The Weekly Marmot - Cataclysm Tier 1 vs ICC

[sifuedition]

I like them being separate. I like the 10-25 same loot tables and shared lockout. Therefore, if they were all in one, you would be totally locked to one or the other. The way it is, you can still designated 10 man raids for the week and others in 25.

I must say, I'm in agreement with several of the recent posts. Blizzard is not and never should be responsible for players decisions or behavior. That is largely what's wrong with society today, IMO. If it is not their responsibility, why should they code around it? Everyone has to be capable of making responsible decisions for themselves.

[Reyntrannin]

Papa, i agree taht there could be a way to gate high end content that would work, but currently i'm failing to see the value in it.
Speaking as someone who is extremely competitive, at least out side of WoW, I would actually prefer to have teh content there pushing me. If I want to put in the time and tears to be the first, then so be it. I'll probably vent by complaining about the time involved or any of a number of things, but I've always preferred to have my goal in sight, rather than hidden behind a series of artificial 'gates'.
The satisfaction of hitting as fast as I possibly can is part of the satisfaction of winning the race.
Imagine a foot race where halfway through, everyone who got there in the first thrity minutes of the race was forced to stop until the 30 - minute mark. Would that be in anyone's interest?
Dealing with the time investment, the energy and burnout involved, and the sheer frustration of going on against incredible competition is a part of the game when you want to be #1, and trying to remove that will remove a major factor of the competition that these players are here for.

[Dedic]

I thought the point was that there is too much to do before the weekly reset when you'd have to start all over again. In that case, you just need a way to progress through the resets. In other words, you down boss A and B one week, but the next week you don't have to down them again to get to boss C, and so on. I thought that was the problem, and a winged instance solves that problem.

[Kazeyonoma]

... they already have a fix like that Dedic..

extend your raid.

[Papapaint]

Dealing with the time investment, the energy and burnout involved, and the sheer frustration of going on against incredible competition is a part of the game when you want to be #1, and trying to remove that will remove a major factor of the competition that these players are here for.

I disagree completely. We don't admire players from Paragon, or listen to the theorycrafting of players like those in Elitist Jerks, or enjoy watching Premonition do live raids at Blizzcon because these players dump shitloads of time into the game. We are interested because they're extremely skilled players who frequently think outside the box to achieve these world first kills.

I don't see how taking what is already a large time investment and increasing it makes for more interesting world firsts. While I don't think limited attempts are a good idea, it did make for an interesting challenge--minus the few wasted accidental pulls or silly wipes, the world first race became who could most effectively use their raid time, not who had the most raid time. That is interesting gameplay.

The race analogy falls short, because every world first counts. Just because one guild gets the world first on Sinestra doesn't mean the other 12 bosses are now irrelevant--each boss is a race. I think the NFL analogy was significantly more accurate--too many games in too short a time. You beat one game only to find you have another in 10 minutes, you're still tired, and you can quit whenever you want... but then you're a quitter. No one likes feeling like a quitter, especially those people who choose to be extra competitive.

[Muffin Man]

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.

I'm positive they remember. Just like they remembered how the Hardcore guilds QQ-ed that TBC reset their T3 with greens dropping off boars in Hellfire Penninsula.

Of course Blizzard gave them what they wanted (or so they thought) since Naxx was cleared with a not insignificant amount of T6.

And that echoes the point that you just can't please everyone.

For more non-scientific evidence: Adept claims that their US first of H Al'Akir was on 10 man because those 10 players were willing to raid on their off-day. So even in one of the guilds that *should* be burning out, they still had players willing to play *even more*.

Edit: To be constructive I feel Blizzard is just going to have to bite the bullet and accept that there will be a very vocal minority complaining about any change they make. When they rolled out limited attempts (I mean the ToC attempts not ICC) and Algalon before that, I'm pretty sure the official stance was they wanted to reward skill versus time. They backed off because of baseless complaints from people who weren't even using up all their attempts. I like to consider my guild a middle of the road one and when we did H ToC we never used more than 15 attempts in a lockout, so I'd imagine the guilds that actually ran out were few and far between.

[Dedic]

... they already have a fix like that Dedic..

extend your raid.

I didn't think that was something you could do indefinitely. I guess I misunderstood what I heard in the video.

[Kahmal]

Tier one Raids in WoTLK they cried it was too easy, Cata Tier one Raids are too much of a pain for the Bleeding Edge Hardcore Raiders now?

You can't satisfy every level of raider, and I'm sorry but the Bleeding Edge Raider's population just isn't high enough for me to care. Hardcore guilds that merely rush for server first and such dont seem deal with similar concerns, since those super raiders proceed them, and present strategies and kill videos for their reference. And naturally middle tier guilds probably enjoy the amount of content they have. Finally the casual raider....content will be nerfed eventually and gear will be easier to access, they can get over it.

No one is putting a gun to their head and making them raid every night constantly. I feel no remorse.

[Fetzie]

Well tier 1 WLK WAS too easy. You could jump right in 2 minutes after dinging 80 (that was how long it took to fly to the instance) and clear naxx in under 2 hours. That is wrong. The only "hard" fight was Sartharion3D, which was overtuned in ten man until you could bulldozer it with 46000 rDPS in under 88 seconds in T8 gear.

[FuzzyLama]

Just wait a second.

Why Blizzard should cater the amount of time it takes to take a part in WF race to what current hardocre players would like it to be? As counter example lets just think about ppl that cant raid more than 10hr per week and would be very keen to also be a part of WF progress. Some of them will have skill to compete, but amount of time that they can put into game simply dosent allow them.

At the moment such a person is just forced to join some semi progressions guild and be somwhere between world 500-1000. And following this example You could say that If somebody in current best progression guilds think that he dosent have enough time to be a part of it, he can just leave it as many ppl did before him, or switch to not so hardocore progression guild that will fit more his raiding times. You can say its brutal but hey, guild raiding is brutal for everyone to get into high progress guild, and stay high on attendance from as low as world progress 5-10k - it is just a matter of point of view to see how it is.

What we suggest now in most previous posts is that there is some fair value of lets say 'x' hr of raiding per week that should be maximum of effort time into progress when competing for WF race, problem it will always leave some ppl on ice, and others will feel limited.

If You would like to have sport like competition in Wow, its not healthy to limit amount of training in swiming pool, everyone should be allowed to do as much as fits him. And there will always be a way to go around limitations for those keen enough to get multiple alt raids going on for example.

[Trexokor]

The reason they should cater to the bleeding edge progression guilds is quite literally what Papapaint outlined in one of his first posts in the thread. The community wants to see how these races play out, and keeping this group of players happy keeps them raiding and keeps them competitive.

If you make the time investment too high, you see guilds like Paragon that can put in immense amounts of time coming out on top nearly every time. There are a few other guilds that can do this and have the skill to compete, but as your time investment requirement increases, the number of guilds in the competition decreases.

A NASCAR race would be much less interesting if 6 cars were competing, rather than the 43 cars that do. Chances are, even if you follow NASCAR, you only know a handful of the actual competitors. But what keeps it exciting is that someone you don't really know could still win and now you're keeping an eye on the race to see if your favorite is keeping up or not. If you know your favorite is going to win, why bother following the race?

Gating that allows guilds to close the gap if they've fallen behind would keep the high end raiding competition exciting. You'd likely still see the same 6-10 guilds getting first-kills, but the world 11th or world 20th guild would have the chance to close the gap each round and, if they can manage to fix whatever kept them from pulling ahead in the last round, they might have a shot at a first-kill in the next. Perhaps they're the first guild to think of a clever way to handle whatever new mechanic that boss has, and they beat it that way. They don't get this chance if the top guild is 2 weeks and 4 bosses ahead of them 6 weeks into the patch.

However, instead of a gating system, my question is simple: Why not release content quicker, in smaller bites?

Are PvP seasons why this can't happen? Surely Blizzard can think of a solution if so. Back in Wrath of the Lich King, we had Naxxramas (a small bite due to its difficulty) which lasted longer than it should. We had Ulduar (a large bite) which didn't last nearly long enough in the scope of all the content released in Wrath. We had Trial of the Crusader (a small bite) which was released far too early, and lasted far too long. And we had Icecrown Citadel, which was fed to us in small bites and was far too easy until The Lich King was released and the real fights were unlocked.

In each of the above cases except perhaps Ulduar, the environments and fights got old very quickly. Nobody wanted to do Naxxramas over and over when it was just so utterly easy to do. Nobody wanted to do ToC over and over when there was no new scenery and there was only 5 bosses. Nobody was even looking forward to Icecrown's heroic bosses so much because we'd already seen several of them for a month or two on normal mode. It felt exhausting.

In the current content tier, I would have suggested releasing Blackwing Descent on patch day, with Bastion of Twilight and maybe Throne of the Four Winds as well around the end of February / early March, or maybe a little earlier depending on when 4.1 is supposed to hit.

This serves two purposes. First, you have fresh content more often. Your players don't get bored so easily when they know something new is coming a little more often. You might get bored of the fights a bit, but you can still be excited because more is just around the corner. Chances are, however, that your guild won't have Nefarian heroic down yet.

Second, players aren't gearing up in raids so ridiculously fast. This tier of content was good in terms of 10 vs 25 rewards. They get about the same amount of loot and the decision between them is supposed to come down to which you prefer. That would have been the case with a bit better balance tweaking, but that's a different subject altogether. However, the fact remains that on 25 man, with up to 13 bosses to kill and a slot machine boss for tier, players are gearing up too fast. Reducing the number of bosses but keeping the increased amount of loot serves the purpose of letting players feel rewarded each week for their boss clears, and keeping gearing 'gated' to a reasonable point.

There are logistics to deal with in this type of system; for example, why even do Bastion of Twilight if it's also 359/372 loot and you've gotten most of that in Blackwing Descent? However, with careful loot placement and some other things tweaked, and Bastion's difficulty increased slightly, this could be a non-issue. Or whatever Blizzard could come up with.

Why we have to have 12-14 new bosses each tier and then wait 4-6 months is beyond me. Even when you're not clearing each of them on heroic, sometimes the content can get exhausting when you've got no clue how long you're waiting for fresh scenery.

Additionally, this kind of content release can even be thought of less as a gating system, and more as increased content patch frequency. I'm fairly sure the PvE player base would thoroughly enjoy this.

[Kazeyonoma]

The reason they should cater to the bleeding edge progression guilds is quite literally what Papapaint outlined in one of his first posts in the thread. The community wants to see how these races play out, and keeping this group of players happy keeps them raiding and keeps them competitive.

While i don't argue that it's fun to watch the competitive nature of the world firsts knowing full well i can't compete, i don't think suddenly the entire face of competitive mmo first kills will disappear because of this. SOMEONE will step up to the plate. It used to be DnT then Nihilum, then Ensidia, and now Paragon. Honestly look at the top 10 now, a lot of them were from before but a good amount of them are people who are new. Who even heard of STARS until they beat someone. limiting the attempts to cater towards a group just inhibits competition overall. If someone else wants to make a name for themselves then they need to strive for it.

[Jericho]

Getting to this discussion a bit late, so I will cherry pick the one thing in this thread that has really irked be so far...

I do still think that world firsts should require large time investments, but surely there can be a middle ground between the awful gating systems of Coliseum and ICC and the extreme breadth of content available in Cataclysm. It is worth noting in this discussion that Cataclysm has presented the largest amount of endgame content ever available at a single release.

The underlined is the biggest falacy there is in WoW today. The amount of endgame content is not necessarily large. We have 13 bosses (+ the slot machine). People that include the Heroic Modes as separate entities in terms of evaluating content need to take a step back. Yes, I have taken a step back since I was raiding in TBC/Wrath and we are now a tighter knit vastly more casual 10man raid instead of a progression oriented 25 guild, but that has nothing to do with the amount of actual content. We never had as much initial content given to us than we did in TBC. Of course a good chunk of that content was far overtuned, but it was there as long as you were attuned for it.

Heroic Mode encounters are NOT new content. They are merely rehashes of existing content made more difficult by adding multiple new elements to the encounter. While these new elements are just that, new, and they change the existing encounter mechanics, often requiring completely different strategies, they do not always change the underlying encounter to a great degree.

Consider current content HMs, how many encounters drastically change? 3 maybe 4? Its more about the addition of requirements, "More Damage Needed", "More Damage Taken", "More and Faster Movement Required". These additions do not make new content, they make old content more challenging.

In ICC a lot of guilds both 10 and 25 were worn out, not by the fact that there were limited attempts. Guild's were worn out because by the time guild's killed Lich King and could start Heroic Modes, it had been months. Thus the heroic mode content was not only not "new", it was far less challenging because it took months of farming the "old" content just to be able to see it, it was boring to a lot of people. The only Heroic Mode that changed with any real degree was Lich King himself. The rest of the Heroic Encounters were just small tweaks or additions and did nothing to change the overall mechanics of the fight.

I am tired of seeing these WF guild's say that there was "too much content". In my mind, there is far less content available in WoW than there should be at any given end game tier. Blizzard needs to expand their idea of what endgame content is and give us a cross section of other end game opportunities.

---

Now that I got that out of the way...

The limited attempts model, while annoying and less than stellar has huge upsides in terms of gating. It focuses those WF guild's at being efficient. However, there are huge flaws with this model. Namely the "Alt raid". I believe that this is also one of the huge flaws with the WF raiding methodology in general. I have no way of knowing how many of those WF guilds ran alt raids during this time in order to gear up characters so they had raid makeup options for encounters. I am going to assume many of them ran multiple alt raids in order to accomplish this.

While I have no sympathy for those WF raiders a great deal of which are apparently receiving some kind of compensation for the time they spend in WoW, I do agree that some form of gating is in the best interest of the game as a whole.

In TBC we had attunements that in essence gated the community. Yet TBC raiding was not only gated by the attunements that Blizzard set forth, they were gated by the level of difficulty of the content and then the slowly nerfing of said content until it was easy enough for the masses. Now Heroic modes were set forth in Wrath to make attempts to not have to continually nerf content. But that wasn't enough, we were given the Strength of Wrynn in ICC as another slow nerf and gating system above the already existing "Attempt" system.

I would propose that we go back to a combination of the Attunement and Attempt system as a way to gate the WF guilds. Yet instead of making these things individual, make them work through the new Guild Rank and Achievement system.

Could we not set up a manner in which a guild was attuned through some form of achievement to do Heroic Modes for individual encounters?

Could we not set it up so an entire guild had only so many attempts on Heroic Mode encounters for the week? Something where only the GM or Officer could turn it on, so that one disgruntled guildie cant just go solo wipe to Sindra 20 times and screw a guild?

Both systems were very good systems, that were flawed when they were first included because of the lack of any real guild tracking and control. Now that we have a basic system in place, it would be a much easier feat for Blizzard to modify one or both systems and fix their inherent flaws while doing so.

--

Personally, the biggest issue I have about the entire "whining and crying" over the gating and time involved in WF raiding is just that, the time involved. Many of these WF guilds spend 6-7 days a week in these instances, not only with their main raid, but alt raids, trying to get more and more efficient for both the encounters they have conquered and those encounters they have failed to master. Dragging alt characters to secondary and tertiary raids in order to make sure they are geared so they can pull off that 11 Druid Heroic Nef WF kill. In all honesty, I would like to see a tracking of how many attempts and how much time it took Paragon to kill Heroic Nef vs how many attempts/time it took for Method to do the same. By limiting guilds to a numbered amount of attempts for their entire guild may gate these players significantly and make them much better at their chosen job. By forcing them to be efficient, rather than allowing them to bum rush encounters with hours and hours of play time.

We often see things about how much time the end game bosses in other MMOs take just to kill. The 18 hour Pandemonium Warden kill in FFXI a while back comes to mind. However, that really is nothing compared to the amount of raid time some of these guilds are willing to sit through in one go around.

[Kahmal]

So there is a need for guilds like Paragon to have competition? TBH i haven't cared about who got a World First since TBC. I was curious as to when someone would finally kill Heroic LK, but again I really dont care.

Being competitive in the realm is a different story. It's very exciting to see Trade Chat spammed with the percentage of that final raid boss. I remember when Illidian was first taken down on Bleeding Hollow, I remember my 10 man group being responsible for the Argent Dawn statue in Dalaran.
Competition is a good motivation, but it's also horrible for moral when you lose at the final boss.

[Papapaint]

Heroic Mode encounters are NOT new content. They are merely rehashes of existing content made more difficult by adding multiple new elements to the encounter. While these new elements are just that, new, and they change the existing encounter mechanics, often requiring completely different strategies, they do not always change the underlying encounter to a great degree.

Of the 10 hardmodes I've seen, each one has changed the fight significantly enough that a similar or greater amount of time was needed to learn the encounter. I have not seen a single encounter in hard mode that is simply higher numbers all around.

In fact, a majority of the hard modes actually challenge you to learn to "un-learn" much of what you learned in normal mode--Omnotron, Magmaw, and Conclave jump to mind.

So I think you're kidding yourself if you don't think hard modes this tier are entirely different bosses.

[Katzazi]

Could we not set it up so an entire guild had only so many attempts on Heroic Mode encounters for the week? Something where only the GM or Officer could turn it on, so that one disgruntled guildie cant just go solo wipe to Sindra 20 times and screw a guild?

That's a really bad idea. It would not change anything about the alt raids. They just have to open another guild for those alts. And depending on how you implement it, even changing the guild for the mains could work.

What it would do: It would prevent any PUG raid to EVER do heroic modes. And it would prevent raids who are mostely from one guild but have some freelancers or raids from two guilds to do them. (Or it would give them double amount of trys but that would be even worse.) Maybe you don't care, because for you its raid=guild. But I did server/horde firsts in a 2-guild-raid on my server. I never did raid in a one-guild-only raid since MC and I'm not doing it now. It would also prevent a guild to run any 2nd raid on heroic mode, as long as the 1st raid may need all the attempts. There are big guilds with multiple raids. Sometimes those raids are at the same level or at different levels.

Any gating system fixed to guilds would not change anything for the world first raids, because they would do just anything valid to contradict it. But it would hurt a big part of raiders. Especially those at the casual end, but also many inbetween. It would hurt them not because they are doing something good or bad, invest huge amounts of time or whatever. It would hurt them just because of their guild-tag.

[lavastyle]

while i agree with the problems lore brought up , i don't understand why no one brought the folowing idea: three dificukty modes easy , normal and heroic and ther you problem is solved pretty much

[Quinafoi]

while i agree with the problems lore brought up , i don't understand why no one brought the folowing idea: three dificukty modes easy , normal and heroic and ther you problem is solved pretty much

Because does "uber 1337 roflpwn" difficulty of Molten Core drop Tier 1 or Teir 37?

Yeah, you can add a hundred different difficulties to the same thing, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still the same thing. People want content. Not more and more different difficulties of the exact same thing.

If progression was...

Run Easy Blackwing Descent
Run Normal Blackwing Descent
Run Hard Blackwing Descent
Run Even Harder Blackwing Descent
Run Really Hard Blackwing Descent
Run Really Really Hard Blackwing Descent
...

You see a problem here? Yes you can add more and more difficulties, but people get bored if they continually have to run the same content over and over in order to progress.