Denogran

And what's your point? The OP, and many of the people in this thread, are asking why Blizzard doesn't tailor raiding to make it easier for people that want to raid on the order of 3 hours a night, and complaining about how punitive the trash respawns are to that schedule. There have also been quite a few people in the thread saying how their guild only raids 3 hours at a time and are in [fill in your favorite 25-man instance here], and are doing fine.

I would argue that any 25 man raid is going to take a significant amount of outside time (time not in the actual raid), or order to get it off the ground. And anyone willing to put in that significant of an effort is not likely to want to "only" raid for 2 hours. Which is why you don't see 2 hour raiding guilds, it's just not worth the leadership overhead for that minimal of a time commitment. And how do you get rid of that? You lower the number of people involved.

I guess I'm really just not sure what you want. It sounds like you're dissatisfied because you can't find a raid that fits perfectly with your specific schedule. I can't say I've ever done a group activity with over 20 people (excluding things revolving around me like my birthday party, or some jazz...and even then not always on my schedule) where I haven't had to compromise for the good of the group. What makes WoW different?

Yes, I agree with this completely.

I don't agree with this at all. If Blizzard wanted people to have infinite tries on bosses without worrying about anything, there wouldn't be any trash. They've stated they use it as a pacing mechanism. And the timer is a related concept, they want people to farm a bit on bosses they've downed, accumulate some gear and skill before moving on. Trash, and repeated wiping on bosses with a set reset table are an enforcement of this timer. Is it a fairly arbitrary timer? Sure seems like. Is it a terrible idea? I don't particularly think so.

 

Evy

In that case, they could allow the ability to reset your raid ID but give it a one week cooldown to prevent guilds who are already farming content from gearing up too quickly. However, this would give guilds who can only raid through one trash respawn, 3 times a week, a much larger window of time to learn a boss fight. A lot of guilds on my realm don't have trouble killing Vashj and Kael just because of the jump in difficulty of the encounters, but also because of the farming time it requires to get to them every week. If said guilds decide that the reason they can't beat the encounter is because of lack of gear, they could reset their instance and farm back up to the boss. I don't really see a downside.

 

Denogran

Well so much for getting work done today....

I'm not trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong so that I can change my playing habits. But I think putting all the blame on Blizzard for the time issues is a bit naive. I don't know how this is any different than anything else in life. If I want to do something for only an hour or two, then I either do it on my own, or with a small group of people. If I'm going to be meeting up with over 20 people, be it for some work function, or some sport, or whatever, then it's going to be longer than some 2 hour chunk, and it's very likely not going to be the exact ideal time for me. That's just the way it happens, it's not worth organizing 20+ people for something that's only going to last for an hour or so. And I'd feel pretty damn spoiled if I insisted it was only to happen on my schedule.

Basically, I'm arguing that Blizzard has given you all the tools needed to raid in smaller segments. Summoning stones, trash on as little as 2 hour respawns. Smaller instances mean less running back when there's a wipe. Close graveyards to alleviate the same thing (except SSC which is just stupid). But how much overhead time can you really get rid of when you're talking about 25 independent people? They're adding guild banks in 2.3, that will help some. Maybe an in-game raid calendar, complete with signups? That'd help.

But what do you want Blizzard to do? Not reset trash cause you find it boring or time consuming? I mean, I find everyone but Vashj boring and a waste of time nowadays, but I'd be silly to argue that I should get a free pass to her just because I'm of that mindset. Honestly, the Al'ar trash is far more entertaining than either VR or Solarian (I'm the add-tank in Al'ar so that keeps me on my toes, but I could see how that fight would get dull in a hurry too). 24 people giggling because that one guy who talks shit all the time got MC'd and immediately obliterated? Fantastic. Running away from the group cause your screen's flashing at you? Only mildly interesting because of the height you gain.

So I honestly just don't get it. There are people out there successfully raiding 3 hours a day for 3 days a week, and accomplishing more content than my 4-hour day/5 day a week guild. Should Blizzard institute in-game raid leaders who explain each fight to you, coordinate times and deal with distributing loot? Do you really think that getting rid of trash respawns would decrease the amount of time the average guild would raid?

 

Nezralix

Your entire argument appears to be that raiding is fine and it's nobody's damn business. I obviously disagree. You talk about tailoring raiding for people with three hours or less, as if to ignore that raiding is pretty clearly tailored to a four hour schedule now. I do want a guild that meets my schedule; everyone does. I can't raid before 8:30. No guilds on my server raid after 8:00. They don't do that because midnight is an extremely popular "drop dead" time when people generally need to be asleep if they're going to wake up for school or work, and the extremely popular (nearly required for a standard mediocre guild) four-hour time slot means that raiding is necessarily pushed to start around 7:30 or 8:00. If it wasn't based on a four-hour clear time, then there would be more flexibility, and I might actually get a raid spot. You might view it as greedy, and had I not heard from so many people who share my sentiments about unreasonably large time expectations on raiding, I might even be inclined to agree with you. I would probably put up with a 9:00 to 1:00 raiding guild if one existed on my realm, but frankly, I'd be happier with a 9:00 to midnight one. A smaller window would enable both of these desires.

Some people just don't have the luxury of "compromising" with management or with their families about raid times, and it shouldn't be such a common situation that they have to. We're not talking about people working the night shift, we're talking about people who get off at 6:00 or 7:00 and can't just jet home to raid in a schedule that's nearly ubiquitous due to the large chunk of time required.

 

Denogran

Which is why they opened up server transfers. What you don't seem to be getting, is that I'm not advocating "diehard stuff." You want Blizzard to change everything to match your specific schedule, while ignoring the ramifications that would have on other people's schedules. I was in your position till I found my current guild(which is coincidentally 9:30-1:30, although I'd much prefer 9-12). If I hadn't, I would have transferred servers to one in my time-zone with a guild who raided to match.

There are guilds out there that meet your schedule. I can very nearly guarantee you that. Whatever factors are keeping you from being in those guilds are because of priorities being set by you, not ones being enforced by the game. Maybe Blizzard shouldn't charge for realm transfer (a discussion best suited for a different place), or maybe your friends on your server are too important to you (my reason for not transferring), but these are your decisions and not the game developers. If there weren't options in place, then I'd agree with you that you're getting screwed. But how it stands, you have options, you're just choosing to not exercise them for whatever reason. That's not Blizzard's fault.

 

GSH

So, Denogran, your basic point is that Blizzard has set up the game in such a way that:

Guild raids 2 hours - Good
Guild raids 3 hours - Bad
Guild raids 4 hours - Good

Is this honestly good design sense? Why have a spike in the middle where it goes bad? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a continuous range of "good" values, and punish values that fall on either side of the range?

 

Denogran

First, way to be black and white about it. I'd say it goes more: efficient, less efficient, efficient. Second, not at all. I haven't said Blizzard's design is perfect, I just haven't heard a good argument against it. I don't see how changing trash respawn timers changes would give you a sweet spot, you just adjust the flow of the peaks. And Blizzard doesn't really seem too enthusiastic about letting people just take as many shots at a boss as they want, not to mention I think they're a good internal time regulation mechanism.

Anyway, this thread has basically devolved into an "I think this...No, I think this" thread, and is very rapidly distancing itself from anything remotely productive, and as such I think I'll be leaving it for a time.

 

Nezralix

My original post asks for ideas how to reduce the minimum time investment that virtually every guild is asking for (typically four hours, three hours for guilds that are serious about time efficiency, more than four hours for very hardcore guilds). When people choose to chime in with things like "this is silly, it's all player-created" and "the time investment is fine, it's greedy to ask Blizzard to change their game", then it shouldn't be too surprising that the thread goes off-topic.

Guilds that raid for three hour segments are rare, and guilds who raid for less than three hours are practically non-existent. This is a very real issue for many players, and that's not a matter of opinion.

 

Furion

While I don't really want to join this argument I'd just like to point out that there clearly is a discrepancy in how rested XP works and how the raidgame favours a brute force approach where you ultimately want to spend as many hours as possible in a raidinstance until it resets to make the fastest progress.

 

Nayt

I'd like to (and plan on researching this). I'm not all up in arms about the Casual vs. Hardcore arguement. I raid 4 hours a night/4 days a week (and take one night off). But it's good to read about guilds who raid less then "us" and who are in BT/MH. IMO and in my guilds case somewhat it has to do with when we start to raid, I think we started Karazhan too late and because of apps/alts we ran Kara too long. Our progress would be farther but we didn't push Lady Vashj/KT originally. I don't know how many weeks we cleared SSC and didn't attempt Lady Vashj (instead we went to clear TK) to "gear up." I would think (read: I hope) Blizzard will implement a few more Magtheridon/Gruul/World Bosses based instances/fights.

Overall, my trouble with finding time to raid is basically knowing when I log off I should go to bed. I'm in a CST timezone, so if I were to raid PST I'd raid 1-2 hours earlier and be able to do things after raids/get more sleep.

Post #24, 30, and 66 made me smile a bit because we have those problems sometimes and we're starting to change our ways (Thanks for the obvious suggestions).

"When Nate's in town a feast is down."
Pizza, Gold, Contests and Myself
Twits about School, Dating, Partying and Jackassery
Hunter / Priest / Shaman / Warrior

 

Wolven

I don't think that is very black/white at all. It is a great argument for eliminating trash respawns or at the very least extending trash respawns to the point of having them not occur in a given night. You have made a few arguments about how changing the respawn timer to different values (1.5 hours, 3 hours, etc) would negatively impact one group's schedule while positively impacting another group's schedule. Obviously that is not an ideal situation because all it would do it move the optimal time for raiding. It doesn't make sense to move the problem from one group to another, you'd just get something like this:

(Good = Efficient, Bad = Not Efficient)

Guild raids 2 hours - Good
Guild raids 3 hours - Bad
Guild raids 4 hours - Good
Guild raids 5 hours - Bad

Change 2 hour respawns into 3 hour and then you get:

Guild raids 2 hours - Good
Guild raids 3 hours - Good
Guild raids 4 hours - Bad
Guild raids 5 hours - Good

The solution you would want would be one that does this:

Guild raids 2 hours - Good
Guild raids 3 hours - Good
Guild raids 4 hours - Good
Guild raids 5 hours - Good

In my mind that means you should set trash respawns to 6 or 8 hours. Either that or eliminate trash respawns altogether. I like the idea that if you clear to a boss you should be on that boss for the rest of the week. I wouldn't mind it if we had to clear trash each day but having to reclear trash multiple times per day is a bit excessive. It doesn't really slow down progress groups but it sure can hamper the more relaxed group that just wants to kill virtual monsters and see cool content.

 

Nezralix

I initially wrote off killing trash respawns as something insignificant, but then again, I haven't often been in situations where my guild was working on killing a single boss for a very long period of time. All in all, it does put a bit of a pressure towards four-hour raids, and that's not so good. They should probably remedy this, maybe by getting rid of them. Or by making them respawn after a set number of attempts on a boss (which has other issues).

 

Sillia

The main issue is the pacing mechanic here. Sometimes the trash serves as a gear check (Attumen and the Stables). If you can't clear all the trash and kill the boss in this amount of time, your raid probably isn't sufficiently geared for the instance.

The other option, I think, is to make the trash more involved with the boss, and an actual part of the boss fight/strategy, perhaps similar to Broodlord Lashlayer, or even Hakkar.

For example, imagine hypothetical raid boss A, being fed power from various clumps of trash. The trash is inert, and will ignore you unless attacked. Each clump of trash affects the boss by giving him extra abilities or damage or whatever, should they remain up. You can go directly to the boss and fight him, or you can spend the time to clear some or all of the trash. Defeating the trash will negatively impact the boss (maybe a damage debuff, or a speed debuff, or reduce the amount he heals, or something), but ignoring it is still an option. Maybe you want to only clear some of the trash, but not all. In a situation like this, you *could* clear the trash, or you could skip it and face a (somewhat) harder boss.

 

Lemmingherder

The gauntlet style fights where the trash is a part of the encounter tend to be the least enjoyable fights out there. Reclearing trash for each and every attempt is tedious as hell when learning a boss. Broodlord and Heigan clears were god awful. Fankriss clear wasn't exactly fun either, but that fight only really took 2 pulls to learn, so it was mostly a non issue. I have been pushing my guild through BT over Hyjal, solely because of the trash clear required for every attempt at a new boss in there. I will grant that the story backdrop and immersion factor of the Hyjal clears are cool from a lore aspect, but it doesn't stop it from getting old after a couple wipes.

The trash model in vanilla wow (BWL and beyond) was probably a bit better then the current system. Semi difficult trash (at least initially, when you were first starting to work on an encounter) that took a bit longer to clear, but didn't come back until a soft reset was easier to manage from a raid scheduling perspective. On the flip side to that, it also probably pushed me to drag some raids later then I otherwise would, because we were close to a kill, and I didn't want to deal with respawn the next day. In all honesty tho, the current trash is not that bad for most bosses. Most can be cleared to in about 10-15 minutes, with 30 minutes being about the longest set of trash I can think of in current raids. The longer clears, you don't even need to reclear it all to get back to your work on the boss, with the exception of Hyjal.

So I have a question for the original poster. You seem to mostly blame the design of the game for the amount of time required to be successful in raiding, yet most of the reasons you detailed were things that are for the most part, 100% player controlled. So what is it exactly that you are looking for in the game, and what about its design would you change specifically? One of the previous posters summed up my feelings very clearly, in that the time it takes to organize a large group of people, the amount of time spent doing the activity needs to be long enough to justify that investment in the first place. That is just human nature.

 

Nezralix

But it's patently false. If everyone in the raid is ready to go (which is one facet of the "come prepared" mantra that keeps being trotted out), then getting into the raid instance and getting started takes 15 minutes. Shorter than finding a 5-man group.

 

Vohbo

Trash in BWL never respawned, not even after a soft reset.
In AQ 40 trash respawned depending on the boss, only the trash before Skeram repopped fast. For all other bosses it repopped after a soft reset. Pre-C'thun trash was hard but didn't repop at all.
Many bosses in Naxx had no trash at all, and for the ones that had it, it usually wasn't a lot and/or stayed dead until a soft reset.

All those instances were, due to that, a lot more enjoyable than the ones we have today, since they focused attention on more compelling boss fights. It seems to me that the trash mechanics and amounts are just there to draw away the attention from poor encounter design on the bosses themselves. (There should not be 6-8 completely trivial bosses in T6 content in my opinion)

Not only that, but a mechanic was actually put in place that *rewards* farming trash (hearts, gems, marks, ...), which I think is just awful and should be a reward (weekly quest or so) for killing bosses.

 

Maczor

This is probably just my personal view here, but I really don't see a problem with how 25 man raiding works. Everything in WoW has been made easier, even raiding when you compare it to what it use to be. My feeling is if you truly can not cut out a 4 hour block of time a few times a week to dedicate to raiding... well then you shouldn't raid. If you can't do that then you obviously have other things you (A) Need to be doing or (B) want to be doing and in reality raiding really isn't that important to you and isn't something you really want do to be doing in the first place.

There are so many other things in WoW you can do in much smaller chunks of time. Even ZA will be a 3 hour clear once learned for almost everyone. I understand those activities aren’t 25 man raids, but it’s not like there isn't anything to do.

If they some how made it even easier to raid 25 man content then I'm not sure I would stay interested in this game. Many things in this thread that have been suggested would allow for guilds to raid in smaller chunks and still make decent progress. But almost every one of these suggestions accomplishes this by "dumbing down" the raid content to a point where it is even easier then it is now.

If the current raid game was originally changed to where you could make the same progress in 2 - 2.5 hours that you currently can make in 4-5 hours then my guild who is currently 4/9 5/5 would have “beaten the game” several months ago, and the top guilds like EJ would have finished even sooner.

I really think if you are looking for “2 hour a night raids” then the 10 man path is what Blizzard is offering. Karazhan has many logical 2 hour stopping points. ZA is smaller and much more compact and can easily be progressed through in a series of 2 hour raids. I just don’t see any need to make any large scale changes (ton of small changes = large scale change) to how 25 man raids work at this point. They are already significantly more accessible then their 40 man predecessors.

 

Sillia

This is hardly a "new" thing. They have been doing so ever since molten core. Remember that the trash in MC dropped BoE epic pieces? There have been epic trash drops in every raid instance besides Onyxia, Gruul and Magtheridon. You extoll Naxxramas, but who could forget [Misplaced Servo Arm], or [Herald of Woe]?

Trash has been the major source of things like crafting materials ([Lava Core], [Elementium Ore]), reputation rewards ([Rage of Mugamba]), and epic items ([Harbinger of Doom]), and has been such since the raid game began.

These are the raiders' consolation prizes. They're a lot like arena points; even if you can't down a boss, you get a chance to get some decent items. You feel like you make at least a little progress (at least we earned some rep tonight), even if you didn't kill a boss.

 

Nezralix

I'm really not sure how I can respond to any of this. You suggest that making 25-man raiding more accessible and convenient is the same as making it easier, and I disagree with that. You suggest that 25-man raiding should only be open to people who can put a large chunk of time into it, more than basically any other type of recreational game takes. I disagree with that too. You suggest that 10-mans are the answer, because they're short and not competitive. That may be true of Zul'Aman, but it certainly isn't for Karazhan, which basically takes as much time as any other 25-man for for a group in the gear it was intended for. You fail to make any real statement why 10-man raiding is fundamentally different than 25-man raiding, and I don't feel that the obvious "more people = more time" argument holds any water, considering how often I've spent more time finding a 5-man pug than starting a raid.

I'm really looking for substantive arguments why 25-man raiding needs to be long, or substantive ideas how it could be made less inherently time-consuming without reducing the challenge of encounters. "Because it's supposed to be long and arduous" is not itself an argument, and it's not productive.

 

Denogran

Do you lead raids? You've made this claim several times in this thread, and either you have the best luck in the world, or you're vastly understating all the time factors that go into this. Most people aren't referring about the time that goes from announcing in guild chat "Ok raid invites are starting, all level 70's leave your group," to getting the raid going. I think most would agree that if done properly, that only takes 15 minutes or so. What I do think most people are referring to, and I know I have been, is all the background time that goes into that.

I led, along with a buddy of mine, weekend KZ runs for a coupla months. The first several runs took literally hours of planning time in order to get off the ground. We had to get people to commit to the time. We had to get the right classes. We had to figure out loot. We had to PuG for certain classes we were short on. And every week was more of the same. It got easier after the first one, as we had more a core group going each week. But if both tanks, or both healers, were gone for whatever reason, it was back to a real struggle to get it going. And this was an informal once-a-week event with 10 people. I can't even imagine trying to get 25-40 people in the right proportions for 3-6 nights a week.

Basically, I think you're ignoring the vast amount of time and effort that goes into making sure you have 25 people of the right classes available at the correct time. I just can't fathom how you think getting 5 people together is equally difficult and time consuming as getting 25 together.

One last example/question. You state you've had trouble pugging 5-mans before, and that they've taken tediously long to get together. Have you ever pugged a 25-man (true pug, not a leading core with a few randoms)?

 

Nezralix

I've led raids, but only AQ20 and ZG raids. Oftentimes they were quick to get together, other times it was difficult to get enough people, and other times I just had to call them on grounds of poor attendance. I was leading them with a guild with a roster that was just barely large enough to do those, and with members with inconsistent attendance. Obviously, that's going to be an issue with a guild that isn't able to run the larger raids, because it's severely limiting in terms of loot possibilities, which encourages ambitious players to go elsewhere. Which is what happens to any guild that's relegated to second or third tier activities. But it generally didn't take extraordinarily long to get them together or choose to call them.

I've never run a 25-man pug. You're right that getting a pug of that size is tremendously difficult, probably in large part due to people being either undergeared or unwilling to key themselves out of a guild run. Although in a raiding guild, getting a 5-man group together can be a genuine pain in the ass also. Regardless, guild recruiting is difficult, but if done successfully it leads to a roster of people who log on for raids. And were players given more flexibility in terms of their schedules, I think it would be that much easier for them to log on for raid time, and easier to find people who were able to do so.

 

Maczor

Nearly every suggestion I've read in this thread to "make 25-man raiding more accessible and convenient" results in the process of raiding being made easier. Removing trash, removing/reducing respawn timers, decrease/remove buffing time, decrease/remove rezing time, remove/reduce consumable farming time, remove/reduce travel time, etc. All of these things have already been done to a certain extent already. Raiding (to me anyway) isn't the 5-10 minutes you spend killing some random boss. It's the preparation, the grouping up and traveling to the instance, the trash clear, and then the boss kill, and then improving how your raid handles all these tasks every week. That is what I like to call "Raiding".

Yes I believe high end raiding & progression should only be open to those who can commit larger chunks of time. I'm not sure what recreational games/activities you are doing, but the things I do IRL take up just as large chunks of times as raiding does.

Want to see a movie at the theater with friends? Plan on it taking 3-4 hours easily.
What to go to a Football/Baseball/Basketball game? Plan on it taking you MORE then 4 hours easily.
You like to go to clubs? With drive time to and from, it will take 3-4 hours or more and you won’t feel like doing anything else aftwards.
Your friend invites you over for a BBQ? You'll be there at least 4 hours if you’re not rude.

Sure there games you can play that take minutes, or only an hour or two, but raiding is more like a team sport or league play then it is just some random activity you do when your bored.

I use to participate in a Bowling league and before that a Basketball league. In each case I was playing at least 3 nights a week for games and 1 day/night a week for practice with the team. In each case I spent more then 4 hours from start to finish.

So to me, blocking out 4 hours of time to Raid 3-4 nights a week is normal, it’s the same thing you do if you want to something equivalent IRL.

10 mans are the answer. No where did I say Karazhan can be completed in 1 night. I did say that you could make steady tangible progress raiding Karazhan for only 2 hours a night because it has logical break points if you wanted to work on it 2 hours at a time.

It's different because 10 mans are easier. I have no doubt my guild will clear ZA in a couple weeks with group of Kara geared alts. We’ve seen the mechanics, and with a smaller number of people (10 vs. 25) there is less chance for someone to screw up.

If you have group X of 25 people juggling balls and group Y of 10 people juggling balls, all of equal ball juggling skill. If each time a ball is thrown there is a 1% chance a ball is dropped, which group is more likely to have one of its members drop a ball first.

Now try the same example only Group X has to juggle 4 balls at once and group Y only has to juggle 2.

Oh and you inability to find a PUG group for a 5 man is really a poor example to refute "more people = more time". Try organizing a 25 man PUG SSC if you truly believe "more people = more time" holds no water.

I don’t really have any reasons that “prove” why 25 man raids should require a large time commitment. In my original post I even said this was probably just my own personal view point. But the reason I think they should take a large time commitment is because that is what I enjoy and that’s how I feel raids should work.

Just like I think Baseball games should have 9 innings. If I didn’t like the fact that I had to play 9 inning baseball games, well then I would find a league where they only did 5 inning games (10 man raids) or I would just go to the batting cage or play catch with my friends (5 mans).

 

Lemmingherder

Inconsistent attendance is not because the guild only does things a few tiers below the top end, it is because the guild recruited inconsistent people. Period. Giving players more flexibility in when they log on leads to the inconsistent attendance you were complaining about in your first paragraph.

Personally, having a guild full of people who show up whenever they wanted would drive me insane. It would make it impossible to raid effectively, and thats true no matter how long a period of time we choose to raid for. It would actually be even harder on the guilds that choose to raid less. Smaller window of time to raid, people showing up late, having to scrounge to fill the last spots, all of that eats up a larger percentage of your scheduled raid time. So to combat that, you either need to recruit more so you always have enough bodies (which screws you on class balance, and makes learning that much more difficult since you will have a lot of different people in the raid from night to night), call raids off more often because of not having enough, or, set a specific schedule, and recruit people who can make it. There really is not a lot of middle ground, 1 of those 3 things will end up happening depending on how lax or strict you want to be with attendance. This again is something that is 100% determined by the players, and is not dictated by the game in any way.

You also have not said what you feel about the game specifically forces people to raid for longer blocks of time. There have been numerous suggestions in this thread on ways to potentially accomplish raiding less time and still being successful at it. The game does not tell you that you can't raid under x amount of time. The end time of the raid is still 100% within the hands of the players. Sure, it may take a longer duration of time to clear out an enitre instance in 1 sitting, but there is no in game mechanic that forces you to do this. There isn't even an in game benefit to doing it, since all the trash tied to the boss you killed doesn't respawn, and you can pick right back where you left off (assuming you finished your raid with a boss kill).

Somehwere above, it was mentioned that the game needs more small scale, onyxia, gruul, mag type encounters. Lets take that a step further, and pretend that every raid boss in the game was like this, but we are going to keep the same amount of actual content. How would spreading 29 Onyxia's all around the world be any better then cramming them into 4-6 instances? Travel time between instances would be just as big a timesink as clearing from 1 to the next, and the guys with limited time are still not going to be able to do everything the game has to offer. I am not sure if this is your main gripe about things or not, that you want to see everything, but don't have the time to commit to make it happen? I still am not sure what would actually make you happy, you seem to just shoot down any constructive suggestion down with "not worth it", "won't work", "stuff", and offer nothing substantive as to why, or what could be changed to make it work.

Ultimately, raiding takes a certain level of time commitment. The exact amount is variable, depending on the group you end up with. If the raid game is important enough to you, you make that commitment. If you choose not to, then that is also your decision. No one is forcing you to do either. If you just don't have the time for it, that is still not the fault of the developers.

 

Nezralix

Okay, you win. People raid in four hour blocks because they just love it that much.

 

ANSeranov

This is pretty much the best answer I've seen so far.

Raiding is a full-on passtime, not just something you do to kill an hour or two. Karazhan is broken up into chunks that you can do 2hrs at a time. ZA looks like it won't take too long once you get the hang of it.

10man content is designed for the people who don't have time for 25mans, or at least that seems to be how Blizzard is setting them up.

More like because four+ hours is an optimal ammount of time spent to progress in 25man instances?

Honestly, it seems to me like you are saying "I have three hours a night to play at wierd hours, I think Blizzard should change the entire raiding game to make it easier for me." The fact is, even if Blizzard DID change it so you could raid in nice neat little 3hr periods, that's still no guarantee that you'd be able to find a raid during those hours. Are you sure you can't sacrifice more for that extra hour? If not, maybe raiding 25mans isn't for you?

You seem to be a very reasonable guy, but honestly, sacrifice is the name of the game when it involves another twenty-four human beings.

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