Ulduar difficulty = why

[mrwingtipshoes]

You have fun without a challenge? then go play angry birds.

No, I'll play wow thanks. Fun and challenge do not require one another to work.

dude, don't hate on ICC, and TOC only happened because time didn't allow them to do the troll dungeon that they wanted to do. What do you think that castle at the top of ZD was for?

---------- Post added 2012-02-14 at 01:58 PM ----------

and Wow is supposed to offer both, and there is both. Wrath offered BOTH, cata did not, it was a crap fest of trying to offer one or the other. dungeons should be a faceroll, and raids would be.. not

Supposed to be both by who? Who decides that? You the almighty forum poster, the voice of the vocal minority? Just because YOU think it should be both does not mean its "supposed to be" the only people can decide that are BLIZZARD and their game designers.

Stop trying to force YOUR choices and opinions down everyones throat.

[Tinyknight]

In my opinion, the introduction of current quality loot from heroics has had more of an impact on the raiding scene than the reletive difficulty of the raids themselves.

Under the TBC model (at least until 2.4) you could get starter raid gear from heroics, but to progress to T5 you really needed to be mostly T4, to progress to T6 you really needed to be mostly T5 (even without the attunements.)

Under the current model as soon as 4.3 came out you could easily get T11 quality loot from Heroics and even T12 loot (at a slower rate). In the short run this is great, everyone gets to jump straight into Firelands, sure the T11 raids became obsolete overnight, but who cares? we've got a shiny new raid to play with.

Unfortunately in the long run this model causes problems, both TBC and Wrath had a long drag with no new raids in the run up to the next expansion, but for me the TBC "drag" didn't feel like one because when Sunwell came out I was just starting BT and Hyjal, we had two whole tiers to work through before Wrath, and we were one of the top guilds on our server, there were plenty of guilds still working through SSC, TK, even Kara when 2.4 hit.

People complain about "nothing to do" these days, and a big part of that is because fully 2/3 of the expansions raids have been rendered obsolete by the constant upgrades to badge loot.

Now I will concede the TBC model did prevent too many people from seeing Illidan, so we need to strike a balance between "everyone sees everything" (and hence have nothing to do) and "only the best see everything" (so most people have stuff to do, but miss out on a lot of stuff too).

[davesurfer]

You have fun without a challenge? then go play angry birds.

dude, don't hate on Angry Birds! have you cleared the game on all stars and challenges? hmmm? Me thinks Angry Birds is harder than a full Ulduar clear

[Palisis]

How do I not know the value of money? I'm the customer here, not Blizzard's money grabbing suit.

Because you like to pay (and want others to pay) for what you don't get and what 5% got to see. Try reading the quote someone is quoting you on, so that you can make a more educated response.

And no, hardmodes are not a good idea. I did them from Ulduar to FL, but doing the same crap all over again is just not fun or exciting.

Ok, then, you don't want to raid? I don't follow your pov on this 2-sentence response. You say you dont want to do the raid boss fights because 'its just not 'exciting', yet you were content in Vanilla doing the same dungeons? Your logic is flawed.

---------- Post added 2012-02-14 at 06:49 PM ----------

sorry, TLDR but i did read some of your points, and the reason stuff worked out in vanilla/tbc was that if you could clear older content, you could do the new content. if you couldnt do the older content, why would you want to go for the new content anyways? it didnt matter to anyone wether you couldnt enter the newest raid as 1st on realm, because you still often had stuff to do in the old raid, wich also prolonged the life of ALL content. when naxxramas came out in vanilla, most of my friends were still ok with running mc/onyxia/first bosses of bwl and progressing on the newer ones, the sheer amount of content made sure they would never run out of it. and it's not like the bosses were surprisingly hard or anything, i even tagged up on some of their raids on my alts, they were happy with the content not being dumbed down to them, but rather forcing them to learn in order to actually see the content. even if they wouldnt ever learn, they could still see ENOUGH of content for them to be happy with the game. with cataclysm, each tier has had a proper gear reset, and made the older raids totally irrelevant, reducing the actual amount of content each tier. why would you bother with tier 11 raids when newer heroics give you instant access to tier 13? - i for certainly wouldnt, especially when there'd be noone running it.

Im not sure what you're talking about regarding 'reason it worked in vanilla'... You'd want to do the new content because it was new. It's more exciting to do the new thing. Same is true of sports and other forms of entertainment. Most ppl are talking and engaged in the 'new'. The ONLY reason people were doing the older stuff is because there was a barrier of entry. They weren't 'happy' to be doing old stuff. Its all they could do and at that point the game, it was still relatively new either way. So now, you can take your undergeared toon (for those who weren't actively playing before a patch drop) or alts (if youve already cleared) into heroics to get them caught up. Its healthier for the guild/raids to be able to bring in gear-ready toons as opposed to spending months on old content people dont care to do.

[Brett Skullcrack]

Because you like to pay (and want others to pay) for what you don't get and what 5% got to see.

I get it just as much as everyone else, I can get to see it just as much as everyone else if I have what it takes to get there. The content is added to the game which everyone can play as much as they want, that's how subscriptions work. If you want your money to pay only precisely for what you do in the game, then you obviously want a game with minute based charging and entrance fees to all instances.

I don't see the problem with content that only 5% of people see as long as the remaining 95% also have content. I chose to play in a certain way, I got my money's worth. Other people decided they wanted to play 5+ days per week and organize 40 people and Blizzard provided those people with content to fill their play times too, all the way to the very top 5% of them. That's a company that truly cared about it's customers and went to extreme lengths to make sure everyone had content -- that company died when WoW's popularity exploded.

Ok, then, you don't want to raid? I don't follow your pov on this 2-sentence response. You say you dont want to do the raid boss fights because 'its just not 'exciting', yet you were content in Vanilla doing the same dungeons? Your logic is flawed.

It's not that hard to understand if you just try a little. In vanilla all I wanted to do (and had time for) was 5 mans, I was perfectly happy with the content provided then. In TBC I decided I wanted to raid, I was happy with the content provided then. Now I would like to raid, but I'm not happy with the content and the raiding model. It doesn't provide me with the kind of progression raiding experience that TBC did and what I enjoyed.

[Kevyne-Shandris]

The game should be accessible with challenging hard modes available for those who want to pursue them, which is what we have in DS and probably is what we're going to continue to get in MoP.

The game has HMs already.

It's not that challenge folks are arguing about (because HMs are a challenge), it's more like they're suffering from the "hurry up and wait" syndrome. They want the content to hurry up and "get here", burn through it to the point they hit a wall (like HMs), then upset they have nothing else to do.

They want content to last to satisfy them, but if the pace is hurry, hurry there's little content that can be reasonably be made to fulfill that thirst.

When upset they look across the pasture at what others are enjoying. The so-called casual is enjoying goofing off in dungeons and trade chat. Their enjoyment upsets them and it's now the casuals the enemy, "How can they be happy and I can't be??!!"

I have never seen a real casual player feel entitled to stuff, as they're happy in what they do have. I do see raiders racing through content screaming that weapon is entitled to them, though. So that premise that casuals feel entitled is off.

Complaints about access to content is a major one with casuals, though. LFR is offering it, but at the same time I feel Blizzard has fallen into the hype that "casual=bad", which for casuals who do try, they too get stuck with those who have no business being in LFR (they're not ready for raiding; or playing roles they have no business playing [Spriest queuing as a healer doing 15k dps and 3k HPS]).

So the complaints are all over the map, and not just one thing that is causing problems.

[Lolercaust]

If you don't you are not as good as you want to make us believe.
Those that care about achievements look at achievements and that should be enough for everyone.
If someone is bragging about something they didn't do (very common in Vanilla) achievements shut them up.
You have proof of how awesome you are with achievements.

If that proof is not good enough for you because not everyone one looks at achievements that you just showed me I was right about what type of player you are.

That wasn't even my point. My point is that no matter what difficulty you killed Deathwing on, you still killed Deathwing. The people complaining don't care about difficulty levels, or worthless achievements, they care about actually killing a boss, a big bad guy. There's nothing big or bad about LFR Spine or Madness or any of the other fights.

You clearly have a hard time discerning different content from different difficulty.
5-10 mans is not the same content as 10+ raids.
Also how many 10 only content was in Vanilla or BC?
How many fresh 5 mans appeared in Vanilla or BC in end game in post launch patches?

I just gave examples of content in vanilla and TBC that were geared towards a demographic that prefers a lower difficulty. What's wrong with multiple difficulties for raids specifically? Because when you have multiple settings you no longer have a raid against inhabitants of a persistent world, you have a projector room where you kill holograms that get stronger when you turn a knob.

Lol at comparing direct actions that players have towards you with actions that players you don't know or interact have this game...
A player insulting you or being rude to you is not the same as a player you don't even know exists killing deathwing in LFR while you do it in heroic.
If you are as good as you seem that you don't do LFD or LFR so you don't interact with those rude players.

Also people are rude not because an easy access to content but because (due to croos realm interaction and easy realm transfers) anonymity is starting to reign supreme in this part of the game. Its the same reason people are rude in the internet and when they are driving.

You don't win this game (aside from pvp) against other players its called PVE for a reason you are fighting against "environment" if you want challenge you have access to it at your preferred difficulty.

I don't see what's so interesting in wanting to block content to other players, I really don't. Specially when this doesn't affects you directly...

It was a bad example, I admit, but my point stands.
You win this game by defeating all of the bosses, of a raid, of a tier, of an entire expansion, whatever your metric is. If everyone defeats all of the bosses, then everyone wins. That isn't fun in an MMORPG. In a single-player game there's nothing wrong with that because players are totally separate from one another.

Nobody is talking about blocking content. We just want a return to the raiding style that gave us a long progression model that didn't consist entirely of running the same raid again on a higher difficulty (which isn't progression btw, it's just the aforementioned hologram phenomenon). In that model, there was not a single person that was blocked from accessing any of the available content, raid content or otherwise. The only times content has ever been blocked in WoW's history were 1) in TK where Blizzard made KT impossible (intentionally, I suspect) 2) in SWP with the three gates 3) ICC with wings that opened over time. In all of those cases, content was blocked for all players. There has never been a point in WoW's history where content has been blocked in the way you are suggesting.

[Kevyne-Shandris]

Nobody is talking about blocking content. We just want a return to the raiding style that gave us a long progression model that didn't consist entirely of running the same raid again on a higher difficulty

Think about this: if only 1.5% of the raid guilds are reporting they downed HM Deathwing, does it justify the man hours and money to sastisfy so little?

When fishing became a challenge the game design went funky. Not everything all the time needs to be complicated to hold interest.

Ulduar style raid may not be popular now because an increasingly harder raid could turn players off. 4.2 with FL it showed players wouldn't even try it until it was nerfed. If they hit "the wall" (or even percieve they can only do 4 bosses out of 8) they may go, "why bother". The success of LFR is that they can complete it all like a heroic dungeon. Tasting that, it'll be difficult to go back to eating cereal again.

I don't personally mind raid progression like that, but pointing out the reality of how raiding is now. FL showed what can happen when players are hit either by a roadblock or even perception of difficulty.

[Fetacheese]

Don't forget that people continued to raid Ulduar on a regular basis while TOC was still in the process of coming out. It was one of the only raids where you could still have fun while slightly overgearing it.

[Hozer]

I would like to agree as far as the "clicking a button for hard mode". I thought it was awesome how you had to do something during the fight to activate hard mode; like killing the heart on XT. Friends i occasionally go there cause its really fun. The thing i did not like was all the sets, so many sets came out very close together; it seemed like i got a full set then boom had to replace it.

[turbe]

Make the game harder.
The subscriptions kept on rising and rising when the game was challenging.
Now that it went to spoonfeeding gear to incompetent meatsacks, they lost almost 2 million.

[Markluzz]

Then don't do LFR, simple as that. From a developer's point of view, it's completely natural that you don't want 99% of people who are playing your game missing out on the current central theme of the game. That's retarded, why would you want to do that? To make some 1% happy? How does that make any sense?

You have to consider: it may not be an issue for yourself to say, oh well, the raid won't go away, I'll see it later when I massively overgear it or when the level cap gets raised ... but you can't sell the game that way to a majority.

You can't constantly put people off every single content patch. You can't give players the feeling that you're fobbing them off with second-hand, out of date content, in favor of some ominous 1% nobody actually knows personally/cares about. And, to makes things worse: that 1% that insults you and for some reason calls you a scrub, n00b, idiot, lowbob, failure etc. on every occasion and gives you the fault for several things they think are going wrong with the game.

Like, hey, here's patch 6.7, the Rise of the Skullreaving Powermongers, and we've got this new raid with 12 bosses and unique raid mechanics and stunning scenery and the new T19 set and what not ... oh, yeah, well, it isn't actually anything you can do right now, maybe in a few months, OK? Gotta let the big boys play now ... you get the idea.

That's not gonna work, certainly isn't what you want to communicate to your player base as a developer, and it makes no sense whatsoever anyway. And it DIDN'T work in the past - anyone who's been around in Vanilla and isn't totally self-absorbed and mindlessly nostalgic should remember this.

Back then, that was a huge topic, people were constantly bitching how they didn't have anything to do in the game for countless months and literally everything that got implemented was solely catered to the hardcore gaming clientele. And, may I say, rightfully so, because that's how WoW was back then, they really did a great job in neglecting the majority of their player base.

I also don't really get this "oh, I never cleared Ulduar but I'm actually happy about it 'cause there's something sooo mystical about missing out" attitude. Whatever works for you, dude, but I can assure you you're the minority here.

I also think many hardcore players aren't aware that regarding raid content, the attention span of a "normal" person is probably a lot shorter than their own. If you're not this highly dedicated dude who wants to be the best and really wants to beat this super-ass-hard boss and gets completely absorbed by it until he's finally done it ... chances are, you're gonna get bored. That's a personal source of motivation that keeps you going, but "normal" people don't have that, they're not trying to prove something to themselves or anybody else. They just wanna be entertained. And after a while they'll want a change of scenery and new content, even if they didn't clear the current one. It doesn't make sense to make raid content so hard that people would need weeks and months of practice to achieve some slow progress. It doesn't work that way for the wide public.

For example, it doesn't work for myself any more. I can't get my teeth into a raid dungeon like I used to. There's so much stuff happening in life, you know, adult matters, work, all the "life" stuff that's pretty engaging, and with time, I noticed how games don't really matter any more. It's child's play, really. You do it for fun and in your spare time, but you don't challenge your capacities with them - that's something you do in real life and in real-life endeavours and plans and stuff. I kind of turned into a normal, casual guy and understood, if you get what I mean.

I think the truth is: the 20 year old, intelligent, but aimless, capable, but free of real responsibility, college/basement guy who has a lot of energy and motivation for competing in video games may be a majority on MMO champ, but actually a minority amongst the WoW player base. And actually it's obvious - those 10.2 millions - that has to be a whole lot of different people and probably the smallest part of them are dedicated hardcore gamers.

So, if I'm a developer and I'm doing this huge, really cool raid and i put it out and nobody really clears it and I put out another one and it's the same thing again because apparently people just can't handle it - hell, then I'm gonna make it easier. It's as simple as that. Should I stave them off and say, oh, they'll outgear it someday? No, I want them to go in there and play my damn game.

Making the "normal" modes relatively easy and implementing a "heroic" mode for the few dedicated ones is actually the only senseful way to do it.

Sadly you are on MMO-Champs and 90% of the posters here like to qq at whatever they can that has to do with blizzard, whether they admit it or not

[coldbear]

Seeing first Yogg and then Algalon was a huge motivator for me.

If I'd seen both on the first week of tries I'd have quit WoW long before I did.

What people need and what they say they want are two different things.

[Kevyne-Shandris]

The subscriptions kept on rising and rising when the game was challenging.

Only when WoW was the "only game in town" and flooding Wal-Mart with boxes. Other games didn't, and the rest is history.

It wasn't challenging that brought people into WoW, it's because it was available to any kid on the street and could run it on their PIII/laptop even.

Game anymore "challenging" than that -- say EQ2 -- is reduced to a niche game of those who could afford the newer computers and preferred the EQ MMO model.

[Twilightdawn]

We need to make the game harder? Yeah no. I've already left because they are making it way to easy to get gear, but at the same time making the time investment just stupidly long (outside of badge gear of course). Raiding was awful in cata. By far, the worst I've ever seen. Nothing unique. Boring. Never bothered to learn fights because I didn't need to know the fights, and the raid themselves were so short.


/shudder.. Huge waste of money. :/

... Really? HOW on earth would you know if a fight was boring if you never bothered to learn it or try it, its amazing how close minded people can be

[namelessone]

Make the game harder.
The subscriptions kept on rising and rising when the game was challenging.
Now that it went to spoonfeeding gear to incompetent meatsacks, they lost almost 2 million.

They lost 2 million after they INCREASED the difficulty. Woops.

[Palisis]

I get it just as much as everyone else, I can get to see it just as much as everyone else if I have what it takes to get there. The content is added to the game which everyone can play as much as they want, that's how subscriptions work. If you want your money to pay only precisely for what you do in the game, then you obviously want a game with minute based charging and entrance fees to all instances.

I don't see the problem with content that only 5% of people see as long as the remaining 95% also have content. I chose to play in a certain way, I got my money's worth. Other people decided they wanted to play 5+ days per week and organize 40 people and Blizzard provided those people with content to fill their play times too, all the way to the very top 5% of them. That's a company that truly cared about it's customers and went to extreme lengths to make sure everyone had content -- that company died when WoW's popularity exploded.

It's fine and dandy if you don't see a problem with it, but just how 'thats how subscriptions work', if there's little-to-no audience for the service, it gets altered or canceled.

It's not that hard to understand if you just try a little. In vanilla all I wanted to do (and had time for) was 5 mans, I was perfectly happy with the content provided then. In TBC I decided I wanted to raid, I was happy with the content provided then. Now I would like to raid, but I'm not happy with the content and the raiding model. It doesn't provide me with the kind of progression raiding experience that TBC did and what I enjoyed.

Try a little to what? Understand a random stranger that didn't make his point clear? Im happy you were happy back then; it's quite evident others weren't. Can you explain the kind of progression you enjoyed? Specifically, I mean.

[Brett Skullcrack]

It's fine and dandy if you don't see a problem with it, but just how 'thats how subscriptions work', if there's little-to-no audience for the service, it gets altered or canceled.

You're saying WoW had little or no audience? They made sure their whole playerbase had content, including the 5% that went into huge lengths to clear the hardest content. They don't do that anymore.

Im happy you were happy back then; it's quite evident others weren't. Can you explain the kind of progression you enjoyed? Specifically, I mean.

I'd say that it's quite evident people were happy back then but are not happy now. Back then subscription numbers kept growing by the millions, now their dropping by the millions.

[Tomana]

I'd say that it's quite evident people were happy back then but are not happy now. Back then subscription numbers kept growing by the millions, now their dropping by the millions.

Because the game evolved, and because the playerbase changed. Subscriptions being stationary does not mean there aren't any new players coming
(Also, because even WoW vanilla was less grindy than EQ and Lineage )

[Palisis]

You're saying WoW had little or no audience?

Not what I said at all. 5% is little-to-no-audience. Now 100% can see the content and choose the difficulty.

They made sure their whole playerbase had content, including the 5% that went into huge lengths to clear the hardest content. They don't do that anymore.

Content is more accessible now. Heroics are still available so they are still in the game. So, sure they had a million+ loss, doesn't necessarily mean it has anything to do with the heroics raids, lack thereof, or lack of content.