Cataclysm Raid Progression Refinements - Page 25

Tinwhisker · 07/28/10, 2:24 PM

Originally Posted by Malleus

You also need to know who is an alt of whom, remember. Guilds often work up alts to endgame raiding level so they can spend twice as long in each reset working on a boss with limited tries, or so they can fill in key roles if someone is missing. If a strict 10s guild with a roster of 13 does this, they can and probably will end up with 26 toons who have the kill.

Just don't put those alts in the guild. Remember, I said it was a way that 10mans could differentiate themselves if they chose to, I never said it was automatic; just like the 10man strict rating now it's easy to mess up if you start inviting into the guild all willy-nilly. The seven toon limit means that you can invite those alts (up to 3 of them) if you really need to and still get the guild kill and also means that a 25man raid group can't get guild guild kill credit without getting it for more than the 13-15 people a progression 10man group would have.

Back in vanilla, my own guild for a very long time had another partner guild called Gnomes of Destiny. Those people were in the guild and raided with us but weren't in guild proper because of uh, reasons that don't matter anymore. MAking your own chat channels that "sticky" pretty much takes care of any guild chat problems you might have by splitting the guild and the recent calendar changes make invites a snap.

Exemplar · 07/28/10, 4:24 PM

I'm not disputing it's easy to externally track data via armory. This all still requires outside research. Yes, websites like WoWprogress and GuildOx can/will likely automate this, but this information is not displayed in WoW itself.

It doesn't void the change that in-game, just looking at people and even inspecting them, (based on what we currently have been told - it's always subject to change) there will be no way to differentiate between a player who killed things on 10, one who killed things on 25, or one who killed the easiest (or hardest) mixture of both.

In vanilla someone wearing T2 killed things in BWL. Visible bragging rights. In BC someone on an Amani bear cleared ZA in 30 minutes. Again, visible bragging rights. Now, someone wearing tier gear did at minimum some Heroics. You have to inspect to see if it's token upgraded. In Cata even an inspect wouldn't tell the difference.

From a general standpoint: looking awesome is great, having to tell people how awesome you are is not great. For those players seeking to be awesome, this could be a consideration. As Tinwhisker's has said, a lot of impetus in gaming is "to win", deriving from the caveman desire to be superlative to win better mates. The harder it is to recognize a winner or the more winners overall, the less prestige is attached to the win.

Also there's a lot of old-timer syndrome. We had to "walk 10 miles to school, uphill, in the snow, barefoot, while carrying our school desk - kids today have it easy." People recollect raiding as harder previously and believe it's easier now, which isn't necessarily true, but still influences emotional decisions.

Finally, I see a curious situation with meta-achievements. Currently some bosses are harder on 10, others harder on 25 - it's the nature of certain mechanics. With achieves shared between the sizes, it would theoretically be possible to take the easiest route to a meta. Perform achieve A on 10, achieve B on 25, and so on.

Tinwhisker · 07/28/10, 11:30 PM

Originally Posted by Exemplar

The harder it is to recognize a winner or the more winners overall, the less prestige is attached to the win.

I keep picturing Syndrome in my head saying, "And when everyone's super, [laughs maniacally] no one will be."

And I think you hit the nail on the head with the metas. Even beyond farming for metas by swapping raids and doing things the easier way there may even become a market for raid IDs. The ability for a 25man raid to get past a roadblock style boss and then drop to three 10mans to sell ride tickets could be quite lucrative. Or, since the gear they get is the same either way, selling off the entirety of the third raid ID to another guild is also an option.

Douglas · 07/29/10, 11:09 AM

Originally Posted by Calixtus

On top of that, I'd like to reiterate that large social networks are (from this particular layman's perspective anyway) the bread and butter of this genre. Setting the game up so that the only way Nick the Newbie can be slotted into a social network that is centered around this particular Blizzard product (or any Blizzard product given the way RealID is going) is if he already knows someone who plays the game is Bad. The game needs things that encourages social networking, and the bigger the network the better because it becomes more robust.

This is why we have to keep a close eye on what's going on with the RealID stuff (especially once Facebook integration really hits) as we think through all this. I can tell you one thing I'm already observing among my friends is, there's a little less incentive not to jump on an unknown alt on another server for some of us, because our friends can still find us and chat with us. We no longer have to be logged into the same faction on the same server to engage in banter. Before this, if I or my buddies wanted to make sure we were available for dungeon runs or for quick VoA runs or whatever, we had to either be logged in on our primary server together or use an out-of-game channel to communicate. Now we have other options (even with other games -- chat between SC2 and WoW seems to work).

Sure, reducing the incentive for large groups to raid together may reduce the social cohesion of the more serious players, but if it's coupled with other things that increase the social cohesion of everyone else, I'm not ready to rule out that kind of change.

Exemplar · 07/29/10, 11:42 AM

For some the current opt-in requirements for realID are too high (the other thread covered details). If realID eventually morphs into simply a unique identifier it would be possible to increase in-game and even cross-server socialization, which would again affect raids.

Currently we have distinct servers for hardware reasons. Bandwidth, physical location of hardware (affects latency), storage space, and so on. We know that it's feasible to at least link instanced battlegrounds for multiple servers, since any given battleground has an upper limit on participants. 5man instances were similarly linked with the new LFG functionality.

If genuinely unique identifiers were present, it becomes feasible to consider battlegroups (or more?) as basically Meta-Servers. Private channels could be shared across servers, whispers could jump across (as realID already does), and not just joint dungeons, but joint raiding would be possible. You may not be able to interact in town with someone on another server, but you could both enter your own server's instance portal and be transferred to the same instance.

If servers were continually linked and there was ease of communication, it would remove the barriers currently present around Looking For Raid. Blizzard has stated they are worried about issues like stopping halfway through an instance - there is no way to later contact people on other servers for a continuation. This is possible on server-only, so they set it up and turned it on. Expand communication and you can increase the ease of forming or continue PuG raids. The pool also expands - those people with a weird schedule could hook up with X times more similar folks than are present on their lone server.

Finally, it also allows the possibility of cross-server joint raiding. There are more guilds in the pool, so more options to raid together with like-minded and like-progressed groups. The risks involved in server transfer are also minimized - you could safely trial for any guild in your battlegroup before you server transfer to formally join their guild.

In short, increased ease of communication could lead to re-injecting the Massive into MMORPG, something many of us have discussed losing as raids (and guilds) shrink in size and some gnaw their nails wondering if Cata could cause 25 to collapse completely.

Beasterbrown · 07/29/10, 12:55 PM

Originally Posted by Exemplar

If servers were continually linked and there was ease of communication, it would remove the barriers currently present around Looking For Raid. Blizzard has stated they are worried about issues like stopping halfway through an instance - there is no way to later contact people on other servers for a continuation. This is possible on server-only, so they set it up and turned it on. Expand communication and you can increase the ease of forming or continue PuG raids. The pool also expands - those people with a weird schedule could hook up with X times more similar folks than are present on their lone server.

Finally, it also allows the possibility of cross-server joint raiding. There are more guilds in the pool, so more options to raid together with like-minded and like-progressed groups. The risks involved in server transfer are also minimized - you could safely trial for any guild in your battlegroup before you server transfer to formally join their guild.

Not saying it won't ever happen, but I'd be willing to bet Blizzard's real reason for not working on this, is as simple as $25.00 server transfers. The revenue stream from server transfers has to be huge. If you could simply trial with an off server guild without paying $25.00 its a big loss for Blizzard. Another $25.00 if you get turned down by said guild. I know some people who have spent hundreds of dollars transferring mains and alts back and forth guild hopping to raid. Allowing cross-server raiding, while it might make some people happy, is not worth losing the millions of dollars in future revenues.

keseph · 07/29/10, 3:16 PM

That is pure tinfoil hattery. Blizzard is making plenty of money on WoW already without having to milk people for xfer money. They have gone on record multiple times about the cost being 99% a barrier to make people not do it frivolously. That's also why it has a cooldown, and why they offer free transfers off super high pop or imbalanced servers where they DO want people to do it frivolously. That cooldown also makes it a terrible source of revenue; if they suddenly needed to make a few million overnight, they could make another celestial steed or two without looking overtly money-grubbing or having any real effect on the health of the game. Cross-realm LFR has the possibility to do a lot for the health of the game and keep more people knit together, and therefore playing and subscribed. More than enough to justify some very minor loss of server transfer fees from people who DO transfer frivolously.

Exemplar · 07/29/10, 5:01 PM

Whenever we recruit off server I always feel bad for the person. If they're as good as they think, all goes well (our luck has been good), but if they're truly bad we wouldn't guild them after they transferred and trialed. Not only did they spend $25, but they're locked on the server and prevented from trialing with that other guild on that server over there.

It's impossible to tell the impact on server transfers if communication were opened. As you suggest, fewer transfers could occur. Some could be content raiding from another server un-guilded. Others fail to transfer because they tried and didn't fit in after a run with the guild on the different server, so never paid to transfer. More transfers could just as easily occur. People could test a new server's guild(s) more easily and knowing they have a safe harbour the risk involved in paying for the transfer itself is minimal.

You could also see multi-guild server/world firsts. Those high end guilds have a lot of members, for good reason, but mechanics prevent them all from fitting in a single raid. Number one guild on your server and desperately need Class X and no room for that extra Class Y, this week? Number one over there could have the reverse issue.

Forgot a side benefit of being forced to a unique realID (that doesn't reveal your name) - people couldn't name/server transfer away from a bad reputation nearly as easily.

Tinwhisker - do guilds really still sell things? Gold is so plentiful and has little meaning anymore. Our guild bank has earned over 60k in the last few months just clearing out all the BoEs no one wanted (even for alts). What would a guild do with money earned from selling a raid ID? Fund unlimited grepairs until Wow closes the doors?

Tinwhisker · 07/29/10, 5:33 PM

Originally Posted by Exemplar

Tinwhisker - do guilds really still sell things? Gold is so plentiful and has little meaning anymore. Our guild bank has earned over 60k in the last few months just clearing out all the BoEs no one wanted (even for alts). What would a guild do with money earned from selling a raid ID? Fund unlimited grepairs until Wow closes the doors?

We're still selling bloods on occasion (granted we charge practically nothing these days, but it still boggles my mind). Our guild bank is well managed and the coffers should only increase in Cataclysm but while gold isn't really worth as much as it used to be and isn't really a goal in itself, what gold does though is grease the wheels and make other things more smooth. If taking the 10 minutes to sell off that extra raid ID pays for the weeks repairs and flasks then that saves the bank manager the trouble of working the auction house for a few nights. That's a couple hours work cut down to 10 minutes.

Calixtus · 07/30/10, 9:46 AM

Originally Posted by keseph

That is pure tinfoil hattery. Blizzard is making plenty of money on WoW already without having to milk people for xfer money. They have gone on record multiple times about the cost being 99% a barrier to make people not do it frivolously. That's also why it has a cooldown, and why they offer free transfers off super high pop or imbalanced servers where they DO want people to do it frivolously. That cooldown also makes it a terrible source of revenue; if they suddenly needed to make a few million overnight, they could make another celestial steed or two without looking overtly money-grubbing or having any real effect on the health of the game. Cross-realm LFR has the possibility to do a lot for the health of the game and keep more people knit together, and therefore playing and subscribed. More than enough to justify some very minor loss of server transfer fees from people who DO transfer frivolously.

These days the actual cooldown is 3 days which means you can actually transfer several times a reset. And the way some server populations have gone in the EU there has to be some reason for not implementing better population control measures. Raiding on my current server is basically less accessible than it was during vanilla, because the population is so low that 25 mans is completely out of the question, and 10 mans follow the same scheduling constraints as the old 40 mans: Primetime, when the maximum number of people are on.

If they're not making money from transfers out of our server, then there's no sensible reason not have fixed the problem. Given how long population has been an issue, they're either completely oblivious just how poorly some servers work or they're doing a financial calculation on transfer income gain vs income lost from people quitting over population issues. Granted, given how hard the design team works to make content more accessible, the former isn't entirely out of the question (because it's plain strange to make accessibility increases when there's servers where they do absolutely no good), but still, it doesn't seem as paranoid when you've seen a server's population drop way past the point where it has a viable population - where a viable population is defined as large enough for a new player to have a chance of accessing all content without changing servers, and without spending significantly more time doing stuff like finding crafters or putting togheter raid groups.

keseph · 07/30/10, 1:35 PM

One server with a small raiding population does not a conspiracy make. Some people really do prefer smaller servers in the first place. Excepting that, there's only two ways to "fix" the problem of a small server: Locking people in to prevent decay, or getting more people to join to encourage growth. Having played most of BC on one, I can safely say I hated raiding on a small server and am glad that I wasn't locked in. And if I had been, I would have simply rerolled a new char (again), so you can't really lock people in anyway. As for encouraging growth, they try that fairly often with the realm transfers, but they're not always very successful. There may also be meta issues, such as hardware stability and relative severity that go into the mix.
I just don't see the logic that fits "my server sucks because server transfers have short cooldowns" -- even if transfers had a 10 year cooldown, everyone would have transfered off, once, and been done. Even a pretty large raiding server only has, what, 40-50 guilds that raid as their main thing (quick check: top US realm on wowprogress only has 55 doing >2 heroic icc25 bosses)? At ~40 people per guild, and $25 per person, that's only $50k for a large server's *entire raiding populaton* to transfer off, which is a pitiful drop in the bucket.

Comparatively, if they can make cross-realm LFR work, it would be deployed on all realms at once, not just your single server, and if it makes you keep subbed for two more months than without it, then they've made more money than by letting you transfer to a larger server. There's also some non-trivial subset of people who would just quit rather than transfer, who would almost certainly be willing to try a free cross-realm LFR tool and therefore stay subbed longer. It also opens up more options to people who want to play on a "small" server but still raid competitively and have some choice of whom to raid with.

Mr. Crow · 07/30/10, 10:20 PM

Originally Posted by keseph

Comparatively, if they can make cross-realm LFR work, it would be deployed on all realms at once, not just your single server, and if it makes you keep subbed for two more months than without it, then they've made more money than by letting you transfer to a larger server. There's also some non-trivial subset of people who would just quit rather than transfer, who would almost certainly be willing to try a free cross-realm LFR tool and therefore stay subbed longer. It also opens up more options to people who want to play on a "small" server but still raid competitively and have some choice of whom to raid with.

On the topic of cross-realm LFR: think there might be a correlation between the "Six bosses or less per raid" design paradigm for post-Wrath raids and the rising interest in cross-realm LFR?

If Blizzard's rationale against cross-realm LFR is "we don't want to create methods for a pugged cross-realm raid to reconstruct over multiple nights" then having a raid that takes no more than one night to complete removes that need.

Even without the shrinking number of bosses, I could imagine a design paradigm where some raids are designed for LFR and some raids are locked from LFR. To use Wrath as a model:

Tier 7 LFR: Eye of Eternity, Obsidian Sanctum
Tier 7 Non-LFR: Naxxramas
Tier 8 LFR: n/a
Tier 8 Non-LFR: Ulduar
Tier 9 LFR: Onyxia's Lair
Tier 9 Non-LFR: Trial of the Crusader
Tier 10 LFR: Ruby Sanctum
Tier 10 Non-LFR: Icecrown Citadel

You could even mirror the gated attunement releases from BC: When a higher tier is unlocked, the raids in the lower tiers become LFR Raids (ie, when Ulduar is released, you can use LFR for Naxxramas). With the raid downshifting mechanic and the current freedoms of RaidIDs, allowing the longer raids to be puggable would be

a) feasible given that more people will have the higher tier gear from running new content and

b) valuable because the puggability of the unlocked LFR raids would briefly get more players into raiding who might not have been into it before. It's essentially an extension on the lifetime of the instance.

Exemplar · 08/18/10, 8:52 AM

Surprised there has been no mention of:

A guild group/raid is 4/5, 8/10, 12/15 or 20/25 members of the group/raid being guild members.

Source

Bold highlighting is mine. 15 member raids? I hope it's not going back to the BC issue of mixed raid sizes. Going from 10 (Kara) to 25 (SSC/TK) did not work well. That was 2.5 Kara groups to make an SSC/TK group - 2:1 would have been fine. Going from 10/25 to 15 or 15 to 10/25 does not work well from either direction. Having raid X at 10/25 and Y at strictly 15 similarly doesn't work. It would have made more sense as a selectable size if raid sizes were currently 10 and 30.

Here's hoping it's a typo or idea that gets scrapped (or expanded to more fine grained size control).

Caeden · 08/18/10, 9:02 AM

12/15 is there because rated battlegrounds which are technically "raids" can have a 15 person limit. AB?

Axanor · 08/18/10, 9:05 AM

Originally Posted by Caeden

12/15 is there because rated battlegrounds which are technically "raids" can have a 15 person limit. AB?

Sounds about right.