The question in all our minds right now is if we could do this, how soon until the rest of the top guilds in the world clear all the raid content that WOTLK has to offer? Did Blizzard miscalculate in the tuning of these encounters? Or is this Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders?
Early trenchant commentary comes from Quarter To Three:
I see one of the raid bosses dropped a rather large entitlement complex as loot.
Further analysis from the ironically named Elitist Jerks community:
No one will ever be satisfied. SSC/TK were available at TBC Launch and everyone thought it was a mistake in retrospect. The fact that the two top guilds in a unified effort cleared the ENTRY LEVEL RAIDS, once they hit 80, shouldn’t be a shock to anyone.
Their insinuation that this is a failure is pathetic. Lich King is not about hardcore end-game raiding, and never really has been; all the changes made have reinforced quite the opposite. This used to be their (SK/Nih) niche, and Blizzard toned it down. I’ll worry more about difficulty when we get past the Karazhan of LK. In fact, I’d be more worried if this took longer than 7 days.
It should also be noted that the penultimate raid (the one where you can kill the aforementioned Lich King who has been wrathing it up all over the place) is, in time honored MMO fashion, To Be Patched In Later. (Blizzard followed this same model the last time, of course.)
But the larger question SK/Nih/CombinedGuildTheyFormedBecauseTheyJustWeren’tUberEnoughAlready poses – “is Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders” – is fairly easily answered.
Let’s look at the numbers, shall we? Courtesy of those XML parsers at Wowjutsu, we have, out of guilds that have members with loot from Karazhan (the basic 10-man raiding dungeon that is so accessible even *I* can participate):
- Black Temple, the “end-game” raid for Burning Crusade: 19%
- Sunwell, the “post-max” raid patched in near the end of Burning Crusade’s life cycle: 5%
Gosh. It’s almost like the numbers are telling us something. What could it be? You think maybe Blizzard focused its efforts on the majority of the player base instead of 5%? Those horrible, horrible bastards, ignoring the Everquest 1 paradigm of aspirational content that the masses can worship less than 1% of the player base for completing!
Of course, if you REALLY beat down WoW like a red-headed stepchild and feel bored with the universe, other options do exist.
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Fools. Don’t know they know video game companies are supposed to try to make as much money as possible?
And this exact same thing happened in the Original WoW content. You had MC for almost 6 months(maybe more) then BWL, then months later Nax then the announcement of an expansion pack, the Burning Crusade. It’s almost as if they are giving you time to gear up or something! These so called “hard core raiders”, a.k.a. Basement Trolls, really need to gain the achievement “Leaving the Nest.”
SSDD. Perfect EQ 1 reference Lum. EQ is a dark, vacant parking lot compared to WoW for a damn good reason.
Please don’t send these people to other games. Thank you.
@Cedia
*cough*AoC*cough*
But I agree, I don’t want the trolls in other games because they help build my helper database so I don’t have to think to hard when questing.
I’m just lazy like that.
Still waiting for the day all raiding goes the way of the dodo.
I believe Blizzard stated that the Lich King would be the final raid, not the penultimate like Illidan was. They said it was a mistake to pull that Final Fantasy-ish twist where after you beat the alledged end-boss, Kil’jaeden pops up.
believe it or not, but some people quit WoW because they never get to the end game — they don’t get the entrance gear requirements to join guilds to advance or survive the Arenas long enough to progress to better “pants” (as you oncw observed). I can see why that would piss off the catasses, but like you say this is McBlizzard, raids for all supposedly.
So the parasites are unhappy that the host is not looking out for their interests first?
Boy, that’s a shame.
What exactly happened to raiding for fun? I mean if those guys are PVErs (as opposed to PVPers) and enjoy PVE/Raid content, why are they so pissed?
The answer is they probably aren’t. They’re the type of player that came into the MMO niche with WoW, they’re not MMO players at all. They “beat” games. Or “win” them.
DAoC, during Shrouded Isles, had pretty much one epic (And I use that term in the old way) dungeon for raiding per realm, and while it dropped some gear you could easily have equal or better from crafting. The dungeon, plain and simple, was there for people that liked to raid. We did so for probably 2 years and didn’t scream for new dungeons every 2 weeks (though Mythic did open up other realms epic dungeons for a week or so once, or rather switched them).
Somehow when ToA came out for DAoC, and when WoW came out for the market as a hole, the design philosophy changed from offering content people liked so they could have fun to offering a progression that never ends, or if it does (but only due to the fact that you run out of content) has no real, meaningful end at all. And “those” players trap themselves in that cycle, heavily encouraging (I will never use “force” in this context, since there IS a choice) any company that’s out for money to even further encourage this behaviour in their design.
Time to play the Devil’s Advocate again..
What exactly happened to raiding for fun? I mean if those guys are PVErs (as opposed to PVPers) and enjoy PVE/Raid content, why are they so pissed?
Because a large part of the fun for them is to barely, just barely, prevail by using their skills to the fullest. To me, many of my most enjoyable gaming experiences have been followed by me thinking: “I can’t believe that I just survived that”.
They’re the type of player that came into the MMO niche with WoW, they’re not MMO players at all. They “beat” games. Or “win” them.
You say it like it’s a bad thing. Granted, some game genres (and old Nintendo Hard games such as R-Type shoot’em ups) are definitely designed for players such as me. MMOs are usually not designed to have and end and thus cannot be “beaten”. However, that feeling of just barely managing to prevail can be replicated with a well-tuned encounter. In TBC, Illidan was a perfect example. He throws basically everything but the kitchen sink at you, and there’s just enough randomness to keep you at the edge of your seat for the whole encounter.
However, I freely admit that my play style and preferences are not the One True Way of playing. No play style should be overwhelmingly favored over the other, and the achiever style is not an exception. However, I reject the implication that the achiever archetypes are “not MMO players at all”. Is there something fundamentally wrong for trying to enjoy a challenge with your fellow players?
The wowjutsu data is not the right data set to uset. They restrict their indexing to guilds of a certain size that have kara+ loot, so of course by definition almost every guild in their data set will have done kara. That remaining 2% consists of guilds that, for whatever reason, have no kara loot but have post-kara loot. What it is good for is showing how many raiders fell out of the pipeline on the way to Illidan/KJ (albeit not so much because it includes post-3.0 data).
IIRC, some blue (Tigole?) commented that something like 50% of 70′s had at least one piece of raid loot.
The sword of a thousand thruths!
I’d say that, for game companies, there is every reason to favor one play style over another. You use your ability to gather in-game metrics to show you your players favor, and spend your development dollars there. If most people never hit the “end game,” why bother coding it?
I really hope they don’t tune the content to be harder. Honestly, this is a big reason for me to return to WoW one day, and if instead the encounters are made impossible to complete except by the elite I’ll have one less reason to give them my money.
Hard content is Fun. The issue comes where you make content inaccessible due to it’s difficulty, or the time required to get there.
Hence the removal of long attunement chains, hopefully the exclusion of hard gear checks on early bosses in raids, and as a personal hope, less “one person screwing up = instawipe” abilities.
I’m happy they’re not catering to the hardcore. I’ve been there, done that, and decided that being in a guild with casual/low stress friends and just running 10 man raids at most is far more fun for me. Now, if only they’d remove the random arena requirements off BG gear.
I’m kind of disappointed that you’re quoting Wowjutsu data, Lum.
The very notion of tracking “character” data is irrelevant when you’re discussing how many “players” are doing something in a game. And as alrady noted, the data isn’t even tracking all characters, so the 98% stat is meaningless.
A lot of WoW players are only playing the game because they enjoy the challenge of raiding with a guild. If either the content or the challenge is removed, they will leave. And it’ll be a lot more than 5% of the “player” base.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens if all raiding is like these first few instances currently available.
Thanks, did not know that – I’ll edit.
Another post on that subject coming shortly
I’m not sure at what point having the bastard raiding child of Nihilum and SK telling us “ZOMG raiding is too EZ” actually translates into truth. Remember when Nihilum cleared BT in one week after it was patched live, did that turn out to be too easy? …
penultimate
Pronunciation:
\pi-ˈnəl-tə-mət\
Function:
adjective
Date:
1677
1 : next to the last 2 : of or relating to a penult
— pen·ul·ti·mate·ly adverb
It’s like its some fucked-up attempt to achieve celebrity. But I’m not sure gamers have celebrities based on playing a beta so you can instantly beat things at release, provided you play long enough to have a seizure(http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,453447,00.html, but the story is all over the place).
I’ve never had or heard anything but derision for these people. Forum trolls get more respect.
Scott, I think you’re assuming a lot here. First of all, there are two endgame progression paths in WOTLK, a 10 man path and a 25 man path. The 10 man Naxx is actually quite impossible for even fairly hardcore players right now, being quite overtuned, while the 25 man Naxx was clearly undertuned and the encounters have already undergone many stealth buffs. I don’t think what TwentyFifthNovember did on the 15th is indicative of any huge paradigm shift for WoW’s endgame content so much as just Blizzard missing the mark on tuning the content. That said, I don’t think Naxx was really supposed to be all that challenging to a conglomerate megaguild that basically did all the fights many times before. No matter how hard it was tuned they probably would have beaten it before the 25th anyway. It’s impossible to make content that’s hard enough for a guild like that.
Anyway, what do I know, I haven’t even bought WotLK yet.
I’m sure if you saw the EJ thread you already know this, but they also didn’t even beat the expansion. One of those raids can be ratcheted up in difficulty as a choice by the raid, which they did not do, and there are also achievements and a special mount for fulfilling certain conditions while killing these raid bosses (kill them with less than a full raid, without anyone dying, etc. etc.).
They could up the difficulty level themselves if they wanted. Too hard? Reduce your raid size by 5 people, or walk in with all green Of Stamina gear, or complete every encounter without voice comms, or without addons. There’s plenty they can do to make it more difficult for themselves, and put themselves at the level of “normal player”. I’m part of an admittedly average raiding guild that was only able to clear MH & BT after the nerf, and still couldn’t beat Brutallis in Sunwell before the expansion. These guys — some of the best players in the world — could probably beat these nerfed encounters with 15 people in similar gear. When they can do the 25-man content with 15 people, I’d say the dungeon is “appropriately tuned”, but that’s just coming from an average player. /shrug
They already have the content set to a “hard mode” via the in-game achievement system. Achievements are in there to give these hardcore of the hardcore something special to work on.
One of them for Naxx is to clear 25 man Naxx completely without a single player death in your raid inside of the instance.
The “Bear Mount” of Naxx25 is locked away in achievements.
Lastly don’t forget that many/most of these players were raiding Naxx in Beta and learned all of the fights there.
Just as an addendum – I’d be curious to know if the best-of-the-best guilds use public addons, or write their own. I know a few healers in our guild use grid, but don’t use clique, because they see that as “cheating” – much as some people saw decursive as “cheating”. Do these guilds use every advantage possible, such as grid+clique?
Setting the jackassery of the “hardcore” aside, I do think that Blizz (and the makers of MMOs in general) could do a much better job of stepping people into high-level preparedness. One thing they could do is make outdoor content more difficult but less tedious (by changing quests that require you to win 10 trivial fights to quests that require you to win 5 moderately difficult fights). The other, I propose a set of solo “test” quests that are designed to promote the use of a class mechanic. With the right parameters I think that the overall time spent grinding levels could be reduced, with new players coming out of the process with a more complete skill set, and possibly the side benefit of allowing players who want to park a character at some lower level cap to do so without hassle.
SK Gaming should go back to CS imo. SCHROET KOMMANDO.SWA
Those were the gold ole days.
I blame WoW for everything, ever.
Not Quite: I know that the “elite” guilds do a lot of spreadsheet-y type things when first encountering various bosses and evaluating strategies; given that all full raid bosses after about Blackwing Lair have been basically impossible for contemporarily geared players without some kind of timer mod, I assume that every cutting edge guild has someone who can at least create scripts for such a thing. In general, I doubt that anyone at the very forefront of “raiding progress” would deny themselves an advantage–you don’t get there without being a total powergamer.
Hmmm maybe WOW is worth going back to after all.
Ill probably stick with EVE but at least WOW sounds like an option now.
What is a RAID anyway? I thought that was a Redundant Array or Inexpensive Drives or something.
It’s that brand of stuff you kill bugs with.
That will be the day I give up playing MMO’s really, I am far from a hardcore player but the only real reason I log on is to speak to friends and to raid, maybe that’s a fault of the game itself I don’t know but if they took raiding out of warcraft there would be very little that is appealing to me about the game.
And this is the reason why, after 4 years, I’m still playing WoW – because they cater to me. Blizzard keeps me interested in a variety of ways, from gimmicks like “critter bites” to Mekgineer’s Choppers to the Disneyesque animation.
Perhaps Nilihum/SK would be happier elsewhere. I doubt many will miss them if they stop playing WoW.
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