Yeah not sure if everyone knows what a known quantity you are though Crimson.
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And that’s the sad thing about it. You can give really good ways to have the system still be punishing while not being overly punishing and they just won’t listen. Play how you want as long as it’s how I tell you to play.
The irony 
The players defending the current system are the ones that are hard to please.
We’re, well at least all I’m asking for is the freedom to switch between the 4 unique abilities each class gets at any given time. Just like a Talent row, it’s not that hard and it’s something that’s been in the game for years.
Yes, sure you can switch covenants currently to do that… But that’s bound to be timegated and why would anybody be okay with being punished for simply trying to change a talent? I just don’t get it. 
and because I bet it will be brought up, Signature Covenant abilities are perfectly fine. It’s simple math, 4 abilities shared between the 12 classes are more likely to be balanced compared to the 48 (4 unique per class) abilities.
Okay. Then lets use Feral Druid. Both sides can be that right?
Feral Druids: 88,565
YIKES.
I was there too and could say that was the reason I stopped doing PvE content. I’m not ignoring the difficulty jump being something that players disliked because I disliked it. My point was that the players stuck around because they were still high off of WotLK. So it was more of a steady decline than a dropoff. I think the first one came after MoP launch which already upset people shearly because of Pandaland alone.
Never raided so I couldn’t speak on the difficulty outside of dungeons. But mentioning those MMOs also points out that both of those games were supposed to be the “WoW Killers”. Now look at them. Dunno what happened to Rift but I know SWTOR is now F2P if you don’t mind not having the benefits. WoW was still king at the time.
I feel like we’re on different pages here though. I’m not arguing Cata subs dropped because they were bored. I’m saying that it wasn’t a nosedive because players still believed in Blizzard to give them a better product.
Then it was a misunderstanding and I will take note of that. But I still hold my stance that the playerbase has improved. If you look on websites like WoWHead and WorldofWargraphs you can see that around 30-40% of the playerbase is clearing the raid on Heroic. Since there isn’t a Normal achievement I’m going to make the hypothesis that around half or maybe even 60-65% of the playerbase clears the raid on Normal difficulty.
Now I’m not a mathematician here but I’m pretty sure that’s not a significantly low amount of players partaking in those difficulties that requires LFR to exist.
People sure are spam posting about the wings on the cash shop.
Hopefully our brave defender Khaelyn will step in to start reporting all the threads for spamming.
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Nah she’ll probably make her own spam thread on the topic and act like it is the only one that actually matters.
#pulltheripcord
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I have a game for Crimson and others that like to see people forced to play the way they do it’s called Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Seems like that is more their type of game
#ripcord9.0.5
Even then it wouldn’t be close. The nonsense that they’re pushing comparing it to DnD just demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of systems and games.
First and foremost, DnD has just as many minmaxers as WoW does, so looking to it as this bastion of killing single-minded optimization is absurd.
Secondly, DnD is content that is curated for a specific group. Just as many GMs will allow players to respec their characters if their build isn’t working as there are GMs who will restrict it. Your experience is entirely dependent on who you’re playing with.
WoW is your GM. It cannot be negotiated with, it simply gives you the content and it’s up to you how you want to engage with it. In DnD, your group decides what kind of experience you want to go for. Maybe you want to do a temple of elemental evil style run where you’re all building the best possible characters you can in a brutally difficult dungeon, or maybe your group doesn’t care and just wants a story driven experience.
In DnD, you can change the table. In WoW, there is one table, and that table has to fit as many people as it can onto it. That is why flexibility is necessary. Those who want to restrict themselves more are perfectly capable of doing so. No one is going to force you to build “correctly.” They may not invite you to their group, but that is the choice you make for playing on your preferences. An inflexible system takes away that choice from the player.
Nothing is lost in pulling the ripcord, save the idiotic fantasies of a few people who lose their minds at the idea of not being able to control how people play the game. To use the DnD analogy, those are the kind of players who get kicked out of the group very quickly. No one wants to be told how to play a game.
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Anyways #PullTheRipcord
It needs to happen if SL has a shot at having a solid launch.
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You must have missed where I said I’d be OK with:
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Untethering covenant abilities / soulbinds from covenant choice. Story aesthetics should be different than covenant abilities.
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Allowing for unlimited swapping of covenant abilities / soulbinds / conduits in the world and only making people lock in stuff during progression content. Like raids / M+ / PvP.
I’m also OK with:
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A separate PvP talent tree that you can alter to your heart’s content as long as it doesn’t affect PvE, untying the bonuses, so to speak.
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Freespecs in raids / M+ at a given level after a given duration has passed (maybe tie it to AoTC or some equivalent).
That’s a hell of a compromise. The core issue of disagreement is about permanent specialization in principle, and no side is budging on that one.
Great, nerf Venthyr, take some of its utility and put it into PvP specific talents that you can swap around to your heart’s content. That’ll fix it.
Yeah and Blizzard doesn’t like it, due to how it affects raid tuning, among other things.
Why are you comparing single specs to classes with multiple specs? Looking at some data for this expansion, I’m seeing 11% of the playerbase has druids at 120, and 6.2% has monks. And that’s a game where you can freespec to smooth over your class spec’s weaknesses. So I don’t even understand what you’re trying to argue even if it wasn’t statistically improper. People have preferences. You could have the best balanced game in the world, and there are some aesthetics that will attract some people and not others.
“I was there too and could say that was the reason I stopped doing PvE content. I’m not ignoring the difficulty jump being something that players disliked because I disliked it. My point was that the players stuck around because they were still high off of WotLK. So it was more of a steady decline than a dropoff.”
https ://imgur.com/gallery/EB2Tzyh
About 1/6 of its playerbase from January to November of 2011. That’s not a steady decline. What made it steady was the introduction of LFR in November of 2011 which flattened the curve and then let the content drought take care of the rest. If the subscription loss from Nov 2011 to the end had been as severe as it was from January 2011 to Nov 2011, Wow would have been around 7.5-8 million subs at its low instead of over 9 million.
Without the advent of LFR, it’s questionable how many people would have even re-subbed for MoP, given how miserable Cata raiding was for most the expansion. I heard Dragonsoul was easier, but I was long gone after Firelands, laughing my butt off at several rounds of emergency nerfs.
But that’s not what the graph shows either. There was a massive increase in subs at the start of MoP. But once again we see a sharp decline, probably because the first tier of MoP raiding was also bloody difficult. So what probably happened was that people LFR’d the raid, then unsubbed. Which also explains why LFR’s are heavily gated now. It also explains why so much of the ToT patch was focused on “in the world” stuff. Chests that randomly spawned, 3 man scenarios, quickly followed up by timeless isle in the next patch along with Flex raiding as another emergency bandaid.
Blizzard wouldn’t have to keep emergency developing these measures to keep people interested in the endgame if the endgame wasn’t hemorrhaging. It would be a waste of money. The timeline is crystal clear here. The devs admitted numerous times through MoP that while they don’t like LFR, not enough people were “seeing the content” to financially justify raid development.
Well sure, I’m just arguing that we know why the subs left. We know it was directly tied to difficulty. We know that Classic proves you can bring people back, even if the devs didn’t believe it (you think you do, but you don’t). We know this can be fixed. To what extent? I don’t know. On the one hand, 12 million seems difficult given the competition WoW has. On the other, given the increased global access to MMOs, it seems like small potatoes.
Yeah but “normal” now is what Flex used to be, and Heroic now is what “normal” used to be. So all this shows is that 40% of the players can clear the raid on “old normal” and, mind you, that’s with TONS of training wheel systems to overtune player stats. Instead of nerfing the raid globally by 20% like they did with Firelands and ICC
Not to mention all the end of expansion carries that people have been saving up for, just so they can get their AotC mounts.
For example, I’m seeing 31% of players have AoTC Ghuun. That’s incredibly low for the first tier raid of an expansion. Again I see AotC Jaina at 29%, so that’s two tiers of raiding with pretty low participation. So it seems the dev’s current model of making two tiers of raiding really really hard, and then making them easier the last tier still holds.
I mean, to put it in perspective, 7% of the playerbase currently at 120 has AoTC from the first tier of MoP raiding. So either WoW has churned tons of players, or MoP raids really were that hard such that LFR (and Flex now Normal) needed to exist.
The other way to put it into perspective too, and I am a mathematician, is that WorldofWargraphs looks at current 120’s, which means there is a survivor bias. If people get fed up with difficult raids and quit, this thins out the population, biased in favor of those skilled enough to do certain raid content. So on top of the other mechanics that Blizzard has shoehorned in (corruptions, warforging, etc.) there’s just the bias in the data itself which overrepresents the kinds of players more likely to do current raid content rather than those non 7% in MoP that got fed up and quit.
Ah so games shouldn’t have rules. Got it.
enough of a quantity to make the devs continue pushing forward with the restrictions.
Honest truth is you are border line .Even you have said that there is a possibility of you switching sides if it was overly punishing .
My response was more in regards to the likes of Crimson .
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Okay. Just lets combine both specs for DPS Druid together!
Druid DPS: 124,996
Point I’m making is that even in a game that can be cleared by essentially doing almost anything, players who play the sub optimal specs have a hard time finding teams or groups willing to take them. So imagine the struggle in a game where this decision matters greatly.
I don’t see that as a dropoff so that’s where the disconnect is happening. I see there’s a steady decline over the course of the expansion. To me, a dropoff in that graph is what happened in WoD.
It’s not possible. Not in Retail. Could it grow again? Sure. But to the degree of Wrath? Never. Classic WoW is not the end all be all solution to fixing World of Warcraft. Because I know a ton of players who would quit under Classics gameplay style. There are elements that could be taken into account for sure, but not an exact rehash of how it functions.
I don’t believe that’s low at all. In fact like I said those numbers are showing that there’s a clear participation in these raids on the difficulty that’s right under the hardest.
Not really. The Devs aren’t stupid. They just know that there are players who will believe anything that’s spoon fed to them.
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I’m so glad a multi billion dollar company who charges a monthly sub and makes us rebuy the game every two years has started putting more cosmetics on the cash shop.
Great move blizzard thank you very cool!
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Sure, that’s why the decision shouldn’t matter as greatly.
True, but WoD more than any other expansion (probably) was a “raid or die” expansion. If you don’t like raiding, here’s this dumb garrison thing that does all your crafting for you, and you can manage it on a phone app. So I left that out to be charitable.
And I agree with that. Which is why I’ve said I’m pretty flexible on what this all looks like. The key is getting elements into the game that makes the system functionally similar, without being overly punitive.
Sure, “of those players who stuck around to deal with the difficult raid difficulty since Cata, and expect that of the game, only 30% of the players are clearing normal by the prescribed time”. I mean it’s a good chunk but only in a narrow context, and with a lot of asterisks and provisos.
Ah so games shouldn’t have rules. Got it.
Because that’s what I said 
Trolling isn’t going to win you any sympathy to your position.
You said:
Rules are by definition instructions that tell people how to play a game. So when you say “no one wants to be told [how to play a game]” this is logically equivalent to: “no one wants to be told [to follow any rules of a game]” by definition of rules. Don’t get mad at me because your position is so unrefined. If your position is different than this, state it more clearly.
There will be no sympathy for my position, ever. I’m not dumb. I’m literally arguing with “But let me do what I want at all times, any restrictions are in principle bad!”
That’s not a principle on which there can be any negotiation, in principle. There’s no nuance, there’s no room for any “give” on either side. A position that hardline just sucks the conversation into a binary, resolvable only by a monopoly on force weighing in on the discussion. Currently Blizzard has chosen. In the future Blizzard will do something else. But whatever happens won’t be because I’ve gained your sympathy, because it’s literally impossible by the definition of your position.
How much cooler would it be if the player completes the campaign for each covenant then could choose whatever covenant abilities they’d like? This way, for example, PVP players could mostly play with choices that help them in PVP but when they feel like participating in PVE they could quickly switch to abilities that help them in PVE. That sounds like a much better system in my opinion. If it were this way then players wouldn’t feel locked into only participating in, in this example, PVP - they could freely play whichever aspect of the game they wish and not be hindered. And they would have this option and privilege because they put in the time and effort to win the favor of each covenant.
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