When did WoW convince itself Raiding is the only thing that's important?

[Miffinat0r]

I seriously cannot understand this logic. I've raided before, I'm sure most of us have, but I wouldn't say it's the be all end all of a video game. It's just a minigame to do with more players at the end of a character's leveling career. Where and why did this become the main focus of the game? I was watching Asmon's video last night and I think he brought up a good point--which is that the reason so many players think Raiding is the only thing that matters is because when WoW was coming up the content creators that were promoting WoW were all from the high-end/semi-high-end raiding communities. This gave the game a false sense of where the priorities arise from.

He was convinced in the video that the game tries to focus too much on the Mythic Raider Player and the Average Joe who does nothing but play once a week. While I don't disagree with the Mythic piece, the more I thought about it I could see the Average Joe piece too. But I suspect that was Activision trying to get new players to play--looking at you Mission Table and Level Squish. Those feel like corporate decisions. But the Mythic Raider piece is entirely the Devs fault. The people in leadership on the Dev team focus way too much on the Mythic Crowd. Most players don't even touch heroic raiding, yet why is it always seem like the center of the conversation revolves around Mythic Raiding.

As I finished it I was watching it with my roomate (old WOW player) and he said when he tried WoW again he noticed the leveling experience was ruined, and when he got to endgame the only thing people talked about was raiding. His conclusion was that it's no wonder the population shrank because it feels like the game thinks it's a good thing if everyone is striving to be a Mythic Raider, and he said how do you expect people to have fun under that system?

[shadowmatrix]

It didn't, players did. WOW has things to do that don't focus on raiding but the more vocal part of the playerbase is too busy chasing gear to notice those activities.

[Blackmist]

Feedback loop coming from every other feature being underwhelming and/or neglected.

They've had no idea what they're doing with this game for a long time.

[Elias1337]

Your logic failed in moment that you think blizzard is focusing on mythic raiders. Reason why mythic raiding feels important and only things what matter is becouse rest of 99.9% of game content cutters to casuals and most peopel can finish such content one hande while watching netflix so content feels like it doesnt matter. Maybe if casual.content had actual resonable challenge it would feel.more meaningfull to progres in such content.

- - - Updated - - -

Feedback loop coming from every other feature being underwhelming and/or neglected.

They've had no idea what they're doing with this game for a long time.

They can make those features more rewarding becouse it wil make absolote other content in different part of game.

[erifwodahs]

Amm, devs focus mostly on raiding? We literally had less to do up until what, MoP when they started to add new zones and systems for casuals. "Leveling experience ruined" I how many people are there who just level ALL the time? How long would they do that? I absolutely hate the argument "devs focus on mythic crowd" - only focus devs are giving to them is literally just to screw them over and put them in the box of how THEY want mythic raiders/Key Pushers to play. Do you thing any mythic raider/pusher asked for Korthia? Islands/Warfronts/Corruptions/Legion AP/World Quests? Removal of Master Loot? Torghast? WoW is getting way more casual features than it used to have in classic/tbc/wotlk and that's just a fact. Gameplay loot for raiders was literally always the same and now PvE players have m+ too.

Only argument you could make is that BiS loot is no longer obtainable by Johny the Clicker because that is what old "casual friendly" expansions used to give them before WotLK, ever since then you have to be somewhat competent to get bis loot. Tho with addition of M+ that is no longer really true either.

[kranur]

I seriously cannot understand this logic. I've raided before, I'm sure most of us have, but I wouldn't say it's the be all end all of a video game. It's just a minigame to do with more players at the end of a character's leveling career. Where and why did this become the main focus of the game? I was watching Asmon's video last night and I think he brought up a good point--which is that the reason so many players think Raiding is the only thing that matters is because when WoW was coming up the content creators that were promoting WoW were all from the high-end/semi-high-end raiding communities. This gave the game a false sense of where the priorities arise from.

He was convinced in the video that the game tries to focus too much on the Mythic Raider Player and the Average Joe who does nothing but play once a week. While I don't disagree with the Mythic piece, the more I thought about it I could see the Average Joe piece too. But I suspect that was Activision trying to get new players to play--looking at you Mission Table and Level Squish. Those feel like corporate decisions. But the Mythic Raider piece is entirely the Devs fault. The people in leadership on the Dev team focus way too much on the Mythic Crowd. Most players don't even touch heroic raiding, yet why is it always seem like the center of the conversation revolves around Mythic Raiding.

As I finished it I was watching it with my roomate (old WOW player) and he said when he tried WoW again he noticed the leveling experience was ruined, and when he got to endgame the only thing people talked about was raiding. His conclusion was that it's no wonder the population shrank because it feels like the game thinks it's a good thing if everyone is striving to be a Mythic Raider, and he said how do you expect people to have fun under that system?

What the hell are you talking about? Do you even hear yourself? WoW has shifted more and more away from raiding being the only endgame way to the point where you don't even have to touch raids and be just as fine as mythic raiders (something which was not true many many many years ago).

What exactly do you want them to do? Remove all difficulties outside of LFR? To what end exactly, to promote world quests or what?

OFC people look up to and talk about the far away or completely out of reach content, it's interesting, the rest they can just log on and do.

If the game thought everyone should be a mythic raider then you'd only have patches consisting of a new raid and that's it.

[exsanguinate]

WOW has things to do.

Like grinding old content for transmog and mounts?

[Neverafter]

Maybe if casual.content had actual resonable challenge it would feel.more meaningfull to progres in such content

Cataclysm dungeons and recent Mage Tower prove making content "reasonably challenging" doesn't make players feel accomplished or strive to be better. It's punishing and players get frustrated and quit.

[Kokolums]

Cataclysm dungeons and recent Mage Tower prove making content "reasonably challenging" doesn't make players feel accomplished or strive to be better. It's punishing and players get frustrated and quit.

There is no in-game community to support it.

If there was an in-game community, you'd complete the mage tower and people you run into everyday out in the world would recognize and celebrate your achievement. But you are anonymous everywhere in modern WoW. So you compete the mage tower and ... no-one cares. Pretty soon, it feels like all solo stuff is meaningless in WoW because no-one cares. Pretty soon, all that matters is raiding because that's the only place you aren't totally anonymous.

Because people are social creatures. It never changes. WoW's core appeal was the in-game community that made everything matter.

[Thrif]

It's been an ongoing process all along I'd say. Raiding isn't the only thing that has suffered this fate, pvp went from being world combat and battle grounds to only care about gladiator contenders and trying to make it into an e-sports.

It's just the same, there used to be people who played the game just for fun, and there used to be people who played the game to be the very best that no one ever was, and the design ever always steadily veered in order to cater to the latter and drive away everyone else. Which is why we have the retail we do.

[Dracullus]

Right now we have arenas, battlegrounds, M+, raiding, collectibles, side content (torghast, covenant activities etc.) for endgame. In the past it was arenas, battleground, raiding. Not to mention patches were all about new raid.

Don't get me wrong, game definitely should invest more into casual stuff, advertise better stuff already in game and make older content more relevant. But core of game doesn't need to be changed, they just need to build around it.

And if we talk about leveling, they tried make longer leveling in 7.3.5, people bitched HARD about it. Including wow messiah Asmon that bitch about everything because for some reason he's bored after he played same game almost every day for 15+ years. During BfA no PVP vendor, titanforging or grind were "critical issues", but when it was repaired suddenly different things are "ruining the game". It will never stop.

Current 1-50 leveling is direct reaction for feedback and is one of highlights of SL, especially since people that want experience old way has Classic.

[Kralljin]

Because the WoW developers have no idea to develop anything else that can be considered good endgame content.

I don't want to go through each expansion, but in Vanilla / TBC, you still had some endgame content besides raiding (disregarding that most of these rewards were also quite often inferior to raiding and had tremendous effort involved), with Wotlk and onwards however those gradually vanished and the game was all about funneling players into raiding - that is after all why Wotlk made raiding more accessible.

At this point, WoW was pretty much a game where you were raiding or character progression stopped in its tracks pretty damn quickly if you didn't make the leap into raiding.
And as said above, this is because WoW deves had no clue to develop anything else besides it.

It's the old Blizzard motto in effect: Devs create games they want to play, the devs didn't have much fun in anything besides raiding, so that's where the game went.

Not to bash on Ion, but the former Lead Encounter designer now being Game Director is an indirect confirmation that the team is at large run by people that care mostly about this.
However, do take note that (i assume) their attempts to rectify these things, with all this talk about meaningful choice and whatnot (which equally pisses off the raiding community) has spectacularly backfired.

[FelPlague]

Maybe if casual.content had actual resonable challenge it would feel.more meaningfull to progres in such content.

"Casual"
"Challenge"

my dude... thats like saying

"The biggest smallest"
They are literally counter to eachother...

casual content is not challenging, its casual, thats literally the point of casual. if you make casual content hard, its not longer casual its hard. so then you end up with pvp, M+, and raiding like we already have.

[Skylarking]

When ion became in charge. I'm sorry but he just looks like a very boring person that has no hobbies or interests in anything other than raiding and high end content. The game design reflects that too.

[The Stormbringer]

It didn't, players did. WOW has things to do that don't focus on raiding but the more vocal part of the playerbase is too busy chasing gear to notice those activities.

Some of the biggest streamers, with the largest audiences, focus on things that aren't raiding. That tells me that there's plenty of people out there with an interest in other, non-raiding content, as long as it's fun and interesting.

Also, everyone in the game wants better gear. It's one of the most core parts of the game. That doesn't mean the whole focus should be on it, though.

[Asrialol]

I'd say since roughly more or less pluss minus oh I don't know. Vanilla.

[Eli85]

"Casual"
"Challenge"

my dude... thats like saying

"The biggest smallest"
They are literally counter to eachother...

casual content is not challenging, its casual, thats literally the point of casual. if you make casual content hard, its not longer casual its hard. so then you end up with pvp, M+, and raiding like we already have.

Casual and challenge are not counters to each other. This is a myth. Casual is simply a reflection of time commitment. You can have challenging content that doesn't require significant time commitment. That's casual challenge.

[Kralljin]

I find it odd that people blame it on content creators.

WoW's focus on raiding isn't a recent thing and frankly predates the popularity of content creators.

[Cwimge]

When ion took the helm and did for a job what he enjoyed as a player. With a raid lover in command, raids took precedent, like attracted like and now we have a feedback loop where mostly raiders are all that's left and they like what's going on so more of the same happens

[Xath]

"Casual"
"Challenge"

my dude... thats like saying

"The biggest smallest"
They are literally counter to eachother...

casual content is not challenging, its casual, thats literally the point of casual. if you make casual content hard, its not longer casual its hard. so then you end up with pvp, M+, and raiding like we already have.

Casual doesn't mean bad there are plenty of two night guilds that get CE.