- AQ40 absolutely broken and overturned on release. Still mutiple issues. (One easy example: Twin Emps Gong).
- AQ40 is still too overtuned and takes too long to clear for the Avg SOD player/dad. No one wants to gather 10-15 consumes + world buffs and play for 3-4 hours. BWL was a perfect raid with Modes and time completion.
- SOD has abandoned classic players. So classic players have abandoned SOD for classic 2. Classic is brain dead. Classic players / dads love easy 1 press buttons that require little to no skill. SOD is not tuned to the avg classic player hense why we lost so many players. (Still losing more. Ask any raid lead).
- Poor decisions. Buffing AQ10 when majority of the player base thought it was easy they buffed it. It was fun steam rolling it with 7-8 people. Idk why they keep tuning things to be harder when no one asked for it. Its nice to destroy mobs/bosses with little to no effort. The players base will raid/play more when something is fun and easy.
- Not even the top sweaty people play SOD so why do we still tune raids to them? I dont see any of the BIS wow players playing SOD anymore. Progress and others quit. So why do we keep making raids that require too much effort/time?
5 Likes
https://ironforge.pro/population/sod/overall/
The new raid and the population playing it shows how hyper focused the devs get on the sweatiest of players. I understand the benefit of playing to your core audience, but that’s a niche part of the bigger core of players the game actually has.
Seems they tuned the raid based on feedback from the single group of jobless eu neets that actually cleared it on ptr. They should honestly know better than that by now, not to mention they should have just delayed aq. I’m sure people would have been happy to have more mount farming time.
2 Likes
TLDR; New/returning players are met with large restrictions to level up and most will quit before lvl 60 unless they swipe and pay for boosts.
Don’t forget how new/returning players are pushed away before even getting to AQ now. I figured I’d give sod another shot after leaving during ST phase, I got to lvl 54 and decided not to bother.
Log in and start checking things out, decent amount of people in ORG. Check AH, current consumes are so expensive I wouldn’t be able to afford them for raiding as I didn’t get in on early incursion farming for thousands of G and other exploits people did.
No one is running any leveling groups, all just boosts being sold, so I go to do incursions. I see a 150% xp and 300% gold buff so I figured I’d at least make some good gold to help keep up with all the current pricing. I choose feralas as I can just fly there from ORG and check out the xp from it. Land in camp mojache and I’m met with elite anubisath guardians and elite bugs, get camped there for a bit so I took a break until they were gone.
After the event ended I ran up to the incursion and I’m met with emerald dream guardians right at the portal where the quest giver is. I can’t pickup the quests without zoning in and out to have about 5 seconds of immunity buff to sift through 20+ quests so I can grab all but the elite kill quests. Completely braindead on blizzards part to have those elites there…
I finally get all the quests I will be able to solo and go and do them. XP is great, quests go good I get to level 53 and 75% with feralas and hinterlands. The gold was a complete joke, barely enough to cover my skills. Hold on though, these dailies are only available to people under lvl 53. The one fun thing I experienced in the few days I was messing around is limited to lvl 52 max??? There’s 51 elites in there, why would I only be able to pickup these quests at 52…
After that I figured I’d cruise around getting runes and trying to find an enjoyable way to level. In the few days I was playing, I didn’t see more than 2 or 3 other people outside of ORG levelling. Many of the runes were not soloable, and with no one else around I was unable to get them( Almost ST bis ENH sham that parsed mid to high 90s ).
Garbage gold gains, can’t use new SOD levelling systems beyond lvl 52, can’t obtain some runes without paying gold to players to help, no one running dungeons in this lvl range aside from boosters.
All this is super restrictive for new/returning players and it’s no surprise SOD keeps going down in numbers each phase.
5 Likes
can you doomers just unistall please lmao
2 Likes
that’d be too easy. how would they meet their forum post nonsense spewing quota
1 Like
They are, have you seen the numbers?
It’s not likely they’ll go up over the next few weeks.
4 Likes
Could it also be cuz you know the holidays? Only a hand full of us are degenerates that dont have a life. lol
Holidays aren’t all of December lol
ur right… November too. =P
What raids are being cancelled for this week? Last week?
As someone who has organized groups, it’s usually the actual holiday that’s ever restricting play time significantly.
It’s situational really. Tons of people go on vacation and not everyone is going to log into wow on a laptop to raid during that vacation. Probably isn’t a surprise if people are quitting because aq40 wasn’t a pushover raid so the dad gamers are going to go where the raids are pushover (fresh 2.0 / era).
Cata seen a similar response with Firelands.
Firelands had a massive uptick in players from the previous raid. It doubled their count again.
AQ had marginal success. And it’s a unfavorable raid to pugs/alt groups so those numbers will fall fast compared to BWL/MC times.
People are still gaming during the holiday months too. This game had how many people raiding last holiday season?
Firelands may of had a huge pick up on launch because it’s the first major content patch cata seen, I promise you a ton of players have either quit or are raid logging exclusively to the point of quitting.
AQ has it’s own issues for sure but it’s really not a hard raid and aq40 is def puggable. I think the bigger issues in aq40s launch is just the bugs. I’m all for making bosses a stand still and do your rotation and pump 99s dad gaming experience, but if that isn’t the reality then people should learn to adapt and improve instead of just quitting 
I wonder how many of the AQ raid numbers are people with multiple toons.
I have a strong feeling most people still raiding in sod have an alt raiding if not more then just one too.
at least we finally admit that weak players want easy content… it’s a progress.
1 Like
The majority of people that want hard content raid mythic in retail. The only people that want hard content in classic are people that didn’t get to sit in org/sw in vanilla and flex their T2 gear and they hate when casuals have the save pixels as they do.
4 Likes
I think people generally get to an age or time in their life when putting in excessive and constant effort into a video game isn’t an interest.
People who think Classic is easy are just unimaginative and uncreative. Look at the hard core movement.
There’s a plethora of ways to make the content harder if you want.
This may be true. I lnow 100’s of people with several alts
they have no idea what they are doing, their leader is so disconnected it hurts. Agrrend keeps saying “we dont want to do x because” and then he always goes back on his words such as:
-saying he wont buff TF , then does
-saying he doesnt want raids to give reals, then changes that
point being their egos have ruined this game the same way retail ego devs ruined retail as well
6 Likes