mek

I don't think the removal of attunement correlates with guild's failure to complete 25man content well, if at all. There were tons of keyed guilds that were still stuck at Kael for months and months, and plenty more that went into 25mans just to farm VR and Lurker every week. Of course, these same guilds probably had trouble with Magtheridon, for obvious reasons; they aren't all good players. Eventually you reach a point in the raid game where the few bads you're dragging around ruin it for everyone; your options are to dump them and try to become "serious raiders" or be satisified with your current progression.

Heroic keying isn't going to keep people from blowing up a raid, and it's not going to teach them how to click a box, either, and it's certainly not going to teach them how to play their class. How not to stand in fire, maybe.

 

Galred

I think most of the posters here would agree that if someone is a bad player, it's their responsibility to improve.

Now, as to how much effort Blizzard should provide to inexperienced raiders - one 25-man instance to teach people how to handle themselves in the larger group (25 instead of 5 or 10) sounds about right. It doesn't need to be trivially easy, just introduce a few concepts at a time via trash and bosses (cross-healing groups, decursing, changing focus fire targets quickly, etc).

I do agree that TBC's 5-mans should be where players learn the basics, and Blizzard has an opportunity to make the WotLK 5-mans rewarding enough that people won't skip them on their way to "better things".

 

Dollar

The whole "I pay the same thing as you, why don't I see the same shit?" is a ridiculous argument.

"I bought <insert any rpg type game here> for the same amount as you did, why don't I get fastforwarded to the end and see everything a long the way for little to no effort?"

For the most part if you WANT to perform better, you can. If you want to get better gear, especially in the days of badges and s3 gear, you can. You can perform better in a raid. It just takes effort. Just like any other game. You can read up on your class and figure out what you are doing wrong. You can leave your guild of friends and family to join a guild that will progress, if you really want to. There will always be a guild that will fit you with paid character transfers you literally have 100's if not 1000's to choose from. Why should WoW require less effort than any other video game? There is no reason for anything to be dumbed down for people (in the minority, I think) who want to be carried through content. If you don't feel like putting any effort into the game then you can do 5 mans and kz pugs. If you think that you should be getting carried through content because you "pay for the same thing" then you are missing the entire point of video games or any game in the first place. A challenge.

Obviously this doesn't apply to things that are blatantly broken and untuned to the point of being impossible or not fun. I didn't think it was fun to throw myself at pre fix C'thun. I do think it is fun to defeat challenging well tuned encounters.

Lord, beer me strength.

 

Rane

Maybe in the US, but it's mostly/always developers doing this. We were able to link Warglaives in General chat after Nihilum's first Illidan kill because one of the devs was kind enough to create one on Magtheridon when he went and checked up on their attempts, e.g. Trust me when I say the average Joe GM really doesn't go on live servers and creates legendaries out of thin air and then spies on random guilds doing end-game stuff, they simply don't have the time. There are fairly large "tickets done per day" requirements to follow and pretty much all their actions are monitored.

That said, spectator mode would be one of the coolest things they could do, even if it's as simple as a modified Mind vision spell. With the upcoming changes where locks are able to summon into instances again, I can see it technically being possible, all at the control of the Raid Leader, of course. The interface is there already with room for 40 people total in a raid (so 15 specs), and the technology could be used for the Arena system as well, which will go miles towards the e-sports acceptance levels they want to reach.

The possibilities and applications would be endless.

 

Pyros

Derail but, back when I was in a leading guild on my server, we've had a few occurances of GMs that were looking at us. Like we'd have a bug on loot, call a GM, and he'd answer instantly, telling us it was a nice fight and so on. I can't comment on how the whole GM thing work, but the way I see it, they can deal with most of their work without having to move around, so they can just follow a guild doing raid progress for their own fun, while still answering questions. Since GMs are also players, it can be assumed they'd be interested in knowing other guild's progress on their realm if they do raid themselves.

As for spectator mode, I think blizzard has been thinking about it seriously, and we might see it with wotlk. After all I'm sure they're planning big UI changes again for wotlk, like the lfg group with BC, and yea it'd make most sense with their e-sports stuff.

 

Rane

I'll derail that again, they're almost never in-game unless they have to . They use a special software to chat with players in a MSN-based chat window and only physically start up the game and appear in the game if it's needed, like porting or despawning. They also get randomly assigned their tickets, so what more likely is the queue time was fairly low and the GM popped in to check out the area and fight after he got your ticket assigned and his comment was after the fact. That's not to say you don't have the chance on being spied on if you're high end and deep into new content, but as far as I'm aware it's not allowed for them to do so, and the above reasons I mentioned.

There were some discussions on Somethingawful forums with former GMs letting go of such information, it's likely the threads are still there if you want an interesting read.

 

PSGarak

Just about everybody in this thread seems to have a very static idea of player skill, ie that everyone has a given, innate skill level that cannot be altered. I wonder how valid this viewpoint really is. I think quite a lot more viewpoints could be satisfied simultaneously by being able to bring players up to the standards of the game, rather than matching the standards of the game to some portion of the players.

What would it take to turn an average player into a good player, or a mouthbreather into an average player? Currently most of a player's improvement comes from either their own desire to become a better player, or a more skilled player coaching them. The game itself doesn't so anything of the sort, and I'm not sure that it's possible given the genre. However, this idea of "training," if implimentable, would be a really nice compliment to ramping difficulty. It would also mean that progression of the elite guilds is more defined by time rather than by absolute progression, since it's now more 'reasonable' to expect joe schmoe to be able to handle the complex and engaging high-end encounters.

I have fond memories of Ninja Gaiden because it was an insanely hard game, but it did an excellent job of bringing the player up to the standards of the game, better than any other game I've seen. As I said, I'm not sure it's a model that's easily implimentable in a game like WoW, nor would you necessarily want it: being a social game perhaps the coaching should come from the game rather than people. Perhaps there should be an exploration of developing talent rather than an emphasis on discovering and poaching it... but maybe it's just a wishy-washy fantasty-world let's-all-be-friends pipedream. Most things like this tend to fall somewhere in the middle, so I'll phrase the question this way: Where on the spectrum between innate and trainable does WoW skill lay, and is coaching mediocre players to be better, whether by their peers or by the game itself, a valid path towards more players being able to experience high-end content?

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

Hypatia

A lot of this comes down to how your guild chooses to treat the game. Somebody mentioned that the point of a game is to compete—but that’s not what I think when I think “game”. When I think about it, the first thing that comes to mind is “the point of a game is to have fun.” Competition is one kind of fun. Competition to see who’s best, to try to be one of the first guilds in the world to complete X boss, etc. But there are certainly other kinds of fun.

The top-end raiding guilds are built around an amazing intensity. Do I look up to folks in these guilds? Yeah. But at the same time, I don’t want to be in one of those guilds. In the WoW -> TBC transition, my old guild broke up into two new guilds, because of philosophical differences about what’s fun, essentially. The other guild became one of the top guilds on the server—being the third on the server to complete Illidan, etc. etc. Our guild is currently ranked #10 on the server in wowjutsu—basically, we’re hanging around the tail of the top end, and are just getting into T6 content now.

The fundamental split between the two guilds was the question of which is better: To play with someone who is extremely technically proficient, but who you can’t stand, or to play with someone you enjoy playing with who needs to improve a bit. Our side of the choice was to prefer people we like to people we don’t like. When we recruit, we don’t bring in players who are assholes. Short and simple. We also work hard to get the best raiders we can, and I think we’ve got a pretty good crew. Not everybody is totally on the game all the time, but we get the job done. And personally, I’m quite satisfied to be in the top ten guilds on the server and be working on T6 content, given that we only raid 12 hours a week max.

And yeah, there were a lot of people who went the other way who I was sad to lose touch with.

Anyway, the point is this: If you are in one of the big-name competing guilds, there’s absolutely no reason for you to care what’s happening in the tiers below you. How does it diminish your achievement to know that other people are able to get into the instances more easily? You were there first, which is what you were aiming to do in the first place. You are elite. Yay, go you. It's in some ways much more of a slap in the face to a guild like mine that they’re removing attunements soon, since we just struggled through those attunements recently, and had some morale issues to deal with because of it.

If things are nerfed into submission, then the people who should be sad are the folks who only get to see the nerfed fights. And if they’re the kind of people who really want to do things hardcore, good luck to them on their way up the ladder. I wouldn’t mind seeing some un-nerfed fights, but I don’t have much choice in the matter—we progress as we progress, and we see where Blizz nerfs stuff as they will. I suspect we’ll be nearing completion of T6 content before the patch hits, which could be nice.

And as for the folks who are getting easier rides in the raiding tiers below my guild of casual-but-mostly-competent raiders? More power to them. We’ve done that stuff. It was fun. It was neat to work together with a bunch of people I genuinely like to get that stuff down, and I’m happy more folks will get the opportunity.

Edit to add: The key thing to remember here is that it’s not like there’s a fixed amount of fun here. You don’t lose funosity because somebody else is having fun. Hell, it can be frustrating to see somebody you know to be an incompetent rolling with an item you’ve wanted forever that never fucking dropped, but it’s not like there’s a limited number of items and you didn’t get it because he did. Sure, there’s a social aspect to the game, but the solution to “I don’t like incompetent people” is “so I won’t group with them”, not “so they should be punished.”

If the game is modified in such a way that more people can see the content and have fun, then it’s a win all around. It’s not a matter of deserving to see the content because you’re not a moron (and know your theorycraft), or being entitled to because you pay for the game.

So let the people who don’t have a clue have their fun, too, because you’re done with that stuff.

And if they can’t get out of the goddamned fire, we still won’t recruit them.

 

◊ Anias

Several people missed the reason I want instant replays included, and prompted, at death. Garak touched on it though (to give credit where due).

They provide an encouragement to _THINK_ about why you died as soon as you die, which is one of the hardest parts of the game for people to intuit for themselves. I've spent a lot of time over the past years explaining "when you die, figure out why you died, then when we wipe post it in raid chat". It's just not taught by the game itself. If your raid group happens to have someone who can share that institutional knowledge, great. If you don't, the game won't give it to you.

I think a large part of the learning curve is abstracted out of the game in wow. It's handled by third parties, be they experienced raid leaders or forums or other sources of authority. I'm interested in identifying areas of that knowledge that could be put back into the game. There's a large number of successful raid leaders, but there's an even larger number of unsuccessful raid leaders. Most of the latter can be blamed on wow's startling lack of built-in teaching structure for raid/group leadership. Stuff like "don't stand in the fire" is pretty well covered by wow's gameplay. Things like "How to analyze why a group failed" is far less covered.

I think having a quick "highlights" reel play when you die would provide a valuable lesson, and a valuable tool. The tool is replacable by third party programs if you know about them, but the lesson is the reason I want it included in the game. The people in wow who choose to fail are on their own. The people in wow who are trying not to fail but simply don't have a good mentor or knowledge of outside resources, I'd like to help. I think you should be able to succeed as a raid leader in wow without having to resort to the outside set of resources. You probably won't excel, but basic success should be possible. I would contend that the game does a poor job of training would be raid leaders, and that things like "why you died" or "here's where the boss really got you" are thoughts that you need to have to succeed, but that the game doesn't do a very good job of encouraging you to have. Most of the valuable lessons I've learned about "how to play games well" come from games other than WOW. It's nice that I've learned those lessons, but I think it would be even better if some of those lessons were included in WOW to make it more accessible to people who might not have mapped the lost woods.

Maybe just include Castille's Deathnote in the base UI would be enough. Maybe blizzard should look at providing WC3 style replays. I think there are plenty of games where this type of "post loss analysis" is encouraged (Mario Strikers for a recent one), and I think they're better games as a result.

 

Whitemane

Does it really require that much technical magic to be possible? Do people really need to see themselves move around shortly before their death to really know what happened? I always found it quite sufficient to just look at my combat log, which is formatted by SimpleCombatLog though.

Would it really teach people a valuable lesson? I think if you are really interested in learning that lesson, the tools are already present and it doesn't require much to just sit down and go through the situation quick to find out why. Either you simply have the wish to improve and understand or you don't. Giving instant replays would seem more like forcing that lesson onto people. Not a bad thing, at all, but it just seems a bit out of place in the context of WoW. Or maybe people do wish to improve and understand, but they have different approaches to the problem. You could also argue that everyone really wants to improve, but not everyone wants to take the time or go through the trouble of sifting through their combat logs.

Mario Strikers - I've never played it, only just saw a few screenshots of it. However I could imagine that the game is fastpaced, compared to WoW, and as such I can see the need for an instant replay. Not to mention I bet you don't have a combat log. So would instant replays really be that useful or would it just be a fancy presentation of something that's really already present in the game?

 

◊ Anias

Reading the combat log doesn't provide information about where you were standing. (for instance)

There's a wide range of "things you fucked up" that a new raid group isn't going to automagically catch. Having a quick replay would speed their process of becoming a better raid group.

I think my point here is that the player training for group combat above the 5 man size in wow needs to be very basic at the start of each expansion, and it needs to have some very noticable "this is what killed you"/"This is what you did wrong" by default. The combat log doesn't qualify as "very noticable".

 

Derketo

Recount is your instant replay. If someone dies on any fight, I always look over how they died if I missed it during the attempt. Shows exactly how things went wrong, from death 1-25.

I'll be alright when we get to pass out time.

 

◊ castille

To give credit where credit is due, DeathNote is actually a friend's mod he wrote back in our MC days. To give people an idea of what DeathNote's output is like, however:

[6. raiddeaths] Castille: [DeathNote]: Spectear (10159 / 2.5) - Amani'shi Tribesman Cyclone Strike 3285 (0.0), Kick 103 (0.7), Amani'shi Axe Thrower Axe Volley 1097 (0.5), hit 4134 (1.3), 1540

Lists the person, how much damage they took, the span in which they took that damage, and then the breakdown with the time until the next hit in (). It's kinda nice, it's real time..

23:40:55> [Illidan Stormrage's] [Shear] was blocked by [Castille].
^ Yes, this actually happened. Yes, Castille is a shaman.

 

Soralin

You seem to be a fairly angry person Xi.

I fail to see why the end game content should be as restricted as it is - obviously Blizzard agrees with me, or the instances would still be at pre-nerf 2.01 level.

Yes, "true end game" is a status symbol that many on these forums don't want to give up - but why aren't these people happy saying "we beat it pre-nerf", or "we did it on heroic mode"? What do the "true end game" players, in this case seemingly characterised by Xi and his battering of anybody not up to Illidan, have against people seeing more content?

I certainly don't advocate any Kara-level guild jumping straight in and killing Illidan, but I do support some "dumbing down" of the end game instances. In my opinion, the ~10% of guilds in BT (quoted earlier in this thread) should in my opinion be higher - 30% maybe, or even 50%. Whether this is done via nerf, or via a "normal/heroic mode" model doesn't fuss me.

 

MeCh

Perhaps because some of us who are behind on content want something challenging instead of watered down crap handing out free epix.

 

◊ Farstrider

Hmm. I disagree this.

I think even in these days of 25 man raids, a lot of raids are carrying some weight of "average" players. But honestly most of the raiding in TBC is 3 step:- a) be properly geared/specced b) don't fail miserably to see the environment around you c) turn up enough to learn the fights and achieve something.

Most of the moaning in this thread seems to be saying "hey we can do b), give us free loot!". What you have to realise is you still need to execute a) and c) efficiently enough to get it done.

 

Moshne

I think the key here for those of us that are against this "easing of the game" is that we see it as a slippery slope.

Yes, the attunements have been lifted, and if that were all, then fine. Those that are truly skilled enough to do the content will be fine, and no one will get what they aren't due.

The problem is the watering down of the game. By lifting the requirements, they knew that these players wouldn't be able to handle it, as they weren't geared enough, so, they give them badge rewards. These badge rewards will be available to people who have done nothing in Hyjal/Bt, but will be of quality similar to drops on bosses beyond the content they are using it to beat. They aren't proving they have equal skill by being able to gear themselves beyond the threshold of Najentus or Kazrogal, they are just getting a pass for it.

Then, as we've all seen, if its not watered down enough with the free near-Illidan quality badge gear, they will lower the difficulty of the fights as well. This isn't a mere elitist concern, but it takes away from the richness of the fights as well. We can't go back and kill Kael'thas with the pre-nerf version, because Blizz made it easier for others. I'm all for allowing everyone the opportunity to do all content in the game, but its not like you need some special OEM number or store bought key, you just have to play, Nihilium has no special "skills" that allowed them to progress quickly, and my fledgling BT/Hyjal guild doesn't either, but we do feel a sense of accomplishment in what we've done, and it feels like its being stripped away simply under the guise of 'equality,' which rings a bit dull on those of us who don't feel we have been endowed with something special to get where we are, just work.

 

Nezralix

It sounds like you (and some other people in this thread) have too much of your sense of self-worth tied up in WoW, and you need to stop doing that. Your guild accomplished something in WoW, you got a title out of it. Be happy, move on, and stop complaining on Internet forums. This thread isn't even about content that was trivially changed after you completed it, so I'm not sure why you felt compelled to bring it up.

 

Uglesh

Let me start by saying my guild would be deemed "average" on progression at this point. Second, I'm a STAUNCH advocate of having a challenging game.

I believe that just about everyone complaining about these changes needs to take a step off their soap-box. I don't think anyone is looking to discredit or diminish your accomplishments. What is being done is merely a continuation of what we have seen since TBC release (eg:heroic keying. SSC attune, pvp rewards) I find it to be down right comical that people are upset at the fact someone else is being allowed an opportunity to try something new. People are somehow confusing these changes as somehow being a Lotto or give away.
I applaud Blizzard for having the intelligence to not repeat their mistakes from pre-BC. The idea of tuning your end game to the bleeding edge and slowly tuning it down is really a novel and ingenious idea that will likely be copied in the industry.

Look at this from a business perspective... who do you cater to?? The 10% end game or the 90% casual?? Yes some people will be offended by the changes... but lets face it.... you aren't going to leave the game over this.

 

Boneitis

At this point roughly 30 new guilds are killing Illidan per week. And you can't use static percentages for your ideal model either because it is faulty math. More and more guilds each week are being queried by Jutsu. So maybe 1% of guilds used to kill Illidan when only 900,000 people in the US were listed. Now almost 3% out of 1.2 million have done it. I remember when Vashj was at under 3%, now it's over 10%. Kael is almost there too. So the percentages and total are going up in tandem simultaneously.

I think what you're asking for is more people killing them right now, instantly, this minute. Because more and more people are doing the content. The numbers don't lie. T5 content used to be the minority, now it's the average. Assuming 2 months until PTR goes live, and at least 3 months after that before WotLK; you'll see far more people killing Illidan than ever even stepped foot in Naxx. If attunements were never lifted, Illidan would have reached 10% before Wotlk.

 

Uglesh