#0 - Oct. 6, 2007, 1:12 a.m.
I saw a CM post recently that said something to the effect of 'you guys just don't give us credit for all the effort we put into casual content'. I paraphrase because I can't find the original post but I saw it before Brewfest started and tough 'wow, that's good, they really do care'.
Then Brewfest happened, and it's the same old story. The top prize for it, even though it's completely cosmetic, requires a substantial amount of participation. This isn't a bad thing by any means and it's something good I think for everyone involved. It's not like you're getting super loot by just logging on 10 days in a row, but my estimates were that you'd need to log on for at least an hour or two for 9 of the 14 days worth of Brewfest. To plenty of people, this is in fact hardcore behavior. To the Weekend Warriors (of which there are plenty I assume) getting the Ram Mount is an impossible goal. For casual content, i think this is somewhat unacceptable. It was vaguely possible to spend 6-7 hours at a time on the game for two days (or a lot of time one day!) when the Dark Iron Attacks worked to get the Ram Mount without a strong commitment to the game, but as those were poorly planned and fatally flawed from the begining the only way now to get the Ram Mount is by logging on daily, doing your 2 quests and hope you can come back on the flip side of 12 hours to run the rams again. (I'm not sure that logging on twice in the same day, 12 hours apart qualifies as casual either...)
On top of it all, we're ripped off two days for the brewfest with a cute gimmick of setting it up. I don't think it would have offended anyone if you'd just given it a 6hr setup at the most, and advertising an event as 14-day, when it's really only 12 was just another sign of disrespect towards the casual gamer.
I don't expect things to be awesome and free. I love to work for them, I love challenges. People can claim that Arena and BG's do this, but Arena and BG's aren't necessarily challenging to get your cookies. BG's just take time spent, Arenas can now be bought for gold.
So, the raiding quotient of the game gets a new raid instance on a regular basis with almost every major patch. There are tons of top-shelf items added all the time, and a vast amount of attention paid to keeping these people happy. Non-raiders have seen one instance patched into the game since launch outside of a full expansion pack, and that's Dire Maul. We've had one questline, the very awesome and difficult while being fairly rewarding for non-raid content Dungeon Set upgrade questline. Things like this appeal to the casual gamer. We don't need half-baked brewfests that were nothing more than a shiny diversion to give developers a chance to say "see! we make casual content too, don't say I never gave you nothin you ungrateful brats!" much like giving a dollar to a homeless man shows that you're a charitable person. It shows a significant lack of care about the non-raiding community to have events like this presented in such a disrespectful manner.
The Dark Iron Attacks were doomed from the start. Someone on the dev team at one point said that they'd learned from their AQ gate mistakes of clumping people in a small area for an event, but clearly that advice was solidly ignored for this. Instead of dwarves attacking multiple spots, clearly coralling everyone into a single pen wasn't going to work. Ever. If not for the large amounts of people, for the large amounts of people who just want to ruin everyone's fun by AOE'ing spells, and /wave macros and anything else they can do to be disruptive. Further, the idea that the rest of the quests were alternately working or not working seemed a bit disrespectful as well.
For all the raiders who think I'm just whining... Lets imagine a scenario where Sunwell Plateau is introduced next month. It's going to be on a timer, such that it opens on Nov 1, and will cease to exist entirely for another year (if it comes back, we haven't seen another Scourge Invasion since the first one) after lets say 90 days. Instead of it fully working for the first two weeks though, lets imagine that the 3rd boss doesn't work, constantly wipes the raid for no reason and is otherwise unkillable. Imagine that it takes two weeks to fix this. You've literally lost time that you won't get back. There's nothing anyone can or will do about it, you've just lost out on at least two attempts to get this loot that you'd really like to have. You're willing to put out the effort to get it, but your window of opportunity will never get wider. Would this be an acceptable scenario? Of course not, that's why raid instances stick around forever and "fun" events go away in two weeks whether they worked right or not.
Nobody's saying we want free epics when we log in. We just want more than busted world events with nearly unobtainable rewards. I'm sure lots of people (especially raiders) will claim that it's just supposed to be stupid fun, but when a good reward for casual players is involved at the end of it all, and it also happens to be tied to the ability to participate on a daily basis... and most of that daily basis is removed from the start... the fun gets sucked out of it very quickly. It's made me feel for the most part, that yet again it's proven that if you don't raid in this game, you barely matter. And that's kinda sad.