Hardcore WoW - Yay or Nay?

[freelapdance]

Thats how Final Fantasy online was. If you died you lost around 20% xp of the level. Had to res at your home town and you basically needed a party of 5 to kill normal mobs. Although I felt that this was just a bit TOO hardcore.

[bignumbers]

id be all for a harder WoW, theres no greater feeling then grinding for a few weeks/months to get that epic that only a handfull have on your server

[Primernova]

I say yes all the way. That was the original formula, easy to learn but hard to master. WoW was never hard, it just took effort and some research not raw time like older MMOs that required strictly grinding.

Weirdly, after many years playing WoW, the best model I have seen so far is, "Raid or die" the vanilla model. TBC was "PvP or die" but still required raiding. WOTLK was kind of a tossup, up to Ulduar was pretty standard but the raids and instances were very milquetoast. After ToC, game went downhill hard.

EQ1: 500K subs

WoW, vanilla: 7M subs

WoW, TBC: 10M subs

WoW, WOTLK: 12M subs

WoW, Cata: 10M subs

Players want a challenge.

Going to add this, since I know it's the go to excuse:

Early Cata was not challenging, it was just replete with one shot group mechanics. One shot mechanics that require the worst players in the game to pull off, the DPS. It also gutted the ability of tanks to AoE agro, but mostly the healers abilities to carry these bad players, which is also why most tanks and healers do/did those roles.