Take it easy on the Nerfing :/

[Tuathaa]

Thankfully, in the future SE is going to split everything giving the people who want ez mode their free clear, and people who want meaningful content their's.

Making story content accessible to people who only have an hour a day to play is just smart business. The idea made Blizzard billions of dollars and the largest mmo in history.

[FrejyaAthenes]

Thankfully, in the future SE is going to split everything giving the people who want ez mode their free clear, and people who want meaningful content their's.

Which is the best step they have taken so far in this whole matter. I don't want to be thankful before seeing the Alexander, but it might work well.

As an aspiring raider this too makes me happy. I just need to make sure that I can get through it before there's a chance for nerfs.

[Magis]

Making story content accessible to people who only have an hour a day to play is just smart business. The idea made Blizzard billions of dollars and the largest mmo in history.

Uhh.....

uhhhhh....


Did you... play Vanilla WoW? Molten Core? Black Wing Lair? AQ40? NAXX???????

While the structure of WoW at the time was more "open" (wasn't a concrete path), the story line and progression path put you through there. Those raids required 40 people, and skill far greater than what SoF was (and a lot of the coils even). There were attunement quests that required anything from clearing raids, long difficult (at the time) quests (Onyxia), or spending a fortune/grinding a faction (Naxx). Dungeons themselves were far more difficult than (speed run this in 10min and aoe forever), which could last from 45m to 1.5h to half a day with BRD (might be exaggerating but damn was that a huge awesome dungeon).

Outside of dungeons which had a easy/hard mode (even then it was more just level 60/level 70), Burning Crusade followed the same path but dropped the raid size to 20 (or was it 25?).

Guess where those subscriptions came from? Oh that's right, during Vanilla and TBC. What happened when they made the game a giant easy mode "casual" game? Oh that's right, they've been losing subscribers ever since.



Funny thing about WoD. They hyped it as being more in line with Vanilla and TBC, and look at that jump in subscriptions! Too bad it turned out to be a flop, which I heard was because they took the MMO out of MMORPG and shoving people into instanced garrisons... where players got to play a Facebook game. They've now dropped to 7.1mil losing 3 million subscribers in 3 months. At least they got a SELFIE CAM!

So, tell me, where is this "smart business" you speak of? People keep talking about "oh look at WoW", but if SE ever adopted anything from when WoW was gaining subs, the forums would implode with the gnashing of teeth. I can just imagine all the complainers that something like BRD or UBRS would be "too hard" or "too long" for a dungeon.

[Tuathaa]

Uhh.....

uhhhhh....


Did you... play Vanilla WoW? Molten Core? Black Wing Lair? AQ40? NAXX???????

Yes I did. Guess what in no way did you or were you required to do those raids to progress from one xpac to the other.
Wows highest subs ever were from wotlk and that had to do with making raiding accessible by everyone.
Currently their decline is do to bad decisions such as integrating twitter instead of fixing game breaking bugs and they thought and still think strongholds are fun
If they made AQ 40 a requirment to enter TBC the game would have died right there. Or Sunwell to enter WoTLK it would have ended also.

[Barimu]

I don't understand peoples time restraints if you can't put time into an MMO get a single player or co-op game then.

[RiceisNice]

...

Yet there was the greatest increase toward (as well as maintaining during) WotLK where raids (as well as dungeons, and gearing for said raids) were much more accessible.

Even staying at that amount of subs is pretty damn impressive if you can get people to stick in a game where content patches (with very little QoL/mini patches inbetween) are months in between.

[Magis]

Yes I did. Guess what in no way did you or were you required to do those raids to progress from one xpac to the other.
Wows highest subs ever were from wotlk and that had to do with making raiding accessible by everyone.
Currently their decline is do to bad decisions such as integrating twitter instead of fixing game breaking bugs and they thought and still think strongholds are fun
If they made AQ 40 a requirment to enter TBC the game would have died right there. Or Sunwell to enter WoTLK it would have ended also.

You mean when their subscription plateaued right? The line becomes literally horizontal for most of the existence of WoTLK until the end. They got a small bump due to Cataclysm hype (as every expansion does) but hype isn't going to power your game. There was a turning point during that expansion which led to the following decline, further increasing the drop as more bad design was introduced (making the hyper theme park instead of a more open world). Also, no one is asking for a AQ40 style raid to gate you to the next expansion, where did you get that? I brought up SoF because it's the storyline of ARR, (as was all the raids the storyline of Vanilla), not because it was required to get into Ishguard. This thread is about nerfs in general rather than just SoF.

Yet there was the greatest increase toward (as well as maintaining during) WotLK where raids (as well as dungeons, and gearing for said raids) were much more accessible.

As I said above, look at every expansion release and you see a bump in subs. If WotLK making raids "accessible" did that, you'd see an increase a year and a half later, not at the tail end of the expansion when Cata is being promoted.

Also we are talking about a short increase of subs (a few hundred thousand for only a few months) for the loss of millions later. Yeah, I think the term is "short term gains".

[RiceisNice]

..
.

There's only so many people that are interested in MMOs. Granted I'm pulling facts out of my ass here but thats how I see it and that was definitely the case for me; If there was a spike upwards for an expansion, chances are those are returning players and not new subs. And technically, TBC had already made steps to accessible raids by lowering the instance size to 25, and introducing currency for gear (which acts in place of doing older instances to get said gear).

Question though, what is the relevance of bringing up WoW's 40 man raids? You brought it up, but at the same time you're saying "no one is asking for it" and I really don't see how it's related to the topic (nerfing main scenario)

If it was really that short term, it would've dropped during WotLK. I played during catacylsm, and some of the issues I can personally attest to is the lack of meaningful end game outside of raids and (to me) overall aesthetics. Heroics when we capped were also more difficult than the WotLK heroics. Catacylsm arguably had less content compared to the likes of WotLK and TBC for players who were previously cappd because it focused mostly on redoing the old world (level 1-60).

Same with MoP, except add in the removal of daily quests limit and alot of players suffered from extreme burnout trying to cap everything.

[StrejdaTom]

I don't understand peoples time restraints if you can't put time into an MMO get a single player or co-op game then.

Actually there wouldn't be a problem with playing MMO while time restrained.
The problem starts when people who play 10 hours a week expect the same outcome as people who play 50 hours a week.

[Magis]

There's only so many people that are interested in MMOs. Granted I'm pulling facts out of my ass here but thats how I see it and that was definitely the case for me; If there was a spike upwards for an expansion, chances are those are returning players and not new subs. And technically, TBC had already made steps to accessible raids by lowering the instance size to 25, and introducing currency for gear (which acts in place of doing older instances to get said gear).

Question though, what is the relevance of bringing up WoW's 40 man raids? You brought it up, but at the same time you're saying "no one is asking for it" and I really don't see how it's related to the topic (nerfing main scenario)

The relevance is comparing the difficulty of content back when WoW was gaining subs, vs when they stopped gaining and started losing subs. People keep saying "make it easier, look WoW has a millions of subscribers", but they ignore (or just don't know) the fact in the early days WoW was hard, and the recent (well, with WoW's age, more like half a decade ago) trend everyone is comparing to was when they were in fact losing subscriptions. You can't point at WoW's millions and say it has these numbers because the game was a casual themepark, when the whole time it was in that era, subs dropped. You have to look at where subs were gained, and that was in a time when WoW was way more sandboxy, and had difficult but rewarding content. One last thing, I'm not using difficult here just for raid type content. Dungeons don't have to be T9. However even dungeons have turned into brainless activities that more act as a timer to your 75 soldiery bonus rather than something to work together to clear and beat. Compare that to WoW's old dungeons, which required CCing, watching patrolling monsters, and maneuvering around mob groups.