Did casuals ruin WoW and if so how?

[DesoPL]

I must agree with opinions, that WOTLK was best expansion ever... But also with WOTLK, the casualisation is begin, what i mean?

Paladins and Warlocks can no longer do quests for epic mounts, there are now from WOTLK FoS achievments for that. Same here for epic druid fly form.
Mounts again restriction lowered to LVL 20.
Many quests in North, you can solo. Hunter, Warlock, Mage can easily solo elite quests.
Otherwise also worth to mentioned, that many quests before WOTLK was deleted like Onyxia chain quest. The rest was deleted with Cataclysm.
Argent Tournament was booring, when you do everyday same daily quests. But also easy money in WOTLK days.

Otherwise... Cataclysm was not bad also... I think at the begining, humans and undeads can have a hunters. Also orcs mages or trolls warlocks. Same here for dwarf shamans, warlocks and mages. But not sure about tauren paladins and priests, or troll druids. The worse thing what Cata brought also, is again daily quests in Molten Front.

[Vintersol]

WotLK was the best addon so far, except the handling about raid progression. Everything else was damn great.

[jayinjersey]

And trust me when I say LFR has hurt the raiding community - it's much more difficult to find raiders now and many guilds are splitting up because of it, last tier, I was in 4 guilds that split up lol. Now I know you're thinking I'm just talking about my own experiences, almost every long time raider I know is saying the same thing - old players are leaving and there's very few new guys to take their place, unlike previous expansions. LFR IMO is definitely the culprit here.

Interesting...cause we've had just the opposite experience.

Yes, there have been guilds that breakup...but that has actually bolstered my guild's roster. We just fielded a new 10M roster. And the people that don't make it we've been running flex and having a blast.

I think I've killed Pride at least 8 times this week...twice normal and 5 times regular, just cause the encounters are fun and the vent is active again.

LFR hasn't killed anything. It was the 2nd boss roadblock in 5.2 that was the issue.

[Deficineiron]

...

One notable issue I don't see you mention in your posts is that unlike all prior mmos you list, wow has always had roughly half its subs in china. Do you have information on product life cycles of major chinese mmos (including the ones that netease operates?) I have read that there are some simply huge ones there on the same pay model as wow uses there, but information is quite hard to come by in english. also, just the changes from the9 to netease and subsequent netease ongoing geographic expansion within china impacts your model.

I know it is pretty common here to use the wow worldwide sub number trend while ignoring the market half those subs are in, but its bad statistics unless you have data to compare to western markets showing that similar sub trends exist in products in their largest market (by subscribers).

[Tazr]

In a nutshell, this:

Casuals are keeping the game alive... Bad clueless dev's are killing it. the fight between good and evil.

Some examples:

-No new dungeons with epics
-Can't spend valor without having done at least one lfr to get rep for it, when they provided tons of non-raid means to EARN the valor
-Painful earning of JP points when a lot of the gear got downgraded to use it
-Not fixing how easy it is to get 'force flagged.' When people complain about ganking, Blizz tells them to pay to transfer to PvE servers....where they can easily be force flagged and ganked anyway
-Not designing to minimize obvious means of trolling (deadly mobs with AoE easily kited long distances to kill other players, not force-dismounting players around quest NPCs/mailboxes, the whole "bloody coin" fiasco where now even your OWN faction wants you dead, even on PvE
-Tab targeting still a joke after all these years - and it's needed still because it can be hard to click on what you WANT to attack because of other players/stacked mobs in the way in raids/with rares

[Grimble]

One notable issue I don't see you mention in your posts is that unlike all prior mmos you list, wow has always had roughly half its subs in china. Do you have information on product life cycles of major chinese mmos (including the ones that netease operates?) I have read that there are some simply huge ones there on the same pay model as wow uses there, but information is quite hard to come by in english. also, just the changes from the9 to netease and subsequent netease ongoing geographic expansion within china impacts your model.

I know it is pretty common here to use the wow worldwide sub number trend while ignoring the market half those subs are in, but its bad statistics unless you have data to compare to western markets showing that similar sub trends exist in products in their largest market (by subscribers).

The product life-cycle I've described isn't limited to traditional Western subscription PC games. Among the games I've already used to demonstrate it are a Japanese console MMO (FFXI) and a Korean internet cafe MMO (Lineage). The cycle has less to do with how they pay and more to do with the fact that people are expected to pay, that they are not willing to do so in limitless numbers, and that the people who are willing to pay aren't living under a rock. Sooner or later most of them will have heard of or tried a given game already.

[Metallikiddd]

kalgan ruined wow. that turd doesn't know what hes doing. he ruined ultima online too. get him out of the gaming industry for good.

[Nimalla]

No "Casual player" isn't a special type of player, if I like the game more, I will play more and will be something you call it "Hardcore" and if game is not fun for me, I'll play less and will be what you call it "Casual".
Basically putting a lot of time in game isn't fun anymore that's why blizzard is making game what you call it "Casual" friendly, which is an ok move.

No the elitists ruined WoW with their demands..
Nothing was hard just time-consuming. Lots of free time=you can have and IQ of 10 and still clear any content you want. BLizz like any other business saw the time constraint so they had to lower the difficulty along with the length of raids/took prebuffing out of the picture(like resistance buffing yourself, fire prot potions so forth) and introduced easier mechanics

I think these two posts sum it up perfectly.

[judgementofantonidas]

almost 5 pm and the servers are still down after adding lfr. who loves lfr now?

[Grimble]

almost 5 pm and the servers are still down after adding lfr. who loves lfr now?

Everyone, except for a small disenfranchised minority of elitists that no one cares about anymore.

Same as yesterday.

[Tomana]

almost 5 pm and the servers are still down after adding lfr. who loves lfr now?

They're also adding the second wing of flex.
Problem?

[Vestig3]

Casual didnt ruins it, blizzard ruined it for the $$$

[Tomana]

blizzard ruined it for the $$$

There is a fundamental contradiction in that sentence. Do you see it?