There’s a reason that subscriber numbers are down, and it’s because this game is now solely designed around the three things that see the least play time. Raids, Mythic dungeons, and rated PVP.
So much emphasis is applied to trying to constantly balance (and rebalance, and rebalance, forever) for these things that so very little time is actually seemingly spent on making the game fun to play for the masses. This isn’t some rant for casuals, but rather a wish that we could simply have more and better content if devs weren’t constantly balancing classes over and over again, or balancing mythic and raid content constantly.
Blizzard delays LFR content, the one path for the largest group of players, and doesn’t even offer access to mythic without being either manually invited or convincing others to join you, and rated PVP is restricted to high level pvp gear.
None of these are difficult to work through, but they are hurdles which tend to discourage a lot of people from participating, yet these events are what gobble up development time and seem to be the most important things in the mind of Blizzard. At some point it’s no longer a carrot, it’s simply something people don’t do.
At its peak WoW was something for everyone, and everyone was playing. Ridiculous amounts of people, and it became almost mainstream even outside of gaming. But for some reason it pivoted to become about hardcore gaming, and elitism and a very small subset of the player base and it’s essentially gone downhill from there.
My question is why? Why did Blizzard do this? Is there more money gained by focusing on the extreme content? I struggle to believe that. But I know we are forced into it. Hurry up and get to max level and then grind our elite content! To the point of literally ignoring over 90 percent of the content that’s in the game.
At what point did being anything beyond the most Uber and geared character stop being fun?
What did WoW previously offer that was “for everyone” and now it no longer offers?
Yet since…lets say…WotLK…WoW has regularly become more and more and more casual for getting better rewards. Every expansion they come up with a more “casual” way to get rewards.
The notion that WoW is more hardcore than before…is just not true in any way at all.
There was no LFR before and people still played, their gear capped out at very low levels as well since they could just do heroics and get the odd badge gear
Casuals have way more to do now, they just don’t want to actually work for it a bit
Is that the reason? So, the actual reason wouldn’t be that the MMORPG genre is less popular than the FPS genre, because players want more instant gratification? Please submit your resume, because I’m quite sure that Blizzard will make you the next CEO.
I agree, Bellular showed the stats on normal-heroic-mythic raid completions and its still pretty sad. Even though it is an improvement.
WoW’s raid game literally has a population of 20,000 guilds lol. And that number is only ever decreasing. And that is the true end - end game - mythic raid completion is in at under 20% … LOL. … so we are talking about 90,000 people being catered to for “end game mythic raiding” lol. And those are basicly the same players pushing +30s
KSM is designed around the average player at least now.
It looks worse for normal and heroic pop/demo wise because those are often done 2/2/6 or 2/3/9 not as 25 player raids.
The only reason the stats improved by about 2-4% across the board is because Blizz heeded players and stopped tuning the game around the end-end-game-CE mythic raid level achiev/gear/BiS
It’s still not great tho.
These 90-120 thousand people aren’t the people driving the game or creating population growth. They just raid log lol. — And there’s nothing wrong with that when you are already in an established guild -
what blizz needs to do tho is cater to guilds and newbies just starting something like a normal raid or increase the population of solo players to recruit from by giving them better content and tuning for lower ilvl content
the best thing to do would be to create a progression system where if you join a lower tier of progression your loot/gear is scaled down to herioc or lfr, or normal level and you can’t just have ppl in 440 ilvl join for the 5/5 dungeon queues in LFD or LFR this would let lower lvl players progress content at their power level, learn more, and bigger players doing this content should be joining those groups to help lower players not carry them or push them or get loot for themselves.
Probably not no if you want fun open world content gotta make it yourself on am rp realm
Also Mythic + is pretty fun to heal tbh
And there’s no real incentive for healers to do it as it’s not guaranteed you’ll get anything and every now and then you get the joy of watching a BiS item like Molten Heart be given to a healer that did less healing then some dps.
Like healing randoms is a painful and annoying experience like be nice to have some actual incentive to run it.
I think you may be underestimating the popularity of mythic dungeons.
I do also think however that the game could do more casual world content like player/guild housing, a regular, steady release of interesting side story content, solo challenge modes, expansion based sub tabs for the materials tab in the bank…
they absolutely are. They’re the streamers, theorycrafters, content creators, guide writers, etc.
you are delusional if you think joe mcpetbattler is someone “Driving the game”
This sounds awful to me. Part of the reason I enjoy the game is because of power gains. Being scaled to the lowest common denominator all the time would not be fun.
Reality check: no one (or, not a significant number of people) is sitting around being altruistic thinking “hmm how can I help a newbie in the limited time I have to play this game”.
They are the people who burnout ragequit and never come back after 3 years. And they never do anything for the community. Outside of a few very rare exceptions.
They don’t group outside of their static groups—
like I said this is fine, but all they are is player retention stats, not player growth stats
you need both to be good
you need those guilds to retain players, we also need new players to want to join these guilds or try harder content or participate and without making the 424 ilvl solo game less toxic and more fun those players don’t stick around
so we have a less leaky bucket -----that bucket drip feeds in new players instead of having a steady trickle or healthy stream
and you will have those power gains and still get your achieves and they will matter in your heroic/mythic raids or M+ gameplay.
Just not in Herioc LFD or even M0’s
and those coming up from 375-411 will still feel big power gains while doing heroics and M0s
it just stops zugzug mythic tank bro from going into Heroic Neltharus and zugging and lets people play/progress challenging content always without trivializing the casual game. And you can still progress out of those tiers into higher M+ and other raid tiers.
I also think they should cap openworld ilvl at 424 lol.
only 440 ilvl and tier should matter in raids or M+ in that content that progresses past the easy stuff or stuff meant to be challenging and not-trivial to the solo palyer. Which quickly becomes trivial because of tuning around 440 ilvls. And tier sets.
This would have an added bonus of making Open World pvp a much better game too. While leaving some wiggle room for gear disparity.
You get your rewards – we get our rewards— no one feels trivialized. All current content remains challenging. Everything unlocks when it’s last expansion. Or 4 patches away. — there’s a reason for solo/wq players to try out normal raids and progress through the power levels within those raids then etc…
I guess I would argue that this is blizzard’s thing to fix. the core of the problem isn’t that players are doing content far below them (power-wise) but that blizzard incentivizes them to do it.
if those incentives weren’t there, players in mythic gear wouldn’t be doing heroic dungeons.
Currently, the goodie bag is the only source of augment runes. so the mythic geared players feel they have to do them to get the runes.
From my perspective, they should stop carrot/sticking raiders into doing casual content. We don’t want to be there any more than you want us there.
This is how they keep the remaining player base that subs long term to the game busy without having to make actual content, or content that has longevity that isn’t spamming some ranked play to climb some kind of e-sport ladder.
WoW has always had kind of a content creation issue, but the game was a lot slower to level and gear in the past, so this wasn’t such a big deal. The current game just showers you in gear, and players can gear out in BIS in less than month sometimes, this is why they have created these systems that infuse e-sport ladders into the game, it keeps people busy running the same content over and over again.
The problem is though, this competitive content only really appeals to minority of the player types that typically played WoW.
This is why over the years, you have seen more and more demand from the player base for them to bring back Vanilla, because that game was an actual MMO, and not some boring e-sport AARPG grinder that retail has turned into.
So much has been stripped out of the game in order to accommodate this style of content.
Like the OP said, classes have been gutted over the years or homogenized in order to be balanced around M+ and rated arena, which makes class design kind of focused on this type of content, because players keep demanding balance and all the utility needed for this type of content. This makes classes kind of boring at the end of the day.
