Thread: Last Resort kills Wotlk, or Wotlk kills them?

http://www.lrguild.org/

This will be TLR if you have a fourth grade reading level

It's always sad to watch a game long, lasting end game raid guild like Last Resort throw in the towel. Was it that the game was too hard, or was it that the game was too easy? I'm not really going to do anything in this thread but add my opinion and the opinion of my peers to the community. You can decide to agree with it, flame them or me for quitting or to disregard the thread entirely. However guilds like this quitting deserves at the very least discussion and reflection, and not just by the community but by blizzard themselves.

The first thing that the community seems to grasp is that these players seem unhappy to quit, even angry at blizzard when they do and this causes the mob mentality of the newer players to cry out "ragequit" or whatever trendy term is in use for that week or month. The truth is this game was marketed to a different audience and slowly over time has been sold out to a new and completely different audience which has polarized the community. One one half you have people who originally bought this game because of the lore and loyalty to Blizzard or Warcraft themselves, people who grew accustomed to sayings like "hard work pays off" and the game reflected that. The other half you have the more modern class of players, people who grew accustomed to sayings like "the customer is always right" and view this game as a tangible "at my own pace" type of game constantly reminding others that simply paying the monthly fee is as much effort as they would like to apply while still expecting full experience of the game.

Is it any surprise that people playing this game for 5 years suddenly find themselves playing an entirely different and new game in this expansion, with different goals completely different from the original intent and direction of the game they bought? Consider yourself a master of chess, but after three years not only was the game changed, it was changed out from under your feet. The rules change the way you win or lose changes and the pieces themselves change, you must adapt or become extinct and if you fail to adapt you forfeit three or more years of character building, friendships, and your favorite hobby.

There are a hundred and one ways to play this game, and none of them are incorrect if you're playing the game for no one but yourself and have no moral disagreement with wasting other peoples time in a group setting. However for players like me who always sought out the most difficult path to overcome, there was and will only ever be one way to play this game. We always do our research or do the research for others, put the time and effort into finding out why 6 attack power is superior to 4 agility or when critical strike has a diminished return and is eclipsed by haste, or armor penetration or just flat out attack power. The natural progression path is mastering your character, then joining a guild that raids and mastering the raid content. After a while you'll grow tired of the people in your guild who do not play to a high degree, nor do they feel guilty playing amongst and reaping the rewards of the players that do. Eventually you will seek a better guild and become the best guild on the server. Being the best guild on the server is very unfulfilling, as for the longest time you had no way to compare yourself to peers unless you looked outside of the box at the progress of guilds on other realms. This is where the whole world first chase was born, the best of the best simply separated by realms and being unable to interact or chat with each other in game sites like wowprogress and wowjutsu and the hundreds of spin offs were born. Now with combat log parses top players can compare the speed of their kills, raid composition, roster size, damage and healing parses, tank threat generation, downtime due to trash, just about everything and anything is logged and saved.

The thrill of competition will always be a thrill, even in a video game and especially in one with this many participants. Unfortunately the new face of high end raiding is alt raiding, learning the fight on a "dummy raid" or raid of alts because of limited attempts so that you can one shot it on your mains (Paragon perfected this method, but it is quickly becoming the norm) is really the only way to assure you're not locked out and watching other guilds run away with all the glory. Make no mistake about it, if there is any form of glory in this game it's from claiming world firsts, the wave of applicants who rush in, the massive increase of traffic to your website, the sponsorship deals of today, all of this feeds into it. Unfortunately having two characters geared well enough to be raiding hard mode content at its release is a taxing endeavor, something that was unthinkable in the past is suddenly mandatory today. It's no surprise that reading the front page of last resorts site bites into this issue pretty hard. I predict LR will not be the last guild to go, not by a long shot but they will be missed regardless.

The saddest part is that so much of the community does not respect players like this, assumes they contributed nothing to the game nor the community and is just as quick to copy and paste their overused "don't let the door hit you on the way out" or "one less monthly fee for blizzard oh well" catchphrases. This is just an opinion post meant to be agreed with disagreed with or discussed, and hopefully people can remain civil. When giants like this fall it says something about the state of the game, the state of the community, and the direction of both.

Originally Posted by VonGimli

Surprisingly, world class guilds have quit before WOTLK and they will continue to quit and new ones will take their place beyond WOTLK. Nothing new.

You should read the front page of their site, this is something new as they are quitting because of WOTLK.

Originally Posted by Rurikar

Who?

Last Resort, you probably watch their videos before attempting the bosses in them

Yes, tad sad. But still people come and go, it's a game. Same with sports - people come and go.

11 million people playing WoW - I'm sure the "new Last Resort"-people are out there. Heck look at Paragon, or just look what become of Ensidia's "glory". It's sad to see old guilds disband, I specially got bit sad the day Curse joined in with Nihilum to form Ensidia. It's fun though to see what the "new era" brings. So far just retards, but I have my hopes up...

Tragic... They fought valiantly, but the beasts of Northrend triumphed. Let us observe a moment of silence for our fallen heroes.

Originally Posted by Moaradin

Who cares. The game is 10x better now than it has ever been, and this is coming from someone who played the game for 5 years.

And thats just your opinion, you don't speak for everyone.

Real hardcore raiding progression died when the 3.0 patch was released.

Originally Posted by Thatwsntmilk

Real hardcore raiding progression died when the 3.0 patch was released.

QFT

Imo they got bored of the game and quit. It is really not that unusual thing to do.
Just take a moment to think about that. You do the same thing over and over again for 5 years and in the end You get bored and stop doing it.
It is the same thing with WoW. Stop talking about the game being too easy. Imo it is just the whole bunch of website's with tactics and videos that give You every detail about the fight and ppl tend to read that, learn it and then kill the boss. That's how it works.
What do You want, bosses that can't be killed?
There are achievements and hard modes for the guys that want some challenge and normal modes for the other.

Anyway, it is sad to see ppl who gave the community a lot leaving, but that's life. I can only say Thanks for everything and GL/HF in life

It's true, you played the game in a completely different way in vanilla then you do in WotLK.

Your are failing in the whole line man, yes i'm sad that LR are disbanding but the reason is pretty stupid..
You said that "working hard pays off" was what you wanted, but now you are afraid of gearing another char to be competitive worldwise??
That's exactly what guilds like Paragon are doing, they are working hard to be on top of the world, not with one but with 2 chars, so maybe they are even working harder that what you did in the past, there's really nothing to blame in this mechanic of the game, you just have become one of the players who think that paying his monthly fee is enough.
Do you remember when you actually had to farm a raid for months to collect resistance gear or specific items to be able to progress? well, now it has been replaced with a "make another char in order to not waste all the tries".

Sorry for the bad spelling.

What makes you think that any of the high-end guilds are worthy of respect?

I can appreciate they are good players, who have accomplished more in WoW than I have, but everyone pays their subscription fee the same as them. The game is not diminished by their loss in the slightest.