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

[MoanaLisa]

Would be amazed if LFR participation is that high these days. Seem totally pointless since all that seems to drop is the Shards of Blahblahblah. I only do Sylvanas on my hunters to try get the quiver tmog. Done it since you could on my ally hunter and few weeks after on my horde and the only loot i have even seen is the shards. The few full runs i did had the same story. No actual loot 99% of the time just shards. I doubt many people go back. Even today when i think most people get it done the ally que was just over a hour and the horde one was 40 mins. Guess it could just be my realm but even on the weekends the wait times are insane.

What I had in mind was something like people accessing raiding would be about 20% and LFR might add another 20-25% on top of that. I agree that most people don't run it a lot and it's pretty clear that many don't wait around for all of the wings to release once a new raid is out. Myself, I do it once to see it and rarely visit it again unless there's some 'fight' (to use the word loosely with LFR) that's more interesting than usual. More often than not it's a frustrating experience once you're in so it wouldn't surprise me to find that most only run it once or twice.

[Osmeric]

It doesn’t matter if they are actually mandatory or not people will treat them as they are making them a chore. If you can get High end power from easy content people will do that easy content none stop to get it.

The solution then is to eliminate the hard competitive content, so there is nothing driving people to gear up rapidly. As it stands, if you fall behind in gearing (you, or your guild) it gets harder to compete for limited raid slots or for raiders.

[MoanaLisa]

This is a trivial problem to solve in game design. It's amazing to me how wow-brain has made so many people think this is some unsolvable timeless mystery.

1. Make all content give a currency that lets you upgrade gear.
2. Make hard content reward tons of that currency.
3. Give the currency a weekly cap.

Problem solved.

Many problems solved if that solution were to be used generally. Many fiddly systems and currencies would go away. Game would be much cleaner in that respect and players wouldn't need to consult lengthy tomes to figure out what they need to do to get X and Y. Run the content you like most at the difficulty level that is best for you and collect more/less of your currency based on that. Then go shopping at a gear vendor.

It seems so simple and direct. Oh wait, it is.

[Jastall]

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.

I mean, was there? Besides raids TBC realistically had arenas, rep grinds and dungeons. Arenas were their own thing, rep grinds only gave you so much, and dungeons were a stepping stone to raids. Both it and vanilla has professions which have fallen by the wayside since then apart from alchemy and SL leggys, but to make the most of them you needed raid mats anyway, and being honest most people got those from raiding.

It's not an accident that Classic in particular was a raidlogging affair for many players. It's not an accident more people proportionally raid in both Classic versions (alongside other factors). It was by far the most viable progression path and already in vanilla patch content disproportionately contained more raids than anything else, same for TBC. It didn't start in Wrath, Wrath mainly made all of raiding more accessible due to 10 man difficulty across the board but it hardly gave it more resources (as evidenced by most of its raids being 1-boss neglected affairs, zero effrot reskinned Naxx, and barely-above-zero-effort two room TotGC).

Now dungeons aren't a stepping stone but actual endgame content in their own right, and there's still arenas on top of RBGs (those started in Wrath if memory serves) and stuff like pet battles and collecting which is a bigger deal than ever if player power isn't your priority. I just disagree with the OP's assessment that the devs only grant their attention to raids, I think the only time that was mostly true was during Mists and WoD. From Legion onwards they've done their damnest to insert new game modes and get people to do something besides raidlog, and both these initiatives were hit or miss affairs to put it succinctly. Really they could have just continued the Mists model of having giant raids and large zones alongside a broken ass PvP and a bunch of launch dungeons that are useless past week 1 and relegated to the Challenge Mode pit of oblivion and saved themselves a lot of trouble and money if they really had only raids as a focus.

[Relapses]

The solution then is to eliminate the hard competitive content, so there is nothing driving people to gear up rapidly. As it stands, if you fall behind in gearing (you, or your guild) it gets harder to compete for limited raid slots or for raiders.

There is no faster way to kill WoW than to give all players access to all gear in the game.

[Kyriani]

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.

The devs used to know this... then they forgot for some reason.

As Ghostcrawler said way back when:

[Relapses]

Many problems solved if that solution were to be used generally. Many fiddly systems and currencies would go away. Game would be much cleaner in that respect and players wouldn't need to consult lengthy tomes to figure out what they need to do to get X and Y. Run the content you like most at the difficulty level that is best for you and collect more/less of your currency based on that. Then go shopping at a gear vendor.

It seems so simple and direct. Oh wait, it is.

If you can get the same currency doing easy content as difficult content, players will just spam the easier content ad infinitum to farm the currency. It's still easier to run 40,000 +2 Mythic Mists of Tirna Scithe than it is to run one single timed +30 Mists of Tirna Scithe. The game needs some kind of vertical gear progression to match the difficulty of the content otherwise the quality of the gear loses all of its value.

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The devs used to know this... then they forgot for some reason.

As Ghostcrawler said way back when:

The Mage Tower wasn't intended to make people better players. It was the exact thing many players had been asking for up to the point they added it: Challenging single player content. The fact that it made many players contend with the realization that maybe they aren't nearly at good at the game as I'm sure they thought they were is an unfortunate side effect; I doubt strongly that a lot of people quit because of it though.

[Eli85]

My problem with this is that time is only a tool used for measurement. So if time is your how you determine casual you need a to explain how it does that. It may not be a fixed amount of for all players but it needs to have some measurable quantity ie % of free time spent or time running actual content. Also skill has nothing to do with my proposal to how to define casual, the worst player in the world can be hardcore and the best can be casual.

I'd also say if you are pushing yourself into doing things that aren't fun in order to to grow, you are not treating those other mmos with a casual mindset but actually a hardcore(if this is the word we want to use thats opposite of casual) one. A casual's only goal should be enjoyment of the game they are playing and for different players that will be different levels of content. But as soon as they start doing content they don't want to obtain a longer goal of growth its no longer casual play. I point back to my previous posts about 1 night a week mythic raiders and 10+ hour a week players that only herb and talk in trade chat. Assuming same irl schedules which of these play styles is hardcore or casual. I'm currently playing about 2.5 hours of wow a week but I'm full clearing mythic SoD while its on farm am I a casual?

The opposite of casual is not hardcore. Hardcore is a mentality, not a time measured approach to the game. For the sake of argument, the opposite of casual would be committed. So you can be casual-hardcore and committed-hardcore.

Yes, time is a tool only used for measurement, and casual vs committed is only a descriptor for that measurement. The problem with the definitions that you and others subscribe, is that too many "casuals" would have skill levels higher than you claim they are, and ergo would destroy your more mindset / gameplay focused definition of casual. So it doesn't work. When we define casual only by the amount of time he/she puts in, it holds up to any and all scrutiny.

As for what that amount of time constitutes, it does differ to each and every person, which is why i cannot give you an exact definition. I could say, for example, that three hours a week is the cap for casual, but then someone else may define casual as one hour a week at most. Given that this is not an objective argument, debating which one is more right is ultimately pointless.

tl;dr: The only definition of casual that holds up to all scrutiny is when it is defined as a measurement of time played.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

The solution then is to eliminate the hard competitive content, so there is nothing driving people to gear up rapidly. As it stands, if you fall behind in gearing (you, or your guild) it gets harder to compete for limited raid slots or for raiders.

You'd have to remove all content from the game then as people act the same way even if they aren't do the highest form of content.

wow would pretty much need a total social shift before we could do any thing is big and that's not likely to happen.

[Kumorii]

I think it's more about people convincing themselves that blizzard think raiding is the only thing important.

[Tyris Flare]

That is a long way of saying "I don't have any evidence."

Notice that I didn't say anything about 80/20. I simply asked you how you determined that the raiders were the 20, which you clearly cannot demonstrate or you would have. We have no evidence that this is the case, and we can make up reasons all we want for either side, but without data it is pointless and obnoxious for you to speak with such unearned confidence. I'll just make up reasons I am right: RPers are the real 20 because they are more likely to buy cosmetics, name changes, etc.. Do I have data? Nope, but it FEEEELS right so I can declare it is true!

Oh, let me guess "It feeeeeels right" only works for you. How convenient.

I didn't say raiders are the core 20, I said lifestyle players. The 20% of your audience are the most important part to keep happy. Lifestyle players (raiders and non-raiders) spend far more money in game.

Many lifestyle players are raiders, but certainly not all. That guy who spends 6 hours in Kortha a day collecting stuff is definitely part of the 20, and he probably buys stuff on the shop. It is less likely that he spends a few hundred bucks a year in realm transfers to change guilds, however.

But the point of bringing up the 80/20 principle is because it applies to basically every business, and there's no reason to expect it is different in wow. The 20% of core players are the most important, the same way that alcoholics are the most important beer consumers (sad but true). It's great if you can increase the profitability from your 80%, but by their very nature these hobbyist players are unreliable. You can't reasonably fish for them, aside from new expansions and hype videos that might get them to buy the game then play for a month. Nearly the entire industry works like this. Flashy stuff -> get hobbyists to buy your game -> focus on delivering content to the 20% who actually play your game and will buy DLC/season passes.

Also note that you haven't presented any evidence on what percentages raid or anything else. You throw around numbers all the time without citation because that's how forums work, but then hypocritically demand that other people do the same, a technique widely displayed by other such amazing posters as the guy with the Maggie Simpson avatar that everyone despises.

We do not have great data on this game, aside from what raider.io can tell us from the API (which, notably, suggest a much higher percent of people participating in at least some endgame content, as we've seen from covenant info). So without that, we are left to rely on basic principles followed by every other product.

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I think it's more about people convincing themselves that blizzard think raiding is the only thing important.

Very true, especially the jilted lovers here

[Mojo03]

I feel like the root cause of peoples issues with raiding, is that this game is hyper fixated on power progression and the best means of progressing is raiding.

The rest of the game outside of the never ending, refreshed every 6 months or whatever, power progression treadmill is a fucking joke.

Then you look to reasons as to why that is and its easy to feel like it's because they value raiding vastly more than anything else, since they are the star of each major patch and clearly have a lot of time and effort put into them.

But again, I think the real issue with WoW is the hyper fixation on power progression systems and the neglect of pretty much everything else in the game to keep those treadmill systems going.

And it seems like it's that way largely because that was what created the highest retention and dollar spent per player numbers on a spreadsheet.

[Kralljin]

I mean, was there? Besides raids TBC realistically had arenas, rep grinds and dungeons. Arenas were their own thing, rep grinds only gave you so much, and dungeons were a stepping stone to raids.

Arena rewards were actually pretty solid for PvE as well, the Offpieces for Honor were also quite solid for a few spec.

but to make the most of them you needed raid mats anyway, and being honest most people got those from raiding.

For the T4 equivalent items, you didn't have to raid at all, all you needed was Primal Nether.

Only the T5 Items were kinda iffy due to Nether Vortex being BoP, but the remaining pieces were effectively BoE because the items themselves were BoE or the materials that dropped from raids were BoP.

But you could certainly craft yourself pretty solid items without ever entering a raid or optionally, buy them off the AH.

Reps also gave some solid items that were actually BiS in T4, especially the weapons were sought after.

And calling dungeons a "stepping stone" is also disengenous, by that logic, pretty anything can be considered a stepping stone towards raiding.
Heroics still gave you some good items and Badges were also decent.

I'm not saying you could get BiS without ever setting foot in a raid, but options were certainly there.

It's not an accident that Classic in particular was a raidlogging affair for many players. It's not an accident more people proportionally raid in both Classic versions (alongside other factors).

Due to the raids being extremely easy by modern standards, you can obviously pass on quite a few things and just raidlog.

I will also point out that quite a few people simply knocked out these things pretty early because there is no timegating involved.
I also got the Rep done within the first two weeks in TBC and then started raidlogging, because the game allowed me to do this.

There is nothing wrong raidlogging itself.

It was by far the most viable progression path and already in vanilla patch content disproportionately contained more raids than anything else, same for TBC.

I'm saying this is wrong, but i am pointing out that these elements actually got smaller or entirely vanished out of the progression loop from WoW and used to be more relevant.

[Arcreid]

That's weird, because ever since Shadowland all the art assets went to Covenant set, all the 3d backpiece went to covenant, while raid share the same asset with pvp, and even recently used the old legendary model.

The problem with casuals in this game is that they lie, back in WOD they said they only want cool armor, now that all the new stuff is on casual content, they want Mythic quality ilvl (Suddenly normal and heroic isn't enough anymore).

But i really don't mind now if they remove hard content, there's already a substitute MMO so it's not like WOW is the only raiding MMO anymore.

[infinitemeridian]

That's weird, because ever since Shadowland all the art assets went to Covenant set, all the 3d backpiece went to covenant, while raid share the same asset with pvp, and even recently used the old legendary model.

The problem with casuals in this game is that they lie, back in WOD they said they only want cool armor, now that all the new stuff is on casual content, they want Mythic quality ilvl (Suddenly normal and heroic isn't enough anymore).

But i really don't mind now if they remove hard content, there's already a substitute MMO so it's not like WOW is the only raiding MMO anymore.

The issue is not the rewards. The issue is that the content outside of raids is bottom of the barrel uninspired garbage that isn't fun.

[exochaft]

The Mage Tower wasn't intended to make people better players. It was the exact thing many players had been asking for up to the point they added it: Challenging single player content. The fact that it made many players contend with the realization that maybe they aren't nearly at good at the game as I'm sure they thought they were is an unfortunate side effect; I doubt strongly that a lot of people quit because of it though.

I think the best part of the Mage Tower system is that power progression rewards were not a part of that system. One of the reasons why the raiding scene (for many, not all) has become less desirable all the time is the combination is constantly increasing the difficulty while tying the best rewards to it. This has many consequences, depending upon the player. There's the raider that used to be able to cut it at the top-end raiding but gradually got to the point where they couldn't anymore due to the difficulty increase... whether it was due to skill or time commitments, it doesn't really matter. There's the top-end raider who can easily do the hardest content, but they're finding it harder and harder to maintain a roster or find the time to do what is required to raid like they used to... not a skill issue, more of a time issue combined with a playerbase shift issue. There's a bunch of individual cases in between, and their reasons ultimately trend towards the game getting more and more difficult in the raiding scene.

I figured Classic WoW would've been the wake-up call that WoW used to be the 'casual gamer's MMORPG' compared to what was on the market at the time. A lot of the design philosophies revolved around making the game accessible while fostering the need to have a social environment to play. However, if you make the game too difficult and ostracize players in the process, you create an self-defeating environment.

As a former CE raider (former since I no longer play), while I thought the mythic raiding scene was actually easy on a personal level, I found that over the years less and less of my friends either wanted to bother with mythic at all or felt that the game was moving away from them towards higher difficulty (or way more grinding) in order to get BiS. Ultimately, I wouldn't have minded if Blizz boosted heroic difficulty slight to be in line with the earlier mythic progression and just got rid of mythic raiding all together. My ideal world would be the return of a semi-Ulduar raiding scene in terms of difficulty access: two difficulty modes, you can get the best gear from the higher difficulty mode, but you can activate hard modes (aka, mythic equivalent fights) for bragging rights or cosmetics only.

Of course, you need more than just raiding, as well. With a fundamental change to the raiding scene, having different ways in the game to achieve the same goal w/o needing to raid is paramount. Also, adding in parallel paths of progression that aren't power related and are just bloody chores would be welcome. All in all, the game current feels like it's designed for the extreme ends of the player spectrum, while the vast majority in the middle get ignored or suffer.

[Varitok]

When they put a raid encounter designer as the lead designer on the game

[NineSpine]

So is it not progress unless its BIS? But even if you want to say yes they more or less still do as you can make a piece BIS with sockets and the like.

Do you think it is reasonable to compare BiS gear with sockets? Seriously? By the way, the reps used to lead to things like more sockets as well as the actual gear.

gonna have to fully reject this notion mythic plus isn’t comparable to raiding and you can progress it casually even if you might not hit the tippy top.

It is high difficulty content for people who want to push themselves for a challenge. You can't queue for it. You have to go with organized groups. That's not what casual means.

then it’s more time/money then what we have/had and I don’t think they’d invest in it.

It is flatly irrational to insist that the same amount of content organized slightly differently is some mega-shift in resources.

Mabye in a different game with a different fan base it’s a easy solution but something like this wouldn’t work with how people play wow, it would just be the maw of souls in legion all over again but with far more rage.

Blizzard could do it of course but I don’t think they’d have the guts or if they tied they would give in to fan back lash and revert it.

Explain to me what the source of "rage" would be? We shouldn't make the game better for the vast majority of players because it might hurt some tryhard's feelings that someone else is having fun in a way that impacts them zero percent?

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I didn't say raiders are the core 20, I said lifestyle players. The 20% of your audience are the most important part to keep happy. Lifestyle players (raiders and non-raiders) spend far more money in game.

Many lifestyle players are raiders, but certainly not all. That guy who spends 6 hours in Kortha a day collecting stuff is definitely part of the 20, and he probably buys stuff on the shop. It is less likely that he spends a few hundred bucks a year in realm transfers to change guilds, however.

But the point of bringing up the 80/20 principle is because it applies to basically every business, and there's no reason to expect it is different in wow. The 20% of core players are the most important, the same way that alcoholics are the most important beer consumers (sad but true). It's great if you can increase the profitability from your 80%, but by their very nature these hobbyist players are unreliable. You can't reasonably fish for them, aside from new expansions and hype videos that might get them to buy the game then play for a month. Nearly the entire industry works like this. Flashy stuff -> get hobbyists to buy your game -> focus on delivering content to the 20% who actually play your game and will buy DLC/season passes.

Also note that you haven't presented any evidence on what percentages raid or anything else. You throw around numbers all the time without citation because that's how forums work, but then hypocritically demand that other people do the same, a technique widely displayed by other such amazing posters as the guy with the Maggie Simpson avatar that everyone despises.

We do not have great data on this game, aside from what raider.io can tell us from the API (which, notably, suggest a much higher percent of people participating in at least some endgame content, as we've seen from covenant info). So without that, we are left to rely on basic principles followed by every other product.

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Very true, especially the jilted lovers here

I specifically posted a link to numbers showing 10-20% raiding. If you weren't making the point that raiders were the 20% that fuel revenue, your point was meaningless and bringing it up is an absolute waste of your time, my time, and everyone else's time unfortunate enough to read your post.

[Djuntas]

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.

Yep, issue is most people seem to only care about gear as a progress system. Gear is like 1/10th my progress in wow...Im Ilvl 240 now, and never thought it was better than when I was 220 really.

[Exkrementor]

Anyone who thinks that raiding got more important over the years has not been paying attention.

Every addon got more and more casual friendly. Maybe not WoD.

You can do nothing in classic besides pvp (which is useless because you need to play 80 hours a week to make it worth), leveling and raiding. TBC brought heroics and arena. Wotlk gave you raid items for farming dungeons and achievements. MoP gave you pet battles, a lot of daily quests and rep grinds, timeless isle and challenge modes. Legion was insane. World quests, archeology, mythic+, more mounts and pets you can farm in a lifetime, class and order hall campaigns, mage tower, suramar, invasions.

Yeah, WoW is just about raiding nowadays...