Why does Blizz want us to raid less?

Q u o t e:
With 25 man and 10 man bosses sharing the same raid ID, why does it seem Blizz is punishing PvEers?

Why can't we raid both in a week? Especially given that the first intro raid is 5 bosses. 5!

When WotLK hit, with the ease of difficulty of Naxx/Maly/Sarth, we would clear the place in 2 nights. And that was 15 bosses in Naxx, Malygos and Sarth 3D.

We thought the LK design was asking raiders to raid more than they wanted to. When you see a boss twice a week, you just burn out on the fight that much faster.

If you really love raiding, as many of us do, bring an alt the second time around.

As to the number of bosses, the 5 is just from Bastion of Twilight. There are two additional raid instances in the first tier of content and together they'll offer enough bosses for us to fully itemize, around a dozen or so.

Q u o t e:
And if you aren't the type who enjoy having alts for raiding? Just gotta bite the bullet is the general idea on that?

Several players seemed to zero in on my mentioning alts. I offered that as an activity if you just really love raiding and can't get enough of it even when each boss only dies once a week instead of twice.

I don't think there is anything sacred about killing a boss twice a week. In fact the concept didn't even exist before LK; if you wanted to kill a boss twice before that you... you guessed it... rolled an alt.

Q u o t e:
I have to say, the new Cataclysm raid set up is just bad. I see people complaining that they're raiding too much in Wolk and running the same bosses twice a week. Think about it tho, who's fault is that? Yours! No one can make you run both 10 and 25mans. If you're in a 25man guild and you run 25s, no guild can make you run the 10mans. You're already getting the 25man loot, which is clearly better then the 10man loot for everyone. If you don't want to run it twice for a little extra, just don't do it, its that simple.

I don't think it is that simple. Making raid progress is a really powerful motivator for a lot of players. While we design raiding to be much more inclusive than it used to be, we still want skill to be a big component. We don't want raiding to just be about who has the most free time, but who uses that time for the most progress. To be successful, MMOs need to had wide appeal. You should be able to have a professional or social life or (heaven forbid) other games you like to play and still feel like you can make progress in WoW.

The old BG model was one that essentially rewarded who played the most. Since some players were willing to play a ridiculous and unreasonable number of hours, the numbers were tuned around that to the point at which many players felt like the feature just wasn't for them. As you point out, they could have just made very slow progress, but in reality they felt so far behind that they chose not to participate at all. While the Arena design has its limitations, one of the things I like is that you can play your matches for the week and be done.

There are plenty of players who chose 25-player raiding over 10-player raiding and had no desire to kill a boss multiple times a week, but felt like they had to do so to earn badges and loot to stay competitive. We considered models such as letting you kill a boss as many times a week as you wanted but only having loot rights once, but then we realized how horrible that was going to be for say the guild's main tank who would be asked to raid constantly without even the hope for more loot of his own.

Really we're just trying to deliver on the original LK intent, which was you choose whether you like 10 or 25.

Q u o t e:
In a recent interview it looks like the main loot incentive is going to be more badges per player in 25 mans. However, if there is a weekly cap of badges/valor points you can receive (the higher end ones), does this mean that regardless of doing a 25 or 10 man raid, players will still end up with the same amount of badges per week?

We're still messing around with the numbers because we want a system that works not only at launch but once there are multiple raid tiers and perhaps weekly raid quests and the whole nine yards. A very general idea (meaning it could end up being different) is that a group that can clear a 25-player raid can earn all of their points that way, while a 10-player group may need to supplement that income with more Dungeon Finder runs. We also recognize that badges are attractive early in a tier but that they lose their luster once you've earned a few pieces, so they can't be the only incentive.

Q u o t e:
Please nail down what exactly you're doing with 10/25 drops. Then tell us. Then gauge the reaction.

Charsi, I can predict what the reaction will be. I think this is one of those cases where it's not going to be possible to please everyone. Setting aside some of the folks in this thread who want to run both 10s and 25s every week to maximize reward potential, most players either prefer 10s and have no use for the 25s or want to run 25s and don't want to feel like they are being inefficient for doing so. In other words, half (I don't know if it's really half, but it makes the sentence easier to read) the community wants an incentive to run 10s and no incentive to run 25s and half the community wants the opposite. On the other hand, we feel like we need to offer both raid sizes in order to make raiding attractive to a broad swath of the community. As a result, I think it's likely that no matter what we do, proponents of each raid size will feel like we're not being fair enough to their side. It's going to be one of those hybrid vs. pure or PvE vs. PvP ongoing debates that never really get resolved because each party wants virtually the opposite of the other.

Q u o t e:
Will there be a single achievement for killing a boss or will it be divided into 10/25 achievements? It'll really suck if it's the latter and you can't run both weekly.

Single achievement.

Q u o t e:
What many players fear, self-included, is that you aren't going to reel in the ease of the 10 man raid format which will result in poor consequences for 25 man raiding.

Remember that in LK the 10s were specifically designed to be easier (with a couple of exceptions where we messed up) and many players ran them with the loot they earned from their 25s, further exacerbating the problem. Given the complexities of some encounters, realistically it's probably not possible for every single battle to be of exactly the same difficulty in both 10 and 25, but we have a lot of room to bring them closer together.

Q u o t e:
I'd be amazed if you could produce someone who genuinely wanted to run both raids, rather than feeling somewhat forced to do so.

Uh... there are plenty of players in this very thread who claim they want to run both. Argue with them if you question their motivation. :)

Q u o t e:
Thus, unless you were prepared to spend roughly six months gearing up to 245 level, running all versions of ToC was the only method that made sense.

Right. This is exactly what I was mentioning up above. We balance around the maximum income possible per week because we know plenty of players will strive to achieve the max per week. The solution in our minds then is to not design a model where you can raid the same content that much. ToC was particularly troublesome because it had four independent lockouts. Yuck. We went to two lockouts for Icecrown based on that experience and are now eager to go down to one.

Q u o t e:
Because of this, I'm very disappointed to see progression oriented players painted as somehow greedy, when the reality is that the behaviors mentioned are in response to Blizzard's massive model shift.

We get this kind of response a lot. In general you're agreeing with me that giving players the option to run a raid into the ground that quickly is a bad idea. The only distinction is you're saying it's not the player's fault. You're absolutely right. It's our fault. Assigning blame really doesn't change the outcome though. We want to try a new model that we think will be better.

Q u o t e:
GC, with all due respect, why would this hypothetical situation, that we as players have the choice to go along with or say no to, stop everyone who potentially wouldn't be negatively affected from the change from experiencing it?

Some of you guys are coming from the angle that players should take responsibility for not playing more than they want to. I agree with that of course, but I also think the game design should not be something that puts that kind of pressure on you. We don't want to make a game full of traps or temptations that you should have to resist. It's more fun, I think, if what the game asks of you is reasonable. Killing the same boss twice or four times (as in ToC) or an unlimited number of times (as in the "no loot" model) doesn't seem reasonable. Neither does having to play Alterac Valley hundreds of times in a weekend to get a prestigious PvP rank. Neither does having to grind for consumables for hours every week before raid night. All of those things are theoretically "features" that players could have shown some common sense and opted out of, but realistically they were just boneheaded design decisions that we needed to fix.

Q u o t e:
It's funny you say "nanny-state" because one thing that keeps popping in my mind when I consider how in the hell the Devs even consider some of these changes at all, is:

WotLK in particular, it just seems like people who don't even like MMORPGS are making changes to make 'people happy' instead of making their game better.

Protesting the nanny state is one thing, but many of these threads read like some version of "It's not fair for Blizzard to remove painfully unfun if slightly mandatory things from the game, because players already have a choice not to do them."

Q u o t e:
Is there any reasons for having Hard modes available only after you cleared normal mode?

They will probably be unlocked very quickly, maybe after one clear, or maybe right from the beginning. We're still working those logistics out. We held the LK ones back partially because we shipped that patch late in the year and didn't want to ask players to raid their asses off over the holiday season. (Yeah, I know, more nanny state discussion ensues.)

I would also expect a little more gearing up from 85 quests / heroics / crafted materials before jumping right into the raids this time around.

Q u o t e:
But here's where I think some of the genuine hysteria, if there is such a thing, might stem from. When you say, "remove painfully unfun if slightly mandatory things from the game" some people think you mean 25player raids. Point blank.

If we wanted to remove 25-player raids, we'd just do that. We know a lot of players like them. Personally, I will probably keep raiding 25s. A lot of players like the 10s too though, and despite what fans of the 25s might think, offering lower item level loot in the 10s doesn't make them attractive enough. We're going to try instead offering more rewards (which includes loot) in the 25s, especially for the heroic modes. Many (though not all) of the players worried about the reward per effort of 25 raiding are concerned more with the heroic modes.

Q u o t e:
"It's not fair for Blizzard to remove a playstyle choice from the game that people enjoy."

I agree with you more when you phrase it that way, but we have a large player base, so someone is going to miss almost any feature that we remove or de-emphasize. In this case we think the folks who hated feeling like they had to run both 10 and 25 every week have a more legit case those who enjoyed running both every week. WoW, and by extension raiding, is supposed to be a fun pastime, not a soul-crushing chore. Note that I'm not talking about noobs here -- I'm talking about the design causing burnout in some of our most dedicated raiders.

Q u o t e:
You have an incredible amount of thoughtful posts in this thread, confusion over directions, feedback, suggestions and clarification requests based on your previous responses and you choose to respond to such an irrelevant piece of dribble that adds nothing to the conversation.

If you cannot contribute constructively to the discussion, then in your own words, just don't speak at all.

There are a lot of posts from players who feel like we are taking away something important to them -- running raids twice a week. While I don't happen to agree with them on the importance of that feature, I can understand that it is important to them. This is why we ask you not to give us static about which posts we choose to respond to. No doubt your "irrelevant piece of dribble" is pretty important to someone else.

Q u o t e:
Just a minor nitpick, but a whole mess of this design team didnt create this game.

It is very minor. :) I myself am relatively new, but most of the design team, and all of the other leads, have been here for a long time, and most from the the beginning. If you want to be critical of any our design decisions, go for it (assuming you can communicate like an adult in polite society). But this notion that none of the original design team is left is as much hand waving as the notion that I must not play your class since I don't agree with your self-designed buffs. :)

Q u o t e:
I dont understand why blizzard seems to have this idea that people feel the need to run both. If you're a 10man guild you have no use for gear in 25mans, and vice versa.

This isn't speculation on our part. We have the data. As far as motivation, in some cases the 10 gear ends up being better than the 25 gear. Especially on 10 heroic, which a group of raiders in 25 level gear can often handle, the 10 gear is equivalent. There is also the issue of badges, which you can only maximize if you hit both versions every week.

We know there are a lot of players who want to run 10s who feel compelled to run 25s for the better loot. We know there are a lot of players who want to run 25s and feel like they still have to do 10s as well. We know both groups of players are getting frustrated and burning out -- not because they don't like raiding, but because they don't like raiding the same content twice a week, particularly when the 10 version tends to not even be challenging since their 25 participation ensures they overgear it.

One raid lockout with same item levels for 10 and 25 and a weekly cap on badge income solves all of those problems for us. It does creates two potential new problems. One, players may gravitate towards 10s because the logistics are easier. We intend to handle that by making 25s more efficient at earning gear. Two, players who really like to run both a 10 and 25 every week lose that opportunity. Sorry. If it's any consolation, because the bosses are divided among multiple raid zones you can still do some in a 10 and some in a 25 or have an alt that only does a couple of those zones a week without the full commitment of two complete boss kill cycles every week.

Q u o t e:
Are you going to limit the amount of honor someone can gain per week from BGs and how much rating someone can gain per week from arena?

We don't limit honor per week, but we do cap it. In the same way we won't limit the hero points per week that you can earn from heroic dungeons. We do limit the arena points you can gain per week (called conquest points in Cataclysm since you can earn them from rated BGs) as we limit the number of valor points -- the Frost equivalent that you earn from raids. In short, the upper tier is harder to earn and more prestigious to own, but once the tier advances you can quickly catch up to the first tier while the second one becomes the new high-end goal.

Technically the Frost badges are limited per week right now, it's just that the cap is set to max number possible. In Cataclysm, the cap will be lower than the max number possible so you have some decisions about how to earn those points rather than having to do everything.

Lower tier -- no cap per time, but an overall cap. In LK: Honor (PvP) and Triumph (PvE). In Cataclysm: Honor (PvP) and Heroism (PvE).
Upper tier -- cap per time. In LK: Arena points (PvP) and Frost (PvE). In Cataclysm: Conquest (PvP) and Valor (PvE).

Q u o t e:
GC, I think you made a typo here. Shouldn't it be as follows?:

Lower tier -- no cap per time, but an overall cap. In LK: Honor (PvP) and Triumph (PvE). In Cataclysm: Honor (PvP) and Heroic (PvE).
Upper tier -- cap per time. In LK: Arena points (PvP) and Frost (PvE). In Cataclysm: Conquest (PvP) and Valor (PvE).

Yeah, you're right. Corrected.

Q u o t e:
Does this mean that's not going to happen and the raiding gear will always be higher iLvl than the heroic gear?

Right, and the raids will be tuned such that you will probably need that heroic gear.

Q u o t e:
You just stated 25s offering "more rewards", since its not in the form of Armor/Tier/Weapons. Does this this mean that your going to offer things to the exclusively 25m raids? If so what kind of rewards would they be? Mounts, Quests, Legendaries?

Me: "We're going to try instead offering more rewards (which includes loot) in the 25s, especially for the heroic modes."

The heroic 25 will drop more armor, weapons and tier-piece tokens per player than the heroic 10. The normal 25 will drop more badges per player than the normal 10, and it might drop more armor and weapons as well. Legendaries would most likely be both 10 and 25. We don't want a player to have to say "I prefer running 10s, but now I feel like I have to run 25s to get a specific item." If they say "I prefer running 10s, but now I feel like I have to run 25s to gear up faster," well, tough.

Q u o t e:
Are you one of the people that has to handle the logistics of running a 25-man guild? (Just curious - you no doubt know how complex it is to juggle personalities, buffs, debuffs, roles, loot issues, motivation, guild goals, etc in a larger group)

I spent much of my WoW-playing career as a guild leader and raid organizer. I understand the highs and lows of that position very well. It is kind of interesting how many designers here are or were guild leaders. I abdicated a couple of years ago because I didn't want my friends to be at the mercy of this job, (as well as my yacht sailing and gin swilling of course).

Q u o t e:
Would you be MORE likely to run 25 man if the item level was only 3 higher?

Your assumption here is that there is some magic tipping point at which a 10 dude wouldn't feel compelled to run a 25 and a 25 dude wouldn't feel stupid for not running a 10. That number may in fact exist, but it may be very hard to hit. I will tell you that we had to go to a whole tier of gear to make the heroics feel like they were worth doing.

The stereotypical hardcore 25 guild (and I used "stereotypical" specifically because I'm not sure how meaningful it is to try and talk about a typical guild) is very concerned with efficiency. They want to get the final boss killed as quickly as possible and gear up everyone quickly. They feel a sense of accomplishment in doing things quickly. Thus we hope the benefit of gearing up more quickly by doing 25s is enough to keep them doing 25s.

Q u o t e:
You are essentially devalueing your own game and removing content. This system of, "The only content is the current raid tier." is terrible because there is no PvE content beyond the current raid tier. Telling me to "go level again" is not why I play WoW. I play WoW to play Athrex and kill raid bosses. You are taking away my reasons to play this character.

This is a near-impossible challenge for MMO design though. Players always want more. No matter how quickly we can crank out content (and to be fair, we could be faster at it), players will always consume it quickly. Being able to run the same raid twice per week may give the illusion of more content, but for a lot of players it wasn't more fun to feel a strong motivation to run that stuff twice.

Q u o t e:
Not correct. He's already made it VERY clear that 10 h gear = 25 h gear. The exact same loot tables.

Yes. The exact same loot tables, but more rolls on those tables for the larger raids, particularly 25 heroic.

I think my use of "more" was unclear. I meant more drops per player, not more unique items on the boss.

Q u o t e:
This sounds good in theory, but it harshly punishes anyone who isn't in the initial gearing wave, and it's why virtually no players ever saw Sunwell.

They've specifically stated, dozens of times, that people actually seeing the inside of the top tier raiding zone during each patch, when it's still relevant, is preferable to used raid zones that act as a wall to anyone who's entering an expansion late.

Yeah. Plenty of players are still running Naxx, Ulduar and ToC today, but Icecrown is the focus, and we're fine with that.

Q u o t e:
But, two raid lockouts with identical loot and a weekly cap on badge income would solve the problem for you, too.

How so? If I want Bryntroll, then I should run both a 10 and 25 every week until he drops it.

Q u o t e:

The answer is not loot, the answer is not badges, and the answer certainly is not gold.

Then there is no barrier to those players continuing to run 25s. Several of my responses were to players who feared 25s would dry up if there was no loot incentive to run them. If you think they're wrong, argue with them.

Q u o t e:
I just don't get how that is looked at as ok. One of my best memories of BC was progressing from Karazhan up to Sunwell Plateau. No skipping bosses or tiers, it was a fun journey. SSC and TK were amazing raids, and all of the members in the guild had to learn the encounters and work together to defeat them.

The problem is that journey was not made by many players (and I'm talking about interested players, not those with no interest in raiding). For everyone who progressed through all of those tiers, a huge percentage of players dropped out along the way, possibly just from the time commitment before they finally got to see the exciting new stuff that everyone was talking about. It might have worked okay for very tight-knit guilds with very stable rosters, but it was a hassle for other guilds who had to go do farming runs just to gear up one or two new players or alts before they could get back into progression. Again, it was more content to have to go back and do old zones, but I'm not sure it was fun content.

We want raiding players, in general, to be able to see the final content. If Icecrown was being used by 10% or less of the raiding population then not only is it pretty hard to justify all of the production time it takes to make a raid, but it also feels to players who don't finish the journey like they don't get to see the climax of the story. Game designers, at least in this day and age, actually want players to finish their games, not drop out somewhere along the way when things get too tedious and difficult. (If you like difficult, that's what heroic modes are for. If you like tedious, well I guess try to get the Insane in the Membrane achievement.)

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.

Q u o t e:
They can go back and do it once or twice. What most people in this thread are suggesting is the BC "journey" Which involved spending up to a month on old content because you needed the gear only it provided to be effective, and that's if you were able to get a majority of your raid from the select pool of people actually on this tier of raiding.

You either ran back through older content to get some new person geared / attuned (at which point nobody else in the raid was earning gear at all) or you attempted to poach from the other guilds who already had geared players. Rose-colored glasses aside, I don't think either of those mechanics was super fun.

What I will agree was fun was seeing the entire story and going from the first raid to the last. Nobody is taking that away from you though. We're just saying that not everyone should have to do that just because you did it... and you even did it first. If newer players (or newer characters from existing players) only see part of the story, we'd rather them see the end because that's what everyone is focused on. That's what they are reading about on the forums. That is where the latest and greatest content will be found.

Q u o t e:
I find this disingenuous. You can still cater to the 25M Hard Mode crowd within the model you've established.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the bulk of the effort in building a raid instance comes from establishing the template for the encounters (i.e. models, story, mechanics, etc.). Both 10 and 25 as well as normal vs. heroic all leverage the initial work that is done and then add tuning to the equation.

Yeah, that is more or less our model. My response was to a player who thought it was fair that he got to see Sunwell because he was a talented player in a great guild but that the great unwashed hadn't earned that right.

Instead we have two levels of difficulty to try and cover the enormous range of skill in our raiding players. That's not sufficient for several posters on this thread who don't want heroic modes -- they want heroic-level raids that are fairly exclusive.

Q u o t e:
So why then should I even bother raiding? By Blizzards logic I should just wait until Deathwing is introduced or about to be introduced to start gearing up. Because everything I did before Deathwing is just going to be one big timesink that will be completely and utterly made pointless by heroics. Just. Like. Now.

If you really want to be efficient, just wait until 5.0 because you'll replace that Deathwing gear then.

You could also wait until 2018 to buy a new car, because they'll probably be more awesome then too. :)

Q u o t e:
No, apparently the whole point of WoW is to sit in town showing off Shadowmourne. Players don't actually play because they enjoy the difficulty and the sense of teamplay where you gradually grind up with your guild.

Instead there's a gear "reset" every tier and that apparently doesn't affect raiders because they'll still get their next Shadowmourne first and be able to show it off in town.

I can't believe that they actually think that is why people play. Unreal.

If the loot doesn't motivate you, then I don't really understand the problem. You can merrily raid 25s or whatever you enjoy. Much of this discussion is from 25-focused players who want a reason to keep running 25s and not go for the same loot in 10s.

Q u o t e:
Do you want people to say "I prefer running 25's. but now I feel like its a waste of time and energy because I can get the same items for doing less work?"

Nope.

Q u o t e:
Maybe this is why Blizzard doesn't really care about people's enjoyment of the game, but only care about how many people they can get to flock to the game.

Players having fun is the most important thing to us. They won't stick around if they're not enjoying it. The challenge is that it's a big audience and what may be fun for you individually may ruin the game for someone else (which is precisely what a lot of folks in this thread are claiming). As such, we often have to make tough decisions.

Q u o t e:
It seems you need to take advantage of more talent then already within your game community.

We hire great players all the time. :) We just don't make a big deal out of it or they wouldn't be able to keep playing with their friends if their true identities were known.

Q u o t e:
Really this whole thread is just immediate, heated reactions in both directions now.

Yeah, I don't want to shut this conversation down, because I think it has been helpful to see many different viewpoints and concerns. But we are over 1000 posts now, and it's clear that we're getting several folks just joining us in the middle without having read the whole conversation, and as a result we're starting to go in circles a little bit. It's nothing anyone individually has said, but long threads tend to lose their potency.

Think about the things I have tried to say and I will do likewise and we can pick it up again, probably in a new thread, in a few days.