Kerg3927 said:
But I'd like to point out that here, you actually agree with my main opinion, which is that LFR was a factor in population decline, even if we have very different opinions of LFR itself. And the latter is to be expected. You stayed because you thought the new direction WoW was taking in later expansions was good or at least acceptable. Myself and many of my guild members didn't like it, and it was big factor in us leaving WoW, although another factor was that many of us wanted to try SWTOR when it came out.
As far as that quote in the article, point taken. Reading it again, I guess it is hyperbolic. But I didn't read it at face value, to literally mean that you could ask every single WoW player that question and they'd all respond the same. More like everyone the writer asked answered that way. In other words, he asked a sample of players.
I played WoW from 1.5 straight through to 4.3(ish?), skipped MoP and most of WoD, and returned for Legion for about...two months. Never really was much of a raider, because that part of the community had zero interest for me. The closest I came to it, was PuG'ing into MC, ZG, AQ, and Naxx on the back of having a great reputation on my server (I played paladin). This was back in the day when paladins were so OP, and paladin gear so whacked, hopping into Naxx in MC/ZG (priest) gear was a pretty regular occurrence.
My favorite expansion was Cataclysm, and I still believe LFR was a symptom and scapegoat for the community as a reason for its decline in sub numbers. Wrath was such a paradigm shift for the game between the introduction of LFG (and the elimination of server reputation), class simplification, the elimination of resource management (especially for healers), sensible itemization for hybrid classes, and the shift towards ilvl as the sole determinant of character viability and content progression, that there really was no turning back after the game's subscription base exploded during the Wrath cycle. Cataclysm brought the game back towards BC-level class and (to a certain degree) itemization complexity, reintroduced resource management as a limiting factor for DPS casters and healers, and in combination with improved encounter mechanics throughout Wrath, the game was all-around harder.
My chief gripe with Wrath was, as a healer player, the game felt like playing a melee DPS in terms of rotations and buff/debuff management, except you made green numbers instead of yellow numbers. Rotation and HPS were all that mattered, instead of triage, mana management, timing and prediction. And, as someone who also played tanks, same bloody thing except you did your DPS rotation in tank stance and had to rotate defensive cooldowns. There was no real diversity in terms of game play between roles, even among classes which could have, and should have, been wildly divergent. Hell, prot paladin (what I spent most of Wrath playing) play was reduced entirely to three buttons: your 9-second cooldown cast sequence, your 6-second cooldown cast sequence, and your defensive cooldown cast sequence. And, I eventually settled on resto druid towards the end of Wrath, because while it was just as button-spammy as any other class let alone healers, at least there was some challenge in timing GCD's and maintaining HoT stacks/AE heals.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wrath was a faceroll-fest where stats other than ilvl didn't matter because gear progressed in a strictly linear fashion. That made the community, well...stupid. The healer community rioting over having to do something for once that most of us who had played through vanilla and BC had to do as a matter of course,
including players who had raided all through vanilla and BC, whose skills had slipped during Wrath -- manage mana and triage -- was pretty telling. Don't even get me started on DPS players pitching a shit over having to CC for the first time in two years, manage their own aggro, and
avoid damage. "Get out of the fire" was always a common joke at the expense of bad DPS players, but there's a reason it reached its commanding memetic heights during Cataclysm.
Then you had the fact, because Blizzard hadn't locked down the game balance on the mastery stat, and thanks to the complicating factor of reforging, a gear landscape where higher ilvl didn't always mean "better" and players at least had to do a
little of their own theorycraft to get the most out of the gear they had, and actually skip nominal upgrades if it couldn't be reforged into something better than they already had. All LFR did was allow players a means to skip heroics, building/rebuilding two-years-forgotten skills, to brute force the content they were expected to have done sooner rather than later through sheer force of ilvl as opposed to genuine gear optimization. That made LFR and its impact on the game a symptom of the community decline that had already happened over the past two years, not the cause. Enough of the community were just too stubborn and/or in the thrall of of Dunning-Kruger to admit, or realize, it.
