[WoW] If you haven't finished Heroic SoO, you aren't allowed to be bored

With roughly 4-6 months before WoD, players are starting to get burnt out on SoO content. As Rohan points out, the delay before WoD is one of the longest content gaps WoW has ever experienced. Plenty of players are claiming that they have nothing left to do but stand on the Timeless Isle waiting for Huolon (or whichever rare you’re farming) to spawn.

But eventually the argument “But you haven’t killed Heroic Garrosh, only 0.5% of players have,” pops up. It’s shown up every single cycle as a means of arguing that there is still plenty for people to do. That 99.5% should stop whining and go kill Heroic Garrosh if they’re so bored!

Edit for Clarity: Balkoth used similar phrasing in a comment to Rohan, but this post is not meant as a response because his comment was addressing difficulty, not volume.

The problem is that this argument misunderstands the other side’s definition of “content.” To some, content that is effectively out of their reach due to time or skill constraints is not really “content” at all. I’m among them, I've not killed Heroic Garrosh and I have no intention to, and yet I still feel like the content well is running dry. Why? Because I already killed him in LFR.

“But Heroic Garrosh is harder and different.”

Both true statements, he is significantly tougher and the fight does change, but the outcome is the same. Ignoring for a moment that there are real barriers to jumping from LFR/Flex to Normal and from Normal to Heroic; we still beat Garrosh. We still let him live. Taran Zhu still decides that he should have a trial. Jaina still does her angry “Wreck some Horde face!” speech and Vol’jin still takes over for Chris Metzen Thrall.

The content ended for me when I got to the end of the “story”. Much like how I feel no desire to try and beat Dark Souls using only the broken sword I started with, the game ends for me once I've finished its primary narrative content. In short, once a player has run out of the content that they enjoy, even if there is content that they don’t still remaining, they are effectively out of content. For some, a game is over once you beat the last boss regardless of difficulty, for others the game isn't over until beaten on the highest difficulty and BOTH are right.

For some players their ultimate goal is to defeat Garrosh on Normal, and Blizzard supports them. For others its to beat him on Heroic, and Blizzard supports them too. Not everyone views increased difficulty as more content. But trying to tell someone else that they aren't "done" because they have not reached the same goal as you fundamentally misunderstands the point of a game like WoW and attempts to inject your goals into theirs. 

You end up like this kid...

And nobody likes him

“So you admit that there’s content, you just don’t want to do it.”

From one point of view yes that’s true, in the same sense that we could say to one of the .5% that has cleared Heroic Garrosh and is bored, “But there’s still PvP content, and achievements, and pet battles…”

What I am out of is content that is targeted to me. I don’t have enough time to set aside to be a full-on participant in a heroic raid, so my activities are limited to more solo/casual friendly alternatives like LFR and Flex. Just as the bored Heroic Garrosh slayer still has theoretical alternatives, the content she/he is coming to WoW for has run out. While that player is coming to have a serious PvE challenge, I am mainly there to have some fun fantasy shenanigans, follow the stumbling story, and play medieval play-land dress-up.

The thing about a themepark MMO like WoW is that it has no discrete finish line, and anyone you ask will have a different definition of what it means to “finish” the game. I am not even sure Blizzard knows where the finish line is. Though I think it’s fair to say that clearing SoO on any difficulty is in their paradigm of what it means to “win” WoW. Some players might be more in line with Blizzard’s intent than others, but I am fairly sure that the vast majority of the “bored” players have played the game fairly closely to how Blizzard intends and are legitimately out of things to do. I mean, if they didn't think people had “finished” content until everyone had beaten the last boss on Heroic, we’d still be playing Wrath.

Plus, Blizzard tends to aim to include content for many different players in each patch, and empirically this is the longest wait we've had between patches. The end of Cataclysm dragged on for quite a while but Blizzard at least spiced that up with Ruby Sanctum (if we can even call that content) and the Mists beta. Regardless of whether you've cleared Heroic Garrosh, finished Normal, or never leave LFR, you haven't seen a new raid in quite a while.

Now I’ll concede that there is such thing as “unreasonable” content demands. Someone who ran SoO in LFR once and decided that was it ignores the realities of raid design, but I am fairly sure that also represents a minority of players, and not the ones that are complaining of boredom. The players that are bored are the ones that have spent some time on the Timeless Isle, raided SoO numerous times on their guild’s difficulty of choice, and finished a legendary cape or two. They’re hardly the type that consumes content rabidly, but after 6 months it begins to get repetitive. Even if you are trying to kill Heroic Garrosh, Siege gets old very quickly. They’re all the players that are playing fairly closely to how Blizzard intends the game to be played, but they are legitimately running out of things to do.