Super-guild has already cleared Naxx

[Pantalaimon]

I have a hard time putting my faith in any game designer that would gear their games for the top 5% of their player population playing at 100% of their abilities. I also have a hard time with being punished along with 24 other folks because someone(s) having an off night.

See, that's my problem with a lot of the achievement chasing. If one person screws up, bam, that's it for the week's shot @ Immortal - might as well hearth and log off, god knows you don't need the gear to do anything meaningful.

SWP and hard raid encounters were different, because you have more than one chance at it! One person screws up, ok, it wipes the raid. You're only limited in # of attempts by the hours you're willing to raid. Achievement chasing, and their little brother timed runs, put a definite, and low, ceiling on the number of attempts you can make. Screw up your one chance, and see you next week.

That's boring. Can you image the sheer outrage if you only had one attempt at a boss and he despawned until maintenance? Well, that's what us at the high end are running into now. Bosses done with enrages, buffs, raid debuffed, extra ability, 20-manned, all that jazz - fine. You have unlimited shots at those. Honestly, it doesn't interest me, but that's likely because of my kneejerk eye-rolling reaction to the word "achievement", courtesy of X-Box Live and Steam.

I guess I'm in the top 5%, then, because I've already cancelled. I've gotten all I'm willing to get from WotLK without shoving thumbscrews into my brain. And that's saying something from someone who was chasing realm firsts in the original SSC - I missed the original Gruul, and I'm sorry I did! Original un-nerfed Hydross? Bring it on. Vashj double spawned? Twice the loot, we get to practice some more this week for free!

I can understand Blizzard's decision, and this isn't a nerdrage hate post, despite the tone. They have to cater to the lowest common denominator. It's just that I fell through the cracks of their marketing department - and they likely knew I would, or at least some like me, going in.

[Tal]

See, that's my problem with a lot of the achievement chasing. If one person screws up, bam, that's it for the week's shot @ Immortal - might as well hearth and log off, god knows you don't need the gear to do anything meaningful.

SWP and hard raid encounters were different, because you have more than one chance at it! One person screws up, ok, it wipes the raid. You're only limited in # of attempts by the hours you're willing to raid. Achievement chasing, and their little brother timed runs, put a definite, and low, ceiling on the number of attempts you can make. Screw up your one chance, and see you next week.

That's boring. Can you image the sheer outrage if you only had one attempt at a boss and he despawned until maintenance? Well, that's what us at the high end are running into now. Bosses done with enrages, buffs, raid debuffed, extra ability, 20-manned, all that jazz - fine. You have unlimited shots at those. Honestly, it doesn't interest me, but that's likely because of my kneejerk eye-rolling reaction to the word "achievement", courtesy of X-Box Live and Steam.

I guess I'm in the top 5%, then, because I've already cancelled. I've gotten all I'm willing to get from WotLK without shoving thumbscrews into my brain. And that's saying something from someone who was chasing realm firsts in the original SSC - I missed the original Gruul, and I'm sorry I did! Original un-nerfed Hydross? Bring it on. Vashj double spawned? Twice the loot, we get to practice some more this week for free!

I can understand Blizzard's decision, and this isn't a nerdrage hate post, despite the tone. They have to cater to the lowest common denominator. It's just that I fell through the cracks of their marketing department - and they likely knew I would, or at least some like me, going in.

I really don't see the difference between stupidly hard achievements and stupidly hard raid encounters in this case really. If one person screws up in a lot of the encounters folks point to it was a wipe. So you spend time and resources to get ready to go again and folks screw up again. And again. Repeat as many times as you wish. Yeah you probably will eventually down the boss (but not all - Vashj, Kael, and Archi have far too many guild kills to their record) but how is that any different than running Naxx 10/25 until folks are perfect and you get the achievement? Yeah if you screw up you're done until next week - but last I checked Blizz wasn't done creating content and encounters for us.

[Taelas]

Chalk up even more to M'uru -- the top raid group on my home server spent three solid months on him and only downed him the night before 3.0.2. I don't even want to know how many raid groups have burned themselves out on him.

"Easy" raid encounters might frustrate the top 5%, maybe even the top 15% -- but at least they'll get done.

[Mavfin]

See, that's my problem with a lot of the achievement chasing. If one person screws up, bam, that's it for the week's shot @ Immortal - might as well hearth and log off, god knows you don't need the gear to do anything meaningful.

If you're in that top 5%, you're not supposed to have anyone screwing up anyway. If you're not down here with us mortals, then you just have to deal. Blizzard's not going to gear the game to you anymore, and I perfectly understand that some people will cancel and move on. I wish you luck in finding the constant challeng in an MMO that you want. As I wrote above, it's a financial decision by Blizzard, and they think the money of a ton of casual players outweighs yours. Cruel, perhaps, but it's true. Those who want a hard challenge in *everything* are probably not going to find it in WoW anymore. Challenges are still there, just not in the way they were. As Bolty said, early Gruul/Mag were insane. Doable? Yes. By mere mortals? No. And Bolty's right. If you read here or EJ or tankspot or maintankadin or other forums, you're not the 'average' player Blizzard's targeting.

[Pantalaimon]

but how is that any different than running Naxx 10/25 until folks are perfect and you get the achievement?

Because you only get that perfect attempt once every, what, forty? That's the reality of twenty five people doing hundreds of actions for ten minutes, mortal or not - it's a game of probabilities. Sure, we're not *likely* to screw up, but it happens. At least at the start.

One out of forty attempts will be perfect: for twins, maybe a solid week. For Mu'ru, better make it two or three - sixty, eighty, over a hundred attempts. If that were an achievement? A hundred weeks... two years? World of difference between annoying as all hell and motivatingly difficult.

Yes, Mavfin, I wasn't looking for sympathy. As I stated, I'll deal and move on... annoyingly enough, though, for a PvE MMO WoW is pretty much it. Better learn to PvP or play single player:P

[Pantalaimon]

Chalk up even more to M'uru -- the top raid group on my home server spent three solid months on him and only downed him the night before 3.0.2. I don't even want to know how many raid groups have burned themselves out on him.

"Easy" raid encounters might frustrate the top 5%, maybe even the top 15% -- but at least they'll get done.

This jogs a neuron - question for the Lounge at large. What was fundamentally wrong with the "old" method of difficult content, followed by nerfs to gradually open them up to more and more people? Is there not enough in the 10 and 5-man world to occupy so-called "casuals"?

I hate that term because it automatically makes me a lynch target, and I've seen guilds who raid 2-3 nights a week accomplish some staggering things, but there it is.

Honest question. No judging here. Fire away!

Edit: I meant I'm not judging!;) I have my flame-retarded suit on, no worries for my feelings.

[Jester]

This jogs a neuron - question for the Lounge at large. What was fundamentally wrong with the "old" method of difficult content, followed by nerfs to gradually open them up to more and more people? Are there not enough in the 10 and 5-man world to occupy so-called "casuals"?

I hate that term because it automatically makes me a lynch target, and I've seen guilds who raid 2-3 nights a week accomplish some staggering things, but there it is.

Honest question. No judging here. Fire away!

It means that guilds who aren't at the cutting edge either never get to see most of the content, or only get to see it for a brief window before the next expansion comes out.

-Jester

[Mavfin]

This jogs a neuron - question for the Lounge at large. What was fundamentally wrong with the "old" method of difficult content, followed by nerfs to gradually open them up to more and more people? Is there not enough in the 10 and 5-man world to occupy so-called "casuals"?

I hate that term because it automatically makes me a lynch target, and I've seen guilds who raid 2-3 nights a week accomplish some staggering things, but there it is.

Honest question. No judging here. Fire away!

To expand on it, Blizzard doesn't like spending hours and hours making a Sunwell Plateau or original Naxx, and less than 10% of their playerbase ever seeing it at its intended time. They even said that's why they brought Naxx back. Financially, that's a waste of development time that could be better put to things more people will see. 10-mans in general will be seen by many more than the 25-mans will, imo. Even with nerfing, damned few have set foot inside SWP past the first trash pull. It's great for difficulty, but, frankly, there's not enough hours in the day in my life with all my other obligations to put into learning it when it was new. Admittedly, I'm older than the average WoW player, and one of the older Lurkers playing, so that does color my view.

Not judging. You said the current/coming way is not for you. That's perfectly fine. The game *has* changed, and if it's not for you, it's not. There's lots of 'harder' games out there for what you want, there's just not as many people playing it. It's not that those of us who stay don't want challenge. We do like it, but we're ok with the achievement way of making it harder on ourselves. We decide how hard we want it. If that's not good for you, then I understand. It's your money to spend or not spend.

[Taelas]

The "old" method also meant that if you wanted a specific challenge (i.e. pre-nerf Gruul), you had to do it within a certain timeframe, as eventually it got nerfed. Lesser skilled players, on the other hand, would be forced to wait.

It just doesn't mix well. It was the best out of a bunch of poor choices, though.

[Walkiry]

I kind of like the idea of a hard push on a user adjustable difficulty knob.

Where's my blindfold?

Use a towel if you don't have one, works just as well. Or apply a cream pie - though I think it's unlikely you have one if you _don't_ have a blindfold or towel. Just make sure you ate a Floating Eye corpse first.

[Skandranon]

This is kind of becoming the usual casual-vs-hardcore argument, complete with the typical appeals to percentage of population. Sure, those things happen to be true, but they don't quite lead to the conclusions most people get out of them. Those things have always been true, and it's not like Blizzard has suddenly seen the light and done what people were asking all along. This new wave of easy raid content is a gamble, but one which carries a serious risk of backfire.

There are basically two potential issues with intro raid content being as faceroll as it happens to currently be. Firstly, it's not development-efficient. I've gone into this before on the Lounge, but briefly, content simply needs to take longer to finish than it took to put together. If it gets finished (and by finished I don't mean beat-it-once but beat-it-until-we're-sick-of-it) too quickly, people become out of content. It is very boring to be out of content. Being out of content causes people to cancel subscriptions. We saw this during the eleven-month span between Black Temple and Sunwell, where people left the game in droves.

So Blizzard's getting more people into raiding, and that's great. But it's also moving more people into this state of potentially quitting if they aren't fed again soon, and that's a gamble. All endgame content is meant to take a little while to finish in order to buy the development team enough time to get the next thing out, but current intro raiding is looking to have a very short life indeed. This is fine if they can get the next patch out in a timely manner, but potentially disastrous if their content team botches it to the tune of another eleven months.

Obviously content should never be tuned for the SK-Nihilums of the world, but let's not exclude the middle: it's not either make it super overtuned or super undertuned. There's a decent middle ground where it takes some time to finish but players feel like they're making progress each week. Intro raid content right now is pushed very far over to the easy end of the spectrum. Just about anybody who hits 80 can clear it right away. This puts a lot of pressure on Blizzard's live team to get some new stuff out there soon. It's a test they've failed before - it remains to be seen how well they'll do now.

It's definitely a point in Blizzard's favour that a lot of the Naxx stuff was already developed once so they didn't have to use a lot of dev time pushing it out again. That makes the easy level of current raid content a lot more tolerable than it would otherwise be. If it was this easy with 18 bosses of wholly original content, I'd be worried. As of now I'm not worried - yet.

The other major potential problem is the guild-crushing effect. Yes, guilds can be destroyed by easy content, and for this I go back to Black Temple yet again. A lot of guild deaths were attributed to M'uru, and the typical one-liner explanation is that "M'uru was really hard". He was, but not to the semi-mythical status to which he's been elevated. If M'uru was the hammer, Black Temple was the anvil, and it was the anvil because it was far too easy, and was the only raid content for far too long.

During the eleven-month gap, bored raiders who were out of content quit. Guilds recruited to replace them, and wound up with players who couldn't be tested in difficult content, and who were simply far too accustomed to Black Temple's incredible ease. Incredibly easy is not a sustainable model - even Ghostcrawler agrees that if Icecrown is this easy there is a serious problem - because there's just no way Blizzard can push content out fast enough. Yet there were all these players who had never had anything other than very easy raiding. Upon their first encounter with an instance built around a sustainable model - difficult but doable - they simply quit, shattering guild after guild as they shrunk down to half of a sustainable raid force.

These were players that could not be kept in any other way than by feeding them a constant stream of trivial content. Since it is simply unaffordable to do that, these players basically could not have been kept in any reasonable fashion. Black Temple's ease wound up retaining them just long enough for these players to destroy numerous raid guilds that couldn't possibly have seen it coming. Many players in these dead guilds subsequently quit, when otherwise they would have persevered to the end. The net effect of Black Temple's ease was to lose a bunch of subs they would have lost anyway, and then to lose a lot of subs that they wouldn't have lost anyway. Blizzard needs to be careful not to repeat this experience.

[Taelas]

Well, there were several factors: The ease of BT, the eleven-month gap, and the difficulty of M'uru.

I fully agree that Blizzard needs to make sure nothing like that happens again -- but I also believe that it was a rather unlikely series of events that led to that situation.

Guilds have a self-tuning mechanism now: Achievements. Black Temple didn't have anything like that. While you could do stuff that would make it harder on your raid, there was no point -- it was the end of the content at the time, and most people had done it so many times they could fall asleep during it and still succeed. Personally I'm not a big fan of achievements, but if they can give guilds a reason to up their game, they've accomplished something.

The biggest risk in my mind is the gap. If they wait that long before introducing new content again, it'll fall apart regardless of what they do.

[Lissa]

Well, prior to 3.0, the ease of BT depended on how stacked you could make your raid. Some fights were exteremly trivalized by raid stacking (Bloodboil instantly comes to mind what with enough AoE healing the fight was a joke, but with low AoE healing, it was a tough fight due to the amount of raid wide damage going on).

As to the general premise, yeah, we need to get away from the casual vs. hardcore. Achievements are kinda there for the hardcore to persue until 3.1 comes out and Uldaur opens up. So Blizzard tried to set things up for making it easier to deal with for the casuals so they don't feel left out.

[Warlock]

For an easy instance there sure are a lot of people that never managed a single boss in BT. Adding Sunwell to the game didn't help keep a single subscription from that portion of the player base that's recruiting for Kara or Gruul. Things are generally undertuned at the moment - from solo outdoor mobs to Naxx-25 - but I do think a model of "most players get something each patch, we know the top ten percent will trounce the basic version but they'll have harder achievements to aim for" is better business sense than either BC's or classic's approach.

[Swiss Mercenary]

For an easy instance there sure are a lot of people that never managed a single boss in BT.

Attunements, and the "Have you gone through Tier 5?" gear check most guilds expect in recruits.

And past 3.0, the only reason for someone to not have seen BT would have to be lack of motivation (Or, I suppose to be exact, lack of farming Heroics/Kara for badges). There were 5-6 PUG groups a week doing it on my server. If you were fully badge geared, you could have gotten in no problem. If you weren't, you could have done a few ZA runs to fill in the gaps.

There's almost nothing in BT that required much thought, with the exception of lol Supremus (And he's killable with half the raid dead under volcanoes), Mother (Where, post-nerf bad play can be compensated with more SR, or more DPS), and Council (And I'm not going to say Council is an easy fight.)

[Mordekhuul]

We found pre-3.0 Bloodboil and RoS exciting and challenging. We generally 1 shotted them, after learning the fights, but small things going wrong on RoS could spiral it out of control, and BB could similarly get out of hand.

Mother Shahraz was definitely a relief after those two fights, when we were first doing them, but then again we had been in BT long enough to have full SR sets for the whole raid.