The Changing Face of World of Warcraft

Back in March Blizzard released patch 2.4 and significantly altered a good portion of the overall gameplay and provided a much more casual experience. Since then Blizzard has continued to make the game more approachable through new dungeons and removing attunements and other restrictions throughout the game. While this may open up a lot of new content to the masses and help the game's overall appeal, does this continuing trend promise to alienate the high-end players who thrive on new challenges? Should Blizzard care?

Comments

iIt has done so already.

[SYSS Mouse]

one of the oldest guild Death and Taxes disbanded today, citing such change as one of the reason. (http://www.worldofwar.net/n/413578/death-and-taxes-disband)

Re:iIt has done so already.

[elrous0]

I suspect the real reason was just member burn-out and disinterest, not any recent changes. No MMO lasts forever, and most guilds are even more short-lived.

Re:iIt has done so already.

[MBGMorden]

I'm a bit split on this, but mostly agree with you. I've been in guilds, but I don't have the time to sit for hours for a raid on a friday or saturday night. Just raid with a guild that doesn't raid on those nights. Seriously, I know where your'e coming from. There's no way I want to spend my Friday or Saturday nights playing a video game either. That's why I got into a guild that raids only on Tuesdays :). (Well, sometimes they'll pull together a spur of the moment Kara on other nights, but I don't attend those).

Re:iIt has done so already.

[mrbooze]

Blizzard has over 10 million subscribers world-wide, their population has been increasing steadily since release.

There is no evidence that Blizzard is suffering from an exodus of casual players. The opposite appears to be true.

Not for casual players

[mseeger]

Hi,

If you want to see new content, you cannot do so as a casual player. I was far beyond a casual player (2 RAIDs a week, several hours of farming) and still noticed, that i was falling behind on the content scale.

New instances were added faster i could complete them. Going through SSC and TK literally took months. The RAID had several crisis meetings, weaker players were encouraged to seek their fortune somewhere else. In the end, we made progress and were inside the black temple, but the fun was left behind. In April i quit after playing my Rogue for more then 2.500 hours.

Quitting hurts... as intended. But there was no choice. You can either do the easy instances again and again or try new content. There you need two things: equip and error-free playing. I loved the game, but it was becoming a second job. No need for that :-(.

The desertion rate is currently high. In the month after i quit, the RAID lost 4 more players with 3+ years under their epic belt. There are still new players coming in (still got 330$ for my Rogue), but WoW is loosing a lot of experienced players currently.

All the things done for casual players considered, the R&D of Bliizzard is still focussed on the power gamer (Nihilum&Co). 90% of all instanced content (SSC and higher) will only be seen by a small minoritry of all players (~15%).

Please don't missunderstand me: The game was fun till the last minute. But to continue and make progress it would have required more time of me, that i was prepared to give. The content for the casual player (daily quests, small isntances, etc) didn't appeal to me.

CU, martin

Re:Not for casual players

[subsoniq]

All the things done for casual players considered, the R&D of Bliizzard is still focussed on the power gamer (Nihilum&Co). 90% of all instanced content (SSC and higher) will only be seen by a small minoritry of all players (~15%)

Actually, many more people see high end raid content than you might think. Wowjutsu is a site that crawls the Armory and compiles stats and progress for guilds and servers, and it also breaks down the percentage of the population that sees raid instances and even specific bosses (it does this by looking at the gear worn by a player when it goes through the Armory). According to the latest run 57.5% of the WoW population has seen The Eye and 62.65% have seen Serpentshrine Caverns, though much less have seen the end bosses Lady Vashj and Kael'Thas. I've noticed that since Blizz removed attunement the percentage of the population that's set foot into Mount Hyjal and Black Temple has increased quite a bit.

Now, it does take a lot of dedication and effort to be successful at raiding and continually progress, at least 20+ hours per week would need to be spent just on raiding itself, not including time spent getting money and consumables. This is what my guild found out after having problems with the new 25 man raiding format when The Burning Crusade came out. We were a raiding guild that had been through AQ40 and were close to being ready for Naxx when TBC came out, but we had a lot of problems making the transition to a 25 man raid and spent a lot of months banging our head against Gruul and Mags. We then instituted new rules and a new guild rank for raiding and our progress took off shortly after that. We went from struggling with Gruul and Mags to whacking away at Illidan himself in 8 months. It may not be the fastest progression but it's enough to make us one of the top 4 horde raiding guilds on our server. On average our hardcore raiders spend 20+ hours a week on raiding, and probably another few hours getting money and consumables for raiding. We have required attendance for raids (3 times a week, but most people raid 5 times a week) and required stats for the different classes/specs. We aren't as hardcore as most successful raiding guilds, we allow non raiders and casual raiders into the guild, we have some class/specs that the hardcore guilds wouldn't think of bringing to a raid, and our stat requirements are probably lower than the other hardcore raiding guilds, but it's been working for us and we're all having a lot of fun.

Basically, if your guild wants to progress through the 25 man raids at a steady pace then you need to have discipline and dedication from 25+ people, and you need to be able to work as a team and not go at each others throats when you hit some adversity.

Re:Not for casual players

[The High Druid]

Actually that's 57.5% of the guilds that the site scans, which is not 100% of the WoW population. If you check the site there are a number of qualifiers a guild has to reach before they are listed. At a rough guess I would say less than one in three guilds on my server are listed on our page on that site.

Re:Morons

[bugnuts]

What you said about beating a boss is absolutely true. Gear does make it easier, but a crappy raider is a crappy raider, and you can't expect him to be anything else no matter how much gear you throw at him.

And here's how it is after the patch:
Level to 70. Replace gear with low-level dungeon loot. Raid one thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Raid the next thing and get better loot. Hooray, you beat the game, go outside. Crappy example.

It's now Raid one thing and get better loot. TURN IN BADGES to received from raiding or heroics or daily quests for loot as good as that found in the next two raiding zones.

Removing the attunements makes perfect sense. It's called mudflation which was coined to demonstrate that the demand for gear gets higher and higher. There is no purpose for the powergamer to go after crappy gear in an old raid ... they want bigger numbers on anything with a number and more glowies on things without. Keeping obsolete attunements to force a linear progression when your gear already outgears that found in the dungeons makes no sense... thus they went away.

Imagine if it was required to be exalted with Hydraxian Waterlords (old Molten Core) in order to go to Sunwell plateau. That's why the attunements were removed... they stopped performing the purpose of keeping undergeared groups for exploiting low-hanging fruit of dungeons they have no business even looking at. Those groups are now geared up through badge loot.

Next Expansion Brings Big Changes

[flattop100]

The OP apparently isn't up to date on the latest about the next WoW expansion (Lich King). ALL raid instances will be playable as both a 10-man and 25-man; the differences will be loot and difficulty. I'm a casual player - I haven't been in a 20-man raid since Burning Crusade came out. I would probably have quit the game soon, except for this news. I enjoy all the stories and quest lines woven into the game, and now, FINALLY, I will be able to participate in "the big ones," even with "only" a 10-man raid.

This is just part of a longer cycle in the game

[icyslush]

We saw this with the last expansion, this is just a refinement. At end-game level before the release of first expansion, you had tons of people at level 60 but with wildly different gear levels. Maybe you were still trying to down the first MC boss or maybe you were uber and were clearing Naxx. You were not equal. Then TBC hit, we went to outland and within 3 levels we had all been equalized by green quest rewards that were better than the best we could get in the old world. It was a great big reset button and everyone got to start over. People complained about working so hard to get their Tier 3 stuff only to DE it at level 63. This time, their giving raiders, casuals and PvPers ways to get roughly equal gear in advance of the new expansion, to cushion the shock, I'd guess. It's the reset button again. We'll race to level 80 from roughly equal footing, the 25 man content will be hard, there'll be new raiding guilds and casuals will be locked out of the best gear again. Until the NEXT expansion, at which point they'll nerf things and hand out epics to equalize everyone once more. It's a reset button. Just consider it the start of Season Three. :)

Re:New requirements a slap to raiders

[MeanderingMind]

This is a common argument, but as a raider I find it dishonest. Yes, casual players can now get T6 level gear. No, this isn't a slap in the face, here's why.

1) You can't get a full set of T6 level gear from badges. Take cloth for example, there are three pieces of healing gear at the T6 iLevel. That's not even half the armor class restricted slots.

2) It isn't easy for casual players to get badges. They don't already have T6 geared people to destroy Heroics with, or to burn through Kara in under 2.5 hours. At the highest end of the casual spectrum, they might be able to muster one upgrade for themselves a month.

3) Experience counts. You can't ebay 25 T6 toons, wowwiki a strat, then waltz into BT and kill Illidan. Skipping progression like that is like skipping grades in school. You're either extremely smart or extremely stupid.

That's actually what they did.

[Calledor]

In 2.4 Blizzard released the Isle of Quel'dollar. Apparently it is the island where all the gold farmers go when they die, because without an epic mount or even a functional cognitive system you can do quests that give you hordes of gold. These quests range from "kill this type of thing" to "fly on this and bomb that" with an occasion al "zap this, or kill that to get this item". Not saying I expected a lot or wanted it but I wouldn't say this was a huge patch for non-raiders. In fact it was sadly the first added content patch (major one at least) that I can remember that didn't have a significant world event associated with it (Diremaul was met with little fanfair). AQ and the scourage were both rather neat, and I really enjoyed the missions to go out with friends and kill invading NPCs. Now the invading npcs are permanent, but you're only going to encounter them on QD and they aren't particularly threatening. It was basically the Burning Crusade opening all over again with about 1/100th of the effort applied.