I'm sorry to be taking this thread a bit off course with this, but really everything you're posting is just showing a pure lack of understanding about human behavior and business strategy, yet you're trying to dismiss arguments that are addressing those factors.

People will work at what they are given. This is a human factor, if you can do something and it's worth doing, you don't artificially wait to increase the spacing, it's true in life and it's true in a game. A rich kid isn't going to buy a beat up Toyota as his first car just so he can enjoy the good car later in life, it just doesn't work that way in any aspect of life. Add to that that there is a pre-established culture of competition in the raid game and expecting people to space out content to avoid boredom is even more unrealistic, as they give up on part of the enjoyment of the game in order to do so.

From a business sense, it makes sense to provide the maximum satisfaction to your consumers, and part of that is taking a look at their habits, and adapting your product to meet them. Blizzard didn't get successful by making a game however the fuck they felt like and then telling us it was good, they made a game people wanted to play, and that encouraged continued play in it's design. Beyond the sense of us raiders wanting things spaced and done ideally for us, it's in the best interests of Blizzard as a company to do so. It is how they would maintain the highest level of subscribers. I'd say this is a pretty valid thread.

Just to take it even further, I firmly believe in what dexvx was suggesting, the carrot on a stick concept seems to be true, servers with nothing end game die, servers like Mal'ganis with 4 Illidan killing guilds are always populated and there is no concern of the server dieing anytime soon. As an example, I have the Illidan shield. When I wear it I will get at least one tell a day about it, and usually it ends with someone going "wow I hope I can get that/do that someday" People looking at the end game get some motivation to keep playing, even if they never realistically expect to hit that end game, they have it as a goal. It's part of MMO design and it's why the game has so much high end content, and why maintaining a solid end game is going to be important to Blizzard's continued success.

I think the present issues are derived from:

Raid Sizes
Beaten to death thoroughly, it still is a valid concern with respect to the current discussion. The flexibility in 40 man raids meant that some people could cover for other people, for funky group make ups, etc. Without this flexibility, you are forced to have a much higher percentage of people playing well and not being idiots. This naturally concentrates talent/skill/non-idiocy, and people who know the mechanics of the encounters and what to do.

By extension, this also concentrates casuals and idiots. I'm a casual, by the way, and have never stepped foot inside Mount Hyjal or BT even though I've been attuned to Hyjal for over a month - My guild killed Illidan in August, and the raid concentrates the good players, per the paragraph above. There isn't that much flexibility in 25 mans to "bring along another enhance shaman for fun".

Theory
Threat: Back before TBC, and even a couple months into it, people discussed whether or not it was ethical (for lack of a better word) to run KTM. There is no longer any question.

Mods: Back before patch 2.0, healers had emergency watch, people could use tanking macros, dps rotations could be built into mods - you simply didn't have to think as much if you wanted 80% of a hard core raider's contribution from pushing fewer buttons and not making choices. The elimination of using "if" in combat took a hit on people that were "decent" due to using an ingame mimicry of the theorycrafters.

Also, back before TBC, many people wrote their own hacked mods to do 4H, Ouro, C'thun timing, though towards the end more people got on board with BigWigs or DBM. CT existed, and some people used it, but you really only needed the raidleader to have it. Now I'd say more than 50% of raiders probably use one (statistic made up on the spot).

Analysis: Back before TBC, there was no lossendil/wws (that I know of), and recount and the newer SWS are much improved for on-the-fly combat analysis.

These are huge increases in the amount of useful information available to players that want to succeed, especially the wws parses and ktm / omen. Before, raiders could try harder, but they weren't so close in riding the 110% aggro line or so good at finding out who sucks at cleansing. Now that they can do this, they can extend their "lead" compared to casuals with even better tools besides their inherent skill/drive/leadership/whatever.

Tangential
It's not just high-end-raiders who are bored. Non-raiders (i.e., not even semi-casuals) aren't exactly swimming with options either. Having run the regular instances plenty, and running Kara for 4 or 5 hours one day, one of my coworkers has decided she will now farm Wintersaber rep for something to do. I'm lucky in that I have Halo 3 now.

Blizzard, in my opinion, should have taken those god-awful rep grinds and put them in the game now, with good rewards, instead of in the beginning with that convoluted attunement chart.

Cenarion Hold rep (or whatever rep those twilight texts were associated with) and AQ20 runs kept casual non-raiders occupied for quite a while. If the rep grinds were added now, with gear rewards slightly above T4 level, it would be pretty similar to that situation, which worked pretty well, in my opinion. Also, consider that AQ20 was even better for casuals back then than ZA will be for casuals now - Same lockout timer, but half the raid size. Once again, that means that this won't be a "bring your friends" instance, but instead another "you have to play correctly to succeed" instance.

Why does it matter? Well, I'm likely to log in more, and play WoW longer (in terms of active subscription) the more than I interact with people outside my guild. I've played less the past to weeks than I have in a year. I simply don't have a reason to log in besides the people, really, and without cross guild easy events like AQ20 or UBRS, and with the smaller guild sizes (thanks to the 40 man to 25 man impact), there are fewer people for me to log in to talk with as well.

At least I'm still on sort-of talking terms with Cortana.

I'm curious as to what those of you who raided Naxxramas heavily think of the "recycling" of the instance that's going to occur in the expansion. Personally, I'm excited about it, since I never got to see Naxx (or AQ40, or even BWL) before TBC, and somehow I've just never had the opportunity to PUG it at 70 either. However, I can see how people might be going, ugh, we have to do that place all over again? no matter how well it was designed or how fun it was the first time around.

I guess I'm just wondering whether you think this is a viable way to allow the less-progressed folks to experience more of the raid instances, and whether Blizzard might be doing the same thing with, say, BT or Sunwell in the future. I'm in the middle of things right now - clearing SSC and TK, starting in on BT and Hyjal - so I'm pretty happy with the amount of stuff left for me to play with, yet I'm also afraid that I'll never get to see Illidan and Kil'Jaeden, just as I never got to see Kel'Thuzad.

I don't know that there's any really great solution to this. You just can't please everyone at once (although Falk's second graph is a lot better than the first one, in my opinion...).

Personally, I invested enough time and consumables into Naxxramas that I never, ever want to have to do it again. It was a well designed instance, but it's done in my mind. I understand that they want people to experience the content so I'm fine with the reuse, however due to my previous experience I'll be annoyed if it's anything more than a starter raid instance that can be skipped by those of us with BT/Sunwell/Naxx experience.

Just in case folks are interested, I have updated the charts to show a few additional things.

* I highlight the 'gain to transfer', which differs greatly between the two models. It shows how much a player would 'gain' by transferring between guilds to a higher rate of progression. The longer the line, the higher this incentive will be.
* I also tossed in a progression rate for a casual guild. I had it slope up a bit more in stage release, since they would tend to have a larger pool of more serious raiders to chose from.

Definitely an interesting look at the current status of the game. We always joke about how we never, ever want 3 tiers of content thrown at us simultaneously again because, without question, it caused some of our members to burn out and quit (raiding, or the game altogether). It was too much all at once. Practically as soon as we had our raiding core with Kael kills under their belt we opted to deprioritize SSC/TK in favor of Hyjal and Temple progression, and while I think it was the right choice for us, it's a shame we basically moved past the most intricate fight in the game after 3 kills, leaving Kael a Post-It on the nightstand that says "back after Illidan, keep our side of the bed warm please."

Personally, I love raiding and I don't really enjoy "time off" from it. I'm bored on nights we don't raid because I don't really play many other video games besides WoW and I can't afford to go out every night, so when we really are genuinely finished with SSC and TK (meaning everyone has that obscure drop that eluded us for months and months) and we're clearning Temple and Hyjal in 2 days (which we may very well do this week) I'm simply going to be bored as fuck. Looking down the road at 4 months of 2-night-a-week raiding doesn't entice me in the least. A 5 boss 10 man zone isn't going to cut it for me, especially if the loot is tier 5 quality, so I'm going to be sitting on my hands until Sunwell hits and hope that sates my hunger until the expansion lands.

As an officer of an Illidan farming guild, though, there is a noticeable release of pressure. This is time to tune our roster, this is time to try new things out without fear of falling behind the curve (again). It also makes the raids in general less stressful as well. If we have a bad turnout on a Tuesday because 2 tanks and 3 healers all got stuck in traffic, it doesnt ruin our raid week for us, the atmosphere in general is relaxed but hopefully still professional.

For a guild like VM, a small guild with only about 30 people raiding, the enormous content push at the beginning of this expansion was rough. Every person in the guild had to be on their A-game 5 nights a week 6 hours a night with no exceptions if we were going to move as quickly as we hoped to, and as I mentioned above, and as other people have stated, that leads to burnout. To then have us all down-shift to 2 nights a week of near-casual raiding for 6 months, it feels like a giant culture shock for us, and not something any of us really like.

I did ignore the PvP aspect of the game here, because it's not something I enjoy. I don't do arena, I don't do battlegrounds and I don't go out of my way to participate in world PvP, so for me, I guess the game really is over until Sunwell. I guess I'll just Quick Save at my favorite levels and load them up once a week to play through, and hopefully find another game to play in the meantime.

I've been all the way up to Sapphiron before TBC (killed KT in a 70's run a while ago) and I'm still not bored with it. It's a well-made instance and I'll be looking forward to Naxx 2.0.

Plus, Hunter tier 3 on my Belf is *phwrrooaar!*

They intended the attunements to be the key to pacing content. However, that didn't work. Rather than farming Vashj for long enough to attune their entire roster, guilds have (en masse) shed the non-attuned people and recruited attuned folk from disbanded guilds. I'll bet there's hardly a guild in the world with an intermediate number of attuned people. Once you get past Kael, you either disband (and feed attuned people to other guilds) or mop up attuned people from disbanded guilds.

In absolute numbers, the pacing is working perfectly. For all intents and purposes, BT is barely in the game. However, in terms of *people*, it's working very poorly. In fact, what it's actually done is destroy guild loyalty as a concept and legitimise guild-hopping.

Personally, I don't mind having new content ready to go. When we were finishing off TK, one of the big incentives people had to focus and get things done was that there were two shiny new zones ripe with new content and loot waiting for us as soon as we dropped Kael'thas.

We're sitting at 3 down in BT and 3 in Hyjal right now, so obviously my opinion is kind of biased as opposed to the top-tier guilds that have been farming Illidan for a month or more and can't wait to get something new to bang their heads against.

Now, the biggest issue I see with this release model is that Kael'thas is a "we do it because we have to" fight, and is, to me, one of the best and most fun encounters in the game. We killed him one week, went back in the next week to get the remaining people attuned, and haven't gone back since. The only reason we'll even be back there, ever, is to get recruits attuned if required.

Finding a perfect balance in pacing content is extremely difficult to achieve. Release everything at once (TBC) and the top end guilds end up getting bored after a few months of farming. Pace content releases every 2-3 months and lower end guilds get discouraged that they're 2-3 zones behind and miss out on a lot of the content (think Naxx).

FYI, Blizzard last released new servers in January with the TBC release and are unlikely to release more since several of those servers are painfully unpopulated (I know, I used to be on Nazjatar). If Blizzard were to waste money releasing a new server today, I'll modify your bet to 6 months with the condition that a guild doing SSC+ content electing to transfer to it* (especially free transfer) doesn't count and even give you 10 to 1 odds. And I'll make it 100-1 odds if we require a BT guild on both factions. Since a horde BT guild doesn't exactly do anything for alliance-side PVE, and may even discourage it, a BT guild on the other side is pretty meaningless.

You're massively underestimating the difficulties that an up-and-coming guild has, especially on a server with next to no native population, and especially if they're rerolling. The lure of being 'first on server' will hold for maybe a month, long enough for some people to get to 70, then the serve rwill become a dead zone like most of the TBC servers. Nazjatar, for example, does have a BT guild on horde side, but according to their comments on recruiting they haven't taken anyone from Nazjatar on a trial run in a long time as there just isn't anyone to recruit. I just don't see how your rerollers are going to stay together and/or attract new people.

This is very true, an alliance guild on Mal'ganis was 4/5 Hyjal and 5/9 BT and then recently disbanded, this was much in part to the more progressed guilds (us and people off server) picking up people who either at least had the vashj vial, or were fully attuned because no one wanted to go back and attune people by running TK and SSC. (exacerbated in this case by the fact that we no longer have either a frost resist or a nature resist tank to do Hydross because one is out of the guild and one is off the game)

Blizzard shortened the lifespan of T5 content by allowing T6 content to be cleared with Karazhan gear. When you have such a small power difference between a trash zone and the high-end, you end up skipping everything in-between (T4, T5). Doing Loatheb/Patchwerk wasn't really an option if you were wearing Tier 1 (unless you used ridiculous amounts of consumables, which was a shame). Gear checks are especially an option today with the consumable nerf, unlike the Patchwerk days where you could throw consumables at a mob until it spits out loot.

Also, arena breaks almost everything in raiding (except for healers, who need mp5/spirit). You can hit level 70, spend 8 days in AV and then join a 2400 arena team and get BT-level epics, without ever stepping foot in a lower-end zone. Everytime I bring my alt into karazhan I see something drop and let out a sigh, because it is vastly inferior to anything I can get from PVP; basically that zone is nigh-useless at this point of the Burning Crusade. I expect the same thing to happen to ZA as well, depending on the iLevel of S3 gear relative to ZA loots.

I doubt many people are in the position to get invited to a 2400 team, let alone after only doing 8 days of AV.

Yeah, people say they don't support guild-hopping, just like a lot of guilds say they don't raid for loot. However, when every Hyjal+ guild in the recruiting discussion a little while back requires applicants to guild-hop from a less-progressed guild if they even want to be considered, it's clear that it's really quite accepted.

It's interesting to me that one reason I've heard offered as to why a company like Blizzard would want to cater to raiders is that raiding encourages people to join tight-knit guilds that they're then reluctant to leave, so they keep paying a subscription even if they're losing interest in the game. By encouraging guild fragmentation, they're tossing away that advantage entirely.

If this thread was about ice cream then you wouldn't find me in it but it's not. It's yet another interesting thread on the best WoW forum to be found on the internet, that's why I'm here.


I don't believe Blizzard has criticized its players for beating content. If I'm wrong about this could you please show me where.

Also, we're talking about content release not a superweapon.

Ok ok, lets go back to question two of the original post

The angle of your question proposes that Blizzard should artificially limit content release to please the bleeding edge of the WoW player base. Sure, you guys are bored as hell but the average guild, even on these boards, still has a tonne of content to devour. Should the pace be set by the pack or by the leaders? Which leader? Nihilum? So they get to barge into the "tier 7" instance and now Tier 5 AND Tier 6 are obviated even for guilds as elite as the Jerks. Or does Blizzard set the release schedule for a guild who will have just killed Kael at end of Septenber. Would you be happy with Hyjal being opened this week instead of a few months ago? Clearly that would be "no". Therefore, it's up to the guilds themselves to pace their progression through released content, right?

This brings up the question of whether or not Blizzard releases content just as soon as it's complete. Vanilla WoW and the content releases in TBC seem to reinforce the point that Blizzard releases material as it is complete, it doesn't appear that Blizzard artificially limits progression by holding back content. Is the new content poorly tuned (Mag, Gruul, SSC) or a cockblock (Vael, Broodlord, C'thun). When TBC was released on January 16th, they had to include a certain amount of content with the release or they'd be laughed off the planet. Can you imagine if they released TBC without any raid instances because Blizzard wanted to pace the beating of the content? Or they weren't released because the raids weren't done? Imagine the outcry from the player base if they released only 61-70 and the 5 mans on January 16th?? "I paid $50 for a patch?"

You also answered #2 with your own post later on,

Blizzard isn't good at keeping secrets, the raid would sussed, people would know very quickly and the heat would be on Blizzard to release the content asap so that the bleeding edge won't get bored and we'd be back to the same spot again.

Whoops!

On Eitrigg, you can't. Period.

Snippy reply: The content was released to suit Nihilum so why are you complaining? I suggest either getting into a more elite guild or learn to deal with disappointment.

Non-snippy reply: Blizzard had to release a certain amount of content with TBC and they did. Then as they completed each raid instance they added it to the game through content patches and continued with future instances (ZA and Sunwell). Again, I ask to who's schedule should the releases be paced to?

Weapons I understand but how is this even remotely true for armor? You've already excepted healers from this argument and I'll go ahead and say Arena/PvP gear is pretty marginal for DPS casters, too. So... which classes benefit from being able to use the majority of PvP gear in PvE?

Are you overwhelmed by the amount of content you have in front of you? Are you disheartened to know that once you clear Kara that there are other instances ahead of you that is going make all your equipment immediately obsolescent? Do you feel as though you are being forced to raid more than you want to keep up with the Joneses?

I'll let Gurgthock answer because I'm sure he knows his own points better than I do, but Kinetik, you're not even arguing the points, you're arguing made up points, and arguing things that have already clearly been refuted, you're asking who the release schedule should be paced for while there are graphs in this thread showing how a specific pacing would be an improvement for EVERY guild.

And if you're concerned about blizzard keeping secrets, tell me the date that Naxx was finished to go on the PTR, what delayed it, why was BT not out at release, when did they start working on Starcraft 2, oh come on really now.

Seriously man, just read the thread before posting long responses. The actual discussion has been about pacing content release to please the 'bleeding edge' AS WELL AS guilds that are just starting or are currently in the middle. I have a low opinion of raid culture, possibly lower than yours, but your rant is just so wildly off-target that it's annoying.

This strikes me as a bit of silly argument. Do you feel Blizzard would do nothing with their time otherwise? I am sure it is assumed that part and parcel of the staggered release time is a refocus of Blizzard's development staff.

With everything released at once, tuning becomes a nightmare. With raids released months apart, each tier can be more fully tuned. If they had never tried to release the game with SSC/TK and BT, we could have been presented with a much more fine tuned Gruul and Mag. With BT pushed back further, the initial problems with Vashj and KT likewise could have been worked out in advance. Zul'Aman could have been worked in earlier, which would help the average raiding guild advance in T5 content. (These examples are nothing original, they have all been mentioned at various times earlier in this post.)

As for being laughed at for not releasing "enough" content all at once, that can be solved easily with better communication about what to expect in future content patches. Granted, since Gruul and Mag are mere bite sized appetizers of raiding, the delay of SSC and TK shouldn't have been great, but if it had been there than Gruul might not have been the frustration he was before nerfed.

Edit: Fast posters beat me to the point, and more succinctly.