And I think there's an error in this perspective. Illidan needs to be in the game -- interacting with players through things like the Netherwing questline, the SMV Akama line, and so forth -- but it's not necessarily true that Illidan needs to be right there ready to be killed right away. When it comes to WotLK, Blizzard has said that they want Arthas to be a force who is felt by all players throughout their time in Northrend. And that's definitely a good idea. Having images of him appear and seeing his power manifested in the course of various questlines and instance encounters will be engaging, but that doesn't mean that "Icecrown Raid Instance" or whatever needs to be in-game from the start, or even in the first few months. Arthas will be on the cover of WotLK, and he'll be in the game at release, in various forms. There would be nothing wrong with his lair at Icecrown being completely unassailable until after some world event introducing the content many months after the expansion is actually released, assuming that there is other content evenly spaced to fill that gap.

Nice -- I'm going to put these graphs in the OP if you don't mind. That's a really elegant way of depicting the issue here.

I think the unfortunate reality is that these boards see raid content from a very colored perspective. As the GM of a guild that is 1/6 SSC and 1/4 TK (2/4 TK tonight, likely), I'm hoping that we will be able to clear the Tier 5 content in the next two months or so, meaning we're looking at December before we ever zone into Hyjal or BT. If we push hard, we might get an opportunity to see Illidan die before Wrath of the Lich King, but I won't guarantee it.

It seems curious to me that we're faulting Blizzard for the pace of progression. All of the changes to the nature of the game - the availability of content, the removal of attunements, paid transfers, gear incentivization - were things that directly benefited the player base. If Blizzard had released BC with only tier 4 content built in, and released Tier 5 in February/March, and released tier 6 in April/May, all of the people complaining about being 'done the game' would still be 'done the game' - it might have just happened in a different fashion.

Knowing the damage that a lack of content can due to a top-end guild, I do think that the current lack of a horizon hurts the best raiding guilds this game has. At the same time, the opportunity for so many more people to see the full extent of the raid game is a very important factor.

At the end of the day, asking Blizzard to control the pacing of raid content punishes strong guilds, does nothing for weaker guilds, and I don't see a causal relationship or any solvency in the argument or the proposed 'solution'.

They are good graphs, but if I may humbly suggest, they would be greatly enhanced adding in a legend built right into it. They are very likely to be quoted out of context.

Note the "threw together" :P

If anyone wants to expand upon them and touch more on what staggering improves on (nice, spaced out farming periods for a roster to recover their collective breath, etc) be my guest!

This presents a major difficulty for many of the guilds on my server, because almost every guild has fallen into a casual-raiding-guild model. I recently posted a link to the boss-kill modelling that was done in a previous post here, because of the consequences it posed for those of us with limited raid time. While it was a relief to see it map as a non-linear curve, it forces us to ask: What do we do now, to close the gap?

Falk's graphs throw it into sharper relief, for those of us on servers where no guilds are above the dotted line.

When gear isn't so closely related to progression, those of us well behind the curve struggle to balance player gearing against movement (however slow) through content. Because we cannot offer guild progression, we're forced to hold out the carrot of character progression. Instead of 'we'll get there first', we need to say 'we'll all get there, even if it's slow' and offer incentives to those who work hard to get into raiding shape.

In vanilla WoW, our raiding model was sufficient to keep us right up behind the top guilds on our server. We were forced by TBC to dramatically revise our raiding philosophy and, despite having fielded a much more professional raid team, are still watching the gap widen. That gap in progression is more dangerous for us, because we have relatively little to attract quality applicants to the server. Because our server is very old, players have longstanding ties to those in other raiding guilds, meaning that movement between guilds happens quite readily, creating a boom-and-bust cycle amongst raiding guilds.

ZA worries me, because it brings to a head our competing objectives, and because we're already spread much too thin across content. If the ZA raids prove to be an unqualified success, that sucks attention away from our T5 raids, which have only now started moving. As our performance in those zones begins to suffer, we get more diminishing returns as people are less willing to enter those zones. We saw this when ZG emerged and people were psychologically finished with MC but early BWL still presented quite a hurdle. If the ZA raids prove difficult, we're wearing out our raiding crew to no good purpose.

Yes, this is definitely a viable approach, and it's one that pretty much has been done throughout WoW's history, formally or informally. Also overlooked is the effect of parallel progression paths. I expect Z'A to actually aid t5 progression because of the gear it no doubt will offer. Just as Z'G made BWL easier for the guilds doing it in the fall of 2005 versus those who did it in the summer of 2005, Z'A will help t5 progression. Guilds struggling with DPS requirements on Vashj, with the benefit of ilvl 13X loot from Zul'Aman filling holes in their raiders' sets, may suddenly be able to succeed where previously they could not. Buffs to mage DPS, and other such tweaks, will also no doubt help.

This is simply untrue, if I read your post correctly. While it technically hurts nobody to have all possible content available from the word "go", there is psychology involved.

For the super-elite, you have the gradual disintegration of cohesion and interest because you have quite literally NOTHING to do in the game; you've beaten it, and it's stayed beaten for months. Contrast that with continually beating the available game every 6-8 weeks as new content is released. You see more desire to farm content to be prepared for the new content you KNOW is coming, you see a systematic reintroduction of real PvE goals.

For the less-than-elite, you have less of a mountain in front of you. When an entire tier is merely an obstacle to be removed before you START to progress, as I would argue T5 has been since 2.1, that's an issue. You feel that you're so far behind as to make competition a joke, and each boss you kill is just one more warmup step. I would even say a tier and a half, because even my guild(5/5 Hyjal 7/9 BT) sees Hyjal as just some place to try and get rid of as soon as possible to get finished with BT. That's harmful to retention and causes burnout issues.

You also have all the strata below the less-than-elite who are more disinterested in raiding than ever because what's the point in working hard on T4 and T5 content when you will never see the end of the raiding game before the expansion, at which point the playing field is re-levelled?

Guilds certainly will continue to defeat content as soon as it is released, and other guilds will do so more slowly no matter your release schedule. The point is that a more staggered release schedule is simply more beneficial to everyone involved from nearly every perspective. I suppose a hypothetical gamer who wants to play like a crazy man for 4 months and then not play for 6 has a reason to prefer an up-front release schedule, but I don't think it is a positive plan for anyone but that hypothetical gamer. The carrot is simply to distant to create any real incentive for anyone but the bleeding edge, and even they have a problem that they only get 1 carrot and then they're starved for 6 months at a time. Give me 3 carrots over an expansion rather than one I can't even smell for the first 2 months of chasing it.


I apologize for that mangled and abused metaphor.

I think your argument here is a bit presumptuous. To suggest that players would prefer to focus on one tier of 'surmountable' content at a time, not knowing what lay ahead, is a contradiction in itself - as you've pointed out, we know that it's coming, it's just 'not available'. Staggering the releases as a way to control the speed at which top-end guilds 'beat the game' seems odd - if a guild in tier 4 can kill Illidan, and all that's holding them back is whether or not Blizzard 'lets them', how is that preferable?

If your mentality towards progression through the game is that nothing but the last boss, or being the first person to down a boss, matters, you've set yourself up to fail. My objective is to see every encounter, sure - but I want to see Illidan with the same great team I beat Attumen with. The 'insurmountable mountain' of content ahead of us is a series of challenges, and we are looking forward to each of them.

You also forget that the game is vastly different from one server to the next. On my server, the top guild is 5/6 SSC and 2/4 TK. There are only 3 Alliance guilds that are raiding 25-man content. My guild is likely to get a server first on Solarian tonight. So our whole server is trash, and our enjoyment of the game is irrelevant to the high-calibre regime - that's fine. We're playing the same game as everyone else, just not with the same attitude.

Hey, at least you're not a 10-man guild.

We've been utterly stymied by the 10->25 man transition, and there are a lot of similar guilds. With TBC, it was viable to form your guild around a core of 10-15 raiding accounts for Karazhan, with the assumption of additional progression. By the time casual, ten-person guilds had completed Karazhan, everyone was locked into tight little groups with unique cultures and bonds.

This becomes an issue when moving into T5. For Gruul, you can augment your core 15 players with hobos in greens and still down the content. For SSC/TK, it looks like you need 30-35 players with T4/crafted gear, coordination, and determination. It's a nasty bait and switch, and we've been waiting forever for something new for our core players.

I'm totally sold on that until I see a) the difficulty level and b) the rewards. Right now it looks to me that Z'A will be the obvious continuation to Kara for guilds who can't get a solid 25-man raid together - but that's where the "difficulty" variable comes in. It might help guilds doing t5 because they will probably stop running Kara altogether and switch to Z'A - but that's where the "rewards" variable comes in. As for guilds that are doing t6 or have completed it, they will probably run Z'A for fun during off-nights and that's about it.

To sum it up, I'm afraid Z'A will be Kara 2.0 and not much more. And if the rewards are not to t5 was Kara rewards were to t4, it might be completely wasted. It looks to me that it will be incredibly difficult for Blizzard not to mess up the difficulty/rewards ratio for a 10-man that comes so late in the expansion.

I can see ZA being used to fill some t5 itemization gaps, as well as providing gear for what is considered non-raiding specs (I think this was hinted at durring blizzcon). And as with ZG I can also see a few must haves for the majority of the players so as to give them reason to go.

You forget composition checks, thoguh the guilds killing Illidan now don't really have to worry about them. An awful lot of discussions here implicity assume that you're going to have 2-4 paladins and 2-4 shamans available for every encounter; kings + salv is pretty much expected, and at least 1 windfury for melee, some amount of tremor, and some other totems from the shammies. Yet a lot of alliance guilds actually only have 1-2 level 70 shamans in the entire guild, and I suspect horde are similar for paladins. It's not really a gear check if, say, your DPS is low because your melee don't have windfury or you couldn't keep up with decursing because you had no totems for that spot.

The fast progression guilds probably don't have too much trouble with this, since they can snap up shamans from other guilds and other servers, but the medium and slow guilds have a much harder time with it. The more casual a guild is, the less likely they are to have people willing to abandon one character and grind another one up to fill a spot. Even if someone is willing to put in that much work it's still going to be weeks of being without that key spot filled. "Recruit more shamans" doesn't really work if there aren't any half-decent ones around to recruit, especially when the better ones can probably find a more progressed train to hop aboard.

The question I have is:

"Is this a problem from Blizzard's perspective?"

I don't want you all to take this the wrong way, but it is the elite guilds that have everything on farm that are the problem. Right now, they have nothing to do, and are voicing their frustration with the inevitable lag between new content. However, had things been staggered (and after reading this thread, to include the OP's subsequent followups and the post with the graphs, I tend to agree that is probably how it should have been done), does anyone have any doubt that the same people upset about a current lack of content would not be daily voicing their frustrations that they have cleared "X" (Kara, Gruul, Mag, SSC, TK, Hyjal, BT) but "Y" (kara, Gruul, Mag, SSC, TK, Hyjal, BT) are not available?

Which is the bigger problem for Blizzard and the game? How do they find the right balance? Or do we agree that the staggered approach IS the right approach to balance?
Additionally, as to nerfing tier sets, is that the right thing to do? It seems that nerfs to anything are problematic from Blizzard's perspective (from a customer satisfaction approach.)

As a side note, I hope that in the future, particularly in Lich King, they include ten man instances. However, I hope that they have learned that they should be parallel to the introductory 25 man instances. Kara destroyed a number of guilds on my server, to include the guild I was in when TBC started.

That was our problem in my old guild- pre-TBC, we had success taking x number of tanks, x number of healers, and whatever else wanted to go. That does not work anymore. Maybe it never did and we just noticed it when we went from 40 mans to 25 mans, but it sure does not work now.

It seems pretty clear from developer quotes and released information that Z'A will not include a highly technical, intricate execution (Vashj- or Kael-style) fight because that's not its intent. Tigole said in particular that the first boss will be a gear check and not an execution or coordination check. Meanwhile, the gear will easily be as good as the tier 5 instances (from what we have seen thus far with a couple isolated weapon drops.)

Is this messed up? If you ask, say, Xi? Yes, it is. Clearly welfare epics are bad for the game!

But there are a lot of guilds who will enjoy having something new to quickly learn and then farm, and for a lot of guilds (notably the ones Gurgthock pointed out, those stuck somewhere in T5 content) it will come as a mainline progression boost due simply to real gear upgrades.

And it is almost inevitable that Z'A will have belt enchants at exalted or some such thing that keeps even the Nihilum-guilds of the world coming back for more, right?

Less than Elite Guilds are not working in a vacuum
There is a reason for this. All the highly competitive players can transfer to a different server where they can be more cutting edge. The big problem in the graph mentioned above is the size of the area between the uber guilds and the raiding guilds. That area is huge under the 'all at once' model of TBC, and it drains servers of their talent pools. Think of this area as the force exerted on your top raiders to be pulled away. The bigger the area is, the more force there is.

For the 'less than elite' you wouldn't face such giant sucking sound on your servers, when people can't gain so much by transfering away. For example, If I'm at 5/6 SSC, and the top guild in the world is at 6/6 SSC, I see the finish line where I'm at now and have an incentive to stick it out where I am.

Because the fact that it's possible(and if you armory me, you'll see that it very nearly is) doesn't mean it's preferable. Look at several of the people from the very top guilds who have posted i nthis thread. They're bored, they're losing itnerest, people are moving away because they DID kill Illidan in T4, and now they wish it could have happened differently. That's my interpretation in any case, feel free to correct me if I misinterpreted some of those posts.

I enjoy each boss kill. I thoroughly enjoyed Kael'thas and Archimonde, but I like killing bosses in any form. If I might continue the mountain analogy, the fact that Illidan is on the top of Everest doesn't mean I want to scream up that mountain slope as fast as is possible without me dying. There are base camps, and achieving each of them should be a goal, and a worthy one. The extremely limited amount of time I got to enjoy having defeated Kael'thas because we flew right by him as fast as we could did diminish the overall effect of defeating him. It's a raid-wide accomplishment, and not an easy one, but it was dismissed as one more step towards Rage Winterchill, a far far less enjoyable boss, that I take far less pride in having defeated. SSC and TK make the people in my raid shudder, and it's not because they're bad instances. It's because they are obsolete instances, and they were obsolete from the moment 2.1 hit the servers. That is an unfortunate diminishment in the value of those instances.

Of course. My server, though a release-day server, is pretty damn backwater itself. We used to have the original incarnation of Pro Baddies(or whatever they've morphed into) on Alliance, but we've never been at the tippy tip top of world progression. And that's fine. I'm competitive, but I'm a realist. I'll never beat Nihilum or DnT or whoever comes along to replace them. That's fine, I compete in the way that I can. But the mass release of content reduces the number of important competition points to one. So what if we're ahead of the other guilds on our server, and have been for a while now? If we fart around on Illidari Council and they beat us to Illidan, they still BEAT US overall. There is only one finish line, and it's a damn long way from the starting line. I would prefer to enjoy each step, but the way progression has been given to us, each step is just one step closer to the step that matters, and no better or worse than any other. And that's the problem, in my eyes.

I've been advocating for a while now that Blizzard do instances differently next expansion. Don't bill it as "slowing it down so everyone is able to stay closer to the leaders" but yes, do that.

Here, let me do some PR-speak:

"Players have often expressed an interest in a more dynamic and changing world, and that's something we're going to work on in Wrath of the Lich King. All of the instances will be tested and shipped with the expansion, but we're also going to be creating storyline 'release events' for the other dungeons. Release events will be world-changing and world-wide events. Don't worry! When we trigger a release event on one server, we will trigger it on all servers."

For example, in TBC, they ship with Mag, Gruul, and SSC unlocked and accessible. ~1 month after Nihilum kills Vashj they trigger a release event on all servers. Say TK was encased in a glowing cage of energy up to this point, but one of the mana-pipes in Netherstorm cracks/breaks etc and it's no longer funneling mana to it to keep the barrier up. Roving groups of blood elves with Elite Astromancers spawn across Outland trying to channel additional energy. After killing a certain number of these, there's no longer enough energy to keep up the barrier, it goes down and TK is raidable.

1 month after Kael is killed, you do something similar for Hyjal. Infinite Dragonflight attacks, maybe a little temporal warping, etc.

1 month after Archimonde goes down, you do the same thing for BT.

Make release events fun for everyone. They'd be like 1-shot holiday content, and they let you justify a paced release schedule without saying "We're trying to artificially slow the top guilds' progress."

Speaking for the masses, the one quibble that I'd have is that nerfs waste our time too, and they cheapen the accomplishments of those who were on the verge of success. It hurts to be the guild that has 22 people attuned when the attunment requirement is lifted; the guild that spent five precious wipe hours learning a strat that is now totally invalid; the guild that had Aran at 1% the night before the elementals were weakened. It isn't just the morale hit; it's that we're constantly micromanaging objectives based on what will benefit the guild most-- and every change that wastes our time hurts us much more, proportionally. Five hours isn't much if you're raiding 24/reset. It's a great deal if you're raiding 7.

Honestly, I'm surprised at the attitudes of you "elite" raiders. Is there not a time you won't complain about something in World of Warcraft? You complain when content is held back, you complain when content is released but not tuned to your liking, you complain when content is released and then you plow through it in five days, you complain if there's not enough content and you're bored, you complain about PvP loot and how easy it is to get except when you have to farm for that one item. God... I could go on but I'm getting annoyed with you lot again.

I see it all plain as day here, right from Nihilum on downward, you're asking for Bizzard to manage your guild for you. If you're not an elite guild you need Blizzard to manage your guild's upward progress through individually tailored release dates so that when you've been Tier X you can rest for a number of days and farm Tier X before you "have" to start Tier X+1. Conversely, if you are the pointed tip of the spear like Nihilum or on the edge like EJ or Forgotten Heroes etc then you need Blizzard to slow down the releases to manage your guild's boredom after you've beaten all the content. Sounds to me like its more of an expectation management thing on your part than something Blizzard can ever possibly deal with.

Anyone who knows me can tell you my biggest gripe with TBC raiding minus the untuned content/items, was the pacing. I loved how in vanilla it was one instance, one only. You farmed it, others caught up, and as a somewhat whole the server moved on to the next instance. This, although there was no real attunement issue in vanilla, would have solved the now large turnover from people leaving vashj/kael killing guilds for ones farther progressed.

I felt like a race horse from February to 2.1 when it came to raiding. In Naxx, we condensed it to a 1.5 night clear, back when it was BWL, we'd pretty much do that in one night and that’s it. Those long extended breaks until the next instance left balance for people, so when the next raid came out we could push 5 days a week for 1-2 months no problem.