Quote:If the mood strikes me I'm happy to pay for stuff, but like I said 'if the mood strikes'. That's where I think Turbine's team has fallen down, or lost the plot. If you make good content, it will drive revenue because people want to play.
That content can be quests, raids, class passes (ss), just so long as it invigorates the player base, that is renewable cash as opposed to one shots buys.
The epic Gianthold update was amazing and pumped up player hours and spending for quite a while, really great update. Thunderholm was pretty good as well, but the availability of duping the mats, plus the ridiculous grind required to do it legit kinda killed it way too soon.
Thunderholme isn't that bad of a grind. A lot of players don't remember the grind for Green Steel. Used to be you would get 1 large red scale maybe every 5-7 runs. So you were looking at 25-30 runs per T3 GS item. That's not that far off from 30 phlogs, if you choose phlogs on the end reward list.
What is different is:
1) Duping reduced the number of players needing to run the content
2) Raid Bypass timers caused the player base to progress at markedly different paces
3) The player base as less tolerance for grind vs. 2007/2008
4) There was no ER/ITR/TR grind, so there was less to do at cap besides grind out mats for GS.