What hurt Wrath was that awful gamma system. I had to take a break early on and it was like pulling teeth playing catchup to join a guild. And because of the new dungeon difficulties they destroyed the PuG scene. it was near impossible to get into a Naxx run that wasn’t for just Saph and KT because everyone was doing the new dungeons to kit out and didn’t want players not in Naxx gear in said groups and the gatekeeping only grew to get worse as they added more difficulties.
At least in TBC while my alts weren’t all kitted out in t6 and Sunwell gear I had steady PuGs for Kara and Gruul netting enough gear I could fill in for other guild runs for Mag and some T5 on my hunter. Wrath absolutely destroyed that scene. People didn’t want to do regular heroics which hurt me even as a tank playing catchup, and few wanted to PuG Naxx and any previous content once the new difficulty came out. Even the dungeon gear became just “good enough” as people were so burnt out on Ulduar the ilvl just wasn’t worth going back for because we did ICC just fine in TotGC gear. Blizzard really made a bonehead move with that change.
Watch any of their recent interviews. The one with Scotteye they specifically said that due to people being better now they down content too quick, which causes content droughts and people leave…
Again, they merely stated an observation. Until you can show me where they state they have a solution and it’s to bring out harder content, and then they went to nerf things this is not a contradiction, just lack of comprehension and understanding of what an actual contradiction is on your part.
Burden of proof. SHOW ME in the interview where Blizzard stated the solution was to give us harder content. Stop running your mouth about it and SHOW IT to me. This should be so easy for you but you fail to do so. I have seen nothing by Blizzard that says they are trying to fix anything giving us harder content.
To a raid that is not out and there is no data offered of “guilds clearing raids” in PTR…
I named the interview. Watch it. You’re just circling the drain of “I’m not listening. I’m not listening” while trying to sound intellectual with the “SOURCEEEEE??” retort.
And I’ve seen that interview and nowhere does Blizzard state their solution is to give us harder content which would create a contradiction. The words are not there, and they do not exist.
Blizzard knows exactly where they want to go with Classic, they just haven’t announced it yet.
Holly Longdale spearheaded EQ’s ‘TLP’ hamster-wheel. Daybreak Games now drops 2 new servers every year complete with a plethora of cash shop items and people play through an accelerated pacing of 2-3 months per expansion(which, with over 20 expacs to go through makes some sense) which they can’t actually maintain endgame-readiness in without spending real money, whether in their cash shop or secondary sources or some combination of both. This has raked in phenomenal amounts of cash for a game which has maybe 10% of WoW’s playerbase. This is where WoW Classic is heading, they’ll accelerate and keep accelerating until they find the sweet spot where you’re either unemployed with 20h of playtime a day or spending real money to keep up and then they’ll merge us into retail and then launch another cycle of servers with the pacing sweet spot they found for profitability. Of course to do so, they need to drive engagement, and post-nerf raids leave more people seeing the content, or at least most of it, and thus makes those people more likely to join the next merry-go-round.
Cherry picking? Okay look. Your entire complaint is Blizzard contradicted themselves. For a contradiction to occur Blizzard would have had to have stated “The playerbase consumes content too quickly and to fix this we are going to give harder content.” Which then nerfing content creates a contradiction as contrary to them saying they want harder content we didn’t get it.
Our education system has failed you, and it’s sad. You learn a few new words and off to the forums it seems. No contradiction was created because they simply said you guys can’t control yourselves with content and it’s been said since Ghostcrawler was the original lead in Cata.
Blizzard is happy with the decision to release the Cataclysm raids in their post-nerf state. They say that the challenge level they have landed on is a better fit for more players compared to the pre-nerf difficulty.
Blizz is just following marketing’s lead. They’ve oversaturated the WoW market…and they know it. Watch their interview with Scotteye, there was a point one dev even stops when saying “there are many WoW experiences we are currently offering…”. Look at that dev’s face when he says it. They KNOW, at least on the developer’s side, that Blizz is overplaying the WoW IP…but they don’t control the game, marketing does. So the people who actually work on the game, the devs, have no real idea where the game is going to go…they are waiting on marketing to tell them what to do.
