Remove LFR, Flying Mounts ---> Millions Resubscribe

[Totle]

This is... one of the dumbest things I've read here.

And not just because I disagree with you, OP.

You want to make the game more BC like - flying mounts were a major novelty of BC. In fact, that they were end game was pretty much a major factor in people grinding out to get flying in order to begin it. It was THE thing to start working on when you hit 70, even more than starting heroics and doing raids.

Secondly:

If the developers removed... removed the heroic difficulty, so essentially normal difficulty is the hard difficulty, and flex became the new normal, millions of players would resubscribe.

So you want to remove heroic... so there's just normal. And then you want to replace normal with flex? Or do you want flex and normal to be the new normal and heroic? Either way, you're dumbing down the raids, and making it more "casual friendly" which is against what you initially want.

But let's address the LFR issue - you want the game to go back to BC. Back to a time when the majority of the players capped at raiding Magtheridon, Gruul, and Karazahn because they weren't the top 2% of players who regularly raided. Therefore, you want to DENY the casuals the chance to raid. Do you understand that the casuals make up the majority of the player base? You are essentially ostracizing the majority of subscribers... and you're expecting millions to resubscribe?

Moreover, many of the subscription declines are due to either gold farmers being booted, or perhaps (crazy idea), the older gen who got into WoW at the beginning have simply moved on because it's been almost a decade.

Finally, the old subscribers didn't leave because of LFR. This is completely illogical. If LFR replaced regular raiding, I can understand your thinking, but it didn't. The hard core game from BC is still available, there's just an extra mode for non hard-core people.

Removal of flying mounts and LFR will do nothing to inflate the subscription numbers. I can't even imagine what would make you think otherwise.

[Deleted]

The casuals dont like it when the more dedicated players get rewarded for putting some effort into the game.. Its quite disturbing. So the only way to solve the problem is to remove it entirely.

Isn't that exactly what YOU ARE DOING

[SL1200]

They take away our flying mounts all the time. It's done nothing to help subs climb. And remove lfr? They might as well, they've made it such a shit experience i'm surprised anyone does it.

[Deleted]

They take away our flying mounts all the time. It's done nothing to help subs climb. And remove lfr? They might as well, they've made it such a shit experience i'm surprised anyone does it.

Subscriptions rose after Flying Mounts...

[NoRest4Wicked]

I think many people underestimate just how many older players who have quit because the game got too casual friendly, would actually resubscribe making a few TBC esque changes to the game.

If the developers removed LFR, and flying mounts from the game (i actually like the fatigue bar where you cant fly forever), also removed the heroic difficulty, so essentially normal difficulty is the hard difficulty, and flex became the new normal, millions of players would resubscribe.

With connected realms being implemented, the issue of low pop servers is essentially a thing of the past, so pugging for flex wouldn't be an issue for the LFR crowd. And bringing back a sense of accomplishment to the game, as well as reduce ilvl inflation through 4 difficulties would really go far in many people's books.

I know these changes would see me back in the World of Warcraft in a heart beat.

What changes would bring you back to the game?

TBC added flying mounts.... lol.

On topic: These changes would make me quit.

[Deleted]

LFR and flying mounts have 0% relevance to declining subscriptions, I don't even get how you can make those links, because it's a plain retarded assumption.

The main reason why wow is declining is how people feel about subscriptions in general. Subscriptions feel like a commitment and that's not something a lot of people like when they play games, they wanna be able to login whenever they want, play for as long as they want without having the commitment of a recurring monthly payment.

The other negative side is, that the majority of wow players is around the age where they are either in secondary school, or university, the moments of life where you are still majorly dependant on your parents (ok maybe not everyone, but I'm sure that's the smaller portion of the group). So they probably become wiser and see that for 8eur a month (and that's if they even play a month), they can save that money and buy a new game in the near future and play it as much as they want.

Then there's the big competition of F2P and Freemium games, which are very popular and bring high profits and you decide whether you want to spend money on it or not (it's currently not very effective yet for high end games a la blizzard/etc...) But I'm sure that the popularity will only increase over time, until the next new thing hits and it starts phasing out. I think that's one of the big reasons why LoL is doing really well, it has a lot more potential than wow currently has.

Do I think blizzard can't do anything about it? I'm not really sure about it, there's some things they can and I'm sure they will do, but in the end the consumer decides. It does seem that blizzard has not been listening too well to their key consumers and put way too much effort in making the game accessible to new players (which come over time anyway) and alienated the majority of their loyal players who provide them with the best marketing and ways to attract new and qualitative gamers.

It's time blizzard learnt how communities work, they still don't have a clue. You are going to get more players by keeping the quality of life high (which you can say is keeping the skill cap at a good level and the fun of play at an even higher level). If they would have stuck to that there would probably be more people saying : Omg this game might not be that good graphics wise, but the gameplay is still awesome, instead of : Omg this game sucks because it's catering to the noobs and I'm not going to pay to play with noobs.

Also their irresponsible decisions about making flying only at max content, and making mop so alt unfriendly until the end has annoyed a lot of my friends (I personally couldn't care less), but all these tiny decisions surely piss someone off at some point and make the decision of quitting 10x easier.

[Jaylock]

LFR and flying mounts have 0% relevance to declining subscriptions, I don't even get how you can make those links, because it's a plain retarded assumption.

Hey no need to become hostile, its just a suggestion to dramatically improve the game experience for many current players, while at the same time bringing back millions of older players.

Its a Win-Win for all parties involved.

[lopk]

If you changed your title to "hundreds of people who have unwarranted hate for LFR and flying mounts would resubscribe, and thousands of people who like those features would leave," I'd maybe be more willing to agree with you. This topic is no longer a dead horse; we've beaten it so much it's pulverized horse remains.

[Anevers]

I think many people underestimate just how many older players who have quit because the game got too casual friendly, would actually resubscribe making a few TBC esque changes to the game.

If the developers removed LFR, and flying mounts from the game (i actually like the fatigue bar where you cant fly forever), also removed the heroic difficulty, so essentially normal difficulty is the hard difficulty, and flex became the new normal, millions of players would resubscribe.

With connected realms being implemented, the issue of low pop servers is essentially a thing of the past, so pugging for flex wouldn't be an issue for the LFR crowd. And bringing back a sense of accomplishment to the game, as well as reduce ilvl inflation through 4 difficulties would really go far in many people's books.

I know these changes would see me back in the World of Warcraft in a heart beat.

What changes would bring you back to the game?

Flying was introduced in BC, I wouldn't call it a TBC esque change to remove it. To be honest, I don't see the removal of LFR or Flying mounts bringing anywhere near a million, or even half that number. When the majority of the player base enjoys flying mounts and LFR, removing them to please the fickled few isn't a good business practice. As many have said already, you risk alienating more people than you would gain. You simply cannot remove features once they have been introduced for so long and not expect hells fury.

Whats funny is blizzard even admitted that "if we could do it all over again we probably wouldn't do flying mounts".

They know they screwed up with flying mounts, they just didn't have the foresight to know how it was going to affect the game in such a large way.

Unfortunately now, as they've also said, there isn't anything they can do, they can't just remove them now. (understandably)

I believe that was Ghostcrawlers personal opinion.

[Deleted]

Hey no need to become hostile, its just a suggestion to dramatically improve the game experience for many current players, while at the same time bringing back millions of older players.

Its a Win-Win for all parties involved.

Im not hostile, it's just what I think about this assumption, nothing personal

I personally don't believe flying has and lfr have that much of an impact. The only reason I could think LFR would cause a decline is because of all the QQ and insults involved in it making people take a distance of the game, but then again, you have that issue in all segments of the game. I don't think they can ever go back to constantly pugging in trade to make people more social, because I believe it's more the issue that all forms of society have these days, people just aren't that social anymore.

[Digory Kirke]

I hope that people who desubbed because of flying mounts and LFR realized that they never had to use these features. They are completely optional.

[Yakshamash]

Nothing wrong with LOLFR. Maybe if they introduce new system and rules for toxic players and idiots. Like, you acting like jerk, you get perma-ban from game. If you don't stick with rules, goodfuckingbye permanent. I'm sure people wouldn't wait 2 hours in que and me and every other tanks will join again (just for fun).
And flying mounts... They killed OWPVP. Stop. Just please, stop. It's us who killed OWPVP. In vanilla there comes 1 ganker, killing 1 guy from other faction. Then, there comes guildie of ganked guys, they kill bastard. Then he calls his guildies. And one by one, they engadge in pvp. Soon, other guilds join in massive pvp.
Today you have 999 members in guild, half online, 1 gets killed, ask in guild chat for help, no one fucking respond!
And I was called idiot 2-3 years ago, wanting to make raids to Orgrimmar, just for fun, to bring every single alliance player who was online to conquer the Horde. No one wanna join, others asked why, another ones is there any achievement... But yeah, blame flying mounts. When no one doesn't care, I'll just mount my drake and fly away...

[Pull My Finger]

Whats funny is blizzard even admitted that "if we could do it all over again we probably wouldn't do flying mounts".

They know they screwed up with flying mounts, they just didn't have the foresight to know how it was going to affect the game in such a large way.

Absolutely untrue.

What you have read is GCs personal, individual opinion, nothing more, nothing less. He wasn't even on the team when they introduced flying mounts.

[notorious98]

Hey no need to become hostile, its just a suggestion to dramatically improve the game experience for many current players, while at the same time bringing back millions of older players.

Its a Win-Win for all parties involved.

No, it's a terrible suggestion and you know it. Neither would improve the game experience for anybody. On the other hand, it would make it worse for some. Subscriptions increased when flying mounts were introduced. I'm not saying that's the reason why, I'm just saying it didn't have a detrimental effect on subscriptions. WoW was already hemorrhaging subs long before LFR was introduced. Stop attempting to simplify a much larger issue. That's what makes your assumption retarded. So the person you're responding to is 100% correct in their assessment of your comments.

[Guyviroth]

Millions may subscribe.

But about four times as many will unsub. GG.

[uopayroll]

The problem with giving incentives to alternative means of travel, would be that the casuals who enjoy all these game numbing features would complain that they are rewarding people for doing other modes of gameplay.

The casuals dont like it when the more dedicated players get rewarded for putting some effort into the game.. Its quite disturbing. So the only way to solve the problem is to remove it entirely.

I do not recall ever seeing someone come here and complain that someone that raids regularly and in a raid committed guild/group has a higher iLvl than they do. Now the same cannot be said the other way around....

[SL1200]

Absolutely untrue.

What you have read is GCs personal, individual opinion, nothing more, nothing less. He wasn't even on the team when they introduced flying mounts.

Hmmm, wasn't the game much better back then? It was. He has been bad for wow.

[Orcindauh]

People fail to realize world PvP is nearly dead on life support with or without flyers and it has always been on life support. World PvP has always revolved around ganking and pissing the other off. No one goes to world PvP looking for a fair fight, if they were, they'd be doing arenas or looking for 1v1 duels of people of similar skill.

[Razecog]

People may resub, but more people will unsub. (Including me. I'm quitting the second flying mounts disappear.)

[thatguy181]

they would drive more away from the game than they bring back.

I don't need to read any further. Your first response to your ludicrous suggestions was the most factual response you've gotten.