Icecrown Citadel "Gating" system
 

Posted earlier on the forums:

Icecrown Citadel testing has been progressing very well over the last few weeks, and this has been a huge help to the encounter design team. We want to thank everyone who has logged onto the PTR and tried the encounters there.

As we're now getting closer to the release of 3.3.0, we wanted to talk about our plans for access progression within Icecrown Citadel. Icecrown Citadel is going to be broken up into four distinct sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. We plan on releasing these four sections of Icecrown Citadel over time and not all immediately when patch 3.3.0 goes live. At this point we can't give precise dates for these release dates as they are determined by when patch 3.3.0 goes live. Once dates are known with more certainty, I'll update the community so they can plan appropriately.

The first section that opens will include the Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship Battle, and Deathbringer Saurfang encounters. Progress beyond that point will be prevented for several weeks. Then the Plagueworks will open with Rotface, Festergut, and Professor Putricide becoming available. After another period of time, the Crimson Hall will open and you can then fight the Blood Princes and Blood-Queen Lana'thel. The final Frostwing Halls unlock then occurs after that, making Valithria Dreamwalker, Sindragosa, and the Lich King available. We believe a staggered release of the content will allow players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace.

There are other elements that gate access along the way. Players may not attempt any Heroic versions of 10 player encounters until they have defeated the Lich King in a 10 player raid. Similarly, players must defeat the Lich King in a 25 player raid before they can attempt a Heroic 25 player encounter. So players must master every normal difficulty encounter in Icecrown Citadel before attempting Heroic difficulty.

The Lich King may not be attempted until Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, and Sindragosa are defeated. Furthermore, the Heroic difficulty of The Lich King encounter may not be attempted in any week unless the three aforementioned encounters have been defeated in Heroic difficulty that week.

The Ashen Verdict provides reinforcements and material for players to assault Icecrown Citadel, but this support is not endless. Raids will have a limited number of attempts total each week to defeat the four most difficult encounters in Icecrown Citadel: Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. As these boss encounters are unlocked, the number of attempts available per week will increase. The initial number of attempts provided for defeating Professor Putricide is only five. When Blood-Queen Lana'thel unlocks, the amount of total attempts remaining will increase to 10. Then when Sindragosa and the Lich King unlock, 15 total attempts will be available to defeat all four bosses. After a raid has exhausted their attempts for the week, the Ashen Verdict must withdraw their support and the four most difficult bosses all despawn and become unavailable for the week. The limited attempt system is a feature of both Normal and Heroic difficulty.

There will be no explicit rewards for defeating the Lich King with a specific number of attempts remaining as there was with Trial of the Grand Crusader. There will also not be an achievement to complete Icecrown Citadel without being defeated by a boss encounter, or letting a raid member die. (i.e. A Tribute to Insanity).

In the weeks and months after all twelve encounters are unlocked, additional attempts against the final four boss encounters become available. This represents the Ashen Verdict growing more powerful and gaining a stronger foothold in Icecrown Citadel. To further help raids, Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream will begin to provide assistance by inspiring the armies attacking Icecrown Citadel. This is represented as an additional zone wide spell effect applied to all players that will increase their hit points, damage dealt, and healing done. This effect will also increase in effectiveness over time. Players may opt out of the spell's effect if they so wish.

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So, they are keeping the gated system for ICC, which was expected, but not in the "several weeks" portion that they are saying. In thoery, Arthas and hard modes won't be available for 2-3 months after the patch (Phase 1, several weeks wait, P2, several weeks, P3, several weeks, Arthas).

And then they are tying tries against the bosses even on normal mode now. I could see that on hard mode, but on easy mode also? But also they are taking away the rewards for killing with 0 tries lost. That makes no sense.

How is this a good thing?

Actually that was the one part of the announcement I was happy about. I hate the idea of emphasizing the 'perfect run.' For one I think it's just stressful and not fun. More importantly, if someone crucial disconnects, your chance at the perfect run is lost for the week.

A couple weeks back my guild got to anub with 50 attempts left, and right before he submerged about 7 people disconnected. Apparently it was some problem with Comcast. One of the DCed people got targeted with impale, and then we were screwed. No insanity for us that week(we got him on the next pull though). The next week our tanks(myself included) were having disconnect issues, so we didn't even make it to Anub with 50 attempts left. No insanity that week.

We did finally get it this week, but after our experience the past few weeks, I really hate the idea of putting so much weight on a wipe-less or death-less run. I'm glad Blizzard is doing away with it in Icecrown.

Limiting a number of tries on normal attempts is a good thing. It prevents guilds from spending hours just beating their heads against it until the pegs all fall into place, and forces people to play smarter rather than just playing longer. I would think everyone on EJ would understand and appreciate that, with how much time and effort we put into getting every drop of usability out of our characters. Now guilds will actually have to step back after a wipe and say "what caused that, and how can we prevent it from happening again?"

Good guilds already do this, bad guilds still won't. Especially when there's no reward for doing better than killing the Lich King with 1 attempt left. All this will really accomplish is locking inconsistent guilds out of the final encounters for longer until they outgear the skill elements of those "gating" encounters.

Yeah, but 5 tries? That's asinine as hell. A bad pull means you just lost 20% of your attempts. The 'getting your feet wet' try is another 20% gone.

I could be alright with 10 or 15 for starter numbers, but 5 is just stupid.

Edit; And that's not including any tries where someone crucial disconnects.

Between all of the boss kill videos available, all the information posted on EJ and other related forums, and the PTR being open to anyone who wants it, "getting your feet wet" should be a thing of the past. No one should be going into a fight on the live realms without knowing exactly what to expect. I do agree with you that crucial members disconnecting would pose an issue, but one wipe out of 5 is small beans, since there is no bigger and better loot for limiting wipes. If that same crucial person is continually having an issue, though, you should be more worried about solving that before downing the boss.

I like the Attempts system in theory, because as mentioned before, it forces people to play smarter, and not just raid 12 hours a day until the boss goes down. However, under it's current implementation, the Attempts system is very prone to security risks. Would be nice to see some kind of raid ID protection to go hand in hand with this.

Not sure how other servers are, but raid ID theft is fairly common on ours. Competition is very stiff between rival guilds, even to the extent of raid id theft. The top two alliance guilds on the server both had their IDs stolen the first week Heroic ToGC came out, and several lesser progressed guilds had them stolen in later weeks.

Reading that post is a great summary of the "raiding for the masses" experiment that Blizzard has conducted throughout WOTLK:

1) How do we make raiding easier while giving the hardcore guilds something to do? A: hard-modes.
2) How do we keep players from impaling themselves on content (read: hard-modes) that they are not ready for. A: gated progression.
3) How do we maintain some level of competition for hardcore guilds in spite of gated progression? A: limited number of attempts.
4) How do we ensure that everyone gets to see every encounter eventually? A: increase the base gear level (via badges and the previous tier's content) or if there are no tiers left, artificially buff players over time.

And I think the experiment is beginning to pay off for its primary purpose. But of course, the more important question is how it affects the hardcore raider.

All of this is a culture shift in raiding from the mentalities of vanilla and TBC. So beyond the associated shock value (and the pointless superficial reactions to it), what does this mean from a practical point of view? I think its two things: 1) raids have less freedom to decide how they want to tackle content, i.e., trying some hard-modes before killing Arthas and 2) raid success is measured more by quality of play rather than time invested. My belief is that your like or dislike of this system depends on how these two points affect your raiding.

For my part, I'm indifferent on these two points. What I'm more concerned about is the difficulty of individual encounters rather than how they're delivered.

A link to an addon that set your Dungeon Difficulty to 10 player normal whenever you were made leader of a raid was posted a while back. I'll see if I can hunt it down, but try searching the forums for it as well. It pretty well guarantees that you can't have your 25 man ID stolen and abused in such a way.

It all seems pretty complex. It reeks a bit of a delay mechanism to allow for Cataclysm/4.0, avoiding a fourth 'filler' raid.

Let's see if I can explain the rather dense wall of text into a more readable format:

Content progression:
- Icecrown will be divided into four gated wings. 4 bosses - 3 bosses - 3 bosses - 2 bosses - 1 boss. Very similar in principle to Naxxramas.
- At the beginning, there will be weeks between opening of new wings.
- The endbosses of all but the 1st wing will have limited attempts, in normal mode as well as hard mode.

In addition to that:
- Heroics are unlocked after completing the Lich King encounter in normal mode.
- As time goes on, number of attempts on the wing endbosses will increase, and a zone-wide buff will get progressively stronger.

I'm - I guess - an average raider. Not in a cutting edge guild, and not even regularly doing heroic 25-mans. From this perspective, most of it seems reasonale. But the limited attempts on the 'endbosses' will be pretty harsh in the beginning, I imagine. Heroic mode seems a long way away.

Well, this is probably a result of all the complaining going on about tanks DCing and whatnot on insanity runs. Which is kind of unfortunate; whether its a mount or a relatively trivial gear upgrade, the idea of an extra piece of loot for playing perfectly (and getting a bit lucky) is a cool incentive.

All the 'the servers and the internet make insanity nonviable' discussion was frankly overblown. Does this break insanity at times? Yeah. Does it suck? Yeah. Does it happen all the time? No. For every insanity wipe that was primarily due to internet or lag in any of the top ~100 guilds, there are probably 2 or 3 that are due to player error. But people acted like their week was wasted if they didn't get a ~50-100 dps cloak upgrade.

The gating system is good because it lets them release content sooner than they would otherwise (in normal mode). And if you're the wowprogress type, it fosters competition, too. Should a guild that gets world first Kael'thas be essentially guaranteed the world first on everything in BT solely due to the fact that they're the only ones who can do the fights, or should each world first be earned on its own merits?

The limited attempts can work, too. If you're the wowprogress type with unlimited time, you can plow through 2/3 of the zone (and get gear upgrades here, too), and if you're a guild with limited time, you have a fighting chance on the final 4 bosses. The guilds at the top of ToTC and at the top of Ulduar were mostly the same, but they were re-ordered a bit. Any guild that wants to excel in ICC has to do well in both unlimited and limited scenarios. I don't see that as a bad thing.

One of reason I preferred ToC and ToGC being separate instances was the ability to do the Hard Modes without worrying about actually finishing the normal instance. While having double amount of bosses to kill was somewhat irritating, it also removed the part of Ulduar I disliked. "We still have 6 bosses to kill, should we keep trying to do Heartbreaker and risk not making it to Yogg, or just do it the easy way?". And that was even before the attempt limit appeared.

Now, it feels like worst of two system combined. You have limits in both difficulty modes, and they are shared . So, realistically, you have to shave off 1-2 tries of Hard Mode, just in case something wrong goes with Normal, otherwise you'll fail to get Arthas that reset. Then again, they might be separate, it's hard to tell that from the post. If so, it might not be that bad.

Still doesn't solve another issue, that should be pretty well known with Tribute runs. "Bring the player not the class" - not only about class stacking, but actually bringing new people in. Unless new recruit is truly a genius, he will need at least one attempt(realistically - several) to get some practice, costing you 20% of your weekly tries. That's stressful both for them and the guild - making "let's just stop for today instead" a better option. Now, if I'm reading it right, we'll have at least 15 attempts for Hard Modes - plus, you can do the ones without limit in the beginning - but the problem remains. Unless the numbers go up rapidly after entire place is open, it's "That Guy" syndrome again. Except it won't be "That Guy costed us 1 cloak", but "he costed us access to 6 more bosses". I really dislike this part of WotLK raiding and was glad it was gone in Ulduar(after Immortal) - only to make a return in ToC. Here, they got rid of one part, while introducing another. It's going in circles, guess it's yet another experiment.

What I'm interested in - who is Attempt Limit in Normal aimed at? I have no doubt 5 tries limit might stop even some "good" guilds, since the difficulty looks to be much higher than ToC. But then again, there's already gating in place, so... what's the point?

Well, still waiting for more details from blues.

Edit: "Bring the member, not the recruit" sounds more accurate ;)

It's 15 attempts for Putricide, Lana'thell, Sindragosa and Arthas, no matter which difficulty you are attempting them on. So you can go and wipe 9001 times on Marrowgar hard and still have 15 for the last 4.

Well yeah, I mentioned that later - you could spend your time on other bosses, while waiting for attempt limit to go up and NPC buff to get better.

The big thing I took away from this is that they did NOT want players spending Christmas day trying to kill Heroic Arthas if they released the patch this year.

I really like these changes because it makes the real race Heroic Mode after the holidays and after students are back in classes.