I don't think anyone would argue that +harder=new content. Although, each difficulty tier has different mechanics and gear and sometimes extra phases (guldan, Argus).
I mean we cleared heroic ghuun the first week? Or early second week. Whatever it was. Are you saying that this is enough? That should be it? Some guilds will take over a month doing that - that IS enough for them.
I'm not saying that's enough or not enough. I'm just saying that making existing content +harder isn't going to be a big enough incentive to get the general raiding population (I'm not speaking to the general pop) invested. So, you see an even smaller segment of raiders in mind-numbing pursuit of rinse-repeat of +harder content.
Wow devs put out content pretty fucking fast man. I know a lot of you guys haven't played since 2005 so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here.
Why shouldn't there he a harder raid mode for people that want to do it? I'm not sure if you're arguing that the harder difficulty is somehow taking away Dev time on new content.
I played Beta and every expansion up until BFA. And I raided with globally ranked progression guilds until WoTLK. So, the hardness of content isn't an issue for me.
My point is that when you just slap on a +harder tag to existing content, it totally removes the incentive for a lot of people to do it. Do people want to do +harder content? Apparently. Does it totally alienate the majority of raiders? Yes. Ultimately, it serves to undermine a majority of the raiding population, because raiding becomes a grind of seeing the same shit every night/week/weekend.
Or are.you guys suggesting making one difficulty that's not terribly hard and having people abandon this game en masse because it's now easy enough for the 40 year old keyboard Turners to be able to handle.
I haven't seen anyone suggesting that. So, either you're salty about something and intentionally misconstruing the point or something else.
From what I've read, it kind of sounds like you want to play a raiding simulator that has X dungeons that get progressively harder as you complete the content, putting you in a smaller and smaller group of peers, because the challenge of harder content is ultimately what you find fun.
That takes both the Massively and RPG out of MMORPG.
Classic WoW did a wonderful job of presenting challenging and interesting content to a large amount of people. A smaller percent of the population was progression, which again I'm not arguing against, but the content was interesting enough to cross the threshhold of "hardcore raider" and entice more people to join. Which is why guilds could get carried by a few "good players" and still be successful.
Forcing guilds to only have elite players compounds the problem of content, because obviously they're going to be the smallest part of the population, consuming the most content, at the fastest pace. If you design a game that caters to this playstyle, which it sounds like you're in favor of, you're not building an MMORPG. You're simply building a raiding simulator with some barriers to entry, which is essentially why people hate WoW now.
