Why don't they return to the roots of the game in difficulty?

[Aktavite]

You sir do not comprehend (which might be my fault) what I mean. Mechanicswise the game was lesser then now. But Blizzard could have never had harder bosses in place due to the spellbook the players had at their disposal. Was that bad game design? I did not find those fights boring did you? It was hard as hell with the skills at our disposal. Which has nothing to do with time.

But time/effort do mesh with a game being hard. Hard to accomplish anything QUICK.

Once again. Time does not equate to difficulty.

The game was poorly designed. You yourself agree with that statement:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post22457155

My job as a Druid when raiding was to sit back, spam Healing Touch Rank 4 or 5 over whichever tank I was assigned and to provide an Innervate to a specific Priest. I should decurse/remove poison when it was necessary.

[darkwarrior42]

I doubt he means heroic Lei Shen/Ra-den as easy content. I think he means with easy and everyone can get everything - LFR and all preraid modes inplace.

And that is actually "everything" heroic/normal isn't important to some people as content.

To be fair, that's partially Blizzard's fault. With Diablo they set up the expectation that difficulty levels aren't designed for players of different skill, but are rather set up for people to progress through all of them.

Still, I also agree with Aktavite that time and difficulty are separate ideas. That's not to say that something which is hard cannot also be time consuming, but it's not hard because it's time consuming (unless there are elements of failure involved and the task is one that is testing endurance, which is rarely seen in MMOs, and never in WoW).

[Deleted]

How can people agree with the dumbing down of WoW?!? This used to be the masterpiece of gaming!
From difficult, hard, challenging content to casual or even purely social play. This game was a work of art. Not because of the graphics, sound, gameplay or any other technical stuff (wich are all good anyway) but because of the social experience that everyone lived. Raiding was a little part of the game and was suposed to be played by the most dedicated players..it was suposed to challange your reactions, inputs, teamplay and skill overall.
The true experience was on the outworld with the opposing faction AND our faction on "leveling", "group quests", "meeting stones", "road/paths to raids", "reputation farm zones" and random old school "world events" that got pretty much outdated and never bothered to be updated again like Gurubashi and Dire Maul Arena.

Everything stated above is completely lost. The social part of this game now takes place in instanced content....and most of the time is spent with people from different servers.
The experience backthen was suposed to be played out there in the world, and everything felt very much like a sandbox/ fantasy world simulation this way. It was way more immersive because WoW was mainly focused on the "leveling" part of the game and today is 100% focused on the endgame instanced content and how fast and efficient you can get them lifeless epic rewards (feels more like heroic blues to me).

My hope is that Blizzard can recreate this sandbox/outworld feeling without beeing necessary "leveling". I mean one can only make so many alts (thats the problem for old players). But still, i pitty every single new wow player because they will never be able to experience the social experience that wow was all about,
Hell i even pitty miself for not being able to feel this ever again even if i decide to make one of those alts that only reach level 35 -_-

[Vaelorian]

How can people agree with the dumbing down of WoW?!? This used to be the masterpiece of gaming!
From difficult, hard, challenging content to casual or even purely social play. This game was a work of art. Not because of the graphics, sound, gameplay or any other technical stuff (wich are all good anyway) but because of the social experience that everyone lived. Raiding was a little part of the game and was suposed to be played by the most dedicated players..it was suposed to challange your reactions, inputs, teamplay and skill overall.
The true experience was on the outworld with the opposing faction AND our faction on "leveling", "group quests", "meeting stones", "road/paths to raids", "reputation farm zones" and random old school "world events" that got pretty much outdated and never bothered to be updated again like Gurubashi and Dire Maul Arena.

Everything stated above is completely lost. The social part of this game now takes place in instanced content....and most of the time is spent with people from different servers.
The experience backthen was suposed to be played out there in the world, and everything felt very much like a sandbox/ fantasy world simulation this way. It was way more immersive because WoW was mainly focused on the "leveling" part of the game and today is 100% focused on the endgame instanced content and how fast and efficient you can get them lifeless epic rewards (feels more like heroic blues to me).

My hope is that Blizzard can recreate this sandbox/outworld feeling without beeing necessary "leveling". I mean one can only make so many alts (thats the problem for old players). But still, i pitty every single new wow player because they will never be able to experience the social experience that wow was all about,
Hell i even pitty miself for not being able to feel this ever again even if i decide to make one of those alts that only reach level 35 -_-

Yup totally agree here +1

[Redmage]

Wait.. What?
"Why don't they return to the roots of the game in difficulty?"
"I know classic wasn't hard."

Technically easy is a difficulty.

[anon5123]

They tried that in Cata. It was not appreciated by most.

this. they made Heroics actually "heroic", and the majority of the playerbase whined and bitched about it until they nerfed the heroics back down to "faceroll free loot" difficulty.

[Deleted]

Compared to today vanilla was easy in terms of complexity. (count & compare boss mechanics from then to now)

It was harder simply because of the lengthy grind and insane time investment to get there (resistance gear gating, fights in naxx were balanced around 50 potions back then)

Everything about vanilla was designed to take longer (to unhealthy levels imo), today's wow players generally don't have that much time as they get older and get families/jobs etc.

[Fluttershy]

I've been playing since classic, have hand of adal/tribute to insanity25/yogg/etc I assure you that MoP content is way harder than BC/wotlk on almost every situation.

Vanilla and difficulty is a joke, half the raid can AFK, the "optimal" dps rotation was to cast fireball every 3 seconds. Bosses had 2 mechanics, at best.

[Deleted]

They tried going harder with the start of Cataclysm, and lost a lot of people trying it out.

cataclysm didnt flop due to the difficult of raids and dungeons, but due to the lack of content in general.

[Otimus]

Why?
-It's not dumbing down in my opinion.
-I didn't find content to be challenging.
-Nor was it hard and difficult, it was nothing compared to the difficulty in modern hard modes, etc.
-Raiding became the most popular part of the game as soon as they allowed people to raid (tbc), they couldn't take it away from them in WotLK. Those people wanted more!
-To many people the true experience is still in all those things.
-You are acting as if people don't participate in "world events" because they removed them, but they removed them because people didn't participate unless it gave them upgrades.

That last point is the most important one!
People would just skip group-quests or invite some dude that was 5-10 levels higher.
"World events" were either abandoned or became a grievers' paradise.
One of the best examples would be Alterac Valley: Players don't even bother playing the map, they just want to rush as fast as possible and get the reward.
Blizzard didn't cause this change, the playerbase did.

Raiding was not the most popular part of the game until LFR, contrary to what you may want to believe. Even when ICC and DS were nerfed into the ground, and had the highest attendance level of any raid environment in the game discounting LFR, their attendance still didn't even hit a single million :x

[HeedmySpeed]

With 'popular' I mean the thing that people are most excited for, not the thing that most people do.
It's the part in WoW that has grew the fastest and Blizzard needs to adapt to that.

There's truth in this. Most of the forum goers think because most people engage in something, they love it.
By that reasoning then everyone loves dailies which we know is far from the truth.

[Otimus]

Maybe because "It didn't work out"? You connect raiding with popularity. Well..riddle me this: At the high time of raiding, with a 30% zone buff, 1.2 million ppl were in ICC. When DS was released with LFR, 2 million went there. BUT: In all the raids before you would see 100 000 to 500 000 ppl raiding.

This doesn't even REMOTELY explain why 5 million people have quit since WotLK...unless you think it is reasonable that 5 million quit because "Oh..in Classic only 100 000 ppl raided but now in MoP 2 million get to see content in LFR so...I quit the game"

Makes no sense at all to me.

What are even "the roots of the game in difficulty"? The roots of the game were in Classic. Here is a link to bosses in MC http://www.wowhead.com/zone=2717 - Feel free to explain to me how this game..at its roots - was more difficult back then.

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And at the same time, there are all the competitors out there who see how Blizzard fails, take all the good hints from the forums and churn out games that cater to all these disgruntled people, finally trashing WoW and attracting millions of subs.

Oh wait. There aren't. Ever wondered why?

Seriously...if it was so easy to make a game that attracts people..why isn't it done? Why with all the clever shit you people spout on the forums can a company like Bioware with a franchise like Star Wars NOT compete with WoW?

Why does Rift et al sink to F2p? That is THE ONE question that nobody can answer me.

I think a major problem is that most of the people who wanted to play MMOs, are already playing an MMO, and switching MMOs doesn't seem to happen much. Either you play what you like, or you just quit the genre. (At least that's how it USUALLY seems.) (Coupled with the MMO genre seemingly not getting new players in general)

[Defaulty]

Game was never hard, just time consuming.

[Deleted]

They reversed it since and it wasn't appreciated by even more than most.

Yeah, that's why almost no one does LFR and only the wannabe hardcore baddies like it. Oh wait, it's the opposite...

[Osmeric]

I wish they would do that with all their games, alas WAR sits in sub limbo with no dev team.

They just announced it will be closing entirely in December.

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They reversed it since and it wasn't appreciated by even more than most.

One issue with MoP, I think, is that the content that is tuned for the average player has very little emotional reward, and so doesn't inspire a lot of engagement. This is because it's seen as obviously training-wheels content, because of the presence of higher difficulty modes. The segregation of the medio-cores into low difficulty ghetto content doesn't help socially either.

The solution is not to get rid of easy content, but rather to get rid of the higher difficulty modes.

[ComputerNerd]

You are more experienced now than you were then.
Even going back to exactly the same game would not equal the same difficulty for you.

You have got better, and so scaling up the difficulty to take into account that experience would kill any opportunity for new players to progress.
The game would be dead, completely by now if that was the case.

Some mechanisms people associate with difficulty were anything but.
Resistance gear for example is a flat, static damage reduction which requires no player response.
The new active mitigation is way better, in that you can screw it up by mis-timing a cooldown.
There was no such skill in a flat reduction.

[Jessicka]

The solution is not to get rid of easy content, but rather to get rid of the higher difficulty modes.

Removing anything is the wrong move. I know as a guild we'll clear Normal by next week, I'd have little incentive to keep logging on after that. With Heroic modes, it's something to keep going at, which will no doubt take several weeks to finish up.

The problem with Cata was removing the easy modes (10N, Normal mode 5 mans). I've no doubt plenty of players could have progressed into Heroic modes, just as they did in Wrath and just as they did later during Dragon Soul, but without those steps in between it made the step up feel that much greater. Same happened at the start of MoP; players had to overcome that step up to N through the parallel character progression of doing dailies - that's why they burned out on dailies, and why they had no incentive to keep raiding, since the raids didn't offer them any real increased power since they'd already got there.

If the raids were that bit easier and thus offered viable progression, we'd have seen less daily hate and a lot more people raiding. And that is the idea of Flex, and why VP gear was removed.

[melodramocracy]

Do I really need to go to the other thread and copypaste a bunch of shit?

Short version: WoW is declining at a time and a rate that is perfectly in line with other leading MMORPGs. These games grow for about six years, then shed about half their users in the space of 2 or 3 years, and finally level out into a slower decline. It's the product cycle, it's how they almost all work, quit trying to connect it to whatever your idiotic pet gripe is.

So the decline, in your eyes, has nothing to do with the game itself, and is just economics at work.

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The solution is not to get rid of easy content, but rather to get rid of the higher difficulty modes.

Because nothing says sub retention like a good chunk of the playerbase sitting around with nothing to look forward to until the next patch. If a player feels no emotional reward from a game mode, and is unwilling to advance to something that might be psychologically rewarding, that isn't a game issue.

[Osmeric]

Because nothing says sub retention like a good chunk of the playerbase sitting around with nothing to look forward to until the next patch.

The number of players that do normal/heroic raids at all is small compared to the number of subs they've lost this expansion. So if they could trade the former for the latter they'd come out ahead.

[Nadev]

So by difficulty, you mean:

-Terrible and/or new players
-Horribly itemized gear
-0 add ons
-Ridiculously long attunements that needed to be completed before you could even walk into the raid

Right?