It's not going that way actually. Those "4 years"-ago players aren't the only ones looking forward competitive play. Some people go, some people get in.

Reason behind this, in my opinion, is more or less "quality" and "quantity" of players, who are doing this for the goal, and not just for "filling up time". While overall quality-level raised up drastically since the ages of vanilla and even TBC, amount of dedication from people went down. Mostly because of players themselves. I personally still miss pre 2.1 times when you actually did something to perform better, and not just went inside the instance, did the buffs and pulled the boss.

This will continue, and sadly, it can not be stopped.

The exact Ghostcrawler quote:
"Players are going to freak when they see the Cataclysm gear (because believe me, we did), but it's also exciting too".

You can guess that the original plan was along the following lines:

Nax: ilvl 200 / 213
Ulduar: ilvl 213/226
Mystery raid (ToC): ilvl 226/239
IC: ilvl 239/252

And that's it. We should have entered IC with an average ilvl 235 or so on stuff, and there would have been no need for a Sunwell radiance-type debuff. Instead, we got an additional tier worth at the lower end, where they started adding half a tier between 10man and the previous 25, and an additional tier at the higher end, in the form of "Heroic"-tagged 25 man loot. Basically, we got the equivalent of 2 unplanned raid tiers in this expansion.

And the next expansion is only 5 levels. Hmmmm....

While what you say is true, how does gating content make it more accessible, and is the accessibility caused by "pushing content" really the kind accessibility that ultimately makes a good a game?

Reducing the logistical requirements to form a raid by lowering raid sizes and removing many out-of-raid preparations (weapon oils, resistance suits, attunements, increased money making from raiding itself to pay for repair bills.) were perfectly sensible actions to reduce the time neccesary to raid. The game is closer than it has ever been to a point where the vast majority of people playing can log on and raid if raiding is what they want to do. This is, as you said, both nice for gameplay as well as being a good business move.

But there's a pretty hefty difference between "if you only have three hours to spare on wednesday and you want to raid, you'll be able to spend those three hours raiding" and "if you have three hours to spare, you're still only raiding two." Maybe I'm just being dense, but havn't we sort of passed the apex of the trajectory here? For years the game has moved in a direction where you could log on, and raid if you wanted to rather than doing a bunch of preparations, to a point where we're suddenly going to spend considerable chunks of the time we're customers not raiding, because the raid's gated or attempt limited? How is effectively transfering back the control-over-our-own-time we've been given over the past few years, in order to increase Blizzard's control over the subscription-time each tier of content lasts, increasing accessibility?

I know some people would argue that it would give more time to revisit old content, but I don't buy it, primarly because of Naxxramas, but also from personal experiences with my guilds raiding schedule during ToC. Naxxramas demonstrated that without a tangiable in-game reward, content can easily sit there for more than two years and be so underused it can be reintroduced with minimal changes without making the sky fall down. The replayability of old PvE content, with the current level/gear advancement paradigm, is quite frankly, a persistent myth. If there's loot worth having - which is why the proto-drakes for Ulduar are still there, as well as why we're seeing "raiding dailies" - you can maybe convince people to show up. If there's not that bit of loot, Naxxramas is a burning torch of an example that shows that old, non-loot worthy raid content, cannot serve as a replacement for actual raiding. People just aren't that into it, and Blizzard knows it; Character progression - due to the design of the game, that's primarily but not exclusively gear - is a more powerful motivator to participate in content than anything else in this game. (At this point you could easily slip off on a tangent about Path of the Titans progression system in Cataclysm. Blizzard will be using that system to move a portion of the the character progression motivator to content that doesn't destroy old content quite the way gear advancement does. Which is awesome, but not really within the scope of what I'm getting at here).

And from a strict gameplay perspective, as has previously been pointed out, the attempts limit don't really stop the really competitive, due to alts, PTR. Since it'll be shifting upwards, it's hard to call it part of the encounter difficulty either.


Don't get me wrong, Blizzard is a business, with the goal of making money. When we pay by the month regardless of how much we play each month, it's obviously in Blizzards best interest to keep us playing as little as possible over longer periods of time - it makes them more money. Having people kit themselves in the BiS of this tier and then cancel til the next tier comes out cause they're now Prepared is bad business. If they can do something about that, they obviously should, and this is an excellent, low-cost, high-yield way of doing it.

That's technically untrue - faster kills means more kills, which is more loot, which means non-equal footing - and somewhat unrelated? My access to the content represented by <Insert Foe> is very thinly connected to, well, the next guy's access. I can't kill Ragnaros because I physically lack the time to perform the neccesary preparations, but I can string togheter two hours of playtime once a week. The raid content is inaccessible. Those two hours of play time is sufficient to allow me to participate in the glorious battle against the Elemental Lord. I can access the raid content. In what way would this be influenced by the timeline between my first kill and the first kill of Guild of Greater Awesomeness?