6081

I think they’re best served by maintaining enough content to make that subscription fee seem reasonable. For the vast majority of time since 2004, I paid pennies an hour for a given month’s fee. Even recently I still feel I get my money’s worth. Games that switched to micro transactions presumably failed to do this.

BTW, those people who unsubscribe and come back for the expansion releases are still pumping lots of subscription dollars into Blizzard’s coffers, far more than they would be through the micro transaction model.

6082

I fully agree with adding new 5mans and that the addition of new “content” in 4.2 sucks.

It’s not just content for non-raiders though, y’know. Even raiders like to run 5mans, craft, quest, get achievements, etc. We’re not a different specie of creature. :P

However, if you put in a 5man to kill Arthas, it’s not going to be the same fight. It’s not going to be the same content. So people will still complain.

I get that you think I’m being an elitist epeening raiderprick, but that’s your prerogative, and I can only shrug and wonder what the fuck you’re on.

I don’t think you can make raids much easier than T11 raids are going to be once you get some pieces of Valor / vendor 4.2 gear without completely trivializing them. The encounters have been solidly nerfed twice since they were first cleared, and you’ll be in gear that’s two full tiers higher. Yes, it requires some learning and getting used to it, but…

If you can’t turn and AoE the lava parasites, or don’t want to bother, then Blizzard has three choices. Blizzard can tell you go, in short, L2P; you can wait until the next expansion comes around and you can literally faceroll the encounters; or Blizzard can make raid instances whose “mechanics” are merely aesthetic, and where you can kill the boss without actually doing the mechanics involved in the normal course of raiding.

I find that last option distasteful, but it seems to be what you’re suggesting Blizzard should do.

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.

As far as I can tell, you’re asking for it to be trivialized.

6083

It’s true that the content is harder

Some of our most skilled raiders

You know what’s funny? My Guild spent more time on normal-mode Ragnaros before we downed him than any of the top 50 Guilds did. Seems to me like they’re investing less time, because they’re more skilled.

6084

People keep saying this. What does “time invested” buy you?
Muscle memory of how to optimize your rotation. (This type of thing is a skill in just about any OTHER endeavor… there’s a reason you practice, practice, practice…)
Learning the intricacies of each fight so that you know how to react when mechanism X happens. (Professional engineers are more skilled than novice ones. Much of this comes because they have experience. This is experience.)
Better gear. (This is -not- skill. This is shifting the statistical model.)

I don’t buy the “just time” argument. There are people who can put in time and never learn better rotations, how to react to specific abilities, when mechanic X is coming, or what to do when it comes. When you pull one of those people into a PUG raid and they wipe the raid, you call them “n00bs” or “lacking skill”.

It’s not rocket science. It’s not twitch reaction mechanisms (entirely, though certainly there’s skill in knowing that the mechanic that places a big circle of crap on the floor is coming and that you need to start moving away, and that’s effectively the difference between slow and fast reaction: anticipation). But it sure as hell is still skill.

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.

It’s never made sense to me that by proving yourself a more effective PvPer, you get better gear than the guys who aren’t as effective. Wouldn’t the game quality be better if it was exactly the opposite? If you’re good, presumably you want challenges to keep improving. So you should have a handicap, not a bonus. This is how it works in sports, right? Why is it exactly backwards in PvP?

6085

You missed the point of what I said though. They aren’t necessarily more skilled at the mechanics as more focused on progression, doing the research, bringing the consumables, etc. When I was an officer in my old raiding guild we had some people who had the fights down pat but were such annoying prima donnas they held us back. I suspect the top raid guilds are not just collections of “skilled” players as cohesive groups who work very well together and are entirely focused on progression.

6086

No it’s not. For casual play in a game like golf you might take a handicap, but competitive sports, when they pay attention to delivering advantages, ALWAYS protect power. That’s why the winningest team has the home court advantage in playoff games, and why playoff brackets are matched power protect (for an 8 team bracket, the sum of the places of both teams will add up to 9 in all cases).

6087

I’m not excluding skill from the mix, it is important. Back when I was a raider we had to let go of some people who were truly decent and fun to raid with because they just couldn’t master the fights. In the end though, assuming roughly comparable levels of play, it’s the person who shows up every night having read up on the fights, maximized their talent spec and consumables, etc and who isn’t focused on themselves who will be the greatest asset.

As for PvP, I don’t do it much myself but I think it’d be annoying if winning lots of Arena matches and the like resulted in getting less gear than someone like me who just occasionally dips his toes in when bored. The fight may be the incentive, but making gear the disincentive would result in a mass exodus from organized PvP, I think.

6088

They really are.

I guarantee you, give me Ïnstinct’s gear (10 ilevels above me) and his raidbuffs (Focus Magic and Dark Intent), and I’m still not going to pull 10k DPS more than I am on Shannox.

That’s right, I pulled 24k DPS on Shannox on our kill, and he pulled 34k DPS on his kill.

Because he’s better than I am. More skilled at the mechanics. Better able to track exactly when to refresh his DoTs, better at managing Starsurge procs, better at knowing exactly when to move, better at tracking when the dogs are imprisoned, better at managing his Eclipse bar.

The top Guilds, the ones that are on Heroic Ragnaros right now, are full of people who are that good. Every one of the 475 players currently 6/7 Heroic Firelands is probably a better player, mechanics-wise, pressing-the-right-buttons-wise, in several respects than anyone posting on this forum, myself included.

6089

Erm, then can you explain why most professional sports have salary cap rules to keep you from aggregating power? (Money into a team is effectively a function of the team’s ability to win; this seems to me to be a more direct analogy than homefield advantage and the like.)

6090

I think there’s still some opportunity for WoW to add non-raiding stuff like more in-depth crafting, crafting quests, cosmetic armour slots and more detailed armour design, making archaeology not suck by tying it in to other things, etc.

I’m not really interested in raiding or a zillionth heroic run, but I will go to the ends of the earth to make a jaunty hat.

6091

The top guild are full of people who are that good and are not selfish assholes who can’t go a night without irritating most of the people they’re raiding with. Like I said, I’ve run with some really skilled raiders who were constantly creating drama, gquitting when things didn’t go their way, backstabbing other raiders, etc. Skill is not enough for raiding - you have to play well with others. That generally requires time to build that cohesive group where everyone knows what to expect from the people they’re running with. My old raiding guild is still run by a cadre of people who’ve been playing together since 2005. There’s always people coming and going, but the way the raids proceed has remained fairly consistent (and in fact the guild has been faltering lately because that core group is finally starting to break down as people leave).

6092

Raiding doesn’t require more “skill”

Changed your mind in less than ten posts? Okay then.

6093

Those are set by the owners, to keep people like Steinbrenner from creating ridiculous salary inflation. It is as often a barrier to good competition as it is an aid (case in point: the New York Knicks basically up to the point that I stopped watching basketball because I didn’t have time for eighty odd games a year, who were so heavily loaded down with oversized salaries that they had basically no shot at ever winning anything). It also makes the league somewhat more stable, because it means that you don’t get a Mark Cuban coming in and buying up every free agent with a recognizable name in the current offseason. Remember - there is rarely, if ever, a reward for being below the salary cap, beyond the ability to buy random dudes that get cut midway through the season. While it has some competitive balancing effect, ultimately it’s not truly effective (since you can always bring in at least a new guy or two at the exception level, so that if a guy wants to win a championship he can decide to go to a good team at cost to himself and there’s nothing to stop it), though it has some influence in that direction.

6094

The Bloodsail Buccaneers faction grind was made for you then, since a jaunty hat was the ultimate reward. You just had to kill 50,000 goblin guards to get it (not to mention closing yourself out of all the neutral goblin cities). I think it’s impossible now though.

6095

I should have expressed it differently. I meant that skill is not the sole element - it has to be there but it’s not going to make you the best raider in the world in and of itself.

6096

This is a bit confusing. Are you saying the Knicks couldn’t win because they had so many high value players that the remaining salary they had to work with wasn’t enough to field a competitive team? If so, doesn’t that rather prove my point?

Aside from the vagaries of ego, team play, etc (which is probably unfair to exclude in reality but has no analogue for the analogy we’re trying to work under), would you expect that if the Knicks totally ignored the salary cap and bought the best player in the league for every position that they wouldn’t dominate? My point is that if you’re already good, and you get something that’s better than what you had, you’re going to be better, all other external variables aside. And that seems like an odd way to set up a recreational activity. (And make no mistakes, PvP in WoW is a recreational activity. The competitive, e-sport portion of it actually occurs under a different ruleset.) It reminds me of the exact reason why the dominant format in M:TG is block limited, rather than including Moxen and Black Lotii.

6097

Yes and then no, unless I am not understanding you, which is entirely possible. The problem the Knicks had was that they simply couldn’t be competitive because they overpaid for veteran contracts when they had a shot (basically before Ewing retired), so actual games the Knicks played were not much fun to watch. They were generally awful. You had Alan Houston limping around on his blown ass knees, a specter of his former self, while everybody else on the team either didn’t know how to play basketball or weren’t good enough to get a job with a competitive team. If the goal of the cap were competitiveness, there would be an exception that would have at least allowed the Knicks to keep the draft picks they traded away for a few of those years. Instead, you got…the Knicks. In practice, the difference between competitive teams and uncompetitive teams only loosely relates to where they sit with respect to the salary cap and is much more closely related to having people who know how to do what they do. The salary cap, to my reading, only exists to keep stupid people from being so stupid that they start crapping on the game as a whole for everybody - not to force competitive play.

Actually…yes, kind of. At least, with the coaching and management staff that they had at the time. For every Boston Celtics, there’s a Minnesota Timberwolves.

The problem I think we’re talking around, however, is the fact that the NBA and World of Warcraft are not particularly good analogs of one another, because there is very little practical difference in whatever objective measure of skill you want to use between the best starting player in the league and the worst. They can all play basketball well enough to merit being one of the thousand men in the universe who get paid money to do it on national television. They will all kick the ass of every single person on this forum, possibly all at once. That is decidedly not the case for a game like WoW. I wouldn’t really class WoW as much of a competitive game, though the designers at Blizzard bust their asses 24/7 to make sure that the “good” people feel like they’re better at the game than the “bad” people. The hyper-competitive people, who are legitimately good at the game in a way that most other people will never be, would rightly be offended at the implications that progressive handicapping would have on competition, and that’s why it doesn’t happen. The much larger group of hyper-competitive people who aren’t really that much better at the game than you or me will be just as pissed off. People who treat the game competitively don’t want to penalize success, and, moreover, they want to actively reward it, which is why Deathwing will undoubtedly drop some of the best shit in the game. I kind of wonder how much of the competitive projection would be solved by providing a soft win condition in the game.

6098

The majority of content in WoW is non-raid stuff. There are alternate paths to get epics that allow players who want them to avoid raiding.

You can get yourself epics in every slot without ever raiding. Maybe some of your epics aren’t as epic as raid rewards, but if you’re not raiding does it really matter?

6099

Excellent point.

Why do so many people who don’t raid care about getting gear of equivalent quality to raid drops when the only reason anyone needs epic PvE gear is to complete raid content? Do players think that epic drops are the ultimate reward in WoW rather than just a means to an end (gear upgrades being required to complete future raid encounters)?

6100

Except, in many cases, weapons. There are only a handful of crafted epic weapons available in Cat, and many of them have questionable stats (ex: a 1.8 speed agility dagger – no good for rogue off hand, not great for rogue main hand, how many dual-weilding hunters and agility shaman are there?)