Cracks starting to show?

[Paelos]

Preach it, brother. That's the exact same experience I've been having. I'm sort of awash in gaming time with little that grabs me.

[WindupAtheist]

I really don't know what the fuck is wrong with Blizzard anymore. They're rapidly progressing from the point where one might speculate that cracks are starting to show, to full retard status. Latest example: Daxxari wades into an "I quit" thread to tell everyone they're not supposed to be able to pug raids, gets owned, proceeds to basically nerdrage.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2267578976?page=1

Did you just tell me that I'm wrong about the design intent and direction of World of Warcraft based on your own assumptions?

I'm just checking. Did I really just read that?

Fuck you, buddy.

[Sheepherder]

Website is down for maintenance.

Will the thread still be there when it comes back up?  Who knows!

[Lantyssa]

Someone sounds a little testy about their design decisions.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Thread is still up. Seems like he's stressed out, though he says raids were never 'designed' to be pugable, not that they shouldn't be. I'm willing to bet the atmosphere in the blizzard offices has taken on a much more negative vibe to it as of late and it's getting to people. He's not there yet but he's a few posts away from a meltdown.

[Merusk]

The great part is he IS wrong.  You should have quoted the whole thing, WUA.

Except you're wrong... raiding is no longer the pinnacle of PvE achievement.  Heroic raids are.  Regular raids are not (and should not) be designed with hard-core players in mind.

Did you just tell me that I'm wrong about the design intent and direction of World of Warcraft based on your own assumptions?

I'm just checking. Did I really just read that?

Well, according to what the team said in WOTLK, yes.  You ARE in fact, wrong.  Raids were meant to be accessible and heroic raids were for the hardcore.. Suddenly that's not the case?

The problem is the current dev crop is hardcore raiders and players.  They want their and their buddie's e-peens to matter again.  We keep seeing this in the responses and the responses of the players who are happy with this change.  All I can say is just stop paying them and move on.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I almost want to say this more hardcore shift is completely intentional. At the end of the day, blizzard knows casual content can only keep casual players for so long and no matter what the player base will dwindle, especially when they release their new mmo. What's left is the hardcore playerbase that will stick with the game until the wheels fall off, the hell mode diablo players and they are starting to tune things up to get there.  Expect the next expac to be even harder on the raiding side.

[Malakili]

I almost want to say this more hardcore shift is completely intentional. At the end of the day, blizzard knows casual content can only keep casual players for so long and no matter what the player base will dwindle, especially when they release their new mmo. What's left is the hardcore playerbase that will stick with the game until the wheels fall off, the hell mode diablo players and they are starting to tune things up to get there.  Expect the next expac to be even harder on the raiding side.

Speaking of Diablo, I have a feeling Diablo 3 is going to take a lot of the WoW casual players (including me), moreso than their next MMO.

[caladein]

Here are the larger replies of theirs from that thread (emphasis mine):

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2267578976?page=3#43

Raid bosses aren’t designed with pick up raids in mind, but the bosses should get more challenging as a raid progresses through the instance. Naxxramas is perhaps not a good benchmark to set raiding expectations against for a couple of reasons. It was content that a number of players were already familiar with, and it was also tuned to a difficulty that was a bit lower than we would have preferred.

I too vividly recall the start of Burning Crusade, and pick up raids were anything but common at the start of that expansion. In fact, the idea of a pick up raid was flatly laughable for quite a while. They didn't really appear with any regularity until the mid-portions of the Burning Crusade expansion, and only after most of the participating players knew the fights very well, or just overgeared them by a pretty wide margin. Even in Wrath of the Lich King, pick up raids didn't start becoming super common until a tier or two of content had already been released. The scenario you mentioned in your original post, of constant pick up raid spam in trade, didn't really occur until a bit later.

We are starting to see pick up raids form for current content even though the next tier of gear hasn't been released yet. In that light, progression appears to be on track.

On the subject of progression, in 4.1 Valor Points should become more rapidly accessible too. As more players acquire gear of high ilevel, and as average gear levels rise as a result, it will be easier to find effective pick up raiding groups.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2267578976?page=6#108

Raiding is the pinnacle of what can be achieved in World of Warcraft; on the PvE side, anyway. With that in mind, we feel that those encounters should be epic, with epic challenges and rewards to match. Cutting edge raiding should present a real challenge and feel rewarding for players who are dedicated to facing down that content on its own terms.

Nonetheless, we fully expect that raid content will become available to a larger population of players as time goes on. Our intent has always been that players will be able to see more and more content with less and less coordination as time goes on. Ghostcrawler’s recent blog on raid progression (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2452061#blog) states that very specifically, and it will result either from the natural proliferation of gear as time goes on, or if that’s not substantial enough, direct adjustments to difficulty. That’s really the underlining intent of our raid progression philosophy in Cataclysm: to strike a better balance between the hardcore raiding of yesteryear and the more accessible raiding of Wrath.

The solution comes down to timing. We want to keep it epic for the high end raiders, but also ensure that content becomes more accessible over time.

[Typhon]

I almost want to say this more hardcore shift is completely intentional. At the end of the day, blizzard knows casual content can only keep casual players for so long and no matter what the player base will dwindle, especially when they release their new mmo. What's left is the hardcore playerbase that will stick with the game until the wheels fall off, the hell mode diablo players and they are starting to tune things up to get there.  Expect the next expac to be even harder on the raiding side.

If it's intentional then they are insane.  Who makes a change to their service which only satisfies a tiny fraction of their customers base, and only for a short period of time, yet is guaranteed to piss off the rest of your customer base?  For 100 guilds?  In what scenario does that even make sense?

[Ironwood]

 All I can say is just stop paying them and move on.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I don't think they expected the reaction to be as extreme as it was. I believe they are intentionally wanting to make the upper end harder to present a longer lasting challenge for the sake of retention years down the line. Starting with CAT they seem to b trying to gradually make max level content harder, however I also believe they failed to do so gradually enough to retain players. 

[Paelos]

The post WUA linked was just about as wildly unprofessional as you can get, short of tossing slurs at the posters.

[El Gallo]

I dont think they're going after the top 100 guilds.  Those people are doing hardmode content, and it's totally appropriate (imo) for that to be ball-bustingly hard.

I think they believe there's a large group of people who are in the "I'm not good enough to be in a real top-end guild, but I want my second-tier skills to be put to the test with my buds" category.  But I think they're wrong about that.  Outside the hardmode types (from Ensidia down to the #1-2 guild on most servers), I think almost everyone who is willing to raid is in the "I just want purps for clocking in for the required amount of time and hitting random keys" camp.

I was pretty sure they'd learned this lesson in Ulduar.  I seem to remember Ghostcrawler responding to people bitching about how easy Trial of the Crusader was by saying "well, we made Ulduar hard and 90% of our playerbase never saw it, so we're back to lolfaceroll; try some hardmodes."  Recently he made a comment drawing a very different conclusion from that experience when he said something like "the problem with Ulduar is that we didn't leave it as the top end raid for long enough, so most of our playerbase didn't get the joy of experiencing that awesome content because we relaesed TotC too soon."  And now we have this asshat openly pining for Sunwell.

In addition to the usual fears about content consumption, I think they are really terrified about item level inflation because of the way stats turned out at the end of WotLK.  That doesn't seem to be worth worrying overmuch about anymore because of the new "not all bosses have the same base avoidance/crit/etc stats."

[Ashamanchill]

Despite the fact that I couldn't get into, I hope Rift becomes immensely successful and frightens Blizz into changing course.

[caladein]

The thing that did Ulduar in was ToC.  There were maybe 100 US guilds that had cleared the place on 25m when it was released (speaking as someone who was in one of approximately that rank and hadn't killed Algalon-25 yet).  Add on that the gear reset system was fully in its stride and releasing a new raid pretty much nuked casual progression as well.  That said, it's still my favorite instance by a mile.

But I'm very much in the "I want my second-tier skills to be put to the test with my buds" camp at this point .

[Paelos]

Are you not entertained?

[Lantyssa]

I don't think they expected the reaction to be as extreme as it was. I believe they are intentionally wanting to make the upper end harder to present a longer lasting challenge for the sake of retention years down the line. Starting with CAT they seem to b trying to gradually make max level content harder, however I also believe they failed to do so gradually enough to retain players. 

It's a game about levels and equipment.  They can't make it about retention down the line because in 0.5 patches anyone will be able to go through the current content.  Not that they'll really care other than seeing the place once, because by that point it won't give them any gear worth having.

It's a huge misstep on their part.  Apparently they have been lucky, not smart, in their design.

[Rendakor]

He's right about the difficulty of Ulduar though; before really getting a raiding guild going (3.3ish, so ICC-tier) I was strictly a PUG raider. In full PUGs I cleared Naxx 10/25, ToGC 10, ToC25, and OS+3 10/25, but never cleared Ulduar. Most PUGs wouldn't make it past the first 4; if we skipped Ignis the Raidbreaker, we'd get Cat Lady and MAYBE Hodir. Mimiron and Iron Council were both pretty tough to PUG, and Freya just had WAY too much trash. I've still never seen General V or Yogg.

Even now, the guild I run falls firmly into the "I just want purps for clocking in for the required amount of time and hitting random keys" group; five of our core raiders are solid, three are decent, and the last two spots are basically whichever DPS is online and interested.

[sinij]

I almost want to say this more hardcore shift is completely intentional. At the end of the day, blizzard knows casual content can only keep casual players for so long and no matter what the player base will dwindle, especially when they release their new mmo. What's left is the hardcore playerbase that will stick with the game until the wheels fall off, the hell mode diablo players and they are starting to tune things up to get there.  Expect the next expac to be even harder on the raiding side.

Appealing to the masses worked for UO, hardcore players were completely pushed out in favor of lowest common denominator, and last I heard UO is still kicking around. In buisness there is no such thing as tyrany of the masses, and I bet that A LOT of casual playing only some time would bring more money than FEW hardcores playing ALL THE TIME.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I never said it was a GOOD strategy. 

[Paelos]

Here's your daily dose of hilarity, the PvP Q&A! I picked some of the best ones. If you want to read the whole thing it's frontpaged on mmo champ:

Q: Is it a possibility that the premade group requirement will be dropped from Rated Battlegrounds, allowing players to queue for a Random Rated Battleground?
A: If you take away the group requirements for Rated Battlegrounds, then you don’t have Rated Battlegrounds – you just have the same old Battlegrounds we’ve always had expect they now reward the best loot in the game. We understand there are heavy logistical requirements to organizing teams – that is in part why the rewards are so good. This is our first stab at offering very powerful gear through Battlegrounds and it is going to take some tweaking to get right. We understand that some more casual players may have given up on the system and we want a chance to fix that.

Q: Why can't we have a pure, straight up, unadulterated Death Match style Battleground?
A: We think Battlegrounds work better when there is a goal that the team can work towards.

Q: With the proliferation of spell interrupts and other control mechanisms, and the ever-increasing value of mobility, how do the developers plan to successfully move casters away from instant casts and make hard casting in PvP more viable?
A: It will require several changes. We feel these changes will ultimately make the game better, but they are big, scary changes, so they aren’t the kind of thing we can just make in patch 4.1.

Q: Players’ skill level in PvP between rated and random battlegrounds are very different. Could a personal rating system such as the one in Starcraft II be implemented so similar level players can be matched up?
A: We have a personal rating system for Rated Battlegrounds. We don’t use it in the random Battlegrounds because random Battlegrounds are engineered for speed of matchmaking, not for setting up perfectly balanced teams.

[WindupAtheist]

If you take away the group requirements for Rated Battlegrounds, then you don’t have Rated Battlegrounds – you just have the same old Battlegrounds we’ve always had expect they now reward the best loot in the game. We understand there are heavy logistical requirements to organizing teams – that is in part why the rewards are so good. This is our first stab at offering very powerful gear through Battlegrounds and it is going to take some tweaking to get right. We understand that some more casual players may have given up on the system and we want a chance to fix that.

Translation: Everyone has quit doing rated battlegrounds, but we're still not giving you casual faggots nice gear.

[Merusk]

Q: Players’ skill level in PvP between rated and random battlegrounds are very different. Could a personal rating system such as the one in Starcraft II be implemented so similar level players can be matched up?
A: We have a personal rating system for Rated Battlegrounds. We don’t use it in the random Battlegrounds because random Battlegrounds are engineered for speed of matchmaking, not for setting up perfectly balanced teams.

 

I didn't realize the SC2 rating system set up a perfectly even and balanced match every time.  How great!  Guess I'll go buy it now, knowing I'll always have an epic fight on my hands after letting my ass get kicked enough to get my true rating.   Pity that there's so few BG players that such a system will never, ever work in WoW.

 

[Paelos]

I loved how they were essentially telling people to fuck off in PR speak in their hand-picked questions they deigned to answer.

The vibe has certainly turned from one of jovial dev team rolling eyes at the crazy players to snotty elitists telling people how they aren't good enough to play in their world, but maybe after a few patches we'll toss you some scraps.

Oh and that thing you want? That's not what we do here. Also, we'll get to those other things later. We could tell you what we think but it's above your heads.

[Ingmar]

Reading waaay to much into that IMO.

[Fordel]

At least they seem aware of the interrupt thing. I guess.


I'm sure they'll fix it 5 patches from now.

[Paelos]

Reading waaay to much into that IMO.

I disagree. I think they genuinely hate part of their playerbase now for not liking their direction. It's only going to get snippier and full of hedgespeak as they go. They had to pull one of the main designers away from posting to the forums directly because they were either afraid he'd say something incredibly stupidly insensitive, or he was about to snap dealing with all the hate.

[Ingmar]

Reading waaay to much into that IMO.

I disagree. I think they genuinely hate part of their playerbase now for not liking their direction. It's only going to get snippier and full of hedgespeak as they go. They had to pull one of the main designers away from posting to the forums directly because they were either afraid he'd say something incredibly stupidly insensitive, or he was about to snap dealing with all the hate.

You're speculating that that is why he doesn't post anymore, that's all. I don't see a lot of reason to think that it is anything more than the usual corporate desire to control the message more tightly. My own speculation is he'd almost certainly been pissing off the CM department, marketing people, etc., for quite a while by getting directly involved in their turf and they just finally won the tug of war.

[Paelos]

Even in that best case scenario you present where the CM's and marketing didn't want him pissing in their cereal anymore, he still runs the direction of the game. They don't. In reality, their entire job is to mollify the populace into buying into whatever message they headquarters wants to present. I could give a shit less what they think or care about since they don't have any say on the game. He was ruining their job by telling people what he really thought off the cuff.

The fact was he didn't change what he thinks because he's locked up in the PR tower posting to a filtered blog instead of directly to a forum.

[El Gallo]

How is that PvP comment a change in direction?  In WotLK, you got the best PvP gear from arenas, and previous tiers of PvP gear from BGs.  In Cata, you get the best PvP gear from arenas or rated BGs, and previous tiers of PvP gear from BGs.

[Ingmar]

Hey, I'd love it personally if he was still posting directly, I always think that is better than sanitized Camelot Herald style fluff/bullshit. I will say that his posting does seem to have created a misconception about just how much control he has over what goes on there though, he's not the Final Arbiter of Everything or anything like that, I don't think he's even directly responsible for raid encounter balance, for example, Cory Stockton (I want to say his board name is Daelo) is the lead content designer, and Kalgan is still their boss (I believe) and both of them probably have as much (or likely more) say into that sort of thing as GC.

Regardless everyone seems to be reading this stuff as if it is some power-mad, thin-skinned admin from their old MUD throwing a tantrum when people don't like his terrible designs or whatever, but most real studios* don't really work that way, particularly not ones run like real companies, as Blizzard seems to be.

*i.e. ones that don't involve Serek Dmart or that guy who was going to fire all the liberals at his company because of bad reviews or whatever the hell it was

[Paelos]

How is that PvP comment a change in direction?  In WotLK, you got the best PvP gear from arenas, and previous tiers of PvP gear from BGs.  In Cata, you get the best PvP gear from arenas or rated BGs, and previous tiers of PvP gear from BGs.

The problem being that rated BGs being mostly unused is a horribly kept secret, and arenas have never been as popular as they wanted since their inception. All the people wanted was a way to queue up, be rated by their own performance, and semi-matched with other people who were in the same ballpark based on previous performance. Maybe a change of direction is a bad choice of words. It may be better to say that with each iteration they are holding to a hardline stance and refusing to yield to what must be perceived as a small minority of customer demands.

The point was that they've gone the direction (and held direction depending on the POV) further and further away from what people have asked for in pvp since the beginning. People wanted a bg that was a deathmatch style since the beginning of the pvp system, and they got WSG. They didn't even necessarily want BGs in a lot of cases, but that's the hand that was dealt. People still wanted deathmatch, so they gave them arenas. People didn't want to get organized groups going, so they created dummy groups to lose and get weapons, and Blizzard responded with added arena rankings.

In the end, people don't want to get really really organized to pvp. Hell, when you get down to brass tax, they don't like it for pve either, as we've seen for the 10 man groups that used to be 25 man groups. If the organization towards content was fun, everyone would make 25s still. When they removed the carrot at the end of the stick, you see it for what it is. If they removed it even further to the choice of 5 mans or 10s to get the same stuff, you could kiss 10 man content goodbye as well.

[Ingmar]

To get back to the spirit of the thread (complaining) I do also find myself doing all sorts of other things that don't involve logging in to WoW these days. I think it is probably:

- 1 part dissatisfaction with heroic difficulty meaning that my ability to have fun with my less skilled friends is impaired (and also our ability to get ready for raid content was crippled). I never PUGged them either way so that part doesn't matter to me.
- 1 part annoyance about a couple features that really get under my skin (I cannot adequately describe how much I hate the fact that I have to grind my way to exalted over the course of multiple months with a guild I FOUNDED and have been in for 6 years)
- 1 part just 6 year same game fatigue
- 3 parts other games distracting me (Blood Bowl, Dragon Age 2, I hyperfocused on Minecraft for a while, etc)

What is not normal for me, compared to my fading days in other MMOs, is there's no MMO that is at all interesting to me taking this one's place as there always was before. That probably means in another 3 months I will be back to playing WoW a bunch, I guess.

[Rokal]

I'm quoting this from another thread, but I thought it fit:

At some point between WotLK and Cata, Ghostcrawler stopped looking at data and drawing conclusions and started drawing conclusions and looking for data to support them.

Do you not realize that this is exactly what you are doing every time you read a dev diary or a change and rage about it? You've already made up your minds (WoW developers are trying to exclude people because they want to bring back some EQ1 power/superiority trip). Any information you read about the game will be warped in some way to support that. The latest dev diary read, in summary:

"The sweet spot in raid balance for us to hit is that everyone feels like they can still make progress. Content that is too hard or too easy doesn’t meet that goal."

This seems like a pretty good goal for raid balance: everyone should feel like they can realistically make progress. If you already hate Catacylsm, the message you got out of the article was "raid balance is perfect you scrubs".

Ghostcrawler actually states in the article that some balance is off (Heroic 10 man too hard), and two days before that dev diary went up they announced that they had hotfixed Regular Magmaw to lower his (hers? its?) health and damage. They nerfed what is arguably a pretty easy fight, but is likely the first boss that any guild will get down. That doesn't strike me as a team of developers sitting in their ivory tower unwilling to listen to players that aren't in the top 1%.

I really don't know what the fuck is wrong with Blizzard anymore. They're rapidly progressing from the point where one might speculate that cracks are starting to show, to full retard status. Latest example: Daxxari wades into an "I quit" thread to tell everyone they're not supposed to be able to pug raids, gets owned, proceeds to basically nerdrage.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2267578976?page=1

Did you just tell me that I'm wrong about the design intent and direction of World of Warcraft based on your own assumptions?

I'm just checking. Did I really just read that?

Fuck you, buddy.

It was pretty stupid of Daxxari to lose his cool and post that, and it could have been worded much better, but isn't it true? Why would a player know more about Blizzard's design intent than Blizzard? A player might know more about the outcome or effect of a design, like saying "you intended to make battlegrounds the focus of competitive PvP, but arena is still the easiest way to get pvp gear". But a player isn't going to know more about the intent of a design than the people who created it.

It would be like if I said the intent of Paelos's earlier post was to say that only happy development teams have good PR. It might be the intent of his post, it might not be, but I should not argue with him about what the intent of his post was. He created the post, not me. I can argue with him about how his post comes across, or what message it actually conveys, but I can't argue with him about what the intent was.

My guild is currently 9/12 on 10-man regular, and we've been working on Cho'gal for a couple weeks. I would consider us mostly casual raiders, we never have the same 10 players each week because invariably real life happens. We're all having fun with Catacylsm and I think most of us like the balance of the raid content, otherwise we wouldn't be playing.

I always wonder whether people pushing for the end-game content to be "nerfed to the ground" enjoy playing FPS or action games with godmode on. If they get bored quickly, or find the game less satisfying when using a godmode cheat, they should understand why having somewhat difficult challenges is better than having none.