f13.net

I've been thinking about Tigoles "25% of people have killed ragnaros, 10% have killed nefarian" comment on his recent interview and while i personally feel hes way off i figured i'd do some research first.  For those still playing would you mind telling me which one of the following statements apply to you:

1: My guild has killed ragnaros

2: My guild has killed nefarian

3:  I don't raid, but i would like too if i had the time

4: I don't raid, but i would like too if i could join a raiding guild

5: I don't raid because i don't want too/don't like it


I can't think of any other options to add atm, but if you think of any other ones feel free to add them.  My guild has killed ragnaros and we are currently wiping to nef so in a week or two both of those will apply to me.

If you count doing weekend guild UBRS runs I guess you can say we raid. If you mean 20-40mans, no.

Guild killed Rag for the first time last week after a month in MC. We're trying again today.  We're definatly raiders and looking on to BWL and beyond already.

My guild before I rerolled Alliance killed Rags, no Nefarion. Raiding again and I anticipate Ragnaros killed and Nefarion eventually. I do raid and, yes, I do enjoy it.

Tigole is full of shit.

5
 

I think raider personality types are just more likely to post. They're louder.

http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/2006/03/raid_content_us.html

Nef on farm status.  We haven't quite made the jump to AQ40 yet.

My guild's been attempting Nefarion for a few weeks now.

[edit] I really enjoy raiding, and I enjoy the social dynamics it stimulates in guilds.

Nef on farm status, guild doing AQ40.  Me, I don't much like raiding at all.  The only reason I am in a heavy-raiding guild is because we played a different game together.  I'm able to contribute by crafting, but I don't much like the whole40 person raiding thing, to be honest.

Haven't been playing much lately anyway.  Expecting to find myself booted one of these days.

Rather than the tiny self-selected sample from this board, if you are really interested, why not check all the server forums. Most have a list from what I've seen. Most are even stickied.

From the list for my server.

Guilds raiding at least MC(not counting zg raiding guilds): Horde 14  Alliance 34
Guilds that have killed Rag:                                          Horde 8  Alliance 29
Guilds that have killed Nef:                                          Horde 2  Alliance 15

Note: Some entities listed as guilds are actually coalitions of 2-5 smaller guilds.

2

We don't have a thread like that on my server :(

1 but not 2.

Rags on farm status but we only got to Vael before our guild suffered a "setback" (guild leader quit the game, still a bit in doubt if we will stay together).

I really enjoy raiding, and would probably do more if I had the chance.  As it is, I consider myself sort of a casual raider... one lvl 60, well geared, but no significant alts and probably 90% of my raiding takes place on the weekend.

2.

I play only to raid.

5. I just can't be arsed with WoW's EQ-wannabe raids after doing the same thing in EQ for so long.


Ironically, I now log onto EQ occasionally specifically to raid with my old guild, I guess it's because there's a lot more variety of stuff there.

I'm sure Blizzard knows exactly how many times each of the uber bosses have been killed on which servers by whom and when -- it's a trivial thing to code up and have recorded in the database.

Im sure they could too but in the interview he called it a "gut feeling" rather than having specific figures.  I was expecting a lot more 5s, but like someone above said its probably because most of those who dont care about raiding probably dont care about reading message boards either.

Pretty much true. Didn't you see the sign in the doorway? "Catassing Poopsocks Welcome!"

2. Hoping to down C'thun on monday.

There are 34 alliance guilds/alliances on the raid progression of proudmoore that have killed Ragnaros or better. Let's assume each of those on average has about 70 active raiders. That's roughly 2400 characters. There are 10000 total characters over level 20 on Proudmoore alliance, which I would consider legitimate players or legit alts, and of that 10000, 5000 are 60.

So, if you have a 60 character on Proudmoore alliance, there's a 48% chance you raid MC. When taking into account the 10000 other character, that's almost the 25% Tigole mentioned.

For BWL, 14 guilds have that on farm, roughly 1000 players by that estimate. That's a 20% chance if you have a 60. Again, close to the 10% overall number Tigole said.

For AQ, 3 guilds have that at the last boss, roughly 200 players. That's 4% of 60s. By far the lowest since it's relatively new.


So, from my count Tigole is pretty much right about my server, which is a release day server. What he doesn't get into is the fact that only 4% of the players have seen the end of AQ, and they are getting ready to push out another huge instance. That's where the disconnect happens.

Basically 80% of those who have completed BWL aren't even done with AQ yet, and there's another one coming out the door. 60% of the MC crew isn't even done with BWL yet. And the big number, 92% of anybody who has ever completed MC has yet to finish the current raid content in the game. Yet, more is coming, faster and faster.

As a raider  I kind of like that though. But I also think they must have brought in someone to channel Brad for the "casual" quests they put into Silithus. The field duty quests couldn't have been made less casual friendly if they'd specifically tried, what with the randomness of the quest distribution. I like to mess around with single group stuff when our guild isnt raiding, mostly on alts, so I hope they actually get some more fun single group content in soon as well.

Also, they probably aren't playing the game much anymore.  I haven't done any raiding because I don't have any characters to level sixty; I don't have any characters to sixty because the game gets grindy around forty or fifty for me, and there's no reason to spend weeks or months trying to struggle through all that crap just to become another faceless sixty in purple armor standing next to thirty-nine other faceless sixties in purple armor.

Raiding sounds like something I WOULD like if:
- I could do it (which I can't, until I hit sixty)
- I was in a guild with people I liked (which I'm not)
- I was in a guild with people who were roughly as inexperienced as me (to avoid all that "MINUS FIFTY DKP!!!!!!!!" stuff as I'm learning how it works)

But until that becomes true, I'll just keep toggling my subscription every month or so and rolling up new alts.

There's no option for me in there.  We are still trying to kill Ragnaros.  So I do raid, but I haven't done 1 or 2.

Former guild has Nef on farm status and is into AQ40. Gave up playing WoW after we got MC to farm status and started into BWL because 40 man raids just aren't fun, the game is so unbalanced that non-raiding game play at 60 is worthless and there's no new non-raid content to make alts interesting.

Jewelcrafting, Outland and the new raid content are all going to sink more WoW accounts as the disparity between hardcore raiders and the rest of the server population is magnified. However, Blizzard shouldn't care until somebody makes a better MMO, and that doesn't look like it'll happen any time soon.

Tigole is spreading utter lies to promote his self-worth, unless there's more user churn of non-raiders than I thought likely.

I don't have a 60...

But if I did, I would at least Try raiding, if I had the time.

Another question: is it accurate to ask someone if their GUILD has killed a boss?

For example:  I have killed Neffarian and Ragnaros.  My guild dropped Cthun for the second time yesterday (2 Dark Edge of Chaos in a row, what are the odds).  However, I was not in the raid (was waiting in cenarian hold listening to raid progress).

Do i count as having killed Cthun even thouigh i have personally never done the fight?

Will it help Tigole's cause if we reply in the affirmative? Indeed, so you did. Grats.

1: My guild has killed ragnaros Yes

2: My guild has killed nefarian  Yes

3:  I don't raid, but i would like too if i had the time  I did raid, but dont play anymore.

4: I don't raid, but i would like too if i could join a raiding guild     N/A

5: I don't raid because i don't want too/don't like it     I dont play anymore.

1

1: My guild has killed ragnaros Yes

2: My guild has killed nefarian  Not for lack of trying - we'll get there soon though (hopefully this week).

Well unless you quit the game or deguild i assume you'll be in a kill eventually, if your guild has done it once it can do it again.

While that is true, this may not be the case for all members of a given guild.  My guild is quite large, and there are a number of people in it who do not raid. They are in it for the network, the collective resources, and their friends, but they PvP, tradeskill and do other things.  There are people in my guild who have been there for more then a year and have yet to kill any raid boss other then onyxia.

Just because a guild has killed a given raid boss, doesent by inclusion mean that EVERYONE in that guild will eventually participate in a kill on said raid boss.

5

My guild kills both regulary but I abstain from raiding on principle. It bores me.

Basically what SurfD said is true for me. I just hang out with old friends from my EQ days.

Edit: Fair enough, I should mention I resubscribe for a month every few months and quit after the new nonraid-content is consumed.

I don't play World of Warcraft, because I got to level 42 and realized that I was leveling up towards a raid-based endgame.

So I'd call that #6.

Yes. We have Molten Core on farm status since January.


No but we are getting there. Currently trying vaelastrasz

5.

I am in a small guild that's been together since 1997. We don't have enough members to do ZG or AQ20 (even UBRS is a stretch), and we aren't going to mass recruit in /6 just because we want to raid in this game (we'll be playing another before long... it's just the best game on the market for us atm /shrug). So we don't raid, we complain a lot about getting 2-shotted by uber lewtmonkies in battlegrounds, and sometimes go on other uberguilds' raids as pickups (I got a mageblade, yay me?).


-- Z.

5

I could make the time maybe, and one of my toons is a 56 Dwarf Priest.  I get so many invites I toggle /tells. 

I actually love playing with other people but I haven't been able to either A.) Find someone I get to know to stick with it long enough to matter, or B.) the fact that 95% of the people I have ever grouped in WoW are cockgobbling tools.  I'd rather wander around alone in blue and green gear then subject myself to that.  Sad, since I heartily miss my AC/EQ1 grouping days. 

Sorry, but this sounds to me like sour grapes.  You found you don't like the high-end game, cool.  But to say 40 man raids aren't fun is obviously your opinion, and the game being unbalanced is blatantly false.

Case in point:  I am fairly epic'd out and have a legendary 2h weapon.  The other day in EPL, a warlock attacked me.  Now I'm not the worst PvPer in the world but I am also fairly decent.  I don't think this guy who attacked me had great gear.

I failed to get him below 3/4 health not once, not twice, but three times before I finally gave up and admitted that I was owned.

So I conclude, skill > gear. 

My point is, if you don't like the game at high levels, got burnt out, or whatever, fine.  No need to make excuses about that.  But your reasons as stated as much utter lies as the ones that you accuse Tigole of.

Um.  That's not a very convincing argument either Jayce.

Really.

still at 1

We killed rag 1½ month ago. took some time before starting bwl and is stuck at vael now. We will get him down soon :)

Er, a level 54 warlock in greens can kill a level 60 warrior in full BWL gear with legendaries, as long as the warrior isn't undead.

Have you seen the new weapons out of Naxx btw? One-handers that do more damage than BWL 2-handers. The fun never stops! :P


-- Z.

As Blizzard puts more content into the uber guild raid end game stuff, I fear they will lose the more casual non-raiding player.  More content aimed at the casual player would be a smart move.

WoW starts to look like DAOC's ToA, when you must MC > BWL > AQ40 > whatever comes next and so on and so on.

I think Righ is right.  People will stay until there's another option.

Is the population still climbing or has it peaked?

I don't raid because I both don't have the time, and don't really enjoy the process. My most recent endgame character was in Panda Attack on Dark Iron, so I definitely had the opportunity, but the only raid I ever attended was one UBRS run and one Strath run. That's it.

- Too time consuming. With a wife and two kids I just can't be trapped at my PC for hours at a time. Nor do I want to be chained to my PC for that long, I just get fidgety, I love being able to stop playing when *I* want to. This is why I love 5 man stuff like Scarlet Monastery and Dire Maul - broken into sections so I can manage my time better.

- Don't care for the process. The UBRS and Strath runs were fairly enjoyable, even though I was stuck for longer than I wanted. But beyond that, I know the higher end stuff just gets more regimented. There's no doubt it becomes work, not play. Stand here, do this, then go there, do this. Just follow the routine. And do it again and again to get your loot. And listen to annoying TeamSpeak, which I hate. I'd rather grind PvP, at least I can play at my pace and it's still somewhat unpredictable.

Eh, anyway, at that point I usually start a different character and go do something else, find another guild, another server. I still enjoy the basic 1-59 game quite a bit.

I'm at 1 and have been there for several months.

I do have a great guild that I guess you would classify as a "casual raiding" guild.  We have a very picky recruitment policy to avoid douch-tard loot drama whinos but the downside to this is that it's often difficult to maintain the numbers required to continually progress in the endgame.  We've been stuck on Vael for a couple of months now and regularly struggle to get 35+ people online at the same time.

Raiding with 20 or 40 people once, maybe twice a week is fun.  More than that and I get burned out.  Part of the problem too, at least from my perspective, is the amount of resistance gear required to move to the next big raiding dungeon.  After doing MC for 8 months or so, it seems we have only recently reached the fire resistance levels needed to have a shot in BWL.  And then what?  Frost resistance for this Naxx thing?  Nature resistance for AQ?  I don't believe I'd get so burned if I didn't have to keep doing the same freaking instances over and over and over again in order to progress to the next tier.

My answer to the casual/raider debate is this;  Offer two paths to obtaining class set gear.  One path would be 20/40 man raid boss drops like now.  The other would be a longer series of solo/duo/5 man quests for people that don't prefer raiding.  This just doesn't seem like too difficult of a problem to solve.  We'll see what happens with the expansion, but if the end game situation doesn't improve in terms of the above as well as pvp I'm going to have to move on.  It's a shame too because much of the game is very well done in my opinion, relative to any game prior to it.

 

/agreed, but they do seem to be leaning that direction with the tier 0 set stuff.  With that success hopefully they would think to apply it to the resistances problem.

But on the other hand, the big disconnect, as Lum semi-famously pointed out on his blog a while back, is that the stuff at lvl 60 is different than the stuff at lvl 1-59.  Some people like both stuff, some people like only one or the other. 

The point is that it's not hard to bridge that disconnect.


Instead of trying, however, they just push the same tired shit out and tell us that we like it.

I STILL can't see the logic in gearing your content to 25% of your user base, even assuming that figure is not totally pulled out of the Colon.

Level 60 5-man instances pre-expansion: 4 (strath/scholo/DM/LBRS)
Level 60 10-man instances pre-expansion: 1 (UBRS)
Level 60 20-man instances pre-expansion: 2 (ZG/AQ20)
Level 60 40-man instances pre-expansion: 4 (MC/BWL/AQ40/Nax)

Now that's without counting onyxia, but also only counting Dire Maul and Stratholm as one instance and not counting BRD at all. Seems to me like it's pretty balanced, the game simply shipped with a casual imbalance and Blizz are slowly playing catchup with the raiding game.

Trying to get your class gear from raiding is already a several month long process for each tier, trying to scale it for 5 man raiding and quest it would make it take too long or require incredible amounts of grinding.  What would be the point anyways? so casuals have a better chance in pvp?.  What people don't seem to understand is that the reason guilds gear up their members is to take on the next pve challenge, pvp inbalance is just a really bad side effect.  You'd be a lot better off focusing that effort into balancing pvp (maybe have gear have different stats when used on mobs than on people? maybe make people go into bgs with a default set of gear that they can upgrade through ranking or consecutive wins?).  The point is if you aren't raiding the only reason you need better gear is to keep up pvp wise and every single raid zone is based around providing the tools necesary for beating whatever raid zone will come next.  

This question came up when I was still playing and my answer (to "why do you want to raid when you don't enjoy raiding or pvp") was "to be able to solo better when the expansion comes". Which is of course wrong on so many levels, but an answer nonetheless.

I think EQ1 at the equivalent stage (18 months after release) had Vox, Naggy, PoF, PoH, Sky, Venril, Trak, VP and various outdoor dragons. Two months later, Velious greatly expanded raid content. It always feels like WoW is expanding much slower, but if they get the expansion out sooner than Q4, they're keeping roughly the same pace (plus they have things like BGs that EQ didn't have).

You'd be wrong. WoW PvP is about levels first, gear a very close second, with the classes/rock-paper-scisors involved being a distant third. unless one of the combatants is complete basket case and does nothing but panic, skill does not even enter into WoW pvp. A level 60 in epic gear would own the most "skilled" level 55, non-epic WoW player on the earth by doing nothing but auto-attacking and occasionally hitting their n00b special attack.

PvP in wow is the most poorly thought out, tacked on afterthought that they could have come up with. It's been said a bunch of times about a bunch of other games, but if WAR does even as a job with PvP/RvR as was done with the current version of non-TOA DAoC, the WoW pvp scene will be gutted of any players of consequence or skill. Collisions detection and circle strafing are love. If they include mounted combat and make sure that having the best item available in every slot won't make more than a 10% difference in effectiveness, it will be the perfect PvP game.

Anecdotal evidence, from personal experience, this board (see http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6135.0), and conversations with other player says you're wrong.  However, I know it's out of character for you to admit that any released game is anything but completely idiotic and moronic devs who have implemented anything but entirely broken systems, so I guess we will just have to disagree.

If you are talking about 1v1 pvp then yes gear and level are everything, in group pvp skill and tactics will trump gear everytime.

2- guild is working on C'thun. 

The problem with the entire debate is that we don't know the proportions of any side.  I imagine there'd be a considerable subscription drop-off by now if the vocal non-raiders were speaking to a truly serious problem.  Not that raiding is something that everyone does- it just seems that the true majority of players haven't hit the content wall yet.  Either that, or Blizzard has made a game so intuitive, polished, and accessible that there are no other options for these people..

Anyways, yeah, I've been in heavy BWL geared groups that get whooped by dedicated PvP teams in little else but blues on occasion.  It's all about communication, teamwork, and group composition; Blizz never claimed to have balanced classes for 1v1.

My guild was working on Nefarian, but due to low attendance we recently merged with another guild. Now we are working on C'thun. On my server there are 3 horde guilds and 6 Alliance guilds who have killed Nef, and one Alliance guild who killed C'thun.

I'd say we're on track to beat him soon enough.

Another vote for "Rag down, Nef keeps ahead of us with early hydralisk production which overwhelm our defenses".

BTW just wanted to add, our new "super guild" after the merge got to rag in 2h 30m and killed him with 10 seconds to go before sons. We sharded 2 of the 3 drops, but never the less it was actually a fun run, with an exciting finish.

We are going the opposite way on our rag kills, on our last clear he died after 3 waves of sons with only 6 people left up :P

Jeez we're pushing it to get down to 3h.  But then again the damage races are fun.  Do you do special things to loot quickly?

Heh, same shit started happening to my guild before I quit WoW (we changed servers, was a nice time to leave the game).  Actually, I think we'd just call for the wipe after the second wave since a lot of players stopped bringing FR gear to MC and just chewed through our available healing power.  Also, we started letting alts come on everything up to Rags.  Sub 3 hour runs turned into 4+.

Lemme guess, you're also:

A) Doing Baron kills where the an officer actually has to yell out over vent, "OK, enough blowing each other up."
B) Wiping on BWL bosses when your usual main tank is letting someone else handle it.
C) Wiping on Vael multiple times.
D) Wiping on Huhu multiple times at 1%.
E) Nef and Chromag wipes on combos you should be able to handle.

Of course, you could just have the Rag problems, but when I started noticing us having problems with Rag, I started noticing how poorly we were doing with other farm status material. I still have forum access to the guild site and they're STILL having the same issues.  I guess moving servers isn't a panacea.

There was a guild merger on my old server similar to what Morph mentioned.  Two guilds with attendence (and attitude) issues merged, cut the fat (more like backstabbed the non-hardcore), and then proceeded to steam roll content they were having problems with previously.  Morph, do people in guild chat now say stuff like, "It's hard to be humble when you're this fucking good!" Mad props if not.. the merged guild on our server got a very large head post merger/success.

I'd still be a 2 on this poll if single.  Married and sooner or later with kids?  Just not possible.  If the wife was into this shit, possibly.

I think pvp would be better off if there was a base set of armor you could buy, and that's all you could use in the battlegrounds. Then, by gaining ranks you could upgrade that armor with socketed items or something. You could have choices of which items to put in which socket for customization. Think the necklaces from ZG and how you upgrade them with each rep gain level except with more options. Something like that.

I think either Threash or Phred mentioned something similar in another thread.  I think this would be ideal.  You'd need to throw weapons into the mix here too (I assume you'd be in favor of that) or have a viable PVP only alternative that's not too hard to obtain. I'd hope they could find a system that's a little less assy than rep and less grindy than the current honor system (they've mentioned it's more time intensive than they'd like), perhaps some sort of battle point or battle currency purchase system. 

The fact that you have to grind up enough resistance gear to move on to the next instance is just silly. It really makes the whole treadmill completely obvious and transparent. They might as well just make it so you can't enter dungeon B without going through dungeon A 50 times first.

About battlegrounds - just level cap them at a certain level where there isn't that much super-gear or just outlaw all super gear. It would take 10 seconds to program.

The thing is, the resistance fights allow them to "cap" how good the armor from each dungeon is.  We can assume they intend for linear progression, that is armor from MC should be good enough for BWL, BWL good enough for AQ40 etc etc.  If they didn't have heavy resistance fights in there then the amount of scaling they'd have to do to make a fight in AQ40 difficult for BWL people would be intense.  Essentially we'd see much larger gaps in armor quality between leaps if it wasn't for the presence of fights that "gimp" you to have that certain resistance.

Additionally people wonder why AQ40 drops NR epics and BWL / MC drop FR epics...the idea there is that those items help you specifically do that dungeon.  It might be a bit silly but in the end I think the presence of resist gear and its use in raid enviroments helps the PvP balance not spin even more out of control than it already is.

Also, it may just be me and my loot whore ways, but I like collecting extra bits of gear for specific purposes like resists. Only problem I have with it is all the space it takes up in my bags and bank.

I think I'd have to buy the last two bag slots on my warrior if I wanted to actually go and farm anything :(

Though my account is not active as I'm taking a break from the game, my guild has killed both Ragnaros and Nefarian and is currently working on AQ40.

So, 1 & 2.

Unfortunately someone on the Blizzard boards shot the idea through with a few holes. That was, build tailored gear. To expect Blizz to have decent druid armor for feral, balance and resto builds, shaman armor for their builds, etc, might make this a little more complicated than it appears at first. Unless they could come up with a generalized set and as someone just mentioned, toss in the new socket code to let people customise it more to their liking. Have gems on vendors buyable as you hit higher ranks. The main appeal for me of this system is it get's pvp players in their own little world and hopefully stops the whines for nerfage of the PVE gear I need to take on tougher instances. Especially as a hunter I'm really tired of seeing a 3 dps upgrade in my next teir weapons because of the constant whining about hunters.

It'll never happen.

The design as it stands IS horribly broken tho.  The PvE impacts far too much on the PvP and the PvP is, well, a completely trivial timesink for Christ knows what purpose.

As soon as a boss is dead, every one except the two officers doing loot starts imediatly on the next pull. When loot is called for a person he runs back and picks it up. Also, loot goes very fast in MC for the new guild cause we shard like 3/4ths of the drops.


Not yet they dont. There was a bit of drama on one side of the merge and a few people quit (to be expected) but they where ferther along in content. Working on C'thun, while my guild was working on Nef. So we are getting a little bit of the newbie treatment, but its already mellowing out alot. On our second night of C'thun attempts we got him to 82% phase 2, which was a guild record. So that helped with them thinking we where noobs.

Please. Let me dream.

Your guild is apparently outfitted with gear that my guild doesn't have yet.

(http://www.ntnu.no/gemini/2006-01e/bilder/catheter.jpg)

Pretty much everyone in my guild has MC+ gear. As in they have every thing they need from MC, and are mostly upgraded with BWL and AQ40 loot. They have been clearning BWL for around 4+ months now.

I'm just trying to wrap my mind around the 2 and a half hour time frame.  I'm accustomed to everyone smoking cigarettes after each boss, taking a piss, grabbing beers, etc. 

2h 30m? ... that seems too fast to be believed. maybe you mean 3h 30m? To get below 3h you have to split your raid to kill sulf/mag while clearing to the rest.

Actually some of the super high end guild have it down to under 2 hours now.  Im sure it involves non stop chain pulling including all bosses and possibly splitting your raid to clear towars gehennas while one half takes care of luci/mag.

There's a video of some Norwegian guild clearing MC in 1h10mins or so. Of course they used flasks and a ton of consumables, but there you go.


-- Z.

1: yes
2: yes

Though currently, we accomplish #2 poorly.  More and more players quit due to burnout, or real-life situations (some kids have really chaotic homes, etc).  In particular, the priest class in my guild was  hit fiercely.  ALL FOUR of our 8/8 trans priests quit 2 from burnout and 2 from things they had no control over.  Another quit due to guild drama... these were our most active, and one of whom was almost indisputably the most skilled priest (horde-side) on the server.  So yea... we hurtin.

We had been making C'thun attempts faithfully, getting to stage 2 reliably... and then the formost alliance guild (Unforgiven) beat us to a server-1st, which pretty much sapped all the drive and motivation that had us really pushing to get c'thun down.  Since then more people quit, people started bitching about the loot system, which was funny considering none of the officers left in the guild cared enough to even update the dkp site anymore.

So we are currently in a very fragile state.  We can still kill Nef, and Twin emps, even with a sub-optimal mix of players, but it doesn't always happen.  As we have to re-equip and re-train a bunch of initiates, we are currently on a "casual-mode" 3 days per week of raiding, not even bothering with attempting new content (aside from visc, when we have the proper group composition).

As to those who skip raiding entirely as the realm of the lifeless catass, i can only say that yes, it does require alot of time, but all the really fun stuff in the game is raidcentric.  You will never find a 10man bossfight like Viscidious or C'thun.  All of the later bosses in aq40 have really awesome design, and require tremendous skill and coordination on part of the player.  Gear, as ever, is a factor, but no amount of gear will let you beat C'Thun without the surgical execution that draws on the awarness and alterness of each and every single person in your raid.

Most every goddamn fight in this game, previous to aq, has boiled town to tank n spank, and their is so much raid design room open that has yet to be explored.  aq is just the tip of the iceberge.

Sucks to hear that about your guild.  I've heard a lot of bad stories about guild reformations upon hitting C'thun; it's quite simply a fight that requires good players in every raid slot, something that no previous boss has truly stressed before with exception to the twin emps perhaps.  Many guilds simply aren't built for the type of challenge that C'thun presents.

That said, it is an incredible reward to conquer your guild's problems and get that eye down.  Mine was fortunate to have enough enthusiastic players to switch out those who couldn't pay attention, and still be good on numbers.

We aren't built to beat c'thun; We have some very weak caster classes, specifically healers, and we've always been very bad at positioning and situational awareness. This will be our third full week trying to down c'thun, and we haven't even made it to stage 2 yet.

All the really fun stuff in the game is raidcentric?  Only for raiders, I'm afraid.

There are many people who play the game whose idea of hell is going on a raid with 40 of their closest "friends." 
A lot of people get to 60 and leave because they don't particularly enjoy raiding or they don't have the time or the lifestyle to devote to raiding.  A lot of people get to 60 and find other fun things to do that don't involve raiding at all.

An exit poll from Blizzard would be interesting.  I forgot if they have one or not, the last time I quit the game was a year ago (I'm currently subbed again).

This poll will certainly be skewed.  As will any poll of the current players, since many if not most of the non-raiders have already left the building.

You don't need to do 40-person raids. The 20-person raids are plenty challenging in their own right, and provide some nice gear. 

 Now, if you're going to put 'friends' in quotes for 20-people I'll have to assign you as one of the unsociable and just unwilling to raid at all.  Sure, I'm not 'close friends' with all 40 people in our MC raids, but I genuinely liked all but one or two folks in the 20-man encounters. Then again, I'm not 'close friends' with folks I work with either, but we work together just fine to get our goals done there.

Yes, I made an analogy between raiding and work.  Yes, it's work because it takes effort and coordination.  If all you want is to entertain yourself, then you don't care if you're wearing purple, blue, or green gear. There's plenty to do up to 60, at 60 reroll or stop playing.

I've seen a lot of people complain that 'there's nothing to do' at 60. (There is, they just don't like the choices.) None of them have given alternatives in a GAME-environment.  WoW isn't a world, it shouldn't be one, so there's not going to be the myriad amount of UO/ SWG-pre-fuckup stuff to do.

You can get purps in smaller dungeons now, right? How much instance farming would that take anyways? And how many different dungeons have to be farmed in order to get the best of this non raid gear? Is it really that much less of a headache than just joining a raid guild?

No, they're equal headaches.  One just takes smaller chunks of time and fewer people than the other. I never said it was less of a headache, just that you didn't need 40 folks to do it.

The only difference between 20 and 40 person raids is the amount of people you need to bring and the amount of people that can slack.  Doing MC really only takes about 10-15 people to really pay attention and 25-30 sheep to basically not do anything terribly retarded, zg and aq on the other hand require almost everyone to be on the ball at all times.

We do it in 2.5 hours, it's actually pretty easy. You just make sure that you are always fighting trash, nobody ever dies to trash, and you never wipe to bosses. The extra half hour is generally from sorting out loot, going over boss strats quickly, and switching people in and out for certain bosses.

I'd like to see lite-versions of raid dungeons for casuals in PUGs. Here's how:

• DPS against players halved, DPS against mobs doubled (or whatever values allow a PUG to clear a dungeon in less than three hours).
• Linear progression: can't do lite-BWL before completing 80% of lite-MC and lite-ZG.
• Private loot: the loot you receive depends on your personal lite-raiding progression.
• Use rest exp to increase drop chance, 1 level of rest exp is say 100% drop chance, so that loot received/days subscribed is about the same as in normal raiding.
• Have the lite-drops be equal to normal epics, except make them soulbound, not disenchantable and their title grey so that those filthy lite-raiders know they are second-class customers.

Or we could be little less of a whiny little bitch and realise that the only reason casuals could legitimately want raiding gear is because of PVP and perhaps put in a palatable PVP solution instead of trying to ruin the raiding experience out of envy and petty spite. Or we could realise we're just as vain and shallow as those filthy raiders we try to blame all the game's woes on and really want gear we don't need so as to /flex our epeen while also being able to flaunt how alternative and special we are with our raid-lite gear. We could even take a giant step forward and realise that WoW is a varied game hoping to pander to multiple playstyles and that not 100% of the game can be for our specific tastes unless our tastes happen to cover a wide range.

Oh yes, I went there.

No, you're right. It's a big reason why I don't play it (and took that giant step). I can tolerate *a little* catassing if that's what it takes to maintain competitiveness in a PvP game, but unfortunately, I'm not Blizzard's kind of PvP'er. It's why I hate DAoC so much as well.

Bah! I wanted it because I had paid for it.

That way lies madness.

You pay to play the game, not to win it.

Thank you for giving the best sig line for the WoW R&D forum, ever.

Unfortunately, there is no game to "play" other than the one to win. It's achiever oriented. Wtf else are you supposed to do in it?

I'm sure Brock Pierce, Ceciliantis, Fansy or Baka could think of something.

It isn't possible to "win", per se, as I see it.  Content is there that appeals to some and not to others- it's part of the model.  Even the ProgressQuest raiding aspect isn't possible to win.  You can earn a respite, but it is a hollow victory if you count it as such; it's a never ending battle.

That said, if one does try to "win" regardless, it should be based on what is essentially personally satisfying to some extent.  I do not try to reach Grand Marshal, even if it is a goal, because I would not enjoy the procedure.  I'm not perhaps as great as I could be in PvP; I shrug it off, I do different things or I live with it if it's satisfying enough.

People are probably too clingy.  If they stuck up for what they strictly enjoyed there would be a much more developed range of MMOs today.

Well we did Rags in one try tonight. So that puts things in their place for MC. Yet, I'm running the BWL raid and I'm still having trouble filling up the ranks when MC is getting 15 man standby lists. I'm not stupid, I know the reason is that people are lootwhoring cockmonkeys and want a sure thing more than that frat guy with the roofies, but it still pisses me off.

I'm looking for ways to draw in the on the fence crowd so we can get the wipes out of the way and start getting successful. What do other guilds do when they get to new instances? Do they offer early bonuses? Do they offer extra dkp to early adopters? Do they give primary invites to people in the early game? I need some more ideas if yall got any.

Depends on your DKP system, but I know several guilds give points only for the first boss kill.  Any time after that boss is killed the first time, no points.   If you're doing one of the zero-sum distributed point systems, though, this won't work.

Well if you have loot whores (which is very very common) then the best way to deal with it is to appeal to their lootwhore tendancies. The best ways are:

- Raid slot pressure. Have the MC invites be based on who attended BWL last week. If you don't go to BWL you don't get into the money raid.
- Extra DKP for attempts and first kills.
- Random raids. They have to come if they want to hit the money raid 'cause they don't know when it's going to be.

Personally I like the first 1 the most, the 2nd one the least.

What we did is to start recruiting more people until those bwl raids where filled, even if meant a 20 person waiting list for mc.  Tell your members the recruiting will continue until people start showing up for bwl, make sure to point how theres 50 guilds out there that can run MC while only a handfull can do BWL.  Base mc raids of bwl attendance.

People blackmailing each other and people only doing things for their guildies if thery are blackmailed. Nice setup there, Kudos!

Naturally in the long term you will ideally be kicking the people who have a pattern of only doing things when blackmailed/bribed, but in the short term that does nothing to help the situation. So yea, you take steps to make sure that people come because that's your obligation to the guildies that do want to progress more than get ezi epix.

Now, if more of your guild would rather get easy epics than progress, you'd be doing them a disservice rather than fulfilling an obligation. Of course, guild leaders never get that out of touch with their ordinary members.  :wink:

Having gone through this myself, the issue is a little different than what the guild wants.

What the kind of people he's describing want is for someone to go ahead of them, figure out the strats, take the wipes and repair costs, get the mobs on farm status, then afk along with the raid and mute the TV just long enough to pickup their phat loot.  Then later quit out of boredom because "this game is too easy".

Those types don't show up to the early BWLs.  Those are the ones you want to identify and gkick.

Yep, those are the nutsacks you don't even want in the guild. Dicking around to try and use them as filler while learning a new raid dungeon will only lead to tears, drama and a number of your better and more responsible raiders leaving in disgust. I know, because those are the idiots that made early BWL miserable when we "forced" them to attend using techniques similar to the ones suggested. Even if I'm not counted as one of the better raiders, I did watch a lot of our better players give up in disgust before I did, and it was a shame.

I'd have to say 5 myself. I'd like to try raiding once but I imagine I would get pretty bored with it pretty quickly. I'd have more fun with it if I could solo raiding instances instead of having to have huge groups.

Oh I agree with you there Righ. I've quit a guild because I figured that the majority of the guild wanted to be more laid back than I did. I've also quit a guild where the leadership was ineffective in solving the leech problem when there was enough people with the desire to progress, but were being held back. The problem of course is you can't just cut people and not raid while you get replacements. You need to be raiding or people will jump ship (and not just flaky people, a lot of a guild's membership will not yet have secure ties with the guild yet unless you are very old), and not many driven people will want to join a raiding guild that cannot raid. So you have to fill raids with the leechers you have as best you can and try to replace them along the way. Then there is the "take the best and merge" solution that a lot of guilds turn to. That's a recipe for drama though and a bit of a copout. It can work quite well, and is probably the only way if your server's pool of raiders is small, so I'm not dismissing it necessarily.

EDIT: Also, I speak only from my own experiences and the other hardcore raiders I know when I say this so I don't know how widely this applies, but... it's not so much having leeches holding you back that makes you want to leave. It's more about not seeing any solution being put forward to solve it in the long term. The guild solves it for BWL, great, but then AQ rides around and boom same problem. Same kind of people, same "solutions" thrown about. It's gonna happen in Naxx. It's gonna happen in w/e the expansion raids are. You look around and you can't respect many of the members of the guild. Once you lose respect for your guildies, and the only people you DO respect are also bitching, the will to keep trying saps away. And the lack of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel is why you leave, if you could see things being done to change it for the good, then you can take standing around in CH for hours only to have no raid come about (with your HEARTH in CH so you're stranded in buttfuck nowhere) because in the end you'll hopefully have the guild you want. Working for your reward is not a foreign concept to raiders, just the reward has to be visible.

So I raved on there... but wth I'll leave it as is. :P

Sorry to say this (I truly am), but it serves all of you right. I hope all of you spend months upon months upon months hopelessly scrambling through Blackwing Lair. And when you do finally accomplish it, I hope all your gear becomes gimp. You deserve nothing else because you ask for nothing else.

Paelos, here's a strategy: Tell everyone to piss off, disband, and then go play some golf. Or Super Mario Bros.

I agree with Stray.  But I'll still play.

That's a little extreme. I think I'll just go with the DKP incentives.

I just really wish lvl 60 was set in its own bracket for BGs so that I wouldn't have to compete with the lvl 60 pieced-out-the-ass catass bastards.

For everything but AV it is.

Of course there are no 50-59 BGs other than AV... everyone in that bracket goes to AV 'cos they can get rep for shiny weapons at 60, good honor, and good xp/loot. 50-59 WSG and AB are literally never up.

BTW, it'll get worse when you hit 60 and end up fighting tier2 teams in WSG/AB as a random noob in blues/greens and no epic mount. AV is more about strategy and tactics than gear (in fact, the best geared people don't really play AV), the same isn't true of WSG and AB, especially WSG...


-- Z.

If your guildies want to be lite-raiders, then let them. No wait, they can't.

...

LET MY PEOPLE GO!

What's extreme is how a "game" can have any features that actually lead people (let alone teammates) to fight and despise each other. Instead of, y'know, letting them have fun.

And some people say Dikus have peaked with WoW...

What we're talking about is playstyle incompatibility at its core, I guess.  This isn't a problem with the content in itself; guilds are relatively drama free if there is a clear policy for recruiting like minded players and there's a generally accepted way for going about at things.  Some guilds don't have strong frameworks; some people aren't sure where they fit in; some don't get along with one another.

It happens.  It's part of the social aspect that keeps things fresh and interesting.  It isn't unique to raids, dikus, or even MMOs.

They're let go... once replacements are there. If you always get 30-35 raiders show up to every boss on learning attempts as opposed to 50-55 on farm days, seems to me like the majority wants to progress.

Yea, heres the real about that whole "raid lite" BS.

You want phat lewt.  But you dont want to wipe for hour after hour, learning the various tricks, strats, and techniques used to beat the newest boss.  You dont get any great satisfaction from from defeating a new encounter with a bunch of friends, and/or you dont consider many (any?) of the people in your guild to be friends.  So you let the other guys put in untold time, gold, potions, mana oils, etc, into learning an encounter, then just kinda skateboard in later and pick up your phat lewtz.

You fucking maggots are not a different "playstyle".  A different playstyle is someone who prefers to do solo/duo content (field duty) or small-scale raids (aq20)/ 5-man content.  You are a goddamn cancer that feeds off the exertions of better  players then yourselves.  Raid Lite peeps would never exist without forerunners willing to man-up to the challenge, wereas solo/duo and 5-man types would.

So please stop trying to pass it off as a different "playstyle".

Funny guy.

"Great satisfaction, "exertions", "man up to the challenge", "better players".....

"Cancer" has gotta be my favorite though. Or maybe "friends", I don't know.

WOW.  Bitter much? Drama split your guild? Good players leave for a different one?

They pay their bills (probably on time, too), they should get their lewtz. Like, the whole service economy, you know, has always been based on money paid versus phat lootz received. How else could it work?

This thread demonstrates exactly why I do not enjoy the whole end-game-large-group-raid-for-loot scheme.  I couldn't have made this up to illustrate it any better.

As Jayce put so succinctly (and you ignored so completely), you pay to play, not to win.

As with most things in life, gotta take the good with the bad.

There is nothing good about your "cancer" post.  It was just weird. 

When I gave up, my week consisted of running dragons in BWL with my hunter while we wiped repeatedly due to some folks' inattention. Shaman would blame hunters, who'd blame warlocks, who'd blame warriors, who'd blame druids... and it would be a screaming fit of class-led generic blame games. On Molten Core nights, since I had 7/8 of my set, I'd take the standby repeatedly, and have to farm, level a known alt or whatnot. In silence, so it didn't disrupt the raid. Despite my protestation, I was given responsibilities and access to the guild leader chat, so I couldn't even mute the guild chat bitching fits as the same muting would apply to the leader channel. Since we gave points to people who turned up on time and who couldn't raid due to numbers, I accumulated a lot of points on standby, which caused some people to resent me. I decided to skip some MC nights since I had no need of points, and little desire to farm in silence, and before long folks pulled the 'random raid night' gags because wipes were taking their toll on BWL attendance, and ironically I got accused of being one of the people trying to duck out of BWL when an MC night that I skipped got bumped into a BWL night (not that they were short of numbers since it was due to be an MC night, but there was a whole "us vs. them" thing going down by that point, and as a "leader" I was a good target for abuse). WoW had become as much petty grief and work as Shadowbane had once been.

Fortunately I got a job, and couldn't log in as much. After a few weeks of chaotic work nights, it just didn't seem as attractive to go back to raiding at all. Apparently the holdup on BWL went on for some time after I left, but then it was cracked, they got through the bosses pretty fast, and put that on farm status. They're now having a (somewhat lesser) repeat of the same crap on AQ40. Plus ca change. So yep, end-game raiding in WoW is not for me, and I'm startled that anybody would want to play it past one round of loot/attendance/scheduling hysteria, although it undoubtedly not as bad if you aren't forced to be a "leader" and just hang around in the background largely AFK like many do. As for PvP, I can kill people with better gear than me, because there are so many bad players in good gear but once they're a full tier of gear ahead, its pretty unlikely, even if they're crap. It doesn't really diminish from the PvP, but the PvP experience in WoW seems somewhat dull post-battlegrounds, even on full PvP servers.

1-60 is still fun, and I'm actually enjoying that again, since the half year break since I did all the lowbie quests far too often with alts has made them less painful. What I'd like are a few dozen more level 60 5-10 man dungeons. However, Blizzard can only barely keep pace with the raid content, so I don't think I'm in for any love there.

Uh wow.

Well I'm in a raiding alliance, so when things go wrong we generally just laugh it off, or if one guild in particular wants to be a bunch of raging idiots, they get the old heave-ho. I'd never joing a raiding guild because I'd have to listen to everyone I raid with who are in other guilds spam away at me. It may not be as effective in the completion standpoint, but I like it much better in the sanity standpoint.

Here's the real what ?

This is the finest utter horseshit it's been my displeasure to read.  Really, you've polished it and polished it until it shines.  Bravo.  I wouldn't bother with it again tho please, it might actually splinter my pancreas.

Here's my take on it.  Raiding is not hard.  At all.  It turns a fun game encounter into a organising sheep scenario.   Fuck raids.

They were a bad idea in EQ and they're a worse idea in WoW.  The sooner people fucking realise that the better.  Which they will.  Going by Blizzards own data, 80% of their player base are going to dwindle and die unless they stop fucking focusing on 40 man raids to the exclusion of all else.

Fuck Raiders.

Go and have a look at the video of the 40 lvl 1 Gnomes Raiding Hogger.  They look as if they have had more fun raiding that one encounter than I have had in my many, many, many MC, BWL runs.

Raiding sucks.

No, raiding sucks for you.

Also the cancer post had the right kind of theme going. Casual raiders I don't give a shit about. You can only come 2-3 days a week? That's fine, I can appreciate you don't have enough time in your life to play all the time, or maybe you just don't want to play more than that a week. That's cool. What pisses me off is people who only go to the easy instances and use the excuse that they only have so much time. If they only wanna just hit upeasy shit and collect purples, hey not a problem. There's tonnes of guilds who generally just farm easy shit and might go after a new boss for something different from time to time. That's great if you're having fun. It becomes a problem when you're in a guild where the majority wants to progress. In that case the leeching bastards should get a fucking spine and go join the right guild for them instead of holding back people who want to progress. But they don't. Why? Because hanging onto a hardcore guild gets you access to more and better purples to farm plus makes your epeen bigger.

You know you sound just as retarded as he does.  Your 80% figure is way off base too, as this thread showed the "i dont want to raid ever" crowd is not that big.  Sure only 20% of people might have killed ragnaros NOW, but 3 months ago that number would have been more like 5%, and 3 months from now its going to be more like 40%.  By the time the expansion rolls around the few people who werent running mc and bwl are going to be able to pug it or run it in small groups in much faster time.  Just because not many people are raiding now doesn't mean most people don't want too or wont raid ever, they simply cant and the number who do raid is just going to get bigger and bigger as time goes on and the zones become trivialized.

Next patch is going to make all zg and aq 20 quest rewards epic, not to mention introduce the equivalent of the field duty quests for argent dawn.  More epics for casuals = easier time with raids = more people raiding.  You are right about one thing though, raiding is not hard...at all.  If more people realized it and decided to start doing it rather than bitch about not being able too you'd see the number of raiders shoot up.

The point on both sides is stupid. It's stupid I have to collect 39 other people to do something remotely fun at level 60 for me. I enjoy raids. I like the idea of killing big bosses and having it all come together. I don't like the number. Ten people should be the max for anything I would ever want or need to kill. EVERYONE could have access to that. 100% of playerbase would have the option of raiding. But that's not what we got, and you either accept that and have fun within the system, or you become bitter and bitch about it on the sidelines until you quit.

It's also stupid to say that raiders suck because they want people to actual DO something if they want to raid. Nobody likes people who coast through shit that people worked hard to establish and give everyone the finger while they do it. That's just life. You can argue with them for being Draconian, or demanding too many hours, or whathaveyou, but that's NOT the same thing at all.

ZG and AQ20 are not casual. They are just like MC and BWL, only they require 20 people other than 40... but that doesn't make them casual. When my guild was allying with another guild for ZG, we spent 7-8 hour sessions just trying to down a single boss (ended up killing the first 3 bosses in 2 runs though). Field duty style quests ARE casual, but they're also crazy farmtastic. 90 insignia to get an epic at revered (44 at exalted), each insignia takes 30 drops from skeletons. Hmmm.

Also, making any kind of statistical judgement based on forum posts is stupid. Of COURSE raiders and "hardcore players" are going to be reading forums more. IIRC tigole said something about 25% of all level 60s having seen ragnaros... considering the level 60 population is 1/2 of the 10-60 population according to that census site, that'd mean ~8.3% of people playing wow will actually see all that shiny new content? (and don't forget that there are plenty of guilds that have been stuck in MC for reasons mentioned in this thread earlier, and won't see the insides of naxx, or aq40, or even bwl until the expansion)

Finally, for some of us, it's not that we don't raid because we loathe green gateways, purple letters and 4 hour wiping sessions (actually we do, I'm sure everyone does). It's because we might be with a group of friends who've been gaming together since 1998, and really don't want to recruit 30 more members in /1 just so we could kill dragons and flex our epeen in battlegrounds dual-wielding weapons that each do 150% the damage of the nastiest blue 2-h weapon available to casuals (Naxx has 75dps daggers and 1h swords, 95dps 2h weapons... for comparison, the 2h sword Demonshear is 53.8dps, and the TUF -best non-raider weapon- is 61dps). And alliances do NOT work in the long term, they invariably end with the bigger guild ditching the smaller guild, the bigger guild absorbing the smaller guild, the guilds merging, or the alliance breaking up in a messy fashion due to loot drama.


-- Z.

I almost agree with Calanthus here. I'm one of those people who are in a guild that wants to progress. And I don't give a shit about raiding. I'm just there because those people are my friends from the olden days of Everquest. Yes, sometimes they are short on people and I tag along. After all, a healer with mostly blue equipment is better than leaving the spot empty. If I would only go to the MC raids to grab me some easy gear I would likely kick myself out of the guild as well. I just don't get the need of some people to clear the roster of anyone not being a hardcore raider.

If they only have 3 hours and their choices are to farm MC for 3 hours or wipe in BWL for 3 hours + solo farm 3 hours for repair costs (numbers out of my ass), guess which one they're going to choose.

And it's not about not wanting to progress. I wanted to progress, but my 1-2 hours 1-2 random times a week just weren't compatible with raiding at all. Perhaps I'm the lucky one.

Er, yes.  That was the point.  Did No-one read the Front Paged Raiding thingy that brought us the quote 'I polish my armor with your tears' ?

You guys take this GAME way too seriously.  And, for the avoidance of doubt, when I say you guys I mean Everyone in the thread.

Ok, I'm going to drop the sarcasm and ask a serious question :  What are the easy instances ?

Strat's pretty damn easy.  Scholo's a little tricky just because of the AOE rooms (which suck if you've got a lousy mage) and it's wayyyy too long.  UBRS is easy up to Drak.  Even well-equipped people who don't take some FR gear/potions to survive being Conflagged get killed/ wiped.   Anything below that is very easy, just time-consuming.  (Doing BRD in a PUG, for example, can take longer than an MC raid.)

Er, yeah.  However, that wasn't what Calantus was talking about, since you don't tend to get purples in there.

I suspect he would classify MC and Onyxia as easy and the other big 3 as hard.  I was just wanting to check.  Not that I'm about to disagree; Onyxia is a total joke.

Finally something I can really disagree with you on. Yay

There are few things I take less serious than World of Warcraft  :-D

MC up to a certain point is ridiculously easy compared to some of the stuff afterwards as well. I guess its all a matter of perspective. Raiders tend to lose their perspective after a while, its a side effect of raiding those hard instances all the time.

One thing I find time and time again is that raiding usually makes people less aware of the 'soft skills' that smaller groups require.  I suspect this is more a side effect of MC, rather than the 'harder' instances, which was why I was asking the question.

For example, it would seem that almost everyone in an MC Raidgroup loses all aggro management skills after a while.  Coming back to smaller groups, more and more you will notice the Rogues, Mages and Hunters that have no idea about keep level with the MT and get their stupid ass ganked.

Last night, while running UBRS, we had those exact classes wipe continuously in a ten man group because they had no idea how to limit their own threat anymore.  After the second death, I just let the mobs go after them.  The other seven of us worked in a perfect team.  It was really, really silly to watch.  I mean, this guy was decked out in full Purple Gear and was getting the shit kicked out of him by UBRS orcs.  Way funny.

However, I'm also fairly sure, having played through it, that those who are running the BWL will have a much better idea of the tasks that they're required to do.

I'd like to reiterate, I belong to a Raiding group who are at farm status for Onyxia, MC, ZG and working their way through BWL.

Raiding is a shortsighted customer focus.

Non of the above in green this time.

Enjoy tearing it up.

Edited because cut and paste is unfair to some.

You are right, that is my experience as well. Thats easy to explain. Raid Maintanks generate ridiculous amounts of aggro. They know every trick in the book AND they have the perfect equipment to do their work. And if Aggro is critical on raids the DDs are basically told when it is save for them to make damage. Basically the same people know what to do in a raid that know it single group. The rest are just fluff. Added dd, added healing power, added <insert the one thing you are used over and over again>. They can survive by being drones that can follow orders, know when to roll on loot, and little else. Get those people in your group and you are basically screwed.

But even the ones that know their job, they are usually fine tuned to their tanks knowing how much damage they can make without it biting them in the ass. The pros are the ones that can tune it down and do not expect the PUG-warrior to instantly transform into their main tank so that they see high numbers on their damage meters.

here's the funny thing: my gf and I just started a few weeks ago playing and now we can easily eat up 4-5 hours running quests or lowbie dungeons.   I'm sure if we keep up and get guilded by 60, we could stomach the same time requirement once a week for a raid.  Never ever thought I'd see that.  But we're having fun.  Oh and VOIP FTW.

If you actually analyse what people have said (some even seriously) in here you'll notice a pattern of, well, stupidity.

"You're game sucks, no you're game sucks"
"More raiding would happen if more people raided"
"We have to raid because raidings the only stuff to do"
"Noobs !  Catasses!!"

Pointless.

However, what's REALLY the point is once again something that Lum pointed out with crystal clarity is that the pre 60 game is wildly, wildly, different to the end-game raiding.  And, as Tebonas and I just discussed, it's quite hard to go back.  As a result, some resist going forward (give me more 5 man content) and some resist going back (Another Dragon PLS).

Personally, my problem is that I honestly think that Blizzard are doing all this against the tide and without any reference to the customer base and are instead listening to the 'we've always done it this way'  or, worse, 'Everquest was popular !'

What really concerns me is the internal figures for burnout/churn and raiding vs non-raiding but of course there's no way to know that at all.  All we can go by is Blizzards own PR where they openly admit that despite the Design focus on Raiding THE CUSTOMER FOCUS ISN'T THERE YET.

I suspect they're leading horses to water and the jury's out on the whole drinking thing.

hehhe, you tempt me.

Can't resist :

with 4-5 hours a week, you'll even get kicked from MC.  You are casual.  You have fuck all chance.

you make me sad



but that video was fun


so I am torn

You think you're sad ?  I fully expect to be kicked from my Raid guild once the Wife goes on maternity leave and she shows the disparity between my semi-casual time and her HARDCORE.

:(

Psh, my server has a guild that raids two days a week.  Two.  They've cleared BWL.

Lots of raiding appeals to a subset.  Subset of a subset even.  Still, that doesn't mean that 70% of the WoW playerbase has run UBRS and every other 5-10 man instance to the limit, and are going to quit in a month if content continues this way.

EQ was quite popular back in the day, and it was far more inaccessible. Many explain this to be the result of a "first time MMO" experience.  Now, WoW is quite popular.  "First time" again?  Perhaps, but I think this idea is getting stressed to the limit a year+ after release.  There's more viability to this model -'unfair' as it might be for some- than it seems.

That's simply not true. For one he didn't say 4-5 hours a week. The casual/hardcore debate isn't about casual/hardcore; it's about raiding/non-raiding and even THAT is because most of the non-raiders think every single raider spends 24/7 online.

I raid. I raid ALOT. My guild has no raiding requirements and yet we're making astronomical progress on our newish server. MC cleared in three weekends, ZG in three. All at 4 days of SCHEDULED raiding with no REQUIRED raiding. 3-4 hours each time. Fuck, 3-4 hours is what you'll spend wiping in a PUG in BRD.

The "casuals" spend (and I can almost guarantee this) more time playing in a given week than the average raider; I'll note that I'm specifically leaving out the two or three super catass guilds that every server has.

So, for roughly 8 hours per week I can go on two of my guild's raiding nights and get phat loots or whatever. That time vs. effort ratio doesn't seem so bad to me. I mean, this is what the game is at 60. The only thing I can say is to play another game. It's not changing. They've made their design decisions. There are other games out there.

 :roll:

I just got kicked from the guild I've been in since launch. I play 6 hours a day, but made the mistake I didn't want to deal with AQ with the stuff I've got going on. Apparently that made me dead weight. The endgame of WoW is the worst minimum wage job you can have. The 1-59 is great. Better than a lot of single player games. But the endgame sucks the water out of diarrhea so much it just leaves a brown, musty powder.

5-6 hours a week? Ironwood is correct. You're barely at casual even.

It is on a scale tho Bob.  Some will kick you (Calantus's Guild, for example, probably would) and some won't.

I changed it to green for fucktard up there who lacks a spine to make his own post a soapbox and had to hijack mine.


Also, I'd like to note that some people do treat WoW as a job and make money out of it.  However, more distressingly, some of you treat it as a SPORT, with all that implies.  Competition, putting in the hours, training, preparation and whatnot.

To me, it's still a fucking GAME.

This is not an argument that's ever going to resolve.  The thread itself is pointless.

I don't think the fact that blizz focusing on end game as a raiding content is bad. The problem is not with raiding, it's with the other 4-39 fuckers that you have to raid or party with. Raiding by itself isn't very different than partying. The problem is the extra complication, time, and organization required to get more than a small group of people who can actually PLAY their characters together. As I said a while back, I probably would have quit the game if I hadn't fallen into a raiding guild because PUGs are simply wretched and by all accounts unfun. For your average joe who's unwilling to find a good guild and simply wants to spam LFG STRAT/SCHOLO in the Looking For Group channel every once in a while, well, my hats off to you because I want to /wrists after a weekend of trying to do PUG raiding with my alt.

I think a lot of people who say "raiding sucks!" have never raided with a real guild that knows what the fuck they are doing. A group of people who can show up on time, get in, kick ass, get the phat lewts, and portal out. It's obvious you like killing shit in interesting places and looting them dry because that's what the game (solo, party, raid) is all about, even at the lower levels; The only thing different is the people that you have to do it with.

PUG raiding is so much different than organized raiding that it's night and day, and I think some of you have only done the former. And you're right. It sucks. Like chrome off a bumper or a golfball through a garden hose.

If blizzard would make some REAL effort to streamline the partying/raiding process, give the more casual players more tools to enable them to find like players, get to the dungeon, and start kicking ass faster, I think the end game would be a lot more fun for people. Meeting stones were a waste of time, why they thought people would use that trash is beyond me. Almost every other game I've played has done it better, blizzard took a giant step backwards (or, possibly, sideways) and it's simply hurting that 'casual' 80% of the people who they lured in by the easy entry into the morpgverse in levels 1-59.

The easy instances are the ones your guild has already beat.  Even MC was hard at first.


MC and BWL ARE casual, and so are zg and aq.  You don't have to spend more than 3 hours in any of this zones a couple days a week, not even while you are learning them.  There is nothing not casual about raiding unless you chose to make it so, like someone above said running brd with a pug takes longer than your average zg run.


Im also going by what i see in the game.  6 months ago there was The Big Three on the server, the only guilds that had mc on farm status and where fighting to see who cleared BWL faster, if you wanted to raid you had to get into one of them.  3 months ago it was more like the big 10-15, now theres gotta be over 30 guilds on the server that run mc and are making progress in bwl.  The number of raiders is just going to get bigger and bigger with every patch that makes classes more powerfull, adds new easily obtainable gear that makes content easier and more and more people reach the high levels.  The percent of "i dont wanna raid ever" people is not going to grow and i still mantain its a very minor one.

Yeah, although anecdotal, I've had the same experience.  It's pretty interesting to observe really.  For maybe six months my server had two serious alliance guilds and one serious horde guild.  They were the only ones who made progress in MC.  Then, midway through BWL, we started to notice that guilds were popping up, seemingly out of the ground- Ragnaros kills were reported from guilds and people we had never heard of before.  Nef was downed by the "established guilds", but the server third is an hour after the second, and from a guild that didn't exist back in the MC days.

Now, we have 10 AQ40 guilds, 8 BWL guilds, and over 15 MC/ZG/AQ20 guilds.  It really is exceptional growth.

Here's the thing though. That shit is only "casual', "easy", whatever you want to call it, during prime time. If you can't play during prime time, it is impossible to do. Molten core is easy? Sure. Go do try to do it at 10:00 am or 2:00 am. You'll be lucky to scrounge up 20 people in a mishmash of auction house epics and  stuff from DM if you're lucky. So not only are they focusing exclusively on crap for a small minority of their playerbase, but it's only viable to even during a few hours a day. There is other stuff they could, and should, focus on that could be used by everyone 24 hours a day. Like dedoing their entire stsytem of PvP for example.

Sigh.

When you say Raiding Is Growing, I'm tempted to ask :  Is that not just because that's all there is after 60 ?

Really ?

It's pretty simple, I think.

1. Casual people are just that - Casual. They don't hesitate to turn off the computer and do something else and/or cancel a game if they aren't having fun.
2. The "majority" of people who play WoW are casual.
3. There isn't much to do at 60 but raid.
4. Over half the online population of any given server is at level 60.
5. A Ho-Jillion people have a WoW subscription and still actively play.

THUS, a majority of people must like raiding, otherwise they would have quit already. Thus, focus on raiding content. Progress is made.

Indeed.  That's what I was talking about up there somewhere ^^^^

However, I'm not sure that's not faulty logic that's not what's entirely best for the game.  And isn't that why we're here bitching ?

Basically, you could summarise that argument as 'They're eating crap, keep feeding them it' ?  Especially if you don't really agree with that first point entirely.

Bear in mind that these games sometimes manage to generate a complex web of Social Interaction that's NOT that easy to walk away from.

Last time I ran Strat with my epic laden hunter, I changed into Beaststalker gear before setting off. Right tool for the job, etc. You can go in decked out in purple shit and wait much longer for the tank to build more hate, and only use auto-shot, auto-attack and wands, but then you'll just doze off.

My beef with WoW raids is not with the casual/hardcore shit. I can be as hardcore as the next guy if I'm having lots of fun. My beef continues to be with the fact that you can't find 39 other people without it turning into asstardery 90% of the time. And the repetition. And the repetition.

If you want interesting statistics, grab Census+ and run it regularly. You'll see that half the population isn't level 60 - mostly those folks are bored people with 60s playing alts. Of the level 60s online, half of them are kicking around in one of the major cities, shooting the breeze, not adventuring. That doesn't seem especially wonderful to me.

Well, yeah, but that's the game they've designed. Agreeing with Lum's sentiment about 1-59 and then 60 that he wrote about awhile ago. I don't want to say that oft-quoted "Raid or quit" that Tigole supposedly spewed out but... if this was a single player game and people decided they didn't like the last 25% I don't think we'd be having this conversation.

Just to give a very casual non-raiding "lifestyle" in WoW:

1. Log into WoW at 8-8:30 p.m.
2. Decide which alt to work on and get started.
3. Listen to chat while working on quests/professions/selling on AH.  If a 5-10 man raid is getting formed, show interest but don't commit.
4. By 9:00 p.m. the raid still hasn't started.  Log off for other alts to pick up items/cash/resources from other alts.  Play on AH for a bit. AFK a lot putting kids to bed, reading books, parenting things.
5.  9:30 p.m. rolls around and the raid is just gettting started.
6.  Log off.  Have to get up in 7 hours.

I have 6 alts.  2 are 60.  2 are 50+. 2 are 20+.  I can only play in small chunks so I'm left with leveling alts, collecting cash/items for alts, playing the AH game, and once in awhile getting into a 5-10 man raid.

WoW allows me to do this and I'm fine with it.  My expectations for a MMOG right now are pretty low.  Let me play on my own time, solo, with some chance at more.  My small chunks of time typically reward me with a level up or at least half a level up or at least a nice find on an item/crafted item. Each playtime is rewarded with something.

Raiding sucks!

#3 guild in Everquest on my server for a long time. Personally I was in the thick right up to time (only Xegony missing), and some forays into time with another character because they had a shortage of Shaman for the raid.

In WoW right now they killed Nef and are fooling around in Silithus and AQ40 (Battleguard Satura was the latest kill if I'm informed right).

And still, raiding sucks for me. Thats neither a quality statement about my own skill as a player nor a quality statement about my guild. Its the fact that raids are nothing more than blown up group encounters. There isn't more skill needed at all. Just more persitance and more dedication to loot gathering. And yes, more people have to concentrate at the same time. If you don't have short attention span disorder that is no problem either.

At most a quarter to half of the people in a raid encounter need the skill, the rest just needs to follow orders. If you are not one of those organizers, don't flatter yourself. The purple gear you obtained you obtained from the sweat of other people and your unfailing ability to obey them...

We did insane shit as a single group in Everquest. Encounters others did with two groups. That was where the fun was for me. Thats where the fun should be for me in WoW. Not everybody just needs to get his shit together to be a top tier raider. Some people ask themself why they should haul around all that dead weight...

I keep seeing people ignore the Play On stats, or claim that they're wrong without any explanation of what exactly is wrong with them.

So if they're wrong why are they wrong?

http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/2006/03/raid_content_us.html (http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/2006/03/raid_content_us.html)

Doesn't account for alts.

On the contrary, it does. Of course if you play your "60 priest having fun all day but switch to" your "60 warrior to tank a dungeon", then you "show up as two". I think this was addressed in the comments, which is why I cut and pasted most of it rather than type it. It is possible that every time a sample is taken, showing only 5% of the current server population raiding a raid instance, the other 95% of players are simply going to be raiding during another sample point, and that everybody who plays on the server is a hardcore raider with at least one character. It's possible, but its more than a little unlikely, don't you think? It's also NOT what the study set out to prove. The average raiding character spends ~5 hours a month in raid content and represents 5% of characters on that server.

Oh, I don't disagree with the conclusion at all.  It's just inaccurate to a point, though I have no idea by how much.

It's difficult to draw anything beyond this conclusion, though.  To argue that raiding is a waste of resources, for instance, you'd have to know the proportion of non-raiders hitting the content wall vs. non-raiders satisfied with the current rate of content.  That is of course, a very hard number to figure out.

My hunch is that Blizzard has a good handle on this number if anyone does, and they seem to have their act together in other areas.  We'll have to see what they do in the long term, though there certainly seems to be a very evident bias at the moment.

Why is it inaccurate?

Because it doesn't take alts into account. :/

They say as much at around the bottom:

I play three chars regularly, my raiding rogue, a level 19 paladin that i mostly pvp with and ive been leveling a hunter (up to 39 now).  That census would show me as three people when im really just one, most people have several chars that they play regularly but most raiders only have one single char that they raid with.  Its very rare to find someone raiding with more than one char, while most raiders and non raiders alike all play at least one alt.  That greatly skews the poll in favor of non raiding.

Edit: i forgot to mention i also have several chars around 35 that i use for trade skills stuff for my main which seems pretty common and further lowers the accuracy of that census.

If every raider who spent more than an hour was always one character, and every non raider was three different characters as you first said that would put the raiders at 11%. If every non raider was five different characters the raiders would still be only 18% of the total.

If you didn't realize that and based your idea on how many people raid from simply reading threads like this you'd assume...quick count of the replies in the thread...80% of WoW players raid regularly.

Raiders are just far more likely to post than non raiders.

I would disagree on MC being casual - just due to the lots of respawns you have to fight through.  If you are learning MC, and it takes 3 hours to do, say, Luci/Mag/Gehennas - if you exit and come back tomorrow, you got a lot of trash to re-clear.  Noone likes re-clearing the same boring trash which is why a lot of guilds want to push on further into the zone - theres not a lot of good safe spots to camp out in either unfortunately.  MC was 'the' raiding zone for a long time in WoW, so imo thats why the common impression is that raiding is for 6-hour-stints.

I do agree that BWL, ZG and AQ are much more 2/3 hour raid-friendly - which is a fantastic idea in my book.

That depends on the guild, and related to how well they complete each of the instances. At a minimum it's any instance your guild has on farm, but how well it is on farm is also a factor. I know when we used to wipe on drakes and wyrmguard pulls some of the eziraiders wouldn't come to our 2nd BWL clears (when we did Razor->Brood, Firemaw->Flamegore, Chrom->Nef) even though we had killed Nef. Now I would class BWL/Ony/MC as the easy instances for our guild, but naturally a guild struggling through BWL wouldn't have it up there, and a guild still going through MC wouldn't have any up there ('cept maybe Ony).


As far as kicking people who cbf'd with a new instance because they have shit going on I'm pretty sure we wouldn't kick them if they said something. We had a guy take 2 weeks off because he wanted to play Oblivion 24/7 instead of WoW while we we learning the later part of BWL. But he said something so we knew not to expect him to be there and had no ill feelings when he came back after getting bored with Oblivion. I sure as hell would be more sympathetic with someone who had a lot of RL stuff going on and so didn't want the added stress of learning something so long as they said so. It's the people who just don't come online when the hard stuff is scheduled without saying a word just because they cbf'd working on an encounter or wiping a few times. It's just like going AFK. It's simply not possible to expect people not to go AFK for drinks, food, toilet breaks, etc. It is, however, perfectly reasonable to expect they say something first so you know you can't rely on them while they are AFK. Nothing like pulling a boss only to find that one of the healers is AFK so an offtank goes down and the whole fight goes to shit... cept maybe logging in and flying down to CH only to find out that only 35 people bother to come online that night.

As for casuals, I literally have no problem with them being guilded and coming along to the occasional raid they have time to go to. We had a number of people who were just friends of our raiders who might come to 1 raid a fortnight, maybe. Hell, we had one guy who had 3 level 60s in our guild, none of which had ever raided with us, because he didn't want to raid at all and was only there to be guilded with his friends. But those were done under a specific understanding that such would be the case. You can't just masquerade as a core member, demanding spots over more dedicated players as well as make it harder to judge numbers for recruitment, and then just not show up to progression because you'd rather not do nothing but wipe during your play time. Something needs to be worked out with the guild or, failing that, people should go find a guild that is more casual and thus suited to their playstyle. There are guilds that have been clearing MC and Ony for months but have only just started to attempt BWL because they just don't have the time and/or inclination to do it while MC is still producing loot and fun for them.

I suppose you have to make rules to enforce fairness... first come, first server wouldn't really be fair, I guess.  I have to say, however, that I could never be in a guild like the ones that Cal and Sorinaugh are in... they don't even sound like fun.  Everything sounds way too serious to be fun.  I guess that's why raiding doesn't much appeal to me. 

I thought Paelos, who seems to have turned into a little hardcore WoW monkey made some sense.  It's not the raiding, it's the numbers.  Organising forty people for a raid and then trying to execute strategy over the intarweb sounds just frustrating to me.  And the raids take way too long... and you have to do them in bits!  If you do this several times a week, you're likely to be spending more time raiding in a video game than with your family.  If you don't have a family... well, I can guess the reason why.

I love playing games.  I don't love drama.  Raiding seems to go hand in hand with drama.  Someone should dig up that video with that nutty guy shouting on TS.  That's how I imagine many raids end up.  These WoW raids definitely seem to illustrate the animosity between hardcore and casual.  I suppose you can't really be a casual gamer who would like to raid every now and then if you don't want to be looked at by many people as a cancerous leech  Definitely not the sort of thing I want to be involved in.

I'll agree with that. They need to drop the stupid respawn rates in MC. It's not their core raid instance anymore, or shouldn't be. Our plan is to do MC until people are reasonably geared and then never set foot in it again unless it's to do an occassional Tier 2 pants run. The guys running my guild are smart. They know MC is only fun for about a month and then it starts to become Molten Chore.

If that was how most raids went that clip wouldnt have been so popular.  The problem isnt casual raiders who only show up once in a while, the problem is with those people who show up to the raids that take no effort just to collect loot while skipping the progress raids.

Actually, fun is always what your trying to have.  Sometimes it is, sometimes it isnt.  If you spend as much time online as most of the "core" members of a raiding guild do, and you're not enjoying yourself, i strongly encourage you to quit.  Games are a fucking waste of time anyway, if you aren't enjoying your /played, the disservice you are doing yourself is criminal.

The "fun" of a raid is crushing an encounter with surgical percision and getting phat lewt.  Its 40 disparate individuals acting as a unified whole twords a singular goal, and achieving it.  Its a beautiful thing, when it works, really.  You can read a thread like this and get the impression that "raiding is easy", but the reality is that unless you are in the top percentile of guilds that have Ouro/C'thun on farm status, your claim is hollow.

Yes, when you are doing a bossfight that requires consice communication, you need to be serious to the point that you are not cluttering vent with useless bullshit for 10 minutes.  If you feel thats asking too much, then yes raiding probably isnt for you.  The "50 DKP MINUS!" style isnt how how we run raids, and i can't image many of the forward-moving guilds do either.  At least not the ones that have a high percentage of working adults, nobody is going to come home from a day at work and listen to your shit while indulging in a hobby.  Their is some blame-gaming that goes on but i put alot of effort into killing that.

The more skillfull and coordinated everyones play, the smoother the machine runs, the more everyone enjoys the experience.

Basically, raiding can be alot of fun, but to make it so requires alot of effort.

You win

-100 points for using a recent McQuaid meme.


The level 60 of today. As in "you're not level 60, your opinion is worthless". This sets you at Blizzard forum retard level.

A)  I've never read anything i can think of by McQuaid
B)  Has nothing to do with a "you're not level 60".  One is a value judgement on the worth of someones opinion based on character level.  Whereas what i am saying is, if you claim that "raiding is easy", but yet you are unable to defeat the hardest raid bosses currently available, then your claim is false.

>  B)  Has nothing to do with a "you're not level 60".  One is a value judgement on the worth of someones opinion based on character level.  Whereas what i am saying is, if you claim that "raiding is easy", but yet you are unable to defeat the hardest raid bosses currently available, then your claim is false.

The "hard" you are talking about is not difficultly. It means "furthest along the item treadmill".

Yeah, your B) is a flawed conclusion. The ease of any abstract pursuit such as raiding doesn't hinge on the difficulty of the top tier.

Well, in MC and BWL you could bring 20 retards and 20 people who were on the ball, and still get things done.  You'd have trouble in BWL, but it'd be possible; I know from experience.  The later half of AQ is rather different though. The Twin Emps splits your healers, and throws ae around, requiring every single one of them to perform competently and be prepared to move.  DPS can't slack, because there's a time limit.  C'thun takes this even further- a highly mobile fight, if a single person is in the wrong place for 5 or 10 seconds, there is a good chance a beam will chain and fuck your attempt.  12 minute run back.  You can't do the fight with more than 2 or 3 semi-idiots.

Plus, AQ drops don't really bring gear to the next level, so there's a very real increase in difficulty.

I dare say that its as easy as everything else once you are all familiar with a working strategy and have a group predominantly outfitted in the appropriate level of mudflated epics. Of course, what do I know? My knowledge of raids beyond BWL is indirect, so...

From everything I have heard of AQ, it doesn't sound fun.  I wouldn't know, because I am one of those people in my guild who is only there for the scene.  I have no NR gear; I don't want one of those sought-after spots, I don't care about the loot, and don't have the time to put in night after night. 

I enjoy being in groups when people need to function but the reality of > 10 person groups generally means some don't have to function above barely.

I care more about what loot looks like than how it helps me; I spend most of my time looking for dragons, or finding herbs, or goofing around on an alt, or "roleplaying" on my pvp server (god it pisses people off heh).  All of which are more fun for me than being with 39 other people doing anything 40 people are required to do.  Fun was the first time I went to Ragefire Chasm as a level 15 with a group when nobody really knew what was what.

But I do understand that people have fun differently.  I don't care if Blizzard makes more AQ type dungeons.  I just want some more Ragefire Chasms.  I don't care if they drop oranges or purples or blues.  I mean, I enjoy it when I am fighting pirates and a grey Parrot Skeleton drops.  That's fun.  The Link series in Un'goro - hugely fun.  Protecting my farmers in Hillsbrad on a little alt against the Horde - that's fun.

I haven't run out of fun quite yet, but I do think that Blizzard would do well to toss more content toward the non-raiders.  People end up leaving when they run out of things to do (except raiders who are compelled to keep trying to get that set! 30-40+ times over and over, run MC run BWL run AQ gogogo!).

Blizzard should have an exit poll.  That would tell them loads more than anything else.

No.

Stupid people in your raid will wipe you regardless of gear, the fight was specifically designed to do this, and i am thankful for it.  Gear will not save you from a Dark Glare that does 50kish damage.  Nor will it save you from some fucktard that scoots a little to near, or worse, someone who was late getting into position after a rotation, and inadvertently fills a gap between you and someone else in your group, linking you into a nice clusterfucked chain lightning (the damage doubles, without limit, each time it jumps, again, gear will not save you).  Gear also wont save you from someone else on the other side of the boss who didnt react quickly enough to the mindflay eye tentacle that is doing 750 dmg/tick to you from across the room and slowing you to the point that you can't escape the Dark Glare.

100% of the raid has to be on point.  Yes, the tanks need good gear to tank the giant claw tentacles, and dps needs good gear to drop everything quick enough, but it only grants you the ability to do what you need to do, lack of correct player action will still wipe your raid.

The whole reason you see guilds merging to beat this boss is because people realized this isnt something you can do with your friends, your wife, your co-workers.  If you want to defeat this encounter, you will go in maximally buffed with the best players your server has to offer, who are 100% commited to defeating the encounter and are unburdend by distractions (get up to answer door, tip the pizza guy, run back, your dead).  Its not ebonroc, or nefarian, where 1 healer not healing or 1 dps autoattacking isn't going to make a huge difference.  You will get fucked, over, and over, and over again, for lack of skill on part of any of the 40 people in your raid.  Imo, it is the best encounter blizzard has ever made.

Can't really speak on Ouro, as my guild has spent no time on him.  I hear, he's also hard.

There's a definate progression in how skilled and/or attentive people are having to be in the raiding game. C'Thun for instance, if 3-4 people are dead in the first phase you had better execute the 2nd phase flawlessly or you're gonna wipe. When we killed Nef for the second time we had 1/2 the raid dead and it didn't even matter, just made it take longer than it had to be. C'Thun is a fight where you can lose 3-4 people on the pull if you don't execute it right. One person is out of place and chain an eye beam... and boom 2+ people dead. A person doesn't run from the dark glare within a second of it starting up? Another person dead. Mindflay tentacle up for ~10 seconds? Probably another person dead.

Similar to how guilds struggled going from MC to BWL, it was a step up in skill/attention needed. It sure isn't rocket science, but there's a lot of people that somehow amazingly cannot do it but function perfectly fine in MC. That's how late AQ is, you have to be a little less braindead and have a bit better understanding in WTF is going on in the fight. I've never had a problem with it (cept the first 3-4 C'Thun attempts where I was getting used to so much shit going on) but evidently some people do. If a BWL guild went to C'Thun I'd bet 20-30 of their members would get the fight within the first few wipes, no problem. But then you got the 10-20 other idiots who just don't get it. That's what makes it hard.

Watch The Fucking Tail!

Those two posts alone sound like the most unfun punishment in the history of punishments.  And I'm including the Guillotine, complete with Old French Ladies knitting.

Jesus.

None of that makes it "not easy". All you're saying is that there is less room for people to go AFK and have a shower (as one of our off-tanks did on a Ragnaros once). That doesn't affect the skilled and attentive player one iota. All it affects is that the logistics of getting 39 other worthy people are more challenging, means you have to more of an asshole and tell mediocre players to piss off even if they are friends, and distribute loot to best serve the raid rather than giving a shit about your fellow players equally. Those logistics were always too bloody challenging, because 90% of players are useless and most everybody is greedy. That's what I've been complaining about. How will these super fun encounters bring more to the table when they're just more of an organisational cockblock?

Raiding is easy. You cannot make a raid encounter that is not easy (for as skilled and most excellent a player as me). The only thing that isn't easy is dealing with the other plebs in your guild. Got my drift now?

I do.  It's what I've been saying all along.

My Raiding Group is a fun and nice bunch of people.  After only 2 initial succesfull attempts we put Raggy on Farm status.  We're doing well and gaining the lewts and working the instances.

Raiding is STILL not fun or, to my mind, what the endgame of WoW Should be about.  It is in fact a cop-out perpetuated by the EQ mindset that refuses to let go.

In My Opinion.  Which I fully admit is worthless.  Regularly.

At some point in those game, the masochism takes over. Its like getting trained on a parcour and getting electro shocks if you take the wrong steps, and if you avoid getting the shocks for some time you feel proud of yourself and eat the cookie they give you. But they still send you through a frigging room where they taser you randomly.

Whoever wrote how Everquest broke you people and make you suckers for punishment was oh so right!

(note: for the below put a silent "for me" with everything I say, I'm not trying to say everyone is like this, but I cbf'd clarifying every statement.)

Hmmm... I'm trying to think how to put this. I guess a good start is that raiding is all about achieving. It's the same sort of thing as killing a hard boss in a single player game, playing a game on hard mode, or trying to beat a high score/fast time. The enjoyment isn't so much derived from the activity, but from the feeling of achievement that comes from succeeding. Now the base activity has to be enjoyable enough to keep going, but it's not the enjoyment payload.

Now when you kill a raid boss you're not just getting the sense of achievement from killing the boss yourself, but also from your guild's/raid's achievement. You can even get a sence of achievement from your guild killing a new boss when you're not even there. I guess it's kind of like how people get excited when their sports team wins a game (which is something I never understood until just now). Now if your team lost players to injury, got screwed in the draft, the coach/key player retired, or a win has simply not come in a long time, the sense of achievement is magnified when you win. The game itself might have been just like any other game, unnaffected by the out-of-game drama/hardships, but they still affect how much you get out of the win.

It's the same for when your guild finally downs a boss that has been nagging at you for a while. Sure you might have gotten your role down ages ago, but other people in your guild didn't, or you've been having attendance problems, or drama was seemingly pulling your guild apart at the time making it hard to progress. So while the fight itself wasn't so hard in a game sense, only requiring you have the basic strat down and then everyone take their game to a step above being retarded, the other aspects still make it a hard fight for the guild. I've always thought it funny when people say stuff like "Boss X down after only our 3rd real attempt!!", but have been at that boss for weeks. The fight wasn't 2 wipes to learn and then kill them. The real fight was the weeks of recruiting and/or getting people to come to learn the boss. It's the whole thing, not just what happens from when you engage the mob to when win/wipe.

So when your guild defeats a boss that is difficult in a metagame/guild drama/whatever sense, you get that boosted sense of achievement. C'Thun is a boss that makes it harder for the guild to down as you can't carry as the quality of your players has to go up on average by cutting the crap ones, it also makes for lots of drama due to cuts, and people not wanting to come because they get frustrated by other people fucking it up. C'Thun IS hard, regardless of what you do in the encounter itself,so the sense of achievement is magnified. We've been saying for ever that it's all just DING! GRATZ! and hamsters hitting levers for food pellets, and it's true. Well, raiding is getting 40+ people to jump on a lever to get one big giant food pellet you all get to share in.

And I see nothing wrong with that.

And Here's The Deal, Calantus :

I Don't Disagree With What You Say.


However, I think that it should be an Opt in/Opt Out situation, which it is NOT at the moment, no matter what anyone says.  As you rightly pointed out, it makes the PEOPLE and herding the PEOPLE part of the game and part of the encounter.  This is Far, Far too random to be Fun for me.  Notice up the top where I said about it stopping being a game and starting being a sport ?  Yeah, read your post again and look at all the metaphors and analogies you used.  You're in a Sport, Mate.  And that's not really what I want.  I want a game.

How to fix that then ?

Scaleable Instances Please.  Let's have inclusion for EVERYONE.  If you wanna do the 40 man thing - You GO GIRL !  You want to jump in with five of your closest mates for a GAME ?  YOU GO TOO !

Wheee.

:)

What he said. I derive pleasure from tactics, from thinking on the feet and quick changes of strategy to accomodate a changed situation.

All things that, if tried in those raids, quickly wipe your ass. You have to prepared beforehand. You have to have you battleplan ready, everybody has to know where to stand and what to do. It a strategic game, where you know beforehand what has to happen to get the mob down. Or dying to find out a new piece of the big picture that lets you kill the mob in one of your next encounters. You simply can't turn around the fight if something unforseen happens and things start to go wrong. If things start to wrong, they go wrong and everything is over. No skill, no quick thinking, no calm demeanor and force of will can prevent that.

I've survived single groups where things went wrong and everything was headed downhill. But people pulled themself together, everybody gave 150% and at the end we were still standing despite the odds. Thats where I get my kick from.

Complety different game!

And I don't disagree with adding more options for non-raiders. What I do disagree with is directly scaled instances, because it takes away the loot incentive, and lessens the achievement incentive. I've gone over it before, but just to recap, there are a lot of fringe raiders who either don't mind raiding one way or the other, but do it because of the loot. There's also other people who like raiding, but would never know it if not for trying it out because of the loot. And with how spreadout the WoW population is, you can't afford to lose those fringe players or high end raiding would die on a lot of servers. So basically raiding has to be the ultimate thing or it dies (unless Blizz made [Raid] tagged servers for people to congregate to... but they'd never do that). And since Blizz wants to be everything to everyone, they don't want to kill it off.

Now that's not me disagreeing with scaling alltogether, but only with direct scaling. There should definately be 5/10 man versions of the raid dungeons that tie into the overall story so non-raiders aren't left out. Those instances should also give loot that makes the gap much narrower than it is for PVP reasons. Basically as long as non-raiders and raiders alike can partake in the ongoing story, both have roughly the same amount of things to do, and the loot gap isn't too bad I think that's all that can be asked for.

The current situation is mostly created by Blizzard playing catchup with the raiding game. If the game shipped with BWL/AQ, and then Naxx/Dire Maul were added afterwards then nobody would be complaining about the amount of time put into raiding vs non-raiding. Of course then there are loot complaints, but Blizz seems to be learning there. Then there are the lore inclusion complaints, which again could be solved by putting in the equivalent smaller instances.

Just making it so you can kill C'Thun with 5 or 40 and number of drops being scaled accordingly doesn't seem like the right approach to me.

Not even a sport really. More like a marathon.

So you're saying that if the wrong person's connection lags for a second, everyone dies and you waste two hours?

Ouch.

--GF

Pretty much. You don't waste 2 hours, you do waste about 15 minutes becuase you have to resurrect and re-buff the party. This *is* blizzard after all, they fuck you, but they do it with lube. Right now, it's a 6 minute run back to the end game boss (C'Thun), followed by the 15 minute buff/prepration to go again. Blizzard deemed it too long so next patch will be opening a door to let people skip that long run back.

Generally, if your main tank or other critical person disconnects you are going to wipe. There's simply no avoiding it. The real difficulty (and tragedy) is that in the later instances one or two fuckups from *anyone* in the 40 man raid can completely ruin it for you, there is no opportunity for the rest of the raid to pull out the stops and overcome it. Everyone does their job flawlessly or you start over, learn from your mistake, and try again. and again. and again.

Blizz chose not to scale the difficulty in the learning of it, since people can learn the instance very fast unless you put artificial cockblocks in like "you can only try this boss once an hour/day/week". They're forced (since people hate obvious cockblocks) to scale the difficulty in the execution by making the timings very tight and making you rely on every member of your raid to do their job perfectly. They put the delay not in the 'learning' phase, but in the 'execution' phase. This can get pretty demoralizing after a while and can easily tear guilds apart from the blame game and frustration at hammering the keys all day but not getting their pellet epics.

The loot scales too.  Obviously.

 :roll:

So, killing Raggy five man will give you a "Chance" of an Epixx, much like Strat.  Whereas Killing him full 40 and you've got your usual 4 guaranteed epixx plus whatever extra shit.

They could do a lot just by changing the loot tables now.  Make it so there is a very small chance that any of the epics or whatever "could" drop in a 5 or 10 man instance.  Make it so it is more D2'ish.  The 20+ instances can continue to practically guarantee epics, etc.

This at least lets the casual player feel like they have a chance.  At this point, I look at the instances that I CAN get into (5-10 man) as just a way to get to know my guildmates better, etc.  I never go in thinking I'm going to get some uber piece of armor or weapon, because there is absolutely no chance of it.  We end up just DE'ing everything.

It would be nice to have somebody get a 1 in 10 run instance get some item that makes everyone stop and stare in awe once in awhile.  You'd be amazed at the amount of pull that kind of jackpot mentality would get.  It certainly worked for D2.

It has been alluded to by several raiders here that they would not like that situation, as a catass non-raider could end up with the same goodies. There's two reasons that that doesn't work for them - one is that there is a potential for their exclusivity to be diluted by people who don't undergo the psychological trauma of dealing with a raid full of chucklebutts, the second is that some of the people currently "forced" to raid to get their epics will do the more convenient and interesting route, thus denying them easy access to a raid full of decent players. This clearly is not optimal for somebody who actually gets their jollies from large-scale raiding.

Or they could just stop releasing fucking raid dungeons in every patch and put in some new 5/10/20man content. I for one would love a new 10-manner.

I don't get the point in having 4 full tiers of equipment before expansion drops since there will be no real incentive to get any of it when you can just grind to roughly level 64-65, so the blues and epic world drops are better than Tier 3 stuff. Of course, Blizz has fucked its itemization up by making items from the 3 tiers better and better despite the fact they're the same rarity/item level and geared towards the same specs roughly.

A level 60 Epic Rogue Dagger from Naxx should NOT be significantly better than one from MC.

The only problem I'd have with scaled raid dungeons, is the inevitable whines from the 5-man groups when an Epic dropped and nobody could use it.  You already see this in regards to Scholo & Strath if, for example, you don't have a Druid but the Wildheart helm drops off of Gandling.   I can only imagine the complaining.

 "We spent X-hours doing MC in our 5-man and this is our 5th time killing Rag. First time dropping a purple and he dropped Fucking HUNTER pants! We didn't have a Hunter! Bliz fix this so it only drops gear usable by the folks in there!"

I don't see why there should be that much of a problem with raids that scale.  It could be that a 40 man raid would be rewarded by having more of the epics drop.  The detriment would be, as Merusk said, that smaller groups might find that there is no one in their party who could use certain loot.  If the dungeons can be made scalable to the number in the group, why not the loot?  As for complaining... they'd get that regardless.  That's what people do on game forums, for the most part.  I'm sure they're used to it.  If not, they've been in a coma since the first day WoW launched their board.

I can see how this might upset the apple cart for Cal and others, however.  They might, indeed, have difficulty filling a 40 man raid group if smaller groups can do the same dungeons.  Of course, this simply tells me that smaller groups might be more fun (certainly less frustrating and more social) and that more people would enjoy raiding if they could achieve it that way.  I know I'd be more likely to take part in a much smaller raid group and I have absolutely no interest in the groups with more than 8 or 10 people.  I have no way of knowing if I'm the majority here, or if Cal and Sogrinaugh are... I always bet on me, though!   :-D

If they go to the trouble of making the encounters scaleable, it wouldn't take much more effort to build the loot table for the instance to only drop epics usable by the classes in it.

You know, I know exactly how you feel.

Except I can wait, unsubscribed, for things to get better.

Doesn't really matter one way or another: that some group might not be able to use a BoP epic that drops is not a valid argument for larger raids. I've seen legendary stuff get DE'd because people don't want to spend the DKP on it. No biggie, on to the next encounter/dungeon/etc. There will probably less dissention among a half dozen people than among forty. If there's tears and foot stomping, pick a different group next time out.

There are two valid arguments for raids not scaling, and I find both to be selfish:

1. The large-scale raiders don't want people who don't measure up to their "standards" from having equivalent loot/kudos.

2. The large-scale raiders feel that they need people to be forced into their playstyle in order for it to remain viable.

Number two has more merit than number one, but its still selfish. If more people would rather do instances many more times with smaller groups than do them fewer times with larger groups, then the claims that most people want to raid because its fun start to look hollow.

I didn't think it was possible for WoW to get even less fun than the last time I checked up on it.

I can't believe people enjoy this shit.

Here's another interesting dynamic, and one I only just considered.

Most folks are arguing for the removal of "massive" from MMOs.  Smaller dungeons, smaller groups, less time, less headaches.  It seems, what is really being asked for is a Single Player game you can enojoy with your friends.


 
True, and so long as the same mechanic were applied to all raids, I don't see the problem there.  Hell they've already got some pseudo code doing this, so you don't see Shaman stuff as Alliance or Paladin stuff as Horde off of bosses that can drop both.

 The only problem I've got with it is from a 'changing the nature of the beast' angle.  Again, it's more single-player game mechanics dropped into a more massivly-scaled game.  Not neccarily a bad thing, and probably something that needs to happen to TRULY create a "next gen" game.

You're in an instance.  You've already left the MM part behind.  I don't see that argument as anything but circular, at best.

Good point, wasn't an argument tho just a thought I'd had about the whole process. 

Still, I'd rather see raid dungeons and the like instanced than things go the GW route, if only because GW lacks even the minor community WOW servers have.

Many MMO players don't try to find fun, though.  They'll take the easiest path, and any fun they have will be incidental.  Of course, when they max their character, they will not generally go back to find the harder paths that are perhaps more entertaining.  That's what makes this stuff so damn hard.

If we look at a raid group and sum up the time they spend- perhaps two weeks to learn each encounter, about four hours every raid; not counting meta-game activities like organization, forums, tactics, etc.  We're looking at what can be weeks or months at a time between epic drops for each person.  What makes them keep at it?  The social elements- vent, forums, the excitement of 40 people acting together, etc.

Is it readily imaginable for someone to go through a 5-10 man instance for weeks or months at a time to get a single drop that is itemized at the same quality, and to enjoy the experience?  Are they going to have any fun?  That's the problem with "scaling down".  There are, by the way, epics one can find outside of large raids which are as good, but do you know how often they drop?  At about that same equivalent rate as a 40 man raid, per person.  Rep grinds are a naked reflection of how unentertaining this is.

Now, I do hear that Blizzard is tinkering with a massive 10-man, Kharazan, for the Burning Crusade, which will have a raid instance timer.  This might make for some interesting concessions to those who don't like to raid but are very organized.  I don't expect that the very general picture will change, however; the harsh reality of Content consumption won't allow it to.

I might be able to tolerate them, if I could exchange my accumulated rest exp for faction. 2 weeks of rest exp are equal to 1 week of grinding, or somesuch.

That would certainly be an attractive change.  Xping an alt is not bad at all on rested xp.  Boy, do I hate rep grinding though.

All over the map here, so bear with me.

The loot issue of scaling a 40-man instance to 5 people could easily be bypassed by using the token system, similarly to what they've done in ZG and AQ, and will be doing in Naxxramas.

On raiding in general:
As I've said before, I enjoy raiding right now. My guild raids 3 days a week; we take a 'casual except when raiding' mentality that has put us 3-4th on the server Horde-side in terms of progression - we're still beating our heads on Nefarion (yes the server is a backwater). We have a pretty large roster, but a fairly small (I'd estimate 40-50) number of regular raiders. Peoples' friends are in the guild, their girlfriends, their little brothers, etc.

I hate grinding reputation. I, for the most part, won't do it (exception: battlegrounds, because the rewards are inevitable as I rank up in the pvp system).

Conclusion: sure, raiding can really suck if you're in a catassy guild that raids every night of the week, or if you're in a drama-filled raiding alliance, or a lot of other situations, but when you're in there with 39 other people that you for the most part enjoy being around and shooting the shit with in vent, it is far from hellish. It's fun. And it's not just the people that make it fun - it's the variety of encounters, formulation of new tactics and strategies, it's the sense of accomplishment you feel at having overcome significant odds (random BWL lag bullshit, people disconnecting, bad class balance, sleepy tanks) and still having been victorious.

You may not like it; you may think it's bullshit and throw around names, but it's fun for some people.

Now, as a sort of postscript, I'll add this: raiding is weird. It's not like the rest of the game. It's artificial. Rogues rarely use Feint before raid bosses, Hunters use FD to survive a bad pull, Priests might use fade before raids, I've never played one, you never worry about resistances (maybe for pvp.. maybe) but the similar strain here is that the things you are used to doing become different when you raid. Things matter that didn't before, and things that were useless become valuable. But, quite honestly, I can't really think of another means of advancement. Devs can only create content so fast. Player-created content usually sucks. The last thing an MMO publisher wants is for people to hit the end and be told, bam, that's it, the end. Go play another game. How do we continue?

That goes both ways though... a lot of classes are forced to only use a tiny subset of their skills when raiding. Also, my rogue uses feint plenty in 5-man content, it IS needed along with vanish for aggro-dumping mobs and  bosses. Ditto with priests using fade in heavy AOE situations. Resists are extremely useful pre-raids, considering the fire elementals in BRD (a level 55! instance) can wipe a level 60 group without banish or frost trap, having 100+ FR on the tank helps a ton. Same with doing the 45min baron run, switching to shadow resist gear just before engaging the baron can mean the difference between success and failure, especially if you don't get enough prep time. Same goes for Felwood consumables, flasks, resist potions etc.

As far as I've seen, in raids, rogues never get to use stealth (!), blind, evasion (mobs can 1-hit you) and stuns in general. Pallies never get to use divine fury / offtanking, not to mention they barely ever get to actually melee mobs as a melee class. Warlocks slap a curse on the main target and hit shadowbolt over and over (dots are a lost cause with 16 debuff slots for the entire raid) and use rain of fire for the occasional aoe part, and banish of course. Their pets might as well not exist except for the phase shifted imp. Mages just spam frostbolt or AM, with the occasional blizzard for the aforementioned AOE. Priests heal and ONLY heal, unless they're the raid's one designated shadowpriest for shadow weaving. Druids are always in humanoid form healing, barring unusual situations (ie. not enough warriors for core packs), moonkin and feral forms are out. Shaman are just glorified totem bots that spam lhw / hw on the main tank. Hunters autoshot with aimed/multi when cooldowns are up, feigning every minute, without the pet of course. Warriors just do the same things as in 5-mans (sunder, block, revenge), but they always have plenty of rage to keep spamming sunder and HS no matter what. (in some 5-10man dungeons, managing rage is extremely important)

Now of course there are exceptions (most bosses in aq20 come to mind, as well as bwl and some aq40 bosses I suppose), but overall I'd say raiding isn't a more varied experience than small group content. Just the fact that mobs can 1-shot you if you aren't a tank leaves little room for error, shutting down a lot of class skills. (fear is actually surprisingly useful in AQ20, but do you use it anywhere else in raids? Except for the panther boss that is.)

Then again, I've only been to 20man raids, MC, some of the world dragons and Kazzak/Azuregos, so who knows, maybe BWL, AQ40 and Naxx are completely different. (I've watched a c'thun vid, and that actually looks like an interesting fight -- too bad 90% of the playerbase will never ever get to see it, eh?)


-- Z.

My point wasn't that gameplay is more varied in raids; it was simply that it's different - something you illustrated very well. It seems I actually meant to type "Things matter that didn't before, and things that were valuable become useless." It's not better, it's not qworse, it's just drastically different.

It seems Blizzard has realised that they were tending to generalise their raid content after Molten Core and began to vary the fights a lot more with later content. Some of the newer bosses can't be tanked (Buru and Ossirian in AQ20), or can only be tanked by ranged classes (Ayamiss in AQ20) or casters (one of the Twin Emperors in AQ40). Unfortunately it seems as though they're not willing to go back and amend the content they've already created.

By the way, Rogues do use stealth in Blackwing Lair to disarm traps in between Vaelastraz and Broodlord.

Yes it is.


That's the problem. If Blizzard cater to a minor subset of players, there's no coming back, because it's Blizzard, and their development pace is slower than continental drift. Devs may only be able to create content so fast, but Blizzard devs cannot even keep up with that.

I think that if Blizzard doesn't start doing something about the end game dillemma now, then it'll eventually kill their game. At least in the West. Being the first MMO to attract so many casuals and so many pvp'ers will be the very thing that hurts it in the end.

Though I don't enjoy it myself, I'll admit that they crafted a nice Diku clone in the 1-59 period....But it was a horrible miscalculation on their part to hire who they did to include the rest (yeah, yeah, it's been said before). Their playerbase is already dumbfounded. Most of the weeping and gnashing of teeth displayed on their forums is at least indirectly related to raids and end game itemization. And those who don't bother with gearing up and raiding are going to get tired of emote dancing in Goldshire. They'll eventually graduate to better sandboxes.

This isn't wishful thinking either. It's just a fact that most people can not cope with or even fucking like the process of raiding. Not even a little. Not very many people outside the most masochistic, oppressed, war torn Koreans at least (and if that's how Blizzard plans on maintaining success, then so be it). Sooner or later the others will find a way to pry themselves away (probably with the help of other games).

World of Starcraft should be done by then.

Really, WoW doomsaying. I'm trying not to laugh too hard.

 :dead_horse: :cthulu: :rimshot: :hello_kitty_2: :roffle:

I would have laughed along with you 6 months ago, but I'm really seeing it as being in the realm of possibility now. Along with Blizzard's help, all you need is two similar games (that are promoted well enough, and don't make the same end game mistakes as Blizzard) to chip away at their numbers.

And of course they must provide ponies.

No ponies. It's just a matter of catering to some of WoW's playerbase as well as, or even better than, Blizzard can. Especially the PvP'ers and PvE casuals - The two things that Blizzard kind of missed the boat on (at least for post 60). It's not an impossible thing. I'm pretty confident that Mythic's capable of at least offering something more appealing on the PvP side of things.

Secondly, there's a bunch of MMO newbies playing that game. Sooner or later, they're going to veer their heads towards other things. Just like we all did to our first games. Those "other things" just have to be un-shitty and not too niche. No fucking way that many people are going to stick in WoW while new, promising, shiny trailers of other games are being shoved in their faces. Especially while they observe all the bullshit they're putting up with in WoW.

[edit] Of course, this is all assuming that Blizzard stays on the same course. I opened up my original post saying "if Blizzard doesn't do something about their end game problems now, then...."

It's still possible that Blizzard does fix things, and starts recognizing who their majority playerbase is. And if they do, they'll still remain the success that they are. I just don't see how they could if they didn't.

Is there a reason, other than they're just too cheap, that Blizzard doesn't hire a small army of devs so that they can crank out more  PvP/soloist/single group/raid content at the same time instead of slowly alternating?

There's two: Tigole and Furor. They're set in the game they want to work on, and steadfastly ignore or bullshit to make the numbers fit their extremely narrow view. And management has no reason to dig deeper than whatever the two say at meetings since subs are so huge. I'd bet a billion dollars that the people in a position to make the decision are completely unaware that people want content like that. There will never, ever, ever be non-high end raid content of any consequence in WoW as long as either of them is involved with the game in any way. The closest they will get is stuff similar to the cenarion faction grind, which is even less pleasant than raiding. And by mostly ignoring PvP until far too late and then coming up with a broke-dick system for that, they've pretty much locked themselves into an infinitely spiraling system of exponentially mudflating itemization -  that you have to raid in a specific order order, one raid at a time to get.

Stray is right. Right now, a pretty substantial number of people are still subbed because there's nothing better out right now. Not that they really enjoy the game any more, or ever think they'll be involved in raids or PvP, just that out of what's available, rolling another alt is more fun. I just rolled another alt on Warson Horde. The number of people I play with that are in the same boat is staggering, and much larger than most people would think. It won't even take a copuple games. Just one that's similar enough but without the suck will pull big numbers pretty quickly. Unless they manage to fuck it up by throwing in a hideous grind or making items>all, Warhammer is going to get a lot of people. It's not going to kill WoW, or at least not kill it fast, but it's going to get big numbers. And with the totality of "so what" about the expansion that's taking 3 years to come out, it's not going to pick up any steam. Hurray, an expansion that's for gigantic high end raid groups. The whole thing only appeals to people who'll never stop playing anyway.

Few I can think of.

* No business case 'aka being too cheap'.  Right now they are making piles of cash for being glacial at developing content.  To get this off the ground would require someone to get some figures which say 'If we hire 20 people, set em up, get em PCs etc, we can make more than the $2M per year it would cost to pay these guys'.  I doubt very much if they have the market research figures which support that.  This may change when they finally start losing subs (whenever that is).
* 'If it aint broke, dont fix it' - Blizzard is famous for producing content very slowly.  Everyone knows this - and its worked fine for Blizzard for years.  Why stop now?
* Loss of control.  Without knowing the internal workings of Blizzard, I'd say theres a good chance the reason they have a pretty consistent feel across all their games is that a small group of designers oversee all new work.  You can't hire another 20 devs/designers without either diluting the Blizzard/Warcraft 'brand' or running risks of producing low quality software.
* QA.  Besides from their awful server architecture, generally Blizzard software is pretty solid in terms of bugs/crashes etc.  Throwing in more devs raises the possibility of rolling out crashing software, which would damage the Blizzard/WoW brand. 

And while they have 6Million+ subs quite happily paying for the slow rollout of new content, this aint gonna change.

People like to point at Tigole and Furor, but Furor does quest design, and I don't even know what Tigole does, but he isn't the lead designer.  To assume that two members -notable for little else than their time in EQ- of a team are in fact holding the reins of power is probably a bit of a stretch.

In regards to all the other stuff- the same argument has been made for almost a year now.  'WoW-but-better' doesn't seem to be all that easy to make, and it'll be quite some time before one could arrive regardless.

Then one looks at up-and-coming stuff: some decent AD faction stuff in 1.11 for all those Scholo runs everyone did; 1.12 planned pvp system revamp; Burning Crusade- 10 man epic instance on a raid timer; flying mounts; plans for revitalized outdoor pvp through world objectives; etc., blah blah blah.  Lots of buzz.  Doomcasting at this point is an exercise in some very wishful thinking.

I didn't say WoW but better. I'm just saying a game could come along that snatches up some of the players that WoW inherited (players which even Blizzard didn't intentionally design for, but just happen to have atm). Mainly the end game casuals and the PvP'ers. All of the little things Blizzard has done for these players reeks of afterthought. Another developer could come along, design the shit the right way from the ground up, and end up making something more appealing.

[edit]

Or in other words, if anything, there's a lot of insight to be gained about the MMO market because of WoW. Insight that Blizzard didn't even have at first.

An interesting thing I've noted from spending a bit of time on test. People get a character loaded with full tier 2 armor, equivalent weapons, and an epic mount, and what do a large percentage of them to? Try to get those characters attuned to and run MC. Does this support the "inspiration" theory a lot of people put forward about high end raiding? I have no clue. I just noticed it during the time I had the global lfg channel turned on (and what a retarded idea that is)

Off topic a bit; What is Blizzard's problem with developing a half decent lfg system? Must be a bit of passive-aggressive behavior on the part of whoever is tasked with it, IMO because no other explanation could possibly account for their failure to implement something in almost 2 years of running.

Heh. How about last names? That's even easier.

Well there's 2 possiblities that I see.   Either none of those folks have ever been inside of MC, and they see test server as the best place to get PUGs, just so they can experience the content; or, raiding doesn't suck as much as the jaded here and the vocal 'casuals' on Blizzard boards seem to think.

Frankly, given the choice of 40-man raids or 10-man PUGs for Purples, I'll take the 40-man.  Things that size need to be scheduled, which means you can, oh I dunno, plan for them.   I know when my guild's running MC or Ony, and I know ahead of time 1) if I'm able to make it that day and 2) if I'm going or not based on who else signs up. 

That's far far better to me than logging in, spending 1-2 hours trying to find 10 of the 'right' people (and smaller raids are less forgiving on 'optimal' make-up)  and then running that instance.   Yeah, you can schedule them, but given the # of folks who don't show-up or have problems and then need to be replace for a 40-man, you're going to have the same problem in a 10-man.

You're Insane.

Agreed.

While some fixate on the "perfect 10-man group," we find it challenging enough to just take whoever is available at the time in the guild to fun them.  If you have 4 priests, 2 rogues, and 4 paladins, it is all the more challenging.

I have 1.5 hours each night to do something.  Period.  You can talk all you want about how great 40-man groups are.  It takes 1.5 hours just to get the many people together and to the instance, let alone running the instance.

Best thing ever?  Introducing those "beat the clock" quests on the 5 and 10 man instances.  Our guild is having a blast on those.  More of that please!

That was what I meant by ponies.  People have theorized, complained, wished and designed for 10 years now, and WoW is the first game with the breakthrough audience that everyone's been looking for.  For someone else to waltz in and make all the right design decisions AGAIN, especially given this industry's penchant for learning the wrong lessons, is pretty unlikely for a while.

By the same token, WoW HAS taught a lesson or three, so the chances for that game to come along are better than they were.  I wouldn't look for it for at least 5 years though.


This is pretty much true for any MMOG out there.  The question is, does the industry learn the right lessons?  I can almost guarantee that the next MMOG will have exclamation points above quest givers' heads, but will the quests be worth doing?

No, I'm sociable.  Something this crowd has always lacked.  :evil:

I'm not saying it's the best thing ever, I'm saying it's the best thing for me.   I'm amazed you get anything done if you have 1.5 hours, PERIOD, Dren.  It takes that long to get an UBRS group together and then wait for everyone to assemble from wherever they are.   I know the MC raid is from 8pm to 12pm, with invites around 7-7:30, and we run the whole place in those 4 hours.  I know it's Friday night, every week.  If I have plans, I don't sign-up.

   Other than those 4 1/2 hours, I don't have to do crap to get the purple lewtz. (Which is all this is about, anyway.)  Hell, I don't even have to login for 99% of the week.   Yes, this is much preferable to the hours I put-in to get the blues I've been replacing out of DM, UBRS, LBRS, Schol & Strath, or the shitton of hours I put in just to get to Knight-Captain and get that crappy blue breastplate because, hey, there's 10,000 hunters and nobody needs another one and running as a priest outside of guild groups is a short path to insanity.

Im going to have say you people theorizing wows downfall and saying its all raid content are pretty much 100% wrong.  Most people don't raid because they have this same "i gotta spend every waking moment in wow and be in a guild full of assholes" attitude towards raiding people here have.  You couldn't be farther from the truth, and theres very few of you.  Every single week theres more and more guilds running MC, as big as wow is i seriously doubt their total player base is growing at the same level their raiding player base is.  By the time the expansion has been out a month or so i would guess 80 to 90% of their players will have experienced all the pre expansion raid content, with the last 10-20% being the "raiding sucks, tigole sucks, and wow is doomed because theres too many raids" crowd. 

If you don't believe me please post this same poll in your realm forums now and then again two months from now, i would be willing to bet the number of guilds that has killed Ragnaros has doubled in those two months.

No, you get to play during prime time hours in a a solid chunk. If you do not get to do that, none of the content they're producing is doable. At all, in any way shape, or form. If a game is supposed to be playable 24 hours a day, then design it to be. As it stands, the servers may as well only be up from 6:00 pm to 1:00 am. If you can not play during that time slot regularly, you will never get the chance to experience any of the high level content aside form the 5-man stuff. Even the 10 man crap they're talking about is unrealistic.

As far as message board pols here or on server boards, it a waste of time. Only a tiny percentage of players read or post to them. Besides, we numbers available from a neutral source available in this thread. Even being liberal with the margin of error and saying it underestimates the number of raiders by 45-40%, it's still a minority of players. Will more people be raiding in six months? Sure. It's literally the only thing to do in the game after 60 besides faction grinding. Crafting? need to group to go to instances? PvP, you need the purple gear.

Things might improve during the day with school letting out, but trying to do a PUG MC run with a bunch of 13 year-olds is a whole different topic.

No doubt because most of them have had drama-queen guild-kills and have reformed under new names in the meantime.

I miss a lot of ZGs because they are no longer scheduled. I don't have the desire to be on 24/7 doing random things so when someone gets the urge to just run ZG and throws one together on the spot I am usually not on. Funny that the 20-man content is less accessable to me currently than the 40-man content. But hey whatever, I'm sure if you are that much of a catass to be on enough it doesn't matter to you that they can be thrown together at all times and don't need schedules. For us normal people it helps that the logistics of 40-mans allows us to plan our playing time and means we only have to log on when we are raiding.

So the people who play things that require less time, less people, less diligence, and less organization are the real catasses?

Greentext or not, color me confused.

You pair are quite literally off your fucking heads.

Getting a 5 man or a 10 man together is harder than getting a 40 man together is basically what you're saying.  For reasons of time, inclination or the fabled 'class mix'.

Sorry chaps, that's absolute and total fucking horseshit.

1.5 Hours to get a UBRS group together ?  Are you fucking KIDDING me ?  I've been running A LOT of UBRS recently because almost all my guild are limping in to the Onyxia Attunement.  It never takes more than 10 minutes to get the group and maybe 10 more to get everyone to the entrance and summoned.

However, for the sake of argument, let's say you're right :

If that seriously IS the case, then don't you think that something, somewhere, has gone very, very wrong ?  How can Blizzard possibly claim to be available to the casual player if that's the case ?  At all ?  Certainly, the casual player after 60, if you are correct, can be quite clearly put in the 'Going to cancel their Sub almost straight away' category and surely that's not good for the game ?

You'll find that in a raid guid, at least my raid guild, a lot of people really do just show up for raids, and are on minimally otherwise. The majority of people who're online on off-nights are people who are PvPing or trying to find 5-10 man instance groups, and there aren't a whole lot of the latter (mostly alts) because most everyone has better gear than they can get via those instances.

So you may be able to get an UBRS group in 10 minutes, but it takes me a lot longer, and I'm lucky if we even have healers online.

But then it was your choice to join a raid guild. Basically you want to do everything. Tough luck!

As your server matures, it becomes a problem in general.  You're not going to get an UBRS group quickly once everyone has what they want from there.

  My server's been open since day one, and even the slow people have gotten at least one 60 by now.  Where there used to be 4-5 UBRS groups forming in primetime, there are now 2, possibly 3, but there are never enough healers.

  The last group I did to help some guild members and allies was comprised of 4 Pallies, 2 Hunters, my Warrior, a mage, a warlock and one priest.  (We didn't complete the run, the beast pwned us 3 times.)  That was the group it took an hour and a half to get together.. even shouting in Ironforge general and 2 guild chats we were only able to scrounge up the one pure healer, and were forced to use the paladins instead.  Why? Nobody wants to run UBRS anymore, and healers are notoriously shy of PUGs unless they REALLY need something.

Then there are instances you run until you have what you need, then you're done with them. If you want LBRS or BRD on my server, you better have some helpful guildmates, or be willing to wait a long ass time.

Let's take this in another direction. Suppose a game like Warhammer manages the following five things:

1. It works - its stable, and free of catastrophic bugs.
2. It maintains the humour of the original license.
3. The graphics are attractive and work with video cards that aren't absurdly expensive.
4. RvR/GvG combat is on par with DOAC's.
5. The 'grind' is no worse than WoW's.

How many people will stay with WoW (in its current form)?

I already plan on quitting wow when warhammer comes out, sometime in late 2007.  You can't play any game forever, if i get 4 years of play time out of wow i would consider that a huge success.  If we are talking about a complete newbie having to choose between the two then sadly i would have to say that warhammer being a pvp game as opposed to a game with pvp like wow would end up pushing away as many people as it attracts.

I will not stay one way or other but I think that I would give Warhammer Online a shot. I haven't played WoW for two weeks now. (and by that I mean not even visiting my guild's website or the forums). It has reinforced my decision to quit at least temporarily. At the BWL stage WoW is extremely boring and cockblocks like Vael have nearly caused our raid to dissolve. It was nice but now the drama is killing my fun. hearding 40+ people to kill the latest foozle has become work and I do not want to do it any longer.

What he was saying is that 40 man raids are scheduled, a guild that works well will have those 40 people there are ready to go at the scheduled time.  I would imagine if you where to schedule 5-10 man runs it would be just as easy, but nobody does.  I would say 1 hour is about right to get a good group to run a 5-10 man instance without previous notice, your case is different of course since you are keying for ony your ubrs runs are the equivalent of scheduled raids.  A player in my guild could play 10 hours a week and not miss a single important raid (4 hours bwl X2, 3 hours MC), and plenty of them do.  If you login during non raid times you'll find 8-15 people online at most, compared to 50 before raids.

Which boils down once again to 'People don't do anything but Raiding because there's no reason to'.

Which, I submit, is wrong and not good.

4 x 2 + 3 = 10?

Time is different in BlackWing Lair.  And if you think that's bad, just wait till they release the Caverns of Time.

 :-D

LF399M TTC PST (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/11/28)

Oops :P

I find it easier to do higher math with my shoes off.

My personal theory is that meeting stones were the pet project of someone high up at Blizzard, and nobody else there has the guts to pull them and replace them with /lfg.

Yes, my 1.5 hours a night limits me substantially.  Typically, I just work on leveling my alts.  About once every 2 weeks I get in on a 5 or 10 man instance.

Scheduled instances for 20 or 40 man?  Nope, I typically can't get  39 people to run during my exact window of opportunity.  Strange that.  I have a strict window that I am able to play.  Anything outside of that, nope.  That means that even if something is getting started one hour into my play session, I can't join because I have 30 minutes left.

For those that say people play 10 hours and get exactly 10 hours of instance play are extremely hard to believe.  I won't call you a liar though.  I just have never seen, experienced, or heard of anyone logging in directly outside of an instance, stepping inside and starting their killing.  The game I know about requires a lot of preparation time such as selling items, buying items, repairs, travelling around, crafting, collecting, farming, rep building, etc.  Even if something is scheduled, it typically starts late, because you can't start with 15 out of 20 or 30 out of 40.  You wait.

I've found that when people say they played for 3 hours, they actually are only counting the amount of time they got to actually "play."  The other hour or two was the stuff that was just preparation or travelling.  That seems to slip people's minds.  That's not an option for me.

When you know exactly when the raid is going to happen why is that so hard to believe?  We raid at the exact same times on the exact same days each and every week.  Its not the same situation you describe, since you can only play at a specific time rather than 1.5 hours whenever you wish, but i personally have done exactly that on occassion when i didnt feel like playing much outside of raids. 

Shrug.  What's being described is a problem symptomatic to every MMO I can think of.  Once again, Blizzard never claimed to have revolutionized anything.  Content is generally more accessible, though.

In the same vein, I don't believe that anything short of a content revolution with WHO will make a very tremendous impact; DAoC didn't kill EQ.

I wouldn't be afraid of one game killing another. DAOC did diminish the importance of EQ overall, as much by bringing new players to the fold as by picking up people who'd already "churned" out of EQ subs. I bet there's already a million or more "former WoW players" out there ready for something else that lives up to their expectations. Every service provider (hence online game) has churn. What WAR (the preferred acronym, not WHO) will likely do is take advantage of the now much larger MMO base and become a very significant player. Just as EQ stopped growing rapidly (but didn't decline a vast amount) when DAOC and other games of similar quality hit the market, so it likely will be with WoW. At some point, there'll be new shiny of whats perceived to be acceptable quality, and it'll cut into the growth of WoW. I dare say that there a lot of people playing the end-game content in WoW because its all that's there (or perceived to be there) that will feed their fix for social gameplay. A proportion of them will probably go play an RvR game if its available.

Or we could go back to trying to see everything in black and white and gainsay one another for another 92 pages. That works too.

'Content' is overrated. Players are the real content for the time being. Half of the people who play for 'content' never play through any of it or see any of it anyways. And most of the people who are running through all of that 'content' sure as hell aren't doing it for the sake of doing it.

Eh, the only contention I have is that my impression from WAR (sorry Righ) is that it will focus on RvR but still have a fairly wide swathe of content.  PvE is mentioned with the specific qualification that it will not sideline PvP, but it'll probably be there in all the traditional forms of which we are familiar.  Essentially, I don't think WAR will be the "endgame casual's" solution; the same problems they have with WoW will probably surface there. 

Of course, the RvR might make casual PvP in WAR more interesting than WoW's BG's, which are pretty boring by now.  Of course, that system is getting revamped soon.

I think we are essentially in agreement, but that is not very interesting. :(

EDIT TO STRAY'S EDIT: I see most content as essentially a means of bringing people together, so revolution in my mind = entertaining stuff to do that involves every player along the spectrum far better than has ever been done, or something.

But, given that their PvE will be sidelined by RvR, the problems will surface sooner. So say hello to huge PvE grind!

"On occasion" I can beleive.  As a playstyle 100% of the time, I can't. 

/agree with Dren. Same boat, different harbor.

Let me give you an example. Under our "Weekly Raid Schedule" there is a post every week. Here was "May 21 - May 27"
Invites go out 15m before raid start and it's expected that you're online for that, and that you're in the zone or instance 5m before raid start. There's a DKP award for being in zone 'on time' so people make an effort not to show up late. I'm an enchanter/miner (enchanter for sharding). My money comes solely from BWL clears (20-30g per run) and the occasional disenchant from equipment upgrades. Nexus crystals net me ~75-80g per which covers additional expenses, since the guild pays for repairs on 'new content' (defined as less than 4 boss kills). At the end of the raid, I take the portal to ironforge, repair, send repair cost reimbursement in-game mail, and then log. My hearthstone goes to cenarion hold in slithius, so I just log in before the raid, normally around 8pm EST, spend 15m in IF buying reagents, selling, AH, then either hearth out to slith or take the flight point to Thorium point. It takes under 5m to get to either AQ or BWL/MC zone-in standing in IF.

Our raid is normally full. If it's not, it's only down by a few people and we clear trash while waiting for more. For a full raid, those who are on and not in the raid itself are in 'waitlist', join a channel, and recieve DKP. They can play an alt or are asked to do specific tasks (currently, if you are in waitlist you are required to get revered with argent dawn in preparation for naxx). If you are online you must be willing to raid and can be called upon to sub at any time, most people log out their mains at the zone-in and play alts, or go PvP and rely on the hearthstone back.

I'm not sure what's so unbelievable about this to you. In my own case, nearly 90% of my playtime recently has been raiding. Our guild schedules raids for 8:00 pm, meaning that the first pull will be at 8 and you better be there and be ready. Raids last between 3 and 5 hours. I log on 20-25 min before the raid starts and I log off 5-10 min after the raid ends. I no longer want or need anything from MC or BWL so until Naxx testing started I was doing nothing except the 2 AQ40 raids we schedule each week, giving me a total playtime of about 10hrs/week.

You just stated what I said.  You spend 25-35 minutes outside of the instance.  That's already a third of my window.  That is all I was saying.  Those that say 10 hours played is 10 hours spent in the instance are leaving out a lot of information.  25-35 minutes of prep and afterwork is a long time, in my opinion.

That's probably the biggest difference.  25-35 minutes is nothing to a raider.  It is subtantial to a casual.  In my case it is even worse as I can log in many times during the week but for short periods of time.  So, that equates to around 2.5 hours a week of just getting ready or recovering from instances.

I'm not saying that playstyle is wrong.  It is fine.  If you have fun with it, great!  I don't think Blizzard will go out of business catering to the raiders.  I never said that.  I just stated that there are those of us that do not fit that template.  Hell, I still play it though.  I can find enough to satisfy me for the time being.

My wish is that they just recognize the casuals and continue to give us things to do outside of raiding.  My hope has always been in the crafting, but it doesn't look like that is possible.  They've only created higher raiding content for crafters.  It would be nice to be able to support a raiding guild from a casual standpoint, but that isn't really possible.

Nobody here's said that, though.  We've all said "there's X amount of time before that the raid starts."  It doesn't invalidate our position that we only NEED to be online X # of hours. That said, Anything is bound to be outside of your window, given that it's so small.

Well, I don't really see 10hrs a week of playtime as being anything but "casual" even if 90% of it is spent in 40 man raiding zones. The issue here is really the ability to clear off a 4-5 hr block of time even if it is only once a week. That certainly is a problem for many, and the 20 man raid zones have really done nothing to alleviate that. The sub one hour raid zone is a great idea, and why we have not seen more Onyxia style raid zones since release is a mystery to me.

We are all agreeing, but this is what my original comment was derived from.


Other than the funky math, it eluded to me that the time spent in an instance = time spent in game.  Unless the prep time is being included in those estimates, something seemed off.  Perhaps MC can be done in 2.5 hours.  I really do not know.  Maybe I just misunderstood the statement.

I just know that when somebody tells me, "Hey, come on and do XXX, it will only take YYY!" I end up spending YYY + a substantial amount of time realistically.  I normally just add 20% more to any estimate I'm told and end up right more often than not.  What I do know is that people in my guild that are in an MC group will be in MC when I log on and still be there when I log off.

People who are farming BWL and AQ40 can do MC in 2.5 hours, sure.  My guild gets through it in a 4-hour window, primarily because we've still got a lot of people with blues (and some with greens).  If we had the uber BWL stuff, we'd cut a lot of time out of that because the power curve on the equipment is that great.  Similarly to how the few times we've had to run UBRS and had a full group of 10 MC-equipped people, the run itself took about 1-1.5 hours. (once the freakin' group was assembled)  The biggest delays were the Rend event and not having more than one mage, so we couldn't just AOE the Drak room down.

The 2nd half of my comment was in green because it was hyperbole, and I was being cheeky about how everybody calls raiders catasses whereas I play less now that I raid so surely everyone else is the real catass. It actually is much easier for me to raid our 40 mans. Smaller instances you don't get that many going around (my realm has ques at primetime, so we aren't talking lack of players), and when you do chances are they already have everything they need other than a class you aren't playing. They were made way less accessable once they cut them down to 5-mans. UBRS is very rarely run, 2-3 on a good night, and maybe one of those will kill Drakk. Maybe. When I got an alt keyed for ony I had to grab 4 guildies to fill up the 5th pug I had tried as it was falling apart at Rend. ZG and AQ20 are run in "off hours" and done when someone says "hey who wants to do ZG/AQ20?" and enough people answer. I very very rarely get into those because the only way you DO make the majority is if you are playing at all hours. The only ones I can make are the ones that are made right after raids and I'm still on.

The fact is, being in a raiding guild enables me to play less because I don't have to be on at all hours to try and catch the groups that are going and wasting time on groups that fuck up. If I want to I can quite literally log on for a raid and be off in 3-5 hours even taking into account delays from people bein late. AND I make money doing it, so I don't have to farm or w/e else on the side if I don't want to. Last week I played for about 6 hours, as I cbf'd going to BWL or MC and only caught our 2 AQs that week. Yeah yeah, block of time and all that. But I can play a block of hours and so can many other people. Between all the raiders, all the pvpers who play even more, and all the people who could raid but don't like it I'd say people with the capacity to devote 3-5 hour blocks would be the majority.

All that is true if you do Pick-Up Groups. I always was more of a fixed group player. I had the same advantages you do. We met at a predefined time and had our fun.

Uh, I don't know what you're smoking or how much your particular server sucks, but there are more people than ever running Scholo/Strat/LBRS/UBRS now that the caps have been changed. I get invited by random people to runs practically a half dozen times when I log on during peak hours. I've been in way way more UBRS pickup groups since the patch.

I'm not buying this "Raiding takes less time" stuff.

Does not make intuitive sense that raiding would take less time. One major reason -- you have many more variables (people) to cause delays. Saying that it takes less time to get in a raid and get going with a guild group vs a PUG is reasonable, however I think that position is ignoring Dren's point. I think his point is that for people who cannot dedicate large blocks of time, raiding is just not feasible as a way of advancing or acquiring items. It also effectively limits his ability to take advantage of the vast majority of post-60 content. I have seen this repeatedly in every game I have been involved in, the higher you go in level, the more time per session you need to dedicate to advancement, not to mention the increased number of people it requires to be involved. In my opinion, that is one of the major flaws of these style games for people like me who want the experience of an MMO without the impact on my personal life.

Yep, as many have stated, this is the main problem. For me it's twofold - I can't be locked at my PC for that long a stretch without totally ignoring my wife and two children, who deserve to have priority over a game. The normal pre 60 game allows me to go AFK when I need to or just log out whenever. And aside from the time I owe my family - even my own personal preference is not to be stuck in one spot until the ride is over. Once I've been sitting at the PC for 3 hours or so I just get antsy, being stuck in a raid for 4, 5 hours is just claustrophobic in a way to me.

So I'll continue to stick with replaying the 1-59 game with alts because I can control my session playtime instead of the game and needs of a group controlling my session playtime.

Nono, I'm saying I play less now than I raid. I'm sure if you played very casually what I play now might seem like a lot to you, but it's actually quite small for me. The raid timers mean I can't play as much as I would if I was doing an activity that wasn't limited. Raiding != Catass is what I'm saying. Unless your definition of catass is 3-5 hours a night 3-4 nights a week, in which case you are wrong. Right now the only catass requiring activity is hitting the highest PVP ranks.

Now that I am a raider also, I would say thats about how much I play. Its much less than I used to play before becoming a hard core raider.

I define catass as somebody that chooses to play rather than take care of the essential things in life like personal hygiene.  So, no, I do not consider most any of you catasses.

I do define anybody that spends more than 2 hours in one play session as hardcore.  Yes, that includes doing it just once a week.  Outside of T.V. or a movie, I can't think of any activity that people do for that long, so it stands out to me.  Ok, my wife does scrapbooking every once in awhile for hours on end and sometimes overnight.  Yes, I would call her hardcore too!

Hardcore is not a derogatory term in my opinion.  Hell, I'm hardcore at heart.  I certainly could and have spent more than 2 hours playing.  On those rare occasions that I get a weekend to myself without wife and kids or chores, I've been known to put in a good 8 hours session, but normal circumstances don't allow for that.

That is my reasoning for wanting shorter instance times.  Put more instances in that are short and low requirement on group members or make them scale.  They will cetainly pick up a lot more interest from the casual group and if done right shouldn't affect the big raiders significantly.

I'm very much like this myself, but only when I do know that I have other responsibilities at the time.  I've noticed that if I do actually get a day on the weekend when my wife and kids go do something for the day and I'm free of any chores, I can put in a 8'er no problem.  Those are rare and becoming more rare as time goes on.  I would assume this is the case for most aging gamers.

My guild has killed Ragnaros and Nefarian (they're currently on Twin Emps in AQ). I personally have killed Ragnaros and Ony and am BWL-keyed but haven't been on a BWL or AQ raid. I'm distinctly a second-tier member (maybe third tier) because of my complete and total lack of time and interest in raiding over and over again to get better pants.

But as I recall, your wife LOVES it. Do you stick to the 1-59 game, or play with her on alts when she's not raiding, or just go do something else while she whacks foozles in AQ? I guess the idea is to play together, but if she's doing the hardcore raiding game, and you have no interest in joining her, what is it about the game that lets you both spend time in it together? How do you reconcile that, when she's probably in AQ/BWL a few nights a week?

He's a WoW widower.

Partly that, partly playing the 1-59 game (I'm levelling up a priest now). 99% of my guild has no idea who I am (personally or professionally) and probably think I'm my wife's alt. It doesn't help that I identify myself as such half-jokingly.

They have a RIGOROUS raiding schedule and honestly I don't have that level of commitment. It also doesn't help that they raid on Pacific time.

A baseless internet rumor was started to day that Scot "Lum" Jennings' unannounced MMO project will have neither raids, nor nice pants.  More details as they develop are taken out of context and inflated to laughable proportions.

 :nda:

Yeah, I don't do dungeon groups, tradeskills, alts, or PvP, I just raid a couple of nights a week with my one and only character. An occasional fishing/mining loop in Azshara's Bay of Storms pays the raiding expenses. It's not much of a commitment to a game. The barrier, as others have said, is stringing a 4-5 hour block of time together on those two raid nights, which I'm lucky enough to be able to do.

So what you’re really saying is that the endgame design decisions in WoW are complete crap. I know that’s not what you’re trying to say, but it is in fact what you are saying. 

There are two activities to engage in at 60, both of which are designed poorly.

First you have PvP, which is so horribly done that it deserves its own thread. I’m not going to get into that here.

Then there are raids, each one of which is on a timer to cockblock you from completing a dress-up outfit in less time than they think you should be able to, despite it not affecting a single thing on the planet other than calling attention to the fact there’s nothing else to do but engage in a horribly designed, tacked on system of PvP. A PvP system in which you must be a hardcore raider or an even harder-core BG grinder to be able to effectively compete.

So since there’s nothing else to do but wait out raid timers except PvP, which is grindy and really pretty much pointless, you don’t log in and play except for the scheduled raids. Raids with 40 other people who you don’t know or care about except to deal with them just long enough to get loot to replace slightly older, less powerful loot, which you then sell or disenchant right before logging off until the next scheduled raid. What’s been described here as a typical raid night is not the definition of a game or fun except to raiders. If you read that description of a typical raid night to almost anybody on the planet, they’d think your were talking about your job as a contractor. And even amongst raiders, a fairly large chunk say they’d rather be doing something else but that raids are the only way to get loot.

But that’s not even where the game gets really broken. So as more and more people progress to raids, there’s fewer and fewer people online, both in your guild and in general. So PUGs become harder to form, getting people attuned/keyed gets harder and harder, and eventually character progression on a server reaches a breaking point. The point where if you’re not already in a guild, attuned/keyed, and in possession of a level XX pants suit – you never will be. The only way to get the groups together to get the gear to get into a guild is to be in a guild already. And that’s without even addressing the fact that except during a few key hours a day during prime-time the content is wasted because the server population is to low to even scrape up enough people to even do a 20 man. Will some people forge ahead no matter what and eventually make it to the designed endgame? Sure. But for everyone that does how many are needlessly alienated and eventually cancel? How many will just roll another alt when they hit 60 and repeat until something else comes out? More than will stick it out. You may not notice them because they never get to a state where you would pay any attention to them. You’d be surprised at the number of times I’ve run into the same people in the same zones leveling alts at the same times I am. The sad thing is it wouldn’t do us any good to form a guild because at the times we play we still wouldn’t be able to field the people to do MC even if we all got together. What percentage of players being needlessly locked out of doing something besides working on another alt is acceptable? Why purposely design in a barrier to entry for no reason other than “because”?

And how is that a healthy endgame? Doesn’t that scream bad, lopsided design? Wasn’t the theme of this tread a few pages back that people who only log in to get raid loot are dead weight that should be cut from a guild? How are endless, escalating, and exponentially more exclusive raids better for the long term health of the game than a variety of other things to do that encourage more players to stay logged in and be entertained? Things that will keep high-end characters logged in, but free enough to come help lower level people in their guild, or even just other players, with a quest or whatever?

How is the current emphasis on high end raids better in any way than any content that can be enjoyed at any time of day by people either soloing or in groups that are of a size that can be realistically formed at any time of the day? So far the most compelling reason to do large raids is that it’s where all the loot is at. And the most compelling reason to not make 5 or 10 mans with decent loot is that people will stop doing 40-mans. That’s just no good. It’s dumb. It’s bad, lazy design. It’s an especially bad decision when, as people freely admit, the smaller instances are more challenging and interactive. And what’s with the 40-mans anyway? Has there ever been any book, movie, or tv series in this genre that had 40 characters of note do anything together? You’d be hard pressed to come up with stories that had a dozen main characters doing stuff in the story, let alone doing it at the same time in the same place. I mean, the Battle of Pelinor Fields only had about 10 characters at it if you stretch “character” to include Gamling. And even then, some n00b chick along to see what a raid was like soloed the Witch King of Angmar.

So rather than make things more epic, 40-mans have the opposite effect. 40 people in a scheduled get-together to accomplish a task isn’t heroic or epic. It’s the dozen meetings I attend at work to decide what needs added to a report going to the sales department or telling department heads that their employees can’t store 4,000 emails with attachments in their Outlook accounts.

So really, switching design emphasis to place preeminence on 5-mans provides more compelling, attainable content for any players wanting to do it, at any time of the day. It also increases a player’s feeling of personal accomplishment and attachment to the heroic ideal typically presented in the fiction of this genre.

I didn't need to read the rest.  Yes, that's exactly what I'M saying.

:)


Edit:  Christ, I just read the rest.  That's EXACTLY what I've been trying to say all along.  Bravo, Bob, Bravo.

You hit the nail on the head Bob, there is nothing further to say.

Yeah, I pretty much agree.

Again, it's an MMO, you guys want a single-player experience you can do with other people.   It's like me bitching in Eve when I get gang-banged by 5-10 other people, because the F13 crew don't play my hours.  Life sucks all around when you're the oddball in a large multi-player experience. 

Here's a question, why doesn't Guild Wars fit what you're asking for. You can play when you want for however long want with no required time chunks.  All the content is small-groups, soloable for most of it. Hell it doesn't even have a fee. The PvP is about as 'meaningful' as balanced PvP is ever going to get, and you get rewards for it.  You don't even have to PvE once!

There's no point in discussing further, because the lines we go down are twisted around and shot back as fuel about broken-ness in a new argument.  "Raids take too long"  "No, they don't, I don't have to play other than XX hours."  "See, the game's broken because it's not compelling enough to keep you logged in other than XX hours."  Fantastic, you win.

But then from 1 to 59 the game caters to a different target audience (how many 40 man raids do you attend at level 30?) and that changes at level 60.

The Massive in Massive multiplayer doesn't mean what you try to tell us it means. That every one of all those people has to do the same things at the same moment. It only means that masses of people are online in the same environment. Ultima Online was Massive Multiplayer as well for example.

To answer your question: Until I reached 60 and used up the content available to me WoW fit what I was asking for perfectly well.

Merusk, that's rubbish.  Total Rubbish.

Good question. At 40 €, Factions seemed like a good deal, until I looked more closely. Turns out, you don't get access to old content, but that's OK, because you still can't advance past level 20! It seems Arenanet neutered their PvE game because they couldn't separate it from their PvP. Other things that I liked in Wow that I presume Guild Wars doesn't have: mining, herb collecting, fishing, crafting, cooking, action houses, rest exp. So the question really is, would I pay 40 € for WoW's levels 1-20 with less things to do?

Just a few issues I have with this...


I still don't buy this.  Are you people ever going to be satisfied with a PvP system?  I think not.

Consider other MMOGs.  There was UO, in which there was essentially one true PvP build, and if you didn't have it, then you were simply not going to win.  There were other games in which you could be one of several classes, but if you chose one of the "gimpy" ones out of ignorance or pique you were 100% useless.  If you chose one of the godly ones you could expect to one- or two-hit everyone.  And then there was AC1, where with no level cap, unless you catassed or macroed you were not going to ever.. and I mean ever.. catch the highest players.

Next to that, with every class having at least a chance in PvP,  a solid level cap, and at least a credible debate over whether purples really are an I-win button, I'll take WoW.


Negative, ghost rider.  I am on a server that's been around since release and I don't see that.  Seems like there is a new raiding guild forming every day consisting of people with blues.  I started raiding at 58, attuned to exactly jack, with exactly one piece of my tier 0, the rest blues and greens - mostly greens.

Maybe it happens on some servers but certainly not all.


I actually lol'd at this.  So I guess reading your post wasn't a total waste of time. :D

Why is it any more rubbish than what y'all are throwing out? All I'm really hearing is "I don't like raids/ Can't raid so get rid of raids!" In other words, "Cater to my playstyle entirely or you suck." The opposite side of the same bullshit coin the ubers were tossing about in EQ.  

 Want to argue for more small-group content and small-group epics, fine.  I agree, and I did so earlier.  To say that raiding is broken, and nobody enjoys it, and hey look there's nothing compelling because you only raid because you have to is bullshit.  I could do the solo/ small group content in Silithus and the East Plagues in the upcoming patch, but it just doesn't interest me.  Yes, I enjoy raiding, I enjoy the 40-person experience and no, I wouldn't play a game that didn't have it.  I've dropped other MMOs because while I suffer from altitis, if that's all there is, why play.



Has your server ever had a queue, or been removed as a selection when creating a new account?   They did it to mine, and it still pops-up a warning if you try to create a new character on it.  (Alleria)   This has done more to hurt the server than help it.  Combined with the 2 transfers (one to a new PvE  one to a new PvP) the upper levels have cleared-out and the lower levels are now all twinks who get run-through instances.  Actual new, fresh blood is a rare thing and usually joining because they already know someone and therefore have a support structure in place.

Guild Wars is far too instanced for my tastes. It feels very artificial and very un-massive. Or rather, it just feels like a multiplayer game. Plus, all the characters look fem and can't jump.


Granted, I'm not a big fan of WoW either, and I'm pretty much just trolling this thread to be honest. I probably would play it more often if it didn't have the item and PvP problems though.

There are dozens of "PvP systems" I enjoy...

Especially the ones that don't have "levels", "classes", and "purple items" in them. Not everything is an RPG. In fact, hardly anything is.....


.....That being said, I can tolerate classes, and even levels to an extent. To an extent. It's uber items that really mess things up though. There have been a few games (MMORPG's to be exact) where that kind of thing isn't a big factor at all (i.e. Shadowbane, CoX).

As for purples. Is there really a debate here? Just take a glance at how damage scales from a normal Mage, for example, to an epically equipped one.


[EDIT] Oops, sorry for the back-to-back posts. Wasn't thinking.

You're rubbish!  

No!  It is you who are rubbish!

Here's something to gnash your teeth about if you really want to- if you're unwilling to put your money where your mouth is, then all the dissertation in the world isn't going to make the slightest difference.  Or are you hopelessly addicted, and/or see no better choice out there?

Who are you replying to?

I don't know.  Do you play WoW, post here, and hate it with a fiery passion?  That is where it applies.

Ah. 2 out of 3 for me. "No" to the one that counts the most (I don't play WoW).

Yes.  See for example here: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6135.0 (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6135.0).  The debate has also surfaced in a lot of other threads here but it's buried and I can't be arsed to go find them.  But they are out there.

Anecdotal point - I have a legendary weapon and mostly purples and I mostly suck at PvP still.

I just have to throw in that the noob warrior totally did NOT solo the Witch King, she had a rogue assist.

The only problem I'm running into now is that my raiding alliance keeps trying to move more crap to Saturday nights. Apparently, I am one of the few people (and this is a sad fact in and of itself) who like to use Saturdays in the summer to travel to places like the lake, friends' houses, or anywhere outdoors away from the computer. So, despite the fact I'm the MT for a lot of these raids, I'm basically having to tell them I'm not going to be playing in that timeframe much.

I really just can't wrap my mind around why people would want to raid on Saturdays so much, especially when they are the same people who are quite happy raiding on weeknights. Anyway, blah blah blah catasses, no life, never see outdoors, etc.

I tried to ignore making a remark about that the last time you mentioned it. Even a terrible PvPer with tier 1 epics can steamroller a decent PvPer who has a full set of 'tier 0' blue armor, so it can't just be that you mostly suck - if you can even control your avatar enough to raid, you must not even be trying in PvP. I'll guess that you're a raid spec prot warrior that's trying to operate alone in PvP - maybe you said, I don't recall - that's harder than most, and takes a bit of learning and some little macros. But no real skill. As my hunter approached a full set of tier 1 armor he became godly in battlegrounds (because most of the people in battlegrounds weren't as far down the raiding path as I was). It wasn't funny how much damage I could do - I could take out several people at once, even classes that were supposed to be rock to my scissors. I know a hunter in my former guild who now has Ashjre'thul, most of the dragonstalker set and a ZG trinket. His opening combo (aimed, auto, multi) kills folks in MC gear before they can react. Being a victim to that is fun PvP right there.

Anyhow, Bob did mention that it was a subject best left for another thread. Good post Bob.

I have a feeling that if I ever hit 60 in my latest WoW kick (playing very casual so far) my endgame will be called UO.

Fury spec now, previously was a mortal strike build but I updated it for raiding dps.  So yeah, my spec is not optimized for PvP, and it seems that the alliance on my server don't know what the word "teamwork" means (heals? wtf does that word mean?).

But you could have a point.  It may depend on the class somewhat.  I still think it's better than most MMOG pvp out there.  (Disclaimer: doesn't include FPS and other non persistent PvP, and I havent played Guild Wars since beta)

Otherwise, if you leave aside the hyperbole, I agree, there is some truth to Bob's post.

If you didnt get a whole week to work on a zone it would be EXTREMELY hard to get past content.  The raid lockout timer might be a cockblock after a few months when you already beat the zone and can do it all in a single day but if you had to start over every single day getting to that point would be nearly impossible.

Very good point.  I don't know why I missed this one.

The saved instance model is a balancing act between restraining the hardcore and giving breathing room to the casual.  If it reset on a tighter schedule then you'd have only the hardest of the hardcore ever able to get past the earliest bosses.

I think the hardcore would prefer a button that says 'Reset Instance, we've done it'.


Calling it a balancing act is ignoring the problem.

Excellent post, excellent points made.  When WoW begins to decline (if that hasn't already started), these problems will snowball.

One of WoW's strengths has been the side-trips and fluff available (the crafting, the auction house, the holidays, dancing...).  The two biggest weaknesses are the pvp system, and the focus on adding endgame content.

I do hope the expansion provides more fluff and side-trips.  The focus on endgame content leaves me with little to do otherwise.

I've never played a game heavily based on levels and uber gear that provided an enjoyable "fluff" experience.

If anybody does it, Blizzard should. Only the major studios typically employ fluffers.

Lol (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-realm-blackdragonflight&t=15095&p=1&tmp=1#post15095)

I know, its very sad. What's worse is that I know of half a dozen people who would actually pay that, and would happily buy the gold to pay for it. Heck, I knew somebody that bought several thousand dollars of gold per month. Some people are rich and foolish.

I'm not that foolish yet.   That's seriously stupid stuff right there.

I wonder why it took so long and why a chinese farming operation wasn't the first.

Selfishness.

It took the AQ 'event' where they needed something really appealing for people to do something that wouldn't benefit themselves. (Like selling mats on the AH at ridiculous prices would.)  So, they offered the first trip.  I'm sure the response surprised them, and got the wheels turning. "Hey.. we DE a lot of crap, what if..."

I expect this will be popping up on almost every server, and then in every game, shortly.  Perhaps it will move MMOs in a different direction.  It'd take an awareness and forward-thinking drive that the industry hasn't shown yet, though.

Our guild has started doing this; a run every two or three weeks or so in preparation for the Naxx material reqs for resistance and armor and such.  We made 6600 gold on our last run..

Shrug.  Hardcore raiders helping casuals gold buyers get epics; whodathunk it?

Although, to be fair, a smart/thrifty player can accumulate a lot of gold, and at a certain point there's nothing to spend it on.  These deals are almost always better than BoE epic prices in the AH, and they're better items.

I tried (and failed) to convince my guild to do that. We're half people who have done MC for 6 months, and people who have done it for a year, and you might imagine the old-timers fucking hate the place by now.

We pretty much hate MC, but there's a small but vocal minority who's trying to get us to raid it so they can get their tier 2 pants. We have several that are 7/8, and since the leading uberguild offers this sort of pay-for-the-ridealong, one of my guildmates will be taking them up on their generous offer of 1000g for the tier 2 pants off of rag this evening.

What really grinds my gears is the announcement of the naxx stuff and the rumors of the 2k gold flying expansion mount. My guild estimates that it'll take 225,000 gold worth of materials to outfit a raiding party of 40 in the naxx armor set. That's just crazy money right there.

I pretty much told everyone I'm going to be qutting the game if it forces me to farm. I absoloutely refuse to farm and buy gold, and if I can't support my raiding with it's own fruits, then so long suckers I'll find another game to play. I won't pay (with my time or my money) for the privilege of having fun. Sorry.

I was just thinking....If the Alliance vs Horde war actually mattered in some way on a server/faction wide level (and wasn't just a mechanic for individual e-peening and HK's), then exclusionary raids, uberguilds, and the segregation between the have's and have not's probably wouldn't be as existent. People would go out of their way to have their entire faction equipped.


Also, to those of you who admit to liking FOH's idea: I have to wonder... Wtf do you post at F13 for? What's the appeal of being here? Why aren't you posting at FOH's site instead? Seriously, you guys are just as out of place around here as furries and Republicans.

I'm not saying that you should leave or anything like that (after all, it's not my site), but I am a little confused here.

I give FoH (and others, they are not the only one) credit for finding a way to leverage their "uberness" to make some extra cash. It sucks that blizzard created this entire issue with 40 man dungeons and bind on aquire items, but you can't really blame someone for captalizing on it. It's like blaming the black market itself, when it's simply filling a niche. You should be pissed at who created the niche in the first place, not in who fills it. It is, after all, a crafted world.

The only suprise I would have at your comments above, and my difference with it, is that I would give people credit if they sold their "uberness" to make RL cash, not some database entry with a few more zeros. Sure, they could then turn around and sell the gold for RL cash, but that takes an extra step and as we all know, americans are just downright lazy.

Zipper, lazy american.

Well, remember, the people who are doing it ARE uberguilds. For a lot of them, the game is mother, the game is father, the game is brother, sister, the game is life. Money in the game can be better than money in real life.

Everyone who buys gold agrees.

What will FoH do with the money they make?  I can't imagine that they need it.  I mean, the amount of cash guilds end up with from raids, players get cash while grinding rep, and so on.  One can play the auction house for cash, can either resell or DE low priced items.

Very good point.


But that's about the stupidest thing I've seen in a long time.  There's a groupthink thing going at F13?  Who knew?

Like someone above said, tier 3 armor requires expensive shit apart from the actual dungeon drops.  Mooncloth and arcanite and some other expensive-because-theres-a-cooldown-involved stuff, so they are probably just thinking ahead.

In addition to all that, there's always the good old sell-it-for-cash option to pay for webhosting, teamspeak and perhaps monthly fees for all members.

I don't think it's a bad idea at all. And just by playing and enjoying WoW I'm apparently among the minority here. Why am I here? Well, there is usually interesting discussion. Why else would you frequent a forum? To try to find people with exactly the same viewpoints as yourself to shore up a fragile ego? I don't know.

Why respond to someone who previosly admitted to not only disliking the game, but whose only purpose in here is trolling this thread? 

Forum PvP?

Forum PvP is ruined by mudflation imbalance. People with higher post counts have an unfair advantage. There's no skill involved.

 :hello_kitty_2:

And again with the Raucous laughter.  Thanks man.

Actually though (speaking of not playing and trolling boards)...

I'm kind of thinking about checking everything out and rolling on ED again. As a gimpy Troll Rogue. Anyone with me? Anyone there?


Hmm

Or how about that other server you guys played on? Earthen Ring?

[EDIT]

6 hours and no reply.

I'm not trolling btw...

No one's dumb enough to reroll for another F13 WoW group.  They've all been abject failures. And no offense, but playing with someone that dislikes the game on principle isn't very appealing.

Anyone's that's still playing has probably carved themselves out a comfy niche somewhere. 

Well, I don't really mind most of the game. I've just got a lot of free time atm, and I'm looking for something to play (something social, that is).

What I truly don't like about WoW is no different than what most of you don't like: The way PvP (especially world PvP) is set up, and how endgame itemization plays out. The rest is OK for what it's supposed to be (and better than other games that try to do the same thing) -- It's just those two other systems that were mashed on top of it that suck.


As for f13 guilds, I don't know what to say about that. If anything, it's any given game's fault. We all seem to get along well, so it definitely isn't drama (not that I've seen at least).

One funny thing is that a lot of my friends are re-subbing with the 14 day free trial; add to that some others who have basically dumped CoV and are looking for another game and you have a convergence of about 6 or 7 of my friends who started to play this week. I guess free trials work, and the 1-59 game is real fun. If you're alliance.

After our third week of beating against cthun and not making all that much headway in phase 2, I'm pretty tired of the raiding game now. I think I'll reroll and go play with my friends for a while.

The demise of F13 groups in any game is invariably a result of a couple of different things.

1) Play schedules.  Boards are immune to this, but games aren't.  Sucks being the only one or one of two people on for any stretch of time, or to only see people showing-up as you're in the middle of something or leaving.

2) Differing goals.  SWG, Eve, and other 'virtual worlds' have handled this fine.  Directed games of any sort haven't.  Hard to get a cohesive guild together when 1/4 wants to do dungeon crawls, another 1/4 just wants to hang out and the rest are doing other crap.

3) Differing playstyles. This is particularly nasty in level-based games.  Get folks who shoot up the min/max ladder and can't help the more casual players, and the group fragments and eventually dissolves.

4) Differing tastes/ quick to burnout.  We've a lot of 'samplers' in the community.  Either things don't grab them and hold them, or they are more interested in each new shiny than the current game.  Either way we churn more than average.

Oh yeah, I've seen the same thing happen with other board communities too - I'm talking the smaller boards of course, Something Awful for example consistently has guilds that work and last because there is a huge pool of people to draw from. A board like F13, you get at best 10 people or so to make a guild .... well no big surprise that doesn't end up working, 10 folks who know each other from a message board just doesn't transfer into a meaningful, functional guild. Might as well just put each other on your friends list and go off and do your own thing.

We were pleasantly surprised to find the other night that Broodlord in BWL drops Tier 2 pants - not sure what the drop percentage is, but it means we may be able to wave goodbye to the boring rockiness of MC forever!

Must have been a fluke because I've never seen one pair drop in a year of killing him and allah and thottbot dont show any either. Are you sure someone didnt confuse greaves with legs? Greaves are usually used as a term for legs but blizz ssems to call boots greaves.

It was definately pants - coz it was hunter pants and I ummed and aahed and eventually didn't bother going for em, since they werent a great upgrade over my existing tier1 hunter pants.  If they were boots/greaves I would have been all over em like a rash since my boots suck.  I'll double check with my guildies that is was Broodlord - maybe I'm getting confused with him and the 3 drakes (Flamegor, Ebonroc and the other one) since we fight all of them in pretty much the same spot.  Will get back to you.

Eh broolord has never dropped legs for us, and allah and thottbot dont show any drops either.  Im pretty sure you must be mistaken.

Hmm, my guildies are calling me a liar too.  Perhaps I had been drinking too much that night...

He does drop Dragonstalker greaves, which in most games would be legs but in this game are boots.

Warcraft! Good god!

Say it again!

Greaves are shinguards.

All teir 2 leg pieces come from Ragnaros.