Blizzard needs to stop being elitist with WoW, and allow the 100m or so Farmville players access to the game. Clearly tab-1-2-2-3 is too difficult. Assigning talent points is hard. Getting to 85 is a ridiculous grind. How is anyone going to figure out all those classes and abilities? You want me to TRAVEL!?! to the next quest hub?
And clearly the market agrees, as WoW is stagnating at just 10m players, while far more accessible games like Farmville have 10x more. And since Blizzard is a business, I think it’s high time the elitist attitude stops, and WoW really expands its player base by allow left-click-only gameplay.
I want an animated Deathwing in the middle of my screen, looking all scary and awesome, and I want to left-click him once to win, collect my epic gear, and log. I’m a casual, and I don’t have time for 30 minute raids, and it’s really unfair that I can’t have access to WoW content. 100m of my friends feel the same way.
Oh, and I’m sure current WoW players would cheer the changes, right? A more accessible game is a better game, isn’t it? More cash for Blizzard also means more devs to create more left-click content, with better graphics and sound! It’s win/win!
Plus if you find the new content too easy, YOU could always make it harder by closing your eyes while clicking, or turning off your monitor.
Hardcore Casual 
Sad thing is, I think Blizzard might be using this post as a template :) Watering down content = win right? :)
It’s not watered down, it’s accessible! GET IT RIGHT YOU ELITIST!
I really hope Rift doesn’t go that way, or it that the inevitable demise of the modern MMO? It is only a matter of time before Little Billy can open AND close a rift with a single click?
Once again… if you use DBM, healbot and other addon’s, then I find complaining about how Blizzard is making the game easy for casuals hypocritical. The raiders wanted to make it easier or they wouldn’t have using the addons as a necessity for raiding.
And like I said before, do it in sub-optimal gear, like greens, and then it will be harder. Run with a sub-optimal spec. Addon’s are a choice, I agree, but so is copy and pasting the optimal spec or getting the best gear.
And again, NOT using addons or a decent spec is a choice as well. You tell me to uninstall DBM, I’ll tell you to install it.
I agree that you can make your game as hard as you want it by, say, running Naxx (in Wow) solo and naked. But that’s not what the game designers had in mind and it is kind of silly.
I think BIOWARE is using this as a template. Just look at what they did with Dragon Age 2 !
What do you think they are delaying Mass Effect 3 for? “To reach a wider audience” is what they call it, in our language it’s called “dumb it down” .
So SW:TOR might be where Bioware makes Star Wars into the next Farmville…….everyone is gonna play it, via facebook using the “Like” button… to kill a Sith Lord.
Sadly I find Rift boring. I think this market has hit a critical mass and needs to burst. Im glad Sony had the issues they have this week.
The last two posts by SynCaine are so sad… I think I am sad because I totally agree with his opinion, and I don’t see an easy solution to making a game enjoyable to the whole spectrum of players from “casuals” to “hardcores”. I am hoping it is possible but may require a different approach. A simple solution is what bhagpuss suggested – difficulty settings. It would be unfair for players playing on “easy” mode to play with or compete against players on “hard” mode so I guess this would require having separate servers for various difficulty settings. Doable, I think.
The thing is, we already have different difficulty levels. Farmville is a single click game, WoW has easy content, Rift has (for now) slightly harder stuff, so on and so on until you get to Darkfall where the PvP is, IMO, the hardest thing to be really good at in an MMO.
The problem is Farmville players want to PvP in Darkfall and win, and companies like Blizzard and Trion are making changes to their games to make that possible, with some people justifying the decision as a business decision, hence this post.
I was talking about different difficulty levels within the same game. That’s why I suggested different servers for different levels. Let the kiddies (or noobs) run happily for their shiny epics and level every 10 minutes with other kiddies and let the hardcores earn their ware and victories their preferred way. If the kiddies get tired of one-shooting Vaelastrasz the Corrupt and want to try a harder mode they would need to roll a new toon and play by harder rules. Anything wrong with that option?
Other than requiring more work for the devs, no. Does make you wonder why we have not seen this already. Is it too hard to do work-wise, or is the demand (perceived or real) too low?
I actually really like this suggestion. It’s simple and seemingly easy to implement.
Upon entering a dungeon in Dungeons & Dragons Online you are presented with a range of difficulty options: Solo, Casual, Normal, Hard, Elite and Epic.
There are a whole raft of players who min/max and optimise in order to be able to defeat Epic dungeons solo, while at the same time catering to those players who want to create wacky builds for fun among friends.
The end-game raiding is just as, shall we say exclusive?, as WoW, but there is plenty of room for less invested players to enjoy a lot of the content, including many raids, only with lesser rewards, which is certainly a fair trade from my own point of view.
Of course DDO is heavily instanced which doesn’t suit everyone, and an action RPG, but I think it shows that it is at least possible to implement a flexible system similar to what appears to be being described here.
Having played DDO, while the different settings are better than nothing, they don’t really change enough IMO to warrant multiple runs. Part of me wonders though if that has more to do with not liking DDO overall (the combat is pretty bad IMO) than not liking the simple numbers tweaks (after all, that’s basically what expert dungeons are in Rift, with an extra boss or two and perhaps some new abilities)
I think that was, at best, a curious decision in DDO – the fact that you have to unlock the higher difficulties by running the dungeons in the lower difficulties first. It’s an interesting idea, in that players are (heavy handedly) encouraged to train themselves on the dungeon before attempting it at a challenging difficulty, a system which many of us seem to be arguing for in end-game raiding, but I feel tay in this case it’s an example of the developers not trusting the players to play to their own level. Perhaps the developers had evidence that the vast majority of players couldn’t be trusted to do this.
As for running dungeons over and over again, well I’d suggest that farm-status raids prove that that’s not really an issue, but that’s perhaps a debate for another time.
(And there are certainly things that drive me around the bend with respect to DDO’s combat, but it does have a few redeeming features. It’s an interesting case study if nothing else.)
Now I remember one of my major issues; the need to unlock the harder difficulties. That made it feel very grindy. I think if they just left all of them open right from the start, players could challenge themselves on something high, and then move down if they needed to. Those who want nothing but speed runs could do so, as could those who only want to see the content, regardless of difficulty.
I’d love it if Rift did that for their instances content now that I think about it.
I’ve been hoping for some kind of difficulty setting in MMOs for years.
It’s an odd wish, since personally, I’d always play on “Normal” like I’ve played every offline game I’ve ever played. Something just makes me see “Normal” difficulty as “the real thing”. I’ve always felt that both higher and lower difficulty settings are somehow not entirely kosher.
But regardless of my personal preferences, it’s been apparent to me for a very long time that a huge range of interests and abilities are represented in most MMOs and i think MMO companies generally make a poor show of giving them either what they want or what they need.
Be careful what you wish for. In the past I was often thinking along the lines “Now, they may have added some meeting stones, but not all is lost. They would never allow players to just teleport.”.
You know how that turned out …
The fundamental problem is that we’re developing this culture of “The One Game,” where new MMOs must do everything in order to compete with existing MMOs which also do everything. If the new MMO does everything well enough, maybe some of the people who spend 95% of their gaming time on WoW will decide to quit WoW and spend 95% of their gaming time on your new MMO instead.
Meanwhile the old fable about “try to please everybody and you’ll end up pleasing nobody” is as true as ever.
The irony is that nobody (not even Bioware) expects to dethrone WoW. They just want a slice of the pie. Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense, then, to target one particular slice of the pie?
To clarify the point of the above rant:
Xyloxan wrote, “I don’t see an easy solution to making a game enjoyable to the whole spectrum of players from ‘casuals’ to ‘hardcores.'”
I agree, and also I don’t see why that’s a particularly worthy goal in the first place.
Was exactly what I was thinking when I read that comment. Games don’t have to fit EVERYONE, and I don’t necessarily want a game that tries to shoe horn me into the same mass produced game as everyone else.
The main reason for striving to make a game that’s enjoyable to a wide spectrum of players is business (i.e., making $$$).
Yeah, I think we get that nuanced perception to game development.
The counter argument is that trying to please everyone (and make oil tycoon money) often leads to failure (and gas station-attendant money). By focusing your audience you can create an excellent product that lasts (and makes rock-star money).
There used to be an addon (might still be around) that turned the screen entirely black whenever you entered combat, and just displayed the words “don’t panic”. Hardcore-hardcore raiding?
@syn
“Oh, and I’m sure current WoW players would cheer the changes, right? A more accessible game is a better game, isn’t it? More cash for Blizzard also means more devs to create more left-click content, with better graphics and sound! It’s win/win!”
So you’re saying that I can trade 10 million elitist Jerks for 90 million (100 – 10 = 90) casuals that don’t pester me EVERY FREAKIN expansion for player housing…
CHA’CHING! Where do I sign up?
Yep simple numbers boys you can keep fighting casual future all you want but look at the book value of Facebook vs Activision AND DO THE MATH.
Oh wait Kotick (Activision’s CEO) already has…
http://www.brokentoys.org/2010/06/23/you-got-your-facebook-in-my-orc-game/
Have fun ragin’ against that capitalistic machine boys… ;)
oh and the 90 mill was to indicate NET change
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting#Theory
I know I’ll get comments otherwise
Just had this talk with my friend who works at Blizzard… I totally agree with you, while he thinks that Blizzard cannot please everyone.
Well, they lost me and my husband and we won’t be going back to world of warcraft… we just cannot afford to play endlessly just to have a little tiny chance of peaking into the endgame content. It’s kind of ridiculous.