EDIT: Wish to emphasize this is not a whine post, it's a way to think about all the possibilities, and see what's good, and what directions could be expanded. Not very constructive, 'cause our suggestions have a very low impact on the game, but I had a lot of fun thinking about it.

There's been a lot of talk about keying and attunement and what drives the raid progression order between the threads. I'm creating a new one to talk about design in general to give creative people a place to discuss.

So - what avenues are there to give a structure to the raid game, a reason to progress, and a way to control both the pace and order of progression? In the end, I think a mixture all the possibilities adds up to be the most fun and immersive.

Item-based Limits / Controls on Progression:

Basic Gear Requirements
This is the most natural and obvious control. To progress through harder fights, you need "better" gear: more DPS/longevity/stamina/mitigation/healing. This method is often the most satisfying, and ties in with basic character progression. The major drawback is gear inflation, and the effect of the raid game on the rest of WoW. In TBC, this route has been heavily scaled back, to reduce its side effects.

Specialized Gear Requirements
This is the heading I'm giving to resist gear, because although resist gear is the most common specialized requirement, other ideas are conceivable. Resistance gear is a popular choice for instance designers for severeal reasons, I think:
- It is an alternate gear progression route, and it can either apply mostly to the guild (gearing your MT / melee in FR for Ragnaros, the inner 15 on Huhuran) or you can design it such that the whole raid has a certain minimum requirement (Vaelstraz). This gives it a high degree of flexibility
- Players can be allowed to choose how fast they meet this requirement. Moreso than basic gear upgrades, which traditionally only come from raid instances past a certain point, players can be allowed to farm outside of raid time to help meet their resistance requirment. They can do Heroics for FR, farm mats for craftables, or be forced mostly to get raid instance limited drops, like FrR gear / Frozen Runes for Sapphiron. In this way it can provide either a timesink, or be used to force raid instance order (if AQ40 dropped all the FrR gear, you'd have to do AQ40 first). The developers could restrict access to resist outside of raids, if they wanted raiding only to beget raid progress, etc etc.
- Minimum impact on non-raiding
EDIT: One con probably not often considered for players is this is the only requirement that eats heavily into bag-space. There must be a solution here if the designers with to continue using this one ...

I think resistance gear checks are fine, in moderation. You get a sense of accomplishment getting your MT his FR gear to take down Ragnaros, and there are many plusses to this route, as long as it is not over-implement.

I also think there's room for creativity here. Another example of specialized gear requirements is the Four Horsemen. Gear which droppped previously in the instance is warrior Tier 3, which provides a key bonus for a mechanic of the fight.

What other routes are available here? You could do all kinds of crazy things with specialized gear! Burning swords could drop which your rogues must be equipped with to help set the bosses adds on fire, staves which apply specific debuffs / counter boss abilities might drop in a previous instance - think of the fire elemental on the top of Un'Goro Volcano, whose shield you must remove with the quest item. This is by far the most unexploited route for raids.

Specialized Item Requirements
The goblins in Blackwing Lair drop hourglass sand, which is necessary for Chromaggus. They also drop Elementium, which you need for some of the best items from AQ40. Again, this is a very under-utilized avenue that gives a guild progression, but has no player or non-raid timesinks.

Other options inlcude the Onyxia-cloak requirement for Nefarian. This imposes a timesink, but it occurs in a fun raid instance and for the guild as a whole. Bob the Recruit does not need 20 Onyxia kills, he can join tomorrow and be handed an extra cloak from the guild bank.


Quest-based Limits / Controls:

Reputation Requirements
Okay, these are the new flavor of the month. Edited to change my perspective: because they chose one basic path for TBC, it can get a bit boring when there's a full spectrum possible.
- Crafter requirements, such as getting a TB armor crafter. This affects the guild as a whole, but not Bob the Recruit.
- Loot requirements, such as needing revered with Brood of Nozdormu to get the final armor pieces.
- Boss-summoning requirements, such as needing the Hydraxian Waterlord faction reputation necessary to summon Majordomo. Again, affects the guild as a whole, not an individual.
- Zone-entering requirments. Naxx had a sliding scale, you could get the rep, or you could pay the gold. In TBC, it's much more strict. You need the reputation to enter the Heroics to complete your zone-attunement quests. Serpentshrine requires revered Cenarion, Tempest Keep has four revered factions, etc.

Quest Chain Requirements
Before TBC, these only requiremed small-group play. There were no series of raid-quests for the next raid. However, every raid has now been chained, so that each instance past Gruul and Magtheridon has a previous instance completion requirement. This isn't so bad, as its not to hard to kill Gruul for the new guy (short encounter). Becomes more tedious 3 instances in (who in Naxx wants to kill Ragnaros for Bob the Recruit?). In general, it's fun and provides a sense of accomplishment. This really becomes onerous when the required instances have steep entrance requirments of their own ...

Quest Chains to Unlock Bosses
Not heavily implemented, it really only appears for Majordomo (some raid reputation attached), and Nightbane (requires small group play and non-raid reputations). Generally these do not affect Bob the Recruit. Again, provides a sense of accomplishment to the guild as a whole.

New Skills
Molten Core introduced the first raid-only class skill: Tranquilizing Shot. Obviously a gimick, and later a gimick to give a class necessity for certain fights, it was nonetheless a creative requirement. You need a few Lucifron kills under your belt to attempt the next boss. This gives players a sense of accomplishment and something to do (you learn a new skill!) without affecting non-raid play. I'd like to see more and better uses of this as well.


Well, what do people think? What methods are under-utilized, and what directions could designers take them in to give more "progression" options to characters and guilds without affecting the non-raid game or adding boring time sinks (farming mats, I'm not counting heroic runs as "boring").

EDIT: Wish to emphasize this is not a whine post, it's a way to think about all the possibilities, and see what's good, and what directions could be expanded. Not very constructive, 'cause our suggestions have a very low impact on the game, but I had a lot of fun thinking about it.

Attunements and raid progression is one of the things that are working extremely well. TBH I don't see any reason that you couldn't power people through every attunement in less than 2 weeks from the moment they ding'd 70, which is hardly unreasonable.

Tigole has posted that they have plans for "backflagging" in the long run, so I wouldn't worry about the "Naxx guild running MC for the new recruit" scenario.

In the short run, the keying requirements are all quite reasonable. The only "hard" one is the Trial of Mercy, but everyone who's completed that has also found it very fun and satisfying. It's a good type of challenge.

I mostly agree with you, and my post is fishing for under-utilized fun areas. The hardest part, I think, if power-repping someone. You'd have to run a lot of 4 different non-heroic instances each to get Bob the Recruit his heroic keys. Arguably, however, this is something they should be doing in their off time if they want to join a raid guild, and gets them their baseline gear and class-awareness.

I don't really agree with this. It is not challenging at all to get revered (or even exalted) with any of the new factions. Ones like Consortium, aldor/scryer, etc are easy to farm in a couple days. The others are gained through quests and running instances. Most of the level 70 instances give roughly 2000 reputation, if not more. I got revered with all of the necessary factions involved with heroics just by leveling and questing normally, with the exception of Lower City. I did ~5 extra runs of Shadow Labyrinth and 70 to get revered there.

The new 5 mans have such a wide variety of loot that pretty much anybody can find upgrades from pre-BC raid epics in them. They are also fun, in general. Maybe not so much after running the same one 20 times, but you can still find ways to enjoy yourself. Pulling 8-12 mobs at a time in Shadow Lab and AEing them all is a blast, and gets you out of the instance in under an hour.

In general, I think the largest problem are the random nature of some encounters. Prince and Gruul come to mind. While it's possible to beat both encounters even with poor luck on infernals or timings of reverb, ground slam positions, etc, they can be many many times easier if the RNG is treating your raid nicely on one attempt.

Edited my original post to include the viewpoints of the posters. The only reason I used the word "overboard" was because I think it's boring to have only one style for every instance, not that the requirement is too steep.

I dislike the keying approach to "unlocking" content reminiscent of all the Tiger woods style of game. Punishing people for not running x content x times is not a way to do it. Reward people for running x content x times.

Bad
--------------------
Punishing players
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Content not accessible at all if you haven't done x content x times
Examples: Heroic keys, 25 man raid keying (TK/SC)

Good
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Rewarding players
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More loot / gear available after running x content x times.
Examples: Rep rings, AQ token turn-ins, BWL hourglass sand / Elementium ore, Runes of the Firelord to summon Rag, Naxx Frozen Runes, Rep rewards from vendors.

Questionable (can be good or bad)
-------------------
Questline Keying
-------------------
Locking content based on quests completed. If the quest is good then there is no problem. If the quest is bad then it's... bad....

Arcatraz/Kz key = good, the quest requires one trip through multiple dungeons. Guaranteed drops.
Onxyia key = bad, way too many steps.
UBRS key = bad, Parts of the quest are chance drops.


The main reason behind why upfront locking of content based on previous content is bad besides the fact that it's annoying is the fact that you are then locked into one main character unless you play a TON. This could be partially resolved by making account wide keying instead of character keying. Then you only have to jump through the hoop once instead of multiple times. Though this wouldn't solve the problem for people coming late to the party to catch up with everyone else.

I want to play the game I pay for the way I want to play it. I do not want to do 100 dumb things just to get to something I want to do. That is why locking courses in Tiger woods golf is dumb and that's why locking dungeons in WoW is dumb.

The strange thing here is that they had most of it right in WoW1.0 and screwed it up in WoW2.0. A large step backwards in pretty much every way. Why change what wasn't broken?

Terrible, bad, awful. You pay for a service because you want that service. Companies accept some feedback and it can be a productive 2-way street, but the mantra of "I pay for it therefore it should conform to my every demand" is abrasive and crass.

I want to 25-40 man raid. I don't want to jump through non-related hoops to raid.

What if people who wanted to do arenas had to complete 25 man raids before they could do them. Not a recipe for happy people.

I am not saying "you should conform to my every demand". I just would like them to ease up on the ridiculous requirements that are currently in the game that are keeping me from even starting what I want to do. I probably shouldn't have said the "pay" word but the rest of my post still stands.

I'll agree with you on the UBRS key because of the random element. But for the Onyxia key I think all they needed to do was seperate out the multiple UBRS runs so that it could be accomplished faster. Just like how the scholo quests required you to run in, kill a boss, run back in, repeat, it's bad design. Other than that though, the Onyxia quest was fantastic because of the epic feel of it.

I really liked that in ZG, the optional bosses were the ones where you had to something extra to get them, but your ability to clear Hakkar was your gear and ability alone. Pre-expansion, things were tuned well enough (I started raiding late) that all the keying business was unimportant compared to your ability to kill things. You could attempt BWL or Naxx early if you wanted, but you'd get put in your place quick if the gear wasn't there. The Karazhan and heroic keys are like that: you get them on the way, doing things you need to gear up anyway. If you havent run things enough for those keys, you probably don't belong there anyway.

Gruul is a little different, a heavy duty roadblock that shuts out an entire instance if he isn't killed. I can't speak to his or serpentshrine's relative difficulty, but I'm just going to ignore the keying business and pretend he's the first boss of serpentshrine, because he functions as the gateway to an instance not unlike Razorgore or Skeram. Except, once people have the gear they want from him, he'll be more skippable.

Example 1:
I now invite some friend to play World of Warcraft. He goes out and buys the game today. He levels to 70 in a month or two. When he hits 70 he will have to run non-heroic x instances x times to get his keys. Meanwhile a large percentage of the population are already heroic keyed and moved on to bigger and better things. A large percentage of the server will refuse to do non-heroic x instance it will be a much larger/harder (more pain in the ass) task than the first people who hit 70.

Now he's frustrated because the rest of his friends are raiding X zone and he just can't. At all till he jumps through these hoops.

Example 2:
I have done all of the instances and gotten all of my heroic keys, killed Gruul / Killed Vash etc.. etc.... However, I get tired of playing my mage and decide I want to play a shaman. (He's level 56 right now). I have to re-key, redo every single thing I've already done regardless of how much effort i've made in gearing him up using crafting or BoE gear.

Now I am frustrated because I have every ability/stat that I should have to beat x content. However, I have to complete the same meaningless thing over just because I switched characters. Not to mention that by now others will have less desire to run these instances again making this task harder.

---------------

Most people here have tunnel vision from being among the first to hit 70. The longer this game progresses the less willing people are to do this 5 man - 10 man content. Eventually getting heroic keys will be a ridiculous task. If it isn't right now it will be soon. It's a poor system which is has the least impact on the first to hit 70.

I'm in agreement there, with the ability to gear yourself comparably with alternate means like crafting you should be able to do so. Well-tuned content shouldn't need artificial blocks like that, it didn't before. But in case you haven't heard,

Yep. They simply need to add the quests (or adjust the rep rewards for quests) to allow you to achieve Revered with all the relevant factions. It's still a time investment for new players or alts, but it's not dependent on the popularity of certain instances throughout WoW's lifecycle, and you'll be getting gold/xp/gear from the quests as well.

Which reveals a fascinating aspect of MMO theory which I think some of the WoW populace is just starting to think about. That entire argument, and maybe some of this keying argument as a whole, is about you wanting more world.

There's a scale here. At one end is UO, Shadowbane, SWG, EVE... those are very much "worlds". Players police themselves and the content is largely self-created through the social interactions. It's a wide open style of play.

At the other end is WoW. Very, very much a "game". It's on rails, where you must do X to get to Y and then Y to get to Z. In vanilla WoW it was very well disguised for the most part; I always knew that I couldn't waltz into Naxx without BWL gear but it never explicitly told me so. With the current keying process WoW's stripped even the lip service to a world entirely when you examine it. Gruul/Mag is world 1-1, SSC 1-2, TK 1-3 and so forth and so on. The princess is always in another castle, which is fine, but it's just naked single player style levels now.

That disconnect can be a little jarring for some folks even if I don't think they realize that's what it is.

Assuming you run the instances then do the quests (not immediately obvious) you will hit revered with every reputation without setting foot in the highest level instance for that rep.

You also go a fair bit of the way through the ce rep, and the extra xp from doing it in this order means you get more gold from the quest-->gold conversion at 70.

That said, it's not obvious at all on the first run through - but for rerolls or random people joining the game late (with friends giving advice) it's very much an option.I wasn't the first 70 on skywall, but I was easily the first revered with several heroic factions as a result of doing it in this order.

As for design space that isn't explored very well, I'd like to offer up: Quest (Guild) as space that would be a good fit for some of the attunement stuff. Not all of it, but it's certainly as viable as "resist gear" and doesn't have the nasty inventory (and database storage) woes associated with it.

All this is doing is moving the instance grind to the beginning of the process instead of the end. It doesn't make sense to me, since you still have to get groups for the instances (which means pugging for late arrivals most likely-maybe grouping with guildie alts), and you won't be getting gear that's useful at 70 by running Slave Pens or whatever over and over again.

Actually if you do it the way I'm suggesting you come out several hundred gold ahead, and faster complete, than doing it the other way. This is especially relevant when the items that are most relevant to you are not drops but reputation rewards (timekeeper leggins for instance).

There's certainly some arguement to be made in favor of doing the instancing second, but you "waste" experience doing it that way. Quest xp is converted to gold at 70. xp from instance kills is not. Doing the instancing first gets you xp + rep + drops, then you do the quests and get rep + xp till you cap, and rep + gold beyond that. Doing it the other way gets you rep + xp from the quests, then Rep + xp + drops until you cap, then Rep + drops, which turns out to be less profit and more time spent.

From the point of view of "catching my friends" and thus going as quickly as possible so you can leverage your friend's progression to help your own, doing it instances then quests is correct.

The reasoning behind doing instances first is that it maximizes what you get out of your time there. In addition to Anias' argument that it provides more gold, most of the lower instances stop giving rep at Honored. I had short bursts of time to play when I was leveling up, so I did lots of solo questing. When I did have time for Slave Pens, Blood Furnace etc, I was usually already Honored or close to it. If I did the instances first, I'd have come out with ~1000 rep per run. Instead, I got 500 rep on my first run, hit Honored, and subsequent runs gave none.

That said, I really hate that the game design encourages this backward logic. It's highly counterintuitive that skipping all quests until you ding Honored is the way to go.

Well you're experience may differ from my own but speaking as a generally very fast leveller (I was the first to hit 60 on my server at release) questing is leaps and bounds faster than instancing to level. I've found this to be true on every character I've levelled (1 mage to 60, 1 mage to 70, 1 druid to 70, 1 rogue to 60, 1 shaman to 55, and then dozens of 35+).

Unless you're one of those masochists who levels as pure holy or prot.

If you're good at micro-managing your time spent, questing will get you to 70 days before instancing will. Instances require you to find groups, summon people, stop whatever quests you're working on while looking for groups, etc...

Not to mention it's kind of hard to look for instance groups when you're out in say Nagrand, which has no instances. The LFG tool is mediocre at finding you groups and on a low population server such as mine you almost cannot find a group for anything unless you're spamming in trade in a major city.

That simply is not true. At least from my point of view. It's not the way to go. You can skip all quests then grind to honored for gear your going to replace through quests or you can quest to 70 grind rep in the level 70 instances associated with each faction and get drops that will enable you to raid WHILE you're grinding the rep.

Grinding is grinding, whether your doing it from neutral to honored or honored to revered. You're both speaking of loss in terms of not getting reputation at honored in lower level instances. I don't know how you guys are already honored when you're entering ramparts or underbog, unless you bought a bunch of unidentified plant parts to turn in.

But from an efficiency stand point I beg this question. How do you know how much rep you will get from quests? You can grind to honored then to do quests but if you don't need exalted with a faction for anything than you are wasting any extra quest rep you might get past revered.

Yes, by saving quests til the end of the grind and doing them at 70 you can get a nice storage of gold, but at the expense of levelling far slower. I guess in the end it really only boils down to personal preference.

I can fully understand the opinion:
"I don't want to pay a monthly subscription and then HAVE to perform tasks in the game that are less fun than other games I can play for free"

For me this applies to farming motes and shit.

I'm not sure why this is such a huge argument.

There seem to be two positions:
*) It's not a huge effort (assuming hardcore online time)
*) It's a roadblock and a time sink (assuming less than hardcore online time)

I can only understand if one would actually exclude the other. But if one looks closely they don't. Lower attunement requirements and progression and the first response does not change. The second improves.

Only if it's an ego trip to make sure that people with lesser time remain excluded from content then it makes sense to insist that attunement requirements remain time consuming.

But alas I have seen my share of hardcore vs casual arguments and it's at best sad that they even exist.