"Catering to 5% of your player base will leave you with 5% of your player base"

[WowIsDead64]

There game isn't dead just old. Like any old mmo veteran players cluster to a few select servers. Blizzard should remove the cost of transferring and simply give it a month long cooldown. The goal should be to slowly shut down dead servers at this point they only act as traps for new and returning players.

My guess - they don't do it due to possible character name conflicts. Extra serves serve extra "namespaces" role.

My problem is opposite. Back in old days I was willingly playing on less populated servers to avoid overcrowding problems. I hate exceeding artificial competition. Because competition is very close to PVP (actually by definition - it is, but isn't considered to be PVP by many players) and I prefer PVE game. So, CRZ ruined game for me. CRZ is especially bad on less populated realms, because Blizzards' population control works extremely badly, so such servers are connected with exceeding number of other servers. Another reason - Blizzard want to decrease amount of physical servers, used to run this realms. This causes even more problems, such as lagging. Especially when world boss is in your location, even if it isn't being killed on your server.

[Dakara]

MMO stands for Massively Multiplayer Online (to state the obvious).
It’s does not stand for “Must be in pre-made group and Discord at all times.”

Playing “Solo” could refer to simply doing WQ’s or Queueing solo via a matchmaking system, and everything in between.
Personally, I throughly enjoyed playing both Cata and MOP “Solo” yet still did plenty of group content. It was just mostly via LFD/LFR and the odd PUG. LFD had nice welfare gear for Alts and LFR still had Tier sets. I didn’t care about my Ilvl or how I compared to Top Raiders, I just had fun.

Modern WOW has stripped away that fun over the years as it slowly eroded the rewards from queueable content, including PVP. Naturally, I went back to organised raiding, probably as Blizzard intended, but as is often the case, people quit, guilds collapse and I’m fed up of paying for server/faction transfers to join new guilds, and without the same fallback to Solo as I enjoyed in past expansions I simply quit.

As have many, many others.

[Aydinx2]

Modern WOW has stripped away that fun over the years as it slowly eroded the rewards from queueable content, including PVP. Naturally, I went back to organised raiding, probably as Blizzard intended, but as is often the case, people quit, guilds collapse and I’m fed up of paying for server/faction transfers to join new guilds, and without the same fallback to Solo as I enjoyed in past expansions I simply quit.

Why lie tho? There is more queueable content than ever. You can get full tier gear without ever manually making a group.

You can complain about solo content being bad, but saying it got worse over time is just a lie when the opposite is true.

[Osmeric]

Why lie tho? There is more queueable content than ever. You can get full tier gear without ever manually making a group.

You can complain about solo content being bad, but saying it got worse over time is just a lie when the opposite is true.

You could try responding to what he actually was saying rather than strawmanming an argument he wasn't making.

[Dakara]

Why lie tho? There is more queueable content than ever. You can get full tier gear without ever manually making a group.

You can complain about solo content being bad, but saying it got worse over time is just a lie when the opposite is true.

If Solo content is bad, when it used to be good... then that's the literal definition of "getting worse over time". So I fail to see where the Lie is.
Bold Tier Sets were removed from LFR in WOD (from Memory) and removed entirely from the game in BFA. I believe they might be back in 9.2 (no idea as I'm un-subbed) so are you implying they're now available via LFR? As applying to Normal pugs via the group finder isn't Queuing.

It was quite enjoyable, back in those expansions, to queue LFR on Alts and collect their Sets, same with the Dungeon Sets. Again, Blizzard killed that style of Game play... partly because Mythic Raiders complained about farming LFR for their Tier Sets.

[HansOlo]

MMO stands for Massively Multiplayer Online (to state the obvious).
It’s does not stand for “Must be in pre-made group and Discord at all times.”

Playing “Solo” could refer to simply doing WQ’s or Queueing solo via a matchmaking system, and everything in between.
Personally, I throughly enjoyed playing both Cata and MOP “Solo” yet still did plenty of group content. It was just mostly via LFD/LFR and the odd PUG. LFD had nice welfare gear for Alts and LFR still had Tier sets. I didn’t care about my Ilvl or how I compared to Top Raiders, I just had fun.

Modern WOW has stripped away that fun over the years as it slowly eroded the rewards from queueable content, including PVP. Naturally, I went back to organised raiding, probably as Blizzard intended, but as is often the case, people quit, guilds collapse and I’m fed up of paying for server/faction transfers to join new guilds, and without the same fallback to Solo as I enjoyed in past expansions I simply quit.

As have many, many others.

They just announced that they will make solo queues with rating(arena). I can imagine that this will go to mythic dungeons and eventually raiding(normal/HC). They have also acknowledged that people are playing differently in 2022 and that DF and onwards will be a different community.

I will still solo queue - not because im casual - but because of the convenience. And it still won't solve anything regarding the casuals needs, which is perfectly fine for me.

We will probably have more threads on how bad people are, meanwhile casuals will be asking for gear, just for signing up on the queue.

[Dakara]

They just announced that they will make solo queues with rating(arena). I can imagine that this will go to mythic dungeons and eventually raiding(normal/HC). They have also acknowledged that people are playing differently in 2022 and that DF and onwards will be a different community.

I will still solo queue - not because im casual - but because of the convenience. And it still won't solve anything regarding the casuals needs, which is perfectly fine for me.

We will probably have more threads on how bad people are, meanwhile casuals will be asking for gear, just for signing up on the queue.

Good to know.

The definition of "Casual" changes depending on who you speak too. I always considered myself casual because I have a lot of IRL commitments placing WOW quite low on the priority list. Didn't stop me from re-joining friends in a Raiding guild to get AOTC and KSM each season, just took me a lot longer. However, when they all quit, I did too.

There will always be "Bad" players, but just because someone is casual doesn't make them bad. Many just want to Log in when it suits them, Queue up for their chosen content and do some WQ's (for example) while they wait. They don't want to stand in the lobby that is the main hub and scroll through the Dungeon finder applying for group after group until they finally get accepted.

[cparle87]

Yeah.... too bad he's only been game director for 2 full expansions yet people STILL heap all the blame on him.

My favorite part is all the people who seem to think all the meme "evil lawyer jokes" are actually true irl and think up crazy conspiracy theories for everything he says and does as part of some nefarious plan to milk as much money out of as little work as he can get away with.

[Azharok]

ilvl - people are acting like getting the new low-end higher ilvl means anything outside of prog-play. because of world creatures scaling up with each patch it's an absolute must because the world is overtuned and there's really no outgearing it anymore just being geared enough to more readily survive. when we used to get powerful gear we felt powerful out in the world. not really anymore.

What ? This is patently false. If anything the world is under-tuned.

[potis]

WRONG!

WoWs huge success was NOT because it was an MMO, but because it was THE MOST SINGLE PLAYER FRIENDLY ONE. Back in the days there were only hardcore mmos where you could do nothing solo, wow was by far the most casual one. Right now wow is the least single player friendly one, and probably the one that is the least successful in drawing in new players.

It wasnt single player friendly, you as the most were simply terrible at it and took x20 times the amount required to do things, you guys confuse tedious and boring thing with single player experiences cause you dont know better.

GW2 is a single player MMO experience, you cant even lose cause the NPCs literally rez you during the scenarion story missions, i dont know about FFXIV, i wont ever play that crap, i hate the graphics.

SL had 0 complains about "single player content" until the 6 month by the way, you know what that means right ?It means it took you bads 6 months to catch up, only reason the complains started is because they fucked up and needed 1 more month for 9.1 or we wouldnt be having this discussion, all they had to do was merge the story line to 1 big covenant story line with a few more quests and you dummies wouldnt even understand the difference, thats all there is to it.

[Azharok]

WRONG!

Only opinions here, no numbers, sources or arguments.

[Athorha]

recurring subs want a changing game, stop pretending theres this 2 million person core which are irreplaceable diehard fans of decades worth of gaming. That is a small number and every year that number grows, so long as the game grows. If blizz caters to those players and have the bells and whistles for raiders ands rpers to bounce in and out as they draw interest that seems like a reasonable model for the game to grow. Catering to the 95% is never good because 95% of people are usually wrong when left full reign.

[Glorious Leader]

No, i don't enjoy FF14; while solo-gameplay is good, the mechanics are so clunky that i stopped playing it. WoW Combat is by FAR superior to FF14, no question here. And it does not change this fact that solo-gameplay is the most important thing, especially since you can always adapt solo gameplay into multiplayer-experiences too. That WoW Subscriber-Numbers are so low is because blizzard only catered for the 5% of playerbase instead of the 95%, it's as simple as that.

SL solo gameplay was utterly crap; the Maw was the worst zone blizzard ever created, and that includes crystalsong forest that had 0 content in it. MoreMaw was also not much better, only 9.2 seems to be okay to good, but right now most players given up on the expansion. If blizzard does the same crap, instead of delivering good solo content at the beginning of the xpack like suramar and does the same as BfA and SL in the midst of an xpack, then the player numbers will dwindle even more. And yes, high subscriber-numbers are important even for multiplayer-player; heck even from pure single players benefit the raiding community.

Honestly 9.2 still kinda sucks for solo players. Theirs this stupid weekly quest to help people in the word which means killing some random named mobs. By the time you get to it its already been killed though.

[Aydinx2]

You could try responding to what he actually was saying rather than strawmanming an argument he wasn't making.

I did. Your inability to read is not me strawmanning.

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WRONG!

...

Literally the Donald Trump school of debating. Opinion discarded.

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I believe they might be back in 9.2 (no idea as I'm un-subbed) so are you implying they're now available via LFR?

Yes. In fact you can even craft a tier piece weekly if you're unlucky on drops. Honestly if you're not playing, why are you discussing the quality of the game that you clearly don't even have the right info on? Because then you get the following problem where you say things that are just not true:

Again, Blizzard killed that style of Game play... partly because Mythic Raiders complained about farming LFR for their Tier Sets.

Yes it is stupid that people would have to farm lower difficulties for incredibly specific items. If it were up to me LFR wouldn't have tier pieces but you could still get them some other way besides Normal. You're not going to play Normal anyways so why does it matter if you don't have tier?

[Azharok]

It was quite enjoyable, back in those expansions, to queue LFR on Alts and collect their Sets, same with the Dungeon Sets. Again, Blizzard killed that style of Game play... partly because Mythic Raiders complained about farming LFR for their Tier Sets.

You really think Mythic raiders care what gear you get ?

[Dakara]

Yes. In fact you can even craft a tier piece weekly if you're unlucky on drops. Honestly if you're not playing, why are you discussing the quality of the game that you clearly don't even have the right info on? Because then you get the following problem where you say things that are just not true:

Yes it is stupid that people would have to farm lower difficulties for incredibly specific items. If it were up to me LFR wouldn't have tier pieces but you could still get them some other way besides Normal. You're not going to play Normal anyways so why does it matter if you don't have tier?

Might have something to do with a new expansion announcement perking my interest.

But it seems you’re dead set on blasting me over Teir sets, which they’ve only recently brought back, while ignoring every other aspect of my messages. Selective quoting at its best.

Never going to do Normal? First of all, says who? Secondly, have you even read my posts beyond the few sentences you’ve decided to poke holes at? Clearly not.

My entire message was about how rewards from Solo Queue content have been watered down over the years making the content less rewarding for those who play it. Removal of Tier sets from LFR was but one example I mentioned.

You really think Mythic raiders care what gear you get ?

No.

They cared that they were running LFR to complete their set bonuses ahead of Mythic opening. It was quoted by Blizzard at the time they removed Teir from LFR due to “player burnout”.

[Azharok]

They cared that they were running LFR to complete their set bonuses ahead of Mythic opening. It was quoted by Blizzard at the time they removed Teir from LFR due to “player burnout”.

Okay, but since it's back in LFR how would that be catering to the 5% ?

[Dakara]

Okay, but since it's back in LFR how would that be catering to the 5% ?

What you’ve quoted is my response to selected quotes from my original message, which has ultimately been lost.

I originally posted that WOW being an MMO doesn’t automatically mean people need to be in pre-mades 100% of the time, and that solo queue content has been watered down over the years in favour of the group finder.

My WOW account is 18 years old, and I’ve spent more of that time Raiding in guilds than Solo, but even then, I enjoyed Solo Queuing as a chill way to play Alts. When my guilds eventually broke up, instead of server transferring immediately, I’d chill solo for a while, which is how I played most of Cata and MOP. I brought up Collecting Tier sets from those expansions and it became the topic of conversation in subsequent replies.

In SL, when my guild stopped raiding and my friends quit, I quit too, largely because I found the solo queue content (I.e not WQ’s) to be entirely eroded and not worth hanging around for. WQ’s, Mission tables and Covenants didn’t cut it for me.

Blizzards grouping system is terribly dated compared to other games. As for the 95%/5% that’s the OP’s title not mine… but anecdotally it would seem the number of players happy with current way of doing things is dwindling.

[kamuimac]

Because 80% of the playerbase finds them too hard apparently

I remember in Legion I would pug normal and heroic raids multiple times a week on alts for fun and very rarely were there problems - people were able to very comfortably pug aotc within a week or two of a new raid, since BFA that's just not the reality anymore, pugging is unbearably bad and most of the game isn't in a structured raid guild - something changed and I don't think players got worse at the game

nothign changed. back in legion raids were already overtuned baring for very first raid.

reality is last casual friendly tier was ICC and DS with its buffs/debuffs allowing casuals to have fun in there. mop flex was last try to provide fun experince - but ofc in WoD they turned flex into normal and started to overtune it again .

BfA was just a point where you were not good enough to keep up with blizzard overtuning content - thats why you noticed it. most players experienced it much sooner though .

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They cared that they were running LFR to complete their set bonuses ahead of Mythic opening. It was quoted by Blizzard at the time they removed Teir from LFR due to “player burnout”.

and blizzard should have said to them " tough luck " we rahter cater to 90 % of players - if 5 % dont like it quit game

instead they made 90 % quit for sake of 5%.

and how Ion didnt get fired for that is mystery to me. one woudl think he must have files on all exectutives who were molesting employees or something because people normaly get fired for 10 % of what he did wrong. hell even for 5%.

[taishar68]

On occasion, I run into someone who has played WoW; they see me in my Diablo shirt or my Horde hoodie and it sparks some conversation.

invariably, in the literal sense of the word, these players are no where near the level of engagement that we exist on here. Take me for example; I have not raided at top level content since Cata, am very casual (as we use the term here), but in terms of game knowledge and activity, I’m a Method level player compared to the folks I run into.

My point is, we are the 5%. Forum items, Reddit posters, Twitter/Twitch followers, we’re the top. And they’re making the game based on us; the casual content we see is designed with us in mind. The folks who played for six months in 2012, or the kid who played at the beginning of an expac that a grandma bought because “Kevin likes video games”; they’re the ones who this is not designed around, because they don’t last long enough to make an impact.

If Blizzard wanted to design for them; the game would be vastly different, I think. Much easier and much more solo friendly. Too easy and too friendly, I’m afraid.