The Weekly Marmot - Cataclysm Tier 1 vs ICC

[Bovinity]

'll ask you directly: what is so offensive about a top guild having an opinion on the amount of time they had to spend to remain a top guild AS OPPOSED to the amount of time they had to spend on previous tiers of content?

They can have all the opinions they want. Who said they couldn't have an opinion?

If your answer is "because they're a top guild and choose that," please remember that no other expansion or patch release has had even a remotely similar amount of available endgame progression content at a single time.

Exactly. This content push has been absolutely stellar. Just amazing. Never before have we seen such a huge variety of good content with difficulty levels spanning the entire spectrum of players and the ability to consume it at whatever rate every player sees fit for themselves. It's amazing, really top-notch.

If you can not answer this question without an ad-hominem about the players themselves or their choices, then your problem is bigotry, and you need to reconsider whether or not you are actually okay with anyone enjoying the game the way they enjoy playing this game.

You've really got to tone down the sensitivity here. There's no attacking here, no ad-hominems, no bigotry and it really seems to me that the only people who aren't ok with people enjoying the game the way they want are the ones who want to restrict what other players can do for the sake of an extremely exclusive group of players.

[Kanzer]

They can have all the opinions they want. Who said they couldn't have an opinion?

He didn't ask if they could have opinions, he asked what is so offensive about their having an opinion. And I point this out because I've been asking it from the start. The amount of negativity people have pulled from simple well worded opinions is astonishing to say the least.

You've really got to tone down the sensitivity here. There's no attacking here, no ad-hominems, no bigotry and it really seems to me that the only people who aren't ok with people enjoying the game the way they want are the ones who want to restrict what other players can do for the sake of an extremely exclusive group of players.

Again, noone is advocating such a thing. I can't even tell you how many times its been said that the point is finding a system that works for everybody. And this even ties back to the original question of what is so bloody offensive about "Personally I would welcome a reasonable gate system."?

Again and again you are deflecting questions and suggesting people are saying things that they are not.

[Bovinity]

He didn't ask if they could have opinions, he asked what is so offensive about their opinion

That's not what he said. Read it again. He asked what was so offensive about them HAVING an opinon.

Again and again you are deflecting questions and suggesting people are saying things that they are not.

In light of the first point, you may want to rethink that one.

[Kanzer]

More deflections. Again the question is what is so offensive about it? You can nit pick all you want but until you answer the question its going to remain the same.

[Papapaint]

u mad bro?

Not particularly, I just enjoy discussion. Good contribution.

no bigotry and it really seems to me that the only people who aren't ok with people enjoying the game the way they want are the ones who want to restrict what other players can do for the sake of an extremely exclusive group of players.

Ah. Here I think we've nailed the crux of the argument between you and I.

Do you really think there's no way to implement a gating system that affects the top end of players and not the bottom end, or those in between? Let's say, for example, the top 450 guilds in the world make up the top end, and we want to come up with a gating system for those players.

By the time Paragon was pushing heroic Nef, fewer than 350 guilds had seen the encounter on normal mode. At the time of the first Sinestra kill, there were 356 kills on Cho'gall. By the time Paragon had cleared all of the content, roughly 300 guilds had a heroic kill.

As of right this minute, Halfus and Chimaeron are the only heroic modes that have been killed by any players out of the top 2%, although Maloriak gets by on decimal points. This says to me, quite clearly, that there could easily have been a gating system in place that affected the top 2% of the guilds without affecting everyone else.

Which means that there could, in fact, be a valid point being made by this guild in suggesting that some method of gating could have improved top end gameplay--because, in the end, their statement was nothing more than their feelings on how they could improve high-end gameplay--without that valid point being undermined by the illusion that any guild outside of the top 2% would feel any change at all to their content availability.

[Ion]

Not particularly, I just enjoy discussion. Good contribution.

It was roughly on par with the rest of the drivel in this thread.

[Bovinity]

More deflections. Again the question is what is so offensive about it? You can nit pick all you want but until you answer the question its going to remain the same.

What am I deflecting? I was perfectly straightfoward with my opinion on the current content. And stop asking what is so "offensive", I haven't said anything was offensive at all.

Do you really think there's no way to implement a gating system that affects the top end of players and not the bottom end, or those in between? Let's say, for example, the top 450 guilds in the world make up the top end, and we want to come up with a gating system for those players.

No matter what, a gating system is going to restrict *someone*. What is the big objection to leaving the content open and letting every single player decide what is the right pace for them? Why is that so.....offensive? *snicker*

[Papapaint]

What is the big objection to leaving the content open and letting every single player decide what is the right pace for them? Why is that so.....offensive? *snicker*

This was what I meant with my discussion of how the community perceives "world firsts". Technically, the "right pace" for those top guilds is determined by what we as a community expect of them. We can assume that these players enjoy, to a certain degree, the freedom of dumping large amounts of time into progression in a competitive fashion. Can we therefore assume that there's a point where that same freedom they enjoy also becomes overwhelming with too much content?

While I wasn't a huge fan of limited attempts in ICC, I think there was a point--around 30 attempts or so--where it really worked out. Top guilds were able to spend a good deal of time on the encounter, but weren't forced to necessarily overdo it, while guilds like mine at the time never came close to using up all the attempts.

In addition, it did turn progression from "let's throw ourselves at this as many times as we can until it falls over" into "let's get as much data from each attempt as possible". I don't think time expenditure should be the only dividing factor between these top guilds.

[cattebrie]

I think we should gate heroic modes only, and still make you kill the end boss of the instance first. I.E. All bosses are able open day one on normal mode, but you gate how fast we can kill heroic mode bosses.

I think this would be a perfect balance for all raiding guild. Most guilds (Casual/Semi-hardcore) would never even notice the gating system as by the time they kill the end boss of a raid, the heroic gates will have been opened.

However, it gives the Top end guilds a chance to breath every once and while. I also personally like the idea because it resets the race a couple times as well. Normally when there is no gating as soon as one guild gets ahead they stay ahead just because they get to see each boss first.

If you have a gate Premonition may win the first 4 heroic kills but it is forced to stop for 2 weeks because of a gate, it gives a change for the other guilds to catch up. And then when the next gate opens,the race is started anew.

Anyways that is my opinion.

[Belak]

Personally, I think this was Bliz's response to the manhandling their end-game content took at the beginning of Wrath. Was it Ensidia who came out 60some hours after Wrath's release and complained they had cleared everything?

I strongly suspect Bliz remembered that, too, when they designed T11 content.

[Knighterrant81]

Make the gates heroic-only, and I think we have a system. We actually ended up burning out in ICC because it took too long to get to the end boss. We were so tired of farming old bosses and just couldn't finish off the LK because alot of our players burnt out and went to do other things. Make the gates heroic-only, so that the world first crowd can pace themselves. The difficulty of normal modes could be adjusted down a bit as well - we've had to sit several raiders who weren't our absolutely top performers and a few actually left the guild over it - which was sad because they were good people, but we couldn't afford to bring someone in for bosses when they can't do enough DPS or manage the movement the boss requires. It would be nice if the DPS requirements were relaxed a bit, or perhaps that movement was a bit more forgiving in normal modes so we didn't have to be hardasses to people every week.

Gate the heroic modes, make it so they can do the heroic modes on day 1 if they want, and tone down the difficulty of the normal modes a bit (just a bit though I don't want the return of Wrath modes where joe blow in greens is an acceptable raider).

[Kahmal]

I love how when I can finally raid hardcore in WoTLK it was made a joke.

They make it mean something again in Cata when I can't raid hardcore at all, and the Normals are to hard to pug lol.

I personally think it's ridiculous that Hardcore guilds are complaining about content difficulty. We all know Method, and Paragon or even Ensidia are awesome guilds, if you dont get a couple World First cause you felt like taking a break know one is going to forget your past accomplishments (meaning that you have had World First, who actually remembers the individual ones you killed first by heart?)

The encounters I've done so far 4/6 BWD aren't much harder then Karazhan. I mean sure Magmaw and Maloriak may have a few more mechanics then Attumen and Maiden of Virtue but from what I've seen in PuGs is a lot of healers just flat out suck. And it took me awhile to finally clear Karazhan in one night.

[Katzazi]

They are not complaining about content difficulty but about the amount of available fresh content at the same time.

I think someone above has the right point and idea: There is more than one point of gating. It's giving more people a chance to compete. Without gating the guilds who can throw enough player time at the raid wins. (Sure, they have to play at an much higher level than most other players do, but it's a competition between the best guilds/players to begin with. All of them can and do play at that level.) If everybody has to take a break now and again it's best for everyone. The players who take those breaks naturally (the ones in the middle and the casual ones) are not affected by the forced breakes. If all, they get a chance to get closer to the top group because they have more time to close the gap.

The idea of gating stuff is not a new idea for competions. It's actually something you can see quite often when looking at sport races that go over multiple days. Think about the race Paris-Dakar or Tour de France. It's not a race that starts at one date and everybody can drive/ride as long as they want to. The races are broken down to relativevly short etapes doable on a daily basis. There are even days off. And everybody starts at the same time again at the next day. (Sure the time spent is added at the end, but at least everybody has the theoretical chance to beat the top guy at least on that day.)

So a gating system that let's everybody not fighting for world firsts be able to do it at their own pace but controls the speed of the race so it's done at a healthfull pace for all the attendants is a good idea.

My bet would also be on something that only gates the heroic modes. I like the idea with the number of bosses you can try/kill. But I doubt that it would work. The top end people would just change toons and enter the other encounters with them or stuff like that.

[Kahmal]

Wasn't Sunwell far more brutal? Even Ulduar HMs perhaps when you think One Light or Zero Lights?

[swelt]

I think if Lore's analysis illustrated anything, it's precisely that it's not possible to please everyone. I would challenge anyone to point to any given expansion and it's raid tiering approach and demonstrate that it's ever been achieved before. You can go back through each expansion and find groups that have had a really rough deal. The question comes down to how many people can you please, and how little can you piss off those that don't get exactly what they want.

I think if the complaint is that there's just too much content, that's a pretty good outcome. That wasn't exactly Sco's complaint though, and I think it's important to point out that the absence of gating around the Christmas holiday is a very legitimate point. As a 'middle class' guild, we simply decided that we would not make any serious efforts on progression until after Christmas, but even in our own realm ecosystem of competition, that decision probably cost us a few places. For guilds that really care about world progression rankings, that's a bigger deal. I always defended the rather harsh first gate in Icecrown Citadel solely on the fact that the patch hit just before Christmas. Sure, just having 4 bosses after months of ToGC was galling, but being under pressure to run progression raids over the holiday period isn't a nice position for a guild to be put in.

Should they nerf the current content? In the past, it was almost a standard practice for raid content to get a pass of nerfs to help along progression and I think we can probably expect to see a few things down-tuned fairly soon. Someone from a truly casual guild asked me where to start with T11 content the other day and I had to warn them that there were no easy bosses. The last patch unlocked heroic dungeons for the masses, I expect a similar (if not as extreme) pass of tuning to be applied to the raid content. Hopefully it will just be a case of adjusting the severity of the fight mechanics, maintain the importance of the mechanics but give a bit of slack if you fail them, rather than nerf them into the ground. No doubt hardcore (or more honestly, hardcore wannabee) forum jockeys will be in outrage over such nerfs, but MMOs aren't static content and this kind of unwrapping of content over time is what keeps vitality going.

[krilz]

I find it hard to sympathize with guilds that spends huge amounts of time in instances in order to gain world firsts and claim to be burn out as a result. No one is putting a gun to their head and if they got sponsors that wants results, then that's their problem. I personally love this expansion so far and only by raiding 2-3 nights (4 hours at a time) we've achieved 4/13 in Heroic 10's. The fact that we don't have to wait for a gate to kill more just keeps us going in our own desired pace.

Besides, one of the things I don't like about gating systems is that once someone beat a certain boss in order to progress, they gain an advantage over other guilds. The best comparison I have was Nihilum who was the first guild in TBC to beat Kael'thas and were the first into Black Temple. The fact that they got all number one kills in BT as a result of this wasn't the problem that you needed to kill KT to get that advantage but that the bosses in early BT were far too easy. If you start with gating again, it doesn't matter that you killed the last boss before the gate 1 month before the other guilds. As long as they kill the last boss before the next gate opens, you're on even terms again which sort of defeats the purpose IMHO.

As for attunement, I didn't have a huge problem with it. The biggest problem was that it was on an individual basis, meaning that if you had 25 people attuned for the next instance/boss/whatever, than those exact 25 people had to progress and if you wanted someone else you had to go back to kill the old boss and getting recruits who were already attuned was a huge hassle. However, if you could attune your entire guild instead that would solve a lot of problems. The biggest problem is how to solve it around guildless people in PUG's which I don't have a quick solution for.

[sakkdaddy]

I actually liked the limited attempts system, mostly because our guild is full of highly skilled players but we only raid 3 nights a week, for 4 hours a night. When we were working on Anub'arak, some weeks we didn't even get through all of the attempts because the Anub fight was fairly long. It's nice to reward skill over time.

The main drawback though was that each pull did feel a bit more stressful, even when we knew we might not even use up all 50 attempts that week. The main benefit was that skill was rewarded over time for the most part, at least after the mass soulstoning was fixed. The other huge drawback was that people felt like they needed to run alt raids, even 2 alt raids, to get more practice and attempts on the bosses each week. These alt raids were the ultimate failure of a system that would otherwise be pretty nice.

I think a heroic only gating system makes sense. Allowing only 3-4 new heroic modes to be attempted each month would really prevent a lot of burnout from the top guilds, and not affect the rest of us much.

I do not want normal modes nerfed much at all though.

[doom1992]

How about for a gating system, they have a system in place where you have say in a 12 boss raid, 2 bosses open straight away, then when you have killed those, the following week you have an additional 2 bosses onto that. For example, if (I am using Method as an example just because Lore talked about them), Method cleared 2 bosses within 4 days of the patch being out, they wouldn't be able to clear anything else till the next reset, then they would have those 2 bosses which should for them be relatively easy by then, and then 2 new bosses to kill that week, and then the following week they would have the first 6 bosses if they managed to kill the first 4 as a guild. Why not use the guild achievement system to implement this, and because pugs are likely to complain, make it so that every 2 weeks, whether you have killed the first 2 bosses or not the second 2 will open. This way you would have the top guilds like method, paragon or stars clearing content faster than other guilds as they do now, but they won't be overworked. This also allows them to continue to compete for the top, because they would be killing probably the 2 new bosses every week. Then make it so that in order to fight a boss on heroic, you have to have killed it on normal first. This means the top guilds have flexibility on what they progress first. They can try progress heroic from the start, or focus on normal progression first. Like guild were clearing different heroics at different times.

[bludwork]

I am pretty unsympathetic to the "truely hardcore" guilds about the pacing of this expansion. NOBODY is forcing them to raid at that pace, a couple of guilds even raided on Christmas day! How ridiculous is that. I was reading Kungen's post on a similar topic at manaflask and he came up with the convoluted mechanism on how to do pacing. Hell no.

The only thing I would change is make the instance release or gating linear, like back in Vanilla. You did molten core, then you did bwl, then aq40 and naxx. An instance should be a entity by itself, not this 1 boss, 3 boss and 6 boss instances. If you're gonna do that make it one instance with different wings.

Getting back on track blizzard did the right thing, lots of instances at release of the expansion, no gating and no attunements. Look who is crying uncle.

[relgatta]

Thought provoking Marmot this week Lore thank you.

As a raider that perhaps drops somewhere in between the casual and hardcore/casual scenarios you described. I am curious as to how many people are really feeling this content is too difficult. Certainly it is difficult to PUG, I don't think that could be argued against. Several of my guild mates who have schedules that prevent them from raiding with us have tried, and to my knowledge none have succeeded outside of BH.

The complaining I see concerning the difficulty of Cata raid content is mostly linked to pugging. I have a difficult time with this however, as it seems to me that if content is simple enough that you can pug it easily it is too easy for a group with a slightly higher level of cohesion and coordination. We saw this in ToC and much of ICC.

I am very pleased with the difficulty of the content as it sits. I like very much the feeling that the content is challenging, and that my hand is not being held with some kind of fail buff like ICC or some other artificial means of advancing us through the content. I think I can speak for our guild in saying that the feeling is pretty much unanimous.

As to the gating question, as another poster has indicated, some kind of gating probably would have been undetectable to us as we are not exactly lighting the servers on fire with the pace of our progression. If it was conservative enough, tuned to limit the progression of only the top 5% of guilds, it wouldn't affect us at all. It seems reasonable to me for Blizzard to tune the rate of content so as to allow raiders to compete for achievements without trying to burn them out. In my mind, Blizzard plays a role similar to the NFL or some other sports organization. It would be bad for the sport if the NFL scheduled games in such a way as to exhaust the athletes. The best players would burn out quickly and be unable to compete. WoW benefits from having a bleeding edge. Blizz should work to support that so long as it is not at the expense of the rest of the community.