Tom Chilton phone interview

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/arts/video-games/star-wars-the-old-republic-vs-world-of-warcraft-online.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

Most important, these persistent games populated by thousands of simultaneous players — they are called massively multiplayer online games — generate real-life relationships and communities.

Then blizzard is contradicting themselves by creating something like raid finder. Which kill the social aspect of the game and hurts the community.

“What we’re trying to do now is figure out what our current audience wants,” Tom Chilton, World of Warcraft’s game director, told me by phone last week. “It became clear that it wasn’t realistic to try to get the audience back to being more hard core, as it had been in the past.”

Here let me figure out the current target audience for you.

1.) Casuals
2.) Hardcores

Everything you do for the casuals the hardcores hate because it cuts deep into all the hard work they have put into the game. Everything you do for the hard cores the casuals hate...we'll mainly because they are spoiled brats that just want handouts.

Which would you rather cater to blizzard?

Here let me figure out the current target audience for you.

1.) Casuals
2.) Hardcores

Everything you do for the casuals the hardcores hate because it cuts deep into all the hard work they have put into the game. Everything you do for the hard cores the casuals hate...we'll mainly because they are spoiled brats that just want handouts.

I think you're forgetting the space in between those two stereotypes.
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Healing Forum MVP

Stolen from MMO-Champion:

Think about it like this [BC], this is what STARTED the whole WoW juggernaut. Blizz had a vision of what the game should be, they released that vision as their game Classic WoW, and it was good. It was their vision, BC continued that vision. Then dollars and numbers change the vision. The original vision was what Blizz started with and that vision gets cannibalized by the bean counters influences.

Raiding accessibility has been around since the original Zul'Gurub (you only need 20 people to raid now?) back in vanilla. Not forcing people to group to level was part of the original WoW design, and back in 2004 that wasn't exactly something you could take for granted in a MMO. I can't speak for the developers, but I personally think making the game accessible to a wider group of players has been part of the vision of WoW all along, and so I don't really see making changes that allow people to see more content as contradictory to the vision.