Cataclysm

[Miasma]

Good job with the personal attack, though.  Shows real maturity.

Yeah I got a little smarmy there, I apologize.

[Nevermore]

Accepted.  Let's move on from that idiot Ghostcrawler now.

[Rendakor]

The fact that you go into a heroic raid at all with the prospect of success pretty much puts you into the catagory that won't understand what I'm talking about. Nor will I understand what you're talking about.

This here isn't even entirely true. I like heroic raiding; fighting challenging shit with my friends is enjoyable. However, I hated the Cata 5 mans because most of the time I was doing dungeons either solo or duo queued and difficult content with PUGs is not fun. And that's without getting into class-based CC limitations (this zone is all elementals but our only CCers are rogue/mage, etc.) which made things even worse.

[Azazel]

(and so you don't feel like daily quests are synonymous with 'boring' or 'grind'). We want to make the Pandaria factions interesting. We want Exalted to be something you earn for bragging rights, not something every player has. We are adding a lot of mounts that will be hard to get

I read the post-mortem the other day, when everyone else did. I didn't think much of this bit at the time, but it popped out at me last night when I was checking my darkmoon rep level (as it'd just gone up).

They may be backing off on dungeon difficulty, after being slapped on the wrist, but clearly those stupid fuckers still just don't get it.

[Azuredream]

Who is clamoring for more difficult rep grinds so I can shoot them?

[Fordel]

I don't remember if I said this in this thread, or a different one... but:


Blizzard has ALWAYS thought this. Blizzard never intended to make a casual MMO, ever. They intended to make a hardcore MMO that trained casual players to BE hardcore. It's been the exact same cycle since vanilla to present day. They fully expected the people who didn't want to raid/grind to hit level 60, then quit/go do something else.

This is why they are constantly, CONSTANTLY surprised that the majority of their player base wants more easy and fun shit to DO. It's why it took them six god damn YEARS to finally put in an appearance tab system and only after they lost a few million subs!


Never mind the expansions, just look at how the content came in Vanilla. Look at how it was directed/released/funneled.

[Zetor]

Yea, Tigole and Furor - two of the higher-up WOW designers back in vanilla - were from FOH and Legacy of Steel [sp?]. I never played EQ, but I understand those were like the uberguildiest among all the uberguilds. And then there was Kalgan who worked on some UO expansion that made everyone stabby and/or quit.

(A bit offtopic, but wasn't Furor the dude who designed most of the Duskwood quests in vanilla?)

[Setanta]

Ok, I want you to imagine something. Imagine you've been involved in a sports team for 5 years. It's a casual league for people down at the YMCA, and it's mostly just a bunch of late-20s-early-30s people who like to get together and kick the ball around against each other. Then, the head of you league sends out an email saying that he's gotten several complaints that the league isn't competitive enough, and he just happens to be on the team that always takes the league way too seriously. They win most of the championships because they recruit for it, while the rest just play with friends.

So, this leader opens the door for semi-pro teams to join your friends and family league, and he requires a skills test in order to form a team. After 5 years, the people on your team, of which you are a leader, are openly appauled. Some are fat, some are slow, and some simply don't know how to play very well. However, you've always had fun with them win or lose, and you enjoy shooting the shit with them before or after games. After all, they are a social part of your day as well. Now, this uppity shit that's leading the league is driving them out, and your friends would rather leave.

I don't normally buy into analogies bu Blizzard should put this post in massive letters on their wall and make every staff member read it before they are allowed to make decisions. It sums up exactly the way in which a company listened to a vocal minority whose subscriptions couldn't keep the company in coke and hookers like they were accustomed to yet decided to piss off infinitely more players but not heeding the signs. Monumental cockup of :CCP: proportions.

WoW isn't even close to dead but there are plenty of other MMO and non-MMO options and Blizzard needs to realise that people will walk to the next game if they aren't having fun.

[Setanta]

http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/scroll-of-resurrection-faq

Auto-80?  Wow (for WoW).  They must actually be hurting.

This makes me sad. Auto 80 means you miss out on the best expansion (WotLK). Now if they had some way of skipping TBC (dated) and Cata (rails) but level 80 to 85 in LK content (or Vanilla new quests), now that might be more interesting.

[FieryBalrog]

A lot of you are drastically overstating the impact that hard heroics had on the game. Correlation is not causation. WoW is 7 and a half years old at this point and it's a miracle they've maintained their sub base at all at this point. 7 and a half years into any other MMOs life and the game is in free fall, especially if it hasn't gone free to play.

Consider this. Cata end-game was easier to get into than both Vanilla and BC, yet Vanilla and BC saw absolutely meteoric growth. Wrath didn't put WoW on the map. Vanilla and BC did. With their hardcore 40 man raids full of consumable grinding, and the nightmarish heroics where you wiped for hours on trash (I can barely remember any BC heroic bosses, but oh GOD I remember the trash). And you didn't have dungeon finder to find you an automatic replacement even if your queue is long as a DPS.

You couldn't even step foot in the premiere end game content of these expansions if you were casual at all. I never saw Illidan, and I didn't even know C'thun or Naxx existed despite being subbed at those times. Yet subs kept shooting up over a span of 4 years, far longer than it takes even the most casual of casuals to level to max. I'm not saying the one is the cause of the other. In fact that's exactly my point.

There is a lot more to this than difficult 5 man heroics somehow being a decision so terrible it busted the game wide open. Frankly difficult 5 man heroics were a great decision from my perspective, because even if they lead to somewhat lower subs I don't give that much of a fuck about Blizzard's sub numbers, I give more of a fuck about having content that I like to do. Me, I would rather do 1 good dungeon where I have to pull out all the stops and strategize and all that in 3 hours than run 10 faceroll dungeons where I literally spam my H key to grind out points. The idea that there's something inferior about this boggles my mind.

Sure, they may not be for everyone, I don't give a fuck. If I wanted to play something because everyone was doing it there are games even bigger than WoW. I could go click on baby cows in Farmville.

[apocrypha]

I get the hate

No, see, here's the thing, for you and other people who say "I don't get the GC hate"

There's no point repeating my point, it clearly wasn't read the first time.

[Zetor]

I can only speak for myself and my guild of casuals/bads/non-raiders (choose your favorite adjective), but we basically played WOW like this:
- vanilla: from start until we hit 60 (several months), at which point many of us quit. Returned briefly for ZG, and returned in force for the tier0.5 questline (which we completed on multiple characters each). Most of us who played didn't really enjoy the "endgame", a handful of us PVP'd - it wasn't very good.
- BC: from start until we hit the cap, and then we PVP'd a fair bit (imo the first three seasons of BC was the PVP high-point of WOW, not that pvp in a diku is 'good' to begin with). We did Kara with another guild, but it got boring after a few months so we pretty much all quit. Some people occasionally trickled back to check out the daily quest stuff and magister's terrace.
- WOTLK: we actually stayed sub almost the whole way, only taking a break between hitting 80 the first time on our chars and before LFD was implemented. Still no raiding, a few of us pvp'd and went on pug raids.
- Cata: a lot of us started new characters for 1-60 (which IS good content imo, btw), but most of us got a main to 85 (1 month or so), ran a few dungeons and quit. We had maybe 2-3 people occasionally reactivating to do stuff like heroics-trollroics-LFR (I was one of them). Currently nobody feels like returning until MOP, though the scroll of resurrection thing wil change that.

[Merusk]

Vanilla and BC only put the game on the map for MMO Gamers.  Once it hit that mass then casuals and farmville types began to check it out because it was on TV, many of their friends were talking about it and it was becoming culturally relevant to a larger demographic than a subset of gamers.   

Some of those folks stuck around because it was accessible and didn't punish them for being bad - and let's face it many of them were because they see games as a distraction not a hobby to focus on.   Why's Farmville so huge? Because it's a distraction that takes little thought to do.  Unfortunately for money hats those games don't have stickiness of a hobby, so there's a balance they need to find to chase the filthy lucre while also keeping the more dedicated subbed.

If you shut the bads completely out of any segment, they'll resent it and quit.  These are not the gamers of yesteryear, used to and proud of being the outcast so they'll accept being told "This isn't for you, you're not hardcore enough.  Go play with this other part and leave this to the 'real gamers'."  Blizzard doesn't get to make that statement if they want their money.  This is a business choice, not a gaming philosophy choice.  You either want the casuals/ bads and their money or you don't.   If you do, and they're the bulk of your playerbase, then the bulk of your funds need to be focused on providing for them and THEN the hobbist who'll be there anyway because there's no other choice.

[Fabricated]

Sure, they may not be for everyone, I don't give a fuck. If I wanted to play something because everyone was doing it there are games even bigger than WoW. I could go click on baby cows in Farmville.

Vanguard is thattaway. Knock yourself out.

[Paelos]

1 - Consider this. Cata end-game was easier to get into than both Vanilla and BC, yet Vanilla and BC saw absolutely meteoric growth. Wrath didn't put WoW on the map.

2 - There is a lot more to this than difficult 5 man heroics somehow being a decision so terrible it busted the game wide open. Frankly difficult 5 man heroics were a great decision from my perspective, because even if they lead to somewhat lower subs I don't give that much of a fuck about Blizzard's sub numbers, I give more of a fuck about having content that I like to do.

I'll address your post in two parts. The first condition. Yes, TBC put it on the map. The growth of the game from when TBC was released to the year end was over 60%. The idea of Outland and walking through the portal was iconic. However, there was backlash to TBC and numbers fluctuated too much for Blizzard's tastes. That's why they made so many changes to TBC mid-stream. It wasn't until Wrath that Blizzard had a solid hold on it's numbers and had increased their MMORPG revenues to their all-time highs, over 22% higher than anything seen with TBC. While Wrath didn't put WoW on the map, it was the very definition of the best of the best that WoW has EVER achieved in terms of numbers, revenue, and overall customer satisfaction of the product.

As to the second part, you mention meteoric growth as a reason for Vanilla and BC were good things, yet in the next point you say your don't give much of a fuck about sub numbers. See, here's my problem with people that make these statements. You are just one hypocritical guy who wants to use numbers when they suit you. The "I like what I like and fuck you" mentality gets you standing alone on your own server fiddling while Rome burns. Also, just because you like a decision doesn't make it great. In fact, from the only standpoint that Blizzard cares about ($$$), it was a huge clusterfuck. So, you're just going to have to come to terms with that fact that you're wrong, or leave the game to chase something else. Because I like what I like as well, and there are about 9M players like me.

[Pantastic]

If you're talking about the 'explosive growth' of Vanilla and BC, how much of that growth was actually people in hard content? I mean, only something like 1% of players even saw the last raid boss in Vanilla, and it was a bit higher in BC but still not common, even after the plethora of nerfs that came pre-WOLK. Vanilla had a lot of people who simply didn't raid, or only poked into MC after it was old hat. BC had a ton of people that ran Karazhan and heroics over and over for badges but never stepped foot into the actual raids, and only did those after several rounds of nerfs (360 cleaves with no warning are good design) and gear upgrades. And I never saw much in the way of blog posts, reviews, and testimonials going on about how great raiding or BC heroics were - things like 'Running Van Cleef was so awseome' were all over the place, 'I love Onyxia' not so much.

I really think wow's explosive growth happened in spite of the difficult content, not because of it.

[Ironwood]

Speaking from a strictly casual point of view, Karazhan was where they got it right.  Hasn't been that 'right' until LFRetards came along recently.

[Paelos]

I really think wow's explosive growth happened in spite of the difficult content, not because of it.

You would be correct. Wow's growth patterns seem to follow the curve of content becoming more accessible, and declined immediately when that access stopped. Let's not forget that one of the reasons TBC was so popular was it decreased raids from 40 players to 25, and it included the 10 man raid for Karazhan. They were moving away from the "numbers = win" mentality of vanilla already in what is seen as one of the more hardcore expansions.

[Merusk]

Speaking from a strictly casual point of view, Karazhan was where they got it right.  Hasn't been that 'right' until LFRetards came along recently.

Pre or Post trash nerf?  Post nerf you're totally right.  Pre? My god, what a slog that was.

[Rokal]

Speaking from a strictly casual point of view, Karazhan was where they got it right.  Hasn't been that 'right' until LFRetards came along recently.

From a 'casual point of view' Kara was long, had tons of trash, had quite a few tough bosses where 1-2 people could fuck your group over, and wasn't something you could clear in 2-hours with a game-formed PuG on the first day of the patch that added it. It would be rejected wholly by the most of this forum if released today.

Difficulty had little to do with the popularity of the game in TBC and Wrath. The game was still riding a wave of momentum, still acquiring new customers. Things like "Make Love not Warcraft" had a much bigger impact on attracting new customers to the game than trends of end-game balance. The game has had more previous subscribers than it currently has active subscribers.

Cata, for whatever reason, completely failed to attract a significant amount of new subscribers despite the new 1-60. The game probably isn't especially appealing to new players at this point, with high-quality F2P games out there that don't require a monthly fee, dated graphics, and a high box-cost to start playing the most recent expansion and everything it requires.

[Ingmar]

Speaking from a strictly casual point of view, Karazhan was where they got it right.  Hasn't been that 'right' until LFRetards came along recently.

Pre or Post trash nerf?  Post nerf you're totally right.  Pre? My god, what a slog that was.

For the people Ironwood is talking about (or well, for us at least), they weren't ready to even go to Kara until well after the nerf.

[Rasix]

Ohh how I loved playing with idiots that could barely do Opera.  Almost every fight other than horseman/chess was a chore with casuals.  

edit: Man, you should have seen this group do Heigan in Naxx.  TORTURE (25 man was something beyond torture, I don't even think the Cthulhu would have a name for something so horrifying).  Some would flat out refuse to do it.  Although overall, 10 man Naxx was tuned a little better for us. 

[Paelos]

Difficulty had little to do with the popularity of the game in TBC and Wrath.

Prove it. The problem I have with most of your views, Rokal, is that so little of them are backed up by actual facts. The majority of what you purport as truth about the game comes from this bizarrely warped POV that has been proven time and again to be counterproductive to both business and growth.

[Merusk]

Speaking from a strictly casual point of view, Karazhan was where they got it right.  Hasn't been that 'right' until LFRetards came along recently.

Pre or Post trash nerf?  Post nerf you're totally right.  Pre? My god, what a slog that was.

For the people Ironwood is talking about (or well, for us at least), they weren't ready to even go to Kara until well after the nerf.

Good point.  Did you see it pre-nerf?

For those who didn't.  Imagine the mob density of the Library through the entire instance, and the library with about 25% more mobs.

At least your faction went up a lot quicker.  

Speaking from a strictly casual point of view, Karazhan was where they got it right.  Hasn't been that 'right' until LFRetards came along recently.

From a 'casual point of view' Kara was long, had tons of trash, had quite a few tough bosses where 1-2 people could fuck your group over, and wasn't something you could clear in 2-hours with a game-formed PuG on the first day of the patch that added it. It would be rejected wholly by the most of this forum if released today.

Nope, raids are ok if they save and can be split-up and take a little while longer.  Nobody bitches about the raids, just the failures we take in to them.  It's the dungeons we're bitching about the most.  Way to continue to be obtuse about it.

[Ironwood]

Speaking from a strictly casual point of view, Karazhan was where they got it right.  Hasn't been that 'right' until LFRetards came along recently.

Pre or Post trash nerf?  Post nerf you're totally right.  Pre? My god, what a slog that was.

Both, we didn't actually mind the trash that much because it was annoying but not tits-rip hard.

But it was better nerfed.

[Ironwood]

Speaking from a strictly casual point of view, Karazhan was where they got it right.  Hasn't been that 'right' until LFRetards came along recently.

From a 'casual point of view' Kara was long, had tons of trash, had quite a few tough bosses where 1-2 people could fuck your group over, and wasn't something you could clear in 2-hours with a game-formed PuG on the first day of the patch that added it. It would be rejected wholly by the most of this forum if released today.

Difficulty had little to do with the popularity of the game in TBC and Wrath. The game was still riding a wave of momentum, still acquiring new customers. Things like "Make Love not Warcraft" had a much bigger impact on attracting new customers to the game than trends of end-game balance. The game has had more previous subscribers than it currently has active subscribers.

Cata, for whatever reason, completely failed to attract a significant amount of new subscribers despite the new 1-60. The game probably isn't especially appealing to new players at this point, with high-quality F2P games out there that don't require a monthly fee, dated graphics, and a high box-cost to start playing the most recent expansion and everything it requires.

Horseshit.  This is another wondrous post about YOUR opinion.  Which is fine, since I'm also just giving mine, but at least I ain't saying it's graven in tablets of fucking stone.

[Rokal]

Difficulty had little to do with the popularity of the game in TBC and Wrath.

Prove it. The problem I have with most of your views, Rokal, is that so little of them are backed up by actual facts. The majority of what you purport as truth about the game comes from this bizarrely warped POV that has been proven time and again to be counterproductive to both business and growth.

Or you could prove that TBC/Wrath subscription highs were due to higher retention of subscriptions due to lower difficulty since you're the one who originally made the argument, instead of a more accessible low-level game and a constant stream of new subscribers. If you think the balance of Naxx had a bigger impact on subscriptions than something like Make Love not Warcraft which was seen by millions and millions of potential new customers, you're a fool. The amount of resources they poured into a new 1-60 shows just how important new subscriptions have been to Blizzard. They also announced they now had more past-subscribers than current, meaning that the game subscription numbers have been propped up by 24 million + subscribers cycling through those doors over the past 7 years.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying "Harder = more subs!". I'm saying that the success of TBC or Wrath had little to do with end-game difficulty, just as the success of Vanilla had almost nothing to do with the balance of Scholomance.

You say my arguments aren't backed by fact when I respond to your non-factual post. Meanwhile your crazy Ghost-crawler conspiracy rants aren't backed by anything besides raw nerd rage.  

Nope, raids are ok if they save and can be split-up and take a little while longer.  Nobody bitches about the raids, just the failures we take in to them.  It's the dungeons we're bitching about the most.  Way to continue to be obtuse about it.

T11 was three separate smaller raids that guilds could tackle in any order, and come back later to resume. Casual players rejected it. Time is a premium, and that means time spent clearing excessive trash or walking back after the 20th Aran wipe.

Kara would not be a successful raid today unless the difficulty was toned way down, most of the trash was removed, and the raid was cut up into much smaller chunks. The Kara & Nightbane attunement also wouldn't have flown in 2012.

[Merusk]

Trash is trash and yes, there has always been too goddamn much of it.   Trash isn't the point of shit.  3-6 pulls max before a boss is optimal.  Anything more than that is just a time killer meant to slow pacing.  Fuck that noise.

No, attunements wouldn't fly today.  I don't recall saying they would, you just brought it up in that last statement as if they're an integral part of the dungeon.  They aren't.  They are also time killers meant to slow pacing and utter bullshit.    Want optional bosses? Do it the way Uldum did with bosses unlocked by killing others and "hardmode" kill methods for achieves vs. EZmode.

The fights themselves?  No, they were fine, as seen by the fact that many raids since have used similar mechanics.. including the beam-swap.

[Zetor]

Speaking from a strictly casual point of view, Karazhan was where they got it right.  Hasn't been that 'right' until LFRetards came along recently.

From a 'casual point of view' Kara was long, had tons of trash, had quite a few tough bosses where 1-2 people could fuck your group over, and wasn't something you could clear in 2-hours with a game-formed PuG on the first day of the patch that added it. It would be rejected wholly by the most of this forum if released today.

Just as a note, Karazhan was awesome for us (small guild of non-raiders) because we actually had enough people to run it. Even though it was a trash-filled slog (we ran it before the nerfs) that needed two nights per week to clear for our rag-tag group, we had a decent amount of fun.... the first 5-6 times we did it. After that people started to get fed up with it and enthusiasm petered off. Our group was also weird in that we had zero problems with positioning/execution fights (like netherspite), but dps races (moroes...) screwed us really really badly. People weren't that good with spamming them buttons, is all.

Still, it was the only raid content we ever did as a guild, so I guess that's something!

edit: that said, fuck attunements... and I don't mean the most popular misspelling of the huntsman's name. 

[Rokal]

As a casual player, yeah, Karazhan isn't an example of 'where they got it right'. It was "where they started going in the right direction" but the dungeon would be rejected in 2012 without substantial edits. The fact that there was hours and hours worth of attunements before you could even step instead was a large part of that raid for casual players reaching level 70 and wanting to check it out. It's probably the most trash-heavy raid in the game and lots of the trash posed a real threat to your group. The ice-skeletons, the actors before Opera, the ghosts, wyrms, on and on and on.

I don't think the fights would be fine at this point either. People would have complained Prince had too much RNG and was too punishing on slow dispels. Aran would be a nightmare. Chess would have just been another vehicle fight for people to dump on. Your nostalgia for Karazhan is giving you an inaccurate picture of how good the raid actually was, and how it would hold up in 2012 especially to the LFR community.

[luckton]

 

[Ingmar]

That makes it seem way more complicated than it actually was. Having to do a 5 man dungeon once that you were already going to do is not really "OH NOES ATTUNEMENT". The extra stuff about doing raids in order, yeah that was dumb.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I think attunement is fine if it's part of normal progression. in that doing all the quests you'd normally have to do to level up would unlock certain dungeons.

[Rokal]

It's still a large barrier to entry. For Kara, that was 7 dungeons you had to run before you could join your guild for a raid. You needed a flying mount to get to the TK dungeons, which was pretty expensive at that point, unless you had a warlock summon you. Some of those dungeons were also fairly unpopular. I still remember having problems finding people to run Durnhold and Dark Portal every time I needed to attune an alt. This would be minimized thanks to LFD and queuing for specific dungeons, but there is no way people would be happy if Kara launched in 2012 with that attunement requirement. The Nightbane attunement was even worse.

Even cutting attunements entirely out of the equation, the raid wasn't casual friendly by today's standards.

[luckton]

That makes it seem way more complicated than it actually was. Having to do a 5 man dungeon once that you were already going to do is not really "OH NOES ATTUNEMENT". The extra stuff about doing raids in order, yeah that was dumb.

Keep in mind that it wasn't just running a dungeon you were already running.  There was a very vast difference between normal and heroics back in the BC day; almost as if they were 5-man raids in it of themselves.  And unlike Wrath and Cata, they never got easier.