People would always pick whatever had the highest loot. It's why purple loot got thrown around like candy when it used to be somewhat rare to see full sets in the population at large. It's a have and havenots thing, there's no real way to solve it. The people with the money will complain until they are given equal access to the items that the more dedicated players have. Games like Diablo side step that whole problem with permadeath but no one would go for that in something like WOW.

Maybe the solution (to no one being happy) is upon character it needs to be specified if you want to play WoW on Easy, Normal, or Heroic mode and on what sort of server (PVP, PVE etc). Obviously, the harder the game server is the better the loot.

*edit: or maybe that should be in Duke Nukem WoW terms- casual/mentally balanced, (easy), sort of OCD(normal), I haven't washed my underwear all week(uber nerd, never gets laid, dork-mode).

They shouldn't need videos and telling them to watch them is treating the symptom, not the disease. They should be able to learn the fight mechanics because they aren't that difficult most of the time. When I played WOW my guild did the encounters ourselves through trial and error, observation and communication. We tried to be laid back about it and didn't blow up at people over mistakes because that never solves anything and anyone taking the game that seriously is probably a drama queen anyway. We didn't win server races but we had a good time and it got done without consulting tutorials and videos which is like filling in the other half of a crossword.

The real problem with WOW is that its old and there are no surprises left. It's obviously being kept on life support just for the cash while they work on new games to sustain them going forward. The people behind the inventive and original parts of WOW moved on already. No game lasts forever, they did a pretty good job of keeping us all entertained this long.

So, does that mean there is just enough?

Problem is, WoW works for everyone, from casuals to the hardcore, whether it be PvE or PvP. But they will never please everyone all the time.

Some wanted the 5 man instances to much harder than they were before. They were, then the casuals complained they were too hard. Blizzard starts to nerf them, then the hardcores complain they were being made too easy.

Raids, kind of the same thing. Except this time, a lot of the more casual raiders were so used to the last 6-8 months of WoTLK where it was literally a faceroll to clear ICC due to the encounter nerfs and zone buffs. So many people were being carried through that didn't have to learn the mechanics because they were just healed through their mistakes.

The raids in Cata (at launch) were very tough, some more-so than others. ie: Al'Akir was bloody ridiculous RNG fight that wasn't fun at all, even if you knew the fight well.

I personally stopped playing because of a few things, but one of them was that I was tired of having to rely on 9+ other people to pull their shit together and be prepared for raids.

In the end, as much as I enjoy WoW (at times) I would rather spend 4 hours actually playing a game and not waiting on people to start a raid, and then having to teach them boss mechanics in detail because they didn't bother to watch vids and read up on the fight on their own time. Then watching them fail miserably on those mechanics for 2 hrs and waste my time.

A small core group (10 man) of us got the first 4 or 5 bosses dead before the end of December (launch was early December), and then the guild started 25 man raids and they couldn't even get those first 4 bosses dead in 6 weeks of raids, even though half the raid could do it 10man easily. The other half of the raid were trying to raid in quest greens, ilvl gear that wouldnt even get them into 5man heroics, no buff food, no potions etc. The guild leader let this happen, guild splintered because of it, and I stopped logging on.

NCSoft has a 'major announcement' coming in two weeks and everything points to a GW2 announcement. What else do publishers announce but new games and release dates? So I think the game will be coming fairly soon. My bet is Q2 2012.

Creston wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 18:11:
Guild Wars 2, Ray. Guild Wars 2.

Is it ever coming out? I've been waiting for GW2 for years now.

There are posts here saying there isn't enough content and posts saying there is too much. So, does that mean there is just enough?

I just think it's really interesting how this is a completely different picture than they painted less than a year ago with "MAJOR MILESTONE: 12 million players! Next stop, THE MOON!"

They're not going to fix anything substantial because they run the risk of alienating some people by trying to please others, as mentioned already. They're just going to churn out expansions even faster, basically milk it harder than ever, and hopefully release their new MMO before everyone jumps ship and they go broke.

Creston wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 18:11:
I love reading the WoW threads on here, because from reading them, WoW never seems anything but WORK to me. You pay blizzard 15 bucks for the privilege of utterly grinding in an effort to find a piece of gear that has an extra +2% on something.

Even my regular day job isn't that dull.

Creston

I really don't know where all this comes from. Having been a "hardcore" raider since Burning Crusade (I've taken a few breaks since then and now), gear has never been easier to get than it is now. I currently have a mage alt that just hit 85 several weeks ago, I put off gearing it up until the last week because my guild has been working on progression raiding (we're currently 6/7 heroic Firelands, so by progression I mean bleeding edge world class progression). It took me less than a week to get my mage geared up in the best possible pre-raid gear; and I'm a full time student who also works full time. I'm inclined to believe that the people who complain about the "grind" either do not play the game, haven't played it in a long time, or are just "doing it wrong."

That being said, my biggest complaint as an old school raider (that I think has been echoed in the thread already) is the lack of originality in the new content. They're rehashing old instances and presenting them as "new" content. At least they are adding some new boss fights and combining abilities in different ways, but as it is there hasn't really been anything fresh or new in quite a while.

WoW is so large now it basically faces some of the same problems governments do. Different segments of the population feel the game is failing for different reasons. The top raiding guilds want harder Raids and instances, the casuals want thing more accessible to all players like Wrath was, and the PvPers want fun Class nerfs that ruin PvE and PvErs want class buffs that unbalance PvP. Not to mention all the varied opinions on what to do with instance PuGs.

No matter what they do a significant portion of the community will be unhappy. I think the best they can do is to balance things where everyone is discontent, but not enough to drop their subs, at least not by the millions.

The problem I see is when WoW inevitably looses a certain # of subs, the share-holders will get pissed they're only making a truck load of money instead of a boat load and demand what is likely to be fun ruining action.

I read this as "our user base is getting really good at grinding....and it is boring...so we will try and make even more grinding with more e-penises etc etc etc"

How many times can you do the same thing over and over?

Blizzard still hasn't grasped the fact that WoW players need stuff to do besides grinding in new, reskinned dungeons.

Blizzard's new content release schedule is just too infrequent. Why haven't they gotten faster at adding a new dungeon, or a new area? Haven't they been doing this for years already? Why not hire more people or improve their tools? To me, it just looks like they're getting lazy.

An easy solution is to open up new content creation to the community. You have 11.1 MILLION people who know and love the game; give them the tools to create dungeons, areas, quests, etc. and let them submit their creations to Blizzard. All they'd have to do is stamp it and ship it if it's good enough!

To busy counting money to do anything else....they werne't doing anything because they weren't losing customers. Why in the world would they add anything if people were content with the stale world? So now - they HAVE to do something....

Blizzard still hasn't grasped the fact that WoW players need stuff to do besides grinding in new, reskinned dungeons.

Blizzard's new content release schedule is just too infrequent. Why haven't they gotten faster at adding a new dungeon, or a new area? Haven't they been doing this for years already? Why not hire more people or improve their tools? To me, it just looks like they're getting lazy.

An easy solution is to open up new content creation to the community. You have 11.1 MILLION people who know and love the game; give them the tools to create dungeons, areas, quests, etc. and let them submit their creations to Blizzard. All they'd have to do is stamp it and ship it if it's good enough!

Ray Marden wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 18:01:
The saddest thing is how so many of the other games are just pale imitations of WoW - after all this time, they couldn't come up with more? Or after seeing everything that WoW did over the years, you couldn't at least steal the solutions that WoW came up with four years ago?

I am hoping Star Wars is okay, but I have a number of concerns with that one. Otherwise, can only Blizzard beat Blizzard; am I stuck waiting for Titan?

Guild Wars 2, Ray. Guild Wars 2.

I love reading the WoW threads on here, because from reading them, WoW never seems anything but WORK to me. You pay blizzard 15 bucks for the privilege of utterly grinding in an effort to find a piece of gear that has an extra +2% on something.

Even my regular day job isn't that dull.

Creston

The problem with Blizzard is that it seems to lack creativity and the other half just does not care - it is number one and it is going to punish its players as long as it can.

Sh*tt* customer service + lackluster content + grinding = Fail

I think the current Firelands content is a perfect example of this. Really, lava, burnt earth, and fire? That's the "new" thing in Warcraft? Oh...and you make it a daily questing zone that looks the same? Oh...with a bombing run of the actual instance? Oh...so you can get into the instance and see all the same lava, burnt earth, and fire?

Meanwhile, what about the ongoing balance issues? Or the focus on grinding pointless content for capped valor points? In instances that are poorly designed, are punishing for letting in undergeared or understkill players? With no reward?

The saddest thing is how so many of the other games are just pale imitations of WoW - after all this time, they couldn't come up with more? Or after seeing everything that WoW did over the years, you couldn't at least steal the solutions that WoW came up with four years ago?

I am hoping Star Wars is okay, but I have a number of concerns with that one. Otherwise, can only Blizzard beat Blizzard; am I stuck waiting for Titan?
"White people problems."
Off to play the expansion with no new classes,
Ray

Wallshadows wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 14:56:
*put on tinfoil hat*

I always had the impression that there was an underlying meaning to the difficulty of raids and that was to give the new developers time to slug through creating the next tier of raids. In retrospect, all the balance issues, hot fixing, and delays gives me the impression that the new team is having a hard time filling the shoes of those who worked through TBC and WotLK content and needed to provide a steep learning curve for players to stifle progression.

Sure, I agree; the difference with the older raid areas is that people were still doing them after the newest tier was available. That stopped with Cataclysm; there wasn't a first tier for the casual people to break into, no farming runs to just latch onto. Making the new raids time consuming to progress through is one thing, but with no fallback for the more casual people to tag along with (or barriers to keep them from doing it), they run out of meaningful things to do pretty quickly while the hardcore are still working on their progression.

Pretty much the same what others have said, except I would like to add:

1) People are tired of 85 levels of quests; the majority being go kill 6 of this and come back, or go pick up 8 of this and come back.

2) Once you do get to 85, you have to deal with the derps in the Dungeon Finder and it's so bad it's not worth it imo.

I quit from January until June...then I played the month of June and it took me 3 days to wish that wow had a week subscription fee instead of a month.

Not enough casual content anymore - or too easy casual content. I really liked the new 5 man instances, but they dumbed them down again, instead they should have been even harder, especially for DPS classes.
Cata didnt even keep me for 1 month. No expansion before that only kept me playing one month - and I even leveled 2 chars and brought them both up to like 354 gear level plus proper PvP gear.
Also the constant massive class changes they do are just too much. I seriously liked most of the changes until Cata. But in Cata and the patches after it they overdone it like never before.
Especially because of those class changes PvP (the by far biggest time sink for me so far) was suddenly completely uninteresting. Some classes were so ridiculously overpowered and others so fucking weak and laughable, that the only way to win was to have the perfect team combo and actually completely ignore some classes.

I noticed ALOT of players leaving at or around the same time like me, so I still doubt their official numbers.
I seriously hope they lose much, much more, until they realize what they did wrong.

We got to see Naxx which many of us never got a chance to back in vanilla. Ulduar was amazing. Then things started to turn for the worse. The Tournament release was just awful. (We should have had a full blown Azjul-Nerub style raid, IMO) ICC was a step back in the right direction with some faults. Downing the Lich King with my friends for the first time was something that I'll never forget.

I didn't get to see Naxx until LK, either. Great memories there. And some bad ones. Specifically a couple of 8 hour 25 man raids, that started at 5:30 or 6 in the evening and finally finished at 1:30 or 2 in the morning (we may not have been great, but by god, we didn't quit until we won!).

Ulduar and ICC were both excellent. Mimiron hard mode (Firefighter achievement) is still my favorite boss fight ever.

The "lootship" in ICC always had something go wrong, where someone would fall off or not make the jump (or just flat out forget to equip their pack!).

And yeah, after weeks of "Defile in 5!!!" screamed over vent, getting that LK kill in 10 and 25 was a great way to wrap up the expansion.

So many awesome memories. Many times I've wished that Cataclysm had never happened, and we'd still be raiding like we were the weeks before.

The casual players are coming out of the woodworks to explain why they left, here and on other forums. I hope the hardcore raiders are shitting themselves seeing that WoW may swing back the other way. If it does.

I quit for the same reasons. Content was too difficult to bother doing. And the Firelands started out cool, but it soon became apparently just how bad of a grind it was.

I left back in January, followed by most of my friends for a couple reasons, but raid difficulty was the primary one. It left my guild of friends with nowhere to go.

We had been together all through BC and WotLK. Loved adventuring through Kara (still my favorite raid), working together with other guilds in an alliance to do SSC/TK, Black Temple, etc. Then Wrath hit and was fun initially. We got to see Naxx which many of us never got a chance to back in vanilla. Ulduar was amazing. Then things started to turn for the worse. The Tournament release was just awful. (We should have had a full blown Azjul-Nerub style raid, IMO) ICC was a step back in the right direction with some faults. Downing the Lich King with my friends for the first time was something that I'll never forget. We worked our asses off for it even with the partial buff.

Then Cata released. The initial "ooh, this is new" feeling was gone in two weeks. The initial raids were all spread out and were much too hard for us. We tried for weeks to get something accomplished but we just couldn't. Eventually people just started to not show up and that was pretty much it. It left us with the choice of do we abandon our friends we've been playing with for years to group up with random people in a new guild to try to get something killed or do I just give up on the game, itself? I, and most chose the latter, a few the former.

Bah, first post and I rambled a bit. Long time lurker here. Love the site and reading the comments section.