Blizzard responds to Nostalrius discussion

[EaTCarbS]

i doubt that this will have success, remember that the best gear was only obtainable by 40 man raids or playing pvp 24/7 with pocket healers or account sharing. Ok oneshotting cloth as enhance with random windfury proccs was fun and the world was more dangerous because everyone had shit gear except the few in top raid guilds. Other than that i would prefer bc/wotlk servers anytime.

without lfr/new honor system not a single casual (90% of todays wow population) is gonna play this

Appealing to the lowest common denominator is probably a reason most original players left the game. I remember when getting gear was actually an accomplishment, compared to getting a full set in a week with WOD.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Appealing to the lowest common denominator is probably a reason most original players left the game. I remember when getting gear was actually an accomplishment, compared to getting a full set in a week with WOD.

A fair point. The most fun I had in-game was WotLK doing justice points in heroics on my 5x prot paladin team and getting those achievements. I had to grind the easy ones first to get the JPs so my gear was up to the point of being useful, which took me a few months, but I never felt like I was being gimmick-bombed by "we're too lazy to balance difficulty anymore so we're just gonna make everyone jump around like chimpanzees on a OD of snickers bars and red bull" crap that started in Cataclysm.

[Bigfish]

Appealing to the lowest common denominator is probably a reason most original players left the game. I remember when getting gear was actually an accomplishment, compared to getting a full set in a week with WOD.

I don't think appealing to the commons was the issue. Heck, part of the reason WoW took off was because they dropped the "you must group to level" aspect that was common place in MMOs before that. Even Raidfinder is just entry level "you saw the boss of the expansion die, now quit or run the real raids". I'd blame the general decline on 2 aspects: long content droughts and the inability to pick up where you left off. Content droughts are pretty self explanatory. Going more than a year with no new content while paying 15$ a month is unacceptable. The big one for me though is that I can't pick up where I left off. Quit during cataclysm before downing Deathwing? Well you're not going to kill him at a level appropriate point now. Go level through the current content and grab your welfare epics from the catch up zone? Suddenly handling the last raid boss feels like a chore you forgot to do than the climax of an expansion.

Want to just level a new character and see the world again? Well 1-60 got replaced with chronologically disjointed mess that makes no sense, and was pushed to make even less sense as you out level and out power zones halfway through them, requiring players to pace themselves and do grey quests if they want to see the world, heirloom their way through dungeons if they want to skip it, or pay 60$ for a level boost.

The appeal of Vanilla is that convenience didn't kill conflict. I would say that's the number 1 lesson the current dev team needs to consider, although at this point I kind of wonder if they even have that much of an interest in the game. Really feels like they're developing the game because that's their job and they're not going to stop developing for their former flagship series, but no one has a clear vision of how to go forward. I mean we didn't have this problem until after wrath, when Outland and Northrend had been explored and we'd dealt with the remaining conflict of Warcraft 3.

[EaTCarbS]

well that's just the thing - by giving everyone easy and quick gear in addition to LFR/LFD, they've essentially killed the content. If you can see it all just by tagging along in LFR then why go beyond that? Why grind to have the absolute best gear when it becomes worse than the next content patches gear (which is essentially given to everyone free)? Why make friends and form a community when you can just queue from org/sw? Why grind pvp gear when stats are normalized? Why even go out and explore the world when everything is accessible from the comfort of the major cities?