(10-26-2011, 04:09 PM)Lissa Wrote: You're totally missing it. I understand mistakes are going to be made, but drastic mistakes, which is what the B team has made, shouldn't. A team wasn't coming from prior MMO experience, they were building things up from the ground up and did a fairly decent job over time with Ulduar being their pinnacle.
...what? "A team" came from Everquest with lots of prior MMO experience. Not ALL the developers, of course, but a solid core. Vanilla WoW was f'ing awful compared to WoW of today - nostalgia may make us pine for it, but if they switched back to it now, we'd be quitting in droves.
Oh by the way, "A team" brought us Ulduar, which I'll happily agree was the best raid instance ever made, but they also brought us the raid before it - a rehashed years-old raid - Naxxramas. Some serious innovation there, yeah! Don't even compare this to Ragnaros. Naxx was the exact same fights as before with minor tweaks for 25-player raiding.
It's too easy to point to lower subscriber numbers and say "B team screwed up." There are too many factors at play to pick any one particular reason for a decline in player base. I personally believe it was the drastic difficulty increase that was the single largest reason. Since WoW's release, the game's gotten consistently easier to play in terms of grind investment requirements, time investment requirements, skill level requirements, and so on, and the subscriber base grew accordingly as the game became more accessible. Cataclysm's release was the first moment where this trend reversed, and the subscriber base reflects that.
I still don't understand the ragging on "B team" juxtaposed with the excellent raid encounters Cataclysm has brought us. Conclave of Wind, Al'Akir, OmniTron Council, Chimaeron, Atramedes, Valiona and Theralion, Cho'gall, Sinestra, Rhyolith, Baleroc, and Ragnaros have all struck me as fun new challenges. The problems that people gripe about regarding balance and bugs are miniscule compared to the ridiculously broken mechanics of WoW's past, where whole specs and even classes were just awful.
There is some serious rose-tinting going on in this thread, and I find it disturbing. The fact is that WoW is old, it's old old old, been beaten to death, and we (most of us) are still playing it because nothing out there has found a way to trump it.
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.