Someone call the waaahbulance. Vashj down, complaints up.

[Fabricated]

http://www.nihilum.co.uk/news/41/

I'm questioning how addicted you have to be to stay playing like that. Hey, here's an idea, quit playing!

The hardcore are retarded.

Karazhan: MAN WAY TOO EASY
Gruul: What the fuck man this is too hard lets farm consumables anyway and beat it
Magi: Again this is even fucking harder lets farm some more consumables and beat it
Serpentshrine: Jesus shit this is buggy and way too hard lets farm some more consumables and beat it, geeze blizzard, what're you trying to do, make us QUIT? betatesting lol

[Tebonas]

I feel sorry for them because obviously somebody stood behind those 25 people with a loaded gun and forced them to do something unfunny.

[Megrim]

Oh my. Judging by the amount of energetic input that must have gone into that post alone, these people need to be manacled to a chain-gang and be forced to build roads, or something.

Oh, and be slapped in the head.

[Ironwood]

What a horrible wee scrote.

[Azazel]

2 things come to mind:

1) ha ha catasses suck.

2) If that's as good as the shineys in the game get in BC, I'm not seeing much reason to really do much more aside from getting an epic flying mount. That loot is indeed pretty crappy, for what's needed to get to it. As in, if that's the top, the middle ground I'd get to at best isn't going to be exciting at all...

[Modern Angel]

You know how the quest to get access to Hyjal requires a vial of blood from Lady Vashj and something else from Kael'thas? The big hilarious fuckup is that she dropped four vials of blood for the entire raid.

So let's set aside the LOL CATASS stuff for a second since we can all get on the WoW general forums. Instead, with 30-45 minute trash respawns and the wildly untuned raids so far they're slowly alienating a pretty large segment of their fanbase. Nihilum's never going to stop playing no matter how much they bitch (though their bitching may be the only way to get things fixed) but those lesser tier raiders, the 15% killing Rags and a little bit of BWL? Nothing for them.

Not to mention that it is a mark of poor management and hubris to be doing the whole EQ horseshit all over again.

[Tebonas]

That particulary large segment of their fanbase are suckers for punishment. If Lady Vashj would drop 25 vials of blood they would whine in a month that they have played through the content and that it sucks because everything Blizzard ever does is to pander to the Newbies and Casuals.

Really, those are the people that thrive on beating impossible odds. Otherwise everybody could do it and their epeen would shrink and shrivel.

I say it is good that they build the timesinks in where only the insane and people with obsessive-compulsive disorder experience them if they have timesinks at all.

[Jayce]

That particulary large segment of their fanbase are suckers for punishment. If Lady Vashj would drop 25 vials of blood they would whine in a month that they have played through the content and that it sucks because everything Blizzard ever does is to pander to the Newbies and Casuals.

I was going to say, let them pander to Newbies and Casuals, since that's what I am, then I realized: if the hardcore go away, who will buy up all my silk cloth on the AH when leveling their alts?  I guess I can live with some ridiculous content in order to keep them around... so they can help me buy the ingame version of a "Porsche, little man".

[Modern Angel]

I'm sorry, I thought we sometimes talked about MMMOG design and the pitfalls thereof on these boards. I also thought that a respawning, wildly untuned and bugged encounter which requires SEVEN WEEKS at a minimum for 90%+ attendance guilds to get attuned for the next one might be germane to that conversation. Further, the fact that Blizzard is spending their budget on releasing another raid zone three past Vashj when every.single.other.one prior is fucked up might be worth discussing.

But, LOLRAIDERS!

I'm never going to see Lady Vashj since they've royally fucked up their raid game. I'm not talking about the guilds doing them. I'm talking about MC/BWL guilds having nowhere to go. SSC is the first "raid zone" in the old sense with trash mobs, multiple bosses, etc and it's completely borked. Not worth talking about, though. Nope.

[Trippy]

An MMORPG end-game raid encounter that buggy and unfinished? Unpossible!

[Modern Angel]

An MMORPG end-game raid encounter that buggy and unfinished? Unpossible!

Not AN end-game encounter. This is just the most glaring example because of the four vials as massive cockblock thing. It's EVERY raid encounter so far.

[Tebonas]

Blizzard only pays lip service to raiders since WoW was released. The latest moment when anybody should have realized that is when TBC came out where Blizzard showed us the quest loot and random drops there that all but spelled out in big red letters "YOU CAMPED FOR LOOT IN THIS GAME? YOU ARE SUCKERS, HAHA"

[Paelos]

I don't really care about the uber-must-finish-first-omg-hurry-raiders. I just want Blizzard to make content that's fair. An example of fair is, hey, I can play just fine in epic dungeons without consumables if I've put in the time to get all my gear that's needed at the previous level. This is not the case in this expansion at all.

[HaemishM]

An MMORPG end-game raid encounter that buggy and unfinished? Unpossible!

Not AN end-game encounter. This is just the most glaring example because of the four vials as massive cockblock thing. It's EVERY raid encounter so far.

Shit, at least Blizzard got one thing over EQ on the polish side. The encounter was actually itemized. THE MEDIUM HAS MADE PROGRESS!!!

But color me totally unsurprised that a 2-year development cycle for an expansion yielded encounters with significant raiding cockblocks. Why be surprised or upset? The raid game, when it's designed for the hardcore raiders like Furor and Tigole, is all about cockblocks. How many cockblocks can you put in the way to keep these guys hammering away on the same content for months? EQ used to do it by making the encounters broken, unitemized or unwinnable. WoW is just going the Veeshan's Peak way. Make everyone need keys, then dribble out the keys a little bit at a time.

But it's all predicated on the MMOG design flaw: encounters must be repeatable for everyone on the server. As long as your players can accept that the orc they killed springs back to life 15 minutes later, this kind of cockblocking encounter will always be used to dole out content at an acceptable (to the developers) rate. The hardcore raiders should just realize that this is their version of level segregation: between the have keys and the have not keys.

Also, LOLRAIDERZ.

[Modern Angel]

I'm not terribly surprised and only mildly upset. I'm more interested in what the current TBC raid game says in the following ways:

1) If Blizzard, arguably the most successful design house ever (arguably!), can't get pvp balance, fun to retention ratio, guild mechanics, etc, etc right what hope does anyone with a twentieth of the money and clout have?

2) It's becoming increasingly apparent that the reason why even Lady Vashj blues are sidegrades to 70 blues/Karazhan epics is to keep the arenas balanced gearwise. If that's the case, is balanced pvp in an item/level based game possible ever? Because they've effectively conceded that they can't do it. And if one wants balanced pvp why isn't one playing a fps instead?

3) What does it say about MMOG project management that huge, game stopping bugs appear seemingly untouched? Are MMOGs that complicated or is it a tendency of developers to "circle the wagons" in their bunker as the more obsessive fans hammer on them repeatedly, thereby causing them to shut off even constructive dialogue?

That's why I'm interested in this mini-debacle. Like I said, I'm not getting there even though SSC *is* supposed to be a BWL type raid.

[bhodi]

It's clear to me the people that are designing, testing, and balancing content and characters at blizzard are not the same people who were in the initial development cycle of the game.

[Modern Angel]

That's a given but moreover I don't think their current people are playing the same game as the rest of us. The more some of these folks plod along in the endgame the more they're confirming their suspicions that Blizzard's internal testing team doesn't do it the same way. Playing in a lag free environment with spawned gear and free consumables (based on what Bliz THINKS people will bring) is alot different than playing with lag and with emotional/time investment involved*.


*Deliberately setting aside the question of whether or not it's right or healthy to invest anything into a game.

[HaemishM]

Are MMOGs that complicated

Yes.

or is it a tendency of developers to "circle the wagons" in their bunker as the more obsessive fans hammer on them repeatedly, thereby causing them to shut off even constructive dialogue?

Yes.

Echo chamber development becomes commonplace in successful operations, especially those with such a huge fan base as WoW, because the job of a CM or team of CM's in carrying feedback to the developers is made so frighteningly hard by the signal to noise ratio on official dialogue channels like the WoW boards.

[Jayce]

One theory that comes to my mind about the loot is that given:
a) you will never get the first stats on new loot exactly right
b) people will yell until they are hoarse when you nerf their existing equipment
c) people will bubble hearts out of the top of their head if you buff their existing equipment
d) you should start low and buff new loot

But that's just a theory; who knows if they are going to buff it at some point.  But on the other hand, if no one goes to the new dungeons because the risk/reward ratio is too low, I'd think they will have to buff it.  On the gripping hand, people went to AQ20/40 en masse for what was essentially sidegrades.

[Fabricated]

My LOLRAIDERZ point was that these people KEPT BEATING THEIR HEADS against what was a totally bugged-to-shit, incomplete instance! They're honestly too addicted to just say, "Jesus Christ, this is AWFUL," and go back to running other earlier, less fucked-up content while filing bug reports and pleading their case in the official forums. Patience, grasshopper.

But no, you get people who beat their dicks with a hammer while complaining about how much it hurts!

Not that blizzard deserves a pass for putting what is incomplete content on a live server, especially when they made such a huge deal about all the new stuff they were putting in TBC...oh yeah, and the delays, did we forget the delays to make it as "good as it should be"? Even Karazhan has elements of it that need tweaking.

Edit: I realized I agreed with pretty much everyone from the casual raiders to the hardcore about the loot curve, so I decided to look some more to see if I wasn't giving these guys a fair shake. There's a "SSC sucks" thread made by a member of Death and Taxes up right now that's pretty reasonable here until someone suggests they simply "Don't run the instance." The response? "Someone has to."

Wow, they're heroes! Throwing themselves onto the grenade of buggy content for all of us!

[Modern Angel]

My LOLRAIDERZ point was that these people KEPT BEATING THEIR HEADS against what was a totally bugged-to-shit, incomplete instance! They're honestly too addicted to just say, "Jesus Christ, this is AWFUL," and go back to running other earlier, less fucked-up content while filing bug reports and pleading their case in the official forums. Patience, grasshopper.

But no, you get people who beat their dicks with a hammer while complaining about how much it hurts!

Not that blizzard deserves a pass for putting what is incomplete content on a live server, especially when they made such a huge deal about all the new stuff they were putting in TBC...oh yeah, and the delays, did we forget the delays to make it as "good as it should be"? Even Karazhan has elements of it that need tweaking.

No doubt. Which is why I'm merrily doing my weekend Karazhan runs. I have a definite date when I cancel: the day I buy Spore, Conan or WAR, whichever comes first. I know for a fact I'm not the only one thinking the same thing.

[Calantus]

Clearly the most important issue at hand is a group of ~50 masochists catassing broken raid encounters and then complaining about the game being broken, not that the content paid for through the expansion is currently broken and guilds below Nihilum are in for a nasty shock once they get there. I'm not even going to bother discussing it beyond that, too many in this subforum are too focused on "lol catass" to provide a good discussion of anything deeper. I'll come back when the more casual raiders have hit the broken content and have given up in disgust thereby unlocking this topic for rational discussion.

[Fabricated]

I'll come back when the more casual raiders have hit the broken content and have given up in disgust thereby unlocking this topic for rational discussion.

That's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. We can't exactly discuss broken content we haven't done yet. When we hit it eventually it'll either be fixed, or broken still, then we can either quit or just do content we like (leveling an alt, doing earlier raids/instances, tradeskilling, et al.) instead of content that isn't fun. Blizzard will fix it eventually, if not, we can take our cash/time elsewhere.

Edit: Also, note that I'm not an OG MMO player like a lot of people here. I'm still pretty much fascinated by the dedication of people who play games in this genre. I used to wonder how some of the FAQ writers at GameFAQs could stand essentially disassembling a game piece by piece and putting it in a well-formatted document for others, this is something beyond that.

[Merusk]

No doubt. Which is why I'm merrily doing my weekend Karazhan runs. I have a definite date when I cancel: the day I buy Spore, Conan or WAR, whichever comes first. I know for a fact I'm not the only one thinking the same thing.

I'm definatly looking out for WAR and Conan.. but the  is still up on both so we'll see how that fleshes out when they drop.   WoW has been great for 2 years, but I know I can leave, play something else for a while and come back a year or so later for the 2nd expansion. Yay for glacial content pace.

[Miasma]

Wow, they're heroes! Throwing themselves onto the grenade of buggy content for all of us!

They're probably just trying to act like Tigole and Furor did in EQ so that they can land jobs designing the dungeons for Universe of Starcraft.  Hiring them was a terrible precedent.

[Jayce]

No doubt. Which is why I'm merrily doing my weekend Karazhan runs. I have a definite date when I cancel: the day I buy Spore, Conan or WAR, whichever comes first. I know for a fact I'm not the only one thinking the same thing.

Interesting how history repeats itself... and hope springs etenal:

UO player: "Just wait till EQ comes out.  Everyone will leave for it!"
EQ Player: "Asheron's Call is going to destroy EQ"
AC player: "I'll be gone the day DAOC launches, and so will everyone I know!"
DAOC player: "This sucks, SWG is going to mop the floor with it"
SWG player: "lol scrubs, cya in WoW"
WoW player: "how can this be so good.. yet so bad?  I'm for AOC the day it comes out!"

[Merusk]

Mine's more of a "It's been 2.25 years.  I need a new game"  But yes, that's the cycle.  You missed Guild Wars, AC2, CoH and FF11 (which was actually what people left SWG for) though.

[Modern Angel]

Mine's more of a "It's been 2.25 years.  I need a new game"  But yes, that's the cycle.  You missed Guild Wars, AC2, CoH and FF11 (which was actually what people left SWG for) though.

Yeah, that's mine, too. There's still alot to like about WoW but I'm not so certain that raiding, even that nice casual raiding they're doing such a good job of obliterating, is one of them anymore. I have my friends, I have well designed five mans, I have a little mindless pvp, I have a 70 shaman to fart around on... those are good things but it's time for something new. I want better integrated world pvp.

[Trouble]

One of the big frustrations that has been cited is that Naxxramas when it was released was almost perfectly tuned. There were a few small bugs that were quickly fixed, but overall the entire instance was amazingly well tuned. Even Four Horseman, Sapphiron, and Kel'Thuzad, all considered to be pretty much the most difficult encounters in WoW to that date, were perfectly tuned without having been tested and beaten on a test server. Now we come to the expansion and the content is buggy and untuned as hell. This isn't just the hardcore raiders beating their heads against the wall. Serpentshrine is one step into raiding for every guild, hardcore and casual alike. The hardest of hardcore guilds are at the end of the instance now, hardcore guilds are at the middle, and normal guilds are just starting. All of them have to deal with 45 minute respawning trash, bugs, and untuned encounters. Blizzard KNOWS how to do it right. They've made their mistakes in the past and should have learned from them. Naxxramas was the example of very few bugs, well tuned but difficult encounters, and appropriate amounts of trash mobs with very long respawn timers. It's very frustrating to see raiding take such a step backwards from its pinnacle.

[bhodi]

It was still tuned to 'Jobless 19 year old' ;)

[Triforcer]

Every day is a little closer to the day I draw an actual paycheck and can buy a computer capable of running whatever the latest Battlefield incarnation is (my current laptop is a 32 integrated card, I can't even fucking upgrade).  I realized recently that I was happy gaming-wise in college because 85% of my gaming was BF1942, with an MMO thrown in very occassionally for kicks.  Gogo Planetside 2/Battlefront 3/BF2242/ whatever. 

[Azazel]

An MMORPG end-game raid encounter that buggy and unfinished? Unpossible!

Not AN end-game encounter. This is just the most glaring example because of the four vials as massive cockblock thing. It's EVERY raid encounter so far.

Welcome to six years ago. Trakanon's tooth, anyone?