#884 - June 17, 2010, 10:38 p.m.
Q u o t e:
Ugh, why are you agreeing with someone making such baseless statements? The lack of people seeing Sunwell had nothing to do with gearing up or when you joined the raid game. It was completely the tuning of the content and the ridiculous raid composition logistics punishing you for having leveled the wrong class.
I agree with you about the class tuning, but the gear was a factor as well. Everyone I knew was running alts or new recruits through the old content to get them geared up.
If you want to know a little secret, part of the reason we can't use gear as a barrier to entry any longer is because the skill of the raiding population has grown so dramatically. The guilds who got the first kills in Icecrown probably could have done it with gear from a couple of tiers prior (with the possible exception of heroic LK). Skill trumps an enormous amount of power from gear.
Q u o t e:
Either way, I have to sigh at the idea that the developers have embraced this model. Someone doing ICC is getting the best gear, and someone that's behind can catch up through badges. This keeps PvE accessible, and increases the amount of people that will see all the content. The latter thing is the main thing behind the new model, right?
Well, isn't there a better way to accomplish that? Sure, it manages to pull it off, but I don't feel it adds much to the overall package. Rather than people progressing tier to tier, the raiding base is just sort of superficially shifted to the latest tier (or the previous one). It makes it hard to sustain a sense of progression when the game at a given point puts so much emphasis on a couple of tiers, and allows the rest to become so obsolete. Or when so much emphasis is shifted to heroics, being teleported to a room isolated from all context, opposed to actual raiding.
I'm not sure you feel this way, but typically the response is "I walked uphill in the snow, so they should have to as well." You got to the content first. You were showing off your tier set and Shadowmourne in Dalaran before those others guys. Why does it matter if they will eventually be able to catch up to you (especially since you'll pull ahead again the second a new raid is available)? The alternative is saying that those players should want to run through every raid tier before they can hit the new stuff, but I can tell you that whether or not they want to (and many don't) the facts suggest that they never finish and give up on raiding.
We're not really trying to keep Black Temple or Sunwell alive at this point, and by the same token, we're okay if Naxx has basically been reduced to achievements or weekly raid quests. It had its time in the sun. We don't need to prop it up forever.
Q u o t e:
Would this mean that 10s and 25s would be able to get legendaries in the same amount of time? or would less shards/whatnot drop in 10s? If so, how much less?
I don't know the details because we probably won't do a legendary for the first tier, but we would definitely not want a structure such that a 25 guild felt like the fastest way to finish the item was to run multiple 10s. If the 25s could finish it first, that would be fine. The 10s would still be able to get the item, which is not possible today.
Q u o t e:
Why not design the two paths for two different purposes and tell the players to choose?
We sort of tried that, Gray, and they all chose 25 (meanwhile telling us that they wanted to play 10 but felt stupid for doing so since they were missing out on gear).
Q u o t e:
You've said that players who prefer the 10man size feel compelled to participate in 25man raids for the better gear. That tells me that those players prefer gear over 10man raiding. If the 10man size was more important then they wouldn't raid 25mans. I would agree that this situation is not ideal for this particular player, but I think you would agree that it is impossible for blizzard to create an experiance that is ideal for every player. So, why try?
I would say if we are at 10% and our goal is to get to 100% then we shouldn't give up just because we can only realistically get to 50%. In clearer words, we can improve the situation a lot even if we can't make the experience ideal.
Gear is a powerful motivator -- perhaps stupidly so, but it is. Players who prefer 10s will run 25s just for the gear. Players who prefer 25s will run 10s if they think it will gear them up faster than 10s. Both types of players will run 10s and 25s if that is more efficient than only running what they enjoy.
Q u o t e:
But you aren't making 25 mans more efficient at earning gear -- you guys are making 25s on PAR with 10s for earning gear. In current 25 man, its a 3 to 1 ratio of players to loot per boss versus 2 to 1 in 10 man. If you make 25s 2 to 1 as you propose, you aren't making it any better than a 10 -- you are only bringing 25s to be in sync with the way 10s are. 2 to 1 == 2 to 1. As previously said many times, extra gold is silly, extra rep is silly. The only thing that compels people to run 25s is better loot -- not having 15 more people jibba jabbering in vent and messing things up for your raid.
You lost me a little there. Current raids don't drop 2 or 3 loot items per player -- they drop 2 or 3 items per raid. Your way would be 20 to 75 pieces of loot. Do you mean that a 10 drops 1 piece per 5 players and a 25 drops 1 piece per 8.3 players? Imagine those ratios were reversed and a 10 dropped 1.2 items per raid (1 per 8.3 players) and a 25 dropped 5 per raid (1 per 5 players). Now the 25 is more efficient. It's more complicated than that because you might have more competition for a powerful drop in 25s, while you might shard more loot in 10s because the target class / spec isn't present.
Q u o t e:
Ghostcrawler just stated a few posts back that the amount of people left from the original WoW team is very minor.
No, you got that backwards or else I said something confusing. The reverse is true.
Q u o t e:
It seems to me that Blizz staff thinks there is uproar from people running 10 mans that their loot isn’t as special as 25 man raids. I have not experienced this at all, and from what I've read on this forum along with people I know in 10 man guilds; people are fine with the current system & frankly don't care about the 25 man loot difference...if they want the 25 loot, they would join a 25 man pug.
In this particular case, we believe we have better data than you.
Q u o t e:
Game designers want people to finish their games? At what cost? At any cost? What's the next step? Leveling 1-85 is too hard so just going to start people at 55? Oh wait, already did that.
Heroic modes are not fun. They are devalued because normal modes are there. More than any single change in LK, I despise heroic modes. In the old days if a boss was blocking us, guess what? We put in the more time and effort and got better and beat it. Now we put in seven attempts. Give up. Switch to normal, get more gear and hope that soon enough we outgear the heroic boss that is beating us now. God forbid we lrn2play.
You are churning out more mediocre players than ever. Are your game designers happy with that?
You're asking for us to spend an inordinate amount of our development time on a very small portion of our player base. That might work for an instance as easy to develop as Molten Core. It won't work for Ulduar. Making raids only for the top 2% is hard to justify when we're sitting there looking at a long feature list trying to decide what features we want to do for Cataclysm and what has to wait. The equivalent would be saying "This is the Survival hunter expansion. We're going to spend a huge chunk of our development time on Survival hunters. If you don't play a hunter, sorry, but please buy our expansion anyway." Your strategy should actually be welcoming as many players as possible into raids -- that's what allows us to keep spending so much time and effort on them. :)
Q u o t e:
When the game was "hard" it grew and grew.
I don't think the causality you are asserting is actually there.