May News/Discussions

[Chesspiece_face]

There's a different aspect to the difficulty in a 25-man as compared to a 10-man than the organizing.

The more players you have, the more difficult coordination within an encounter becomes. If the encounter's difficulty relies on that coordination, it cannot be directly translated to a lesser-sized group. The encounter has to be significantly revised.

Assuming that Blizzard can successfully revise every encounter to keep the same difficulty in a 25-man as in a 10-man is a stretch, frankly.

That, combined with the problems involved in organizing 25 people compared to 10, more than justifies the "roughly one tier" of quality the 25-man raids will have over the 10-mans, at least in my eyes.

I could make this same argument for 10-player content only argue that the less amount of players you have, the more efficiently each player has to play. You don't have as many people there to cover your ass.

I also believe that it lets blizzard off the hook for laziness to just say It would be really hard to balance the difficulty between the two types of encounters. Yeah it would, but so far Blizzard has done a wonderful job of creating interesting and still difficult content. I am perfectly confident in their abilities to do it given their track record. It also echoes the lack of confidence that Blizzard had in their players when they decided that cosmetic or prestige awards (a la Bear Mount) would not be enough to keep people playing raid content when they started designing.

Blizzard has taken inumerable steps to move away from the Raid or Die mentality that the game started with (which was legacied in from games like EQ), yet dispite what they may say they just can't seem to take the last step. Whether it is because they are lazy and don't want to introduce different design challanges for the team, or whether it is because they are in some way scared of taking that step, or even if it is just because they still have that same lack of confidence in their players I cannot say. But all their talk of inclusive design means very little if the basis of character progression still relies on the foundation of an exclusive design. No matter how much Kaplan might mean it when he says that choice between 10 player content and 25 player content should be a social choice the reality is that as long as the loot is up-tiered in the 25 player content then 10 player is still just a stepping stone up to the "real" endgame.

[Taelas]

I could make this same argument for 10-player content only argue that the less amount of players you have, the more efficiently each player has to play. You don't have as many people there to cover your ass.

That's a good point.

I also believe that it lets blizzard off the hook for laziness to just say It would be really hard to balance the difficulty between the two types of encounters. Yeah it would, but so far Blizzard has done a wonderful job of creating interesting and still difficult content. I am perfectly confident in their abilities to do it given their track record. It also echoes the lack of confidence that Blizzard had in their players when they decided that cosmetic or prestige awards (a la Bear Mount) would not be enough to keep people playing raid content when they started designing.

There is also the possibility that it is not possible.

There are limits on the difficulty they can place in encounters. Latency, player abilities, length of the encounter, etc. That's without even looking at gear.

Blizzard has taken inumerable steps to move away from the Raid or Die mentality that the game started with (which was legacied in from games like EQ), yet dispite what they may say they just can't seem to take the last step. Whether it is because they are lazy and don't want to introduce different design challanges for the team, or whether it is because they are in some way scared of taking that step, or even if it is just because they still have that same lack of confidence in their players I cannot say. But all their talk of inclusive design means very little if the basis of character progression still relies on the foundation of an exclusive design. No matter how much Kaplan might mean it when he says that choice between 10 player content and 25 player content should be a social choice the reality is that as long as the loot is up-tiered in the 25 player content then 10 player is still just a stepping stone up to the "real" endgame.

What does it matter whether there is a tier of gear you haven't accessed? You'll have seen all the encounters in WotLK, and that is what truly matters. Remember: Arthas will not be an encounter until the last patch of WotLK -- after that, we'll get another patch.

Besides, as it is a tier of gear less, two or three 10-man Arthas guilds can band together and go through Icecrown Glacier 25 and upgrade their gear.

[Skandranon]

Actually that is exactly what his argument is:

I couldn't actually be bothered to go through the pages of comments. If that's what he meant, he did a piss-poor job of explaining it (which, I suppose, is evident from the fact that he had to restate his actual argument in a comment). The original article doesn't convey this point very well.

[--Pete]

Hi,

I specifically said they had different tasks. Obviously it will not apply when they have the same task...

Yes, and what you are missing is that neither condition applies. You used a bull#$%& assumption, either intentionally or through ignorance, to bolster your argument. I used an equally bull#$%& assumption (except I knew it was bull#$%& and pointed it out) as a counter example. The reality falls somewhere in between, and unless you can enumerate how many members of which groups have to succeed in what, and give something better than 99% (out of your ass) percent probability that they will succeed, then your arithmetic may be right, but your mathematics is nonsense.

though I have never heard about any encounter where different raid members are working to achieve a goal and only one has to succeed -- except for healing and to a lesser extent, dealing damage. This is not a problem when considering the shift between 10 and 25-man raids, as it's solved simply by scaling down the healing and damage required.

You understand nothing. My claim isn't that only one needs to succeed. My claim is that both "they all need to succeed" and that "they all have a 99% chance of success" are both crap. Ignorant use (i.e., "torture") of mathematics.

The situations I am talking about exists.

Bull#$%&. The general situation might exist, so feel free to argue that as much as you want. But if you want to use precise numbers in a precise manner, then get ready to back up your claims or expect to get blasted.

--Pete

[Taelas]

Hi,
Yes, and what you are missing is that neither condition applies. You used a bull#$%& assumption, either intentionally or through ignorance, to bolster your argument. I used an equally bull#$%& assumption (except I knew it was bull#$%& and pointed it out) as a counter example. The reality falls somewhere in between, and unless you can enumerate how many members of which groups have to succeed in what, and give something better than 99% (out of your ass) percent probability that they will succeed, then your arithmetic may be right, but your mathematics is nonsense.

It was an example. It is meant to illustrate what I am saying, nothing more.

Way to get upset over semantics.:rolleyes:

[--Pete]

Hi,

It was an example. It is meant to illustrate what I am saying, nothing more.

Way to get upset over semantics.:rolleyes:

It was an argument in favor of your position. It was a stupid argument. I just pointed that out.

Upset? You haven't seen me upset, you haven't been around long enough by years.

And please, look up 'semantics' -- because, once again, you show your ignorance, not the least since this discussion had nothing to do with meanings or definitions.

Feel free to reply, but I've had my fill of fools for today.

--Pete

[Skandranon]

I could make this same argument for 10-player content only argue that the less amount of players you have, the more efficiently each player has to play. You don't have as many people there to cover your ass.

You bring up a very good point here, one that was actually brought up in the 25 v. 40 man debate at the end of 1.0. You're right. To maintain overall difficulty (which, in these terms specifically, equates with chance of success, which relates closely to the chance that no one fails), 25 man raiding at the start of TBC drove up individual task difficulty immensely.

A lot of people don't remember it, but as one of the few who killed TBC 2.0 bosses, let me tell you, it was no game for casual players. Imagine a Lurker Below where failing to jump out of the water on your first try is nearly certain death; imagine Hydross where fully potted and flasked and performing to near-maximal class potential, you scrape by the berserk timer; imagine a Magtheridon where a single missed channeler heal interrupt results in failure. Eventually Blizzard had to step in, slashing the difficulty of every raid encounter in the game significantly, in order to make the endgame sufficiently accessible. The next tier of content, Tier 6, is widely acknowledged as being excessively easy.

Blizzard faces a design dilemma; in order to make ten-man encounters as difficult and as time consuming as twenty-five man encounters, they have to increase the demands on each individual raid member. But in doing so, they risk making the encounters inaccessible to the very casual player base that they are attempting to make the smaller-cap raids appeal to.

I believe they've learned the lesson of TBC 2.0 raiding in a way that people fail to appreciate. The dynamic is a tradeoff. As the raid size decreases, content accessibility also decreases while maintaining the same overall difficulty. So the question isn't whether they can make ten-mans as hard as twenty-five-mans. They can. The question is, would they want to?

It is an inevitable consequence that a ten man that is as hard as a twenty-five man will be harder on each individual if the encounter is equally difficult and time consuming, overall. You can't escape that. And harder individual tasks are going to exclude people who cannot perform them. You can't escape that, either.

In my opinion, ten man gear is worse than twenty-five man gear because ten mans are going to be easier. Not because Blizzard has drunk the raiding Kool-Aid, not because they hate casuals, not because they are trying to enforce a 5-10-25 gear progression. Ten mans are going to be easier because the inevitable consequences of making them just as hard and just as time consuming are going to exclude more people than they include - a decision based on the very inclusive design principles you claim not to see.

Ten mans don't have to be easier. It's just better for everyone if they are.

Blizzard has taken inumerable steps to move away from the Raid or Die mentality that the game started with (which was legacied in from games like EQ), yet dispite what they may say they just can't seem to take the last step. Whether it is because they are lazy and don't want to introduce different design challanges for the team, or whether it is because they are in some way scared of taking that step, or even if it is just because they still have that same lack of confidence in their players I cannot say.

Nor can Dave Sirlin, and he's a game designer. And neither of you can say because you haven't bothered thinking about the constraints on an MMO design team.

Any MMO endgame, of any sort, has to take into account the capability of the live team to produce content. Especially Blizzard-style handcrafted content. An endgame has to be highly development-efficient, which is to say that it must take the maximal amount of time to consume per unit of developer time spent. This is just good sense, because one of the responsibilities of a live team is to produce content on a regular basis, in order to keep players and keep them paying monthly fees. Development-efficiency means you can meet this responsibility with a reasonable amount of time and money spent.

You can create development-efficiency in a number of ways. One way to do it is to make it highly repeatable, which is to say that a player will feel satisfied consuming this content more than once. Another method is by making it difficult, thus increasing the time it takes to consume (of course, as noted above, you need to be very careful with this, because increasing difficulty too much decreases accessibility). In addition, you can simply directly increase the time required by adding certain time-sink elements. Lastly, you can create efficiency by funnelling as many players as possible into consuming the same kind of content, so that you need not spend time and money on multiple kinds of content, but just the one kind.

Now let's go back to 1.0's 40 man, raid-or-die mentality. It isn't just blindly adopted from EQ. It's a model Blizzard looked at specifically and adopted because of its many advantages. It's highly repeatable - with forty people to satisfy and only a little loot dropping, people have incentives to run it again and again. It's not necessarily difficult at the start, but it's reasonably difficult enough that most players take a week or two to progress on each boss, and then beat it. So its consumption rate is relatively slow, which makes raids more efficient to develop. Raids certainly have a number of time sinks, such as instance timers and consumable requirements. All of these things made 40-man raids a very efficient kind of content for Blizzard to develop. Given that, they would be foolish not to develop it and try to make people play it. It's a very rational decision.

It doesn't just apply to raiding. PvP has emerged as the second endgame because it also satisfies these requirements; it's very repeatable, it has large time sinks, and since most of the content is provided by battling other players, it requires nearly no development time to maintain. Blizzard isn't promoting Arena heavily for nothing. PvP is also highly development-efficient, and so they are also interested in funnelling people into that, as well. This is simply a rational decision to make.

So as I said earlier, people who don't understand this don't understand the purpose of maximum-limit raiding in a fantasy MMO. It's all about efficiency, getting the most player-time invested (and hence, player fees collected) in return for the least amount of development time and money used. Maximum-limit raiding is simply one of the best ways to do it.

[Taelas]

It was an argument in favor of your position. It was a stupid argument. I just pointed that out.

...:huh:

No, you attacked my argument based on the idea that the numbers were arbitrary and a "torture of mathematics".

It doesn't matter what the numbers are. There will always be a certain chance of success at any given task for any one person. Assuming multiple, different tasks, the combined chance of success is equal to (X%)*(Y%)*(Z%) and so on and so forth. I merely gave them the same chance of success to have a quick mathematical example that would make the result clear.

So yes -- you're arguing with me over what I consider to be semantics.

[Warlock]

I've been a long term proponent of 'small groups need endgame too'. Even from that perspective, I'm not sure I'd agree with giving the same items to groups of both sizes; a large group is going to take longer to organise, longer to assemble and longer to learn fights so deserves to get something for the extra effort. Proportionately more same quality drops wouldn't be enough.

It is good that the gap is narrowing to a single tier (roughly half what it is now, itself a vast improvement on the original release) and more importantly there will be regular new content. There wasn't a whole lot new for a small group player in the three years between Dire Maul and the expansion; I'm glad that won't happen again. I do expect 25 man players to think of each new 10 man as fairly trivial. Of course it will be; they'll be in gear a tier too high for it.

[Lissa]

...:huh:

No, you attacked my argument based on the idea that the numbers were arbitrary and a "torture of mathematics".

It doesn't matter what the numbers are. There will always be a certain chance of success at any given task for any one person. Assuming multiple, different tasks, the combined chance of success is equal to (X%)*(Y%)*(Z%) and so on and so forth. I merely gave them the same chance of success to have a quick mathematical example that would make the result clear.

So yes -- you're arguing with me over what I consider to be semantics.

The point Pete is making is you're using Statistics in a bad way. In essence, you were proving the point that 78% of statistics are made up on the spot... :whistling:

[Chesspiece_face]

It is an inevitable consequence that a ten man that is as hard as a twenty-five man will be harder on each individual if the encounter is equally difficult and time consuming, overall. You can't escape that. And harder individual tasks are going to exclude people who cannot perform them. You can't escape that, either.

Yes, a 10 player instance which is tuned to the relative difficulty of it's corresponding 25 player would be harder on each individual which is a good reason to have the same loot tables. I also don't have any argument over excluding players who can't perform the required gaming challanges. But that is totally different than excluding players based on how many friends they have. If i pick up Super Mario and can't complete world 9-1 because i'm just not good enough, fine. If i pick it up and get to world 9-1 and the game tells me to plug in 3 other controllers and get some friends or else i cannot continue, not fine. The main difference here is that in the first scenario I can practice and improve, in the second it's a hard gateway to progress and unless i'm willing to put up with the social hassles it's a dead end.

I go back to Kaplans point in discussing the rational of making 10 player versions of 25 player content. He says that the only question should be where your social comfort level is. Which I whole-heartedly agree with. But the game design belies this possition. Still, the quesion of character advancement past a certain point isn't "how good are you" or even "how much time have you invested" but "how many friends do you have".

Nor can Dave Sirlin, and he's a game designer. And neither of you can say because you haven't bothered thinking about the constraints on an MMO design team.

I'm not even going to get into the flamethrowing of who has thought of what.

Now let's go back to 1.0's 40 man, raid-or-die mentality. It isn't just blindly adopted from EQ. It's a model Blizzard looked at specifically and adopted because of its many advantages. It's highly repeatable - with forty people to satisfy and only a little loot dropping, people have incentives to run it again and again. It's not necessarily difficult at the start, but it's reasonably difficult enough that most players take a week or two to progress on each boss, and then beat it. So its consumption rate is relatively slow, which makes raids more efficient to develop. Raids certainly have a number of time sinks, such as instance timers and consumable requirements. All of these things made 40-man raids a very efficient kind of content for Blizzard to develop. Given that, they would be foolish not to develop it and try to make people play it. It's a very rational decision.

So as I said earlier, people who don't understand this don't understand the purpose of maximum-limit raiding in a fantasy MMO. It's all about efficiency, getting the most player-time invested (and hence, player fees collected) in return for the least amount of development time and money used. Maximum-limit raiding is simply one of the best ways to do it.

I understand this perfectly, I also understand that it is a design philosophy based on a false assumption. That assumption being that the user base of MMO's is not growable and that to maximize profits you need to design to minimize or negate churn. It's a philosophy that is based on MMO populations capping at around 500k and two or three of them nipping at each other for each player. WoW totally sunk that assumption and it didn't do it because it took the EQ philosophy and did it better, it did it because it made 90% of the game using a totally different approach and look at how many subscribers they have. It seems totally absurd to me that after all the evidence of the last 5 years they still can't break free from the old mindset. If the choice is between designing the game to reduce the churn of a couple hundred thousand players or to design the game to bring in a couple million new players that is no choice at all.

[Mirajj]

May 27 News
~~~

As Pantalaimon points out, Kil'Jaeden has been downed by three guilds already. Less than a week after the gate opened allowing access to him. This makes me wonder if KJ's tuned a bit too easy at the time.

In an amazing bit of effort, Serennia of VANQUISH has soloed Onyxia. Yes, you read that right.

In topics somewhat related, a discussion of protecting your online identity and the excuse "It's only a game" are brought up. These are both very pointed reminders that the internet/our favorite games are plagued with folks who have no problem acting like an idiot...and how far that can go. While most of us aren't too worried about our online identity, most of us have also likely experienced someone in the "it's just a game" category, to our detriment.

I saw this one coming. Boomslang starts this one off by wondering if having the ability to start a Death Knight at level 55 is "Cheap". It's an interesting thought. What makes DK's so special that they get to start at lvl 55? If a DK can, why can't the rest of my alts? Why do I have to start a mage alt from 1, but a DK from 55? How important are those first 55 levels? Even figuring in the raised level cap at 80, you start more than half way through a DK's "life". It's lead to some interesting questions, to be sure.

[oldmandennis]

The problem with "challenging" 10 mans is that they are totally and completely subject to class balance. If it is a challenging DPS race that pushes 10 well balanced people to the brink, then a group that stacks shamans and rogues wins easy, and the group with a moonkin and a ret is up against a brick wall. If tank burst is the problem then you can make it a ton easier with a bear, or if there's AoE a prot pally trivializes it.


ZA harder then SSC what? For us ZA hit in between Vashj and Kael, so we weren't totally out gearing it. I think it was a 2 day clear the first time, and we were pushing for bears not long after that. SSC took months to work through. I really really doubt that you took longer to clear ZA then you did SSC.

[Taelas]

ZA harder then SSC what? For us ZA hit in between Vashj and Kael, so we weren't totally out gearing it. I think it was a 2 day clear the first time, and we were pushing for bears not long after that. SSC took months to work through. I really really doubt that you took longer to clear ZA then you did SSC.

A guild between Vashj and Kael should be outgearing ZA. ZA is after KZ in progression, along with Gruul, Magtheridon, and the early SSC bosses.

[Swiss Mercenary]

A guild between Vashj and Kael should be outgearing ZA. ZA is after KZ in progression, along with Gruul, Magtheridon, and the early SSC bosses.

Umm, not really, no. If it were, why does Zul'Jin drop almost Hyjal level loot?

And ZA is mostly challenging because of your group's gear level and class composition. Can't say the same for most of SSC/TK/Hyjal/BT.

[Chesspiece_face]

The problem with "challenging" 10 mans is that they are totally and completely subject to class balance. If it is a challenging DPS race that pushes 10 well balanced people to the brink, then a group that stacks shamans and rogues wins easy, and the group with a moonkin and a ret is up against a brick wall. If tank burst is the problem then you can make it a ton easier with a bear, or if there's AoE a prot pally trivializes it.

I see this more as an encounter design challange than a problem. We already see many examples of encounters where different phases require different efforts from a group. A properly designed encounter may require heavy dps for one phase and then go right into AoE the next phase. If you deck out your group to trivialize the dps you could be in a lot of trouble come AoE, etc. The end result would be an overall challanging encounter while any particular phase may be somewhat trivialized by group makeup.

On a side note, it was previously mentioned that certain classes would most likely be ostracized by a challanging 10 man content (IE ret pallies, moonkins, etc. which are usually restrained to a single spot in 25 player content). I don't think this issue is a question of encounter balance but more class balance. I don't think that there is any question that Blizzard is still having some problems creating viable uses for all the class trees and hopefully they continue to improve this area of the game.

Edit: I believe i misread your post initially. I'll leave my original response because i think it is still valid, yet maybe not as a response to your post. lol.

Like i say in my second paragraph though, Class balance is an issue. But this should be looked at seperately from encounter design. Encounters should be designed to challange groups and individuals based on thier class purposes. If an encounter is set to be a dps race than any dps class should be able to offer something to the group. If certain classes are weighted so that they offer so much more when it comes to their class purpose than Blizzard needs to work on the class balance more. What they don't need to do is design encounters around the imbalances that are already present, or dumb down encounters to alleviate the inefficiencies in class balance.

[Pantalaimon]

If certain classes are weighted so that they offer so much more when it comes to their class purpose than Blizzard needs to work on the class balance more.

I'm a little short of time, wrapping up a workday here, but just wanted to take a second to elaborate on this :)

I'm now going to proceed to pull arbitrary numbers out of a bodily orifice, so please don't eat me Pete!

Assume DPS class X can produce 1000 DPS as a baseline, and is a pure DPS class, meaning they don't bring anything else really relevant to the table (disarming traps in the suppression room aside:P)

Now take DPS class Y, which can produce 700 DPS as a baseline personally. However, Y also debuffs the target, generating, say, 40 extra DPS each for the entire raid.

Which class "offers so much more" to a raid?

In a 10-man, say with 5 or even 6 DPS, it would never be advantageous to take Y. In a 25-man, you would always take at least one, because with 15ish DPSers in the raid they bring more to the table than anyone. They also bring an extra blessing, letting you take one less holy Y, can DI for wipe recovery and refresh judgements.

:lol: OK thinly-veiled X and Y aside, this is a problem of scaling that IMHO you can't just pin down to class balance. If everything were balanced and there were no interesting ret paladin synergies, you'd have a game entirely populated with "pure" DPS classes - in my opinion, a step backwards if anything! And it's not just retadins... any DPSer with cool nonpersonal perks has scaling problems which discourage bringing them to 10-mans. Off the top of my head, essential 25-man classes such as survival hunters, affliction warlocks, PvE arms, heck even boomkin and elemental shamen (although now we're debating if they're essential or not:P They're still viable in 25s though!) would be written off for hard, progression-style 10-man content. Why gimp your raid's chances? Bring them when it's on farm.

OK, I'm not entirely against your argument of 10-man loot = 25-man loot, adjusted so neither is a clear runaway in terms of efficiency for obtaining said loot. Well, at least I'm less against it than before reading this thread. But some classes, by virtue of being, well frankly just bad in 10-man instances, will always be pidgeonholed to the 25-man scene. So here's hoping they don't get stranded on that figurative island while the so-called casualisation of the game sails off into the 10-man sunset.

[Kevin]

ZA harder then SSC what? For us ZA hit in between Vashj and Kael, so we weren't totally out gearing it. I think it was a 2 day clear the first time, and we were pushing for bears not long after that. SSC took months to work through. I really really doubt that you took longer to clear ZA then you did SSC.

With the exception of Vashj, and with the two at their current nerf states? Yes, easily. We don't 8 man most of the bosses in ZA. We have 20 manned everything in SSC except Vashj. Oh wait, it was 21 for the Karathress pull but someone died 3s in so it might as well have been 20. We also worry a lot less about group composition for successful SSC than we do about it in ZA. We are lot more comfortable taking someone in all greens who has never raided before into SSC than we are taking them into ZA. And the first 3 bosses in Hyjal I think are probably easier than SSC, but Hyjal is another story.

And it is hard for me to say exactly how long something took us to learn since our raid time is very much scattered. We generally get 2 25 mans a week though not this last month. We generally get 2-3 10 mans a week some are often after the 25 man. So I base learning on number of wipes before a kill as it can literally be 3 weeks between pulls of a boss. Most SSC bosses were in the 5 +/-2 range. The bear boss in ZA was 2 wipes on the PTR before the kill sure, but it was 5 or so on most of the others and since we didn't have a pally tank with us the first time we saw the dragonhawk it was way more than 5 on him.

Of course I can't say for sure on Vashj. I think we've only had 5 real pulls on her at this point and no we haven't killed her or Kael. And I don't count body pulls or stuff like that before folks are ready in that metric of pulls before kill but I do count everyone is ready but something really dumb happens and you wipe within 15s.

[oldmandennis]

When all is said and done, it's probably going to be like it is now. 10 mans can get a little more challenging, and drop gear that is one tier behind. Stuff will be by and large balanced around 25 man content. You can stack a group and blow away 10 man stuff.

It's just going to be disappointing when the stuff being blown away is Arthas.

With the exception of Vashj, and with the two at their current nerf states? Yes, easily. We don't 8 man most of the bosses in ZA.

Well you could 8 man most bosses in ZA if you wanted to. I suspect you are more concerned with ZA because people want to hit timers. Also, making an exception for Vashj sort of guts the whole thing. She's substantially harder then the rest of the zone. That's the sort of difficulty people are doubtful can be done in a 10 man. Its the sort of 20-30 hour curve that makes things epic (though T6 badge gear should grease those skids for you guys a bit - DPS matters). Lets see if feel the same way when you have her down.

[--Pete]

Hi,

I'm now going to proceed to pull arbitrary numbers out of a bodily orifice, so please don't eat me Pete!

No reason to. Good job illustrating your point.

--Pete