Why don't they return to the roots of the game in difficulty?

[melodramocracy]

The number of players that do normal/heroic raids at all is small compared to the number of subs they've lost this expansion. So if they could trade the former for the latter they'd come out ahead.

All this implies really, is that raiding was not the reason a significant chunk of those people left.

That really isn't the point though. The point is that there should be, in theory, something that a player considers worth doing, and isn't immediately within reach.

Whether Blizzard doesn't currently have *that* formula down (but arguably did at one point), or there's simply a lot of players that probably shouldn't be playing an MMO to begin with (equally likely), removing all challenging content is probably the worst solution that could be arrived at.

[Osmeric]

Are you saying that removing content for players will result into less people leaving?

Possibly. The idea is that difficult content that someone will never do acts to degrade the game experience for that person, by sending the message that he/she sucks. Unlike in a single player game, exclusion from the "cool kids" circle of elite gamers is a real downer.

[melodramocracy]

Possibly. The idea is that difficult content that someone will never do acts to degrade the game experience for that person, by sending the message that he/she sucks. Unlike in a single player game, exclusion from the "cool kids" circle of elite gamers is a real downer.

Except that exclusion in this game isn't actually bestowed upon a player by others. 99 times out of 100, it's the player themselves not being a willing participant, and instead imagining that they're being excluded. Saying 'I can't' when the real reason is 'I won't'.

Self evaluation isn't something people are generally good at.

[Osmeric]

Except that exclusion in this game isn't actually bestowed upon a player by others. 99 times out of 100, it's the player themselves not being a willing participant, and instead imagining that they're being excluded.

That doesn't change the logic of the argument at all.

[RickJamesLich]

Personally I hope they go back to more challenges in the game, at this point, aside from raiding just about everything is so easy to the point where it feels like insulting your intelligence lol. It's hard to die on anything, and if you want to consume the content, it's pretty easy to do it within a few days of hitting 90 (give it a few weeks if you play very very casually). IMO that's part of the reason why subs are dropping, it seems there's a chunk of players out there that get bored after they've seen everything a few times.

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So by difficulty, you mean:

-Terrible and/or new players
-Horribly itemized gear
-0 add ons
-Ridiculously long attunements that needed to be completed before you could even walk into the raid

Right?

To be fair, those long attunements usually weeded out many bad players

[DarkTZeratul]

Stratholme is a good example of this, where you just had mobs upon mobs walking and patrolling everywhere and so when doing it under duress (timed run) with 9 other people (it used to be a 10-man dungeon) it was flippin' hard not to aggro everything by accident!

Technically, it's always been a 5-man dungeon. It's just that, like all dungeons, you could bring 10 people if you wanted (until they capped them all at their intended difficulties in 1.10). None of the quests, though, could ever be accomplished in a raid.

Hell, until 1.3, you could run any dungeon as a 40-man raid (this was, in fact, the only way to get into Molten Core).

To be fair, those long attunements usually weeded out many bad players

Not really. They did, however, serve to weed out a lot of good players who couldn't be bothered with it, and a lot of raid groups that didn't want to have to run yet another prospective new member through half a dozen heroics and a raid none of them needed anything from anymore.

[Varabently]

The game is losing popularity anyway, why don't they return it to something like "Algalon being hard for the whole of the expansion", no nerfs at all? I know, WoW vanilla wasn't technically "hard", but why not anyway?

I think they need to go back to one difficulty of raiding. Make flex go from 10-40 players. Just grab your guild and go. I think they should put bosses in the game that was just stupid stupid hard. Crazy DPS/healing/tank checks, but less dance-y. Focus on player skill and gearing, not how well you can memorize mechanics. Boss mechanics are important, but make them about your class knowledge and skill. A great example of how NOT to do this is Blackwing Descent in Cataclysm. Some of the fights had so many mechanics (the 4 dudes at the beginning) or those which were just gimmicky. Gimmicky is stupid IMO and shouldn't be what the game is about.

[Grym]

they implemented it way wrong in cata though by making the beginning way too hard for even experienced and well geared players.

Actually it was only hard for the non experienced, at the beginning of Cata everyone was still in questing greens and blues so gear doesn't even come into it. For the more experienced players interupting and moving wasn't an issue, but for the rest of the people they were causing massive cock block hence they reversed it.

But they weren't hard for raiders.

[volescue]

they implemented it way wrong in cata though by making the beginning way too hard for even experienced and well geared players.

Cata was not nearly as difficult starting out than BC. The problem was you had all the people who started playing during LK and then those who played during BC but got used to how it was during LK complaining because heroics weren't steamroll able right away. I remember avoiding Shattered Halls on my prot warrior unless I had a mage, lock, and rogue. Without their CC it was just so much more difficult to hold threat and keep it on those big pulls. Even when we started getting into T6 content I hated that place. In Cata as soon as you had a few heroics under your belt and got some heroic/early raid gear, the instances became a whole lot easier.

The reason it would be a horrible idea to go back to BC difficulty is that everyone is so used to LFD/LFR. It is just too damn convenient to be able to queue for a dungeon and afk/do something else while it finds the group for you. BC heroics required decent coordination, which from what I have seen is quite lacking in LFR/LFD. I don't have faith in my fellow WoW player to cooperate to get things done without massive headaches.

[Grimble]

So the decline, in your eyes, has nothing to do with the game itself, and is just economics at work.

Pretty much. I've been lurking around this genre as long as anyone, and hearing "Look how <game> is losing popularity! If only <dev I hate> hadn't stupidly nerfed <thing I like> then the game would have stayed at peak forever!" everytime some MMO hits six or seven years and people start moving on just gets really god damn old after the first decade of having to listen to it. It keeps happening at the exact same point in virtually every game's life, even though the "stupid nerfs" are different every single time.

Cataclysm stunk and might have pushed their retention lower than they would have liked, but there was no earthly way they were going to get past that expansion without a decline even if it was fucking brilliant from start to finish. No big-budget mainstream MMO has ever gotten past that age without beginning to lose people.

WoW is certainly bigger than those other older games, but its business model (subscription fee, boxed retail expansions, internet cafe bullshit in Asia) is as conventional as it gets.

[RickJamesLich]

Not really. They did, however, serve to weed out a lot of good players who couldn't be bothered with it, and a lot of raid groups that didn't want to have to run yet another prospective new member through half a dozen heroics and a raid none of them needed anything from anymore.

Perhaps our experiences differed, but many of the bad players would ask "how do I get attuned" and usually got turned off when they found out about the process. And some of them weren't even that bad, the MC one in particular took like 10 minutes. Again strictly speaking from my own experience, but if someone had the attunement for me, you can bank on them knowing what they were doing at least a little bit.

[Noomz]

The game is losing popularity anyway, why don't they return it to something like "Algalon being hard for the whole of the expansion", no nerfs at all? I know, WoW vanilla wasn't technically "hard", but why not anyway?

Why would they appeal to a playerbase that no longer plays the game?

[RickJamesLich]

Actually it was only hard for the non experienced, at the beginning of Cata everyone was still in questing greens and blues so gear doesn't even come into it. For the more experienced players interupting and moving wasn't an issue, but for the rest of the people they were causing massive cock block hence they reversed it.

But they weren't hard for raiders.

I'll agree here, at the start of cata, you couldn't outgear instances (whether it was yourself or bringing in a friend) and you couldn't ignore mechanics, the fights themselves weren't that bad and if you played smart you could down them, but some of the stuff like wotlk heroics pretty much always put the player in a position where they always "won" no matter how badly they played, and losing was like a culture shock for them.

[Deleted]

-Nor was it hard and difficult, it was nothing compared to the difficulty in modern hard modes, etc.
-Raiding became the most popular part of the game as soon as they allowed people to raid (tbc), they couldn't take it away from them in WotLK. Those people wanted more!

I hate the "hardmode" argument. Thats not new content and its simply not rewarding enough recieving epics with diferent colors from the ones everyone already have. Its so much hardcore with so little reward...i just dont get it. And most of them are just the same bosses with improved stats, unlike Ulduar with totally new mechanics and rewards.

-To many people the true experience is still in all those things.

What things? The thing i said were completely EXTINCT? How can people experience what doesnt exist -_- wich one were u talking about:
"the social experience", "leveling", "group quests", "meeting stones", "road/paths to raids", "reputation farm zones" or "world events"

-You are acting as if people don't participate in "world events" because they removed them, but they removed them because people didn't participate unless it gave them upgrades.
That last point is the most important one!
People would just skip group-quests or invite some dude that was 5-10 levels higher.
"World events" were either abandoned or became a grievers' paradise.
One of the best examples would be Alterac Valley: Players don't even bother playing the map, they just want to rush as fast as possible and get the reward.
Blizzard didn't cause this change, the playerbase did.

I think people dont just fight for rewards. Its proven that cosmetic, funny items and mounts are more than enough to remove peoples ass from the main city to the world.
Gurubashi arena and Dire maul are sooooo old and you can still find people there from time to time. I dont think world events are as bad as you imply. Darkmoon fair is always fun, at least for me. I didnt even referenced the "world boss" topic...that thing causes too much rage and hardcore guild fights and are always a problem. But blizzard could simply implement a timer for each guild so not only the best ones couuld kill them. Bah less one funny thing in world of Warcraft just because whiners cant have them pretty epics fast enough -_-

[Nadev]

To be fair, those long attunements usually weeded out many bad players

So it wasn't necessarily harder, it was more exclusive, which is basically the extent of this argument.

[RoKPaNda]

So by difficulty, you mean:

-Terrible and/or new players
-Horribly itemized gear
-0 add ons
-Ridiculously long attunements that needed to be completed before you could even walk into the raid

Right?

1) The average player is still pretty bad. It's a myth however that vanilla raiders didn't theorycraft, have proper rotations, etc however. We did.
2) This is true, the gear itemization was horrible for quite a bit of vanilla. Mostly in blues though. Such as str plate with spirit. At launch, raid epics were terribly itemized, but a couple patches in Blizzard fixed most of the itemization woes in raid epics. (55-56 level crafted blues were better than some MC epics originally.) There were still some weird pieces here and there though. Weapon itemization was pretty bad for some classes thanks to the whole weapon speed thing.
3) What? There were plenty of addons. Nothing quite as advanced as modern boss mods, but there were addons. Quite a few.
4) I'll give you the point on attunements as well. For the average guild, those were horrible. For those of us that were in raid guilds that were above average, not so much. The only thing that sucked was when we recruited someone that wasn't finished with their attunements or someone wanted to switch mains.

Honestly I have to question whether some people who call vanilla raiding easy were even there ever. Which is most likely the case considering those of us who actually did raid in vanilla are a pretty small minority, those of us who raided beyond BWL even more so. Most of MC was easy, most of ZG and AQ20 were easy. Ony was questionable. That's the one encounter where I would probably agree that it was more that we weren't very experienced more than the encounter's difficulty was what took so long to get it down. BWL was a total game changer, a lot of the fights in there were amazingly frustrating, but at the same time very satisfying. AQ40 had some easy bosses, and some really brutal ones. And Naxx was, well, Naxx.

At the start of BC I really don't think you can blame inexperience at that point. Kael/Vashj were really difficult, so much so that once we got past them and got to BT, everything in BT including Illidan was a huge let down. BT was the first time where we finished it in the same reset as the top guilds instead of being a week or two behind, KJ was a step up in difficulty, but from there until I stopped raiding everything was basically faceroll.

[Biske]

To be fair, those long attunements usually weeded out many bad players

I dunno, man. We had a 70yr old lady in our raid back in MC with reaction times as slow as you'd expect from that age.

[Kreldin]

I've played since Vanilla, quit during Cataclysm but returned in 5.3. Vanilla was not "difficult". Hard, yes, but not difficult, because the hardship came from lack of user experience and the way the game was designed, initially. For instance, as a warrior in Vanilla leveling, I usually couldn't fight more than one mob at a time because I would most likely die. I remember dying a million times in Stonetalon, fighting the harpies in that one area filled with harpies and elementals. If I pulled more than one, it was usually death. Is that really difficult, or just poor game design? MC wasn't not really difficult, either, from a mechanic-stand point. Compare the mechanics of MC bosses to what we have today. You definitely need a lot more raid-awareness and knowledge of the mechanics. The hardship came from dealing with 40 people in a raid, where half the raid wasn't paying attention and the other half was forced to carry them. Farming for weeks to get resist gear and other raid mats.

The only thing I do like from that era is leveling dungeons - today, it's how many packs can you pull at a time, how fast you can get through, aoe fest. I enjoyed the slower-paced, one group at a time, CC targets nature of the dungeons, which they attempted to do again at the start of Cataclysm. Just my personal preference, however, but I can see how they can't really go back that way with the LFD system, since as LFR shows, most people aren't "good" at the game - good as in, not understanding mechanics (or really, not caring to read about the fight before hand) and not knowing their classes' rotation.

Another thing I miss from Vanilla/TBC is old-style tanking. I've been tanking on my warrior since Vanilla, same toon. Holding threat was actually a challenge in of its own, as far as I remember, at least it wasn't like it is today. They changed it in WotLK, I remember my first time in Utgarde where I just ran in and pulled entire groups at a time. It was a far cry from dungeons in TBC, especially places likes Heroic Shattered Halls/Heroic Shadow Labs. Most difficult time I had tanking in WoW, I think. Boss tanking also feels waaaaay too easy, especially in ToT/SoO. I admit I haven't gotten too far into SoO, but in ToT almost every boss had extremely simple tanking mechanics. I get 2 stacks of this debuff, other tank taunts. We do this over and over again until the boss is dead. I can't think of any boss, except Tortos, that doesn't have a taunt-swap mechanic. Tortos is even easier, I just have to stand there and hit shield block as he's casting Snapping Bite. Tanking Megera is a snore-fest. Only fights that requires any sort of mobility are the last three, but they ultimately boil down to taunt when you get this debuff.

[RickJamesLich]

So it wasn't necessarily harder, it was more exclusive, which is basically the extent of this argument.

Hey, if it weeds out people that are likely to wipe your group, that's never a bad thing IMO.

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I dunno, man. We had a 70yr old lady in our raid back in MC with reaction times as slow as you'd expect from that age.

Hahaha, that's pretty sweet though. I dunno, back then you could carry a few wacky people at least, nowadays it's much harder to carry a dude (or grandma) that isn't pulling their own weight. If that lady ever had a nerd rage, you could record it and get 100k views on youtube lol.

[Biske]

3) What? There were plenty of addons. Nothing quite as advanced as modern boss mods, but there were addons. Quite a few.

Not at the start there weren't. And most of the addons that were out were to add more action bars and basic functions (like cosmos or CT mod) that are part of the default game now.

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Hahaha, that's pretty sweet though. I dunno, back then you could carry a few wacky people at least, nowadays it's much harder to carry a dude (or grandma) that isn't pulling their own weight. If that lady ever had a nerd rage, you could record it and get 100k views on youtube lol.

She didn't rage, but I did. I was 18 at the time and we had some weird roll system that had points and you did a /roll 1000 plus the number of points that you had, and I got unlucky and rolled low even though I had way more points, and she won the giantstalker's chest piece over me, which was the last piece of giantstalker's I needed at the time and boy did I secretly rage.

Completely unrelated pic from back when noggenfogger and the world enlarger used to stack: