Why is Exclusive content a bad thing to some people?

[khalltusk]

It did work like that in TBC for the most part, and speaking personally as a player on hiatus at the start of the expansion, having to play catch-up more than halfway thru...it was fantastically done.

I had to put in effort to get the gear I needed to begin applying to Sunwell guilds, but with things like 10 man ZA, long lasting loot from Karazhan, badge items, Sunwell reputation items, Magister's Terrace items (I fucking loved that zone, perfectly tuned 5 man difficulty), and the option to just straight up buy fantastic crafted gear from Sunwell patterns, or join SWP trash farming runs (and meeting a lot of cool people in the process)...I was up and raiding SWP within a month with a friends list full of great people I'd met along the way.

The pacing was perfect. I couldn't just log in for the first time in 8 months and jump into SWP within a week or two, but it also wasn't needlessly long and drawn out. Furthermore, the instance difficulty made me really feel like I'd earned my way into SWP...and that's very important for setting the scale of the game and pacing of progression. I had to be playing my Priest very well to get through the ZA runs, Kara, Magister's Terrace, and the few pickup group raids I was able to get into for SSC/TK/Hyjal/BT. By the time I set foot into Sunwell Plateau, I felt ready in every way. My gear was ready, my healing was ready, and my ability to work with a team was ready.

I feel like if I wanted to make a comeback now, the activities are much more brainless and don't really put a lot of emphasis on ANY of those skills. In fact, some guy did a great video where he hits 90 on a new Rogue, and literally gears him up for raiding while AFK. To prove a point in how ridiculously hand-out the game has become, he /follows through LFD Heroics, LFR, etc., and by the end of a couple weeks he's ready to raid current content without having ever dealt damage in a dungeon or raid, spoken to another player, followed any strategy, learned his rotation, or anything at all.

The guy was preach and while he has a point (you can play as badly as you like and get rewarded to a degree) he is still a massive elitest. I've done every raid mode you can imagine either the vanilla/tbc model the wrath models (up to icc as I quit in toc) came back for cata and lost interest in it after doing some "heroic" raids and currently mega casual in mop. I will be frank. If mop did not have LFR or pet battles and some of the other casual friendly features my self and a lot of my friends would not have come back.

We have odd play times and when we log on simply just want to get on and play not having to schedule our lives around a game anymore. Heroic raiding is a massive time commitment and it often felt like a job. I enjoyed raiding regardless and would not have changed a thing about it back then. The only issue with LFR is probably how quickly its released perhaps staggering it a bit more would help on release but not too much.

As for someone AFKing and getting gear, that happened in pugs in vanilla and in dungeons. All preach did was see if its possible. It is and thats not blizzards fault. Thats players for not noticing and using the tools provided to deal with it (in the video someone spots it and he gets kicked so he proves the point that the game works as intended)

[yjmark]

They tried to go back to a BC-like philosophy in Cataclysm. It failed. And I think that failure shows that BC succeeded in spite of that philosophy, not because of it. It was much easier for WoW to grow back then, where there was a large population of potential new customers, and not a large population of ex-customers giving negative word of mouth.

Today, recruiting into the game is harder, so the game design has much less latitude for screwups.

Yeah, I don't think the growth in subs during TBC had anything to do with raid philosophies either. It was a newer game, and there was no real competition. Hence, subs went up. Now, it's an older game with lots of competition. Hence, subs go down. Not really rocket science.

[Deleted]

They tried to go back to a BC-like philosophy in Cataclysm. It failed. And I think that failure shows that BC succeeded in spite of that philosophy, not because of it. It was much easier for WoW to grow back then, where there was a large population of potential new customers, and not a large population of ex-customers giving negative word of mouth.

Today, recruiting into the game is harder, so the game design has much less latitude for screwups.

Yeah, I don't think the growth in subs during TBC had anything to do with raid philosophies either. It was a newer game, and there was no real competition. Hence, subs went up. Now, it's an older game with lots of competition. Hence, subs go down. Not really rocket science.

So maybe the subloss in cata wasnt because of harder 5man Heroics... the game just got old and had too much competition.

When Cata shows that WoW grew in spite of lower accessibility during BC then MOP shows that WoW grew in spite of the higher accessibility during WOTLK.

[Pegasus25]

All content should be accessible to anyone who purchases the game, however, making said content stupidly easy to complete is not the way to go.

[Nihth]

They tried to go back to a BC-like philosophy in Cataclysm. It failed. And I think that failure shows that BC succeeded in spite of that philosophy, not because of it. It was much easier for WoW to grow back then, where there was a large population of potential new customers, and not a large population of ex-customers giving negative word of mouth.

Today, recruiting into the game is harder, so the game design has much less latitude for screwups.

They tried, but didnt come close to TBC IMO. The reason why Cata got really boring really fast at least to me, and as far as I know my friends as well. Was they made the normal and heroic 5 mans harder than it was in WLK. So it got ridiculously boring just dieing over and over with a LFD group, while at the same time by very easy with a group of friends over Skype, where everyone know what to do and knows how to CC.

[Sierra85]

There's too many kids now that want instant gratification instead of actually working (& grinding to an extent), and this has bled into the community thereby destroying everything that once made it good.

The fact that organising hard pulls in heroics and working as a team, and actually travelling to an instance and not just insta popping in there with a LFD. People will say "rose tinted glasses" & "its way better now" and thats their opinion but the fact that things used to take effort made the pay off that much greater.

[Aquamonkey]

There's too many kids now that want instant gratification instead of actually working (& grinding to an extent), and this has bled into the community thereby destroying everything that once made it good.

The fact that organising hard pulls in heroics and working as a team, and actually travelling to an instance and not just insta popping in there with a LFD. People will say "rose tinted glasses" & "its way better now" and thats their opinion but the fact that things used to take effort made the pay off that much greater.

I'm surprised dungeons still have instance portals. After they added the remote queue system for BGs, they stopped making instance portals for new BGs.

[mipper]

Here's a book, and you can't read the last chapter unless you've read all before it.

The general WoW community wants cliff notes, and then wonders why there's nothing compelling them to stay subscribed. *shrug*

Taking this to the extreme, what if they made the game such that you couldn't level up until you completed all raid content on level?

[Ronduwil]

I'm not sure I follow what you mean here.

We're trying to just look at a pure and simple 13 ilvl increase, and I'm just saying that as far as I'm aware...13 ilvls always represents a similar percentage boost in gear power. So you've got n and n+13, and regardless of whether n is 150 or 900, when you add 13, you've increased the stats of that gear by roughly the same percentage in both cases; whether it's 150 to 163, or 900 to 913.

Percentage of what? Percentage of the previous tier? Yes. Percentage of the current max? No. In other words, if a player is fully decked out in heroic gear and you're two tiers behind they're going to do 400% of the damage you do in an exponential system. It doesn't matter that the relative jump in each tier was the same (i.e. 100% increase). You can't take two percentages that are percentages of different numbers and call them similar. That's meaningless.

Put another way, even though the percentage increase in BC days was the same, the impact on stats across two tiers seemed much smaller because they didn't have such large numbers back then. i.e. 400% of 2000 > 400% of 20. Even so, scaling isn't the only factor because new tiers drop every 2-3 months now instead of every 4-6 months like back then.

[LeperHerring]

Taking this to the extreme, what if they made the game such that you couldn't level up until you completed all raid content on level?

That'd be great, tbh. Imagine that all the content from the first raid in vanilla was still relevant, and you could still play through it all at different stages of progress with different characters the way it was designed to be played. There would still be guilds starting from the very beginning, and there would still be guilds on all tiers of progress. This would require larger populations overall for servers (or some xrealm stuff) to have enough players on all tiers.

[dryankem]

Not sure why people blame the player base for using tools that blizzard developed. I don't ever remember anyone asking for a watered down raid system but since it's here I'm going to use and enjoy it. Same with LFD. Heck even have group will travel just sort of popped up and there was a little crying when it went away (it's hard to have something and remove it) but the community got over it.

If anything I only see people that raid wanting things removed so that only they have access to it. But if someone can point me to a thread where someone is asking for thunderforge in LFR then I'll eat my words.

[LeperHerring]

If anything I only see people that raid wanting things removed so that only they have access to it.

That sentence doesn't even make any sense. If something is removed then nobody has access to it.

[nekobaka]

They tried to go back to a BC-like philosophy in Cataclysm. It failed. And I think that failure shows that BC succeeded in spite of that philosophy, not because of it. It was much easier for WoW to grow back then, where there was a large population of potential new customers, and not a large population of ex-customers giving negative word of mouth.

Today, recruiting into the game is harder, so the game design has much less latitude for screwups.

And what was that philosophy? The only thing I saw was an attempt to make heroics heroic and even then they fell notably short of BC difficulty. Cata gutted grinds to lower than that of WotLK, normal mode dungeons removed, faster gear catch up, and more badges from doing heroic five mans making the pace on par with raiders compared to BC and WotLK that had the majority of badges coming from raiding and five mans trailing behind considerably. If you did not raid in WotLK then you trailed considerably behind compared to Cata. That accelerated rate and reduction of grind left a lot of players who would have normally been busy with the WotLK grind to be all caught up. The BC model was even less rewarding.

[dryankem]

That sentence doesn't even make any sense. If something is removed then nobody has access to it.

If you remove LFR then only raiders can raid. If you removed tier pieces from LFR only raiders get those. That is the only argument on these threads.

But you are correct I should have stated that differently.

[Osmeric]

And what was that philosophy?

That it is ok for most people to lag behind raiding in current content. That the best players should be the most prefered customers. That hard content will make people rise to the occasion and get better, and if they don't the devs shouldn't care. That most players will be ok with table scraps after their betters have been served first.

[Deleted]

Better gear that is only there to allow us to do harder content. Gear itself isn't a rewards, it is a tool to get the real rewards, killing bosses.

There is YOUR Problem - you dont see gear as a reward anymore so pls quit WoW and make it a better community tia

[Thimagryn]

There's too many kids now that want instant gratification instead of actually working (& grinding to an extent), and this has bled into the community thereby destroying everything that once made it good.

The fact that organising hard pulls in heroics and working as a team, and actually travelling to an instance and not just insta popping in there with a LFD. People will say "rose tinted glasses" & "its way better now" and thats their opinion but the fact that things used to take effort made the pay off that much greater.

It works both ways, and this is only what you view the situation is. I see it as the kids not being kids, but the majority of the playerbase that you simply don't interact with. Raiding was never a huge focus of Warcraft 6-7 years ago. Sure, a lot of emphasis was put on the content, but the majority never experienced it. The fact that people ARE raiding through LFR makes it seem like there's an influx of noobs; which is true to the extent that it's going to happen because you have a huge influx of people who would have normally never raided before.

The hardcore venues are still there, and you can see that many complaints on this very forum are by people who want things to stay hardcore yet don't actually do heroic content themselves. This is vocal minority at its best.

I have to say that I myself would like things go back to the roots of rewarding hard work, but I don't think it's a solution for Blizzard already facing problems of losing subs (mostly casuals who are now playing other MMO's). There is no reason to make content exclusive any more. There is no barrier of entry for Heroic content, and you can see right now how few people are actually doing it.

[Sajek]

This debate has raged on for a while under many many threads. It's a tough issue since basically, this LFR/easymode stuff is what we live with right now.

I understand the movitation for Blizzard doing it and I understand why so many say they want to see all the content, and ya, they do. Pandaria excluded, I was a hardcore raider in all previous expansions, since vanilla and though, in my casual form of play that I practice now, ya, sure it's nice to see it all but that is the problem.

It is no longer special. You're not excited or in awe or a lore event or concentrating on boss mechanics so you could get to see the next boss or lore event or whatever. You already saw it in LFR, everyone has or everyone will. It's *far* less exciting. And yes, gear has always been a big part of this game but now it's just a gear fest....you don't raid to get gear to achieve something hard, I can't help but shake the feeling that nearly everyone gets gear so they can get better gear and so on and so forth.

Gear is now a means to an end to get better gear. It used to be that gear was a means to an end to see more content. Subtle yet very important difference.

[LeperHerring]

If you remove LFR then only raiders can raid.

You're still not making any sense. A person that raids is, by definition, a raider. Then yes, only a raider would raid.

[brunnor]

There is YOUR Problem - you dont see gear as a reward anymore so pls quit WoW and make it a better community tia

Gear has never been the reward. Gear is just a tool needed to move on in progression. If "zomg epics" is the only reason you play, I think it is you who has the problem. If bosses didn't require extra gear to kill, I wouldn't see a point to having it.