Raiding isn’t the only norm for progression in WoW anyway, not by a long shot. Unless of course you want the best PvE gear, but the only reason you need that is to raid the next tier…
Mounts, pets, vanity items, roleplaying doodads and titles are all doable by long grindy solo quest-chains and occasional use of the dungeon finder. If it’s for the looks, you can get great looking gear too, often better than whatever nonsensical whimsy went into the current tier’s gear. Not my personal cup of tea, but it’s there for people.
Wow, what the hell was that?
That was a drive-by Gear-scoring
ACChar
6064
Moral of the thread so far: Karazhan, Magister’s Terrace and the Stormherald were WoW’s best :)
Which is actually totally different from asking to get the same gear as the people who are raiding get through questing, so I guess now that you’ve changed what you’re asking for to something I’ve already stated I support, uhh okay.
It was me pointing out that it’s really fucking easy to clear raids, and if you don’t actually care about raiding or want to raid, then why the hell do you care about the stats on your gear?
(Leaving aside PvP, because it’s clear that Ryslin isn’t a PvPer.)
Because the game doesn’t have a win condition, so you have to supply one yourself. BiS gear is a suitable win condition. What’s worse - doors start shutting in your face for content that you might want to do if you don’t have good enough gear, because World of Warcraft in particular ties all of your progression to your gear. So if you want to poke around in ICC…well, you better have the right gear, or you’re just going to explode into a pile of guts, and if you’re not, you know, good at the game (whatever that means for your particular class), gear gets that much more important.
It would be better if there were some other, more obvious alternative that you could substitute for the win condition. Like, take any SRPG these days, with their entirely unnecessary bonus dungeon that opens up at the end of the game that has all the best gear in it. I don’t do that shit. Why would I? I’m punching myself directly in the balls, and for what - the opportunity to get a hammer that makes me better at the game? I play the game to the end, and maybe do the bonus dungeon a little bit after I’m done (until I get annoyed), but I already “finished” the game. I’m done. You take out the story, though, and now getting to the bottom of that dungeon and getting the ultimate gear because the win condition for the game as a whole.
This is an area where WoW could take some direction from Guild Wars or what I hope SWeaToR turns out to be. When you “finish” the campaign in Guild Wars, you close off the story and get a natural stopping point, because you just killed the bad guy. You’re done. You solved it. The story is over. If you want, you can go grind out a bunch of lumpy, dumb looking armor in the Underworld, but there’s nothing in terms of direct story implications down there. There’s some neat lore, but you can read about that on the internet. Guild Wars lets you win the game. WoW should let you win the game, and then do the postgame if that’s what you feel like.
What exactly is keeping the guy who “wins the game” from unsubscribing and picking up the next MMO on the market? Guild Wars can do that because they don’t charge by the month, but I highly doubt SWTOR will do so as long as they follow the WoW pricing model.
Blizzard has kept me paying $15 a month since December of 2004. That’s worth a lot more than their box sales even when you figure in the subsequent expansion costs. If I’d won the game a few months after buying it they’d have made a helluva lot less cash off me.
Nothing, but I would contend that this is inevitable since subscription services seem to be on the way out.
Would this simply be a matter of letting you kill the Arthas character in a 5-man or quest environment? WoW tends to stuff the end boss in a raid, but since the BT patch in BC they’ve been better about letting you interact with the villain outside of a raid environment.
I think the point Ryslin was trying to make is that she has different goals for WoW than you. Currently she’s locked out of seeing top-tier content because she no longer has the time or friends in the game to dedicate to raiding. She’s merely asking a hypothetical question; why is Raiding seen as the real end-game of WoW, when the majority of players don’t get access to it?
So really, there’s no need to get so miffed at her about it, I think.
It would be a bigger problem for WoW, because WoW and story have a sort of awkward relationship. Comparing it to Guild Wars, every campaign was about fifteen instanced dungeons that you did that told a cohesive story from start to finish. WoW doesn’t have anything like that unless you do a lot of reading and disregard the parts that don’t matter, like the guy who wants you to go murder thirteen species of bear in every different environment. Even in the case of Arthas, there was a whole other dungeon environment that, so far as I am aware, had nothing whatsoever to do with him (other than sharing a general geographic location) that was the climax of the game for a while there with Ulduar. Isolating out a story quest line for the next expansion that tells a story from start to finish, is deliberately pointed out from among the rest of the quests, and have the sorts of things that we associate with story (like cutscenes and junk) might be a good start. They do okay with that for some of the newer environments - Blizzard just hasn’t blown that up to cover a whole expansion instead of just a zone.
What makes you say that? Micro transactions seems to be more the “we failed at retaining subscribers so we’ll see if we can make money another way” alternative.
Ha ha holy crap the raider vs casual fight is still happening?
I think that Star Wars will be telling as to the future of the model, but you just don’t hear that much about big MMOs betting heavy on subscription outside of WoW and Star Wars. I’m not deep into the scene (and my primary MMO-related news source was broken on my machine for a few months there, though I’m getting news again now, so somebody must have fixed the file formatting at some point or the CoreAVC upgrade I did fixed everything), but hasn’t everything else that isn’t just desperately niche (EVE) gone free-to-play at this point? If every other alternative in the market is free, WoW is going to be forced to change over whether they like it or not, just to stay competitive.
And if she had wanted to ask that question, she could have, but she didn’t. Instead, she complained about how she wanted to be even on gear with the hardmode raiders by the end of the patch and how “skill” just meant not standing in the fire.
That aside, you can’t make the same fight for a 5man group and a 25man group. It’s a stretch making it for 10, and the need to have every fight in 10man as well as 25man means we’ll never see a fight with the depth of Vashj or Kael in future instances.
If you look at the Kael’thas 5man in MgT, it’s a hugely simplified fight in every respect and it was still considered pretty difficult for a 5man encounter, though not as crazy-hard as the faux-PvP fight.
So if Blizzard wants to avoid locking people out of top-tier content because they don’t raid, at all, then Blizzard will have to stop making raids. Which isn’t going to happen.
That entirely leaves aside the point that the “bleeding edge” and “top tier” that people talk about has changed drastically. There are more people clearing raids on Heroic difficulty than there were raiding at all in Burning Crusade.
I don’t really agree with that. The least they can do with each major content patch is build in 5 mans that are part of the story. They did that well with the three 5 man Icecrown Citadel runs, but they could have added a final 5 man where the group gets to confront and defeat Arthas. The ilevel of the gear would still be sub-raid, but players would get to experience the content without raiding. They certainly shouldn’t be releasing patches like 4.2, where the only new “content” for non-raiders is doing dailies.
One interesting tidbit I read somewhere is that Blizzard is considering adding a new level of difficulty for raid content in the next expansion. Instead of just normal and heroic, it would be easy, normal and hard. Presumably the easy mode would be designed to be puggable with current gear levels, rather than one tier behind like they do now. They desperately need to stop locking out the rest of the game while in a raid though, since it’s probably the worst part of trying to pug one. You can’t quest or really do anything other than sit there and hope it will eventually start and not fall apart after an hour of trying to get enough people.
Hey man, this isn’t true. Especially not when they’re contemporary. And very much especially not 10-mans with folks who primarily play solo/casual…
Our guild was made up of about half folks who’d been raiding for a while/a long time (some of us since EQ), and half casual folks who did dungeon runs at best. The latter had a tough time with stuff like making sure magmaw’s lava parasites died before they got to folks. And when you have a tough time on the first boss in a raid, well, it’s not particularly easy.
Raiding takes a different mindset and at least half an order of magnitude more attention than anything else in game, including running the heroics. It requires umpteen more precision than soloing. (My DPS is always fine when soloing; it matters how I string abilities together while raiding. It generally only matters marginally how I string abilities together while grouping, even in heroic 5-mans.)
I get that it’s easy for you. I certainly don’t think that it’s an unlearnable skill or anything. But it does take work, it does take skill, and you’re once again being a dick by just brushing that off because you have and continue to raid. There is a real hurdle there.
Presumably this will get quite a bit better with 4.2 gearing for 4.1 raids. Hopefully Blizzard got the balance of power right so that it’s not completely trivialized by the new gear for the next “tier” of raiders down from the folks who did it while it was contemporary. There will still be folks for whom it’s difficult even in full T11 gear, however, for a number of reasons. There’s nothing wrong with those folks, and there’s nothing unreasonable about the fact that they really want to see that content (and 4.2 content too!) and feel frustrated that they can’t.
Here’s a question (seriously, I have no idea what the answer is):
Is Blizzard better served by a player who subscribes continuously until they burn out of sheer and utter frustration never to return again, or by a player who hits a soft “win” condition, unsubscribes, then comes back again when a new soft “win” is put into place via patch/expansion/etc…?
Raiding doesn’t require more “skill” as much as time invested. When I raided, I spent four nights a week doing three or three and half hour runs to clear the content (Vanilla and TBC content). It’s true that the content is harder, but the true test of a raiding guild is keeping all those people focused on moving forward. Some of our most skilled raiders were actually liabilities, because they didn’t think of the group, were drama queens, etc. Real raid progression requires an investment of time that I eventually found to be unhealthy for me for all kinds of reasons. Blizzard has moved steadily away from the dedicated raiding guild model of play as the pinnacle of the game, but raiding still requires time that I can’t give. I don’t think it should have exclusive access to content.
Gear is another matter, of course - I agree that the highest ilevels should remain in raid content, just as the best PvP gear shouldn’t be attainable without putting in the time doing PvP. That to me is only logical.
Nope.
Care bears largely won and raiders left the game (apart from the top guilds standing at hardmode Ragnaros right now).
