didn't they buff gruul right at the end of/after beta?

qft. The nice thing about MMOs is that you really don't have to have things 100% ready in order to ship, you can just patch up the loose ends later. I don't think anyone would have been happier if TBC's release were delayed by a couple more months so that BT and Skettis content could be included in the release, for the most part the late introduction of these things didn't seriously affect anyone's gameplay experience.

imo when WotLK rolls around Blizzard should focus even more on polishing the 70-80 content at the expense of endgame stuff. Give us a nice Tier 8 and some new heroics, but save Tier 9/10 for post-release PTR testing... most raiders seem to be fine with content released on a staggered schedule anyways, and it's certainly better than not having the content tested at all, as was the case with the Tier 5 instances. If Blizzard had redirected their efforts on the Tier 5/6 content into having the 2.1 solo content in at release, in addition to better-tuned heroics, the game would've seemed pretty damn complete for an MMO.

It's always a matter of prioritizing the importance of completing various pieces of content for release, and then looking at each thing and saying "is it worth it to delay the release by X days so that we can finish content Y?" There's always a cutoff point and everything beyond that will be "unpolished".

The truth to be honest is that TBC was not ready and by not ready I mean close to unplayable in certain aspects. 2.1 saved the expansion for the most part. If 2.1 would delay 1-2 more months even more guilds would collapse and more players would stop playing.

If you go through the list of content/aspects that was badly tuned to the level unplayble, the list will not be short:
-Raid content. Enough said. I don't think any raid leader agrees that TBC raid content as a whole was playable before 2.1 (or the small patches that changed gruul, magtheridon etc), the handful of top guilds aside.
-Heroic Dungeons.
-Terrible, terrible Itemization. Blues being way better than epics and so on.
-Class issues - For example top guilds that raided back then had zero melee dps, because they were either dead or would do subpar damage. I don't know what unplayble is, but not being able to raid as a certain class certainly isn't playble content.

The above, is all what I expect to work from blizzard as a player that plays to raid. For me, TBC was not ready and certainly not polished. We can have a detailed analysis maybe someday that explains whether TBC was a success at all or not, considering that in my opinion it was the lowest quality product blizzard has ever released.

Btw. the expections of people are naturally higher from a blizzard game. They really are not in the position to release a game in the same low quality condition that for example EA would.

Yeah, following the beta kill he got a very hefty buff (something like 50% more HP). So I don't think it's really accurate to say "they took an impossible boss and made him more impossible". From what I remember, the feedback was that he was a little too easy, and Blizzard grossly overcompensated, resulting in a version of Gruul that wouldn't be out of place in T6.

These are ridiculously nit-picky concerns that only significantly affected a tiny percentage of the playerbase at best. Calling it less-polished than, say, WoW Vanilla is extremely hyperbolic, unless you think MC 1.0 was more fun, accessible and rewarding than Karazhan, in which case I think most people would call you insane.

2.1 fixed a lot of things. But for roughly 99.9% of the playerbase or so, I really doubt it would have been worth delaying the release for by more than a week or two.

It sounds like you were playing a completely different TBC to me at release. Sure, Gruul was a bitch pre-nerf (we never killed him before that), but he was beatable. He wasnt bugged, he was just tuned badly. I'm not saying we can forgive that, but there really is a difference between testing something internally and seeing several million worldwide trying it. Heroic dungeons were fine at release, and have just been stupidly nerfed since. Everyone at release who cried 'you need 2 healers and a mage for any heroic' are those who either a) are unwilling to experiment and b) need to learn to play. I tanked heroics right from the get go as a warrior, and even pre-thunderclap changes (ie. allowing it in def stance), we could handle multi-mob pulls ok. Sure, something like Shattered Halls was pretty damn hard for those just starting, but how many people here have been demanding 5-man progression anyway?

As for class issues, of course Rogues at launch were completely different to what they are now, but in the guild I was in during early TBC, our rogues dominated damage meters because they were excellent players, and our warlocks/shadow priests/mages weren't. Sure, it might have been a lot easier to be a good warlock than a good rogue back then, but good rogues could still put out extremely good dps, and only the top few guilds pushing through SSC/TK really needed to worry about getting rid of melee.

The way I look at TBC, it had:
a) Very polished level 61-70, with excellent dungeons, good loot from quests and instances (maybe a little too much elem shaman and paladin loot)
b) Excellent artwork, varied zones that were awesome to explore, interesting new monsters
c) Good early level 70 content - Instances, Heroics, Karazhan
d) Overtuned 25-man raids (apart from Maulgar)
e) Excellent stability, VERY few noticeable bugs

Sure the hardcore might not have been happy with SSC, but on my server only three guilds had even downed Maulgar before Gruul got nerfed, so it was hardly like that was a huge cockblock for most raiders. I'm not saying that those in the top 10% should just suck up overtuned encounters and horrible trash, but as has been mentioned, it's a matter of balance - for 99.9% of the players, TBC was ready. This board is filled with a lot of the raiding elite, and hence a disproportionately large portion of players here had to deal with early TBC 25-man raid content, but the fact remains that most people probably don't even know that Gruul was ever different from how he is now.

Heroics were not too hard. Sorry. They didn't require group stacking, although obviously this makes it a bit easier as group stacking does anywhere. They were tuned to be hard for the same crowd that peruses these forums and have been nerfed since so that the rest of the player base could complete them. Plenty of people did the heroics pre-nerf. I wish they still had the same level of difficulty because the are now a boring pushover.

The itemization was all over the place, I'll give you that. However, I don't really think they knew what people wanted or what stats were the best with the introduction of the rating system. If you look at the itemization of teir 1 sets (at release) they had the same issue. Epic also refers to the rarity of an item, not it's quality. I'm not defending their choice in making Karazhan epics around the same ilvl as blues but people seem to think that purple means "better quality than rare" when it actually means "rarer than rare rarity".

WoW -> Info -> Items -> Item Basics

You still seem to be ignoring the fact that they purposefully tuned Gruul that hard. Tuned him so he required full flasks and consumables and most view that choice as a mistake. This was done as a direct result of player testing that found the beta Gruul to be too easy. Again, I'll repeat myself for the last time because we're far off on a tangent, most of the "issues" people had with TBC at release were limited to high-end raid content that was not part of the public beta testing and was purposefully tuned (over tuned?) to a hard level to present a challenge to those guilds and they made a mistake.

I'd agree that the expansion was on track to be a disaster for raiders before 2.1. There were so many problems, such huge problems with itemization, so many untuned bosses, such ridiculous standards for success in heroics...the list goes on. Which isn't to say success was impossible or that people didn't make it work...if there's one thing MMO players have demonstrated over the years it's that they'll do whatever it takes to succeed. Original Gruul sucked, but he wasn't original C'Thun.

Um no. I side with Moogul here. 60-69 really was very well and fine. 70 was still fine and dandy, the problems started right after Karazhan. Which incidently is where public beta testing really stopped. There was as far as I remember only one known kill of Nightbane in TBC Beta. There was one or very few Gruul kills and he was as far as I remember far too easy, which prompted Blizzard to make him harder and that did go too far.

I was in the TBC beta from day one. From the invisible Blade Towers in HFP, the removed questline with Sergant WhatshisName in the cage at the southern Ramparts, the Fel Bearreavers of Death, the You shouldn't be here Teleports out of BEM and SMV, to the Evil Female Nagas of Disconnect in Nagrand, I've probably seen most of the major quirks and Bugs prior to Release. But I didn't raid. There wasn't enough time, Naxxramas was still on my regular schedule. Many people got their invitations very late and subsequently, the levelup content was very fine. The high end was not.

Heroics were fine too at and after release. Oh they were definitely too hard for all the people that won't even go to the instance if they don't have one Def Tank, one Mage and one Healing Priest. It was hard but it was a challenge.

Now about the item progression and what happened after Karazhan, we don't need to discuss. The effort to reward ratio was getting way out of hand. Part of this is probably due to insufficient wide-spread testing. Part of it most likely due to the major mechanic change caused by the introduction of the new rating system and it had to be observed how it really pans out.

Patch 2.1 fixed the raiding game, which at that point was considered broken. However pre-25 man raiding, the game was not broken nor unfinished or unpolished. It was higher quality and more polished than many other game companies sell even in public beta.

The fact that there wasn't a really suitable entry-level 25 man raid instance is a design issue, but says nothing about polish or bugs, or if, then only with regards to the big design picture.

Calling it buggy and unpolished without clarification because something is very hard that takes a hard core player base 1 month to reach and more casual players that still sink significant hours per week into the game 2 - 4 months is simply not fair.

I personally think they took too long with the corrective measures in 2.1, but at least when they fixed it, they fixed it well in one go.

Well, that system might hold true for world drops but I guarantee that there are a lot more people running around with "epic" T4 loot than "rare" dungeon set 3.5 loot.

And many Kara epics were originally lower ilvl than 5-man blues, which goes a long ways towards explaining their lack of quality. But I never thought it was a big deal because Kara wasn't significantly harder than a lot of heroics anyways. I'm not a huge fan of the idea that people should be rewarded more simply because they happen to play in a larger group.

I personally don't think Heroics were fine at release, but the problem wasn't that they were just "too hard", it's that their difficulty was way too contingent on group composition. I don't really buy the "it was fine l2p" excuses because those don't exactly address the issue, which is that certain groups that adhere to the general mold (1 healer / 1 tank / 3 different DPS) should not be significantly better than others.

A lot of things could have been done better, but their ultimate impact on the game isn't that great. I'm not trying to defend the quality of TBC's release unconditionally so much as refute the absurd assertions that most of the game's content was buggy/untested/broken/whatever else.

Heroics are aimed at your average Joe Bloggs, fully geared in dungeon blues, in order to offer an alternative method to get epics (i.e. not raiding). The only people who ever did heroics before the nerf was people who needed to run them for attunements to raid instances, who were conveniently overgeared anyway. Your casual level 70s were off getting their epics in arena, not in heroics. This demonstrates exactly my point: sure, if you worked at a heroic, even with a sub-optimal group setup, sure you could clear it with a few wipes. But why bother doing that when you can piss about in arenas for a couple of hours a week and get gear that was as good? The relative difficulty of Heroics compared to other means of getting better gear was too high. I'd agree they beat them a little hard with the nerf stick - but them I'm overgeared now. Funny that, I see you (and probably the friends you run them with) are too - that is also a factor a lot of people ignore when moaning about how heroics are a walk in the park. As someone who has a newly 70 Druid alt, I can tell you that tanking heroics even in close to optimal blue gear just isn't that easy. I made up for it by grouping with geared healers, but others don't have that luxury.

Bringing out the "epics aren't supposed to be better than blues, just rarer" story is pure conjecture - everyone knows, whilst that may be the case (after all epics are rarer than most blues), that was Blizzard trying to justify the total hash of things. As for tier 1 having the same problem...wouldn't you think Blizzard would've learned from 2 years of vanilla WoW, not to mention the superbly itemized T3 sets?

As for your third point: I'm not sure whether you're referring to Gruul or SSC/TK here, but Gruul certainly wasn't "high-end" raid content, even then. It's entry level - the first port of call for any guild that has cleared Karazhan. I'll say it again. Gruul is entry level raid content and therefore was poorly tuned for its place in progression. Blizzard hugely over-reacted to the beta testing of him and went way overboard with Gruul's HP. I'm not ignoring the fact that he was purposefully tuned to be hard - as someone who was active in the beta forums I'm fully aware of why they buffed him - it was just a huge mistake.

I wish we had more statistics, but pre-2.1 caused an enormous amount of guilds to break up, which resulted in many of those raiding players quitting the game completely, at least that I knew personally.

We all know the reasons, but what was the net result on the only statistic blizzard cares about: monthly subscribers.

Obviously blizzard brags about the total number of wow players increasing overall - but how many more people would still be playing today if the pre-2.1 raiding shitheap didn't cause them to quit?

Nowhere near as many as have entered the game in the last year through seeing the advertisements for TBC and giving it a try. And absolutely *nowhere* near as many as rejoined the game to try out the expansion, be it for a month, two months, or a year.

The people who quit in disgust were a very small percentage of a very small percentage, and were easily overwhelmed just by the people who came back to try a free month of game-play in the Blizzard promotion of January of last year, and ended up staying for just one additional month to finish the grind to 70.

It's been said approximately 8.342 billion times in the last year on these boards ... raiders are the minority. Raiders are the minority. 5% of all 25-man raiders quitting is the tiniest drop in the tiniest bucket out of the vast sea of WoW subscribers.

Take Shadowsong as an example. Last census I saw said 24k people on this realm. There are ~ 40 guilds which have legitimately killed a 25-man raid boss, and still exist as an entity. WoWjutsu isn't so good at removing failed guilds, so long as someone with raid loot remains in them. Ballpark each guild at 100 people. That's 4000/24000 that have *raided* 25-man content (max, since most raid guilds have 35 raiders, and 65 alts/friends/randoms). That's 17% of the server considered "raiders" (and that's an absolute maximum).

Assume 5% of these people actually saw pre-nerf SSC (in actuality, *one* guild on SS was in SSC pre-nerf, and they killed Lurker only, and had Hydross to 40%) and quit the game because of it. So 200 people quit. The population of shadowsong has increased at least 3000 in the last year, at a bare minimum, many of them new players who had genuinely not touched WoW until TBC.

3000 > 200. Fin.

As an interesting bit of info...

I will point out that in a gamasutra article a while ago, they pointed out (from the Activision-Blizzard announced deals) that WoW has a lower-than-expected monthly churn rate of around 4-5% overall. With 9 million subscribers, you're talking about (with 4.5% churn) 405,000 players quitting every month.

Think about that for a bit. There are more people who quit WoW each month than have seen the inside of Black Temple.

And yet subscription continues to climb ... which says that while they lose 450k / month ... they *gain* 500k / month ... that's the impressive thing.

And every single one of those new subscribers buys $20+$25 worth of WoW copies to join the game, which costs Blizzard about ... $2. You have to assume the cost of development of TBC was deprecated long ago, so basically any further sales of Vanilla or TBC are pure gravy for their operating budget. I wouldn't mind having $11 million / month flowing in that I didn't have to do anything to generate.

As much as I can tell you to want to point angry fingers at Blizzard, you're deluding yourself if you think it mattered that much. For all of the guilds that actually got there quickly, plenty of them just wrote it off as something they just needed better gear and strategy to accomplish, and it was fixed soon enough that they still had time to run Karazhan and 5-mans before really getting put off by it. For those players who actually got that far and were shocked enough to quit playing, I'm willing to bet that NONE of them got so far removed from the game that they didn't hear about the raiding revamp, so plenty of those came back to the game at that point. Those who quit because of the challenges of raiding, heard about the revamp, and didn't come back, you can assume that plenty of them were just about burned out enough on the game that they were going to quit sooner rather than later anyway.

But the simple truth is that a large majority of players weren't in that position soon enough after expansion release to even care about it at all.

The numbers of people that leave or enter a game isn't always the best factor in determining its' quality. (what was it? "Just because Mrs. spears has sold so many albums it doesn't mean that she makes quality music") I don't doubt that wow is doing a good job keeping the masses in the game. That's not up to debatte. However, It also doesn't mean that blizzard been doing a high quality job with TBC, and to be honest I also doubt they are very happy with what they have done with R&D content, considering some of the comments they have made themselves.

Despite the assumption that "the only thing a company thinks about is money", in reality, blizzard is the best example of why a company should produce high quality products to be successfull in the long run. Game industry isn't a one way street. If you get up there, you should do your best to stay up there or you will get replaced by the next bunch of talented developers.

As a side note; Raiders are the minority of course. But, so are the pvp'ers; so are those who only run 5 mans; so are those who just run heroics; so are those who just do dailies. It's the combination of all the above that make wow the giant that it currently is. The arguments such as "bah not many do X in the game anyways so X doesn't matter" don't have any logical reasoning behind them.

Ilvl isn't an appropriate metric unless you're comparing items of the same quality (ie blue vs blue, purple vs purple). The item budget multipliers are higher on epic items, which means they'll have more points to spend on various stats, even if they have a comparable or slightly lower itemlevel.

I don't disagree that the itemization was screwed up, but a large part of that was just basic errors and audit problems. Things like the junior technician's bracers were superior because someone transposed 2 numbers when entering in the item (42 stamina instead of 24? Oops!) There were also numerous instances where the point budget for an item wasn't completely spent or was overspent. Next expansion, hopefully they have a database check for that sort of thing.

I'd also add that Karazhan wasn't completely tuned at launch. They played around with Nightbane quite a bit in the early months (skeletons were immune to everything but holy magic, he'd fear on landing, etc.) Romulo and Juliet was easily harder than the Curator and any other opera event (and Romulo used to hit harder than most of the mobs in the zone). Aran used to cast dragon's breath on your melee during flamewreath. They buffed the items in the zone at the same time they nerfed the encounters and re-worked a horribly broken consumable system. On balance it had fewer issues than the other zones, but even Kara wasn't perfect.

I think the timing was pretty close but 2.1 did come out before it decimated too many raiding guilds. Now, the transition from leveling to 10-mans to multiple 10-mans to 25-mans was rocky as hell but the over-tuned versions of Gruul and Magtheridon were not too out of place.

From my own experiences in a top-for-server but months-behind guild, we were pushing pretty hard back then and although we never really pushed for that pre-nerf Gruul kill, we had at least something to do at the time. Doom, DLK, HKM and Kara (especially Nightbane) kept us mostly busy and the break also encouraged us to farm the hell out of heroics for what loot and enchanting mats were available. The badge stuff and resist sets were also nice to get out of the way too of course. As it stood, the timing only really left us a few weeks back of where we would have been if 2.1 had hit at launch.

Arguing over how many of those "new" subscribers aren't just returning wow-ers would be unproductive, but I feel its safe to say that the $11 million / month is high, how much I don't know. But the statement that "they didn't have to do anything to generate that income" is completely incorrect.

Wow is not a toaster. While I'm sure some number of toasters are sold on friends telling the buyer "Honeymaid Toasters are the best", a vast majority are sold on cost, number of slots, and shineyness. These are predetermined when you make said toaster, WOW is a (to abuse a buzzword) evolving product. All of the effort and cost into maintaining a product that people want, weeding out the things people don't like, and generally maintaining a state of excellence provides the driving force for that many people to sign up each month.

I'm not trying to suck up to blizzard, nor sell games: there'd be no point on these boards anyways, everyone here is hooked. But it bothers me when people downplay the massive effort and cost required to create and maintain something of this magnitude, and keep adding to it.

They've definately earned that income of additional subscribers, and assuming they keep putting time/money/effort in and maintain what they got, they'll keep it. But that connection of huge upfront effort and significant continuing effort shouldn't be disregarded.

Otherwise we'd still be enjoying 1 tranq shot book a week.

Marauders on Nazjatar - guild killed Gruul, then broke up with a big chunk of people going to Dark Iron and another big chunk to a PVE-RP server, never even attempted Mag. But 2 people joined who each had a piece of Mag loot, so the guild is credited with a Mag kill in spite of being pretty much defunct and never having even attempted Mag.

Wowjutsu is pretty lax when it comes to cross-checking early content, but it has checks at halfway marks in instances from what I remember. Thus, someone joining a guild with Kael loot does not give credit for Kael unless the guild already has records for the other 3 TK bosses. Same goes for Vashj and SSC. Magtheridon / Gruul aren't really all that important, so it mostly just looks for <more than 1 piece of loot> and then gives credit for the boss.

As well, this only happens on name changes or server transfers, as it will track toons from guild to guild assuming it saw them in the original guild. At the very start of Wowjutsu, the database wasn't very populated, so you had some stuff like people getting kicked from TK guilds and giving Al'ar credit to <random no-name Magtheridon guild>, but that got ironed out very quickly.