who said i was saying anything about the players gatekeeping? I’m talking about the way the game is developed. Developers gatekeep you till you overcome the challenge and obtain the reward. Players play a secondary role in gatekeeping by creating their own skill systems.
I mean in ToGC you did not need to be in a high end guild for multiple guild split runs. We were doing them in 10 mans by week 2 and we are very casual.
Not arguing your overall point just saying split runs is more about time restrictions and numbers than just skill level. Now of course super sweaty speedsters can do it on even heroic ICC right away but still.
1 Like
Which is why the buff makes perfect sense cause it’s near the end of the expansion where that doesn’t matter jack and you just want people to see the content.
Otherwise you get Naxx.
I was 14 when i lead a full clear heroic icc run in the og days no buff. This game is not as hard as peopple make it out to be. People are asking for 5.3k gs to get into the raids. Even though you have people 5.8 pulling 4-5k dps which is sad. If u have good players gs doesnt matter to an extent. People thinking you need to do all this to complete stuff just mond blows me. Like gamma dungeons and needing to be 5k gs or above thay shot make me laugh so hard. Yall need to get better not expect other people to be better. I dont feel like being in last teir raid gear to get into a raid yall making wow toxic and sad
nahhh I want easier runs and bigger pump, thanks 
1 Like
Splitting your 25 man into two 10 mans is not what people mean by “split runs.” Split runs are filled with alts to funnel gear to a few mains. But it’s still true, even much more casual guilds were dipping their toes into split raiding in ToGC. What else was there to do?
Top guilds were doing ABSURD amounts of ToGC splits, and even much less hardcore guilds were doing one split. It was just too easy to do so. ToGC was a huge alt phase because the raid is so short. People aren’t playing all their alts in ICC every week. It’s really that simple. Raid participation dropping over the course of a months-long raid tier is completely normal, btw.
Yeah, everyone who can’t kill H LK without a buff would instantly quit, that’s exactly what those Ulduar numbers indicate. 
I wasn’t talking about breaking your 25 man into 2 10’s but running actual split runs with alts and mains mixed to funnel mains gear. We were running around 5 10’s in ToGC to do this. Again this is just to point out ToGC is an outlier and not a great example for things like that.
Not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me at this point. I only used nax/trial data because they are both wrath. I can pull metrics from any raid tier in wow’s history if you’d like historically hard raids have lower player retention.
I’m completely aware that some of trials raid number increase is due to people running on alts, but we will see what happens with ICC. The number of logged raiders has already dropped 30k in the last week and curious to see what this week is once it gets listed.
yes and you will enjoy the buff in 2 or 3 months
i cant imagine anything less than 90 to 95% of the guilds that were participating doing split runs have stopped in ICC with how drastically longer and more difficult it is.
Probably .
no
toff does not represent me
8 weeks after launch is the word around the water cooler, but given Blizzards track record of changing content they promised to change I’ll believe it when I see it.
I don’t care much whether we get the buff or not honestly, but saying “wah no buff cuz killing lich king is SPESHUL” irks me in all the wrong ways.
1 Like
I also get slightly annoyed when Blizz caves to the people that are demanding an extra hard version of wrath instead of just providing the proper recreated tuning.
Ulduar should have been nerfed halfway through to the final numbers.
ICC should get the buff (this place was literally designed around it… even today only 79 guilds have fully cleared it). Just because some people don’t need it anymore doesn’t negate that most still do, and the game isn’t made better by leaving it out.
4 Likes
Blizzard needs to worry about implementing the buff too soon, the playbase slowly dies if they make content trivial too quickly. P1 was a great test for that. If P1 lasted the length of the original WotLK dalaran would have been a ghost town a month before uld came out besides people running on alts.
If there were no special/rewarding loot in this game the majority of people would not bother playing it. Just another watered down game with a short lifespan at that point.
As opposed to all the gdkp/p2w people who trivialize content immediately.
No. Just because you only play the game for loot doesn’t mean others do.
2 Likes
No one likes to admit it, but the drive behind raiding in this game is to be a snowflake who has killed bosses not everyone was able to kill, and wear gear that not everyone has. Once they start nerfing and casuals start clearing the content, the drive to continue starts to dissipate for a large chunk of players.
Who said i play the game only for loot? I play the game to beat my own damage numbers each week and improve my play. And for progress.
There are many games that have been created in the last 20 years and the data shows if you can’t create a level mix of symmetry and excitement when it comes to challenge vs reward, you create an incentive for the playerbase to leave for one that executes that chemistry better.
This is why p2w games get pumped with loads of money, because theres a huge amount of players that want to overpower other players with gear. (Rather than have more powerful gear that they actually earned)Theres going to be fewer of those players in wow because you can only carry so many whales in one 25m raid. Players in those games quickly realize theres no real chemistry outside of pay money get best loot, and quickly leave the game.
But the point I’m making is if players and especially paying players perceive in a game that everyone has the best gear or that the skilled players see the sold items from the developer as having no value they will either quit or stop buying those items. There will always be people who just play the game. But most wouldnt play if there were no reward structure.
Eh, really it ends up being the opposite. People quit much faster when the content is too hard compared to when it’s a little too easy.
It opens up alt play much more, and is more rewarding as the players make progress on their characters, unlike a brick wall.
Insurmountable challenges rarely motivate people.
2 Likes
Why do 2 difficulty modes exist in raids now? Are casual players really going to quit because they cant clear all of heroic 3 weeks into the tier?
1 Like