I guess about 8 million people disagree with him. It's easy to stand at the side and comment on things, but he's just like anybody else and he has no idea what is good or bad for WoW. Seeing how well WoW is still doing, 4,5 years after TBC ended, Blizzard must have done something right. Too bad for that minority that wants exclusive content, this is not the game to get it in. Go play EVE or something.
The bolded and underline part is COMPLETELY UNTRUE. Casual players have been whining almost since MoP came out that they want normals nerfed, or some other middle ground raid.
Just look at the game man. Are you playing the same game as everyone else? The greatness of wow was the exclusivity of its end game raid content. Shape it any way you want, but you have to admit, it was cool seeing other players with exclusive gear and cosmetic rewards and then setting goals to get there yourself. Its not like that anymore.What entitlement? Again players have stopped demanding nerfs to normal modes because they now have LFR which means Blizzard isn't nearly as likely to nerf normal/heroic modes like they did in previous expansions. I know you people love to hate LFR and that casuals have "your" gear but because of that you get to keep your challenging content challenging.
Be careful what you say.. us "hardcores" set the foundation for the game with all its greatness and glory when it was first released. You are playing a shell of the former game.If driving Wow downward means driving the wannabe hardcores out of the game I'm all for it.
I would have to agree with him, when I played in BC feeling that BT was unobtainable due to how difficult it was at the time to clear out TK made it feel like the game would never end and it gave me a goal to achive. Now in mop I have no goals other than reaching the minimum Ilvl so I can be fed content through an IV in LFR then go repeat it all on varrying difficulties.
This is actually very true. I was scrolling back on the general discussion here to posts from 2007 (they are all still on here) and there is such little PvE whine compared to now. The biggest drama topic that kept coming up then was "PvE vs PvP!!!!!" which was the result of the addition of arenas and all that. There are very few whines like "I play 4 hours a week and want to do Black Temple" and the nonsense like that which players expect these days. After a while a lot of 3/4 5/6 guilds wanted attunements removed, but nothing remotely like how the game is now.
edit: this one's hilarious though http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...rvers-petition . I think that went away for a bit during WotlK but it's back now.
Last edited by mmoc9f738f0006; 2013-06-07 at 09:08 PM.
We will all make our own assessments from our own personal experiences with Wow over that time period. And make our own judgments based on players we know who left and their reasons for unsubbing.
My experience is that the vast majority of players that i saw leave in that time was generally to do with the change in direction of the game overall. Sure, some gave mroe specific reasons but this statement covers why they left.
Therefore, i can make an educated assessment of why the subs have been in decline since Wrath. And its due to a direction change in overall game-design.
What proof do u have that players r leaving because theyve killed LK and now think the games over?
It was a example, but proof I have is people on MMO champion who have said that. However I believe people leave the game not because of one single thing or one HUGE single thing and it is silly to think that there is one thing. My actual opinion is that a NUMBER of things cause subs to drop. People hate the content, people hate the difficulty, people are getting older, people don't have time, people don't have money, people killed the lich king, etc. THESE are why I think subs are dropping. These are things I have seen people say on here, irl, etc say why they left. Not just one thing or one huge thing and the rest are tiny stuff, but a combination of things.
Last edited by Theendgamelv3; 2013-06-07 at 09:11 PM.
Let's be honest. What they really want is the base level of the game to be what heroic raiding is so that it completely forces people out of the game entirely (because, bear in mind, they don't want those player sin PVP either).
So once people who aren't allegedly hardcore raiders are gone, they can have content made directly for them. But of course, this means that the sub rate would dip to untenable levels and would force WoW into a F2P model which would then put it in direct competition with other MMOs of that caliber.
Talk about a shell of a game. If it were up to these so-called hardcore players (none of which I really put much stock into here on MMO-C), WoW would die a miserable and shameful death before it ever catered to people of different skill levels.
It made most people hate their life and quit the game due to the lack of content, I was at that point in the end of vanilla and would've quitted without the promise of gear reset coming with TBC. Forums are full of people totally detached from reality who think there's hero worship left and right among the 8M random subscribers who wants to be in Nihilum, but the reality is that nine out of ten of those 8M randoms can not name even one guild from top10 list.
Unless one of those 25 people was a competent organizer of things or somebody who had previous experience of raiding and/or raid leading that wouldn't happen. Guilds do not come out of nowhere, those come out from the ruins of other guilds mostly. I can guarantee you 25 totally random people who start WoW today for the first time in their lives has pretty close to zero chance of finishing normal mode ToT before next expansion is out.
Kinda proves my point. Considering how broken and overtuned Kael and Vashj were, what you had was probably 20 people who had raided before during vanilla and knew already wtf they were doing.
Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.
Thing is that he is not the only game designer saying these things, if you watched some of the stuff coming from the Wildstar devs (some old WoW devs) they are saying similar things. Morello isn't the first to say this nor are we the first players to talk about this.
I just wish Blizz would be willing to talk about this with the community at large not just the top 5 and not give the same formulated responses that we as a community get.
And they are formulated they come from a standard company playbook just tailored for WoW, hell my own company uses it for our clients when needed so I now when they try and evade rather then giving a proper answer, where is the Blizz from back in the day when they talked to us rather they point and say look shiny....
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I neither hate things nor people on the game. But yes, there is an entitlement that shouldn't be there. The "I should finish all content regardless of skill/effort" killed all Mysticism related to raiding. I do wonder if doing LFR 2 or 3 times is more worth it that pugging 2-3 normals each couple of week and hope to see a bit further on the instance each time you pugged. Never played like that, so I don't know. I do remember how instances felt when you progressing there, though. Don't know if it's nostalgia or what LFR/normal/heroic distincitions made to them.
And yes, it's simply too late to go back. They can only patch it.
Last edited by mmoc38db56fadf; 2013-06-07 at 09:31 PM.
I think Morello is spot on, and its this kind of insight that demonstrates why LoL's star is rising while WoW's is fading.
I think at this point WoW is coasting on secondary and tertiary assets: things like setting, the wealth of lore, art direction; even things like just having friends whom you've played with for years, makes WoW one of those things that would be hard to kill even if you were trying (which with the way design is heading, may not look so different). But the core direction of the game has shifted away from what originally made it great, mainly on the grounds that Morello articulates, i.e.: what gamers say they want and what they truly want and balancing those things. WoW seems to just be chasing short term frills instead of actually engineering a game people want to play.
I saw it earlier in this thread where someone alluded to the direction of WoW being justified by the money it makes (in this case, saying that since WoW is the premier MMO means that, at least from a business standpoint, the devs are doing their job well). But I believe this is the fundamental difference between Riot and Blizzard: Riot wants to make a game that people want to play foremost. This means, on the level of game design, things sometimes need to be difficult or out of reach for the player, because of the net positive effect it has on the game world. Whereas, at this point, WoW seems to not be concerned about the game's integrity persay, but developing features that the player base is asking for. In a way, its good business because giving customers what they want is usually what keeps them customers. The problem is when one comes at the expense of the other. Riot has a more visionary or far-sighted approach, the thinking being that if they make a great game foremost, it may not have every quality of life feature or frill that their competitors do, but people will want to play it based on the strength of the gameplay and gameworld itself. If at a certain point you compromise the integrity of the game to appeal to your base you undermine what made it attractive in the first place. So while you think you may be attracting customers/money it may be short term gains at the expense of the health of the game in the long term. So while you may make money, or in the case of WoW (acting in conjunction with the aforementioned asset inertia), slow the loss of revenue. You are ultimately unraveling the game and, long-term, working against your stated goal which is to make money.
This is why Riot has got things right so far, and WoW has lost the plot a bit. Players that justify the changes thusfar seem to share blizzard's lack of perspective on what is a good long term strategy in favor of short term selling points. These are the kind of features that probably brief very well to the shareholders or boardmembers but only because they're approaching it with a purely business kind of mindset, ignorant of what makes games truly successful and not a simple cash grab. This wider point could be applied to the triple A games industry as a whole. They're so fixated on hot sounding bullet points that they're forgetting what makes people want to play games in the first place. I don't need millions of dollars dumped into a fully voice acted game if the rest of the game is shallow or unfun. Likewise games like Baldur's Gate 2 will be classics despite the lack of features compared to todays games. Its like we're just playing the 7 minute, 6 minute, 5 minute abs game with game development these days when if someone came out with something that actually worked it could take 20 minutes and everyone would still buy it.
Riot is saying they want something that works first and foremost, and WoW is caught up in saying but we can do it faster, better, easier, all the while watering down that core experience which is so important.
Last edited by Sniperpally; 2013-06-07 at 09:32 PM.
If Wildstar does better than WoW, their point will be proven. If exclusive raid content was the "gold mine" why aren't MMORPGs who have it shoot pass WoW in popularity? That is what I was talking about when I said in another post how there is not just ONE thing or one BIG thing in WoWs declining subs. Here is the thing, you can have game developers say all that, that doesn't mean they are right. You have had people in the past who were the leads in their fields of whatever...be completely wrong about their assessments on whatever they know.
I don't recall raiding being much bigger in BC then it was in vanilla(aside from pugging which was mostly the 10 man raids) pvp was the big thing in BC and that was due to the newly made arenas and EASILY Accessible PVP gear