June News/Discussion

[Sir_Die_alot]

Hi,
Maybe, maybe not. People will leave if they get bored, true, but they will also leave if they get frustrated. Hard core gamers are usually the first to jump onto a new game, and the first to run through new content. To make end game content hard enough to slow down the hard core gamers is to make it too frustrating hard for the casual players. And there are a *lot* more casual gamers than hard core. What it looks like, to me, is that Blizzard is trying to hold the casual player by reducing the (already low) player skill requirement and hold the hard core players by adding end game content. By introducing the new content at a high difficulty, they make it interesting to the hard core players who hit it first. About the time those players are 'done' with that content, Blizzard nerfs it so the casuals can play it. Seems to be working.

What I'd love to see is some realms that are like things were early on. I feel like I've missed out on most of the game, and that I'll never really get the WoW experience.

--Pete

I don't think we really disagree fully if at all. I'm all for early content to be tank and spank easy. But as you move along things should get more and more complicated, not all at once like they have done in TBC ala Mags Vasj and Kael. The casual guilds will still have their content to work through but they won't hit brick walls they will just take longer and longer to kill a boss but it will still feel like "progression". What we have now is the "hard core" gamers get semi stuck on fights like the current Vasj/Kael cockblocks, get them down, then fly through content again. Every guild on my server (pre attunement removal) had the first 2 bosss in MH down their first night there. A few had the first 3. This is often after a month or more of wiping on Vashj and Kael. Obviously this is not a linear progression of boss difficulty which causes progression to quickly start and stop. IMO this puts more strain on a guild than simply slowing down as progressivly harder fights would be. Again I use the example of the pre BC raids, for the most part the fights were pretty linear in difficulty. There were still some easy and/or gimmick fights, but by and large one boss was just a bit harder than the one before it. Not everyone saw Naxx pre BC but you can (and I have) gone back to see it now you just need like minded people to take with you. :)

Quick edit: The cockblocks also cause people to jump guilds, causing guilds to slow down even MORE in their progression. So not only do they cause the same frustration of not being able to see further content, they exacerbate it by forcing guilds to bring new people in before they can move beyond them. Before the attunement change this could halt a guild's progression permanently as new people needed to do the difficult attunement fights before they could attend high end raids. This was a terrible design and probably the dumbest thing Blizz has yet done in wow.