Is WoW always going to be like this?

[nekobaka]

Yeah, WoW was very casual FOR THE TIME - compared to now, it would be considered a hugely HARDCORE game.
Doesn't mean that you can continue to add casualness toward infinity without ever reaching the point where "too much is too much", but that obvious reasoning seems lost on the kind of you.

Actually Cata showed just that which is why MoP returned with so much grinds because Cata was too casual in terms of grinds and weekly time commitment. It was fine if you only played a handful of hours a week then content would have lasted you months, but for the "casuals" that played more than that the content lasted a month if that. The leveling grind in Cata was even shorter and players made far more alts earlier in the expansion to counter the lack of grinds than players did in early WotLK. MoP showed that the player base isnt as casual as players think. All the dailies at once might have been a bit too much, but there was "casuals" who loved it.

If you look at WotLK grind for five man players that didnt raid they had to do a daily heroic every day of the week while earning a fraction of the badges that a raider did which on a gearing grind standpoint took five man players about four times as long to exhaust the badge vendor. Cata on the other hand by response of non-raiders increased the reward rate which reduced the grind which left a predictable time point for players to complain about not enough gear on the vendor just a few months into a tier.

Cata struggled more from lack of content on top of accelerated content consumption rate due to faster grinds which then lead to players butting up against other forms of content to keep them busy. I only played a handful of hours a week though so I didnt get bored unlike the no-lifers that call themselves casuals.

[Akka]

Actually, they flat-out admitted the dungeons were too hard in postmortems and that matchmade content needs to be easy.

Actually, they admitted the dungeons were too hard FOR RANDOMLY MATCHED GROUPS - the bad idea was including LFD in the game and as such destroying any sense of community and forcing the content to be dumbed down, instead of keeping the design that had been hugely successful for five years.

- - - Updated - - -

Or Cata was the breaking point for their financial department coupled with hemorrhaged casual subs, and raiding got axed because it was providing the least bang for their buck.

It's been already pointed that Cata hemorraged much more sub after being retooled for casual than before, but you still pretend it's the opposite.
Guess you just ignore facts that prove your wrong - an amusingly extremely common behaviour with the people who share your views, I wonder why.

[Thage]

Actually, they admitted the dungeons were too hard FOR RANDOMLY MATCHED GROUPS - the bad idea was including LFD in the game and as such destroying any sense of community and forcing the content to be dumbed down, instead of keeping the design that had been hugely successful for five years.

The LFG channel wasn't community. It was a bunch of assholes demanding unrealistic gear requirements of people who needed the dungeons for gear.

Times change, the game is changing with them. You can fall in or leave. But frankly, don't expect Blizzard to listen to the hardcore players anymore outside tuning Heroic/Mythic going forward. They're not going to shaft their majority demographic so you lot can feel special again. End of story, enjoy your day, I'm gonna go solo Kara and hit up Siege LFR.

[nekobaka]

Actually, they flat-out admitted the dungeons were too hard in postmortems and that matchmade content needs to be easy.

They were cutting the money that was being shoveled into a furnace that barely kept one room warm. LFR revamped that furnace to keep 60% of the house warm, justifying the money that got put into it.

It has been said by GC multiple times that the issue was shoving players into them with no alternatives.

To your second point you have yet to provide a source to budget cuts to raids and in the other thread I have found a source from Ion that says LFR allowed more resources to be directed to raids. Nothing was said about cutting resources to raids.

Or Cata was the breaking point for their financial department coupled with hemorrhaged casual subs, and raiding got axed because it was providing the least bang for their buck.

If you're gonna put words in my mouth, buy me dinner first. Be a gentleman.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/...he-Daily-Blink

LFR justifies the creation of more raid content when millions of players are able to see content. Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel'thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing. The reason Mists of Pandaria is starting with 18 bosses and adding larger raid tiers than we have had previously is because many players are going to see the raids through LFR.

So start posting sources.

[Krazyito]

Because hardcores want to be able to pretend they're the center of the game's universe, like they did in Vanilla, and LFR ruins that for them. LFR makes them into nothing but an obscure minority doing some hardmode shit most people don't know or care about. And boy does that hurt their feels.

I'm a heroic raider. I could care less if the casuals see their version of the content. Unless they find the time or step up their game they still wont see the same content I'm seeing and by that time, I wouldn't care again since they joined our ranks.

I would LOVE more people doing heroics. More competition, more recruitment possibilities. Anyone complaining about casuals at this point in time is asking for too much. If you want to hold something like that, just know they wont see the same content as you because executing mechanics correctly as a team is content in itself

[Akka]

NO ONE is controlling anyone's access to flex. Don't like current groups requirements? Make a group. If there are so many people out there that are being "excluded" then you should easily be able to fill a new group with such people. I fucking hate it when people suggest that some ethereal group of people are holding the "keys" to flex.

Yeah, I notice that too.
If you ever suggest that the content of the game should require to actually play rather than roll your face on the keyboard, suddendly the armchair white knights start to act as if some kind of secret police will slam their door and prevent them from logging and playing.

[Dormie]

The LFG channel wasn't community. It was a bunch of assholes demanding unrealistic gear requirements of people who needed the dungeons for gear.

Times change, the game is changing with them. You can fall in or leave. But frankly, don't expect Blizzard to listen to the hardcore players anymore outside tuning Heroic/Mythic going forward. They're not going to shaft their majority demographic so you lot can feel special again. End of story, enjoy your day, I'm gonna go solo Kara and hit up Siege LFR.

That whole post was childish BS.

Yes it WAS community because you saw those 'assholes' more than once. And if they weren't assholes you'd group with them again. I never had a problem getting into PuGs. I would always whisper the group leader saying that I know the fights and how much DPS I did, 85% of the time I got in. And it's still like that.

It's not hardcore players saying these things.. and the only people that want to feel special are the scrubs who are so awkward they can't join a damn PuG.

[Traxex9080]

The LFG channel wasn't community. It was a bunch of assholes demanding unrealistic gear requirements of people who needed the dungeons for gear.

Times change, the game is changing with them. You can fall in or leave. But frankly, don't expect Blizzard to listen to the hardcore players anymore outside tuning Heroic/Mythic going forward. They're not going to shaft their majority demographic so you lot can feel special again. End of story, enjoy your day, I'm gonna go solo Kara and hit up Siege LFR.

Clearly everything you're saying is wrong and is being proved wrong just by the constant decrease in subscribers. WoW is a dying game. I quit WoW because it's old, boring, and easy. Many others have too. The sub count is only going to decrease from now and the next expansion. Clearly something is wrong with WoW for people to continue to leave. So you go ahead and defend your dying game if that's what you must to feel good about yourself. Instead of spouting nonsense in an effort to prove yourself right, how about you come up with a way to fix the problems that exist in WoW because clearly everyone else is wrong.

Where are the polls of hardcore players forcing changes down blizzard's throat in the past? I don't believe blizzard has ever listened solely to the "hardcore players" community.

[Flaim]

my problem with current lfr is not the accessibility (who the fudge cares wether someone has purple pixel or not?!), it's that it's far too easy to do nothing and still win.
if lfr was at least tuned like current flex there would be a severe uproar by the shitters (@mods: i'm sorry for the choice of words, but i just can't think of something better fitting) thinking they could afk their way through all the content, but they would die down after some time (let's say 2-3 months) and we would be left with a superior community!
"survival of the fittest" is what's missing this game. do something to improve yourself or stay at the bottom without having anything achieved at all.

[Akka]

All of that would lead me to believe that the sub losses had nothing to do with the difficulty (or lack thereof). There is simply no evidence that removing option or increasing the difficulty of the game in any of a number of possible way would have a positive impact on the health of the game. You are assuming that had Blizzard made different choices, that subscriber numbers would have gone up, or at least not gone down as fast. Possible, but no more so that the chance that the sub numbers would have dropped even faster.

Actually, it's the pro-casual that constantly (and I mean CONSTANTLY, you can see examples littered in the very few dozens previous post) claim and hold as a Holy Truth that WoW was somehow doomed to fail if it hadn't made the complete turnaround in design philosophy from Wrath and on, despite having, as you say it yourself, absolutely no evidence about that.
Just look at Callei that pretends that LFR saved raiding - as if raiding needed any "rescue" in TBC or Vanilla.

I have no less evidence that these guys - if anything, I have at least a few correlations (which is not evidence, but is much, much better than the NOTHING they have).

[Dormie]

my problem with current lfr is not the accessibility (who the fudge cares wether someone has purple pixel or not?!), it's that it's far too easy to do nothing and still win.
if lfr was at least tuned like current flex there would be a severe uproar by the shitters (@mods: i'm sorry for the choice of words, but i just can't think of something better fitting) thinking they could afk their way through all the content, but they would die down after some time (let's say 2-3 months) and we would be left with a superior community!
"survival of the fittest" is what's missing this game. do something to improve yourself or stay at the bottom without having anything achieved at all.

And this is where 'business' ruins everything. Someones about to come in saying how that would be a bad business move yadayada. Well good business doesn't make good games. Unfortunately there isn't really a solution.

[Sageofthe10paths]

Did you saw the video from min 3:35.......he did absolutely NOTHING and was always the DPS with the most damage taken...in the end he was full epic and seen 100% of the content in the game.

This game was once a symbol of respect and considered the ultimate challenge/ social experience and the best design in the gaming industry...and now this is the wow we have?

Dude, why do you care? Him acting like this just mean's he's a piece of trash and a few other good players had to carry him. If you get too many scrubs in LFR you can't finish it, and then the players get their stuff together and finish it. Beating the game on LFR is like beating a game on VERY EASY, it's like "Yay, you put in minimal effort and completed something..." It's not Normal or Hard Modes, and soon their will be Mythic to take a swing at. Plus you can do Battlegrounds for a new type of challenge and their may or may not be bots, but those fools get banned on the regular, so it's not that bad. You got arenas as well where no one is carried, no bots and it's just hard as nails pvp.

Guess what I'm trying to tell you is don't be pessimistic, seems like you're searching for something bad about the game to drive you away. If you really don't wanna 100% play the game, no worries man! You not playing will add up with other plays and they will make WoD a better expansion.

[Katchii]

Nope. MoP is the worst xpac ever. Reason it's losing players faster than ever.

I hate this argument....

Yes, subs have gone down. No one, even Blizzard, can say EXACTLY why. Is it because the expansion packs is "the worst ever?" Is it because there are dozens of other MMO's out there that pull subs away? Is it a change in the population of players where they can't play anymore due to family or other personal obligations? Has the MMO market changed? Is it any combination of any of the above? Or maybe a completely different reason that we can't see?

Stop point at an expansion you don't like and blaming the sub drop on it. It might be a contributor to the sub loss, but so could a dozen other things.

[Akka]

Actually Cata showed just that which is why MoP returned with so much grinds because Cata was too casual in terms of grinds and weekly time commitment. It was fine if you only played a handful of hours a week then content would have lasted you months, but for the "casuals" that played more than that the content lasted a month if that. The leveling grind in Cata was even shorter and players made far more alts earlier in the expansion to counter the lack of grinds than players did in early WotLK. MoP showed that the player base isnt as casual as players think. All the dailies at once might have been a bit too much, but there was "casuals" who loved it.

True.
And despite this, notice how often on these boards, people claim that Cata was "too hardcore" and it's hailed as THE defining "evidence" that WoW "needed" to be dumbed down ?
There is several people answering my posts right now which repeat this as a mantra (while ignoring the proofs of the opposite).

[Saxtorph]

You say it was because raiding was "exclusive." I say that the popularity was because the vast majority of players didn't have raiding forced on them and were given many other far more compelling forms of content to play through. The fact remains that without LFR there would be no raiding. I personally would be perfectly cool with that because we would have good five man dungeons to play though instead. You should be on your hands and knees thanking Blizzard for giving all non-raiders the finger and giving them half-baked versions of the still-exclusive heroic content that hard core raiders are being fed on silver platters right now. Instead you're fixated on the crumbs that everyone else has to settle for.

Please list the "far more compelling" content. Because it just sounds like hyperbole.

[Gurbz]

Clearly everything you're saying is wrong and is being proved wrong just by the constant decrease in subscribers. WoW is a dying game. I quit WoW because it's old, boring, and easy. Many others have too. The sub count is only going to decrease from now and the next expansion. Clearly something is wrong with WoW for people to continue to leave. So you go ahead and defend your dying game if that's what you must to feel good about yourself. Instead of spouting nonsense in an effort to prove yourself right, how about you come up with a way to fix the problems that exist in WoW because clearly everyone else is wrong.

Where are the polls of hardcore players forcing changes down blizzard's throat in the past? I don't believe blizzard has ever listened solely to the "hardcore players" community.

WoW is "dying" primarily because it is a 10 year old game. That, combined with the fact that it continues to carry a subscription fee, and that there are far more options available when it comes to good quality MMOs on the market, means that there will be more people leaving than resubs or new people coming in. Other considerations are periphery concerns at best.

[Akka]

The LFG channel wasn't community. It was a bunch of assholes demanding unrealistic gear requirements of people who needed the dungeons for gear.

Actually, this only happened in WotLK. It was much more reasonable in TBC, when how people played actually mattered to clear content, instead of mindlessly throwing ilvl at a boss.
In TBC, people attempting to PuG raids were more interested into how you played than what kind of purples you wore - I managed countless blue-geared raids back then. Once WotLK made it possible to just faceroll content, people simply didn't bother with gameplay and got people with achiev and GearScore.

You're running out of feet to shoot yourself, pal.

Times change, the game is changing with them. You can fall in or leave. But frankly, don't expect Blizzard to listen to the hardcore players anymore outside tuning Heroic/Mythic going forward. They're not going to shaft their majority demographic so you lot can feel special again. End of story, enjoy your day, I'm gonna go solo Kara and hit up Siege LFR.

Keep repeating yourself that.
What I see is that they have falled below their Vanilla level of sub. Maybe your spoon-fed crowd where the proverbial "vocal minority" and you (gratz !) succeeded in driving away their "core demographic" ?

[Gurbz]

Actually, it's the pro-casual that constantly (and I mean CONSTANTLY, you can see examples littered in the very few dozens previous post) claim and hold as a Holy Truth that WoW was somehow doomed to fail if it hadn't made the complete turnaround in design philosophy from Wrath and on, despite having, as you say it yourself, absolutely no evidence about that.
Just look at Callei that pretends that LFR saved raiding - as if raiding needed any "rescue" in TBC or Vanilla.

I have no less evidence that these guys - if anything, I have at least a few correlations (which is not evidence, but is much, much better than the NOTHING they have).

Well as far as LFR saving raiding, thats a paraphrase from something that the lead producer of WoW actually said in an interview regarding LFR. He pretty much said that Blizzard could not continue to devote resources to developing content that such a small percentage of the playerbase actually got to utilize. The implication was that Blizzard would not have continued developing raids without LFR, or a similar solution to make raiding more accessible than it was at the time, in place.

[Deleted]

Well first thing to do is to change lfr gear to be rare, since color means more than ilvl.

[miffy23]

Way too many people here bickering about all kinds of things, all but the real issue at hand.

For better or for worse, whether you like MoP or not, it has been stagnant - and i'm not talking about sub numbers. Or the content per se, for it has been excellent. But as Preach illustrates very well in the video, and I and others have described in this thread, there is very little fresh blood coming into raiding.

Raiding is the heartpiece of WoW, and the casual approach with LFR, while looking great and flashy on the surface, is slowly corroding the essence of PVE.
There is nothing wrong with LFR per se as an "easy, casual activity for everyone" - but it acts as a very tight fishing net that lets almost nothing through to the "real" PVE endgame, being normal raiding and beyond.

What does LFR teach new players? It teaches them that they need not play their class well, have their gear sorted out or know what they're doing, heck they don't even have to actively play their characters. They can just sit around and enjoy the scenery, or troll people. And most of the time, or at least eventually, they'll get rewarded with some achievements and loot. "Congratulations, you paid money and spent time in our game, please enjoy these compliments of the house".

There is no motivation or challenge there. They got tier sets, they saw the final boss. They saw the story, they "played" the encounters. Ofc it's lightyears between LFR and even Normal, but tell that to a new player that just cleared his final LFR wing.

Once again, there is nothing inherently wrong with the concept of LFR - it just needs to be drastically edited. As it stands now, PVE high end players are dying out. This is no hyperbole or exaggeration. My guild is quite large, with a LOT of actively raiding people, from the ultra casual LFR and occasional Flex player to our raid teams casually progressing through heroic SoO. Yet there is one thing I've noticed during the last 1 and a half years:

I have not encountered a single raider in MoP at normal level or above that has actually started playing in MoP. Heck, not even Cata as far as I can recall. To me, that is a very loud alarm going off. Not one? Not a single one? Something is seriously wrong here, and I don't like where it's heading.

It's good that they are merging realms now as much as possible, because we're going to need it to keep the game alive and kicking on the raiding side of things. Which is a travesty, considering that the raid content in MoP is some of the best they've ever designed. It deserves more than half-assed LFR attempts.