Can we just have the Wrath of the Lich King Raiding Scheme?

[Velhart]

If anything, it suggests that the use of addons made the game more enjoyable for a greater number of people.

This is one thing I don't agree on necessarily. Addons are nice, yes, but addons like Deadly Boss Mod exists because people were not willing to learn to watch the mechanics themselves. It did promote laziness, but with PUG's in WoW, it just felt like a necessary evil sometimes. An MMO is well designed when you have less desire to use addons. In FFXIV's case, the only time I have wanted the addon feature to finally arrive is for a built in DPS Meter, which has 20 threads of it's own.

[Fendred]

Actually they lost 800,000 subs. ((SOURCE)) : http://www.gamespot.com/articles/wor.../1100-6421529/ . But then again they lose and gain every now and then.

I would like to point out that add-ons made things easier, and so players were unable to work with a more manual system. I think I'm the one you're quoting on add-ons by the way, I could be wrong and presumptuous. Hope I'm not. It would be terribly embarrassing.

I would also say that your view of the add-on usage is also a wrong view then, because people were really coddled by the use of add-ons and really can't do raids and stuff without them...

I'm talking about Wrath of the Lich King, which was WoW circa 2008. Go look at financial reports for it at that point in time. They were in the positive and gaining subs at that point. You are erroneously looking at a financial report from 2014.

Addons hardly "coddled" players. Teams still wiped frequently before defeating bosses. Also, I hardly consider finding a good golden middle that lets the different demographics meet and share a genuine raiding experience (which is not Crystal Tower) "coddling" players. Especially when they have time to create an even harder mode for the top 1% of players like Blue Garter (I'm looking at you, "wasting developer time on newbs" Dwill...)

[skaterger]

This is one thing I don't agree on necessarily. Addons are nice, yes, but addons like Deadly Boss Mod exists because people were not willing to learn to watch the mechanics themselves. It did promote laziness, but with PUG's in WoW, it just felt like a necessary evil sometimes. An MMO is well designed when you have less desire to use addons. In FFXIV's case, the only time I have wanted the addon feature to finally arrive is for a built in DPS Meter, which has 20 threads of it's own.

This. But when you allow third party addons developed by the community to be part of your game, this is what is to be expected. People will always try to make things easier, as seen not only by bigwigs/dbm but also addons like powerauras. I never knew anyone that raided hardcore in wow not to have these 2 addons. I hope that stuff like dbm and powerauras will never make an appearance in ff14.

1. It's not necessary to have a big flashy red icon to show firestarted/thundercloud procs. The default UI is more than enough
2. You don't need anyone announcing twister/divebomb/voice. Just watch the cast bar.
3. You should never need to look at your hotkeys ever while playing. 90% of your focus should be on raid awareness and what is going on around you.

People have gotten so accustomed to using these tools that when they don't have access to it suddenly, it seems like they forgotten how to play. I honestly think this could be one of the reasons of the low skill cap of players in this game. The only addons I think worth having are like you mentioned dps meter and UI/raid frames addons like xperl and inv/bag management like altoholic.

Addons hardly "coddled" players.

They didn't coddle players, but they made it significantly easier. If not it wouldn't be mandatory for raiders. Bad players will be bad, they will die even with dbm, but for your middle of the road raider, it made it much easier, so much so that when they are deprived of it like in ff14, they suddenly start finding they are unable to cope. Raid awareness is 1 of the most important skills of raiding and dbm negated much of that.

[Amberion]

I'm talking about Wrath of the Lich King, which was WoW circa 2008. Go look at financial reports for it at that point in time. They were in the positive and gaining subs at that point. You are erroneously looking at a financial report from 2014.

It was released in November 2008, and had a slight increase in subs before it. But they lost those after like 2 months. So it did not do so well. WoTLK started it's turn for the worse, subs stagnated.

[Dwill]

It was released in November 2008, and had a slight increase in subs before it. But they lost those after like 2 months. So it did not do so well.

Wrong, try again.

[Fendred]

I completely agree with both Skaet and V. However, there is another way to look at the modding situation in World of Warcraft. The way boss fights were structured were such a burden to the community that many programmers took hours of their lives to carefully create addons just to announce said abilities, and then continue to update those for years. Not only that, but finding a group of people that didn't use one of these mods by the time Wrath of the Lich King was out was like trying to find a four leaf clover. It would have been a "oh my god, they do exist" situation if you found one. More importantly, they didn't tone down the fights to the level of what is Crystal Tower. They really only dealt with one particular aspect of fights (mostly), which was announcing abilities that could wipe the party- something people are trying to do manually without them anyway. All they did was remove the chance of human error on announcing or accidentally missing a cast bar. Otherwise fights remained entirely intact.

[Amberion]

Wrong, try again.

I used this one: http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png

And it shows a increase during release, then it declined and stagnated until Pandaria, where it subs plummeted.

EDIT: Guess you quoted it before I edited in the stagnating thing there.

[Dwill]

I used this one: http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png

And it shows a increase during release, then it declined and stagnated until Pandaria, where it subs plummeted.

EDIT: Guess you quoted it before I edited in the stagnating thing there.

It shows stagnation 2 years and a half later, not 2 months.

[skaterger]

I completely agree with both Skaet and V. However, there is another way to look at the modding situation in World of Warcraft. The way boss fights were structured were such a burden to the community that many programmers took hours of their lives to carefully create addons just to announce said abilities, and then continue to update those for years. Not only that, but finding a group of people that didn't use one of these mods by the time Wrath of the Lich King was out was like trying to find a four leaf clover. It would have been a "oh my god, they do exist" situation if you found one.

I think nobody here denies that the mods are extremely useful and we are thankful to people that spent their time creating and updating it, and when you are trying to push progression it is a godsend. Most of us who used it then didn't think twice about it, it was just something that you accepted you had to install, but looking back at it now in hindsight I kind of wished it was never implemented.

As for your initial suggestion, I think it could potentially work except for 1 big issue:

Wow had a very clear loot reward system. There were 10/25 man raids, with 25 man raids giving higher ilvl loot than 10 man, and the hard mode iterations of each giving a higher ilvl than the corresponding normal mode. The developers made it clear from the start and the playerbase was mostly okay with it. In ff14, yoshi has made it clear that casuals will always be able to get the same ilvl of gear (weapon aside) in a catch-up patch, see hunts. With your suggestion of a lower ilvl for normal raids, I'm not sure how they are going to balance the gear, not to mention to placate the cries from non raiders about not having the same ilvl of gear as raiders.

[SarcasmMisser]

People have gotten so accustomed to using these tools that when they don't have access to it suddenly, it seems like they forgotten how to play. I honestly think this could be one of the reasons of the low skill cap of players in this game. The only addons I think worth having are like you mentioned dps meter and UI/raid frames addons like xperl and inv/bag management like altoholic...

Bad players will be bad, they will die even with dbm, but for your middle of the road raider, it made it much easier, so much so that when they are deprived of it like in ff14, they suddenly start finding they are unable to cope. Raid awareness is 1 of the most important skills of raiding and dbm negated much of that.

My thoughts exactly. I am not against addons, but what I am against are players who are so utterly tunnel vision that their level of human error is just far too high and they depend on event alarms to even follow a fight. Ramuh currently is a perfect example of how low awareness is in your average player, and it's little wonder its so hated by the general population who cannot keep track of anything but themselves in an encounter.

And I'm not just calling bad players bad, but also faults in even the best raiders. I know people with savage turn clears who still don't know the pattern of the dragon dives in t9, and depend on one player marking and tracking it. Or using event alarms for abilities that are in a static rotation.