GC intentionally uses some word play to make a point, because he can't make that point by speaking the truth.
Yes it is true, people don't say "make this less convenient" or "make this more tedious", because that isn't what they actually want.
People say things like "Make this more realistic" all the time. Or "make something more challenging". These may end up making things less convenient, but what matters is which is more fun in the long term. Sure it would be really convenient to just get full epics in my mailbox upon hitting 90, the thing is, I don't think that would be good for the long term growth of the game.
Generally speaking by Blizzards actions and words it was the intent of Blizzard to push these kinds of groups out of raiding and push them into LFR. Blizzard was seriously trying to kill PuG and casual raiding guilds thinking these players would be happier in LFR and GCs words and the developers behavior is showing that their thinking that LFR was going to keep all casuals happy is wrong. PuG raiding might not directly promote social bonds like that of a guild but it does provide a good breading ground to build long term social interaction and even moving up to normal modes and beyond compared to system like LFD and LFR which are solutions to poor realm populations and lack of content. Blizzard tuned up normal modes and players who still wanted to do normal modes was forced to adapt and respond to the changes that Blizzard made which results in more exclusivity and an overall greater hurdle to overcome just to be ready for normal modes as LFR fails to properly teach players raiding mechanics and skill sets.
I believe as well that content that brings players together and promotes a stronger community is better for the game in the long run and GC is hoping that will be the case with Flex, than again with him being wrong with so many other things I just hope we are all right about that. I have been in a PuGer for about six years with three of those also being involved in guild raiding and have helped many players over all the years dating back to Classic, if there is a will then players can get better. PuGs and guilds go together. WotLK did take a stab at guilds and reduced their overall importance, but have also allowed guilds more flexibility.
Last edited by nekobaka; 2013-07-18 at 06:10 AM.
Polling people who come specifically to bitch about the game is only going to get you numbers on those who are unhappy with the game. That isn't nearly as accurate as polling a larger variety of players.
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Which is why they have an "other" option with the ability to specify your main issue which you damn well know because you quoted the person who said it earlier. Stop trying to spread misinformation to push your agenda, it isn't going to work. No one here is nearly as stupid as you think they are.
That is exactly the point we are arguing though. People who aren't happy won't keep playing. Thus the game needs to be fixed and changed to make them happy with it. The difference in our views is how it is changed to fix said problem, but we both agree that there is in fact a problem.
Forced isn't the right word and people use it all the time for both sides on this. We aren't forced to do anything, just the incentives to do it are very very high for hardcore raiders. We shouldn't be having to get tricked in to running LFR to do what's best for our guild. We should have our things to do to make us good for raids and "you" should have your things to do for your progression. Those two paths shouldn't meet unless you are going more hardcore or I'm going more casual.
Case in point, the second the preview for Proving Grounds went up people were screaming bloody murder because it is supposedly ruining the game despite the fact it was a much requested feature and can only help teach players how to do new roles in group content.
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Again people like you are outliers, most Wow players aren't going to put up with content they hate for extended periods of time. If you think Blizzard isn't noticing when players stop doing certain content and can't discern why that might be then you would be quite wrong. Player activity is a lot more meaningful than you give it credit for and Blizzard is a lot more aware than you give them credit for.
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Again only players are responsible for building and maintaining their community. If queue systems can destroy their communities then they probably weren't nearly as strong or thriving as people claim. Blizzard has given us tools to enlarge our communities and create them in ways that weren't possible before and a fact a lot of people fail to consider is that realms were a technical limitation that wasn't necessarily meant to be the basis to build a community and certainly isn't the only way to create one.
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Traveling to a dungeon has NOTHING to do with community. Not at all. Don't even try it.
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It absolutely is the player's fault. From the get go LFD was designed to supplement player formed groups not replace them. The existence of a queue system didn't remove your ability to form groups. Want to do it the old fashioned way? Get off your ass, quit your bitching and make your own groups. It is that simple. What I think the real issue here is as a result of the queue system, elitist jackasses can no longer hold their realm communities by the balls and play god to determine who gets to do content. The queue system lets players bypass that petty bullshit entirely.
If this has been pointed out repeatedly during the 28 or so pages I've not read, sorry.
Everyone keeps pointing out that its a vocal minority that are asking for "less convenience", and I don't dispute that, but it doesn't mean everyone who remains silent is in love with the direction the game has gone.
Penalty volcanoes are effective but people like you undermine it by saying it doesn't work which results in people not reporting players which results in the very thing you are bitching about. I don't always agree with you and most of the time even when I disagree at least I can see your point of view but this is one issue where I can say with absolute certainty you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about and many of your comments on the subject perpetuates this ignorant notion that Blizzard is ineffective in policing players. As a moderator on this site you know damn well there are several threads made on a daily basis that complain about account suspensions due to harassment, language, botting and many other violations which flies in the face of your entire stance on the issue. Am I saying Blizzard can't improve their systems? Absolutely not. In fact Blizzard has spent a better part of the last year streamlining and improving their systems so they are able to service tickets faster and more accurately. They are responding to harassment issues much more quickly now and punishing players faster as a result. To say it isn't getting better is a flat out lie.
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So Blizzard should make knee jerk changes to the game based on zero data just to prevent being "too late" in stopping subscription loss? Are you kidding me right now? Look I'm sorry if people are butthurt about quitting the game but there is no "too late". People unhappy with the game quit until it gets better. Blizzard isn't a mind reader and they can't see the future. Like it or not the only way to see how certain changes play out is to just pull the trigger and see what happens. Anyone who is personally insulted by this probably has no business playing in a social mmo anyway.
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That isn't what Blizzard said but ok.
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Blizzard is a business and their decision to cater to casuals is why we have such a huge variance in types of content and difficulty meaning even hardcore players have a place in Wow. Hardcore players should take that into consideration before ranting about how casuals ruined the game.
All of the threads i've seen have been of players who think they are hardcore. The real top players don't care about LFR.
The traffic you see on forums is like 0.001% of the game.
It's Blizzard's fault for putting this system in the game, players are almost always gonna take the easiest way possible, it's designer's duty to steer them. Of course it didn't remove anyone's ability to form groups, but it encouraged random grouping via Luck of the Draw buff, and all the stuff you get from completing a random dungeon. And also, it was (still is) very convenient. People are not going to pass on that.
It's not a fair competition, you either get to make your own groups with communicating and possibly some wait and travel time or you click a button, get teleported inside the dungeon, while you get a power buff and the game showers you with rewards after you finish it. Gee, I wonder what the players are gonna choose.
I knew it was bullshit from start and that it was detrimental to realm communities (I don't hold the same views about elitists as you, because I've never experienced what you described here, elitist jackasses holding community by balls in 5 man content? never heard that one before), immersion and game cohesion. But it was the most rewarded way in a game where those rewards matter (badges and points), so I went along on the ride, because it was the easiest way, not because it was the best way.
I do agree with a lot of what you say but you are wrong about wrath. Not everyone raided in wrath, Raiding while at a larger% than vanilla/tbc and even cata was still lower than the amount of players doing raiding now.
Still you're bang on about Cata changes it made things a lot more difficult for the more casual raiders to get going and in MOP the difficulty in normal mode was still quite high and the only alternative was LFR. If we had flex + FLR during these times I think raiding would be in a real sweet spot.
There must have been, Occulus and Halls of Reflection should have told them that much.
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The U-Turn from 'Hard' to Dragon Soul reduction of difficulty and over-zealous nerfing was arguably as much a mistake as starting off with hard in the first place. Having driven away people who found it too challenging, they then drove away players who enjoyed it that way. Hense layers now. Hopefully it can please more people.
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Outcry over LFD was probably as loud and lasted much longer. Now we see tears because Heroic Scenarios and Challenge Modes aren't a part of it.
Removing content will only hurt the game, as you remove content, you remove the players who enjoy that level of content. That is what happened in Cataclysm. Twice: First when they removed the easier level of difficulty of 10N and Wrath Heroics, and again when they lowered the difficulty across the board to try to stem the flow and removed content from those who liked the challenge. You could even quite easily argue a third time with the merge of 10 and 25 lockouts having removed content for off-nights.
Last edited by Jessicka; 2013-07-18 at 10:03 AM.
It amazes me that some people still haven't figured out that he is a rather arrogant....gentlemen (for a lack of a better non bannable term). There is no doubt he's done some good for the game during his time, there is also no doubt he's implemented some of the biggest failures in it, he always has, and continues to say things that justify whatever happens to be the hot issue to present it in the company's favour, regardless of how it's perceived by anyone else. While I understand, this is partially what he is being paid for, I find he has no backbone at all. He is very quick to discredit many comments if they don't go along with his current view of things.
Saying people rarely argue against convinience is laughable when you consider the fact, that during his 'reign' he managed to loose over 50% of subs in the West.
He may be a great sales man, but considering an mmo should be all about player retention, not padded sales figures while you bleed at the other end; he is nowhere as succesful as he perceives himself.
As is, Blizzard is structuring their model around the ability to milk as much money as possible from an old franchise, the fact that it's a game is secondary, in fact, completely irrelevant. It's a money making machine, and as long as there are avenues of income leading straight to their headqaurters, it couldn't matter less what people think about the design.
They've had a spectacular success, that they are now on the way to spectacularly destroy and continue living in denial, sitting on their pile of money, laughing at ignorant investors that facilitated all of that and fell for every padded figure thrown at them.
But then, the way this world turns, at the end, they are still the winners. Sad, sad state of things where a bag of gold and reputation, allows you to stomp all over people that brought you to where you are and attempt to discredit them every step of the way with no personal responsibility of any sort.
Last edited by mag07; 2013-07-18 at 10:37 AM.
I think the snowballing effect of loss of subs has to be taken into account when trying to figure out why they have been going down so fast. When people start to quit, servers become deader, people have a harder time to find others to do things with. The game feels less like a mmo and then even more quit. It's a huge problem and Blizzard has failed to do anything about it. That's the thing tho about convenience that has to be taken into account tho when dealing with the suffering servers. People who remain on those servers have to have lfr, they have to have lfd and the other tools of convenience because without them they wouldn't be able to do anything at all. Taking out or trying to limit those tools may work on the mega servers but the rest I think would be in a terrible spot.
Their data can't show if people LIKE something in the game, I can't stand LFR but I do it on my alts, people bitch about dailies but they do them...........see?
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You sir are in denial, just because they don't like ONE thing in the game that they do does not mean they would unsubscribe from a game which there are LOTS of things they do enjoy, take me for example.......
1) I can't stand LFR I think it is the worst thing ever put into this game but I do it because of valor and alts
2) I like to do pet battles, play the AH, do heroic scenarios, raid heroic modes.
So yeah, people will still pay even if they do 1 thing they don't enjoy because of the other things they do in the game, I respect you standing up for Blizzard but my god this statement of yours is pure delusional.
Folded, or were forced to fold too quickly, because, in essence, the lvl 85 content tuning was teh only game aspect which blizzard was willing to reverse course on. Also, given how LFD worked, I am not sure why they thought they could put challenging, brain-on content into such a sausage grinder system.
10/25 lockouts could have been reversed and weren't. other changes would have been harder or impossible to change - linear 'no-choices' questing, for example. I think there were many things which collectively managed to annoyed a fairly broad cross-section of the playerbase.
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Ask the ATVI board and institutional shareholders (as well as vivendi and kotick) what it is, I assure you that the people who ultimately control wow think of it and see dollar signs (in 10-digit increments).
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
"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?"
they should get the team that changed the wsg gy's and claimed it would stop gy farming on this immediately?
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issue i have it that their annual western subs are still likely well over 500m in revenue, its just too much for them to contemplate replacing by another mechanism. I think they are more likely to go to a dual-system of micro-transactions + sub fee.
going from memory on their financials, I don't think current wow revenue levels without sub fees would even pay server costs annually, to say nothing of new product development. That is a huge amount of blood they need to suck from western players under any sort of f2p model.
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this is my view as well - a game where you can beat the biggest baddie currently in game within a few weeks /played at most from starting, with most of the outdoor world fairly structured with compulsory exact quest order, limited remaining optional grinds (and none too long), etc, is going to have less replay value than diablo 2 did. Be sure and make sure instances, rather than being 2+ hour challenging events, become 20-minute 'hit your aoe key' and say 'gogogo' things with complete strangers who you are unlikely to ever see again.
seriously, once you beat d2 on normal, was beating it on nightmare THAT big a deal? at that point it was 100% gear-driven, you had seen everything...then if you beat nightmare but didn't beat hell, did you feel bad? did you feel you didn't 'finish the game'? for most people, of course not.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
Actually while they don't care about the feature itself... ultimately they need to care. Why? LFR does draw people away from normal guilds = food for heroic guilds. While I don't count myself as being "THE" top. I don't regard 175/350 ranked being THE top, recruitment was very very hard. So hard infact that after 6 years of being GM of that guild, I threw in the towel. And I am not the only one. Recruitment was the nr 1 thing on my agenda every day. While before the days of LFR it was pretty doable to try and get people in once a week or even less. I wonder how that suddenly changed.
So yeah while LFR as a raiding enviroment (if you can call it that) has no affect on heroic raiders or normal raiders - it affects their recruitment. And thus affect them.
edit: just to clarify:
these people that run LFR might not be suited for guilds that run heroics and are TOP of the world. But there might be other raiders in that normal guild that would make it in a TOP of the world guild. Now due to lack of recruits this normal raider gets less raids or his guild falls over. Now this player will need to find a new guild. Perhaps another normal guild or even a heroic guild. It is a snowball effect really. Less people get interested in "real" raiding. In my heroic guild we had people who played 100% a day almost (no work etc). This guy traded heroic raiding for LFR the day it came out. Just because he didn't want to be put on a schedule anymore. While he hated LFR vs Heroic... the no schedule was THE thing he was actually looking for.
So it does draw away people from those high end guilds.
Meanwhile people who play LFR do not like it but do it for the GAINS... not because it is fun. LFR has a lot of potential it is not currently fullfilling.
Last edited by Vaelorian; 2013-07-18 at 01:33 PM.