The Weekly Marmot - What if MoP Released Without Raids?

[Suplazin23]

This would be a horrible idea. I mean I would love if MoP could drop earlier then it probably is but with no raids would just not make people happy. If you are in a guild where 24 people want to level as fast as possible and get in there and raid but you want to take your time, you are in the wrong guild. Take your time on your alt and read quest texts. There will be time to experience challenge modes and all the other stuff. It pretty much ruins the race and fun of it all. In t11, normal modes were hard. t12 normals were lol. t13 normals were lol wtf? It is actually nice to have normal modes be worth it. Just clearing the first day normal modes are out and having to wait til next week to start the "race," is pretty much boring. Having an actual challenge from normals to heroics proves to be alot funner. Just doesn't make sense to me to do all the new stuff, then do all the raids. And then just be bored with everything by the end. Give it to us all at once so we can play with everything little by little and it'll last much longer

[Ayrybyn]

No, personally I'm not interested in pet battles or farmville or even questing at the start of an xpac. I buy the game to raid. there's plenty of time after the content is cleared to derp around with everything else in the game.

leveling may be a key component to YOU, and that's fine. I'm happy the type of content you're interested in is available, and likewise I want the content I'm interested in to be available or I simply wouldn't buy the game. its that simple. personally I could care less about leveling and I usually push through it as fast as possible.

If you really believe I have to concur with you gaming philosophy, your just crazy. I'm TELLING you I won't by the game if the raid content isn't out. I'll wait for raids to be released. I'm fairly sure I'm not alone.

First of all, you didn't read my second post, I don't agree with postponing raids and I listed, to me anywho, some very good reasons to me as to why. Second, that post was in response to your misquote of Lore's earlier post, for you didn't really read into what, exactly, he was saying and sounded like you were personally attacking him for his opinion. Third, leveling isn't a key component to ME, it's a key component of the GAME as is gearing for raids. You still have to level your toon and get it geared in order to get into the raids that's just part of the game and how it's played. If you want to push through all of that to get to the raiding, that's your business and I could really care less about that. And it's not about concurring with anything, it's about your inaccurate response to what Lore stated. There's an appropriate way to respond to what a person states and I felt that the way you phrased yours came across as trolling.

[mittsuri]

This would be a horrible idea.
If you are in a guild where 24 people want to level as fast as possible and get in there and raid but you want to take your time, you are in the wrong guild.
It pretty much ruins the race and fun of it all. In t11, normal modes were hard. t12 normals were lol. t13 normals were lol wtf? It is actually nice to have normal modes be worth it. Just clearing the first day normal modes are out and having to wait til next week to start the "race," is pretty much boring. Having an actual challenge from normals to heroics proves to be alot funner. Just doesn't make sense to me to do all the new stuff, then do all the raids. And then just be bored with everything by the end. Give it to us all at once so we can play with everything little by little and it'll last much longer

ok you do have some valid points but like many you are failing to realize something very important, those 2-3 weeks we don't have raids is time blizz can focus just on raids, so like lore said the normal modes can be tuned around you in full heroic gear with crafted epics and rep epics excetera. Not only that if blizz has all this time to focus on these raids, that means fewer bugs a more progressive system of difficulty, fun encounters (I'm sorry the race aspect is fun but if the encounter sucks it doesnt matter how fun the thrill of the race is), and most of all challenging heroic modes (maybe ulduarish, one can only dream i guess). All in all if they spend the 2-3 weeks just focusing on raids I'll support it.

one last thing no one said you had to do pet battles or challenge modes, you could spend this time getting gear and getting profs up so you can not just spend your first night wiping on boss #1 because your undergeared and have had no time to stratagize because we might be server first and blah blah blah.

[Lore]

The main issue is how the press would spin it.

"MOP launches without raids." would really hurt sales figure.

I think if blizzard were to just say the raids were going to be gated off for the first 2 weeks most people would just think of it as another type of gating

[Grizzleface]

Even though I'm a raider.....I love this idea!

[Aggathon]

Gating hasn't historically gone over too well though.

I think this is one of those things though that blizzard can just do and people will just have to deal with it if they want to keep playing and it won't cause massive sub cancellations. They'll still get the same # of subs b/c people will still raid, some people just might buy the game a week late or just simply not play for a week while they wait for raids to come out (which is different from the dead raid instance known as dragonsoul how?).

Obviously based on reactions here, there'd probably be a large outcry of people bitching and moaning about that, and there will be people that will buy the game late...

... but I mean... will all that matter? I doubt it.

Though you could make the argument "just release the game when the raids are done and let guilds decide what they want to do." If guilds want to say "okay you have 2 weeks to be raid ready, don't come bitching when you're still in ilevel 400 gear but a grandmaster in pokemon and we gave up your raid spot to some new guy."

I mean... we're talking about 2 weeks right? How much would delaying the game for 2 weeks really matter?

[Ayrybyn]

I mean... we're talking about 2 weeks right? How much would delaying the game for 2 weeks really matter?

To some alot, to others not much. I'm in the latter catagory and feel that rather than delay the raids, and have an incomplete expansion, I'd rather see a delay in the expansion and have Blizz make sure that they have enough content ready for a more complete expansion. This way there are more options for more ppl and you don't see a ton of whining about lack of content. To me there's no difference in delaying the raids to make sure they're more complete or just delaying the expansion to make sure of the same thing. At least with delaying the expansion, Blizz can also adjust other content as they come across it and fine tune the entire expansion before finally releasing it.

[Aggathon]

I agree with that a lot actually... in fact...


WTH happened to "It will be released when it's DONE, and not before."

[Leucifer]

Obviously based on reactions here, there'd probably be a large outcry of people bitching and moaning about that, and there will be people that will buy the game late...

... but I mean... will all that matter? I doubt it.

Yup. People will still buy it. Blizzard could probably delay it by a month..... people will still buy it. Look at D3. Originally was expected before Xmas.... then it was announced it would be pushed into Q1 of 2012.... then delayed "indefinitely".... then scrambled out in May. And it sold how many copies? Delaying raids or MoP by a matter of one or two weeks ..... it'll still sell.

WTH happened to "It will be released when it's DONE, and not before."

Like how D3 was "done"? They're still patching it.

"Done" is history. At least where Blizzard is concerned. I'd actually say that's where games are heading (as someone else mentioned). There's no such thing as a "final product" anymore. I've been messing around with the old Xbox recently and one of my thoughts has been, "Wow. The dev had to ensure this thing was nearly or completely bug-free before release." I think we can forget about games "being done" anymore.

[Theotherone]

I think if blizzard were to just say the raids were going to be gated off for the first 2 weeks most people would just think of it as another type of gating

Maybe they could buy some time by having a guild achievment be a long epic quest chain that would take 2 weeks to find a key to open the new raid...oh wait that might not go so well. "We got the key, pay us $500k to open the raid." Deja vu all over again.

[Aggathon]

Like how D3 was "done"? They're still patching it.

"Done" is history. At least where Blizzard is concerned. I'd actually say that's where games are heading (as someone else mentioned). There's no such thing as a "final product" anymore. I've been messing around with the old Xbox recently and one of my thoughts has been, "Wow. The dev had to ensure this thing was nearly or completely bug-free before release." I think we can forget about games "being done" anymore.

That's a complete misconception of how game patches work. Pretty much every game EVER has patches and hotfixes, from BF3 to MW3, to WoW, to D3, to SKYRIM, that doesn't mean the game isn't done. That means that there may be small balance issues that couldn't be forseen because it's impossible to beta test on such a massive scale, the only things that are imba about D3 are like the ultra high end inferno drop timings and a few places where people figured out how to power level with XP and those got fixed.

In fact, your post before where you talk about how much D3 was delayed... that's my POINT, Blizzard releases games when they're done. Sure minor balancing things will have to happen, but that's happened with almost every game ever.

Now... if Blizzard had released D3 but said "we don't have inferno mode balanced yet so... you can still play D3 up to inferno, but you can't play inferno for another month yet" THEN they'd be releasing incomplete content.

[Lore]

Gating hasn't historically gone over too well though.

I honestly believe that gating is one of those cases where people complain about it even though it's good for them. We want to be able to consume all the content immediately, but we also want it to stretch out over several months.

[Aggathon]

Oh, I'm not debating whether or not it would be good for them, just that people will bitch about it, just like in TBC when warrior rage generation was normalized and everyone threw a hissy fit over it until TBC actually came out and they tried it and went "oh... ya... actually this makes a lot of sense and is actually good for the class"

[Leucifer]

That's a complete misconception of how game patches work. Pretty much every game EVER has patches and hotfixes, from BF3 to MW3, to WoW, to D3, to SKYRIM, that doesn't mean the game isn't done. That means that there may be small balance issues that couldn't be forseen because it's impossible to beta test on such a massive scale, the only things that are imba about D3 are like the ultra high end inferno drop timings and a few places where people figured out how to power level with XP and those got fixed.

In fact, your post before where you talk about how much D3 was delayed... that's my POINT, Blizzard releases games when they're done. Sure minor balancing things will have to happen, but that's happened with almost every game ever.

Now... if Blizzard had released D3 but said "we don't have inferno mode balanced yet so... you can still play D3 up to inferno, but you can't play inferno for another month yet" THEN they'd be releasing incomplete content.

Yes. Because gaming started in the past couple of years with internet connections..... obviously.

In the grand scheme of "gaming".... meaning, Atari 2600 through Nintendo, or my old s*tty IBM or Commodore.... hell, all the way up through Xbox and Playstation 2 at release.... games had to be COMPLETE AND FINISHED before sold. You couldn't update a CD or DVD that you had sold to someone on a lot of those.

Reality is.... if you don't have an internet connection from here on out.... you're pretty much screwed.

[Fetzie]

Instead of saying "Raids unlock 14 days after MoP goes live", use the gearing up process as a "gating mechanic". Quests like in TBC where you had to do 5 man content, or alone as part of the last level or two levelling process. That way you are not saying "you guys have to wait 2 weeks and we don't care how bored you get", rather slowing the players down in an indirect manner.

[Aggathon]

Patching is completely different from being Done, especially when we're talking about complex multiplayer games, not single player games where it doesn't really matter if someone figured out how to break the game or not.

ZOMG NERF LUIGI HE CAN JUMP A PIXEL HIGHER THAN MARIO!!!

[sifuedition]

My druid running WoE at least 23 times before he saw the healing mace drop says two weeks to prepare for raiding sounds just peachy. Maybe I also have a skewed perspective because I tend to have at least one of each role raid ready so I can be flexible about our raid needs and having time to have more than one ready would be cool too.

[Ayrybyn]

I honestly believe that gating is one of those cases where people complain about it even though it's good for them. We want to be able to consume all the content immediately, but we also want it to stretch out over several months.

It goes back to my previous post about how players are "impatient," it's become a common thing in WoW anymore nowadays. I understand that, as a subscriber, you're paying for a product and want everything that you can get from that product. Yet there are very few players anymore who understand the concept of patience and that sometimes the best things available are worth waiting for. Like you've stated about consuming all of the content immediately, players nowadays want their cake and be able to eat it as well. I like to call it the "Fast-food" syndrome, yes I know that fast food isn't really all that fast ; it's the concept bare with me plz, anymore players want instant gratification and they want it to last a long time as well. It's something about many of the players of WoW that has brought me to the brink of quitting before.

[Jirek]

One thing that I haven't seen anyone touch on that would be another benefit to this idea (and I"m in favor of it for a lot of the reasons stated) is that it would take the "we're better because we play 80 hours a week" argument out of server first raid boss races.

For previous expansions, server first raid boss kills had as much to do with who could play 80 hours the first week to grind to max level quickest and gear up to even get into the raid content first as it did with the skill level of the guilds involved. If you have a two week stretch where everyone has the time to gear up to the same level, then when the gate does drop and everyone is off to the first raid instance you have more competition for those kills than ever before. Also, at this point you've taken the grind aspect out of the equation, now the first kill will in all likelihood actually go to the most skilled guild rather than just going to the "well we were pulling the boss on day 2 because we grinded for 48 hours straight to reach max level quickest" guild. I'm not saying grinding and levleing isn't a challenge, it's just a challenge in a different way, if you give everyone time (especially those that are skilled players but have real life preventing living like a hermit for a week to get to max level that quick) I think you end up seeing an even more impressive guild race for server firsts than ever before and in the end, I think that would be a great thing.

[Aggathon]

The reason no one has talked about it is b/c gear has very little to do with the server first speed. Most server firsts are done with far less gear than the server 4th and 5th kills are, even if the same "total time spent" is roughly the same. It's literally attempts/skill per day. The people who raid 80 hours a week will still get the server first/world first kills, they might even just get them faster since they'll spend a lot of time gearing up and trying to get full BiS gear before raids drop. Two weeks still isn't that much time to try and get your toon fully Heroic-5man geared up from nothing, especially since I'd imagine they wouldn't release valor gear until raids went live either.

The only way to limit the "we play more" factor is to reduce the number of attempts you can take in a week ala TOGC. And even then people would run it on mains and alts to get more attempts in.

If you play an absurd amount of time per week, you're probably gonna be getting the server first kills, regardless of how the gating plans out.