I’d been playing since early vanilla and have seen the odd twists the each expansion brought.

Vanilla was good for the casuals so long as they didn’t want end game raiding… that was reserved for the truly hardcore guilds.

TBC brought us something more balanced, you still needed to be rather hardcore in the beginning for early raid content, but the reg/heroics got everyone trained for what was to come in raiding.

Then Wrath hit and threw all that out the window and catered to casual players… running a dungeon? Just AOE everything. Doing a raid? Yep… same answer. Don’t want to raid? We got you covered with dailies.

Now we have Cata, and it feels like something between vanilla and TBC. Raiding isn’t really open for the casuals, and the gear grind almost feels like what the vanilla raiders needed to do for raid consumables… it wasn’t pretty then, it aint too fun now either. I’d expect that raiding will open up more for the casuals as they get rep/badge gear, but the fight mechanics will likely crush them.

I’ve been one of the hardcore vanilla raiders, took a step down to mostly hardcore in TBC and found that Wrath was kinda fun when you had *gasp* casuals in the same raid as us hardcores. Cata has turned me off of WoW though.

The wild swings between gameplay is too much, you need to have split personalities just to cope with it

I think this is kind of an interesting point because if you end up in a social group where the leaders are really really organised, then mostly all you have to do is keep showing up and taking part.

You see the same thing with raiding (although raiding pretty much encourages strong leadership) where some people will consider that finding a suitable raid guild or a group of 10 closeknit friends who want to raid is trivial where for others it’ll be so difficult that they eventually give up. But not everyone in a 10 man group was equally involved in organising it, some just were in the right social group to get involved. (Sure this might have taken work, or they may have lucked out.)

So if devs can encourage guilds to form with the expectation of strong leadership and lots of organised events (aside from the question of how many people actually want to spend all their online time organising things for other people) … a lot of people could theoretically get entertained.

This, I think, is what will kill SW:TOR in fairly short order after launch. The game is promising new levels of “entertain me” and I don’t see how they can possibly put out quality story content as fast as players are going to churn through it. And when they run out of story, there are going to be some very disillusioned players finding that it’s back to killing ten womp-rats… or worse, that there isn’t even any kill ten womp-rats to occupy them until the next batch of story content.

You make me want to write a post entitled “Feminism has Killed Raiding”.

If only I could figure out a half-way logical argument for that. The comments would be amazing.

The problem that Heroics are not positioned this way by Blizzard. It is a stepping stone before raiding. It is not a middle ground mini-game. It doesn’t have self-sufficient progression or accomplishments aside from a couple of gimmicks. There is lack of scaling. There is not much storyline supported by quests on par with what vanilla or TBC had.

From there we’ve moved, one small step at a time, to something almost as specific as Football Manager 2011.

And all in response to player driven demands. I guess it’s partly because in a free for all sandbox where people can do whatever we want we’ve shown that what a large proportion of us want is to be dicks to other people.