I have played since release and I fail to see how the game is ruined? It is still the best mmorpg on the marked. Soon 9 years old.
Because early MOP was anything but casual time-wise , which - surprise - made casual players run away.
Yeah, because in BC, everyone did that. Which is why I ran into strength-gemming mages in BC... oh wait.
Yet BC was simpler to play for me than MOP. Healing? Hurr, 2 buttons (both single-target) and I'm good, whoop-de-doo. Now I have a lot more tools to play with. Talk about dumbed down.
Which is why you had guild poaching and associated drama all over the place. Clearly it's because people enjoyed raiding only Kara /sarcasm
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
Dunno on what private servers you played but people did enjoy raiding only Kara because that was the best they could manage until the 3.0 nerfs.
I won't even bother responding to the previous points because they are plain stupid. If healing was easy to you back then you must have only run normal dungeons and bgs.
From a tanking point of view, tbc was the most challenging period for me. Back when you actually had to pay attention to threat and not smash your face on the keyboard and boom all mobs/bosses stick to you until the end of time.
"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?"
No casuals didn't kill wow, they paid for it. There's more hardcore content now than ever and ways to distinguish yourself from them. If it upsets you that they get to have pretty gear too then you're not. Superior player, you're just an ass.
"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?"
I don't think it's casuals who killed WoW.
Of course, casuals complained when they did not manage to get through the content within the patch cycle. However, the majority did not ask for a super easy mode where you simply run brain afk through the content without any effort.
In WotLK progression meant to see the content. For me, this was the biggest reward in the game and good gear was your tool to progress further into it. Today, you queue for LFR and you do not just see the content slowly, you run through it. So all that is left as progression is the gear. That's why so many people are complaining about the gear grind. It's all that is left for motivation.
Today WoW seems to me like a single player game where you download a trainer and switch to god mode. Funny for the moment, but no long term motivation. That's just bad game design and neither requested by the casuals nor the hardcore gamers.
"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?"
Casuals (LFR) = Happy
Wannabie Hardcore (Normal) = Unhappy
Real Hardcore (Heroic worlds first guilds) = Happy
It's the wannabies that ruining the game, I notice its them that want to get rid of LFR, because they watch youtube videos from the real hardcores, showing everystep and still cant beat every boss in normal mode even when they go into LFR them selfs to get gear to beat normal LOL.
So they upset and need attention. Usually its the ones that a lacking that need to tell other people are "bad" "lfr ban please"
Yup. Only about 5% of players have downed even J'R in heroic ToT. Maybe 1% have cleared heroic ToT at this point.
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Many obviously were not. The sub losses have been large and most of them must have been "casuals".
Personally, I had no interest in doing normal modes this expansion, due to how they were going to be tuned. So I'm in that category, and I'm not terribly happy. I will likely be cancelling my sub after the next renewal cycle and walking away from the game in early November. Why should I, as an LFR-only player, be expected to have any interest in clearing SoO LFR more than once?
"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?"
Yes, it's a little bit ironic. Even more so when I see that some of those people didn't even actually finish e.g. BC content.
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Well, first, they altered the model in WOTLK - Naxx and the corresponding tier saw far better rates of completion.
Second, there is a very thin line between respectively catering and not catering to the casual players. If you go overboard, people will complain about having nothing to do, if you go the other way, people will have too much to do and quit. The above problem is aggravated in the sub model by the fact that you have to keep enough casual players to make the game bring money, but at the same time make sure they don't run out of casual content. It's a very complicated thing to do and I'm not aware of any sub-based game that managed to pull it off.
Last edited by Tomana; 2013-09-10 at 01:30 PM.
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
10m subs before WotLK Release. /threadNo, it's "finance breaker". BC raiding model was hideously inefficient from a financial PoV. Which is why they changed it for LK.
We talk about 10m people that played the game at a time, where the game wasn't accessible or convenience oriented. We don't talk about a game that had failed in the first months and has start to grow after the ultimate "casual patch".
And now? Subs still dropping, that means people still run away or the game got some bad reputation that avoids new players from testing the game out.It was not a stupid decision, because prior to that, a lot of people quitted before lvl 10. I remember the Tauren starting zone in vanilla and I understand how it made some players run away, especially when playing weaker classes.
Wows popularity was at it's height when levelling took weeks of /played and raids were irrelevent to 95% of the playerbase.
Raiding has been made the centrepiece of the game and levelling is measured in hours.
Both the raiding as the only thing to do endgame and the extremely fast levelling paradigm were put in because of forum whinging by hardcore raiders wanting to have raid ready alts and to justify the huge budget spent on raids no one ever saw.
Either of those sub eviscerating changes caused by casuals? Nope.
And about 20 million who didn't stay /thread².
We're also talking about a period where there were no MMO competition worth mentioning (except stuff like EQ/LA2 which were even more hardcore), almost no MOBAs, and no F2P games. WoW spearheaded the casual MMO segment from the start, but the market was not the same in 2004 and in 2008. Not to mention the whole MMO market was running close to saturation point, as the total number of subs from all MMOs combined clearly shows.
Subs still dropping in a 9 year-old game? Who would have thought that? Heck, original WoW devs probably didn't even expect the game to last this long, much less be the leader on the market after 9 years.
Of course it has bad reputation. 90 levels to go through and reports of huge time commitments required to experience end-game make today's gamers run away. Not to mention the sub cost. They would rather go play LoL/DOTA or some kind of shooter or a F2P game. Big time commitment is soooo '90s-'00s today
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-