Not just ICC. Their first raids of the expansion were Naxx and Sarth. High end raiders complained that they were able to beat them day 1, in greens. Note also that I’m not just talking about tuning as far as numbers, but mechanical complexity.
Look up Tankspot’s explanation for H LK hard mode, vs H Neltharian hard mode. For the last fight, of the last (big) raid of an expansion vs the last boss of one of the first tier raids (usually the tutorial raids) of the new expansion, you’re talking a 7 minute (LK) vs 14 minute (Neltharion) explanation due to how many layers of mechanics were present in the fight. That doesn’t even properly convey, both, how reflex intensive Cata’s mechanics were (4 people coordinating roughly 1 second cast interrupts on several pillars) nor how spatially demanding they were (how you kite the adds, where you kill them, how you manage the fire along with all the other mechanics). It’s a lot.
As to why an easier version of the raid needed to be released, no one said it “needed” to. Blizzard’s severe nerfing of Firelands, 3 months after the raid was released told me that they knew that they overtuned raids, and participation was far below the levels they expected (participation was directly mentioned in one of the two patch notes). Like I said, I didn’t formulate this model until after, both, the “Dungeons are Hard!” blog and Blizzard’s emergency Firelands nerfs because that gave me all the insight I needed about, both, what was causing massive sub drops and Blizzard’s perceived need to fix that by fixing raids.
“Pausing here, I would argue raid difficulty was not the cause.”
OK but you better argue from a model that would predict the same game features mine does, else it’s probably a post hoc “just so story”.
“From Vanilla to BC they went from 40 man raids to 25 man (and 10 with Karazhan). Wrath offered 25 man and 10 man versions of raids. These seemed to be attempts to fix the issue of maintaining a large membership (including having members on “stand-by” and “bench” roles) while dealing with personality and loot drama.”
Sure, but this has nothing to do with the change from Wrath to Cataclysm, which is when the sub numbers started spiraling. Remember, you’re attempting to provide a competing explanation for the sub loss that also would predict the same changes in game state that my explanation provided.
“I would argue that raid difficulty was at best a secondary concern. The fact that LFR (a bad system in my opinion) was easier was a necessity due to the lack of coordination.”
Noting you’ve made here is an argument, just a set of claims. I made what’s called an abductive argument, whereby we have 12 facts about the progression of the game, and how players / Blizzard have reacted, we have proof that raid difficulty was something Blizzard was trying to manage in Cataclysm, and we have these 12 things being predicted by that problem and its fallout, making that problem the likeliest explanation.
If you say you have an argument, I expect and inductive, deductive, or abductive argument, with support for your claim, not just a competing claim masquerading as an argument.
No kidding, that’s the point. The “but the story ended” IS the competing hypothesis, so I don’t need to add it. I just need to point out that saying “but muh story” has 12 future facts / behaviors it can’t explain (chief among them being that subs INCREASE when a new expansion comes out, and then start decreasing once non raid endgame content is consumed, which isn’t what you’d predict if boredom of story is the culprit).
You don’t understand the claim. The claim isn’t that some servers weren’t equal at some present time. The claim is that servers that were relatively stable for years, suddenly started dying and centralizing after Cataclysm. This fact isn’t something that would predicted by people being bored with a story. It would be predicted by people centralizing to find competent people to raid with.
Again, vastly missing the point. Wrath had badge systems to deal with this as well. What we’re discussing are changes from Wrath (hey, valor badges!) to Cata (hey, time gated dailies!) to MoP (Holy God so many dailies!) to eventually LFR itself being time gated, flying being removed, etc. None of these are predicted if people are “just bored with the story”. They are predicted if Blizzard knows their current raid philosophy isn’t working for most players and they’re trying to keep people artificially playing the game as long as possible.