Cracks starting to show?

[Xanthippe]

I suspect that for every wow player who currently finds heroics fun, a great many more do not.

I further suspect that those who find heroics fun are not signing up for the random daily heroic.

[Rendakor]

I really only run them in full guild groups for the guild XP, since we otherwise don't get much XP when it's not raid night.

[Shrike]

As soon as my guild started getting a few raid kills i stopped setting foot in heroics.  There's like 3 wortwhile things in the vp vendor, i already have one and I'm on boss kill away from the second.

I wish I could say this, but I'm still stuck on the daily treadmill of daily heroics for that trickle of VP. I've got 10 days until I can finally get my 2pc T11. Guild is no help; quite the opposite at the moment. I waste more time on this shit. I look forward to the day I can stay the hell out of heroics, but I fear it's only going to be after a subscription cancellation.

Fundamentally, I just want to play the damned game. I want to see my character--whom I like a great deal--advance and grow. Problem is, I can't. Not without 40 min queues filled (apparently) with crack monkeys and textbook case morons. This last week hasn't been too bad (so far), but the one before about had me at wits end. 25% completetion rate. Hell, I thought I was in for another fail last night when the tank bailed on the second boss in GB because the miserable prick didn't get his fucking trinket. Then the rest of the group followed, just leaving me and one dps. We were like, "So...what now?" Then the group magically filled with competent people and we smoked the rest of the instance. That was timely, because it was 3:30am and I was looking at my daily rolling over into the next day.

Bottom line is this sort of shit is really pissing me off. I just want to have some fun, but I'm finding precious little of it at the moment. I've already started pulling alts out of the guild, but not much luck finding alternatives.

[Paelos]

If I had to put my finger on what is making this expansion a problem for Blizzard, it would be the unintended consequences of their actions on the social knitting of their community.

The "not fun" feeling stems from a lot of places with no certain reason as to why for people. The reality is that Blizzard accidently broke the social ties people had to the game by exposing the weaknesses of their average player. Example, healers are needed in all situations. They are not a popular class group as a whole. Instead of incentivizing them with cooler abilities and better ways to get stronger, they are directly tying healers to your ability to perform in a raid scenario. If you think about baseline encounters in Cata, having strong healers is a must that can't be outgeared by a tank or faster dps. I can choose a lesser tank by ability and put him on Magmaw and be fine. I can't do that with a healer.

The changes caused many healers who were already not really having that much fun doing it, but enjoyed the social tie, to become just completely frustrated. They then quit. The rest of the people trying to find groups stall out. Tanks end up running heroics until they end up with their items, then they quit doing them because they are just long and pointless. DPS continue to struggle to fill things out, and unless the tanks go back over and over their groups stall out there.

Then, you bring in the expectations gap installed by the L2P requirements for raids. People who weren't any issue before, and showed up all the time, now are a huge liability because they can't walk and chew gum fast enough.

[Xanthippe]

If I had to put my finger on what is making this expansion a problem for Blizzard, it would be the unintended consequences of their actions on the social knitting of their community.

The "not fun" feeling stems from a lot of places with no certain reason as to why for people. The reality is that Blizzard accidently broke the social ties people had to the game by exposing the weaknesses of their average player. Example, healers are needed in all situations. They are not a popular class group as a whole. Instead of incentivizing them with cooler abilities and better ways to get stronger, they are directly tying healers to your ability to perform in a raid scenario. If you think about baseline encounters in Cata, having strong healers is a must that can't be outgeared by a tank or faster dps. I can choose a lesser tank by ability and put him on Magmaw and be fine. I can't do that with a healer.

The changes caused many healers who were already not really having that much fun doing it, but enjoyed the social tie, to become just completely frustrated. They then quit. The rest of the people trying to find groups stall out. Tanks end up running heroics until they end up with their items, then they quit doing them because they are just long and pointless. DPS continue to struggle to fill things out, and unless the tanks go back over and over their groups stall out there.

Then, you bring in the expectations gap installed by the L2P requirements for raids. People who weren't any issue before, and showed up all the time, now are a huge liability because they can't walk and chew gum fast enough.

A huge part of it now is also the perception by the players that the devs' position - thanks to Ghostcrawler's brilliant post (that man should not be allowed to talk to community, that was a boner of epic proportions) - is that the players just have to L2P or wait a few months until they can have their fun back, when people are sufficiently geared due to upcoming patch content or whatever.

The main takeaway for me from Ghostcrawler's post was "this game is no longer for me."

Now, this isn't to say that there isn't a core audience having fun with WoW - there is.  But it's not as wide an audience as it used to be.

[Paelos]

Now, this isn't to say that there isn't a core audience having fun with WoW - there is.  But it's not as wide an audience as it used to be.

The main problem I'm having is that a lot of my fun is conditional on other people having fun. If they aren't having fun, I can't help that, but it does manage to shoot my fun right in the fucking foot.

[Ingmar]

Apart from the fact I'm no where *near* a hard core raider?

If you're doing hard modes that aren't gunship, you are part of the hardcore.

[Minvaren]

I poked my head into BRC reg last night on a whim - first Cata dungeon or raid I've been in.  The second boss fight with the beams made me realize that getting people to cooperate on that in heroic in the average PUG would be face-stabbingly horrible, coupled with the DPS requirements for the average PUG to pull it off.  The "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, INTERRUPT NOW" message from DBM was amusing, tho.

Also, what's with the "don't stand in the fire" mentality of all the new content?  I mean, yes, stand in teh fahr = bad.  Yes, you need to learn to not do it.  But I got it the first 50 times you did it to me in each zone, the next 100 times you did it in each zone just pissed me off.

Like others have mentioned, it feels like I'm not the target audience of the game any more.  And that once my subscription lapses in a week, that I'll be taking an extended vacation from it.

[caladein]

I further suspect that those who find heroics fun are not signing up for the random daily heroic.

That's pretty much all I do with my Hunter: solo queue for random Heroic, do some dailies, run Heroic.

My annoyances with Heroics almost entirely stem from people gaming queues.  Either DPS queuing as a tank and trying to pull a "Who's tanking guys?" or DPS queuing with a tank and then having the tank wipe the group on the first pull and leave (which more often than not causes the group to immediately fall apart anyway).  Bad players are just a hazard of being in a pick-up group.  People standing in fire is usually good for a laugh and if they're bad enough that you can't finish the instance with them, you don't have to go back to Orgrimmar to try and (fail to) get a replacement.

[Typhon]

If I had to put my finger on what is making this expansion a problem for Blizzard, it would be the unintended consequences of their actions on the social knitting of their community.

The "not fun" feeling stems from a lot of places with no certain reason as to why for people. The reality is that Blizzard accidently broke the social ties people had to the game by exposing the weaknesses of their average player. Example, healers are needed in all situations. They are not a popular class group as a whole. Instead of incentivizing them with cooler abilities and better ways to get stronger, they are directly tying healers to your ability to perform in a raid scenario. If you think about baseline encounters in Cata, having strong healers is a must that can't be outgeared by a tank or faster dps. I can choose a lesser tank by ability and put him on Magmaw and be fine. I can't do that with a healer.

The changes caused many healers who were already not really having that much fun doing it, but enjoyed the social tie, to become just completely frustrated. They then quit. The rest of the people trying to find groups stall out. Tanks end up running heroics until they end up with their items, then they quit doing them because they are just long and pointless. DPS continue to struggle to fill things out, and unless the tanks go back over and over their groups stall out there.

Then, you bring in the expectations gap installed by the L2P requirements for raids. People who weren't any issue before, and showed up all the time, now are a huge liability because they can't walk and chew gum fast enough.

Great analysis, I think you are spot on.

[caladein]

Also, what's with the "don't stand in the fire" mentality of all the new content?  I mean, yes, stand in teh fahr = bad.  Yes, you need to learn to not do it.  But I got it the first 50 times you did it to me in each zone, the next 100 times you did it in each zone just pissed me off.

There's only so many things you can throw at the generic "one tank, one healer, three damage dealer" group that aren't simple gear/throughput checks.  Homogenizing things like tank cooldowns, healer toolkits, interrupts, crowd control, and magic dispels has expanded the possibilities a bit these past few expansions.  At the same time, Blizzard still makes fights like pre-patch Beauty or Baron Ashbury that require too much of one or the other for some groups.  (Another example would be the need for burst AOE damage on Corborus, which still isn't spread around perfectly.)

Once you've exhausted those options, you're left with things independent of player class and that's mostly just movement and target selection: attack (or ignore) the adds and stand in (or out) of the fire/beam/bubble/swirly thing.

Edit: I misunderstood your post, but a frequent complaint about solo content is that it had no relation what you did in groups.  Now, while leveling you have things to not stand in, or kick, or dispel, and you've always been able to crowd control extra stuff you pulled.  I don't know how effective it is at actually training new players, but there you go.

[Paelos]

A mechanic I'm not a huge fan of in certain fights would be unavoidable raid damage from no where. Things like the flaming arrows on the 2nd GB boss, or the raid spit on Magmaw. There's really nothing you can do with that damage other than telling the healer to fucking deal. You did nothing wrong as a player, a raid, or anything else, and yet it's constantly ticking down your raid.

I much prefer a stand in the fire mentality, or a staggered cleave, or something that punishes bad play over simple mindless "fucking deal" damage all the time, even if it's not really large.

[Modern Angel]

I further suspect that those who find heroics fun are not signing up for the random daily heroic.

There's a circular argument going on which I find fascinating and I need to comment on, since I find it's cropping up in f13.

I am a casual* player. I have no time to look at the right specs or gear.
L2P guys are so mean! They're such jerks to casual players!
Nobody is signing up for the LFD systems because of all the casual players in the system slowing things down! I can't run dungeons!
I am a casual player. I have no time to look at the right specs or gear.

If I am a tank/healer who knows my shit, why would I jump in that queue with people who won't look up a minimum amount of how to play? And then the people who are proud, eager to admit that five minutes on EJ to learn about the latest class changes** is simply too much, wonder why the queues are so long. It's very strange to me that the expectation is either a game which caters to the lowest common denominator or putting tanks/healers through hell in order to drag the terrible people through when L2P is a small fraction of the effort those two require.

But I also don't play as of this week because the base mechanics are finally too old for me anymore. I think the age and the sudden, overt reversal of their "show don't tell" questing philosophy are the real problems. Dungeons can be tuned away, and they will be. But the complete change in philosophy when it comes to the day to day stuff and just how OLD the game feels now can't be so easily changed.


* There needs to be a distinction between "casual" and "bad". I mean it. The game is geared toward "casual" players more than ever now. It is not geared toward "bad" players, where it was much more forgiving of "bad" players before.

** I promise, it takes zero time to click on the Class Spec thread and read the first post. It's all you need.

[Rasix]

Good casual players have to play and put up with bad players more than anyone else.  It's not like we can magically will our way into a group with raiders playing their alts. 

[Modern Angel]

Except that raiding is pretty casual, too. You can (and frankly probably should since WoW is pretty explicitly a casual raiding game now) will yourself into a group with raiders playing their *mains*.

One of the things I wish I could dispel is the casual side of things notions about who raiders are and what you have to do to raid successfully. It's really very different than the expectations, expectations which were probably set six years ago.

[Rasix]

Thanks for talking to me like I'm a 5 year old.

[Minvaren]

Also, what's with the "don't stand in the fire" mentality of all the new content?  I mean, yes, stand in teh fahr = bad.  Yes, you need to learn to not do it.  But I got it the first 50 times you did it to me in each zone, the next 100 times you did it in each zone just pissed me off.

Edit: I misunderstood your post, but a frequent complaint about solo content is that it had no relation what you did in groups.  Now, while leveling you have things to not stand in, or kick, or dispel, and you've always been able to crowd control extra stuff you pulled.  I don't know how effective it is at actually training new players, but there you go.

I completely get and accept the fact that it's designed to train new players to not stand in the fire when getting to dungeons or raids - and agree that it was needed and is useful.  But the sheer frequency it was used in the expansion's solo content was annoying, not reinforcing.  I found myself going "OH NO NOT ANOTHER ONE" when I found a new mob that had a "don't stand in the fire" ability, and getting through Twilight Highlands for that reason alone felt like a chore.

[Ironwood]

Thanks for talking to me like I'm a 5 year old.

 

[Modern Angel]

Thanks for talking to me like I'm a 5 year old.

Welcome. I'll bear the hurt feelings in mind next time all you "casual" players revive the LFD horror stories thread where you laugh at the bads you played with before coming back here to talk about the mean raiders laughing at the bads they were playing with.

[Ingmar]

Thanks for talking to me like I'm a 5 year old.

Welcome. I'll bear the hurt feelings in mind next time all you "casual" players revive the LFD horror stories thread where you laugh at the bads you played with before coming back here to talk about the mean raiders laughing at the bads they were playing with.

Having trouble parsing that sentence, personally.

[Modern Angel]

I find it absurd to have a thread bitching about retards ruining your LFD groups and then getting mad about elitists telling you L2P in this thread.

We're all the LFD Retard to someone. All of us.

[Rasix]

John Madden?

[Malakili]

I had someone try to tell me the other day that they were a "20 hour per week casual player".  While I understand the distinctions you are making, casual does not in any way imply playing more than an hour or so per day.  Fuck, 20 hours is half a work week.  

Tough call.  I consider myself a casual gamer and I play an hour or two a few nights a week, but get up to 20 hrs with marathon weekend sessions.  Hardcore gamers will play 4+ hours daily.  

If you play nearly every day, spend more time reading forums about said game, and even more time working excel spreadsheets to maximize your toon, then you're hardcore (IMO)

Hardcore v. Casual is much more a mentality than a pure hours measure in my opinion, as you've noted.

If you just fuck around and don't really care how good you are, you really aren't "hardcore" to my mind.  One of my friends was unemployed for a while and was playing a LOAD of WoW, but he didn't care about playing well, he mostly solo'd, did a random dungeon rarely when he felt like it, didn't know rotations, or optimal specs, or anything.  He just liked wistfully spending his days in Azeroth.  To me, thats casual, even though he was probably logging 30+ hours a week when all was said and done.

[Lantyssa]

If you are raiding, you are not casual.  Maybe the Casual Raider that Paelos defined, but not a casual player.

And for real casual players, heroics are too much.  Needing to devote 2-3 hours of intense play to beat one dungeon is too much.  And they made the mistake with Wrath of letting casual players think Heroics are their endgame.

[Modern Angel]

See, I think that's the opposite. If you put in 30 hours a week, you are hardcore. If you don't know rotations or how to gear, basically not giving a shit, that's not casual; that's bad.

And there is absolutely casual raiding. If you put in two hours on a raid night that's not magically more hardcore than putting in four on flower picking and normal dungeons. Though I will agree with the mistake of letting anyone think Heroics are their endgame.

[Soulflame]

Right now, there isn't casual raiding, because you needed to be hardcore in order to gear up in order to raid.

I've been around a couple of guilds filled with decent raiders from last expansion, neither guild has even started raiding yet.  To me, that's a huge indictment of the game.

[Rendakor]

I consider my guild a casual raiding guild. Honestly once you get to the point where you can clear heroics with ease you can start raiding; anyone who hasn't "started" raiding yet is not doing so by their own design, which is not a fair indictment of the Cata raiding game.

[Fordel]

Casual people aren't bad, Casual people are people who put up with others being bad. 

[Modern Angel]

That's profound.

[Merusk]

I find it absurd to have a thread bitching about retards ruining your LFD groups and then getting mad about elitists telling you L2P in this thread.

We're all the LFD Retard to someone. All of us.

As the guy who started said thread, I'm totally justified in my bitching.  I don't need to l2p, I was doing just fine pulling 10k+ in my 333 gear and staying out of fires.   However, because 1) I'm not a total introvert xenophobe and 2) I was on a schedule 3 hours behind the majority of my guild (I'm EST they're PST) I made frequent use of the LFD tool.

I can stay out of the fire just fine but when others can't and it affects my enjoyment. Wiping time and time again is an exercise in frustration that meant I gave up doing something I liked, running random LFDs.

See, I AM hardcore and I'll admit it.  My definitions of hardcore follow Paelos', so even though my play times when clearing ICC and Ulduar were only about 10 hours a week I know I was doing stuff the majority wasn't.   That doesn't mean I don't give a fuck about the play experiences of the people not running them. This is not an either-or proposition where "Only" casual players are bitching.

The Devs dun fucked up. It's that simple. I don't see why you and Mal feel this need to carry their banner and say "no no, everything is fine."  It's clearly not.

[Ingmar]

At the same time I think the idea that OH GOD THIS IS THE TURNING POINT IT WILL NEVER BE GOOD AGAIN is a silly attitude to take, given Blizzard's track record of fixing the stuff they've screwed up before. Yeah they still don't totally get PVP, but everything else they've generally improved over time. This isn't Mythic we're talking about here, and in the end I really don't think Cataclysm will be TOA.

[Sjofn]

Casual people aren't bad, Casual people are people who put up with others being bad. 

You know ... that's a pretty good definition.

I stopped being that sort of casual sometime during WotLK. It's making me play WoW less, because I just ... don't want to give piggyback rides.

[Feverdream]

I'm hardcore, I guess.  My guild's well into the raiding content.  I never have to touch a heroic unless it's with a full guild group, and our alt groups are starting to easily blow through heroics as well.

I should be happy with the game, right?

I'm not.  Something just isn't fun any more...and it isn't me burning out on MMOs; I know myself well enough to know when that is or isn't happening.

I used to enjoy 'chaining' heroics with friends who were more casual players (or who were entirely new to the game) when they finally hit level 80 so that I could help them get gear.  Now just getting them through their normal dungeons is no walk in the park, and heroics, even with some of us carrying the newer folks (I play a Priest, and I am very conscious of trying to 'protect' more casual friends from the experience of healing Heroics before their gear is ideal) are often not all that much fun.  And they take too freaking long.  If things get a little rocky, I can end up spending my whole evening getting people through ONE heroic.  That just isn't all that enjoyable.

I used to enjoy BGs (didn't care much for arenas -- I did well in them but I don't like the mindset or implementation of 'PvP in a box' =P).  But I liked BGs; I even liked pugging BGs and met some great people that way.

I don't know if it's the fact that the rated BG system (which I had very high hopes for) is pulling the more competitive players away into their own groups, the fact that you earn honor at a trickle now, or something else, but the BGs are much more of a 'zerg this fast and queue up for the next one' mentality, while rated BGs are simply too competitive for my more PvP-casual friends.

I still enjoy it when my guild downs a boss for the first time; I am a sucker for team-based play where everyone is working together toward a goal.  But the rest of the game is just starting to feel, I don't know...hollow, somehow.  And while I like raiding, it's not all I want to do.  I would like to enjoy the rest of the game as well (BGs, crafting, questing, world PvP, whatever).  

I WILL say that the new leveling experience from 1-60 is absolutely stellar, and well worth doing.  I still need to do that on an Alliance character just to experience it (I play Horde).  But once those characters hit 85, there is no way in hell I am interested in doing what I need to do to get them geared either for raiding or for competitive PvP.

So even as a raider, I'm definitely not in the 'just l2p' group.  I don't think that's the issue at all, and cannot imagine how horrid it must be to try to deal with the random dungeon system at this point in the game.

[Malakili]

See, I think that's the opposite. If you put in 30 hours a week, you are hardcore. If you don't know rotations or how to gear, basically not giving a shit, that's not casual; that's bad.

And there is absolutely casual raiding. If you put in two hours on a raid night that's not magically more hardcore than putting in four on flower picking and normal dungeons. Though I will agree with the mistake of letting anyone think Heroics are their endgame.

I think it can help to try another context.  What if someone watches 30 hours of TV a week (not even really that much a stretch all things considered with the amount people watch these days), but just sort of passively watches.   Now what if someone else only watches 10 hours, but they are super familar with the actors, the names of the episodes, the plot lines of a variety of shots, and so forth.  To me, the second person is way more "hardcore" about their TV watching than the first person.

[Modern Angel]

I agree that they fucked up. I just disagree where the fuck up was. If Heroics in TBC were too hard (they were), in WLK they were too easy. Slap in a mid game introduction of the system, where lots of relevant gear was available across all tiers and player gear further trivialized already trivial content, and you have a completely sleep walking, brain dead end game. It required so little thought it was absurd; it wasn't playing a game, it was being kept busy and the amount of time people were happy just to zone out and be kept busy for hours on end frankly made me feel a little uncomfortable. Toss in LFD with the loot hose and you had a sudden zero accountability system. It was Lord of the Flies with stupider people.

So that was the expectation going into Cataclysm Heroics when they're tuned at a great midpoint between TBC too hard and WLK too easy. They were just challenging enough that there was a danger the first few weeks. Now they've been nerfed and should provide a wipefest to only the worst groups while being a non-snoozefest to everyone else. From a game mechanics standpoint, sorry... they're fine. Raids are just right, too. Surprisingly so, in fact, given how wildly off the tuning was in much of WLK. And if they scared away the tanks (I think healer tuning is, indeed, a bit off) because you have to push more than one button or plan CC every third pull then the expectations should never have been lowered so far in the first place. That post-LFD slice of nerfed Heroics, loot hose and one button tanking was an aberration, not the norm. It was a bit over one year anomaly in a game that had been FAR closer to Cataclysm than not throughout its history.

I'm sorry, I can't get behind nerfing an entire game down to the lowest common denominator. Honest to god, I really don't care who gets leet gear or who gets to see content. I mean it. That shit is stupid and I'm secure enough in my real life that I'm not worried about losing my e-peen to lesser players. But I don't beat every game I play. Sometimes I'm just not good enough to beat that last boss or clear that last stage. When I saw my friends playing they were universally playing it because they were hopelessly addicted, not because they were having fun. Now they're having more fun in less time than they were in WLK because the content is actually moderately engaging again. Just from a mental health standpoint I'd rather see WoW lose some subs while engaging brains than doubling their profits from zombies.