This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
This is my first post to wowhead. However, I feel quite strongly about many points in the comments here. I've written my own blog post on what I think Blizzard should do that probably can help mitigate the hardcores and the casual player. I consider myself a casual player. Only have been playing for a little over a year now and enjoyed the game for the most part. When Cataclysm came out, I felt after reading various posts that the game mechanics would make the game harder. Some people have enjoyed the challenge. However, I quit temporarily because I had some personal business to attend to. When I returned, I talked with a friend who considers himself a fairly hardcore raider. He mentioned about incredible frustration in terms of the end game heroics and how he and some others spent several hours trying to down a mob during a random. Another friend of mine (who played a Resto druid) pretty much quit after dealing with a similar experience. So that kinda turned me off from instance grinding.Fast forward a bit and I managed to level up a few toons to 85. I've done only two Cata instances. The first one wasn't so bad, but the other wasn't fun at all (seemed like the tank had some issues, but whatever). That kinda turned me further off from running Cata instances. Right now, I just don't have the time nor energy to really put into watching videos and becoming a theoretical expert. I want to just play the game and experience the different aspects of it as a casual gamer.That said, I think what Blizzard should have done was separate the realms on a difficulty setting. Kinda like what they've done with Starcraft and Diablo. Yes, WoW has Heroics, but the problem with that design is that you're essentially rewarding gear based on the skill of the player and preventing casual players from getting the opportunities to play end game content. There is no "learning difficulty setting" that allows n00bs like myself to learn how to raid properly against a boss or instance without dedicated effort. The closest thing I've seen in the game is how new Cata zones would introduce you to some concepts that will appear in raids or heroics. However, the problem that Blizzard is missing is that players need to learn how other people perform and understand each others' roles and build chemistry. The guild system partly solves this, but doesn't guarantee anything.Second, I think Blizzard should focus more on content rather than just game mechanics. It seems that too much effort is put into finding the right numbers with each class to achieve balance so they can raid or pvp. As a long time RPG gamer, I feel as though this game is more like after school street fighter rather than something that puts emphasis into storyline and immersion because of their focus. So people who might come to the game looking for an immersive experience might get bored after completing most of the basic content since what the end game boils down to is reaction, gear and dedication. I think part of being an MMORPG is kinda like the old AD&D Friday night gaming thing, where a bunch of friends gather together, share a pizza and hit some dungeon/quest. Here, you see more emphasis on competition, which, imo, eliminates the social aspects since there's a lot of pressure to do things the right way.Lastly, I really have to wonder what community Blizzard might be talking to at times too when they address issues. I think a lot of casual players probably don't voice their opinions as vocally so Blizzard might get only a slim snapshot of how people truly react in game. For instance, I get the feeling that the PTRs are better than most of the regular realms, which is where they might get a good portion of their feedback. From what I've heard, PTRs have really cool people who are interested and dedicated to the game. However, for someone like me, I ended up leaving my first realm (a PVP spot) for a PVE realm because I got really sick of world PVP, camping and just the general immaturity of players. For the most part, it's been better but that old realm nearly burnt me out towards the end. I wonder sometimes if Blizzard directly had to deal with those types of people whether or not they would change the way they designed their games.
I totally agree with you. I still have fun in getting achievements even if I already did it three times on other characters. Like tough ones (sea turtle and such things).
Additionally, my guild had a speculation on mage tanking where the frost spec would be beefed up to be an almost kiting-based tank style using all of their freeze abilities. If you were to increase the armor value from their shields and give them some sort of "Frozen Skin" armor that allowed blows to "glance off" (parry) of them it would work out. This would also give a unique tanking style that has not been seen in-game before.
A lot of things I agree with have been said. I've played WoW on and off since beta. I played the most during vanilla, and then quite a bit in BC. WOTLK I came to late, but ended up playing quite a bit of. CATA I played about three months of. I just recently finished my free "try out Firelands!" week. Honestly, it wasn't enough to convince me to come back.For me personally, the combination of factors leading to is more complex than simply the game getting older. A major part of it is that I have gotten older. When WoW came out, I was still a student. It was shiny and new, an awesome game, and I had the time to join a raid and see the 40-man content that so few people really got to see back then. It was a great social experience unlike anything I'd had before (the closest thing would have been Final Fantasy XI, then Counterstrike and Team Fortress Classic... but none of them really came close). The first time things started falling apart was during the debacle that was the original Naxxramas and the era of the first BGs. It wasn't that Naxx was hard, it was that it was buggy, laggy and, quite frankly, not fun. People forget that. Try Heigan's dance with incredible lag. Now with ten people you might have one person lag out and die, but back then 15 people failed out due to lag spikes and another ten from graphical issues leading to a crash. It was enough to make you not want to play anymore. (And don't get me started on the original C'thun. Hope you like wiping to a completely fabricated time block!) Then there was the other part of the game--PVP. I had tons of fun in WSG back then, but that's because I was a raider in tier 3 and everyone else was swiss cheese. the queue system was broken, causing players to abuse it and all the drama that comes with. And of course there were the 72-hour AV matches so many people think back on fondly that were really just horrendous.But so much of that got fixed early in BC that we came back. And we kept on keeping on for a lot of BC because it was still shiny and new. And because none of us had kids or serious jobs yet. As a smaller group by that time, we appreciated the addition of smaller raids like Kara and ZA. In my personal life, though, things got hectic. I was earning a post-graduate degree, in a long-term relationship, and hey, I had a PS3 and other games to play. So I would quit for months at a time (especially between Kara and ZA--didn't care about the 25-man raids).WOTLK was a turning point, I think. For people with a core group of gamers, it was heaven. And for casuals, it was pretty damn good too. There was a huge number of good, fairly fast 5-mans, and all the raids were accessible to ten- and twenty-five-man groups without restrictions. The game felt older by then, aged you might say, but the quests and quest mechanics were pretty fresh. The dungeons were interesting. The story was interesting! More than anything, BGs felt mature and remained fun and raids were probably the best of all time (excluding Naxx, which was always an abomination, in my opinion). It had a lot of staying power and I played it quite a bit more than I thought I would given the age of the game. Plus, it coincided with an era in my personal life where I had very little time outside work for a real social life. When I did have time, it was already later in the evening, or it was in the morning, et cetera. A game like WoW fits that schedule quite well, actually!Come CATA. It felt more like a continuation of WOTLK than anything new. The raids are fine, but they felt a bit less epic now. Perhaps after dungeons like Ulduar and ICC, it's hard to come back and be impressive again. The new zones were fun to me, actually, but there frankly weren't many of them, and I didn't feel there was much revolutionary to them. Phasing was awesome and new in WOTLK, and it's being used well now in CATA, but it's not shiny anymore. And I felt I had to complete them out, so by a couple months in, I had done every quest in the new zones. That said, CATA added a lot to the old world as well, and I played that out quite a bit. Of everything, I enjoyed that the most, actually. The old zones and the new storylines (particularly on Horde, in my opinion) are quite interesting. But raiding and PVP are feeling a bit stale to me.More than those factors though are personal factors. I just got married. I have a serious job. I don't have the time most of the things in a game like WoW take. I've gone from being in one of the top vanilla raid guilds and one of the top WOTLK strict 10 guilds to not having time enough to even level a character in this game. And while the new Darkmoon Faire thing looks fun, and Firelands is okay non-raid content, but not "wow"ing, it's just not enough. WoW doesn't really have enough bite-sized content to justify blowing $15 a month on it for me, in my opinion. Sure, I could throw down a WSG or Isle match from time to time, but not at that cost. Honestly, I'd love to keep playing WoW. But at this point I don't think it's worth the subscription fee. When I can spend 5$ for a game like Terraria and derive 40+ hours of entertainment from it in a month, I can't justify paying $15 for a month of WoW to play a BG I've played a hundred times and get enough honor for a headpiece. I'd love to see WoW go the route of F2P (or at least cheaper-to-play... say 5$/month) with microtransactions, honestly. I'd be fine with having to pay 4-5$ for a new 5-man dungeon or possibly a bit more for a whole raid. Is that unrealistic? Maybe. But people like me are the ones who buy those silly $25 mounts from their store. We're the people who actually buy mini-Ragnaros. Et cetera. They could sell people like me a ton of crazy crap through microtransactions. But right now I don't pay anything because I can't justify the monthly fee. So yeah, I'd like to see (and am anticipating) a change to the payment model in the coming year or so.Then again, it's fair to point out that once Diablo III is out, there's a lot lower chance I'd play WoW even if it were free. I mean, that game is going to be free to play, and its brand new and has more bite-sized content. Anyway, sorry for being Old Man Nostalgia and ranting. I guess my real point is that perhaps part of the waning is also due to a large swath of the customer base getting older and, frankly, growing out of WoW.
On the subject about the declining subscriptions, every changes in the game touches a player differently.Lots talk about the raids lockdown on 10 mans and 25 mans. For harcore raiders who did both every week, this change limited them a lot. For casual raiders, it doesn't affect them a lot but still touches them.For Player versus Player players, in my personal opinion, it feels like very new features are offered. One new BG, one new zone and the continuing arena seasons. But, the PvP only affects those just mentionned. We are talking about WORLD of WARcraft. I have once played a game where it was only PvP oriented (Knight Online for those that know it). The PvP in it had some affects on the rest of the game (A clan could battle against other clans for the zone of Delos and the winner would control and receives taxes from the purchases at Deloz and Moradons npcs). Or you have Perfect World which guilds could control zones through PvP wars (maximum 3 zones) and receive incomes taxes from purchases of all players at npcs in those zones. It would be very interesting if World of Warcraft would make PvP interact with the rest of the map in an innovative way like the games I just mentionned. Also, we are forgetting the very source of Warcraft, Alliance versus Horde. Now, the only time we see some sort of fun on that is when a group decides to raid an opposing faction capital. I don't see any groups forming and just running around and kill every Horde or Alliance just because they hate them.About Boss mechanics, I could say lots of complaints are astonishing as other games sometimes don't even have mechanics at all (no tank, no dps, just a bunch of players exchanging blows with a stupid monster that does the same attack over and over and over without even realizing there is a healer out there). But I do agree some of the fights repeat themselves. Just last week, I was studying the fight for Argaloth. Yes, it's basically the Brutallus fight with a little added twist but still almost the same. Or Sindragosa, it made me remember the Sapphiron fight a lot. And these mechanics that repeats themselves does bore some players that decides to try other things or other games.Or another thing I thought about recently: it was really fun with what happened after we killed the Lich King, it changed a few zones (Western Plaguelands for example). What is sad is, it doesn't feel as it was a direct results of our efforts. There are players which does and have fun at the same time doing all the quest. The phasing in Icecrown zone was awesome but it's the only real phasing I saw so far in World of Warcraft. It would be fun if in let's say for example Stranglethorn, we could definitely win our fight against the Trolls tribes and retake Stranglethorn.All these affects players differently. Some will adapt, others will find a new place to have their fun. But ain't that part of the fun :-)
The one thing I can't stand about Cataclysm, is that people spend most of their time in SW/Org, I don't like that. I want to have a reason to go to the new zones, or the old zone. All i do is go to Hyjal, do Molten Front (best dailies I've seen, joined shortly before WOTLK), hearth, log out, level alts. While leveling alts is fun, it gets extremely boring once you go to outlands, because while they may have changed the old world, they didn't do anything to BC/WOTLK content, making it dull by comparison. I do admit that the BC raids were my favorite, having the most lore and the greatest aesthetics, but the new raids are pretty poor. Firelands looks cool though.That is what I feel Cata failed most at.
A lot of these points are good. But I think for me, the biggest mark against cataclysm isn't so much the content itself, but the way Blizzard enabled the player base to ignore each other.In Classic, BC, and even Wrath, PuGs were a big way of meeting the people on your server. In fact most of the people that came to be the regular raiders in my guild were originally people I met in PuGs. And even aside from that you got to see regular faces posting "LFG" in trade chat. You knew who to join and who not to.While the Dungeon Finder inherently made it easier to join dungeon groups, it not only killed off the primary means of finding GOOD groups, it killed WoW's community as a whole.I can't even do a 5-man anymore without someone typing the words "lulz, you're horrible, scrub" to someone else in the group. Back in BC, people would HELP. They'd give advice or tips on the class. And people would take that advice to heart.Cata enabled people to solo things a little too much, and cut off the only means a lot of people had to see the raids. Not because of difficulty, but because they catered to the people who make the community a harsh mistress. Guilds are now almost exclusive, and people are afraid to leave higher level guilds, even though they hate the members.It's the horrible community that makes Cata bad. and Blizzard just enables it.