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.
That assumes...
A) That people playing on private servers value in the millions. (They don't)
B) That said people would be willing to quit the free bootlegged game they are playing to go back to the subscription main game. (They won't)
C) That the reason they left in the first place had anything to do with difficulty. (It usually does not).
As for making the game easier is "not working", depends what you consider to be working. If Blizzard made the game hard tomorrow and lost 2 million players instead of 1 million, would you call that a success? Blizzard is never going to reach the point it did during WOTLK, it's too old now. The only process they can run with now is to reduce the bleeding as much as possible, and doing that is catering to the majority of the player base, which are not in any form "hardcore".
I think in general terms this is a major issue with wow which has grown more and more over the last 5 years. Specifically excluding heroic raid content, virtually every single pve aspect of the game has been reduced to silly difficulty.
By this I include voluntary or self-directed player goals, such as frostsaber mount rep (and other reputations, such as timbermaw), 5-man content which remained challenging at appropriate gear levels and also took enough coordination and effort to complete that it would structure an entire night to complete an instance for most players, extended in-game player goals such as the dungeon set 1 questline (as well as other max-level extended quest chains, scholo for example), the quest to get exalted with various cities to access other mounts, and any number of other goals players DID use to structure their time.
basically, if I grasp current game together, the catch-all rejoinder which seems to be the only thing really beyond most players who want to try is heroic raiding, and even then there is a visceral difference on beating the big baddie on normal/nightmare and then trying on hell, versus having only one difficulty and one way to kill it, and making it something that takes work.
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why not chill, he obviously means naxxramas lvl 80.
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folks playing on a 1.12 server or 2.4.3 server aren't playing there cuz its free, but because of the game version. I expect most if not all would pay to play on a blizzard server with proper instance and ability scripting quite happily.
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.
WoW has never been difficult, just time consuming. Pre-BC it was time consuming because it took forever to get an upgrade, and you could only down "harder" bosses if you had the gear. BC was time because of the same reason. WOTLK was less time consuming, thus appeared "easier", but Algalon only appeared harder because of the same reason as BC and pre-BC, people just didn't realize it. Once you had the gear and learned the strat Algalon just required lots of focus, but it wasn't any harder than Yogg or Mimiron.
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.
Or perhaps you should do a bit of research before opening your mouth...
True enough, Cataclysm's heroics were difficult and I expect were the "first attempt" at bringing back difficulty in a game where gameplay out-paced the AI of mobs and such. A shame it only lasted for two weeks, but it was a huge difficulty slope from Wrath's heroics.
That said, I strongly believe that the Timeless Isle, rare mobs, proving grounds, etc are all parts of the game where they are trying to ease the difficulty back into the game. And I welcome it.
If you don't think there are A LOT of bad players in the game, you are playing a different game.
Guild runs where you can guarantee the people you go with weren't idiots were always fun. The problem with group content and randomly thrown together groups is that the content may not be hard for you, but is certainly appears hard for the tank/dps/healer you go thrown in there with drooling on their keyboards. If you only got 1 bad player in your group you were lucky, but even with only 1 it was almost guaranteed to turn into a bunch of people screaming at each other at some point in the run.
First of all, A, private servers were just an example of the type of players that have been lost.. B, go ask them, a lot of them play BC because it has what current WoW doesn't. C, again, go ask them. Because your wrong.. your argument is basically ignorance.
Your only argument is that more people haven't left, when you don't know if your right or wrong.
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Hah, difficulty like recieving 20 epics in 60 minutes. Ok then..
No, it proved placing organization-required mechanics into random-queue modes was no longer wanted by the majority of the playerbase. They've since learned to split that off into an organized-queue system, and that is why HC scenarios and CM's do well. Just like 5-mans, normal scenarios and LFR do well, being tuned for disorganized groups.
It also proves how whiny elitist jackwagons are when they are no longer catered to as they once were and how they continue to try and delude themselves into believing playing a video game a certain way makes them better than the other people who also play it.
Because most people don't want it "that hard". Most of those that thought they want it hard were bitching like crazy in Cata. "Back then when the game was sooooo hard and awesome" when people hit the wall they were like "oh, man, that's my level, I'm never going to raid anything, let's farm some shit, maybe I can buy a mount in 3 months". That was because WoW was like the only online game it was worth playing. Now they will say "fuck this piece of shit game, I can do better things" and they will go an play one of the other 13 million online games, most of them free too.
They lost pople after LFR and nerf hammer. MOP shows it pretty much even more how casual form of MMROPG is nothing then harm for the game.
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So why WoW lossing subs since wow becom more and mroe casual? Sorry but WoW alredy lost 5 mil subs. And after this fail 5.4 patch where blzz pretty much killed compettive PvP, destroyed several specs (forst mages, ferals druids) i only hope that thius game will drop even more subs so blizzard can finaly realize taht they fucked their most amazing game what they ever had. I pretty much quited after summer becous game isnt challenging anymore (and yes i finish every hc content what this game could offer since TBC) and is made for casual and like Kungen said ,,wow becom games for litle kids,,.
Hmm i kind of agree i mean, i stopped playing a couple of weeks ago but i still tend to read some news when i got some time. I see the top guilds beeing 11/14 HC already, it was released this wednesday right ? HC content ( for EU wednesday , tuesday for US ) But still 3-4 days for 11 HC bosses? Seems abit under tuned tbh.