#3 guild in the US quits WoW.

[Merusk]

Thing is.. most of them haven't quit playing.  Several have transferred off the server to join other raiding guilds, and several others have joined the other top-5 guilds on Alleria.  I can't check his armory from work, but it wouldn't surprise me to find he's still logging in, a week after the 2nd statement and 2 weeks after the first.

Like you said, you can only 'quit' if you stop playing, otherwise it's whining. My understanding is only about 5-6 of them actually have done so.    That leads me to the whole "you're just whining because BLizzard woke-up and realized that pumping out content 80% of the playerbase  won't see isn't a good investment." (according to Wow-jutsu only 11-12% of players have been IN BT/MHJ)

[Morfiend]

Well as a whole they "quit" raiding. It wasnt fun for them any more, so they stopped doing it.

[Xanthippe]

Well as a whole they "quit" raiding. It wasnt fun for them any more, so they stopped doing it.

It took them a whole lot longer than most to figure that out.

[Dren]

You really haven't quit if you are still writing huge essays about the game you "quit."  They've replaced instance raiding with forum raiding.

[Jayce]

Isn't this from their guild front page?

If you're a high-end progression raiding guild, and you quit raiding, isn't that pretty newsy for your guild website?

[Fabricated]

Blizzard has Uncle Scrooge's money bin and can't put out content at anything but a fairly glacial pace, but I'm not really annoyed myself since I'm still pretty much on the low-end of the raiding scale and still have plenty of content ahead should I want to do it. The lack of new 5-mans sort of bugs me and this is with me having 2 characters I play that don't really need any blues anymore. Magister's Terrace is really fun, but it'd be nice to get one of those every 2-3 months or something. Shit, it'd be nice to get more than a single new 5-man instance over the course of 1-2 years.

[slog]

so I got home and looked over their site.

Seriously, it's a bunch of crybaby raiders who want Blizz to cater to their every whim

[UnSub]

Dammit, my post got ate.

In short: Blizzard have gotten very complacent with that US $10 m per week in profit that comes in throught their doors. They could (and probably should) be burying their competitors with new content for WoW.

[pants]

Dammit, my post got ate.

In short: Blizzard have gotten very complacent with that US $10 m per week in profit that comes in throught their doors. They could (and probably should) be burying their competitors with new content for WoW.

Who are their competitors however?  WAR and AoC are coming along soonish - however they seem to have a slightly different mindset, that being more PVP focussed.  If you want a PvE game to whack foozles - theres noone out there or on the horizon.  I'm sure Blizzard has a war chest if they need it, but for now they have plenty of time to make World of Starcraft or whatever, work on the WoW expansion, and roll in their piles of money.  Which is where most of the money is going - not in investment, but in rolling in piles of money - cause thats what you do if you have a wildly successful product.

[Ratman_tf]

lolz raider drama

Oh noes. I posted in this thread, so now I'm part of it! 

[Paelos]

I don't care what he writes, so I stopped reading it at that point. Have fun dickheads, until the next time some weird computer game grabs your dick with a lasso.

[Koyasha]

Our crew is on RoS in BT and I'm having a helluvha lot of fun with the game right now. We'll be finishing up BT in the next few weeks, just in time for the Sunwell to kick off.

But give me a fucking break. When you raid 7 nights a week of course you're going to burn through content faster than they create it. You did power raiding to shine your epeen. Once that glow wore off, you found out that you burned right past any and all fun you could have been having with the game in the process.

Bravo douchebags, bravo.

EDIT: I'll expand on this a bit

If you don't find raiding inherently fun, you're doing it for all the wrong reasons. Granted, raiding sure as hell isn't for everyone. But for me personally, I love the challenge of taking down "big shit" with guys I've been gaming with for years. The cheers on vent when you finally knock over a guy you've been working on for a few nights makes it well worth it.

Enjoy raiding for what it is, challenging encounters designed for large groups of people. If you base your raiding on anything other than that you are, as Schild said earlier, doing it really fucking wrong.

I see a problem with this as relates to WoW.  First off, I agree that's the right way to go about raiding.  However, someone has to be at the top end of progression along any scale of it, and when that someone gets to see the new content that is supposed to challenge them before it is even released to live servers then how is that content supposed to remain fun and engaging for the next however bloody many months it's going to be until something new comes out?  It's not.

Right now, they have the Sunwell Plateau on the Test Server.  Guilds, mostly consisting of top-end raiding guilds, are going there and kicking the shit out of it, and from the loot and info on places like mmo-champion, most of the bosses have been beaten.  These people have faced the challenge, beaten it, and are now going to be relegated to farming it for the next however many months for their real characters.  Before the content is even released to live servers.  Sure, this content needs to be tested...but the people it's designed to entertain are not the people who should be testing it, because by the time they're done with that, it's not entertaining anymore!

EverQuest has always had a reasonable pace of releasing content, and they didn't throw it out there to be tested, either.  They did in-house testing, and when things came up when the actual players got a hold of it, they tweaked it on live.  With most expansions, top end guilds took somewhere around 2-4 months - sometimes more - to reach the 'end' of the expansion, by which time another expansion was just around the corner.  They farmed the content for a couple months, then had a new expansion worth of shiny to play with and be challenged by.  Blizzard has enough money to release raider content at that pace as well as releasing casual and small-raid content at an excellent rate as well, but they're not doing it.  How long was it between the release of Planes of Power and when Fires of Heaven finally reached the Plane of Time?  I think it was well over six months, but I don't feel like looking it up - I do know it was quite some time.  When Shadows of Luclin was released, the Avatar of War had just been beaten a matter of weeks prior.  Nobody had months after these encounters had been beaten and they were no longer challenging with nothing else to do; new challenges constantly awaited them.  There are many flaws in EQ, but keeping players supplied with challenge has never been one of them.

[Dren]

Isn't this from their guild front page?

If you're a high-end progression raiding guild, and you quit raiding, isn't that pretty newsy for your guild website?

That's true, but it reads as thought the audience is everyone else.  The author has obviously been reading forums that contain the comments from everyone outside of their guild.  That person is obviously still spending time worrying about the "State of the Game" and the community.

They may not be paying a sub, but they are still playing.

[Kirth]

EverQuest has always had a reasonable pace of releasing content, and they didn't throw it out there to be tested, either.  They did in-house testing, and when things came up when the actual players got a hold of it, they tweaked it on live.  With most expansions, top end guilds took somewhere around 2-4 months - sometimes more - to reach the 'end' of the expansion, by which time another expansion was just around the corner.  They farmed the content for a couple months, then had a new expansion worth of shiny to play with and be challenged by.  Blizzard has enough money to release raider content at that pace as well as releasing casual and small-raid content at an excellent rate as well, but they're not doing it.  How long was it between the release of Planes of Power and when Fires of Heaven finally reached the Plane of Time?  I think it was well over six months, but I don't feel like looking it up - I do know it was quite some time.  When Shadows of Luclin was released, the Avatar of War had just been beaten a matter of weeks prior.  Nobody had months after these encounters had been beaten and they were no longer challenging with nothing else to do; new challenges constantly awaited them.  There are many flaws in EQ, but keeping players supplied with challenge has never been one of them.

Also, EQ content had a certain measure of re-usability. I remember doing things like ToV when our low end 'casual' raiding guild didn't have a PoP or SoL target to take, and people enjoyed it and it was worthwhile for the most part. Blizzard has a lot of dead content now, and when wrath launches it will have alot more, IMO there philosophy of 'bringing everyones gear level' up to a point ( I think the original post referenced t6 gear being available from badges) is incorrect because it invalidates content that people would otherwise do to "gear up" a raid force.

[Miasma]

Progression in Everquest took so long because everyone on the server had to share the same damn Bosses.  Can you even imagine such a terrible idea nowadays?  Yeah sorry but we killed Illidan two days ago, he'll be up in another fourteen hours but our server has an ordered list for who gets to take the next shot at him, you might get a chance to wipe on him in another four weeks, see you then.

Plus Everquest was the game that pioneered intentionally breaking bosses so that you couldn't progress because the later content wasn't actually finished yet.  Anybody who thinks fondly of raiding in Everquest is one of those people who remembers the good times but forgets about all this bullshit that surrounded it.

[Llava]

(according to Wow-jutsu only 11-12% of players have been IN BT/MHJ)

11-12% of guilds, even.  That's not considering the full membership of the guild, or unguilded players, if I'm correct in how wowjutsu works.

But if, for instance, you raid with another guild and get a drop from BT, your guild is marked as having killed that boss when actually it's just you.

[Paelos]

(according to Wow-jutsu only 11-12% of players have been IN BT/MHJ)

11-12% of guilds, even.  That's not considering the full membership of the guild, or unguilded players, if I'm correct in how wowjutsu works.

But if, for instance, you raid with another guild and get a drop from BT, your guild is marked as having killed that boss when actually it's just you.

Correct. The majority of my guild has never been in SSC or TK, but because I have a few drops from there on my raiding alliance, it counts us as done.

[Righ]

If somebody transfers from a guild and has a drop from a raid, it will count the guild they transfer to as a raiding guild that has experienced that raid. The true statistic is that 11% of guilds in the ranking tables (which ranks only around a third of guilds that the site knows about) has had at some time one or more player character that has equipped an item from BT. Even with people who have changed guilds or who fill spots in other guilds raids that comes to only 3% of guilds that the site even knows about having at one time had BT loot on a character in their guild. I would imagine that considerably less than 1% of players have a character that has been through the BT instance portal. Hell, I'll bet that considerably less than 1% have a character that could.

[SurfD]

If somebody transfers from a guild and has a drop from a raid, it will count the guild they transfer to as a raiding guild that has experienced that raid. The true statistic is that 11% of guilds in the ranking tables (which ranks only around a third of guilds that the site knows about) has had at some time one or more player character that has equipped an item from BT. Even with people who have changed guilds or who fill spots in other guilds raids that comes to only 3% of guilds that the site even knows about having at one time had BT loot on a character in their guild. I would imagine that considerably less than 1% of players have a character that has been through the BT instance portal. Hell, I'll bet that considerably less than 1% have a character that could.

I was pretty sure that WoWJutsu had some kind of mechanism in it to prevent transfer / guild hoppers from inflating a guilds potential progression rank.  Pretty sure you have to be IN the guild before you get a new tier item for it to count you as having downed X boss. Simply transferring your T5 equipped character into a t4 guild does not bump them up to T5 status.

[Tannhauser]

Shit, I figured out raiding wasn't fun way before these addicted douchebags.

[Selby]

Anybody who thinks fondly of raiding in Everquest is one of those people who remembers the good times but forgets about all this bullshit that surrounded it.

This needs to be stated over and over again.  Having to set the egg timers to bosses\mobs and getting in line to have a chance at a boss?  Fuck that noise.  Seriously.  I thought it was bullshit then and I still think it is.

[Merusk]

Yeah, I said "people" but I knew that I meant only raid-guilds with 10+ players.  My bad.. I'd avoided saying that so well until just then, too.

If somebody transfers from a guild and has a drop from a raid, it will count the guild they transfer to as a raiding guild that has experienced that raid. The true statistic is that 11% of guilds in the ranking tables (which ranks only around a third of guilds that the site knows about) has had at some time one or more player character that has equipped an item from BT. Even with people who have changed guilds or who fill spots in other guilds raids that comes to only 3% of guilds that the site even knows about having at one time had BT loot on a character in their guild. I would imagine that considerably less than 1% of players have a character that has been through the BT instance portal. Hell, I'll bet that considerably less than 1% have a character that could.

I was pretty sure that WoWJutsu had some kind of mechanism in it to prevent transfer / guild hoppers from inflating a guilds potential progression rank.  Pretty sure you have to be IN the guild before you get a new tier item for it to count you as having downed X boss. Simply transferring your T5 equipped character into a t4 guild does not bump them up to T5 status.

Yeah, they said in one of the first versions that it would show-up as a guild having done a boss if someone x-ferred in, but they've got tracking stuff implemented now.  If you click-on a guild and someone's x-ferred now now the loot still shows as in that guild, with a >> next to that person's name indicating what guild they hopped to.

  They can't do anything to track server x-fers or renames, though, so no idea how it's handled when a new person suddenly appears with a bunch of loot.

[Koyasha]

Also, EQ content had a certain measure of re-usability. I remember doing things like ToV when our low end 'casual' raiding guild didn't have a PoP or SoL target to take, and people enjoyed it and it was worthwhile for the most part. Blizzard has a lot of dead content now, and when wrath launches it will have alot more, IMO there philosophy of 'bringing everyones gear level' up to a point ( I think the original post referenced t6 gear being available from badges) is incorrect because it invalidates content that people would otherwise do to "gear up" a raid force.

Well, it takes a lot of badges to get the t6 equivalent loot, so there's still time spent in the gearing up process, but as for entertainment...yeah.  How many times before I get bored of every damn heroic in the game, or even quick Karazhan/Zul'aman clears?  WoW is absolutely terrible about keeping people constantly engaged with new and interesting stuff, instead having us redo the same old stuff for months upon months.  Years, even.

WoW was released in November 04, and BC was released in January 07.  That's 2 years, 2 months.  Furthermore, the release of Burning Crusade wiped out the usefulness of all level 60 content, making: Dire Maul, Stratholme, Scholomance, Upper and Lower Blackrock Spire, Molten Core, Onyxia's Lair, Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub, Ahn'Qiraj, and Naxxramas Necropolis obsolete.  I have no idea how many hours of development, programming, zone design, art, or anything else went into those zones put together, but essentially all of it has been thrown away. 

It's now been 3 years, 4 months since WoW's release, 1 year and 2 months since Burning Crusade.  Every boss in Burning Crusade's initial release has been defeated, bosses that were added in patches since Burning Crusade have been defeated, and most of the bosses that are yet to be released with the next patch have also been defeated.  For the people who have tested these bosses, there's nothing left to challenge them until Wrath of the Lich King comes out.  Nothing unseen, nothing undiscovered, no fun challenges await.

Where was EQ 3 years, 4 months in?  Shadows of Luclin - expansion number 3 - had been out for 5 months.  Fires of Heaven just got their first Emperor Ssraeshza kill.  The entire end-zone for Luclin was yet to be touched, and Planes of Power was 5 months away.  The Planes of Hate and Fear were actually still difficult - although their content had been mostly obsoleted.  Kunark content was still strong, and Velious content was still some of the better available gear for most people.  Most guilds would not set foot in Vex Thal until well after Planes of Power was released.  Not only did EQ not discard their old content, but they kept new content coming at a pace ahead of the top raiders.  Among EQ's problems was never one of keeping content available and waiting for people to defeat. 

Progression in Everquest took so long because everyone on the server had to share the same damn Bosses.  Can you even imagine such a terrible idea nowadays?  Yeah sorry but we killed Illidan two days ago, he'll be up in another fourteen hours but our server has an ordered list for who gets to take the next shot at him, you might get a chance to wipe on him in another four weeks, see you then.

Plus Everquest was the game that pioneered intentionally breaking bosses so that you couldn't progress because the later content wasn't actually finished yet.  Anybody who thinks fondly of raiding in Everquest is one of those people who remembers the good times but forgets about all this bullshit that surrounded it.

And it's not just a matter of non-instanced content and competition, either, because much later, in the ages of Gates of Discord, Omens of War, and the newer EQ expansions where all this raid stuff was instanced and on a timer just like WoW's, things still played out like this, with top guilds taking several months to complete an expansion, not finishing until the next one is just around the corner, and 'average' raiding guilds being an expansion or two behind on content with much to look forward to at all times. 

On a related note, it was predicted by someone (or maybe a few someones) when woW first started-up that  Blizzard's content pace would doom them.  It looks like the cracks on that might finally be showing.. 4 years later.    I guess the catalyst would be 2 new MMOs coming out relatively soon that actually have captured the player's imaginations, unlike Vanguard and TR.  Odd, that.

Blizzard's content pace is glacial, which is what people have said right from the beginning.  Way back when WoW was first announced, we were commenting on Blizzard's glacial content production.  If you're not a raider you've been doing Hellfire Citadel, Coilfang Reservoir, Auchindoun, Caverns of Time, and Tempest Keep since Burning Crusade release, and only now have the new Magister's Terrace to throw in anything new whatsoever.  If you are a raider, you've had some new stuff become available since Burning Crusade, at least, but if you're in the upper echelon of raiders you probably already completed all of that some time ago, and are now getting to 'test' the new content, letting you get all the challenge you can out of it without even improving your real character.  Blizzard and WoW aren't going to be 'doomed', but the glacial content may start to make them lose some players as more options become available to its playerbase.

Lucky for me I'm not in the top echelon of raiders, because I too would be no longer having fun, if this was the case.  Also lucky that I switched faction....twice...since Burning Crusade was released.  Because if I had been playing one or two characters on one server this entire time, I would be no longer having fun, considering how many times I've -already- done all the existing instances, and how many more times I would have done them if I hadn't spent so much time re-leveling a new character.

[kaid]

While he said it with a bit more drama than perhaps needed the main point is true when you are no longer having fun playing a game stop. Most of my guild is currently in hiatus mode because frankly we have not had any new content that is really doable for us since freaking drake quests were put in around 6 or 7 months ago. ZA looked on paper to be great as we do enjoy kharazan but frankly even though we have killed the prince he is by no means on farm status and our secondary tank just is not up to taking the wooping that the first ZA boss dishes out.

Thus we have had jack all to do that is new since shortly after BC was released. I do not hate wow I have mostly been playing eq2 lately with doing pvp stuff on the side in wow and arena stuff.

Blizzards content production pace smacks of really horrible management and or abysmal dev tools. If EQ2 with a much smaller cash flow can put out good quality releases every 8 or 9 months and blizzard is looking like its going to be at least year and a half between expansions something is wrong.

If they could hit the 12 months between expansion marks while slow it would probably be fine. We still had enough to do at around the 12 month point after bc came out but we all decided that since there is no real hope in sight of the expansion coming out any time soon to take a break to prevent burn out.

I give blizzard props for their quality but the pace they make things makes baby jeebus cry.

[Llava]

I'm not playing anymore, but I'll recommend this to people getting bored with content.

Speed runs.

Start with heroics, get your best healer, your best tank, and your three best DPS.  See how fast you can do as many heroics as possible.

Following that, speed Karazhans.  Friend of mine has been solo healing them lately.  One healer (he's a Paladin), two tanks, 7 DPS.  Clear from top to bottom in 2 hours, and that's with a number of those DPS not being great.

After that, start on ZA.  Here's where it gets really fun- do the timed events.  You need some amazing players for this, but the previous steps should have brought you to this point.  We did 2 healers, 2 tanks, 6 DPS, and all the DPS should be able to maintain at least 900DPS.  Learn the instance, learn what pulls you can run past.  Last time we did it, we were about 30 seconds from getting the 4th timer and we had a few screw ups.

An event like that is where you really get to play your class, really use all the tools you have, rather than 25man snooze-fests.

Once you have a bear mount, go AFK in Shattrath or whatever major city you prefer, make a guild called "Bear With Me" or "Grin And Bear It" or "Bearly Elite" or "3/4, 5/6, Bear Mount".  Then sell your account, you beat WoW.


Oh, tips for ZA:  Don't wait for loot.  Kill the boss and move on.  The prisoner dudes will still be there when you get back and each of those costs you probably a minute.  The other good thing about this event is that every second counts- it's only 45 minutes.  That beats the hell out of running SSC for 4 hours.

[Modern Angel]

While he said it with a bit more drama than perhaps needed the main point is true when you are no longer having fun playing a game stop. Most of my guild is currently in hiatus mode because frankly we have not had any new content that is really doable for us since freaking drake quests were put in around 6 or 7 months ago. ZA looked on paper to be great as we do enjoy kharazan but frankly even though we have killed the prince he is by no means on farm status and our secondary tank just is not up to taking the wooping that the first ZA boss dishes out.

Thus we have had jack all to do that is new since shortly after BC was released. I do not hate wow I have mostly been playing eq2 lately with doing pvp stuff on the side in wow and arena stuff.

Blizzards content production pace smacks of really horrible management and or abysmal dev tools. If EQ2 with a much smaller cash flow can put out good quality releases every 8 or 9 months and blizzard is looking like its going to be at least year and a half between expansions something is wrong.

If they could hit the 12 months between expansion marks while slow it would probably be fine. We still had enough to do at around the 12 month point after bc came out but we all decided that since there is no real hope in sight of the expansion coming out any time soon to take a break to prevent burn out.

I give blizzard props for their quality but the pace they make things makes baby jeebus cry.

This. Because *every single complaint* people have with the game, no matter what that complaint is (and I'm talking real complaints here, not ROUGE KILED ME N I HIT PIROBLAST), can be solved with them getting off their asses. Four 5 mans and one 100 man a month is retarded and that guy is retarded but they can do better than this. EQ2 does a great job with quality, fast content releases in the forms of patches, mini-packs and full expansion packs.

Interestingly, it's not just the casuals bitching about the content anymore. It's raiders, hardcore pvpers, across the spectrum... which, of course, isn't a problem now and will never be a massive problem given their sub base but it may be a bit of one once the competition lands.

[Llava]

Honestly, I probably woulda stuck around much longer if they did something as simple as putting timers into heroics and 10 mans.  Just give me extra badges in heroics and for 10 mans some goofy mount.  Speed runs are fun, reward people for doing them.

[Fordel]

One thing to consider is when they 'lose' players due to their glacial content development pace, is how many are really truly lost.


I know from even my own little guild, that people come and go in waves. We always have a few people 'quit' during the low points, but they all show up again once the new patch comes out. Like, how many people are not playing, but still keeping a sub due to the 3-6 month prepaid plans or whatnot?


Isn't that the ideal MMO customer? Pay for the subscription but don't use any of the resources? 

[Paelos]

The truth is that most people don't really bother cancelling for long when they leave. They do just that. They wait until the next content patch, pay for another month to check it out, and then make decisions from there. When the next expansion hits you can expect another insane wave of people to return to check it out. However, given all we've seen just getting 2.4 out, there's almost no way in hell the expansion is coming until Thanksgiving, which is purely unacceptable in my view.

Taking 2 years to get the first expansion done, ok that's fine and all, but TBC hasn't really rocked my socks. It introduced a lot of crap I hated, like kara being on the only lead-in to 25 man raiding/Zangermarsh/fucking attunements, and it introduced some stuff I liked, ala difficulty adjustments in 5 mans/lower raid caps/dailys for gold instead of farming endlessly. In fact, most of the nifty hardcore content didn't even actually launch in the expansion. ZA, Black Temple, Magisters, and Sunwell have all come in the last approximate year, soaking up lord knows how many resources.

The next expansion is make or break for me in terms of the game. It'll be coming out at the same point I was in DAOC when ToA released. If it's going to make things even more ridiculously hardcore at the top end to appease the epeens, I'm out. I like to raid, but I do it for fun, not getting kicked in the balls repeatedly for months on end. Killing Arthas after 10 phases and 30 minutes isn't worth it to me.

[Llava]

Killing Arthas after 10 phases and 30 minutes isn't worth it to me.

Quit now.  I guarantee you at least 20 minutes and 5 phases to that battle at the very, very least.  Hell, the group I ran with would be disappointed with less, and we were about as casual as decent 25 mans can get.

[Paelos]

Killing Arthas after 10 phases and 30 minutes isn't worth it to me.

Quit now.  I guarantee you at least 20 minutes and 5 phases to that battle at the very, very least.  Hell, the group I ran with would be disappointed with less, and we were about as casual as decent 25 mans can get.

You think things would get that far? A boss fight should never take 15 minutes unless you ARE NOT PREPARED!

[Llava]

Going with my gut.  There have been grumbles about the Illidan fight being anti-climactic.

Though who knows, maybe Blizzard knows better.  They've done well.  Honestly, there are ways to improve the game, but it's not for flaws with it that I quit.  It was because I have goals for this year and WoW was getting in the way.  So I should probably give them the benefit of the doubt.

I was hoping they'd put in a boss with a really low health total who has a ridiculous regeneration rate, so the question isn't total damage dealt but damage per second.  They could very well end up throwing wrenches like that into the system, and that would run counter to the staple of "more HP, more damage, more harder".

But... something still tells me, 20 minutes, at least 5 phases.

[Fabricated]

If I was Blizzard I'd just design Arthas in a way that he was literally impossible to kill but so it looks like he is totally killable if you would just play perfect enough. The uber-guilds would happily beat their heads against him for months until you decided enough time has passed and made some subtle adjustments to make him killable.

[Merusk]

They've said a few times already that Arthas won't be an encounter.  Some BS about "Arthas as the Lich King is too badass for even a 40 man of level 100s to kill him."

Which means, what? Archimonde is a pussy? (Ok, well, they did have the forest wisps helping there... )

[eldaec]

Can I have their stuff?