Sillia

There's a lot more planning involved when there are more people involved. Most of your examples indicate that you don't need that many people to go. Going to a game, movie or clubbing don't require a certain number of people. If I have even one friend come, that's enough. Organizing the BBQ takes a lot more effort than the others; the organizer has to spend a ton more time than anyone who goes.

Yeah, some of those activities take more contiguous blocks of time. However, they are still far more flexible than raiding, because there's always another showtime for the movie in another hour, or you can tivo the game and watch it at your leisure with a bag of pork rinds and cans of pop, or the club will still be open if you get there at 11pm instead of 9pm. Even showing up to a barbecue late isn't a big deal; people come and go and eat and it's cool. These are all vastly different than raiding. There is no second showtime. There is no showing up late. You're locked in to the starting time, and you're locked in for the whole week. If you miss it, you're out of luck.

A bowling league is a more apt example than the others above. However, the bowling league is also more forgiving than raiding. You can show up late, and it's ok. They don't have to postpone, or sit around waiting because some people didn't show up. It's bowling; if you are going to practice, you get the ball and pitch it at the pins. The only time that it's important is if you are in a competition, and you don't show up on time.

Raiding is a lot less forgiving or flexible than other types of gameplay. Streamlining it and making it more friendly would increase the flexibility, and make it more accessible to more people. Which is the entire point of the OP.

 

Maczor

My point here was that IRL things take chunks of time, regardless of what it is or when you can do it. Whether you go to a baseball game tonight, or in a month, it still take 4+ hours of time. Whether you go to the club by yourself tonight or with a friend 2 weeks from now, your going to spend 3,4,5 hours before your all said and done and the OP basically says he can't (or doesn't want to have to) schedule 4 hour blocks of time to raid because other activities never require it. This simply is not true.


Again my point was that raiding is very much like "real world” group activities where you are working towards a goal. Our bowling team wanted to win the 3 leagues we were in. We each personally wanted to beat our high score or roll another 300 game and we wanted to perform well at states. The same thing happens in raiding. People want kill Illidan, and they want to kill him before other guilds on their server. They want to improve their gear and make their characters better. They want to get things on farm and clear Hyjal in 3 hours.

I thoroughly enjoy the raiding game as is and any changes to make it “easier” will just mean that I complete everything faster with less effort. How fun would bowling be if everytime you went you bowled only 1 game, and each time you bowled a 300… I think I would be looking for a new game to play…

 

Sillia

Why aren't you playing EQ then? Compared to EQ, WoW *is* like bowling one game a week and getting 300 each time.

You might think wow's raid game is ok where it is. The OP has a different opinion. And yes, this is all opinion-oriented. I don't care so much about opinion as I do about the future of the game. The ultimate question is "will reducing the overhead and administrative time requirements of raiding lead to better overall customer satisfaction? Will it retain more subscribers in the long run?"

 

Denogran

You're still missing the argument, or choosing to ignore it. The ultimate question isn't whether reducing the overhead and administrative time reqs lead to better overall satisfaction. I'd say most people would say yes. The question is whether that's a problem inherent in anything requiring 25 coordinated people to do, or whether it's a problem specific to WoW?

If it's the first, then you'll notice that Blizzard gives you many options within the game itself. First, they're careful to refer to 10-mans as Raiding, even if a number on these boards would disparage that definition. Second, they've included heroics, 5-mans and a new 10-man instance - all of which have far less demanding time constraints.

If it's the second, then what exactly is so different in WoW from anything else in real life? Compare raiding to being on a super-competitive soccer team. If you want to practice your individual skills, you're welcome to do so in as big or small increments of time whenever you chose (farming for mats, getting spell rotations down, etc). If you want to work on a specific subset of skills, you can grab a couple other people on the team and practice for short periods of time too (5-mans, or group farming). But if you want to work on your holistic team skills, then you're going to need nearly everyone there, and willing to put in a decent chunk of time to boot. Sure you can get started without a halfback(healer), or play decently well without a forward(dps), but what happens if you're missing your goalie (MT)? And then if you're going to actually play, well you have to coordinate all your guys with all their guys and that gets to be an even bigger headache. Now say you were ranked, and competitive enough that you needed to practice 3 days a week and play 1 day a week in order to be considered successful. Do you really think this scenario would require less administrative overhead than raiding?

This scenario isn't so far fetched either. If you want to be pretty good at soccer, say at the college level, you'll put in 4-5 hours/day easily. If you want to be amazing, like European soccer clubs, you'll spend all day every day doing it. If you want to play with your buddies at an ok level, you'll play maybe 2-3 hours every couple of days playing.

The thing to note though, is that in the example playing soccer isn't comparable to raiding, it's comparable to playing WoW at all. If you want to play some sort of organized, competitive soccer, that's comparable to doing some sort of raiding(ranging from heroics to 25-mans). And depending on how much you want to progress, you can choose how much time to devote to the activity.

 

Maczor

Oh the EQ card! Very original. Most of us know what EQ was like, and while I did enjoy it for the most part WoW defiantly moved in the right direction with how it handled its raids in WoW Classic and even with the 25 man changes in TBC. And WoW is not like bowling a 300 game every time compared to EQ... if it were more people would be done with the game and this thread would not have even been created.

I just want one (Just one) aspect of the game to be somewhat challenging and require a large time commitment. Just one. PVP has been changed. Reputation grinds have been changed. Loot availability has been spread out evenly over the entire wow Population. Very few things are rare anymore. Everyone already can get everything with a minimal time investment. Raiding has already been made much more accessible and requires a lot less time then it use to, but I never once complained about that. 25 man raiding is the last thing in this game that requires (1) a close knit group of people that share the same goals and (2) a large time commitment in order to succeed. Can’t we keep this last aspect of the game intact? People don’t have time to raid? Go do the other 9000 other things that WoW offers that I don’t have time to do because I choose to spend my time raiding instead.



This will mostly be my last post in this thread since I feel I don't have any thing else to add and I don't want this to turn into people just arguing with each other like many other posts do that have your constant replies.

 

Nezralix

So it's not enough to enter a thread with a "this thread is stupid" attitude, but you have to leave it with a personal insult too?

 

songster

Let's strain the analogy to breaking point.

Right now, you can't play soccer at all unless you're in the championships, putting in your 4 hrs a day of training. OK, there's the 6-a-side friendly league (Kara), but it just doesn't feel the same as a proper soccer game. Where's the second division, the village teams, the Sunday afternoon kickabouts? If you aren't prepared to enter the competition, you're not allowed on the pitch.

There should be room for a lower-end 25-man raiding scene that doesn't require that many hours per night, but still lets you experience the thrills of large group play - which are quite different from small groups.

It's getting there - the 2-nights a week social crowd are finally cracking Maulgar and Gruul, and a percentage have even got Magtheridon. That's still not a whole lot - not when you had ZG, AQ40 and MC in pre-TBC days. And to cap it all, Hydross is a resist check for not one but two different resistances. OK, so maybe you don't have to take him on first, but imagine if (say) Magmadar had required you to have 300 Shadow resist on 2 people and 300 fire resist on another two!

I've banged on about this before, but IMO there should be at least one full-length cap-size raid instance that you can zone into the day you hit 70 and have a chance on the trash at least. Dungeon blues should let you take down the first boss comparatively easily. It seems that Blizzard recognise this - hence the comments that Naxx will be tuned to Molten Core level in WotLK. Nobody's saying that all cap-size raid content should be able to be tackled in 2hr sessions, 3 days a week, without overly onerous farming for resist gear on the very earliest bosses - but it would be nice if some of it was.

 

Sillia

But you'll also notice a lot of things that have been done in wow that weren't commonplace before. Instanced raid content is a huge one. Rather than competing for a world spawn, you each get your own raid instance. A lot of folks take this one for granted, but I certainly remember spending hours each day camping for kings in FFXI.

They could have easily kept all the best loot from world bosses that required competition to pull and defeat. They could easily be the hardest bosses in the game. After all, if a world boss spawns once a week at some random daily time, only the most dedicated players would regularly kill those bosses and therefore be rewarded for their dedication. Instead, they put them in instances and allow you to schedule according to your own desires, rather than by their schedule. Would you seriously be happy if they stayed with the old method of raid loot distribution, rather than instanced content?

Removing administrative overhead isn't a wow-specific thing, but neither is instanced content. If they can streamline that aspect of the raid game and remove a bunch of player frustration and raising overall customer satisfaction, why can't they apply that same philosophy to other aspects? Why shouldn't they streamline things?

 

GSH

What about having a built-in DKP system? Most raiding guilds use one of three systems to distribute loot: Random, Loot Council, or DKP. There's in-game support for the first two systems, but a guild that wants to use a DKP system has to set up an out-of-game system to handle it.

And that's a fair bit of work. A simple DKP system, one that preserved memory across raids, would cut a lot of effort out of running a raiding guild. It also doesn't have to be the perfect DKP system (not like we'll get any agreement on that subject). It just has to be a reasonable system.

I would suggest a Spend-All DKP system. If you are in a raid, and an epic drops, you gain a point. If you win an item, you lose all your points. This would be pretty trivial to implement, and require relatively little extra data to be stored. It's not the best system in the world (I personally prefer bidding systems), but it would be good enough for a more casual guild, that didn't want to spend time and effort setting up their own system.

 

Golias

I think we can do better than turn this into a casual Vs. hardcore topic. The OP is correct when he says the paradigm is to raid 4 hours a night or plus. It seems what people are disagreeing here is with any kind of engineering that would make raiding more favorable to raid into to 2 or 3 hours blocks. I also think that is a decision up to each player/guild.

However, I also won't say "everything is fine, deal with it". The amount of time dedicated to raiding, in order to be successful, is more demanding and straining than it should. This includes preparation time too, not just raiding hours.

Raiding takes anywhere from 30 to 40 hours a week on a serious guild in most cases. This is too much, even when you compare with other serious hobbies. I'd argue it would be nice to have solutions where this overall time requirements are decreased, but still leave a big margin of freedom for guilds to decide how to invest their time.

 

Vohbo

Our raid times are 19 30 to 23 00, they always have been, with possible extension to about midnight in very rare circumstances. The length of these blocks is kind of a natural effect, since most people are ready to start playing at around 19 00ish and they go to sleep somewhere past 23 00, giving most people a 4 hour block where they can play in. So I don't quite understand why it surprises you that raiding is done in these 4 hour blocks.

 

Nezralix

This doesn't strike you as a chicken or egg scenario? Obviously everyone in your guild can deal with that schedule, or they wouldn't be in your guild.

 

Uglesh

I hate to wade back into this quagmire... but i will.

First, who ever said that ALL content will be viable for every player?? If you were in business (and lets not forget that this is EXACTLY what this game is) would you not try to create a game to hold as many people as possible?? The fact is that there are simply many different types of players out there with varying degrees of play time available to them. As such, Blizzard has created a vast array of opportunity for everyone to find some niche in the game that they find enjoyable.

If you were TRULY a 12 hr a week player, you wouldn't be worried about 25 man content at this point because you would likely still be in Karazhan (as is much of the population). I really don't understand how someone can say that even in 2-3 hr blocks you can't progress. Surely you don't expect to be in Black Temple at this point do you??

Lets look at some basics I think we can all agree on. Karazhan is EASILY broken into small chunks. SSC and TK both have bosses that can be reached in 30 min or less from entry. In all these instances, once you kill the boss all the associated trash stops spawning. This means that even if you only did one boss a night you could progress. In time as you gear up and learn the fights, that will become 2 bosses (or more) and give you a chance to clear the instance.

Time played is completely player controlled. As we have stated in the past, the biggest wastes of time are largely the result of players not being prepared or maximizing their time. I know personally, once my guild had Kara on farm and we were gearing new players and Alts we would run "Zero Tolerance" nights. This meant chain pulling and no unnecessary breaks. We cut our time down by 25% or better on most nights.

While I feel for people who have limited schedules, I really don't think we need to trivalize the game for the sake of the players who spend the least amount of time in it.

 

Barraind

4 Hours is psychologically pleasing. It is 1/2 the amount of sleep you're supposed to get, 1/4 your waking hours, 1/2 the typical "free" time in a day (yes, I know the commute to and from work/school/whatever is not free time, and a tremendous pain, but its considered). It has a halfway point that is between the end of the second hour and start of the third, its halfway point coincides with the longest amount of time the majority of people let themselves focus on things anymore (2 hours, its not just something Hollywood created, its based on some research), and leads itself to a natural break point, which revitalizes people and puts them into focus for the next 2 hours.

3 hours is not pleasing. Its an odd number, it feels manufactured, and cutting it up into various pieces puts one off axis, and with a feeling that something is generally wrong (the 2 hour block thing). Additionally, from experience, calling an end to something after the third hour leaves one with the feeling that something is either unfinished or took too long to do.



From a practical standpoint, if you can break off 3 hours of time to do something, the majority of those people can do 4, and 4 is better, because it is more, and more is better, because you need that time to learn content (or once learned, allows you to do it in 1 fewer day than 3 hour blocks allow for, even discounting completely trash respawn timers).

 

Linnet

I'm really not seeing this. 4 hours is fine, but there should (by the law of averages) be a non-insignificant number of people who have a longer commute, need to do stuff before they log in of an evening etc who would prefer to start an hour later but still need to finish at the same time. There don't seem to be a lot of guilds who cater to that, so you're stuck dashing out of work at 5 on the dot and eating a sandwich instead of supper just to make the raid on time several times a week -- this is NOT unusual from my experience.

So the question is, why aren't there more guilds who could cater to that timing and how can the people who share that restriction (like I say, it's not an insignificant number of people, when I was hardcore raiding it was quite a few of us) find each other more easily.

I don't think raiding per se needs to change, but I think there are real improvements that could be made in game to help people find guilds that cater to them and to help guilds with different schedules recruit.

 

Lithose

We raid 10 hours a week..Two 3 hour days and one four hour day (Four hour day is friday). Our raids end at 10:30 (11:30 on friday) so we can sleep for work ect.

We are now 3/5 in Hyj and 3/9 in BT..It is entirely possible to run an effective raid group on three days a week, however, you need a good solid infastructure. Strat discussion should be done on message boards, not before the boss..Consumables should be ready to go, people should be repaired and you should have reliable people ready to summon "just in case". Raid lists should be posted the night before, not formed the hour of.

I agree that things could be done to make raiding more player friendly, without reducing difficulty. Things like thining trash, stopping respawns, increasing selective loot (Cut down on dissing), offering faster wipe recovers and a slew of other things.

 

Nezralix

I'm fairly certain that this is the most preposterous thing I've ever read on this forum.

Clearly, anybody who can put in three hours can probably do four. And if they can do four, then why not five? Heck, they might well have six hours to spend. You know what, people with jobs are a minority, there's no reason not to crank it up to an all day affair, so long as all these time blocks are practically equivalent.

 

songster

Part of the problem is time zones. Four hours an evening may well be fine, but that four hours also has to overlap with the other raiders around you. I am in the UK, with a full-time job and children. Raiding from 20:00 to midnight UK time would be fine. That is 21:00 to 01:00 game time.

As far as I can tell, there is not a single guild in SSC or higher on any EU PvE server that has those hours. EU servers work on CET (1 hr ahead of UK), and the vast majority of groups start their raids some time from 18:30 to 19:30 CET. Many days I literally do not get through the door until 19:30 CET. I'd kinda like to actually see my family, or eat something that isn't a sandwich in front of a screen.

 

epiphenom

While I agree with you that the other argument is pretty crazy, I don't see why you insist on labelling this point as equally so. Is it so absurd to believe that most players inclined to endgame raiding find the four-hour block to be the time of greatest consensus? That, in terms of the general raiding population, that more of the population might be concentrated in one block of availability instead of being generally distributed across all availabilities?

The point isn't that all time blocks are equivalent. The point is specific to the four-hour block. Five hour and six hour guilds are very rare because no one has that kind of time. But clearly, a lot of people have the four hours to spare, and people with four hours to spare naturally drain away from three-hour guilds' recruiting pools, because people with four hours are a subset of people with three hours. (People with five and six hours are also a subset of people with three hours, but there are significantly fewer of them.) Obviously we disagree on the proportions, but just because I observe the 4-hour pool to comprise 50% or more of the 3-hour pool and you don't doesn't make the argument automatically unworthy of consideration.

 

Barraind

I'd advise you re-read many of your own posts in this thread then, because its nowhere near those in terms of "... what the fuck?" quotient.

Running around screaming "thats not true, thats not true, thats not tr-uuu-ue" doesnt make something untrue.


If you start raid times around 7pm (which is a pretty traditional start time for most raiding guilds across most servers in most games (though I see 7:30 crop up now and again)) there is really no difference between a 3 hour raid and a 4 hour raid for many people. There just isnt. The 4 hour raid block is not unique to WoW, it exists because 7-11 is virtually the exact same thing for most raiders as 7-10 is, and 7:30-11:30 is about the same as 7:30-10:30. If you are sacrificing a chunk of your evening to raid, maximize that sacrifice, and keep from sacrificing another large chunk on a different evening. Its the psychological opportunity cost, and yes, its a conscious part of raid leading/organizing.

I've raided in hardcore and casual guilds for many, many years, and in games where peoples play patterns followed the same pattern of log on at 7, log off to sleep a little after 11 (or if they didnt, stay up till 3ish). Its not new, its not special to wow due to any internal mechanisms, and if raids were designed to take 3 hours, many raid guilds would still schedule 4 hours around them, and expect people to commit for that long.

 

Brista

Isn't this already there in the form of the buff/nerf cycle? 2.3 comes in this week, buffing some key elements (eg protection warrior threat, druid and priest healer mana regeneration), nerfing a hard boss or two and handing out easily obtained shinies

This allows the more casual raiding guilds to beat content they wouldn't have been able to do in earlier builds on the game.

It's actually quite a clever system that allows the hardcore to reap rewards from spending numerous hours a week wiping on hard bosses without forever preventing casuals from seeing that content.

On top of that the level cap rises so if you were too casual to see inside BT at 70 you should be able to go with a few friends at 80 or 90.

So effectively there is a rest exp type system but rather than building up daily it gets delivered in a block every few months.

 

GSH

What's interesting is that on most of the servers I've been on, the standard raid time is 6-9. That's possibly because they've all been PST servers, and going 6-9pm allows the EST people to raid from 9-12 EST. 6pm is the minimum that west coast people can commit to, and 12 midnight is the latest that you can reasonably expect east coast people to stay up. The lead guild on Skywall, Reclaimed, stretches it by raiding from 5:30-9:30.

Now, I'm not sure why east coast people play on PST servers, or why it doesn't seem possible to make a west-coast-only guild. But I submit that 7pm start times are not as common as you think they are.

 

Dominus

Just to put in a solid example, my guild raids 3 hours a night standard, with a 5 hour sunday raid. I can't think of a single trash clear in TBC that takes 45+ minutes that I've experienced (beyond the skip Al'ar go to Void Reaver thing). Sure it might not be optimal to raid 3 hours (you waste some of the respawn timer on trash), but it certainly hasn't ever been an issue.

I wasn't with my current guild when they were learning the front 5 of SSC, nor VR in TK, but I was here for Al'ar, Solarian, and our recent Vashj kill. My take on a 3 hour raid schedule is this: SSC trash clears are short and sweet for the most part. The week after our first Vashj kill, we had Hydross/Lurker down and had done the first 2 pulls to Morogrim in ~45 minutes. Less than 1/3 of the supposed "sweet spot" time many people want. When working on new bosses (Al'ar...Solarian is a joke) with trash clears, 3 hours works fine. You clear to Al'ar, get attempts for the duration before respawn (which is technically [Time of first pull + 2 hours - total time spent on trash clear]...in reality, less than 2 hours). IF you hit the respawn of trash, you assess the situation, decide whether or not a reclear + a few attempts is in order, and then you put the decision into action. Simple as that. Many times this leads to raids being called early, which hasn't ever been a problem for us since I've been around. In fact, I'd think that would be preferred among the people who can't dedicate more than 3 hours.

So, to anyone who says that only being able to raid 3 hours a night has left them absolutely devoid of options, I call BS. Server transfers are available, and if my guild (who started a bit late) is on Kael now, there are certainly some 3 hour/3 night guilds out there in MH/BT.

The most important part of getting things done in a 3 hour block is to make sure everyone is prepared to start on time and focused on the task at hand. Trimming the time it takes to actually start has a tremendous effect on the speed of clears. Likewise, people being focused means trash goes by in a breeze, with few to no deaths, and no wipes. Those two things alone can account for a major difference in attempts (IE, 20-30 min clear to hydross started 15 minutes after you should've pulled, and 45 minutes from pull time to having hydross/lurker down).

 

Furion

I'm well aware of those circles, but I kept them out on purpose as rested XP *specifically* rewards those that don't do "brute force", while nerving does not care wether you brute force or not. The guild who raids less hours will not get any advantage over the guild who spends more hours, even on a "nerved encounter" with "buffed characters". Actually in many cases the guild who spends more hours/week will not only progress faster in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense (efficiency) as well. Just to make my argument more clear. If you generalize that to the point of "doesn't Blizzard help the casuals by nerving content" it's just a different argument.

P.S.: I think content nerving has just "accidently" turned out like this and at the point where they made an active decision for nerving/buffing cycles it has been in the game already for a time... not very clever in my book, but apparently it works. I'd prefer a different system but this isn't the topic at hand.

 

Sillia

It isn't that 3 hours a night leaves you devoid of options. However, the 3 hours/night crowd has a harder time than the 4 hours/night crowd, and is barely better than the 2 hours/night crowd when working on a difficult boss despite spending 50% more time than the 2 hr/night crowd. The additional hour spent isn't as useful as the previous two hours spent, and it seems out of place.