08-14-2006, 06:59 PM
Quote:You seem to be conflating "less people" and "less difficult". While there might be an overall reduction of difficulty (I certainly hope not), that would be an entirely different issue.
They won't reduce the difficulty. While making everything easy results in a short-term surge (because easy content is accessible to everyone), it results in a long term drain across all segments of the population. Hardcore players leave because they're not getting challenged. Casual players leave because they're bored of it (they never like to run things more than a couple of times anyway). PvPers leave because everyone else is leaving. They need to keep the content hard.
That said, the dirty little secret that Blizzard refuses to acknowledge is that most people don't really want hard content. On the Raids and Dungeons board, which topics garner the most complaints? Number one is Lord Valthalak. Number two is the 45-minute Baron run. Neither of these are large raid content.
The casual player, and even some of the hardcore non-raider players, shy away from anything that's truly difficult. Daily there are posts about how Valthalak and the 45 minute Baron run are too hard, and the complaints centre around the fact that you can't walk in there and one-shot it blind. "I've tried it three times," the complaint goes, "Can't you all see that it's just too hard?" And raiders, who have experienced the only challenging content in this game so far (which is absolutely the fault of Blizzard, because even small groups should have hard content) say: "So?".
These threads aren't flamewars. Every time, helpful raiders provide constructive input. "Get a group of five people together and do some practice runs; it may take ten or twenty tries, but you'll get it." "Create some flasks - Supreme Power can increase your clearing speed." "Gather some more of your Dungeon 1 set and upgrade weak slots in your gear."
The response is horrified. "Ten times? I don't want to try anything that many times. Flasks? I shouldn't need to drink potions! Not everyone's an alchemist! What do you mean, I shouldn't be able to do it in random green items bought off the auction house?!"
Lowering the raid cap won't help these people. Far more stands in the way of their access to raid content than numbers.