Wintern

This server wide reputation has the potential to be a huge disaster, let's hoping they learned from AQ40.

 

◊ Praetorian

I don't really think it'll be a problem. The problem with AQ40 was a combination of the numbers involved for some of the mats and the incentives. Runecloth turn-ins went quickly on basically every server. Why? Because the stuff was plentiful and every level 60 got tons of it, and you could turn it in for a guaranteed green item that might vendor for a lot if a weapon or turn into high-demand enchanting mats, along with a chance of blues/epics as well. But there was no incentive whatsoever for people to farm up lots of linen, let alone 800k of it, or to turn in expensive herbs in any meaningful quantity.

Here, it's doing a new daily. Thousands of people do dailies... daily. If it offers gold and has a rep tie-in or some other incentive, plenty of players will do it -- not just raiders. And not for the sake of the server or to somehow help the raiding guilds on the server, but rather for their own personal gain. It makes sense to me, and it adds a touch of "realism" or a sense of players affecting the game world. I mean in Skettis, we've been blowing up so many Kaliri eggs that the damn things should be extinct by now. Here, if there's a war being waged around the ruined Sunwell, you have the opportunity for a sense of real progress as players' collective efforts change the dimensions of the battle and the available quests.

 

Lymmel

I am a bit worried by the non class specific sets, I definitely wouldn't appreciate a high on hit/crit generic dps caster set that would have less +damage than my shadowpriest specific t6 set and would end up creating a fsw vs t5 situation. Even if I imagine that with generic sets the bonuses will be pretty strong, as they will need to apply to all relevant classes so that might be an incentive. With only 6 bosses I doubt there will be room for more than 1 kind of piece for each slot/role.

 

Caligula

Without going too far into the realm of pure speculation. The developers seem to heavily favor the new token systems, as do many players. Maybe there will be different sets favoring different stats, sort of like the Warlock PvP sets. I just don't see them going back to the MC/BWL style of "1 set per class" or "1 set per spec". And I'm pretty sure they've learned from the whole FSW mishap

 

Malan

Well and they aren't even full 'sets' either, the article says that mostly its single items with a few 2pc sets that are not class specific.

Easiest way to deal with that would be Rings + Neck or Weapon + Ring or Weapon + Offhand, etc etc.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Caligula

That's a good point. Ala AQ rep/Silithus style.

 

PSGarak

A slight extension of what Praetor said: My server (Hyjal) was the fourth US server to open the gates despite only have maybe 4 guilds kill Nef by that time (the first server had around 10), and we basically credit that entirely to Fires of Heaven giving massive incentives to every tom dick and harry to do the turn-ins. If you sent them the crap for the turn-in, they would mail you back the green and enter you in a daily raffle for all the random world-drop blues and purples they had collected from their boss kills, plus running one random nub through MC and giving him first pick of the loot (it ended up being a level 50 hunter who got 5 pieces of giantstalker). The raiding guilds did it to unlock raid content, and the non-raiders did it because all that "junk" was actually good gear for them.

Details aside, the point is: the content got unlocked way the fuck faster, because FoH harnessed casuals to do a lot of the grunt work, and they did that by offering cheap and easy incentives. Dailies will do the exact same thing. It will go extraordinarily quick compared to the AQ40 gates.

What I'm really concerned with is whether unlocking the town is a permanent thing, or it has to be done, say, each week (ie camp gets reset every weekly raidID reset). Personally I would prefer a weekly thing because it makes for greater integration of raiding and world-events but I could see the arguement for the other way too, especially on low-pop servers.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Lymmel

I am also wondering if they chose the reputation triggered bosses and world event gradual progress as a pacing mechanism so the instance can last a while for all kind of guilds, as opposed to the rather anti climatic fast clearing of Black Temple.

Guess it's speculation at this point, but I wouldn't expect it to be a 2-4 month event like the gate opening was, more like something to hold off the waves of guilds who have finished bt/hyjal and will be in danger of waiting for wotlk another x months if they steamroll through SP too fast.

 

Galred

Well I'd rather see the longevity of an an instance be limited by reputation/daily quest turnins than either impossible-to-kill bosses (C'thun 1.0 by reputation) or brutal overtuning (T5 content on TBC release).

This smells like an experiment to me - will the playerbase accept this kind of limitation? I think Blizzard is desperatly after some way to prevent Nihilum-style guilds from blowing through all content instantly but yet not having the bleeding edge raiders cancel accounts.

Also, smaller sets I recall being vaguely mentioned by Blue posters in the past. If it's AQ20-style "sets" I'd be very happy, I thought those were a great complement to your raiding gear that didn't interfere with your existing set pieces.

 

XI-

References.

WowJutsu: World of Warcraft Guild Rankings: Ranked US Realms

US Realm Stats - WarcraftRealms.com

Look at the top 3 realms on wowjutsu, and then check their populations. Now by no means do I consider their numbers accurate, but I think they are a decent ballpark. Anything that involves turning bullshit in or aggregate number of quest completions is a fucking shitty idea biased towards higher population realms. Maybe if we're really fucking lucky they'll segregate it by faction again too.

The best part of Naxx was the chase and the competition something conspicuously absent in TBC with the open path of raid progression. The fact that they're ruining it for Sunwell is just sad. No one gave a shit about the race in AQ because everything was bugged and cockblocked by the stupid gate event. Nevermind the fact that the state of the raid game now is so horrific that as soon as someone gets a first kill they release a complete video and strategy guide to pump up their epeen size.

I'm at work, more later...

 

◊ Praetorian

There's no reason they can't make the thresholds proportional to, say, the number of level 70 characters on a given server.

(Besides, honestly, I expect most of Sunwell to be cleared on the PTR anyway. I mean, it's six bosses, and there are hundreds of guilds worldwide who are dying for new content. We're basically done with BT and Hyjal and only go back hoping that Illidan will drop some good stuff. When Sunwell hits the PTR, we'll be lining up with everyone else.)

 

◊ Vontre

Unfortunately Xi, the whole "race" aspect of raid progression is only enjoyable for maybe a couple hundred players in the entire world. Most of the rest of us, even impressively hardcore guilds like EJ, are not dumping the 7 days/week for race progression at the beginning of the instance, nor would we want to. That's not really a fair complaint.. I agree raiding is shitty now but this is a pretty insignificant complaint.

The Sunwell pacing mechanism is, at very least, something we haven't really seen before, it doesn't sound much like the AQ gates at all, and it'd certainly be possible to weigh the quest progression as a function of realm population rather than a fixed value. This does offer a bit of "dynamic world" to the server, in a small way that doesn't really impact the majority of players, and the idea has potential at very least. I personally didn't mind the AQ gates, actually, but I wasn't the one farming linen... or anything at all, actually.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

songster

I'm intgrigued by Kael being the end boss of the 5-man. Recall that they lifted the SSC/TK attunements once BT came out. Could this be a way of loosening the Hyjal attunement when Sunwell comes out? Would be interesting indeed if 5-man Kael also dropped a vial. Would make backflagging less of an issue too.

 

◊ Praetorian

Sort of. When Nihilum and Curse were both on Illidan, their websites were both pretty much overwhelmed with traffic. Huge, huge, huge spikes. Yeah, only a handful of groups have a real shot at a "world first" but people do care.

 

Pyria

The linked blog also mentioned that you'll get to see a town built as you complete dailies and accumulate resources for the faction in question. I think this is an awesome idea, it gives a tangible sense of progress and group effort that is somewhat absent from rep/honor/cash grinds.

Hopefully Kalecgos will be a nod to Vael, still one of my favourite fights in WoW. He also underlines my theory that the unfortunate fate of every WoW dragon is either to be enslaved by evil or corrupted and driven mad so adventurer mobs can zerg them and steal their shinies.

 

UnholY_Prince

I wonder if the new 5-man will require you to be Hyjal attuned. Lore-wise it would make sense, and it seems implied that the Sunwell reputation grind may take place in there, among other places. However, this would also alienate the majority of the player-base, and I don't think Blizzard would want to release Sunwell without giving something to the majority. Still, if fresh 70s are jumping in, killing Kael after they haven't fought him the first time, just seems like a strange way go about the continuity.

 

XI-

You aren't new to wow are you Gurg? Expecting intelligent design from Blizzard is like expecting the US Government to be able to stick to a budget, it just isn't happening. As for the Sunwell PTR, I think typically the content is broken enough on purpose to stop this phenomenon. AFAIK no one killed Illidan on PTR, and I know for a fact no one completed Naxx, and I don't think either of those was due to a lack of guilds trying.

Even if you try to come up with some arbitrary numbers, than you almost scale it the other way. Korgath is low pop, but almost 100% raiders and would have a high motivation to open the gates. And you'd end up screwing realms who might only have 1 raiding guild, but a big population (PvE servers for example). Implementing raid zones through player driven world events not dependant on the people directly doing them is a lose-lose situation. If they want world events make it some kind of timed raid encounter leading to a huge RP lore event that people can attend but really not influence.

 

Emeraude

Lore! Kalecgos is in Sunwell, and we have to fight him, a la Vael. That makes me all kinda giddy, nice continuity!

I do hope that nothing bad happens to him, er bad as in death, being enslaved by Kil'Jaeden has to be pretty bad obviously. I was kinda worried about the lore surrounding Sunwell, I suppose if Kalecgos is involved we'll also see Anveena at the end.

 

Charsi

Moreso if they simultaneously changed the Vial of Eternity quest to require a single vial - this vial being obtainable off either Kael in TK, Vashj in SSC, or Kael in the 5 man sunwell instance (presumably on Heroic mode).

That would make a big dent in flagging problems. There would still be the Akama line to complete for Black Temple attunement but it wouldn't be anywhere near as hard, and would still require a Al'ar/Rage Winterchill kill.

I for one am intrigued by the "sets but not tiered sets" suggestion. I am reminded of the Cenarion Circle expedition "sets" that were released when AQ20 came out - these sets consisted of a ring, cloak and weapon, and were of course tokenized.

I'm curious.. was it possible to actually lose the gate opening event? I was present at ours, there was a lot of raiding, wiping to ridiculous hive bosses (did anyone figure out the "colossus of hive zora unleashes a massive attack" mechanic..?), and general lag and confusion until the npc's pretty much did the work for us. Did we really influence the outcome of the AQ gate event, or simply the timing?

 

• Playered

The non class set items, which really exclude AQ-esk items as they were class-bound, interest me but I believe they come across more like the ZG ring type of sets, which were awsome.

Using reputation as a means of unlocking bosses also seems a better approach than a straight up attunement, but time will tell how they deal with it. Not to mention that it provides a way of keeping content from getting stale so quickly as after you grind rep for a couple of weeks you get something new (aside from being able to do it in Heroic...) which should atleast keep things happier if it includes the 5mans aswell.

The positive thing about this way of slowing progression down is that it means they wont have to leave several overtuned and 'lucky'/buggy bosses for people to grit and endure, overcome and then feel abused when they get nerfed down somewhat.


The way they are handling the mini-world event also looks like a positive step forward into dealing with the situation, however will it mean larger servers can brute force them down quicker and thus meaning guilds on smaller servers are stuck for some time untill they can even attempt those bosses?

Im a little shocked that Kael is just a boss in the 5man instance, I guess its one way of making it so everyone gets a chance to interact with him but still... major downrank for such an important figure.

 

◊ Praetorian

There were 13 bosses on the PTR and far fewer guilds who had the time to really try to tackle that content. We were working on catching up to Nihilum/LR/DnT/etc. at the time and we don't raid six days a week so what raiding time we did have was spent on the live servers learning Vashj through p2, and clearing SSC/TK so that we'd be ready when 2.1 went live. Hyjal was also pretty much completely fucked, yes. Archimonde was killed (via exploit, but still), and every boss through Gurtogg in BT was as well.

Sunwell only has six bosses, and there are a LOT of guilds that want to jump on the PTR and see this stuff. We'll see, I guess.

 

◊ Kalman

There's self-interest for everyone involved in this idea. Raiders do the dailies because they want to open up the new bosses, and non-raiders do the dailies because they want to open up the new quests from the later parts of the built up town. Yeah, it ruins the "race" aspect of things, but honestly, the PTR is where the race will be. Yeah, it favors high population realms - but what doesn't, really? No one is going to argue that the raiding and gameplay experience isn't generally better on a high pop realm than on a low pop realm.

That and Blizzard, despite occasional mistakes, generally *does* design things intelligently, and learn from their mistakes (even if they then sometimes proceed to forget). TF/Sulfuras rare drop legendaries had flaws in their method; we see Atiesh. AQ gate event is a massive farming failure - we get personal attunements on our next 5 raid instances. Those attunements are frustrating and unfun - the ones that require significant non-raid progress are removed.

Blizzard learns. The only way to ignore that is to focus on their failures without looking at the followups.

 

Renew

It's a unique idea for sure, but I would prefer that the unlocking would be done via guild only etc type events. A timed BT clear, Hyjal clear etc.

We'll hopefully get more information soon on what is planned for Sunwell. Having this info come out is pretty nice though, I really really really am bored.

Having full tier 6 on our raid is also a bit worrisome.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

XI-

High pop is relative. Look at the examples I provided. Korgath has tons of progression guilds, but in terms of overall population it's definitely in the lower third. And I don't think anyone considers the PTR a race, given that 90% of the ptr experience is getting your character transferred and hoping the fucking realm will stop crashing for 10 or 15 minutes.

Yes, and then we got the unfettered joy of warglaives. I'm glad we learned a lot from Atiesh.

 

Nite_Moogle

Can you honestly think of a better way get them that makes sense than prying them from Illidan's cold dead fingers? Don't get me wrong, the drop rate is retarded, I would have rather seen them be 'normal' drop rate epics (though that wouldn't be nearly as fun), but it's not like he's going to leave them laying around BT in fragments or something.