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

[Ronduwil]

Square Enix is on the same trajectory as Blizzard. The sad thing is that the playerbase refuses to see this because of all the blind hype, and this same thing happened in WoW - people couldn't fathom the thought that WoW could be getting worse.

I completely disagree. This is what killed WoW:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...in-wow/1181215

SE is not falling into that trap. You're right that the majority of the playerbase is midcore, but I think your definition of midcore is skewed. Midcore players don't look up rotation guides on discord. Midcore players don't install addons to track their DPS, so they really have no idea how much damage everyone else is doing. Midcore players don't demand that their healers even DPS, so they don't care that there are a couple of healing jobs that have two-button DPS rotations. Midcore players are casual. If you really feel that WoW is catering to casual players, then either you haven't played since WotLK or your perception of what is and isn't casual is way off. Blizzard has been giving casuals the middle finger since 2011.

[Roflcopter]

I completely disagree. This is what killed WoW:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...in-wow/1181215

SE is not falling into that trap. You're right that the majority of the playerbase is midcore, but I think your definition of midcore is skewed. Midcore players don't look up rotation guides on discord. Midcore players don't install addons to track their DPS, so they really have no idea how much damage everyone else is doing. Midcore players don't demand that their healers even DPS, so they don't care that there are a couple of healing jobs that have two-button DPS rotations. Midcore players are casual. If you really feel that WoW is catering to casual players, then either you haven't played since WotLK or your perception of what is and isn't casual is way off. Blizzard has been giving casuals the middle finger since 2011.

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. They missed with Shadowlands as BfA was also a steaming pile.

Blizzard was like the Star Trek movie franchise. Every other one was a smoldering trash pile.

[Y2K21]

I’d argue Legion were casual friendly.

I wouldnt know about that. Legion was very bad early for casual players in terms of systems that Blizz had to patch-in catchup mechanics because if you got behind on AP, you were essentially doing less than other players. Also the RNG legendary system. Also spec locked progression with artifacts. Also the expansion wasnt alt-friendly.

Legion literally has been the format for how the BFA/SL have been worked.

[Roflcopter]

I wouldnt know about that. Legion was very back early for casual players in terms of systems that Blizz had to patch-in catchup mechanics because if you got behind on AP, you were essentially doing less than other players. Also the RNG legendary system. Also spec locked progression with artifacts. Also the expansion wasnt alt-friendly.

Legion literally has been the format for how the BFA/SL have been worked.

I wouldn’t say I’m hardcore by any stretch, but Legion was pretty easy to progress and keep multiple alts. I cleared every tier regularly with 3 classes normal and heroic (DH, warlock, Paladin) and had some other reasonably geared alts. Clearing heroic was doable by pug. Unlocking flying wasn’t an ordeal like some other expansions. That is another thing that has been hurting WoW also. Stupidly locking flying forever and behind an insane grind like they did in WoD. Legendaries in Legion weren’t all that hard to come by really.

[Y2K21]

I wouldn’t say I’m hardcore by any stretch, but Legion was pretty easy to progress and keep multiple alts. I cleared every tier regularly with 3 classes normal and heroic (DH, warlock, Paladin) and had some other reasonably geared alts.

So you grinded AP between three different classes (not counting any spec swaps if any) prior to any catch-up implementation (so no AP knowledge catchup, order hall resource catch-up, not legendary tokens)?

Thats what everyone complained about from 7.0 to 7.1.5 was that AP gated alts and spec swaps.

What killed WoW for a lot of people I know was the fact that a large portion of the game was unplayable if you weren't in an active guild on horde specifically. As long as SE allows players to experience most if not all of the content without needing a static or large active FC, then they'll keep doing fine.

Bro, unless you are progging Mythic -- you can find Alliance guilds pretty well off. Server dependent of course, but thats another issue onto itself.

[Roflcopter]

So you grinded AP between three different classes (not counting any spec swaps if any) prior to any catch-up implementation (so no AP knowledge catchup, order hall resource catch-up, not legendary tokens)?

Thats what everyone complained about from 7.0 to 7.1.5 was that AP gated alts and spec swaps.


Bro, unless you are progging Mythic -- you can find Alliance guilds pretty well off. Server dependent of course, but thats another issue onto itself.

Yeah. I was home with the kids during Legion so had a lot more time on my hands. Otherwise, it would likely have been only one class.

Also, I didn’t swap with the classes for the most part. Prot Paladin, Havoc DH and affliction lock. I did swap the lock later on to destro I think but that wasn’t until Tomb of Sargeras where there was catchup.

[Roflcopter]

Bro, unless you are progging Mythic -- you can find Alliance guilds pretty well off. Server dependent of course, but thats another issue onto itself.

Finding a full server is always a top priority. You don’t wanna be stuck on a dead or dying WoW server. I remember everyone still memeing “Blackrock is Full” until I left it as almost no one was on it anymore.

[Y2K21]

Finding a full server is always a top priority. You don’t wanna be stuck on a dead or dying WoW server.

You can say that about any game that has servers. No one wants to play on the server/data center with no one playing on it.

[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.