Why does ANet have to cater to the "inexperienced?"

Idk, there's no such thing as a hard area in pve anymore, if you want a challenge you either have to pvp or handicap yourself.

WoW still doesnt have an easy / god mode button like GW does.

UB makes GW easier and less skillful then killing mangy wolves or black bears is in WoW.
I found soloing in WoW up to around level 30 far more challenging and skillful then it was using UB in FoW.

I'm waiting for this legend to show up on Snopes - it's simply not true, just something online gamers keep telling themselves because...who knows why.

The breakdown at 10 million was:

2.5 million US accounts (this includes Oceania - Australia, New Zealand, etc), 2 million EU accounts, and 5.5 million Asian accounts (China, Korea, etc).

To answer the OP: Blizzard is making WoW more accessible and easier. Anyone who's been near the WoW forum recently - especially Wrath of the Lich King - has seen the fallout from this.

Since The Burning Crusade was launched, Blizzard has:

* Added heroic (hard mode) mode to instances, allowing another progression tier for 5-person dungeons. The bosses dropped heroic badges, allowing access to raid-level loot (with enough badges - 25-75 or so).

* Added badges to all raid bosses. The easiest raid drops 22 badges from all bosses, and the most expensive badge loot costs 150 badges.

* Improved XP scaling from 20-60 to increase leveling speed. It's much easier to hit 60 now than it was pre-Burning Crusade.

* Added badge loot that's equivalent to the loot that drops in T5/T6 instances (Tempest Keep, Serpentshrine Cavern, Black Temple). You can get this loot while running Karazhan and heroics over and over again, and never setting foot in a 25-person raid.

* Removed attunement requirements to enter Karazhan, Black Temple, and Mt. Hyjal, allowing raids that have sufficient gear to tackle the BT and Hyjal, but didn't have the attunements, to start working on them. Since 2.4, the number of guilds raiding those two instances have gone up considerably. You also don't need the key to enter Karazhan (although someone with the key needs to unlock the door). This makes it easier to gear up alts, since you don't have to do any quests to get access.

* Provided epic loot via PVP - you can get the best in arenas, and fairly good stuff in battlegrounds at this point. A lot of it (but not all) is useful in PVE, and is easier to obtain than raiding for it.

In addition, with Wrath of the Lich King, they're:

* Adding the Death Knight, which will start at 55th level, eliminating most of your leveling - you just need the last 25 levels to 80.

* Revamping the heroic instance system so that heroic instances have their own separate loot tables from the normal instances, providing more reason to run them after running the normal versions.

* Providing two raid progression routes - All of the raids can be set to 10- and 25-person instances, allowing you to run the same content in a small or medium-sized raid. They're on separate lockout timers, so you can run both the 25- and 10-person versions of the same raid in the same timeframe without any trouble.

But anyway, yeah, a lot of the hardcore players in WoW have been screaming much louder than anyone around here about how WoW's being dumbed down. So, the answer to your question is: WoW's doing the same thing Guild Wars is.

There is difference between WoW and GW in regards of dumbing down:

In WoW it is well expected. Also, in WoW "elite players" (whoever they are) get new elite stuff to do.

elite area gets dumbed down -> new one is added -> elite area gets dumbed down -> new one is added ... over and over.

In GW there is no new content to replace dumbed down one. And few skills singlehandedly dumbed down pretty much everything.

Well, you need to remember that in GW, it isnt that the areas are getting dumbed down, its the skills, or at least that we get new skills that make elite areas far too easy.

But as I said before, hard mode and elite areas are meant to be hard and elite. They arent meant to be for players that cant learn to play them properly, or for people that only have an hour to play the game.

If you dont have the time to do something, then dont do it. You wouldnt ask for an exam in RL to be dumbed down, made easier or for the time length to be reduced because you didnt learn enough to pass that exam.

Guild Wars began as a very simple game for PvE players to play. I mean we had mobs that just stood beneath AoE spells like fire storm that would not even attack!

PvE is meant to be fun, for many this means quick and easy. For others it means a challenge. Unfortunately what some see as a challenge others view as frustrating.

PvP was always meant to be a challenge, a place to push yourself to the limits that this game has to offer.


Remeber also that the challenge of ANY game is centered around the first time you play through. There are few games that have any challenge once you have beaten them a couple of times.

If you are so mad at the differences between WoW and GW wait a year or so and buy GW2. I hear Anet is going to make a "happy-balance" with grinding for WoW fanboys and casual playing for casual players.

Uhm. But GW2 is in 2012. That's 4 years.

[citation needed]

That's a fallacy, you have to factor in all the differences between the two games. It's extremely narrow-minded and stupid to just take one part of a game and then compare it to the game's popularity. It's simular to me saying:

Idiots have hands.
You have hands.
Therefor you're an idiot.

Even the most pessimistic of schedules released in some semi-official form place GW2's release in 2010 at the latest. I wouldn't be shocked at an 09 release myself, but then again they haven't really talked much about their progress.

Regarding this actual topic: WoW caters to casuals/bad players pretty much constantly. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea to the contrary.

WoW doesn't make things easier? Really? So after I spent 4 months working on Naxx for over 8 horus a day to get my Tier 3 elite purples to only have Blizzard release an expansion where people could get blues and greens as good as my hard earned purple tier 3 is not making the easier? I quit WoW after 2 years (Open Beta until TBC release) as a guildmaster of a hardcore 120 man raiding guild because they made the game easier.

It is a problem with almost every MMOG these days. Only Eve Online still caters to the hardcore.

Beating the game was never the challenging part. Even when the henches were complete idiots, couldn't be flagged, and had next to no useful skills, actually making it through all the missions wasn't that terribly tough. Trying to slog through UW or FoW before imba was the rough part. When UW and FoW became too easy because of the new skills, they introduced DoA. Then they took the challenge away from DoA by adding Ursan so people could play it.

I don't want to have to spend hours in front of a video game to see the content, and neither do most other people, so things change.

Like I said, if this bothers you, go play something else that hasn't been simplified yet. AoC just started up, it will be awhile before they carebear the hell out of it.

Leveling was eased because the "inexperienced" didn't want to play through to level 70 when they didn't even have the patience to play to level 60. The only reason I even went back to WoW is because they reduced the assinine leveling times at the same time Guild Wars basically took a huge crap and died.

They opened up leveling so that they could sell the expansion to people like me who didn't have the patience to jump through their ridiculous hoops just to get to 60, nothing more, nothing less.

What a stupid comment. You devoted a laughable amount of time to the game and you're complaining that they advanced it so you can do it all over again? Are you saying you just don't want to play anymore, or are you failing to realize that they basically just handed people like you a whole new set of crack pipes to smoke?

I'm really having a hard time understanding the point here. You devoted a ton of time to a video game, so you obviously enjoy it... and you're upset that they expanded the content so you can move on and do it all over again? What, exactly, is the problem? Were you under the misapprehension that there was some goal to WoW? Are you confused as to the purpose of the endless raiding grind? I don't get it, and I don't think you do either.

Good point about it not having a point, I guess I felt it did at the time as my elite uber armor was a show of my skill, time spent, and commitment to the game with my guildmates in overcoming the most difficult content in the game to date. That armor was a status symbol to me (as dumb as that is I guess) and when they made it worthless it ruined that feeling for me and was the reason I did not buy the expansion and left the game entirely.

I guess it doesn't make sense in some ways because, yes, I did enjoy the endless raiding grind, but not only for the grind itself, more for the results which was having uber armor to pwn people with in PvP and walk around town making everyone drool. It is what it is, and that is how I felt.

I will not say that ANet caters completely to the inexperienced, but face it. In this competative world where people will change what they are doing at the drop of a hat, ANet needs to get people in and keep them. If giving inexperienced people something extra then so be it.

Look at how many MMORPGs are on the market and how many more could spring up before GW2. ANet not only is trying to hold onto some of its established players, but they have to get new ones into the game, so a little extra doesnt hurt that.

To me this is the least of the GW problems as there are still things that need to be addressed that the community has pointed out years ago. Anyway that is for another thread.

QFT. Call To The Torment == *twitch**twitch**Xanax*

On normal mode, all of the elite areas are very doable. It takes a moderately skilled group to progress through them. On Hard Mode, however, is where things get a little rough, and this is where I'm largely concerned. What I don't get, most of all, is why they would add a Hard Mode than simplify the heck out of it. If people wanted to see all of this content, they could just lower the difficulty level. Anything on Normal mode is very doable with a moderately skilled set-up.

I feel that it's more about applying instant gratification more than anything else. By reading all of these comments, I'm starting to realize that more and more. That may seem a little assy of me - calling all of these imba skills "instant gratification" buttons - but I can't see them as much else. It's almost akin to playing Oblivion, setting it's difficulty slider to the highest difficulty, then being handed crazy good weapons and armor to make it feel like your playing on the lowered difficulty level.

I don't know why people feel the "need" to beat these areas at the highest difficulty. It could be all of the titles and the HoM, but I'll leave that discussion open for others.

But they still haven't opened up raiding. While attunements have been removed and other aspects have been eased, they're still not making them soloable just to get people to see the content. The raids are going to be obsolete, only to be explored by a few bored players in the coming months, and they're still not "opening" them to the masses.

They, Blizzard, have held to this for years. They have not opened the "most polished" (quotations for subjectivity) content to everyone. They've only opened it to people with the dedication to see through them. There have been people complaining about them catering highly to raiders and that they'd like to see the content themselves, but Blizz hasn't really budged on it. And WoW has still prospered in spite of it.

No need to wait, just get AoC.

It is GW + WoW 1.5.

Right right, Blizzard making the entire game easier isn't nearly as "bad" as Anet adding an optional skill to make the game easier.

It also has requirements that many people's computers don't meet, like needing 32GB of free space. Not all people have super uber machines.