The Changing Face of World of Warcraft 328
Back in March Blizzard released patch 2.4 and significantly altered a good portion of the overall gameplay and provided a much more casual experience. Since then Blizzard has continued to make the game more approachable through new dungeons and removing attunements and other restrictions throughout the game. While this may open up a lot of new content to the masses and help the game's overall appeal, does this continuing trend promise to alienate the high-end players who thrive on new challenges? Should Blizzard care?
iIt has done so already. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:iIt has done so already. (Score:5, Informative)
Not for casual players (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to see new content, you cannot do so as a casual player. I was far beyond a casual player (2 RAIDs a week, several hours of farming) and still noticed, that i was falling behind on the content scale.
New instances were added faster i could complete them. Going through SSC and TK literally took months. The RAID had several crisis meetings, weaker players were encouraged to seek their fortune somewhere else. In the end, we made progress and were inside the black temple, but the fun was left behind. In April i quit after playing my Rogue for more then 2.500 hours.
Quitting hurts... as intended. But there was no choice. You can either do the easy instances again and again or try new content. There you need two things: equip and error-free playing. I loved the game, but it was becoming a second job. No need for that :-(.
The desertion rate is currently high. In the month after i quit, the RAID lost 4 more players with 3+ years under their epic belt. There are still new players coming in (still got 330$ for my Rogue), but WoW is loosing a lot of experienced players currently.
All the things done for casual players considered, the R&D of Bliizzard is still focussed on the power gamer (Nihilum&Co). 90% of all instanced content (SSC and higher) will only be seen by a small minoritry of all players (~15%).
Please don't missunderstand me: The game was fun till the last minute. But to continue and make progress it would have required more time of me, that i was prepared to give. The content for the casual player (daily quests, small isntances, etc) didn't appeal to me.
CU, martin
Re:Morons (Score:3, Informative)
Level to 70. Replace gear with low-level dungeon loot. Raid one thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Hooray, you beat the game, go outside.
It's now Raid one thing and get better loot. TURN IN BADGES to received from raiding or heroics or daily quests for loot as good as that found in the next two raiding zones.
Removing the attunements makes perfect sense. It's called mudflation which was coined to demonstrate that the demand for gear gets higher and higher. There is no purpose for the powergamer to go after crappy gear in an old raid
Imagine if it was required to be exalted with Hydraxian Waterlords (old Molten Core) in order to go to Sunwell plateau. That's why the attunements were removed... they stopped performing the purpose of keeping undergeared groups for exploiting low-hanging fruit of dungeons they have no business even looking at. Those groups are now geared up through badge loot.
Next Expansion Brings Big Changes (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not for casual players (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, many more people see high end raid content than you might think. Wowjutsu is a site that crawls the Armory and compiles stats and progress for guilds and servers, and it also breaks down the percentage of the population that sees raid instances and even specific bosses (it does this by looking at the gear worn by a player when it goes through the Armory). According to the latest run 57.5% of the WoW population has seen The Eye and 62.65% have seen Serpentshrine Caverns, though much less have seen the end bosses Lady Vashj and Kael'Thas. I've noticed that since Blizz removed attunement the percentage of the population that's set foot into Mount Hyjal and Black Temple has increased quite a bit.
Now, it does take a lot of dedication and effort to be successful at raiding and continually progress, at least 20+ hours per week would need to be spent just on raiding itself, not including time spent getting money and consumables. This is what my guild found out after having problems with the new 25 man raiding format when The Burning Crusade came out. We were a raiding guild that had been through AQ40 and were close to being ready for Naxx when TBC came out, but we had a lot of problems making the transition to a 25 man raid and spent a lot of months banging our head against Gruul and Mags. We then instituted new rules and a new guild rank for raiding and our progress took off shortly after that. We went from struggling with Gruul and Mags to whacking away at Illidan himself in 8 months. It may not be the fastest progression but it's enough to make us one of the top 4 horde raiding guilds on our server. On average our hardcore raiders spend 20+ hours a week on raiding, and probably another few hours getting money and consumables for raiding. We have required attendance for raids (3 times a week, but most people raid 5 times a week) and required stats for the different classes/specs. We aren't as hardcore as most successful raiding guilds, we allow non raiders and casual raiders into the guild, we have some class/specs that the hardcore guilds wouldn't think of bringing to a raid, and our stat requirements are probably lower than the other hardcore raiding guilds, but it's been working for us and we're all having a lot of fun.
Basically, if your guild wants to progress through the 25 man raids at a steady pace then you need to have discipline and dedication from 25+ people, and you need to be able to work as a team and not go at each others throats when you hit some adversity.
This is just part of a longer cycle in the game (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not for casual players (Score:3, Informative)
Re:New requirements a slap to raiders (Score:4, Informative)
1) You can't get a full set of T6 level gear from badges. Take cloth for example, there are three pieces of healing gear at the T6 iLevel. That's not even half the armor class restricted slots.
2) It isn't easy for casual players to get badges. They don't already have T6 geared people to destroy Heroics with, or to burn through Kara in under 2.5 hours. At the highest end of the casual spectrum, they might be able to muster one upgrade for themselves a month.
3) Experience counts. You can't ebay 25 T6 toons, wowwiki a strat, then waltz into BT and kill Illidan. Skipping progression like that is like skipping grades in school. You're either extremely smart or extremely stupid.
Re:iIt has done so already. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:iIt has done so already. (Score:5, Informative)
There is no evidence that Blizzard is suffering from an exodus of casual players. The opposite appears to be true.
That's actually what they did. (Score:2, Informative)