Originally Posted by Douglas
There are pre-endgame casual players out there who, if pressured to play in a less casual manner, will instead simply quit.
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Who is asking them to play less casually? If anything, we're asking you, who already has the end-game experience, to play
more casually. Where all of them continue to play at the level and speed they are comfortable with, you need an outlet to play with them (without feeling like you're compromising their entertainment value by trivializing the content). This doesn't require anything on the part of the casual player - if anything, it requires you to play at a pace that accomodates your friends.
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Indirectly, it's not good for the more hardcore players either, because the more people playing WoW, the more resources can be put into the portions of the game they like, and the less people playing WoW, the more likely it is that someone -- Blizzard management, Vivendi management, whoever -- will start messing with things to try to "fix" the "problem", and I'm not optimistic about how that might turn out.
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Begging the question - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Something like a mentoring system would keep more of those players playing WoW for a longer time, and playing more of it when they do, no? On my own, I can think of four subscriptions (people I know personally in real life) that would still be active if a system like this were in place.
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Blizzard has repeatedly stated that their primary focus is on improving the game in a forward-thinking manner - that is, devoting their time and resources to new content as the game continues to evolve. The only work they've done on the pre-60 game since January is to go back and, in the upcoming 2.3 patch, reduce the amount of time it takes to level, and add an additional quest hub - further exemplifying their point. They're facilitating getting to level 60 (or 70, or 80, ad nauseum), because that is where their content development is geared towards.
This request, to me, looks likely to get filed away under the same header as Heroic Molten Core - interesting, of potential value or intrigue to a handful of people, but ultimately not a good RoI for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by Caligula
I'm pretty much flabbergasted at the number of people who are saying that this system wouldn't work because there's "nothing in it for the high level person". Except, you know, playing a game with their friends. This especially goes out to the guy who says "I don't like being run through things or running people through them". THAT'S THE POINT! Some people don't want to take the entire challenge out of the game, but still want to play with their friends. Some of those friends don't want to be run through an instance, they want to run an instance with their friends WITHOUT the challenge removed.
"Run the instance naked" doesn't quite cut it either. A naked 70 mage can still AOE farm SM, and at the same time the friend that they are running through the instance doesn't get to do anything except eat up phat lewtz(tm) and not get experience.
I'm not sure why this concept is failing on some. Really, it's not too difficult if you think in terms of fun, and not in terms of phat lewts and phast clears. Some people want to play with their friends without being completely out geared/leveled for an instance. Some people want it to be a challenge. Some people want to get experience without the level reduction. Can we discuss the mechanics/implementation of a mentoring system and just accept that these people exist? Because they do.
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I don't think anyone is arguing that they don't exist - rather, we're looking (in fairness, subjectively) at whether or not there is any likelihood in this change being accepted. Despite it not being a central part of this game, I know people who play WoW just to grind up professions. I also know people who only play WoW to manipulate the AH market (I know a mid-40's man who is an accountant in real life, and he rolls level 1 alts on new servers and tries to see how much money he can make - usually, he gets to 5-figure gold amounts before he tries a new server).
I play WoW with RL friends (and family), too - but because me and my sister want to do 2-man MC, doesn't necessarily mean Blizzard is going to facilitate that.