05-24-2008, 05:46 AM
Quote:I tend to agree with his position on 10 man vs 25 man. As was noted in the DnT incident there is a lot of moaning about he casualization of WoW but if "raiders" really wanted a logistically difficult fight regardless of loot rewards than 10 man versions of raids, etc. wouldn't impact anything, they would still do the logistically difficult fights. If 10 man versions of the 25 man instances were introduced with equal rewards and nobody did 25 man instances anymore doesn't that just imply that people don't want to do those anyway and only put up with it because of the loot?
No. Because "equal" rewards aren't as easy as putting the same items in the same instances. Sirlin isn't looking at his article from the reverse perspective, which is to say, if you make rewards easier to get in the 10-man, people who would much rather be raiding 25-man will raid 10-man instead for rewards, even though they find it less fun. Putting the same items in the same instances inherently makes rewards easier to get in the 10-man because they're easier to organize.
"Easier to organize", by the way, is not, as Sirlin takes it, an automatic indicator that 25-man is less fun and therefore something people only do for loot. Things can be both harder to do and more worthwhile when you can do it. It is more difficult to learn to play chess than it is to learn to play tic-tac-toe, but the rewards of having learned chess are greater. That said, if I won $100 every time I played either tic-tac-toe or chess to a draw, I would never play chess again. That doesn't mean chess is unfun or bad.
Equal rewards means "equally proportionate to the difficulty of achieving them". And difficulty is not unfun. That's what Kaplan gets and Sirlin doesn't.