07-17-2006, 01:58 AM
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But it's not that I can't raid. It's that I simply do not want to. The game is over for me now. And so, I've not only cancelled, but I warn everyone I can about what the game is from 1-59, and what it becomes at 60. Some of my still-addicted friends are pained by this; they tell me $40 and the expansion will combine to become the ultimate panacea, fixing everything. I tell them it's not worth it. Do you honestly believe that this company, this husk of Blizzard, is going to give you equivalent gear, equal rewards for equal effort, for every playstyle? They're not. They're going to coerce you into buying a new product, and then 10 levels later, it's going to be back to Raid or Die.
They don't know what else to do. They've run the numbers many times. Low development cost, high player use is the way to go.
[...]
The odd thing is that they have tremendous economies of scale for development. If they *know* that you have 6 million customers for whatever they throw in WoW, they can afford to put in a lot of time and talent. Add ten developers at ten thousand a month apiece (a very good salary) and that's $100,000/mo -- 2% of their gross revenue from the game. And that content will be around for as long as WoW is around...
With that kind of resources available, they could afford to develop very radical alternatives. Or even slightly radical alternatives, like difficult randomized 5-man dungeons. "Can't be done" -- well yes it can, with good minds at work.
But they're very conservative, and the safe thing to do is to have tiny little increments in power from raiding.