Here's a little tip for everyone who thinks they know what WoW needs more than Blizzard does: Blizzard trackseverything. This means that when they frantically backpedal on the core design of an expansion (c.f. the complete 180 in difficulty curve design that happened after the trollroics and the frantic nerfing of Firelands/introduction of LFR), it usually means they've got all sorts of metrics on "PUG Heroics starts vs PUG Heroics completes", "Time played vs time idling" and the likeon top ofall of the "I am cancelling my subscription because of X" feedback and people shouting on messageboards.
So when they remove all the artificial difficulty gating, it's because theyknowthat's why people are quitting. See also: Ghostcrawler's uncharacteristically rapid admission that Golden Lotus dailies was a bad design they won't do in the future - they've almost certainly got data from a whole bunch of people who got to, say, honoured/revered and then went "Fuck this shit" and stopped repping.
Here is a little tip--people who read statistics have to interpret them. And there are entire industries which have been formed off interpreting the same statistics in different ways. Heck, do you know in polling many times the answer given isn't trusted? Yep, even a DIRECT answer to a question isn't trusted because of how many variables can surround the answer (Like severity.) So, for example, people can leave after non-completion of dungeon X/Y/Z and then answer the game is frustrating, but when you do a more comprehensive review, you find the only reason they found it frustrating was because they were getting beaten in PvP and felt like weapons from X/Y/Z were the answer. OR you might find out they found it frustrating, but it was that factor, combined with the lack of new content, that made them quit, rather than continuing to learn.
Overall, I agree with you about the difficulty thing, to. Remember that. I don't believe making derp mode was a good idea--I liked it when they used organic difficulty "variables" to make it easier....Like for example, if someone needs to some kiting of death beam 104, then let the raid be able to pick who that is (By standing in certain spots, or whatever) so you can farm these difficult jobs out to your better players and allow your weaker ones to enjoy the same fight, but an easier version. This puts slightly more difficulty on guild/raid leadership and certain players within the raid, so the fight itself can still feel like an achievement (Because those people need to learn it) but it's not frustrating for "bad player that's nice and helpful 101". But overall, I agree lower difficulty on bad players is better--it's always better when poor players can see content, but it's even BETTER when they can see that content WITH good players AND they don't feel like they had to hit the herp derp switch to get through it.
But claiming Blizzard in prescient because of data is...laughable. They obviously aren't. And I'm sure Blizzard has quite a few statisticians that even conduct polling on test groups for them. So, they aren't bad at interpreting numbers, I'm sure of it. But understanding what those numbers lead to in such a subjective environment, with so many variables, is VERY difficulty. And Blizzard even says this, over and over, that despite their metrics, it's impossible to "know" what the issue is--especially given that in all likelihood, the issue is NOT one thing and actually a composite of tons of different things. (and that's saying nothing of how most players are clueless about what they actually "want" in a game anyway.)
Which is another reason why it's always cringe worthy when people tell Sandbox gamers that latest Sandbox game failed because no one wants to play Sandbox games--completely leaving out engineering, balance, world design, server stability, bugs and tons of other things that are needed to make MMO's work. On the same token, it's often absurd that people never conclude that any
one thingis a key to Blizzard success. The fact is, this game was far more popular when it required 25 people to raid, and far less of the overall content was accessible--so I could easily make some bullshit coincidental argument about numbers, like you're doing. But I'd be discounting the games age and how difficulty worked on a social level, rather than a game level back then and how bosses per month in new content was much higher (Even if each boss was simpler and less scripted) or fuck even how loot was far more random! (Making the age old argument that people like to gamble.)
tons and tonsof other issues/mechanics that have come and gone since then that that time period that could also explain the decline in numbers since Vanilla.
And in that same vein, you're just being naive to think it's one thing that made Cata suck, especially "just" difficulty (Which again, I agree with you even.)--when there are other factors, like that Cata had TEN MONTHS between content generation on average, by far the slowest in terms of bosses per time. So I could easily say that people care less about highly complex, 200 mechanic bosses (Like the fire giant) and simply want
MOREbosses who are overall simpler and that's the reason why Cata sucked! Or the fact that Cata had no way to gear without jumping right into the hard shit, so you couldn't blunt the curve with proper progression/farming (IE there was no "easy" raid to farm loots to make the next raid easier.)--there were just a fucking
tonof issues aside from difficulty . It's not ONE thing.
