Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[Tridus]

A lot of success is timing. WoW just happened along at the right time, just like Facebook did. Use in the net was booming, broadband made gaming more feasible, you had more people interested in pc gaming overall as pc prices went down etc.

This is comically wrong. Console gaming was on the rise when WoW came out, PC gaming was starting a decline. Gaming online was feasible long before then. See: Starcraft's massive success at it.

WoW took the concept of a giant world to explore with lots of other people and made it mainstream accessable with Blizzard's usual level of production quality. That's it. It was so successful because it delivered what the market wanted better than any other game did at the time and effectively created a market for itself.

Then they went astray by taking away the community aspect and making it effectively a solo game for so much of it, but that was the result of a long series of individual decisions meant to solve problems that all made sense at the time. Even the duty finder model, which has had all kinds of lousy side effects on MMO community, was a great innovation originally because it solved the problem of trying to form parties in chat when you were a DPS class that wasn't popular in parties.

This revisionist history stuff is silly. If you don't like WoW, that's fine. Claiming it's a bad game and got lucky because reasons is nonsense. By any objective measure, WoW is the most successfull MMO ever made by an order of magnitude. You have to do something right to be that successful.

They did, and they were. I think the only content that was nerfed because of community outrage was the Steps of Faith.

Steps of Faith wasn't nerfed because of outrage. It was nerfed because people started abandoning it en-masse when it came up in roulette, making it difficult for people to get past that point in the MSQ. SE had to react to a MSQ block because all of Heavensward was gated behind it.

Royal Menagerie got similar howls of outrage but didn't get nerfed. Why? Enough people stuck around to help others get clears that the same blocking problem didn't occur.

[Stormfur]

Steps of Faith wasn't nerfed because of outrage. It was nerfed because people started abandoning it en-masse when it came up in roulette, making it difficult for people to get past that point in the MSQ. SE had to react to a MSQ block because all of Heavensward was gated behind it.

Yeah... outrage is probably the wrong word for that. Protest is more like it.

I do wish we would have...not necessarily "harder" fights, but more mechanically-unique fights.