May News/Discussions

[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.