I think what could be considered the biggest problem with the achievement system is that sometimes getting a world first achievement and world first kill could be mutually exclusive. If you go for the kill you can't get the achievement until the reset (unless you are that much better than everyone else).

To a lesser extent this already happens with non-linear content (in AQ40 you could go for viscidus or for twins, for example). However there at least the time you lose isn't set in stone by the reset schedule. For pragging factor (= epeen) what really counts is usually world firsts (or world top 10/100), server firsts and faction firsts. Achievements combined with lockout timers just don't play very well with the existing model.

When the topguilds killed M'uru and Kil'jaeden they spent a good 40 hours or more on each boss. That is the learning process with trial and error, repeating till they have the strategy down and can execute it. 3 Weeks after the first clearing they spent 4 hours clearing the entire instance. That is called farmstatus.

Naxxramas strategies were perfected more then 2 years ago and in case they should have forgotten they could go through it over and over again for 2 months on the beta. So when they set foot into naxxramas for the "first" time on live, it wasnt in any way progress, it was simply farming. If the topguilds would have had ANY problems farming an instance it would be a complete brickwall for its target audience: the new raiders.

But luckily it wasnt like that and WoW now has an excellent entry level tier with a whole 17 bosses with nicely varied encounters so that anyone who is new to raiding has a place to learn. Could anything have done to delay the prorgress and make the content last longer? sure they could, but they didnt, and i think that is a great decision.

They could have set a higher geartreshold forcing people to farm heroics first. In order for this to have any effect they would also have to tune up the encounters so that they were only just beatable if you had the right gear. That would be a significant increase in difficulty.

They could have put in attunements forcing people to do quests, reputation grinds and dungeons. However, I beleive after what we experienced in TBC, this would not be a warm welcome.

They could have put in a gate system, open up a wing at a time so that no matter how good and active you are, you would not be able to move once you got to a certain point. Again, it's been tried, and i doubt anyone would like to see that again.

Finally, and most unrealisticly, they could remove the farm status tag the dungeon had from the start, by fundamentaly changing every encounter between beta and live so they would have to do the learning process all over again. But that is of cause completely unrealistic.

So what it comes to is an excellent tuned beginning/learning tier without any artificial blocks. And it's great, especially that they didnt try to delay anyone by adding blocks that didnt contribute at all to the dungeon. That some guilds ran out of content in 3 days, is their problem really, not Blizzards. The rest of us should rejoice that we got such excellent content to start with and from what we've seen so far, an expansion that will outlast the previous in every aspect.

Surprising? Not really.

Nihilum/SK beating all the content in the first reset was predictable. Other top-end guilds doing the same. I guess it was expected.

What I'm more concerned about is the whole middle-class of raiders. The people that cleared KZ relatively quick, kill Gruul after he got fixed, killed Magtheridon during the 2-group cube rotation time and had some steady progress through SSC, but couldn't quite manage Vasjh or Kael.

Those guilds make up the large majority of raiders. Those guilds will clean out Naxx in three resets at most and run out of content in the weeks after that. And then what? Wait for Ulduar? I'm sure Blizz is capable of creating interesting content for everyone but the top of the line raiders, but if Naxx is setting the entry level this low, I don't have my hope up high for Ulduar.

How many months are we going to have to wait to see a raid that doesn't make you think "meh"? And more important, how many months *will* we wait. I'm personally not looking forward of having to deal with bored guildies because there's nothing to raid.

It's ok if there's easy and accesible content. My gripe is that *all* content available is too easy and too accessible for, well, everyone that raided before.

This is a genuine question, since I've never been in this particular position, but what do the cutting edge guilds do in this case? My understanding is that the raid week dials down to a night or two, and then they probably spend the rest of the week doing tradeskills, instances, PvP, or catching up on quests.

My guild falls almost neatly into the kind of guild you described, with the exception that we killed Vashj and Kael just prior to the keys being lifted from Black Temple. For us, and I would imagine for similar guilds of this level, the raiding week was a constant number of hours from our first trip to High King all the way until we stepped into Sunwell right before WotLK was released.

Personally, I welcome the idea that more than the cutting edge guilds will be able to fully clear the content with some extra breathing room before the next content patch.

And so, the question for you and Lucinde: When will your guild be ready to enter naxx 25, and how long will it take you to clear that place? (and by clear, I really mean gear up from that place+heroics).

The thing is that its not like you kill KT and then naxx wont be visited. For a guild like yours it will take at least 3 weeks from KT down until you clear the entire place in a couple of raiddays. And THEN its still the time it take you to gear up sufficiently for the next instance that will measure if naxx was too easy. Not only aren't these guilds close to the efficiency of the real powergamers, but it will also take them a lot longer to gear up their guild from an instance seeing how their raiding pool usually is a lot bigger then the most hardcore ones.

Thus, naxx only becomes obsolete when it stops giving a significant amount of upgrades for your guild (and/or when you farm it in a night).

Its not only about naxx, its about the concept of lowering the bar on difficulty.

If they keep this formula people will run out of content. What will happen that instead of 10% of the guilds getting fatally bored in a few months because they "beat the game" and ran out of content it will be 50%. Are they prepared to pump out new instances in a pace that warrant it? I dont think so! The wait between BT and SWP killed more guilds than M'uru ever did.

I wholeheartedly support of people being enabled to see the content, but dumbifying the raids wont solve that. What it will do is make people uninterested after killing arthas for the 50th time waiting for frostmourne to drop.

Are all 25 of your raid members going to want to go back to Naxx just for the Heroic achievement? Really? Achievements are cool and all, but I think that guilds will find that doing "Achievement Nights" will be hard to fill once you're moving on to bigger and better instances.

Edit: If we're farming an instance, I'd rather go in on an alt, achievement or not. Getting your core 25 man team to go back to an instance they outgear (when everyone has a few alts they could probably bring along for loot) can certainly be a problem.

Achievements are not content, they are a clever way to keep people doing old stuff. You cant cut a raidinstance just because you add X amount of achievements to old places. It gets old and the amount of people who will get bored and leave for pastures new will be significant.

Realize that in my guild, we rarely have more than 30 people online at any given time. With that, us going to a 25-man raid PERIOD is going to be enough to keep us going back, whether it's farm content or not. Achievements are somewhat of a fad in my raid group as well, so yes, I could see us going back for that. For larger and/or more hardcore guilds, obviously, it's NOT going to be enough.

On Pacing:
Obviously this window of appropriate pacing is always sliding based on where your guild falls on the curve, but I think most raid leaders would agree that some time where you are farming, gearing, and stocking up for the next zone release is an enjoyable break. We (my guild) want to be in a position where we're waiting and preparing so that we don't have to continue in the old instances, and if there comes a night where we would like to go back to Naxx and attempt to get a proto drake, we'll go for it.

On Achievements:
There is at least some level of personal pride in passing even the 5-man heroic achievements. They mean nothing, but I'm sure there are things people have done in TBC that they can think of as a cool achievement. "Kill Ogre Boss in Shattered Halls With Zero Deaths." An achievement similar to Thaddius' in heroic mech, and we can go on and on. Do they mean anything tangibly? Not really in most cases, but people do the achievements because it's another avenue of "progression," which is gaining more and more forms these days and that is a very healthy thing for WoW as a whole. Maybe you don't have the time or desire to do Naxx, but hey, you were able to complete all of the heroics and their achievements. That's something to put your name to and is represented nicely in game for others to see.

[e]Clearly having every single boss in the expansion as easy as Naxx but loading it with a ton of achievements to place artificial hard modes on literally everything is poor game design, but that is the challenge Blizzard is putting on themselves. Just enough meaningful achievements with progressively more difficult content. So far I think they've done a fine job. We can only wait and see at this point.

But if you have a higher instance you can get loot from, then you're not out of content. The argument is that raid achievements provide new challenges for people who would be out of content and bored otherwise, not that raid achievements in introductory instances are more fun than doing "bigger and better instances."

I am in another one of those guilds that beat KT just before the attunements were lifted.

What my guild never got in all of TBC was any time just farming. There was always some new thing off in the distance to progress through which might sound great...The reality was we always felt like we were sprinting to the finish line and had no sense of pacing, no time we could say "let's just gear up the new recruits in easy content." Now, I don't want endless months of this, but honestly a month or so of farm mode for 50% of the raiding guilds is probably not a bad thing.

At the very least it let's all the guilds have a brief moment when they can say "I am caught up with all the raid content." I remember at one time being a "Nef killing guild" was meaningful in a way that being a "Vashj killing guild" never really was in TBC.

Ten man instances are certainly a different story than 25 man instances - I know a lot of people who just want to kill a boss, clear an instance, then never see it again. Which is unfortunate, but usually you can find 10 people who want to complete something just because it's there (myself included - I tried to get a lot of people on the server to do Naxx before it went to Northrend, and of course, got only the 10-15 players that I usually know are interested in doing extra stuff).

25 people might be a little harder, especially after you wipe a few times trying to keep the drakes up. Some of the achievements are "do this perfectly," which means that if someone dies on an "Achievement" night, you might as well wipe it. Yea, there are other ones, but the point remains that if you screw up at 5%, there's gonna be a lot of pissed people wondering why we're intentionally wiping on "farm" content.

Bear runs...if you screw up, you try again three days later. There's disappointment, certainly, but it's a carrot on a stick. It will be there again soon enough. Even if you try for weeks on a bear mount, that's still one wipe every three days. Nobody likes wiping multiple times in succession on a boss that, for all intents and purposes, they have no reason to kill anymore.

Edit: I've realized I'm being stupid and arguing an optional aspect of the game. If someone wants an achievement, they'll go for it. Ignore my idiocy.

I think that when our guilds get into Naxx25 and see, collectively, just what kind of challenge (or lack thereof) exists for us, a more fruitful discussion about whether or not Blizzard failed at their game design can take place.

We still have the majority of our members leveling up to 80, which isn't too bad considering that the game has not yet been out for a week. I think it's a safe assumption that the majority of all players, even raiders who got pretty far in TBC, are still leveling up to 80. The game is far from over.

If the majority of guilds get to Naxx after a few weeks and still steamroll the place, then it is probably safe to say that it might be a little bit undertuned. But for now, the sample of guilds clearing Naxx is essentially limited to the kind of player that is so focused that they managed to get 10 levels in less than five days along with 24 other people, and then had the time to kill 15 raid bosses on top of that.

That is not your typical player or guild.

I honestly don't think we can say that the new raid tuning is about to lead to more people getting "fatally bored" than the old design, considering a large part of players didn't even get to raid before.

Keep in mind the people farming BT for months before SWP was released were a vast minority already, the people working on M'uru were an even smaller subset of the WoW player base. At the same time you seem to ignore the undoubtedly still large group of people who levelled to 70 and were left with farming the same levelling instances in heroic mode for badges (for gear they didn't have a real need for), farm BGs which are mostly over three years old, and maybe did some Kara and maybe even ZA runs. Those people now get the opportunity to go from levelling and 5-mans to early raids, and *they* shouldn't run out of content for a while.

In the end it's a tradeoff, on the one hand you want to enable the (large) group of average players to see more content and prevent them from getting bored from having to run the same old 5-mans and BGs until the next expansion, on the other hand you want to keep a (smaller, but arguably more outspoken and more prestigious) part of the population happy with challenging raids and gear checks and give them encounters with a minimal margin of error (and supplying them with new content along the way that's mostly going to be wasted on the average group for a while).

With the new design, the larger group of people will not run out of content theoretically, only the smaller one probably will. Whether the average players will participate in easier raiding in numbers is the real question. If the same few people raid, but a large part of the raiding population isn't challenged by T8 and beyond, we'll have a problem. But we're not at that point yet.

I honestly believe you have either not listened to what blizzard has been preaching these last 6months (or more) before the expansion. Naxx is made to be easy, an introduction, something to get more people raiding. They have promised us much harder dungeons and I have no problem believing them on that.

Thus the premise of your post is faulty.

As a counterpoint, I'd say you vastly overestimate the time required to raid. I'll use my raid team as an example.

We began raiding 25-man T4 content (Gruul & Mag) in Aug 2007. From there we progressed slowly to Loot Reaver. Our raid team was initially made up of the non-serious people who couldn't commit the time to raiding. As the team solidified, we moved into SSC & TK. In March, we killed Vashj and KT the next month, both before attunements were lifted. Our raid schedule consisted of Tue & Thu night from 7:30-11pm, seven hours total a week.

We had people who never logged on except to raid - they showed up in T4 and early T5 content with vendor gems. We didn't require any specific consumables, didn't require anyone to read the strategy in advance, didn't expect the best enchants. All of this was requested, but only about half the people made the effort.

We cleared through Bloodboil and Azgalor like this, and finally expanded our raid schedule to a 3rd night - Mon - when everyone was bored and out of things to do on their alts/10-mans/heroics/etc. We killed Archimonde and Illidan using our 3-night strategy of 10.5 hrs/week about 6 weeks before 3.0 came out. We debated going into SWP but with expansionitis kicking in, we backed off until 3.0 came out and SWP became stupid easy.

Anyone could have cleared through Illidan without a "hardcore" schedule. And without massively dumbed down content.

My biggest problem with this argument is the people concerned less with the lack of challenge, and more with the fact that Naxx's ease is going to lead to there being "nothing to do." To those people I ask, "so what?" If you run out of stuff to do, cancel your account and come back for the 3.1 test realm or live push. I mean, it just seems like such a seriously retarded non-issue and irrational gripe, that it's hard to take a lot of posts serious.

The only people with a legitimate cause for concern about that are all employed by Blizzard.

My guild takes raiding fairly seriously but raids with a small roster (32-ish total accounts in guild) on a very limited schedule (about 10 hours a week). We killed Vashj in mid-February, barely missed getting Kael before attunements were lifted, and killed Illidan just before the 3.0 nerf, after losing quite a lot of raid time and accumulated fight knowledge/gear through some heavy turnover during the late spring and summer months. After the nerfs we farmed BT and spent a couple of raids in SWP killing Kalecgos and Brutallus (couldn't quite get enough priests together at once to pull off Felmyst).

We felt like we really hit our stride in September and are carrying most of the same roster forward into Wrath. We are in no rush to start raiding (only 2 or 3 of us have hit 80 already), but some members are already fretting about the supposed ease of the content. I'm taking a "wait and see" attitude, but I am afraid there will be real disappointment if we DON'T clear the content within a couple of resets. On the other hand, there will definitely be a sense of let-down if we do.

Overall, I think Blizzard has done a good thing here, but I am a little worried at how it will affect my mid-level guild.

This sounds like a logistical nightmare from a guild management standpoint. Guild members that are bored stop logging in/cancel, guild members looking to raid for the fun of it go elsewhere, and finally the guild dissolves leaving those planning to come back without a raiding guild to return to. While I could see this working for an extremely tight knit group, I am reluctant to accept this kind of approach to any impending hardcore raider boredom.

We're straying off into the path of rampant speculation and "sky is falling" warnings at this point. If you can't keep your guild together through this brief of a content lapse, then maybe you need to look internally and not at Blizzard. You will have more trouble in the 25 man version than you think, especially if people in your raid have little or (more likely) no Naxx experience. Go do the content and then come back and post your honest first hand opinions. My personal opinion is that Naxx 10 is fine given it's intended purpose. Boss for boss it is on the same level (harder/easier in some areas) as Karazhan with many different ways to challenge new(er) raiders.

Do you want to see pre-3.0 Sunwell guilds wiping for days in here? Again, what would that say for guilds that only got a small taste of Tier 6 (or Tier 5, or only Kara) after 3.0?

Well, I think a lot of the other concern comes in because you have the people who are clearing it now and want to be getting a huge head leg up over everyone else. That was the same complaint they were raising when the Sunwell was gated (that you were being artificially held back, which allowed the "scrub guilds" to catch up.)

To that, my main response is more of a "boo hoo hoo", 'cause seriously, you are not going to have guilds that are six raids ahead of everyone else. Even if they were, they'd just bitch and complain at that point too. Non-issue.