"Players rarely argue for less convenience." - Ghostcrawler

[Deleted]

Its a done discussion, the game traded community for convenience, and people are gonna go nuts when they try and reverse the damages, if they even do.

[Itisamuh]

Its a done discussion, the game traded community for convenience, and people are gonna go nuts when they try and reverse the damages, if they even do.

Except they did absolutely nothing to stop people from being social and continuing to do things in the old ways.

[Nobleshield]

Except they did absolutely nothing to stop people from being social and continuing to do things in the old ways.

They kinda did, in one way at least: You are encouraged to use the tools to go to a dungeon instead of, for example, traveling their yourself. If you enter say Shado-pan Monastery as a group, you get nothing out of it; if you queue using LFD you get your bonus. Not a major thing since you can still form a group on your own, but you are required to use the in-game tools which for some might indicate a loss of being social by having to travel to the dungeon.

[Deleted]

Except they did absolutely nothing to stop people from being social and continuing to do things in the old ways.

Yeah cause promoting a 'Sit in city and click queue button' gameplay style isnt blizzards fault, its clearly the consumers fault.

HERNIA. INCOMMING.

[Ronduwil]

this is wrong.

it is more akin to them building a sports complex, and then the people who want to walk around the track demand to walk on the baseball diamond, the football field, and the tennis courts because they payed for it. then once they're allowed to walk on those parts of the complex whenever they like they demand that the walls be removed, the goal posts taken down, and the nets removed because they hinder their ability to walk where they want. once the complex has been torn down into a field where anyone can walk as they please they tell the people who want to play baseball, football, and tennis that there is endless areas to play those sports now and they don't see why it is a problem that they had it all removed.

Really? Because I missed the part where anyone was demanding that heroic raids be removed from the game. All the cries I've seen so far is for LFR to be taken out of the game.

[melodramocracy]

Yeah cause promoting a 'Sit in city and click queue button' gameplay style isnt blizzards fault, its clearly the consumers fault.

HERNIA. INCOMMING.

Constant pleading for convienence and speed = yep, pretty much the fault of the playerbase.

[Vyadore]

Really? Because I missed the part where anyone was demanding that heroic raids be removed from the game. All the cries I've seen so far is for LFR to be taken out of the game.

I have read the entire thread and the best response and the one that seems most logical is WOW is an 8 year old game and it has already defied the normal game life cycle. We are in new territory here and reasons for growth or decline are speculative at best.

My household has 3 WOW players. I am a semi-hardcore raider, my wife is a farmer / casual leveler and my daughter is a busy graduate student that is a good player that likes raid content but has no time to have a scheduled gaming commitment.

We all have been playing since vanilla/burning crusade so I think we have a fair representation of the various gaming "levels" in the WOW market. We all think LFR is a good thing. It is not mandatory, it allows casuals to see the "raid environment" (meaning a boss with a large group trying to coordinate to kill it) and the loot that drops is fun for people to get a "reward" but it is not infringing on "serious" raiders.

The game is at the best stage it has ever been at. The servers are reliable, the content is immense for any person just starting and the gameplay offers a wide range of styles. Hardcore raiding, casual raiding, heroics, pet battles, questing, auction house and economics (my wifes pastime), team pvp, random battlgrounds.....the list goes on.

I'm not saying the game is for everyone and each individual should spend their time and money as they see fit. But to argue that WOW is somehow diminished in it's current form is probably an extreme position at best not supported by review of the content.

[Ronduwil]

I maintain the biggest issue WoW has right now is that they tuned up the difficulty of 10-man raids, according to Blizzard because they had to when removing the shared lockout, and this utterly destroyed many average run-of-the-mill raiding guilds. The genocide started in Cata and, other than Dragon Soul and possibly the nerfed Firelands, has continued to this day. When you force guilds to choose between benching longterm players or friendly and helpful players because the difficulty is so high you can't risk bringing them anymore, when previously you would have had no issues with them, there is a big problem. My own guild recently had to do this with a Mistweaver Monk that we had to put on the bench because the heals just weren't quite enough for us and were causing a wipe. This player was extremely nice, friendly and helpful and was making efforts to improve, but those efforts just weren't enough. If the difficulty scale had been correct like in Wrath, this would probably be a non-issue and while we might have had a bit more trouble than most, we wouldn't have had to basically tell this player "Sorry you can't raid with us anymore, your heals aren't quite good enough and we can't afford to wipe on this anymore, so we're replacing you" because having even one person not performing at 110% means we can't progress at all.

This is exactly what's killing raiding. LFR didn't cause this. People won't get better at raiding without practicing and beginners can't practice when the barrier to entry into normal raids is so massive. Flex raiding might help this situation.

you know you will be rewarded with 5 million (dollars/euro/pounds whatever) íf you walk through a gauntlet of 2 inch nails/spikes. You know for certain that you will survive but you also know you will be severely wounded. Getting that 5 million in this way is very efficient and probably for most preferable vs working your ass off for the next 30 years. I mean your wounds will close and heal but you will still have that 5 million.

Except 5 million will set most people up for life, whereas gear is only good for maybe 3 months at most nowadays. The reward for the gauntlet in question is closer to 5,000 than 5 million. Contrary to what is commonly stated, the rewards for LFR are mostly bad.

you are required to use the in-game tools which for some might indicate a loss of being social by having to travel to the dungeon.

I'm sorry, but travelling to the dungeon is not a social activity. Even when it was required, 9/10 groups I was in had the two people nearest to the instance go there and summon everyone else. The social aspect was in forming the group, and that is still a possibility. In my opinion they should raise or remove the cap on the number of rewarded guild runs players can do per week and throw in a personal reward for those participants. This would promote socialization far more than reinstating travel to instances would. The loot bag bonus that is given to healers and tanks for queueing solo is also anti-social because it encourages them to group with random strangers from other servers rather than with "local" groups.

[MoanaLisa]

Time/Money is the reason GC gave in a tweet as the main reason, lack of social ties is another, along with "I don't know how to play this guy anymore" in reference to too much change. They have been pretty open about it. Just as he said they now realised players would quit before they upped their game.

That was the big one they had to learn. Born purely of arrogance I think that WoW was so good that people wouldn't leave if they were forced to get better. I agree that they're relatively open about why people leave. Now if they would do something to address the really bad elements of the game community...something more effective than penalty volcanoes.

[Osmeric]

So in your mind, polling has no validity?

Those who do polls attempt to select the subjects with some rigorous methodology, to get as unbiased a sample as they can.

In contrast, those who post to a forum are entirely self-selected.

Comparing the two is ludicrous. Please don't make this flawed analogy again.

[Deja Thoris]

As for ongoing data; they don't really need polls, since they can track actual behaviour of everyone in-game. They don't need to poll to find out whether people like LFR, they just check their data and see how many people are actually running LFR. That removes the possibility of people ignoring the poll, or trolling it, or being biased in their responses, and gets right to how people actually act.

Since when can you equate liking LFR with running LFR? If you do that then you draw the wrong conclusions off the data you have.

People run LFR because its the only viable method of character progression outside of raids. Hell, I'm 9/13HC and I ran it when we didn't clear for runestones and I still run selected bosses to try to replace my crummy o/s shield. Do I like lfr? No.

You can't point to the data and say Deja runs lfr therefore its a great success. It's a chore I put up with.

[MoanaLisa]

So in your mind, polling has no validity?

Self-selected polling? No, not so much. It's useful for surfacing potential problems--which are often obvious in any case--but beyond that of not too much use unless you do further polling with a more random sample.

[melodramocracy]

Those who do polls attempt to select the subjects with some rigorous methodology, to get as unbiased a sample as they can.

In contrast, those who post to a forum are entirely self-selected.

Comparing the two is ludicrous. Please don't make this flawed analogy again.

I don't personally choose to answer polling questions, or ignore them? News to me.

Again, if folks don't have faith in the feedback given in forums as actually representing a larger group of players, then Blizzard effectively has no accurate feedback on what players think until it's too late.

[Osmeric]

I don't personally choose to answer polling questions, or ignore them? News to me.

You appear to be working on the bad analogy trifecta today. What's the third one going to be?

"Self selection" and "having the option to decline to answer" are not anywhere near the same thing.

[melodramocracy]

You appear to be working on the bad analogy trifecta today.

And you appear to be missing the point entirely.

[Deleted]

In forums, its often about echo chambers and filter bubbles.

People talk in the threads which cover their topics and their opionion about it.

[Deficineiron]

Blizzard sees REAL Data and knows what the playerbase likes to do.

they do see real data. how they interpret that data, and then how/if they implement their interpretations in future game versions, is entirely another matter. cataclysm lvl 85 initial tuning, anyone?

[MoanaLisa]

they do see real data. how they interpret that data, and then how/if they implement their interpretations in future game versions, is entirely another matter. cataclysm lvl 85 initial tuning, anyone?

The bet with Cataclysm was that people would rather up their game than leave. They lost that bet. GC's recent tweets to that effect are telling and something that only a few people are actually talking about. I think there's a lot of other stuff that pertains to Cataclysm that is both relevant and displays a huge amount of confirmation bias on the part of Blizzard's management but Occam's Razor and all of that: If the core belief behind the Cataclysm design was that people would pick up their game instead of leave then that explains a lot. It was just wrong and I don't have any idea if they polled for that.

I'm inclined to fault them less if the design--catastrophic as it was--was born of the faith that people really wanted to play better and would accept the pain for a better game experience over the long haul. It was 100% wrong and a profound misreading of their customers but if--a very large if--that was the thinking then it's difficult to fault them for their design ideals.

Everything that happened afterwards is the bigger problem for me. The nerfs, the complete reversal on the whole idea behind the expansion, the lackluster raids, the lack of endgame content, the massive shifts that confused players and made it even easier to leave--that's all on them and to me is much worse at this point than the mistakes of the original design.

[Deficineiron]

Now come to think of it, someone must have complained about the following 'conveniences'

1) Being able to quest freely right from the start instead of being locked down for 10 levels all the time in the same area, over and over as a Worgen, Goblin or Pandarean

2) Gaining other Alliance/Horde city rep when you did some of the main faction's quest (eg doing a Human netted 250 rep for Stormwind and 75 for the rest). Now its capped at 5999/6000 Friendly and you must, I repeat MUST, do their assosciated quest or grind dungeons with a tabard

I must thank the genius behind these ideas

#1 was almost certainly a very targeted effort by blizzard to increase the new sub retention rate by giving them a 'story' in starting zones. they probably conclude that existing players won't be so annoyed by this that they quit.

more generally the entire linear questing thing is geared towards players who don't want/cannot independently explore the world - they need/want to be led by the nose, to be the hero and win and kill the big baddie and talk to demigods or indiana jones or rambo or whatever.

- - - Updated - - -

The bet with Cataclysm was that people would rather up their game than leave. They lost that bet. GC's recent tweets to that effect are telling and something that only a few people are actually talking about. I think there's a lot of other stuff that pertains to Cataclysm that is both relevant and displays a huge amount of confirmation bias on the part of Blizzard's management but Occam's Razor and all of that: If the core belief behind the Cataclysm design was that people would pick up their game instead of leave then that explains a lot. It was just wrong and I don't have any idea if they polled for that.

I'm inclined to fault them less if the design--catastrophic as it was--was born of the faith that people really wanted to play better and would accept the pain for a better game experience over the long haul. It was 100% wrong and a profound misreading of their customers but if--a very large if--that was the thinking then it's difficult to fault them for their design ideals.

Everything that happened afterwards is the bigger problem for me. The nerfs, the complete reversal on the whole idea behind the expansion, the lackluster raids, the lack of endgame content, the massive shifts that confused players and made it even easier to leave--that's all on them and to me is much worse at this point than the mistakes of the original design.

I am sure there were folks inside saying they couldnt go putting tbc-heroics in an LFD world, but it was done anyway.

I suspect what happened since then may be the external manifestation of what I would loosely call the 'harder game' faction inside bliz losing most influence over overall game tuning decisions, and the 'accessibility' and 'money' factions (these can overlap of course) pretty much directing game direction by themselves. a million lost western subs likely represents over 200M$ of high-margin revenue over a year. At that point the money faction (which includes A/B mgmt) says the harder game faction blew it, make the damn thing (even) more accessible.

[Deleted]

Constant pleading for convienence and speed = yep, pretty much the fault of the playerbase.

Erh, removal of responsibility much? lol.
Who added the changes and content? Blizzard.

They don't have to make changes unless they wanna.