadmanWalking]

4.3 and MOP will be a 9 month window, not 7 months. We're still a month and a half from MoP, and DS came out in December.

3.3 also had a filler raid to tide us over, we got no such thing for the much smaller DS.

Also, I never spoke of the quality of the releases, only the quantity. WotLK saw an additional 34 bosses, not including the PVP bosses, after it's initial release. Cata saw only 15, all for a saving of 3 whole months on it's life. That's a huge loss in quantity of content for a very small gain in development time.

You are correct about the 9 month window, brain fart on my part, but 9 months is a whole hell of a lot better than 12.

3.3's filler raid was contemptable crap, but if you want quantity over quality then I guess thats right up your alley. Me? I want Quality over Quantity. I dont want them to pull out a cookie cutter and start smacking out boss after boss. I can't actually point to any bosses save for the final raid in Wrath that I thought were unique.

BTW in early Sept there is going to be a Theramore event, 2 weeks before the release of MoP. You don't have to wait for december for MoP.

[Deleted]

2 is multiple, yes, but usually people just say 2 for 2, and multiple for larger numbers. Multiple is usually used to imply a very large number, and while 2 million is large, it's far from as bad as it could be.

You also completely ignored the rest of the post, which provides a very logical reason for the decline. It has little to do with easy content, though some of it may be due to that, and much more to do with the amount provided within a given time frame. We are getting less content per content patch than ever before, and it's showing in declining sub numbers.

You know if they released 100 bosses that all died in day 1 of LFR, Normal and Heroic the amount would not matter at all. It was never about the amount it is about the difficulty. Once you get to the 10ish clears you are getting bored, once you get to 15 you feel like quitting and once you get to 20 you have reached for the gun in the drawer next to you.

If they had released 20 bosses in DS people would have quit sooner because they would be clearing 20 bosses in a week rather than 8. Releasing all bosses at once is just baseline a bad idea, maybe 20 bosses would work if they gave you 3 new bosses each week but once all 20 have been released they better release another content patch soon because people will get bored quickly with 20 bosses in one raid.

[araine]

You're certainly entitled to that opinion, but I consider myself to have been pretty average raider in TBC, so I'll just say that my experience was that having done Karazhan, and having made the transition from the 10-man Karazhan to Gruul and Mag to round out tier 4, I felt like I had done my time in those places when we moved on to SSC and TK.

Starting off SSC sucked because you really needed a frost resist tank for the very first boss, Hydross. We geared one tank only to have them poached by another guild who's tank quit. Getting another tank at this stage in the game isn't too bad. Just need to get a new guy and gear him through T4 and make a new frost resist set. No problem. We press on and get through SSC and TK, get our vials, and the guild instantly starts bleeding. Guilds higher up the progression path are recruiting, but you better have your vials (Hyjal, and therefore BT attuned). So where does that leave us? Oh great, recruit more people, and run more Tier 4 then 5 OR if you're really lucky they'll have done some arena and at least have some decent pvp gear and can jump into your SSC and TK farm runs, which you can't skip because people you recruit will need to be attuned for Hyjal/BT. Keep in mind the strict raid composition requirements on TBC as well. This is long before the "bring the player" design philosophy. If you need a spriest, or a shaman, or whatever, that's what you need. It can't just be any ranged or any healer.

We finally get into Hyjal and aside from Archimonde, it's a joke, and we're just frustrated that we were kept out of the party for so long due to bleeding/recruitment issues.

Meanwhile, we continue to progress which is slow, because the players that burn out are always geared and most of the people you find to replace them are not. This continues through the rest of the expansion. My guild at the time was in the top handful of guilds by the end of the expansion, but it was only through sheer force of will we kept pushing. So many other guilds did one of two things: completely disbanded, or, in at least one or two cases, guilds on my server merged so they could still put together a 25 man raid group. (And in those cases, there's always some overlap and people got screwed over in the process... DRAMA!). Then there was Sunwell. You want to recruit people to run Sunwell? You're better off looking for a guild that already does it and hope you can join and ride the bench for a few weeks and maybe get in on a night when someone doesn't show up - because there's >no one< running around ready to do Sunwell who isn't already in a guild. If you want to keep your guild alive you had better hope the other guilds die from lack of raiders before your guild does because recruiting from the aftermath of a guild break up is about the only source of new raiders you're gonna have.

In my opinion, it was a terrible, god awful, guild destroying system. Was there prestige in making it to/through Sunwell? Yeah, I guess. Was it worth it? I don't think so. The catch up model of raiding added in Wrath made it infinitely easier to recruit. Practically anyone could be just one tier behind in gear, without needing to be carried through a bunch of old content and wasting precious raid time. Joe-Schmoe new-guy-to-the-game could gear up, largely in his own time, and start raiding in a matter of weeks (not months) regardless of what tier we're on currently? What's not to like? But what about the prestige? There was more prestige than ever. Achievements arrived. Meta Achievements arrived. There were several really exclusive titles, and mounts like Mimiron's head and Invincible's Reins. It wasn't hard to know who to look up to.

This post turned out to be a little longer than I intended, but that was my experience. I like the way the game has been going, but I don't think Cataclysm was perfect. I think Firelands and Dragonsoul were too short, and Dragonsoul in particular felt uninspired. I liked the initial difficulty of 5-man heroics. The new ZA/ZG I really could have done without. I liked the Molten Front. I liked Tier 11, though it did seem a little over-tuned, and never got the nerfs it really needed. That's all really just my opinion though, not that anyone will care, I just wanted to share what I thought about TBC since everyone else seems to think it was so damn great.

It was far from great, remember so many cases of gearing up people and see them leave. I remember the hell hole of having to carry people to get Kara key. It still had many of the flaws of Vanilla still going around. Back than we had the problem for a while with getting folks with ony keys

[Chrysia]

You are correct about the 9 month window, brain fart on my part, but 9 months is a whole hell of a lot better than 12.

3.3's filler raid was contemptable crap, but if you want quantity over quality then I guess thats right up your alley. Me? I want Quality over Quantity. I dont want them to pull out a cookie cutter and start smacking out boss after boss. I can't actually point to any bosses save for the final raid in Wrath that I thought were unique.

BTW in early Sept there is going to be a Theramore event, 2 weeks before the release of MoP. You don't have to wait for december for MoP.

No, I want both quantity and quality. I don't feel that's too much to ask, especially considering they've shown they can do it. Also, no unique bosses in Wrath except in ICC? Did you raid Ulduar at all?

If you want to use the Theramore excuse, then I can counter that Cataclysm was actually released in October of 2010, since that's when we got the first prepatch.

---------- Post added 2012-08-08 at 12:13 PM ----------

You know if they released 100 bosses that all died in day 1 of LFR, Normal and Heroic the amount would not matter at all. It was never about the amount it is about the difficulty. Once you get to the 10ish clears you are getting bored, once you get to 15 you feel like quitting and once you get to 20 you have reached for the gun in the drawer next to you.

If they had released 20 bosses in DS people would have quit sooner because they would be clearing 20 bosses in a week rather than 8. Releasing all bosses at once is just baseline a bad idea, maybe 20 bosses would work if they gave you 3 new bosses each week but once all 20 have been released they better release another content patch soon because people will get bored quickly with 20 bosses in one raid.

I'm not saying release them in one raid. The start of Cataclysm was a great idea, with 3 raids in the tier. I'm saying that a 9 month period with an 8 boss raid is ludicrously small. Even the just over 5 months for the 7 bosses of Firelands dragged the hell out. I'd rather have larger tiers for an extra month, rather than half an old tier for saving a pittance of time.

Ideally, though, what we would get is more tiers on a faster release schedule, like Blizzard has been swearing they'd do since ICC dragged on for so long.

[Adoxe]

Nonononono I'd rather have the game evolving than live stuck in the past...People need to move on, TBC might've been great but that time is over and it's time to face the fact that it will not return in any shape of form.Deal with it.

[Kharli]

[B]Also a lot of kids and adults today have ADD/ADH.

oii where was it ever stated that there is more persons with ADD/ADH today than before?
i actully happen to have the mildest case of ADD i'm still playing fine, yes there is people with worse case of it but it do not mean they bad players.

[kondura]

To OP - you do realize that the beginning of Cata was a bit harder in 5-mans than some parts of TBC?

It would have been bearable except that, as a healer, people were impatient as hell and made our game an absolute misery. Some Tanks thought they could AoE tank like in WotLK and expected healers to just keep them up - and when people tanked, people were impatient and demanded they AoE tank.

I quit after a month or two of Cata due to this - just before they made it a bit easier. Most people I knew that quit also never came back.

[DeadmanWalking]

No, I want both quantity and quality. I don't feel that's too much to ask, especially considering they've shown they can do it. Also, no unique bosses in Wrath except in ICC? Did you raid Ulduar at all?

If you want to use the Theramore excuse, then I can counter that Cataclysm was actually released in October of 2010, since that's when we got the first prepatch.

---------- Post added 2012-08-08 at 12:13 PM ----------



I'm not saying release them in one raid. The start of Cataclysm was a great idea, with 3 raids in the tier. I'm saying that a 9 month period with an 8 boss raid is ludicrously small. Even the just over 5 months for the 7 bosses of Firelands dragged the hell out. I'd rather have larger tiers for an extra month, rather than half an old tier for saving a pittance of time.

Ideally, though, what we would get is more tiers on a faster release schedule, like Blizzard has been swearing they'd do since ICC dragged on for so long.

I was countering your pre-cata raid with a pre-mop scenario, if you want to counter Theramore with pre-patch then MoP's Prepatch will be out in 2 weeks in August. So nyaaah. :P

If you add more tiers faster then all you are doing is ensuring that what I am geared up with will be obsolete in 3 months rather than 5 and if I only keep gear for such a short amount of time then whats the reason for pursuing the gear in the first place? All the gear you want doesn't drop the first time the boss drops so it might take you 2 or 3 months to get the gear you want and then BANG your gear is obsolete, congratulations now here is another 3 months of hurdles to get gear that will be useless in 3 more months.

It took me 5 months to get my Deathwing two hander in a 25 man raid. At least let me use the damn thing before I throw it out for a green drop.

[Condemner]

I find it very funny that most of the facts in these kind of threads are based on other negative forum threads. I personally think the main reason WoW looses subscribers, is that it's still 'WoW', and that the time between patches is somewhat to long for a lot of people.

When you keep playing the same game for 6/7 years, which in my opinion actually improved in the years, you gain experience playing it, and you'll get better at it, clearing new content based on the same game faster.

To stay on topic:
Basing the your statement to only negative threads, and not measuring it in a more professional kind of research or basing on facts only blizzard has, does not makes your suggestion logical. It's actually a very big risk they'd take.

I think the subscribers will increase again when MoP hits, and after that, it will drop again, as it has always done.

PS: I spoke about 'negative' threads since you see those more. People tend to complain more then to give compliments with constructive feedback. (only human though)

[DeadmanWalking]

To OP - you do realize that the beginning of Cata was a bit harder in 5-mans than some parts of TBC?

It would have been bearable except that, as a healer, people were impatient as hell and made our game an absolute misery. Some Tanks thought they could AoE tank like in WotLK and expected healers to just keep them up - and when people tanked, people were impatient and demanded they AoE tank.

I quit after a month or two of Cata due to this - just before they made it a bit easier. Most people I knew that quit also never came back.

Yeah we recently had a guy come back to prepare for mop and he wanted to get into DS LFR before MoP so I was running him through the strats in regular dungeons and then when we moved on to heroic mode the bosses were too hard for a random group to deal with even though I was over geared for it. So I bought him some pvp gear and the guild made a 5 man and went into twillight heroics where we farmed better gear (both tank and dps gear) for him so we could get him into LFR like he wanted. I have to say that Twillight Heroics are far more fun than cata heroics and I think they strike the right balance of difficulty and enjoyment for a casual raiding guild.

[Chrno]

How arrogant can you people be to claim to know why 2 million people quit?
Some may have been unhappy with the nerfs but I'm betting that a very small amount quit as a direct result of the nerfs.

Here's what people don't get. People stop playing for various reasons, and chief amongst those reasons is that they don't get the enjoyment out of it that they once did. Why? Because its how THEY feel.

I would bet my life on it that less than 100,000 people quit as a direct result of nerfs. I would also bet that more quit at the start of Cataclysm, than later because they tried to bring TBC style difficulty back and it was too hard.

Edit: "Too hard". My meaning here is not that it was impossible to do, but time consuming and seeing as time is your only commodity in this game, it was too valuable to waste on something that was not going to reward you sufficiently for the amount of time spent. (I don't like it but there it is. I played WoW before the "welfare" epics and IMO Blizz made a mistake in allowing too high a reward for less time, meaning when they tried to reverse that, people raged.).

and yet your pulling a 100,000 number out your ass lol.

I don't care why everyone quitted
But i quitted because of LFR / and the lame ass liniair progression these last 2 expansions

[DeadmanWalking]

Personally I hate that PVP gear counts towards PVE raid content locks, you can basically buy your way to end game. It also causes tank fails all the time. It wasn't such a big deal with the guy in the guild because we made a guild group and everyone knew he would be underperforming as dps but the rest of us were over performing so we made up for his low damage and we all knew what to expect.

[Jiggity]

First of all, depending on your server, the amount of "progression" guilds on any given tier of TBC could be between 0 and lol.

Second of all, you're complaining about LFR by being part of the problem. Congratulations, you are one of the asshats that makes sure Blizzard will never tune LFR higher, because they know that the majority of the community will pull this bullshit.

I was on tich and there were probly 6-7 raid guilds recruiting for ssc/tk at any given time. has there been a guild recruiting for chogall ever since firelands came out? hells no, now anyone joining the raid community from firelands on never saw the starting raids of cata and never will. Calling me names because you dont understand my point, its okay though, the wow community is pretty terrible in general thesedays.