Funny, I remember oogling the first paladin in t2 I saw. I was like “Man, I wish my gear looked that cool, I want to be him.”
You’re underestimating the desire and envy aspect of the game simply because you don’t have it.
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Actually it did work for them. Sub numbers proved it. Mid to End wotlk was by the numbers the most successful time in terms of sub count. TBC was numero 2 just after it. Let’s not forget that TBC had without a doubt the hardest content gates of ANY time in the game in terms of progressing. You had to attune just to do attunes that led to other attunes. Yet the numbers of players where crazy. The gear, skill, and coordination requirements of Vashj, Tidewalker, most of The Eye, Council, Illidan, Archimomde, all of Sunwell including the FIRST DAMN TRASH pack.
TBCs existence and success alone breaks any argument that defends the idea that the game needed to be ultra accessible.
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The problem with having “nothing of value” drop in LFR is that you wouldn’t have the hard-core raiders there the first few weeks to teach/carry the legion of bads through the “content”. They never just wanted to “see the content they paid for”, it was always about gear just like every MMO ever…
Then make it even easier. Just have nothing drop period. Want to see content? Here you go. That way you separate the people who reallyh want to see content vs those who want an easy way to get gear.
We say that, but the mass exodus of player base happened after raiding became more accessible.
I think the fundamental mistake is thinking that the amount of player interaction with content dictates the success of the game overall. See before there was a motivation model that worked. You had the 10% who were very happy being hardcore and committed. Then you had a huge swath of players who will spend the whole xpac fighting to get into the 10%, with most failing. And then you you have another huge swath of players who are mostly just spectators and either just check things out and bail, or resub for each xpac launch and then cancel after a couple months.
The system worked because there was inherent competition. Even if you weren’t in the top 10%, you wanted to be. And the content preceding the top tier raid was difficult enough to give you progression even if you don’t make it to the top. Now we can argue all day long about whether that is a fun environment or not, what is better or worse, but the fact of the matter was that it did work. Was clearly working for Vanilla/BC and part of WOTLK. If I’m a business person I’m looking at sub numbers and revenue, and I don’t care what people are doing in game if they are giving me money.
I would find it very, very hard to believe that Blizzard is currently making more revenue by cutting costs to produce very shallow content, but having much fewer subs. I don’t think they are saving that much $$$. This system where you rocket to endgame, then hit a brick wall of boredom and spamming reps is just not keeping people’s attention the way a long long challenging journey would.
It’s all about attribution. Just because few people raid, does not mean others will not spend the whole xpac fighting to become strong enough to raid. Just because over half of the player base is doing M+ does not mean that the average player would rather spend more time doing those than raiding, could just be that they feel like they have to.
If Blizzard releases some sort of statement along the lines of “over 50% of all players who unsubbed from Vanilla through WOTLK said that their reason for leaving was because end game content was too hard or they didn’t feel like they could accomplish anything outside of raiding” Then I will rest my case. Until then, I will maintain that the money grubbers just decided to cut cost without any data-user response correlation. They just decided they wanted to focus their resources on other things and lost interest in sustaining WOW as a long lived gaming tradition, they just saw it as project with an endpoint that they want to suck as much cash out of as they can before it withers and dies. The literal opposite point of view that Riot Games takes when designing/developing League of Legends and allocating resources.
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The only way to make some of the LFR stuff easier is to turn the boss into a training dummy and yet…
I mean really, how many times did the General in Ogrimmar have to be nerfed because the LFR crowd couldn’t handle “don’t hit the boss when he turtles”?
I’ve put up with a lot from wow over 14 years. But I stuck through it until I physically couldn’t do it anymore. When my sub expires in March, I’m going to tell my guild I’m quitting raiding (we are all still close and play other games together) and play ffxiv exclusively until classic comes out.
The could just watch videos like everyone else did in TBC and WoTLK who wanted to see top tier die but couldn’t handle it themselves.
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See you in STV!
raids were mostly easy and accessible in wrath and thats when they had the most subs of all
the numbers dont support your argument. mop, bfa and legion all sold well too. you may not like the game now,(i dont play it myself) but the model is working financially
They were no easier or more accessible than they are now as far as non-lfr modes. There were plenty of fights that gave people trouble in WOTLK continuously. What made them more accessible was no need for attunements and every spec being accepted by the community as viable.
Also, “working” and “making as much as it used to” are two different things, though I suppose with all the MTX and that guy who had a thread a while back stating he dropped $700 in one month… that whales might be contributing enough to be near the same income levels? I’d like to believe whales aren’t THAT big of an influence in modern gaming, though…
Agreed. I feel like they made some big changes hoping to get ahead of trends in the gaming world. And with WOW being the first of it’s genre to reach that kind of success, they didn’t have any sort of precedent or data to prove out that their player base and desired gaming experience was vastly different from what other genres are expected to produce.
Blizzard thought their player base would align generally with the entire gaming community, and did not appreciate that what they had, and what was expected of them, is something you won’t find really anywhere else in game production. And now they have gone too far and lost too much money to pull a 180.
i felt that way about mage tower skins in legion, and challenge modes to a lesser extent in mop
You completely write off TBC which had ever expansion post wotlk below it. Hmm okay.
Also the current model isn’t working. They are propping up the game with micro transactions at whole new levels. Not sure if you follow any journalism on the Subject but Activision isn’t doing too hot and Blizzard has some of the lowest paid devs in the industry. The game I’d sub 2million subs and it has been for awhile.
the most popular expansion in the games history supports my argument. mop was also very good, i guess the retail haters here didnt enjoy like i did. legion was also good, i would not have played 14 months if i didnt enjoy it
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They can’t salvage BFA at this point. It’s like a climber that fell down a mountain side on everest. It’s got a broken leg, no phone, and it’s getting cold. If he’s lucky he will die quick.
i dont like bfa, but its not because the raids are too easy
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Sub numbers say differently. Mop had some small lights in the darkness but everything cata+ has ended the game in a worse place.
the game got older too, you dont know that subs would have stayed high for over a decade if they kept the same model
people move on, and the younger generation now doesnt care about wow or mmorpgs
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You probably don’t like BFA for the samen reason the rest of us dont. The game is a meaningless chore. Legion was also a meaningless chore but it took people time to catch on. People are still slowly waking up who are playing BFA.