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.
That's quite simply not true. The work behind keeping a guild together with nothing to do is ridiculous, people go off and quit for a while, well you have to replace them for farm, then maybe they can't come back, or maybe you need them early, or maybe the guild falls apart, SO much can happen. Saying that "nothing to do" is a non issue is really missing something big in how the top guilds work. You lose more good players during break times than progression times. On top of that, people at the top end are playing because they want to play. Having to cancel your account for months at a time while you wait for something else is really not going to work.
As for the achievements to keep things around, that can only go so far. I think it's a novel idea, but it can't be THE difficulty in content unless it's giving real rewards. After killing Heigan 20 times, if you keep having one person die, a lot of people no longer are gonna care about getting the achievement, and more likely than not, if things are cleared this quickly, a lot of the achievements will be done quickly too.
That said, I fully agree with Gurgthock's point earlier, this is Karazhan and how Gruul was supposed to be, not a next step from Sunwell, not even only 1 or 2 steps back from Sunwell, this is supposed to be like Karazhan in it's final form. If content starts that way that's quite alright, give the guilds who are not bleeding edge some content, let bleeding edge blow through it and wait (waiting some is okay, too much is an issue) and then ramp up the difficulty. If they do have future dungeons that are challenging, and to be perfectly honest, follow the MC -> BWL -> AQ -> Naxx difficulty format, they've got a successful expansion. We can't expect an MC to be a challenge for any guilds who have been playing since then, but we can expect a gem or two in the BWL equiv, then some real good ones after that, and hopefully Arthas will make even TwentyfifthNovember scratch their heads for a bit. If they can nail that, they've done a good job. They don't need anything with the "Sunwell difficulty" that they said they weren't going to have, if they can make fights that involve real strategy and are fun to do. Personally I'd welcome less brute force like the end of Sunwell and more strategy if they can pull it off.
You lose more good players during break times than progression times. On top of that, people at the top end are playing because they want to play. Having to cancel your account for months at a time while you wait for something else is really not going to work.
Not to mention, the sorts of players you most want will be less attracted to you if you're in "farm mode." The players you want to recruit are the sorts that aren't afraid of wiping and enjoy the learning process--the players who would rather get a first kill with a guild than get epics.
When you are "working on P2 Illidan!" everyone wants in. I'm not saying you can't find people who will join while you're on farm, but often you find that these are people more interested in farming for loot than in learning the content. : /
That's probably not true for the highest-profile high enders (i.e. I'm sure EJ gets eleventy billion apps to choose from no matter what), but I'd bet that it holds true for most others. I know I had some people jump ship to guilds that had Illidan on farm before we downed him, and for the most part they were people I was happy to see the backside of.
(I reference Illidan because I was less involved with recruitment for the guild I was a part of during Sunwell).
I can't imagine that Blizzard is too concerned that the 0.01% most hardcore amongst their fanbase will go off and quit, never to return, if they don't jam new raid content out the door *right now*. They're working on it. They've probably been working 80 hour work weeks for *months*. If I were a Blizzard developer, and somebody told me that they powered through two years of my hard work in a week and quit the game because their raid schedule wasn't demanding enough for their tastes, I'd be relieved. And glad that my competition gets to deal with them instead of me.
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.
Of course time devoted will vary. But you sound like an exception rather than the majority. Most guilds progressing to say BT required more time per week. I'm not saying it was impossible to progress with less time spent, but it certainly isn't the rule.
On the other side of the coin, look at all the guilds who were working on Kara/ZA going into the expansion.
I can't imagine that Blizzard is too concerned that the 0.01% most hardcore amongst their fanbase will go off and quit, never to return, if they don't jam new raid content out the door *right now*. They're working on it. They've probably been working 80 hour work weeks for *months*. If I were a Blizzard developer, and somebody told me that they powered through two years of my hard work in a week and quit the game because their raid schedule wasn't demanding enough for their tastes, I'd be relieved. And glad that my competition gets to deal with them instead of me.
That's not really how it works though, because every time you lose that one top end thing, it trickles down to the next level. On top of that there is something with the carrot on the stick and seeing things other people do that you then want to do, and if everyone's doing that, it does lose some of that special "wow that's cool" factor.
Of course Blizzard should not be bending over backwards catering only to the top end, that wouldn't be good business because they are not the highest portion of income, everyone knows that. However, you'd be crazy to think that they've been doing it wrong this whole time and that they never should have released this high end stuff that only the top can complete. They've CLEARLY had the best business model a game like this has ever had, and that does include keeping the top happy. Any argument to the contrary is ignoring the fact that this game is at what, 5 times the next highest subscriber base in MMO history? Any argument saying that they should have the top end content available immediately and make all raid content only for the top few % though is also doing the same thing.
The model that seems to be the most successful for them is to have some content for everyone, and then slowly nerf down everything so that more and more people can see it. I fully expect that they'll keep doing that, and that they will keep learning from their mistakes. That's why TBC started with content for more than just 40 man raids, and that's why WotLK has started with easy content, and I think we can all expect it to ramp up to be more difficult, without having to reach the point that the very end of Sunwell did.
Regarding Heroics as a deliberate path of progression: Wouldn't this suffer from the SSC/TK attunement syndrome of forcing tanks and healers to run the same content over and over long after they can pick up any upgrades from it, just because there are so many more DPS (who need so many different drops) than there are tanks/healers?
Regarding boredom after beating current content: In the intervening months before the release of Sunwell, guilds who had BT on farm made do with their own achievements - max DPS on Teron, RoS without Deaden, Prot Paladin MTing Illidan, etc. I believe that people who genuinely enjoy the game will keep playing the game regardless. Anyone who's willing to quit after clearing Naxx/Sarth/Malygos in a single reset was probably just looking for an 'out' anyway.
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.
Exactly. I am curious to see how many 25 man guilds fare. Turnover was already pretty high in TBC when players just wanted to see content, saw it, then left. With the ability to steam roll over content and see it all fairly quickly, I am not sure how member ship will be in 25 man guilds.
Difficulty (not just time sinks, but the need for planning and organization) gave guilds a reason to be together, as well as a common interest in the game. I have formed many friendships this way over periods of months working with others and enjoying WoW.
I think it is the more dedicated people who enjoy difficulty who are generally the ones who post on forums like EJ, who put in the effort to run 25 man guilds, who create interesting mods, and who may--because I simply don't have any way of knowing--form a solid social WoW backbone. Will this group of people dedicate as much time to the game now? People like and want to see content, sure, but once they see it do they stick around? I know some won't, I guess the guestion is how many is there.
The more important question is when will the next major instance be released. If it is upwards of 6 months from clearing Naxx then there is going to be trouble for the top end guilds and even many lower tier guilds. If they manage to push out the next instance that is reasonably challenging within 4 months and people know it is coming, then people will probably cope better. My guess would be something akin to a mid January PTR to get everyone excited and aware that a new instance is coming that will provide more of a challenge.
First of all, I think everyone who thinks that people are going to "run out of content" is overreacting. Yes, some people will eventually finish everything, but this is true no matter how much content there is or how hard it is, it's only a matter of time. We don't even know how hard the later raids will be yet, so it's far too early to make "the sky is falling!" type comments without further information.
Secondly, as a member of a guild that didn't really raid in TBC, I'm glad that the initial few raids are far easier than they were in TBC. I was one of the few (about 4 or 5) people in my guild who wanted to raid, while the rest either didn't care or thought it was too hard. Because of our numbers, we could only do 10 mans without PUGing the majority of the raid, and the skill and gear level of those outside of our core group meant that we were stuck running Karazhan. We ran out of content in TBC not because of a lack of content, nor because of finishing everything, but simply because the people we had couldn't under any circumstances take on the next level of content. My hope is that WOTLK's easier initial raids allow us to introduce our less-skilled members into raiding in an environment that won't punish their inexperience too severely. In turn, this will (hopefully) get them to learn how to raid successfully, and then we can progress on to the harder raids.
That, or I'm going to have to either abandon a guild full of friends with whom I enjoy playing in order to raid or resort solely to PUGs.
Anyone could have cleared through Illidan without a "hardcore" schedule. And without massively dumbed down content.
You are absolutely right, but a lot of servers simply don't have raid guilds that take progression seriously AND have a 2-3 night schedule. So for a lot of players, the choice isn't there unless they want to start their own.
(I've always been surprised that guilds on more time limited schedules weren't more popular, actually.)
(I've always been surprised that guilds on more time limited schedules weren't more popular, actually.)
I think it has to do with the nature of guild leaders. Raids tend to fit the guild leader's schedule, and guild leaders tend to play more. People who play on limited schedules don't really become guild leaders.
As well, there's the constant pressure to do more. One more night is another night to farm an instance, or get in more attempts on the latest boss. A lot of guilds start with the intention of a limited schedule, and then the schedule slowly increases.
One thing that's missing in a lot of this discussion is that a lot of the lower tier guilds don't know "how to raid". They need to learn the very basics. As an experiment, take an alt and apply (anonymously) to a lower tier guild. Raid with them, but stay quiet and observe them. It will be an eye-opening experience.
In my opinion, the single greatest advance in raiding in WotLK is not the easy entry level raids, but the built-in Raid Calendar. I think that Calendar is going to do wonders for entry level raiding.
To get back a bit to the original subject, even though this point has also been made by a lot of posters in this topic, Blizzard's response:
Keep in mind that guilds like this are comprised of people who have bested every raid encounter we've released since Onyxia and Molten Core. They've made it a focus for years now to conquer every piece of PvE content we put out there, and do it first. Knowledge, experience, and teamwork are built rapidly when struggling through so many different boss encounters.
Now, I'm not arguing that the raid content is any easier or harder than in the past. I've not done any of the 25 man raids yet. I do get the feeling though that the majority of the people I've seen on the forums specifically arguing that the content is too easy, based on the performance or opinions of the top guilds of the world, have not experienced the content either.
Is it possible you will draw the same conclusion when you've cleared every 25 man encounter through Arthas (when his time comes)? Of course. When your intuitions grow into experience after you've made such accomplishments you'll have better ground from which to justify your disappointment.
Of course we're monitoring your feedback and experiencing the content ourselves. I reiterate that we'll always consider adjusting content for greater ease or difficulty if we feel it is necessary to maintain a fun and rewarding game. (Source)
An answer pretty much as expected, wait out for everyone to get to 80 before truly judging.
As for people running out of content: I believe that achievements, especially with the very visible mount/title rewards, should do the trick to keep top-guilds happy untill the next instance(s) come out. There could be more variations of this later in the game, such as specific types of loot only available while doing x or y (think ZA timed and bosses gaining strength if you don't kill his adds/lieutainants/whatever).
Of course, the next instance shouldn't be waited for too long, as may have been the case for BT->SWP... An AQ-like event might even make the top-guilds happier, giving them something to be the best/first in besides killing a boss (as in: work together as a guild to realize a scepter or whatever).
Pretty much sounds like they're going back to Pre-BC, when BRS was the raid-check, doing simple 10 mans and getting some half-hearted gear, then moving into MC, which seemed like a huge deal until raids like AQ and BWL came out. At that point, MC became farmable and used for gearing.
Sounds like Blizz is fixing a lot of the mistakes they made, and congrats to them on that.
Overall, the experience in WotLK has been enjoyable, especially for someone like me who takes a moderate pace, moving to level quickly yet still experience the content, lore, and achievements.
I think it has to do with the nature of guild leaders. Raids tend to fit the guild leader's schedule, and guild leaders tend to play more. People who play on limited schedules don't really become guild leaders.
As well, there's the constant pressure to do more. One more night is another night to farm an instance, or get in more attempts on the latest boss. A lot of guilds start with the intention of a limited schedule, and then the schedule slowly increases.
One thing that's missing in a lot of this discussion is that a lot of the lower tier guilds don't know "how to raid". They need to learn the very basics. As an experiment, take an alt and apply (anonymously) to a lower tier guild. Raid with them, but stay quiet and observe them. It will be an eye-opening experience.
In my opinion, the single greatest advance in raiding in WotLK is not the easy entry level raids, but the built-in Raid Calendar. I think that Calendar is going to do wonders for entry level raiding.
I think a few posts in here have touched on some good points, but I think my guild and experience is a great example of the "middle of the pack". We hit the Kael/Vashj wall pre-removal of attunement and have always tried to be a "player friendly" guild. Sure many of us have had offers to "progression" guilds, but I have a job/wife/family/time commitments that pretty much limits my raiding. Our guild raided 25 man content 3 weeknights a week, with optional pickup nights for Kara/ZA. The problem is, north america has 4 time zones. Start times on either side of the coast virtually eliminate half the country.
The trouble for guilds like ours was never "people don't know how to raid", but always having to fight turnover and people's personal schedules. Most guilds like our complain about the same thing... ATTENDANCE!! That's what sets apart a lot of the raiding guilds. If my guild has to call 1 raid a night due to a shortage of players then it cripples our progression. I can train a monkey how to Tank or DPS within tolerable limits (nothing we saw required anything more then 80% of max dps), but you can't make up for being 2-3 ppl short in a new instance. Nothing Blizz can do will make casual players personal schedules more agreeable with raiding.
Really this thread boils down to one thing.... TIME. People who are at the top have simply been able to put in more time then most. It's been beaten to death here, but Blizz has only a few "options" if they want to try to appease these people.
1.) create artifical barriers (attunements/rep grinds/resist fights)
2.) timed gates or spaced release of content
3.) tuning all encounters to appease the top and nerf'ing them repeatedly (which often leads to broken encounters)
All of the these has some element of merit, but would cause QQ due to excessive time sinks and also prove discouraging to a bulk of the population.
You are absolutely right, but a lot of servers simply don't have raid guilds that take progression seriously AND have a 2-3 night schedule. So for a lot of players, the choice isn't there unless they want to start their own.
(I've always been surprised that guilds on more time limited schedules weren't more popular, actually.)
This is my guild: 3 nights a week, 10.5 total weekly raid hours. It's generally a good schedule (and certainly very manageable for people with lots of real-life commitments), but our schedule gave us fits about halfway through BT, when we simply weren't getting enough time to work on progression bosses. We remedied that by tightening up raid discipline considerably and learning to do trash at a very fast pace, but it was tight, and many of us really wanted to add a fourth raid night. In the end, adding more raids wasn't feasible without expanding the size of the guild, and we didn't want to that -- so we just powered through with what we had.
But yeah, I'd say progression on a limited raid schedule is an interesting challenge in and of itself. One thing the light schedule eliminates is the ability to do much farming of cleared content (if you don't have to do it to get to your progression encounters). The badge gear was extremely helpful to us because of this.
I'm hopeful that the winged design of Naxxramas will be helpful for limited-schedule guilds.
The trouble for guilds like ours was never "people don't know how to raid", but always having to fight turnover and people's personal schedules. Most guilds like our complain about the same thing... ATTENDANCE!! That's what sets apart a lot of the raiding guilds. If my guild has to call 1 raid a night due to a shortage of players then it cripples our progression. I can train a monkey how to Tank or DPS within tolerable limits (nothing we saw required anything more then 80% of max dps), but you can't make up for being 2-3 ppl short in a new instance. Nothing Blizz can do will make casual players personal schedules more agreeable with raiding.
That's our guild in a nutshell. We were 2 nights a week until we were at a point where we needed to ramp up and wrap up vashj/kael for attunements. After adding a third night progression went a long fine, but we soon began to realize that people weren't showing up a night a week thereby pushing the rest of the schedule back. Shock and awe that it always seemed to be a similarly minded group and that night so happened to be comprised of farm content standing in the way of the next step in progression. After the amount of pain we went through welding raids of alts and non-raiders together to knock illidan down a few times we were spent to the point that we just called it a break until wrath and restructured into a pvp guild until then.
I absolutely love the strategy in a good raid encounter, and look forward to seeing what they have in store for us. However, I'm also glad that (at the very least with the new non-heroic scheme to raid encounters) I won't have to field a subpar raid because 3 or 4 people think "casual guild" means "show up if my ticket is punched on the purp-train and ignore the rest of em".
That's not really how it works though, because every time you lose that one top end thing, it trickles down to the next level. On top of that there is something with the carrot on the stick and seeing things other people do that you then want to do, and if everyone's doing that, it does lose some of that special "wow that's cool" factor.
Of course Blizzard should not be bending over backwards catering only to the top end, that wouldn't be good business because they are not the highest portion of income, everyone knows that.
It should also probably noted that high-end raiding guilds disproportionately impact the health of a server. Very high end raiding guilds will often run PuGs of old content. "Noobs" can attend these PuGs and see the right strats and good ways to do things and take them back to their guild. When my guild hit Shahraz, the price of Primal Shadow on our server tripled, and continued to rise as the next couple guilds got close. High end raiding guilds and serious arena teams provide support for professions like Alchemy, Jewelcrafting and very possibly Inscription.
Where there are high end guilds, the economy thrives and it is easier to do things on a server for the whole server. More people come to and stay on the server, even those uninterested in raiding.
This isn't to say that developers should ignore the middle end for the high end, but it is to say that it does make sense to spend resources somewhat disproportionately on the high end.
It should also probably noted that high-end raiding guilds disproportionately impact the health of a server. Very high end raiding guilds will often run PuGs of old content. "Noobs" can attend these PuGs and see the right strats and good ways to do things and take them back to their guild. When my guild hit Shahraz, the price of Primal Shadow on our server tripled, and continued to rise as the next couple guilds got close. High end raiding guilds and serious arena teams provide support for professions like Alchemy, Jewelcrafting and very possibly Inscription.
Where there are high end guilds, the economy thrives and it is easier to do things on a server for the whole server. More people come to and stay on the server, even those uninterested in raiding.
This isn't to say that developers should ignore the middle end for the high end, but it is to say that it does make sense to spend resources somewhat disproportionately on the high end.
The argument makes sense to an extent, but I think it overlooks the potential for Blizzard to redefine what constitutes "high end".
What we consider average may, in the future, be much closer to the high end. Down the line it could be your guild that invites the "noobs" to PuGs of old content, or that supplies the materials or gear other guilds need to catch up to you. This isn't because you'll have become more hardcore, but because the sea of raiders will have expanded.
What I lack in intelligence I make up for in verbosity. Monte's LoL Blog
It should also probably noted that high-end raiding guilds disproportionately impact the health of a server. Very high end raiding guilds will often run PuGs of old content. "Noobs" can attend these PuGs and see the right strats and good ways to do things and take them back to their guild. When my guild hit Shahraz, the price of Primal Shadow on our server tripled, and continued to rise as the next couple guilds got close. High end raiding guilds and serious arena teams provide support for professions like Alchemy, Jewelcrafting and very possibly Inscription.
Where there are high end guilds, the economy thrives and it is easier to do things on a server for the whole server. More people come to and stay on the server, even those uninterested in raiding.
This isn't to say that developers should ignore the middle end for the high end, but it is to say that it does make sense to spend resources somewhat disproportionately on the high end.
It's also a really good argument for preventing the high end from congregating on specific servers like Mal'ganis.
All those network effects do nothing for a server where the high end have transferred away.
It's also a really good argument for preventing the high end from congregating on specific servers like Mal'ganis.
All those network effects do nothing for a server where the high end have transferred away.
That is indeed the flip side of what I said. I don't know how many potential recruits I've talked to that told me "X Excellent Guild transferred off, and my server just died. I want to go to a server that has life!"
EDIT: And this also explains why the "good-neighbor" policy is the best one to pursue with other guilds on your server. Don't actively ninja their core raiders, provide them accurate info about people who have left your guild or got kicked, work out trades and other deals when you can (i.e. If you'll bring these people in for their Vashj key, we'll give you some Hearts of Darkness and let one of your raiders in to see how we do Bloodboil). Guilds who work to destroy other guilds on their server rather than nourish them are just cutting themselves off at the root in the long run, as recruits are less willing to transfer to a server where there is only one or two strong, healthy guilds.
Which is nice... I mean, I'd rather not be an asshole anyhow, but it makes me happy that not being one is the most intelligent choice.
Nothing Blizz can do will make casual players personal schedules more agreeable with raiding.
The new debuff system will do absolute wonders for this. With the strictness of raid composition required for Sunwell, a casual guild basically had no chance. Say your average attendance is 50%. You need a boomkin on every raid because of the synergies. How many do you need to recruit? Well, the naive answer is two - so with 50% attendance each, you're covered.... except that's not how it works. If you recruit two boomkins, that still means that you're cancelling 1 in 4 raids due to lack of the synergies. If you recruit three, you can push it down to 1 in 8 that gets cancelled, but there's a whole lot of sitting going on and a *huge* amount of extra gearing up to do. Now multiply that by the number of essential synnergies (shadow priest, enhance shaman, etc.) and it becomes literally impossible to ever field a properly optimised raid group.
With the new system, you can pretty much throw your entire raid group in a bucket, pick any random combination of 3 tanks, 7 healers, 15 DPS, and have most of the synergies covered. When patch 3.0.2 hit, the top end guilds saw their raid DPS increase by 50% or so due to all the new talents. Ours more than doubled, because on top of the new talents, we had the fact that every one of our raids was now ending up fully optimised in debuff terms - something we had never been able to properly achieve before.
Sure, Blizzard haven't made casual players' schedules more agreeable with raiding, and a casual group will still learn slower simply because people are less familiar with the encounters. However, raiding as a whole will be VASTLY more accessible for the more casual groups because the day-to-day randomisation of raid composition you get in a casual guild will not be nearly as much of an issue.
So a week ago, rightfully so, people were pointing out that it was easy to beat the content and that the real challenge was only killing Sartharion with drakes up, but it seems they've done that already too(see websites linked before), which with only one week of gearing up, seems to also be a bit undertuned. While I don't specifically think it's a bad thing, I think they should have overtuned this kind of achievement, so it could only be done later, when you actually outgeared the stuff(like solo onyxia, even though they removed that I believe).
People are forgetting how terrible TBC "entry level" raiding and even heroic 5 man was. When you were in greens or partial blues, doing heoirc 5 man was scary. And the horror stories coming out from the raids trying Gruul, High King, and Magtheridon was so bad everyone stuck to raiding Kara.
Even Kara wasn't exactly that easy, not if you had just hit lv 70.
Yet, everyone can remember how so many people flocked to raiding because of MC and Onyxia. Especially MC. The experienced raiders would later call it a bore, but it not only kept a lot of guilds going (look at all the guilds stuck on the first boss of BWL that just continued to raid MC). and it drew in new raiders by the loads.
I was a committed casual player until I tried out MC and found that raiding wasn't quite as scary or as difficult as what it was made out to be. If I was the same person, and my first raid was on Hing King, Gruul or Matheridon, I think I wouldn't have picked up raiding at all. I would have been scared off straight off the bat.
TBC raiding wasn't really fun though I participated in it quite a lot (cleared BT pre-nerf, entered sunwell). It required an inordinate amount of hardcore commitment. Plus it really weeded out the "less skilled". We had players who were singled out and chewed out because they were wiping the raid. And it needed to be done. But it wasn't a pleasant experience by any means. So many fell by the way side simply because they weren't "hardcore" or "skilled" enough. And we are talking about entry level raiding in TBC, not even sunwell.
Everyone remember the first MC boss Luci? It was literally tank and spank. Sure, subsequent bosses had you being aware to "move out of the fire" and stuff. But if you died, the raid didn't die as well. Only at Baron did they have "the bomb" where you could blow up your raid and that was several bosses in already. You could wipe and learn baron while still collecting loot from the earlier bosses.
TBC raiding was tuned too tightly that the death of even one person meant a good chance a learning encounter would be a wipe. Remember Kael from TK? Vashj of SSC? It was like "All of you must survive and do it perfectly to the last stage or its wipe" Achimonde was the ultimate - one guy die = the raid dies. (most of the time).
By the time we killed Kael, raiding felt like work. Archimonde just made it that much worse. Overall, I enjoyed raiding from MC through BWL and even some of AQ40. By twin emperors, it was starting to feel more like work than play already. It was "everyone must be fully prepared, all consumables up, read up on strats, then still throw yourself at the encouter dozens of times, die dozens of times, before we make it through".
When we did make it, it was a relief, it didn't even feel good. I remember being asked to click on cubes on Magtheridon. The stress was terrible (because if you misclicked, you wiped the raid). We had people who begged off on cube clicking because they got so stressed up with being responsible for a raid wipe. Aran was almost as bad, and it was in Kara! The newbie raid would wipe so many times on Aran because people moved.
I remember writing a huge post on this. Aran in difficulty was beyond anything they had even in MC, and it was a beginner 10 man raid! TBC had no MC. It was AQ40 difficulty in skill level from the very get go, and it got only worse as you continued.
Blizzard said they wanted a game that was "easy to pick up, hard to master". That applies to raiding as well. These current starter dungeons are MC. They are raid dungeons on training wheels. They will get a new guild working together, and have fun and get some loot while doing so.
The next level of dungeons will be BWL level of difficulty. Moderate level.
Then, the next level of dungeons is where they can throw everything at the players. AQ40 and NAXX level difficulty. And if the next expansion is not yet out then, one more supreme sunwell level difficulty dungeon.
Blizzard is smart to scale things up. This way, everyone finds a niche. Every raid has content they can learn and farm while they are wiping to the next level of dungeons.
Quoting for those who cannot bother click the links:
I seriously hope Blizzard does not continue to make content like this. It is an utter joke, pure and completely. We did not raid this content on the PTR, we did however all raid 40 man naxx back when it was actually something worth-while to mention. It use to mean something in this game to down an encounter, now it means pretty much nothing. I pray that the casuals don't win out and destroy difficult content for those of us who enjoyed clearing it. I cross my fingers and pray that Ulduar provides us with somewhat of a challenge. Let the casuals have the 10 mans, let us have the 25 mans.
I just really don't understand what makes people post things like this. Is it really that hard to understand the new way Blizzard chose? Do they really think they are sending Blizzard message? Or is this just a way to be cool and interesting? Why not just enjoy the good stuff wotlk brings? There really is a lot of it.
Your thoughts?
Last edited by Bellise : 11/21/08 at 4:02 AM.
Who we are is but a stepping stone to what we can become.
The people that have already cleared the hardest acheivements, the ones that have already cleared Naxx, the ones that have *even hit 80* are insanely ahead of the curve. That people are talking about heroics in another thread really astounds me - but I suppose being in raiding guilds (or just being on a more active server) helps one find groups.
The character I have been leveling is in an extremely casual guild that plans on doing raids when enough people get to 80. I don't plan on staying forever, but I did want to see just how guilds that were extremely casual would operate. These are the sorts of people who make up the buik of the WoW population, and for whom a lot of the stuff that's new in the expansion is for. When I last logged out, which is about a week after launch, the guild had one person at 79, one person at 78 (me), one at 76 (I think) and then about 6 at 74. Most officers were still 73 or below.
Average players don't have the time to play more than a couple hours a day and certainly aren't in any rush. And plenty of those like me that do have excessive amounts time and are interested in levelign quickly didn't play on beta and thus are severely hampered by actually reading quests and spending significant amounts of time figuring out what to do. Thus, even though its been a week, I can't imagine anyone at level 80 already (which for this board seems to be "expected") thinks of it as even close to notmal.
The content is not designed to challenge the top 1% of raiding guilds, nor even the top 10%. It's designed to be experienced by the wide majority of players, most of whom can't play every day and gets at most 10 hours a week, if that. Yes it's quite easy, but I think that Blizzard has learned that they don't want their painstakingly designed content, like the glorious entrance of Kil'Jaeden, to be experienced by only a very small percentage of their playing population. It might be quite a while before Ulduar gets in the game because if it gets in before the top guilds have completely farmed Naxx, a good chunk of their audience will probably have barely hit 80. Blizzard's model is to let everyone enjoy their content and it's what has allowed them to maintain such high subcription numbers - ones that are apparently still growing. They probably don't care nearly as much about the long wait between BT and Sunwell compared to the atrocious tuning of t4 that was the result of being told by hardcore raiders what they thought the difficulty was like.
Originally Posted by Bellise
I just really don't understand what makes people post things like this. Is it really that hard to understand the new way Blizzard chose? Do they really think they are sending Blizzard message? Or is this just a way to be cool and interesting? Why not just enjoy the good stuff wotlk brings? There really is a lot of it.
"Hardcore" raiding guilds these days are certainly raiding primarily for the challenge; those that want phat loot to pwn noobs with will pvp for it. Without challenging content, there's no reason for them to exist: the top 1% of each realm might as well just pug it because there's no real need to optimize anything for players of that skill given the content's current difficulty. Their complaints are logical, but only on the basis of the fact that they are a "raiding guild" when Bilzzard has come out and said plenty of times that they're more interested in getting people to raid with their friends instead guilds that are run much like the military. I might be wrong on this account, but from my experience talking with friends and seeing what goes on, in many top guilds the people don't care one whit about each other, often actively detest each other, but still raid together because both want to stay raiding with that guild. I can't imagine Blizzard likes that appraoch to raiding at all, and is taking what steps they can to make things accessible to guilds that aren't just a group of people who happen to raid together.
11/19/08, 5:20 PM
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