Personally, I always felt that a large reason Old Content felt more spaced out was because of Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, when it was released we were currently working on finishing BWL (Chromaggus I believe), however, since our server took a while to open the gates, we had the opportunity to wrap up the instance just shortly after the first guilds on our server entered it. Furthermore, AQ40 had the T2.5 sets, so it didn't feel like a "required" instance (even though it really was).
The problem with TBC, is every Tier set feels like the AQ40 sets did, I don't have a great sense of accomplishment unlocking all my Tier Bonuses at 4 pieces like I did when I finally got my last piece of Tier 2 (never did much in Naxx, so I never got more then one piece of T3).
Also, the other problem, in my opinion as someone currently working on Vashj, is that I feel like my character will never be complete, when we used to farm BWL for months, I always felt like that, even if it took forever, I would eventually have everything I wanted (or the vast majority of it) from the instance. I look at SSC/TK, in particular Vashj and Kael, and see loot that would be nice, but unless I get it the one or two times they will drop, I'll never see it, and to me, that would make my character feel incomplete.
As the raid leader for a guild that's 5/6 SSC and 2/4 TK, I can tell you that having a vast amount of content ahead of us is really encouraging. We didn't enter SSC/TK until 2.1 and we've basically made progress at a snail's pace, but it's easier to be fine with this knowing that there is a definite end that is going to change in 2 months time. We're not going to be stuck struggling through SSC/TK when Sunwell is released and then stuck in BT/Hyjal when the expansion is released.
But spacing out the raid content more (ie. releasing Hyjal/BT in late August/early Sep) wouldn't leave you in any different of a situation -- you'd still have plenty of raid content ahead of you. And you would have been much closer to "catching up" with the world-first folks, which was always encouraging to me when I was in a mid-tier raiding guild.
Personally I'm really glad for the break, but that's because it came at the right time for me, missing progression sucks, but right now I've got a big quarter of classes at school so I like not raiding every night, but from a real design point, I do think the original WoW 1.0 release schedule worked better.
We're seeing people coming and going, we're getting more people ready for sunwell, and of course farming Hyjal and BT weekly in 2 or 3 days. But doing this for 6 months just doesn't seem appealing. I really am hoping to see a more enjoyable set of content with WoTLK where they release solid enjoyable raid content, and give us times of pushing and times of break, rather than one long push, then one long break as we're seeing right now.
People brushed it off when I mentioned it earlier, but I think this "shotgun" approach also devalues Kael'thas and Vashj.
As mentioned above, 6-7 Vashj kills and thats it. Kael'thas is what? 4-6?
Seems like Blizzard kinda wasted the very best of T5 raid design.
I personally would have liked it better if there was a 4-6 weeks "farm" period on Kael'thas before having Black Temple and Hyjal being released.
I do, however, like the less-linear approaches in the same Tier, I just dislike the multiple Tieres.
Personally, I think blizzard should stick to releasing one Tier at a time, then release a 20 man, then release another Tier. An approach like that should keep all raiders happy, from casual to hardcore.
Saying "This is ready, and we could push it live tomorrow, but we won't, because it'd artificially shorten the life of our t5 zones, and we know that Sunwell won't be ready for a while still."
That would cause a shitstorm of unimaginable magnitude. Saying "BT is looking really good folks, but it needs some more work. It will be on the PTR "soon"(TM)" would be way better.
As I am not active in TBC raiding at the moment, I will only comment on what I have experience with.
The Raid -> Break -> Raid -> Break system worked amazingly well for my raiding guild in Classic. It gave a time for folks to wind down from teh stress of heavy raiding and gave our 3-5 nights/week of raiding a place that still generally caught up with the faster guilds before the release of new content giving us time to anticipate. You could go to the PTR and play and read up about the cool new things coming and anticipate how much fun it would be. It was the equivalent of a serial story that keeps you tuned in until the very last word and looking froward towards the new installments.
That anticipation was really missing at the beginning of TBC. It was more like a book. You could flip through to the end and read the last few pages- in fact you couldn't really avoid doing so. There was an attunement chart a mile long out before it was released. The new patches have been bug fixes and light content and very very few compared to the 14 or 15 patches in the 1.0 cycle. TBC is what it is shipped and delivered.
I prefer the serial style releases. New patch notes with exciting new gear to fluff out the tweeks that you can drool over for a few weeks while still comfortably farming (or catching up) the last tier to finish out the current content. WotLK seems very far away and there's not a whole lot of content coming out before then- there's ZA and Sunwell (one of which I will see) but people are finally starting to realize that "yearly" expansions aren't exactly yearly. We've got months before Sunwell and then months again before Wrath- Halloween last year I was hooked into my Beta client (no current whispers about alpha or beta testing going on now) and to release Sunwell in December or so and then the new expansion in April is simply foolish. Summer 08 is the earliest I can imagine Wrath coming out, and it's going to be a long wait with very little extra content for the fastest raid guilds. The slower guilds might catch up- if they don't get bogged down in the misery of being 3 and 4 instances behind the curve.... which is pretty damn discouraging.
Those of you who volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA, I've got some good news and some bad news.
Bad news is we're postponing those tests indefinitely. Good news is we've got a much better test for you: fighting an army of mantis men.
Pick up a rifle and follow the yellow line. You'll know when the test starts. BSG Quick Reference
That would cause a shitstorm of unimaginable magnitude. Saying "BT is looking really good folks, but it needs some more work. It will be on the PTR "soon"(TM)" would be way better.
Er I mean saying this internally, at their planning meetings, not actually announcing "We have content but we're holding it back for your own good." That would be bad, yes.
There is a need to cater to those who can play 5+ nights a week and have completed the game as it stands now as well as those who only manage 2-3. The biggest problem with 2-3 night raiders is that it takes up most of their time simply farming old content and there's no time for new content before the week resets. Having that extra 1 or 2 days to spend on a new boss increases your guild's progression exponentially. The reset timer in my opinion is the biggest impediment to the majority of guilds' progression.
It occurred to me that if we doubled the loot drops from a given instance and changed the reset timer to 2 weeks, this would solve a lot of problems on the casual raider's side; where it would give them the appropriate time to farm old content and get decent attempts on the new during the 2nd week. Plus it would halve the pain I'm sure many feel when heading to their nth exalted Karazhan run or Molten Core, and possibly take the strain off of servers to accommodate 100 Karazhan runs at once. Remember Blizzard subscription isn't pay by the hour.
The other idea i think may work is to remodel instance progression to Normal->Heroic raid dungeons ala 5 man dungeons, so that most every guild will at least be able to see the higher end dungeons but leave the best loot as accomplishments for those who can defeat Heroic Raids.
In fact, if you combine both of these ideas you can have:
-Normal Raid dungeon difficulty with a longer reset timer (perhaps somewhere between 1-2 weeks) and more loot per kill but lesser quality.
-Heroic Raid dungeon difficulty with the normal 1 week reset and the best loot with the original drop rate.
If Blizzard wants to market their raiding product to WoWers there has to be several flavours to choose from depending on your tastes, a.l.a Mobile Phone plans or Business/Economy class airplane tickets. It needs to provide more than one raiding model if it wants to keep everyone happy.
I agree that, since my guild has just reached Illidan, the one-model raiding system means while we have nothing to look forward to beyond him, and any new raid content Blizzard produces will be impossible to reach for the vast majority of raiders, subsequently (or coincidentally) there is an abnormally long wait until the new instances come out while we wait for people to catch up.
Personally, i think the guild could use the break. 2 1/2 nights for Hyjal and BT, and i get to play TF2 every other day.
Just an observation. Many of the comments in this thread of enjoying going back to an instance for a chance at that great rare drop are directly counter to the "efficient loot allocation" thread in this same forum, where people want less randomness and more tokens with their loot.
Something I think hasn't been mentioned is the overlap in progression from one instance to another in the later vanilla-WoW dungeons. The early bosses in AQ40 were easier than BWL bosses. The early bosses in Naxxramas were easier than late-AQ40 bosses, as evidenced by the many guilds who were farming Razuvious before they got their first Twin Emps kill, or who skipped to Naxx without ever killing C'Thun. Similarly, there's not much in Tier 6 content that can match the difficulty, technicality and organizational milestones of Kael'thas. So what's the difference? Attunements.
If Blizzard removed T6 attunement, there would be a TON of guilds farming Naj'entus Supremus Winterchill etc. while they worked on Kael...or skipped him entirely. Eventually they'd run into a boss that either through gear checks or coordination checks required them to learn the lessons of Kael'thas. That's why so many of those guilds that hopped right into Naxx hit a brick wall on Patchwerk...without the fantastic gear you got from the end of AQ40 it was difficult to drop him. That's also why I think Tier 6 is noticeably lacking in straight-up gear checks (there are Stamina checks, but a couple pieces of PvP gear gets you past those)...attunements being what they are, gear checks aren't as needed.
My point is this: the extreme stratification we're seeing in progression (the oft-quoted tiny numbers of guilds in MT/Hyjal) happens in part because of pacing, but also in large because of attunements in general and Kael'thas in particular.
So here is a question for you all. Back when Nihilum first killed Vashj and it was discovered that only 3-4 vials dropped off of her and it would take weeks of farming her to get into Hyjal, there was a bit of an uproar. Do you think that is a better situation to force people to farm content a bit before moving on, or is it better to simply not release content at all for those 7-8 weeks and force you to farm content that way?
So here is a question for you all. Back when Nihilum first killed Vashj and it was discovered that only 3-4 vials dropped off of her and it would take weeks of farming her to get into Hyjal, there was a bit of an uproar. Do you think that is a better situation to force people to farm content a bit before moving on, or is it better to simply not release content at all for those 7-8 weeks and force you to farm content that way?
No, as a matter of psychology. That's up there with Blizzard announcing "BT is ready but we're not releasing it yet until more people are up to that point in progression."
The other problem with that, of course, is that for a guild that's middle of the pack, months later, they still have to spend 2+ months farming t5 before they can even begin to move on, and that's highly discouraging.
I think there are 3 major factors that a lot of people have spotted that make the current situation different than previous ones:
a) A lot of guilds are far more experienced and aware of game mechanics now. Apart from seriously bugged/untuned bosses (original Kael/Mag/Vashj/Gruul) every encounter that was beatable was beaten within days from the top guilds reaching it. Only artificial cockblocking stopped this progress, like 45 minute trash respawns in ssc and so on. Hell, some of those guilds even beat the original version of those bosses, like the original Vashj or Mag which most others would consider practically impossible. But even beyond the top 10, tons of guilds can march through the content with greater ease than ever before simply because their members are just facing similar boss abilities all the time and know their class, spell cycles and mana efficient spells inside out by now. The bad players have propably been weeded out at this point and there's pretty much nothing stopping their progression. Add the really fast release of videos and strategies and you can see that marching through content now with a guild that is together more or less for 1-2 years now (or consists of people who have been raiding for that long) has lots of chances. There won't be an instance anymore that takes the top guild 2 months to complete it unless it's bugged or badly tuned. Guilds today are just that good. As for why they moved from the 15 boss naxx model to 6/4 boss instances, I think it's a typical 'the good old days' reaction since people bitched terribly at how uninteresting clearing the 13 bosses of naxx to reach the last 2 was. Imagine if you now had to clear all tk+ssc henchmen to get a shot at vashj or kael. At least you can do half anymore.
b) Also related to that, blizzard's philosophy seems to have changed, especially since the early tbc raiding fiasco. It seems to be more 'let's tune easy and if it's too easy who cares', rather than 'let's tune hard and if it's too hard we tone it down'. There are a lot more encounters in hyjal/bt right now that could use having their difficulity slightly increased rather than slightly decreased. The ones who were too difficult/random, like Archimonde, Shahraz got nerfed really soon.
c) Finally, their content is far less buggy now. The parry problems involved in fighting shahraz or the occasional double ros are minor fouls compared to the crime that was the original c'thun tuning. Simply put, every single one of the encounters in bt/hyjal was doable from day 1 and polished to be bug free. Maybe a bit untuned towards the easy side apart from shahraz, but still providing some challenge. Most people don't realise that if c'thun/ouro were properly tuned at the time aq40 was released most guilds would face a february--->june 2006 break, which while not as long as the current one would have been quite noticeable.
All in all the raiding break is propably troublesome for the guilds which are there, but I believe Blizzard have just reached their limit. They can't produce instances much faster than what they have already been doing to cater for a small population which will just beat the next instance they provide in a matter of weeks. I think they are pretty determined they will just naturally lose this demographic as those people have pretty much beat the game in the sense of having mastered it in almost any aspect.
No, as a matter of psychology. That's up there with Blizzard announcing "BT is ready but we're not releasing it yet until more people are up to that point in progression."
The other problem with that, of course, is that for a guild that's middle of the pack, months later, they still have to spend 2+ months farming t5 before they can even begin to move on, and that's highly discouraging.
That is a good point with guild's trying to catch up that I hadn't considered. What if it was something more reasonable like 9 vials per kill so you are required to kill them 3 times each? Is there a reasonable number short of 25?
I remember farming UBRS for Onyxia attunement, because we could only fit 10 people in (I started after it went from 15->10), and it was a big deal when 2-4 bloods started dropping. As painful as the limited attunement drop can be, it would work to pace the progression.
However, it wouldn't change anything compared to a "we won't release t6 until t5 is cleared for 6 weeks", because both would require the top-end guilds to farm for 6 weeks.
That said, I agree with Gurgthock's statement. We're working on Kael'thas right now (along with 600 other guilds) and I'm glad we won't have to kill him for 7 weeks @ 4 attunement drops each just to get 25 people for Hyjal...not to mention it has to be the *right* 25 people out of the 28 with vials (again, assuming you optimally distribute vials).
I suppose being 'forced' to hold back in such a direct manner is more visablly 'offensive' than having simply nothing else to go to, no one likes being forced, they want options/choices.
The fact this was tied to attunement which was already a very sore area didn't make it easier either.
The Frozen Rune & Heart of Darkness are a better method of holding content off untill people are ready for it than using an attunement method.
The 'Normal/Heroic' raids do have potential, it allows people to learn the fight(or experience the dungeon) in basics on normal mode, then when they are ready to move onto the heroic version they can.
Giving perhaps 1 tier token or general loot drop when there is no token to drop in normal mode, and the full 3-4 in heroic mode, and having a shared lock-out on them together, so once your saved to normal mode you cant enter the heroic one.
But its generally a wierd thing to mess around with and balance correctly (considering the time it takes to balance the normal version), however it does effectively allow them to re-use content to appeal to more than just the hardcore, to re-use items, and a way to provide attunement (must complete in normal mode first).
That is a good point with guild's trying to catch up that I hadn't considered. What if it was something more reasonable like 9 vials per kill so you are required to kill them 3 times each? Is there a reasonable number short of 25?
I personally feel that 25 people in the raid need the vial then all 25 should get it. On our first Kael'Thas kill the server bugged out about 30 seconds later. Some people still dead. Loot not distributed (had to do this over vent and on alts etc). Most importantly, only 8-12 people were able to loot their vial. We killed Kael. We were ready to go kill our fist handful of BT/Hyjal pushovers. We wanted to see the new content. The new content, with the shiny new epics, and such was sitting there waiting for us. Alas we had to wait an extra week because GM's refused to restore vials to the people who did not receive them.
Being told "grats farm for a few weeks or so new content is coming" is vastly different from "grats you still can't go see the new content you've been waiting for until you stare at this old stuff for another couple weeks". Being on the receiving end of the more content is out there but you can't go sucks. Massively.
I don't think anyone would be happy with a mandated number of Vashj kills to attune your raid, regardless of their progression point. Adding more vials does nothing to remedy the philosophical screw-up that limited vials represent...regardless of the number of vials, if it's anything less than 25 it's stupid.
I made a couple of posts like this about 2 months ago when Illidan guilds were becoming more common, and it seemed to be mostly blown off at the time. But I imagine that is generally because people tend to have an unrealistic expectation as to when stuff will go live - like when Sunwell was announced, there were people in my guild saying oh man, we need to hurry on Illidan! Whereas other people were saying uh, that won't be out til January.
Anyway, we did discuss this earlier and my thoughts on the matter haven't changed at all. Releasing content zone by zone is a far better alternative to the current system. I would summarize it as:
1) Makes the last boss in x zone feel like "the last boss," rather than just another roadblock, which is immensely more psychologically satisfying.
2) Allows lower tier guilds to not feel as far behind by artificially limiting the progress of the best players.
3) The constant occasional breaks can be motivational for many people, and it avoids the huge gap in content that you have now. You may have periodic 1-2 month breaks, but never a six month break.
Honestly if there were any other well-made games that could fill the WoW niche out right now, I think they would be getting significant subscribers. Other developers are probably upset they are missing this golden opportunity to woo people away. But there really isn't, so people are turning to Halo or Team Fortress or whatever to casually fill the gap in the interim.
Setill, though, while short breaks can breathe new life into players, long breaks are generally bad. This amount of time is long enough for people to completely lose their addiction/interest and turn to something else entirely, and I think it will be very, very noticeable come Sunwell.
My interest in PvP is the only thing sustaining me at the moment. If I didn't care at all about arenas I can't imagine I would still be playing with any regularity.
I wonder if Blizzard has ever considered heroic style raid instances. Just ramp up the fights a bit, make em give a couple of new items or a special rep or any number of things. Its not the ideal solution, but it also provides an option for guilds that find stuff too easy after the fact.
IMO the problem is that SSC/TK are still too hard and are completely un-enjoyable to do, my server is very slow, and my guild is only 4/6 SSC and 1/4 TK (with 5/6 and 2/4 not too far away if only we could recruit some new members as we had a good 10 go AWOL on us over the past few weeks), the best guild on our server only killed Kael like 3 weeks ago, and has already killed most bosses in both Hyjal and BT and looking at other guilds this seems to be the trend.
Alot of guilds get stuck around 4-5/6 SSC and anywhere from 1-3/4 TK finally kill the last few bosses, get attuned and proceed to completely demolish the next 2 instances in just a few weeks.
They should really look at nerfing some of the fights (Leo should have a longer enrage, Morogrim should have less adds, Al'ar a slower meteor...and i have no idea about Kael/Vashj) or opening up Hyjal at the very least to everyone so we can get some kills in.
It reminds me alot of pre tbc with Nax opening up when most raiding guilds were stuck at the end of BWL or middle of AQ, except with Nax we got to go in and see something new and fun, and get some loots from the execution fights that we had at the start, but blocked other wings with gear checks, now we have BT and Hyjal that have both styles but we are stuck back in AQ and BWL until we either stop raiding or finally manage to clear the zones.
Edit: Oh and the point i wanted to make about this effecting EJ, Nihilum etc was that, without us lower end guilds progressing alittle faster than we currently are, releasing the Sunwell would basically create an even larger gap between less skilled/more casual guilds and those that are currently farming illidan, basically meaning we should just pvp'ing instead, as the gear from arena will be much much better than what we currently have available to us.
It won't help so much on the raids but season 3 and the new content coming in the next patch will help stem the tide of apathy until xpac. Then it starts all over again.
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I'm in a guild that's only just starting to pick up the pace. We have the easy bosses on farm (Gruul-Maggy-Voidy-Lurkey) and are starting to experience the slightly harder bosses - what I'd call the 'real' stuff.
My biggest fear is WotLK. If it comes too soon, I'll never get to visit Black temple at this pace. Hell, I might not even experience Kael if the new expansion comes in, say, January 2008. THAT'S what's discouraging. It's not the obscene amount of content that I've yet to see, it's the fear of having to level my character up again, start farming greenies and blues and pots and reputations and primals and what-have-you again, without having experienced bosses like Reliquary of Souls, Kael, Illidan.
Pre-TBC I was marrily playing my resto druid healbot (mainly for the sake of experiencing new content, new bosses, new concepts and not so much because I enjoyed being ganked by every DPS class that would feel like getting a free HK off me), farming MC whenever people cared to show up, farming BWL, doing AQ up to Ouro and C'Thun... then *BAM*. Naxx gets released, we stupidly decide an epic fight in the proportions of C'Thun isn't epic enough compared to T3 Boots and Bracers, then 1.12 patch is out, Decursive is broken forever despite the fact you could never manually dispel 30 people getting the poison spit at the 3 bugs and similar encounters, Rank 13 PvP armor becomes available to Joey Random, people become dispirited at the news of blue and green gear being better than T3... raiding dies.
I had a hard time coming back to WoW. I stopped playing in early December, remembered I had a lowbie human female Warlock waiting for me in a realm where RL friends were playing in February, so I came back. I actually did a good job on this character. I farmed my reps, I levelled my tailoring, I farmed thousands upon thousands of herbs for pots and repair money, I read enough theorycraft to give me the top spot in damage meters in my guild in most encounters... I enjoyed it, because the thought of visiting new instances, learning new bosses and happily having the living shit beaten out of me in innovative ways is FUN. And since my guild is starting to be serious about PvE progress, the only thing that will seriously annoy me, as it did Pre-TBC, will be not the addition of yet another Tier instance while I'm still wiping at Hydross, but the thought of having to do all of the aforementioned things again without first being compensated for my troubles.
My first *doh* moment came back this spring when I realized we would have 2 full tiers of raid instances up simultaneously. Realizing exactly how far behind the leading edge of raiding we would drop was a tremendous source of stress and discouragement. Now, about half-way through T6, the stress is easing up (when it looks likely we might finish T6 before the Sunwell), but I sincerely wish Blizzard will never repeat this sort of scheduling. Having a small break to just sit down and farm a tier is nice, being pulled straight into the next just in order to complete the next, before the one after that comes is a pain. I can well imagine the reverse problem for the top end groups. I wonder if some might not fall apart from lack of content for so long..
Another negative aspect that comes along with the T5/T6 launch model are the infernal attunements. Had there been a break between the two tiers, there wouldn't have been a need for them, or at least you could have had a few Kael'Thas/Vashj kills under your belt before the sudden rush into T6 content. Now T5 feels like a waste of time you have to endure just to get the last few people attuned. Hardly a good "ending" to a tier of instances imo.
Finally, I'd like to make a comment about the WoWJutsu %'s. It is indeed only some 3-4% of "raid guilds" who have reached T6 content so far, but I think the number is a bit missleading. That number is the fraction of all those guilds who have enterd Karazhan, that have also enterd T6 content. Let's keep in mind there are a very large number of small guilds who only ever intend to run Karazhan. If we look at guilds who have pursued T5 content actively, which is (depending on your definition of "actively"), some 20-25% of all those who enterd Karazhan, then the actual fraction now in T6 content jumps to 12-20% with some 3% having cleared all of it. I think those numbers are perhaps a bit more realistic.
1. As has been said, guilds and people are much better at this game than they used to be. Honestly, imagine doing original Onyxia with the original vanilla blues, would it have taken that long to kill her as it has back in those days? People (especially people from the very top) are probably better at this game than Blizzard have imagined or anticipated; seeing the fact that they released pretty much all of the content with the expansion they probably didnt expect it to be beaten this fast.
2. Once they realized that the content has been beaten they had the choice between naxxramas-like model of "the few the proud the hardcore" or let the "wow 1.0 bwl/aq40-clearing guild" have a chance at beating the game. They'he chosen the latter risking the ennui for the top guilds. A wise decision in my opinion, from the utilitarian point of view as well as economically. I am a GM of a guild who has just killed Kal'Thas and i am excited to have the opprtunity to clear the existing content before the next expasion (or at least see much of Sunwell plateau before the next expasion comes out) and i'm sure my type of guild vastly outnumbers the Illidan-farming type of guild.
I agree with Praetorian that staggering the content a little more would have been better for the game (in hindsight), but if 1. is true they probably made the right decision. Development cycle for raid instances is quite long! Lets hope they'll do even better with WotLK.
PS: I remember an 1up inteview with WoW lead designers, and the fact that they were quite surprised that wow brought about a "mmo-culture" change, the fact that guilds no longer kept the boss strats to themselves, but "had" to post post a video and/or a strat online to get the fame. This must have been quit the opposite in the EQ days. The strats and bosskills trickle down the foodchain much faster than the old EQ players among the devs are used and expecting to?
Last edited by Kargoroth : 10/01/07 at 9:48 PM.
Reason: spelling
10/01/07, 7:41 PM
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