◊ Wraithlin

This is my first thread on these forums, so I hope it goes down well.

Short Version
If the risk-vs-rewards is sufficiently poor in raiding that there is a significant drop-off in the number of raiders how will that impact the non-raiders?
I believe (as is show by my arguments) that the total consumer base will drop, even though the vast majority of people involved can never hope or may not even aspire to being “Premier league” players.

Long Version
This thread began as some thoughts after reading:
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=9613 [Preatorians's post on the effect of consumables post Naxx, Pre-TBC.]

Followed by:
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=9990[ TBC itemization thread]
And
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8146 [TBC alchemy]
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=10027 [Gruul, including comments on his risk-vs-reward]

It was also from a throwaway comment by Kaubel that raiders were the rock-stars of WoW. I would like to put forward an alternative theory and use it to ask for peoples feelings on risk-vs-rewards and mudflation in MMO's in general and WoW in particular.

If WoW were soccer, then Bleeding Edge raiders would be the Premier League: other raiders would make up the varying professional and semi-professional leagues. Casuals are those people who watch TV; hardcore casuals are those who play non-professional leagues.
And
Blizzard would be broadcasting Football, and selling football equipment and merchandise.

Now while there will always be those who play football with absolute dedication, due to their love of the sport, what has caused the massive popularity in playing football are the financial rewards. The large rewards and mass coverage are intimately connected, and combine to encourage an ever increasing number of people to aspire to playing professional football. In much the same way, pre-TBC there were a very large number of lower-league raiders who were in it because they aspired to the rewards of high level raiding; epics.

And this is the crux of my argument.
The number of people who play in the premier league and receive vast remuneration are insignificant compared to the millions of people who watch football on TV or kick a ball about the park. It is these people who put the vast majority of the money into the business (Blizzards pockets).

However, the sales of football merchandise, and the popularity of football (measured in terms of player-base) increases as the financial rewards for being in the premier league increase. That is, the lure of rewards increases the number of playing WoW, including the number of non-raiders.

To keep to my analogy, if tomorrow all football players had their wages capped at $100,000 per annum, what would happen to the game?
In my opinion, in the long term, there would be a large drop off in the number of people both playing and watching football. How many kids who play football dream of earning the big money and being a professional football player; now compare that with other sports where the financial reward is orders of magnitude smaller.

So what is my point?
My argument is thus:
The new consumables are more powerful than ever, yet the increase in power from itemisation is much less than previously; to the point where a large number of guilds who have or might kill Gruul have publicly voiced the opinion that they will not kill him regularly, perhaps only to key for Serpentshrine.

With the current speed of mud-flation from the gear that has been data-mined or revealed by blizzard it will take a VERY long time to outgear fights such as Gruul; and the risk vs rewards are sufficiently high to prohibit people killing him at the expense of vast consumables regularly. The situation would be analogous to one in which Onyxia still requiring your whole raid to flask a year after she first died.

With a lack of meaningful gear progression, the requirement for consumables will be higher, and last longer than ever before if the fights are to remain challenging; yet if the rewards do not reflect this number of raiders will tail off. To return to my analogy, if the wage cap is too low, less people will play football professionally or semi-professionally. This will impact the popularity of WoW in the long run as interest in the game fades.

How do other people feel about this ?

 

Farstrider

That seems to totally ignore one key factor - having fun. Which I think is more important in both your sports analogy, and in WoW, than you make out. The only people who would stop playing are surely the people who only play for the gear, which is something I personally can't imagine doing?

It does currently seem that the itemization jumps are smaller and the gear improvements slower as you progress through content in TBC, however - personally I'm pretty comfortable with that, although ultimately making a game where encounters are progressively harder, without just making them require better gear, seems very difficult indeed to achieve.

My personal thought is that itemization will end up jumping in a way that it did in WoW 1.0 to allow people to be "outgeared" by encounters, and therefore to restrict them to the best of the best in the way that Naxx was. That's total speculation however, & I know that's something that gets frowned upon here.

So overall, I think you're wrong, but it's an interesting idea.

John O'Groats to Lands End 2009 for Leukaemia Research

 

Azrayne

Your analogy is pretty flawed, it would be more accurate if you included the fact that having a higher wage inherently increases your ability to play soccer, your innate ability aside, and that people of all levels of play are forced to play against eachother. The heart of the issue is what happens when that professional league team goes up against the locals who like to go down to the field and play a game or two every saturday, and unlike soccer, you don't have people divided up playing against those of similar skill. Not only do they have the massive advantage of being more organised, more practised and more knowledgeable, the scales are further tipped in their favour in that they gain inherent advantages just for having a higher wage (better gear), the professional top-league team totally wipe the floor with the local non-professional players, and neither team has fun that way.

 

◊ Wraithlin

All analogies fail if inspected closely enough, however I would say:
Professional players can play football 24-7 and therefore can progress to a higher level than someone who plays 1 evening a week. Being sufficiently good at football that you can become a professional infact does inprove your ability to play football because it allows to to commit more time to playing football. Indeed, if you consider teams over individuals; being in a higher league means you have more money, so you can pay for better players, meaning you can stay competative in the higher leagues.

Further, with the new arena rankings people will be filtered into leagues, where people will mostly play against people of an appropriate level; and the FA cup would be an example where the premier teams play against non-league competition (sorry for any non-soccer fans).

Of course professional players cant come to your local park and steal your football for 3 hours, but as I said, no analogy is perfect; I would very much hope the game isnt balanced so that joe casual feels he has a fighting chance against any prospective ganker.

 

Azrayne

That would work if you where arguing burely on a skill/organisation basis. What you describe here is the equivelant of an organised team full of skilled players, who play together often and know eachothers playstyle, communicating on vent, vs. your average random 15 chumps from 15 different servers, 5 of whom are afk. Not only are the more skilled (not exactly the right term, but you know what I'm saying) at an advantage because already, this advantage allows them to gain gear which throws an already uneven fight further in their favour. This last part is what Blizzard are trying to somewhat limit.

Except that arena's (and even BG's) do not consist of the entirety of gameplay, or even of PvP.

But that's more or less what's taking place at the moment.

Except that 'Joe Casual' consists of the vast majority of the playerbase. There are a few issues here:

1) Obviously, those who better more effort into the game 'should' have more powerful characters.
2) These benefits should not be so much that those who don't play as much as the aforementioned hardcore players don't even stand a chance, even if they're a better player.
3) All paths of gameplay should reward players on a similar level. This seems to be something Blizzard have finally caught onto with the heroic 5mans/arena's/nice crafted gear.

I think another thing you fail to take into account is that the epics we're looking at from raiding atm are the lowest tiers of raid gear. Anyone remember the days of casters passing on T1 because their blue spellpower set gave better bonuses overall? We're seeing something similar here. If you think that T5 or T6 isn't going to be noteably superior to the current Arc/Shadow Labs/etc/Honor system rewards, you need to think again. Be patient, wait a couple months, just enjoy the raiding for it's own sake and not for the purples, and remind yourself that progress now will go towards giving you access to later loot which 'will' be significant upgrades.

I understand where you're coming from, but you really did choose a horrible way to try and make your point.

 

Antiphonal

If I may interject here:

1. It is far too early to start doom and gloom on progression given that first, most guilds are just now getting geared up and keyed up for TBC's UBRS (Karazhan) and second, that only the most progression-minded guilds are killing 25-person bosses. Third, the high end raiding (Black Temple and Hyjal) have never even been seen, much less fought, much less looted.

2. The jump in item power between UBRS and MC was too dramatic, especially before UBRS and the 5-mans were re-itemized. The jump was so enormous that there was no way to skip MC. Other than attunement to Serpentshrine, you could - if you so choose, skip Gruul if you dislike him. If you enjoy the fight, you get very nice loot as a reward for farming him. With so many new raid encounters, I doubt it would be in anyone's interest to make hard gear requirements from one stage to the next - requiring several months of farming one stage before the next is available. Personally, I think this will be a boon to raid guilds since it will be much easier for someone to get up to speed in terms of gear than before. Attunement will still be a big chore though.

3. BWL was criticized for having anemic loot in comparison with MC. And it is true that the first few bosses had _mostly_ sidegrades or minor upgrades. But the effect of the whole was much greater in terms of a full suit of armor.

 

Vlad3

I agree with you that itemization for Gruul Lair is poor if you compare it to items available in Karazhan and 5 man blues. When WOW was released items in MC and Onyxia were by far superior to everthing else in the game. And those fights didnt require consumables.

Right now both arena rewards, PVP honor system epics and crafted items all have the same item quality then Gruul Lairs drops (item lvl 100-105 epic). Blizzard stated many times that raiding will not be the only way to get the best gear in the game.

Speaking of mudflation, greens and blue at lvl 70, are pretty much better then anything short of Naxx. While I have no problem with the fact that old instances are obsolete (there is plenty of new content for every play style without forcing anybody to complete old content in order to progress), I find to odd that there is soo little difference between the best epics available (currently lvl 105 epics) and some green collection reward (green item lvl 120). The gap between 105 epic and 120 green is pretty small if you take into account the risk and cost of getting that epic vs getting that green. I guess we will have to see where it goes from here.

 

• Zyla

I'd supplement your analogy, to compare off season training programs to farming/consumable use.

While intensive training does increase performance, there begins to be a point where there is a diminishing return. It makes sense in a game like american football, where there are only at most 18-19 games in a season. The body has sufficient time to recover, and there is a substantial offseason. In wow, farming intensely on a nightly basis quickly leaves you with nothing in the tank, and it goes year round. There is no off season.

I agree with your concept that the pros should be rewarded higher. In any sport, that intense training leads to stronger and more responsive physical performance as a base. Why should it be different? Having been a minor league baseball pitcher, I can tell you that the only real difference between different tiers of leagues comes down to 1. Training 2. Bigger/Stronger players 3.*slight* talent.

Pros reap the rewards of their work, it should be no different.

We don't use words like that...St. Louise is listening!

 

torrent495

Tier 5 is ilvl 120, compared to the ilvl 105 Tier 4 that drops off Gruul. That's an upgrade of 15 ilvls. Remember that the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is actually only 10 ilvls (66>76). So "Mud-flation" is alive and well.

I also don't understand your football/soccer analogy. Casuals don't play WoW to watch other people raid on TV. That's completely wrong in every respect. I mean, you could talk about carrots and world-building and community and whatever, but those arguments don't really have anything to do with football fans purchasing merchandise from their favorite teams. Raiding in World of Warcraft is not a professional sport, end of story.

 

◊ Nork

There is no prize money attached to Olympic medals. The athletes are there for the chance to prove they are the best, and the chance to participate in something that is beyond your average person. The fact that someone could get a medal through different means (e.g. the Nobel Prize) means little to an Olympic Athlete, because the medal was only a small part of the reward for competing.

I raided MC, ZG, and BWL for months after getting all my gear from the respective zones. If you enjoy raiding, then the gear will be a secondary concern. If your only interest is gear, then go where that gear is.

Personally, this thread doesn't sit right with me. As far as I can tell, the claimed complaint is "Blizzard nerfed raiding by providing non-raiding ways to get gear". That's not a bad thing. That means that I have more options for getting good gear. This makes me feel that the true complaint is "Being in a raid guild doesn't make me better than everyone else anymore". If I wanted to read that type of thread, I'd go to the Blizzard class forums.

 

Farstrider

I don't know, I mean much though I would hope it wasn't true, I think there are a lot more people out there who raid solely for the loot and who's ultimate ambition is nothing other than to be better geared than everyone else. Much though it doesn't match your motivation, or mine, I think we probably need to accept that, given the amount of loot drama you see, there are a lot of people who are motivated pretty much completely by "purples".

John O'Groats to Lands End 2009 for Leukaemia Research

 

• Cynic

1) Even if a good amount of raiders end up quitting (which I doubt), there will always be the bleeding edge people doing the biggest, baddest mobs around. They are entertainment enough for the masses to be inspired to awesome loot. You don't need 200+ guild playing in the NFL of WoW.

2) Itemization is 10x better then it was in WoW 1.0. Granted, there are still some holes here and there, and many of these I predict will be fixed in the future. I also *personally* like the ability to "sidegrade" and socket my items to my liking. Getting away from the WoW 1.0 where EVERYTHING from the new/next raid zone is clearly better is totally boring and leaves no room for choices in gear. I like choices.

3) Are the consumables *really* that much more powerful, in comparison? Somehow I doubt it. You remember the early, early days of doing Rag with Fire Protection pots because no one had good FR gear (because it didnt exist). Those damn pots often ended up giving you 150-200% more then your total hps throughout the fight. Nothing I've seen in TBC is giving 20k hps worth.

While I'm not personally a proponent of heavy consumables, I can see their value from a designers POV and as such I'm not completely deterred by them.

Summation in Point: The sky is not falling.

 

Cryect

Two issues, one is as you increase stats on an item it gets more expensive to keep adding stats resulting in to add the same amount of stats as you did in the past between Tiers you need to increase the iLvl even more and two the costs of sockets apparently depends on the iLvl and color of the item (which is why its hard to pinpoint an exact price on sockets you need to compare equal iLvl items of equal quality to derive the price point for that item, Blizzard's opinion is apparently you will put better gems into better gear therefore sockets should be worth more (yes, there is several fallacy's in this idea)).

I need to do something useless.

 

thebuddha

This seems like just a long way to say a relatively simple problem.

You don't really need a complicated analogy to purpose that at the moment there are blatant errors on Blizzard's part in end-game raiding itemization (I'm referring to Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, etc.). Some items are just plain bad. I'm not talking sidegrade/situational/offspec loot--I mean literally terrible loot that is worse than other easily attainable gear be it from 5 mans or elite quests. I'm not going to go through and list off examples but I believe the other thread about TBC itemization has plenty of them.

 

Cryect

Yeah, I don't think anyone is going to be killing Nightbane or Gruul for their loot tables. In Nightbane's case, there is much easier bosses with way better loot tables and same thing in Gruul's its loot that we've seen before except turned purple with higher DPS values.

Edit: Heh one thing is some of the items from Nightbane definately look cool had that shield thats a dragon breathing fire out occassionally drop for one group and the offhand that is a dragons head doing similar stuff also drop for another group. So guess Tigole is finally going more along with the thing he said while a casual player and hardcore player will both have similar quality gear the hardcore players gear will be flaming (back before WoW came out).

I need to do something useless.

 

Mordinm

I think the sports anaolgy is a poor way to understand issue. My local bowling ally sees more people though it in a week then the local soccer field or basketball gym or football field. Yet I would bet the vast majority of people bowling at Big Al's have never seen professional bowling from more time then it takes to flip the channel off of ESPN 7 or what ever channel got stuck with nothing better to show.

The sports people play on a non professional level have much more to do with the structure of the sport rather then the popularity of the professional version. Take soccer vs football. In the US football is far more watched then soccer and yet soccer is the more popular sport for casual play because of the game structure.

 

◊ Praetorian

I don't get Nightbane at all. Fun fight, for sure, but he's clearly a notch above the rest of the instance. I mean, he has a reputation requirement, questline, and heroic-clear requirement just to summon him, whereas you can walk into Kara on your first day there and kill Prince. Yet he drops loot that is ilvl 100, the same as Attumen and Maiden...? What's the logic there?

And with Gruul, it kind of goes against all my powergaming instincts, but I really just can't justify pushing to kill him right how in light of the fight design versus the reward. When we need to kill Gruul to complete Serpentshrine attunement for a bunch of people at once, we'll do so. I never considered skipping Loatheb once we'd killed him once, even before Sapphiron was in the picture, because despite his costs, the reward seemed worth it at the time -- virtually any item he could drop would've been a big upgrade for someone in the raid. But why kill Gruul for ilvl 110 loot when you can do Prince for a massive loot table of ilvl 110 loot, or a dozen other things for fairly comparable ilvl 100-105 loot?

 

Elendril

My main incentive to kill Gruul is to get a start on the long, long line of leg piece set tokens people will be wanting for the next 6+ months with the single drop :(

 

Cryect

I think we will be well decently Tier 5 before even half the guild has their Tier 4 Legs.

I need to do something useless.

 

thebuddha

I don't think that's necessarily true. There's tons of other loot that is comparable/better than T4 leggings depending on class. Not to mention, no one in their right mind is going to want to do Gruul if you're killing stuff in Serpentshrine/Tempest Keep.

 

Ukerric

You can't beat EvE TV and the tournament broadcasts.

They should use Arena as qualifiers. At the end of each season, the top team gets their armored netherdrakes - AND the opportunity to enlist in the serverwide contest. They get a free char copy on the "World of Warcraft" server (PVP server which is used only for competition). On tournament day, the teams log, they're dumped in a specific zone, with specific objectives. And the battles are broadcast with a streaming service, along with commentators and a "we redo the battle now" feature after the end.

I mean, I don't even play EvE. But I did watch some games, notably the main events (featuring highly known clan players).

Actually, I would probably say that what has caused the financial rewards is the massive popularity of football. The cash in football doesn't come out of nothing, it comes because you get a lot of people watching them (both on place, unless you happen to be an italian this week, or on TV), which translates into massive ad budgets, which translate into massive cash for high-end clubs, which translates into massive salaries for the good players.
Not much, except making a lot of TV executives or club managers terribly happy, as they would pocket large amount of cash that wouldn't land in the pockets of the players.
You're confusing cause and effect.

The amont of cash in football isn't what makes the football popular - the popularity of football is what generates the amount of cash.


(and that means that applying this analogy to raid itemization is completely bogus)

 

◊ Praetorian

But why? Maybe it depends on class, but still...

I can do the Chess Event (aka free loot) and get this: http://thottbot.com/?i=60040

Compare that to this: http://thottbot.com/?i=54652

If I socket the Kara legs with standard AH-bought blue gems, I end up giving up 6sta, 2mp5, and 5 +healing over my set pants. If I throw in one or two of the epic gems I get from heroics, I will end up with more or less an identical pair of pants with 30 less armor.

Not every single class has an alternative like that, but still, point stands. I suspect many do.

I just don't see the reason to kill Gruul for loot right now. Once I have 25-30 people Nightbane-flagged needing the Signet from Gruul, we'll kill him and then go to Serpentshrine, for tier 5 loot that will be ilvl120+. And failing to farm Gruul (while farming Maulgar, Kara, heroics, etc. every timer) isn't going to impact our ability to progress in Serpentshrine at all. Gruul's loot table just isn't deep enough. He has set pieces, and maybe 3 pieces of legitimate progression loot that are real upgrades. Not having those isn't going to prevent us from progressing in Serpentshrine.

If anything, I see Gruul's future as being a source of off-spec set pants once we're doing tier 5 content and have the DPS to burn him down without spending a fortune every week.

 

• DeeNogger

Is Gruul really that big of a time/money sink? The mountain seems the tallest from the bottom: perhaps Gruul will be much more reasonable, risk:reward wise, once its been "conquered".

I write things The word of DeeNogger -- New Blog Post November Something

 

cladnin

And that's the ultimate problem with Gruul and encounters with terrible loot. There is absolutely no reason any guild should say "I don't want to kill this mob that is a tier higher in our progression", ever. Every guild that has killed Maulgar should want to be attempting Gruul (and in theory, should have a good chance at killing him without a huge hassle / money drain), and should be able to achieve greater loots than available currently. Instead, everything is backwards. The majority of guilds don't care that Gruul even exists until they get 20-30 people to kill Nightbane. Those same guilds care even less that Gruul exists, because he is not only a huge time sink, a huge money sink (dps / invul pots) but his loot risk vs reward is pure terrible. Gruul should probably lose 25% of his hp, and his drops reworked/reitemized (and possibly get a +5 level to them).

 

Elendril

People are set fiends, and while some classes have comparable/better alternatives, not everyone does. I've been drooling over Rip-Flayer Leggings from Netherspite myself, but I'd still rather have Demon Stalker, if only for completeness' sake :-P

But yeah, I've been saying Gruul seems like he'll be much less frustrating when people have better gear and can live through unlucky shatters, and we have enough DPS to handle losing people who mess up.

Maybe more than anything else I really want to kill him for epeen's sake, since I'm sick of being #11 on every kill list :)