May News/Discussions

[Chesspiece_face]

The way it currently is now, there's a ladder yes. But that ladder works - you climb it as much as your combination of skill, social ability and time dictate.

Herein lies the (so-called) problem though. The ladder doesn't really work. It works for 5-player content but then totally breaks down after that. Like Skan says: at this point you are hit with mutliple gateways impeding anyones ability to continue up the ladder. My point regarding the gateways was just that # of friends is a hard deal breaker, a players gear and skill can always be improved.

I also think I should clarify my position a bit, the debate has drifted (not necissarily a bad thing, it's still interesting.)

Kaplan says: the difference between 10 player content and 25 player content should be social comfort level.

Kaplan says: there should be easy designed 10/25 player content and hard designed 10/25 player content

Blizzard already states that they are implementing 10 player versions of 25 player content just with 1 T-level lower loot.

I think this last point really throws the present progress ladder into more disarray then might be obvious at first. Skan, you say that the lower level of loot in the 10 player content allows them to balance it easier and allow more people to see that content. But how much easier can they really balance it? even with a T-lower loot table they can't balance it down to really be much more accessible (in either difficulty or time investment) without leaving 25 player content ghost towns. Who cares if it is lower tiered loot if the players will be onto the next 10 player instances before the 25 players can gear up in thier instance. Suddenly the 10 players are obtaining the same level loot and they are seeing fresher content than the 25 players. The only place the difference in loot quality becomes an issue is either right when content is released or when most of the people are at the highest level of content. This leaves the 10 player instances needing to be balanced pretty close, at least in time investment, to the 25 player content to force things to fall in line. Even with the difference in loot levels 10 player content will have to have reset timers close to the 25 player content if not the same else players blaze through the 10 player stuff and not even bother with 25 player content. If you really want to design them easier than forget one tier lower gear you need to drop the gear down a helluva lot lower than that. (But then you have 5 player instances.)

Taking the step of creating 10 player versions of 25 player instances really equated to jumping out of the plane and now they are sitting there going "hmmm, do I really want to pull the cord?"

If, however, we abandon the concept of the progress ladder as it stands we can come up with an arguably better design which allows a place to progress for the most amount of players.

For those that may not have the time or skill needed to sit at the big kids table there is always 5-man stuff. You start with the normal instances and when you are adequately geared from those you can move on to Heroic versions of those same places. Progressing from Easy Heroics to the Difficult Heroics offers you better loot and should increase player skill.

For those that have more time and skill you have 10/25 player content with the deciding factor being, like kaplan says, social comfort level. These instances also progress by difficulty with the Easy Instances being more lenient on player skill and also offering lower Tier loot. As you progress up the difficulty ladder of instances the loot goes up in quality as does the requirements on players. By keeping these instances in the same tier loot however allows blizzard to balance both instances to require about the same amount of time, etc. so that they don't have to worry about people flooding to one or the other because they can loot up faster. It also allows players to move more freely between each version alleviating pressures on raiding guilds. As well as allowing blizzard to totally forego attunement chains etc. (I saw a lot of people frown when they dropped the attunements in a lot of the BC stuff because now people would be going into the higher level instances without having learned the lessons present in the lower stuff.) If you have a difficulty based curve in place, however, any player with appropriate gear will have at least some experience and associated skill whether they got that experience from 10 player content or 25 player content.

Edit: There is also no reason that there cannot be 10 player content ala Black Rock Spire, which is essentially an extension of 5-player content and doesn't have the equatable 25 player associated instance.

Edit 2: I also understand the argument for easy versions of high end content. If there is going to be a cool Arthas battle why not make it so that all your players can see it and feel like they are part of the story. But by this logic why don't they just make 5 player versions of those instances? That is the level where most of the players end up at anyway and it seems like that is the level which needs the most leeway in getting to just SEE the rest of the story. It seems that the mentality is that these battles need to maintain some Epic nature, but by imposing granduer based on the number of players you are already limiting the amount of people that can see it. A properly designed encounter using dialogue, setting, etc can bestow a feeling of Epicness on players no matter how easy the encounter is. (My favorite thing in the whole game is still the Opera scene in Kara.)