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This was probably the biggest reason why they couldn't find players on par with the skill they required.Quote:
Originally Posted by Darkaz
As for 25's "dying". This is an evolving game, it has to be or things will get extremely boring. The same thing happens with every other product in the world. Car's started out as steam cars and then came internal combustion engines and kill steam engines. Yet we're in a much better place with todays cars.
Can you, i've been doing alot of cross realm raids where i'm the foreighn server dude and i can't actually help summon peeps?
When it was clear that DS-type of nerfs come to stay in WoW, I starting thinking that maybe Blizz should change the meta-achievement of each instance or tier so you need to complete it without the debuffs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lore
But more in the topic, if they normalize the gear of the challenge mode version of the Raid to a high item level, it integrates farming with it isn't it? I mean, you need to farm in order to get to that item level first and after you reach the item level that it is normalized gear drops become cosmetic.
Lets say you clean DS at 397 item level but the DS Challenge mode is normalized for 400 item level (you have access to it, but your gear isn't optimal), you need more gear yet, but you don't need all the gear from the instance, so you won't hate the RNG forever. So you continue farming until you get 400, after that you continue farming just because you think you can get a way to get a better time, you do the instance because of the time, the loot is just a nice thing you get in addition to it.
I <3 U mad
Private Message
To: Lore
Subject: PST Question
Message: LOL U MAD BRO?
Both you and Lore have been trolled hard with that question at 17:44. In fact I'd say you are actually one of the trolls.Quote:
Originally Posted by uglie
Think about it - who in their right mind would actually want to do super hard content where their team mates are players that have been picked at random....
Give casual players a bit of credit, they are not that crazy. Most of them are incredibly smart people with more than enough imagination to realise what would happen. They got to witness it first hand at the start of Cataclysm and if anything that painful experience would make them far more aware of the consequences of random grouping for challenge modes than you are!
There have been a spate of posts like the one that prompted the PST question and like YOURS doing the rounds on official forums and the less reputable WOW sites.
I suspect the poster behind the post that prompted the PST question is actually a hardcore player pretending to be casual and hoping to stir up some trouble by scaremongering and suggesting that casual players will demand that challenge modes be nerfed and "QQ it will end up like Wrath heroics" etc.
I have seen many posts like your post that are trying to drum up outrage in this way.
NO. Just no. Please stop scaremongering and trying to generate bad feeling toward those casual players who have absolutely no intention of asking for access to Challenge modes.
Please also stop with the silly talk regarding Heroic raids being nerfed. That had nothing to do with casual players (who can't even play in organised groups to start with) demanding that they be nerfed. Where on earth did you get that idea? Heroic modes were nerfed to assist the weaker heroic mode guilds (and the better Normal mode guilds that gave it a go) who found they ran into a progression brick wall.
Seems to me that you are full of hatred and throwing false accusations towards a bunch of players that haven't done you any harm. Kind of odd....but hey this is the internet I guess.
The guy who really wanted challenge mode queues seemed genuinely interested in being able to quickly get 5-man pugs at a high difficulty level. The form of his feedback was offensively self-interested and he insisted on ignoring the problems with the idea (chiefly, not having a single well-defined goal for the run), but I don't think he was trolling.
I must confess to not reading the full post, I only saw what Lore quoted in the video which was in itself a quote from the person that asked the question.Quote:
Originally Posted by Marco
Do you have the link to the original thread so I can see the conversion and look at the poster and his guild (assuming he didn't use an alt)?
The guys insistance on ignoring the obvious problems doesn't stop my alarm bells ringing I am afraid....
I tend to work on the assumption that the mere fact that a person found the forum almost rules them out from being an entirely casual player and I have often suspected that any post starting with "I am a casual player but...." is almost certainly from someone whose main got at least a server first...
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6551925497?page=8#149Quote:
Originally Posted by Toypop
Also see #162 and #163. He didn't claim to be a casual player as far as I know; in fact, he presented himself as pretty avidly interested in 5-man pugs.
I don't see challenge modes being extended to raids during MoP (if ever). There are some issues that are not yet addresed, and I think we (as in both the devs and the comunity) need to see how the 5-man ones pan out.
Lore touched on the leaderboard being locked after Mists if the focus is on the new competitive aspect of pve; however, whenever they tweak spells on a fairly large scale such as those in content patches, we'll see new teams, with different strats that will shave a few seconds off the previous patch. To remain meaningful in any sensible way, they'll need to reset the leaderboards with every patch and we would have 'challenge seasons', much like pvp. That could work, but the nature of PvE is that it lacks replayability, so it'd spiral down to less people interested in them with every patch.
So they'd eventualy end up as the entry heroics that nobody runs. Unless, of course, there's some incentive to run them (new gear, FoS, or the like). But lets go back to pvp: there are rewards for every season, but those serve more as a token of your past awesome-ness; the real incentive that drags competitive pvpers to rbg/arena is to be the new top ranked player; and there's merit to it, because beating people in some season requires a sufficiently different strat everytime; I don't particularly see much value in being the new fastest team to beat the same content.
I could be wrong, and I'm one of those that is extremely pumped up with these challenge modes. But I just don't see them as that much of the way competitive pve will pann out from now on. Not to mention that I see more merit in being the world first to figure how to beat a fight: things like finding out how many moonkings you need to bring to ragnaros to beat the seed guys, without compromising the single target dps check. Overall, I see challenges more as a cute little toy they're throwing at us.
Edit: uhm, interesting:
If and when we move on to future challenge mode "seasons", titles to recognize players' past accomplishments are definitely something we'll consider.
Here is my issue Lore and while I disagree there is an impending doom to 25-mans, I think there is a larger issue you are not taking an honest look at and I'd love if you could. Might I suggest you read Paragon's message again and think on this part of their message which I think is the biggest issue "It has always been hard for us to recruit new players". Personally I feel that if it's HARD for Paragon to recruit players, how hard is it for other 25man guilds to recruit players? I'm sure you have some idea: FRICKING HARD.
I know because I've gone through this roller coaster of 25mans for the last 6 1/2 years. The reality and I firmly believe this is that the average skill of your average WoW player has been steadily going down over time as population has grown in World of Warcraft. This is just a statistical reality. Furthemore, the better players will flock to the servers were the best guilds are in hope to possible eventually join them. So you'd think that on Paragon's server, they would have a large number of players to chose from who are skilled and can meet their raiding schedule and more importantly skill requirements. Maybe? I guess not.
During Tier 11, my whole guild moved servers for this very reason to try to move to a more 25man hardcore focused realm. It helped a little, we did better with a few new better quality people and those people helped us progress better through Tier 12 and 13, but again the rollercoaster resulted in 15 of our 25 just disappearing. We tried for many months to build back up and couldn't find the people necessary to fill in the guild. The people just aren't there. There aren't enough people anymore interested and skilled enough to progress in 25m raiding unless you're already a 25m guild that's established, has a good solid core, etc. Guild's that are even established can't recover from a large loss (as is the case of Paragon).
Of course with the news alone that Paragon was switching from 25 to 10 due to lack of good quality recruits, if they REALLY wanted to stay 25m, I'm sure they have at this point more recruit applications than any sane person can deal with. So honestly when it comes to Paragon, I'm sure it's more of a conscious decision to go 10m due to real life reasons as decided by the core team and the recruitment thing might be somewhat of an excuse. We'll see as we approach next week.
Getting away from Paragon and going back to my theory and opinion of the state of WoW. I firmly believe it's a player base issue. You have two problems. Problem A, and it's hard to validate this without a poll, but I think that more and more people in America are beginning to prefer 10m over 25m, leaving 25m to "the casuals" and 10m to the hardcore. This opinion shift may or may not have been magnified by the introduction of LFR as a 25m format. This would be a shift in the preferences of America to be somewhat similar to the rest of the world, where that has always been the case. This would mean that the ability to run semi-hardcore to hardcore guilds in America would be getting increasingly difficult because less *SKILLED* (key word there) people are interested in them. The top end would suffer less since there will always be some small percentage of the elite who will compete on that format even if there is not another 25m guild in the world.
More importantly is that I think there are honestly still a lot of people who are interested in the format or rather they don't care which format (10 vs 25), but the overall skill of WoW players is dropping over time. My hope for World of Warcraft is the challenge modes (and to your point possibly scenarios) could be developed which help your average WoW player become a better WoW player. Paragon's issue and I think most hardcore (but not speaking about top 50-100 for example) 25m guild's issue is that there aren't enough good WoW players to sustain *most* hardcore 25-man WoW guild over long periods of time. While the "best" 25-man guilds can keep their doors open, continue to get good recruits, and sustain their populations due to prestige alone, most guilds that are even of the level of quality of Month's Behind can't really sustain themselves due to it being REALLY REALLY hard to find and keep good players. Month's Behind will never have this issue of course because they have presitige not in World Firsts, but through their association with Tankspot. For the rest of us, we just wither over time and eventually throw in the towel.
To bring it back to Paragon and my own personal story just a little out of spite, the fact they threw in the 25m towel makes me feel slightly better about my decision to throw in the 25m towel this expansion if that means anything. While I recognize there's a lot of guilds out there still doing 25-mans it doesn't change my own feeling about the format (I love it) and the pain I'm going through having to settle with leading a 10m guild in MoP. I'm dealing with it in my own way (pushing for our 10m being even more hardcore than the past), but that's just my story.
Anyhow... I hope Challenge Modes and skill improving scenarios make for better WoW players over time and maybe my guild will be a 25-man again. Until then I'll stick with 10's because the 25m revolving door is just... I dunno, getting too old for it I guess.
One final note:
I think Blizzard needs to think LONG and hard on what they can to do to make 25m guilds easier to run. Yes the more loot in the instance is kinda nice because players are such loot whores. Yeah. I get it. That is a big part of it, but 25m's take a lot of work and relieving that stress will go a long way. Yes it's a LOT OF WORK, more work than most gamers can fathom, for a leadership team to run a 25m guild. It's not twice the work as a 10 man, or even 2.5 times the work. It's more like on the scale of 5-10 times more work. If Blizzard made it easier to do, maybe more 25m guilds wouldn't fall appart. If they made the guild recruitment system not suck that would be a good start. If they made integrated 25m loot systems. If they made normal/heroic loot work more like LFR (aka you can run it as often as you want but any player only gets loot once). If they made the lockout system suck WAY LESS (for example if you could do the first 4 bosses in Heroic 25m then switched to heroic 10m for the next 2, then switched to 25m normal for the last 2) that would make it easier. We could make lists like this all frackin' day.
uuuuugggg
Off my soap box now.
oh my... WTB 2 sec clip of Lore going "Dear who ever posted this, You are dumb, please get off the internet."
I very much hope to avoid the 10 vs 25 debate, so I will try to stay on point. I should admit I hated, hated 40 man raiding back in the day, and very much prefer 10 mans to 25. That is just my personal opinion, I don't think Blizzard should cancel 25 mans or anything like that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Livistos
That said, Liv, your post looks to me not like a defense of 25 mans, but a reason to switch to 10s.
The reasons people have been gravitating to 10s are well known, but proponents of 25 man raiding should be arguing FOR what makes 25s more fun and asking, heck, demanding that Blizzard design encounters to play to the strengths of 25 players. The only difference now as far as I can tell is the scrum is bigger and the bosses have more hit points. If the bigger team on 25 mans is more epic, then the scope of 25 man encounters should be more epic, simply scaling up the numbers is not enough. As long as 10 and 25s are being designed in tandem, I don't know if they can truly create that separation. I can't think of many encounters that felt more epic lately with the bigger raid team. Faction champs in TOTC maybe?
Moreover, I think adding extra loot is not the answer. LFR has shown that players resent doing content they don't enjoy for loot. Raiding (under the current model) is the major end game activity in WOW. LFR, at least, can be done on the side and does not preclude raiding with your guild. A situation in which raiders have to pick between the content they prefer versus content that rewards better loot is not a good one for the game or the long term health of 25 man raiding.
A long time ago, a guildy once told me that when it's 40 vs. 1, you kinda want to root for the 1. If Blizzard wants to make large scale raiding attractive, I do believe they need to make encounters feel like you need those extra heroes to beat that one bad guy.
You have to remember that Paragon is an all finnish guild and only recruits people that are fluent in finnish. This is what makes it difficult for them to recruit players and not the fact that they can't find players of sufficient skill.Quote:
Originally Posted by Livistos
You can't expect every feature of a theme park mmo to be targeted at you but its certainly reasonable to be disappointed when development time is spent on a feature you won't use instead of on one you will. I guess maybe the guy's post was a bit over the top but I feel much the same way. I wish they had spent more time on other aspects of the game than on one that I am unlikely to utilize. I pretty much feel the same way about pet battles and pvp - I don't think its a terrible thing to say you wish they had devoted resources to something you would use instead of something you wouldn't as long as you don't indicate its the end of the world if it does happen.