Dvergar wrote:
Your complaint is that wow is getting too easy and/or accommodating the less-skilled. It's not a valid argument that portal was a terrible game because there weren't enough hooker nazis for you to shoot with your bazooka. You judge a game on what it is trying to be and what it has accomplished in that regard.
That wasn't my complaint at all. I simply said (or rather implied) that the premise that more players seeing content is better is faulty.
Dvergar wrote:
You want wow to be a very difficult game.
I didn't say that, and that isn't what I want.
I think WoW - like SMB3 - should have a good difficulty slope. I think there should be some challenging content, and I think there should be some not so challenging content. I think there should be shades of grey and natural progression, not the sharp dichotomy there is now.
Dvergar wrote:
Clearly the end-game is very difficult if such a miniscule percent of subscribers cleared it before it was nerfed.
Not necessarily.
You might as well argue that the fact that Koreans are so much better on average at SCII than Americans proves they have a natural superiority at the game. It's a simplistic, correlative argument that completely ignores the many factors involved, such as culture, priorities and playstyle. I think that if Americans felt that being really good at SCII was as important to them as the Koreans do, they could develop their skills to the same level. For whatever reason, though, they don't. Almost every culture has unique areas of expertise and deficiency driven by their situation and value system.
The fact of the matter is, WoW isn't a difficult game, and it never has been. Go look at MMOs like EvE or EQ, or the Dragon Warrior series of RPGs, or hell even Mario games where the nominal reaction time is under half a second (compare that to about 2-3 seconds on Ozruk, or one second on HLK25). While there are definitely a lot of players who simply aren't good enough to do all content, to regard that as an all-encompassing problem with the players or the content is off-base.
Maybe players didn't do the raids because they...didn't feel like it? Maybe a lot of those people who didn't do them just weren't interested in joining guilds, learning to play better, or hell, maybe they just didn't find the raids fun?
WoW's strength has always been its broad appeal. I believe that the reason the game is in terminal decline now is that the developers have lost sight of the importance strength and have been willing to compromise it in favor of their own priorities, including shoehorning more players into less content.
So I think that to argue "how do we make the raids to get more players to see them?" is to turn the real issue on its head. The real issue is, "what should we make that more players want to see?"
Raids should be for raiders. Simple as that. I don't believe that because I think non-raiders are lesser beings (although I do think that non-raiders who feel the need to have the game dragged down to their level for want of status in it certainly are), it's because I think that both the game community as a whole as well as its component demographics would be best served with their own appropriate content. I think there should be sub-raids, mini-games, challenging heroics, social theaters, time attack dailies, etc, at all level of difficulty, with a lot of random elements and replay value.
Unfortunately, and despite many other individuals than myself saying so for years, the dev team has chosen to take a less imaginative - and ultimately dead-end - approach.
Dvergar wrote:
Blizzard wants wow to have strong story-telling and immersion, they want people to experience things in their game. It's not a bad thing that people are downing bosses.
Blizzard devs think that people downing bosses is more important than strong story-telling and immersion. That is a bad thing. Tell me there's "strong story-telling" and "immersion" in T11/T12 or modern heroics, compared to Vanilla instances which were no more difficult. Tell me LFD or the new guild mechanics, aimed at shoehorning players, are good for lore and immersion.
Hell, BoT shipped with no music, and Throne with no voice emotes. Tell me "immersion" is important to the dev team if they don't even bother with the most basic elements of immersion since the beginning of time.
Dvergar wrote:
It's a bad thing that you are so tied up with this perceived status that your enjoyment of the game is affected by some unknown person's ability to enjoy the game. That's what all of the complaining is about.
I think you're projecting. You went off on a rant about your apparent belief that "perceived status" drives exclusivist attitudes on my part, but that isn't what I believe at all; my views are in fact driven by what I firmly believe to be best for the game and its largely casual playerbase.
So what drives this projection? Well, I think a lot of people are less than honest with themselves about what
really drives their views and attitudes about content nerfs and access to "content", which really means purple pixels (since there's ten other tiers of raids and three continents that are out there, waiting to be "seen"). And I think they perceive the attitudes of others as the reflections of their own suppressed drives. People don't easily admit how much this game, or status in the game, means to them.
