There is a very compelling argument to be made that retail wow does not cater to its target audience. Casuals.
What is a casual? A casual player is a player that does not run many mythic+ dungeons, they don’t participate in rated bgs, and they don’t participate in arena. A casual does not engage in team play, they likely do not use voicechat, and yet… they make 90% of the playerbase.
Casuals are the reason that pruning occurred. Blizzard literally destroyed good class design to satisfy casuals. Casuals are why there is so much hate over the 1v1 balance of certain classes. Casuals will never step foot in an arena, but arena balancing is ruining their gameplay. And the complaints of casual players HAS ruined our gameplay in the past. points at pruning
So, my proposal is that retail wow be split. Everyone gets the same gear between the two types of servers. Players can even server transfer from serious to casual, and from casual to serious. The time investment to get the gear is EXACTLY the same. It’s just that on CASUAL realms, different balancing of abilities applies.
On casual realms, all classes are balanced around 1v1 in pvp. All classes are homogenized. All classes are dumbed down and simplified. Blizards casual fantasy come to life is what these realms are. These are the realms that a player who only plays wow for an hour a week would play on. They are the casual realms. On noncasual realms, actual serious play design occurs. Tada problem of pruning SOLVED.
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Play how you wana play and you’ll be fine.
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You tell yourself lies to sleep well at night too?
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I don’t even know what that means. But ok.
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You want to double the workload for the people at Blizz when they are still way behind on fixing bugs from Legion?
No thank you.
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This is a heck of a Sunday thread. I’m super impressed.
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OP are you casual or serious?
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MMOs need to feel populated for them to work. Does segregating casuals really help the game?
Can a casual progress to a raider? and vice versa?
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This is as far as i got and laughed , are you just trolling?
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not in the end of an expansion, if they are the type who has blues after a year of an xpac, then no not really they wont be a mythic raider, it takes heavy grinds 8 hours a day at times.
Gosh, they already did this update. Turn Warmode off and you’ll be fine.
I don’t even know where to begin. 
Just no to all of that.
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You’re thinking of the right things but looking at the wrong detail. There is absolutely a split (or several) in a game that has tens of millions of fans at this point.
From the crowd that wants a dangerous and challenging world based MMORPG experience to the crowd that likes instanced content to the crowd that likes single player content. That’s just the world design.
Then you have classes which ranges from extreme passive to extreme on demand.
When you look at all these in the right way they can all be adjustments to appeal to a vast number of players. Such as a character select toggle that adjusts the world to your preference. And a talent system that swings between passive and on demand abilities for play preference.
If they did these two things alone it would generate a lot more interest in the game. Especially get out of making polarizing features required gameplay. Such as the world quest system.
Identify what is a core reward against all the various gameplay features and make those core rewards part of every gameplay feature. Then have unique rewards unique to each gameplay feature.
The goal with all of this is to appeal to the largest number of players possible. Identify where the breaks are and accommodate them in a way that makes the game last long into the future.
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There once was a very neat game called WildStar. And one of its design philosophies, as one of its Devs loved to point out, was ‘hardcores only’. They were like, ‘We’re the game for players who liked old school hard 40-man WoW raids.’
It didn’t go over well and the game was basically sunk while they scrambled to pull their heads out of their backsides and started adding casual content as fast as they could. They still had amazing raids but it was the casual stuff, especially housing, that kept that game afloat as long as it did.
RIP WIldStar.
Basally you split off hardcore only WoW and hardcore only WoW will tank.
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The casuals weren’t crying about utility bloat. I remember the posts. It was the elites who whined about their toolbars being overloaded with macros.
That was why the pruning happened.
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Pruning happened because it made blizzards job of creating content and balancing easier.
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THis is the way we troll we troll
THis is the way we troll we troll
We Trolling
