thats great buddy, now, do that same for 8 more chars, as a current mega classic degenerate, the story is no longer the reason myself, and most of wow degens play the game.
Catering to the addicts creates an environment increasingly populated only by addicts.
That is a truly moronic long-term business strategy.
Continually redesigning the game around the people willing to repeat the same optimized loop across eight characters progressively makes the game less appealing to everyone who does not want to interact with it that way.
Then, as those other players leave, the remaining population increasingly consists of exactly the people whose behavior you catered toward in the first place.
And suddenly you have “evidence” that this is what your primary customer base wants.
Of course it is. You designed an environment that selected for them.
And I am not saying that a game should cater to everyone. A game should have an identity. It should have a philosophy, a direction, and a vision of the community it wants to cultivate.
What I am saying is that this vision should not be dictated by the addicts within that community simply because they are the people most willing to consume whatever optimized loop the game gives them.
Developers should build the game around the community they want their systems to produce.
Otherwise, they gradually select for the people most willing to organize their lives around those systems, everyone else becomes increasingly alienated, and then people like you point toward the population that remains as proof that catering to them was good business.
That is circular.
A healthy game should be more than a center for people who don't have an AA meeting to go to.
This is exactly what happened between Wotlk and Cata.
Heroics in Wotlk were brain dead easy, someone who was deaf and blind could likely do them easily.
Then Cata came around. Heroics were really hard, challenging, and engaging. You needed to be alert, you needed to use CC again, and you needed to be competent. It was what the players, the ones that were still playing after TBC, were hoping for. A real game.
But unfortunately the majority of the playerbase at that time, those that started with Wotlk, complained about the difficulty. So Blizzard nerfed everything, and the game was easy again. I was there when they nerfed Tier 11 raids because of complaints, it was honestly like night and day.
And it only devolved from that point on. Becoming more and more into what Retail is now.
Edit: This line is also why FFXIV is so widely popular and successful.
Developers should build the game around the community they want their systems to produce.
So many people are crying that Yoshi-P (director and producer of FFXIV) should cut out the beginning or early expansion parts of the story, so players can join up with their friends in the current end game content sooner. He has responded saying he will never do that. It is a game you play for the story, so cutting out the story is stupid.
WoW has practically removed the early game in the interest of allowing people to join others in newer content.
This has created a game where a large part of the world is abandoned.
WoW expanded vertically and forgot about the ground from which it came. That does not mean catering to casuals alone, nor does it mean catering to tryhards alone. It means designing for both in a way that makes the game actually feel like a world.
There are ways to make raids easier for casual players while preserving harder content for those who want it. Blizzard just has not explored those system designs very deeply.
Consider if the World First for a raid unlocked ways to make that raid easier for those who came afterward. This could address the very problem Blizzard encountered as it increasingly had to balance raids around the capabilities of its most dedicated players while still making that content accessible to everyone else.
World First could actually be brutally difficult again without requiring everyone who follows to meet the same standard.
Instead of simply nerfing the raid, the game could add a small story point: an encampment outside the raid built by those who came before. The camp provides buffs relevant to that specific raid for players who want assistance as they venture inside.
Those who want the original difficulty can simply refuse the assistance.
And those who complete the raid without it could be added to a “Hall of Fame,” with the first players to accomplish this memorialized within the encampment itself.
Now casual players can receive assistance without the harder experience being taken away from those who want it. At the same time, the accomplishments of the strongest players become part of the world experienced by everyone who follows them.
That is what I mean when I say developers should build the game around the community they want their systems to produce.
They do not have to choose between casuals and tryhards. They can design a world where both have a place.
I never said to cater to the giga casual. You assumed the weakest form of my argument and then argued that it would be bad.
Of course it would be bad.
There is an enormous space between catering to the giga casual and catering to the addict. My argument is that developers should build toward the community they actually want to cultivate, rather than either extreme.
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u/Zarzalu 6h ago
thats great buddy, now, do that same for 8 more chars, as a current mega classic degenerate, the story is no longer the reason myself, and most of wow degens play the game.