Mists of Pandaria discussion

[Lissa]

You're totally missing it. I understand mistakes are going to be made, but drastic mistakes, which is what the B team has made, shouldn't. A team wasn't coming from prior MMO experience, they were building things up from the ground up and did a fairly decent job over time with Ulduar being their pinnacle.

...what? "A team" came from Everquest with lots of prior MMO experience. Not ALL the developers, of course, but a solid core. Vanilla WoW was f'ing awful compared to WoW of today - nostalgia may make us pine for it, but if they switched back to it now, we'd be quitting in droves.

Oh by the way, "A team" brought us Ulduar, which I'll happily agree was the best raid instance ever made, but they also brought us the raid before it - a rehashed years-old raid - Naxxramas. Some serious innovation there, yeah! Don't even compare this to Ragnaros. Naxx was the exact same fights as before with minor tweaks for 25-player raiding.

It's too easy to point to lower subscriber numbers and say "B team screwed up." There are too many factors at play to pick any one particular reason for a decline in player base. I personally believe it was the drastic difficulty increase that was the single largest reason. Since WoW's release, the game's gotten consistently easier to play in terms of grind investment requirements, time investment requirements, skill level requirements, and so on, and the subscriber base grew accordingly as the game became more accessible. Cataclysm's release was the first moment where this trend reversed, and the subscriber base reflects that.

I still don't understand the ragging on "B team" juxtaposed with the excellent raid encounters Cataclysm has brought us. Conclave of Wind, Al'Akir, OmniTron Council, Chimaeron, Atramedes, Valiona and Theralion, Cho'gall, Sinestra, Rhyolith, Baleroc, and Ragnaros have all struck me as fun new challenges. The problems that people gripe about regarding balance and bugs are miniscule compared to the ridiculously broken mechanics of WoW's past, where whole specs and even classes were just awful.

There is some serious rose-tinting going on in this thread, and I find it disturbing. The fact is that WoW is old, it's old old old, been beaten to death, and we (most of us) are still playing it because nothing out there has found a way to trump it.

Did you try any of those fights in 10 man Bolty or are you looking at it strictly from 25 man? If you tried those in 10 man, you'd have a very different look at those fights. Most of the bosses in Tier 11 were hitting for the same level of damage as was happening in 25 man. If they properly scaled everythings between the two tiers, they would have either; a) set the damage going out to be similar between the two sizes accounting for the loss of healers between 10 and 25 (ie, damage in 10 would be lower than 25 man) or b) required more healers on a similar level for 25 as seen in 10 - 8 to 9 healers per encounter instead of the 5 to 6 seen typically (because bosses in 25 man would have been hitting even harder than they were). You, yourself, mentioned numerous times how easy the 25 man fights were, but did you ever really sit down and see what was going on in 10s?

This is the kind of thing I'm pointing at when I say that B team screwed up. They didn't properly tune 10 man vs 25 man and made it so 25 man was way easier than 10 because of the amount of damage that was being thrown around.

Likewise, I'm in no way nostalgic for smelling pile that Vanilla was when a Warlock was just spamming Shadow Bolt over and over when the optimal build was sacrificing your Sucubus and with Ruin for double critical damage. The other aspect is that Vanilla they, the Devs, were mostly clueless and learning the system. Likewise, a lot of the people that you say came over from EQ weren't EQ devs, but various players that had an inkling of what was going on. And, they did figure things out after about a year of live (when they did re-itemize a lot of the Tier 1 sets, some will recall that I specifically by passed Felheart for Nemsis because I mentioned how badly itemized Felheart was originally).

And simply, how do you account for nearly a million subs going in active in just 6 months of a new expansion when the game was gaining subscribtions up until that expansion came out. Age might have something to do with it, but definitely not everything.

And let's hit Naxx really quick. It made a re-run because not many people got a chance to go through it. Look at how far we got back in Vanilla (and that's because we put too much emphasis on trying to get C'Thun). We might have gotten Patchwerk, Grobbulus, maybe Gluth, Heigen, and maybe Gothik, but we still wouldn't have seen the end of it. Consider that only two guilds, maybe three, actually killed Kel-Thuzad on SR back during Vanilla (DJ and CM). Hell, there were only 6 guilds that got C'Thun on SR. There were a lot of guilds that never saw C'Thun down on SR and there were even fewer for KT, so I can see Blizzard wanting to relook at Naxx, especially when it tied so well into the Wrath storyline. And, looking at the other fights that were from Tier 7, they did a pretty good job with making Malygos and Sartharion interesting (especially with the hard mode mechanics of Sarth).

So yes, I do still stick by what I've said, B team screwed up, they made the mistakes that they shouldn't have.