My point still stands that staggering raid content would (A) not have affected guilds like yours and mine and (B) would only have helped the raid game since the bleeding edge guilds would of had less "nothing to do" time.
The "elite cusp" as you call it has every right to complain, I see no flaw in that. If Blizzard did a better job of staggering the raid content your guild and my guild would still be exactly where we are now and the bleeding edge guilds would have less to complain about. Sounds like a win/win to me.
That's a dangerously paternalistic argument, to say that the game should have been cockblocked more severely for the benefit of bleeding-edge guilds. I could see it being made, but I have yet to see anyone from aforementioned bleeding-edge guilds chime in and say that they wish the content were more staggered in any of these discussions. And if they do, I'd like to see them not raise living hell in situations such as the infamous C'Thun cockblock or bugged BWL or SSC/TK 1.0 trash, etc. etc.
They arent saying to bug the encounters, merely let them farm them for a while. Like guilds farmed nef for a few months before AQ, so should we have been farming kael and vashj for a while. Instead we killed Kael a handful of times to get people keyed and were out of there.
That's a dangerously paternalistic argument, to say that the game should have been cockblocked more severely for the benefit of bleeding-edge guilds. I could see it being made, but I have yet to see anyone from aforementioned bleeding-edge guilds chime in and say that they wish the content were more staggered in any of these discussions. And if they do, I'd like to see them not raise living hell in situations such as the infamous C'Thun cockblock or bugged BWL or SSC/TK 1.0 trash, etc. etc.
I think if you change your view and see WoW not a game with a one every 18 month expansion but as a continuing service Blizzard provides then it doesn't look so paternalistic.
What if Blizzard launches the expansion and just flat out says "every quarter there will be a world event corresponding to a new arena season and a new Raid Zone being released." Would anyone really be unhappy?
Yes, everyone would have been better served by Blizzard staggering the release of raid content. Yes, it's a little silly to play a videogame for 4-5 hours a day, 4-6 days a week, for 2-3 years and then act like the developers are incompetent for not churning out triple-A quality content faster than you can go through it.
We kill Mag. You do your attunement quest (of old) and you're out of there. The difficulty doesn't change drastically but the gear does.
We kill Kael. You do your attunement quest and you're out of there. The difficulty GOES DOWN and the gear quality DRASTICALLY goes up.
T6 does not require t5 loot. I wore crafted. T5 is only there as a means to get attuned. THAT is the problem with tbc. It's months and possibly a year or more of development time for wasted content. It isn't a race. There just isn't a reason to go back. Stagger the content or put some gear checks in the next expansion.
I think if you change your view and see WoW not a game with a one every 18 month expansion but as a continuing service Blizzard provides then it doesn't look so paternalistic.
If they're purposely sitting on content for the good of the customer, than I think it does.
I can understand why BT and ZA weren't included in the release. They weren't ready. And no one really holds it against Blizzard. But it takes the argument to a different level to say or imply that SSC/TK should've been ganked out as well.
Originally Posted by Lookit
There's really no need to rehash this argument.
Oh, good link, also been dead for 2 months, not sure what the policy on thread necromancy is..
but I have yet to see anyone from aforementioned bleeding-edge guilds chime in and say that they wish the content were more staggered in any of these discussions.
And if they do, I'd like to see them not raise living hell in situations such as the infamous C'Thun cockblock or bugged BWL or SSC/TK 1.0 trash, etc. etc.
We are not talking about C'Thun style content blocking. We are talking about delaying/staggering the release of the next Tier until the previous Tier has been farmed a certain amount. There is almost zero downside in doing it in this manner.
I didn't want to start discussing this topic again since it has already been discussed in the above thread. But Wunlastri's view on the matter didn't seem to have any logical backing to it, so I felt I had to reply.
I'm fairly sure it was paced this way to allow more people to finish BT and Sunwell prior to the next expansion as one of the big gripes was from the number of guilds who didn't have time to clear Naxx prior to TBC. I would agree that it is not Blizzard's fault that you are good at the game. Unfoturnately for bleeding edge guilds it leaves you bored for some months until new content but all in all it's in Blizzard's best interest (as well as the general WoW population) for more people to see as much content as possible vs. balancing content release around the elite fringe.
It's easy to forget your progress relative to the general WoW populace but people would do well to remember that most people never got to experience Rags in 1.0. And the hard reality is that the game will suffer far more if people get fed up because expansions are thought of as coming too quickly and they don't have enough time at end game than if the Nihlums and DnTs of the raiding world get bored with their top dog status and move on to a different game. The average joe will look up to the number one guild in the world regardless of what their name is.
I don't know about you but I wouldn't be taking on Hydross without a full NR and a full FrR tank, gimmick 1 hour warlock kiting kill aside.
Because AH purchasable gear counts as a gear check, for a total of 2 people in the raid...please give me a break. If we wanted to use that type of logic, then every boss that requires anything that has been purchased off the AH, is now a gear check. Buy the gear, then learn the pull, and you're already 75% of the way to a win. You don't have to spend months and months for people to sit there and farm up T4 content to beat him, which is what a gear check is, you have to have cleared previous content so your dps/tanks/healers were able to beat the timers faced to them.
The reason I use Naj'entus as the only real gear check is that for being kills, your dps is very tight, and if you got idiots in your guild, then they are running around with very low health, making them a liability. These same players are not a liability ever again after seeing Naj'entus. If the berserk timer was 10 minutes instead of 8, I would be hesitant to say this.
I'm going to link to an off-site article that I've read a few times and every time I read it, I gain more insight into the world of gaming. I feel that the article applies here.
I'm going to quote part of the article because I couldn't really have said it better myself.
Ok, those of you still here…your game will need to attract the hardcore players who play at an insanely high level. They’re your opinion leaders. If a game can stand up to the rigors of tournament play—which is orders of magnitude more rigorous than you might believe—then it will be able to hold their attention. As players get better, they will get more into your game, not less into it. The hardcore players, as opinion leaders, influence a big part of the casual market.
Basically, if the top "hardcore" guilds move on to another game, it will stagnate. Interest in the game will go away. The average joe will not have anyone to look up to. If the theory of "casuals will look up to whoever is on top, no matter who it is" was true, then EQ would still be flourishing. Keeping the "hardcore" gamers interested keeps the game going. Without them the game is mediocre by default. I'm not going to go any further as that would result in a rehash of what was said in the "Pacing" thread.
I'll have to agree to disagree on that. The whole line of reasoning is specious and self serving in my opinion. And EQ is as a matter of fact still going to this date it just isn't top dog anymore. Games cannot stay on top because the masses are fickle. It has very little to do with the "elite" players of said game. It's no different than any other form of entertainment. And in the same way that Oscar winners and film critics don't drive box office sales, Nihlum does not drive subscribtion renewals. There are still a great many people who don't even know who Nihlum is so suggesting that they and their ilk are in some way the lynch pin in the whole operation is a bit foolhearty. Such self important thinking is dangerous.
There are still a great many people who don't even know who Nihlum is so suggesting that they and their ilk are in some way the lynch pin in the whole operation is a bit foolhearty. Such self important thinking is dangerous.
You don't have to know who Nihilum is; quite frankly, all the average bloke needs is someone in better gear, camped in Ironforge/Shatt to look up to. Personally, during my newb days, when Razorgore was still a cock block, my role model was a hunter in tier 1, with Rhok'delar. He was the only one with a full set, and was just standing out in a crowd, be it a pre cross realm AV, or simply the IF bank. The day I saw that guy is the day I knew I wanted a Rhok'delar myself. It took me a whole year to get it, but it gave me something to strive for. Basically, he's the reason I'm still around 2 years later. Otherwise, I'd have never bothered raiding and I'd just have been fed up with 5 mans and UBRS, cancelling my subscription.
Oddly enough, now that guy has long since quit WOW, and it's my turn to be people's role model, and I do have a few hunter friends that look up to me. And I still get people I don't even know asking me where I get my gear (which is a great achievement, in the age of thottbot, wowhead and AtlasLoot).
I don't fancy being a celebrity; I hate being in the center of attention, but I have to be honest, when someone asked me for tips just a few days ago, and the discussion ended with something like 'keep up the good work on the EJ boards' I realized there's actually truth to the hardcore people being the engine of MMOs. But I can easily see myself, when I started, simply amazed at the artworks and the stats of the raiders' gear, and listening to them talk about specs, enchants and consumables, i felt so out of place, yet I wanted to join their inner circle. I feel I need to add that the casuals can become hardcores themselves. The thing is, if you can keep refreshing the hardcore population faster than they're quitting the game, you're pretty much set for a lengthy and productive life span.
Originally Posted by XI-
In summary, TBC raiding is easy. 9/10 encounters can be summarized with 1 phrase. Stay out of the fucking fire. If this is too difficult BWL was still there last I checked, so go have at it for some practice.
Because AH purchasable gear counts as a gear check, for a total of 2 people in the raid...please give me a break. If we wanted to use that type of logic, then every boss that requires anything that has been purchased off the AH, is now a gear check. Buy the gear, then learn the pull, and you're already 75% of the way to a win. You don't have to spend months and months for people to sit there and farm up T4 content to beat him, which is what a gear check is, you have to have cleared previous content so your dps/tanks/healers were able to beat the timers faced to them.
The reason I use Naj'entus as the only real gear check is that for being kills, your dps is very tight, and if you got idiots in your guild, then they are running around with very low health, making them a liability. These same players are not a liability ever again after seeing Naj'entus. If the berserk timer was 10 minutes instead of 8, I would be hesitant to say this.
The problem is Naj'entus was never really meant to be a gear check...Tigole or whomever specifically stated that the first boss in BT was a "Grats on Kael, here's 2 more free epics on top of Rage's 2 free epics!" routine. I find your quote interesting given that the check was only on 2 classes (priests and mages), and really easy to achieve with tailored gear + a couple PvP pieces. You didn't need any t5 loot.
Tailored stuff has damage, while arena stuff had stamina. Tier 5 had both, but it wasn't required because the requirements in both categories are too lenient. Guilds that reached Patchwerk in full tier 2 came pretty damn close to the berserk. Maybe if Naj'entus was a 7 minute timer with a 10k splash, he'd be on that level.
Oh, good link, also been dead for 2 months, not sure what the policy on thread necromancy is..
There isn't any policy I can think of offhand... the point being it's already more or less been discussed to the death both ways, and unless something revolutionary or radical is announced that brings new discussions to the table, people will tend to just rehash points and opinions we've all heard a few dozen times over, whether it be in that thread, or elsewhere.
Of course, I'd say if something new did come up, that thread would be the best place to discuss it. The latest tangent this thread has taken already has little enough to do with 2.4/Sunwell.
How long do you guys think is appropriate for the average completion time of the event? I don't have any statistics off hand but for comparison my server was 10th place on AQ40 gates and we finished the turn ins 1 month after they started. The previous 10 servers (GG Medivh...) were much more coordinated and did it a lot shorter period. I'd say the average was somewhere around 2-2.5 months.
Is 2 months too long? Does the amount of time even really matter if people are motivated and having fun with the event?
For the AQ40 event, there was a month where the players could work towards it, and after the first month, the turn-ins started auto-completing it themselves, then you needed a guild to actually open the gates.
So you had crazy servers like Medivh, that finished the event before the auto-completion finished.
Then you had servers like Sargeras, that were 1/2 to 3/4 of the way there when the auto-compete stuff started happening so it took us a month and a half.
Then you had the low end crappy server with no population or raiding guilds that did little to no work and took 2 months, and a guild to kill Nefarian in 4 hours which probably took them longer. :X
I imagine that the developers felt a month and a half was satisfactory before for their average playerbase, so I imagine it'll be similar for this. The difference being that even if a guild WANTS to work toward it hardcore, they can't because of the nature of the daily quest. You can only complete those raid unlocking quests, once daily. So it'll be a work in progress that's for sure.
I think if you change your view and see WoW not a game with a one every 18 month expansion but as a continuing service Blizzard provides then it doesn't look so paternalistic.
What if Blizzard launches the expansion and just flat out says "every quarter there will be a world event corresponding to a new arena season and a new Raid Zone being released." Would anyone really be unhappy?
Those that neither raid nor arena wouldn't be satisfied with that. Add 'a new 5-man' and 'new solo content' with each major patch and you'd cover most people. Anyone that got in on a free trial and got hooked by the solo or small group game is probably going to want more of it, even at level cap.
Is 2 months too long? Does the amount of time even really matter if people are motivated and having fun with the event?
The problem with this type of event now is not how long it takes to open, it's the length of the delay between raid content. If we were to get content released every 4-6 months, and have to do some sort of event to open them, so that the maximum time between raid content releases is no more than 6 months, that is fine. The problem with it now is that BT and Hyjal have been open for 7 months now, and are going to be open for 9 months at least before Sunwell is released. Far to long between raid content. Sure the guilds that are months behind on content are going to find it fun, because magically they are now on par with the best guilds in the world progress wise.
Speaking from my guilds progress, killed Illidan on September 11, with a few set backs on progressing, we still finished very well in the standings, but by the time new content is released, we will have spent at least 6 months farming Illidan with no new raid content. Adding in a world event to further delay access by 2 months to content will force fa more people to quit, reroll and all around lose interest is the worst thing possible.
Looking back at MC and the first Rag kill till when BWL was released, was a max of like 2-3 months. First kill of Nef till AQ40 train wreck, about 4-5 months. Twin Emps farming till Naxx released was 3-4 months. And those are the numbers for the best guilds in the world, not my guild. Take Nihilum's Illidan kill to Sunwell's soonest release, 8 months of killing the same crap. Average release between raid zones pre-TBC was 6 months. Problem with TBC's releasing was that T4 and T5 content were shipped together, and only T4 content was tested. If testing on SSC/TK would of been done on the PTR after TBC release, we probably would of seen launch about April~, pushing BT/Hyjal back a little bit, making this a moot point.
Blizzard loves to do world events, but the problem with the world events is not the time of the event itself, its when the event is released to when the content is accessible. Probably the best world event ever was killing Eranikus for the Green Scepter shard, Maws a close second. Repeatable content on world events is awesome.
Last edited by Hate Monkey : 12/28/07 at 9:05 PM.
Reason: mute moot who cares.
The problem with this type of event now is not how long it takes to open, it's the length of the delay between raid content. If we were to get content released every 4-6 months, and have to do some sort of event to open them, so that the maximum time between raid content releases is no more than 6 months, that is fine. The problem with it now is that BT and Hyjal have been open for 7 months now, and are going to be open for 9 months at least before Sunwell is released. Far to long between raid content.
Well if you look at the best guilds in the world and how fast content was cleared, it's a safe assumption to say that your average raiding guild will clear content 2-3 months later than the top, sometimes more. Thats a total of about 5 months after the release of the content till the average raiding guilds have it cleared.
This gives the top guilds plenty of time to farm up the gear, making their raid performance higher, while the guild that may have 3-4 kills of the end boss when the new content is released is still going to struggle with some bosses that require higher dps, better geared tanks, and so forth. Look back at Patchwerk, a barely clearing BWL guild hit a brick wall here, while a farming for a while BWL clearing guild here over took the encounter relatively easily.
Well, pacing was debated before, but I guess I can sum up my own view like this;
January => June - Too much to do for everyone. At least I felt stressed out sitting there in early T4 content, knowing how awfully many bosses were alreay out there, with more to come.
July => whenever - Too little to do for more and more people.
I walked away from T4 and T5 with a feeling that those instances were merely a very lengthy attunement process you wanted to get done and over with. Surely, had there been 2-3 month breaks between tiers, then Magtheridon and Kael'Thas would have felt more like epic end level encounters and less like hurdless you had to get past. Obviously, none of this was helped by the fact content was tuned to Naxxramas level consumables orgies from the start.
And ofc this all affects the Sunwell too. The faster groups will now be more or less completely T6 geared, whereas the slower ones will not. So the developers again face a dilemma with tuning the Sunwell. Set it to "too easy" for the Nihilums of the world or "too hard" for the more average guilds. *
All I can hope for is that the unlocking of the second half of the instance works out in a nice manner, and hopefully manages to rebalance the situation a little. But I'm sceptical. I think we will need the next expansion before the major problems introduced with TBC gearing / raid pacing can be sorted out properly.
* - Though I should add that I think the badge / PvP / etc stuff in TBC is a major improvement over vanilla WoW. At least you can get new recruits into ok gear fairly fast now.
You can't have any non-cockblock gearchecks in a world where you're trying to not have PvE geared people dominate the PvP world, at least not until there are many more stats that clearly are superior in one world or the other and much more gear that is good in one world and bad in the other. You can still have cockblock gear checks-- resist gear, basically-- but you can't have normal, fair do-this-much-DPS-and-have-this-much-HPS checks.
(Tank checks still work, but a model where you only need to raid to gear up your tank and nobody else gets meaningful loot is a crappy model.)
Arena balance is the reason that there isn't any substantial gear progression in TBC. There's no reason a guild in Kara level gear can't kill Illidan, and in fact that's exactly what's happened.
This was a totally foreseeable issue and in fact was a necessary consequence of the decision to balance PvE loot against the PvP game.
12/28/07, 3:59 PM
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