This would have happened regardless, not matter what Blizzard did.
It’s a game that has existed for 14 years. It had its peak. It’s normal that this happens. No single system is to blame for this; the game overal is. People just get bored with it over time, or burned out, or at some point just grow out of it.
It’s like me saying the decline of WoW’s sub numbers is because of Archaeology being introduced in Cata. Numbers declined, clearly Archaeology is to blame.
See how stupid that sounds?
As for your initial question: I don’t think TF was created solely with the intention of catering to more casual players, but it definitely has a positive effect on this particular group of players.
Yeah that was me grasping at straws a little bit. That said, I’m still not convinced that Titanforging does enough good to offset the bad that it does.
And that is because of your mindset and conviction. You artificially see and hear people who hate this system everywhere. This is a psychological thing.
I feel the exact opposite about TF and I think I belong with the majority. The same psychological effect at work.
The point is; this is not a fact. It’s a feeling. Both of us have no clue what everyone else is thinking unless the entire playerbase is given a poll to vote on and we find out actual numbers.
I have stated this before, but BiS is not a good thing. Blizzard doesn’t want you to go after it. It creates a situation where only 1 particular, very very very rare outcome is the correct one. You’re setting yourself up for failure.
And in the meanwhile you will do anything to try and still achieve this; you will grind content you despise, you will play much more than is healthy, you might even stoop to questionable or even unethical tactics in order to get what you desire. This is a toxic way of playing the game and I wish you would understand this. You are free to do so of course, but for your own sake as well as others, it would be better if you changed your ways.
Yes there is. If you seriously have no gear satisfaction whatsoever then you should just quit. That’s not a TF thing. That’s a basic WoW itemization thing.
But BiS is STILL in the game, it just takes way more RNG to get it. If you check any class on Icy Veins, there’s a list of BiS gear for each spec from both dungeons and raids. And so, people aim for them. But, the problem is, if it drops, cool, but it’s not good enough. You need it to be HIGHER, and so you farm it more and more, setting yourself up for more failure.
But that’s what TF is doing! You end up doing content you don’t enjoy, because you MIGHT get lucky and finally get that piece of gear you’ve been after to titanforge. So, even if you got the basic drop (340 from Mythics), you’ll run those Mythics again, and again, and again, until you either finally get the peice to titanforge really high, or you just give. This creates an even more toxic way of playing the game, and creates even more frustration when you don’t get it to WF/TF
No, there isn’t. There might be for casuals, because “anything is better”. But, for those of us, like me, who sim our characters and want to make our characters stronger, there is no satisfaction in getting the normal dropped gear. The ONLY time we are satisfied, is if it titanforges 20+ ilvl’s than what it’s supposed to be, and that’s rare as well. And even then, we’re not completely satisfied, because we KNOW it can be higher, and we KNOW it can get a socket, it’s just all down to RNG.
No no no no no.
That is what THOSE PLAYERS are doing. It’s a choice. You don’t have to. Noone is forcing you.
It’s like someone who quit smoking, but at sometime smokes another cigarette. You’re not blaming the cigarette! The person was weak.
Then seriously; just quit.
What you are doing is not healthy. It’s not normal. It’s not good.
How can you play a game like that? Everything would turn into a negative experience; that’s not what games are for.
You are literally doing this to yourself, but you don’t want to admit this so you look for something to blame.
That’s why WF/TF ONLY benefits the casual players. ANYONE who is serious about Heroic raiding are simming characters and aiming for their BiS gear. It’s ALWAYS been like this. And WF/TF makes this an even longer grind for us!
The ONLY people who benefit from WF/TF are those who can’t/won’t put the time and effort into doing the harder content. Because, now they can be at the same level as those who DO put the time and effort into the game to do the harder content.
When WF/TF wasn’t a thing, and only BiS gear existed. The excitement you would get from getting that piece would be amazing! Same as if you were farming mounts/transmog/ANYTHING in the game, the moment you got it, you were happy.
It would be like turning mount farming into “You have a chance to have shards drop (Like a 5% chance) and you need 30 of them to get the mount from the boss”. It just increases the farming times, nothing more.
Not to mention, why isn’t it healthy to want to IMPROVE in a game like WoW? That would be like saying “RPing isn’t healthy, you need to quit” or “Tmog farming isn’t healthy, you need to quit”.
I’m WANTING to improve in the game, and so I put effort into it. But, because of WF/TF, getting the normal gear drops doesn’t feel like much of an improvement.
Is it really wrong for someone to want to get stronger in a game like this? I don’t see how you can say that “this is not healthy”. It’s how MOST games should be played.
There are LOADS of games out there that challenge you, are those not healthy?
There are LOADS of games out there where you can spend 100’s of hours playing it, is that not healthy?
How you see a game is different to how I see a game. I want to play the content, get better, then move to the harder content, whilst aiming for the best gear I can to improve my damage/healing/tanking more. There is no problem in playing a game like this, at all.
This is separate to the value and the badness of TF, but there is one thing we all need to agree on, because we have facts:
The same number of people have turned up to sub at the start of every expansion since Cata.
Until Blizzard stopped reporting numbers, we have official figures for every quarter. Since then, we still have official figures for “first-day” sales. It’s like a metronome: regular as clockwork, we get 3.2-3.4 million “first-day sales”. And while we had official numbers, that equated to just over 10M subs.
https://i.imgur.com/NY7ICpZ.png
Somebody in one of the numbers threads proposed that in BfA, the link between first day sales and opening subs might be broken because of changes in the Chinese government’s stance on online gaming. That’s an asterisk on our confidence in sub numbers for the latest expansion, and I can’t disprove that.
Two things changed with Cata:
The starter audience with each expansion stopped growing
The pattern of activity and subs diminishing over the course of the expansion began.
As best we can tell, the pattern of drop-off over the course of an expansion is the only variable since then. Faster, sooner, slower, later. Mists held up quite well. WoD dropped like a brick. But it hits the same peak with every new expansion.
Now, we can say that the game is no longer growing. We can say that the average number of subs over the course of an expansion is down.
But it is clear that something, or some combination of things, happened at end of Wrath/start of Cata, that changed the pattern of player behaviour dramatically over the course of months, and that pattern has persisted until today.
Bingo! The game’s decline isn’t normal or inevitable. The game’s age is not to blame. There’s still millions that check in every expansion just in case the game became better (and then leave). It’s so easy to make excuses for bad game design but it’s hard to deny that a lot more people have quit wow than play it. And a lot of the people that quit still check in every now and then, get disappointed and leave again.
There’s no single reason for it. It’s a combination of different factors and those will differ for every single person.
So seeing people blame ‘decline’ of subs on things like LFR or TF just makes me frustrated. It’s so short-sighted and silly.
This is a product of the constant changing of tiers. Gear is only useful or interesting for a short time before it’s replaced by more powerful things and those in turn will be replaced quickly too… etc.
A transmog is forever. A mount is forever. Gear is fleeting and thus loses some of its luster.
Calling others weak seems a bit ironic to me. Mate, you go nowhere where you could get “hurt”, you do not do anything you could fail at, you only want to get stuff by the lowest denominator. You are literally the plushie version of a gamer. You cannot call others weak for being ambitious and liking challenge. That’s like telling an athlete that he is weak because he wants the best pair of sports shoes for the Olympics.
Being ambitious is not like smoking. Raiding is not an unhealthy vice. Wanting to be appropriately rewarded is normal. Stop trying to guilt trip people into your world of bruisable peaches.
Edit: I don’t mind you like your world. Stay there as much as you like. But your constant attempt to demonize raiding and raiders is irritating.
Not really, I used to look forward to gearing up, but gearing up isn’t really tied to the difficulty anymore.
So getting loot in raids ins’t exciting because TF/WF took that away. Pre WF/TF you’d kill a boss and you knew if you got a drop it would be a big fat upgrade, no other than azerite there are few items that are obvious upgrades when you get them. I have higher ilvl items in my bags that I don’t equip because they are a dps loss.
The reason loot isn’t exciting is because you have no way of knowing when you get an item if it’s an upgrade or not. I have to run a sim. I run so many sims now I paid for a membership to raidbots to skip the queue.
I also find when you get an item and it doesn’t TF/WF it also adds an extra layer of disappointment.
I don’t dislike TF/WF because someone who doesn’t do high end content is getting rewards beyond the content they’ve completed. That is just a side effect of the system. I’m also not against tier pieces dropping in LFR. We don’t have that system this expansion and I miss it.
However, the people in charge of the game like the system. So there is little we can do about it. I don’t see the point in getting angry with other players for their views unless they are hurling insults.
People’s constant attempt to demonize LFR and TF is just as irritating. I have my opinion and yes, the raiding try-hard, elitist mindset to me is toxic and dangerous.
No. I want to keep advancing. I’m not asking for that advancement to be mythic level stuff. Stop putting words in my mouth.
I’m not. You clearly didn’t understand my analogy then.
I’m talking about the type of player who is so obsessed with reaching an unrealistic goal and goes to such lengths to reach it, that it becomes unhealthy and a hazard.
If you take that description personally, then maybe yes you have a problem and should look at yourself in a fair way.
Oh not you too… Sigh.
Just… forget it. You just don’t understand… It’s not TF/WF that does this. It’s YOU.
This happens yes, but that is NOT TF’s fault. That’s itemization. Stat weight. Things like that. People need to stop blaming TF for things like this. It’s so damned tiresome!
Again, all down to mindset. Don’t aim for TF. It’s nice if it happens, but the real thing you should aim for is the regular version of the item that drops. That is your goal. Be happy with that. Don’t set unrealistic goals.
Unfortunately I’m the victim of ridicule, flaming and other personal attacks all the time. Just for voicing my opinion. But I will not be silenced.
Of course it’s a combination of factors. Lfr alone or Tf alone didn’t make me lose interest. Of course they differ for every single person. But saying this :
Is simply parroting the same defensive quotes we’ve been hearing from blizzard since wotlk. “It’s fine, it’s normal, it wasn’t better just newer.” Or the highlight of “you think you do, but you don’t”.
You’re welcome to like the game and I hope it gets even better for you. But if you want to deny that the things you personally enjoy are breaking the game for others then calling anyone “short-sighted” is bound to bounce back.
It’s how the game worked for years, it’s not me. It’s the game. Things change, we don’t always like those changes (just like some don’t like the forum changes). Random sockets are also having that effect. I have a mythic version of my heroic ring but it’s not an upgrade because the socket is worth much more.
I think it doesn’t help when we were told in one of the Q&As that they didn’t like how stats had more impact than ilvl in Legion and that they were going to address it in BfA. Yet ilvl is far from king. The GCD changes have meant many classes crave haste.
Yeah it’s probably just psychological but I have friends who feel the same. But I have no idea if that’s a common thing or not. It’s just true for me.
I was threatened with being reported (there was nothing reportable ofc). I feel your pain. We may not agree but I think we should all be able to speak our minds.
That’s because you are so hardcore about the game, you are so hardcore that you had to pay a membership on the third party site to sim your gear. Majority of the regular players don’t do that and don’t even think about doing it. And the gear stopped for me to be exciting for many reasons - the removal of the sense of linear progressions, the fact that I can nowadays farm it in the mythic + dungeons and get the better one and gear faster than I could from heroic raids, the fact that warfronts are giving items of the heroic raid level, the removal of the tier sets, the stupid azerite system and the fact that all stats we are getting are now random.
With the way the game is working now I can now be excited only about the new content to play, the achievements I can make with my guild and the friends but not about the gear, since nothing is special about it anymore, it’s a lot about the RNG and we are replacing one piece with another so fast.
You don’t want to advance, you want to be advanced by the RNG gods granting you stuff that doesn’t belong in the content you do. That’s why you like TF, because it gives you the feeling you are advancing without you actually getting better, instead only getting stronger by outside means.
You literally did, when you told him he is weak for wanting BIS. Raiders want the best gear to advance in harder content. It’s called BIS because it’s best performance, not highest ilev. You want gear because …I dunno, you like one shotting mobs that are 3 shotted anyway.
It’s mostly unrealistic because of the layers upon layers of RNG that blizzard slapped into the game. Otherwise, it’s just a bloody item from a damn boss in a game, it’s not inventing fusion engines. It’s bound to drop sometimes. Maybe not all 16 slots of them, but at least some of them. And they deserve to feel that satisfaction.
You’re still trying to guilt trip, and trust me, it’s not working.
And while we’re at it, I haven’t raided in, I dunno, might be a close to a couple of months and guess what, I’m not rolling around in withdrawal pains.
You’re not. You’re like those people that buy an offroad car and never leave the city.
Yeah, I got that drilled into me by my parents. Don’t expect much, don’t ask for anything, aim low, that is how you will never get disappointed. By all gods, if I’ll ever have kids, I’ll teach them the opposite.
I hope you have this attitude only in game. Some of us, however, want to be in game everything we couldn’t be in real. Not all of us can participate in the Olympics, but we can at least be the best dps in our guilds. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s what makes the game worth playing for many people.