Did casuals ruin WoW and if so how?

[Glorious Leader]

Fun fact: There were more raid bosses in Wrath than there are in this expansion.



My preference is for shorter raids, or a few different raids per tier, as well as more 5 man content, so yes I would. But that has nothing to do with my stance on folks thinking that raids were historically less 'important' than they are now.

Wrath was around for longer. Extrapolate based on the frequency of boss updates in mists and then corellate that with the length of wrath and you get?

My preference to but yes raids were less important for many more players then they are now where they are singularly important for almost everybody. While it may shock and surprise you end game content for players throughout most of wrath and cata was just running dungeons and not touching raids at all or very sparsely maybe a pug on occcasion.

[Ronduwil]

I will agree blizz is nudging people who didn't raid before into doing so, even if there were good reasons why they didn't want to in the first place. And there was multi-player content for casuals before, like Kara, if you raided back then, how many people did you know that never touched that place that hit max level and enjoyed pve? I don't know any myself.

I never went into Kara at 70. I was busy screwing around with Scryer and Sha'tari Skyguard rep. I had no desire to see Kara and only got dragged in with friends after WotLK had come out. The chess game and the play were kind of cool, but aside from that I was underwhelmed. Multi-player doesn't have to mean a minimum of 10. I'll take a well-tuned 5-man over a 10-man zergfest any day of the week. The most enjoyable raid encounters usually involve the 10-man group splitting into two 5-man groups at crucial phases of the fight. Why is there this notion that content requires a minimum of 10 people to be worth running?

dungeons have NEVER been a great thing EVER. They have squarely been used for gearing purposes for what? OH YES...RAIDS!!! lol

That's not true. In WotLK you had 16 dungeons to pick from, and they were all still available at the end. If you wanted you could limit yourself, but that was an option and not something you were forced into. In Cataclysm you had to pick a tier of dungeons to queue into, and the rewards varied significantly from dungeon tier to dungeon tier. Ironically despite being the easiest dungeons HoT heroics gave the best rewards, so everyone queued for those. So we went from a system where at the end of the game you had a 1/16 chance of seeing a given dungeon each time you queued to a system where you had a 1/3 chance of seeing a given dungeon each time you queued. You don't see the difference there? Now it doesn't even matter because there are only a handful of heroic dungeons total and their rewards aren't even worth the time it takes you to faceroll them.

[Tomana]

Fun fact: There were more raid bosses in Wrath than there are in this expansion.

Maybe, but Naxxramas was recycled.

[pallyopness]

Wrath was around for longer. Extrapolate based on the frequency of boss updates in mists and then corellate that with the length of wrath and you get?

My preference to but yes raids were less important for many more players then they are now where they are singularly important for almost everybody. While it may shock and surprise you end game content for players throughout most of wrath and cata was just running dungeons and not touching raids at all or very sparsely maybe a pug on occcasion.

Players can still do that. Go run all the dungeons you want! They even have scenarios which offer harder gameplay!! and requires even less people!!

[Ronduwil]

Players can still do that. Go run all the dungeons you want! They even have scenarios which offer harder gameplay!! and requires even less people!!

When was the last time you tried healing a dungeon or scenario? You can basically just autofollow and then for maybe 10 seconds of each boss fight you'll have to throw out a heal or two. Aside from that you're pretty much worthless.

[Glorious Leader]

Players can still do that. Go run all the dungeons you want! They even have scenarios which offer harder gameplay!! and requires even less people!!

And you get less reward for doing that then you did in previous expansions and you also don't get any more new dungeons this expansion at all. Actually with the removal of the valor vendor past a certain ilvl you get virtually no reward.

[pallyopness]

When was the last time you tried healing a dungeon or scenario? You can basically just autofollow and then for maybe 10 seconds of each boss fight you'll have to throw out a heal or two. Aside from that you're pretty much worthless.

Thats how every dungeon in the game has been....its only been hard maybe the first week of gearing and thats pushing it...

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And you get less reward for doing that then you did in previous expansions and you also don't get any more new dungeons this expansion at all. Actually with the removal of the valor vendor past a certain ilvl you get virtually no reward.

less rewards? how do you figure? what great rewards have dungeons ever offered that you are trying to say? No new dungeons? There have been scenarios which are pretty equivalent to dungeons imo.

[Pann]

1. Realm communities got ripped to shreds with the introduction of LFD, pvp queuing and later on LFR. You can play this game with all the chat windows disabled, sure blizzard introduced them but only because the "casual" playerbase said they wanted to see all the content.
2. The lack of realm communities has lead to a epidemic of "keyboard heroes" who act like the biggest fucking morons on the internet (wow in this case) because what others think about them doesn't matter at all. Back in the days before LFD you had Tanks, Healers and DPSers you LIKED on your friendslist and if you EVER wanted to get somewhere you had to actually behave so people would invite you back.
3. Now that everything is so easy you end up playing what? 3-4 hours a week and you can see EVERYTHING in this game, you're wondering why the realms have so low population and the subscribers are dropping? People get bored of doing the same thing over and over so they subscribe when new expansions come out, new major patches and then quit again when they've done everything in a month or two.


Casuals demanded easier thing, blizzard let them have it, sub numbers drop, wow is now half of what it was before LFR was introduced. You CAN'T ignore those facts...

Casual players demanded nothing they left when the game no longer met their needs.

[Koloss]

It would solve EVERYTHING if all raid modes were on the same lockout. Every each player would go what is he suited for and they wouldn't touch each others' world. If hardcore people don't have to go play with newbies or casuals in LFR, they don't care. The problem is that they HAVE TO! Even if they say that a hardcore player doesn't have to run Flex and LFR, it's not true, they have to because they want to maximize their performance. So just make all raids in same lockout, and leave raiders to raid only, leave casuals to do scenarios and lfrs only, and they won't argue with each other.

[Glorious Leader]

less rewards? how do you figure? what great rewards have dungeons ever offered that you are trying to say? No new dungeons? There have been scenarios which are pretty equivalent to dungeons imo.

Scenarios are obviously not equivalent to dungeons. They are over blown group quests. In the past I could buy current lvl gear (i.e RAID GEAR) simple from running dungeons INCLUDING tier pieces. Not so much anymore.

[Osmeric]

Casual players demanded nothing they left when the game no longer met their needs.

The hardcores (or faux hardcores) demonizing the casuals have to pretend it was just Blizzard responding to illegitimate complaints. If it was Blizzard responding to actual bottom-line-affecting behaviors, then that would contradict their elaborate self-serving fantasy that making the game harder would save it.

[pallyopness]

Scenarios are obviously not equivalent to dungeons. They are over blown group quests. In the past I could buy current lvl gear (i.e RAID GEAR) simple from running dungeons INCLUDING tier pieces. Not so much anymore.

you can still buy equivalent gear by running 5 mans and scenarios, that hasnt changed....sorry you cant get raid tier that is made for raiders to tackle harder content....much harder than 5 man or scenarios....and all that gear makes the 5 mans and scenarios easier which is what you are bitching about so really you are compounding your whole issue here.

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also 5 man challenge modes are still pretty hard right? so you have those all complete i take it?

[Glorious Leader]

you can still buy equivalent gear by running 5 mans and scenarios, that hasnt changed....sorry you cant get raid tier that is made for raiders to tackle harder content....much harder than 5 man or scenarios....and all that gear makes the 5 mans and scenarios easier which is what you are bitching about so really you are compounding your whole issue here.

Actually yes it has changed. In the next patch (tmmrw in fact) the vendor is gone. Prior to that it required the rep of either obnoxious dailies or RAIDS. To say it hasn't changed is an obvious lie. The developers themselves have said it changed.

[pallyopness]

Actually yes it has changed. In the next patch (tmmrw in fact) the vendor is gone. Prior to that it required the rep of either obnoxious dailies or RAIDS. To say it hasn't changed is an obvious lie. The developers themselves have said it changed.

Oh I see....you dont want to do what it takes to get the gear, you want the easy route...gotcha, thats all you had to say..

[Lumineus]

Some even want to go back to the 4.3 recipe of making 2-3 new dungeons give more or less pre-raid BiS combined with Justice items better than anything in t14 content.
'Cause ya know, HoT dungeons and DS as the only PvE endgame was such a success.

Well, by any useful measure of success (number of raiders attempting/clearing normal mode, working on heroics, etc), T13 was by far more successful than either of MoP's tiers so far. And actually if we have to have extremely linear raids I'd prefer them to be no longer than DS. More bosses just leads to things like being Lei Shen's unpaid janitor and Siege of Orgrimmar beginning with four bosses in Pandaria.

[Glorious Leader]

Oh I see....you dont want to do what it takes to get the gear, you want the easy route...gotcha, thats all you had to say..

No I want a casual friendly alternative to max level progression that rewards as equally as well as the raid. What dungeons used to be.

[nekobaka]

Nerfing Cata Heroics was a response to the exodus, not the cause of it. I watched two very active guilds with 20+ players constantly online die right before my eyes at the start of Cata until there were maybe 2-3 people on at one time (if that).

I have seen this happen in BC, WotLK, Cata, and MoP. Your experience is not unique to Cata. Even with the nerfs to Cata heroics the subs continued to drop as lack of content combined with shorter grinds was the biggest enemy of Cata. Blizzard focused so hard in Cata to cater to the players with a handful of hours by holding back the no-lifers and along with revamping old world content to entice new players to come that the 10 hour to no-lifers got bored for even those that did not find the heroics to be hard.

[Kotiria]

This question/topic is honestly so old and redundant, I'm not sure if it deserves legitimate responses anymore..

[pallyopness]

No I want a casual friendly alternative to max level progression that rewards as equally as well as the raid. What dungeons used to be.

so the same gear without the trouble of the same challenge....just like i stated....LOL...no dungeon has ever dropped the same ilvl gear....sorry you are playing the wrong game

[Glorious Leader]

so the same gear without the trouble of the same challenge....just like i stated....LOL

More or less exactly what we had through most of wrath and cataclysm.