WoW revenue down 54% in seven months

[blackened23]

Uh your friend is new to the game, is he not? Most new players took 2-3 months to hit max, if not longer. The really hardcore guys who leveled to 60 asap weren't joining the game after BWL, they were in it from release.

Of course, if your friend is actually one of those few super-dedicated 5 hours a night levelers who already knows everything about WoW, you could just take him into BWL. While I wasn't a fan of the 40 man raid size overall, one nice thing is that the impact of a single raider is so insignificant that you can easily carry one player who is under-geared for everything on farm.

I'm not really sure what your complaint is.



There is a reason for that. "Old WoW" endgame after leveling involves running raid after raid to get geared up and progress through item progression. It might take 5-6 months as you think, but during those months you gear up in ZG, AQ20, Onyxia, MC, BWL, potentially world bosses, AQ40, and then Naxx. You spend a lot of time because you are seeing a ton of content and it's all unique.

Hit the nail on the head right here. Gearing up and catching up was interesting in vanillia and early TBC because you had a TON of RELEVANT raids to do it in. Now? Only the current raid is relevant. You run 3 different versions of that same raid over and over and over and i'm sure you can see how stupidly boring that gets. In vanilla, there was no massive gear difference. You could do just fine with BWL gear. You could do fine with AQ40 gear. Naxx40 gear of course. Now? If you're not in the latest tier you might as well delete your character. This was not the case in Vanilla/TBC - earlier tiers were still relevant and still ran A LOT because there was no massive item level inflation as there is now. In fact, the healer trinket from BWL was the most sought after drop 2 tiers later, as was the mishundare's helm. People STILL ran BWL constantly to get drops even after Naxx was released.

This simply does not happen now. Now? You do LFR of current tier. Then normal of current tier. Then heroic of current tier. Meanwhile, current tier becomes mind numbingly boring and stupid because you ran it so many freakin' times.

The item level inflation has made the game for the worse. SITTING IN QUEUE has made the game worse and removed all sense of exploration and socialization. I'm sorry, socialization and role playing are the PRINCIPLES of what MMOs are based on. NOT convenience. So if blizzard wants to eschew role playing fundamentals in favor of convenience for idiots that play 13 minutes a day, it is no longer a role playing experience. Logging into WoW and seeing 7 gabillion people running around Orgrimmar just in queue is sad and telling. That isn't role playing. MMOs aren't supposed to be about convenience for idiots that play 10 minutes a day.

Anyway, the bottom line is the MMO genre is dead. I say good riddance. MMOs have been going in the wrong direction for years, and until something new and revolutionary happens it's time for the entire genre to die and reset. Maybe EQ next can change that, there are some new and interesting ideas there.

 

[Phanuel]

Just bring him into the main raids. For any moderately successful raiding guild, getting a reliable new member is far more important than having him geared from the outset. Getting good raiders is hard, the gearing is far far easier to do.

We only ever did that to 1-2 people because they were old old old members back from EQ days.

How do you prove that some new rando is a "good" raider if they aren't joining you with gear already in hand? (Pro-tip, you don't, you move on to the next applicant).

 

[smackababy]

We only ever did that to 1-2 people because they were old old old members back from EQ days.

How do you prove that some new rando is a "good" raider if they aren't joining you with gear already in hand? (Pro-tip, you don't, you move on to the next applicant).

If you don't, they gear up and leave to a better guild. There were a few stepping stone guilds on my server and they hated it. However, they were always hurting for members because they'd gear up people who would go on to guilds able to do better content.

 

[Phanuel]

Hit the nail on the head right here. Gearing up and catching up was interesting in vanillia and early TBC because you had a TON of RELEVANT raids to do it in. Now? Only the current raid is relevant. You run 3 different versions of that same raid over and over and over and i'm sure you can see how stupidly boring that gets. In vanilla, there was no massive gear difference. You could do just fine with BWL gear. You could do fine with AQ40 gear. Naxx40 gear of course. Now? If you're not in the latest tier you might as well delete your character. This was not the case in Vanilla/TBC - earlier tiers were still relevant and still ran A LOT because there was no massive item level inflation as there is now. In fact, the healer trinket from BWL was the most sought after drop 2 tiers later, as was the mishundare's helm. People STILL ran BWL constantly to get drops even after Naxx was released.

No they didn't, we sure as shit didn't. They ran AQ40, and even then... http://www.gamespot.com/news/wow-guild-banned-6160983 you just skipped to the end because the items off C'thun were all you were really after.

This simply does not happen now. Now? You do LFR of current tier. Then normal of current tier. Then heroic of current tier. Meanwhile, current tier becomes mind numbingly boring and stupid because you ran it so many freakin' times.

Really, so doing ICC for over a year wasn't?

The item level inflation has made the game for the worse. SITTING IN QUEUE has made the game worse and removed all sense of exploration and socialization. I'm sorry, socialization and role playing are the PRINCIPLES of what MMOs are based on. NOT convenience. So if blizzard wants to eschew role playing fundamentals in favor of convenience for idiots that play 13 minutes a day, it is no longer a role playing experience. Logging into WoW and seeing 7 gabillion people running around Orgrimmar just in queue is sad and telling. That isn't role playing. MMOs aren't supposed to be about convenience for idiots that play 10 minutes a day.

I never had any sense of exploration in WoW. Sitting in queue is better than spamming /trade or /1 "LFG Heroic, war DPS" (grats on bringing no CC to a party during TBC dungeons guy).

Socialization is also way overblown. Most people socialized within their guilds and that was the extent. I met randoms while having to spam /trade and /1 and then never spoke to them again afterwards.

We'd meet new people who wanted to app because they wanted to app. You never went out and ran dungeons looking for new people because, surprise surprise, typically you were way beyond the gear dropping in those places and you needed someone who could hit the new raid instance running and you weren't going to find them spamming /1 in a city.


Pray tell, what are MMOs supposed to be about? It's relatively massive, it's multiple player, it's online. What criteria are we all missing here?

 

[blackened23]

If you don't, they gear up and leave to a better guild. There were a few stepping stone guilds on my server and they hated it. However, they were always hurting for members because they'd gear up people who would go on to guilds able to do better content.

You have this backwards. The good guilds don't "gear people" up. Only the bad guilds do that because they don't have an alternative.

Once you get into the realm of high ranked guilds, you either have the gear necessary to raid or you get denied as an applicant.

 

[Phanuel]

If you don't, they gear up and leave to a better guild. There were a few stepping stone guilds on my server and they hated it. However, they were always hurting for members because they'd gear up people who would go on to guilds able to do better content.

We were the #1 guild. You didn't have anywhere else to go. Like I've said before;

Do you know how you progressed or got new members as a guild? You poached them. That was the only way to replace lost members, you skimmed off the top of the guilds right below you to keep your roster full and ensured that those guilds below you never made any progress because they kept losing their best and most motivated players to the guilds above them.

If a guild was still clearing MC/BWL/ZG when Naxx was current content, that guild was forever going to be clearing the old content. They were never going to progress because all of their best geared players were going to jump ship as soon as possible.

 

[smackababy]

You have this backwards. The good guilds don't "gear people" up. Only the bad guilds do that because they don't have an alternative.

Once you get into the realm of high ranked guilds, you either have the gear necessary to raid or you get denied as an applicant.

And guilds that couldn't quite do the latest content were always looking for new members because the good players who got in, got geared up, and got experience left for better guilds. They were stepping stone guilds. There were quite a few of them. They were always spamming looking for new applicants.

We were the #1 guild. You didn't have anywhere else to go. Like I've said before;

That is what I meant. I hadn't seen that post, or at least don't remember it. There were guilds who players simply used as stepping stones. They always had to recruit new people, because after a couple weeks, the better players were geared up enough to start doing content the guild couldn't and went to a better guild.

Being at #1, I'm sure you had applicants who did exactly that. But, they had to. Not every guild will be able to do all content; the good players usually won't just sit around and wait either.

 

[railven]

This simply does not happen now. Now? You do LFR of current tier. Then normal of current tier. Then heroic of current tier. Meanwhile, current tier becomes mind numbingly boring and stupid because you ran it so many freakin' times.

What's stopping you from doing it that way? If the experience is all you really crave, what is preventing you as a player/guild from doing it the old fashion way?

 

[blackened23]

That is what I meant. I hadn't seen that post, or at least don't remember it. There were guilds who players simply used as stepping stones. They always had to recruit new people, because after a couple weeks, the better players were geared up enough to start doing content the guild couldn't and went to a better guild.

Being at #1, I'm sure you had applicants who did exactly that. But, they had to. Not every guild will be able to do all content; the good players usually won't just sit around and wait either.

I don't really think this was as prevalent as you make it out to be - being in a guild was part of the social experience which was about half of what I found fun with WoW up to WOTLK. Being in a good guild was a nice perk, but it did have drawbacks as well; but in the end, I enjoyed most of the people I was playing the game with. While some players did this (guild hop), a lot of folks didn't despite having the ability to. Some people were far more content with raiding less and having fun with friends rather than going hardcore raiding 5-6 days a week. Or having to bang your head against a desk from wiping to Heroic Lich King in Wotlk 5-6 nights a week. Or wiping to pre-nerf M'uru endlessly 6 nights a week in sunwell. And there definitely were guilds doing 6 days/week in Naxx 40 especially once they got to bosses like Gothik (VERY tough in Naxx40), Sapphiron and the like.. If I had to do it all over again I probably would have been in one of those more casual guilds raiding 3-4 days a week max - sure I wouldn't be the most progressed, but I wouldn't get burned out from raiding 6 nights a week, either. So there were an even mix of folks who didn't go "hardcore" guild skipping just because of friends and having a more reasonable raid schedule.

 

[Anteaus]

What's stopping you from doing it that way? If the experience is all you really crave, what is preventing you as a player/guild from doing it the old fashion way?

This is exactly the way I feel about a lot of things. People often say that it's Blizzard's fault the game is declining because they include features that people actually use, often to the detriment of older raiding styles, but the truth is that if so many people really wish for a return of the old ways they can simply form a guild that adheres to the old way of doing things and recruits accordingly. Tell your members not to use LFR and that you will go through the content together. Elite guilds are still completely possible and can outpace the gearing potential of anything LFR can provide. Skills and effort still matter, even if the bar has been lowered for everyone else. It's true the content isn't as hard as it used to be, but that shouldn't prevent people from enjoying it all the same.

Features like LFR is meant to help more people see the content, but that doesn't mean players who want more can't take things to a higher level.

 

[CWRMadcat]

We only ever did that to 1-2 people because they were old old old members back from EQ days.

How do you prove that some new rando is a "good" raider if they aren't joining you with gear already in hand? (Pro-tip, you don't, you move on to the next applicant).

The response to the op wasn't about inviting a random, he was asking about how his friend could "catch up". Most guilds (even the top guild on my server at the time), relaxed recruiting standards markedly for players referred to them by members of their active raiding roster.

After reading the first response I realized I should throw in some qualifiers:

I'm specifically referring to Classic WoW, pre-achievements and all that. By reference, I'm not looking at something superficial like (I did Dire Maul with X player in your guild once and he/she was cool). It was honestly pretty common for friends of raiders to get fast tracked in the early days.

 

[smackababy]

The response to the op wasn't about inviting a random, he was asking about how his friend could "catch up". Most guilds (even the top guild on my server at the time), relaxed recruiting standards markedly for players referred to them by members of their active raiding roster.

The guild I was in didn't do that. You had to have the achievements of previous content and the gear of the previous content in order to make it pas the initial application. If you listed someone in the guild as a reference, they were asked after the initial vetting process was done but the raid / class leaders.

If the applied as a casual, they would have to reapply as a raider if they wanted to do any of the current content. On occasion, we'd do older content and bring along the casuals that were geared enough for it. Finishing up the legendary mace in Ulduar for example. Sadly, my alt Holy Paladin was next in line for that, but we never finished it. =(

 

[CWRMadcat]

This is exactly the way I feel about a lot of things. People often say that it's Blizzard's fault the game is declining because they include features that people actually use, often to the detriment of older raiding styles, but the truth is that if so many people really wish for a return of the old ways they can simply form a guild that adheres to the old way of doing things and recruits accordingly. Tell your members not to use LFR and that you will go through the content together. Elite guilds are still completely possible and can outpace the gearing potential of anything LFR can provide. Skills and effort still matter, even if the bar has been lowered for everyone else. It's true the content isn't as hard as it used to be, but that shouldn't prevent people from enjoying it all the same.

Features like LFR is meant to help more people see the content, but that doesn't mean players who want more can't take things to a higher level.

Let's be real here. LFR has never been about seeing the content, it's always been getting maximum purples for the time invested. These people don't want to make any commitments, don't want to actually bother to be good at anything, but by god they're going to get their purpz. Blizzard might as well just end the charade and place an NPC that you can hit up for your random free weekly epic.

 

[Anteaus]

Let's be real here. LFR has never been about seeing the content, it's always been getting maximum purples for the time invested. These people don't want to make any commitments, don't want to actually bother to be good at anything, but by god they're going to get their purpz. Blizzard might as well just end the charade and place an NPC that you can hit up for your random free weekly epic.

Even so, let them get their epics. At the end of the day if your guild is running like a well oiled machine it shouldn't matter what people outside the door are geared with. If we are talking about gear snobbery then yes I can see how some would lose the desire, but if we are talking about playing a game and mastering content regardless of what the rift raft does on their free time, then there is nothing keeping that from happening.

 

[Anubis]

You have this backwards. The good guilds don't "gear people" up. Only the bad guilds do that because they don't have an alternative.

Once you get into the realm of high ranked guilds, you either have the gear necessary to raid or you get denied as an applicant.

that was not always true (assuming it is now). from Vanilla through to Cata we often took under geared apps if they showed the knowledge we were looking for and had at least decent experience at the content.

everyone operates this differently but our application process was one of the longer/more involved ones out there, it weeded out people on its own, nearly everyone who took the time to do it got seriously looked at, and of those we accepted id say 90% made the cut and stayed around for a long time. we had an incredibly low turnover rate

FWIW we ran top 50 in TBC and as high as top 20 in wrath

 

[railven]

Even so, let them get their epics. At the end of the day if your guild is running like a well oiled machine it shouldn't matter what people outside the door are geared with. If we are talking about gear snobbery then yes I can see how some would lose the desire, but if we are talking about playing a game and mastering content regardless of what the rift raft does on their free time, then there is nothing keeping that from happening.

This is my ideology. Those only focusing on LFR won't get a spot in my guild for the raid roster, nor chances any serious progression guild.

Let them have their epics, it doesn't affect you at all.

EDIT:

This is exactly the way I feel about a lot of things. People often say that it's Blizzard's fault the game is declining because they include features that people actually use, often to the detriment of older raiding styles, but the truth is that if so many people really wish for a return of the old ways they can simply form a guild that adheres to the old way of doing things and recruits accordingly. Tell your members not to use LFR and that you will go through the content together. Elite guilds are still completely possible and can outpace the gearing potential of anything LFR can provide. Skills and effort still matter, even if the bar has been lowered for everyone else. It's true the content isn't as hard as it used to be, but that shouldn't prevent people from enjoying it all the same.

Features like LFR is meant to help more people see the content, but that doesn't mean players who want more can't take things to a higher level.

I'd like to add to this that Blizzard even made the nerfs/rolling buffs optional. You can easily talk to an NPC at the start of each raid zone and turn off the buff/nerfs. If someone really wanted to do it legit, without any handicaps - it is there for them to try.

 

[Soccerman06]

Just bring him into the main raids. For any moderately successful raiding guild, getting a reliable new member is far more important than having him geared from the outset. Getting good raiders is hard, the gearing is far far easier to do.

You must have not been a warlock or sp lol. Getting some gear for them was near impossible until mid-late end tier with hardcore guilds. Paladin tanks and mt healers got gear first and then healers and then dps once healing wasnt an issue. Then you had to compete with moonkins, ele shaman, mages and whatnot just to get the other gear (yes some of the best caster gear moonkins and shaman wanted were clothe or other slot). Then getting bis gear for every caster was impossible because of all that unless a particular tier dragged on for a year.

 

[Gryz]

The problem with LFR is that it makes all content irrelevant, except the latest raid.

The systematic assignment of stats on gear also makes it so that not even a single item from the previous raid is worth getting. (Contrary to e.g. the Dragon Spine Trophy, ToEP, etc).

During vanilla, when some guilds were in Naxx40, others guilds were still in MC, BWL or AQ40. There was true progress. And you could see how people were doing by the gear they were wearing. Same with TBC, people were still enjoying Karazhan when others were in MH and BT. And you could still be proud of your Karazhan gear, because you earned it fair and square. It only took you longer to get.

Nowadays you get LFR gear for free. And it's better than any 5-man heroic gear. That killed people seeing 5-man as serious or fun content. (Like e.g. heroic were fun during TBC). It also kills all previous raid-content. I stopped playing WLK after killing Arthas a few times (April 2010). I came back in Cata at the end of FireLands. I wanted to do Baradin Hold, Throne of the Four Winds and Blackwing Descent. Nobody wanted to do those instances. Nobody.

If people "just want to see content", then do LFR for the previous raid-tier. That would imply there would be no LFR in a new expansion, until the 2nd raid is out. Shouldn't be a problem, as the people who depend on LFR usually level more slowly anyway. But can you see the complaints if the average player can't get near-best gear anymore ?

I always would have liked this solution:
Latest raid-tier is still hard, takes a long time to get your gear.
Previous raid-tier has unchanged difficulty. But the amount of gear that drops from each boss is tripled or quadrupled.

That means that everybody still has to go through all raid-tiers. Has to learn every fight. Gets to experience every fight as it was intended. But once you learn the fight, you only need to kill those bosses for 2-3 weeks. And then everybody should have all the gear they wanted, and a full tier-X class-set. E.g. when in normal mode, you get one tier-X headpiece per week, you now get 4 pieces. After killing the boss for 3 weeks, everybody in the raid has their helmet.

This would allow people to catch up with the current raid-tier really quickly. And it would allow them to get full sets, rare trinkets, etc. And be ready for the next raid-tier within a month. So when you join the expansion pack a year after release, and the rest is 3 raid tiers ahead, it takes you only 2 months to catch up.

And because there is so much loot to be gained, I am sure there will be lots of players giving the older raid dungeons a try. And guilds will have no problem gearing up new members on off-nights. Because they can fully gear 2-3 new members in a night.

Blizzard just lacks the creativity to solve problem in inventive ways. The original team had that. Imho it all fell apart in August 2009, when the Coliseum patch was released. (And just after main developer Tigole left WoW).

 

[AViking]

Interesting idea. You have to make sure that people kill content while actually following the mechanics. This outgearing nerfed content and bypassing the mechanics killed the quality of players.

Raid mechanics were pretty much recycled. Every once in a while you would get something new but for the most part I could reference a previous fight and get people going. However if someone doesn't understand something as basic as a council fight because there was never any need to follow mechanics it makes people bad.

You can test this quite easily really. At least you could. Take people in to Twin Emps. They can't do it. Drunk friday night raiding of something like Twin Emps was hilarious. This became relatively apparent by the time I got to a fight like Heroic Conclave of Wind or better yet Omnicrom. People needed that crazy add on to be able to do Omnicrom.

Ascendant council? Dear lord. I used to run a GDKP and the stupidity of people on that fight was unprecedented. Yet it's the same fight as 10 other fights.

 

[Veliko]

The problem with LFR is that it makes all content irrelevant, except the latest raid.

I remember my brother doing ICC raids in a PUG even when MoP was out.

The systematic assignment of stats on gear also makes it so that not even a single item from the previous raid is worth getting. (Contrary to e.g. the Dragon Spine Trophy, ToEP, etc).

Well, it seems a bit pointless having previous-tier gear better than current-tier gear.

During vanilla, when some guilds were in Naxx40, others guilds were still in MC, BWL or AQ40. There was true progress. And you could see how people were doing by the gear they were wearing. Same with TBC, people were still enjoying Karazhan when others were in MH and BT. And you could still be proud of your Karazhan gear, because you earned it fair and square. It only took you longer to get.

There's still progress and to suggest otherwise is just plain daft.

Those that are capable of clearing every boss of every tier still do so, just as they did back in vanilla.

The only thing that has changed is that those who would have got stuck can now do the newer content.

Nowadays you get LFR gear for free. And it's better than any 5-man heroic gear. That killed people seeing 5-man as serious or fun content. (Like e.g. heroic were fun during TBC). It also kills all previous raid-content. I stopped playing WLK after killing Arthas a few times (April 2010). I came back in Cata at the end of FireLands. I wanted to do Baradin Hold, Throne of the Four Winds and Blackwing Descent. Nobody wanted to do those instances. Nobody.

So?

If people "just want to see content", then do LFR for the previous raid-tier. That would imply there would be no LFR in a new expansion, until the 2nd raid is out. Shouldn't be a problem, as the people who depend on LFR usually level more slowly anyway. But can you see the complaints if the average player can't get near-best gear anymore ?

So why would Blizzard implement a system that isn't wanted?

I always would have liked this solution:
Latest raid-tier is still hard, takes a long time to get your gear.
Previous raid-tier has unchanged difficulty. But the amount of gear that drops from each boss is tripled or quadrupled.

That means that everybody still has to go through all raid-tiers. Has to learn every fight. Gets to experience every fight as it was intended. But once you learn the fight, you only need to kill those bosses for 2-3 weeks. And then everybody should have all the gear they wanted, and a full tier-X class-set. E.g. when in normal mode, you get one tier-X headpiece per week, you now get 4 pieces. After killing the boss for 3 weeks, everybody in the raid has their helmet.

This would allow people to catch up with the current raid-tier really quickly. And it would allow them to get full sets, rare trinkets, etc. And be ready for the next raid-tier within a month. So when you join the expansion pack a year after release, and the rest is 3 raid tiers ahead, it takes you only 2 months to catch up.

And because there is so much loot to be gained, I am sure there will be lots of players giving the older raid dungeons a try. And guilds will have no problem gearing up new members on off-nights. Because they can fully gear 2-3 new members in a night.

Blizzard just lacks the creativity to solve problem in inventive ways. The original team had that. Imho it all fell apart in August 2009, when the Coliseum patch was released. (And just after main developer Tigole left WoW).

You're mostly moaning about things that don't really affect you.

 

[blackened23]

Any bets on how much WoW will further die and rot millions of subs at the next Activision/Blizzard income/financial statement?

I'm betting subs dip to 4 million world wide. Lower than they were during TBC, and blizzard had not even launched WoW to most parts of Asia during TBC despite the higher sub numbers. I welcome the death of WoW. F2P time maybe? When you're bleeding 700k subs a month, it probably is. I think so. Really, MMOs have become too convenience based and lost the fundamentals of role playing along the way. I think the entire genre needs to be "reset" and rethought completely - EQ Next looks promising in this respect since it has some truly new ideas. We'll see I guess.

 

[Anubis]

You must have not been a warlock or sp lol. Getting some gear for them was near impossible until mid-late end tier with hardcore guilds. Paladin tanks and mt healers got gear first and then healers and then dps once healing wasnt an issue. Then you had to compete with moonkins, ele shaman, mages and whatnot just to get the other gear (yes some of the best caster gear moonkins and shaman wanted were clothe or other slot). Then getting bis gear for every caster was impossible because of all that unless a particular tier dragged on for a year.

that really depended on your luck with token drops and how your DKP system worked. for us there was no real priority besides main specs first. Tanks and healers and DPS all bid against each other, highest bid won, we used silent bid, 1 and done, worked fine

 

[AViking]

Vast world and massive "maps" to play in still appeal to people. Just look at GTAV.

MMO's are probably not dead for this reason. Someone will eventually figure something out. Doubt it will be anyone in this thread though since everyone, myself included, are way too hard headed about things. That's why I was trying to be reasonable and come up with a solution where it would appeal to both sides of the argument. Catering to the lowest common denominator can't possibly work long term. They're just milking it at this point.

 

[flexy]

Vast world and massive "maps" to play in still appeal to people. Just look at GTAV.

MMO's are probably not dead for this reason. Someone will eventually figure something out.

MMOs are not dead and the genre is not dead. As I said earlier, people will always love to play in "virtual worlds". The problem is how they are realized, what a company does to the genre.

"Figure something out?" <--- this is pretty easy. The key is that people need to have as much freedom to do what they want. Yes it is THAT easy.

A "perfect" MMO would be a dynamic world with as little as possible "set rules" where things such as economy, encounters with mobs/enemies, exploring etc. happen naturally. Any additional, forced thing is ultimately detrimental. "Dailies", "Raids", "LFG" etc. are things which more or less oppose the idea of a free, open world. (Nothing against Raids, dailies etc. as long as they are optional and ADD to a game...BUT the problem is when such things become essential parts of the game as they are now.)

The other issue is then how companies want to gratify each player as "incentives" to play a game..by handing out mounts, making things easier etc...which removes challenges. Removing challenges is ULTIMATELY bad. This also includes simple things like "having" to walk to a place as opposed to quick travel or flying mounts. While at the first glance "convenient"..it's not "convenience" what makes a game good or people playing. It's the CHALLENGE and adventure. The conveniences are in fact reasons many people leaving the game now.

 

[Chiropteran]

I wasn't running BWL in 03/2006, and for me to get a group to go back to BWL was difficult (trust me, I tried.) The issue is with no catch up, new players are left trying to catch up.

I thought you said BWL, my error. It doesn't matter though. Whatever raid you are doing, you can bring your under-geared buddy, if you want. Even Naxx allows for enough slack to easily carry 1 undergeared player, out of a raid of 40, except possibly for sapphiron/kt. If you don't want to, he could go join a molten core guild or find a molten core pug, and work on from there.

You still keep ignoring the issue I keep repeating: tell me exactly how would you task me to get 38 people to run BWL? My guild wasn't running that content anymore.

How does this have anything to do with vanilla?

Related question: my new MoP guild only has 8 members, we can't do any raids, how are we supposed to do heroic mode raiding?

Answer: tough luck, you can't. Same answer to your question: if you don't raid BWL, you can't do BWL. It's not rocket science. If you want to gear up your late joining friend, bring him on whatever raid you are actually doing. If you don't want to do that, that is your fault.

Ironically, you were complaining about not having time to stay with the average "LFR" raider, but here you are being completely hypocritical saying in Vanilla it was fine having to spend months (not including hitting max level) just to catch up.

You are progressing. Everything you did was meaningful in vanilla, because it wasn't made obsolete shortly after. You could take a few months raiding ZG/MC, and then quit for a year. When you came back, you might not be a geared as a BWL raider, but you could easily get back into raiding because there were guilds that wanted a character with intro raid epics, over newbies in blues.

The time it takes a person to catch doesn't mean the people he is catching up to freeze. They keep progressing.

I'm not sure what your point is. Yes, catching up involves progressing through the content.

I'm confused here, you had no issues farming all the previous tiers in vanilla for months (even years) but now you have an issue with a new tier every 3-4 months? Can you contradict yourself more.

There is no contradiction. If you want to progress through vanilla, that is what you do- work through molten core (optionally ZG), then BWL, AQ40, and then Naxx. Everyone had to do this, you generally couldn't skip a raid tier because guilds didn't want to gear out unproven players. As a result, your past time was never wasted. You might spend months in Molten Core, but you had to do this. You might spend months in BWL, but again everyone had to do this.

If you wanted to be strategic about gear out for raids in the least amount of time, you still had to do pretty much every raid.

In new WoW, it's a bit different. You can choose to spend months in the first raid, but it all becomes instantly obsolete on the next raid release, and all that time was ultimately just wasted. Nobody else has to spend that time to progress, instead they just do the new LRF.

If you want to be strategic, and gear yourself out the quickest with the least effort, it makes the most sense to NEVER raid until the final tier of LFR, then just buy the bare min ilvl gear to get into LFR and run it. All the rest of the raids might as well not exist as far as you are concerned.

And as far as hard modes, I think they are terrible and ruin the incentive of raiding. In AQ40, C'thun was damn hard. It was amazing to kill him. In Ulduar, Yogg-saron normal made wasn't nearly as hard. Sure, then there were hard modes without watchers helping, which I did, but it just removed one of the basic aspects of the game. You had hard raid fights that were tough, but then after killing them you had the satisfaction of coming back and enjoying an easier fight next week for easy loot, and seeing the next encounter of the raid. With hard mode a lot of that is removed. Instead of next week being easier, you come back and do the same boss except now he is harder, there is something new to learn, and you don't get to see a new boss because you are still working on killing the same boss in some more difficult way.

I like hard bosses, but multiple difficulty levels is stupid. I don't want to learn a fight 3 different times.

How many months did you raid each raid, and be honest:
MC
BWL
ZG
AQ20
AQ40
Naxx

What difference does it make? It's completely irrelevant.

What? Again, they've released more raid tiers in MoP faster. This is why your new train of thought makes no sense. "I'd rather farm slower and longer than the same instances over and over and over." Considering HOF launched 3 weeks after MV, then TOES 1 month after that, then ToT in 4 months and SoO in another 4 months.

That is interesting maybe if you are a hardcore raider raiding each raid as they come out. As a casual who didn't raid at all so far, if I came back today and wanted to do any except for the latest raids, I would be out of luck. They are obsolete, nobody spends time in them, they might as well not exist. In vanilla, this wasn't the case. I could raid at my own pace, molten core didn't just effectively vanish when BWL was released.

So in MoP, I can LFR the latest, *maybe* the raid prior to latest, and then move on to doing the latest raid in normal/hard mode. The same raid 3 times, and maybe the previous raid on impossible to fail easy mode. That doesn't sound appealing to me. Doing the same raid on 3 different difficulty levels sounds boring as hell, and since it's the only content with relevant item drops it's really the only option if I wanted to be a serious endgame raider.

You spent more time grinding the same content in vanilla than you ever did in MoP. You even said this as one of your complaints earlier.

It's never been about the total time spent. It's been about what you get for that time. You spend a month in Molten Core, you will probably win a couple epics. You spend 3 months in Molten Core & ZG on the side, you are pretty well geared compared to the average. This holds true for the entirety of vanilla WoW. Even at the end of vanilla, just before BC, your molten core epics are still something of a badge of honor, new players can't get them- not without going through molten core just like you did.

On the other hand, you spend a month in MV, maybe you get a little more gear compared to a month in Molten Core. You spend 3 months in MV, you are geared to the teeth for the moment. 6 months later, brand new players are picking up better items than what you have from brainless difficulty LFR, and you have NOTHING to show for the three months you spent farming MV.

I would have loved to, but my guilds in vanilla weren't friendly to "newbs." It was their responsibility to get geared, not the guilds. My first start in raid leading was during Vanilla because I did work to get my friends geared. We cleared ZG a few times, but it got progressively harder to fill a static pug as people moved on. In the end he didn't get geared, and couldn't join me in Naxx.

That isn't a game mechanics problem, that is a guild problem. Or a non-problem, depending on point of view.

I repeat myself, but your friend couldn't raid at level 1, or 10, or 50. He had to level up to 60 by himself. Why couldn't he join a molten core guild and progress by himself? Why did he need you to hold his hand? Why couldn't he gear up the same way everyone else does? I mean, what if he *did* get geared up, but your guild leaders still didn't want him because he didn't know all the Naxx fights?