May News/Discussions

[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.