Tharia

This is part of what I meant, although I realize I didn't write it ^^
Participation has the same problem a communication, if it gets too big, the smaller guilds or even bigger have little to no influence, one guild participating hardly makes a difference when there are 200+ guilds working on it so the feeling of participation just isn't there.
on the other hand, when there are only 10-20 guilds, it gets interesting.
You play with these people since three years (in most cases) on the same server, you know quite people from other guilds, even other factions personally. You want to achieve something with them, not with some random guild from another country.

//EDIT. Gurg, if thats what they want to do, they could just add a timer. Obviously they had something more "interesting" in mind.

 

Spherus

Well arguably it doesn't really increase the longevity of the content but rather creates a staggered release. Kalec, Brutallus and Felmyst will be killed by nearly all top-tier guilds within a few hours of 2.4 going live, Twins as soon as the gates open, etc. They may as well make separate Magtheridon/Gruul-esque instances for the 3 final bosses and release them 3 weeks apart starting from 2.4's release on live.

 

• Snowy

Which is the same thing....? It was pretty much agreed that one of the key failures of TBC was releasing all the raid content at once.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Orestus

I'd agree that if the entire gate opening mechanic enters the world as is, its kind of a repudiation of the whole "world first" race and excitment by Blizzard. What will most likely end up happening is whatever high-pop server out there has the perfect storm of T6 guilds, progressing T5 guilds, etc, will open the gate first and their uber-guild(s) will get the world firsts wrapped up, because they've seen and probably farm all the fights on the PTR.

That brings us though to the real question, doesn't this very extensive PTR really just invalidate the whole "World first" competition anyway? As raiders, we want Blizzard to make a good-faith effort to deliver us challenging, tuned, bug-free encounters when the patch hits, and the only way they can do that is by letting us test them repeatedly on the PTR. If Blizzard really wants to get SP pushed out as polished as possible, they can't do it w/out letting guilds test Kil'jaeden extensively, and after a week or two of working on him and learning the fight, he's basically going to be on farm for any of the top guilds who have the time and the motivation to do that much work on the PTR. My general recollection of the mood of WoW for the past couple years has been that world firsts meant something when guilds go into a fight blind, and have to work out strats, etc. As much as any of this stuff means anything, and remembering its a gamer we're talking about, it meant something when everyone heard Guild X killed world first Patchwerk or 4H or Kel'Thuzad or whatever. Will it mean anything when Guild X kills Kalecgos 1hr after the server starts? Not when 50 other guilds do it that night, I don't think.

Perhaps Blizzard sees this, knows their testing schedule and what they expect for testing the rest of the zone, and realizes the whole "world first" race is going to be, like many have said, just a question of which servers come up first and which high-end guild gets their raid together the fastest. To that end, they may see the opportunity to have what is, competition concerns aside, a cool, thematic, interesting world event that alot of people can experience and participate in. They may even see it as a way to promote more guild-interaction than you normally see in WoW...I could see high end guilds offering to send a few "advisers" along w/ lower end guilds to help push them through Vashj/Kael or whatever.

Or maybe their world events team and their guild relations team just haven't had their coordination meeting yet, who knows?

 

Vernichter

I think the gate mechanism is meant to mimic the assault on Quel'danis. I, for one, am thrilled by the prospect of an interactive world event where I can actively participate (through dailies), where I will personally benefit from the event (more dailies and vendor NPCs), and from which I will be able to discern that my participation was useful. Furthermore, unlike the AQ unlocking, the act of participating is enjoyable and individually profitable.

In the same manner the gate opening is an interactive server event in which lots of raiders will be able to participate. Given that it will only take a relatively short time for each gate (1-3 weeks, lets say), each contribution with an Essence of the Immortals will feel significant, and contributing guilds will also be individually rewarded with gems, etc. If it took a longer time it could be a heavy drag, but the pacing seems appropriate when viewed just at the server level.

I am certainly very sympathetic to the situation of Forte, Last Resort, and others. I'd like to suggest that they just enjoy the content as new content, but I understand that for them, a big, legitimate appeal is the competition. It is the downside of Blizzard's approach for improving our immersion into the world.

 

◊ Ulfgar

Given that Blizzard developers have apparently said that the number of essences required to open the gates will vary to some degree or another based on server population, people really need to stop repeating the idea that low population servers are going to be disadvantaged. The fact is, no one knows how it's going to work.

What's likely, of course, is that the gates won't all come down at once and that some top tier guilds will be disadvantaged in the race for world firsts. But we don't actually know who that will favour.

 

Ghando

It wouldn't be totally outrageous to send Kil'jaeden live without PTR testing. As I recall, Kel'thuzad received no PTR testing (unlike the rest of Naxx, which was tested quite a bit on PTR) and he was very finely polished/tuned. Blizzard can demonstrably test and polish individual encounters by themselves. They need our help to test entire zones.

At the end of the day, what's really more important? Clear/definitive WORLD FIRSTS on Kil'jaeden and the other bosses, or a really well-tuned and enjoyable experience once everything goes live? I think the devs' perspective is pretty obvious, and I'm inclined to agree. If Sunwell goes live and every encounter is pretty well tuned and relatively bug-free, how could anyone really complain?

 

Spherus

To me longevity implies content more in line with Naxx - where the content itself determines the rate of progression (arguably, gear obtained within the instance was necessary to continue progressing) rather than the artificial cock-blocking Blizzard seems to introduce when they simply don't want to progress for whatever reason (C'thun v1 - again, arguably just buggy but the length of time it took to be fixed implies to me at least it was a somewhat intentional stopping point).

 

SanSul

My server Haomarush was listed as medium and now just recently Recommended. We have only one raiding guild farming illidan, and only two additional guilds that kill Vashj and Kael. Not to mention, the Illidan farming guild already spends signifigant time in BT/Hyjal per week and its week will already be full from Sunwell and unlikely able to do Kael and Vashj.

We are looking at about 9-11 essences turned in per week. At that rate, it would take us 8 weeks per gate, so basically we would unlock the final boss 6 months after Sunwell in released?

So maybe Blizzard is offering lower essences per population, but what about med/high populated servers with no progression? I really don't want to get stuck paying another 25$ just so I can experience sunwell before Northrend. And if they auto release gates, I am doubtful that they will be released in a timely fashion so it doesn't turn into another Naxxramus vs Honour.

 

• Falk

Call me a backseat commentator, but since C'Thun, very often regardless of whoever gets world first, you'll get people of all kinds claiming how X should have gotten it before Y for Z reason, resulting very often in prolonged shit-flinging competitions - if not by guilds, then by average forum-trolling retard-joe fanboys, particularly those who seem to like to turn the whole thing into a capitalist USA vs unwashed Europe deal. Taking the perceived control of that out of the guild's hands and into the server may be something they want to try out intentionally. It's better than arguing about overtuning or patch dates or despawn bugs or mass-soulstoning, I'd say.

You're reading too much into this. Considering some of the things Blizzard has been/is looking at to the extent of possibly merging realms, I'd say they'd be heaping work on themselves if this was their objective. PCT is pittance compared to the amount you earn from customer satisfaction/retention.

 

Kazanir

Doesn't that statement fail logically though? If Blizzard is capable of correctly testing and tuning 4H, Sapphiron, and Kel'Thuzad, why can't they also tune the rest of the bosses in a zone? The reason we have so much PTR testing now is because of the clusterfuckage of BWL and to a lesser extent AQ -- but those examples don't show it's not possible for Blizzard to nail raid tuning without help -- it just shows that in those cases they were incompetent.

'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.

 

Mordinm

Time and resources seems to be the most likely answer. Blizzard may very well be cappable of correctly testing and tuning every boss in every new instance. But if Sunwell had not come out till this December there may not have been nearly so many people on wow left to play it. They need our help to test zones because they lack the resources to thoughly test them in a timely maner. So they devote their limited manpower to test the latter bosses so that they can be release to live without the test realm preview and still well balanced.

 

Oxylos

Purely allocation of manhours. Rest assured the test team is working forty to sixty hour weeks during patch times testing the content their bosses tell them to. If you have the PTR to get people testing content then you spend more time on Kil'jaeden, Kel'thuzad, whatever. If there wasn't a PTR then all of naxx would have been tested more thoroughly EXCEPT for the fights you speak of that were tested heavily internally because the manhours would have been shifted. Say what you will about this not mattering on release vashj (or any of ssc) but you can certainly assume Blizzard knows exactly which bosses will be reached on the PTR and plans this very carefully and then allocates their team to the remaining boss or bosses (along with many many other things the test team has to tackle such as the always fun "take a character and run into every wall at every angle to see if you fall through the world" stuff that people who have never been in QA don't have the pleasure of experiencing)

 

Elendril

These same discussions come up every time a new raid zone goes on the PTR and nothing new is said. Can Blizzard test raid encounters internally? Of course, but with not with nearly the rigorousness of hundreds of guilds trying everything they can to beat them. The value of having all virgin encounters for raiders to overcome when the zone hits live is vastly outweighed by the importance of having properly functioning encounters - thus, raid zones on the PTR. They have limited testers with limited time. A competition for world firsts is far less important than preventing the PR and customer service nightmare that a broken zone like BWL causes.

As for the gate opening - it's a cool design that breaks up the typical mold of simply killing a boss in a zone and moving on to the next one. Might it frustrate some people and throw a wrench into the "world first" competitions? Yes. But the value in having variety in design is far more important in the big picture. From the looks of the structure of the daily quests and the like, this is the AQ gate opening done right.

 

• Falk

Pure conjecture, but with a reference point they could compare how well their internal raid team does vs boss x and boss y and see how succesful guilds are on test versus boss x, then extrapolate how hard boss y is to kill based on that. You'd still need a realistic reference point (like, how well are guilds geared?) for the first few bosses to prevent the entire thing from being overtuned from the start, or undertuned from the start (hi BT v1.0)

That'd only work for pure mathematics (and even then only very broadly) like tank survivability, dps expectations, healer longevity, etc though. Execution and problem solving would be a whole different ballgame.

 

Nezralix

World firsts are a player-created phenomenon, and it shouldn't be surprising at all if Blizzard isn't interested in them at anything more than a cursory level. Why?

1) It's not in their interests to have the content steamrolled by maniacs in a few days.
1a) They want the content to have some lifespan, so players don't start crying about Blizzard not giving them enough to work with.
1b) They don't really want to have to create razor's-edge content that's all but impossible to complete, ever. To that end, unlike Arena competition, this sort of environment fosters a rather unhealthy demand on player time investment, with guilds asking their members to put in ten hours a day for no really good reason. It might as well be a "who can level to 60 the fastest??" competition, as far as time investment goes.
2) It potentially requires a lot of GM intervention and oversight, which I'm sure they'd rather not devote the manpower to, all the while risking inconsistencies.
3) The whole affair is muddled in factors that largely invalidate the accomplishment anyway, including server economies, server stability, patch rollout schedules, intra-server competition, and so on.

All of these factors have been touched on. All of them are very real issues that outweigh the rather illusory sense of competition that guilds may want to attach to the raiding game. There's just no point in dwelling on it.

 

Sillia

To those debating the issue about server population:

I'm immediately reminded of people transferring battlegroups in order to find competition and better options. Would that not be a feasible solution for the raiders who really are bleeding edge and really want to compete for worldwide first? Server first wouldn't really be affected at all; it'd only be cross-server issues that would crop up. If a guild is serious enough to push for world first, what's a server transfer matter?

 

Anedris

Maybe they intend to allow Kil'jaeden to be killed on the PTR because they know that will invalidate any kind of world firsts and thus make this whole fuss a non-issue...?

 

Katria

Haven't seen this posted yet, new badge gear is listed on MMO champion
MMO-Champion - World of Warcraft Guides and Raid Strategies

2 hand weapons for 150, main hand for 105 and offhand for 45. Looks like my rogue may spec fists...
Chest/legs for 100 badges, gloves/belt for 75, and a few nice rings for 60.

 

Pyros

Was posted about 4pages back. Like, at the same time this went up on mmochamp/worldofraids.

 

• Ungeir

Easy now, don't go slinging shit at me for voicing my opinion. You know jack about me, stop assuming what I know and where I've been.

I said it won't matter to 'most' guilds. Yes it will matter to some. But those are a very tiny fraction of the guilds that are gonna do Sunwell. I could have put it better, so here it is in simpler terms:

Competition for world firsts is interesting and I certainly understand why people do it. But, the fact that possibly the tiniest fraction of players have this competition running among themselves should never be a determining factor in anything Blizzard does. Raiding is not eSports. I am not happy they are doing this whole Arena/eSports thing - but that's a totally different thing, and I've seen no hint that they intend for pve to be any sort of eSport.

I agree that the gates are probably intended as a pacing mechanism, and probably also as a way to foster server community. The instance-based pve model that wow has (with a few world bosses, but those are of little importance), there is little interaction between raid guilds on a server apart from competition on server firsts and the usual drama of people switching guilds/forming new ones. The gate adds an element of interaction, however small, that I think is intended to create a bigger sense of community among the guilds. One might even see a situation where SW 3/3 guilds help guilds stuck on Vashj/Kael in order to get more essences turned in. Maybe we won't see this, but it's an interesting situation.

Intra-server competition for world firsts is fundamentally flawed. Different patch/hotfix schedules for EU/US, different server environments, different stability/lag issues, already make it flawed.

But yeah, this isn't fair from the point of view of the player that has world firsts (or being in top 5, top 10, or whatever) as a priority. But I do not think it is sane to ever expect Blizzard to take any consideration towards this race. Past history of hotfixes certainly doesn't suggest so.

 

• Nopher

It’s not like the sort of participation and benefits you speak of above needs to lead to the progression meta-game being ruined for a lot of high-end guilds though. Simply scaling the event based upon server population would make a lot of sense or heck; perhaps even make sure it’s not a factor in the progression race at all. Why should Joe average care about unlocking some bosses in an instance he won’t step foot into for a long time? Surely the biggest perks will be the badge vendor with kickass loot and more daily quests, no?
The only people truly effected by the Sunwell event are the ones that have farmed content for months now, trust me, we have no problem farming the old content for some event (which in itself is not a bad idea, I like the server-wide participation) as long as there is some mechanic in place ensuring that each server has a relatively equal burden to carry. The lifespan of content doesn’t have to come at the cost of ruining the progression meta-game, it’s quite possible to get both.

That you think the entire progression meta-game is invalidated by a number of flaws is in many way correct, I however don’t see the point in introducing another major factor that turns it from somewhat exciting to completely worthless though. You speak of how minor things like patch rollouts and server economies effects the race, how do you think weeks of opening some gate will factor into it all?

In some ways we have what you spoke about as factors invalidating accomplishments on crack now with the PTR. Very few people among high-end guilds care at all about whom kills what there because it’s after all just testing, EU servers and transfers are a big mess etc. I expect a lot of bosses and numbers to be changed for live and I think the openness of the community (even on EJ before the admins stepped in) reflects that.

I think most people accept that the race for world-firsts and such is not a perfect competition in any means but it’s a fun game inside the game; our very own meta-game which we enjoy quite a lot. I don’t see the point at all of completely obliterating it though since it will lead to a lot of high-end guilds dropping out all together. It’s not like the mood is all that great among us after a good 8 months of farming BT and Hyjal after the shitfest that was initial TBC raiding. Sure most of us will come back and check out WotLK but if this trend continues I have no doubt whatsoever that you will be missing a lot of guilds (which you and others know by name, have seen movies of and whatnot regardless of how flawed the race in itself is) a couple of months into WotLK. No one is asking for the game to be centered on us but what might happen now is really uncalled for and doesn’t affect Joe average consumer even a tiny bit if it was changed to scale.

I’m aware of the “Blizzard developer” claiming that the event will scale based on server population and I’m, together with a lot of other high-end guilds, holding out and hoping to get a blue post confirming this at some point this week. Just like Eoy from Forte said this is one big gamekiller for us and we won’t just let this slide without making any fuzz about it.

 

• sadris

The fact that DnT, Nihilium, etc all have website crashes during the world-first races means that there are a lot of people who care, regardless whether or not they themselves are capable of participating in them.

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

mackzter

Totally agree with what Nopher wrote and It would be totally ridiculous for a smaller server not to have a chance because they don't have a "solid" raiding community.

Need a proper last race before WotlK!

 

• Ungeir

We also still have to see how the final tuning of the first three bosses end up on live. It might be that the gate opening event (with or without the population scaling implemented) will not be the main limiting factor at all, but rather clearing the bosses will be. It's quite, probably very, possible that this will not be the limiting factor - but I actually hope it will be the challenge of the first 3 bosses, rather than the race to open the gates, which becomes the focus.

I also think we're approaching a situation where world firsts have much less value than they used to have, as new content is no longer the challenge to best and most dedicated. Blizzard simply cannot create challenging content for this crowd which is even remotely accesible for the majority of raiders. TBC-launch proved this.

Hopefully we'll see an insanely difficult Kil'jaeden encounter which makes this whole discussion about unfair gate opening events pointless, because mastering the encounter takes weeks and weeks And this is fight which is gonna matter - noone really cares today about who got Skeram world first.