World of Warcraft: Classic

Noodleface said:

I think fundamentally we are on different wavelengths here. Neither of us is going to agree the other is right.

It was a hard decision to leave my guild to pursue a challenge, even harder because I had been the GM for years.

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You're arguing within a terrible design model to begin with.

Making existing content +harder, because devs are too lazy to create new content creates these kinds of issues. A lot less people are willing to put in time/effort, because they're basically being punished with the same content. There's nothing to get people motivated, other than poopsockers thinking +harder = new content when in fact it is not.

Due to this, people have to leave their current guilds or guild leaders have to drastically change the makeup of their guilds, because players aren't motivated to do the same shit over-and-over again.

So, change this shitty design and you'll have a totally differe player/content dynamic.

Noodleface said:

I don't think anyone would argue that +harder=new content. Although, each difficulty tier has different mechanics and gear and sometimes extra phases (guldan, Argus).

I mean we cleared heroic ghuun the first week? Or early second week. Whatever it was. Are you saying that this is enough? That should be it? Some guilds will take over a month doing that - that IS enough for them.

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I'm not saying that's enough or not enough. I'm just saying that making existing content +harder isn't going to be a big enough incentive to get the general raiding population (I'm not speaking to the general pop) invested. So, you see an even smaller segment of raiders in mind-numbing pursuit of rinse-repeat of +harder content.

Noodleface said:

Wow devs put out content pretty fucking fast man. I know a lot of you guys haven't played since 2005 so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here.

Why shouldn't there he a harder raid mode for people that want to do it? I'm not sure if you're arguing that the harder difficulty is somehow taking away Dev time on new content.

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I played Beta and every expansion up until BFA. And I raided with globally ranked progression guilds until WoTLK. So, the hardness of content isn't an issue for me.

My point is that when you just slap on a +harder tag to existing content, it totally removes the incentive for a lot of people to do it. Do people want to do +harder content? Apparently. Does it totally alienate the majority of raiders? Yes. Ultimately, it serves to undermine a majority of the raiding population, because raiding becomes a grind of seeing the same shit every night/week/weekend.

Noodleface said:

Or are.you guys suggesting making one difficulty that's not terribly hard and having people abandon this game en masse because it's now easy enough for the 40 year old keyboard Turners to be able to handle.

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I haven't seen anyone suggesting that. So, either you're salty about something and intentionally misconstruing the point or something else.

From what I've read, it kind of sounds like you want to play a raiding simulator that has X dungeons that get progressively harder as you complete the content, putting you in a smaller and smaller group of peers, because the challenge of harder content is ultimately what you find fun.

That takes both the Massively and RPG out of MMORPG.

Classic WoW did a wonderful job of presenting challenging and interesting content to a large amount of people. A smaller percent of the population was progression, which again I'm not arguing against, but the content was interesting enough to cross the threshhold of "hardcore raider" and entice more people to join. Which is why guilds could get carried by a few "good players" and still be successful.

Forcing guilds to only have elite players compounds the problem of content, because obviously they're going to be the smallest part of the population, consuming the most content, at the fastest pace. If you design a game that caters to this playstyle, which it sounds like you're in favor of, you're not building an MMORPG. You're simply building a raiding simulator with some barriers to entry, which is essentially why people hate WoW now.

Noodleface said:

I don't agree that is why people hate WoW now, but I don't agree with a lot of what people have said.

I think having 2-3 difficulties (I think LFR should be removed) of the same raid is perfect. Their reasoning behind this is solid, it's the community that is setting the bar.

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Which community? Which is again my point.

If you have 20,000 players dictacting foundational design decisions of raid content, when 200,000 would otherwise participate in raid content, and another 1,000,000 who are either on the outskirts or maybe never see raid content, you've got an upside down design philosophy.

I'm not saying that the minority of players dictacting raid content is wrong or bad, I am saying when you have such a sliver of the minority (such a small degree of players) dictacting content design there's a problem. There's no balance anymore and it feels like a grind to everyone except a sliver of a percent. There's that and everything else being a soloable game.

Noodleface said:

Mythic+ is the perfect example of a system in place that is literally +harder each level it goes up, and people love it. It's the greatest feature WoW has implemented in years. It even fosters a strong community where you're playing with likeminded people for your skill level. But again, this would be perceived as fracturing the community.

If you want to join a guild, kill some bosses and bullshit on discord with your friends you can absolutely still do that. You can kill bosses in Mythic even (we did in our forum guild). If you want to go hard, you can do that too.

I think WoW has done a great job of making content that is no longer one-size-fits-all. Maybe no one agrees with me on that, but I think they absolutely went the right direction with raid difficulties and mythic+ scaling.

Anyways, this is a classic thread so I'll stop shitting it up.

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Allowing dungeon difficulty to scale, so that 5 dudes can grind out the same content is one thing. Doing the same for raid encounters is another.

If they went so far in the right direction, why are they having to reboot the entire IP?

Noodleface said:

AFAIK they're copying the EQ design philosophy here. Classic is a hefty undertaking, but they're bleeding subs.

If you polled a majority of the people quitting I bet 1% would complain about raid difficulty (filter out LFR comments).

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Where have I said "raid difficulty" is the issue? You clearly want to think that's what I'm saying for whatever reason.