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  1. #381
    Quote Originally Posted by Gielnik2 View Post
    WoW already strikes the perfect balance I feel like. Leveling is mindless, yes, but the challenge is there in the endgame for people who seek it. Mythic raids are harder than any Dark Souls game and that's great; everyone has something to strive towards. PvP is PvP and theoretically has infinite difficulty scaling. For the less inclined players you have world content and lower difficulty dungeons/raids.

    This is why I never understood people calling WoW a casual game. This thing can be as hardcore as you want it to be.
    It’s only hardcore if you can commit to a raiding schedule. Otherwise you just finish heroic raids in a month and wait for the next tier.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jessicka View Post
    https://web.archive.org/web/20110113...n/blog/2053469

    This wonderful blog post, which was deleted after it prompted probably the biggest exodus of the playerbase in the game's history.


    I don't disagree, this was proven with the limited interest in Challenge Modes in MOP. I don't even think people want the 'best' gear to be honest, I think they want gear that makes their job easier. The harder you make the content, the less content players will be with what they have. I mean, you see that in the expectations on gearscore, achievements etc that people ask for in LFG.
    There’s a lot more interest in high keys than challenge modes, so it may be that they just hadn’t found a design that worked.

  2. #382
    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    I’m not sure how true this is anymore.

    Per raider.io 1.8 million unique characters have run a mythic+ so far in season 3.

    Over 800,000 unique characters have run a +15 or higher key.

    Now, that includes alts which some people have many and some have none. So maybe 300,000 unique players doing the highest mythic+ content with rewards?

    If that is some vanishingly small 1% of the playebase than WoW is doing REALLY good.
    Who is most likely to have numerous alts? Probably people running high keys, as they are the most invested hardcore players. 300,000 is EXTREMELY generous, and it also ignored how many of those just bought runs.

    But let's take your numbers at face value. 300,000 is pretty small overall. We are talking about something like 10% of the player base.
    "stop puting you idiotic liberal words into my mouth"
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  3. #383
    Quote Originally Posted by Jessicka View Post
    https://web.archive.org/web/20110113...n/blog/2053469

    This wonderful blog post, which was deleted after it prompted probably the biggest exodus of the playerbase in the game's history.


    I don't disagree, this was proven with the limited interest in Challenge Modes in MOP. I don't even think people want the 'best' gear to be honest, I think they want gear that makes their job easier. The harder you make the content, the less content players will be with what they have. I mean, you see that in the expectations on gearscore, achievements etc that people ask for in LFG.
    Is it bad that I fully agree with the blog post?

    I think their mistake is trying to design the game from a shareholder perspective of “most capture as many subs as possible” rather than deciding what the game should be like on their own.

    I don’t think watering down the game since then has helped as subs have continued to drop. And we are left with a more shallow game that has to rely on literally 20+ discreet dungeon difficulty levels.

    Truest statement of that blog post:

    “…it was unfortunate that we largely killed Ulduar raiding when Trial of the Crusader came out.“
    Last edited by Argorwal; 2022-04-11 at 02:50 PM.

  4. #384
    The Unstoppable Force Jessicka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    Is it bad that I fully agree with the blog post?

    I think their mistake is trying to design the game from a shareholder perspective of “most capture as many subs as possible” rather than deciding what the game should be like on their own.

    I don’t think watering down the game since then has helped as subs have continued to drop. And we are left with a more shallow game that has to rely on literally 20+ discreet dungeon difficulty levels.
    Oh, there'll be no shortage of people saying that they agree with it, because that's the cool thing to do. Doesn't change that the game hasn't recovered from the backlash to it all these years later.

  5. #385
    Quote Originally Posted by Celement View Post
    Why ask a question answered in what you quote...?

    I can't tell if you are posting just to post.
    You are actively paying for a video game you feel like makes you do chores. That is not the fault of the video game. That is a fault of the perception you have of the video game. You know what most people do when they feel like something isn't "respecting their time"? They stop paying for it. They don't go on forums and argue for 20 pages about how their perceived vision would be better for the game.

  6. #386
    Quote Originally Posted by Jessicka View Post
    Oh, there'll be no shortage of people saying that they agree with it, because that's the cool thing to do. Doesn't change that the game hasn't recovered from the backlash to it all these years later.
    Do you feel if Cata heroics were easy from the beginning that subs wouldn’t have declined in Cata (or maybe ever)?

    Did nerfing the Cata heroics and later intruding the 3 toothless heroics in 4.3 save WoW?

    TBC heroics were hard and subs grew, why is that?

  7. #387
    The Unstoppable Force Jessicka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    I
    “…it was unfortunate that we largely killed Ulduar raiding when Trial of the Crusader came out.“
    Sure, but that hasn't been something they were ever likely to change. The nature of expansions is that they reset the playerbase and put everyone back on the same starting point, major patches aren't really much different - you can't expect people who were struggling in Ulduar from day one of Ulduar, and there were many of them - to keep grinding Ulduar for the rest of the expansion. We see in every patch ever, irrespective of player completion, that players get content-fatigue toward the end of patches. Resetting is the only real solution to that.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    Do you feel if Cata heroics were easy from the beginning that subs wouldn’t have declined in Cata (or maybe ever)?

    Did nerfing the Cata heroics and later intruding the 3 toothless heroics in 4.3 save WoW?

    TBC heroics were hard and subs grew, why is that?
    They were a piece of piss with guildmates, I got kicked in LFG simply because people didn't like Warlocks due to the shit state they were put into the expansion in, I wouldn't even get to the first trash pack. So I avoided using it.

    The refinements in MoP were for me the best state the game landed in, Throne of Thunder patch probably the best of it. WoD probably would have been better received had they not tried to force Garrisons.

  8. #388
    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    Is it bad that I fully agree with the blog post?

    I think their mistake is trying to design the game from a shareholder perspective of “most capture as many subs as possible” rather than deciding what the game should be like on their own.

    I don’t think watering down the game since then has helped as subs have continued to drop. And we are left with a more shallow game that has to rely on literally 20+ discreet dungeon difficulty levels.

    Truest statement of that blog post:

    “…it was unfortunate that we largely killed Ulduar raiding when Trial of the Crusader came out.“
    The problem with that blog post is that it puts understanding the content on the backs of the players rather than on the developers. The problem WoW has had increasingly with every expansion is that they design obtuse mechanics that pretty much require research ahead of time, rather than designing content than can be understood simply by playing it. This is fine for fringe, niche challenges, but when you make it part of the core of the game (like heroic dungeons) it becomes problematic very quickly.

    If you look at the Vanilla model, unique mechanics were few and far between. Instead, there was a shared set of basic combat mechanics that worked across almost all content and learning how to manage those core mechanics was what the gameplay was about. The primary part of these mechanics was threat management, and outside of that there were general concepts like cleansing debuffs. There are massive downsides to this design paradigm, such as things feeling same-y after awhile, but it is important to understand that that is what the design was.

    As time went on, they increasingly replaced these general concepts with fight-specific, unique mechanics. This is a perfectly reasonable design direction, but they never developed a coherent internal language that players could learn. Instead, something as seemingly simple as "Don't stand in bad" turns into learning different signals in different fights. A coherent language of what "bad" looks like, rather than an endless parade of fight-specific visuals is necessary for this design to work for the average player. Instead, they've doubled down over and over and over again, making the fights more and more complex and obtuse, to the point now where it is difficult to even run fairly low difficulty content without doing a bunch of research and homework beforehand.

    Piggybacking on this problem is the add-on arms race between the encounter designers and add-on developers. This has made the aforementioned problems worse and worse.

    Putting that on the players is incredibly condescending. It's not the players' fault that Blizzard failed to design internally coherent signals for fights, or mechanics that can be understand by just playing the game. That's Blizzard's poor design.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    You are actively paying for a video game you feel like makes you do chores. That is not the fault of the video game. That is a fault of the perception you have of the video game. You know what most people do when they feel like something isn't "respecting their time"? They stop paying for it. They don't go on forums and argue for 20 pages about how their perceived vision would be better for the game.
    You also criticize the game, so it is hypocritical to say everyone who has different criticisms should just leave. If that's the case, you would leave.
    "stop puting you idiotic liberal words into my mouth"
    -ynnady

  9. #389
    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    Do you feel if Cata heroics were easy from the beginning that subs wouldn’t have declined in Cata (or maybe ever)?

    Did nerfing the Cata heroics and later intruding the 3 toothless heroics in 4.3 save WoW?

    TBC heroics were hard and subs grew, why is that?
    People didn't start doing heroics in TBC until like... late T5.

    Heroics in TBC were extremely unpopular and people literally only did slave pens and mechanar for more than 50% of that expansion. Lich king hype and illidan hype made subs grow, not 5mans. idiot.

  10. #390
    Quote Originally Posted by NineSpine View Post
    The problem with that blog post is that it puts understanding the content on the backs of the players rather than on the developers. The problem WoW has had increasingly with every expansion is that they design obtuse mechanics that pretty much require research ahead of time, rather than designing content than can be understood simply by playing it. This is fine for fringe, niche challenges, but when you make it part of the core of the game (like heroic dungeons) it becomes problematic very quickly.

    If you look at the Vanilla model, unique mechanics were few and far between. Instead, there was a shared set of basic combat mechanics that worked across almost all content and learning how to manage those core mechanics was what the gameplay was about. The primary part of these mechanics was threat management, and outside of that there were general concepts like cleansing debuffs. There are massive downsides to this design paradigm, such as things feeling same-y after awhile, but it is important to understand that that is what the design was.

    As time went on, they increasingly replaced these general concepts with fight-specific, unique mechanics. This is a perfectly reasonable design direction, but they never developed a coherent internal language that players could learn. Instead, something as seemingly simple as "Don't stand in bad" turns into learning different signals in different fights. A coherent language of what "bad" looks like, rather than an endless parade of fight-specific visuals is necessary for this design to work for the average player. Instead, they've doubled down over and over and over again, making the fights more and more complex and obtuse, to the point now where it is difficult to even run fairly low difficulty content without doing a bunch of research and homework beforehand.

    Piggybacking on this problem is the add-on arms race between the encounter designers and add-on developers. This has made the aforementioned problems worse and worse.

    Putting that on the players is incredibly condescending. It's not the players' fault that Blizzard failed to design internally coherent signals for fights, or mechanics that can be understand by just playing the game. That's Blizzard's poor design.
    I don’t know what you’re talking about to be honest. The location of super non-obvious mechanics that require weakaura and such is in mythic raids not any dungeon ever.

    Dungeon mechanics in Cata weren’t complicated, they just demanded people actually follow them rather than just play through it. Like moving away from the stone guys aoe in Stonecore that people still can’t figure out somehow.

    I do think the biggest issue was making heroics harder AND making them queable. That to me was the mistake. If some servers had too low populations and needed cross realm help they needed to merge (connect) realms or developed the cross realm group finder instead.

  11. #391
    Quote Originally Posted by NineSpine View Post
    The problem with that blog post is that it puts understanding the content on the backs of the players rather than on the developers. The problem WoW has had increasingly with every expansion is that they design obtuse mechanics that pretty much require research ahead of time, rather than designing content than can be understood simply by playing it. This is fine for fringe, niche challenges, but when you make it part of the core of the game (like heroic dungeons) it becomes problematic very quickly.

    If you look at the Vanilla model, unique mechanics were few and far between. Instead, there was a shared set of basic combat mechanics that worked across almost all content and learning how to manage those core mechanics was what the gameplay was about. The primary part of these mechanics was threat management, and outside of that there were general concepts like cleansing debuffs. There are massive downsides to this design paradigm, such as things feeling same-y after awhile, but it is important to understand that that is what the design was.

    As time went on, they increasingly replaced these general concepts with fight-specific, unique mechanics. This is a perfectly reasonable design direction, but they never developed a coherent internal language that players could learn. Instead, something as seemingly simple as "Don't stand in bad" turns into learning different signals in different fights. A coherent language of what "bad" looks like, rather than an endless parade of fight-specific visuals is necessary for this design to work for the average player. Instead, they've doubled down over and over and over again, making the fights more and more complex and obtuse, to the point now where it is difficult to even run fairly low difficulty content without doing a bunch of research and homework beforehand.

    Piggybacking on this problem is the add-on arms race between the encounter designers and add-on developers. This has made the aforementioned problems worse and worse.

    Putting that on the players is incredibly condescending. It's not the players' fault that Blizzard failed to design internally coherent signals for fights, or mechanics that can be understand by just playing the game. That's Blizzard's poor design.

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    You also criticize the game, so it is hypocritical to say everyone who has different criticisms should just leave. If that's the case, you would leave.
    most of what you wrote was wrong because it literally came off the backs of people facerolling ICC group finder where they were >2 tiers of gear over the content they did

    Cata was basically halls of reflection for every dungeon, which while it wasn't hard, was actually tuned for the gear it dropped. Cata heroics were easy... just press your fucking buttons (something that people didnt have to do in the last expansion)

  12. #392
    Quote Originally Posted by Kehego View Post
    People didn't start doing heroics in TBC until like... late T5.

    Heroics in TBC were extremely unpopular and people literally only did slave pens and mechanar for more than 50% of that expansion. Lich king hype and illidan hype made subs grow, not 5mans. idiot.
    So 5 mans being hard didn’t grow subs in TBC but 5 mans being hard caused subs to go down in Cata?

    Interesting.

  13. #393
    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    I don’t know what you’re talking about to be honest. The location of super non-obvious mechanics that require weakaura and such is in mythic raids not any dungeon ever.

    Dungeon mechanics in Cata weren’t complicated, they just demanded people actually follow them rather than just play through it. Like moving away from the stone guys aoe in Stonecore that people still can’t figure out somehow.

    I do think the biggest issue was making heroics harder AND making them queable. That to me was the mistake. If some servers had too low populations and needed cross realm help they needed to merge (connect) realms or developed the cross realm group finder instead.
    I think that it is really, really easy for people who are very good at the game, or take the time to look stuff up, to underestimate how obtuse the game is to the average person.

    I used to think that making things hard and queue-able was the problem. Then, I played FF14 and it proved me incredibly wrong. There is a ton of queued content certainly as difficult or more difficult than cata heroics and it works totally fine. Why? A coherent, shared telegraphing language that allows learning fights (and the general combat system) by doing the fights, rather than with prior research. Plus, there is no "ignore the mechanics and power through" which allows players to learn bad habits.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kehego View Post
    most of what you wrote was wrong because it literally came off the backs of people facerolling ICC group finder where they were >2 tiers of gear over the content they did

    Cata was basically halls of reflection for every dungeon, which while it wasn't hard, was actually tuned for the gear it dropped. Cata heroics were easy... just press your fucking buttons (something that people didnt have to do in the last expansion)
    If it was easy, it wouldn't have been an issue, so you clearly aren't willing to engage with the reality of the situation.
    "stop puting you idiotic liberal words into my mouth"
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  14. #394
    The Unstoppable Force Jessicka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    I do think the biggest issue was making heroics harder AND making them queable. That to me was the mistake. If some servers had too low populations and needed cross realm help they needed to merge (connect) realms or developed the cross realm group finder instead.
    Funny that these are things that weren't even considered at the time because such low pop realms didn't exist.

  15. #395
    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    So 5 mans being hard didn’t grow subs in TBC but 5 mans being hard caused subs to go down in Cata?

    Interesting.
    you can't be dumb enough to really think that the difficulty was the sole defining reason?

    the 2 characters that carried the franchise on their backs are dead, what's left? TBC heroic participation rate was dogshit throughout. WoTLK heroics were pretty low participation until ICC patch as well.



    but fr, who the fuck cares about deathwing?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jessicka View Post
    Funny that these are things that weren't even considered at the time because such low pop realms didn't exist.
    low pop realms always existed

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    Quote Originally Posted by NineSpine View Post
    I think that it is really, really easy for people who are very good at the game, or take the time to look stuff up, to underestimate how obtuse the game is to the average person.

    I used to think that making things hard and queue-able was the problem. Then, I played FF14 and it proved me incredibly wrong. There is a ton of queued content certainly as difficult or more difficult than cata heroics and it works totally fine. Why? A coherent, shared telegraphing language that allows learning fights (and the general combat system) by doing the fights, rather than with prior research. Plus, there is no "ignore the mechanics and power through" which allows players to learn bad habits.

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    If it was easy, it wouldn't have been an issue, so you clearly aren't willing to engage with the reality of the situation.
    "cata heroics were easy... just press your fucking buttons (something that people didn't have to do in the last expansion)"

    People were unwilling to adapt and/or get good. dassit. pressing cc spells and not breaking said cc afterwards wasn't difficult in the slightest.

  16. #396
    Quote Originally Posted by Kehego View Post
    "cata heroics were easy... just press your fucking buttons (something that people didn't have to do in the last expansion)"

    People were unwilling to adapt and/or get good. dassit. pressing cc spells and not breaking said cc afterwards wasn't difficult in the slightest.
    If they were easy we wouldn't be having this conversation. Stop using this topic as an excuse to talk about how awesome you are. Nobody cares.
    "stop puting you idiotic liberal words into my mouth"
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  17. #397
    Quote Originally Posted by NineSpine View Post
    If they were easy we wouldn't be having this conversation. Stop using this topic as an excuse to talk about how awesome you are. Nobody cares.
    But they were easy. Difficulty is subjective.

    Lmao why the fuck would someone try to flex epeen on HEROIC dungeons, like the absolute entry level group content? Its not hard to kick a cast, it def isnt hard to polymorph a mob, and that's all you had to do. press your fucking buttons.

  18. #398
    Quote Originally Posted by NineSpine View Post
    You also criticize the game, so it is hypocritical to say everyone who has different criticisms should just leave. If that's the case, you would leave.
    There's a line between constructive criticism and demanding the game cater to one's own personal vision. The OP has been doing the latter throughout this thread. He wants to remove an RPG element from the game because he feels it's unnecessary. That RPG element he feels is unnecessary is the exact reason other people play the game. I don't think a game that has repeatedly been criticized as "lacking engaging RPG features" by people who've quit should be in the business of removing one of the few RPG elements it still has as this would (imo, obviously) move the needle even further towards WoW becoming a lobby game.

  19. #399
    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    There's a line between constructive criticism and demanding the game cater to one's own personal vision. The OP has been doing the latter throughout this thread. He wants to remove an RPG element from the game because he feels it's unnecessary. That RPG element he feels is unnecessary is the exact reason other people play the game. I don't think a game that has repeatedly been criticized by people who've quit should be in the business of removing more RPG elements in the interest of moving WoW even further in the direction of becoming a lobby game.
    Yeah, he's horribly wrong. It's a terrible idea. But I think the games fucked up for different reasons and so do you. I get it though.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kehego View Post
    But they were easy. Difficulty is subjective.

    Lmao why the fuck would someone try to flex epeen on HEROIC dungeons, like the absolute entry level group content? Its not hard to kick a cast, it def isnt hard to polymorph a mob, and that's all you had to do. press your fucking buttons.
    I don't know. You are the one flexing right now. You tell me the appeal of doing so.

    Again, if they were easy, we wouldn't be having this conversation and Blizzard wouldn't have admitted they were hard. Difficulty is subjective, and that's why we base something like that on the experience of the entire player base not just Kehego because he's soooo amazing and soooo good at wow that this wasn't a challenge for him.
    "stop puting you idiotic liberal words into my mouth"
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  20. #400
    Quote Originally Posted by Argorwal View Post
    TBC heroics were hard and subs grew, why is that?
    Correlation does not = causation. Saying x is why subs grew is completely disingenuous because there are a variety of reasons why subs grew. NO one thing causes subs to grow or decline. Completely disingenuous to say subs grew in TBC because heroics were hard. That was probably like the 1,000th reason why subs grew.

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