Agreed. I absolutely love that I can play around in frost, but when grouping or whatever I have my better PVE spec in my back pocket. So nice
Agreed. I love having a healing spec I can switch to for dungeons
Are you arguing with yourself?
Wowâs decline started in Wrath. It was the first time when the player base split and people quit in droves. Yeah, it was net growth but relatively slowly. Basically you had the Wrath Baby camp and the old school RPG camp.
While WoW always catered to the casual, Wrath just put the pedal to the metal. Not any one change cratered WoW. The casual mindset did. If you follow the trend - even from the current player base, weâre on the path to what Retail is today - the casual side of Retail.
No, thatâs one of my obsessive fans.
100%.
The game is fully focused on the casuals⌠but they try really really hard to not piss off the pros too.
So the people who suffer are the mid tier good not great players.
Casuals have their LFR, pet battles, world bosses.
Sweaties have their MDI and RWF and precise class tuning that is promised to never change to not upset their work.
The good players⌠have to just pick one or the other. There is no place for us.
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I think walking that middle ground is really hard imo.
This is just my opinion, but I think the Classic player base is kinda sort of a new breed. In you Retail you have totally casual players and thatâs cool with them. They donât need to âbeatâ the game, just enjoy their LFR, their achieves or whatever.
In Classic, you have players who expect to âbeatâ the game, otherwise they wonât play. This scenario is pretty much impossible to appease everyone unless they make everything so mind numbingly easy, anyone can do it.
Itâs not out of the realm of possibility that if Retail had gotten rid of the âcarrot on a stickâ and just turned everyone into a winner, itâd be a lot more popular today.
The issue is blizzard puts very little effort into this content.
If you arenât doing mythic20+ or mythic raids you get basically nothing in retail. They even massively screw over flying to just to make everything in the open world worse.
Believing that casualisation killed WoW when the overwhelming majority of the playerbase is casual is spectacularly delusional.
Itâs especially delusional when the PvE content is much harder in Retail than it is in Classic, BC, or WotLK. In fact when WoW started losing subscribers it was after a few months of Cata when the PvE content had reached a peak in difficulty for the time.
There are many reasons why WoW started losing subs but they do not have to do with casual-friendly content like LFR existing. Itâs more tangible reasons like there being a lot more online gaming and socialising options than there were before 2010. In fact in recent years the problem has been there are way too many systems that demand your time and energy every day and catching up is complex and arduous. This is in contrast with Classic especially after BC launch where you can for the most part just raid log and be fine.
This is utter nonsense. With M+ and multiple raiding difficulty levels there is plenty of things for mid-level players to do. Plus, side games like pet battles and transmog collection are relevant to players all across the spectrum from casual to hardcore. They arenât things that get neatly divided into âthis is for casualsâ and âthis is for hardcoresâ.
There are a lot of things wrong with retail WoW, but âcasualisationâ is not one of them.
Your guess is as good as mine. Someone can say that if Wrath being as gate kept as OG Vanilla was, it would have also plateau in subs, is also legit. Fact is, Wrath was indeed the first xpac where there was a mass of exodus of subs due to casualization. Whether not it would have been better or even worse if they approached it from the other side, your guess is as good as mine.
And for the record Iâve been saying all along that casualization was the way to go forward and that Blizzard made the right decision - despite the fact that i donât like that play style.
There are but they force these players into a certain meta or you cant play.
Dont play lock or survival hunter? Oh youre a healer who isnt a disc priest? GFY with your invite. Requeue or dont play.
Thats where the midtier players are screwed. Cant play what you want because youll never get invited, and Blizzard wont touch classes after week 3 because practice for MDI which is 3 months in the future is already underway and we cant possibly touch their meta.
No, thatâs not fact. That is, as you said, your guess.
Most people play the game to a casual capacity so the idea that the game had an exodus due to casualization is unviable. Also WotLK still saw a net gain of subscribers. It slowed, for sure, but thatâs more due to market saturation than anything. The first net losses happened after Cata launch and funnily enough it coincided with classes getting a lot more involved and PvE content getting a lot more challenging.
Classic WoW wasnât even particularly gatekept. Back in the day class/raid information resources were hard to come by and the hardest part was scheduling 40 people to be on at once. As we saw from the 2019 release, the content itself was actually very easy. Most of the âdifficultyâ was artificial timewaster grind.
Thereâs far more challenging content available as time went on so whatâs the gripe?
I played all of season 3 and 4 as MM in M+ just fine.
Yes, as some specs itâs harder to get groups. Thatâs true for any era of the game. BM Hunters or Frost Mages how theyâre feeling right now in WotLK. Itâs a fact of the playerbase that has nothing to do with the PvE content offerings. Itâs not an argument that the mid-tier of players is somehow screwed. There is a lot of content for them to do.
Because the average difficulty per player has skewed far lower. Heres what i mean.
In Classic, the only end game content is raiding, 100% of players raid on the most difficult content in the game.
In retail, majority of players do LFR, some do Normal, less do Heroic, and almost nobody does Mythic (in terms of percentage).
That means the average difficulty per player is far lower than it used to be. Most players focus on the easier content, opposed to forcing players to do the hardest available content. Thats why the entire game feels so watered down these days. Theyâve watered down the median so far its hardly even a recognizable game anymore.
Lol.
The average player in 2022 is far more skilled than the average player in 2006. Retail players come to classic and find it easier all the time. Even the easy retail content is more mechanically involved than most of the âhardâ Classic content. Naxxramas was the end raid of Classic and one of the âhardâ mechanics was jumping over a short gap; literal Super Mario Bros level 1 stuff.
The type of people who stick to LFR only are the type of people who wouldnât raid at all if LFR didnât exist. Saying that in Classic 100% of players raid on the most difficult content is fallacious because very few players actually raided at all. Itâs that pool of players thatâs in LFR in modern times.
âWatered downâ is a buzzphrase people throw at anything without understanding what it means. Retail has big problems but itâs not due to being âwatered downâ. In fact the biggest problem of the last two expansions were the layers upon layers of overcomplicated mandatory systems. Thatâs the other end of the extreme from âwatered downâ.
Posts about LFR on the forums get thousands of likes. There arent single posts about mythic or heroic raiding.
Majority of the game does LFR as its the lowest possible denominator of the game. Stop taking the actual difficulty of it. im talking about in comparison to whats available. Thats how the game has been watered down. Majority of players do the easiest possible content the game has.
Where as in classic everyone does the hardest, even if that "hardâ is easy
Subs peaked in wrath. The actually first major exodus was in Cata when blizzard tried to cater to the minority of people who whined that wrath was too easy.
No, in Classic they mostly just didnât raid.
Now in WotLK many more raid but the raid difficulty isnât too far ahead of retail LFR and TBH neither is the quality of the players.
I can assure you as someone who played both that generally retail players who play classic fare a lot better than classic players who play retail. In fact the latter group tends to have a bad reputation in retail.
Youâre still using âwatered downâ in situations where it doesnât make sense.
And i find it to be the exact opposite. Retail players struggle with the fact they have to type, interact, and chat with their group members. They are used to the retail queue / never say a word to each other and log off.
I have a friend 3.3k m+ io, struggling hard in HOL Heroic because he doesnt know where to go, and is so worried and stressed about the communal aspect of the game. So much so that they quit WOTLK to go back to retail.
Its very odd how retail players are terrified to communicate in an MMO. Reason #2 why retail is garbage. All the watering down created a single player game for 95% of the base.
Feel free to give me my LFR at any difficulty and raid, and not just create a specific difficulty because I want to use the queue system.
The point of the queue system is that we donât want to go around wasting our time putting groups together or competing for spots against others and missing out on PvE simply because we lost out on a first come, first served basis.