12-08-2008, 05:14 AM
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.
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.