Like Wildstar! Time for me to play that! Oh wait…
Heroic and up raiders are a much smaller number than you expect.
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Let’s not kid ourselves. Wildstar was a completely new intellectual property. Surely nobody is going to confuse Wildstar with Warcraft?
Well, it’s all hypothetical so I suppose we can agree to disagree. I acknowledge the importance of lore and a good story (they’re actually what keeps me playing) but I believe that if WotLK had dungeons like Cata… 30 minute queues just to get into a 45 minute dungeon that no one was capable of because no one can figure out what to CC… it wouldn’t have maintained that upward trend.
Killing Arthas might’ve been what sold the game but instant queues and 15 minute dungeons were what kept them playing. Unfortunately we can’t use Cata as a foil since it was both a dip in lore and in accessibility
I did it manually a few years ago. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it worked out, somewhat embarrassingly, to my having spent about 1/6 of my time playing WoW. That meant that I was, on average, logged into the game 4 hours a day, every single day, including the six months I was unsubbed at the end of Cata. If I hadn’t been unsubbed for that time the hours /played would have been even higher.
The reality was that my /played time was inflated by the nature of my job. I work in a “seasonal” business, so I have certain times of the year when I have almost no work. WoW was inexpensive entertainment, so during my work downtimes I’d basically be logged into the game from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed, and that 16+ hours a day during those times really inflated things.
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I disagree. If Wrath dungeons were as difficult as Cata dungeons nobody coming from BC would have blinked an eye.
BC was the expansion where LFD didn’t exist and you actually needed to work at being good.
The problem occurred because of Wrath dungeons being so trivial. People got used to the trivial approach of Wrath and stopped socializing to complete them. Then Cata comes around and they’re back to needing community again. That’s the jarring effect that drove people away from Cata dungeons. And lore wise Deathwing was a paperweight to Arthas.
And how many people actually completed the quests to become attuned to TK/SSC? I don’t have the statistics off hand but I know it’s definitely not a big number.
The people doing difficult content has always been the minority… and a very very noticeable minority. Even MC, which it feels like everyone did it back then, only had a small % of players attempting it and that continues up until we have less than 1% of the population doing Naxx.
Vanilla through BC saw gradually increases in population, but the spike was WotLK and it coincides with LFG. Then a sudden spike down in Cata. Again, you can say it’s the end of the WC3 lore but it also correlates with accessibility.
Why are you bringing up raids when we’re talking dungeons? The attunement stuff in BC involved a lot of raid headache chores that yes, not many people cared about.
They did run the dungeons though.
MC is a raid. Loads of people ran the 5 man content and BRD was no picnic when it was current content.
Vanilla through BC also had challenge requirements for everything. Not just raiding.
Wrath was the first time that wasn’t the case and it truly didn’t matter because of the Lich King lore.
I brought up the attunement to TK/SSC because you had to do heroic 5 mans as part of that attunement.
Edit: Anyways, you’re free to disagree all you want but the correlation is there. You can rebuttal as much as you’d like but it really just comes down to “nu-uh”. We’re going in circles so again, agree to disagree.
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True… But it was catered to the more hardcore crowd complete with long dungeons and attunements.
What went wrong? Forums where people non stop complain about anything. Developers get a sense of unhappiness from a very small portion of the player base in most cases and then make adjustments. This has snowballed in to constant complaints about everything.
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Well yeah but that wasn’t all of the attunement process. Some of it was just so obscure a lot of casual players didn’t know about it or couldn’t be bothered with it.
An aside I remember farming fire lock tank gear for SSC. Back then you spent as much time outside of raiding as you did inside raiding just getting prepared. So it was quite a bit to do with all that and well, raiding in general just not being fun after awhile.
The dungeons though? I don’t think a metric exists but if it did I’d be interested in seeing it.
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But you only have to do that if you are going overboard on the min/max. No matter what system blizzard puts in someone is going to take it to extremes and then everyone else complains that they now are “forced” to do the same thing. Nothing blizzard does is going to please everybody because the game has grown so much. All we can do is leave or stay and futilely complain. Because if blizzard changes things to suit you, it always affects someone else negatively.
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You never needed to farm trivial content constantly till legion… Heroic isn’t much of a difficulty to me its a speed bump you pass over the first night while waiting for the real difficulty to unlock.
Adding more and more pointless content to trick people into thinking they are improving isn’t a positive for the game.
No one is tricking me into anything…I suck ballz and I know it. My aspiration was never to get into high level raiding, it was just to have fun. But even if I’m not getting better, my toon is getting comparatively stronger, which rewards me for my time played. If I wasn’t rewarded I would stop playing, and more importantly paying. If enough people like me left, there would be fewer resources to spend and the depth/quality/quantity of your raids would drop. Then eventually the raiding wouldn’t be worth it and the Raiders would start to leave. Rinse and repeat until WoW follows Wildstar into obscurity. Wow will eventually die, and I’ll be sad, but it’s my opinion that it would have happened long ago if blizzard hadn’t introduced all the QoL and accessibility features.
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To me, it’s obvious what went wrong. WoW has gone from a game that appeals to MMORPG’ers to a game that tries to appeal to EVERYONE. That’s an impossible goal; no game company is EVER going to get EVERY gamer on-board; it’s a lost cause. An MMORPG has to be changed too much to appeal to the FPS’ers, and changed even more to appeal to the Candy Crush’ers. In trying to appeal to everyone, they lose the ones that made them successful in the beginning.
The closest example of what happens is the 2nd law of thermodynamics, Entropy. Basically, everything tends downwards. And once it starts, there’s no stopping it.
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MMOs are and always have been a niche genre, but AAA companies don’t want to make niche games.
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It’s coming it’s called pantheon rise of the fallen. I’m seriously looking at this.
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Sorry you apparently had bad girlfriends/boyfriends/whatevers.
Comparing time spent in a video game to time spent with actual human beings is… problematic.
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What went wrong was making games around “data” rather than just make it fun. ALso the SJW stuff hurts game design too.
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Quite the opposite, in my view, MMORPGs were niche and then publishers started pushing them(because of WoWs success!) to everyone. And in doing so, the immediate feedback they got from a broad playerbase was to remove RPG elements, remove any heavy time investment, remove any barriers to quick play and immediate rewards. WoW at least tried to fundamentally hold on to progressions within audience splits (i.e. design PvP to offer wide participation but maintain an Elite path for the committed, varied raid difficulties, etc.).
The other thing that went wrong, and again, WoW is at fault a lot for this, was the business-side expectations for MMORPGs. No longer was there space to be a “good” title with a few 100k subscribers(or even a million- two million), the aim was MILLIONS of subs, and then of course micro-tranactions, etc. So like most financial endeavors the pressure was on for extreme profitability, and success become a little too binary, with things considered boom or bust, with almost no in between.
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