Cracks starting to show?

[Ingmar]

I also don't think it reads as condescending at any point, personally.

Yeah, this.

GC's post was in response to player unhappiness, where players basically stated that the Wrath paradigm was really fun and the Cata paradigm was not.  GC's post can be summed up as I did (L2P and then you'll have fun), which is developer arrogance at its finest.

How's that all working for Blizzard?  The answer lies in lost subs.

See, when players tell devs "we're not having fun" and the devs' response is "you're not playing right" then the game is on the decline.  Wrath was the pinnacle of player happiness, it seems, at least in terms of subs (as well as player bitching on the boards).  Of course everybody wasn't happy, everybody won't always be.

Note: this is in the Cracks thread, not the Cataclysm thread.  I'm not trying to piss on your good time - I get where you are coming from, really I do.  I had fun in WoW for 6 years.  I'd just like to have fun in WoW again, but until Blizzard gets their head out of their ass on why the fun is gone for players like me, that's not likely.  It baffles me, frankly, that you and others don't seem to understand that there might be some problem here for some players, because you're still having fun.

I'm actually hardly playing myself, I probably split the difference between Paelos and Rokal on the state of the game opinion overall. I just think piling on GC like he's the Great Satan of WoW is kind of ridiculous. I still don't see the arrogance, I see 'this is why we did what we did, please give it a chance, here are some tips to help.' They have a long history of fixing their own screwups (in PVE at least), it just always takes time. If this ends up being a mistake (some aspects of Cataclysm certainly clearly are from my viewpoint, some aren't, etc.), they will probably fix it once again, and I don't think they'll need to fire anyone to do it. The same people who made the decisions everyone loved in Wrath are still there, after all.

[Khaldun]

Over time, games create their own "average player" the same way that behavioral experiments create a population of animals that are really well-trained to what the experimenter wants (but often quite bad at doing anything else). WoW's appeal early on was that it tried to have something for almost everyone, and did that at a reasonably high level of professional skill (compared to the competition). But over time, WoW and its playerbase have evolved in tandem and the appeal has narrowed. What is interesting to me is that in the past, Blizzard has consciously tried to avoid this kind of narrowing, this kind of designer tunnel vision. Either they've surrendered to it, reckoning that the thing is what it is and it's not going to get any bigger or better, or they've gotten careless.

There are clearly players both in WoW and who might be drawn to WoW who DO want "worldliness", which is something less challenging than full-on sandbox design. I think maybe right now there are players discovering that they want it who previously didn't know it was something they liked or cared for.

[Ratman_tf]

If this ends up being a mistake (some aspects of Cataclysm certainly clearly are from my viewpoint, some aren't, etc.), they will probably fix it once again, and I don't think they'll need to fire anyone to do it. The same people who made the decisions everyone loved in Wrath are still there, after all.

People are fighting WoW fatigue, there are some new shiny MMMOGs that don't buzzsaw your face off, and Cata zigged when it should have zagged. Doomcasting WoW is a fool's errand, but I will say that I think this is one of the lowest points for WoW since launch.

[Ingmar]

If this ends up being a mistake (some aspects of Cataclysm certainly clearly are from my viewpoint, some aren't, etc.), they will probably fix it once again, and I don't think they'll need to fire anyone to do it. The same people who made the decisions everyone loved in Wrath are still there, after all.

People are fighting WoW fatigue, there are some new shinies that don't buzzsaw your face off, and Cata zigged when it should have zagged. Doomcasting WoW is a fool's errand, but I will say that I think this is one of the lowest points for WoW since launch.

Almost certainly, although I have my doubts that RIFT is going to be much more than a blip on the way to the games that are really threatening (SWTOR, GW2.)

[Ratman_tf]

Almost certainly, although I have my doubts that RIFT is going to be much more than a blip on the way to the games that are really threatening (SWTOR, GW2.)

I don't think SWTOR is going to be very threatening to WoW. Either it's going to be "The story game", in which case it's not directly competing with WoW, or it's WoW in a Bioware skin, in which case there's going to be a lot of pissed off fans who were expecting "The story game".

GW2... maybe. 

[Fordel]

If it's WoW (actually good as WoW, not just sorta like WoW) in space, SWTOR will take a huge chunk out of WoW.

[Rasix]

It has that potential to hurt the NA population.  I have no idea how popular Star Wars or Bioware are in the rest of the world.

[Sjofn]

If this ends up being a mistake (some aspects of Cataclysm certainly clearly are from my viewpoint, some aren't, etc.), they will probably fix it once again, and I don't think they'll need to fire anyone to do it. The same people who made the decisions everyone loved in Wrath are still there, after all.

People are fighting WoW fatigue, there are some new shiny MMMOGs that don't buzzsaw your face off, and Cata zigged when it should have zagged. Doomcasting WoW is a fool's errand, but I will say that I think this is one of the lowest points for WoW since launch.

WoW hardly buzzsaws your face off, yeesh. Yeah, the heroics are a little too hard (although I've only done one completely horrible failure PUG since starting back up, people are getting better at them and/or starting to outgear them) and take too long, but that is hardly EQ levels of cockpunching. It's not even TBC levels of cockpunching.

[Paelos]

Mini-rant:

Cataclysm wasn't just one big thing that caused a lot of people to flip out. It was a lot of little things that become annoying, and you wanted to do this but they changed it, and you wanted to run this but it took forever, and that slowly pissed you off, and then people left, and that pissed you off, and you log in and try to do something but you don't feel like doing anything because you don't want to get together the people to do something. And then you log in less and less because there's just nothing that's tying you down anymore to the game except for scheduled times when you try to get things done. Eventually that wears off and you have nothing.

Then you go on the forums and tell everyone that you're unsubbing and that Cata's the worst thing ever, and Ghostcrawler raped your game with his smug asshole face.

[Ratman_tf]

If it's WoW (actually good as WoW, not just sorta like WoW) in space, SWTOR will take a huge chunk out of WoW.

How WoW it is (if it is), and what exactly is a huge chunk... but I'd bet it wouldn't.

[Ratman_tf]

WoW hardly buzzsaws your face off, yeesh.

No, no. I mean the alternatives (Like Rift) are getting better.

[Ashamanchill]

Yeah heroics aren't hard now Sjofn, we're at the part where they become easy through gear, the problem being (for most of us it seems anyways) that everyone we want to play with has left. At Cataclysm's release there was a huge groundswell of people, but the difficulty and time consuming nature of them left them unviable as an endgame option, leaving only PvP as a serious time sink.

What they should have done, is made the heroics totally facerollingly easy at release. Then, when people have picked up some gear, maybe raided a designated loot pinata raid boss or two two, to get their confidence and learn their role, then they could have turned that difficulty notch to eleven. Sorta like how the ICC dungeons were harder, but it was cool cause we all had some purps by then.

You know what I think one of my biggest (and also pettiest) beefs with this expansion has been though? They talked a big game before the damn thing about shit they were going to do, but failed really bad at it. I remember them talking about how they were going to steer away from Ulduar style boss mechanics of the tank being two shot, and yet those heroics were painful for that at release. Even when I was getting geared standing in a puddle for that first second it was laid down by the boss fried my processor as it tried to compute a number for the damage I took.

Or what they did with healers re. PvP. They nerfed healers mana regen so they scaled mortal strike way back to compensate. Fair deal. Except one of those changes have been rescinded or made trivial through gear, while the other is still there.

[Rasix]

What they should have done, is made the heroics totally facerollingly easy at release. Then, when people have picked up some gear, maybe raided a designated loot pinata raid boss or two two, to get their confidence and learn their role, then they could have turned that difficulty notch to eleven. Sorta like how the ICC dungeons were harder, but it was cool cause we all had some purps by then.

 

[Rokal]

People are fighting WoW fatigue, there are some new shiny MMMOGs that don't buzzsaw your face off, and Cata zigged when it should have zagged. Doomcasting WoW is a fool's errand, but I will say that I think this is one of the lowest points for WoW since launch.

Assuming you're talking about Rift, I always thought it was funny that people used Rift as an example of how players were leaving WoW because of Cata's design decisions (namely in these discussions, that they made the game too difficult for the average gamer) . Maybe not yourself, it seems like you might also believe that WoW is just getting old, but I've seen it brought up a few times. It's definitely a competent game where most of WoW's competitors over the past couple years have been sloppy messes, but Rift is much more tailored to the hardcore gamer than WoW.

The talent trees (souls) are large and complex, and you are asked to pick all 3 of your first souls within the first 30 minutes of playing the game.

The game eventually expects you to understand 8 entire souls (classes) by the time you hit the level cap, because you can switch between them at any time. Your solo build probably isn't going to be perfect for dungeons, for example, so you may have two soul roles (talent specs) by the time you start doing dungeons.

It's very easy to die when soloing with plenty of the souls, so if you are playing alone there's a good chance you'll make plenty corpse runs.

There are quite a few group quests scattered around, and almost every Rift that spawns is functionally a group quest. You aren't going to solo them unless you're one of the really good solo classes or you over-level the lesser Rift you're attacking.

You have to manually ride to a dungeon every time you want to run one, and until this week's patch you needed to find your group via the chat channels.

The dungeons are long from what I've experienced, and the end-game dungeons are said to be fairly difficult (I haven't tried any myself).

According to the Rift forums on F13, there is also a large emphasis on macros for end-game.

The only people Rift really siphoned off of WoW were hardcore gamers that were bored of WoW. My old raid guild for example (from Vanilla/TBC) left for Rift, but they were in shambles by the end of Wrath and I hardly knew anyone left.

I am playing Rift a little bit, and I'm enjoying it (mostly for the graphics, I'll shamelessly admit), but I spend most of my time playing WoW for the same reason so many of you are angry at the game. It's where the people I went to play with are (or in your case aren't anymore).

What they should have done, is made the heroics totally facerollingly easy at release. Then, when people have picked up some gear, maybe raided a designated loot pinata raid boss or two two, to get their confidence and learn their role, then they could have turned that difficulty notch to eleven. Sorta like how the ICC dungeons were harder, but it was cool cause we all had some purps by then.

This is essentially what normal mode dungeons at 85 were supposed to be. I really don't see how you make Halfus much easier than he already is, but they probably could have tuned Mag'maw to be a bit easier. Mag'maw is kind of a funny fight in that once your guild downs him once, he seems insanely easy. It's 90% strategy. What they should have done was make the worms easier to kill. Most guilds seemed to want to force their group to do the most straight-forward strategy possible, and if they nerfed the worm hp it probably would have been possible for those guilds to succeed with that strategy even if their ranged dps sucked. I think making it easier to 'get the ball rolling' would have helped. I also think the fact that everyone was doing random heroics didn't help. In TBC you didn't jump into Shattered halls or Shadow Lab as your first heroic, you did something like Ramparts. VP and ToT were much easier than GB or SFK, but a lot of groups probably failed in harder heroics before they succeeded in easier ones.

[Sjofn]

WoW hardly buzzsaws your face off, yeesh.

No, no. I mean the alternatives (Like Rift) are getting better.

Ohhhh, that makes more sense.

I'm glad the alternatives are getting better, I haven't actually tried one in a while because I was tired of them sucking. :P

[Ingmar]

This is essentially what normal mode dungeons at 85 were supposed to be. I really don't see how you make Halfus much easier than he already is, but they probably could have tuned Mag'maw to be a bit easier. Mag'maw is kind of a funny fight in that once your guild downs him once, he seems insanely easy. It's 90% strategy. What they should have done was make the worms easier to kill. Most guilds seemed to want to force their group to do the most straight-forward strategy possible, and if they nerfed the worm hp it probably would have been possible for those guilds to succeed with that strategy even if their ranged dps sucked. I think making it easier to 'get the ball rolling' would have helped. I also think the fact that everyone was doing random heroics didn't help. In TBC you didn't jump into Shattered halls or Shadow Lab as your first heroic, you did something like Ramparts. VP and ToT were much easier than GB or SFK, but a lot of groups probably failed in harder heroics before they succeeded in easier ones.

We've been over this before, but the issue is that you can't jump from normals into casual raiding, you need the heroic gear first. Very hard heroics have a direct negative impact on the ability of casual players to get together and do raids as a group, which is like 90% of the problem for guilds like mine. We never even got raids organized, in large part because we never felt 'ready', and that was because we experienced so much failure in the heroics early on.

We could carry the one or two people who weren't really performing up to what they needed to be in Wrath normal-mode raids, and heroic 5 mans, for the most part. Cata heroics, not so much.

[Paelos]

Yep, casual raiders hated doing heroics, meaning they didn't get the gear they needed to raid, but they tried to do it anyway and got frustrated, and they gave up to play something else because the idea of grinding heroics for points was too much for them.

I'll fully admit I did everything in my power through rep grinds, crafting, and AH negotiations so I didn't have to do heroics as a tank.

[Margalis]

This was one of Cataclysm's biggest disappointments for me - in leveling a new character, even without rested xp, I was rarely able to finish a zone before the quests became grey.  There was no stumbling upon a quest, because everything was very linear.  There were no tucked away corners to find.  Vanilla WoW had a lot more of that sort of thing - unexplained areas with no seeming connection to anything else.  Cataclysm made Azeroth feel less world-y than ever.

There is definitely such a thing as too much polish.

In music and literature often times the first few works from some entity are better than later efforts, even though later efforts are often better produced, more polished and more coherent. Sometimes when things are too coherent and polished you lose lovable quirks and the personality that first attracted you. Or put another way, removing Cindy Crawford's beauty mark would probably make her "objectively" better looking but also not as popular and famous.

There is something to be said for a little bit of noise and rawness in something. So yeah, I agree, it's possible to make tighter, more coherent design that on paper seems better but ends up being less compelling.

[Rokal]

We've been over this before, but the issue is that you can't jump from normals into casual raiding, you need the heroic gear first. Very hard heroics have a direct negative impact on the ability of casual players to get together and do raids as a group, which is like 90% of the problem for guilds like mine. We never even got raids organized, in large part because we never felt 'ready', and that was because we experienced so much failure in the heroics early on.

We could carry the one or two people who weren't really performing up to what they needed to be in Wrath normal-mode raids, and heroic 5 mans, for the most part. Cata heroics, not so much.

Edit: nm, not getting dragged into it again :p Difficulty for normal raids and heroic 5-mans are about the same.

[Paelos]

The better progression path would have been to ease the fuck up off everyone in the beginning and get "progressively" harder as you released content in the patches. You know, actually prepare people for your grand vision of making things more difficult over time by heating up the bathwater instead of dropping everyone in a boiling pot.

[Merusk]

Almost certainly, although I have my doubts that RIFT is going to be much more than a blip on the way to the games that are really threatening (SWTOR, GW2.)

I tend to agree and CoH was that blip for EQ, so it's happened before.

[caladein]

The better progression path would have been to ease the fuck up off everyone in the beginning and get "progressively" harder as you released content in the patches. You know, actually prepare people for your grand vision of making things more difficult over time by heating up the bathwater instead of dropping everyone in a boiling pot.

Except players complained about the increased complexity of the 80-85 leveling and normal dungeons not being completely trivial from the off as well.

[Ratman_tf]

Assuming you're talking about Rift, I always thought it was funny that people used Rift as an example of how players were leaving WoW because of Cata's design decisions (namely in these discussions, that they made the game too difficult for the average gamer) . Maybe not yourself, it seems like you might also believe that WoW is just getting old, but I've seen it brought up a few times. It's definitely a competent game where most of WoW's competitors over the past couple years have been sloppy messes, but Rift is much more tailored to the hardcore gamer than WoW.

I use Rift as an example. It seems to be doing well, and people are having fun playing it.

I got in the beta, played for about 5 levels and quit in disgust. I'm sick to death of rat tail quests. Fuck that shit.

[Paelos]

Except players complained about the increased complexity of the 80-85 leveling and normal dungeons not being completely trivial from the off as well.

What complexity? What are you talking about?

[Rokal]

If all the heroic 5-mans were easy at launch, I wouldn't be playing WoW right now. The only thing that made me come back to the game was hearing that 5-man content might be fun again (per my criteria of what makes a game fun (being engaging and moderately challenging me)). I would have enjoyed the raid game, but ironically I probably would not have gotten to it. Promises for better content in patches does about as much for me as it does for you.

The better "please everyone and keep our content compelling" path would have been finding a way to make players do the easier heroics first. And yeah, probably making Mag'maw a touch easier, or at least give players a more obvious 'first' target. People expected BWD to have an easier fight at the start because, assuming all the raid zones were equal as it was said, it had the most bosses. If Halfus or Council were easier, point people there first. Let the players slowly approach harder content, and you get to keep the same challenge level of the content over-all, but you don't scare everyone off. I know people would have thought this was obnoxious (it's essentially gating), but you could have gotten a quest at 85 that asked you to do heroic Throne of the Tides. After you complete that you get a quest for Vortex Pinnacle. After that HoO, then Tol'vir, then BRC, then Stonecore, then finally GB. Leaving players to do the heroics in a random order when the difficult wasn't actually even between them all was a mistake.

What complexity? What are you talking about?

While leveling from 80-85 the dungeons were still much harder than they had been in Wrath. Even though normal-mode BRC or ToT is much easier than the heroic versions at-level, they were still way harder than Azjol Nerub or Utgarde Keep. For some people, even the difficulty of normal-mode BRC or ToT was too much.

[Nevermore]

Almost certainly, although I have my doubts that RIFT is going to be much more than a blip on the way to the games that are really threatening (SWTOR, GW2.)

I tend to agree and CoH was that blip for EQ, so it's happened before.

Don't you mean DAoC?  CoH came out in 2004, about six months before WoW.

[Sjofn]

The better progression path would have been to ease the fuck up off everyone in the beginning and get "progressively" harder as you released content in the patches. You know, actually prepare people for your grand vision of making things more difficult over time by heating up the bathwater instead of dropping everyone in a boiling pot.

What's fucked up is they totally said they were planning to do that at some point, that they were pretty cool with how easy Naxx was as a starter raid.

[Ingmar]

Almost certainly, although I have my doubts that RIFT is going to be much more than a blip on the way to the games that are really threatening (SWTOR, GW2.)

I tend to agree and CoH was that blip for EQ, so it's happened before.

Don't you mean DAoC?  CoH came out in 2004, about six months before WoW.

CoH was the blip for EQ and DAOC both, I'd say.

[Ingmar]

We've been over this before, but the issue is that you can't jump from normals into casual raiding, you need the heroic gear first. Very hard heroics have a direct negative impact on the ability of casual players to get together and do raids as a group, which is like 90% of the problem for guilds like mine. We never even got raids organized, in large part because we never felt 'ready', and that was because we experienced so much failure in the heroics early on.

We could carry the one or two people who weren't really performing up to what they needed to be in Wrath normal-mode raids, and heroic 5 mans, for the most part. Cata heroics, not so much.

Edit: nm, not getting dragged into it again :p Difficulty for normal raids and heroic 5-mans are about the same.

The difficulty of the raids has literally nothing to do with my point. We are willing to get our shit together and go nose to the grindstone for a scheduled event that requires 10 people. It is way more annoying when the stuff you have to do to prep for said scheduled event also requires that level of focus. Also it is much easier to carry 1 or 2 people out of 10 than it is to carry 1 or 2 people out of 5.

I'm sure if we could get everyone interested and back in game to do the heroics and start raiding *now* it would be much easier, but the ship has already sailed for a lot of the people I tend to rely on for key roles. I'm not sure we have 10 active raiding-interested people total now (although I'd have to log in enough myself to see who else is logging in regularly...)

[Rokal]

The difficulty of the raids has literally nothing to do with my point. We are willing to get our shit together and go nose to the grindstone for a scheduled event that requires 10 people. It is way more annoying when the stuff you have to do to prep for said scheduled event also requires that level of focus. Also it is much easier to carry 1 or 2 people out of 10 than it is to carry 1 or 2 people out of 5.

I differ with you here because I don't think that raiding should to be the only compelling 'end-game' for players. Back in Wrath I didn't really have the time or the desire to raid, and the 5-man content wasn't very compelling for me. I think smaller groups or people that can't devote 8+ hours to the game every week should have compelling content for them as well, just like the content for solo players shouldn't be completely boring either.

[Ingmar]

The difficulty of the raids has literally nothing to do with my point. We are willing to get our shit together and go nose to the grindstone for a scheduled event that requires 10 people. It is way more annoying when the stuff you have to do to prep for said scheduled event also requires that level of focus. Also it is much easier to carry 1 or 2 people out of 10 than it is to carry 1 or 2 people out of 5.

I differ with you here because I don't think that raiding should to be the only compelling 'end-game' for players. Back in Wrath I didn't really have the time or the desire to raid, and the 5-man content wasn't very compelling for me. I think smaller groups or people that can't devote 8+ hours to the game every week should have compelling content for them as well, just like the content for solo players shouldn't be completely boring either.

Then the normal 5 mans should give good enough gear to raid in.

[caladein]

What complexity? What are you talking about?

While leveling from 80-85 the dungeons were still much harder than they had been in Wrath. Even though normal-mode BRC or ToT is much easier than the heroic versions at-level, they were still way harder than Azjol Nerub or Utgarde Keep. For some people, even the difficulty of normal-mode BRC or ToT was too much.

It's not just the dungeons but the solo questing as well.  There would often be something to not stand in or interrupt or dispel.  More importantly, the big end-of-chain group or vehicle quests were replaced with soloable quests with boss mechanics with the exception of a few in Uldum.  That combined with the longer fight lengths meant that questing was much closer to what end-game-PvE (as a damage dealer) was than at any time before.

[Rokal]

Then the normal 5 mans should give good enough gear to raid in.

Yeah, the shitty side effect here is that it would end up making the raids easier than they are, and I like how they are balanced now. You'd still gear up in heroics because it would make the raid content that much easier if you could walk into the raid with full 359 gear even if that's what the bosses dropped. Hell, people felt like they needed to do arena in TBC because it made raid content that much easier. I'd have been in favor for a less dramatic power increase between normal 5-man and heroic 5-man gear though. Let's say normal mode dropped 342 gear and heroics dropped 346. That way raids could be balanced for 342 gear and you wouldn't feel like you *needed* to do heroic 5-mans to raid, but you'd still get a reward from doing the heroics without the reward being big enough to have a huge effect on the difficulty of raid content.

[Paelos]

Then the normal 5 mans should give good enough gear to raid in.

Yeah, the shitty side effect here is that it would end up making the raids easier than they are, and I like how they are balanced now.

But it would move the challenge to the heroic raids while giving the game more accessibility. How would that not be a win-win for everyone? Serious people get their challenges faster, and normal people get to raid with a little more forgiveness.

[Xanthippe]

People are fighting WoW fatigue, there are some new shiny MMMOGs that don't buzzsaw your face off, and Cata zigged when it should have zagged. Doomcasting WoW is a fool's errand, but I will say that I think this is one of the lowest points for WoW since launch.

Assuming you're talking about Rift, I always thought it was funny that people used Rift as an example of how players were leaving WoW because of Cata's design decisions (namely in these discussions, that they made the game too difficult for the average gamer) . Maybe not yourself, it seems like you might also believe that WoW is just getting old, but I've seen it brought up a few times. It's definitely a competent game where most of WoW's competitors over the past couple years have been sloppy messes, but Rift is much more tailored to the hardcore gamer than WoW.

<snip>

There are quite a few group quests scattered around, and almost every Rift that spawns is functionally a group quest. You aren't going to solo them unless you're one of the really good solo classes or you over-level the lesser Rift you're attacking.

<snip>

The only people Rift really siphoned off of WoW were hardcore gamers that were bored of WoW. My old raid guild for example (from Vanilla/TBC) left for Rift, but they were in shambles by the end of Wrath and I hardly knew anyone left.

I didn't "leave WoW for Rift" but I did leave WoW, and I am playing Rift, and you are wrong about some of this. 

I don't raid - didn't much in WoW and don't much in Rift.  I mostly run solo. Most rifts that spawn are minors. I can solo any minor rift at 50, including lvl 50 rifts, and duo majors.  Expert rifts can be done in a public raid.  Raid Rifts cannot; they do need geared people who are communicating. 

I haven't run out of things to do, have barely run instances, and spend most of my time questing and rifting and doing some pvp.  It's entirely possible to play Rift as a non-hardcore non-raider - and to have fun doing it.

There are some hardcore Rift players, but I would not say that is the majority of players.  I have no idea how the raiding game compares, or how many people will leave Rift to go back to WoW.  I do know that Rift has a lot of players who do not play WoW, and a good number who left WoW not to play Rift, but because they were unhappy with WoW.

When I stop playing Rift, I won't be returning to WoW, unless Blizzard fixes those things that I am unhappy about.  I'm not holding my breath, particularly in light of Blizzard's president's recent remarks.  From what I can determine, Blizzard still doesn't get why people are unhappy - they think faster content is the key, apparently.