May News/Discussions

[Chesspiece_face]

Things happen for reasons. In this case, they're happening for good reasons. You can't make a reasonable criticism of Blizzard's design by asserting that it's self-evidently absurd, because there are plenty of reasons why it's completely rational. If you want to suggest an alternative, you need to explain how what you suggest is better all-around and covers all the same ground the current endgame does.

No, I can't make an argument asserting that it is self-evidently absurd. I can, however, do what exactly what I have been doing. Quoting people who work for blizzard describing their design philosophy, and using those quotes to point out flaws and inaccuracies between what they claim to be doing with content and what is really happening "on the ground level" as it were.

I think your position that blizzards design and the one I am arguing for are worlds apart isn't very accurate. In fact I see the changes blizzard is making and has been making as a continuous pattern of moving towards the type of design I am speaking about. Many people conflate the idea of lower gateways of admission with feelings of "OMG free epix!" and i think this is the challange blizzard will face going forward. I'm sure we both agree that the more people that can reasonably see a piece of content the better. I'm sure that blizzard also agrees with that. I think that the great problem with the current end game is that the gateways for admission into any piece of content grows exponetionally with each step you take up the ladder.

Presently the gateways for content include things like # of Friends, Gear, Skill, Time, and maybe Character Spec. Time is more of a constant in these types of games. It's a fact, if you want to play you need to invest the time. Character Spec limitations are sort of brought up in a previous post and those issues are related to Class Balance. But the remaining gateways are really inescapable when you view the present state of WoW. And in many ways the design of the end game mishandles these gateways.

The fist checkpoint anyone needs to go through is the Friends aspect. Then depending on where you are in the progression Gear and Skill can move back and forth as more important. This is a problem because Gear and Skill (instead of alleviating the social issues of the Friends gateway) tend to exacerbate those issues. When Raiding guilds start losing players they need to start recruiting people at their level of content and because of the way things are set up presently the number of players at any step of progression is limited. I can go on and on about the inherant social issues with raiding, I'm sure I wouldn't be telling people anything they don't know.

When I look at Blizzards decision to create 10 player versions of 25 player content I see this as a strong step in the right direction. But I don't see it as alleviating or even necissarily reducing the hard gateways that are present in the WoW endgame. This is an issue specifically for WoW because the curve for most of the game is very low, then you hit the endgame wall and if you are able to get over it you can start to progress again with a higher curve. As long as that wall is there though it will produce a lot of the churn we are both talking about.

Let me say that I am not against the disparity of Tiers of loot between 10 and 25 player versions of content on principle. I have misgivings about how effective it will be to alleviate the aforementioned wall. If I am playing in the 10 player version of (insert instance here) and the rest of my guild is raiding on the 25 player version will the gear disparity be too large for me to sub in with them in the 25 player if they need a spot? Therein lies my hang-up. By creating relative difficulty instance versions with the same loot tables you can alleviate the hard wall and social frustrations related to raiding (The same frustrations that many people use as an excuse for why 25 player content should have better rewards!) by creating a greater pool of players. You also alleviate a lot of the loot pressures of raiding: If I am subbing in for someone and I normally progress my loot in a 10 player instance there is less of a chance of problems developing over loot drops. People would be more inclined to come into a raid for the first time knowing that they aren't going to get anything for their time or trouble if they have another means for progression already.

The benifits of this for raiding guilds wouldn't stop there either (and this benefit will be seen to some degree just with the inclusion of the 10 player versions). Because it will be much easier to gear up other members of your guild so that they are on the same level of the progression curve. The disparity between the gear of the raiders in any guild and the rest of the guild has always been a problem and it only hurts a guild when it is more efficient to recruit outside "mercenary" raiders to keep doing content instead of helping the members you already have progress up the curve.

I think the response a vast majority of the players get when they try to poke their head into the end game as it stands now is "sorry, you're not geared up enough. Go do PuGs/PvP/Whatever till you get your gear high enough" (ironically by the time they actually do that the rest of the raid is at the next tier and they are still undergeared) when the environment of the end game needs to be "Dude! get in this group, you need to see this!"