btw, my opinion on "hardcore" vs "casual" (Since the discussion is going that way.)
I think a lot of design has been pushed through people who were in unique positions in EQ, and then in WoW. If you look, a lot of the decreases in "difficulty" in WoW, came from time and people required (The two biggest difficulty factors in EQ). Raids became smaller, and less time intensive--because the entire view on accessibility had encompassed just those two variables (And lets face, we all thought the same thing--how many raid leaders here breathed a sigh of relief when raids went to 25 man, we thought we could "cut the fat"). But that's not really a complete picture of accessibility, is it? Does anyone here think it's rarer for a player to 1.) Invest more time 2.) Get more friends 3.) Grow more skilled?
I'd say number 3 is,by far, the rarer scenario. So by infusing every difficulty aspect into the need for more skill, and supposedly increasing "accessibility" by decreasing time/people required, is it not possible that there was an inadvertentdecreasein accessibility? (Therefor requiring a "skill switch", which you can artificial decrease difficulty--which is what WoW had to do.)
The above is a variable, one of many, that make it really difficult to talk about those "old school" methods, or "new accessibility" with any kind of certainty. There are hundreds of reasons for why things became broken, and even some that run completely contrary to design intent and purpose (Like the above). So they are hard to flesh out. Even things like engineering, can have a huge influence on game numbers. The fact is we DO NOT know if a hardcore game would have 150k subs, because there are a million other variables that can subvert even a simple intention in an operation this complex.
In my opinion--here is what happened in this Genre. WoW decreased Time/People required, and streamlined access, and made engineering far superior (Less lag, easier on systems (ect)). All those things lead to a huge increase in sub numbers. So WoW continued to add them. But certain elements of this, became like adding too much sugar to a cake, or icing. Something that WAS essential, now becomes overbearing and destructive, because it completely destroys any context of flavor or texture (Or other elments of this bad metaphor). n.
Unfortunately, MMO's cost millions to experiment with. And as stated above, even clear design intentions don't always work how you expect. Social aspects of games ar hard to measure. Writing off any component that was in at the apex of this market, is maybe a bit silly, when we know so little about what, exactly, got us to the top of the mountain. Even WoW developers have said interpreting their mountains of metrics is difficult, and they've FUBARed it multiple times.
Anyway, long and short, those old school elements were part of the perfect cake. Maybe we should examine that, too.
