You bring up a lot of really good points with this post and you raise some excellent questions.

In my opinion, hard modes are progression. You had asked whether more non-hardcore players were showing less interest in raiding and I feel it’s exactly the opposite. I see more people running around with the same gear that I have access to and it’s very strange for me to see.

I will say that 25 mans have become the minority and most of the people that are wearing said gear are getting it through 10 mans and they’re achieving success that way. With that said, more people seem to be raiding and because of this hard modes have become the thing that separates the men from the boys, sorta speak.

Blizzard has made it very clear that they want their players to see their content, regardless of how you do it. While there are more people raiding, that doesn’t mean they’re raiding well and many are still struggling with the opening bosses of content. I can understand why Blizzard feels that people have more to see and they want to delay Firelands to give people that chance.

My guild just hit 11/12 in 25 man regular modes and we’re just about to launch into hard modes. That’s where I get hungry for more and focused and I want the time to enjoy those things. I don’t feel pushing Firelands back is such a bad idea.

There’s nothing in 4.1 that would even slightly make me change my mind on this. The ilvl 353 gear appears to me to be a somewhat desperate attempt to get people moving into PvE progression again. I doubt it will do much good.

If they are delaying Firelands because it isn’t ready, I wonder why it isn’t ready. My suspicion? They’ve already torn up the plans they’ve had for raid encounters in this expansion and are redesigning them from scratch. Possibly, they’re redoing the raid to have three difficulty levels.

Without a steady progression, I think a lot of people decided ‘Screw it. I’m gonna go play rated bgs’ which are both fun and relatively loot rich. More loot rich than spending the night wiping on elemental council, anyway.

In a lot of ways, the situation reminds me of early Burning Crusade.

And you’re not allowed to get bored with this tier of raiding until you’ve finished all your greens!

This raises a few issues for me, such as:
– what’s the point of progressing faster than the ‘blizzard norm’ unless you have a special interest in butting your head against hard modes?
- are people not advancing quickly enough because raids are harder, or is it because non-hardcore players in general are just showing less interest in this tier of raiding

Which says something about the people who were asking for harder raids.

Me guild is making progress about as I expecteds, which means we’s downing bosses but has a long ways fer ta go. So when Firelands arrives I ain’t anticipatings that we’ll be bored yet, but we may be reasies fer ta move on anyhow. Course, is fair ta say what any guild what calls itself Black Leather Undies ’cause the real name be too weird is not a good indicator of nuthin’.