May News/Discussions

[Chesspiece_face]

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.

Actually I believe Sirlin makes a distinct point to say that the relative difficulty for doing the 10 man instances should be equal to the difficulty in doing the 25 man instances, leaving the only difference being a players social preference. This is the point that Kaplan uses to defend the creation of 10 and 20 man versions of the same instance yet fails to take to it's logical conclusion. Blizzard has taken great strides to create a more inclusive design yet they still seem to fall back on the same raid design falacies of the 40 man days, which brings with it the same loot related problems.

You reference Tic-Tac-Toe and Chess with the assumption that 10 man instances are somehow inherantly trivial, but the only reason that these instances are designed in such a way is to bend to the arbitrary loot progression rules blizzard has been a slave to since the beginning. If this short sighted loot progression is abandoned however the types of encounters and instances which could be in the game are endless. As is there will NEVER be a 10 man instance which can compare with the challange of a 25 man. Not because of the inherant social taxes related to organizing a 25 man raid but because there is always loot which can trivialize it. Whereas Kaplan and Blizzard seem to say that 10 man should be no less a challange than 25 man their actions in designing the loot progression speak louder than their talking points. As long as the gear progression moves from 5-10-25 the 5 and 10 man instances will always be "easy", not because of the social requirements but because the loot has designed them that way.

Edit: Another point made in the link is how blizzard shy'ed away from Cosmetic rewards from the 40 man raids early in WoW because they didn't believe that it would be enough of a motivator for people to keep doing these instances. I think this has patently been proven false with the success of things like the timed Bear Mount runs. They've already begun implimenting item sets with the same models just different color schemes, I see no reason that the 10 man versions of 25 man instances can have items with the same stat quality as the bigger instances but give the 25 man rewards cosmetic prestige rewards. this leaves the design of instances (both 10 and 25) more open and not hamstringed by the loot designs yet rewards the people that put in the extra effort into the social requirements of 25 man content.