Mists of Pandaria discussion

[Bolty]

Again, check your numbers. B Team takes over, subscriptions go down.

Sup Quark, missed you 'round these parts. Too much EJ, too little LL!

I would say the declining numbers are due to a couple of things, some of which may be linked to this "B team" taking over.

• Sense of community / world lost. Server transfers changed WoW, obviously. Server communities used to be tighter; people knew each other, every server had its own feel, and players had to get along with others better or else risk ostracization. LFD (and upcoming LFR) groups are notoriously filled with a-holes because there's no need to be civil. Nobody leaves capital cities anymore because there just isn't a reason to sans Archaeology. If we want to go back to the old way, it means taking an hour to form a group and head to a dungeon, so what's the solution?
  
• Badges. The concept was sound: let newer players or alts have a means to gear up enough to tackle the latest raid content, in order to avoid the guild tier stratification, player sniping, and other pains brought about by vanilla/TBC's raid progression system. The downside is obvious: you annihilate the raid progression system, making only the very latest raid the relevant one. This greatly lowers the sense of achievement or progression, when every six months the whole system is reset and you're moving on to the next raid. WotLK's initial model of letting you use badges to gear up to the previous tier's item level was replaced by Cataclysm's model of letting you use badges to gear up to the current tier's item level. This greatly reduces the gear incentive to even bother raiding at all. I don't want to see the system go back to vanilla/TBC levels, but Cataclysm's model is pretty out of whack.
  
• PvP system. The PvP system is fairly sound - PvP should be based on skill, not gear, so getting gear is pretty trivial - but when you mix it into a PvE system, you have problems. We saw this in TBC, when new players / alts simply played PvP to gear up rather than start from the bottom of the PvE progression system. So PvE is forced to use a similar gearing model, or else it'll be ignored in favor of the far easier PvP gearing system. What's the solution here? It's not enough to make a stat (resilience) that's useless in PvE; the main stat / secondary stat gains on PvP gear will eventually be worth it enough to not bother with a PvE grind that takes 10x longer.
  

I don't think any of these are necessarily a "B team" issue. The Cataclysm raids have been pretty awesome, actually. The only real screw-up of the "B team" was Trial of the Crusader. ICC was great - hey, they finally put a boss in you have to "heal to death!" Heroic Ragnaros was the most difficult fight ever made in the game, and even after his 15% health and damage nerf, he's still one of the most difficult encounters out there. We're still fighting unique and interesting boss mechanics. "B team" may have designed these fights pretty well (well, except the overtuned wtfisBlizzardthinking heroic Ragnaros), but are getting orders from on high that not enough percentage of the playerbase is killing them, so nerf away.

My only beef is the total loss of progression feel. Every patch release is a gear reset, and it doesn't matter where you were in progression. BAM, you're on the next tier now. Get to it. Don't worry that you never got to a few bosses last tier. I don't have a solution to this one, because it also means that when the expansion wraps up, you're back to a large portion of the playerbase not getting to all the content, and eventually most players will just get PvP gear instead (like in TBC).