And that stratification hurts the end game in the long run when you've relegated the MC+BWL+2/3rd AQ guilds to just 3 25 man end bosses out of 2 zones from the total of what? 6 zones all said and done?

Don't forget that ZG/AQ20 were also out there for guilds that weren't making it deep into Naxx.

Those 2 zones were probably my favorite places to run in the entire game. They were a great way to play with people outside of your guild and get to know people. Heroics just aren't the same.

The current raid stratification's ridiculous. The expansion has felt like running full steam into a brick wall. Rushing to level only to find that you're expected to beta test.

Beat me to it. Quigon - Look around you (so to speak) at your guild, and at your peers on these boards. You'll find an awful lot of intelligent, observant people. The guys who keep WoW running are cut from the same cloth as you and me and Praetorian and half of the other posters on this forum - they basically have to be. Fixing the endgame isn't a job for Superman; it's a job that current employees of Blizzard Entertainment are more than qualified to do. That makes the terrible state of things at the moment all the more perplexing, and all the more frustrating.

Well Quigon, I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I just can't see a situation where Kaplan would be unaware of the situation and honestly, I'm quite sure he's actively monitoring it in a way that would probably strike you as obsessively. Sure, it's been a long time since the LoS days but he's a pretty detail orientated fellow shall we say. If the simplest answer that comes to mind is that Tigole is just out of touch, I'm going to keep looking for another simplest answer.

Hey, I could be wrong of course.

I don't think Tigole has ever cleared through Serpentshrine trash in full. If he has, then I will gladly just accept they're slowing us down on purpose because stuff isn't finished.

I think all signs point to that; and there isn't an appropriate PR response to "we fucked up, when Illidan said, 'You are not Prepared,' well, by 'You,' he means Blizzard." Clearly they're not done. I mean seriously, black temple in 2.1... Black temple. What kind of fucking joke is that.

Again, its like telling your boss you completed some task you really didn't, and having it bite you on the ass later - Black temple isn't finished... Hyjal isn't finished... for god's sake, the post tonight by awake shows that SSC isn't finished. Nothing beyond, or apparently including, Vashj is at all completed.

You speak of Jeff Kaplan (Yes I know he's Tigole - sorry that wasn't clear ) - welll frankly, his problems are more damning
- Recurrence of AQ40 and pre-tier 1/2 fix loot problems. I really, truly, wonder about the itemization problems in the game. They almost ruin a boss kill that was otherwise fun. You guys know what I'm talking about.
- Recurrence of massive trash issues.
- New issues with encounter tuning - and poor design.

Are these his problems? Who knows - but none of the above should be so alarmingly bad, and none require significant amounts of time to fix. You know we can't blame Tigole for everything under the sun, its just not fair or probably realistic. But, whether or not he has lost touch? By allowing some of this to go live, yes, he clearly has. Most of the people hired to work for blizzard have vehemently ranted against the very crap that has been spewed out at us. I'm not sure why calling people out on fucking up hard somehow elicits such a sheepish response - people... the game has issues, lets wake up. Something drastic needs to happen at the raid QA/Dev team over there - because the level of failure going on now is just impressively stupid.

There are the bug issues which can take forever (Gruul's shatter bug?) to fix. Then there are simple tuning and obvious issues... like loot, and trash, and perhaps content availability.

Maybe there are smart people working on this game, maybe there are smart people working on this game in end game guilds... but they sure aren't the ones in charge of getting things done. They're probably part of the QA division, report the bug, and it gets qualified as "Working as intended", or "fix later". Then some jackass in charge who worked on atari games his entire life adds 2 more murloc spawns and gives them a quarter million HP each.

Jeff and 'Tigole' are one and the same person. In EQ (and I don't know your background here) Tig did leave relatively early on but he was still there for some rather significant cockblocking.

I just don't know what to tell you. I haven't had the pleasure of banging my head on the SSC trash for weeks yet so perhaps it really, really is worse than the blatant cockblocking in EQ that many of the present Blizzard people railed against back in the day. Ignoring even the public funny rants and such, this was stuff that was talked about late at night, drunk and chain-pulling. Gamers are gamers and none of these issues are remotely new. Not PvP v PvE balance, not itemization, not encounter balance and sure as hell not trash.

Can you really look me in the eye and say with a straight face that you think the same team that rolled out Naxx 'accidentally' got it all wrong in so many ways with SSC and The Eye? I just think that's preposterous. Even on the encounter design end I find it unlikely, given that it's been mostly mathematically possible since the days of MUDs. From the itemization standpoint, either the design philosophy has changed intentionally or unintentionally. "The purple factor" I think was overestimated this time around shall we say.

Enough from me though, time to step back for a while and see what develops.

I know they're the same, sorry I didn't make it clear in my post.

Anyway, as I stated before, I don't at all think they got lucky, which is why it speaks mostly to the Personnel, priorities, and perhaps politics. I could live with Naxx 2 through 2 thousand from here to forever for my raiding needs. Regression is a bitch though.

Just a small point though:

If the raid team got Naxxramas so well tuned (with some help from us, granted)... That is, naxxramas, with 18 bosses, in less than 12 months.

What have they been doing in the 9 months since Naxx essentially went gold? Surely they didn't spend 3 months on each of the well tuned SSC encounters? No seriously, what has the raid team been doing this last year? Sure, have a season or two off for doing a nice job with Naxx... did Karazhan take all of the testing time up? Every last month? It had issues at launch, and they were VERY quickly addressed.

Lets say they tuned naxx up through October or so. So OK, 5-6 months of tuning current raid encounters. Where has that time gone? Into Gruul? Into Vashj? It makes me shudder to think of the long term implications.

Yup the 4-vial thing is silly. Again scaling positively with tightness of group and speed of progression instead of negatively. It may be true that the very crust of raiders had to wait for new content in the past and that sort of gaps this with farming, but for a lot of raiders, new content was always ready when they cleared a new boss. Having to farm old content for longish periods of time to even get a shot a new content certainly won't keep people happy, the prospect of always having explorable content in front of your nose at least on our group was a huge motivator.

Onyxia did this pacing right. You can casually kill Onyxia in parallel with BWL and get the needed scales.

But maybe the real question is if killing Kael unlocks the block, but looking at the attunement chart it really doesn't look that way. But in the end it could feel like SSC->TK has a similar slowing flavor as Ony->BWL (as said looks unlikely and purse speculation at this point). You get your vials while working on TK. If you are too fast you are short vials overall.

Of course this could indeed be just meant for now. Very fast groups look at 4 vial drop rates and later they up that substantially to make it less painful for slower raiders?

They fixed C'thun a few days after DnT made a public mockery out of blizzard which caught on like wildfire with the wow forum popluation.
There werent any massive changes needed to make C'thun go from unkillable to killable which is why i believe that he simply wasnt tuned properly and that blizzard just didnt "get it".

Well, someone I knew who I played with for over a year was actually hired to work for Blizzard, and when he did he quit raiding because he was now working 70+hours a week for months on the TBC crunch. He didn't raid; he didn't even really want to play the game when he wasn't at work (not shockingly).

But anyway yeah, the main point of note here is the repeating of mistakes in the past. It also comes down to a basic question, I suppose: would the customers really be happy if they just waited longer to put out polished, complete content, or bottlenecked them? I mean it's very clear that some guilds will throw themselves at even broken content in order to beat it, either because they want to beat it that badly or they don't want to believe it's broken. Has Blizzard made a conscious decision that it's better for more of their players to let the top guilds beta test their content so they can have it polished for the herd? Or is this really not an intentional choice, and they have expected things to be much more polished at this point? I guess in other words, are they fucking up on purpose, or by accident?

I'm not really sure which would be better.

Its not just one thing that has us pissed off at blizzard. Its a combination of a bunch of things. Blizzard KNOWS how to fix a lot of this stuff, they just refuse to do it. Thats the current problem with the game. Its been stated on this forum tons of times about what they did with Naxx. Look at the design, look at the loot, look at the trash. Blizzard knows how to make gear upgrades over 5-man gear. Blizzard knows how to make the trash not a time sink. Blizzard knows how to tune a boss properly and they have the man power to fix glaring bugs that stand out in end game encounters. They just don't.

Gear - I think they just don't want there to be massive gear disadvantages this early into the release of TBC. I think they know how to itemize the gear correctly. Look at tier3 and how good it was. They are probably just choosing not to because they probably consider it to be "too early" into the game.

Trash - Blizzard knows how to design trash to make it less tedious. Almost every instance has had a long respawn time. MC, BWL, AQ40, Naxx. If you wipe in there you can just run back and not have to worry about trash. I honestly think Blizzard just wants the trash there to limit your time with the boss. The less time you have on the boss the slower the overall guild progress is going to be.

Tuning - Blizzard's in house raid team is probably one of the best around. I'm sure they probably have the best gear available to them up to the point in whatever dungeon they are on which gives them a major advantage. They also have 0 lag, top of the line computers, and have been together for years now. Its like, they know how to make every one of these encounters in Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern, and The Eye into damn near impossible encounters. Then based on how hard they want them to be for the rest of the world, they back them off a little bit. Apparently Gruul and Magtheridon weren't in line with where they wanted them and back them off (That and people who spent 2 weeks on them and said "OMG ITS IMPOSSIBLE" kept going off on the forums). I honestly think Blizzard's in game team is so geared out they don't even notice a lot of "minor" bugs that go on in encounters. Example. Hydros and his crushing blows.

Communication - This is one thing Blizzard has always been really bad about. They just have horrible communication with its raiding player base. How often do we see posts of relevance on the forums about raiding encounters until after people have been griping about them for weeks? Kel'Thuzad was actually somewhat decent with Tigole posting and trying to fix it with DnT's spawn bug. But The Lurker Below? Vashj? How many encounters do we have to see bug out week after week before we get a response that they are at least working on it. I would much rather have a post saying "We're looking into it" then just dead silence.