Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos was the game that brought me into gaming. I was 17 years old then, I abhorred gaming before this game. From then on, I became a fan of Warcraft and Blizzard. To see it all go down the drain like this is truly sad for me. No king rules forever but at least some of them went down in history as real badasses. I hoped Blizzard and Warcraft would be one of them but it is no longer possible.
Lmao this is so incredibly wrong. The majority of the playerbase are super casual. The competitive players make up like...5% of the game's population, probably. It's why LFR still exists. It justifies Blizzard making raids that aren't 100% phoned in because way more players are actually seeing the raids. Before LFR, the majority of players only saw a raid on Youtube.
1: that’s not what they said even though that’s what you wanted to hear.
2: player intelligence didn’t need blizzards help to go down, that happened on its own. But they had two choices, lower the skill required to play and keep the game from tanking or keep the skill required above whatever arbitrary IQ score you deem high enough and watch the game die because it can’t retain the playerbase thanks to the base’s unwillingness to get better.
WoW's entire model is built to take advantage of turbo casuals who either forget to unsub and let the sub lapse, or who just play at such a snail's pace to never actually get to anything to benefit the top active 10% of people. It's actually kind of shitty, but to also be fair, they've tried doing all sorts of things to get people to do other stuff, and they've made everything quicker, and it's never worked. Contrary to what a lot of assholes will say, though, I don't think it's entirely just because people are dumb, I think a lot of people just don't like the trappings and staples of the "classic" MMORPG genre (i.e. having to apply to play the game, an active guild to do most everything really meaningful, tons of socialization. I think this is why the genre is in a slump. Most people don't care for this kind of stuff, and other genres stole a lot of the carrot on a stick-y parts of MMORPGs, without all the baggage. I also don't think how classes/specs can radically change pretty often helps either. Blizzard loves their pendulum design shifts.), but somehow got shoehorned into playing it anyways, probably because Blizzard built a game that almost exclusively caters to that mentality.... except at the end of it, where it does an entire reverse of how it plays before then. That's just horrible design, IMHO. If you put a lot of "skill" traps as you leveled, in WoW, earlier on it's life (it wouldn't work now, it's way too late), and forced grouping, and had, like... actually good tutorials built into the game ages ago, the game probably would have lost a lot of people, but the general playerbase would probably be a whole lot more consistent. Or, if that's not what Blizzard wants, they shouldn't fucking design a game who's entire endpoint is based around that, and stop trying to shoehorn everyone into it. The ideal thing would be to have two avenues for those two groups, instead of trying to shoehorn people into doing content they don't want to do. MoP did this, and it worked. Almost every style of play had a path they could follow, and it followed the traditional MMO progression curve to some degree. The only real downside being the lack of dungeons.
I dont really think its the devs fault, its simply game design, ESO is literally a single player game with MMO features, WoW is literally the opposite.
People tend to not like accepting that MMORPGs have subgenres and not all are the same therefor they cant be compared.
But thats what happens when your game design is based around housing and quests and you add dungeons that go from 0 mechanics to 2 mechanics and your community cant even press W for 1.5 seconds to get out of the red circle.
People seriously dont understand how segregation is a healthy thing for a game, assuming you actually try to find people similar to what you want.
Last edited by potis; 2021-05-15 at 07:10 AM.
Everything you said here and in your first post is completely right, and exactly why I've moved on to FFXIV after playing WoW since 1.8.
The most hilarious thing is watching WoW players here scramble like "B-but you can't get the same item level as me by only running LFD and LFR!! You don't deserve it! You don't need it! Why do you want it???" (HINT: I want it because big numbers feel good, as I happen to be a human being), and yet I've been hard pressed to find ANYONE in FFXIV complain that dirty casual solo scrubs like me can get a gear level 1 point removed from Mythic raiders at the end of a raid tier.
Because my progression does not affect them. They still have the mounts, the titles, the shiny weapon bling. It's just that my only-queued-content ass gets to catch up to them. And let me tell you, this fact makes for some interesting DPS recounts sometimes...
Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos was the game that brought me into gaming. I was 17 years old then, I abhorred gaming before this game. From then on, I became a fan of Warcraft and Blizzard. To see it all go down the drain like this is truly sad for me. No king rules forever but at least some of them went down in history as real badasses. I hoped Blizzard and Warcraft would be one of them but it is no longer possible.
No one cares about what gear level you get, no one, maybe the immature 20 year "mythuc raidurs" but the majority of the decent players do not care what happens outside of their bubble of players.
You guys simply dont understand statistics, maybe you, personally wont affect the instanced content but many others will, and thats the problem.
For every 10 of you getting freebie gear, there will be at least 4-5 out of those 10, in the life of the expansion that will attempt content out of their skill level just because they have the gear, and thats the problem.
You guys simply dont understand how WoW is all about the enjoying the instanced content when they are relevant, just because you take forever to do what others do in a few hours, you think that somehow thats the correct way to do things.
Why do you want 225 ilvl? Whats gonna change? You know whats gonna change? You will try to start a raid with others like yourself, fail miserably at everything and complain about something else now that you have the gear.
Literally the same way, pugs in Vanilla in 2005 couldnt get past the first two molten destroyers in MC, when you were supposed to be clearing AQ40/Naxx.
Last edited by potis; 2021-05-15 at 12:10 PM.
I think you’re on the right track with this. Today, we have numerous convenient systems that group players together to down content efficiently, therefore, bypassing the social and competitive ways to find like minded players who were interested in progressing through various forms of content. It didn’t become this way overnight. It’s been gradual, and back in earlier expansions before LFR, LFD and guild finder, etc, it required social interaction to seek out players to do content. This was even satisfying enough for the casual players, and it didn’t matter as much to them that they didn’t get to raid in places like Naxramas, Black Temple, Sunwell - you get the idea. People in leading edge guilds didn’t care about casuals, and casuals didn’t feel ignored by the top end guilds. Every guild usually had something to progress towards in socially cooperative ways without these modern convenient systems we have today.
TLDR; Social interaction in earlier expansions of the game was a form of content in itself, creating meaningful and fulfilling experiences that drove players to want to do more challenging content. Today’s group finders dilute the player experience and have helped to polarize casual players from competitive players.
Those who are telling me how I am wrong, claiming that the playerbase at the end of a patch's live consists mostly of casual players doing low difficulty content. Take a look around Oribos and your covenant sanctum. There are mostly 38k+ HP characters, consisting of HC and mythic raiders, key stone masters and 2k+ PvP players. When you see somebody with ~25k hp it's most likely someone's alt. Most casuals have cancelled their sub ~1-2 months ago.
Last edited by Beatman; 2021-05-15 at 01:42 PM.
It's two different routes that both lead to the same place really. Do you want your gear fast or do you want it easy? Both are equally okay in my book as long as it keeps players happy and subscribed, you never see a raider in FFXIV complaining that a casual got the same gear as them after a few months.
For me personally I think it's easier to just do the raids. Grinding out matchmade dungeons, trials and raids for months is just too much effort for me.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
The developers are at the point where they could literally scale content or the players themselves so that nobody actually needed the gear , in fact they do this to test on the ptr and did it for pvp content for a couple of expansions. Of course participation plummeted and I think they're cognizant enough to recognize how much not having a gear reward sucks. Once you recognize this it becomes very clear that they have quite an apparent disdain for most people who play this game.