World of Warcraft died because the developers only catered to casuals and world prog

[Kolsykol]

I find it hard to even consider going back to WoW for a lot of reasons, but the gear is one of the major ones.
WoW just has this '' toy figure '' gear design it's hard to explain and I never thought much about it when I still played.
But I think this is especially true in more recent expansions, the armor sets have this weird fake and cheap look.

It's not just WoW tho I feel like this is a thing in most Western games involving loot and especially those that have ingame stores and the armor sets in WoW remind me a lot of skins you'd see in a store.
FFXIV is funnily enough regardless of all the '' lol weeb gaem '' comments significantly more '' grounded '' in the gear design department, not saying that as an inherently good thing but when I look at the gear it makes sense especially for the regions and context of where you get it.
In WoW it sorta feels like it's differently colored LED strips and like everything just has this enormous shapes.
It just looks like they were designed to be toys or like they come from the Warhammer 40k universe but pg-13.

There's also a very severe lack of variety in the actual diversity of types of gear.
As much as people want to whine about it every time we get it ( and it is a very small minority of the gear, people gotta stop pretending otherwise ).
Stuff like skirts and shorts and even heels and thigh-high boots add a lot of variety it makes the gear less homogenous and also allows you to better customize your character to how you imagine them and want them to be.
The types of gear just differs a lot more, even if we look at stuff like the Crystarium gear.
Where in WoW can you get chest pieces like that?
You can't.
The gear all follows the identical framework and there's no actual variety, it's the same with some different colors and shapes but it's ultimately the same at its core.


In WoW you're out of luck unless you want to play a burly warrior in full plate or a mage in robes etc.
There's only one caricature with very little variety and it has only gotten worse with time too.
You simply don't get the wide variety of gear like in FFXIV and it makes WoW very unappealing to me, it doesn't make me excited at all about going out to get gear for transmog.

[Larirawiel]

Where in WoW can you get chest pieces like that?
You can't.
The gear all follows the identical framework and there's no actual variety, it's the same with some different colors and shapes but it's ultimately the same at its core.

Jepp, that is true. The gear is a part of the character model in WoW, except shoulders and helm. But this decision has also some advantages. WoW has way less problems with clipping errors and self shadowing.


Cheers

[Ronduwil]

I’d argue MoP and Legion were casual friendly. Maybe not as much as Wrath, but they were and the player numbers of those 2 expansions reflected that. Blizzard used to have a more casual and higher quality expansion after ever steaming pile of “hardcore” garbage expansion.

IMO, every expansion since WotLK has been hostile to casuals. Cataclysm made dungeon difficulty on par with raids while downgrading the gear rewards signficantly for no reason. Players in my Cataclysm raiding guild who were decked out in full Firelands gear refused to run the troll heroics because they were too hard for them. The only reason I even started raiding consistently was that I was tired of being capped at 453 item level from troll heroics when the 378 gear was so much easier to acquire from the raid. They eventually relented and gave casuals reasonable item levels after an unprecedented exodus. In MoP they backslid again. Once again, they made the dungeon loot absolute crap, but this time they made the dungeons a complete faceroll. So once again casuals were capped at crappy gear levels, but from then on they justified it by saying, "Well, their content is easy." That would have held true, except that it was no fun to be running dailies in "casual" gear, pulling one mob at a time in order to not be decimated. In the meantime, some raider would swoop in, pull every single mob in the area, casually faceroll them, and fly off into the distance, leaving you to wait another few minutes for the next respawn. Was that "catering to casuals?" IMO, it decidedly wasn't. I don't know about Legion because I let my sub lapse the day they announced they were going to remove flying from the game to "make the world feel dangerous again." I came back at the end of BFA in anticipation of going hard in SL, but the problems had only grown more extreme, and the game was simply not fun. As an example, crafters at the end of BFA had to grind out mass quantities of a currency that was only available in raids. Grinding the currency through LFR (the equivalent of an alliance raid via duty roulette), the grind literally took years. Grinding it out in a Mythic raid took just weeks. How is that "catering to casuals?"

I love that in this game I deck out every newly capped job in 580 gear that I made myself despite not ever having set foot in Pandemonium. That's a strength of this game, not a weakness, IMO.

[IdowhatIwant]

Not really. The Final Fantasy crowd comes first, IMHO. I do not see much RPG elements in FF14. For me FF14 is more comparable to a third person loot/lobby shooter than a RPG. You have very little influence to the character progression. Higher itemlevel and some meaningless materia and nothing more. No talent trees, no items with special proccs, no items with special disadvantages, no weapon types aka blunt weapon, no weakness or immunities agains types of magic etc.


Cheers

Some of these things were removed, because the casuals felt it was gate keeping...

[Ronduwil]

I think your definition of Midcore is skewed. While you are correct that Midcore players are casual in the sense that they are not usually raiders, what you described are complete casuals. No effort required casuals.

I think that your perception of a game's purpose is skewed. I put in effort at my job. If I wanted to put in more effort, I would be logging out of the game and back into work. Most players don't play a game because they feel like they need to put in more of an effort. They do it because it's an effortless activity that they can perform at the end of a long day's/week's worth of effort. Call me a boomer (even though I'm technically Gen X), but the idea that the average player should be expected to do extra curricular research outside of the game, download third party addons (against TOS, mind you), and baby sit every other player in their party is ridiculous to me. The average player in your static is in no way representative of the average player game-wide. I have no problems with players who set these insane expectations in their FC/static, but I get really irritated when they try to claim that the game would be better if it were imposed on everyone else. Contrary to the OP's claim, this is the mentality that brought WoW into decline.

[Ronduwil]

I’d say midcore in the WoW sense was people that cleared normal and heroic raids weekly either pug or guild, cleared mythic 10 for the loot box and kept an alt that cleared at least normal and some mythic+.

The fact that I was in the most casual guild you can imagine and yet they still expected us to be clearing a mythic 10 every week is the very thing that prompted me to unsub from WoW. I'm sorry, but when a game considers that level of effort as the bare minimum for entry, it's gone too far off the rails. If FFXIV were to go that route, I would stop playing it, too. Thankfully YoshiP is a reasonable man.

[IdowhatIwant]

The fact that I was in the most casual guild you can imagine and yet they still expected us to be clearing a mythic 10 every week is the very thing that prompted me to unsub from WoW. I'm sorry, but when a game considers that level of effort as the bare minimum for entry, it's gone too far off the rails. If FFXIV were to go that route, I would stop playing it, too. Thankfully YoshiP is a reasonable man.

So you had to clear mythic 10 every week to remain a member of this casual guild? I smell some bs some where. Probably the fact that about 95% of players in WoW do not touch mythic raids at all so a casual guild wanting everyone to clear what only about 5% of the players are even doing sounds off.

[Ronduwil]

So you had to clear mythic 10 every week to remain a member of this casual guild? I smell some bs some where. Probably the fact that about 95% of players in WoW do not touch mythic raids at all so a casual guild wanting everyone to clear what only about 5% of the players are even doing sounds off.

No. I had to clear Mythic 10 to participate in the weekly raid, which is pretty much all there is to do in WoW. If you don't raid or M+, there's no prorgression for you. Also, what does M10 have to do with Mythic raiding? M10 means a Mythic dungeon with a key level of 10. To put it in context, imagine that tomestone gear item level went no higher than 550, which is even worse than the gear you buy in old Sharlayan for finishing the MSQ. If you wanted anything higher than 560, you'd have to run Savage or Ultimate raids. There is no Mythic keystone in FFXIV, so there's nothing I can compare that to, but imagine that they cut the timers for all the roulettes to about 1/4 of what they are and they downscaled your rewards if you failed them. That was pretty much WoW's state when I let my sub lapse.

[MaxCarnage]

I think that your perception of a game's purpose is skewed. I put in effort at my job. If I wanted to put in more effort, I would be logging out of the game and back into work. Most players don't play a game because they feel like they need to put in more of an effort. They do it because it's an effortless activity that they can perform at the end of a long day's/week's worth of effort. Call me a boomer (even though I'm technically Gen X), but the idea that the average player should be expected to do extra curricular research outside of the game, download third party addons (against TOS, mind you), and baby sit every other player in their party is ridiculous to me. The average player in your static is in no way representative of the average player game-wide. I have no problems with players who set these insane expectations in their FC/static, but I get really irritated when they try to claim that the game would be better if it were imposed on everyone else. Contrary to the OP's claim, this is the mentality that brought WoW into decline.

My work is very taxing and exhausting. I also play FF to have fun and relax. You know what I don't find enjoyable or relaxing? 15 minute runs taking 25 to 30 minutes. Carrying people who want to do the bare minimum because their fun is more important above all else.

You don't have to be in a static, download a parser, do research on optimization and perfect your rotation to be midcore. I don't partake in any of that. But having low expectations that are still higher than "healers dont need to dps and dps only need to press their 1-2-3" does not make someone hardcore or an elitist. If using your kit, not even optimally but just using it in general, is too much effort for you to put in, find some friends who are willing to carry you and don't subject the randoms you get paired with to your selfishness.

Also, if a healer not being expected to dps is midcore, by your own assessment, what would make them a casual?

[IdowhatIwant]

No. I had to clear Mythic 10 to participate in the weekly raid, which is pretty much all there is to do in WoW. If you don't raid or M+, there's no prorgression for you. Also, what does M10 have to do with Mythic raiding? M10 means a Mythic dungeon with a key level of 10. To put it in context, imagine that tomestone gear item level went no higher than 550, which is even worse than the gear you buy in old Sharlayan for finishing the MSQ. If you wanted anything higher than 560, you'd have to run Savage or Ultimate raids. There is no Mythic keystone in FFXIV, so there's nothing I can compare that to, but imagine that they cut the timers for all the roulettes to about 1/4 of what they are and they downscaled your rewards if you failed them. That was pretty much WoW's state when I let my sub lapse.

Misunderstood, I thought mythic 10 meant mythic 10man. I aint been in the WoW scene in a bit.