Originally Posted by
Jessicka
I think the problem here is when they try something 'new', or even revert to something 'old', is that they go a bit crazy with it. Case in point, start of Cataclysm; they say 'Heroics are now hard', and go all out this is fucking hard; there's no easing into the new philosophy, just knee jerk swings from one extreme to the next. It's not really suprising then that players react badly to such a shift and leave the game. They respond by shifting back completely the other way in DS in a manner that fails to really bring back the players they just pushed out, and end up alienating the players who liked it that way; who then went on to complain about the lack of content for 9 months.
Move on to MoP, we've become accustomed to levelling alts and being able to consume everything relatively quickly, knocking over Deathwing 7 times a week, then suddenly MoP hits and OMG CAN'T DO ALL OF THE THINGS. Just no lead in at all and back to the brick walls raids. Now, if the raids weren't brick walled by Garalon and Elegon, then maybe dailies wouldn't have hurt so much as raiding would have been a viable gearing path on its own; but those two bosses and reluctance to do anything about them meant people weren't progressing their characters and the only way they could became dailies.
I think they repeated the same mistake with ToT. Horridon was too much for guilds that completed T14, but hadn't done so cleanly or quickly enough to get their upgrades and maybe a couple of Heroic pieces. Again, they're pushed into LFR and dailies to catch up, because gearing from the raid itself wasn't a viable progression path with so few bosses, ie one, open to them; and the past tier is 'old', done with over months, and dropping inferior loot.
I just hope they don't make the same mistake yet again, or overreact to it in way players feel is too radical a change in direction going into 5.4.