You make games for the masses. You want to include casual and hardcore. Wow has a done a good job, and sometimes great job doing that. Since 2004 games pretty strong…
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I would say that excessive RNG is killing WoW.
I would say it, but I have to wait until the RNG allows me to post it.
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It’s only “pandering” if you’re giving someone what they want.
If I’m a casual who doesn’t give a crap about dungeons or raidings and wants to be left out of all of that silliness, Blizzard isn’t catering to me by raining increasingly powerful gear down upon me or giving me easier methods of jumping into that content. They’re giving me what they think I need irrespective of what I actually want.
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The problem with that is the “community” throws up gates to stop that. Gearscore in wrath and raider io now are perfect examples. Sure some will use the cop out make your own group. Unless you know some tanks and healers it normally didn’t work. It’s not uncommon to see above ilvl for normal raids saying you need aotc, bads will be kicked, etc.
Lfr let’s me bypass the artificial gating as for pandering to raiders. Did you not remember WoD. Casuals got squat the power gap between lfr and normal was huge. Yet raiding didn’t increase.
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There are a lot of opinions on this topic and many of them have a very short sighted view of the entire issue.
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I was in a progression raiding guild from Vanilla --> WotLK. So I know exactly when it happened and I can speak about the ramifications of it.
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They knew that in Vanilla most people never touched a raid. One of the barriers for that was raid size. So in TBC they reduced that to 25 men, and had an intro raid as 10 man. That kind of stacked the numbers to begin with, but 10 man raiding was viewed as very popular and thus was added in WotLK
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The LFD item was added to offset realms that had lower populations and thus less participants in group activities. Once LFD was added the next logical step was LFR. Again this wasn’t added to dumb things down, it was added to increase participation numbers.
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When they started with class homogenization and smaller raids, many of the people I played with in Vanilla and TBC quit the game. In an effort to attract the newer gamer, the console gamer, the game was simplified to use easier rewards, more badge gear, more options to obtain that gear etc. In addition daily activities like profession quests, dailies, and such were added.
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This was all necessary to some extent because the end game for many is so time intensive. It wasn’t expected that people that raid would do all of those other things as well. But some did. Keep in mind, if you didn’t have that transition to more casual content, many people would quit once their raiding days were done.
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Guild hopping and server transfers are work for people, so without this casual content people would have quit in really large numbers.
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CRZ was put in to save money on CPU cycle times, database usage, and data replication. Having 250 servers in North America, most of which were 80% empty, and having that data replicated across redundant data centers is a huge fixed cost for Blizzard. By idling those servers, and not having ‘chatty’ items replicated it saves a lot of money. It also gives the appearance that the game is fuller than it really is.
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There has never been a statistic available to demonstrate that people were quitting because of lack of content. Even though MoP we had a 14 month content drought, where the game still had 7 million active subs the entire time (it briefly dipped to 6.7 million before 5.2 I believe).
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WoD saw subs increase to 10 million again, only to see design choices made by the developers be the reason why people left. There is no other reason but that. The game didn’t suddenly age 10 years in one expansion.
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It may be the case that developers were limited in their choices for WoD. Maybe they are out of database space for items, spells, and need to reshuffle the deck ever since. The last 3 expansions have been a series of prunes, only to earn back what you had before. Making things baseline to the character takes away player choice. All while people were leaving they wanted to keep people playing longer and longer, so we now have layered RNG which takes away player choice.
The correct answer should have been a complete 180 with choices made in WoD. Up until MoP there were net sub losses, but nothing close to what they did during WoD and after.
‘Pandering’ to casuals isn’t a design choice. They are in business to make money, and if it attracts more people it’s better. Had they not made the game more friendly for people those people in TBC weren’t going to still be here, that’s not possible.
Many of the people on here that are LFR heroes as you so call them, were raiders at one time or another, we just don’t want to play that way any longer.
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Whats killing WOW is “fixing” things that were never broken and changing fun thing just for the sake of change and then being arrogant when the players demand changes be reversed.
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If they left the game at its debatable best, WOTLK, and didnt change anything for the last 9 years I have a feeling we would still be in the same boat from boredom.
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The single biggest complaint I have about wow is simple. Classes aren’t fun. They’ve been pruned and pruned and many feel like an after thought with the current design.
That’s exactly why there needs to be a difficulty level where those barriers are not required.
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For some reason I totally read the topic as casual pandas ruined wow.
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They ‘slowed down’ too much and killed it.
Agree with the first part, though I am pretty sure I disagree with the second. The pruning from MoP onward doesn’t seem to have taken that much away in “fun” to me. I mean there was alot of niche stuff that was never used most of the time.
What kills the fun to me is when they make things overly complicated. When I get stressed out and confused and things become unintuitive and I have to go read in depth GUIDES on how to play my class to do marginal DPS…
That’s fun killing to me.
Pretty sure 10 man raiding was available in Cata and MoP?
10/25 were merged at the end of Wrath, and the difficulty of 10 man was ramped up considerably due to giving the same level rewards. Before then, they were separate lockouts and rewards.
Ah I see what you mean now.
Which casuals asked for Azerite gear, AP grinding, the removal of flight, and for consumables to be super expensive?
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I would argue that instanced content was always the focus. World content always felt more like “scraps” that were thrown to casuals. All the meat of the game was put into those raids and dungeons.
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Catering to hardcore isn’t what killed Wildstar. It was a number of factors: Bad marketing, short attention span of players, not being able to combat the negative press, people not willing to give it a try even after being told it wasn’t just for hardcore. I played Wildstar from launch, and as a casual player I never felt like I wasn’t wanted in that game. I found plenty of stuff to do, and never engaged in the “hardcore” aspects of the game.
in Nillar and BC?
You have a very different view of it than I do then. I rarely if ever did a dungeon in Vanilla and BC and never did do any raids and felt I always had plenty to do out in the world.
Yup, Vanilla and BC the most, I think.
All casuals got in Vanilla (by that I mean those who didn’t get to raid or do many dungeons) were killing random Scourge dudes in the Plaguelands, and killing random Twilight cultists in Silithus. That’s pretty much it. It felt like the game was telling me “you’re not cool enough to fight anything meaningful so here’s some random faceless nameless lieutenants to beat up instead”.
BC gave casuals just a little more. I was surprised at the time that Blizzard was willing to give players like me an opportunity to earn a nether drake or build a flying machine. The daily quests and mounts and such were a slight improvement, but it felt like most of the same; you are not cool enough to actually fight the main villains so here’s a bunch of their minions for you instead, peasant scum.