I bring this up because I have often felt/commented that for many guilds that are somewhere in the top 3-10% of guilds, the normal modes are too easy, but the hard modes are a bit “beat your head on the wall hoping for something” difficult. I would like to see a “middle” difficulty, I guess. Although I am quite sure that would have many complications as well

I agree, perhaps a better move would have been to Valor badges. But on that same token, Naxx was basically puggable by the time Ulduar released, so I wonder if the huge jump was because Blizzard thought so many people had valor gear/badges, that it wouldn’t meet their goals of evening the playing field? I’m not sure.

I will selfishly admit that I like it because as a recruiter for a progression guild, it makes more applicants available to me, at least from a gear perspective

ToC and the raiding/gear changes it brought has in general been terrible for WoW. Ulduar was far better in all ways.

When you first buy the next Halo or Counterstrike, the single player campaigns will have ‘easy,’ ‘regular,’ and ‘hard’ modes of some sort.

When I play those games, I always start or regular. My wife and son always start on easy. I have friends that always start on hard.

What’s so crazy about that? Blizzard is only doing what most game designers do – letting most people finish the game if they want to, on the difficulty level they want to do it at.

I really do feel that the community does have some impact on the shape of the game. I just hope that blizzard remembers that those that holler the loudest just yell loud and aren’t always representative of the majority!

And it’s true! If you were a raider in vanilla, you didn’t buy fun toys, you just couldn’t afford the gold loss. It took hours to make just 100g!

I definately agree that taking out some of those arcane keyings from the old world was the right thing to do. It’s hard enough to find an instance group in the old world, more or less having to go through a million different quests just to get the keys. I don’t think this is dumbing the game down at all, I think it’s updating it to keep with the times!

I think that WoW does a lot of things right, and as long as they encourage good play, and multiple avenues of fun for the game, I think it is the right thing