Eulolia

You're right about progress/commitment. But the problem I see is: why are SSC and TK regarded as such "progressed" instances? I've even seen the word hardcore used to describe them multiple times this year. Yet they are the first proper (i.e. more than a cave with 2 bosses) 25man instances in the game and don't have any attunement. Are they really that inaccessible?

I would describe them as "menacing" in that there are long bossfights that can wipe you suddenly and nasty trash clears, but there's not a huge gear check element. Am I foolish for believing the first big 25-man instance should be as welcoming as the first big 40-man instance (mc..) was? Surely the "the game has progressed" argument only applies to those that have been around for all that progression?

 

frber

Simply think it is that most people discover that raiding isn't something can sustained for long term; while still keeping other more 'important' hobbies and a healthy social life in the very first instance they really work to learn and beat (not counting beeing powered through a place by people who did it before). Don't think it matters all that much if its a 10 man or a 25 man.

For this expansion for most people its after Karazhan the intresst to keep progressing in raids dies out. But don't think its the instance. Its simply the progression model with months after months of grinding that takes its toll. Most people would likely lose intresst and stop raiding regardless of what the first instance was.

 

Bixel

As a note: I've been a raid leader, guild leader, a member, an initiate within end-game guilds, struggling to form guilds and newbie guilds across several MMOs. Right now, I'm just a plain old member in a small guild that is a group of friends. We're skilled players with limited play time. I prefer this atmosphere, though it's not without it's problems. This is my perspective.

1) Coordinating the schedules of 10+ busy people who enjoy playing with each other really is a problem for smaller guilds. It's sometimes a challenge to put together 5-mans with the right makeup. Putting together a 25-man is practically impossible for newly (i.e. 3-6 months) minted raid guilds. Those that last longer often end up with burn-out (lack of play, too much play, too much stagnation, etc.) from their core members. If they do not have enough momentum as a guild, they just won't attract the members to continue.

2) PvP gear right now is easier to obtain per time spent than pve gear. This contributes to the problem in (1). Why pve when I can spend time doing pvp and over time I'm guaranteed to pick up drops that are good. If I do pve content, I am not guaranteed anything. Badge drops are inferior to arena gear.

3) Right now pve is static, scripted content designed for a very limited set of class-makeups. This lets people optimize their raids, gear and guilds to handle new content -- which is generally familiar and similar making it easy to conquer. As noted by the more recent PTR news, top guilds easily chew through the "new" scripted content.

4) Fix should be to match the content and reward with the players' class, gear and skill level as an automated process. Content should dynamically adapt or map to the group in the instance rather than executing a contrived script that's tuned for a specific class makeup.

I realize that's ambitious. Maybe a first step would be to do as suggested and provide simultaneous content for every new instance at every level: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 40, whatever-mans with normal, heroic, timed, etc. at each level. However, if Blizzard can piece together (4), even as a guideline, tuning is not nearly as problematic for instance variances.

 

Hildegard

Skilled players, that have few time

I know the readers here tend to belong to the players that dedicate a lot of time and effort into the game, which is a thing I support. But WoW is a mass market product and it lacks of content for people, that can actually play, but don't want to invest a lot of time.

I have to agree with frber. I really like raiding and I think I am able to play along in most boss fights as a rogue after a two to five minute explanation. I know how to do damage and can still maintain DPS cycles when a lot is going on or perform target switches. I can maintain about 1000-1100 DPS while using saison 3 daggers and badges/karazhan/zul'aman/void reaver stuff while my spreadsheet tells my I could do 100 or 200 more. I don't die in the flame wrath, the sprout or to Leos whirlwind and I don't blow up my group on Solarian.

What I would like is to reduced time efforts. I stopped raiding pre TBC before Huhuran, because I just wouldn't farm lvl50 instances for nature resistance. I like PVE, but I like less time consuming and especially less repetition. I am bored doing the same instance for more than five times and I seriously hate any instance I have done more than ten times.

I think a lot of people in the late twenties or beginning thirties enjoy raiding as an experience but don't want to put that much effort into the game, especially on a regular basis. This is actually a large group of people, that don't want to raid regulary but enjoy some evenings with raiding. This group has after Karazhan, Gruul, Magtheridon and Zul'Aman nothing really left.

This group hates everything including lots of repetition. Badge gear, honor grinding, farming instances, daily quests... all the stuff build in to be a time sink. So the nerfs to the timesinks would really be welcome.

Perfect world for players like me would be if every boss dropped their items for everyone, if there was no such things as reputation, if the requirement for riding 300 was more like the Shartuul event and honor gear purchaseable by arena points, if there was less trash und no respawn.

I support status symbol and advantages for the more dedicated players, but I would like to do the boss encounters, but only once or twice. If I do them months after the real raiders - I don't care.

Right now the game supports time sinks in every way. I can see the point in limiting progress, but lots of people quit the game because it is either too time consuming or too boring or too frustrating (like doing arenas without a lot arena gear).

Because of that instances could be changed in a way, that right now you get a quest reward for killing a boss from Gruul to Kael'Thas, that are old and of no more interest for progress oriented raiders, and get the items, that are interesting for you by killing the boss once. The bosses in the T6 und Sunwell should still drop normally it would just help that people didn't have to go back to Gruul for a trinket or still farming T5 content before being able to progress.

This group loves raiding, it's willing to pay 11€ per month, but it also likes RL relationships, spending time somewhere else and being more spontaneous about their free time. This group is big, but their needs aren't adressed by the current instancing ideas.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Insitut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Soralin

Don't expect that to change. World of Warcraft is a pay to play game, its in Blizzard's interest to keep people playing - and that means timesinks.

While I agree things like farming level 50 instances for NR gear for a end game level 60 raid was stupid, Blizzard have learned from that mistake and we see very few resistance fights now. Those that do require resistance (SR for BT, for example), have crafted items linked to that instances faction.

I support the idea of progressive nerfs, because I think it allows more people to see content that they wouldn't otherwise see, which is also in Blizzards best interest - allowing more of their client base to see more of the instances that their designers put so much effort into. Just exactly how that works and how it impacts upon the "true end game" guilds and their claims it cheapens their efforts is something I'm keen to see.

 

• songster

You say that, but in fact the ideal customer from Blizzard's point of view is someone who keeps paying month after month but doesn't actually log on much. Less stress on the servers that way. That's clearly the intent with the dailies. Come on, play for a short time, then log off again. Wouldn't be at all surprised to see weekly or monthly quests pop up in the future (there's precedent for the monthly quest with the Consortium gems).

If you have a guaranteed carrot ahead of you, that's all it'll take to keep some people subscribed. So if it's a case of "Do this monthly quest three months in succession to receive loot", that just bought Blizzard another three months' playtime from someone at the casual end of the scale. They get their rewards without the grind, and Blizzard gets their customer.

Blizzard's best interest is actually in developing real-time timesinks, not game-time timesinks.

 

Maczor

I was going to reply to each of your points but as I was replying most of them were the same. I get where you are coming from and it just sounds like WoW isn't that important to you and your friends and that your other activities take priority. A lot of your comments sound like you should be playing a single player/co-op console/PC game that you and your friends can pickup and play whenever you want, and stop playing it just as quickly.

I’m not sure what your gaming history is, but WoW is literally “Super Easy-Mode” in nearly every aspect compared to its MMO predecessors. No penalty for death, PVP safe zones, instanced content, smaller guilds/raids, ability to respect, top end loot that is extremely accessible, the list goes on.

This statement struck me as strange seeing as you basically are saying you hate everything about WoW. I have to ask is this game really for you if you hate such a large portion of it? Few people like everything about WoW. I hate Arena for example, but the other aspects of the game I enjoy. I like to take an hour or two and do some BG's. Or solo run Strath 2 or 3 times in a row trying for the Deathcharger. Or grind Orgers in Nagrand for rep. Or just fly around Blades Edge Mountains and mine ore.

Your biggest issue is you say you hate farming an instance and don't like to kill a boss more then a few times. Your solution is to dumb down raiding (and the game in general) even further to the point where players like myself (top 600 US Illidan guild, nothing special) would have been done with not only raiding after 2 months of TBC… but done with EVERYTHING, completing each new 25 instance in a couple weeks instead of a couple months. This kind of change is not good for WoW or raiding.

However I do have some options for you if you want to see all end game raid content at a mere fraction of the true time investment required.

1. Join a T6 guild as a guest. Our guild does this and we’ve taken raiding members friends, or old members who can on longer raid through all of Hyjal and most of BT. Most of these guests will get to experience the Illidan encounter while investing something like 1/20th the time a normal raiding member of Prodigy would have.

2. Join a PUG. Yes these exist. I know because our guild runs them on the weekends. We’ve done SSC and TK including Kael and Vashj. In 2.4 I wouldn't be surprised if we started doing Hyjal and BT. We’ve taken randoms that were vouched as good players (AKA you) and even have gotten them both of their vials. Granted Blackrock is one of the top progressed servers, but this is an option especially if you are looking to see content only once.

3. Level 80 is just around the corner. You said you are ok seeing the content months after everyone else. And if you already don’t have a lot of time to play WoW, why not wait until you are level 80 and go back and kill Archimonde and Illidan then? I did it with Kel’Thazad and it made for a very relaxing and fun night of raiding, one or two shotting encounters I’ve never seen before.


I agree there is room for improvement, but a lot of that will already happen in WOTLK. We are getting Naxx as an intro 25 man dungeon. Also the 10 man progression path is supposed to be more complete and on par with the 25 man path.

But you need to realize that if both of us are playing WoW and you play 8 hours a week and I play 30, I’m going to get to experience more of the game then you. It’s just the way an MMO is designed and if that isn’t acceptable then maybe this genre isn’t for you. I hate most things about FPS games… and guess what I don’t play them very often.

 

Shadout

Easy doesnt have much to do with time-sinks.

For your comment of about people clearing all TBC instances a few weeks after release, I thought the obvious solution for that was posted a ½ year ago: Staggered releases of instances as it was pre-TBC.

The point is, games obviously will have time-sinks, if you got everything without putting something into the game (time), it wouldnt be a game.
That doesnt mean games have to have stupid time-sinks however. And one of the issues with the MMO-genre so far has surely been the use of obsessive time-sinks. WoW has less than many earlier MMOs, but thats hardly a reason to stop this progress toward maturing the genre.

Removing or lessening dumb time-sinks wont destroy WoW, hell, it might make it better for everyone.

I dont really get that argument even if it pops up once in a while.
Why pve?
Because you liked pve? Sounds like the only reason needed.

 

glowacks

While Hildegard's assessment is fairly accurate for a large group of people in the guild I'm in, I personally would like to spend more of my free time attempting to beat content but can't for a couple of reasons. First is that I currently don't have internet access outside of public labs, heh. But the main reason is the reason that I am in such a low level guild and tolerate it to begin with: there's no real pressure on success. We've lost a decent number of people to higher level newly formed progression guilds because of their drive to succeed and not care what pressure is put on them. I play Warcraft to have fun, and will absolutely leave any guild that has a raid or guild leader yell at its members about raid-related stuff for any reason. For that reason, I absolutely love the guild I play(ed) in regularly, even if its progression was lower than I really wanted and was capable of. The point is that there are plenty of people that are willing and capable of progress but can't because of some sort of factor that relates to the multiplayer aspect of the game. There are others (I sorta fit in this category too both ways) that are capable of knowing the things that they should do but are unable to actually do them due to equipment issues - whether mechanical or organic - and this is something that's never going to change. The Heigan encounter was definitely limiting in this fashion - people "skilled" in it were not necessarily any better in any other part of the game.

They design encounters that some people are better at than others by virtue of the mechanics, and by the same token there are raid instances that are better for some raid groups than others due to things completely divorced from the actual encounter. The length of Karazhan compared with Gruul/Mag for example. Other than possibly the main tank, there's certainly no need for Kara gear on Maulgar if you know what you're doing, especially given crafted gear. Thus a guild that only has 1 hour every single night could conceivably kill Maulgar quickly, making a couple attempts a night, while if they were stuck on anything in Kara they'd really only get 1-2 attempts a WEEK. While this is basically an unreasonable time distribution for a raid, it more-or-less demonstrates that the expected value of your guilds time availability is not direct related to their progress potential compared to the distribution of that time. If you make something accessible to a guild that raids one day a week for 4 hours, it need not be as accessible (or even possible) for a guild that raids 2 hours a night twice a week, and vice versa. And for a guild like mine, sometimes the raid is only going to be full from 9-11, something that worked fine while working through MC, but tended to fall apart later...

Economics says that Blizzard's goal is to maximize the future value of the income streams generated by current and future subscribers, less the future value of costs associated to obtain that income. Thus they want more customers, and would prefer them now as opposed to later, but they need to balance that with maintaining those subscribers. If content in general is doable by players who have a short amount of time available, are they going to be able to keep nearly the number of subscribers that have larger amounts of free time? Now I agree that Blizzard's best customers are those that pay and never log in, and that there is a lot of brand loyalty and lack of competition working here, but there's a point where players are going to quit in large numbers if the game no longer interests them. This was true pre-2.1 (almost everyone I knew quit playing, including me), something that they are trying very hard to stop from happening. I'm sure the people in their sales department are looking at their cancellation figures from accounts that killed Illidan and the impact that the long delay in releasing content had on their bottom line. The other option of releasing more content that is doable quickly has the other effect: they'd have to hire more designers, programmers, artists and testers in order to keep up with a larger output rate, which would cause their costs to go up at a rate that is probably not commensurate with the increased (or maintained) subscription.

It's probably an old line to say "they won't do that because of economics", but it definitely is a large issue in how they design content. There's a reason why Blizzard has managed to developed the far-and-away most popular MMO out there, and it's due (in part) to them knowing just what exactly they can do to appeal to the masses while still offering something to the hardcore out there. I'm not saying that designing content that can be tackled faster is a bad idea, but that if its a good idea I'm sure Blizzard would have realized it by now!

 

Necraz

One section of the post that merits further discussion is the intra-realm competition that was much more prevalent pre-BC. Whenever a major boss died pre-BC, there's a very good chance you'd hear about it relatively quickly. Post-BC, you're lucky to hear about a guild killing Illidan unless you happen to stumble across an update to WowJutsu or your realm's progression thread. Much of the sportsmanship and healthy competition seems to have dwindled out of existence with the creation of BC, possibly excluding the bleeding-edge guilds that clear instances on the PTR.

Progressive nerfs and attunement removals may help to open content to casual players, but it doesn't seem to be an ideal solution for any party involved. With a mixture of gradual retuning, alternative gear sources (Blizzard has repeatedly cited that the new "T6-equivalent" badge gear is in part catered to give raiding guilds earlier in content a helping hand), and challenging quests; I'm certain a happy medium can be reached.

From my experience with the ZA Timed Quest (Fairly consistent three-chest runs), it is an excellent example of an elegant solution to this problem. Adding an extremely difficult to get and highly sought-after novelty item as the final reward is advantageous to everyone. Casuals can safely ignore the timed quest and receive excellent loot, while hardcore players have a chance to raid at a more suitable level with proper rewards for their increased effort. I certainly hope that Blizzard follows this lead when designing instances for WotLK - it's a far more attractive brand of content reuse than implementing untuned cockblock bosses (Vashj with Mind Control comes to mind) to slow progression until the content is repeatedly nerfed. As Glowacks mentioned in the end of his post, content must be made such that it takes a reasonable amount of time to conquer - otherwise it would be impossible for developers to keep up with player needs. My thoughts are that anything that allows paralell levels of progression in a single raid instance is both good for business (Content reuse) and for raider morale.

 

Hildegard

The point is I really love this timed run. We do two chests easily but struggle on the third, mostly because of trash wipes because of going so fast from Nalorakk to Jan'Alai, but we will be able to get the third chest by the time everyone will have the one for badges. I love Zul'Aman and for a player like me it is something like the best instance ever done. But well - right now I know this instance and it starts becoming boring.

I completly support, that someone playing 30 hours competitive or preparing for competitive content should have better gear, more intriguing titles, better show-off mounts, do more DPS and have more money. The point is that Blizzard could reduce the amount of time required to beat the early 25 instances (which no real raider cares about any more) instead on just moving the time requirement to more Karazhan and heroic runs.

Especially the trash hurts. Why on earth do you have to fight the same completly boring trash group six times when going from Hydross to Lurker ? I'd much rather have a double pull of these giants that look like Quagmirran but not the same thing over and over again.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Insitut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

frber

Personally I think the game is great fun. I like logging on whenever I have time to spare and getting a heroic group; or doing a few Battle Grounds. I also have Kurenei Exalted on my character; and don't really mind some relaxing monster bashing occasionally. Don't really dislike the game at all. Just don't think its worth the bother to arrange my life around the game; so wont schedule play time; and thus raiding is out of the picture for me.

Now I also somewhat dislike feeling that my character slowly gets left behind; which is the case currently. It is still sort of a competative game and you get your character compared with others you group with. Even PuG grouping kind of lose its fun if everyone else has much better characters. I know getting better and improving should be a motive for playing the game alot; and feeling superior is the reward. But the opposite side of that is that players who decided to cut down playtime really has little incentive to stay with the game.

At least for me personally I often did things I totally hate just to get stuff over with. Like the 10 hours straight in AV just to get some of Honor loot even though hating every minute of it; instead of playing at a pace that is fun and getting the stuff after a month instead of after two days. Same with grinding badges. I can do 5 heroics a day and get the rewards resonably fast; but get bored to the point of quitting for a month or two (I did a few times now) or do two or three heroics each week and have a great time; but never see any of the rewards.

At least for me my basic concern with both raids, and the game as a whole, is that the designers drive me to play more each week than I want. Since the rewards are apperently priced so they will take a resonable amount of weeks to obtain for people who play alot more each week than I do. The best way to solve that I think is really to try and look at how many hours/week the average player really enjoy spending on the game. For me optimal is maybe 15-20 hours/week (I am not really a casual player I guess) but will differ between player for sure. But the point would be for Blizzard to decide how much time/week that is resonable to expect; and then adapt the pricing of rewards after that. While making sure that anyone spending more time farming runs into serious issues with diminishing returns.

I am betting Blizzard realise that this is an issue and try to move the game towards a time sink in realtime; rather than game time with daily quests, and of course raid instance lockout. They could improve on it further of course by putting much more into the daily quest rewards while cutting down the rewards for pure grinds. Like making a weekly BG quest worth 5000 Honor that asks you to win one BG of each type for instance. While cutting down the honor for the actual BGs a bit to compensate. They could do the same with the Heroic instances. Make a quest chain that require perhaps several different objectives (run 3 Heroics not always to end boss maybe) that gives 10 badges as a reward; but you only can do once each week.

To make raid instances more casual friendly along the same lines they could change boss drops to only individual tokens (or ingame DKP points). Freely let you reset the instances at any time; but only allow any given player to recive points for killing a particular boss once/week or more. Would make it lots easier to PuG raids. With no need to worry about getting saved and missing out. This doesn't have to mean lowering any kind of difficulty threshold; just removing organizational annoyances; but would still make raids more accessible. Something like that would be a better way to make raids casual friendly than just pure nerfs really.

Don't think much will happen in World of Warcraft though. The design of this game is set. But the next big game will likely be better. How many think the next big MMO will even have raids?

 

Hildegard

Exactly. And I would approve to apply this only to instances that aren't currently progress instances. So it would not harm the experience for hardcore guilds. The bosses do not need to be nerfed, at least not more than in the usual way like now.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Insitut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Fragged

Hang on a second. that's not really true.

Certainly the amount of content available to a non-raider is smaller, but it's really not that much smaller. If they made Gruul/Mag/Tk/SSC/Hyjal/BT accessible to you you're only talking about 6 additional instances, which in the grand scheme of things is a pretty small portion of the games content.

To some extent then I think you're playing the wrong type of game, the money in an mmo comes from people reliving content repeatedly.

Well, think about it from Blizzard's perspective, how many months till you (or at least most people) aren't playing anymore because they've done/seen everything (and hate repeating the content as you've said.)

I think a key part of a successful mmo is what I'd call aspirational content. This is the stuff more casual players don't experience (at least not the way it was originally intended) but are aware of and encounter second hand variations of. I believe it's a key part of what keeps people attracted to the world, they may think they hate it, but it helps blizzard keep them playing, which is of course the goal.


This is one place where I think Blizzard could've done better. There's no reason for level 60 attunements to apply to level 70 players. Letting new people get to go see some of this stuff (even in a watered down way at 70.)

The real question is, if you were able to get all the gear you wanted for your character, see all the content in the game, and basically be done with it, would you keep paying for it? Because even if you say you would, by and large I believe this group of players wouldn't (you can see in microcosmic scales evidence of this, such as the old grand marshal grind at 60, once people got it, their pvp time dropped dramatically, and many retired once getting their finished gearset, those with the aspirational goal, even with it unreachable had a much higher retainment rate.)

There's a reason these games make it statistically unlikely even after 6 months of farming to literally have no upgrades left (the random number generator is a big part of this), I think one of the real reasons Blizzard has been willing to raise the token drop rate is that they've realized that set pieces don't work as aspirational loot for people already farming an instance (and thus there's less of a reason to throttle the rate at which it drops.) People with nothing to work for are difficult to retain, creating good content is expensive and time consuming, thus the cost effective solution they use is to simply throttle the rate of rewards to leave the vast majority of players wanting at least a handful of items, never letting them feel truly finished. The model of a successful mmorpg is one of the constantly dangling carrot.

 

Onomatopeizator

That has some truth to it, but only some. MMO's where people don't log on are dead MMO's. It's a community game, and you need other players online to group with them, raid together, kill them or just show off your new gear in front of them. If you could start on a low-pop and high-pop server (without queues though), which one would you choose?

 

Discombobulator

That might be true but you cant say that any 5+ man instance isnt progress either.

The various progress levels on a server or wow's population, make every Post BC instance "progress" for a certain part of the pop. Im on Mal'Ganis wich is one of the most progressed servers in the US, yet I still know about guilds who flask for moroes n stuff. (while /2 trade pugs clear the place in less than 2 hours)

Bosses/Instances/Attunement will get nerfed as they want to make it reachable for joe weekendraider. Its really apparent that they dont want the Naxx Situation repeating. 1st they nerf attunements then bosses to the level that 50% of the gen pop is able to reach the given instance's endboss. (downing is another issue.)

The bad thing about that is the positive effect Vashj/Kael has on a raiding guild. Thoose 2 fights teach coordination and discipline in doing ones role and being an effective filter for deadweight. With thoose 2 removed from being even worthy to do after 2.4 bad players will go BT/MH and cry nerf till they get it. (Azgalor trash anyone?)

 

Hildegard

The point about Vashj/Kael is true. But it would be far more easy if you had to kill every boss before them only once and could than spend time on working on them. Skipping Vashj und Kael is something only few guilds consider as much as I heard. We raid now for 2 to 3 hours on three days, which is ok during winter. So we will most likely spend one day in Hyial and one day in SSC and one in TK and just skip bosses we don't really need (like Hydross).

But the point is also the competition for raiders, that isn't really there or happening for big parts on the PTR.

1. Phase: Hard Competition wi