Cracks starting to show?

[Paelos]

It's not useless to show you that the people exist. I'm not really concerned when the kills come.

Even by that logic they were 25-30% down on the numbers of guilds beating T11 stuff.

[caladein]

It's not useless to show you that the people exist. I'm not really concerned when the kills come.

Even by that logic they were 25-30% down on the numbers of guilds beating T11 stuff.

When a data point is from and from what population are critical to understanding it.  Especially as you were trying to juxtapose it with a very unique survey from MMO-C.

The type of player who would go in and kill a few bosses in ICC just to check it out before the new expansion rolls around isn't terribly relevant to designing normal/heroic raids.  (It is very relevant to LFR though.)

[Amaron]

I just looked at that chart.  I found the numbers for people who have defeated heroic mode even more disgusting.   2,500 characters out of 2.7million even after 2 and a half months?  That can't even be called difficulty.   I'm sure the "I believe I should have access to top end gear" segment isn't the biggest in the world but restricting that content to less than .1 percent is taking things too far.   It'd be fine the first month but numbers should start ramping up quickly after that.

[Kirth]

I just looked at that chart.  I found the numbers for people who have defeated heroic mode even more disgusting.   2,500 characters out of 2.7million even after 2 and a half months?  That can't even be called difficulty.   I'm sure the "I believe I should have access to top end gear" segment isn't the biggest in the world but restricting that content to less than .1 percent is taking things too far.   It'd be fine the first month but numbers should start ramping up quickly after that.

You are the 99%

#OccupyOrgrimmar

[Paelos]

Heroic mode has always been a travesty when it comes to the total raider pop.

Heroic Sinestra only has a 2.28% kill rate on Wowprogress out of 72,000 tracked guilds.

[Pantastic]

I tried to do the ticket thing a few weeks ago and they said the item had been deleted too long ago.  It could be that I didn't word it properly, however, as I specifically asked for an item restoration instead of a quest reward replacement.

If they treat it as just a deleted item, then they look to see if they have a record of you holding it, and they don't keep that for stuff that happened years ago. If you make it clear that it's a quest item that you deleted, then they just look to see if you completed the quest, which is tracked permanently. I think they're also more lenient on restoring quest rewards since you can't just go back and grind the item out again the way you can with a drop. I'd try again making it clear that you're looking to get a quest reward replaced.

[Fordel]

Is it wrong that I hate people for submitting tickets for that kind of shit?

[Rendakor]

Heroic mode has always been a travesty when it comes to the total raider pop.

Heroic Sinestra only has a 2.28% kill rate on Wowprogress out of 72,000 tracked guilds.

Heroic BoT is still as hard or harder than Heroic FL, because it (along with H BWD and H T4W) never received a giant nerf.

[Ingmar]

Honestly, I can't care at all about tiny amounts of people doing heroic mode, that's what it is there for.

[caladein]

Most of the other T11 Heroic bosses aren't so bad just because their mechanics are more conducive to being overgeared.  Heroic Cho'gall for example was pretty easy even for our (6/7H) group that hadn't done the normal version in a while (so interrupts weren't fantastic).

Sinestra though, I couldn't help but laugh during some of the terrible attempts we put in on her.  She's not cheap or anything either, just genuinely difficult.

[Amaron]

You are the 99%

#OccupyOrgrimmar

Psst.  You're off by an entire order of magnitude.

[Ingmar]

You are the 99%

#OccupyOrgrimmar

Psst.  You're off by an entire order of magnitude.

The joke, you are missing it.

[Kirth]

You are the 99%

#OccupyOrgrimmar

Psst.  You're off by an entire order of magnitude.

The joke, you are missing it.

yeh, watch the news...oh wait they are not covering it.

[Amaron]

The joke, you are missing it.

It wasn't a joke.  It was an ad hominem attack on my comment.   In other words worthless drivel.

[Ingmar]

...

[Merusk]

Brilliantly uninformed, that boy.

[Ironwood]

Brava.

[Rokal]

I think you over-estimate how much effort Blizzard puts into their heroic modes. Stuff like Heroic Rag and Sinestra probably takes a good deal of work from them. The rest of the fights? We're talking about maybe 1-2 new mechanics. Often it's something simple like managing an extra debuff, dealing with extra damage, or a new add (with an identical model to the others). In that sense, it's not a huge 'waste' for blizzard to have low completion rates on heroic fights, because it didn't take them tons of resources to make in the first place. The normal modes contain the majority of the work, and Blizzard needs to be concerned when those see low completion rates there (well, at least when there is nothing else worth doing in the game to keep people subscribed).

[Kirth]

The joke, you are missing it.

It wasn't a joke.  It was an ad hominem attack on my comment.   In other words worthless drivel.

The weird thing is I complete agreed with your statements, this is come from someone who was there for almost every world first BWL kill, in the guild with the world first AQ gates opening (Fury, Medhiv), and i ran a server first guild thru the end of WOTLK to per 4.1. I think that having content that a mere fraction of a percent of your customer base has access to is bad design. But yeh it was a joke that had nothing to do with attacking your point of view more a play on the percents that your quoted and recent events (Psst Google occupy wall street.)

[Amaron]

Brilliantly uninformed, that boy.

Please inform me then.   My comment is equated to a much derided occupation of Wall Street.   The comment also implies I must be one of have nots whining for my "share".   I might even be honest and agree that's correct on some levels.   That doesn't change the fact that it's an Ad hominem attack though.  Knowing all this is how I conclude it's an Ad hominem attack in the first place.

I don't care that much but calling it a joke is incorrect so I stated such.

The weird thing is I complete agreed with your statements, this is come from someone who was there for almost every world first BWL kill, in the guild with the world first AQ gates opening (Fury, Medhiv), and i ran a server first guild thru the end of WOTLK to per 4.1.

If you didn't mean it as an Ad hominem then I guess it just came across wrong.   Lack of context is just making it look bad in my eyes I guess.  I've been following the wall street thing since before the macings so it sounded like an unfavorable comparison.

[Ingmar]

 

[Sjofn]

I want to hug this latest page.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I want to hug this latest page.

With a pillow.....tightly.

[sinij]

Numbers don't win us anything. They don't win you anything. Conversations are worth having - ones based on experiences and feelings. We know what the numbers say, but they don't mean anything if you are still unhappy with your enjoyment of the game and your perception of its direction.You're spot on, and while we were coming to some of those same realizations not too long ago, unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your outlook) it's not something we realized in time for Dragon Soul. But we do plan to act on those realizations before too long.

Blizzard saying "These are not the droids you are looking for".

Too bad we are room fool of Toydarians.

[Miasma]

Where is that quote from?  Is it real?

[Merusk]

It's real.  Was on MMO Champ's front page this morning when I went to go look for it.

Blue Tracker: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/202894/135-of-all-wow-players-completed-normal-fl

Full Quote

Firelands Raid Completion
As others have pointed out, your 1.35% is just wrong due to the stats MMO is stating, but whatever, we’re not going to reveal any of our internal numbers to show how wrong you are, or discount the numbers posted on MMO for that matter. I will say they’re likely as accurate as they can be. Meaning, they’re wrong, but at no fault of theirs simply due to the data they have available to them. While we do have data we pull and review very regularly, it’s not always a true measure of success or failure without considering the context.

We try and make content for all of our players. It’s both a blessing and a curse that the WoW player base is as large and diverse as it is. “Hardcore” players for example tend to dramatically underestimate the skill gap between themselves and the vast majority of other players. A lot of games handle this problem through multiple difficulty settings. That is harder to do in a game as content rich as World of Warcraft, but it is something we’re looking at more and more with new features like Raid Finder essentially adding a more accessible setting.

But even with a system (we believe) as awesome as the Raid Finder, there are no simple solutions.

Players are motivated to raid (and do any content for that matter) for a lot of different reasons. A sizeable number of players are satisfied with seeing most of the game content once. If they kill the dragon or slay the Lich King, they (appropriately) feel like they have won the game. That view is pretty heretical to the traditional raider, who is used to working for weeks to defeat a boss and then spending the next few weeks or months farming that boss so that their group has a leg up for the next tier of content. Other players can be motivated by gear, and once they accrue their rewards they are done with the content. Others are motivated by the challenge, and if things are too easy, they lose interest. These players also tend to assume that everyone shares their mindset and they will be happy to wipe on a fight over and over and over with hopes of improving. In reality, we know from data that a lot of players might be willing to wipe a few times, and then after that, they’re done raiding and potentially even playing. It might be easy to dismiss those players and argue raiding is not for them, but that’s not really our design goal. Raids represent an enormous commitment of developer resources. In the same way that we would never make 20 new Arenas just for Gladiator-level players, we don’t want to develop a raid that only 2% of our raiders can see. We will make sure that there are challenging encounters for players who enjoy that sort of thing (as many of us professional game developers do), but then our goal will be to, over time, broaden the potential audience by bringing the content difficulty down. We think the shock with Firelands for some players was that the nerfs were so severe instead of gradual. For the 4.3 Dragon Soul raid we plan on gradually nerfing it over time, sort of like we did with Icecrown Citadel, except by nerfing the content instead of buffing the players.

There is another portion of players that are just not interested in raiding no matter how accessible it is, and that’s fine too, but we do keep track of how player behavior in the past may match player behavior currently or even in the future as we make these choices. Overall our goals are to ultimately get as many people seeing and downing Deathwing as saw the end of Naxxramas in Wrath of the Lich King. That’s not all going to be day 1 of the patch, or even in the first month, but with the Raid Finder and gradual lowering of content we think we can create that initial super high barrier to test the true worth of the hardest of the hardcore, while also providing some fun and accessible content to a much wider swath of players.

Yeah, we need to offer a lot of different kinds of content so that non-raiders still have things to do, or even for raiders to do on off nights. The Molten Front dailies were really popular for several weeks, but like all content, players eventually move on. We hope the DMF and even Transmog will provide some non-raid focused activities in 4.3, but beyond that we have plans to do a lot more. And when you see them you'll be all like :O and we'll be all like :D and then people on the forums will still be all like（╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

The point of not divulging statistics is that they are only one part of what drives overall goals and development. Unfortunately, the fundamental truth is that people put too much behind numbers (case in point, posts in this thread and a couple other dozen that sprung up because of the MMO post), and will build entire cases on them alone with no thought for context or meaning.

Bottom line is that no matter what numbers we show you, it's not going to make any situations 'better'. From time to time we show StarCraft II players literal win/loss %, as accurate as they can possibly be pulled from the source itself, and they're either ignored (because players simply don't want to believe their experiences are "wrong") or laughed at as being some underhanded plot to feed them misinformation.

Numbers don't win us anything. They don't win you anything. Conversations are worth having - ones based on experiences and feelings. We know what the numbers say, but they don't mean anything if you are still unhappy with your enjoyment of the game and your perception of its direction.You're spot on, and while we were coming to some of those same realizations not too long ago, unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your outlook) it's not something we realized in time for Dragon Soul. But we do plan to act on those realizations before too long. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

[Paelos]

As a man who deals entirely in numbers for a living, that statement is the most blatant bullshit I've ever heard. Numbers are truth. Numbers are data. Numbers such as the amount of people who actually went into a raid and then summarily completed it would quash any arguments people have about the openness of content. Numbers reveal the situation for those who want to find it. There's a reason that companies are required by law to report their numbers to the public on a quarterly basis.

The problem is that MMO champs numbers are probably very close or the overall numbers are even worse from Blizzard internally.

[Lantyssa]

The problem isn't numbers, it's properly understanding what the numbers mean.  So yeah, if you can't understand them, they're meaningless.  Numerical analysis isn't exactly a skill most people, even devs, possess.

[Kageru]

Meaningless and misunderstood are quite different things.

Now saying, "Your stats are wrong but we are not going to tell you why or how" is truly meaningless.

[Ironwood]

I'm going to go with 'Who Cares?'

Due to recent hacking, I have a month of play and it's exactly the same.  It's just not going to change at this stage and those fooling themselves that it will are insane.

For me, I'm holding out for another game.  Nothing's grabbing me yet tho.

[Paelos]

Meaningless and misunderstood are quite different things.

Now saying, "Your stats are wrong but we are not going to tell you why or how" is truly meaningless.

That's my point as well. Giving the numbers and letting the people decide would be the intelligent thing to diffuse a situation where people are obviously wrong.

That statement says the numbers won't prove anything to people that have already made up their minds. What? Really?

[Fordel]

Raids represent an enormous commitment of developer resources. In the same way that we would never make 20 new Arenas just for Gladiator-level players, we don’t want to develop a raid that only 2% of our raiders can see.

That's my favorite part, because they keep doing that. 

[Rokal]

MMO champ about the numbers:

I may not have been clear enough when we posted the Firelands Graphs previously, so let me remind you that they are intended to show which changes made Firelands easier, not how many people raid.

Some people translated that to "1.35% of players saw the end game content!" and forgot that the sample was 2.7M characters, not 10 players, and someone smart pointed out that this % is probably around 15 or 20% at this point. (Which is pretty impressive for the end boss of the latest raiding tier)

It's the same problems as usual when you try to examine these numbers. Counts alts the same as mains. Counts 'guilds' even when only one person from that guild ever participated in a raid. etc.

[Paelos]

If the reality is closer to 20%, Blizzard would say it or allude to it, or make some statement that the numbers were off by several multiples in a vague sense. It would be a giant fuck you to the community who hates them, and a rallying point for the current marketing. There's a huge gap between 2% and 20%.

Truth is, it's not even close to that. Nobody shedding players just sits on fantastic data that proves they have made adjustments to bring the game more in line with their goals. Nobody sits on good news when the tone is so bad. That CM post sounds like a petulant child saying, "My Daddy knows more than your Daddy!"

[Tannhauser]

I agree.  Marketing is glad to announce 10 million subs, they would want to put out any positive number.  Their statement that "Our numbers are better than that but we not gonna show 'em" stinks.