[Deceax]

Interesting post from Gevlon this morning. When he stops jerking his own ego and writes about WoW he can still produce a good article. Definitely can relate as most of our rag deaths have stemmed from getting hit by 1 ability killing a person.

http://greedygoblin....ow-raiding.html

[Wrathblood]

Yeah... I think there's some truth to what he's saying. I personally think sheer ennui is WoW's biggest problem, and then trying to create a game in which people who just started a few months ago are even theoretically on an even playing field with people who have been playing fanatically for 6-7 years is probably second. But, that having been said, this expansion they seem to have somewhat abandoned having a few loot pinata bosses at the beginning of each tier. Halfus wasn't too bad, really, but especially at the start before his nerfs he was a HUGE step up from the difficult of heroics. Every tier has had bosses with tricky mechanics (Teron Gorefield, lol), but usually its not EVERY boss for a few tiers in a row has tricky mechanics.

Also, I think his memory is skewed a bit in terms of BC raiding. First, there was a REASON less progressed guilds did SSC and Kara. Well, two reasons. First, Kara dropped justice badges and was easy, and since there wasn't an LFD tool yet, when you included the effort of getting the group together, it was by far the most efficient way to rack up a bunch of justice badges.

Second, you had to run SSC (and TK) because you HAD to in order to get attuned for MH and BT. So, even if you weren't "good" enough to do BT, there was at least the feeling that you were working toward BT by doing SSC.

[Sobeyet]

Wrathblood, on 16 September 2011 - 11:29 AM, said:

Every tier has had bosses with tricky mechanics (Teron Gorefield, lol), but usually its not EVERY boss for a few tiers in a row has tricky mechanics.

I can't imagine starting a guild from scratch right now, even on a decent server.

Just the number of killed bosses have gone down drastically from T11 to T12. 33k guilds killed Shannox, 65k guilds killed Magmaw. 13k guilds killed Rag, 43k guilds killed Nef. (Of course the numbers aren't a perfect comparison; progression tends to slow down during the summer, casual guilds going back to T11 because they can't do T12, etc.)

25-mans have pretty much fallen off a cliff:

• Beasts of Northrend - 58,801
• Marrowgar - 59,356
• Halion - 12,127
• Magmaw - 4,394
• Shannox - 3,891

So a little under 95% of 25 man raiding guilds shrunk to 10s or just died off since ICC. Even Halion got 3 times as much love and it was released on 6/22/10 (middle of the summer) toward the end of the expansion.

Wrathblood, on 16 September 2011 - 11:29 AM, said:

Second, you had to run SSC (and TK) because you HAD to in order to get attuned for MH and BT. So, even if you weren't "good" enough to do BT, there was at least the feeling that you were working toward BT by doing SSC.

I personally prefer that model. Clearing a tier on normal then doing the heroic version doesn't feel very epic. I can understand Blizzard's logic for doing it - why devote resources to creating Sunwell if 1% of the population is even going to take advantage of it (though by that logic they should be getting close to killing 25s) - but the carrot just isn't the same when it's the same boss who drops gear with a higher ilvl.

[Deceax]

Quote

I can't imagine starting a guild from scratch at this point, even on a decent server.

Even more so because of guild leveling. Who is going to want to start from scratch and lose level 25 perks, and at the same time lose all the rep from the guild you are currently in.

[Wrathblood]

The downside of the attunement system is that recruiting becomes brutal. If your guild is in BT and you find a recruit who looks great, going back and running SSC just to get one person attuned is going to be a drag. That having been said, I didn't think the Kara attunements (basically 5-mans and quests) were unreasonably onerous and I liked that system a lot better.

[Sobeyet]

Wrathblood, on 16 September 2011 - 01:23 PM, said:

The downside of the attunement system is that recruiting becomes brutal. If your guild is in BT and you find a recruit who looks great, going back and running SSC just to get one person attuned is going to be a drag. That having been said, I didn't think the Kara attunements (basically 5-mans and quests) were unreasonably onerous and I liked that system a lot better.

Who said anything about attunements, just dump hard modes and add more bosses with greater disparities in difficulty, if the guilds on the lower end of the spectrum could at least kill a few bosses it gives them some momentum instead of wiping on Shannox 20 times. If these type of guilds never kill the last boss, at least they have a reason to keep running on the hamster wheel. I realize that it's cheaper/faster for blizz to create the same boss in "hard mode" with an extra mechanic or two, so it makes more business sense. The fact that they did that and cut down on the number of bosses is what irks me; number of bosses should have gone up, not down (So instead of spending 9 months making a tier with 12 bosses, they can spend 6 months making a tier with 6 bosses and their heroic counterparts. Where'd the extra time go?)

Not sure how I feel about the LFR tool. I know it's supposed to be easier than normal modes but I'm still not sure if 10 random people will be able to coordinate amongst each other. If they let a full group queue for it like LFD I suppose it could be an option for guilds that are struggling on normal, but again it seems like they're just copping out and retuning the bosses they already made instead of adding more.

Though if they wanted to maximize efficiency for development time : keeping people running on the treadmill, solo/5-man content is probably the best way to go. The raiding scene isn't dire enough to warrant that (and it'll take them a while to even consider dropping 25s with the reputation hit they'd take and the hardcores they may lose), but it could be a good way to extend the life of the game another +6 months when it's really on it's deathbed.

[Wrathblood]

Eh, I actually like the attunements because it basically fed into the solo/5-man content which I agree is the actual backbone of the hamster wheel. The invention of dailies back in BC was what pushed the economy into its relatively inflated state, but it was also the game-changing idea that allowed them to put in a bunch of changes to make the game relatively more "casual friendly" while still keeping the hardcore players busy enough so as not to let them get bored.

WoW in vanilla had a bunch of players who were happy to play the game 30+ hours per week, and WoW kept them busy by making it relatively difficult to do things that are now relatively basic (like herbing or fishing. making nodes appear on the mini-map, sparkles on plants, etc), plus doing a solid job of stacking up the buffs required to raid difficult content was INSANELY more difficult to do than it is now. Getting the right gum from the blasted lands, dealing with the friggin horn, or whatever it was, for MC, all of those stupid little buffs you had to painstakingly accumulate and then use took HOURS. Raiders really did have to farm to be able to raid back then, and the farming was a whole lot more involved than it is now. Plus, the effort of building and running a guild that could support 40-man raiding must have been a fairly massive investment of time.

But then you introduce dailies, you give people more stuff to do, and stuff they can do every day. Its an awesome time sink, and one that's accessible for both serious raiders and casual players alike. With time spent on those, you can make a million things vastly easier (like standardizing buffs) which makes the game dramatically more accessible, lets WoW triple its subscriber base.

But the dailies only have value if they feel like they're leading you to something, or at least making something ELSE more accessible. Like raiding. Which is struggling a bit these days. I still like it a lot, and I think WoW is still a very good game with a metric crapton of momentum, but I do fear its on the decline and I'm actually kinda glad its apparently only got maybe 2 expansion left. I kinda hope it winds up on its own accord before I eventually lose interest in it. I don't think either of those are imminent, and I'm an extremely patient person, but my money is on WoW reaching its denouement in roughly 3 years, which I think will just squeak under the wire.

[Sobeyet]

Wrathblood, on 16 September 2011 - 02:14 PM, said:

Like raiding. Which is struggling a bit these days. I still like it a lot, and I think WoW is still a very good game with a metric crapton of momentum, but I do fear its on the decline and I'm actually kinda glad its apparently only got maybe 2 expansion left. I kinda hope it winds up on its own accord before I eventually lose interest in it. I don't think either of those are imminent, and I'm an extremely patient person, but my money is on WoW reaching its denouement in roughly 3 years, which I think will just squeak under the wire.

For sure, scale is a huge part of it. Even though WoW's lost 900k subscribers since Cata's launch it's still a fucking behemoth. They could probably abolish raiding entirely and still be the largest / most profitable MMO on the market. WoW's creeping up on it's 7th anniversary, and even if it lost 1 million people a year for another 7 years it'd still outpace Aion/Rift/et al. And they could still churn out money from growth in the Asian / Latin American markets since it's still a new game for those people. SWOTR would be a huge success if it could even hit 1/4 of WoW's player base.




Trying to quantify "absolute death" on a scale like that is silly; it's like nuclear war or global warming. Even if the majority of life on the planet were to perish shit would start popping back up in a couple of hundred million years. That's not even enough time for the universe to sneeze.

[Deceax]

Quote

Not sure how I feel about the LFR tool. I know it's supposed to be easier than normal modes but I'm still not sure if 10 random people will be able to coordinate amongst each other.

LFR is for 25 man only.

[Sobeyet]

Deceax, on 16 September 2011 - 03:33 PM, said:

Quote

Not sure how I feel about the LFR tool. I know it's supposed to be easier than normal modes but I'm still not sure if 10 random people will be able to coordinate amongst each other.

LFR is for 25 man only.

I knew it was one or the other, couldn't remember which. That's even trickier then, can you imagine 25 random people? /shudder. That means it can't be used as a tool for struggling 10-mans to train themselves for normal either, what the hell is the point of it then? I know pugging is much stronger on larger servers, are they hoping that consolidating the battlegroups with the tool will replicate that effect? I know people pugged ToC/ICC 25 even on Drenden (post-nerfs), but the overall environment feels a bit different now. Though I tend to avoid pugs like the plague (BH is about as far as I'll go) so I might not be a representative sample.

[Wrathblood]

LFR for 25s just seems like madness. I mean, there's a HUGE difference between pugging something and throwing it together with an LFR tool. How many healers do you bring? 5? 8? How many ranged vs melee? You can judge player quality and make decisions on things like as a pug, but with LFR you're trusting the tool to do it for you. I'm sure a really smart LFR could probably make good decisions, but at the cost of potentially severely lengthening the wait time.

[Sobeyet]

Wrathblood, on 16 September 2011 - 04:13 PM, said:

LFR for 25s just seems like madness. I mean, there's a HUGE difference between pugging something and throwing it together with an LFR tool. How many healers do you bring? 5? 8? How many ranged vs melee? You can judge player quality and make decisions on things like as a pug, but with LFR you're trusting the tool to do it for you. I'm sure a really smart LFR could probably make good decisions, but at the cost of potentially severely lengthening the wait time.

Wonder how it's going to pick the raid leader (if there's going to be one). Can't assume everyone will have vent either. Or that people won't randomly leave halfway through the raid / be kicked (2 dozen people voting on kicks? Prisoner's Dilemma ftw). It's a Nash equilibrium wet dream.

[Wrathblood]

The only way I can see it working is if you can only start the tool if you're RL of a group that already has, say, 60% of the raid, then you put your needs into the tool and wait. Plus, prob need to mandate need/greed loot rolls.

[Forte]

Sobeyet, on 16 September 2011 - 02:57 PM, said:

Wrathblood, on 16 September 2011 - 02:14 PM, said:

Like raiding. Which is struggling a bit these days. I still like it a lot, and I think WoW is still a very good game with a metric crapton of momentum, but I do fear its on the decline and I'm actually kinda glad its apparently only got maybe 2 expansion left. I kinda hope it winds up on its own accord before I eventually lose interest in it. I don't think either of those are imminent, and I'm an extremely patient person, but my money is on WoW reaching its denouement in roughly 3 years, which I think will just squeak under the wire.

For sure, scale is a huge part of it. Even though WoW's lost 900k subscribers since Cata's launch it's still a fucking behemoth. They could probably abolish raiding entirely and still be the largest / most profitable MMO on the market. WoW's creeping up on it's 7th anniversary, and even if it lost 1 million people a year for another 7 years it'd still outpace Aion/Rift/et al. And they could still churn out money from growth in the Asian / Latin American markets since it's still a new game for those people. SWOTR would be a huge success if it could even hit 1/4 of WoW's player base.




Trying to quantify "absolute death" on a scale like that is silly; it's like nuclear war or global warming. Even if the majority of life on the planet were to perish shit would start popping back up in a couple of hundred million years. That's not even enough time for the universe to sneeze.

I wonder where Rift falls on that chart, that's what I've been poking at this past week or so.

[Wrathblood]

Was wondering the same thing. My guess is that it peaked a little higher than Aion, but has fallen to even a little below Aion now.

The chart has some interesting things. Runescape is gaining subscribers? Its trajectory, though modest, is impressive. Also, I always thought Lineage peaked higher than that, maybe I've been thinking of the combined Lineage/Lineage 2 numbers.

[Sobeyet]

Rift is in the 150k - 1 million chart:

[Wrathblood]

Comparing the chart tells me that like half of Korea must be playing Aion, because I would not have guessed it to have more than twice as many players as Rift, LotR, and EVE combined. I was never especially a Warhammer fan, but I've seen people playing it for a good 20 years now, and its trajectory makes me a little sad. I'm surprised DDO and Planetside didn't even make the 150k - 1M chart.

[Sobeyet]

Wrathblood, on 20 September 2011 - 10:57 AM, said:

Comparing the chart tells me that like half of Korea must be playing Aion, because I would not have guessed it to have more than twice as many players as Rift, LotR, and EVE combined.

No wonder it's so damn grindy. Though the Korean market's pretty big (especially for gaming), bigger population than Canada, Australia, etc.

Wrathblood, on 20 September 2011 - 10:57 AM, said:

I'm surprised DDO and Planetside didn't even make the 150k - 1M chart.

They're on the 50-100k chart; I'm getting them from here http://mmodata.net/. As always I'd treat it with a degree of skepticism (highly unlikely that all numbers are spot-on), but as a ballpark view it's interesting.