[Because 5% Doesn't Pay the Bills]

via Broken Toys, on the removal of the incredibly complex attunement quests for Black Temple:

"Not everyone is happy about this:

'Blizzard no longer cares about the hardcore gamers, be that the raiders or the pvpers. Well, we’re done with it. It wasn’t just one thing really. While we were all excited to get some tier6 for our freshly 70 alts from this new badge gear, there’s a part of you that just has to feel some pain when you look back at all the time you spent farming instances…for nothing.'

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, silly. It’s silly to expect game developers to create content that 50 people on the planet can access. OK, so that’s an exagerration. According to Wowjutsu, 286,000 people have entered the Black Temple, and 121,000 have finished it. Still, that is 5% of a given fairly hardcore population… to show up on Wowjutsu, you have to be in a raid that has completed some portion of Karazhan. Just as a comparison, those figures above are compared to 2.2 million players that watched the Shade of Aran blow up their raid."

  The costs of developing and running an MMO do not allow the old EQ model of pandering content to the minority uber elite. It's not going to happen, and to expect it to just reeks of entitlement complex. Which happens to be what the 'hardcore' raiders like to accuse the 'casuals' of having, ironically enough. =P

"This isn’t a bad thing. If you make your game’s endgame challenge dependent on how fast your content designers can crank out ever-increasingly-difficult challenges, you either have a game that no one can finish, or a game everyone can eventually finish, given enough investment of time.
Which makes some people unhappy. Raiders denigrating casual players in WoW has a long, storied tradition, after all. But casual players pay the bills. I fully expect Wrath of the Lich King to have a hideously complicated attunement sequence for taking down Arthas at the end. I also fully expect that sequence to disappear a year later."

  Unlike EQ, where the high end content remained out of reach of the majority of the players, even after the hardcore had moved on to newer dungeons, at least WoW is trying to allow more folks to be able to experience more of the game as they add to the endgame. I'd like to see a good explanation of how to solve the problem of accessibility in a better way from these folks who feel that just because some other guy can get into Black Temple a year after they themselves did, it somehow cheapens their own personal game experience. Once again, the entire raider shpiel about how they're 'in it for the challenge' just rings false. If they were, they wouldn't care.