Dragon Soul Killed Cataclysm. They recouped players with the pre-WoD hype but then failed to deliver with only raids and have lost almost half of them, even though it's expected that some will leave after the launch as they always do.

SE and Blizzard have very different philosophy. SE have been very cautious with 2.x and continue with 3.x and have deviated very little with Heavensward.

Blizzard on the other hand are bi-polar in their design; they either make things too hard or too easy; too much or nothing.


Back on the days MMOs were very niche and thanks to WoW they brought them closer to the main stream. Most people these days don't want to grind for a month to get their dungeon set, grind for a further month to get reps up etc. Blizzard stated that those that ran Molten Core, Naxx etc were a very small percentage, close to 1%, of the actual player base. Spending large amounts of resources on one percent of your customer base is frankly dumb so they opened up raid content to everyone, if they feel like it. Time moves on and so do their player base.

The guy who raided Molten Core may have been in his late teens, early twenties but now he's thirty, or almost thirty, has a family, a full time job and just can't justify spending that amount of time in front of a computer. If he still plays. While MMOs have massive turn over, most never expect to finish the starter zone, so the trickle of players is much smaller so proportionally the veteran is much more common among the player base. Blizzard stated that most of their player base is in their twenties so that 12 year old troll in chat is most likely an adult.

SE I believe understand this and that's why coil was a lot more casual than it was hard core. I've said this many times FF14 is not a raiding game. In HW we got two raid difficulties because just like WoW you can't spend those precious resources on a small percent of your player base so story mode was developed, a much better idea than nerfing the so-called savage mode.

Let's not forget that SE add a significant amount of stuff every three months, and a fair amount every month so it's ill-timed to judge HW when we haven't even received a proper content patch. I do however think that fiver moths is too long to wait for a content patch. It's of no concern of mine that they took a break after the expansion released. This should have been planned while HW was being developed, poor planning by those in charge. For me a casual player just last night I decided to do Alex 1-4 normal so it affects me little.