So we're all hearing about how there was a big drop in subscriptions since February (I even saw a story about it on the BBC news website.) As someone who still enjoys playing the game, it's always a little disheartening to hear that subscribers are on the decline because of the obvious fears that with fewer people playing, the game is marching toward its end.
Of course, 8.3 million people is still a crapton of people. Boston, my hometown, is a major city, but within the city itself there are only roughly 600k people. Even if you expand to include the Greater Boston Area (technically, where my hometown is) it's only about 4.5 million.
8.3 million people is a lot, and I think we could see the player numbers drop to a tenth of that and still see Blizzard making more of this game.
Anyway, I wanted to write here to say that, actually, I think the current state of the game is pretty damn good.
Mists has been overall a very good expansion. We got a new class (that was actually pretty well balanced from the start - DKs, I love you guys, but damn were you OP in early Wrath.) We got a cool new continent that felt far more connected than the spread-out zones of Cataclysm. Really, the only thing that I think was a misstep was tying ALL valor gear to doing daily quests.
It was a noble effort, I think, to give the various factions real personalities by requiring you to quest for them. In some cases, this worked out well - the Klaxxi and Operation Shieldwall/Dominance Offensive both I think worked out great. (August Celestials and Golden Lotus, on the other hand...) Yet even with the best daily quest content, I think it was a mistake to make all valor gear tie in to daily quests.
The Shado-Pan Assault is the ideal gating mechanism for Valor Points. One acquires VP by doing what you want to be doing anyway - going into raids and killing bosses. By having the SPA simply limit what purchases you can make depending on how much time you've spent killing bosses in that raid, it reinforces the idea that VP gear is meant to fill in the gaps left by whatever hasn't dropped for you.
Once you hit iLevel 480, and you can start queueing for Throne of Thunder, things smooth out pretty well. You can do the KTO/SO dailies, though probably more for Lesser Charms than for actual reputation gear, but really, if you just want to raid and only raid, at that point, it's a totally viable option.
As an aside: I know that farming Lesser Charms makes it seem like you really can't escape the dailies even if you are at that level. I have some sympathy toward that point of view - people always want to maximize their gear acquisition, and the line between optional and mandatory is pretty fine. I wonder if, perhaps, the bonus rolls could have been dealt with better. Perhaps only giving us a single roll per week, and making us really focus on just that one piece of loot, with less grinding required, would have been good (though the reduction from 90 to 50 lesser charms was inspired.) I actually wonder if the upcoming anti-bad-luck-streak measures - where a boss will get more likely to drop loot for you the more times you kill it - are really solving the problem that Charms were supposed to - though I don't know how you'd implement such a thing for Normal/Heroic modes.
Back to my main point: I think what Blizzard needs to do now is figure out a decent catch-up mechanic. I think it's fine, and actually preferable, that people are required to run each raid in sequence in order to queue for further ones in LFR. Given the ease of finding a group in LFR (you hit a button and wait) the old problems of attunements are no problem at all. However, I don't think that a person who hits level 90 after most players have already killed/arrested (or whatever) Garrosh should be forced to run MSV over and over, praying for that one ring he or she needs to get geared up for Heart of Fear.
There are two options, in my mind. One is to make the drop rate in older tiers absurdly high - far more than the 20-ish% they brought the 5.0 raids to in 5.2 (don't quote me here, I'm just giving a very rough estimate. I don't have figures in front of me.) If the drop rate for useful items in MSV, HoF, and Terrace jumped to 80%, and maybe 40% in Throne of Thunder, you'd have a situation where one could catch up without too much trouble - if they ran all the raids diligently each week, they'd be geared up in less than a month, probably, which I consider an appropriate time to pay your dues, make sure you understand how raiding works, and get enough experience that you can fly below the radar and not piss too many people off (a month of raiding will usually give you an idea of whether you're doing your job right.)
The other option is new tiers of 5-man heroics. This was the tried-and-true catch up mechanic in Wrath and Cataclysm. The only reason they were unhappy with it was that people could skip older raids. Well, fine, but that's what a catch-up mechanic is for. 5-mans are naturally easier to gear up in, because you can do that dungeon once a day (and really, with the dungeon finder and random dungeons, that limit's sort of moot anyway.) The other big win for this style is that you can make serious character progression even if you dislike raiding. Right now, there's really no way to get well geared in PvE without at least doing Raid Finder. If we want people to have real, true options, I think that having new tiers of dungeons (maybe even bring back the concept of dungeon armor sets?) would be great.
That said, given the state within the expansion cycle we're at, there's little to no chance we're getting new 5-mans in Mists. However, given the response to this, and comments from Ghostcrawler, I fully expect that the next expansion will have them come out with new patches.
Blizzard has been trying to wrangle what it wants WoW to be. In many ways, Mists was a revolutionary reimagining of the way the game functions. There have been some hiccups, true, but I think overall if we see them use the Mists formula and just tweak it a little next time, things will be great. Will it get back those players who left? I really can't say. What I can say is that WoW is a better game that it ever has been (yes, even better than Wrath, though I miss the Scourge.)
Next post I'm going to go into my personal wishlist for how they can build on past expansions to make next one great.
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