WoW being more hardcore oriented = more popular?

[Kagthul]

Because they quit months ago, those characters are no longer tracked due to being inactive. .

Nope. Talking about characters still logging in.

The vast majority of players dont do anything past basic leveling, dalies, world quests, and maybe some casual BGs now and again. Been that way literally since forever. Back in Vanilla, Blizz memtioned at one point that half the accounts didnt even make level 60 before TBC.

People posting on forums have a hard time divorcing their anecdotal experiences from the stats. By the mere fact that you post on a forum about it, youre already far outside the norm for the average player.

[arkanon]

It's exhausting to play when there are so many interconnected systems and currencies. From a usability perspective it's really bad. Back in the early days the game was a lot more accessible because the few systems the game had were all pretty easy to get a handle on.
Today you often have to do a lot of research in order to understand how the game works and it changes from patch to patch, the foundation is constantly changing.

I should point out that these are not challenging for me personally, having played since launch and seen the gradual introduction of them, HOWEVER I absolutely agree that for many, especially more casual or newer players, it is extremely overwhelming.

[TheLucky1]

It's exhausting to play when there are so many interconnected systems and currencies. From a usability perspective it's really bad. Back in the early days the game was a lot more accessible because the few systems the game had were all pretty easy to get a handle on.
Today you often have to do a lot of research in order to understand how the game works and it changes from patch to patch, the foundation is constantly changing.

- - - Updated - - -



Because they quit months ago, those characters are no longer tracked due to being inactive.

- - - Updated - - -



That's a big reason casual players quit the game and move over to FFXIV for example. There you can play the game a lot more relaxed and still greatly progress your character.
For the m+ crowd and mythic raiders that game would be horrible, it just moves to slowly but for the average player it's comfortable and soothing and you won't get yelled at if you make a mistake.

I never had a problem with the many game systems and usually just thought they are badly balanced/designed and that it's not really the amount that is the problem.

However now with 9.1 announced i caught myself with how much reading up i actually had to do:
Domination shards and where to get them, sockets and the maw, soul cinders and how that works with torghast... also new torghast score in general, m+ scoring and how that turns out with valor/ksm, the new pvp gear scaling and how worthwhile that will be as a mainly pve player, renownlevels and soulbind unlocks...

Information is way more available and easier to digest nowadays compared to the early years of WoW, it's still quite daunting how much time you have to invest to inform yourself about all those things and how screwed you are if you don't.

[Uurdz]

Short answer: no

Long answer: No, because when this game was at the height of its popularity during Wrath/early Cata we had near constant complaints about how the game was "too casual" now with the removal of things like attunements, non-degrading honor, LFG, normal dungeons/raids etc etc. Basically, the main storyline/key elements of the game were now more accessible, and this pi$$ed off a minority of hardcore players at the time.
Even late TBC had folks moaning about even the slightest dip in their perceived difficulty.

If the popularity of the game was inherently linked to how "hardcore" it is (a vague definition/concept) then Blizz would make it more "hardcore". It's simple market economics. WoW is a product (always has been) and every time you play it/buy a sub you are being sold something.

In short: you cannot over do it on the hardcore sauce. Doesn't work.

I think people conflate "Hardcore" with "Timesink"

TBC is a massive Timesink wrt obtaining reputations, completing the levelling grind and the static power growth week-on-week (i.e. No Artefact power, Welfare Epics or Weekly Chest rewards).

Either you crafted, dungeon'd or raided for your gear. Notwithstanding now the ease of buying items via GDKP runs (on Classic) all these elements were largely timesinks.

It appears that game developer consensus is this is "bad game design" at least from what i've heard. Enjoyment in an rpg for some is linked to perceived value - you enjoy obtaining an item relative to the value you attribute to it over an above an inherent value that item has. WoW has diminished the value of "epics" with these now obtained via easy world quests, easy mythic dungeons and simple participation awards (weekly chests/honor rewards).

There are many gamers who like this being easy and find their sense of value and enjoyment in other things, like collecting, making gold or simply clicking their way through LFR without much thought. They are valid and deserve to be acknowledged just as much as the "hardcore aka. Timesink" group.

I also think the gaming industry has shifted considerably from big time sink type games into faster zoom-ee, streamable and "casual" games. This is primarily because gaming is now more mainstream than the super-nerdy sub-set used to be so the playerbase tends to view spending more than a few hours a day as being too large of a hurdle.

Honestly I think many (but not all) complaints are just Old Man Gamers howling against the wind.

[PaladinBash]

Class design was better in BC than Vanilla and better yet in Wrath. It was a very clear straight-up improvement on existing talents and spells and how they functioned being refined after years of development. You take things like the pally seal+judgement system and how it works great in Wrath compared to BC which was itself better than vanilla. Take something simple like Demonology having to not sac its pet coz it dies from AE damage. Can't tell me the game was better when your fucking Felguard died because a single AE goes off or that going OOM doing your rotation as Ret was better than not.

These are the differences between those expansions that made them better and more loved. Cata changed this shit and added new stuff that was sometimes good and sometimes bad. They had great raids and other content but also changed some classes for the absolute worse. PVP has been all over the place with lots of wild fucking ideas and metas. Being too hardcore might turn some people off and attracts others but what really makes the difference is class design. Shadowlands is a pretty shit expansion content-wise but I don't care because the class I main is still shitting on everyone. Ret is designed awfully but it still does lots of damage and kids are STILL mad at being dunked on by me. It's not going to last so I'm making the most of it. Soon it'll just be shitty design and shitty damage and I'll go back to complaining because they'll never let this happen again.

TL;DR the real canary in the coal mine of class design is that so little is being iterated on that Ret paladin is actually doing lots of damage an entire season and is not being nerfed

[MoanaLisa]

The game has never really been hardcore. It was created as a more casual alternative to other MMO's—mainly Everquest—that were more along that line.

People have ENDLESSLY bitched about this since the start and now ongoing for 15 years. There have been other games to come along that promised a return to those "good old hardcore days" which was laughable to start with. They're gone.

WoW's great descent in popularity and subscriptions started with Cataclysm heroics and Ghostcrawler's bad idea about bring the player not the class. All that led to was a ton of class homogenization which they've been half-heartedly trying to unwind for some years now.

The experience of the first few months of Cataclysm and the total failure of other titles to make heightened difficulty work are all the evidence required. People can still say they prefer a more difficult game but if you're going to be a mass-market MMO you have to play to the mass market and that's very much not players who thrive on difficulty and endless dying and wipes until they figure it out.

The game has all sorts of problems but being not difficult enough isn't one of them.

[Yriel]

Semi-true (I doubt that all of the BFA subs are less money than just the SL box sales, but yeah box sales are big) and then they make the rest of their money by making sure people stick around and stay subscribed.

Casual tourists don't stick around.

One of the grand misconceptions of gaming, but particularly mmos that you hear to this day being presented as truth is that you make a great game by making it for the casuals. No, the casuals will not stick around and play your game. They'll leave in droves no matter how noob friendly your game is. They'll chase the next new release and never look back. Dedicated "hardcore" gamers are your actual audience and these people don't want a bland, superficial game made for people who barely play it. They want depth, they want challenge.

Games like Path of Exile prove that. And yeah I know it's not strictly speaking an mmo.

The people you make content for stick around. If there had only be a mini raid, no m+ progression and all x.1 and x.2 patches would only be casual stuff like questlines, reputation islands, pet- and mount related content, warfronts, scenarios and so on then you can bet that it would be the hardcores that wouldn't stay around long. If people have noting enjoyable left to do they quit, no matter what.

[VinceVega]

People have nothing in this game to work towards anymore.

Hardcore raiders/gatherers/PvPers/Mythic+ gamers have something they want to achive. The first 3 more static, the last one has a moving goal post you can adjust. But if i don't care about a challenge.... what are they supposed to do?
Back before LFR they basically had to PuG or find a guild, do the raid and maybe quit then or they have found someone and stayed.
Now you wait a month. Run through LFR. Complain about how bad the raid and the gear is in LFR. Leave the game again.

There is a huge amount fo people who just play by themselves and are perfectly content with this. There are many hardcore players also who are fine with how they have to do open world stuff for a while so people have ther stuff to do.
Then there is this weird middle cloud of selfprofessed "casual" gamers who hate everyone who dares to do something challenging in wow, hate everything that is the slightest bit challenging in wow, hate that they cannot get max level gear via mail but probably spend more time in wow than anyone of the before mentioned players.

Wow has many problem. And there are many reason why wow declined over the years. On of them is basically that it got old. We got old. People have other stuff to do when they get older and priorities shift while the general gaming community also gravitated to a different playstyle. Sure wow, Everquest and co will always have a place but they will never have a comeback like it was in BC/wotlk. Not in the near future at least.

But to think this has to do with a supposed "hardcoreification of the game" when it is more accesible and easier to "finish" then ever is just laughable.

[Zyrinx]

People have nothing in this game to work towards anymore.

Hardcore raiders/gatherers/PvPers/Mythic+ gamers have something they want to achive. The first 3 more static, the last one has a moving goal post you can adjust. But if i don't care about a challenge.... what are they supposed to do?
Back before LFR they basically had to PuG or find a guild, do the raid and maybe quit then or they have found someone and stayed.
Now you wait a month. Run through LFR. Complain about how bad the raid and the gear is in LFR. Leave the game again.

There is a huge amount fo people who just play by themselves and are perfectly content with this. There are many hardcore players also who are fine with how they have to do open world stuff for a while so people have ther stuff to do.
Then there is this weird middle cloud of selfprofessed "casual" gamers who hate everyone who dares to do something challenging in wow, hate everything that is the slightest bit challenging in wow, hate that they cannot get max level gear via mail but probably spend more time in wow than anyone of the before mentioned players.

Wow has many problem. And there are many reason why wow declined over the years. On of them is basically that it got old. We got old. People have other stuff to do when they get older and priorities shift while the general gaming community also gravitated to a different playstyle. Sure wow, Everquest and co will always have a place but they will never have a comeback like it was in BC/wotlk. Not in the near future at least.

But to think this has to do with a supposed "hardcoreification of the game" when it is more accesible and easier to "finish" then ever is just laughable.

Wow got old but it also got stubborn under the current regime. They have boxed the game Into a small space (I mean this literally, in that SL feels so tiny) and figuratively in that basically WoW is an arcade game now, and nothing really matters outside of instances and then, only during "this" patch. But this team really thinks they are the smartest kids in the room, so each iteration doubles down. Legion to BfA to now SL.

[Wries]

WoW's great descent in popularity and subscriptions started with Cataclysm heroics and Ghostcrawler's bad idea about bring the player not the class. All that led to was a ton of class homogenization which they've been half-heartedly trying to unwind for some years now.

This would ignore the success of MoP and Legion, where the great "class homogenization" was still in place. The numbers might be in favor of a numbers decline coinciding with the change, but that it somehow is *caused* by this game design philosophy change is unsubstantiated.

BFA and Shadowlands walked this back, not "half heartedly" but thoroughly, and they have been largely disliked and seemingly didn't bring back any larger regular subscriber bases.

Also there seem to be quite a few people disappointed that mythic+ now more than ever revolves around a strict meta, which it of course does when crucial unique class abilities are make or break in higher keys.

[Rageonit]

And a little bit of history: This game was growing fastest when it was considerably less accessible.

Yet it was way more accessible than all other MMOs on the market back then.
But to answer the question: no. "Hardcore" stands in contradiction with "popular". Look at other sources of culture: hardcore/ambitious books, movies, music and what not are always less popular than the "approachable" counterparts. Games are no different.

[anon5123]

In short: you cannot over do it on the hardcore sauce. Doesn't work.

..........except that's exactly what happened in Cata, and caused Blizz to lose 3+ million subs.

[MoanaLisa]

This would ignore the success of MoP and Legion, where the great "class homogenization" was still in place. The numbers might be in favor of a numbers decline coinciding with the change, but that it somehow is *caused* by this game design philosophy change is unsubstantiated.

Despite the fact that Mists is one of my very favorite expansions there's no denying that Mists ended up with around 2,000,000 fewer people subscribed than it started with. It's difficult to say that that can be called a success. I'm not by any means ascribing all of that to class design. The slide certainly started during Cataclysm and developers were not hesitant to say that increased difficulty was the match that lit that fuse.

I loved Mists but objectively looking at what happened with subscriptions over the course of the expansion, it's very hard to call that part of it a success. Perhaps only in the sense that it could have been worse.

[Osmeric]

Hard content replaces Fear of Missing Out with Fear of Messing Up. Most players don't play to personally fail, especially in group content.

- - - Updated - - -

..........except that's exactly what happened in Cata, and caused Blizz to lose 3+ million subs.

He didn't mean it's not possible to over do it on hard content, but that one cannot do that and have a successful game.

[WowIsDead64]

Short answer: no

Long answer: No, because when this game was at the height of its popularity during Wrath/early Cata we had near constant complaints about how the game was "too casual" now with the removal of things like attunements, non-degrading honor, LFG, normal dungeons/raids etc etc. Basically, the main storyline/key elements of the game were now more accessible, and this pi$$ed off a minority of hardcore players at the time.
Even late TBC had folks moaning about even the slightest dip in their perceived difficulty.

If the popularity of the game was inherently linked to how "hardcore" it is (a vague definition/concept) then Blizz would make it more "hardcore". It's simple market economics. WoW is a product (always has been) and every time you play it/buy a sub you are being sold something.

In short: you cannot over do it on the hardcore sauce. Doesn't work.

Blizzard treat hardcore players as more "stable" and use these players' own advice, that it would be better for game, if only 1M players would play it, but it would be played by "true" players. Blizzard think, that casuals will run out of their casual content way too quickly and leave anyway. This misconception is created by Blizzard themselves, because when they make game more casual, they constantly do things wrong and not how casual players ask them to do. Example: WOD was very casual-friendly, but at the same time attempt to remove flying and fact, that garrisons weren't addition to outdoor content, but were the only content in game - killed it. Same with SL, where Blizzard "listened" to players and tried to make game more RPish, but making choice "meaningful" via gating rewards behind potentially endless grind - isn't right way to do it. Players actually asked to turn rep grinds into something more meaningful, than just filling bar with number on it. They didn't ask to make this grind endless. This leads Blizzard to "We do, as players asked, but they complain anyway - they're just whiners, who don't actually like Wow" misconception.

You should understand, that profit = revenue - development costs. So there are two ways to increase profit - increase revenue or decrease costs. Blizzard think, that making good casual content costs too much to make it profitable for them, as increase in number of subs doesn't cover all loses. So they choose 2nd way, i.e. cut development cost. And of course it's cheaper to make "grind the same 35 anima WQ for months and years" content, than something, that has higher quality, but fades a lot quicker.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Yes, objectively, if you measure media metrics.
I am unsure why people think Blizzard is clueless on how to make money from their game.
Do you not realize that they know exactly where the money is coming from?
They aren't guessing.

The push towards more esports is clearly working for them financially.
They wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't, and a vast majority of players do not ever have any interaction with the scene.

That should tell you everything you need to know about the situation.

[Osmeric]

Yes, objectively, if you measure media metrics.
I am unsure why people think Blizzard is clueless on how to make money from their game.

Companies pursuing bad metrics is quite common. SL smells strongly of what happens to a product when bad metrics are pushed internally, and the developers optimize for them.

One can imagine how this might happen. They might have internal data showing the players who play more per day are more likely to remain subbed. Hours played becomes a predictive metric, and the developers are told to increase it, because (this is where fallacy creeps in) this will cause players to stay subbed (correlation confused with causation).

[Kralljin]

WoW's great descent in popularity and subscriptions started with Cataclysm heroics and Ghostcrawler's bad idea about bring the player not the class. All that led to was a ton of class homogenization which they've been half-heartedly trying to unwind for some years now.

It needs to be said that "bring the player, not the class" was first implemented in Wotlk, that's where they homogenized support elements from each class, no longer was there any unique buff (except Bloodlust, which mages then received in Cata).
Which was a result of the rather stringent setup requirements back in TBC, as not having a given spec present would really impact your raid's performance.

It's really funny when you look at the evolution of this
Classic:
Lots of unique Class specific buffs + handful of spec specific ones
TBC:
All of the above with even more spec specific buffs
Wotlk:
No buff is unique anymore and can be substituted by another class / spec
Cata:
Same as above, except fewer buffs
MoP:
Same as above, except fewer buffs
WoD:
Same as above, except fewer buffs
Legion:
Fuck it, we'll just delete them all

Wotlk also where they stopped designing raid encounters around a given spell, such as Mind Control or Spellsteal (Razuvious in Naxx is a remnant due to its remaster nature), which likely happened because the existence of the 10man difficulty for *every* raid effectively forced it because it's difficult to have every class present in a 10man raid, simply glueing that ability on an item / object (like 10man Razuvious) also is not a good solution.

This is an aspect that has yet to return to WoW outside of Mythic difficulty and likely never will.

I also raise the argument that those unique buffs from TBC would have been even more imbalanced in a 10man enviroment, so the increase in accessability in the form of 10man raiding in Wotlk, came at the price of homogenization, at least if those 10man raids shouldn't be an even bigger joke because tuning a 10man raid around the TBC support buffs is pretty much impossible.

Another point is also that a big part of the homogenization has happened due to Arena
https://www.engadget.com/2009-11-13-...a-mistake.html

We didn't engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There's constant pressure on the class balance team, there's pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don't PvP don't understand why their classes are changing. I don't think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we'd have to do to balance it in that direction.

That's one of the head honchos admitting in 2009 already that Arena was a huge mistake, especially for the Class design.

[Osmeric]

WoW's great descent in popularity and subscriptions started with Cataclysm heroics and Ghostcrawler's bad idea about bring the player not the class.

Cata didn't fail because of class homogenization. It failed because the difficulty was beyond what too many customers wanted. Class homogenization had nothing to do with that, except that it may have made the devs feel they could tune content more tightly.

Ultimately, the view of the game as a platform where the best can excel has been detrimental. What kills a game like this is increasing focus of the dev team on something they know in their hearts is true, when it actually isn't true. Pursuing that mirage makes the game sicken; holding tightly to it in desperation as the game spirals down makes the game die.

[MoanaLisa]

Cata didn't fail because of class homogenization. It failed because the difficulty was beyond what too many customers wanted. Class homogenization had nothing to do with that, except that it may have made the devs feel they could tune content more tightly.

A good portion of the post from which you extracted the quote (see below) was about the terrible effects of the increased difficulty and how that's never worked for other games. Homogenization was more of a long-term thing in my view. No disagreement that the sudden onslaught of one-shots in Cataclysm heroics pushed the game off a cliff.

The experience of the first few months of Cataclysm and the total failure of other titles to make heightened difficulty work are all the evidence required. People can still say they prefer a more difficult game but if you're going to be a mass-market MMO you have to play to the mass market and that's very much not players who thrive on difficulty and endless dying and wipes until they figure it out. The game has all sorts of problems but being not difficult enough isn't one of them.

- - - Updated - - -

It needs to be said that "bring the player, not the class" was first implemented in Wotlk, that's where they homogenized support elements from each class, no longer was there any unique buff (except Bloodlust, which mages then received in Cata).
Which was a result of the rather stringent setup requirements back in TBC, as not having a given spec present would really impact your raid's performance.

Yeah, I messed up the timeline for that. I suppose I was thinking of GC's exhortations that difficulty = engaging content. My bad. You're right. It was Wrath that they started all of that. I was playing a mage as a secondary main in Cataclysm so that might have had something to do with it.