You’re not spoonfed Mythic-level epics, which is what matters. You people keep pretending that the colour of the item link is all that matters and it really is tired and pathetic at this point. The content that gives those items is no easier; it just has far less artificial difficulty barriers which is a good thing.
Grinding is neither difficult nor fun.
The classes atually play far more differently now than they did in Classic. Vanilla WoW zealots like yourself just got confused when people were talking about homogenisation of utility (i.e. things like how Bloodlust can be provided by multiple classes when originally in BC it could only be provided by Shamans) and assumed they meant all the gameplay was homogenised too.
When it came to core gameplay Vanilla WoW classes were simplistic and very similar to one another.
I don’t care about your life story.
Yes, because as we all know, everything in the universe can have exactly one cause, no more and no less. You can’t attribute the success of one thing to multiple causes, right?
Of course, the marketing was a big part of it. But WoW being more forgiving and accessible than, say, Everquest, was also important. Like I said in my post, you’ve had MMOs before and since WoW that had good marketing and they failed to maintain a playerbase even a fraction of the same size. The ones that did all adopted the same casual approach WoW did.
One key example is death penalties i.e. losing experience/items when you die. WoW dropped that, and some wannabe-hardcore elitists cried about that then too, but developers found it helped encourage people to explore and try new things without being irreparably punished for failure. Hell, the existence of 20 man raids in Vanilla was purely an effort to appeal to casual raiders; they talked about this on their own podcast, and it turned out people really liked the smaller raid sizes which is why they went ahead with that. Final Fantasy 14 also went with smaller raid sizes and it is pretty much the only successful subscription-based MMO outside of WoW. Wildstar, on the other hand, doubled down on 40-man raiding… we know how that turned out.
The reason developers go with these approaches is because they are proven to work.
Factually incorrect so I didn’t bother reading the rest of the paragraph.
Firstly, catch-up mechanics were introduced in BC in the form of Badges of Justice, PvP gear, the two 10-man raids of that expansion, and Magister’s Terrace/crafted gear. Furthermore, all attunements i.e. the only things maintaining the strict raid progression of BC were removed in patch 2.4.
Secondly, the decline did not start in WotLK. The growth slowed down in that expansion but it was still positive until Cataclysm. When it did decline in Cataclysm it was before there was even a 2nd raid tier so obviously catch-up mechanics could not have been the cause; in fact, Blizzard found a lot of people quit due to the entry level content suddenly becoming a lot harder which was the result of people like you demanding it to be the case.
It doesn’t even make sense for catch-up mechanics to be tied to subscriber decline. A tiny percentage of the general WoW population actually does cutting-edge end-game content yet here you are trying to pretend that literally millions of players quit over end-game content became too accessible. How does that work?
Do I really need to tell you about the problems with correlation v.s. causation?
You don’t even have a correlation because, like I said, the “hardcore” MMOs are failing too. It’s a genre that relies on getting people to spend months or even years playing the same game, which is a very hard thing to get people to do when there are so many new, hyped-up games releasing all the time. It’s a lot to ask from someone. The only successful MMOs right now are ones that appeal to casual players as well as hardcore players.
Notice how you don’t even attempt to draw a relation between your perception of people’s dissatisfaction here; you just immediately assumed everyone was unhappy for the same reason you’re unhappy which is incredibly self-centred.
“All examples don’t count because of reasons”
Your dismissal of Wildstar is especially weak. It came out in 2014, i.e. late-MoP and held up for about 4 years. The game was just as casual-friendly then as it is now.
Yes, you did. Incredible that you used the same bad logic as that other poster to try to argue this point. It isn’t even true; you’re not at the top of the food chain anymore and the T3 people will need to carry you through to Naxx level. That’s the exact problem with the strict progression model; once you get left behind it is very hard to get back to the top level. That is exactly why they went with the gear catchup system. They found that the progression within a tier was meaningful to people even if it doesn’t practically matter when the next tier comes out.
When I got mythic Jaina down it mattered a lot and I am very proud for it even if I’ve replaced all the gear now and can easily kill that boss with a bunch of carries now. Because it was a damn good accomplishment for when I did it and that’s what matters.
“Old man yells at cloud”
That’s not even true, for crying out loud. We have substantial new RPG experiences all the time now with more ways to display progress and accomplishments than ever. You’re basically saying that modern gaming is bad because it isn’t entirely built on top of thousand-hour no-lifer grindfests that only a select few have the time to complete so they can act as the museums for the rest of the peasants. At some point people get bored of being a museum-goer. And at some point it becomes apparent that you’re placing an immense amount of self-worth in a god-damn video game of all things.
You’re not done here yet. And you won’t be until you quit, because the people of the Hunter forums can tell you that I don’t give up on forums argument easily.
