Surprised that so few people are raiding

[Orange Joe]

SNIP.

I don't really get into the whole wow killer game thing. I was asking cause I was curious. I would like to see anything you could show to back your claim up.


I just don't like it when people make shit up and talk out of their ass.

[skrump]

And which games would those be?

At this point pokemon is more hardcore than wow so I imagine pretty much anything that isn't branded with the Nintendo logo is as well.

[SamR]

At this point pokemon is more hardcore than wow so I imagine pretty much anything that isn't branded with the Nintendo logo is as well.

Ah, more hyperbole masquerading as fact. Gotcha.

[stigz]

Personally, I came back to the game 2-3 weeks AFTER MoP came out and was behind the rest of my guild as far as leveling (I even chose to level a monk as main from 1-90 instead of one of my many 85s) and they had only started attempting raiding for the first time the week before I came back anyways. We've had the time to make boss attempts and kill a boss, almost kill two but we've been plagued by real life issues for raiders as well.

Two of my guildies had family coming in for two weeks and can't raid, one has been given a work schedule where they're working certain weeks during raid nights, two more had their power go out because of Hurricane Sandy and a few didn't show up because of Halloween, etc etc. When real life smooths out a bit and everyone can settle down in a few weeks raiding will become much easier to accomplish.

I'm sorry but, what exactly did this bring to the thread?

Anyways, most if not all friends in my circles are turned off by the general raid theme, even though some still do it anyway out of obligations. I wouldn't be surprised if that was commonplace amongst other players.

I mean evil pandas/bugs/sha? Meh. Only thing cool is Mogu.

A lot of people are excited about the upcoming troll raids though so that may surge the numbers a bit.

[Orange Joe]

At this point pokemon is more hardcore than wow so I imagine pretty much anything that isn't branded with the Nintendo logo is as well.

I know you were really hoping to get a good insult in here that you weren't thinking. (SUPRISE!!!) But since they have pretty much added pokemon to the game your insult fails.

[SamR]

I like that two of you decided to beat this tired drum. This is the part where I'm supposed to say that MMO X is the WoW killer and you get to mentally invalidate my entire position because the idea that anyone but Blizzard can dethrone WoW is preposterous. Right?

Don't the obvious traps you try to lay get old after awhile? The truth is that "other games" are just other games. Plural. They go to D3 or TL2 or BL2 or whatever game is this week's hot ticket. They go to consoles or they put more time into TV shows or (shockingly) hobbies that do not include a screen at all.

So you're saying hardcore raiders are quitting WoW to play casual, single player games or just to watch TV. Sounds like they burned out on raiding. I know the feeling. I burned out on raiding in TBC. Didn't play much for a while.

For a minute there, I thought you were saying that there were better games attracting the hardcore gamers. Now it sounds like you're saying they just burned out. That's a completely different argument and actually supports Blizzard's attempts to create more casual content for those people like myself who've burned out on raiding.

[Zoneseek]

I haven't raided since vanilla. In vanilla I raided 5 days a week, I cleared every single boss in that expansion between two guilds. It was fun, but grueling. After that I never raided again, outside of here and there for fun. At first this was because I was burned out, but now 6 or 7 or whatever years later my lifestyle doesn't support raiding anymore. My wife hates it when I play games "without a pause button" so really LFR and quick heroics is the most I can get away with. I tried doing one raid at the start of CAT with an old guild I used to play with. We started at 5pm on a sunday and ended at 11pm. My wife was out of town, but the whole experiance sucked. After a couple hours I just wanted to get up and take a break, im not used to staying put for hours and hours anymore. I wanted to make dinner, so I had to run up and down between my office and my kitchen over and over again trying to cook some food between bosses. Lol, it sucked. Honestly the experiance turned me off so bad it was the first real raid I did since doing kara in BC and its officially the last one I have done outside of LFR. LFR feels more like a heroic, its quick and easy and to the point. That's what fits my gaming time these days. I just don't like raiding anymore, and I know most of my friends feel the same way.

[Gheld]

LFR requirement is about 10 ilevel too high.

Heroics are boring, and you are gambling away time you could otherwise spend on the overly steep rep. grind (which is overly steep and boring).

So I don't even feel inclined to do LFR.

Game becomes unplayable to anybody who has less than 5 hours a day to play. Lately I have about 5-10 hours a week that I'm willing to play.

Balancing choices seem to be geared towards the 'special snowflake' crowd. Special snowflakes win. You may have your game back. I'm not interested in it anymore. (but I won't be funding it with my money).

[Kazlehoff]

The jump in difficulty between LFR and Normal is immense, it's turning the majority of the player base off. They are Casuals/bads/kids/non-hardcore.

ftfy.

srsly if you cant kill Stone Guard and Feng, you are terrible at this game and should just save your $15.

Garajal has a tight enrage but basicly all of MSV is on the tanks and heals for the HARD mechanics... DPS just have to push there buttons really hard.

Balancing choices seem to be geared towards the 'special snowflake' crowd. Special snowflakes win. You may have your game back. I'm not interested in it anymore. (but I won't be funding it with my money).

Got that backward. blizz finally stopped catering to the special snowflake "LEAVE NOONE BEHIND" crowd.
Can i have your stuff?

[Gheld]

Got that backward. blizz finally stopped catering to the special snowflake "LEAVE NOONE BEHIND" crowd.
Can i have your stuff?

The "leave noone behind" thing started toward the end of TBC and beginning of WoTLK. Badge gear was introduced late in TBC, which gave players a fighting chance. During that period of time WoW reached it's peak of 12 million subscribers.

Then the special snowflakes started crying because they didn't feel special if other people had epic gear, so they started steepening the hill in Cata, which is coincidentally when subscribers started dropping like a lepers limbs.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Got that backward. blizz finally stopped catering to the special snowflake "LEAVE NOONE BEHIND" crowd.
Can i have your stuff?

Not taking sides here since I find this "discussion" childish at best, but...that statement just doesn't work. How can people with the idea that everyone should have a chance, be special snowflakes? If they want to cater to the big crowd, they're not exactly "special" in said crowd.

Nono, the special snowflake = someone who wants to be the only one on a certain mount/in a certain gear set knowing that everyone or at least the majority of people around him will never have it.

[Adam Jensen]

My guild *just* started. And we've already been plagued with attendance issues (thanks Sandy) and a technical difficulty that resulted in only 1 Stone Guard kill since the raid released.

[Kazlehoff]

Not taking sides here since I find this "discussion" childish at best, but...that statement just doesn't work. How can people with the idea that everyone should have a chance, be special snowflakes? If they want to cater to the big crowd, they're not exactly "special" in said crowd.

Nono, the special snowflake = someone who wants to be the only one on a certain mount/in a certain gear set knowing that everyone or at least the majority of people around him will never have it.

I would politely disagree, and state that those who want to be able to do everyhting in a game with minimal effort, or have a hand-held trip to the best gear and mounts in the game would qualify as special snowflakes, and that those who are willing or able to put the time and effort into learning there class and spec, gearing it, and putting the required time investment into it are not "special snowflakes" but are the people that blizzard should be catering to.

theres a reason people liked vanilla and TBC so much, and that while with Wrath and cata sub numbers went up, overall happiness went down.

[Orange Joe]

I would politely disagree, and state that those who want to be able to do everyhting in a game with minimal effort, or have a hand-held trip to the best gear and mounts in the game would qualify as special snowflakes, and that those who are willing or able to put the time and effort into learning there class and spec, gearing it, and putting the required time investment into it are not "special snowflakes" but are the people that blizzard should be catering to.

theres a reason people liked vanilla and TBC so much, and that while with Wrath and cata sub numbers went up, overall happiness went down.

Special snowflake is a term for a few people trying to stand out in a crowd. Not the crowd trying to do something. It is not term for someone that is bad.

[Firecrest]

I don't really get into the whole wow killer game thing. I was asking cause I was curious. I would like to see anything you could show to back your claim up.

I just don't like it when people make shit up and talk out of their ass.

I think the proof is in this very thread. Statics show less people are pushing content. There are definitely different ways to interpret that data though. One could argue that people aren't raiding because the content is too hard such that even the diehard raiders cannot progress. Or you could argue that, despite the fact that we're six weeks into the expansion, people just haven't gotten around to raiding much due to all the other stuff to do.

I believe that the cause is hardcore/skilled/dedicated/whateveryouwantotcallthem players leaving the game because Blizzard is catering more to the casual/unskilled/undedicated/whateveryouwanttocallthem players. If you believe differently, I'd love to have that conversation. Likely we're all right anyway, since it's probably a mixture of many different factors.

So you're saying hardcore raiders are quitting WoW to play casual, single player games or just to watch TV. Sounds like they burned out on raiding. I know the feeling. I burned out on raiding in TBC. Didn't play much for a while.

For a minute there, I thought you were saying that there were better games attracting the hardcore gamers. Now it sounds like you're saying they just burned out. That's a completely different argument and actually supports Blizzard's attempts to create more casual content for those people like myself who've burned out on raiding.

I'm sorry that you're so locked into seeing what you want to see that you read right past the part where I said "other games are other games" and went straight into attacking the examples I threw up. Besides the things I listed, hardcore gamers could just as easily go to hardcore raiding in other MMOs or hardcore gaming in console FPSs or hardcore bicycling for that matter. The point is that they will move on to whatever activity offers them the challenge they crave.

God. How shitty must your position be that you feel compelled to argue this way? Some of you seriously do a better job making my case than I do - based solely on the idiocy of your arguments. One can't help but assume that, when you hone in on one point out of 50, you have no qualms with the other 49; making me mostly right and you mostly wrong. Since selective argumentation is how you roll, I suppose I should point out that I'm not saying that that burn out is not a factor - just that I don’t believe it to be the main contribution. And, if you believe it is, you should make that point yourself rather than doing… well, whatever it is you’re trying to do here.

---------- Post added 2012-11-01 at 12:52 PM ----------

Special snowflake is a term for a few people trying to stand out in a crowd. Not the crowd trying to do something. It is not term for someone that is bad.

They guy's point with the original “special snowflake” comment was that he thinks the casual crowd wants EVERYONE to be special snowflakes and he wanted to mock the irony of the fact that when everyone is special - no one is.

Note that this is not, in any way, a point I'm going to try to agree or disagree with. It's just a clarification of what I think someone with not so grand communication skills was trying to communicate. It's just a subtle issue of intrepretation and, really, is just a stupid thing for you to argue about that makes it look as though you have nothing better to say.

[Osmeric]

In short this would of been a great expansion if blizzard would of put 10/25 on different lockouts and raised the ilvl of the basic pvp gear to be equal with the minimum requirement of lfr.

I used crafted, then honor, PvP gear -- along with gear from other sources, including crafted, valor, epic rewards from quests, holiday, and a few heroic 5 mans -- to reach ilvl 460 on my main and start doing LFR. Now, with a single LFR gear item, my ilvl on that character is 469.

The PvP gear was a big help, although it couldn't get me to ilvl 460 by itself.

[Rivellana]

I'm sorry but, what exactly did this bring to the thread?

Anyways, most if not all friends in my circles are turned off by the general raid theme, even though some still do it anyway out of obligations. I wouldn't be surprised if that was commonplace amongst other players.

I mean evil pandas/bugs/sha? Meh. Only thing cool is Mogu.

A lot of people are excited about the upcoming troll raids though so that may surge the numbers a bit.

Um...the thread was about why so few people are raiding. I was mentioning my personal experience with my guild as just one example of something that can happen that can be a reason there are less people raiding. People leveling slowly, people gearing slowly, real life situations causing people to not be able to log on...

Pretty simple.

[Osmeric]

There does appear to be a difficulty "hole" between LFR and normal raids. Casual/bad guilds that want to raid together, particularly in a 10 man format, are out of luck.

It's not clear to me that raiding in normal modes is down that much from Cataclysm, particularly from T11. But then, T11 was pretty hard, and made many guilds give up. Blizzard seems to be taking a risk locking out these lower performing guilds. Sure, they can do LFR -- but that solution makes membership in such guilds nearly worthless.

Personally, I'm not bothering with normal mode raids this expansion, except perhaps maybe to pug some later. This is a two edged sword for Blizzard. It's good for them, in that LFR is satisfying me, at least for now. But it's also bad, because it means I'm basically playing this as a solo game, with no social connections to keep me around if I get bored.

[roflmfao]

It's not so much the difficulty that is holding us back, I am on a low low pop server where alot of people left during cata. We have 8 of or 10 solid raiders geared and ready to run, and finally picked up a couple of solid pugs to finish off the group. We were all ready to go on Tues, but one of our main healers in in NY, so we're thinkin we are screwed for another week.

Can't really say if it is a difficulty issue since we have only spent a couple hours raiding but really hoping Blizz figures out something to fix low pop servers as thats the biggest thing I see holding us back.

[Armourboy]

I think its probably several factors all creating the numbers. For starters, you can't really deny that there is far more stuff to keep people preoccupied right out of the gate than in the last few expansions. We had guild members who spent the first couple of weeks doing pet battles, checking out Monks, and getting sidetracked with various other things. I've also discovered that unlike myself and a couple of friends, that most people really aren't that interested in doing dailies so that also slows things down.

Now some of it also is the hangover from Cata, which has left me answering " Is this expansion better than the last " far to often to guildies that had quit. I think because of the severe lack of things to do with that expansion its leading to lots of people taking it a bit slower so that it lasts longer.

However, I still think the number one thing is that WoW's player base is aging. Our people that were teenagers back in Vanilla are now finished with college and working. Our players that were in College are now working, married and have families. Those of us that were already in our late twenties, have suddenly found lives because we finely aren't broke anymore ( like most new couple are ) and can do other things. I think it shows up in the raid numbers far more than it will in any other part of the game because it takes the most scheduled time.

Finally, if the Normal mode bosses are too hard ( I wouldn't know, still waiting on everyone to catch up ) it will have an impact on overall numbers. Now whether that is the case or not I can't say, but I would suspect that the highest % of people raiding was in WotLK, where it was easy to get into and the first raid was really easy. Cata and I'm assuming MoP has stepped back from that somewhat so its not all that shocking.