Originally Posted by
Kilee25
Although I agree with you in principle, there’s a massive gap between getting the basics down and getting anywhere approaching simmed performance out of a class while dodging boss mechanics and watching debuffs and raid timers. There’s a group of players who basically got left behind somewhere along the way, and the people still playing the game essentially took the attitude of “good riddance.” Over the course of 5 expansions, I watched some of my closest friends essentially hit the limit of their mental bandwidth. Everyone has their own personal wall where they simply can’t play any better. The issue is that most raid bosses are tuned in such a ways that everyone in the raid is theoretically getting 80% (or whatever) performance out of their character. When you have a raid of people only getting 60% for whatever reason, the guild essentially reaches a breaking point where poor performers are either let go or the raid part of the game is essentially killed. The ever escalating levels of difficulty in the retail version essentially makes sure that most everyone playing is going to get the chance to see their own personal wall. These people will become disappointed and disinterested for a myriad of reasons. Perhaps they just get angry because they realize they can’t get past a certain personal best. Or perhaps they feel bad for letting their raid team down. Whatever the reason eventually these people move on because the game becomes a very unpleasant experience to them. Based on my experiences with my friends, the downhill slide started in wrath, but really started to take effect in cata. By MoP, most all of my “casual” friends had completely left the game, and never came back, even though they spoke fondly of it. The game had simply reached a point where these people could no longer participate in the social experiences the game had to offer. Even the few who came back, they only participated in story content, and never joined back into content that the rest of the guild was doing.