High end raiding in huge decline?

[Celarent]

I just looked some facts and I found high end raiding isn't as popular anymore. Is content too hard or do WoW have much less subs nowadays?

In link above you can see about 5 and half months around 2000 guilds killed Kil'jaeden

You need to grab archives from a date.

In September 2008, about 5.5 months after 2.4's launch, only 233 guilds had downed Kil'jaeden.

Double the number seems pretty good for a game pushing thirteen years.

[Tiyr]

I will never understand why players with a massive throbbing hard on for geriatric-friendly WNBA-tier 10M raiding cannot even entertain the very real possibility that Mythic Gul'dan is likely a more difficult encounter. And who in their right fucking mind judges raid participation levels by the last fucking boss of the instance? If you're going to accuse me of intellectual dishonesty, at least have the decency to have an argument which makes sense.

First of all, potential difference in difficulty is the reason why I took time since world first, but sure we can instead look at time since instance opened to some of the earlier bosses.

Here is time from instance opening to second to last boss.

157 guilds are now 9/10 after 60 days, that's 3140 players.

In the same time there were 167 25-man guilds and 180 10-man guilds who were 12/13 in SoO, for a total of 5975 players.

...so now it even became a lot worse for your argument.

Oh you don't like that either? Fine, let's take half way through the instance.

There are 764 guilds who are 5/10, 15280 players. Basically in NH this how many is guilds who manages to kill two bosses that are more difficult than heroic bosses.

At this point there were 611 25-man guilds and 1942 10-man guilds who had killed Kor'kron Dark Shaman for 7/13, a total of 34695 players.

Congratulations, now it became still even worse for you.

Even if you were to not even count any 10-man kills at all, there were as many players who were 7/13 in 25-man then as there are 5/10 now, and more players in 25-man who were 12/13 then than there are now at 9/10, making your earlier argument of participation having "dramatically increased" still be complete bullshit.

Do you have any way at all to back up your claims, or are you going to stop pretending and admit that you are obviously completely full of shit?

[Shakou]

What's with the question mark in the title? There is no question that high end raiding participation is at an all time low.

[Relapses]

First of all, potential difference in difficulty is the reason why I took time since world first, but sure we can instead look at time since instance opened to some of the earlier bosses.

Here is time from instance opening to second to last boss.

157 guilds are now 9/10 after 60 days, that's 3140 players.

In the same time there were 167 25-man guilds and 180 10-man guilds who were 12/13 in SoO, for a total of 5975 players.

...so now it even became a lot worse for your argument.

Oh you don't like that either? Fine, let's take half way through the instance.

There are 764 guilds who are 5/10, 15280 players. Basically in NH this how many is guilds who manages to kill two bosses that are more difficult than heroic bosses.

At this point there were 611 25-man guilds and 1942 10-man guilds who had killed Kor'kron Dark Shaman for 7/13, a total of 34695 players.

Congratulations, now it became still even worse for you.

Even if you were to not even count any 10-man kills at all, there were as many players who were 7/13 in 25-man then as there are 5/10 now, and more players in 25-man who were 12/13 then than there are now at 9/10, making your earlier argument of participation having "dramatically increased" still be complete bullshit.

Do you have any way at all to back up your claims, or are you going to stop pretending and admit that you are obviously completely full of shit?

LMFAO, so your response to me calling you on the bullshit metric of using the last fucking boss of an instance to define raid participation levels is to go to the second-to-last boss? Did you graduate as valedictorian from the University of Shitty Arguments? Just so we're on the same page: My claim was never that participation levels between 10- and current 20M Mythic are the same. It's that if you eliminate 10M Heroic from the equation, raid participation has increased. And that's a good thing because nobody who actually enjoys raiding liked 10M Heroic anyway. (And before you go off accusing me of a No True Scotsman fallacy: The least of all being Blizzard, which is why they got rid of it.)

To wit: 10M Heroic was a mistake. It should have never existed. It was a mistake from the beginning and one of the worst things Blizzard ever did to raiding. Oh, what's that? I can already hear you furiously typing a response about how "logistics shouldn't be a factor in raiding" and "10M Heroic was more difficult than 25M anyway!" Guess what? You're wrong. Forcing Blizzard to tune encounters around two potential raid sizes resulted in two entire expansions worth of encounters which were inexorably at odds with one another, with endlessly fucking stupid "10 v 25M" debates on what constituted "real raiding." Speaking purely from the perspective of somebody who enjoys the quality of the raids Blizzard produces over the number of people completing the content, 20M is one of the best things Blizzard ever did for the game. You're welcome to disagree with me on this front but please don't try to disprove my position by spouting off nonsense about raid participation levels in the Special Olympics of Mythic raiding.

[Bonkura]

And that's a good thing because nobody who actually enjoys raiding liked 10M Heroic anyway.

How can you accuse people of talking bullshit when you throw around false statements like this?

"10M Heroic was more difficult than 25M anyway!" Guess what? You're wrong.

This is bullshit too. Some encounters were harder in 10M, some in 25M. Simple as that.

[Relapses]

How can you accuse people of talking bullshit when you throw around false statements like this?

Go ahead and read the sentence which followed that. I'll give you a hint: It's in parenthesis. If 10M Heroic raiding were sustainable, we'd still have it.

[Bonkura]

Nah, no point. You're either just looking to piss people off or you're just really that ignorant and believe your claims are true.

[mmocfd1b0ab5a3]

You need to grab archives from a date.

In September 2008, about 5.5 months after 2.4's launch, only 233 guilds had downed Kil'jaeden.

Double the number seems pretty good for a game pushing thirteen years.

Wasnt kiljaeden wing opened on May 20th, 2 months after patch 2.4

[Relapses]

This is bullshit too. Some encounters were harder in 10M, some in 25M. Simple as that.

Alright, since you're obviously following the tried-and-true method of not even bothering to read what I'm saying before responding to me: The point isn't that 10- or 25M was more difficult; it's that as long as parity exists, it lends itself to shitty fucking nerdraging about which version of the instance constitutes legitimate raiding. Having a single raid size tuned for endgame raiding is leaps and bounds more appropriate for the Mythic raiding scene since it eliminates such anal-retentive arguments from the equation.

[david0925]

When you can't support raiding with raiding and need to do world quests, 5 mans, and other forms of raiding to keep up with the curve (artifact power), you either have to
1. Cut raiding time/quit raiding altogether (what a lot of people are doing)
2. Increase play time (what most people are not willing to do because the playerbase has aged and cannot/will not dedicate more playtime)
3. Focus more on the main spec of your main character (which turns off any player that likes to progress their alts reasonably).

I personally play a lot and am enjoying mythic raiding still but can definitely emphasize with people that choose to quit highend raiding when the rewards you get from them (even when counting the satisfaction of beating them) doesn't outweigh the grind and the wipes it takes to get to them.

[Grimnakh]

Yet again the loud casual oriented players on MMO-Champion pretend like Legion isn't completely different from any previous iteration of this game.

WoW was made, launched and succeeded as a raiding-centric MMORPG. A player who wants character progression had to achieve it via more difficult in-game content, and said content had lockouts on it preventing those who had no other obligations from advancing at a rapid pace compared to those who did. Whether this was due to content limitations or game design choices is irrelevant, no one sensible was whining how they can only clear the raid once a week or the dungeon once a day unless they were revisiting old content to farm a mount or a pet.

You no longer need to do more difficult content to have more character progression. It's still theoretically the fastest way* if you're good enough, but there are people out there running around with 925 Draught of Souls from LFR and 10% damage increase legendaries which dropped from a world boss they can zerg with infinite other people. How much time you have to spend affects your character's progression far more critically in Legion than it ever did in a previous expansion. You can argue all you like about how much you love it and how it's amazing for the game or whatever else, but stop implying or outright stating that that's how the game always functioned. One mustn't tell lies.

Our wishes that the game returns to form have little to do with entitlement or inflated ego, we just want the game that we've been playing for the past decade+-.

*After they fixed the AP from extra chests nonsense that had us engaged in exciting spam of +2 and +3 keys.

WoW was not started as a raid centric mmorpg, raiding was anbonus at the end game few people did and most people barely thought about, it became a raid centric mmorpg. Which is fine, but youre just wrong.

[david0925]

WoW was not started as a raid centric mmorpg, raiding was anbonus at the end game few people did and most people barely thought about, it became a raid centric mmorpg. Which is fine, but youre just wrong.

However raiding was the only way you can progress your gear after you hit max level and did the dungeons, even with the terribly drop rates in both dungeons and raids. So if you look at it in terms of just power progression, Vanilla is actually a lot more linear than the latter expansions. Yes, you're still going to hit a gear wall and need to raid mythic/heroic content to absolutely maximize your character, but there are multiple paths to get there compared to Vanilla (which, other than a few crafted outliers, are all from raiding).

To this day I do not understand why they allow WF/TF to go beyond base Mythic level, but I guess "free upgrades are ok because everyone gets a chance at it" is ok.

[KrazyKraka0]

As a mythic raider myself I find the hardest thing to justify continuing to raid at that tier is the fact that i can get better gear from heroic / normal raids which require about 1/10th the effort. I'm in a 2 night raiding guild (5/10M) and its sad that we have to dedicate an entire night to doing heroic just because the majority of the upgrades our raiders need are from warforge / titanforged heroic items.

[Grimnakh]

When you can't support raiding with raiding and need to do world quests, 5 mans, and other forms of raiding to keep up with the curve (artifact power), you either have to
1. Cut raiding time/quit raiding altogether (what a lot of people are doing)
2. Increase play time (what most people are not willing to do because the playerbase has aged and cannot/will not dedicate more playtime)
3. Focus more on the main spec of your main character (which turns off any player that likes to progress their alts reasonably).

I personally play a lot and am enjoying mythic raiding still but can definitely emphasize with people that choose to quit highend raiding when the rewards you get from them (even when counting the satisfaction of beating them) doesn't outweigh the grind and the wipes it takes to get to them.

You can empathize with them thats fine, but more players would be harmed if they made raids completely self sufficient than would benefit, and Id rather Blizz put the needs of the many ahead of the few. End game raiding demands are fine for people that enjoy playing the game in more aspects than just raiding and participate in more of the game the way it should be.

[Deleted]

You can empathize with them thats fine, but more players would be harmed if they made raids completely self sufficient than would benefit

Except that's how this game existed for a long time. Who exactly got harmed during all this time?

[Niwes]

Yes. Encounters are becoming more and more complicated every tier. With removal of addon features like camera distance nerf, unit positions, friendly nameplates auras they should significantly reduce complexity of encounters to compensate.

ehrm no. plain and simple no.

first:

todays encounters (since MoP) are all pure movement encounters. no switches, no tactical simultaneity, no holding mobs in cc, and so on. blizzard simply switched to pure movement encounters, because its easier to design and easier to scale.

second:

you are wrong. since mop the encounters are not more and more difficult. the same basics, the same tactics, the same forgivingness, in LeiShen, Garrosh, Archimonde, Mannoroth, Blackhand, Higmaul, Guldan, Elisande, everywhere. Its literally the same thing with always the same difficulty level, because its just the movement and target swicthing that matters.

so no. imo you are massively wrong. look at statistics. showing the same.

[MooCowCat]

I don't think there is a decline, some people just can't do that kind of commitment. I have done semi hardcore raiding over the years off and on, but now i just feel to old to put energy into a game and would like to spend my time with quality of life. To do mythic raiding it takes a commitment and it is hard for most people to put that kind of effort into a video game. hell i know people that have played since BC and still can't do a rotation if their lives depended on it lol. But thats ok, i think it is great having all the different levels of play.

[Tiberria]

Sunwell is a a terrible model to use anyway, because back in TBC, they didn't have gear catchup mechanisms like have been introduced since WoTLK, where the previous raid tier essentially became obsolete as soon as the next raid was opened. In TBC, you literally had to progress directly through Kara/Gruul/Mag > SSC/TK > BT/Hyjal > SWP, and there were a lot of guilds continuing to progress through earlier raids even late in the expansion. That greatly reduced the number of guilds that were able to even step foot in SWP. The number raiding in TBC was a lot more, just a lot were stuck in earlier tiers.

You can however look at US end tier boss kills from WoTLK going forward to get somewhat of an idea.

WoTLK - 4000 H25 Lich King Kills = 5000 20 man Mythic equivalent
Cata - 445 H25 Madness kills, 2999 H10 Madness kills = 2056 20 man Mythic equivalent
MoP - 377 H25 Garrosh kills, 876 H10 Garrosh kills = 909 20 man Mythic equivalent
WoD - 808 M20 Archi kills

I didn't count 10 man LK kills, because they were a split lockout back then, and many guilds were killing both (and very few people in WoTLK considered 10 man a progression environment). From WoTLK > Cata > MoP > WoD, we went from 5000 > 2056 > 909 > 808 in terms of end tier progression clearing. We essentially lost close to 60% of the high end clearing raider base from WoTLK > Cata, then about another 60% from Cata > MoP. It continued to drop off from MoP to WoD, but at a much slower rate.

I think it's fair to say that high end raiding was certainly on a sleep decline from WoTLK to MoP, which continued, but was slowed down in WoD.

Now, there are 2220 US guilds that killed M Xavius. You can't really compare that to the expansion end bosses, because Xavius was a much easier boss than any of the end expansion bosses, and because there were only 7 bosses in EN, etc, etc. I also don't want to compare it to Imperator, because Imperator was a much more difficult boss than Xavius (or Cenarius). However, if you look at Ko'ragh kills in WoD, there were 1772 kills, and that is after the expansion was out for 2 years. There certainly appears to be some evidence of an uptick in Mythic raid participation in Legion, which isn't surprising given that we know sub numbers spiked up.

[Relapses]

Sunwell is a a terrible model to use anyway, because back in TBC, they didn't have gear catchup mechanisms like have been introduced since WoTLK, where the previous raid tier essentially became obsolete as soon as the next raid was opened. In TBC, you literally had to progress directly through Kara/Gruul/Mag > SSC/TK > BT/Hyjal > SWP, and there were a lot of guilds continuing to progress through earlier raids even late in the expansion. That greatly reduced the number of guilds that were able to even step foot in SWP. The number raiding in TBC was a lot more, just a lot were stuck in earlier tiers.

You can however look at US end tier boss kills from WoTLK going forward to get somewhat of an idea.

WoTLK - 4000 H25 Lich King Kills = 5000 20 man Mythic equivalent
Cata - 445 H25 Madness kills, 2999 H10 Madness kills = 2056 20 man Mythic equivalent
MoP - 377 H25 Garrosh kills, 876 H10 Garrosh kills = 909 20 man Mythic equivalent
WoD - 808 M20 Archi kills

I didn't count 10 man LK kills, because they were a split lockout back then, and many guilds were killing both (and very few people in WoTLK considered 10 man a progression environment). From WoTLK > Cata > MoP > WoD, we went from 5000 > 2056 > 909 > 808 in terms of end tier progression clearing. We essentially lost close to 60% of the high end clearing raider base from WoTLK > Cata, then about another 60% from Cata > MoP. It continued to drop off from MoP to WoD, but at a much slower rate.

I think it's fair to say that high end raiding was certainly on a sleep decline from WoTLK to MoP, which continued, but was slowed down in WoD.

Now, there are 2220 US guilds that killed M Xavius. You can't really compare that to the expansion end bosses, because Xavius was a much easier boss than any of the end expansion bosses, and because there were only 7 bosses in EN, etc, etc. I also don't want to compare it to Imperator, because Imperator was a much more difficult boss than Xavius (or Cenarius). However, if you look at Ko'ragh kills in WoD, there were 1772 kills, and that is after the expansion was out for 2 years. There certainly appears to be some evidence of an uptick in Mythic raid participation in Legion, which isn't surprising given that we know sub numbers spiked up.

The important thing to note is that 20M has proven to be far more sustainable for the Mythic raiding scene despite sub levels.

[Tiyr]

My claim was never that participation levels between 10- and current 20M Mythic are the same. It's that if you eliminate 10M Heroic from the equation, raid participation has increased.

Did you seriously not even pay any attention at all? Do you have some kind of mental disorder that forces you ignore facts, or are you actually acting like this willingly?

Again, from my last post, the number of guilds who had completed 5/10 (meaning you have managed to kill a whole two actual mythic bosses since the first three are so easy) on mythic was 764, in total 15280 players.

The number of guilds who at this point were 7/13 heroic SoO in 25-man only were 611, or 15275 players.

Wow, an increase of a massive 5 people! And that's if we follow your logic of not including any 10-man guilds at all in the SoO statistics, meaning the "Special Olympics" SoO 10-man guilds like Paragon, Exorsus, and so on.

Show me one single statistic that would in any way support your argument of participation having "dramatically increased" since SoO as you claimed here:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/showthre...5#post45095565

Just one, you can pick any statistic you want as long as you can prove it somehow. And no, you inventing it in your own delusional little mind does not count as proof.