Yes but by how much? Again there was a reason Vanilla wow was so successful. It catered to the masses and threw hardcore players a bone. Now, its the opposite.
As someone who has played this genre for 20 years, I know how mmos work. And to be frank, they don’t work well at all. Most of them are failures because they cost millions to make and then play this game of catering to people who have way too much time on their hands, people who are in the minority.
I have seen this formula time and time again. Vanilla WoW hit it out the park and got a ridiculous amount of subs because most people with lives could actually get somewhere. A lot of hardcore players go on about tough Vanilla was but it was just not true. As a casual player I did everything but Molten Core in Vanilla, and I was more than happy because with my gear I could do everything else in the game no problem and not get roflstomped. I could even have raided Molten Core if I really wanted to.
Now? No chance. People keep saying we have to accept this new normal, why? Blizzard did an amazing job catering to the casual player base in the past, no reason why they can’t go back. They should ignore the hardcore model just like they did in 2004. It will result in more consistent subs if they can make content accessible to everyone and not just a small few. Yes throw the hardcore players a bone, but just a bone, not the whole max level game.
Why do you think each expansion millions of copies are sold, and then 2 months later most of them are gone? People want content, they don’t want to redo content 2000 times on different difficulty levels. If Blizzard focused on content instead of pleasing tryhards, they would get more consistent subs.
It took me almost a year to hit max level in Vanilla and I loved it. I had so much to do. Now? Why does levelling take 1-2 weeks? Blizzard creates all this amazing content, and then lets people blaze through it just so they can hit max level and start grinding mythic dungeons? What a stupid design, and what an easy fix they could have just making levelling much longer.
So no, sorry I won’t accept it. There are obvious fixes here, it just does not cater to the have it now gogogo hardcore player.
WoTLK is when wow subs peaked at 12 million subscribers. The population was on a steady upward trend right up until cataclysm. Loot very much did drop from the sky - remember badges of justice? A system sorely needed right now.
Yea i don’t really know what else to do tbh, getting gear rn is so trash it makes me not want to bother with anything outside of doing like one mythic and playing something else.
Doing mythics for like 4 hours and getting 140 anima is a waste of time.
what? there is nothing even resembling a badge system in the game right now. run a dungeon, get no loot (again). get no tokens. here’s 35 anima so you can fail another mission board quest. same deal for raids. its highly unfulfilling.
I came to the same conclusion – which is why I uninstalled this morning.
I’m older than the typical player (I think) and definitely busier. I’m interrupted multiple times an hour, any hour I play. I’d never join a group of any importance simply because I could never guarantee my availability, which (clearly) would be unfair to the group-mates.
What I think a lot of people don’t get – particularly the people convinced theirs is the ‘right way’ to play – is that the strength of WoW has always been it’s flexible nature. There was stuff for friggin’ anybody. I played WoW for years before I ever even ran a dungeon. I find raiding so excruciatingly boring, I’m amazed and fascinated that it seems to be the game’s central focus. There’s nothing I’d like to do less in WoW than participate in a raid.
Anyway, having played almost entirely solo since the very beginning , it was shocking when my Shammy recently reached 60 to see that not a single World Quest (not one!) offered a piece of loot. It was a pittance of anima, 200g, or some reputation. In. Every. Zone. So, against my nature I ran a few dungeons… and got not a single piece of loot. So I ran Torghast – which, conceptually, I absolutely loved! I’d just run the tower for a couple years, if that was actually an option – except that it doesn’t, it or of itself, offer anything to help me do that. It offers a currency which I don’t have an immediate use for. So, basically, pointless.
So as a solo, extremely casual player, I realize and accept that I’m not a valued part of Blizzard’s development perspective. Which is fine, I guess. But I don’t think there’s ever been less interesting stuff to do for anyone not into the group content.
(And saying there’s no need to progress if you’re not willing to group is a pretty obtuse view – it’s fun to get more powerful, that’s the point. I doubt anyone in 200+ is struggling with overworld mobs anymore. Having everything be a slog all the time is a drag, man. But good luck – the game’s all yours.)
If I play chess, and play against a GM, sure I’m going to lose, but why should his rooks also be more powerful than my rooks? It’s like the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, with no system in place to allow a gradual closing of the gap in ilevel.
At least years ago, I could farm a full set of conquest gear, and know that (for running random BG’s) my gear would be just as good (or very close) as anyone else’s. Because conquest gear, with resilience was pretty much the best for that activity. And I KNEW, 100%, that with enough playtime I was going to acquire it. However, Now a person who is 2500 rating will have vastly better gear than some who is only 1500 rating, and the 1500 rated person will NEVER be able to get the best PvP gear. It has a very detrimental and demoralizing effect to the semi casuals player base.
i cant help but feel you didnt actually read my comment. i said: i group for m+ if my friends ask me… and your response was… that i need to group and make friends.
You know that both Mythics and Arenas have a scaling system right? 1400 arena rating or mythic +4 which both grant 207 ilvl gear are not sweaty in the least. If you push for 2100+ or mythic 15’s then yeah, those are harder to do and require some effort.
What features exactly are catering to the hardcore players? Because from where I sit, just about every change has been to the detriment of players who like challenging content. So point out which changes have been hardcore friendly.
Was is the AoE cap that served solely to stop high M+ers from doing huge pulls and kiting the mobs down?
What about the removal of master loot that was widely used by mythic guilds to put loot in the hands of their most important players?
Was it the gutting of mythic plus rewards? The only system in place that allowed players who didn’t have time to raid hardcore mythic a chance to get mythic level gear? (Yes it was too much but the point still stands)
Was it the inception of warforging and titanforging that served to give casuals a chance to get a piece of gear much higher than the one they actually earned, and made hardcore players have to grind out content in hopes of getting titanforged pieces?
How about the conduit cap? That was literally only put in to stop hardcore players from switching conduits willy-nilly to fit the specific piece of content they were doing?
What about covenant swapping? Widely contentious because the discrepancy between their efficiencies in different pieces of content, which served to stop hardcore players from being optimal if they wanted to do multiple types of content at a high level.
The ironic thing is that all of these things listed are changes put in to hurt the competitive players and most of them ended up hurting the casual scene much more. Case and point this thread complaining about the lack of loot, which hardcore players don’t care about since we spend hours and hours farming M+ for our loot while the players who don’t have either the time or motivation to spend all that time have to rely on getting lucky.
