I doubt that very many players worldwide are really decked out in complete heroic gear. If it's so rare, I guess it was my imagination that the 1 LFR I've done this week also happened to have a Mr. Heroic in it doing 400k dps. I didn't even look to see if he was the one whining when we wiped on Lei Shen. There was plenty of boohoo'ing over the tank failing though. Even some idiot was QQ'ing because they had to run back versus getting rezzed - to Lei Shen of all bosses. One of the shortest runs from the graveyard in MoP.
What pattern are you referring to?
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I used to think no sane person would idle for hours at the mailbox in Ironforge to just show off their shiny purples too.
As a note of the statistics, It seems that 99% of the playerbase could have their game improved if blizzard didnt spend 1/3 of the raiding content trying to make sure less than 1% of players felt "accomplished" and heroic.
It kinda puts a big spotlight on the new "mythic" raiding, having to put all that extra time to make sure a 20 man raid can do "the most engaging and hard content" that only a fraction of a % may or may not do; when all of the other raiding content will be determined by flex mechanics. Thats a lot of extra time and effort for a single raid difficulty...that only a very very minor group of folks will see or attempt to complete.
On a personal note: Im ok with there being the option of Heroics. I think its a good idea to have content for those that game the system to the best of their ability; but I also hate that much of the game is changed or affected by these very few individuals.
Looking at PvP , there has been countless changes to classes because 1 person is exceptional enough to game the system and do better than the average person, or blizzard is expecting them to. Thus, they do sweeping changes to that class, arena combo, etc. to get rid of the "exceptional" situation, that 99% of players will not run into or figure out. In the end, it just leaves 99% of the players worse off, just so that 1 person can be taken down a notch. In this regard, there is no room for being a really good player, only that you can only be as good as the bar set by blizzard.
On the flip side, with raiding, the barometer goes in the other direction; so that "exceptional-ism" gets the majority of blizzards attention (like in pvp) but is instead catered to greatly, even though again, they are such a low percentage of the playerbase that it shouldnt be affecting the rest of the game as much as it does. Resources are spent on something that is suppose to be half of the raiding scene, for only 1% of the population to use. This becomes even more convoluted with the addition of LFR and Flex ...so that there is (currently) 4 difficulties to balance around; and in that same breath, you have been contending with both 10 man and 25 man versions (until LFR and Flex came out).
But even still, as with the pvp issue, if you game the system better than blizzard prefers....its back you go.
Blizzard is really caught up in this web of raid content now..without a clear understanding or plan of what to do, even worse than when they made the leap from separate 10 and 25 man lockouts to shared ones, or before that....going from 40 mans to making smaller 20 man content....to 1 10 man and the rest 25s . Do they not know how ratios work ? Its funny how they make a lot of excuses for not doing other types of content, because it means there will be less resources for raiding as a consequence...and YET they keep wasting resources on raiding content that they have no clear idea of how its going to work. Instead of making more 5 mans...BGs (or...*gasp*...other types of pvp and rewards)...alternate leveling/progression paths...etc. They think its best to have multiple difficulties for raiding...and raiding content that barely anyone will see or do, let alone complete.
Even though tuning content for different difficulties is only part of creating a raid, those programers / testers / artists (for new mechanics) , etc. , however limited they may be, could still be better used for working on a fraction of other content, like making 5 mans a little bit bigger...or adding just 1 more. Something that can and will be used by the majority of players, rather than "the 1%", to coin a term.
Again, I do like that there is something for people who want a bigger challenge, I just dont agree with the resources used (especially with how bloated it is now with all the new raid difficulties, and how they are changing) , so that we can appease the same general % of players that historically....was the reason raiding was changed to begin with; because only a very very small % of people were doing the raiding content, especially ones like Naxx in Vanilla.
I dont want to take away content that folks may enjoy, but if only 1% of folks are using the content youve spent countless hours working on, Im pretty sure blizzard and other companies understand the reasoning behind and have had past history of....not working on things that only 1% of people will use.
If you asked blizzard to spend 5 hours on making a new hunter pet (a Donky for example), that statistically only a very few % of people would actually hunt for and use; I 100% know that they would turn around and say that and feel that their isnt enough resources to put towards doing that 1 thing that only a few people will use. Now imagine if making that donky took 20 hours....or 120 man hours to get "right" . Then the chances they would make it are astronomically smaller.
So why is a raiding bracket for 1% of the players ok to spend those resources on?
I understand that there is a fine point between making things just to have them, making things because statistically it makes sense..and making things because its "enjoyable for those that would use it"; but we've had this battle with blizzard before, between having things done because it would be enjoyable vs doing things because blizzard knows the "fuzzy math" behind if its needed or not. Its never been a winning fight for the players; and this one should be no different ( If to keep with consistency) . It should make no sense to work on something this influential to the game, if barely anyone is going to utilize it.
I could make a moral call, leaning towards "just keep it" if it was a much higher % ..like say only a third of folks...or a fifth, but certainly not 1% ...let alone if it was really 0.24%.
It really does rather "spit" on everyone that has asked for, or suggested to create other types of content .. like how we use to 2x more 5 mans in the past, but get turned away because "it means that raids will have to suffer" ; if just on principle alone.
I disagree. Raid Finder didn't come in until the final tier of Cataclysm and up until that expansion, numbers were never dropping like they are now. The fact is, before LFR, there was always something you hadn't seen; pugs were more plentiful, guilds were more plentiful. In this expansion, which has more to do for a non-raider than ever before, we have lost the same number of subs as Cata in half the time. That's utterly ridiculous. They won't all be from raiding of course, but an MMO like this lives or dies based on the strength of it's end-game. Blizzard has done a really poor job in making the progression path simple and efficient for those seeking to break into N/HC.
Player burnout is the main problem caused by LFR - it's not a sustainable mode, it's not a healthy environment that's encouraging people to form bonds and spawn guilds (seriously, how many threads do we get about "toxic" players and being afk in LFR?). Blizzard is finally waking up to this and realising that they need to encourage player interaction. An anonymous AFK fest is not engaging for anyone.
When you have to run LFR and Flex ad nauseum to get enough gear to get into a Normal or Heroic guild, by the time you reach that point, many people are already sick of seeing the instance. It's really hard, especially if you're just starting out or rerolling, to be motivated to do all the crap content to get to where you wanna be. My guild has just experienced this with some of our old friends; they came back to the guild with the idea that once they get enough gear to not be dragging down the raid, they could come in for farm and then eventually progress. Almost all of them bar one is no longer subbed a month later because they're bored of farming LFR.
Blizzard has failed to provide a realistic progression path. The raider pool is shrinking as more and more people get fed up with the intense grind required just to get to the harder modes. Yes, you can do heroics in weak gear if you're very good. Have fun trying to find a raiding guild that will take you on though. Especially if you don't have any experience. People starting late, or coming back after a break start off in a pit and have to put forth a lot of effort and go through a lot of boring content to bring themselves up to date again.
In TBC (and to some extent, Wrath) that burnout didn't happen because you had guilds at all different levels; you could always find something that would be challenging to your current level of progress. I stopped playing for 6 months in TBC. When I came back, I joined a Kz guild and progressed from there. If that happened today I'd be faced with a 2-3 month LFR + Flex grind to bring my gear up to about 540 JUST to get into some challenging content. By making everyone focus on only the newest tier (and forcing them through "tourist mode" to get gear), it causes a problem.
It's valid, actually. Like I pointed out, I am part of the management for a guild that raids just 6 hours a week. That's basically nothing. I know people on my server who spend more time than that doing dailies each week. "I don't have time" is just code for "I'm too lazy to bother learning how to play/make friends/form my own guild". It's a cop-out used by people who want every tiny bit of hard content to be deleted, and everything be made available to them at the "spam AoE, collect loot" level. "I should be able to get the Garrosh HC mount if I want it - I don't have time to raid 24/7" - If you tell me you haven't heard/seen that type of sentence before, you're a liar. More often than not, it's the kind of bad player who claims to be "casual" whilst playing 50 hours a week. Just because "it's a video game" doesn't mean all challenge needs to be removed until you can win the game whilst watching TV. Every game has some requirement of thought or effort from the user.
If gear is just a tool to kill a boss, then why does heroic raiding award a completely different set of gear than the normal tier?
Hint: it's not because the boss absolutely must be designed to require better gear.
If it was truly a challenge that the heroic raiders truly wanted, it seems to me that they would want to prove their skill by clearing heroic modes while wearing the same gear that the normal guys had. Getting better gear just really muddies the water, doesn't it? How much of that progress was really superior skill or higher itemlevel?
I say this because we all know absolutely NO ONE jumped up to 25man in Wrath to get the better loot, then fall back and grab the 10man achievements.
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I keep pretty current with blue posts and I do not remember this being said.
Care to source it?
Yeah I guess you must be the (un)luckiest person because every lfr group is filled to the roof with 400k dps raiders. I wish I was in that region as I have not seen a single person breaking 250k in lfr since 5.4 except for people I convinced to accompany me.
Again how when nowhere near 99% of the playerbase is even using a fraction of the content that isn't heroic or maybe even raiding at all.
Personally I often feel it is also the lack of confidence in social skills as being part of a group and having to talk to people is actually quite hard.
Last edited by cFortyfive; 2014-01-10 at 06:20 AM.
You are incorrectly assuming that everyone is running LFR with the intent of graduating to Flex or Normal.
I think people are walking away from raiding because they are tired of raiding. Let's face it, pretty much across all recent MMORPGs - it's raid for the best gear or ???Blizzard has failed to provide a realistic progression path. The raider pool is shrinking as more and more people get fed up with the intense grind required just to get to the harder modes. Yes, you can do heroics in weak gear if you're very good. Have fun trying to find a raiding guild that will take you on though. Especially if you don't have any experience. People starting late, or coming back after a break start off in a pit and have to put forth a lot of effort and go through a lot of boring content to bring themselves up to date again.
I think people are really wanted other ways to advance their characters - be it through some other system other than gear or simply do other content and get gear equivalent in power to the raid gear. I highly doubt that people just want this gear mailed to them and most (that I've talked to in/out of the games) are perfectly fine with investing time and effort in obtaining this gear (or whatever character advancement). Almost universally, the people that I play MMOs with are 100% tired of raiding.
They are not tired of WoW - they are tired of raiding.
Burnout was horrendous in TBC and exacerbated by guild poaching.In TBC (and to some extent, Wrath) that burnout didn't happen because you had guilds at all different levels; you could always find something that would be challenging to your current level of progress. I stopped playing for 6 months in TBC. When I came back, I joined a Kz guild and progressed from there. If that happened today I'd be faced with a 2-3 month LFR + Flex grind to bring my gear up to about 540 JUST to get into some challenging content. By making everyone focus on only the newest tier (and forcing them through "tourist mode" to get gear), it causes a problem.
Thanks for lumping me in with lazy people.It's valid, actually. Like I pointed out, I am part of the management for a guild that raids just 6 hours a week. That's basically nothing. I know people on my server who spend more time than that doing dailies each week. "I don't have time" is just code for "I'm too lazy to bother learning how to play/make friends/form my own guild". It's a cop-out used by people who want every tiny bit of hard content to be deleted, and everything be made available to them at the "spam AoE, collect loot" level. "I should be able to get the Garrosh HC mount if I want it - I don't have time to raid 24/7" - If you tell me you haven't heard/seen that type of sentence before, you're a liar. More often than not, it's the kind of bad player who claims to be "casual" whilst playing 50 hours a week. Just because "it's a video game" doesn't mean all challenge needs to be removed until you can win the game whilst watching TV. Every game has some requirement of thought or effort from the user.
I actually play 25 to 35 hours per week. This is not really less time overall than when I hardcore raided but it is in chunks - as in, I might play an hour or 30 minutes, then be AFK for 15 and sometimes even autolog. This is not friendly to many guild's raid schedules.
I don't raid now because I am in a small friends and family guild and I enjoy these people. We have fun together doing older content and we just aren't big enough (anymore) to do anything else. I could leave them and just chat with them and do the same things; however, I haven't exactly seen guilds advertise raid nights (lately) for the nights that I could possibly schedule time (if I really wanted to).
I'm not lazy. I just am simply not interested in raid content anymore. You see, when I raided - I was the guy that showed up stocked with potions, food, and elixirs. At one time I was the mage that showed up 20 minutes early to summon 50 stacks of water (who remembers that?). I'm just done with raiding in general - I'm ready for something else and there's nothing that says MMORPGs have to be married to just raiding for endgame.
I love scenarios. I like dungeons. I'd like more difficult dungeons that actually required us to use all of our class abilities (not just CC one mob of each pull but act on the fly). That content was replaced by what seems to be an endless stream of raid bosses. Since it was all raid bosses - I'm glad LFR was put in because if it wasn't - I'd have just kept my money instead of buying MoP. I've already marked Diablo 3 off for the auction house debacle - almost no "real" endgame except for raiding is not making me real fond of MoP either.
Last edited by Raeln; 2014-01-10 at 06:30 AM.
Some of the blizzcon wow panels from this year, cant remember which one. I also believe GC also mentioned it in some blog post but not entirely sure about that.
What they said was roughly along the lines of implying that with flex, they wished they never implemented LFR, that flex is what LFR should have been from the start, but that it is hard to remove LFR now once it is implemented already.
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With that logic you should open your eyes. How many % of wow population do you believe does the fishing world boss? How many % of the worlds population do you think do the daily nat pagle turn ins? How many % of wows population do you think do celestial tournament? How many % of the worlds population do you think did the warlock green fire quest line? How many % of wows population do you think completed all timeless isle achievements?
Everything in world of warcraft is designed to cater to a very small fraction of the population. By catering to the 1% x 100 they cater to 100%. That is how WoW worked for a long time.
Move to Thrall Horde. Always someone in LFR breaking 250k it seems. Last week, there were 4 or 5 in the same raid. Guess all of them were valor capping.
Same sample size a month ago or so showed that 80% of people had done MV on LFR. There are folks raiding but no, I don't see the numbers to support continuing to design heroic raid content.
Again how when nowhere near 99% of the playerbase is even using a fraction of the content that isn't heroic or maybe even raiding at all.
Sorry.
Didn't read the whole thing but wanted to comment on this part. With the raid changes in WoD, they'll actually be spending less total time tuning/designing mythic encounters, since they only have to design for / test one version: 20 player. Honestly I'd say testing time will be less than half, actually -- not only would they have to test both, but they'd have to try to make sure they were both not just properly tuned but also as close to similarly difficult between the two sizes as possible. As in, 10 heroic with a smaller assumption of available classes/buffs has to be approximately as difficult as 25, with full assumption of all buffs and classes ... without a 10-heroic group with all buffs having too easy a time.
Normal and heroic in WoD will actually need more development time than before, due to the flex technology. They'll want to make sure every raid size from 10-25 is appropriately tuned. They'll probably err on the same side they did with Flex as it currently exists, where it's tuned to be easier on 25 than on 10 (assuming equal skill/gear for all players), but they will still need to make sure it's appropriately do-able on 10 and not faceroll on 25.
I think in this way the amount of resources they put into Mythic will be more justified.
I am the one who knocks ... because I need your permission to enter.
I believe they said they wished they had been able to implement Flex before LFR - not that they wish they never put LFR in.
I think they have this hope that Flex will remove the need for LFR. I don't see it happening though. Flex will never service the same percentage of the playerbase that LFR will.
The Nat Pagle rep took all of 5 minutes to design.With that logic you should open your eyes. How many % of wow population do you believe does the fishing world boss? How many % of the worlds population do you think do the daily nat pagle turn ins? How many % of wows population do you think do celestial tournament? How many % of the worlds population do you think did the warlock green fire quest line? How many % of wows population do you think completed all timeless isle achievements?
Step 1: Copy Nat Pagle and make him the Angler's quartermaster.
Step 2: Create 3 fishable quest items that give trivial exp. Oh, the quests are dailies.
Step 3: Set each one of them in their own water type and put their original drop rate to ignorantly low.
You seriously think those things take anything along the amount of time spent designing heroic raid bosses?
Actually, no.Everything in world of warcraft is designed to cater to a very small fraction of the population. By catering to the 1% x 100 they cater to 100%. That is how WoW worked for a long time.
Vanilla had most of the development pointed toward the individual player and small group. Raids came much later and were barely used by the playerbase.
TBC had quite a bit of stuff aimed at smaller groups and Karazhan, even though it stopped being relevant midway through TBC was still extremely popular by the end of TBC for heroic marks. Raiding, even though there was more of it was still not essentially the only thing to do. There were reps and dungeons and difficult heroics to tackle as a small group of guildies/friends.
Wrath had quite a bit of stuff to do, including various achievements to catch up aside from just raiding.
Failaclysm... eh, let's just skip this one.
MoP started out great but after 5.1, all we got was a few more scenarios (which give crap for gear progression). 5.2 gave us Thunder Isle, which was okay but the dailies were very Golden Lotus like. Too many per day and not random enough. Timeless Isle was okay for awhile but it really fades fast. The real meat and potatoes of MoP is raiding. Either you raid via LFR, Flex, Normal, Heroic or you.. go earn 50k more timeless coins?
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The patch was released 4 months ago.
Care to point out a single console/PC game that developers hope and pray will be relevant 4 months later without another DLC or content patch?
Just how much is your 50 cents a day supposed to provide you?
Netflix is 25 cents a day and I bet no one expects them to give them as much entertainment as WoW is expected to.
Last edited by Raeln; 2014-01-10 at 06:48 AM.
Well, answering this kinda late.
The most probable reasons is helping a friend, doing the legendary quest chain or them needing gear.
I have been 14/14H for over 2 months now, I am still rocking 3x i522 gear which I could theoretically upgrade in SoO LFR. Now, I do not give a shit about gear so I do not bother doing it, but some people care about gear, so it is highly possible that heroic raiders run LFR for gear.
Thats not how wow works at all; and adding up 100 things that 1% of people use..does not mean that 100% of people are satisfied with the game, it means 100% of the people are satisfied with 1% of the content, which is made up of 100 different parts. It still means the game was designed terribly and will fail instantly.
Going back to your questions, I would LOVE to see the statistical numbers for those, so I could gauge it if meets my expectations (including the moral comment I made..of if it was 1/5 or more ). Since neither you or I have those numbers on hand, its a rhetorical question is it not? And it doesnt help with your argument either.
How many chickens would log in during the Autumn Harvest Festival and hunt for the Turkinator achievement?
IF all of those examples you have...were 1% as per the example I was giving..then I would suggest those not be created either. In cases like the green fire though, and similar events, I never liked that it was tied to a quest line to begin with. Is the quest line interesting? Sure, to some folks im sure it is. And im sure others just want to blitz through it for the green fire. That entire situation could be solved by not creating an extravagant quest for the spell effects..and just make it an option from day 1 of the patch. Nobody would have argued against it...if nobody knew of the quest. They asked for green fire..not the quest chain; so that in essence, was a "bonus" for some, and a "hindrance" for others. The whole ordeal though...wouldnt have taken blizzard hours and hours to make, it would have been as simple as adding a glyph; something blizzard has shown to be possible before. Nothing on par with creating countless Heroic mode encounters, let alone a single fight.
not 7 mln. probably half of them doesn' care one bit about raiding. Lots of the other half is fine with just lfr/flex/normal.
It's not like everyone is raider actively trying to kill garrosh on hc. You cannot say it is just 16k out of 7mln who completed it and question difficulty of the encounter on it.
Yep, that's all they had to do to make heroic Immersius.
They absolutely did not need to hire/pay for two testing teams for both 10man and 25man to spend an undisclosed number of man hours playtesting that encounter before it was ever released.
I imagine some of the 10man team is rolled into the 25man team but if not, that's 35 salaries to pay who knows how many hours to playtest for each raid tier. Not counting the salaries of the team (read: more than 1 person) that creates and balances all the damage numbers for each ability the boss has and spreadsheets/sims that and the healing required/tank damage mitigated/avoided all out to determine what raid composition it takes to complete the script.
It's not like just 1 button pusher making minimum wage decides, "hey, let's just add two more blobs to Immersius and call it a day! Jim, you want to go to Subway for dinner?"
Last edited by Raeln; 2014-01-10 at 06:57 AM.
I am sorry, but need I point out that we are only about 4 months into the Siege.... these numbers are not quite accurate yet we should be waiting about 2 and a half more months before we judge the numbers.