I just stumbled upon the following discussion over at WoW insider:
Raiders were a MUCH bigger part of the game than the casual and lazy would have you believe.
Thanks to the lazy and unskilled masses we now have a game that is a sad and pathetic shade of its former greatness.
Only have 3 hours a week to play? Then why on earth are you playing an MMO? Go back to your consoles and your A.D.D instant gratifications. Don't like the grind? The why are you playing in a game where progression includes grinding? Go back to your Quakes, your Mario Karts and your Half Life LAN parties and leave those of us who like RPG based character progression to enjoy the game we embraced.
Dont have time to devote to raiding? Then go play a game that doesnt have it and leave the game to the people who do have the time and energy to invest in it. We were doing just fine without you.
In response, Salty said:
I find it sort of ironic that only the most hardcore people are upset the game is becoming more simple and accessible – because now it’s going to be more difficult to be the best. If you’re so hardcore, then it’s just going to be that much more challenging to play the game in a more challenging way. If your class has been homogenized, play it better, be better than the rest if that’s truly your hallmark. Now you aren’t just competing with fellow warriors for that MT spot, you’re competing with a lot of truly great players in other classes and ‘castes.’ Now your guild has real competition from these tiny, tight-knit groups, not just the “Big 3” on your server/faction.
When they cast down the cookie cutters and smote them with the fist of an angry god, with it went the pride and elitism of a caste of players whose only pleasure in the game came from clutch ownership of narrow niches. Theorycrafting isn’t going away – you just have to do it if you need to be a better tank than another person. Your raid leader (or your raid group) will recognize it and prefer you, your knowledge of your class’ arsenal will shine through the one or two abilities that defined a class’ superiority pre-wrath. Now your class is so much more than two abilities, your style can out-dps your spreadsheets.
It’s a better game this time around, more fun for everyone if you’d look past your precious raid slot. There will be less backstab jockeying for madlib raid spots, less screeching raid leaders, more chances to elevate yourself from the great gear gulf. You can’t beat WoW – all you can do is get better; part of that is learning to make the best of the hand your dealt. You can look at a ‘nerfed’ ability or a new spell and say “god damn, what is my class becoming? Wtf did they do to me?” or you can say “I can think of a way to make the best of this ability, to bring it to the table in a useful way.”
In my opinion simplification and dumbing down are two different things, one with a possible positive connotation, the other with a strictly negative connotation.
Simplifying and streamlining the game is a good thing, WoW really does need less idle time and less grind time, which should be replaced with quality content (gameplay). Classes should get balanced (at long last) and itemization should be more intuitive.
On the other hand we have the dumbing down effect brought to you by Blizzards dream team (as discussed in one of my earlier articles) - in order to enable entire families to spend (waste?) their time on the game, Blizzard is striving to dumb down the game enough so that everyone would be able to play it.
This is inherently wrong as it makes the game less interesting in skill/action/personality/social interaction aspects and more demanding (time wise) when it comes to clearing raid trash, doing daily quests and continually farming either for gold or for arena points.
The lack of Blizzards insight into this distinction spawned many problems - like for an example the division (a rather needless one at that) between self-proclaimed hardcore gamers and n00bs where hardcore players get to invest 12hrs per day into the game, and nabs get to invest only 12hrs per WEEK. The division is not based upon skill but upon the degree of having no (real) life.
So dumbed-down grinding in WoW spawned "hardcore" players who became elitist jerks based on their ludicrous willingness to spend all their waking hours in a virtual world!
Also, due to this dumbed down system of level progression, hitting the cap (lvl 70 currently) is only a matter of time, not skill - so many lvl 70 elitists are actually quite clueless. What they dont want to happen is for the game to become simplified enough so that less hardcore people would be able to "steal" their (reserved for those most foolhardy) raid places!
Truth be told, a pain in the ass self proclaimed l33tz0r player will inevitably get replaced by someone with a more....balanced temper, regardless of how many hrs. he is able to invest into endgame raiding :)
Simplification - YES!
Dumbing down - HELL NO!
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