BreezyLimbo
Banned
Win 3 matches in Hearthstone to get a mount in WoW, get the deluxe edition of WoD to get a back in Hearthstone...
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Win 3 matches in Hearthstone to get a mount in WoW, get the deluxe edition of WoD to get a back in Hearthstone...
Wait, how do we even know LFR was a mistake? How do we know what people are unsubbing for?
There has to be some participation data collected by Blizzard regarding this.
We don't, he was just taking a wild guess based on anecdotal evidence so it's just like, one mans opinion dude, can't say I agree with almost any of it myself personally.
As for participation data, I dunno, what kind of participation? MMO champion occasionally posts stats on all sorts of things. Obviously it can never be as accurate as what Blizz has but the stats are pulled straight from armory achievements so it can give us a decent idea of the state of things.
LAUGHTREY
Modesty becomes a woman
How would that even make sense?
In this case im saying that people do LFR and then quit, so they would see a ton of people "enjoying" lfr by completing it. I do LFR but I wish it was removed from the game, the entire culture of the raiding game changed when it came out.
By mistake I meant regardless of it being something that retains players or not, I meant it just being a dumb thing to introduce. It's ok if in a social game there are things that some players just don't get to do or see.
The only reason i came back to WoW at all was LFR.
Which may be a reason the numbers are less stable, people like me get their fill of LFR, see the content, and then go, then maybe come back when a new raid comes out.
But without LFR i don't think I would have come back at all
Which may be a reason the numbers are less stable, people like me get their fill of LFR, see the content, and then go, then maybe come back when a new raid comes out.
But without LFR i don't think I would have come back at all
davepoobond
you can't put a price on sparks
Your whole hypothesis seems to revolve around LFR destroying raid culture and raiding when in reality other factors like the removal of 10 man versions of raids and raiding culture eating itself from the inside out with little to no new blood coming into the hardcore raiding scene to replace those leaving it are much bigger factors.
LFR made the raid content more accessible, and allowed for casual players to get better gear than they more normally have had access to which could provide a platform to get into consistent raiding.
The player economy of raiding doesn't jive with your "fact" that LFR killed raiding and by proxy killed the game. The same was said of LFG when it was implemented in wrath.
LAUGHTREY
Modesty becomes a woman
Exactly this. Is it so hard to imagine some people stop playing altogether when they do this? Or people aren't back all at once, and it makes it that much harder to get a stable group.
Why else would they Nerf LFRs rewards compared to MoP? They don't do things randomly without purpose, especially when it means making an entire new set of armor and set bonus. They're trying to move people away from LFR, and keep the goal of Normal/Heroic in the horizon. Even if you don't actually arrive there, you will spend more time trying than just doing LFR and being done.
Look at what you just wrote. People leaving and no new blood, but people use LFR to get into raiding. So which one is it? No new blood or LFR is the source of new blood?
LFR is only a problem now because in MoP there was at least other things to do after you were done with LFR. Either fully geared or done it once, you still had dailies and 5 mans with useful rewards, the Halfhill farm didn't trivialize professions but it helped if you did it daily.
This is why LFR is being brought up now. I don't think it's single-handily the problem for a 3million sub loss in as many months, but it can't be helping any more than 0 content. If you had to at least get a guild and progress through normal/heroic/mythic they might have stayed around a little while longer.
Pretty much what I was getting at. His argument seems to be focused on LFR destroying all these things and then he posts the sub graph and tags the release of LFR in the middle of a decline! Whatever was eating subs away in Cata happened before LFR even came out. If we are going strictly by that decline it seems that LFR actually helped slow down sub losses ever so slightly which is doubly impressive when you consider it is at the very tail end of the expansion when no new content would be coming for almost a full year.
As for the last post there, I don't think any reasonable person is trying to argue against that the lack of non-raid content in Warlords is a huge factor in driving the subs down.
More importantly though I think you are flat out wrong about the fact that if LFR was gone people would migrate to "real" difficulties. The reality is those people would just not raid at all. Would they un-sub? Who knows. But suggesting that a huge amount of people would get into normal+ if LFR is gone is just crazy. Raid participation was very low before LFR was a thing and yet sub numbers were higher than they are now. Why weren't all those people raiding before LFR?
For the social engineering side of it, there are complaints on the other side as well about being forced to put up with guilds or semi-guilds just to see endgame content. Some people don't subscribe to our vanilla romantic notion of MMO social-gating: make friends online to be able to progress together, whether they are significant enough demographic to justify LFR... well only Blizzard knows. The fact that LFR is carried forward from MoP suggests maybe it is popular enough.
davepoobond
you can't put a price on sparks
I didn't say anything except LFR is the source of new blood. The first part is what was happening DESPITE LFR existing or not existing.
What? LFR isn't the problem in this statement. The problem is that there is no support structure like 5 mans with useful rewards or as many dailies. People complained about the dailies and they dialed it back much too far, I agree.
there would be a very limited amount of people who would be interested in raiding enough to be forced into normal/heroic/mythic raiding if LFR did not exist anymore. The friction to getting into the normal/heroic raids is much less now that flexible tech is across those difficulties, but LFR serves a purpose that can't really be covered by anything else.
Raiding culture is only part of what makes the game successful. PVP and adventure content is just as important for the game's retention of players because the game is quite diverse in its offerings. Raiding is a big part, but it isn't the only part.
in my example, i retired from primarily raiding and don't even do LFR. All i do is garrison stuff and achievements and gold-making. That is what is fun for me right now. I would also say the social aspects of it, since i use it like a chat with all of my guild friends.
Yeah, usually for things to take effect it takes a couple of quarters to see what sort of impact it has. I would say that it helped slow sub loss generally.
and to be clear here, this whole part is directed to LAUGHTREY and not me.
Yeah, correct. I didn't bother quoting because I thought it'd be obvious. You weren't really saying crazy things like lfr going away would give a big boost to normal raid participation.
Mostly because those are sentences I don't think I've ever seen anyone say before.
davepoobond
you can't put a price on sparks
oh, i was just pointing it out to LAUGHTREY if he bothered to come back or skip over your post.
Gentleman Jack
Member
This selective labeling of the graph really rubs me the wrong way. Dozens of other things happened during the downturn, including a tremendous reallocation of resources post WotLK to other Blizzard projects, the death of the Lich King heralding the end of the Warcraft III storylines once and for all, no Blizzcon in 2012, the launching of countless other competing games and services for gamer time, the general exodus of the casual market from high-commitment gaming (see what happened to consoles between Gen 7 and Gen 8). You need more than this to really back up the argument that LFR and the general smoothing out of the WoW gaming experience caused these precipitous drops.
Personally I blame it on the general fickleness of gamers. No new gen of gamers growing up wants the WoW of yesteryear, and the old gen of gamers simply don't have it in them to invest the continuous blocks of time required to keep a TBC/Wrath era community alive and kicking. Both consumer segments seem perfectly happy playing a game for a short burst of a few months then moving on to the next big thing. WoW is facing the same crisis all high budget gaming spectacles face. Audiences aren't sticking around because they just don't consume the media like that at these price points anymore. The game's not doomed but the 10M number was clearly an outlier, something Blizzard is going to smart from and make them even more risk-averse when it comes to reinvesting in WoW. That means more things like LFR, not fewer.
LAUGHTREY
Modesty becomes a woman
I didn't say taking LFR away would make people move to raiding, I don't know where you got that idea, I was just talking about LFR being a big contributor to the sub downturn.. If anything I was pretty deliberate when I said they can't put that toothpaste back in the tube with that one. If you take away that convenience without putting something else in its place, no one would be happy. Introducing LFR made people move away from it, and they probably won't go back. I WISH they would take it away, just rip that band-aid off and go back to the way it was where not everyone had to do everything in the game, sub loss be damned. It probably won't happen though and the gear change is the closest they will come to it.
I'm not entirely sure I'm reading this right, but I'm pretty sure wowprogress freezes data once a raid tier isn't current content, so if this is accurate it paints a pretty clear picture from the first raid tier of the last 3 expacs.
Tier 11 60k ranked
Tier 14 40k ranked
Tier 17 20k ranked
I don't know if Tier 17 will make up the difference before HFC. They're still pretty close for the Heroic/Mythic participation, but on the more casual side of the spectrum it looks like it drops. I can't find anything else that would be an accurate representation of raiding participation.
JSoup
Banned
Was disappointed there wasn't some D3 stuffs to earn cross-game from the upcoming HotS release.
davepoobond
you can't put a price on sparks
AFAIK wowprogress doesn't freeze any data. things count a lot less as time goes on and it doesnt matter when you complete it.
i remember in our guild we completed stuff from a previous tier and got more points than a guild that broke up and didn't complete those bosses before they did even though they had better progression than us during that tier
i remember in our guild we completed stuff from a previous tier and got more points than a guild that broke up and didn't complete those bosses before they did even though they had better progression than us during that tier
"If you had to at least get a guild and progress through normal/heroic/mythic they might have stayed around a little while longer."
You're argument from earlier was that LFR made people not care about doing normal/heroic anymore and if that LFR was gone those same people would be doing normal/heroic (aka more people would be going back to those difficulties). I just think that is crazy, yeah I absolutely bet there are people that stopped doing "real" raids and just shifted to LFR full time, but, I don't think that was some crazy huge number.
Also what the hell does the number he posted even represent? I'm confused because if it is meant as a way to argue less people are doing each of those raid tiers I can only scratch my head. I would imagine there is a lot less people doing T17 compared to T11 considering when T11 was relevant the game still had 11 million players where as we aren't even done with T17 and that number hit 7 million and could have possibly gone down even lower.
I feel like I am missing a key component to understand what this point was supposed to be.
davepoobond
you can't put a price on sparks
i guess he is counting # of players ranked for completing bosses.
it is flawed for the reasons you state, and also that WoWProgress is very slow when it comes to counting the different player counts, so it is hardly accurate considering the dynamic shifts each expansion.
None of the raids have different achievements, so i dont know why those #s are indicative of anything but overall player base reducing... which we already know.
LAUGHTREY
Modesty becomes a woman
Uh, look at the percentages. 50% completing heroic (new normal) vs 90% (old normal).
People do the easiest difficulty more and the subs are down. Correlation doesn't equal causation but lfr does not seem to be a net positive like they said it would be.
If they could use lfr to justify more raids, that'd be worth it. But now there's less raids..
No one has said why they think the rewards were nerfed either. If lfr is so good at retaining players, wouldn't they put more rewards in it, not less and objectively lamer? Even lfr only things to get organized raiders into it.
davepoobond
you can't put a price on sparks
You're killing the game
JSoup
Banned
Let it burn, my fat Horde ass needs the latest fashion.
I can't stand LFR personally, but it has more to do with the idea of playing with 24 complete strangers than the lack of difficulty or gear. I'm pretty sure that I'd be decently happy just doing LFR if I were running it with a guild full of people that I liked. I raided seriously in TBC, but each expansion since I've been more and more casual, and I'm perfectly happy just focusing on solo content unless the right guild comes along.
Off-topic, but as someone who's always been terrible at maintaining alts, I'm really proud of the five on horde that I have now(I have a monk on alliance as well, but I just leveled her to check out Shadowmoon and the ally garrison). I leveled the last of them about a week ago, and all of their respective transmogs are either finished or very close to it(my paladin still needs her sword).
Sanva the shaman
Off-topic, but as someone who's always been terrible at maintaining alts, I'm really proud of the five on horde that I have now(I have a monk on alliance as well, but I just leveled her to check out Shadowmoon and the ally garrison). I leveled the last of them about a week ago, and all of their respective transmogs are either finished or very close to it(my paladin still needs her sword).
Sanva the shaman
Pewa the priest
Mihla the monk
Lonta the paladin
Dunha the druid
Robin64
Member
It's funny, I never raided pre-LFR, aside from MC/ZG days back when I was actually in a big guild. Though we never beat either, we still had a lot of fun going there each week. Guess it was more the social aspect. But for TBC and onwards, I felt like there was enough to do without raiding. 5-mans, which kept being added to, for a start. So seeing the raid via LFR shouldn't have any affect on my playstyle, as long as the other stuff is still around, but it just isn't.
Pretty sure that a fairly significant portion of the games audience has never even done normal and heroic raids. These are the people that can't pass proving grounds, or maybe they just don't care to do anything harder. I remember years ago the amount of people that even hit level 10 was amazingly lower than you might expect. It was a good chunk of people though I can't remember the exact number. Hell remember the Sunwell in TBC?
Less than one percent experienced that at the time.
Less than one percent experienced that at the time.
Robin64
Member
You're really love those Taurens huh?
Female tauren are byooootiful creatures.
I like Tauren Paladins, so imposing and righteous.
Your post made me look up paladin xmog options.
http://www.icy-veins.com/wow/transmogrification-paladin-one-hand-sword-weapon-item-model-list
Holy crap that's a big list...
You're really love those Taurens huh?
Once Cata added tauren priests and paladins, I knew that I wouldn't be healing as anything else on horde.
Agreed. I even kept the sword from the level 20 quest for transmog purposes, it's one of the few things you can equip that just screams "Sunwalker".
Totally unique, no other swords in the game with this model.
My paladin's transmog started as my interpretation of an archetypical sunwalker, but ended at the "Ambassador to Therazane" look that she has now. I still have my sunwalker transmog saved in MogIt and will take a screen of it when the servers come back up.
hellmonkey
Member
Did you just do it today? It took 2-3 days for everything to clear for my wifes account.
CarbonatedFalcon
Member
My hunter recruited a rare treasure hunter that also had burst of power this week. Aww yiss.
The other treasure hunters I recruited this week weren't as awesome, unfortunately.
The other treasure hunters I recruited this week weren't as awesome, unfortunately.
OmegaSkittle
Neo Member
It is really surprising how hard it is to recruit people for a casual(ish) raiding guild. My guild has been trying to recruit DPS for over a month now as a 9/10 BRF H guild.
My shaman's 3 options were all gnomes. Upsetting. Upsetting!!!
CarbonatedFalcon
Member
So my monk just hit 60 and got zen flight. I gotta say, having it interrupted when you interact with something (questgiver, most notably) is kinda bullshit.
Also, the spell effect is kinda distracting, and my fem orc looks silly with her eyes closed and lips puckered up during the spell. But instant cast yo.
Also, the spell effect is kinda distracting, and my fem orc looks silly with her eyes closed and lips puckered up during the spell. But instant cast yo.
My friend and I did the RAF last night. The email went through with the link for him, and he created his account and character, but when we started playing together the benefits from RAF weren't there. Made sure to re-log/re-launch everything with no success.
I'll try again tonight to see if it's activated. Maybe after the maintenance it will have gone through.
Thanks for the reply though.
Gentleman Jack
Member
Man I really want to see what the price of things are on TW auction houses.
Enter the Dragon Punch
Banned
http://blizzardwatch.com/2015/05/12/world-warcraft-team-welcomes-moorguard-senior-designer/
Steve Moorgard Danuser is now the senior designer for World of Warcraft
He was the senior designer for EQ2, EQ Next, and Kingdoms of Amalur
Steve Moorgard Danuser is now the senior designer for World of Warcraft
He was the senior designer for EQ2, EQ Next, and Kingdoms of Amalur