Blizz is going to ruin WoW with the Lich King

Let's do this bit by bit...

Q u o t e:
The Lich King has been blizzard big boss since wc3

Warcraft 3 really established Arthas in the position of the Lich King in its expansion - The Frozen Throne. His relevance is not to be trivialized, but to say that we have established him as "The Big Boss" is a bit of a stretch. Warcraft 3 introduced a whole new level of threat to Azeroth - The Burning Legion. There have been some encounters with them and their powerful masters, but I'd hesitate to say that they've been "defeated" once and for all. We've also seen the rise of old gods such as Yogg'Saron and C'thun and I'm sure you're aware of the impending return of Deathwing. There is a whole slew of lore characters who haven't been around and thousands of plots and intrigues that have been developed throughout the lifespan of World of Warcraft and its expansions. Many big nasty bosses have been slain and still the problems of the world have not been alleviated. Perhaps, just maybe, there is more going on then one can gather in a glimpse.

Q u o t e:
I understand Blizzards market plan is to make this game more casual and thats just good business but in the process their ruining the epicness of WoW.

Our market plan has been and continues to be: "Make the game fun, dramatic and exciting." There are still great challenges in the world for more veteran players, and now we have the ability to keep these challenges, as well as tell our story to the people who really want to hear it, but may not have the time to dedicate to the high-end raiding experience. That's not to say that The Lich King is going to be a pushover. Far from it. But you'll learn more about that soon... Aside from that, WoW still has plenty of epic-ness... We have always planned to make certain that the upcoming 3.3 dungeons and encounters are of the highest possible caliber. Our design team continues to push itself and the game we love in ways no MMO has ever gone before and the result will be EPIC.

Q u o t e:
With this whole new normal/heroic raid encounters The Lich King is going to be as easy as Anub normal so that everyone can see and kill the lich king well thats great have the best story-line boss be killable the 1st night your able too real epic.

First, you have to realize that the players who are "downing" any major raid-boss, on the first day of it's live release, have been practicing that boss for at least one other day on the Public Test Realm. These guilds are also a minority and it doesn't make much sense for us to only let a very select few players see the content that we have spent thousands of man hours making awesome. However, it does make sense for us to allow players, who want to see the lore, an opportunity to do just that.

In closing, please let the forums know if you manage to take down the Lich King when you set foot in his lair. I strongly suspect you'll end up turning tail and heading for safety.

Q u o t e:


during vanilla ( i know you werent here for it as your previous misinformed posts have clearely stated yes UBRS was a 40 mannable instance i can point out in the patch notes where it was lowered and retuned....) people spent months to down a single boss not an entire instance... even if they had one day head start.. the fact they still down them that dfast speakes volumes about both the difficulty and creativity of the original games designers. Kalgon on these verry boards during tbc stated the design team couldnt come up with any thing newer which was why many of the boss encounters were retreads..

Ah the good old days, back before there were level or player caps on instances. I remember them well. Let me help you out here. The change to UBRS was made because it was always intended for that to be a 5-15 person dungeon and players were bringing in a full 40 people to clear it in next to no time. Thus, killing General Drakkisath quickly and potentially getting a shot at their tier 0 chest piece. Clever though it was, it wasn't our intention for that to be the case and (viola!) instance caps were born (previously it had been just 40 people per instance, but there were ways around that). We didn't change the difficulty of the encounters to accomodate for the reduction in people allowed in the instance, as you seem to imply. As for players taking months to down a particular boss, that is absolutely true. Unfortunately, the majority of the time where that was the case, those bosses required several hotfixes to function as intended and once they were properly tuned, they were generally "downed" shortly thereafter. The difficulty that some of those encounters began at wasn't always originally intended to be the case. Fortunately, we have learned from the past and evolved in our approaches to gameplay and encounter design. This is largely due to the incredibly dynamic team of people who make this game, but it's also due to the feedback that we have received from hundreds of thousands of players.

As for the retreading of bosses, that hasn't been the case for some time. You can see the difference in many of our encounters in new mechanics and different variations of gameplay. This is displayed in many dungeons in Northrend and Outland, from 5-person to 25-person raids, most bosses are doing new and interesting things. I will admit to some overlap, but sometimes certain types of things are just fun to do.

Q u o t e:

instead i'm going to ask you a question... if nothing in your design philosophy has changed since vanilla why is it that during that time even up to the middle of the first expansion you had a solid playerbase always online... and since the last patch every server is nerely a ghost town...Terenas is a day one servers.. this week has been the most desolate i've seen it this... desolate...

you cna try to blame the aging of the game... yet it would be a lie. a solid game gets devoted folowers * the true hard core* unless you run them off with a drastic change in game design... hell even EQ still has a solid base.

how is it that in a single week the server pop can decrease this mutch? bg's have gone from 16 current bg's to 1 at max 4 in the 80 bracket and similar decreases in all brackets.

Well, it happens that I, among many other people, monitor realm populations on a pretty consistent basis. We are not in "dire" straits as you seem to think we are. Perhaps, your play times don't match up with the majority of players on your realm. Realms have an extremely interesting dynamic all their own - they have highs and lows and spikes in population at some times, while they lull at other times. As for "Day 1" realms being immune to population migration, I'm afraid that simply isn't the case. Many players have shifted or rerolled on to realms that came on the scene later, and this has changed the landscape for players like yourself.