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No offense, but giving raid leaders extra gear is probably the worst idea I've heard >.>
You'll instantly see a whole ton of "new 25man raiding guild, plz join!", none of which will actually have 25 people in them, and what's left of the current 25man playerbase will splinter out like crazy. As Ion said, it's a great way to kill 25-man raiding. "Only the strong survive" just doesn't work. For example: the current 25man situation.
I understand the point you are making, just I never said gear, only for transmog if any. I really think that those guilds very much exist right now, guilds that try and fail, but you think it is different, is ok.
It doesn't really matter what the reward is, you're talking about creating more 25-man raid leaders, which is absolutely not the problem at the moment. The problem is in the number of 25-man raiders, and connecting those players with the existing 25-man raids.
This is not the concern blizzard sites in their blue post on the matterQuote:
Originally Posted by Lore
"We’ve also received a lot of feedback regarding 25-player raids, and have been looking for ways to address some concerns. Ever since we changed 10-player raids to drop the same item level as 25s, we’ve seen a steady decline in 25-player raiding. This isn’t surprising. A 25-player raid takes an extra level of logistical commitment for the officers of those groups"
And frankly, if the problem is not enough people, is it really fair to push people in a direction they appearently don't want to go?
You're not really reading what he's writing.
He's not saying "nobody wants to do 25 mans", he's saying "getting people who want to do 25 man raids together is difficult".
And the burden isn't JUST on the officers (though recruiting, especially for non-server-first type guilds, is definitely not easy)...it's on the people who have to pay to transfer. Especially if you have an entire alt-ecology to transfer. It can literally be hundreds of dollars. It's a completely unreasonable burden.
If the problem they were trying to solve was "25 man raiding is suffering more than we expected and we worry about its future" the SOLUTION to that problem is remove the absurd cost for server transfers, not random "incentives" that may (heh) or may not (more likely) work.
I agree with what Lore said in his post, and also that the solution is in making the road to gather 25 people less troublesome (not giving them better gear, even if it's RNG-based). I was just pointing out that that blizzard is citing another reason for the decline in 25 man. I forgot to mention the entire point (the curse of posting right after i woke up, before going to work..) , which was that I think Blizzard uses faulty logic on this one.
Yes, I could pay for server migrations and move my characters to another server in the hopes of finding a nice 25 man raiding guild there. I don't think I should be required to pay this money, however. I already pay my monthly fee and my two yearly upgrade fee. I'm already paying for a Massive Multiplayer ORPG, why should I need to pay extra to get that Massive Multiplayer feel?
Admittedly, I'm derailing a bit into whining about low-pop servers, but those are related somewhat. There's people on my server that would prefer 25 man raiding, but not enough of them. It's very likely the same on other servers. All we really need to "save 25man raiding" is allowing these people to get together without 2/3th having to put in a large whack of money just to play together.
Based on a blog post by one of the best elemental shaman theorycrafter's Binkenstein at http://www.totemspot.com/vb/entry.php?b=76.
I think this may even help raid leaders choose between killing your farm bosses or staying on a boss and possibly extending a raid lockout. it's more relevant if there is more than one raid.
For elite and Thunderforged, i doubt they will use both at the same time, it was at least an experiment. i don't feel that both experiments would work together, it's a bit much i agree. I think there was a flaw in the elite mode experiment in that at least for 10 man normal elite was the easiest way to kill it. Original hard modes added just that another difficulty level, yes we have heroic for that but having elite on both means that i don't feel at least in normal it achieved it's goal.
I think i'd put the percentages at more lie 1% chance to drop in 25 man and 0.5 - 0.7% in 10 man.
My opinion, Thunderforged sounds nice but i'm not convinced it's the solution to either keeping 25 man working, or reducing the obvious difference in opinion in the debate between them. i think i'd support the make a 15 man and have the one size method.
The problem with free transfers is Blizzard makes basically no cost money from them and players would end up flooding the top realms. They need a disincentive for players to realm hop. But in the end it's a business and you don't give up no cost/low cost cash flow.
What about if you kept the single transfer cost a $25, but added another option, say $50 for up to all your characters on the server; you'd keep the block to prevent running away from problems, but not make it absurd to find a new home. Hell, you could even just make the option $25 lets you move all you want and I'd probably still be a deterrent.Quote:
Originally Posted by Theotherone
Does blizzard really earn more money from the transfers than they lose out on from players abandoning the game because their realm is empty? From what I understood, the money was intended as a deterrant from server hopping. That's real nice and all, but with the paid transfers in place, it's like they consider that the available "fix" for being on a dead server, making it practically mandatory for players to caugh up that money, which is complete and utter nonsense. We're already paying for subscription fees.
If you want to play with specific people on different servers than you rolled on, I can understand the extra cost, because they're providing you a service there (transferring your character to a realm where your friends are).
But if you're simply looking to join a 25 man raiding guild (or any raiding guild for that matter on the really low servers), you shouldn't require to pay extra for that, so blizzard should come up with something different than the transfer costs.
If you look at their revenues, they make a pretty good amount of money off of the "paid services", which include server transfers, but I don't believe they break out the detail on it. It includes a bunch of other services; so can't really say how much is from transfers. They do need to fix the dead realm issues - CRZ cannot be the sole answer.
I'm not saying they're not making money off of it. Of course they are. However, from my understanding, that wasn't the intention of the cost for server transers. It was meant as a deterrant.
That of course leaves the big question: If blizzard could fix the low-pop server problem, would they do so, or would they leave stuff as it is, to not shoot themselves in the foot for missing out on transfer money?
CRZ is not meant to fix low-pop servers. If it was, it would affect Pandaria/Stormwind/Orgrimmar. It's meant to fix low level areas looking very empty, because the vast majority of players hare having fun in Pandaria.
That said, they might use the CRZ technology to fix the problem, by bundling groups of low-pop servers together permanently. This would of course include:
- Allowing people from the same group to CRZ raid current instances together.
- Allowing people from the same group to trade with each other.
- Allowing people from the same group to invite each other into guilds.
- Combining the auction houses for realms belonging to the same group.
- Applying CRZ to Pandaria/Stormwind/Ironforge for the same group.
While easier said than done, the CRZ technology already covers most of that. Naturally, there could be a few issues, like two guilds on different realms in the same group with the same name.