gatzu.

Of course this is all speculation and they could just as easily already be doing this but, how hard would it to be to hire another team that only designs the basic concepts of the encounters without bothering to balance them. Then have the real designers balance it and put it on ptr. This way they could be making multiple 25-man instances at the same time and be able to rush out a new content if their pacing is misjudged.

Then they could avoid the current problem. When everyone destroys their sorry excuse for TBC raiding in half the estimated time we don't have to sit here and wait eight months for new content.

 

◊ Quigon

I mean I knew this reply was coming, but do you think this pace of content is acceptable? Do you truly believe this is the best that they can do?

We know they can make content better and faster, because they have. They have more resources now - enough to make WoW 10 times over.

I hate this argument about how "You can't say that they should make more content, because you don't understand the technical ramifications of blah blah *baahhhh". Its not impossible. Unless designing more than 1 raid boss every 2 months is impossible.

I just want to reiterate - in nearly everything (and MMO's and games are included in this) content is able to be developed in parallel. This is why the internet works. This is how the big Shigeyu games are developed - this is how the business world works. Management is fundamental though... perhaps they're the reason some of the devs left after Naxx, but that is all speculation.

 

Killmour

I agree,

Something like 600 million of that was profit, from what I've read, if their '06 year was in the same fashion, thats almost 900 million dollars in the last two years profit.

I just can't see how they can't hire people and run development cycles in parallel, it seems like many of the recent patches they have nearly the entire staff working on bug fixes and the like, rather than having a large team of developers and a large live team.

 

Addled

I entirely agree with you, and that brings up why I liked pre BC so much. Once you get into late BWL, AQ40 and beyond, you start getting into fights that require coordination, of multiple mini fights combining together into a whole. Nefarian started the trend with the 3 phase fight, where the raid had to break up into 2 groups and handle spawning drakonids from 2 far-away entrances, then in phase 3 a portion of the raid had to break away from Nef to handle the undead zerg.

AQ40 really emphasized the trend. The first three fights require the breaking of the raid into smaller portions to handle different threats, and delegating some authority from the RL. For example, my RL delegated the duty of finding the Skeram clone to the hunter class leader, and the identification of sheep targets (MCed player) to another person.

Sartura, we had to split up tank and healers to grab, control, and kill Sartura's adds, then Sartura herself. Fankriss, had to handle the bugs spawning from the tunnels, had to handle the snake spawns, and Fankriss himself. C'thun, well that fight had loads of spawns, not to mention the little subfight where you were teleported inside him. I shouldn't even have to bother explaining Naxx since the reader can figure out where I'm going from here.

--------

Maulgar does a damned fine job teaching coordination to a new raid. It's not a gear fight, it's an execution fight.

But Gruul is ridiculous. It's an overtuned gear check fight that doesn't teach you anything. People doing Gruul have already learned the lessons it's trying to impart. Get out of cave-in = get out of infernal spawns on Prince. Shatter = spreading out on Maiden of Virtue so you don't chain the Holy Whatever. Gruul throws all these things, plus more, at a new, tenuously-held-together raiding guild, and then Blizzard sanctimoniously wonders why BC raiding was so slow in the beginning. The initial tuning on it was idiotic. Who was QAing it, bots? It's good that they nerfed it, but I still feel Gruul is a bit overtuned considering where he is on the progression ladder.

Look everybody, you cannot use Gruul nor VR as an example of 25man bosses that can be tuned down to 10/5 man bosses because the bosses themselves are stupid. They teach nothing. The BEST 40/25 man fights teach you and/or force you to coordinate many disparate elements. I have yet to figure out what VR is supposed to teach me. Run away from incoming attacks? Or is it intended as a loot pinata? If that's the case, switch VR and Gruul so new raiding guilds can use the gear to hit up SSC/TK faster.

--------

The point that I'm driving at here, and I hope you appreciated the journey, is that there is a limit on how low the raid size can be before you have to start homogenizing the content. In a 5man, you can't assume that there's an offensive/defensive dispeller. In a 10man, you can't guarantee that a specific class will be in a raid. Once you get into 20+ people in a raid, you start getting options. 20 players guarantee you at least two Protection/Feral specced tanks (plus maybe a hybrid tank that can tank OR heal/dps), a minimum of 5-6 healers, then DPS. And it's a fair assumption that one of every class will be in the raid. Fight requires Mass Dispel/Avenging Wrath/Misdirection/whatever? Yes, WE CAN DO THAT.

You cannot break down a 5 man group into anything less because you can only assume 1 tank, 1 healer. 10 mans, you can, at MOST, break into 3 groups, and that's only if you have hybrids that can do 2 things out of tanking/DPSing/Healing.

With 25 people, you have enough players to really force them to coordinate, and have them think on their feet at the same time.

ZA shows this to be true. It's is not difficult skill wise, but it is difficult gear-wise. If your raid has the skill to get through the first half of SSC/TK, then you have the skill to clear ZA. Everything about ZA screams gear: Halazzi is a gear fight, the other 3 bosses involve killing trash fast (Nalorakk and Akil'zon use the wave mechanic, Jan'alai spawns trash on the encounter itself), plus clearing the trash fast between bosses (again, gear) is essential to taking loot chests. 95% of the time, the entire raid is focused on one target. There is barely any delegating or subdividing of groups necessary.

 

Jaxtrasi

To my knowledge, no one on this thread has said anything that disagrees with you. What Douglas and I (at least) have said repeatedly is that it doesn't matter.

The *point* of many 25-man raid bosses is (and should be) to test and expand your 25-man raiding skills, either with an emphasis on personal precision, an emphasis on teamwork in a chaotic environment, or an emphasis on strong strategic coordination. This is absolutely necessary to prevent 25-man raiding from becoming dull and repetitive.

The same thing is not true of 5-man. If all that happened was that the gear requirements got harder, if 5-man Maulgar was just essentially Skyriss with tougher gear requirements, that would be as good as most RPGs out there (and better than many). That's how heroics work. It's how most 5-man progression works. People who want complex encounters requiring intense coordination should do 25-man raiding. If it's not possible to replicate that in 5-man, then it's not possible to replicate that in 5-man, and no one who prefers 5-man content is going to complain, but they've got meaningful progression.

You gave an example of Zul'Aman as an instance which requires gear rather than being designed around complex encounters. I assume the implied point is that you wouldn't want 25-man to be reduced to this sort of level. I agree. I also wouldn't want to see that - I think the 25-man raiders deserve complex, demanding content to satiate their desire for challenge. I don't see what this has to do with the design of the 10-man version of the same dungeon.

Look at Zul'Aman. Is it unpopular with 10-man raiders? Is the lack of complexity and coordination required hampering its success as a dungeon with its target audience? What about Heroics? They're not only lacking in complexity, but also fundamentally repetitive old content. They still seem pretty popular to me, and I would propose that this is because they represent a progression - something to use your gear on, and get better rewards as a result.

Arguing that 25-man raid mechanics cannot be easily replicated in 5-man or 10-man can only be an argument for the abandonment of 5-man and 10-man content completely. Since Blizzard have never wanted to do this, and have showed less and less sign of doing so more recently with their acknowledgement of the popularity of 10-man raiding content, I think it's a very salient point with regards to the design of the 10-man bosses, but not in any way an indictment of the system as a whole.

"I've never known people as dogmatic as those who insist that all opinion is equally subjective."

 

Shadout

Okay, lets get back on track. Of course they could speed up the content releases somewhat, but thats not exactly the point. Even if content came out twice as fast, there would still be a difference between releasing everything at once vs. staggered release of content (the releases would just come more often with faster developing).

The point is: If they could develop twice as fast, you would have seen 6 25-man instances released with TBC. Would that have been great? I dont think so. It would be much better if that content came out in intervals.
Sure, its better if those intervals are every 2. month rather than every 4. month, but thats not the point.

I'm simply saying staggered release of content is better than how it was done in TBC, no matter how fast/slow said content is made.

 

Jaxtrasi

When I said staggered, I meant:

Patch 2.1: new 25 man content
Patch 2.2: new 10 man content
Patch 2.3: new 25 man and 5 man content

i.e. how they did things in TBC.

As opposed to:

Patch 2.1: new 25 man content, 10 man content and 5 man content
Patch 2.2: new 25 man content, 10 man content and 5 man content
Patch 2.3: new 25 man content, 10 man content and 5 man content

Are you referring to delaying the content rather than releasing it all at once? As in, the release of Black Temple was "staggered" from the completion of SSC/TK resulting on a gap in content before it was released?

"I've never known people as dogmatic as those who insist that all opinion is equally subjective."

 

Sebalot

I think they employ parallel development more than ever but that they just have shifted a larger part of their workforce into developing things for the expansions rather than content patches. And with TBC being very frontloaded with instances it is much more noticable than it was towards the end of vanilla WoW.

It is of course possible that Blizzard doesn't want to expand their team too much either. Perhaps they prefer to have the same key persons involved in design and that is the bottle neck. Or it may be so simple that they prefer to keep costs down and make a lot of money. The game is doing fine as it is on the whole, I guess.

 

Shadout

With staggered I'm referring to delaying the release of content.
E.g.
TBC release: Kara, Gruul, SSC
+ 2 months later: TK
+ 2 months: Hyjal
+ 2 months: BT
Or some other arbitrary release schedule.
With the idea being, that each instance gets some lifetime before its made obsolete. (with the added benefit of allowing them to be testable on PTR, which didnt happen to SSC/TK in beta, we kinda saw how that turned out)

In TBC everything before Kaelthas was pretty much just "complete and forget" on your way to Hyjal/BT.
Compared to guilds pre-TBC farming each end-boss of the instances for some time, before the next instance was released. This way, you ended up with many small breaks between content, rather than one big wait after all the content was burned through. (Although the length of the breaks can indeed vary depending on the resources Blizz throw at it, as Quigon points out, its probably unrealistic to expect there would never be breaks at all, and its not really desirable with no breaks either, since you are just zerging through the content, rather than using it for a while. Which imo, is a waste of an instance that took plenty of resources to make. Also, small breaks helps the guilds somewhere below bleeding edge, to catch up a bit.

Its important to remember BT was actually supposed to have been part of the initial TBC release too, which clearly shows the non-staggered plan of content delivery Blizzard had (even though they did fail to get it out before 2.1. You can somewhat argue that nothing beyond Karazhan in TBC raiding was really finished before 2.1 anyway, SSC/TK/Hyjal was clearly unfinished and untested).
To throw out everything you got at once (with the release of an expansion), and then pretty much not deliver anything new for the next 1+ year... thats what I'm talking about.


My personal opinion, not really founded on deeper knowledge of the internal works at Blizzard ^^, is, the front-load of instances released with TBC, might have been a strategy toward faster releases of expansions (the 1-year expansion schedule they mentioned back then).
E.g. pretty much release Expansion A, and then throw most of your devs over to working on Expansion B instantly, with only balancing and minor content going into the patches.
If so, it didnt go very well
I bet they spent lots of time in the months after TBC, just fixing up all the broken end-game. A staggered release here, would have eased that double workload tbh.

 

Alici

On a tangent, but since we're talking about development schedules and timelines...

How do you think that development time and resources should be allocated for raids/10 mans/5 mans? Should development follow how many users access each aspect of the game?

My reasoning for bringing this up is that some of the people who are criticizing Jaxtrasi's proposal cite that "recycling" old content would cut into the portion of resources that developers have to make cutting edge content, and this would most likely be true. However, take a look at the following:

Raids (25 mans)
- Takes the most amount of time to develop and balance
- Raids are the least accessible to the majority of the population

Casual (5-mans)
- Takes the least amount of time to develop and balance (comparatively)
- The most accessible to the majority of the population

In this regard, it would seem that putting more development time into that which is 1) more efficient and 2) has the most exposure would be a better bang for the buck. I don't want to do away with raids entirely; quite the contrary, I believe that raiders NEED to exist for the purpose of being those who others look up to. However, the inordinate amount of time and energy that is used to push raid content compared to casual content seems puzzling to me.

My personal opinion is that Jaxtrasi's system would kill two birds with one stone, because it opens progression to 5-mans and opens lore to casuals. Blizzard doesn't see it this way, however, for they would rather create new content than revisit old. So in creating new content, how should Blizzard's developers balance their resources in pushing a balanced expansion? A 25-10-5 dungeon set in every patch? 10 5-mans for every 25-man that comes out? What would be the ideal balance that developers should strive for?

 

Addled

Honestly, I like the new wing design Blizzard has started, i.e. make one hub (Auchindoun/Coilfang/Hellfire Citadel/etc) and then make 1 raid instance, 1 L70 5man instance, and 1/2 5man "lower" instances. The only thing I'm upset about is that they removed the trash to the instance portal. Pre BC we had to fight through trash to get to the Mara/Sunken Temple/BRD/etc zoning portals, and now we have no trash (except maybe the odd orc on top of Hellfire Citadel).

However, revered requirement for keys was a bit too much. It felt too "grindy" to have to keep doing regular SH/SV/BM/etc to get revered rep, then be able to do heroics. I don't know how the rest of you guys did it, but the moment my priest hit 70, I focused on only a few instances to get healing gear, then crafted the Whitemend and PMC stuff to get a quick boost in gearing. Then I went back, in full Kara gear, and ground out the rest of my reputations to revered.

I hope in WotLK that the rep requirement for heroics will be honored or nonexistent. Let players figure out when they're ready to go in.

 

gnoop

The instance hubs are nice. The problem is, while we had additional raids put in, 5-man's have been lacking updates, 2.4 being the exception.

As for the trash pulls. I'm happy to have them gone. With the limited time I've got, another few minutes spent on junk mobs just to get to the instance is a waste of time.

 

Nezralix

I really think it could have used an additional 5-man dungeon, given the apparent length of time left before WotLK.

 

Jaxtrasi

I intensely dislike this setup. It's firmly rooted in the 5->10->25 progression, based on the assumption that all players will eventually end up as 25-man raiders. Quest content is one long advertisement for raid content (by which I mean, it foreshadows it). 5-man content is similar. You get to the end of the instance only to find... the actual boss is now inaccessible.

There is no reason raid content cannot be isolated. Raiders don't need to be motivated to kill the boss with clever foreshadowing. They need him to be an involved, challenging fight with rewarding loot. Azuregos is an ideal raid boss from a lore perspective - blue dragonflight who what?

"I've never known people as dogmatic as those who insist that all opinion is equally subjective."

 

Yenadar

I 100% agree with this, and think that the OP's idea is a more direct and literal method of this. Seriously, Titles as rewards are complete crap. Yeah sure, go get one. It is great. Get another. Now you have to choose between the two, and which is actually a note of stature and success? Get a third. The problem just got worse. Get another 5 or 8 titles. Wow, this has gotten bad. Mounts have attempted to alliviate this a bit, but again, there is the same problem. You can only have 1 up at a time, and only some of the time at that.

The idea of size increases, if implemented properly is a fantastic idea. There is clipping issues with terrain that would have to be coded around, but if that mage from that Server First guild came to your struggling guild to help out, having him standing in the raid, a bit larger-than-life.... now that is an e-peen boost for that raider, and something to look up to for those that are trying to get there. (pun intended) One reason why the ZG tiger is so valued, more-so than the other ground mounts? Because it was so BIG. Size increases might also further boost mount sizes)

New expansion? Have each level gained reduce the size increase, so that by level 80 they are back to normal size...until they start killing end-game bosses again.

Casual raiders want the lore and the experience, hard core want something to stand out from the crowd. Very few hard core raiders have a problem with casuals getting the same gear, they have a problem with the fact that it diminishes their own success when they have 10 other players standing next to them at the bank in the exact same gear, but did 1/10th the amount of work and effort for it. The whole basis of the gear qualitiy levels, (Rare, Epic, Legendary) is around the 'heroes and legends' idea anyway, but there is essentially no transfer from this to the visual world any more. Having people walking/running/flying around shatt/IF/SW that are larger-than-life keeps this tune true. I am not saying to make them twice or three times as big... a max of 50% bigger is REALLY noticable without being absurd.

Adding personal size increases, even if very minor, will stack up over many kills, and would be a fair indicator that "that player has seen more end-game than that other player" at a glance. Perhaps a bigger % increase for server firsts, diminishing % awarded as time passes, and never more than once per kill.

At first glance, this may just seem like a gimick, but I don't know a single raider among my friends or my guild that would not absolutely LOVE this. (And it was proven with pre-Mother trash...everyone prays for the size increase every time now, and goes crazy when they get it)

(just gotta figure out the clipping issues, so that world-first guilds can still walk into the bank/AH...)

 

Tyrian

Playing the devils advocate here - but why do they need to do this? The game is still expanding consistently and getting more profitable. Why would they need to increase their development costs for a Golden Goose thats getting fatter every day already by itself. Would having more content patches bring in new players? Surely new people dont buy wow because 'News just in: 2.5 is coming out!'. You could say they need to retain existing players - but judging by the 10 mill number - existing players certainly arent going anywhere either for the last 3 years.

Of course, personally, Id love them to create another development team and double the content - but from their business POV - it doesnt seem to make as much sense.

 

Shub

There's a reason why you would do this regardless of player count expansion/profitability, and that is to reduce customer churn. It's possible that Blizzard actually wants some churn as a way to remove resources/gold from the game without having to introduce other gold sinks, or wants some churn to occur so that truly crowded servers can still be unlocked from time to time without having to resort to free transfers off the server to achieve that. New content won't bring new players, but it may keep players who would have otherwise quit around longer, lack of content can drive players away.

 

epiphenom

You're right that efficiency is a key concern of where development time needs to be allocated. But take your analysis one step further. Yes, raid instances take longer to develop and are less accessible. But with regards to ease of consumption (and, relatedly, player retention), what are the differences? How much time does one player spend in an average raid instance? How about in the average 5-man?

A new raid instance will keep the advanced raiders occupied for months; not just learning it, but farming it. It's been eight or nine months since Black Temple, which is clearly too long, but the point is that quite a few people have been running it for at least five or six months, every week. These players have been retained for months. In comparison, the average casual runs every 5-man a few times, maybe twice or so or until they get all the drops they need (which is, of course, far easier than doing the same in a raid instance). This 5-man has retained player interest for perhaps a week or so. For a raider, a raid instance isn't old content until it's been farmed for a while; for a 5-man, it's old the first time you finish it, which is probably going to be on the very first try.

The point? Raiding is a more efficient use of development time than creating 5-mans, because raids are consumed much less quickly. This ties into why raiding is the end-game in the first place. Any MMO has to find something for the most hardcore section of the population to do, because they act as trickle-down aspirational models and retention mechanisms on large portions of the non-hardcore population. Whatever it is that the end-game is, it has to be something for which you can reasonably provide enough content to keep them happy before it's consumed, which means that your development time must be spent efficiently. It doesn't have to be raiding - see Blizzard's new found focus on arena PvP, which is also very development-efficient - but it has to be at least as efficient. Each minute of development time needs to translate to as much player time spent playing it as possible. Five mans and casual content do not score high on this scale at all.