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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"...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."
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.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
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.
"...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."
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.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
In forums, its often about echo chambers and filter bubbles.
People talk in the threads which cover their topics and their opionion about it.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
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.
Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2013-07-17 at 06:17 PM.
"...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."
#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 - - -
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.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.