Cracks starting to show?

[Paelos]

The hardcore raiders hated WotLK. They were just drowned out by the STFU and deal patrol. The term welfare epics was tossed around a ton. Still, they didn't quit and WoW saw it's highest subs. Now the hardcores are trying to drown out the casuals who are pissed, but the threads keep popping up and getting their heads cut off by mods.

[Fordel]

To the surprise of no one, there are waaaaaaay more casual players then hardcore players.


-edit- Really, In my little circles, I'm not seeing so much "OH GAWD THIS SUCKS I QUIT QQQ BAAAW", it's more just "meh...". No one is giving enough of a shit to actually 'rage', they are just doing other shit and slowly dropping off.

[pants]

Really, In my little circles, I'm not seeing so much "OH GAWD THIS SUCKS I QUIT QQQ BAAAW", it's more just "meh...". No one is giving enough of a shit to actually 'rage', they are just doing other shit and slowly dropping off.

Yup, same here.  Lots of (including myself) - meh, been playing this for years, its just more of the same, I'm outa here.  Deathwing isn't nearly as charismatic a bad guy as Arthas was, and if youve been playing the same game for 6-7 years, sooner or later you're gonna get bored.

[Paelos]

Yep I don't see much casual rage. I see a lot of, well it's been fun, but I don't feel like I need to log in every day. Then it's every other day. Then once a week. Now it's none.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Death by paper cuts.

~10man just as viable as 25? guilds start shrinking or whittle down to only those ''really' wanting to raid, others who usually went out of comraderie start fading.

~LFD system? No need to form bonds and get to know people, a lot fewer "hanging out with buddies" when playing.

~40min queues? Sorry you rolled dps, try again?

~Long/hard heroics? just logging in to get your daily valor feels like a chore.

There's also a lot more little things but they all add up.

[Fordel]

It's none of that stuff except the harder heroics thing, which is just a part of the whole "We must make everything 'Meaningful' again!". Leveling has to matter, Mana has to matter, AE has to matter, blah blah blah.



We went up 5 levels, and became less capable, had more downtime and lost overall functionality and ability. We were made mere mortals again and that is just horse shit in this kind of game.

[Lakov_Sanite]

It may not be those things for you but a lot of people in my guild and on my server those reasons are exactly the case. None of them alone is a reason people quit but you start combining little reasons....they all add up.

[Ashamanchill]

I think your right, all those little design(tm) changes have added up. I strongly suspect, that instead of Cataclysm, they had of released WotLK 2: Arthas' Revenge!, with 5 new zones you had to grind for rep to get slightly upgraded loot, with 10 new heroics tuned at the ICC ones dropping slightly upgraded loot, with 3 new raids similar in style dropping, you guessed it, slightly upgraded loot, they would be doing much better right now.

But, I guess the devs were bored, or GhostCrawler has become a bit of a megalomaniac, so they decided to see how many things they could wrench around with, including the above mentioned by you.

[Setanta]

IWe went up 5 levels, and became less capable, had more downtime and lost overall functionality and ability. We were made mere mortals again and that is just horse shit in this kind of game.

To the extent that I levelled a main and 2 alts and CBF's leveling the rest of my 80s to 85 because there is no incentive whatsoever.

[Paelos]

But, I guess the devs were bored, or GhostCrawler has become a bit of a megalomaniac, so they decided to see how many things they could wrench around with, including the above mentioned by you.

I think they saw a genuine problem with the game and reacted to it in the completely wrong way. They were worried the game was posing no challenges, that healers were bored as hell spamming crap, and that people weren't even bothering to use abilities in their classes because there was no point. Add in the bloated spec trees, the mudflation, and the 15 minute heroics, and they honestly believed they would lose players due to boredom with a faceroller system.

None of those things were wrong. They were actually taking place. The reaction to them should have been to stratify the challenges further using heroic mode raiding. Putting loot on both 10 and 25s wasn't a bad idea, but making it so you can only choose one had been a total disaster. Making heroic raids harder is a great idea, but making normal raids so hard that the first bosses prove a ridiculous challenge for many previously casual groups wasn't. Nerfing healers and healing AE but keeping unavoidable raid wide damage is just ridiculous. Pick one. Either you want an AE game or you don't.

The heroic dungeon thing is just hubris. If their intent was really to just tell people to enjoy regulars forever, that guy should be fired.

[Arrrgh]

In reply to will the masses come back if/when they grow tired of Rift/whatevernewshiny it would have to be in 4.3 if WoW pulls its head out of its ass by then.

WoW screwed over the casuals and they left. 4.1 brings harder heroics when the casuals already wipe in the current heroics. 4.2 brings a new raid that won't be puggable since it's the fresh new one.

4.3 can either add a ton of new casual content (but WoW adds content at a glacial pace) or nerf the hell out of the difficult of everything so that raids are PUG friendly (like ICC with it's huge buff to players at the end) and casuals can easily buy epics with the points from the new easy mode heroics.

I suspect the casuals feel screwed out of their epics. People like their purplez. At the end of Lich King everyone was happily epiced out. Cata took away their toys, made their abilities feel weaker (see constant trade spam looking for raid healers), and forced them to grind more difficult content just to get blues.

[Nebu]

Seems to support my belief that MMO gamers prefer to be segregated using time as a metric rather than skill.  Were I a hardcore WoW player, I'd rejoice at the addition of content that challenged my play rather than stressing my playtime.  Anything that requires me to choose from a variety of abilities to overcome an obstacle is a welcome change.

[Ivanneth]

Death by paper cuts.

....

There's also a lot more little things but they all add up.

Rated Battlegrounds, too. When they first announced them I was very excited. When the final product was released it was nothing more than larger arena teams. It didn't make me quit the game, but what could have been something great turned out to just be "meh..."

[Paelos]

Seems to support my belief that MMO gamers prefer to be segregated using time as a metric rather than skill.  Were I a hardcore WoW player, I'd rejoice at the addition of content that challenged my play rather than stressing my playtime.  Anything that requires me to choose from a variety of abilities to overcome an obstacle is a welcome change.

From a gaming perspective, I agree. This is a good set of changes. They added more ways for players to distinguish themselves and shine when people maximize available resources. It's not about grinding forever, it's about simply being good at what you do. The current content rewards mental agility, awareness, reaction time, and critical assessment. When you get a in group of people with those skills, it can be a glorious romp through some of the greatest gaming ever. I suspect that's why the developers wen this way, because it created a better game.

However, from a business standpoint it's catastrophically stupid. As an example, Wow's audience would like Monopoly. It's extremely popular, not terribly complicated, and you can be of any real skill level to approach the game and have fun. One day, Monopoly decides it's been too simple for years, and changes it's rules to be like Settlers of Catan. Now it's a better, more strategic game that appeals to people who really enjoy board game depth, but you just fucked over about 90% of your players who liked the original game. Whenever you control a marketshare in the millions, you need to realize that a huge percentage your audience doesn't want to be highly challenged. You also need to realize that a combination of all the abilities I listed doesn't exist in 90% of the human populace. A shocking percentage have none. Most people have one or two. A good amount have three. Four is rare, and it takes all four to from every single person involved to work your way through all the current content. Usually the place where most people fall apart is reaction time and critical assessment. God knows how many healers just said "fuck it" because they couldn't handle those two in the new format.

[caladein]

Nerfing healers and healing AE but keeping unavoidable raid wide damage is just ridiculous. Pick one. Either you want an AE game or you don't.

Really, the only bullshit AOE this tier is Atramedes (if you aren't using the mod).  Everything else is just sort of "there" without being dangerous or has some skill component to it.

Nefarian's Crackle is a good example of the latter.  It simply will not kill anyone if you trigger it with the raid topped off, so the throughput challenge is only one of dealing with the aftermath quickly enough to not limit the DPS.  Cho'gall and Elemental Monstrosity are a bit different, there it's a question of asking your healers to hold enough in reserve throughout the fight (either by their own skill or the rest of the raid's) to go into another gear for a very short period of time.

[Paelos]

My point is there are better ways to test your raiders without damage that's "there" and doesn't serve any other purpose.

Unavoidable raid-wide damage is a copout mechanic.

[Merusk]

Re: Skillplay.

The problem is game devs are often adept at all the things listed.  People who are adept at something rarely understand how few have that same skill set or how many lack the ability or drive to develop it. 

[caladein]

My point is there are better ways to test your raiders without damage that's "there" and doesn't serve any other purpose.

Unavoidable raid-wide damage is a copout mechanic.

Raid-wide damage still serves a purpose even if by itself it's not dangerous by putting players at risk for other things (on Atramedes explicitly so).  It's pressure.  From my perspective, it's a good thing as long as that's not all I'm dealing with.  Having to switch between standard triage or a fixed assignment and AOE spells and the different options inside those is more fun than just playing whack-a-mole with tanks and whoever screwed up.

It also scales very well between raid sizes which is probably why we have more of it versus area-based or chaining stuff.

[Paelos]

I disagree. Putting one of the already most under-represented classes into the crucible for no reason is not good design. You want to test the skill of everyone, then raid wide avoidable damage through strategy is the way to go.

I have no problems with raid-wide damage as it serves it's place. I have a problem with it just existing with no possible player skill playing into it besides HEAL MOAR!

[Malakili]

Seems to support my belief that MMO gamers prefer to be segregated using time as a metric rather than skill.  Were I a hardcore WoW player, I'd rejoice at the addition of content that challenged my play rather than stressing my playtime.  Anything that requires me to choose from a variety of abilities to overcome an obstacle is a welcome change.

From a gaming perspective, I agree. This is a good set of changes. They added more ways for players to distinguish themselves and shine when people maximize available resources. It's not about grinding forever, it's about simply being good at what you do. The current content rewards mental agility, awareness, reaction time, and critical assessment. When you get a in group of people with those skills, it can be a glorious romp through some of the greatest gaming ever. I suspect that's why the developers wen this way, because it created a better game.

 Usually the place where most people fall apart is reaction time and critical assessment. God knows how many healers just said "fuck it" because they couldn't handle those two in the new format.

I had a group last week sometime where the healer thought they had a bug because they were going OOM so fast and their spells were costing too much.  In fact, he or she went as far as to relog to "fix" it.  I was trying to say that they had just leveled up and that in Cataclysm thats how healing was past level 83 or so, but they didn't seem to understand and just insisted their spells were supposed to cost only like 1200 mana (which perhaps is what they cost at the previous level?).  They ended up quitting the group and apologizing about the "bug."

I was doing Vortex Pinnacle yesterday and we wiped on the last boss the first time because 3/5 of the group hadn't done it before and didn't know to run into the triangle/zone when the guy made it.  Well, thats fine, they just didn't know but I was willing to give them a pass.  The next time, the hunter, who had JUST been told in depth what to do because he died the first time around (due to ignorance), just stood there and died AGAIN.   He said in /p "lol, I reacted too slowly."  To which our tank said ..... "it takes him like 15 seconds to cast......"  Its true, if you're reaction time is THAT slow, and your awareness that bad that you miss the GIANT YELLOW TEXT that pops up these days there is simply nothing I can do for you.

My point being that it seems like, especially for newer players, by which I mean people who either never did high end content or came in during wrath, just never built the skill set necessary for this kind of thinking during play (this kind of thinking = the 4 things you've listed).  I recall back when we were working through AQ40 our raid leader commented that Molten Core taught us how to use our abilities/manage threat etc, Black Wing Lair taught us how to use terrain and exploit line of sight, and AQ40 taught us the importance of situational awareness (which I would use to summarize your 4 qualities in a single term perhaps).  It seems to me like this kind of progression in learning the game is missing now, and therefore it might be more difficult for people who never had that "training" to step in.  I don't think that a lot of people are simply incapable of doing these things by some inherent set of traits.  But I do think that they aren't really trained well by Blizzard through a natural progression in end game content.   Of course, even if Blizzard did offer more avenues to learn these skills, there is a good chance a lot of people simply wouldn't care to spend the time learning, goodness knows some of those very early BWL bosses took my guild 4-6 weeks of 3-4 nights a week of wiping over and over again to learn when they were new, and you can' really expect people to go through that learning process.

[Ingmar]

As long as it is just one tool in the box it is fine, I think, it isn't like every single fight always has it.

[Slyfeind]

I left WoW because of too much insta-travel and the over-simplification of character building. Rift filled those needs nicely for me. I'm probably in the minority though. 

[caladein]

I on the other hand am looking forward to not needing a second person to summon to BWD in about a week .

[Rendakor]

Seems to support my belief that MMO gamers prefer to be segregated using time as a metric rather than skill.  Were I a hardcore WoW player, I'd rejoice at the addition of content that challenged my play rather than stressing my playtime.  Anything that requires me to choose from a variety of abilities to overcome an obstacle is a welcome change.

If the heroics were SHORTER than LK but harder I personally wouldn't have complained as much; taking something that used to take 15-45 minutes and making them take 30-120 and also turning the difficulty up considerably is what got under my skin.

[El Gallo]

If every dungeon had a non-heroic lvl 85 version that gave better loot than you can get through questing + a smallish number of justice points, the Cata dungeon problem would basically be solved.  The fact that there will not be regular modes of the 4.1 5-mans shows that they still have no clue.

The raid problem could mostly be handled by making regular mode raids a little easier and increasing the hardmode rewards. 

Also, get rid of the fucking shared lockouts between 10s and 25s.  Though that may just be my selfish POV.  During much of WotLK, I was in a very tight GDKP 25-man group that took out most hardmode raid content.  This let me get my hardcore ballet fix, while at the same time letting me do 10s with my casual guild of people I've gamed with since early EQ.  A couple are truly amazing players (much better than I am), but most of them keyboard turn in the rare event they realize turning is needed.  So now, I don't get to be the back-row chorister* at the Bolshoi (*whatever the ballet equivalent of an opera chorister is).  Instead, I spend my raid time dying for 2 hours because "when the girl dragon is on the ground, never snuggle unless DBM screams at you; when the boy dragon is on the ground, always snuggle unless DBM screams at you" is like asking them to 5-star Through the Fire and the Flames while blindfolded.  Aaaaghhh.  Anyway, where was I?

Another little thing: I wish Baradin Hold battles gave you currency that could be used to buy pvp gear outside the honor point system.  I really liked that part of Wintergrasp, and it gave me a strong incentive to play WG a lot.  For BH, winning gets me 2 tokens once a week.  I get 10-20 tokens every day from the pve dailies, so who cares about 2 per week.  The fact that BH itself isn't that fun doesn't help, of course. 

[Nebu]

If the heroics were SHORTER than LK but harder I personally wouldn't have complained as much; taking something that used to take 15-45 minutes and making them take 30-120 and also turning the difficulty up considerably is what got under my skin.

I understand that this is a significant problem and agree with you.  Make the heroics more of a challenge, yes.  Adding more trash mobs seems like an unnecessary grind. 

[El Gallo]

They could make heroic dungeons work like hardmode raids (i.e. same trash as normal, just harder bosses). At least that's how hardmodes used to work.

[Paelos]

They could make heroic dungeons work like hardmode raids (i.e. same trash as normal, just harder bosses). At least that's how hardmodes used to work.

Yep, back when they were fun.

[Margalis]

Re: Skillplay.

WOW is generally considered an "easy" game. 5 years in is probably not the best time to decide that what the game really needs is to be highly skill-based.

[Merusk]

I wasn't arguing it was.

[Sheepherder]

I disagree. Putting one of the already most under-represented classes into the crucible for no reason is not good design. You want to test the skill of everyone, then raid wide avoidable damage through strategy is the way to go.

I have no problems with raid-wide damage as it serves it's place. I have a problem with it just existing with no possible player skill playing into it besides HEAL MOAR!

I disagree, putting everyone on the spot with an avoidable AoE just dilutes the blame.  DPS will still get pissed that they weren't healed.  Healers will get pissed that the DPS are careless fucks.  Sounds like a recipe for guild drama.  You should never be able to confuse a "heal this" test and a "dodge this" test.  There should be "heal this" tests, however the pace Blizzard used in WotLK was entirely wrong.

EDIT:  A huge part of the problem is that they believe that healers should always be casting something, and they built mana regen, cast times, and efficiency for that.  Problem is, it was a terrible idea.  They should have dumped mana regen while casting almost entirely, slowed raid and tank damage right the fuck down, and buffed the hell out of in-combat spirit based regen while applying a diminishing return based on time regenerating mana (to encourage short mana breaks).

[Paelos]

There should be "heal this" tests

I think this expansion is proving that's a bad idea. I believe if healing was fun, that would be fine. It's not. And "harder" doesn't not necessarily have to be the only way to make it more interesting.

Squeezing your healer population is a recipe for disaster. It's a fragile scenario on a good day.

[Sheepherder]

I edited in a section after you posted.

The problem with healing is that Blizzard likes to pull shit like a "dodge this" and "heal everyone" back to back, then segue into "spam your efficiency heals," which is hard on people.

[caladein]

I don't think the answer to "there aren't enough healers" is to make healing have a high skill floor.

Long term, there are never going to be enough people who want to heal compared to the people that want to punch the dragon.  All that would happen is that you'd increase the churn rate as people try healing because it's an easy raid spot and then a lot of them drop it out of boredom.

[Fordel]

People didn't enjoy healing before either, it was just easier to put up with.


Almost no one actually enjoys healing, in any MMO. People enjoy the side-effects of being a healer; the guaranteed group spots or the feeling of being wanted and in demand.


The actual game play of being a healer? The number of people going "fuck yes, HEALING TIME" is very, very, very small. To the point where I am still amazed people make games WITH healers, instead of just making everyone self sufficient with everyone also having a small bit of "I'll save you dude" as well.