Reply With QuoteNo it's because it's easier.Originally Posted by lubz
It’s simple really and IdC to get into the difficulty argument because Blizzard themselves have come out and said they try to tune the encounters equally but 25 man ends up being harder.
Keep it to a single lockout for everything and just upgrade the gear slightly for the more difficult content. That being the 25 man difficulty. SIMPLE
No it's because it's easier.
Do NOT bring this to be a 10 vs 25 man debate on which is harder. That was NOT the point of this discussion nor do I want it to even get remotely close.
First and only warning guys. 10 vs 25 man debates get very nasty and we've had enough of them.
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"Damnit!" - Jack Bauer, 24
Care to provide a link to this quote of yours?
Lore,
This is strictly a business move by Blizzard in South Korea.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft#Regional_variations
See third paragraph down from bookmark and I've personally confirmed this within Blizzard CS. You can contact me directly if you'd like to discuss/confirm.
Let us be honest here Lore. This move by Blizzard, in fact really shows how much "the suits" are getting their MBA hands into the mix.MBA Wanker 1: "How do we squeeze a bit more blood out of this Korean turnip (or kim-chee)?MBA Wanker 2: "Hell, let's bring back 10/25 separate lockouts! That'll keep them playing for 4-6 hours more per week!"Game Designer: "But North American/Europe have been wanting that too."MBA Wankers (in unison): "eff those monthly paying noobs! Why would we add that cost to our balance sheet?!?! We'll see no ROI from those monthly paying fools in the States and Europe. Silly noob gamer!"While I wasn't a fly on the wall, I can assure you that the above is a close approximation of why this move has been made in South Korea and ONLY in South Korea; not South America, China, North America, or Europe.
Additionally, I'm not sure your candy analogy really works here. Unless of course politically, you lean towards having a nanny state. It's not Blizzards responsibility to meter out to us how much raiding we should or should not have. So let's not candy-coat (see what I did there) the real reason behind this move.
Not implementing this in NA/Europe saves Blizzard MONEY, by reducing their operating cost
This is purely a move to beef up Activision/Blizzards Global Balance sheet (they no longer report by Geo, shocking) and it should disgust gamers in general.
That Blizzard will add a feature to only one sub-set of it's base, strictly out of pure greed, while denying it (and spinning with their regular PR bulls#%t) from a large portion of the NA Community that has cried for it.
I realize that part of your livelihood depends upon the game, but spinning this move into one of "Blizzard is protecting you kids for your own good" is a bit demeaning (even tho gamers are by definition unable to control their actions); completely false; and really misses the point.
-Duncan
Last edited by Dionys; 10-30-2012 at 03:30 PM.
But, if they bring this change to US/EU, 10-man players are once again second-class citizens. 25-man gets the same loot, and more of it now. If that's not enough, then maybe people don't love 25-man as much as they say. If you have to have better loot to do 25-man, then you just loved the better loot in Wrath and want that back, along with the guaranteed recruiting stranglehold you had because of said better loot.
25-man players are NOT second-class citizens now. You still get a slightly better quantity of loot per raid member than 10-mans now. Evidently slightly greater than equality is not enough for you.
I am in a leadership position in my guild and I think 25m raiders often want to act like leading a 10m takes no effort and 25 is so hard. I do completely agree that 25m is relatively harder, but that should not be used to trivialize the effort of leading a 10m. Personally, I don't see why 25 would need more incentive than it already has if people actually prefer 25m.
(Bolding is mine.) That's always been the rub. If people truly prefer 25-man because of the size, then there shouldn't be a problem with things the way they are. But, some usually bring it back around to more or less wanting the Wrath situation back, and that Blizzard moving away from Wrath's 25-man advantages in Cata was tantamount to murder of the 25-man format.
It couldn't possibly be that many people who raided 25-mans in Wrath *only because it dropped better loot* now run 10-mans because they like that format just fine when rewards are even, could it?
Last edited by mavfin; 10-31-2012 at 11:04 AM.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/7207171
I don't feel like providing the video's in which they slip up on numerous occasions like @ the Blizzcons but feel free.
This specifically says that they tune them to be equal. The only imbalance referenced is in leadership complexity. They acknowledge that 10m has more personal responsibility and 25m has more coordination challenge. Nowhere do they say 25m is intended to be harder.
Q. It has become apparent to the WoW community since the beginning of Cataclysm that 25-man raiding guilds are starting to become a dying breed. The recent news that top ranked guild, DREAM Paragon, will be switching to 10-man raiding, has caused us to realize that even some of the best guilds on the planet are being faced with this crisis.
I myself have been keeping extremely up to date on MoP, and any posts that Blizzard makes anywhere for that matter. But one topic that I rarely see is the conversation about 25-man raiding.
I think that, at this point, it is extremely hard to deny that 25-mans are beginning to fade away. There are even quite a few servers that don't have a single guild on it that runs 25's, anymore! Obviously, yes, you can run LFR, but that just doesn't do justice compared to the real thing. We saw a decline in 25-man raiding since the start of Cataclysm.
So my questions that I have for you are this: - What are Blizzards views on 25-man raiding? - Can anything be done to save 25-man raiding or make it more appealing? (Does Blizzard have something up their sleeves?) - What has caused 25-man raids to fade away?
A. In short, we're not satisfied with the current status of 25-player raids. There are clear logistical challenges to sustaining a 25-player raiding group. It's inherently 2.5 times as much churn, and thus 2.5 times as much recruitment needed. In terms of actual encounter difficulty, while we haven't always succeeded, we feel that we can deliver on a comparable experience between the two modes: 10-player raiding often involves greater personal responsibility, while 25-player raiding is more complex on a macro level (more moving pieces). Even perfect tuning doesn't compensate for the logistical difficulties, though.
Our hope and intent when introducing the parallel 10/25 structure in Cataclysm was that people would be free to pick the raid size that they prefer, but I'll admit that in light of the organizational challenges of maintaining a 25-player roster, we may need a slightly larger incentive to make that choice a truly free and fair one. When you're the guild leader of a 25-player raid group, and you realize that you only have 21 people regularly showing up, it's much easier to just forge ahead in 10-player mode than it is to go through a fresh recruitment cycle to bolster your ranks. And if Mechanar taught us anything, it's that players will always take the path of least resistance when the rewards are equal. (Note that this doesn't mean that it's necessarily the most fun path or what players would choose in the absence of any outside forces pulling them one way or another.)
A small step we've taken to that end has been to increase the amount of loot dropped in 25-player Normal mode in 5.0 to 6 pieces per boss, matching the Heroic loot rate as it has stood in Cataclysm. That's something. But it's not a true solution to the problem. It's something we continue to discuss on a regular basis.
Last edited by sifuedition; 11-05-2012 at 08:30 AM. Reason: Readability of the pasted quote
But thats not really true in the realities of the game. _IF_ the game were one huge server or server transfers were infinite and free it could be close to the truth, but the reality is that the odds of any 2 people who "prefer 25-man because of the size" being able to reasonably raid together are incredibly tiny. Server is a factor, faction is a roughly 50/50 factor, schedule is a massive factor for most people albeit less so for college kiddies and people with training wheels jobs and no real responsibilities. Add in even a modicum of other factors that can prevent grouping (e.g. I'd rather not group up with people who think xbox360 trolling is awesome or who favour incessant use of the n-word purely for provocation) and lore's frequently stated idea that 'as long as 25 people want to do 25man raiding its ok' is absurd. 90 or more like 95%+ of those people aren't going to be viable because of schedule if nothing else so even if there are quite a few people who would 'prefer 25m raiding' that doesn't provide an actual foundation for 25m raiding.
I forget which dev it was who said it but the force that is kiling 25m raiding more than any other is entropy - disorder created by guilds dying and the loss of raiding interest from server transfer fees is perfectly analagous to entropic heat loss in thermodynamics.
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