Did most of the decent players quit?

Community General Discussion
41

I would assume so, as I have not quit.

Ha ha.

42

i havent had issues with dungeons (ignoring pugging M+), and LFR is generally terrible. but for people who dont really want to raid, it gives them a chance to taste it and see the story unfold. after i tell them what they need to do, most people learn and apply the changes.

(not tooting my horn, im pretty casual as well, i just aim to get AOTC)

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43

Damn, beat me to the punch. :expressionless:

44

I know a lot of people who I would say are in that middle tier of skill who have quit. Though this started before BFA and well into Legion. A consistent feeling for a number of them is that the game in general didn’t feel like it did enough to support people in that casual but skilled area. For a number of them Mythic being set at 20 didn’t help anything, being part of smaller but skilled guilds would essentially be stuck in Heroic limbo without being able to move until some restrictions for pugging were lifted at the end of the tier.

4 Likes
45

Trivial world content that can be completed while sleepwalking produces clueless DPS as mentioned in the OP. If you want to improve overall quality, give world content some real claws: increase the amount of damage they do, give them dungeon-like abilities, add soloable yet challenging elites. Make it so players can’t autopilot through quests and expect to live
 if you don’t pay attention and stay engaged, mobs should kill you.

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46

Guess that explains how they’ve blown through a 10 million sub decline since a Wrath
say it with me
”they always come back
” Except when they don’t.

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47

I mean, it makes sense. WoW is now catering to the lowest common denominator and has lost millions of players, it would only make sense that a lot of the people that stick around and prefer those changes are the window lickers. People who want engaging gameplay find another game.

9 Likes
48

I didn’t leave, but I did stop raiding. From BC to Cata I was an avid raider, with some rated PVP on the side.

Just can’t seem to muster the effort anymore. I mostly just do quests, level alts, and collect pets.

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49

Or they just didn’t know what it even wanted them to do. Entering vehicles usually causes people in LFR to fail since if they haven’t done the boss they have no idea what any new ability even does. Or they were AFK. If you told people what to do and they still failed
 okay I could see your point.

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50

He mean go try that game. Cause WoW is a Garbage game.

51

Ignore Akston, he’s nothing but WOW shill like Ythisens, you’ll see him telling everyone is wrong in every WOW complain thread out there.

5 Likes
52

Pretty much, I hope he stays here. The FF14 community definitely doesn’t want him.

53

There were really bad groups like this before too, they were just less frequent to run into. I have a hilarious story from Burning Crusade about a group where the mage had more +healing gear than I did (as the healer) and the hunter with us had a lv16 white quality bow, was missing several slots of gear entirely, but was super proud of the couple lv40 something epics he had, despite us trying to explain that this was insufficient for a Burning Crusade heroic dungeon.

That said, I really do feel like truly clueless players are much more common now than before. It’s something that’s been slowly creeping up on the game. While most people want to completely blame the much more readily available high level gear, I think there’s more to it. It’s also players not helping each other any longer. Not teaching each other things and spreading knowledge.

An extension of that is how nothing really matters much gear-wise or ability or rotation-wise until you get to max level. There is no longer a time of learning your character’s abilities as you progress through the levels. Most players just plow through levels (or buy a level boost), get to max level and it should be no surprise they don’t know what to do.

The flip side of this coin are the players who refuse to listen to advice given to them. I was in a recent Motherload M+ with a monk healer that obviously knew almost nothing about the class. I play a monk healer and tried to offer advice. (Even the simplest of advice would have helped. They didn’t even have a weapon with INT on it
) Even after the group stormed off due to the inability of the healer, I stuck around and said “Hey, let me go over some things with you and you’ll have an easier time healing” but they brushed me off. Which just makes me sigh because you know they’ll just go into the next group doing the same thing and yet another group will have a bad day.

Another angle on the problem is fights being MUCH more tightly tuned than they were back in (especially) vanilla. In vanilla, an average group could completely carry five people in a 40man raid without noticing. Maybe moving more slowly, but you could do it. Heck, in my guild’s raid in vanilla, we constantly had people who would go AFK on/off with auto-follow on a fellow raider. We had another guy that was barely competent, but was a fun guy to play with who we brought along. You can’t do that anymore at all unless the rest of the group completely outgears the content. You need everyone to be playing on at least the middle to upper end of their character’s ability. Not everyone was ever capable of that performance level, but the fights weren’t tuned tightly enough for it to matter.

The skill floor has also been raised significantly for most classes. People complain the rotations are too simple, but I say the rotations are deceptively simple. Due to being so simple, the tiniest mistake is catastrophic. This is a secondary factor to the tight tuning of the fights. It’s no longer good enough to click A, then B, then C abilities to get them to mostly overlap. You might be losing HUGE damage not knowing to click C before clicking A and B, even if it looks like it’s doing exactly the same thing to someone who isn’t a WoW rocket scientist and hasn’t picked apart every fraction of a second of a boss pull. Input any lag into the equation and you’re basically doomed. The problem is further compounded by global cooldowns on pretty much everything, which can cause even very slightly less skilled players to think they clicked C
 only to notice it unused after they’ve clicked A and B because they had clicked it the TINIEST bit before the global cooldown finished. Now it’s too late and it’s an unrecoverable mistake.

For not standing in things: Getting your job done perfectly correct at every second while running a marathon circle around a boss room, when you can only step on half the floor is not something that was regularly a thing. There were things players needed to move out of before, but never to the level of the way it is now. I remember performing the Firefighter achievement on level (Mimiron hard mode) several times and I feel like that extreme level of “don’t stand in stuff” is now seen in almost every regular fight in the game. It’s no longer an achievement
 it’s the NORM.

Lastly, you have to remember that Blizzard is doing a lot to push more and more people into raiding. (Since M+ didn’t exist until recently, but is a higher level of content compared to dungeons in their non-mythic state, I feel it appropriate to compare it to previous expansion raiding.) I am convinced there is a much higher percentage of the current WoW population raiding now than EVER raided in vanilla. (Percentage, not raw numbers of raiders.) There are a lot of players who simply are not cut out for that, but they go there anyway because that is where the game is pushing them to go. Raid encounters are now included in many otherwise normal quest lines even. These are people who you wouldn’t have seen in high level content before because they weren’t in high level groups, they were out and about crafting, gathering, socializing, whathaveyou. To someone playing high level content, they were invisible, but they were there!

TL;DR 
 Bottom line: I think you’re doing a little bit of comparing apples to oranges by saying players have gotten worse. I think players have stayed mostly the same (maybe some decline in overall ability) but it’s the game that has cranked up the difficulty and is pushing some players into content inappropriate for their ability.

5 Likes
54

What? Classes have gotten harder? A lot of them you literally just press whatever lights up and still perform fine.

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55

No, everyone is not bad.

The dungeons and raids are just overtuned.

As was well said above:

[quote=“Turandotte-icecrown, post:53, topic:124508, full:true”]

56

I think a lot of the issue started when Blizzard started selling boost. you get a lot of new players even some older players that have no clue how their class works and they under perform, don’t know all of their spells, etc;
For the most part though I have been lucky with the groups lately
mostly getting grouped with KTs and so I am getting lucky getting people that know the dungeons and their class.

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57

The game is actually far harder now than it ever was in Classic.

People confuse Tedious and overtuned stats with - Difficulty.

You can count the mechanics of most bosses in Classic with two fingers.

The problem now, is gear is so accessible, and content is so much harder, you have people with gear they shouldn’t have, doing content they can’t do.

The game is more accessible, but its by no means easier.

3 Likes
58

Nice meme. :+1:

Upvoted.

59

Am i missing something here? Game is harder? BFA?

60

Know what a mages rotation was in Molten Core?

Frostbolt. Decurse. Iceblock.

1 Like