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

[Sucralose]

Shockingly enough during the aforementioned drought we still managed to get a raid tier as the corner stone of every single major patch. And you want to argue its not privileged?

Err they cut shatt out as the middle tier of the expansion and split one tier in half in the casual themed expansion that was WoD though.

[Glorious Leader]

Err they cut shatt out as the middle tier of the expansion and split one tier in half in the casual themed expansion that was WoD though.

Sounds like you still got raids...

[Miffinat0r]

Sounds like you still got raids...

What you're talking about is privilege. And when a question like the one I asked is talking about a privileged class balancing that privilege with other players often feels like opression to them because they're not the center of the focus anymore.

It's like people are taking the scarcity they face in the real world and trying their hardest to match to a game where scarcity isn't a thing.

Said this earlier, and I know you have the Picard avatar--but it's like when Picard encountered the 20th century lawyer who found out that scarcity has been eliminated and poverty/hunger are no longer things in the Human society. How did that man react initially? He was shocked and upset because the thing that gave him separation between himself and others were removed and now he's like everyone else...which is free.

[Kralljin]

Shockingly enough during the aforementioned drought we still managed to get a raid tier as the corner stone of every single major patch. And you want to argue its not privileged?

I'm repeating myself by saying this: Dungeon design as well as encounter design can work pretty isolated from what the rest of the team are doing.

I think anybody who has ever worked at a company has experienced a situation of:
Department / Team X has some issues but Department / Team Y are doing fine - simply because one team is fucking up, doesn't mean others are as well.

Unless you can highlight that Blizzard specifically made the decision to favor raids and dungeons over more casual content during WoD's development (at least to a more severe degree in comparison to previous expansions), you just come across as butthurt that raiders luckily didn't get as fucked over as other audiences - not by design but by incompetence of the people that were responsible for designing the features that aren't dungeon or raid content.

[Beefhammer]

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?

Basically day 1. Raids were always the zenith of the game, where stories concluded, and where the best gear always came from. People who couldn't raid still wanted to raid but couldn't make the cut due to skill, or just couldn't commit to a regular schedule. With 10m added to all raids in LK you saw a bump in participation, with LFR you see more than 50% participation. There is no other activity in the game outside of leveling, normal(maybe heroic), and daily/weekly/WQ.

So it has always been there.

[Miffinat0r]

Basically day 1. Raids were always the zenith of the game, where stories concluded, and where the best gear always came from. People who couldn't raid still wanted to raid but couldn't make the cut due to skill, or just couldn't commit to a regular schedule. With 10m added to all raids in LK you saw a bump in participation, with LFR you see more than 50% participation. There is no other activity in the game outside of leveling, normal(maybe heroic), and daily/weekly/WQ.

So it has always been there.

But that's just some rose colored glasses there. There are some differentials you're taking for granted:

1) Leveling before was significantly harder and slower. That meant that the real hardcore raiders got zipped to the end the rest made friends and leveled together and formed groups.

2) Social media did not exist in it's current form until 2010 which gave MMORPGs a unique place in the development of videogames and social media.

3) While the raid maybe the zenith, it was not the Alpha and Omega. That would be the journey in how you got there.

4) LFR was added specifically because Blizzard saw that a clear vast majority of players were not raiding. They felt their game was a raid centric game and they believed if you give people a taste they'd want to do more. However again GC reminds ya--that ain't true.

So what we have here is a misconception of a belief in a system that a player used, but in doing so they could ignore the wants of others because their preferred game mode allowed them to become isolated from all others. Then it was reinforced by Devs like who are utter pieces of crap like Alex was and now you have a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's beyond me why they would've ever ever hired anyone associated with Fires of Heaven. Dude if you read about them, they are trash people.

[Berndorf]

I don't think the problem is just with it being raid centric. Its the mindset which keeps the focus there which includes a game director who helped lead the game to that mindset to begin with. People say 'I only raid because I enjoy defeating bosses with my guild' yet at the same time 'I wouldn't raid if people could get gear just as good by doing x or y' or 'if you aren't raiding what do you need gear for?'. There's a degree of dishonesty imo in how people approach all of it that I don't think will ever be fully solved in how changes are implemented. People need to be more honest in how much they value gear and how other players would want it for however they like to play. Otherwise you wouldn't have all these raiders who were pvping like crazy just because it seemed easier to gear that way and vice versa at times. It's always been all about the gear and just which route you want to take to get there.

[Miffinat0r]

I don't think the problem is just with it being raid centric. Its the mindset which keeps the focus there which includes a game director who helped lead the game to that mindset to begin with. People say 'I only raid because I enjoy defeating bosses with my guild' yet at the same time 'I wouldn't raid if people could get gear just as good by doing x or y' or 'if you aren't raiding what do you need gear for?'. There's a degree of dishonesty imo in how people approach all of it that I don't think will ever be fully solved in how changes are implemented. People need to be more honest in how much they value gear and how other players would want it for however they like to play. Otherwise you wouldn't have all these raiders who were pvping like crazy just because it seemed easier to gear that way and vice versa at times. It's always been all about the gear and just which route you want to take to get there.

This is exactly the issue. I've said throughout this entire thread if Ion came out tomorrow and said:

"We realize what's happening, but to us our M+ pushers, and Raiders are the audience and we want to focus delivering good content to those players"

I'd drop this discussion in a heartbeat. There's an honesty there which is saying that you're okay with having less players, which is what I feel a lot of casual minded people wouldn't mind hearing and most likely would back off if that were the case, but it's not it goes back to the dishonesty in it all.

[potis]

But that's just some rose colored glasses there. There are some differentials you're taking for granted:

1) Leveling before was significantly harder and slower. That meant that the real hardcore raiders got zipped to the end the rest made friends and leveled together and formed groups.

Dumb sentences like this is why no one takes the rest seriously.

"Made friends while leveling", because the rest dont group up, or all the HARDCORE FRIENDLESS RAIDERS, dont do dungeons together.

You guys always assume your experience is the correct one or the fun one, god forbid someone has fun, and isnt terrible at doing things.

Leveling in Vanilla was never a goal, you were terrible at the game cause lack of knowledge, WoW Classic literally showed this to everyone, yet you guys repeat this dumb shit.

Raiding, which WoW has the main focus of, is a western MMORPG thing, Western MMOs in 2000s had Raiding, Eastern MMOs had countless hours of pointless leveling and +5 items, its literally a design choice, WoW was an easier Everquest (Western Genre) that got lucky and became a trend so it got famous as fuck, by pure luck.

[ReesePieces]

This is exactly the issue. I've said throughout this entire thread if Ion came out tomorrow and said:

"We realize what's happening, but to us our M+ pushers, and Raiders are the audience and we want to focus delivering good content to those players"

I'd drop this discussion in a heartbeat. There's an honesty there which is saying that you're okay with having less players, which is what I feel a lot of casual minded people wouldn't mind hearing and most likely would back off if that were the case, but it's not it goes back to the dishonesty in it all.

Delivering "good content" for M+/Mythic Raiders doesn't mean Blizzard has to create artificial scarcity of player power and only provide one path( Cutting Edge Mythic Raiding) to reach maximum player power.

If casual players could work their way toward Mythic Sylvanas items through the Covenant Sanctum system, does that suddenly make the SoD raid worse content?

[Sucralose]

Delivering "good content" for M+/Mythic Raiders doesn't mean Blizzard has to create artificial scarcity of player power and only provide one path( Cutting Edge Mythic Raiding) to reach maximum player power.

If casual players could work their way toward Mythic Sylvanas items through the Covenant Sanctum system, does that suddenly make the SoD raid worse content?

Pretty much... the issue isn't that they can work towards it the problem lies in what they have to do in order to. If the covenant provided a challenge on par with mage tower it could work. You can't just suddenly instantly gear everyone past all of the games content or you are going to see a gatekeeping system come into play so fast raider io will be used for heroic dungeons and something far worse for everything else.

You can't invalidate every difficulty but mythic raiding and not expect massive knock on effects.

[Miffinat0r]

Pretty much... the issue isn't that they can work towards it the problem lies in what they have to do in order to. If the covenant provided a challenge on par with mage tower it could work. You can't just suddenly instantly gear everyone past all of the games content or you are going to see a gatekeeping system come into play so fast raider io will be used for heroic dungeons and something far worse for everything else.

You can't invalidate every difficulty but mythic raiding and not expect massive knock on effects.

Ya know this sounds like what older people would say about how things are therefore you cannot change them.

Literally your fear about opening up a vendor/token system that awards BiS regardless of content is only showing that even you don't like the idea of raiding.

But for some reason I just cannot understand why you think the very fabric of the game will unravel if this happens. It makes no sense, out of a fear of trying to keep people's ego's maintained.

[ReesePieces]

You can't invalidate every difficulty but mythic raiding and not expect massive knock on effects.

I don't see how having different paths to power invalidates anything. The power progression for casual could be time gated similar to FFXIV. The raid content is still there for a challenge to overcome similar to the Mage Tower.

Just because power is ONE of the rewards from raiding doesn't mean that if that ONE reward is no longer relevant that all of the other rewards(fun learning/ progressing the fights, titles, mounts etc.) are now worthless.

[Deadite]

Rep and upgrading your gear. I think upgrades go past 239 actually.

Ah you are talking about the Archivists' Codex in Korthia? The best you can get is 233 from that. Mental that you think all the shit you have to do and grind to get that stuff is 'Just doing Wq's'. I guess after months of grinding 233 is a pretty sweet ilvl tho.

[Soon-TM]

Or


instanced content specifically raiding is the one thing they give a shit about.

Occams Razor

The way I see it, whether the WoD fiasco was intentional or not is irrelevant, because even if it wasn't, the fact is that even in such a &$#@ty situation they managed to pump out three very good raids, arguably among the top 5 in the entire franchise - while everything else was left to rot.

The only logical conclusion is that either the sub-team(s) in charge of raids were very skilled while everyone else was mentally handicapped, or said subteam(s) received substantially more funding than the rest.

Inb4 "they were training a bunch of new hires". Were all (or even most) of them supposed to work on casual content? If yes, looks like all of them were fired at some point between BfA and SL.

[Beefhammer]

But that's just some rose colored glasses there. There are some differentials you're taking for granted:

1) Leveling before was significantly harder and slower. That meant that the real hardcore raiders got zipped to the end the rest made friends and leveled together and formed groups.

2) Social media did not exist in it's current form until 2010 which gave MMORPGs a unique place in the development of videogames and social media.

3) While the raid maybe the zenith, it was not the Alpha and Omega. That would be the journey in how you got there.

4) LFR was added specifically because Blizzard saw that a clear vast majority of players were not raiding. They felt their game was a raid centric game and they believed if you give people a taste they'd want to do more. However again GC reminds ya--that ain't true.

So what we have here is a misconception of a belief in a system that a player used, but in doing so they could ignore the wants of others because their preferred game mode allowed them to become isolated from all others. Then it was reinforced by Devs like who are utter pieces of crap like Alex was and now you have a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's beyond me why they would've ever ever hired anyone associated with Fires of Heaven. Dude if you read about them, they are trash people.

It wasn't just added becasue many were not raiding, but because the many who were not raiding want to in some sort without the structure and guild ties.

[Sucralose]

The way I see it, whether the WoD fiasco was intentional or not is irrelevant, because even if it wasn't, the fact is that even in such a &$#@ty situation they managed to pump out three very good raids, arguably among the top 5 in the entire franchise - while everything else was left to rot.

The only logical conclusion is that either the sub-team(s) in charge of raids were very skilled while everyone else was mentally handicapped, or said subteam(s) received substantially more funding than the rest.

Inb4 "they were training a bunch of new hires". Were all (or even most) of them supposed to work on casual content? If yes, looks like all of them were fired at some point between BfA and SL.

Or they gave the casual player base exactly what it asked for... all of this arguements stem from the flawed view the wow casual players enjoy playing wow. Most of them don't. What they want is an achievement simulator it is why they can never propose content just reward schemes. The content isn't something that holds their interest.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't see how having different paths to power invalidates anything. The power progression for casual could be time gated similar to FFXIV. The raid content is still there for a challenge to overcome similar to the Mage Tower.

Just because power is ONE of the rewards from raiding doesn't mean that if that ONE reward is no longer relevant that all of the other rewards(fun learning/ progressing the fights, titles, mounts etc.) are now worthless.

It doesn't work because wow is a lot more difficult at end game then final fantasy. You would create the Cata heroic problem all over again where you would see players trying to brute force mechanics and rage.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

[Soon-TM]

Or they gave the casual player base exactly what it asked for.

AFAIK nobody asked for Garrisons (not what was shipped, anyway), Facebook-like mobile games and LITERAL game in the mail. Devs gave the casual playerbase what they (devs) THOUGHT they wanted, and the result was an unsurprising failure. Imagine a guy who wants to seduce a lady, but failing because he is completely oblivious to the girl's tastes and preferences - so his conclusion is "screw women".

Hell, even a few hardcore folks (but who weren't as delusional about their casual fellow players as you) warned them during alpha that it was going to fail, but devs just gaslighted them and went on with that abomination of an expansion. Business as usual for Blizz, of course.

[Sucralose]

AFAIK nobody asked for Garrisons (not what was shipped, anyway), Facebook-like mobile games and LITERAL game in the mail. Devs gave the casual playerbase what they (devs) THOUGHT they wanted, and the result was an unsurprising failure. Imagine a guy who wants to seduce a lady, but failing because he is completely oblivious to the girl's tastes and preferences - so his conclusion is "screw women".

Hell, even a few hardcore folks (but who weren't as delusional about their casual fellow players as you) warned them during alpha that it was going to fail, but devs just gaslighted them and went on with that abomination of an expansion. Business as usual for Blizz, of course.

Of course ironically my distain for them would of served them as well as those who cared about them. There is an irony to that.

[ReesePieces]

It doesn't work because wow is a lot more difficult at end game then final fantasy. You would create the Cata heroic problem all over again where you would see players trying to brute force mechanics and rage.

Your assertion that WoW's endgame is "a lot more difficult" than FFXIV is suspect. I know they have 8-man instead of 20-man raids, but from what I have read, the Ultimate fights are very difficult(100s of pulls) and are for cosmetic rewards not player power.

Even if I concede your point that FFXIV endgame is easier than WoW endgame, your argument for having only ONE path to maximum player power(Cutting Edge Mythic Raiding) is that players would eventually achieve maximum power, and then complain they couldn't beat the hardest content after having reached the maximum power level?

Seriously?

So because some people MIGHT complain about content being too difficult, instead we should keep the current system where 99% of the player base is locked out of full power progression?