What exactly do you mean by this? I'm part of a guild that raids 3 to 6 nights a month (we try and do every Sunday if we can, then follow it up Monday if there is interest, but there's always one week where we end up not raiding), and we've cleared all of Karazhan.
I'd like to think my research into the character of guilds is fairly thorough, although, admittedly, I was suppoing sampling 6 servers and finding reasonable consistency would avoid something so embarassing as simply not discovering a guild type. I have not yet encountered a guild whose raiding can best be expressed as a function of events over a month.
How long has this been the case?
Is this "by design"?
Is the one week a colloquial, or mechanical measure?
Are there other guilds like yours?
Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.
Sorry, had an emergency at the office today...anyone remember back in the 80s when they used to say that because of technology we'd have more leisure time and less work?
To answer the three people who responded to my post.
Originally Posted by Ghorthor
It does mean that we do not jump through any burning hoop just to be able to see every content, like most guilds now raiding BT probably do. I think it is a completely different mindset of players. You do have those who push as hard as they can to achieve the goal and others who just considered it to be too inaccessible.
This isn't about content being to hard or to time consuming. It's just the question how much do i have to change my gaming experience from the last 2 years so i can raid current raid content. For many players the answer is: too much. That's the flaw of the current endgame design in this game.
Ahh, well that I agree with. We all did our Karazhan keys obviously, but the keying process beyond for the later 25 mans did seem to be a waste of time. But if we had 30 members or so (unlikely because we don't raid often enough), we would have done them I imagine, I guess we'll never know.
Originally Posted by Viator
By casual I mean the vast majority of players who either never get a level 70 or get to 70 and run a couple five mans. If you even know about this site you're neither in the majority or casual. If you've ever crunched numbers on how much dps you need to do or compared spirirt regen for your class to mp5 you're not casual. So you're certainly a casual raider but not casual in the larger, more real sense.
Honestly, I'm not sure on that. I guess, at the end of the day, it's all how the word "casual" is defined. The way I view it is "people who don't raid that much", which granted is a very lose expression. But when I see some people say they are casual raiders because they only raid three nights a week, I'm floored by that.
We like to have fun, but at the same time we all want to be good at this game. I'm a casual golfer, but I try and learn from my mistakes and play a better round everytime I'm out, I sort of see this as the same way. But I guess that's just symantics. I'm fine with "Serious player, casual raider" as a short description of our players.
Originally Posted by Dakous
I'd like to think my research into the character of guilds is fairly thorough, although, admittedly, I was suppoing sampling 6 servers and finding reasonable consistency would avoid something so embarassing as simply not discovering a guild type. I have not yet encountered a guild whose raiding can best be expressed as a function of events over a month.
How long has this been the case?
Is this "by design"?
Is the one week a colloquial, or mechanical measure?
Are there other guilds like yours?
I will admit, we're probably a rare breed of guild. About three groups of friends who all had members in common, all of which have been raiders in the past decided to give up raiding 4 nights a week and start a new Horde guild on a new server . The number one rule is that we'd only play for fun. Spec, gear, class, race, whatever you want, it's fine with us. Our first ZG Raid we had eight Shaman (coming from Alliance, we had quite a few people who wanted try the "overpowered, God class"). Luckily, we had one person who liked to tank, and a few people who enjoyed healing, so it all worked out for the best.
We don't have a monthly schedule by any stretch of the imagination, I just used the monthly number because there's always a week a month were something comes up and we don't raid on Sunday (long weekends, tank is out of town, we just didn't have enough people intersted that week, etc.). Anyone who wants to raid shows up on Sunday, if we have enough, we go. If we have too many people, someone offers to sit. We're all adults with wives, kids, careers, etc. so there's never an issue with it, we just seem to go with the flow and it's seem to work so far.
I think we sort of fluked into it really, I wouldn't advise this sort of guild to someone starting a new one because it could so easily fail. We've had one or two people leave because they wanted a more structured environment, others leave because they've just had a baby, or been transfered to a new timezone, but for everyone who leaves a friend of one of the members will come join (or transfer) because they are sick and tired of raiding four to five nights a week and miss just having fun with friends in the game. Certain aspects of the game we do take seriously though, wiping sucks, so when it comes down to a boss fight, we make sure we research it. For a stretch when TBC came out, even raiding only once a week (if that) we were the number 3 Horde guild on our server in progression, but honestly I think that says more about the Horde on our server than our abilities. But it just goes to show that when we actually got into the boss fights, we took the game seriously, but other than that, we just are around to have a good time.
To answer your final question (sorry for the length of this), I haven't met anyone in a similar guild to ours. No raid schedule and no loot policy, yet everyone is in epics that they've gotten in Heroics, PvP or Karazhan makes for a weird combination. I guess that's why I was confused by the initial post. Raid wise, we are as casual as it can get, but we set our mind on clearing Karazhan and we did.
One, and this is something Dakous might remember, I was in a guild called The Elites back on Lothar from release to about a year in. While remembering to obey the 'no old drama here' rules we were... less than stellar. We raided three or four days a week in MC and ZG, so there goes that definition of casual. We had people with six and seven 60s playing dozens of hours per week, so there goes that definition. We had people very into grinding crafting mats, making pots, etc so there goes that definition.
The difference was that people were never kicked out. Ever. Let me revise: they were only kicked out after doing something so egregiously stupid as to get them blacklistes on the server. There were no performance requirements, no trial period; you applied, you spoke to an officer on Vent to prove you weren't an obvious psychopath and you got in. MC invites were on a first come, first serve basis. No signups, even. You logged on and it was literally a race to get invited. It took us a year to clear MC.
So when I say that the casual raider is defined more by a lack of structure and lack of willingness to put the bootstraps to someone who is an obvious detriment to teamplay it's because I've been there, seen it from the inside and all the other factors (playtime, number of raiding nights, etc) are irrelevant to discipline.
Second, I just got a job working on a high profile MMOG and while I'm new to it I've learned enough to know that what we, the players, THINK is going on and what is ACTUALLY going on are pretty different. Your chosen playstyle is going to give you tunnel vision as to what people are doing. Here on these boards we're all raiders (and serious ones to varying degrees) so we tend to think that the number of people (people, not guilds; important distinction) is way, way higher than it is. The 'there's no such thing as truly casual progression' comment was largely off the cuff but I stand by it. I understand that for the purposes of this thread casual refers to guilds like mine and some of yours but I really think it's important to remember what the casual market really is when talking issues of larger game design and theory.
Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork
The 'there's no such thing as truly casual progression' comment was largely off the cuff but I stand by it. I understand that for the purposes of this thread casual refers to guilds like mine and some of yours but I really think it's important to remember what the casual market really is when talking issues of larger game design and theory.
Now that I better understood what you meant by casual, I probably agree (still thinking about it). The one thing that goes against what you say is when Blizzard came out with those stats about MC and Ragnaros, I can't remember the exact numbers, but didn't they say something like 40% of the game before TBC had killed Ragnaros? The number probably wasn't that high, but I do remember that it floored me. True, that leaves 60% who hasn't, but that's still a very high number.
It'd be interesting if they had published a number like "% of accounts that have one character attuned to MC", "% of accounts that have killed one raid boss" or something to that effect, then we'd all know.
The difference was that people were never kicked out. Ever. Let me revise: they were only kicked out after doing something so egregiously stupid as to get them blacklistes on the server.
With respect, The Elites as you describe them (and as I classed them) typify, exactly, a social raiding guild. And using the definition of "A non-metric guild," ("Lawl poast DMs~" is not being metric):
There were no performance requirements, [...] MC invites were on a first come, first serve basis.
Second, I just got a job working on a high profile MMOG and while I'm new to it I've learned enough to know that what we, the players, THINK is going on and what is ACTUALLY going on are pretty different. Your chosen playstyle is going to give you tunnel vision as to what people are doing.
Almost like how someone saying a mid-tier guild was 8 bosses into Naxx, when in fact, the average guild was Fankriss/Nefarian expansion day?
Someone said, "Everyone kills VR on the first or second pull." Or something to that effect, and there was a great deal of forum nodding, as I recall (and I don't dispute the statement itself - merely the implication everyone will continue killing VR on the second pull). While realm drama is uninteresting, I know, the fact that my guild had not "already" killed VR was viewed as us being a bunch of clueless noobs (which may well be the case). However, there are approximately twenty guilds that have killed something, somewhere, in a raid instance, and we are now the third to have killed VR. If our server is typical (a premise I will accept to not be true, but significantly divergent?), times ~100 american servers means 300 VR+ guilds versus 2000 not.
Casual progression, indeed. Gruul's Lair is where it's at.
Edit: I'm terribly sorry. My brain did one of those cross-fires where similar words in the same jar got mis-picked. I originally typed "Fankriss/Naxx" when I meant "Fankriss/Nef". I looked at the below responder and the "progress creep" comment with disbelief and confusion because it's stayed the same... until, of course, I noticed the brain misfire.
Last edited by Dakous : 07/03/07 at 4:31 AM.
Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.
Almost like how someone saying a mid-tier guild was 8 bosses into Naxx, when in fact, the average guild was Fankriss/Naxx expansion day?
Also like the way this factoid keeps creeping further and and further into AQ40.
When the initial thread came up on these boards, it was quite clear from the survey that the average (median) guild had just about cleared BWL. Note, that's "just cleared", not "on farm". Said average guild was probably not downing any bosses in AQ40 on a routine basis.
In fact (and this is more speculative), I'd say that what broke the "average" guild was having to drop MC from the schedule to make room for AQ40, when the less-active members of the guild were still after MC drops. I'd bet significant sums that the average guild never dropped MC.
Absolutely we typified the social raiding guild. I brought it up to illustrate why I think casual/social raiders are casual/social because it most certainly isn't playtime or farming and only MAYBE number of hours spent raiding at one sitting.
And, yes. Precisely like everyone claiming being five bosses into Naxx was casual. We walked into VR and we were absolutely abused by the trash. Then we were abused by him. This isn't the sort of thing that you just waltz into; I'm glad we tried, I'm glad we saw it, now we know.
Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork
And let's not forget the random BoP's, Vortexes and patterns you will get clearing to both Lurker and VR. There's some pretty good BoE and BoP craftables to be found and made, your crafters and weaponsmiths will love the Vortexes (should get 1-2 at least clearing to either boss) as well.
By all means, every guild should give it a go if they can field the 25 man. The change of pace, new environment, heck even the the overwhelming truth of getting your arses kicked should be a good boost to any guild interested to get a taste of endgame raiding
The trash drops are definitely one of the best parts of SSC/TK raiding. Clearing trash is always monotonous, especially after continual wipes on a difficult encounter. But, trash epics, vortexes, and nice recipes/patterns really excite people and renew their motivation to continue working on whatever encounter you're headed to.
I think the whole recipe idea was one of the best ideas blizzard has come up with. A few notable pieces like Boots of Blasting, Red Belt of Battle, and the Boots of Utter Darkness allow multiple people to get the item (if not bop), and can be saved incase so and so is unable to attend raid that night. They can even be sold if nobody feels they need or want the item. I think a pattern for Boots of Utter Darkness sold for 600g on the AH last time they dropped. Extra guild gold is a great thing .
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xi6WsB8dZcE
Raiding music that gets things done.
The best Theorycraft and Mathcraft happens after a raid and before the sun comes up.
The trash drops are definitely one of the best parts of SSC/TK raiding. Clearing trash is always monotonous, especially after continual wipes on a difficult encounter. But, trash epics, vortexes, and nice recipes/patterns really excite people and renew their motivation to continue working on whatever encounter you're headed to.
Agreed. My (casual) guild has made a couple of sessions of attempts on Void Reaver after getting Gruul on farm status. Yes, that's a couple of sessions of attempts, no kill yet, best result ~10% at enrage time - he's not free loot for an average guild! In so doing, though, we've yoinked a couple of epic patterns, a couple of trash epics, 3 nether vortexes towards our shaman's Dragonstrike, and a bunch of flask marks that we need to sort out. It is WAY more satisfying and rewarding that the attempts on Gruul prior to the first kill.
Along these lines, how do you schedule raids? We raid like 3-4 days/week. We've killed Mag for the first time and Gruul/Kara (although we've been very unlucky on the druid/priest/war drops) is on farm. We're probably gonna crack Void Reaver this week.
What would you recommend for those who are you just starting on SSC and TE? Figuring 3-4 raids/week, how should a guild set their weekly raid schedule? Should we even still raid Kara?
Yes, you will still need one evening for kara. And you should still farming gruul/mag.
I don't know how long you can play on a raiding day, but i guess it could look like:
Kara = 1 day (weekend for open end raids could be fine, depending on how fast you are)
Gruul (1h) + Mag (1h) + VR (2h) = 4h = 1 day
Try's on lurker, tidewalker or karatress should consume the other 2
....when Blizzard came out with those stats about MC and Ragnaros, I can't remember the exact numbers, but didn't they say something like 40% of the game before TBC had killed Ragnaros? The number probably wasn't that high, but I do remember that it floored me. True, that leaves 60% who hasn't, but that's still a very high number.
It'd be interesting if they had published a number like "% of accounts that have one character attuned to MC", "% of accounts that have killed one raid boss" or something to that effect, then we'd all know.
Tigole said in an interview (with NYT ?) that he had "a gut feeling" that 25% of all players had killed Ragnaros. At the time, that sentence really pissed me off.
First of all, I don't think 25% of players had been past Lucifron. Yes, even when on some servers people were running Pugs to MC. Secondly I think he didn't realize, or didn't care, that on Horde side the numbers were even lower. Because of the pally/shaman issue, the fear ward issue. But most important: on Horde the numbers are smaller, so it was harder to fill up those last slots in your guild roster without recruiting just random warm bodies.
But what pissed me off most, was the fact that Blizzard's main raid encounter designer had "a gut feeling". And obviously did not have the hard numbers. That was really disappointing. And it was a sign that Blizzard management (or Vivendi's stockholders) did not know how their development budget was being invested. A few weeks/months later we suddenly had official pages where we could see the killcount of all mobs. I'm pretty sure they started keep stats on mobkills after getting criticism about the lack of knowledge how their players were actually playing their game. And soon after that, Blizzard announced that in TBC max-raid size was 25, and there would be a huge 10man raid instance.
Now that we have the armory, and we have the wonderful Wowjutsu website (http://www.wowjutsu.com), we can look at those numbers ourselves. I've posted this in another thread, but let me repeat it here:
These numbers are from the 4th of July.
Assuming 2 million US players.
Assuming 40 active raiders per guild.
I'd written my post before WoWJitsu had been "released" to the public, and it's a fantastic site for doing exactly what Blizzard should be doing already.
Taking your test a little further, if we look at Moroes. The 12204 (and last) guild that WoWJitsu parces has gone past him (Maiden, and others around that area have done to the Curator). The problem is, I think when we start getting into guilds that have only done Karazhan, you start getting into smaller guilds throwing off the average. So if we move the average guild size down from 40 to say 30, but say 15000 US/Oceanic guilds have killed at least something in Karazhan, that gives us 4.5 million or 22.5%.
Considering even on my server where advancement is incredibly slow, we've got Horde and Alliance groups "pugging" the Prince, so we can probably add another five hundred thousand guildless and tiny guilds to the "killed something in Karazhan" list. Upping it to (liklely generous) 5 million, that's still only 1/4th the player base that have touched the easiest of raiding the game has to offer.
Is that a lot? Is that down from with TBC and the fact you don't need to raid to get good gear anymore? I have no idea.
Oh, also about Tigole's statements, I do remember that they started publishing mob kills (what mob had killed the most players in Azeroth), and Vael was near the top of the list (as were Vand and Drak from AV, "Cat" because so many Hunters don't rename their pet and those bloody Defais Pillagers from West Fall). So perhaps more people were raiding BWL in the past because it was the only way to get good gear without slaving away at the old honor system 24/7. Frankly, I have no idea...and while a site like WoWJitsu is great for this sort of thing, I really think Blizzard should be stating this.
To be honest, I don't think they can do that much better. I'd say they've probably made the most raid-accessible game (at least that i've played), and it's a damn fun one. They've made a lot of attempts to open it up. Karazhan for all intents and purposes is a huge success in it's current state. The difficulty scales up from very basic to very complex encounters that I think anyone with a small desire to do the content will be able to do it. With an MMO that stretches across such a wide range of demographics, you'll never achieve a majority raid population, but the amount of raiders you have is still pretty significant.
Oh, also about Tigole's statements, I do remember that they started publishing mob kills (what mob had killed the most players in Azeroth), and Vael was near the top of the list (as were Vand and Drak from AV, "Cat" because so many Hunters don't rename their pet and those bloody Defais Pillagers from West Fall). So perhaps more people were raiding BWL in the past because it was the only way to get good gear without slaving away at the old honor system 24/7. Frankly, I have no idea...and while a site like WoWJitsu is great for this sort of thing, I really think Blizzard should be stating this.
Vael's place on the list was a result of several factors.
What killed players at 60? Not all that much. Most of a server was either 60, or leveling alts (see Pillager). Raid bosses are far more deadly per-encounter than normal mobs. Raid bosses are also more "unique" - there are lots of different names for the various types of UBRS trash that would kill some fools during a zerg.
Other unique mobs with a lot of face time would be the AV generals and warmasters, all of which were on the list, as far as I recall. I know both generals were.
Raid bosses also will kill just about everyone in front of them if something goes wrong and it's a wipe. That's 35-40 deaths (depending on hunters and DI's) to that one mob everytime he "wins."
On top of that, Vael was a fight with a *very* steep learning curve that would end in seconds on a mistake, could be reset immediately, and could be attempted rapid fire. Even for guilds that blew up, gave up, and otherwise didn't beat him, attempting Vael could be done extremely quickly. It certainly wouldn't be impossible for a single Vael to log 400 players killed in a single night. I personally know of Vaels that killed a helluva lot more people than that.
Vael also pumped up his tally by every so often killing a couple raids worth of players from a guild that had him on easy farm status because, well, that's not a very good encounter to get cocky and slack off on, especially if he BA's nothing but healers...
Find something else that can compete with that volumn of death. Drakkisath could kill 10-15 people if they somehow wiped, but (a) that probably wouldn't happen more than once to the same group and (b) it took a long time in between attempts just due to the run, let alone respawns, PUG afk's, etc. It also was quite likely to not happen at all on a given run, whereas Vael always had the potential to go on a murder spree.
The position of the Vael encounter in the instance, design of the encounter, relative accessability of the encounter and relative lethality of the encounter compared to other opponents at 60 (both a good deal harder than everything else to that point and an assured 39-40 deaths per failure) were really a pretty unique witches' brew.
I think that the best we can do is guess at progression levels. While the stats from WoWjitsu might provide a small window of information, there are plenty of problems with how it comes about it's numbers.
My personal feeling is that true "Casual" progression is at Gruul's, and will likely stall out very shortly after.
I personally don't like the expansion and the horribly linear path your raids must take. I have said it before, but I consider myself casual and I struggle with the thought of how long it's going to take us to gear up enough people with Kara/Gruul's gear such that we can begin learning more content. Blizzard certainly decided to play more to the hardcore crowd with this expansion. More and more, the encounters have become all a bad script where poor luck or a blip in latency can cause a wipe which wastes 20-30 minutes.
Time will tell if it was a good business decision if after a year the "true casual" population starts to dwindle because people are tired of only being able to run Karazhan consistently.
Uglesh, the problem I see with non-linear progression, especially in regards to casuals, is putting out too much content. If you have the ability to do 3-4 different raid zones of around the same difficulty, in addition to attempting 1-2 more of higher difficulty, in a guild raiding 3-4 nights a week, how does that work out?
Essentially the system now is such that after you do an instance for long enough, you can (generally) forgot about it (save alts and random pieces that are inexplicably better than higher-level items) and move on to the next zone to focus on progression. This way you have maybe 1-2 instances max on farm status while progressing in one more. Sure, it seems like there's less to do, but if there was more, would you be able to fit it all in?
Uglesh, the problem I see with non-linear progression, especially in regards to casuals, is putting out too much content. If you have the ability to do 3-4 different raid zones of around the same difficulty, in addition to attempting 1-2 more of higher difficulty, in a guild raiding 3-4 nights a week, how does that work out?
In my opinion that's what we have now. In 1.x WoW I was never saved to more than 2 40 mans (MC, then MC/BWL, then BWL/AQ40, then AQ40/Naxx). Now I'm saved to 4 separate 25 man zones. And if we're talking about difficulty, with the removed attunements, you now have some bosses in teir5 zones that are readily accessible and easier than Magtheridon (end of teir4 content). With the lack of attunements between teir4 and 5, as it stands, the game is pretty open ended and offers choices at each tier.
Granted theres only certain places you can go to get certain items that are "the best," but guilds need some direction, some sort of progression line. A guild with a short raid schedule (ours for example is 3 days of 25 mans, 3/6 SSC + VR), has much to choose from in terms of content. Now if we consider difficulty of encounters with respect to learning time, that's strictly a guild to guild issue (i.e. casual in terms of skill vs. time). Judging from personal experience only, the fights in SSC/TK do require 25 cognizant people, but if you have the right strat, can execute that strat, and minimize downtime, you will be successful. These forums have been just one great resource in helping to refine our farm and progression strats. Don't ever be afraid to ask a guild that seemed to down a boss rather quickly how they approached the fight. It can save hours of time.
(...)I struggle with the thought of how long it's going to take us to gear up enough people with Kara/Gruul's gear such that we can begin learning more content. Blizzard certainly decided to play more to the hardcore crowd with this expansion. More and more, the encounters have become all a bad script where poor luck or a blip in latency can cause a wipe which wastes 20-30 minutes.(...)
While it is probably true that overall content is harder for casual guilds, I think this hasn't got much to do with having to farm a lot of gear first. There are many options to get good gear, and generally speaking it is better to build a strong set. The added difficulty comes from the increased individual performance required for encounters. Like someone said, many fights seem to contain "idiot checks" (I don't like the term, but you get the idea), tasks that you must fulfill or the raid dies. This is related to the reduction in gear size. While apparently this makes fights easier, the fact is before 40 people could just outgear the encounter and carry along the members with lesser performances. This isn't happening now, at least to the same extent.
As for the gear, you can certainly do void reaver/mag/lurker without being loaded in epics. It sure helps, but a solid organization will be much more decisive.
It's probably been stated but 'casual' and 'hardcore' are loaded terms. It's been demonstrated numerous times that you don't have to raid 40+ hours a week to make significant progress in TBC. Several guilds in BT/Hyjal now only raid 5 nights a week and that's just the guild. Individual members can be raiding as little as 3-4 of those nights depending on their class/guild needs.
Farming for comsumables now is easier than ever, especially with daily quests where you can get over 50 gold for food, flasks, pots, and repairs, in a little over an hour.
If you're playing WoW less than 15 or so hours a week then, sure, raiding probably isn't for you.
Obviously, there are guilds that raid just as much or more so than the 'hardcore' guilds and don't reach the same results. The only remedy to that is nerfing the encounters which they've done already and will continue to do as time goes on.
Keep in mind, as skewed as those numbers are, there will always be a fairly large portion of the WoW playerbase that simply does not want to raid. Of course that begs the question: should they continue to develop content that only 1-5% of the playerbase experiences regardless of the reason for it? I'm not a game designer, nor do I pretend to know anything about marketing or sales but, even speaking as a raider myself, it does seem to confound logic to spend time and money pumping out things that only a select few will experience. But if they abolished 25 man raids, what would they put those resources into? More 5 and 10 man instances? More battlegrounds? World PvP? Who knows, it might eventually come to that.
"If you're playing WoW less than 15 or so hours a week then, sure, raiding probably isn't for you."
I know I personally play for a fair bit more then 15 hrs a week, but raid wise I typically raid 3-4 nights a week for ~ 3 hrs per night. I don't consider my schedule to be anything but average, and our current progression would indicate that fact. The trouble for most "average" guilds is the scheduling and duration of raid nights. While I know we COULD clear Karazhan in one night... most average guilds are still taking at least 2 nights. This leaves the 3rd night to do Gruuls.
I enjoyed the Pre-TBC option of doing ZG or AQ on off nights... the loot wasn't epic, but the encounters were fun and it was a good way to kill a night. I share a lot of people's frustration with the fact that there is a very strong "Lotto factor" in most fights now. I just like to have options and not have to stare at the same bosses week after week after week.
Maybe it's just the fact that Pre-expansion most guilds only ran ONE raid ID for AQ, ZG, MC,BWL, ect.. This meant people could come and go without blowing up the raid. Our guild contains many players 12 hrs apart by time zone, so I could find a sub tank and go to bed when it got late. Honestly, I'm still trying to fiqure out where all the fun started to get sucked from the game.
Well, there have been interminable threads about "casual" and/or "average" progression on this board. It strikes me that in Wowjutsu we actually have a correct answer to this question, for some value of "correct".
As of the latest update (16th July 2007), the stats are as follows:
# Total Guilds: 15349 (median of all raiding guilds is #7675)
# Ranked Guilds: 12191 (median of all progressing 10-man groups is #6096)
Percentage of guilds with at least one kill in Gruul's lair = 58.88%. This is the percentage of ranked guilds, thus we deduce:
# Guilds with at least 1 25-man kill: 7178 (median of all 25-man groups is #3589-3590)
Percentage of guilds moving into the T5 instances is harder to estimate. Void Reaver skews the numbers considerably, so let's leave him out, and define a semi-serious guild as one with at least one kill in SSC. That's 13.42%, thus we deduce:
# Guilds entering T5 instances: 1636 (median of all T5-capable groups is #818-819)
The beauty of Wowjutsu is that we can now go and look up these exact guilds. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...
THE GLORIOUS AVERAGE GUILDS OF TBC RAIDING
1) The average raiding guild (#7675) Wicked Legion - Llane.
Has cleared up to Prince, but not Nightbane.
2) The average ranked guild (#6096) Bloodline - Arthas.
Has cleared Karazhan (excluding Nightbane), but also has loot from 3 Maulgar kills.
3) The average 25-man group (#3589-3590) Illuminati - Stormscale. Greymane - Corruption.
Both have cleared Karazhan including Nightbane, and have killed Maulgar and Gruul.
4) The average Tier 5 capable group (#818-819) The Fallen - Burning Blade. Ðark Moon Templars - Crushridge.
Both have cleared Karazhan, Gruul's Lair and Magtheridon, and both have killed Hydross, Lurker, Morogrim and Void Reaver.
Conclusions:
"The average raider", whether you look at all guilds or only the ranked guilds, has just about completed Karazhan, but has not been able to make the transition to 25-man raiding, apart from occasional Maulgar kills. They are stonewalled at the logistical hurdle of growing in size enough to do 25-man raids.
"The average 25-man group" has killed Maulgar, Gruul and nothing else. It has not killed Magtheridon, and has not entered any of the major 25-man instances. They are stonewalled either at the logistical hurdle of attunements (now lifted, so may change in subsequent weeks), or the encounter complexity. The lack of Magtheridon kills would suggest the latter rather than the former, since Magtheridon never needed attunement. And it most certainly is a stonewall rather than simple progression effects. Note that moving up almost two and a half thousand places in the ranking (from 6096 to 3589) nets you one more boss: Gruul.
"The average Tier 5 capable group" has killed the easiest 3 bosses in SSC, and the easy boss from TK. That is, they have not killed anything much beyond the so-called "loot pinata" bosses.
Hyjal and BT are a niche market and don't have any bearing on this post.
"If you're playing WoW less than 15 or so hours a week then, sure, raiding probably isn't for you."
There was a comment by Kaubel on the benefactor's bar that rang true to me, and relates a lot to this. The basic point was "if you are going to be casual, you might as well be casual in a different game."
Yes, WoW has done a great job with making a lot of content accessible, and having lots of things to do, but at the end of the day the endgame in WoW is a gear grind. A casual player is going to get stomped in arena, they are going to have a hard time getting into an organized raid, and they aren't going to care about a huge serious of farming quests for faction (another benefactor's comment - someone said roughly, "since going casual, I just want to log in and hit stuff for an hour or two every once in a way, which alts are good for"). The basic notion is that even the faction grind quests only really interest more serious players, even more serious players who don't raid. None of my friends who I consider casual even have an epic flying mount.
But anyway, I think this is the big thing Blizzard wants to keep away from their casual base. Personally if I stopped raiding and arenaing to the extent that I do, I'd just quit WoW altogether and play something else. It actually amazes me that casual players bother with this game past getting to level 70 when they could go play LOTR and be on top of the world simply because there's not much of an endgame to let people get past them.
On the other hand... these figures are considerably higher than those from 4th July as posted in #112. In particular, the period from 4th July to 14th July saw at least 1000 (?!) more guilds kill Maulgar, and another 400 or so enter SSC.
How much of this is due to real changes, and how much is just wowjutsu being able to pick up the marginal guilds with only a couple of drops, is anyone's guess.
On the other hand... these figures are considerably higher than those from 4th July as posted in #112. In particular, the period from 4th July to 14th July saw at least 1000 (?!) more guilds kill Maulgar, and another 400 or so enter SSC.
How much of this is due to real changes, and how much is just wowjutsu being able to pick up the marginal guilds with only a couple of drops, is anyone's guess.
One to watch, I think.
I wonder what the factor of raiding alliances is here. It could be that people from those 1000 guilds had killed Maulgar prior to the 4th, just not gotten loot for one of their members.
It would only take 300 raiding alliances with 3.4 guilds each to have this be the case.
I don't have the knowledge to query the data directly, but one could parse through the guilds and find how many have less than 25 members. That would give an indication what factor this scenario plays. It certainly wouldn't be accurate as these types of guilds may be alt heavy and show as having many more than 25 members. If only there was a way to see how many accounts belonged to a guild such as /ginfo reports.
06/30/07, 12:43 PM
Precisely like everyone claiming being five bosses into Naxx was casual. We walked into VR and we were absolutely abused by the trash. Then we were abused by him. This isn't the sort of thing that you just waltz into; I'm glad we tried, I'm glad we saw it, now we know.
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