It's startling how fast game activity is falling

[Phookah]

Whats an x-fire?

[Kissme]

That is actually funny because I know people who thought they were good players until he asked for help from me. I brought over my alt and some friends alt's and he didnt know what to say. He is a RL friend and wanted his guild to have progression so we took out players who couldnt put up numbers and replaced them getting 5th on the server downing heroic DW. But yes people will see things from a different standpoint and you are right to each his own but if you are going to look at raiding in general you are think you are either good or bad. My friend thought he was good until everynight he finished 60 million dmg behind and he ended up sitting out some fights to get them down. Obviously there is a huge difference between a good player and a bad player.

That's the problems with curves, someone will always be in the top and someone will always be at the bottom. Or as a real life example, stack ranking evaluation of job performance. You could be in the top 10% of the world in performance, but if your group consists entirely of the top 1%, you look incompetent (and so do at least 4 other people in the top 1%). Likewise someone who's barely in the 40th percentile would look godly if everyone else was in the 10th.

Problem with relativity. And the performance doesn't even consider all the players that used to be at the top that quit. You said you are in a top 100 guild. Do you think you'd still be a good player when compared to the people in a top 5 guild? As a top 100 guild you're definitely good compared to the majority of the WoW playerbase, but you might be considered average at best in a top 5 guild. You seem to understand how relative skill is in this game, but a lot of people view it as a black and white, you're good or you're not proposition.

[Osmeric]

He does? Last I remember Osmeric was a hardcore player who loved challenge modes.

...am I mixing him up with somebody else? o_O

Good grief, you must be. I thought Challenge Modes were a great idea, just so Blizzard could see how few people actually wanted to do them.

[isadorr]

Unless there is a level change from 85 to 90 like MOP, your gear will last you into the next raiding expansion. Also it would depend on how fast you progress on how fast you could gear up. Gear has come very quickly this xpac between crafting,rep and lfr along with good progression in raiding. But realistically gear is just something that speeds things up some, we were raiding cata in blues and greens downing bosses. While others on the server were geared and couldnt down the same bosses, i think the massive gear available is to offset skill level imo. Most guilds overgear the current content but the skill level is low.

[Pann]

Did you ever see the large forum post about putting better players on a seperate server and not nerfing anything on that server? And leave others on another server where nerfs would be implemented at earlier times if needed. WHy do you think that didnt fly or was one of the most repeated posts? Without the better players in the game helping bad players, they would simply quit or constantly complain about content being too difficult. Just like super easy LFR, it can rather smoothly when you see other raiders in the raid or go incredibly bad on a easy boss because there are really bad players in the raid. The better players are needed to carry the bad players, even pushing progression in a good raiding guild you usually end up carrying quite a few.

I think you'd find that it would be the opposite. In my experience those that complain most about bad players are not nearly as good as they think are.

[Kevyne-Shandris]

GC is just a scapegoat people use, they need someone to blame for their problems with the game.

Let's put it this way: his position should be rotated every 2 years. That ensures there's new vision there, not a monopolistic view of how the game should be played.

You can put Cata and MoP solely under GC's belt and how the game has gotten worse overall, as he's the lead...and leading the game towards a dead end.

We don't need streamlining to FPS levels, where FPS games are expanding their unlocks and even offering talent builds (BF2142 and BF24F are great examples of talent building in FPS games). He's turning WoW into a shooter, where other devs are turning FPS games into MMORPGs (and FPS games make 10x more money than MMOs).

Backwards.

[DeadmanWalking]

Yeah... I believe that is my answer since they added lots of things to do but due to time management, I cant just login and do 25+ dailies on each char(yes, I know that you get inc % rep on other alts) but meh, Imo seems the greatest way of progressing but ofc there are other ways but for the meantime if you ask me why I quit? I've been playing for too long and I believe I should take a break and focus abit on real life tho I will come back one day and I don't believe the game is dead yet.

I don't understand where you have this ideal that you have to do 25+ dailies a day on each character to get your characters where you want them to be. Even if you did every daily available in a day and maxed out rep with -all- factions you could only buy 1 valor gear from 1 of the vendors every two weeks. I can understand you would get burned out doing that, its like being in a marathon where they tell you that you can have a goodie bag at the end of the race and you decide to run it 25 times in a row and when you get to the end you still only get 1 goodie bag.

Its up to you to gauge how fast you want to do the content, theres no reason to over do it. Just because the dailies are there does not mean you have to do them all at once. Cripes.

[Kissme]

They were always a small demographic. The devs came from that background and poured w-a-y too much resources into that aspect of the game. The result is a landscape full of now empty raid zones and dungeons (expect for the few going back for transmorg or achieves, they are dead zones).

Zones like the Tillers should just be upgraded per tier/expansion so to reuse the landscape. Cost efficient and saves resources for more important things -- like new content similiar to the Tillers that offers some fresh air to the staleness of big-box instances.

MMOs are changing as it needs to change. We're no longer 18, we're getting older and the kids never experienced the older days of D&D and used to the long waits to gear out and to level.

I agree they were always a small demographic, but I also think that within the confines of the WoW population that demographic has shrunken from it's original size for a variety of reasons.

The obsolescence of zones is a result of old game design. A new game with self scaling zones, removing gear from character progression, and making rewards and progression tied to activity rather than the nature of the activity would all be things to consider for a new game, but WoW is tied to it's roots. I agree that MMOs need to change, I just don't think that the shift from big box dungeons to facebookesque mini games is necessarily the best evolution.

[GrieverXIII]

If a game has three difficulty levels, one of which sees ~3% of customers finish it, one ~15% and even the lowest has less paying customers finish it then not finish it, the issue is with the game not the players. And people demanding for "work" in a game usually lack the opportunity or ability to "work" at work. Any work. Not just rocket science.



While this may work for you, possibly for Osmeric (don't know him/her) and certainly for the makers of that Bird game, it isn't a favorable outcome for Blizzard. You should be able to understand that (its not rocket science, i (sic) swear).

Tbh, while i enjoyed your little satire, pulling numbers from your rear makes me simply not want to take you seriously. Not only you don't have any idea on the number of players that actually completed normal modes (a whole MONTH after they were released), you assume the entire playerbase has actually any kind of DESIRE to raid. Why include people that don't care about raiding(and there's a very high amount of them)?

Besides, there's just a point where Blizzard CAN'T please everyone, specially since it seems that the more Blizzard tries, the more people complains because they feel entitled to play a game 100% tailored around them when its just plain impossible. When they admit this and find other ways (raise the monthly sub for all i care) to make the game profitbale using the playerbase that is actually interested in MMO gaming, the game will only get better from that point.

[isadorr]

That's the problems with curves, someone will always be in the top and someone will always be at the bottom. Or as a real life example, stack ranking evaluation of job performance. You could be in the top 10% of the world in performance, but if your group consists entirely of the top 1%, you look incompetent (and so do at least 4 other people in the top 1%). Likewise someone who's barely in the 40th percentile would look godly if everyone else was in the 10th.

Problem with relativity. And the performance doesn't even consider all the players that used to be at the top that quit. You said you are in a top 100 guild. Do you think you'd still be a good player when compared to the people in a top 5 guild? As a top 100 guild you're definitely good compared to the majority of the WoW playerbase, but you might be considered average at best in a top 5 guild. You seem to understand how relative skill is in this game, but a lot of people view it as a black and white, you're good or you're not proposition.

I would welcome the challenge of a top 5 guild and usually the top guilds have much better rosters across the board. Like us in 25 man, we carry quite a few that arent good or bad but are at the bottom of the meters at the end of the night. A top 5 guild has great numbers across the board and you can also use WOL or Epeen bot to see where you ranked according to all of the players that use a public log. To rank in the top 200 is rewarding for me and i gauge myself against the best to see how i am doing,fire mage ftw lol. To me there is a good player and a bad player, numbers make that very obvious. The fact that blizzard is throwing gear out there is there attempt to nerf content without nerfing content lol.

[hyphnos]

Crucial distinction? It's entirely your opinion as to what is worth doing. If you think raids are the only content worth doing you are limiting yourself to a fraction of the content. And what of people whom don't think raids are worth doing? Would you call them worthless casuals whose opinions are invalid?

All he means is that a lot of what they put in to do is so time consuming in aggregate that whatever your playstyle the game expects more time from you to progress to make it feel like its worth the investment.

This effect is across all playstyles from solo daily players, to dungeon runners who geared via JP and valor in the past, to AH junkies who have to farm spirits, to normal and heroic mode raiders. Everyone has had had a time demand increase of some sort put on them. Be it dailies to open up valor vendors, extra raid bosses, more dungeons to cap valor, dailies to get bonus rolls, removal of transit conveniences so more time is just spent "going" to places, to running a farm...

You look at that list and see there is a LOT to do. And for almost every type of player to get to where you were before, it takes more time. The only players who gained are super casual quest lovers who finally got a way to earn valor outside dungeons. That could have been added without the game deciding we all need to play 10 to 20 hours per week. It's a fun game and all but when you think of how much time you end up spending just doing your normal thing and whatever extra is needed to cap valor, it's a bit much for being just a game.

[Pancaspe]

My experience is that I see more and more old friends coming back as the word spreads about this excellent expansion.

[isadorr]

I think you'd find that it would be the opposite. In my experience those that complain most about bad players are not nearly as good as they think are.

I would have to agree with this. As my RL friend told me had a good raiding guild that needed dps help and the first night i raided with them i could see they were all very bad. A ungeared alt finishing 60 million dmg ahead of geared players is what I call bad, imo. I tried helping people out with reforging,gems, macros and rotations along with when to use cds. It didnt matter what i did, nothing really changed numbers wise. We cleared all of heroic but only after replacing most of the raid including my friend with my friends alts.

[Osmeric]

All he means is that a lot of what they put in to do is so time consuming in aggregate that whatever your playstyle the game expects more time from you to progress to make it feel like its worth the investment.

I wonder if they made this change as a competitive maneuver, so their players wouldn't have time to also play some competitor (SWTOR? GW2? TESO when it comes out?)

[isadorr]

I agree they were always a small demographic, but I also think that within the confines of the WoW population that demographic has shrunken from it's original size for a variety of reasons.

The obsolescence of zones is a result of old game design. A new game with self scaling zones, removing gear from character progression, and making rewards and progression tied to activity rather than the nature of the activity would all be things to consider for a new game, but WoW is tied to it's roots. I agree that MMOs need to change, I just don't think that the shift from big box dungeons to facebookesque mini games is necessarily the best evolution.

Sounds like farmville to me. Theres some excitement lol.

[Ferocity]

What turns me off about WoW raiding (let alone PvP) is the gear grind. 4 months of good gear (more like 1 month to enjoy it), then it's another 4 month grind. It gets old fast. At least with the Tillers there's something to produce that can last the entire expansion, and something totally removed from the usual.

I like how you wrote it. This is what I mean under "gear treadmill". Why the heck to grind millions of dailies, farm millions of lucky charms, if you will never be able to enjoy results of your work? By the time you will be amidst upgrading gear - it is to be sold to vendor due to new raid tier. So in the end you will have half-upgraded gear and zero gear for any offspec, as all VP is used for upgrading. By the time you will get that 0.000001% drop chance weapon (or any other wanted lottery drop), there will be other raid tier already. It's just rat races since t9, and in MoP they got new disgusting colors.

More people are getting this clue already. There is nothing fun in rat races. "What are we fighting for?" Why spend so many efforts into something, which will be considered vendor trash in a month or less? Why farm lucky charms, if lottery is broken anyway? By the time you will be half geared from lottery, it will be another raid tier anyway.

[isadorr]

I wonder if they made this change as a competitive maneuver, so their players wouldn't have time to also play some competitor (SWTOR? GW2? TESO when it comes out?)

Have any of these really made a real dent in wow? SWTOR is def not a threat lol and i played GW2, deserted zones with most people talking in chat rather than doing anything. Joined a guild that was supposed to be about raiding and it is now desolate.

[GrieverXIII]

If a game has three difficulty levels, one of which sees ~3% of customers finish it, one ~15% and even the lowest has less paying customers finish it then not finish it, the issue is with the game not the players. And people demanding for "work" in a game usually lack the opportunity or ability to "work" at work. Any work. Not just rocket science.



While this may work for you, possibly for Osmeric (don't know him/her) and certainly for the makers of that Bird game, it isn't a favorable outcome for Blizzard. You should be able to understand that (its not rocket science, i (sic) swear).

Also, to quote this verbal diarrhea once more, the day people stop assuming raiders "don't work" or don't have "normal lives" with everything that our society labels as "normal", is the day i'll stop assuming being a casual is an excuse for bad. I work 8-4 40 hours a week and feel free to judge my armory, its tied to my sig picture.

[isadorr]

I like how you wrote it. This is what I mean under "gear treadmill". Why the heck to grind millions of dailies, farm millions of lucky charms, if you will never be able to enjoy results of your work? By the time you will be amidst upgrading gear - it is to be sold to vendor due to new raid tier. So in the end you will have half-upgraded gear and zero gear for any offspec, as all VP is used for upgrading. By the time you will get that 0.000001% drop chance weapon (or any other wanted lottery drop), there will be other raid tier already. It's just rat races since t9, and in MoP they got new disgusting colors.

More people are getting this clue already. There is nothing fun in rat races. "What are we fighting for?" Why spend so many efforts into something, which will be considered vendor trash in a month or less? Why farm lucky charms, if lottery is broken anyway? By the time you will be half geared from lottery, it will be another raid tier anyway.

If you are clearing the current content with heroics mixed in, it is viable to upgrade and do these things. I think more people dont like it because their progression is so slow that it will resemble what you are talking about.

[Osmeric]

Have any of these really made a real dent in wow?

No, but when they were designing MoP they might have thought one of them would.