The Weekly Marmot - What if MoP Released Without Raids?

[Gregasaurous]

out of context quotes are out of context

[leethaxor]

@Kren considering the nature of RPG

No we assume that the leveling progress is part of the genre. But it really isn't the earliest MMORPG's used a long level grind as a way of milking money from their fan base. While I'm not big into DnD, you use levels to mark increases in skills, which states progress along character path. This translate well via an xp system to online gaming, given large distances between levels you can create long grinds.

Really end game content was the biggest addition to the RPG genre by giving people something to do once they have reached a 'level cap'. I believe Evercrack (inb4 darksend yells at me for being wrong) was the first MMO to really allow 'level capping' and having end game progress' which allowed players to level post max level.

This 'post level' system could just be easily used in place of leveling system. Get items to be more power to get better items. Use quests for gating progress make BoE's rare to allow for better progressed characters to make money but still allow experienced players to rush the progress and looky there you just created a 'leveling' system that actually makes your character do things, and learn to play in a PvE environment.

[Lore]

sir,

you said .

I'm sorry if you think that's somehow uncommon, but I'd venture to say with a bit of confidence, that there is a good number of people that share the same or at least similar sentiment.

back on topic, those people, myself included, would be pretty pissed. [/COLOR]

I can see how you'd feel that way if you were to ignore the other 70% of that sentence. Here, let me try:

I'm sorry

No worries.

[Krenian]

That could very well work, leet, in a setting where the environment agrees to this setting and has been well placed.

World of Warcraft is NOT that environment in the least.

It has stayed the same way for the last seven years with the same idea: Level, get gear, kill baddies, get more gear, kill big baddy, rinse when expansion comes.

It's probably not going to change either. If you started a game and went out and said 'this isn't gonna have any leveling. You start at level 0 and build up your skills/gear from there, have fun!" just like The Secret World is doing, then you can easily put that in play. One of the reasons why I'm really curious about TSW is because of that: They're removing the leveling paradigm but keeping the RPG element in somehow. I want to know 'how' because to me, leveling is core.

So now I wanna see if they're ready to actually revolutionize the genre because let's face it, we're in a huge rut.

[leethaxor]

So now I wanna see if they're ready to actually revolutionize the genre because let's face it, we're in a huge rut.

I need to update the blog I was doing about MMO design, leveling was on of the things I wanted to cut from the standard MMO genre.

[Krenian]

Take it one of those ideas where "Focus more on content, less on fluff to get to said content" type deal.

[Gregasaurous]

It's probably not going to change either. If you started a game and went out and said 'this isn't gonna have any leveling. You start at level 0 and build up your skills/gear from there, have fun!" just like The Secret World is doing, then you can easily put that in play. One of the reasons why I'm really curious about TSW is because of that: They're removing the leveling paradigm but keeping the RPG element in somehow. I want to know 'how' because to me, leveling is core.

So now I wanna see if they're ready to actually revolutionize the genre because let's face it, we're in a huge rut.

Off topic, but... the guy with the purple name text started it!!!! lol, anyway, i think it would be VERY difficult to do any kind of MMORPG without SOME kind of leveling if there's going to be any PVP involved. While yes, not all games are designed for PVP, I think 99% of them on the market have it. Maybe my knowledge of MMO's isn't wide enough, but I see it being a huge issue.

[Lore]

I need to update the blog I was doing about MMO design, leveling was on of the things I wanted to cut from the standard MMO genre.

I actually talked about something similar in like Weekly Marmot #26. I think WoW is going to be the last successful MMO of its type, and the industry will only survive if people start to realize that "Massively Multiplayer Online" is not a genre.

[Lore]

Off topic, but... the guy with the purple name text started it!!!! lol, anyway, i think it would be VERY difficult to do any kind of MMORPG without SOME kind of leveling if there's going to be any PVP involved. While yes, not all games are designed for PVP, I think 99% of them on the market have it. Maybe my knowledge of MMO's isn't wide enough, but I see it being a huge issue.

Interesting note: the most successful PVP-focused MMO to date (the original Guild Wars) had a totally optional leveling experience.

[Ion]

Gearing up is an important and integral part of raiding. If you don't want to spend time farming gear, you should probably not raid in World of Warcraft. I mean no offense by that whatsoever, I'm simply stating that that's how the game is played, and if you don't enjoy that type of gameplay, you probably won't enjoy World of Warcraft. Given that you and Ion both spend a lot of time on the forums expressing how much you dislike WoW, I'd figure you'd agree.

1) You're conflating "gearing up" and "farming gear". They're similar, but not the same.

2) I don't dislike WoW. I dislike some aspects of WoW and those aspects are far far worse in Diablo 3.

To quote:

This 'post level' system could just be easily used in place of leveling system. Get items to be more power to get better items. Use quests for gating progress make BoE's rare to allow for better progressed characters to make money but still allow experienced players to rush the progress and looky there you just created a 'leveling' system that actually makes your character do things, and learn to play in a PvE environment.

This is a far more meaningful system than WoW's. A lot of what's annoying about WoW's gameplay is very much Skinner box-ish and I simply don't have patience for that sort of nonsense. The ACTUAL ENGAGING parts of WoW are exactly as leet described:

I play to raid, for the challenge, for learning and working together as a team to defeat a boss.

No other game does this as well as WoW. Well rift to an extent but lets admit it, its about the same and WoW has been here longer.

The challenge of working together, learning together, as a team to defeat a boss. Yes, sometimes there's a gear-barrier-of-entry involved, but A LOT of the time there's simply not. Or said barrier of entry is low enough that you are past it by the time you get to the next piece of content.

Your definition of "liking World of Warcraft" isn't the ONLY definition of liking World of Warcraft. Grinding gear isn't the goal, it's the result of doing the interesting things...killing bosses with your crew. You seem to enjoy the gearing up process...to me it's simply a side effect.

Presumably this is why you're still raiding in WoW and I'm not. There's nothing left to hold my interest, but you're still having fun grinding gear. To each their own.

[Lore]

I don't play WoW specifically for the gearing up, but I don't hate it enough to not play when it's all that's there.

Also, for the record: I wasn't actually saying that there should be more of a gearing up process than there already is. I think T14 raids should be tuned around players having Heroic Dungeon gear (as they were with T11). A lot of people tend to hit those first raids in an expansion without realizing that they're grossly undergeared for the content and then get mad about it, which puts Blizzard in the position of either having to nerf things (as they did with T11) or just have a whole lot of pissed off raiders.

The more ideal fix would be to somehow have everyone realize that they're undergeared and should farm more, but that's expecting a lot of the average MMORPG player.

[The_Pancake]

I have to say that I think this is actually a really good idea. And personally I think that Ion and the others that got so upset about it are stuck in that initial stage of "oh that (sounds like) a terrible idea, why would they do that? blegh!" stage that Lore mentioned and are just refusing to even consider anything beyond that. An example of this short-sightedness is that point about hating gear farming, when it's gear farming that you WILL be doing anyways, regardless of whether raids ship with MoP or not, the only difference is that if the raids don't ship you won't be required to do the entirety of the 5man gear farming in the first 6 days of the expansion so you can start raiding before the first reset.

Yes, at the moment wow is a 2-legged monster of raiding and pvp, but clearly that isn't their intent going into MoP. They're adding all sorts of other legs to the beast. You only perceive them as pointless crap because you only perceive raiding and/or pvp as the only worthwhile aspects of the game. You're basically saying pet battles/challenge modes/scenarios cannot be new types of worthwhile content because they're not current types of worthwhile content. The argument is about as valid as saying that RBGs could not become a meaningful aspect of the game because battlegrounds weren't rated before Cataclysm, or saying back in vanilla that battlegrounds were pointless and nobody would waste their time with them before they were added. Believe it or not, new things CAN be added to the game and become meaningful forms of play within the game.


I personally think this is a great idea. As Lore said the start of an expansion is a mad dash for raiders because when a new tier of raiding comes out you want to be running it as soon as it comes out, but at the start of an expansion you are not ready to be running it on day 1; you need to level and get pre-raid gear, maybe relearn aspects of your class, and then hope that 9 or 24 other people have done so as well. Having a buffer of a few weeks takes a lot of that pressure off to get ready for raiding as well as to help make sure that the rest of your raid team is ready as well.

Basically the way it's been in the past is like having a sprinting race that starts while everyone is still in bed and the time spent getting dressed and driving to the track is just as much a part of the race as the actual sprinting. Delaying the raids a little bit would be like actually letting everyone get ready and lining up at the starting line before the whistle is blown.

And as far as player perception goes I do think it could be presented in a more positive way. Like Lore said, they can't release the raids until they're finished, so at the very least we're waiting until then anyways. If they were to give us everything they do have ready right now that couldn't be anything but good because we'd still be getting things that we'd otherwise have had to wait longer for. As long as Blizzard presented it as them releasing MoP early with what was already done, rather than presenting it as releasing MoP incomplete. Like if your parents gave you some of your christmas presents at the start of December but weren't going to give you your "big" present until the 25th, would you complain that your christmas was incomplete? If so you should be smacked with a snowshovel.

[leethaxor]

stuff I agree with

I think having the first boss be puggable in normal blues, the second in heroic blues. Then starting to require some level of skill cap there is a bit better of an idea since it will give people some sorta intro to raiding and content and make progression more natural for those starting out. WHILE giving more content to players something to do out of the gate.

[Harikari]

[rigo8582]

This wouldn't bother me at all. I ran into this during cataclysm. I leveled fast and got geared for raids and the rest of my guild took forever. Then on top that the difficulty of heroics slowed them down so by the time there was enough people to do Tier 11 content I was irritated and didn't want to play anymore.

I would be ok with just Pet battles and Heroics for the first month. It would let me level my alts at the begining of the expansion instead midway through.

[Jazzan]

I think this would be a good idea, especially for anyone who wants to raid with a monk. Because its going to be hard enough for people to go from 85-90 in three days (which is what I've actually seen a few guilds on the recruitment forums saying they require) much less have someone go from 1-90 in that time. Putting the right marketing spin on it might be tricky though... I suspect it might go over better if it was "everything is there, but you just can't do the raids yet" then "oops, sorry we aren't done yet! Here, do this for awhile instead!" That way, even if they are still polishing a few things up in those two weeks, at least it seems a bit more positive. Sorry for the block of text, my iPhone apparently doesn't like this comment system... There were paragraphs in there, really!

[Harikari]

Lore, you've jumped shark altogether with this one.

You can trot right back to Mr. GC and tell him you fronted the idea to the community and that we ain't buying it.

Tell him gamers have long memories and we don't forget the promised raids that were never delivered, the Zandoms patch, getting locked into a year without content, heirlooms still not cross-realm, how the devs abandoned this tier and all it's bugs and imbalances and all the other promises Blizz made and didn't follow through on.

Look, we all know that WoW is dropping subs like mad. We see the servers getting emptier by the day. We also know there is a race between Blizz and GW2 to get something on our PCs. And we have a pretty good idea that Blizzard is having a pretty tough time meeting their timeline.

Blizz would need to deliver some sparkling content NOW, as part of *this* expac. Tell them to get that cross-realm thingie out now, address server population and imbalances now, do the pet battles now and maybe, just maybe, they have a chance to hang onto some subs.

[Wraist]

My 2 cents

Blizzard likes money so they will do whats in the majorities interest, like any other company interested in making money and staying profitable.

People are going to complain whether there is raid content or not when MoP releases.

I like the idea of not being "forced" to miss content to be raid ready asap, but that is also the price of competitive raiding. Which is a choice that every raider makes. The raid train is coming, everyone either gets on or out of the way. To Lores point it would be nice if it stopped just once. For 2 weeks. We have had longer stretches of no new content, this is not a ground breaking idea.

For those in the camp of "I play to raid" think of how much more you could accomplish with 2 extra weeks to prepare for raiding, you'd be geared to the teeth, and raid mats to last the whole tier, instead of just scraping by with half gear from a previous tier. There would also be a bigger pool of players, most likely your friends, to pull from that would be raid ready.

No one enjoys grinding, but its part of the game and now it's slightly less annoying.
Blizzard could easily release MoP with no raids, AND no new PvP season. 2 weeks is about the time it takes most players to hit the level cap and be raid ready anyway, so there really isn't an issue for non raiders. Most players who are "bored" raiding at the moment probably let their accounts go inactive until MoP releases anyway, doing something else, or hating themselves while still raiding DS.

So, if blizz did release MoP with no raids, some people will get some breathing room to enjoy the rest of what the game has to offer, while most of the people dragging the quality of the games challenging content down will be complaining to no end about how they can't do their LFR, and crying for a double secret easy LFR.

In a nutshell, its a great idea but people aren't ready for it.

[Dibby]

Oh man, I would love if they did this. I've been strongly considering rerolling my main to a Monk, but unlike DKs, Monks start at level 1. Granted, leveling doesn't take that long nowadays, what with guild perks and heirlooms, but probably the only hesitation I have is that I might miss that train for Raiding. Delay the Raids for 2-3 weeks and that problem would just up and vanish.

I'd really like to see it happen, but it doesn't seem like something Blizzard would do, unfortunately.

[Azurah]

If they had the expansion complete and postponed the raids for two mabey three weeks; I think it would be much better. Like you said, I could play the game and experience all the new stuff for a little while without the pressure of raiding.