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?
His personal feelings aren't as important as his overall point which is that frontloading content and the resulting pressure it brings leads to guilds collapsing due to there being greater incentive for people to server transfer or raiders who simply stop playing due to burn out. Prior to joining my current guild, my old guild was 3/5 Hyjal and 4/9 Black Temple. It collapsed. The crush of having to work on Tier 6 progression content while still having to go back and attune the odd person in SSC and TK was too much for some of them to bear. People stop showing up... all of a sudden we stop doing BT and Hyjal altogether. Then a few people like me decide they don't want to wait around and recruit half a dozen more raiders and attune them all so they transfer to another guild. This is not an uncommon story. It happens daily in this game now.
Don't be a stupid git. Managing a release schedule for game content is ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENT than managing a release schedule for new product lines in the fashion world, or new types of plastic piping in the piping manufacturing business. Where do you get off telling the consumer of said product (speaking of pipes, if you're just going to whine, keep yours shut) that they need to "manage" their consumption of your product? It is always the duty of the firm, and also always in the best interest of said firm, that supplies the product to manage its release schedule. You do not see major fashion labels releasing 100 new styles in the spring, because it would a) bankrupt them, b) cause a "new style" draught later in the year, c) cause a glut of styles wherein no style would appreciate the level of sales it would under a staggered release, and d) lose market share because of a-c. Similarly, you don't push out 3 tiers of content simultaneously when 1 is enough, because of the exact same reasons. This is basic, fundamental, marketing theory, and while you can always argue with a theory, the fact of the matter is: there are a million examples of it being correct, and you would be a poor businessman/woman* to ignore them.
*not to mention a fool.
I agree, Blizzard must manage expectations but they have a release schedule that they want to meet right? There's a plan somewhere on Planet Blizzard with a schedule of releases and they do their best to meet that schedule. If their schedule includes an expansion with item A, item B and item C to be included in that release they'll work to get it out as planned. The fact that D and E were also ready when A, B and C were ready just means that Blizzard can release them when they choose to. Just as you said, Blizzard has a schedule of releases and engineering/software companies like their schedules so D and E go out on schedule and Blizz sits there clapping each other on the back for a job "done under budget and on schedule." So D and E go out before you are ready for them to be released and now you're complaining about too much content? Or is your guild just too slow to manage the pace of the expansion?
Again, I ask, who sets the pace of content releases?
By the way, please keep the ad hominem attacks out of your post. It was well thought out except for those bits of childishness.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight Eisenhower
One of the major problems is that a lot of people were expecting content to go past Naxx in difficulty pretty quickly. Blizzard might have been planning to go this route themselves based on initial BC raid tuning.
The biggest problem, in my view, is that you're really going to need 2-3 tiers open at release to actually challenge high end raid guilds to some degree. Even in WoTLK the first 2 tiers of raids shouldn't take a long time for guilds that are clearing Hyjal/BT now to do. From a difficulty standpoint that's just not where they're meant to fit in. As long as 25 man raids remain a viable path from blues -> epics there's going to be content that will be thrown on farm very quickly. Pacing eliminates farming the same content for long stretches, but personally I'm curious if you'd see another type of burnout from players having to wait an additional 6-8 months to see something new and challenging. In practice bugs or horrible trash can slow this process down greatly, but ideally I think it's fair to say most players would rather not deal with them as a pacing mechanism. I guess what I would ask is would people with illidan on farm be content with 6+ months of easy content simply as a necessary evil to open more challenging things?
Personally, I also agree with some previously stated opinions that BC hasn't really ended up the way it was meant to for a variety of reasons. Lore wise I don't think Illidan being the end fitted well, and from what Metzen stated at the lore panel he wasn't ever suppose to be the key reason players were in Outland. There was suppose to be more content flat out that never got added to the game. So far the Sunwell rumors seem to support it being a big "fix it all" band-aid to bridge BC to WoTLK. If Kil'Jaeden will indeed be the final boss there, it seems incredibly out of character that he'd actually risk going to the heart of Azeroth on his own without some massive invasion force. I'm sure lore could be written to support it, but there would have to be some pretty big bombshells in it(the reincarnation of Sargeras anyone?). So far BC just seems to feel both rushed and cut short.
I'm not convinced there is an overall lack of innovative encounters in TBC, I just think some of them are in the wrong places. Magtheridon was a pretty fresh fight conceptually, but due to it's position in the raid chain it's not going to be super challenging either. Hydross was new twist too, as was Al'ar and even Void Reaver. On the flip side the first 3 bosses in BT/Hyjal are pretty straightforward and easy encounters with elements similar to a lot of previous encounters. While I wouldn't argue that a lot of Naxx was cleared quickly, almost every fight had something in it you hadn't seen anywhere else in game at it's core. Gluth and Grobbulus didn't really have that edge but given the sheer number of bosses, it did feel excusable. It seems like Hyjal particularly lacks the traditional gateway bosses that paced things out a bit in pre-BC WoW. BT/Hyjal just don't have the same polish that Naxx did.
It would be interesting to see how much extra time it takes to design multiple instances for every tier. A change of scenery is nice, but if half the time goes into designing the actual map and choosing the regional trash mob's theme then it really should be scrapped. I'd rather have the whole wing theme we were suppose to get in the first place, then run out into the middle of the desert again.
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?
Grasping at strawmen but to answer your questions, no, no, and no. I lack the time to commit to raiding right now, and as such, I'm not really to chafed about it. However, I do feel that secondary effects (i.e. transfers and burnout) which explains why my server's top alliance guild is only 3/4 in TK right now. That all trickles down.
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.
I don't understand, what has been refuted exactly? What made up point? That Blizzard has an internal schedule and they work to that schedule rather than the desires of the general community. Blizzard seems to be responsive to its general community, if not as detailed as one would like all the time, but they seem to listen and respond to community concerns fairly often.
Blizzard has multiple offices, and while I dont' know the specifics I'd be highly surprised that all the same people working on WoW would be working on SC2 as well.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight Eisenhower
I agree, Blizzard must manage expectations but they have a release schedule that they want to meet right? There's a plan somewhere on Planet Blizzard with a schedule of releases and they do their best to meet that schedule.
Yes. This thread is about what that schedule should be. Should they plan to release A, B and C within the first three months, and then nothing for 9 months? Or should they plan to release A, B and C at more even intervals?
The first plan - frontloading content - has two drawbacks. (a) it presents slow-progressing raiders with a seemingly insurmountable mountain of content. (b) it means the fast progressors zoom through it all and then twiddle their thumbs for 9 months
The alternative - staggered release - avoids both of these problems to some extent and thereby benefits both groups.
I agree, Blizzard must manage expectations but they have a release schedule that they want to meet right? There's a plan somewhere on Planet Blizzard with a schedule of releases and they do their best to meet that schedule. If their schedule includes an expansion with item A, item B and item C to be included in that release they'll work to get it out as planned. The fact that D and E were also ready when A, B and C were ready just means that Blizzard can release them when they choose to. Just as you said, Blizzard has a schedule of releases and engineering/software companies like their schedules so D and E go out on schedule and Blizz sits there clapping each other on the back for a job "done under budget and on schedule." So D and E go out before you are ready for them to be released and now you're complaining about too much content? Or is your guild just too slow to manage the pace of the expansion?
Again, I ask, who sets the pace of content releases?
By the way, please keep the ad hominem attacks out of your post. It was well thought out except for those bits of childishness.
I shouldn't really respond because now you're basically trolling. However, content should be released to keep the upper end guilds content. If they quit the game, it topples like a house of cards. Content should be released to keep the middle teir happy, because they are the people keeping the game going with subscriptions. Content should be released to cater to "casuals"(tm) because they comprise a large part of the player base as well. Right now, we're discussing the 7 month (estimated) break between the release of content for high-end guilds.
Blizzard doesn't have the luxury of simply catering to the least common denominator. If someone "finishes the game" and nothing else is created for them to fight for extreme periods of time, they leave, this applies to everyone.
I'm not sure what you don't understand about this. People are not going to limit themselves to 2nd best if they have the option to be #1. No one is going to settle for 2nd in the Superbowl so hopefully next year they come back and win and it's more satisfying then.
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.
I think you've mistaken my opinion here. There are significant business factors with scheduling of product releases but Blizzard is hardly osborning itself with raid content releases.
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.
The end game is still there its just that guys like Ret have beaten it already and now you're bored. But you're the elite and there's a shit load of other people who are inspecting you and dreaming that someday they'll be just like Ret and that is very beneficial for Blizzard I'm sure. Blizzard doesn't want you to walk away from the game but there's a lot more people up to their necks in content than there isn't.
How do you propose Blizzard pace the releases if it was to drop its internal schedule and adopt a response model based purely on "community" desires. I've seen a lot people shit all over my rejection of such an idea but no one has proposed a working alternative. Does someone want to nominate their guild as the pace setter for "average raiding guild"? Or will we pace the releases based on EJ? Or Nilhilum?
Or Personal Vendetta, my guild? If I set the release schedule no one would be in Arcatraz, Botanica or Mechanar yet.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight Eisenhower
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.
Interesting charts, Avair, yet I suspect much too optimistic with regards to the casual guild progression rate - you give it a constant slope, yet looking at how casual guilds have done with raid content until now in TBC, they often seem to stall and and either crash and burn or stay stuck with a zero-slope (or something very close to it) rather than continually progress at average slow rate. Not that it is the fate of every casual guild, but it seems remarkably frequent.
At some point (different from server to server and guild to guild) you are likely to reach the point where outflow of people and loss of experience/skill/gear (due to guild-jumping, stopping playing, or whatever) and the inflow of undergeared replacements that need to be geared up and trained in the probably low number of raiding days reach an equilibrium where the guild is unlikely to proceed further, losing ability as quickly as it is gained. Depending on when it happens in the release schedule, the result will either be a close to constant "gain to transfer" until the end of the expansion or (if the point is late) or a rapidly increasing "gain to transfer" until such time as it gets constant because the raiding guilds reach the time (if the point is early) under both the "all available" and "staged content" methods, when it does not lead to guild collapse..
I am not sure that this really impacts the conclusions with regards to staged content vs. all available, but it is something to keep in mind.
Last edited by Deliverance : 10/02/07 at 4:55 PM.
Reason: Clarification of two different likely outcomes for the "gain to transfer" in paragraph 2
I don't understand, what has been refuted exactly? What made up point? That Blizzard has an internal schedule and they work to that schedule rather than the desires of the general community. Blizzard seems to be responsive to its general community, if not as detailed as one would like all the time, but they seem to listen and respond to community concerns fairly often.
Blizzard has multiple offices, and while I dont' know the specifics I'd be highly surprised that all the same people working on WoW would be working on SC2 as well.
Hrm lets see, you altered YOU getting called out for blaming people for not pacing themselves into blizzard insulting players, you added a worthless argument about blizzard keeping secrets to avoid the point behind holding content back, you're now relating my comment about SC2 to being the same people, rather than looking at the point that blizzard can keep secrets, and you're adding in Blizzard's initial release plan as something that has any bearing on the point of this argument, when the exact point is to debate this current release plan so it can be improved for everyone's benefit.
Every post of yours I've seen devolves into ignoring issues in favor of giving reasons that essentially lead to "Blizzard shouldn't try to please their customers, that's not their job" which just shows how ignorant you are appearing to everyone on these boards.
Every time you bring up an argument that isn't avoiding the point, it's something that's already been refuted, such as when you try to say "well who is this pacing change good for, why should they only cater to the top 1%" when the page before has posts stating exactly why it would be good for everyone in the raid game.
Your refusal to actually look at any of the points put forth in this thread, and insistence in trying to devolve this into raider bashing is just making this a thread that is ripe for being closed, and it's not very well appreciated by the people trying to actually analyze an ideal scenario in hopes that it will be implemented in the future. Please take your nonsensical trolling to the WoW boards where I'm sure you will be praised for your disdain of raiders "crying."
But you're the elite and there's a shit load of other people who are inspecting you and dreaming that someday they'll be just like Ret and that is very beneficial for Blizzard I'm sure. Blizzard doesn't want you to walk away from the game but there's a lot more people up to their necks in content than there isn't.
That's the point you seem to be missing. It's not the 'elite' guilds that are leaving the game, it is the 'carrot' chasers. The 'elite' guilds sustain themselves at the expense of the carrot chasers. To fumble an analogy it is akin to journalist Lou Dobbs lamenting over the vanishing middle class in America.
More so than before, WoW is seeing a rise in the top guilds cannibalizing the middle tier guilds and the game is moving closer and closer to an extreme casual and extreme hardcore paradigm.
Last edited by Metrosexuelf : 10/02/07 at 5:02 PM.
How do you propose Blizzard pace the releases if it was to drop its internal schedule and adopt a response model based purely on "community" desires.
This is your straw man. Nobody is proposing Blizzard adopts a response model. What we ask is that they return to the model they used in pre-TBC, where they don't frontload almost all their raid content into the release and the first patch.
If they have 4 raid instances, then it simply makes sense to have one available at release, a second 1/4 of the way to the next expansion, a third 1/2 way to the next expansion, and the final one 3/4 of the way to the next expansion. Roughly evenly spaced releases from one expansion to the next. There is nothing too hard to understand about that.
I think you've mistaken my opinion here. There are significant business factors with scheduling of product releases but Blizzard is hardly osborning itself with raid content releases.
Well I can't say I've ever seen the word osborning before, but I think you're implying that they shouldn't be concerning themselves too much, but the fact of the matter is that's simply not true, and has been pointed out how this hurts them from a business standpoint to do the releases the way they have, and why it should be improved. If you can't bother to read the thread, don't post.
The end game is still there its just that guys like Ret have beaten it already and now you're bored. But you're the elite and there's a shit load of other people who are inspecting you and dreaming that someday they'll be just like Ret and that is very beneficial for Blizzard I'm sure. Blizzard doesn't want you to walk away from the game but there's a lot more people up to their necks in content than there isn't.
How do you propose Blizzard pace the releases if it was to drop its internal schedule and adopt a response model based purely on "community" desires. I've seen a lot people shit all over my rejection of such an idea but no one has proposed a working alternative. Does someone want to nominate their guild as the pace setter for "average raiding guild"? Or will we pace the releases based on EJ? Or Nilhilum?
Or Personal Vendetta, my guild? If I set the release schedule no one would be in Arcatraz, Botanica or Mechanar yet.
I propose they look at the speed at people clear, and actually think about how they should set it up themselves, we are not paid by blizzard to tell them the precise timing for their content release, but we are paying them to release content at an appropriate pace. The examples given earlier in this thread show the reasons most of us believe the pre TBC release setup was superior, and it is not unrealistic to expect a company to do the research themselves.
Interesting charts, Avair, yet I suspect much too optimistic with regards to the casual guild progression rate - you give it a constant slope, yet looking at how casual guilds have done with raid content until now in TBC, they often seem to stall and and either crash and burn or stay stuck with a zero-slope (or something very close to it) rather than continually progress at average slow rate. Not that it is the fate of every casual guild, but it seems remarkably frequent.
I concede this point that I may have modeled a sample Casual guild incorrectly. 'Casual' guilds are probably too varied in their slopes, and TBC might that worse due to crash and burn problems. I.e. they peak and just never get past some stuff. But I wanted to show the slope of a simple tight casual guild that just can't raid more than 3 days a week, and how they don't even hit the releases.
This is your straw man. Nobody is proposing Blizzard adopts a response model. What we ask is that they return to the model they used in pre-TBC, where they don't frontload almost all their raid content into the release and the first patch.
If there was a release model (which I don't believe for vanilla WoW) it was pretty good except for the guilds who beat C'thun the day he was fixed. They still had a lot of downtime (AQ farming time) between the big eye's death and Naxx's release.
If they have 4 raid instances, then it simply makes sense to have one available at release, a second 1/4 of the way to the next expansion, a third 1/2 way to the next expansion, and the final one 3/4 of the way to the next expansion. Roughly evenly spaced releases from one expansion to the next. There is nothing too hard to understand about that.
I agree. However, lets say these instances are to be released every three months for a year whereupon the next expansion is scheduled to go out. (Just for argument's sake). What if the first raid instance was tuned to be super easy to give everyone a taste of 25 man raiding and 'everyone' beats it within four weeks of release. Now there's two months before the scheduled release of instance #2 and everyone's bored as hell. The fact is, unknown to everyone is that instance #2 is complete and is ready for release but Blizzard is waiting until the scheduled date. No one wants this (see discussion here and here).
So everyone's bored for 2 months but now there's new content and holy shit it's hard. Nihilum beats it in 6 weeks lets say and EJ beats in 9 weeks (it's super hard content remember). Nilhilum gets a nice rest, the EJ type guilds get a decent break and 3rd tier guild is on the 2nd last boss when instance 3 comes out meaning they get no farm time on the old instance. Immediately everyone jumps into the #3 and the cream rises to the top and beats the content before the next release is out (again).
Do you see where this is leading? There will always be stratification of guilds so, again (sigh), I ask who do you base your release schedule around? Looking back at TBC perhaps yeah, they should have released BT more towards the Summer but releasing your Final Boss six months after the expansion was released is a public relations disaster from another angle.
John Q Public: "You released your expansion pack incomplete."?
Blizzard: "Yeah, but we really polished him up before he was able to be beaten."
John: "But he wasn't ready when the game came out"
Blizzard: "Yeah, but no one could kill him when the game came out anyway so it didn't matter."
John: "So you released a game that was both incomplete and one that no one could finish".
John Q. Public's ignorance knows no bounds and this would be the type of Q&A that Blizzard would be getting from Time, or Newsweek or NYTimes etc. There's this angle that you have to cover as well as keeping your hardcore players interested in the game.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight Eisenhower
From a PvP perspective arena season 2 combined with the rebalancing patch 2.3 are late. Most battlegroups are slowly dying out at this time as the top teams barely play anymore due to lack of competition. Also because its simply useless for them to play as they have everything they want and more. Arena seasons need a scheduled timeframe in which they happen, so it is clear from the start untill the end when that season will stop. Long arena seasons with no known end date kill the competition.
Well I can't say I've ever seen the word osborning before, but I think you're implying that they shouldn't be concerning themselves too much, but the fact of the matter is that's simply not true, and has been pointed out how this hurts them from a business standpoint to do the releases the way they have, and why it should be improved. If you can't bother to read the thread, don't post.
I've read and reread the OP and my challenges stand up still I think. Who sets the schedule for content release? Blizzard? If so, then shut up buttercup and deal with the boredom. If it's raid progression (as most people want it to be) then who sets the standard? The people who are getting world firsts or guilds who are only entering Black Temple now?[/quote]
I propose they look at the speed at people clear, and actually think about how they should set it up themselves, we are not paid by blizzard to tell them the precise timing for their content release, but we are paying them to release content at an appropriate pace. The examples given earlier in this thread show the reasons most of us believe the pre TBC release setup was superior, and it is not unrealistic to expect a company to do the research themselves.
Obviously they have a lot of data they can use to detect trends and it's quite possible they could detect raiding speed but to what benefit? So 80-100 guilds aren't bored before the next content release? Blizzard won't leave money on the table by just ignoring that block of dedicated players but should they let such a small contingent determine content releases? Blizzard is a big company with a lot of engineering inertia, once a system is set up and running it can be so hard to change the procedures that anything short of an act of dog is too little. I have one word for this type of problem: Syncrude.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight Eisenhower
If there was a release model (which I don't believe for vanilla WoW) it was pretty good except for the guilds who beat C'thun the day he was fixed. They still had a lot of downtime (AQ farming time) between the big eye's death and Naxx's release.
And yet Ret, who got the world first Ouro and US First C'thun were still looking to keep running AQ well into the start of Naxx because it wasn't long enough for an entire raid to be fully geared, because it was spaced properly.
I agree. However, lets say these instances are to be released every three months for a year whereupon the next expansion is scheduled to go out. (Just for argument's sake). What if the first raid instance was tuned to be super easy to give everyone a taste of 25 man raiding and 'everyone' beats it within four weeks of release. Now there's two months before the scheduled release of instance #2 and everyone's bored as hell. The fact is, unknown to everyone is that instance #2 is complete and is ready for release but Blizzard is waiting until the scheduled date. No one wants this (see discussion here and here).
So everyone's bored for 2 months but now there's new content and holy shit it's hard. Nihilum beats it in 6 weeks lets say and EJ beats in 9 weeks (it's super hard content remember). Nilhilum gets a nice rest, the EJ type guilds get a decent break and 3rd tier guild is on the 2nd last boss when instance 3 comes out meaning they get no farm time on the old instance. Immediately everyone jumps into the #3 and the cream rises to the top and beats the content before the next release is out (again).
Do you see where this is leading? There will always be stratification of guilds so, again (sigh), I ask who do you base your release schedule around? Looking back at TBC perhaps yeah, they should have released BT more towards the Summer but releasing your Final Boss six months after the expansion was released is a public relations disaster from another angle.
So everyone's bored for 2 months, no one quits, people go "ugh I wish blizzard was faster with content." versus a large number of people are bored for 7 months, and quit the game, or stop caring, and the next dungeon is less popular as a result. That's the point, that's why blizzard makes the release schedule, that's why they look at the data, we don't have the data, they do. You can not expect any regular raider to tell you the perfect schedule, and it is 100% unreasonable to expect that as a prerequisite to this being a valid argument.
Secondly, you say no one wants to see content being held back, well you're just pushing an invalid point because that's exactly what people have been saying they would prefer to see. Almost no one in my guild is happy with having to push from February until July/August straight in order to be competitive, and there is no one at all happy with waiting 7 months between dungeons.
And yes, there's always going to be stratification of guilds, the point hasn't been that this would remove that, it would remove the huge level we see now where a top guild has cleared everything, and lower guilds have 2 full dungeons ahead of them.
John Q Public: "You released your expansion pack incomplete."?
Blizzard: "Yeah, but we really polished him up before he was able to be beaten."
John: "But he wasn't ready when the game came out"
Blizzard: "Yeah, but no one could kill him when the game came out anyway so it didn't matter."
John: "So you released a game that was both incomplete and one that no one could finish".
John Q. Public's ignorance knows no bounds and this would be the type of Q&A that Blizzard would be getting from Time, or Newsweek or NYTimes etc. There's this angle that you have to cover as well as keeping your hardcore players interested in the game.
Well you don't have to be retarded and answer questions that way. You tell them no, the expansion pack was complete, we plan for further updates because we want an ever changing world. Thus the question never comes up that it wasn't ready when the game came out, if it does you answer that it wasn't intended to be, it was intended to be part of the changing world, and if John Q Public is asking that last question he's a retard that gets no credibility anywhere because he's making shit up.
I've read and reread the OP and my challenges stand up still I think. Who sets the schedule for content release? Blizzard? If so, then shut up buttercup and deal with the boredom. If it's raid progression (as most people want it to be) then who sets the standard? The people who are getting world firsts or guilds who are only entering Black Temple now?
Are you serious? I'm really hoping you're trolling, because I'm not sure how you're STILL missing the point. Of course Blizzard sets the standards, Blizzard is not a sealed container where no information comes in, only patches come out. These decisions are made by Blizzard, who takes a look at player opinion, as well as the data they have, and can you know, alter the things they do like any other business in order to best satisfy their clients.
Obviously they have a lot of data they can use to detect trends and it's quite possible they could detect raiding speed but to what benefit? So 80-100 guilds aren't bored before the next content release? Blizzard won't leave money on the table by just ignoring that block of dedicated players but should they let such a small contingent determine content releases? Blizzard is a big company with a lot of engineering inertia, once a system is set up and running it can be so hard to change the procedures that anything short of an act of dog is too little. I have one word for this type of problem: Syncrude.
How is it determining content releases, no one at this point is asking for more content overall, a better pacing is not the same as dictating release, and on top of that IF YOU WOULD READ THE FUCKING THREAD it's already been pointed out how this benefits others beyond those 80-100 guilds.
Second, are you really so dense that you think a company can't change their procedures in order to better satisfy their customers? If so, god I want you as a customer to my business one day, just shit all over you and keep taking your money. Every business changes, the biggest businesses in the world with the most bureaucracy change in order to suit their customers. You really just seem like you have no idea how the real world works.
Anyway, I'm done with this thread for now, I've got a meeting with a professor in a few minutes and have to head out. You don't seem to be willing to listen to anything anyway, it's like arguing with a rock.
My apologies to the moderators for adding more junk to this thread, and good luck in cleaning this up to get it back on topic. Hopefully I can return and this thread will have reasonable discussion again like it did early on instead of this WoW forums garbage (which again, yeah, I contributed to)
I would call us a middle-weight guild, we raid ~4-5 days for ~3-4 hours, right now we've killed vashj ~5x and kael ~3. We won't be bothering to do ssc/tk anymore at all as long as we have enough people attuned we will be trying to push hyjal/bt.
Doing an end boss of a major raid instance ~5 times with no intent to regularly do it again unless you really have too (in order to attune someone) is a sure sign the content pacing is completely out of whack.
Thinking about the number of times we did nef, ragnaros, c'thun in comparison is pretty sad.
The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.
Secondly, you say no one wants to see content being held back, well you're just pushing an invalid point because that's exactly what people have been saying they would prefer to see. Almost no one in my guild is happy with having to push from February until July/August straight in order to be competitive, and there is no one at all happy with waiting 7 months between dungeons.
Ok then, so for the next expansion there's five (?) raid instances and Blizzard decides to pace raiding progression with quarterly content patches. Think about this for the future (it's especially applicable to Ret) you've beaten the game to this point and have farmed it out but you still have three weeks before the next instance comes out. What do you do now?
How is this any different than the situation we're in now?
And I withdraw any insinuation that the leaders of Nihilum, EJ, Ret are incompetants. It's obvious you guys are not but you still have to take a step back and see your situation for what it is: your skill & determination have made you bored with the game.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight Eisenhower
Absolutely. It's especially sad for Kael'Thas who is probably the best encounter in burning crusade but also one of the most "useless". I killed stuff in karazhan more than kael'thas just because there were reasons to do kara even while progressing in tier 5 : enchants, some items like the +shadow neck, .. Why exactly would we do TK ? Oh yeah, the mount.
The release schedule and attunement approach of TBC was, in its initial incarnation, an experiment by Blizzard. By all accounts that I have seen, the intent was for everything we have now to have been originally included in the expansion. Guilds would then have had a clear stream of content to do until such time as they had completed the Black Temple. I would also hypothesize that Blizzard was expecting the shift from 40-man content to 25-man content to increase participation in the PvE end game with the back drop of ZG as very popular 20-man content. Unlike in WoW vanilla, attunements would limit the best guilds from progressing, while lesser guilds while gear would hold back lesser guilds who would need it to overcome the skill gap.
However, this model for TBC was handicapped by a number of logistical and technical issues for players. The forced transition from 40 -> 5 -> 10 -> 25, a biproduct of attunement through heroics and rep grinds, was brutal for guild continuity. Insufficient development time prevented BT, Hyjal, SSC, and TK from being accessible or functional at release. The stop-gap was the high difficulty of the first incarnations of Gruul and Magtheridon, which made the raid size transition even worse for more casual (MC/BWL) guilds. Furthermore, the punishing design of SSC and TK trash and encounters, coupled with consumable requirements, made those dungeons unappealing for those few guilds with the skill to attempt them.
Considering what seems to have been the initial vision for TBC, it is little wonder that Blizzard released BT and Hyjal in May. The fundamental error, though, was that they did not tune SSC and TK beforehand. Given the massive frustration at that time with the glacial pace of the patch release, it has always struck me as bizzare that 2.1 did not come out in late March or early April with the revisions to consumables and all of T5.
I agree with the initial premise of this thread. The model for releasing PvE content in TBC is not a good model for WoW for a number of reasons, and Blizzard should revert to the model of vanila with the caveat that the model includes parallel progression paths. However, I'd argue that another issue is intimately tied with pacing: patch timing. It is a poor strategy for fixes and game refinements to be delayed because of major technical impediments or major content releases. Although the extra manpower requirements might cause some slowdown, it makes a great deal more sense to me for Blizzard to release one patch a month with major content only arriving every four to five patches then for Blizzard to only release patches every four months with major revisions and content lumped together.
10/02/07, 4:28 PM
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