Krazen

Well, except for the fact that the fires actually chase after you, and the airburst, and the fear into those fires...

'Extremely easy' is debatable. It's certainly harder than the 90% of tank and spank 5 man bosses we have.

 

• Playered

For a 5man Archi you are required to bring a second healer to counter the 25% chance your only healer will get it and the remaining 4 players are screwed, its not very likely - however a 10man version is more plausable.

 

Valen

I'm talking about the design idea mainly. Why do people wipe on archimonde so much?

My point is, when we study a fight like archimonde, the single elements that occur during the fight are not hard to counter one by one. For example, the elements occuring during the previous 4 fights are deadlier than what happens during archimonde. However, archimonde as an encounter is hard because it's not forgiving at all. That means, the designer tries to kill you based on mistakes done by you, and at the same time makes sure that as soon as you do those mistakes, everyone else suffers.

Now, knowing that, the main challenge is that you have to ensure that 25 people can play for 10 minutes, without doing any mistakes. It's an example of a fight that gets harder with more people. Archimonde in a 40 man setting would be a nightmare for many guilds out there, because the mistake ratio would sky rocket.

Everytime we manage to wipe on archimonde and then someone says "sorry I did something stupid there" I tell people that "look guys, we are 25 people, each of us doing silly mistake 5% of the time can potentially mean that he never dies."

For the same reason, a C'Thun is just hard because you have to make sure 40 people do it right.

 

Antarius

I think you hit the nail on the head perfectly. Say what you want about slow development, they pick their release dates VERY carefully.

1) The original game came out to compete with Everquest 2. Hell, the original plan was to hopefully have just have as many subscribers as Everquest in order to be profitable. In addition to being a perfectly timed "Christmas release" the fact that it beat EQ2 by a week to market helped a lot of "MMO vets" try out the "new kid" because they were so hungry for any game at that point (Everquest having had a mass exodus of players a few months prior).

2) Burning Crusade was set up to completely crush Vanguard and Lord of the Rings online. Never mind the fact that Vanguard would have crushed itself, you saw that as both of those games slipped into early 2007 releases, so did BC. When BC did finally launch, there were still severely broken quest lines in every single zone, and every single NPC and quest in Netherstorm plus Blade's Edge Mountains had only been on the test server for all of about 5 days, but they still made sure that every single player was well on their way to 70 before any possible competition could have established themselves. Polish is all well and good, but was it "polished" that the giant cannons in Hellfire Peninsula were in fact just shadows on the ground? Eventually you just have to call things "good enough" and that's how BC launched, even if the percentage of the player base who saw the end of Naxx was less than 10% of the player base that has seen Illiden.

3) We'll have WotLK launch 1 month before Warhammer Online/Conan. Blizzard likes to talk about how they won't release anything "until it's done" But the producers/higher-ups at Blizzard make sure that "when it's done" happens to be when the game will be most competitive in the market. That it gives them 2 months of F&F Alpha followed by 2 months of Beta testing following the release of 2.4 makes things look pretty good from the point of view of a producer.

 

Bullshot

Except Conan is scheduled to launch in March. I obviously have no idea if that is going to slip.

 

Prinsesa

I think you guys are severely underestimating the amount of progression to be found in 5 mans.

Shattered Halls is brutal for fresh tanks. If you're a Warrior, maximizing CC is practically a necessity. If you're a Paladin, either you find a great healer while you tank everything or you coordinate CC with your normally CC-unfriendly Consecrates.

Those people who can't handle Kargath's adds? They will be the same people who will refuse to DPS sparks on Curator

Blackheart the Inciter and Grandmaster Vorpil are DPS checks. Take too long, and the Incite Chaos phases will run you OOM and Vorpil's Voidwalkers will stack up too much to avoid.

Murmur? If your melee dies on his Sonic Boom, it's a fair bet they won't survive Enfeebles either.

I certainly had trouble tanking heroic Steamvaults prior to 2.3's fear change - get feared by a Siren and your whole team gets gibbed by the aggro loss before you can recover.

There's also Black Morass being one gigantic gear check, with Temporus' healing debuff and Aeonus' Time Stop thrown in just for fun.

At the most basic level, heroic Slave Pens, Underbog and Mechanar were all being farmed before the heroic dailies were implemented. Doesn't the fact that these 3 keep getting farmed indicate that they're easier, thereby implying that all the other instances are harder, which means there's some sort of 'progression' in place?

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Liebestod

The Netherstorm and BEM questgivers were there for much much longer than 5 days, probably at least a month (for the record, I think Bone Wastes was the last PvE area to receive major revisions, though I know they added some work to BEM as well towards the end.) I can't really think of many quest chains which were broken at release - the Mana Bomb code fragment quest was bugged and removed, there was a caravan questgiver that might have been removed on the PTR, the last part of the Archmage Vargoth chain was removed which made it end rather lamely... but that was really it. TBC was polished quite well, really, and for the most part what wasn't polished was held back until 2.1, with the arguably-unfortunate exception of the T5 instances and maybe some heroics.

2:

The "new" information coming out is interesting.

a. First of all, hearing about the fact that the normal/heroic modes are going to give out better loot without higher difficulty... I honestly find that disappointing, and this isn't just as a raider who would be interested in seeing a 5-man tuned for all T6 gear or something. This just screams welfare epics in the same way that the Headless Horseman did, but now we'll have the MT (Magister's Terrace) all year round, on a one day lockout. I think even casuals should be disappointed... why can't there be a clear progression path through 5-man instances like there are for 10/25-mans? There's already "easy" heroics and "hard" heroics whether Blizz means it to be that way or not, why can't they capitalize on this fact and make loot scale accordingly? And then make MT tuned for full heroic epics or something? Just seems like it'd be more interesting.

Hopefully Blizzard learns a little more about the importance of tuning Heroics for WotLK. The endgame instances shouldn't just have "non-heroic" and "Heroic" difficulty... they should be more-or-less tiered in their own right with the Heroic designation largely used so that there can be more content without having to design a ton of new dungeons. Hell, throw in the "epic" difficulty as well. The only stipulation is to not make the dungeons overly unforgiving for non-cookie cutter groups... imo Heroic dungeons would have been better if they made most mobs CC-immune, or perhaps did a better job of mixing mob types.

b. I'm glad to hear that it seems that Sunwell Isle will in fact have its own outdoor zone. Maybe this should have been taken for granted once the news about "building a town" was released, but all we've really heard about are the instances. This seems to stick close to Blizzard's original intention of the Sunwell (having it just be another Quel'Thalas zone along with Ghostlands and Eversong Woods), and I hope they don't shortchange it too much (I imagine that it'll be pretty small, maybe the size of Terokkar Forest's forest part).

I always imagined that it would be like a mix of Ghostlands and Eversong, with the Scourge fighting the Legion there, but so far.. looks like Eversong, and no Scourge? Metzen has some 'splaining to do.

3:

WotLK beta/release. I'd expect that 2.4 will still be a couple months off, and I imagine that they're dragging out its PTR debut because they want to stall its release so that there'll be a smaller content gap between Sunwell and WotLK. Arguably this would be a good thing because it means they do plan to release WotLK reasonably soon after Sunwell - I'd expect the beta to start sometime soon after 2.4 goes live. I think Blizzard has made more progress into WotLK's design than people give them credit for - not only did we have a playable demo 4 months ago, but we also have a lot of content on the various zones... for comparison's sake I don't think we knew this much about TBC until the alpha build was leaked and people poked around the ingame files. That tells me that they might be skipping the F&F alpha that we saw with TBC and might go straight to a closed beta soon.

 

Kazanir

The only really valid conclusion -- and I think the obvious one -- is that they simply don't have the right amount of staff. (The other possibility I suppose is that they are at the organizational limit for staff and that to add more people to create content would simply create bottlenecks elsewhere in the company, or something.) Creating new content takes designers, developers, testing, sound and art people, level designers, etc. etc. It's apparently that while Tigole wants to get stuff out the door, it's not happening and that can only be true if his staff sucks or he doesn't have enough of them. Just from analyzing what he says at the rare times when he sits down with "the press" it feels like he has a lot he wants to get done and most of it is not happening, or isn't going nearly as fast as he'd like.

To which I say, why not hire more people? Well, Blizzard's job opening page looks pretty packed with things at first glance, so perhaps they are attempting to triple their content creation staff and simply aren't getting enough qualified people. That seems unlikely though given the number of people in the industry who would probably like to work at Blizzard. (I'm not an industry buff but I assume that number is not insignificant.) The other possibility is that the Decision Makers within the company have decided that WoW isn't going to be around forever and that they have enough resources to finish the next expansion at which point it will be time to wrap up the game and call it quits on major new content releases. This seems unlikely too but I guess it's possible.

It seems like Blizzard just needs to spend some of their $520 million of operating profit on seriously increasing the content creation team for WoW. The current pace of patch cycles and content addition really isn't cutting it, especially for raiders and especially after the fiascos that accompanied the launch of TBC. I know that it's a lot more complicated than "oh just hire more people" but it's not like Blizzard lacks in financial resources or name-brand hiring power to do it either.

'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. I told you. This is bigger than a war. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.

You can come with me. I can protect you.

 

• Rerox

While I can not comment on the first part of your "analysis" of WowJutsu, I can most certainly prove you wrong on the second part.

WowJutsu most certainly does not simply add a Bosskill to a Guild, only because one is wearing T5 Shoulders.

We don't raid as a guild, but as a raid alliance and while the guild, the majority of our raid comes from, is ranked more or less correctly with WowJutsu, the guilds our other raidmembers come from never get credited with the bosskills, we do in BT/Hyjal.

When you drill down to certain guildmembers and hover over their infividual instance-icons in WowJutsu you'll notice that there are bosses shown in blue (loot on this char is linked to the guild) and in white with a star (loot on this char not linked to the guild). I even noticed that its more likely loot is incorrectly NOT linked to the guild than loot that is linked to a guild that doesn't deserve credit for it.

So it's save to say that WowJutsu is using a way more sophisticated system of linking loot to guilds than just correlating charactername, its loot and the guild the char is in.

 

Tyrian

Whats that meant to mean? Do you really expect him to say hes got nothing/little on his plate? Its his job to have a huge workload and with Blizzcon they said one of their design philosophys was to put more design ideas/material on their plate than they can hope to do and be forced to pick and choose.

Not sure I agree with that - Overall, I think TBC has a very generous amount of content for an expansion to last ~1 year. The Sunwell patch etc should see whether the new content is satisfying enough to bridge the gap to 1.5 years from TBC->WOTLK. The only real issue many seemed to have was the pacing/simultaneous upfront release of content and the horrible initial overtuned encounters/consumable requirements/trash which required a huge patch again just to make the content doable and 'fun'.

 

pheno

Don't put all you hope in that argumentation, Blizzard has stated that they expect groups to clear Karazan if they expect particular type of gear :<

- That's why we're warlocks, not lovelylocks! -

 

Crystael

Yea, when I say polished, with BC I felt it much more of a superficial polish, I mean 2.1 was essentially a massive bug fix patch as well as giving us BT and Hyjal. Call me a cynic, but I personally think it's bollocks that Blizzard only release a game when it's done - they release a game the latest they can but still in time to make sure they retain their subscribers, which as someone pointed out earlier in the thread is the most important thing when you're running any subscription-based
business model. Customer retention is everything and as such they will make sure that Wotlk is out before Conan, or at least make sure 2.4 has enough to keep people playing. Could this be why they've delayed 2.4, so it's out at the same time as Conan?

inaninterstellarburstiambacktosavetheuniverse

 

Tyrian

Whenever I hear this said from Blizzard I cringe - because its rubbish. Original WOW1.0 certainly wasnt ready on release (unitemised silithus?, terrible raid instance ID lockout bugs), but they wanted it out the door in time for a christmas release. And it was a smart move - from a business pov they sure did the right thing. TBC clearly wasnt 100% ready in the full scope of the word. I wouldnt have considered tbc fully 100% ready quality wise until the huge patch that fixed all the trash/consumable problems/itemisation ilvl progression . But again, originally tbc release-quality was 'good enough'. I just hope they dont require another big patch to make wotlk raiding 'fun' like tbc did.

The idea that 'we release content when its ready' is a cute catchphrase, but we arent stupid - they release content when its needed (maybe due to time of year, reactively to competitors products release date, angry/upset customers demanding content etc) even if it might not be 100% ready as blizzard would like.

 

Strawberry

Sorry to jump in to comment on something that was a topic about ten pages ago, but it think that the pattern for world PvP should be (don't shoot me) the Stranglethorn Fishing contest.

Think about it. It happens once a week at a set time, for a set time, offers rewards that characters of all levels and all factions want.

Imagine if once a week for two hours you could bomb Halaa and got a unique epic that went to ONE person, and three cool ultra rare drops (Maybe a 0,5% drop off a player for each one?). People would be there for the whole two hours every sunday, and the zone wouldn't be a constant gankfest/occasional amusement to gear up.

Imho, it'd be better if just like STV fishing, it was open to all. I mean, you often see a vulture like swarm of level 19 twinks running around frantically fishing, being eaten by raptors. Imagine the props you'f get if your twenty L19s took down a 70. Or more likely the fun you'd get one shotting 5 L19s at once (/lol at your Libram enchants, dual crusader gnome rogue).

Feel free to shoot this up as much as you like, it's just a flight of fancy.

 

Moogul

I think you're kind of on to something here, the important thing is making world pvp good when you're not there.

'Huh?' I hear you say. What the hell do you mean by 'good when you're not there?' Well basically, I'm talking (again) about rewards - there needs to be a benefit of World PvP that continues when you're not there. Obviously item based rewards, or flasks or whatever are one example, but it can apply to world/zone buffs too.

On my server, I found that no-one ever really bothers to cap the Zangarmarsh objectives, and to me, there's a clear reason why. Sure, having a graveyard closer to SSC can be really useful,, and the damage buff is nice for running heroics, but if you cap the towers and then zone in to heroic underbog, all that's going to happen is someone from the otherside will recap it, and there's nothing you can or will do about it. You want the buff for doing PvE content, but you need to be constantly PvPing to get the benefit out of it.

In contrast, look at the Auchindoun towers. Now these might still not be as popular as AV farming, but certainly in the early days (as in, first few months) of the game, they were hotly fought over, and even now people will often say 'Hey, the towers are up, let's go cap!'. Of course, the 6 hour duration limits it to at most a ~3 fights a day, but you know that those fights are mostly going to happen - why? Because once you've capped them, no-one can take that away from you for 6 months. If you go to Terrokar, cap the towers, and then do heroic mana tombs, you know that they'll last the whole time. Suddenly you've drastically improved the speed (and hopefully ease) of doing instances in Auchindoun, and you can take full advantage of it.

I think most people would be happy for world PvP to happen less than all the time, if it at least happened some of the time, and I think having limits on how often objectives can change side would help a lot.

I think a good model for Wintergrasp would be to have multiple towers capturable singly, say 5-6, each one once captured cannot be recaptured for 2 hours, after which it becomes attackable again (but does NOT revert to neutral, you have to capture it from that side), and each one gives a buff on it's own (hopefully a different buff for each tower).

That way, you might decide to do an instance, and say 'Right, lets go get the +5% damage buff in Wintergrasp first!'. You head there, and find some other side (Let's call them Alliance, since I'm Horde) are there too - they've had the same idea. You fight over the tower, and eventually you win. Hooray! Time to do that heroic. The Alliance now know they cannot get that tower for 2 hours, but they can go and get a different one. Maybe they decide to get the +10% runspeed one, since movement is always nice, so they go and assault that tower. Hopefully some other Horde are there defending too, and the fight will continue.

With 2 hour durations minimum on buffs, they would be worth getting, and with 5-6 towers, you'd be looking at on average, one being available every 20 minutes or so, sometimes multiple ones up at the same time. With each one giving a buff, it'd still be worth it for the outnumbered faction to try on an unbalanced server, though obviously they still wouldn't get as many buffs.

 

tedv

My old guild before the expansion had a perpetual problem recruiting enough tanks. Someone would always say, "Why don't we recruit more?" The standard response was, "What a great idea! I'll just visit the corner store and pick up a six pack of tanks, and maybe an extra shaman too."

Getting talented people is really hard even when you have a solid recruiting infrastructure in place. While Blizzard is famous, one downside is that a lot of really incompetent applicants start glutting up the recruiting process. It's easy to throw money at the problem, but harder to do so in a way that has a dramatic impact on your current, immediate staffing needs.

One other possibility-- and I'm purely speculating here-- is that Blizzard believes the value of working on World of Warcraft is so great that they don't need to offer competitive salaries. The game industry as a whole really does expect 25% longer hours for 15% less pay. I spent 6 years writing First Person Shooter AI so I could get a job in the game industry (shameless plug: BrainWorks). I actually went through the whole interview process with multiple houses and got job offers, including one with a competitor of Blizzard. I turned them down because working on games is still work, and that doesn't justify being underpaid and overworked. Maybe Blizzard hasn't figured out that they need to offer more than they are, and as a result all the truly smart people are working for Google instead.

 

Caligula

I work for a software company. A trend I've noticed over the past few years is, sometimes the product just needs to get out the door. If the developers sat around and fixed every single bug they ever found it would add months or years on to the release of the software. Our checklist is something like this: Is everything fixed that causes GPF? Are all the tools usable? Can the user start from scratch and come out with a finished product without being stopped by a bug somewhere? After that, everything other minor bug that gets fixed is just icing on the cake. I honestly do not believe that a piece of software can be released totally bug free. I agree that Blizzard wanted WoW to get out by Christmas but they certainly didn't release it with any game-breaking bugs. If you look at TBC, that was scheduled for a Christmas release as well, and was delayed. Blizzard has a reputation of putting out games when they are finished, nitpicking silly things like Raid ID lockout bugs that can only really be tested on a massive scale doesn't give them the credit they deserve. Especially considering the size of their development team then and the game they were able to produce.

Speaking of TBC, they purposefully released the game with the tuning and consumable requirements that it had. Look at Loetheb, Sapph, KT and the requirements on those fights. It was just natural progression. This is what they thought the end-game raiders wanted, and encounters were tuned for it. As it turns out, the only guilds that were really had the time and resources to down Gruul 1.0, Mag 1.0, etc, were the same guilds that had the time and resources to obtain every world buff and every consumable possible to down Loeth, Sapph and KT. Blizzard realized that your average, or even above average guild could never do this, or if they could they would become so frustrated with the process that they wouldn't bother. Hence the consumable changes. Again, the original raiding game in TBC was intended, by design, it wasn't a "bug".

You clearly did not anticipate the release of Diablo II, or SC:Ghost, or Warcraft Adventures. D2 was delayed, not for months, for years. WC Adventures was never released because they felt it wasn't good enough. SC:Ghost, after years of delays may never be released. That's thousands or hundreds of thousands of development hours and dollars that are wasted. They could have chosen to release those games in buggy, unfinished or incomplete states, but they didn't. Blizzard releases games when they are ready, or they do not release them at all. Blizzard releases games at a certain quality level and I certainly appreciate that.

When WoW was released were you able to play your character fully to level 60 without encountering any game-breaking bugs? I certainly was. I was actually overwhelmed by the polish of the game at first. After the debacles that were Anarchy Online, Shadowbane and other MMO's of the early 00's, WoW was the most complete MMO that had been released. WoW, after 3 years, is still holds that honor.

I think you need to learn yourself on the history of this company before making any other remarks on their policies.

 

Crystael

Or perhaps Blizzard decided that those resources would be better spent on the WoW cash-cow instead? Moving those resources would more than likely make up for the time and money lost developing SC: Ghost.

inaninterstellarburstiambacktosavetheuniverse

 

Caligula

Honestly I think the problem was that they just never recovered after the original 3rd party developer abandoned the project. Also the recent announcement of SC2 leads me to believe that most of the ideas and concepts will end up there, much like the RPG elements from Warcraft Adventures have been incorporated into WoW.

 

Tyrian

TBC was not 100% ready when it was released. Certainly the raiders didnt feel so - and they are a genuine part of the playerbase who can form such opinions based on the quality of the content aimed at them that was available. Nobody is saying that tbc on release wasnt visually good enough, or drastically un-playable, or anything-but very polished in general. However the game in its entirety wasnt just wasnt fully ready - it was good enough to ship. It took a few months and the big patch to really fix the game to a really acceptable level that customers should expect, especially the raiders. Nobody is expecting blizzard to hold off content 'until every bug is fixed' - thats just naive - but putting out the motto that they only release when-its-ready to imply that they only release 100% fully tested, 100% fully playable content and bugfree (within reason) content is a tad misleading.

Perhaps people have forgotten over time, but the raid lockout issue was something a little more than a 'silly thing', especially given the length of time it lasted and amount of people that were affected.

Really? How much raid content testing was there in TBC Beta? Do you think, if they had spent more time testing raid content on the beta with players - the consumable requirements, trash difficulty, trash respawns etc - would have gone unnoticed by the testers?

On one hand you could say they 'purposefully released TBC content with requirements like naxx' but on the other hand, you could say they only released content like this (which was met to much criticism and negativity) because they didnt take the time to thoroughly test it and find out players DIDNT like it this way. The content might have been designed that way, the bug was players didnt want it that way - and only a small amount of testing would be needed to find that out and fix it accordingly.

From my POV, the biggest dissappointment of TBC release (Dont get me wrong, I absolutely love the game and will play it till they pull the plug) was that it took a BIG patch a few months later to make what I enjoy (raiding) 'fun' again. Consumables, trash, ilvl progression etc were all contributors. Why did we need a patch to accomplish this? Alot of raiders share that sentiment. When all the major raid guilds on the server in the post-release months dont bother killing Gruul, dont bother going to SSC because 'its not worth it, blizzard is obviously going to have to fix it before we consider busting our ass in there' something went very wrong. Clearly, the content was not delivered in a manner that many considered ready.

 

Benegesserit

Well according to the blue post (no source was linked at mmo-champion), Blizzard did mention that "most" big news will be channeled through mags or websites, and that the podcasts are intended to be "a glimpse of what it is like to make the games you love from their (employees) perspective". Wish they had the insight to tell us that before it popped.

 

Wunlastri

I'm torn because I want to save badges for 2.4, but I want to try out armor penetration gear. Have we heard anything new on more on new badge loot yet?

 

Docjowles

There was a blue post recently saying they have no plans to introduce more badge loot, though of course things can change.

Edit:

WoW Forums -> Badge of Justice

 

Caligula

There is a difference between the developers and company "feeling" that the game is ready for release and the players "feeling" that parts of the game weren't ready when they are playing it. What you're talking about is tuning. From a software development perspective, as I explained in my post, the game was ready. No serious bugs, all content playable from start to finish. Nothing game-breaking.

You aren't really considering the fact that there are many bugs that, no matter how much testing you do, will only be discovered after being tested by the millions of end users. Just because a bug wasn't discovered in testing doesn't necessarily mean they didn't test enough, we both agree on the point that you can't fix everything before release or release will never happen.

As for trash respawn timers, I think we're all familiar with the "pacing mechanism" quote. Again, this is all intended by the developers to keep the difficulty level high. Clearly it was a mistake on their end. Unfortunately that's a gamble they have to make. Either allow players to defeat all content in beta and have every strategy and video available before the game is even released, or leave some surprises for the player and hope they like them. We didn't, they changed it.

We can argue the semantics of the word "ready" all day. The fact is, they thought it was ready. The trash respawn timers were planned, the tuning for world buffs/consumables were planned. It was relatively bug free with nothing really major (save maybe Vashj weirdness but I've already touched on the reasons behind that). The quests were there and working. The instances were there and working. The only way for them to get feedback on the things you've noted without spoiling the game is to release it and let the players respond. It seems like you're ignoring the bulk of the game to focus on some very specific, tuning-related, aspects of end-game raiding

edit: bah, I'm not going to redo my entire post again for your 3rd edit :P

 

Copernicus

Gruul was killed during the TBC beta. They knew about the consumable requirements (nearly everyone was flasked going into the kill) and the person posting about the kill said it probably required too many consumables and raid stacking.