To whom who agreed that accessibility was healthy for WoW

[yomammyass]

You were wrong. Admit it.

The Ex CEO of Blizzard even admits that it killed the social aspects of a social game.

Update

I am not going to reply to all of your comments, but instead check out this video, it’s pretty much spot on, on why accessibility ruined the game.

Oh and to those who say “wotlk had accessibility features and it increased subs” - Not really. Wotlk had badges which made you to play the game for many hours a time to buy one epic. These days you can get an epic doing regular quests. So please go away with your logic. Subs increased by the end of tbc but it flatlined during wotlk launch, with a small bump during uldular and Icecrown, after that it declined. Because “accessibility” easy epics for the noobs

[RoKPaNda]

Is this one of those discussions where people who have spent 15 years arguing that Blizzard is stupid and out of touch are now proudly holding up a statement from one of those supposedly stupid out of touch devs from an interview? Like when they said that Ghostcrawler said that LFR was his greatest regret but what he actually said was that how they implemented LFR was the mistake, not LFR itself?

Quoting from the summary on the front page:

Making WoW less social takes away some of the reasons why some people play.

and

As WoW evolved over the years, it became less social. In an effort to increase accessibility, the team removed some of the reasons why you needed to play with the same group over and over.

Why did they do that though? Because the casuals weren't doing the content and the casuals keep the lights on. If you're designing content that's being enjoyed by those of us at the top but less than 20% of your playerbase is doing the content what are you supposed to do? They made the call to make it more accessible to justify the investment in developing that content.

Also claiming that the game is less social is a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle disingenuous. The game is still plenty social, people are still using comms in raids / M+ / etc and with their guilds. The only way it's less social is if you define social as bugging people in general chat because you want to kill an elite mob to get a sword that's going to be useless in about 20 minutes. Look at Classic WoW right now, it's not social. Aside from my guild, which is the same on retail btw, the only interaction I have with other players is when I'm trading (which may as well be automated for as much interaction as that is. "WTB [Whatever] - My mats + [Amount] Tip.", "Hey!", "Hey." /inv /trade, accept, leave party. Woo.) or when I get AddOn messages "HEY WANT TO TANK/HEAL X FOR US??????"

MMOs aren't as popular anymore due to accessibility and time investment. They could have a resurgence in the future.

This is probably the dumbest statement that I've ever read and I usually like Mike. He was one of the more entertaining Blizzard people over the years. The MMO market is in the best place it's ever been. Maybe not for Blizzard because Blizzard isn't making $15/mo x 12m anymore, but there are more active MMOs on the market right now for players to choose from than there ever have been. It's a good thing that there isn't a new MMO coming out every 5 minutes that's going to just get shutdown within a year.

[Razion]

It's certainly true that WoW has declined in social avenues over the years. But they also haven't done as much to add to the social systems, which he has also noted. (Despite Communities like, just recently.) There are other forms of being social people experience nowadays like VR Chat or Zoom and whatever else that WoW doesn't even utilize. You can't see your team-mates faces while doing a dungeon or raid, or really interact in a lot of the free-form interact-with-object type ways a lot of other modern games have now (BDO, Minecraft, etc if you need examples).

But talking again about accessibility, remember Legion Pre-Expansion Invasion? A lot of people were around and leveled during that time. Even more recently, bonus XP event, people are using it. Korrak's Revenge? People used it. Other events in WoW's history that had great accessibility like Zul'Gurub and more notably ToC/ICC dungeons were utilized by people who wanted to catch up (putting aside people chain-running the ToC raid four times a week into the ground and breaking themselves and how generally bad the jousting was received) in terms of people wanting accessibility I think was received well. I definitely think there's a place for accessibility that the audience desires on some level. It could certainly be balanced better when accessibility is added, social features can also be added. But from the description a lot of the problem is people just don't really have an idea of what they want to add in terms of social features - even Mike Morhaime wasn't too vocal of what new social features the game really needs. And while OP may not see the appeal of accessibility, as a player I see it firsthand bring together people to play together a lot, and if the main culprit of all of this is that we haven't had enough social system patches in the game, it's probably time they addressed that rather than blame other things that are generally considered good things.

[Shiza]

Is this one of those discussions where people who have spent 15 years arguing that Blizzard is stupid and out of touch are now proudly holding up a statement from one of those supposedly stupid out of touch devs from an interview? Like when they said that Ghostcrawler said that LFR was his greatest regret but what he actually said was that how they implemented LFR was the mistake, not LFR itself?

Quoting from the summary on the front page:



and



Why did they do that though? Because the casuals weren't doing the content and the casuals keep the lights on. If you're designing content that's being enjoyed by those of us at the top but less than 20% of your playerbase is doing the content what are you supposed to do? They made the call to make it more accessible to justify the investment in developing that content.

Also claiming that the game is less social is a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle disingenuous. The game is still plenty social, people are still using comms in raids / M+ / etc and with their guilds. The only way it's less social is if you define social as bugging people in general chat because you want to kill an elite mob to get a sword that's going to be useless in about 20 minutes. Look at Classic WoW right now, it's not social. Aside from my guild, which is the same on retail btw, the only interaction I have with other players is when I'm trading (which may as well be automated for as much interaction as that is. "WTB [Whatever] - My mats + [Amount] Tip.", "Hey!", "Hey." /inv /trade, accept, leave party. Woo.) or when I get AddOn messages "HEY WANT TO TANK/HEAL X FOR US??????"



This is probably the dumbest statement that I've ever read and I usually like Mike. He was one of the more entertaining Blizzard people over the years. The MMO market is in the best place it's ever been. Maybe not for Blizzard because Blizzard isn't making $15/mo x 12m anymore, but there are more active MMOs on the market right now for players to choose from than there ever have been. It's a good thing that there isn't a new MMO coming out every 5 minutes that's going to just get shutdown within a year.

When it comes to World of Warcraft being less social, I think it is also partially less due to ingame reasons but more due to how the internet evolved. Back in the day, there was little in terms of social media and instant messangers, so most of the social activities happened inside the game. This was where you were chatting with your friends and your community. Nowadays, it moved outside, to social media plattforms and instant messanging services. I would say this made the game partially even more social, as it allows you to join bigger communities for certain game activites. You have gold making discords, class discords, rp discords your guild or raid discord and so on.

[Kokolums]

When it comes to World of Warcraft being less social, I think it is also partially less due to ingame reasons but more due to how the internet evolved. Back in the day, there was little in terms of social media and instant messangers, so most of the social activities happened inside the game. This was where you were chatting with your friends and your community. Nowadays, it moved outside, to social media plattforms and instant messanging services. I would say this made the game partially even more social, as it allows you to join bigger communities for certain game activites. You have gold making discords, class discords, rp discords your guild or raid discord and so on.

This isn't true at all.

Yahoo! might have argued 10 years ago that shutting down its vibrant games community was because the modern day internet really didn't support that. So they closed chess, poker, etc. But that's not true. All that happened is Facebook picked up where Yahoo! left off. Facebook now offers a slew of popular games like Y! used to.

Erasing the Blizzard community is defended by saying that in the modern internet age, people have other avenues. But that isn't true. What actually happened was that, like Yahoo!, people were forced to migrate to another platform to be social, in this case its Discord.

But the point to make here is that human behavior never changed. Its just that Yahoo! and Blizzard stopped offering a service and Facebook and Discord offered it instead.

[Bloodyleech]

Even if it "killed" the social aspects, it still provided more subs. /5cents

[Marrilaife]

Players asked Blizzard to make WOW less social and more "solo friendly".
Blizzard caved in.
In consequence, many of old players left, and the new ones that came are used already to everything being soloable or puggable, a.k.a. minimal human interraction needed.
Blizzard can't make a 180 degree turn anymore or they risk this new playerbase would riot and ragequit.

Hell, to this day I see petitions / suggestions to make matchmaking for m+ / rated pvp teams (instead of forming them manually), or remove mythic raid id lockout / make it xrealm from the get go. So yes, people still think that making the game even less social and more automated is a good idea.

[Arc Tossz]

its is the number 1 most essential thing int he game and always has been

[Justpassing]

I don't know why you want people to "admit" stuff or even care about what random people on the internet think. Life's too short for that shit.

[Shiza]

This isn't true at all.

Yahoo! might have argued 10 years ago that shutting down its vibrant games community was because the modern day internet really didn't support that. So they closed chess, poker, etc. But that's not true. All that happened is Facebook picked up where Yahoo! left off. Facebook now offers a slew of popular games like Y! used to.

Erasing the Blizzard community is defended by saying that in the modern internet age, people have other avenues. But that isn't true. What actually happened was that, like Yahoo!, people were forced to migrate to another platform to be social, in this case its Discord.

But the point to make here is that human behavior never changed. Its just that Yahoo! and Blizzard stopped offering a service and Facebook and Discord offered it instead.

Blizzard never stopped offering a service, they have expanded it with B-Net and Communities. The game didn't even became easier, it is harder than it has ever been and even LFR is more challenging than classic raids or dungeons ever were. Classes and players just evolved and they removed more and more aspects of the game that were more obnoxious than challenging.

[Great Destiny Man]

One person gives his opinion on things and that's irrefutable proof. Yep that's how rational debate works.

Even Greg Street (who was far more involved with design) admitted that the world has changed too much to reproduce what Vanilla WoW achieved:

It is going to be really hard for any MMO in the future to recreate the sheer novelty of social interactions that WoW produced. The world is different than it was then.

No-one is proved wrong, subject is still more complicated than "WoW designs killed social interactions".

[shoc]

Some point along the line Blizzard forgot that WoW is a game and not a social media platform.

[Powerogue]

The accessibility is what got me back in. Mainly the updated groupfinder that could let me join people's actual non-LFR raids and other groups. Absolutely incredible. Was enough of a push to get me to realize I wanted a raid guild again.

It really is a good and bad thing. Socializing is easier than ever, but less necessary than ever, and I don't know of a way that those two can be reconciled.

[Tojara]

That proves absolutely nothing LOL.

To quote Garrosh in WoD "TIMES CHANGE". Our entire society and how we consume media has changed in the span of 16 years, who would've thunk it?

The game is still incredibly social and it's sort of proving his point. People just aren't social in the same ways they were 16 years ago. You throw in a blast to the past like classic WoW did and people aren't going to approach it the same because its 2020, not 2004. MMOs were relatively new at the time, youtube wasn't a thing really and this was a lot of peoples first step into multiplayer games in general. Fast forward to present day in classic and the same mannerisms that have been adopted over the last 16 years still apply, it's not like you can strip everything back making everybody behave like they did that many years ago.

The worst thing is people will use the argument that WoW was growing during the first few expansions so obviously these systems in place during 2004 were the best practice, and they ruined the game by changing things. Which is absolutely retarded logic. They might have made missteps along the way (whether it be big or small), but I'm sure they had data that reflected what general direction the game needed to be headed. I don't even want to imagine what the game would've looked like if they kept most classic systems in tact. There's a reason why most expansions (at least the early ones) were such a huge departure from the previous ones.

Socializing is still as present as ever, it's just not really required if you choose not too. If you want to poke around leveling characters and do the lowest form of raiding (not an insult, merely pointing towards the easier raiding difficulties) you don't really need to talk to anybody. This was true of classic and most of TBC as well, as the barrier to entry for raiding was quite high.

At the end of the day the game is old and the need to socialize doesn't necessarily need to be done in game. Guild/clan websites don't even need to exist as of late because almost everything can be done on discord. As such you have plenty of social media platforms or programs to find communities if you choose, meaning that you don't necessarily have to jump into general chat or find people randomly in game.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Accessability up to a certain point is totally healthy. Especially when it comes to content options, because once you run out of content you run out of reasons to play.

Honestly the biggest part where Blizzard screwed up was they began to conflate difficulty with accessibility. Instead of trying to find ways to bring more content to non-elite players, they ended up deciding to just simplify the entire game. Instead of making things like World Quests or Torghast back in, say, Cata-WoD they instead decided to gut classes and say "Well we made all classes so accessible a caveman could play them, why aren't more people playing?"

[Gorsameth]

You were wrong. Admit it.

The Ex CEO of Blizzard even admits that it killed the social aspects of a social game.

WoW became big because it was an accessible MMO in a world of ultra niche hardcore MMO's.
Accessibility is the very reason WoW is what it is.

Now you can argue that they might have gone to far in some places but your blanket statement is factually wrong.

[enigma77]

Easy raids and dungeons are accessible, lfr/lfd are an antisocial cancer on the game.

There is a difference.

With the exception of pvp, matchmaking simply does not belong in an mmo.

[Big Thanks]

WoW became big because it was an accessible MMO in a world of ultra niche hardcore MMO's.
Accessibility is the very reason WoW is what it is.

Now you can argue that they might have gone to far in some places but your blanket statement is factually wrong.

He is saying the accessibility we have today.

Today

Is actually im-po-ss-i-ble to be social when you open up the LFG tool and enter a group to kill a world boss and one shot it.
Zero chance.

[jcf190]

I can only speak for myself, but I somehow managed to continue playing with the same people for the entire history of WoW. I don't think it's Blizzard's fault if you're antisocial.

[sam86]

You were wrong. Admit it.

The Ex CEO of Blizzard even admits that it killed the social aspects of a social game.

they admit what ? did i miss that? where and when?