Casuals > Raiders, when it comes to content - misconception

[Deleted]

No no, I completely agree with you.
The moment they made dungeons and raids much harder it caused a massive decline in subs.
When they nerfed it, they lowered the decline.
And when LFR came, they stopped it.
For a while..

It is very unlikely that LFR caused the stop in the loss of subs.

[Tomana]

They were only stupidly tuned for stupid people. The problem isn't that they're overturned, it's that the playerbase is so bad/lazy that they no longer have patience for any mandatory content that isn't complete faceroll.

And that is a global trend in game that Blizzard had to follow. Why they suddenly didn't in Cata is beyond my understanding.

LFR only stopped sub drops temporarily because it was something completely new to the game, that alone got old players to resub at least a month just to check it out.

Maybe, but you can't prove it. What we do know however, is that a lot of players who never saw a raid previously could experience it. Too bad the raid in question was DS

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It is very unlikely that LFR caused the stop in the loss of subs.

Why is that?

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I think there were some people who just do 5 mans, who saw what the Cata 5 mans were like, and said "I'm outta here".

I think there were some people who wanted to raid, but saw what the 5 mans were like, and went "the raids are going to be harder than that?!" and then gave up.

And I think there were some people who made it through into T11, found the raids were unenjoyably difficult, and stopped.

I think there were also those who were on the borderline, and had guilds collapse out from under them for these reasons, and friends depart, and then left themselves.

Quite probably, yes. Add to that the guild collapses caused by 10/25 lockout changes, and we got a grim picture -_-

[Deleted]

And that is a global trend in game that Blizzard had to follow. Why they suddenly didn't in Cata is beyond my understanding.


Maybe, but you can't prove it. What we do know however, is that a lot of players who never saw a raid previously could experience it. Too bad the raid in question was DS

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Why is that?

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Quite probably, yes. Add to that the guild collapses caused by 10/25 lockout changes, and we got a grim picture -_-

LFR had little to do with the stop in the loss. What is far more likely is the free expansion, free game time, free mount, free copy of D3, free level 80 char, free faction change free mount and free server transfer they just happen to offer at the time.

[Tomana]

LFR had little to do with the stop in the loss. What is far more likely is the free expansion, free game time, free mount, free copy of D3, free level 80 char, free faction change free mount and free server transfer they just happen to offer at the time.

Not quite. AP had overall 1.2M subscriber and the end-expansion (aka 1 year of DS -_-) losses started earlier than that.
Unfortunately we don't have stats about how many people used the SoR level 80.

[Deleted]

Not quite. AP had overall 1.2M subscriber and the end-expansion (aka 1 year of DS -_-) losses started earlier than that.
Unfortunately we don't have stats about how many people used the SoR level 80.

And? as long as it was before the report it contributes to the reported subs figure.

[Duronos]

I swear we're going to need a class teaching WoW history. "And this Joe is called the great collapse of realm community".

[HeedmySpeed]

If I chose to factor in every derp random MMORPG in history, the average age-at-decline would drop to a lot less than six years, making Blizzard look like huge geniuses just for doing as well as they have so far. While that would be a fun rhetorical point in terms of sticking it to people like you, it would also be intellectually dishonest. Therefore I instead chose to compare it to its direct predecessors, highly successful mainstream games with lots of cash behind them, relative to their time.

If you have an alternate theory, one that explains why World of Warcraft was supposed to follow the same business cycle as Eve Online until those damn stupid developers fucked it up, feel free to elucidate. I'll listen. It's going to have to be a pretty outlandish theory though, given that Eve is a quirky indie that flew under the the radar for years, while WoW is a heavily-hyped behemoth.

Sounds like cherry picking to me. And Blizzard has been smart, or rather they've been doing the right thing unknowingly. I don't know what happened in their office and what interpretation of data they're listening to but they fucked up. A fuck up will happen eventually, a bad design call will be made eventually, but that's what we're here to discuss.
-lack of advertisement
-lack of graphic updates
-lack of immersion
etc etc

You're obviously guilty of these by lashing out at hardcore players who wanted content to mean something again. So feed your bullshit to someone else, Nostradamus.

While design choices can obviously impact subscriber retention, in all but the most extreme cases it's a much slower and more distant impact than grandstanding forum dipshits seem to imagine. Furthermore, while it's certainly possible to chase your customers away if you piss on them hard enough, it's much more difficult to make design decisions that magically keep people from just plain getting bored and quitting after playing the same game for years and years and years.

It's even more difficult and less realistic to expect any particular design decision to attract lots of brand new players to an old game that they've already been ignoring for years. If they couldn't be won over back when WoW was on South Park and the hype was at its peak, they're sure as hell not going to be won over just because you nerfed raids, or buffed raids, or whatever. They've never played the game and that shit means very little to them.

Would you then agree that making challenging PvE content in Cata was an "extreme" decision? If so then I'd argue LFR was an "extreme" decision. In a game of WoW's nature I'd consider both of these things as "extreme cases."

I'm sure you're one of those who feels sub losses at the start of Cata were mostly attributed to hard PvE content but the continual spiral (actually, the more severe spiral) just after the switch is attributed to "age" and the "natural life cycle."

It really just sounds like you won't accept being wrong unless you've changed your outlook since your flaming posts against the hardcore community.

[Grimble]

Sounds like cherry picking to me.

Fine. At your insistence, I will now instead compare WoW to every MMO to ever exist. Ahem.

All the hardcores crying that WoW is losing subscribers because it's too easy are fucking idiots. As you can see by comparing it to every other game, WoW didn't begin to decline until long after the industry average age. Clearly the game's continuing casualization has been a massive success that has brought the game terrific longevity and financial reward. Thank you, HeedmySpeed, for pointing this out to everyone.

Happy? No?

I've compared WoW to the large market-dominating games most similar to itself. If you can think of some different games from the past that one can draw actual useful comparisons to WoW from, then go ahead and name them and tell me why. Quirky little indies and big underperforming games that crashed and burned in a year or two probably need not apply though, unless you've got some really brilliant reasoning on what they can say about World of Warcraft.

You won't though. You've been long on attitude and real fucking short on having anything meaningful to say.

You're obviously guilty of these by lashing out at hardcore players who wanted content to mean something again. So feed your bullshit to someone else, Nostradamus.

You'll see me ripping to pieces all the dipshits who think their stupid-ass little raiding hobby and the tiny minority of players who seriously pursue it are somehow the core of the game, on which Blizzard's fortunes must inevitably rise or fall. There's a fucking lot of those on this forum, and boy are they sad about not being as important as they thought they were, and god are their tears sweet.

What you won't see is me trying to pin subscriber losses on my own pet design issues. The most you'll get from me is a thought that the harder heroics at the start of Cata were probably having a negative effect on retention, given the way Blizzard aggressively reversed themselves on the issue.

Even then, however, it was probably a relatively minor effect that you'd be hard-pressed to nail down without lots of precise internal numbers that we don't have. A decrease of 10% in the length of the average subscription, for example, would be more than enough to spur Blizzard to immediate action, but probably not enough to make a real dent in the quarterly sub reports unless the issue went unaddressed for a couple years. The idea that 3 million people all quit overnight because they were wiping in heroics too much is nonsense. The game had begun to plateau during Wrath and was always going to start losing subscribers around the start of Cata no matter what.

Would you then agree that making challenging PvE content in Cata was an "extreme" decision? If so then I'd argue LFR was an "extreme" decision. In a game of WoW's nature I'd consider both of these things as "extreme cases."

Neither of these is an extreme case by genre standards. The Star Wars Galaxies NGE was an incredibly extreme case that killed a game. The addition of Trammel to Ultima Online was an extreme case that worked out for the better. The stuff Blizzard does is mostly just evolutionary. Dungeons are hard, then easy, then hard again, then easy again as they fiddle with the knobs to min-max that subscriber retention percentage. Here's some raids, here's some really hard raids, here's some really easy raids, blah blah blah. Nothing drastic, nothing revolutionary.

[Daffan]

I liked cata 5 mans.

[Grimble]

I quit during Cata, but before hitting cap. Were they really that hard? I mean I'm sure they were compared to late-Wrath faceroll heroics, which I fucking loved, but in early Wrath my little guild groups of new 80s in blues and greens were still marking targets and CC'ing and all of that. It wasn't THAT easy until everyone outgeared them by leaps and bounds.

[Daffan]

Even I raided during BC and I had minimal time to play the game, I never believed the 1% shit. I was a casual, I never progressed past Tier 1 (Kara, Gruul's, MK) but I still raided.

When ToC came along, that's when the game started getting stale for me, I could skip Ulduar, a tier I was working towards and I just felt fucked? They always talk about, "Everyone should see the content", well why couldn't I see Ulduar? Because you could out gear it with 5 mans... It just pissed me off.

I agree, and anyone who says its YOUR FAULT is totally way off. When the content isint relevant gear wise, less people do it. Guilds dont do it, they move on - They chase the perpetual loot rabbit, not to see the content. Without being required to do it they wont. I'm in the same boat as you, i came back in late WOTLK after the same thing in BC ( although i did do T5) and i never really saw naxx/ulduar.

Then, people will say but they need uber loots from 5 mans to make catching up easier, for ALTS yes, but for new players - no.

Also bred a new type of "bad" player wih their welfare epics cant even do 35000 dps.


For some added fun to my post, just did a Hscen where the paladin had full raid finder gear and a 528 weapon, gemmed to max stamina with no reforge/enchants and did 28000 dps.

[shise]

There we go again.

Casual can perfectly be a HC raiding player. In fact, I know many casual players who raid in top guilds. They simply log for the raid + some daily quests or w/e.

[Tomana]

Casual can perfectly be a HC raiding player. In fact, I know many casual players who raid in top guilds. They simply log for the raid + some daily quests or w/e.

In a top guild, you have to do that 4 or 5 days a week during progress. Hardly qualifies as casual.

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And? as long as it was before the report it contributes to the reported subs figure.

And the fall following two quarters of stagnation was of ~1 mil, and that was while APs were still active.

[wych]

I quit during Cata, but before hitting cap. Were they really that hard? I mean I'm sure they were compared to late-Wrath faceroll heroics, which I fucking loved, but in early Wrath my little guild groups of new 80s in blues and greens were still marking targets and CC'ing and all of that. It wasn't THAT easy until everyone outgeared them by leaps and bounds.

They weren't hard they just required a bit of co-ordination and skill at the start of the expansion when people didn't over gear them which isn't present in most LFG match making groups

[worsthitmanNa]

They weren't hard they just required a bit of co-ordination and skill at the start of the expansion when people didn't over gear them which isn't present in most LFG match making groups

On release they took more coordination than bc heroics honestly.

[PrairieChicken]

In a top guild, you have to do that 4 or 5 days a week during progress. Hardly qualifies as casual.

You are talking about realm first guilds perhaps.

You can clear full heroics playing single day

[Zylan]

An old quote springs to mind that sums up Casuals vs Raiders perfectly.

"I don't know the key to success but the key to failure is trying to please everyone."

Basically, casuals are responsible for the vast majority of Blizzards income from WoW, they cannot simply ignore Casuals and at the same time they cannot simply ignore Hardcore raiders either (even if they do account for maybe 1-2% of the entire player base) but all of this comes with a price - Hardcore raiders feel self entitled and believe Blizzard owes them something for nothing as far as constant streams of content goes just because they can do content the average joe cannot. A lot (not all) of casuals think the same about welfare epics, again believe they are owed something for nothing which is why a lot of people are happy by being spoon fed epics.

Blizzard can't keep everyone happy and constantly trying to do so is only going to damage the game in the long run, look at the numbers as a perfect example

During TBC: WoW player base was increasing but people were all running around in blues and generally envied guilds that could do harder content (SSC+ most guilds could barely manage Magtheridon and Gruul let alone SSC/TK+ until the end of expansion nerf patch came)

During WOTLK: WoW was at its absolute peak, the numbers were at such a stable insane level due to the easiness of the expansion and what it offered people who couldn't raid hardcore.

During Cataclysm: Seen a drastic drop in subs (the main excuse seems to have been "Bored of expansion!") when in actual fact the reality is it was more than likely a case of "No more welfare epics" or very few so game is boring.

During Pandaria: Again numbers are still falling (even if its slowly they're still going down) - LFR had some what an attraction to the casual base but I feel its still not enough to keep that sector of players happy, being able to buy epics for Justice (yes I said justice) points and get them from other sources rather than relying on coin rolls from LFR seemed a lot more popular among the casual player base than LFR has been.

TL;DR - Blizzard need to replicate WOTLK some what to start pulling numbers back in again - what they don't want is how easy most of WOTLK was (bar a few select encounters/instances the majority of WOTLK was easy)

[melodramocracy]

I quit during Cata, but before hitting cap. Were they really that hard? I mean I'm sure they were compared to late-Wrath faceroll heroics, which I fucking loved, but in early Wrath my little guild groups of new 80s in blues and greens were still marking targets and CC'ing and all of that. It wasn't THAT easy until everyone outgeared them by leaps and bounds.

What made them hard is people not used to the slower pace and having to do a good deal of cc, with the additional layer that healers, thanks to drastic across-the-board changes to the role, would generally need to stop and drink after every pull, and easily go OOM if a pull wasn't executed correctly. There were a few that were tougher than others (Ozruk and his trash were probably the least forgiving), but it was more about a required shift in the attitudes of players rather than outright difficulty. It didn't take all that long for people to smarten up a bit.

After experiencing them, everything from 4.3 onward has been a huge letdown as far as instances go.

[Mormolyce]

did you ever think that those social skills may start to wear thin when you find yourself continually surrounded by stupidity? even ghandi could only take so much LFR.

IMO seriously toxic people rarely get into raiding guilds because people wouldn't deliberately recruit someone like that.

Again, plenty of casuals/LFR players are perfectly nice people. Hell I'm one of them now :P

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An old quote springs to mind that sums up Casuals vs Raiders perfectly.

"I don't know the key to success but the key to failure is trying to please everyone."

Basically, casuals are responsible for the vast majority of Blizzards income from WoW, they cannot simply ignore Casuals and at the same time they cannot simply ignore Hardcore raiders either (even if they do account for maybe 1-2% of the entire player base) but all of this comes with a price - Hardcore raiders feel self entitled and believe Blizzard owes them something for nothing as far as constant streams of content goes just because they can do content the average joe cannot. A lot (not all) of casuals think the same about welfare epics, again believe they are owed something for nothing which is why a lot of people are happy by being spoon fed epics.

Blizzard can't keep everyone happy and constantly trying to do so is only going to damage the game in the long run, look at the numbers as a perfect example

During TBC: WoW player base was increasing but people were all running around in blues and generally envied guilds that could do harder content (SSC+ most guilds could barely manage Magtheridon and Gruul let alone SSC/TK+ until the end of expansion nerf patch came)

During WOTLK: WoW was at its absolute peak, the numbers were at such a stable insane level due to the easiness of the expansion and what it offered people who couldn't raid hardcore.

During Cataclysm: Seen a drastic drop in subs (the main excuse seems to have been "Bored of expansion!") when in actual fact the reality is it was more than likely a case of "No more welfare epics" or very few so game is boring.

During Pandaria: Again numbers are still falling (even if its slowly they're still going down) - LFR had some what an attraction to the casual base but I feel its still not enough to keep that sector of players happy, being able to buy epics for Justice (yes I said justice) points and get them from other sources rather than relying on coin rolls from LFR seemed a lot more popular among the casual player base than LFR has been.

TL;DR - Blizzard need to replicate WOTLK some what to start pulling numbers back in again - what they don't want is how easy most of WOTLK was (bar a few select encounters/instances the majority of WOTLK was easy)

Game is 8 years old, almost anyone who was going to try WoW already has, there is nothing they could do to get 12 million people to pay $15 a month to play it anymore.

That really eclipses anything you may love or hate about the game in your personal experience.

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What made them hard is people not used to the slower pace and having to do a good deal of cc, with the additional layer that healers, thanks to drastic across-the-board changes to the role, would generally need to stop and drink after every pull, and easily go OOM if a pull wasn't executed correctly. There were a few that were tougher than others (Ozruk and his trash were probably the least forgiving), but it was more about a required shift in the attitudes of players rather than outright difficulty. It didn't take all that long for people to smarten up a bit.

After experiencing them, everything from 4.3 onward has been a huge letdown as far as instances go.

MoP deliberately designed the heroics to be easy. Personally I enjoyed Cata's heroics (and despite the current "consensus" that everyone hated them, I remember at the time that plenty of people said they loved the challenge on the forums).

There were a lot of reasons why Cata heroics were so hard - a big one is that they came after everyone had gotten used to doing Wrath heroics in full ICC gear (you could buy everything for badges and it had been out forever), like 6 tiers overgearing most of those dungeons. Players have such a short memory and ICC lasted so long. Then they walk into hard Cata heroics in shitty quest greens and BAM.

And I'd like to say that Cata heroics where legitimately complex. Even leaving aside how undergeared everyone was in the first few weeks (after Cata had been out a month or two, before the nerfs, dungeons had already gotten a LOT easier due to the average ILVL of players shooting up), think about how many mechanics each boss had and compare that to TBC bosses. Everyone bangs on about how hard TBC heroics were, but mechanically they were incredibly simple. The challenge was just the tuning - sheep this mob because otherwise the trash does too much damage. And tanks couldn't hold AOE threat. Basic stuff by today's standards. I'm sure it was "difficult" at the time though.

[Tomana]

You are talking about realm first guilds perhaps.

You can clear full heroics playing single day

The person I replied to said "I know many casual players who raid in top guilds"
I can't speak about all of them, but most top French guilds, for instance, raid at least 4 days a week, and more like 5 or 6.