WoW being more hardcore oriented = more popular?

[Osmeric]

A good portion of the post from which you extracted the quote (see below) was about the terrible effects of the increased difficulty and how that's never worked for other games. Homogenization was more of a long-term thing in my view. No disagreement that the sudden onslaught of one-shots in Cataclysm heroics pushed the game off a cliff.

I don't think there's good evidence that homogenization has had any significant effect on the trajectory of the game. To argue otherwise risks falling into the correlation/causation trap.

[Kralljin]

Yeah, I messed up the timeline for that. I suppose I was thinking of GC's exhortations that difficulty = engaging content. My bad. You're right.

I mean, he's not completely wrong, issue is that however Cata heroics were an attempt to return to like TBC heroics, but failed to realized that the reward structure of the game was altered in Wotlk.

Their intent was to return to TBC style heroics but rather created a hardmode version of Wotlk.
In TBC, you could avoid heroics for quite some time because other elements such as factions / professions (or even fucking questing) yielded some solid items, in Wotlk / Cata, your character hit a dead end pretty soon if you failed to complete heroics (which most people didn't in Wotlk because they were fucking easy).

I generally hold the opinion that their huge mistake was to throw everything at gameplay over fantasy, but in order to make it appealing in terms of gameplay, a modicum of difficulty is necessary.
A lot of players were not ready to handle difficulty, but rather going back to a style where difficulty is existant but not a gatekeeper of character progression, they continued their gameplay focused design - except without difficulty and then ended up with very dull content.

[Triceron]

I'd wager most people who are still playing are closer to hardcore than casual so my general answer would be: yes.

You are drawing wrong conclusions as to why the playerbase is waning. The most important factor is - because the game is 15 years old.

People who are still playing are mostly compulsive gatherers (mount/mogs/toys/pets/achi points collectors), super try hard pvpers or raiders/m+ pushers. I think you are horribly wrong thinking that people who still play this game after 15 years would be happy doing slow and boring content (as you can see by classic wow that is mostly populated by hardcore crowd anyway).

The reason they stick around longer is because blizz creates more expansion content for them. Very little end game content focuses on the thing casuals crave for - questing story and exploration. All the new subzones are designed for rep/power grind, all the story locked behind raids. This is why subs dramatically drop after the start of new expansions, and they never consider making a true casual-tailored endgame experience. Blizzard just leaves the casuals be, and would rather feed the whales knowing that casuals will come back to buy the next expansion regardless of leaving for the majority of it

[Malania]

Who said this? WoW has always been a casual MMO compared to the games that came before.


Also early Cata days were a complete shit show, I don't know what your talking about. They made heroic dungeons more challenging than usual and the crying was unbearable.

It was just a return to TBC style heroics of having to mana manage in dungeons and CC. I could pug dungeons at launch as a healer in Cata. It wasn't a shitshow. The problem was the large playerbase who started in Wrath and never had to learn mana management or CC in a Wrath dungeon. The whiners are the reason the game now is a clusterfuck of attempts of appeasement for every demographic and why no one is happy.