I shine my greens with raider tears.

[WindupAtheist]

I've been reading the WOTLK forum on Blizzard's site and seeing a lot of stuff like this.  God, it fills me with joy to see the last of the Catass Elitist Brigade scream in horror at the realization that it doesn't really matter anymore.

[photek]

Wow. Just wow. Talk about coming late to the party. I'm glad I stopped hardcore raiding when we killed Kel'Thuzad (was world 2nd or 3rd), the second he fell, I unsubscribed my mage account and handed it to a friend with best gear available and just PvP'ed on my warrior alt (with full Naxx/AQ gear). In TBC I killed Lady Vashj / Kael'Thas at best, but it was mostly for fun and some gearing with my old guild and I've nearly solely PvP'ed on all my characters and those bosses were on farm on the raids I joined. For me the reason for hardcore raiding and gearing up was guild progression and being on the top, but the bonus was partially to melt faces in PvP, so thanks to Blizzard for relieving me of the pain of no-life and 24/7 playing. Sorta.

In one way I'm glad they are taking 10 man instances more serious though, for some 40/25 man raids are just too much and too tedious and some people want top gear, but don't have the time or motivation to be a part of pissing contest. I on the other hand have never been a casual gamer, so it means squat to me and I'm not too fond of "welfare epics", but hey it gears up my alts and I'm a PvPer. Personally I enjoy some of the hardcore aspects of raiding, especially high difficulty encounters which require great cooperation and structuring, tank and spank encounters should have been buried and stayed in Molten Core. Even if its 10 man encounters they should be tricky and require a great deal of cooperation, cause thats what "PvE" is all about, teamplay.

[Merusk]

Heh.. that's hilarious.

And if you dislike "welfare" epics, you're going to hate WoTLK even more.   They've stated a few times that the time investment for  PvE vs PvP was imbalanced, and they're going to make it easier to get PvE gear in LK.

I, on the other hand, think it's great.  You shouldn't have to play a game 40 hours for a single upgrade.

[photek]

Heh.. that's hilarious.

And if you dislike "welfare" epics, you're going to hate WoTLK even more.   They've stated a few times that the time investment for  PvE vs PvP was imbalanced, and they're going to make it easier to get PvE gear in LK.

I, on the other hand, think it's great.  You shouldn't have to play a game 40 hours for a single upgrade.

Nah its okay, I don't mean dislike in the way that you can invest little time to get good gear, thats great, but it should require some skill and not just little-to-no effort. Now this breaks the entire WoW formula of welfare epics. I'm solely PvPing now and will do so in WoTLK if I'm not playing something else.

[stray]

It's really weird to me to hear it said that it should require "skill" to get gear. The principle of one flies in the face of the other.

And if you're saying that devoting oneself to playing raids is skill, then I don't know what to say. Other than the typical cliché response, I guess: There's nothing skillful about raids. Compared to almost every game known to humankind, they're incredibly facile. And even moreso once you've beat them once -- at that point, it's just drudgery. By definition, drudgery is painful and hard to do, I'll grant that. But requiring skill? No. Not to mention that you're losing substantial parts of your life doing all of this. I would call that courageous at best -- to forfeit all of the other good things you could do with one's time is truly brave. But I wouldn't call it skillful.

Besides, if you really wanted to skill to shine through in that game, then allow easier access to that gear (or hell, no gear at all! Yay.). That way you can really sift out the wheat from the chaff. That way people can stand or fall on skill alone.

[photek]

Now there are some aspects where I do agree with you, and I never said any raids until now have required a massive amount of skill. It requires XX people who are geared, dedicated, motivated and have common goals and are willing to listen to their raidleader and follow instructions. From there you learn phase by phase and down bosses and progress forward. Now this can sound very simple in theory, in practice it really isn't "just like that". It does require skill, but Ill come back to that later. Anyhow now doing the same boss after you have killed him gets easier each time you do it, but such is everything in life as you probably already know. There isn't one task an average human being in its field can undertake and do repetitively for 5-10++ years and not become expert in it. With the exception of situations where you are directly competing with other human beings, which is exactly what you do in PvP.

Now this does take skill. Micromanagement, twitching, reflexes, knowledge, wisdom gear yet again and lots and lots of practice versus different opponents, setups, builds, classes etcetra. I'd love to see a skillless person get 2100+ rating in arena in WoW, it simply won't happen without a time investment and constant playing. Now facing every setup and class and build in the game knowing how to play versus them makes it much easier for you, it still doesn't mean its easy. It does require skill and that is exactly what skill means. This is the same as raids, doing the same things, learning new bosses, new phases etcetra and facing new opponents and figuring out how to kill them. It does take skill, just not the same amount as PvP for the sole reason of human>repetitive and predictable AI actions.

A skill is the learnt capacity or talent to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of work, some general skills would include time management, teamwork and leadership, self motivation and others, whereas domain-specific skills would be useful only for a certain job.

Also this progression gets thrown into the four stages of competence. Which means :

   1.  Unconscious incompetence
          The individual neither understands or knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit or has a desire to address it.

   2. Conscious incompetence
          Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.

   3. Conscious competence
          The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.

   4.  Unconscious competence
          The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes "second nature" and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she can also teach it to others.

[Kirth]

I would really take anything concerning how "casual friendly" WotLK will be on release with a grain of salt, considering how well tuned the entry level raids in TBC (Gruul, Magtheridon) were. And to say hardcore doesn't matter may also be presumptive since we are talking about Pardo and Kaplan, former grand poobaas of catass in EQ1, the later also being the one who coined or at least popularized the term welfare epics.

[stray]

I think my main gripe is the repetitiveness. Not only because it requires one to lose a bit of their life inside a game, but generally speaking, the whole idea is so ass backwards compared to how other games are done. The way a typical game's boss would work is that you repeat the puzzle until you beat it. Not after. That fact that you finally beat a boss means that you have nothing else left to learn about him. The learning process is in the failing, not the repeating. Imagine not being able to progress through Contra without having to beat this dude up over and over again:



Contra would turn into boring work too if that was the case.

[Time to rant for a sec]

Hell, I would say this about all mmo gameplay in general. Not just raids. I am literally learning nothing new after killing the first one or two mobs of a certain type, and am learning nothing new after using this or that new class skill a few times.

Basic example: I swing my sword, auto-attack, mob dies. There is no reason that I should keep doing that over and over again. I learned that part of game right away, y'see.  

Next example: Ooh, a new fancy mob that heals himself. And looky here -- I have an interrupt skill. I'll interrupt him the next time he tries to heal. Voila. So that worked. No reason I should have to keep doing that much again!  

Example: How to walk from point A to B. Yay. I did it. Mom would be so proud. But why do they keep trying to teach me how to do this? Just how many FedEx quests do they think it takes before someone understands the concept?

Example: Wow, my first group. Apparently I picked a tank class. I'm supposed to taunt and keep these guys on me, while the priest heals. Simple enough.

And so on and so forth. All the way up to raiding tasks. It's all just the same old shit after awhile -- and only a truly mentally deficient person couldn't get the hang of the game immediately. But I, and many others here (and many elsewhere for that matter), are not mentally deficient. We are normal folks who understand a pattern when we see one -- and act accordingly. Either do your best to give us new patterns, or give us a fucking hyper-condensed 1 day of leveling crash course fasttrack into the game, so we can move on to just pvp'ing -- where the encounters are a little more dynamic and unpredictable. The rest is bullshit.

/rantoff

[Aez]

Great example Stray.

Also, point and laught at the catass.

[photek]

Definitely valid points, but this just goes back to the basics and MMO structures in general. You do have a point though. I have many ideas (doesn't everybody) on how to break the standards and move MMOs forward, but I do somehow unfortunately believe that MMO's need to be like they are, at least for now, repetitive, in order to function for most people. You have to attract people with something familiar and something they already enjoy, but want more of, just different. MMO designers have a bigger marked and more potential subscribers this way, making complex MMO's with mechanics that require re-learning everything is a high-risk organization that most are not willing to undertake. Just take a look at the FPS genre.

I do hope at a future point we will see a solid evolution or turning point in MMOs where it doesn't have to be like todays. I at least am tugging towards that sector while working in game design, but eventually it will all be about timing. Releasing something so awesome and groundbreaking to the people that is so good they don't see it at the time for what it is(I can name quite a few games which has done this "error", released too early) is bad business.

[Venkman]

Raiding requires skill, just not any the game measures. It's all about doing the same thing again, but better, and along the way amassing the gear and group you need to progress to the next tier of raids.

Which is fine, for folks that like that. While that group isn't probably all that statistically large, they're as important to an MMORPG as any other group, a very relevant part of the Player Pyramid.

If WotLK launches by lowering the barrier for more people to get into the raid cycle, who's going to complain about that? Seriously, lower the barrier even more, get people to repeat the same exact content over and over. It's already been proven people want to do that. And it's already been proven to be good business (less content creation). What's not to like?

And for those who don't like it, there's PvP, or other games in the genre.

Nothing wrong with that Blizzard is doing here.

[Kitsune]

It's amazing how your life peaked within a video game, elitest.

The thread ended quickly on the WoW board.

[Fordel]

I would really take anything concerning how "casual friendly" WotLK will be on release with a grain of salt, considering how well tuned the entry level raids in TBC (Gruul, Magtheridon) were. And to say hardcore doesn't matter may also be presumptive since we are talking about Pardo and Kaplan, former grand poobaas of catass in EQ1, the later also being the one who coined or at least popularized the term welfare epics.

It was in one of the recent interviews that they said the opening TBC raids were a giant mistake. Something about opening the expansion with a brick wall to climb over or something 

[Fabricated]

I would really take anything concerning how "casual friendly" WotLK will be on release with a grain of salt, considering how well tuned the entry level raids in TBC (Gruul, Magtheridon) were. And to say hardcore doesn't matter may also be presumptive since we are talking about Pardo and Kaplan, former grand poobaas of catass in EQ1, the later also being the one who coined or at least popularized the term welfare epics.

It was in one of the recent interviews that they said the opening TBC raids were a giant mistake. Something about opening the expansion with a brick wall to climb over or something 

Actually you got that backwards (edit: If I'm interpreting you right)

He said something more along the lines of "The entry level raids were way too fucking hard. Mags was way way above the level of gear/content he was supposed to be at, and only having ONE 10-man be an entry level raid was really stupid. In BC we basically said, 'here's a brick wall, climb over it'."

Basically the entry level raids are going to be way more accessible and there'll be more of them before the cockblocky silliness the uberguilds all enjoy.

[sam, an eggplant]

Even now years later, it rarely ceases to amaze me how articulate and just plain clued-in the WoW devteam is. There's a reason why WoW is #1, folks.

[Venkman]

I don't for a second believe it took them a full year to realize the brick wall that BC raiding was. They either knew it going in, or realized it was a good way to talk about how to sell the next expansion.

Never underestimate the power of linking "for the gamers!!/1" with a point of sale.

[Jashan]

Good to see I am not the only one. I joined a competitive guild before TBC, took my first step into Karazahn with my priest and then quit.

But I distinctly remember an April fools page made by the wow team. It showed an exaggerated map of what you had to do to get to the black temple. It was a very, very long scroll fest of instances, and then their heroic counterparts. So to back up Darniaq, I have to say that they knew this was a problem a long time ago.

[sam, an eggplant]

That's silly. Truth is that every diku to date has had that very same brick wall, where you hit max level and then gosh, now what do you do? Traditionally it's followed by a couple of months of farming dungeons for the best single group items followed by endless raid progression until the next expansion. It's a testiment to blizzard's designers that they not only recognized that this was a disservice to the majority of their customers but were willing to break the mold to an unprecedented degree through multiple progression paths before the next expansion pack's release.

It's easy to say these things in hindsight. Obviously forcing all your players to raid to advance their characters doesn't service the majority's needs. I agree. Everybody complained about it. So why hasn't anyone else addressed the problem?

[Venkman]

Of course.

All I'm doing is disbelieving the notion that Blizzard is handling things any differently. WoW is a standard diku. The only real difference* is that they paced the game so that more people can get drawn into the looping content.

* Aside from, like, working.

[sam, an eggplant]

Oh I don't think the basic advancement mechanics are changing, certainly. But they're making all that content much more accessible and providing multiple progression paths. It's not revolutionary, but it is innovative, and I think it'll continue to be successful.

[WindupAtheist]

Raiding requires skill

Given the potential for one person to fuck shit up, and the odds of someone having an off night when there are 25 or 40 people involved, how hard can it be?  I mean yeah, jump three times when the boss farts lava, duck behind the pillar when he casts Frost Snort, whatever.  Those are just instructions to be memorized.

I mean, if I create gameplay simple enough that the average slob has a 90% chance of doing it right, all I need is to require 25 people to all do it right at the same time, and suddenly I have "challenging content" where the odds dictate that 3/4 of all attempts end in failure.  Throw the agony of logistics and interpersonal drama on top of that, and suddenly we have a small percentage of the playerbase that is "elite" for slogging through.

[Nija]

DIKUs suck. I'm probably not going to pay for another.

[Tale]

Given the potential for one person to fuck shit up, and the odds of someone having an off night when there are 25 or 40 people involved, how hard can it be?  I mean yeah, jump three times when the boss farts lava, duck behind the pillar when he casts Frost Snort, whatever.  Those are just instructions to be memorized.

I mean, if I create gameplay simple enough that the average slob has a 90% chance of doing it right, all I need is to require 25 people to all do it right at the same time, and suddenly I have "challenging content" where the odds dictate that 3/4 of all attempts end in failure.  Throw the agony of logistics and interpersonal drama on top of that, and suddenly we have a small percentage of the playerbase that is "elite" for slogging through.

You've levelled up one paladin into greens and never raided. Why are you trying to discuss raiding?

Raiding is not the simple sequence of scripted events you described. Skilled reactions matter.

A skilled player with a crowd control ability sees a healer rezzing someone, and a mob pathing towards the healer, and buys time for the rez. Without that, the healer's corpse joins the other.

A skilled player with low mana picks exactly the right spell to cast with remaining mana - maybe it's a heal on tank #2 instead of tank #1, and it's the only reason tank #2 survives for the next heal. Or maybe it's a DoT on the mob instead of a rebuff, the last tick of which wins the fight.

I remember a situation where I wasn't supposed to be tanking, but something went wrong with a healer and I saw a tank drop. The mob was loose to mow down healers, so I tried to buy time by taunting it and sacrificing myself. But the healer leader saw what I was doing and called a heal chain on me, the healers responded fast enough, and we succeeded where another raid might have failed.

Raiding skill is the combined ability to make good split-second decisions. When it's "whelps, many whelps" and the guild just handles it.

[Tarami]

I don't for a second believe it took them a full year to realize the brick wall that BC raiding was. They either knew it going in, or realized it was a good way to talk about how to sell the next expansion. <snip>

This is what Microsoft does aswell. It's a valid sales argument when you're the biggest fish in the pond. "Yeah, we know we're a giant on clay feet, but look, next iteration will be much better." MS is barfing the exact the same thing about Internet Explorer 8 as they did for version 7 - "We know the last one was a wreck, this is much better! Please developers, keep wasting your precious development hours on our products, it isn't all in vain!"

Seriously guys, it's part of the Grand Scheme. They could remove all the cockblocks overnight if they wished to and lose a minimal amount of subscriptions. It's just that every dish needs to come with a side-order of turd, just to get the opportunity of listing "Turd removal - Price: Your soul". Buy this expansion pack of cockblocks so you can enjoy the cockblock-removing one. Marketing, DIKU-style. :)

[Ratama]

Raiding is not the simple sequence of scripted events you described. Skilled reactions matter...

...Raiding skill is the combined ability to make good split-second decisions. When it's "whelps, many whelps" and the guild just handles it.

Um, no.  WUA is right; scripted is as scripted does.

The only time skill comes into play is when someone bangs the pooch.  Raid encounters are controlled, scripted events; the same shit happens the same way, every time.  Unless some monkey fucks up, it's 'do your job, collect loot, on to next'.

I sure as hell your definition of 'fun' doesn't primarily consist of cleaning up after other folk's .

Last week was my last week of raiding in WoW (only staying subscribed to do some 2v2 with brother, seeing as how it's the only thing we do together anymore, really).  And looking back, the raiding was a waste of time; the time/reward ratio is so fucked up that it beggars belief that sentient beings could pay to spend so much real time for such little reward, or that the devs would value their customer's time/money so little.

And since you seem to care, this is coming from someone that has done 'progression' raiding for every boss in BC (well, not the Sunwell shit, but up to and including Illidan). 

Pre-edit edit: I suppose, to the credit of WoW's devs, that after just four+ short years, they now realize that PvE needs to offer more reward for the effort/time spent.  Well, thank the Light for small, extremely tardy favors.

[stray]

WTF does looking at a hotkey bar and seeing that one doesn't have enough mana for Rank 7 Heal, but has enough for Rank 6 have to do "skill"?? At best, that's vigilance. Hell, it's not even that. It's just about being able to read.

Now if it's a long sequence of split second decisions, then I'll grant you that that has a lot to do with skill. A good fight against other players comes down to a some of that (a good fight, that is...) -- but a raid encounter? No. It's a bit more forgiving with your lack-of-attention and mistakes. Especially if you've already played it.

[WindupAtheist]

You've levelled up one paladin into greens and never raided. Why are you trying to discuss raiding?

Yeah, because no one could speak upon the complex and elite world of raiding unless they've partaken, right?  Face it chuckles, it's just a video game, and it's one that looks pretty fucking weak.  The reason I've fucked off at 70 instead of trying to raid is the same reason I haven't gone out and bought any number of shitty-looking games, namely because they look shitty.

Given the appropriate strategy and level of gear, is there any reason why 25 players who are completely mediocre but who don't make any critical fuckups couldn't win any raid in the game?  Hell, is there any reason a guy with 25 accounts, 25 computers, and the urge to write a lot of detailed scripts couldn't theoretically just bot his way through one?

[Ratama]

The hard, stressful parts of raiding seem to be:

A.  Teaching people gameplay basics that they should have learned after their first hour playing their first Mario game (getting hit by fire = bad... and for fuck's sake, don't keep standing in it).

B.  Please don't get completely smashed until AFTER Archimonde's dead.

But seriously, raiding is teaching 20+ people what to do for EACH AND EVERY BOSS, and keeping said cats herded for 20+ hours or so a week (well, that and finding 25 people with that much spare time; seriously, there should be a special child abuse hotline to call just to tattle on parents that play these games).

Actual game skill has very little to do with it.

[Nija]

The hard part of raiding is doing the instance more than once. Which, by the way, is certainly a requirement of raiding.

[Kirth]

  Hell, is there any reason a guy with 25 accounts, 25 computers, and the urge to write a lot of detailed scripts couldn't theoretically just bot his way through one?

Nope.
If raiding was so easy, why did only a low % of raiding guilds complete the access quest for Black Temple/Hyjal? I'l concede that learning the script to a fight isn't the challenge of raiding, its more having a fair share of meta game knowledge and the ability to think on your feet as mentioned. I'll also point out that some of the later TBC raids were some of the best designed encounters I've ever experienced, scripts aside there is a lot of random natured stuff they include in the design of the encounters that would prevent your theoretical 25 man bot squad from making a dent in them.

I eagerly await the backlash after wrath launches when all the accessible "casual" content that players wanted is over tuned causing your avg joe schmoo in greens to hit a brick wall until some artificial time period is reached and it gets nerfed down coincidentally in the same patch or content release that the next hard core raid come out in. 

[WindupAtheist]

With enough people involved, Murphy's Law would make "Push the big green Kill Arthas button, not the red Kill Us button!" a dicey proposition.

[Polysorbate80]

I'l concede that learning the script to a fight isn't the challenge of raiding, its more putting up with the endless bullshit shenanigans of 24 WoW raidiots

FIFY.

Christ, I can barely tolerate most groups of 5. 25?  Fuck no.

[Trouble]

That's silly. Truth is that every diku to date has had that very same brick wall, where you hit max level and then gosh, now what do you do?

The Brick Wall in earth TBC was a different kind of beast. Basically the raid content right out of the gate was some of the most difficult content in TBC to date before they nerfed. There was supposed to be a gentle difficulty curve like pre-TBC where you started out with beginner raids and worked your way up to the hard ones. Having completed all that content before it was nerfed, it was in fact a literal brick wall for anyone outside the best guilds.

On a side note, this goes back to the "raiding takes no skill" argument and lays it flat. If raiding took no skill then everyone would be able to beat all the content easily which is certainly not true. Playing perfectly for the duration of a boss fight can be difficult to do even for the best players, and the cutting edge content often requires near perfection to beat.

[stray]

As you said, people worked their way up through earlier dungeons (and by doing so, slowly geared up for each successive raid encounter). It's an itemization issue. Not a "difficulty" curve.

As for the bosses... Boss fights go hand in hand with knowing how to play games in general. Figuring out puzzles, being aware of one's surroundings and abilities, making split second decisions -- those are all things that a gamer already does -- and has been doing since he or she was old enough to pick up a gamepad. There are a ton of puzzles and boss fights from games in the past 30 years that are even more complex and less apparent to figure out than anything in an mmo so far. Yet, many people have been beating them since they were kids. So...if the typical raid boss is difficult to many players in mmos, then all that tells me is that they aren't even gamers. They're just people who fuck around and think they are. For what reason, I don't know... But if all of that shit is difficult to them, then I have to wonder what they've been doing all of these years.

That being said, there is the added element of cooperative play which adds to difficulty -- you could have 24 gamers doing their thing, and one housewife (or househusband  ) who could fuck things up for everybody. I understand that. It shouldn't take much to teach them though -- or better yet, kick them out.

[Venkman]

There seems to be two sides here: 1) people who never raided but understand the concept of scripted repeatable encounters; and, 2) people who've raided so often it's second nature.

The "skill" is in between. You can read all of the cheat sites you want, but that's just going to give you the knowledge. It's not going to help you actually hit the right keys at the right time while 23 or 39 (or in EQ1's case, 74) others do so as well.

Your personal skill is not going to necessarily guarantee success. This is sometimes misconstrued as luck when it's just that someone else screwed up. Whether they're having a bad night, got called AFK'd, or are high/drunk/tired doesn't matter. They didn't do what they needed to do when they needed to do it (CCing, healing, snaring, whatever). These are predictable events to a point. To think otherwise ignores the years of drama we've all sat through in these games.

And that's skill with a lowercase "s", because the term is descriptive and on a sliding scale. What to do is just flat out knowledge. Actually doing it is the skill. Yes, an FPS game requires more player skill than your average heal rotation/buff bot in an MMO. But that doesn't mean MMOs are a bunch of people with their thumbs up their noses waiting for the proverbial manna from heaven.