"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
Can you right click on your portrait, select heroic mode, and walk into Throne of Thunder? Access.
Is it possible to kill the bosses in Throne of Thunder? And are there multiple difficulties to do so?
You're struggling to clear the raid on normal, correct? Yet you have seen the entire instance on the Looking for Raid difficulty. You have accessed the content.
The gear treadmill is a different discussion and i think they've done it wrong because for most players, yes, you can hit a brick wall whereby you just have this set of welfare epics and you can't progress any further due to time constraints, skill etc.
The problem with Wow is the time synch business model. People fail at pvp and pve for one of two reasons - basically - 1) lack of gear 2) not knowing how to play their class as well as not caring to learn. There is no excuse for the latter, granted; Blizzard does a pitiful job at informing people on how to play their class, but the community does a great job with videos and such. As a result, Blizzard continuously makes the game easier and people still dont know how to play or what to do and when to do it. This solution alienates the hardcore players in the process. What blizzard needs to do is address the former, the lack of gear. Why come back to the game after a short break when you're way behind in gear? Why Pvp as a new 90 and die 12xs and be utterly useless? How can you effectively raid with garbage gear from 2 or even 1 patch ago? The answer is not lower the skill level or barrier to entry for raiding (LFR) or pvp (take away resilience), the anwers lies along the lies of giving ppl the opportunity to catch up. The idea of temporarily increasing the cap of conquest or valor for those who took a break was a great idea and we've seen NOTHING of the sort. There is a lot more wrong with the game, but this is perhaps the most fixable and Blizzard does NOTHING. We get "spectator" pet battles instead - WTF?????
That is the most naive reasoning I've ever seen posted on a forum. Like could I accept having millions of dollars thrown at me? SURE RIGHT ON. Does that mean I have access to millions of dollars? well no not really.
While something may be programmed to be accessed by players it is not in fact accessible by the majority of players. It is designed in fact to not be accessible to the majority of players and if it was you wouldn't find any value in it.
Blizz says this and then says that.
People complained HC too easy, they agreed made cat HC "hard", people complained HC too "hard" blizz agrees makes them easy, people complain they are too easy blizz agrees and creates Challenger modes, people complains Challengers modes are not what they want what they want is harder 5man, blizz says they like how challenger modes end up.
You want to bet next expansion we will have challenger modes with epic gear has rewards?
Ask yourself one thing how much fun are you having in MOP 5man HC?
Remember they saying that dailies weren't mandatory and they liked how they end up to they agreeing with the community that dailies felt mandatory and that they will learn from their mistakes?
I could go on and on about allot of things, no dual spec no name change/faction change, no hybrid dps, only warrior tank, only mages can be OP etc... they did allot of changes to the game, some for better some for worst.
Last edited by mmocce676f6b0f; 2013-05-15 at 07:47 PM.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
We're beating a dead horse by even beginning to think its the difficulty of raiding that is seeing warcraft lose subscriptions. We saw from the statistics released by Blizzard that the majority of the player base isn't even interested in raiding / seeing the raid as the minority of the player base use the LFR tool.
Fact is, the tools are there to see the content blizzard develop now, and they didn't used to be.
Normal is a step up in difficulty and the leveling / dungeon process is worlds apart and does not prepare a new player for the challenges that lie ahead.
Complexity can, and should be reduced partially in normal modes, and this gives heroic modes a further edge and interest whereby these mechanics can be added on and you have some Ulduar like fights.
Heroic can be left alone, its fine. For the players with the appropriate skill level, its fine. Heroic guilds are breaking because they're killing each other by making the race harder on each other. Its not the content.
Yes it is. I have written nearly a novel of stuff down why this is the case in another thread but I will leave the basics here.
In an effort to allow players who focus on one character to have something to do, they dragged out the entire game. Everything from leveling, to progression, to reputations, etc... Take longer to accomplish. This made it so the game, for awhile now, does not lend itself well to "short term" and "simple" goals. Gone are the days of logging on a single weekend, running dungeons for a stock of JP and just buying gear from the vendors. Now you have to do LFR to really progress, which is heavily bogged down by the nature of RNG.
In WOTLK I could log on my druid and in a weekend get full T9.
In MoP I will likely spend hours running three LFR wings and walk away with nothing but gold.
There is the problem, and why so many people dropped in the east. They play the game BY THE HOUR, not by the month. When you have only an hour to play before you have to pay again, and the game no longer lets to pull off short terms goals in that hour that feel accomplished, you will likely quit. Even the horse will get tired of the carrot, if after so long he can't even gain a satisfying nibble.
Grocalis: yes, I agree with all that.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
One thought on the gear issue: Now, my memory may be playing tricks on me here, because I seem to recall that back in the glory days of late vanilla and BC, there wasn't such a huge gap between tiers of gear as there is now. Yes, better gear was still, well, better, and if you weren't insanely, amazingly good, you'd need to gear up before tackling the next tier of raiding, but at the same time, just because you hadn't geared up in the most-recent, highest-powered raid tier didn't make you useless. Skill could actually compensate for a degree of disparity in gear. I particularly recall that in pvp, knowing your class and how to play it, combined with knowing your opponents, actually mattered, and only people with ultra-high-end pvp gear could come close to the "gear steamroller" PvP has since become.
Last edited by ringpriest; 2013-05-15 at 07:57 PM.
"In today’s America, conservatives who actually want to conserve are as rare as liberals who actually want to liberate. The once-significant language of an earlier era has had the meaning sucked right out of it, the better to serve as camouflage for a kleptocratic feeding frenzy in which both establishment parties participate with equal abandon" (Taking a break from the criminal, incompetent liars at the NSA, to bring you the above political observation, from The Archdruid Report.)
Good post, I just wanna see where it goes. Also would like to see a blue poster in here.
There is a nerf bat for fine tuning and then there is a nerf bat to drop the difficulty down to the next level. If there are going to be multiple difficulty levels then there is no point in a large scale nerf bat other than to prolong content. This relies on the player not being burned out from the content itself and being full from the carrots they have eaten.
The term casual has come to cover such a large variety of players and it is not possible for one solution to fit all. There are those who want mindless grinds and then there are those who want to pick up challenging group based content when it suits them. As of right now the gap that has been created between the "easy" content and the "challenging" content is at least in my view point the largest it has ever been. Instead of lowering the wall, all Blizzard did was push it back and made it higher. If you are one of the players who are standing in front of the wall and look back and just see a flat land behind you then you are SoL.
Last edited by nekobaka; 2013-05-15 at 08:18 PM.
regardless of the actual difficulty of normal raiding, easier or harder then previous xpac, there are many guild progressing through it. The tier isn't over yet.
For easy raiding, you have LFR now.
why are people crying about difficulty? Before, their argument were that very few go to actually see the content. but now there is LFR, so seeing the content is no more the actual reason. Why do people want easier normal raiding then?
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."