How raids used to be article

[Vladar]

Look at what I found, one of the 1st articles that explain the old raids in wow. Now thats epic, it even mentions that you have to be certain bosses in order to face stronger ones, not the casual crap we have now were everybody needs to see 100% of the content. Enjoy:

http://web.archive.org/web/200411290...interview.html

---------- Post added 2012-12-31 at 10:49 PM ----------

My favorite part is this one:

That actually happens in every dungeon - not just the raid areas. I added Blackrock Depths to the current beta a while ago, and the testers went nuts. They said "This is the hardest dungeon ever. I can't believe how hard this is tuned. This is impossible. There is no way it can be done with a group of five."

So I posted on the forums and said, "Let me know how you feel about it in a week." Sure enough, a week later, groups of five were beating it. And now it's attacked regularly and beaten pretty easily. They'll figure it out, and I think knowledge is the best advantage that they can have. Plus, we can make higher-tiers harder just by playing with the numbers, and then players will have to ramp up in gear and resists to beat these higher challenges.

Today, if you wipe once in a dungeon the first time you enter it, the casuals will start crying.

[KCguy]

What is the point of this article exactly? It sounds like you're just mad because Blizzard made the game more accessible to it's subscribers. Which is how it should be. I get it, you miss the nostalgia of the "good ol days", but times have changed kiddo.

[Aquamonkey]

Today, if you wipe once in a dungeon the first time you enter it, the casuals will start crying.

That hasn't been my experience, even in LFD. The first week, people work together to figure out the dungeon. If there's a wipe, we try something different.

It's only after that initial "learning period" that people become unforgiving. They expect everyone to know the instance after a couple weeks and berate people who don't.

[Daetur]

Actually, a few things stand out to me about that article, namely that Blizzard seems to stand by very similar values to this day.

"You really have to give casual players and high-end guilds a variety of different ways to raid."
They always wanted to provide raid content to "casual" players.

"Then we decided that for some tiers, we wanted to force you to progress through lower-levels to get to higher ones. However, we didn't want to force you into a linear progression through the raid game. We tried to make the progression more natural, such as requiring you to defeat a lower-tier raid boss so you can acquire the power and equipment to fight a higher-tier one. "
They want players to gear up and gain equipment in order to progress to higher difficulties, but do not want to require linear progression from tier raid to tier raid.

"The fun of the encounter is going to be defeating the raid mission, not getting access to it in the first place. "
Blizzard places more value on players seeing or completing the raid than trying to get into it or access the content in the first place. This seems to be a very natural progression towards the current state of "attunement-less" raiding and LFR.


This all said, of course, clearly things have changed since then. But let's not get ahead of ourselves and think that Blizzard's values used to be all that different.



In regards to the BRD "THIS DUNGEON IS HARD" portion of your post, I think that says far more about the community than Blizzard's "changing" values and designs.
If you remember from waaay back then, we didn't have things like Wowhead, Mr.Robot, Simcraft, or other such information and optimization sites. Characters performed far below optimum output, and even Blizzard didn't have a good concept of proper toolkits for classes and a large set of viable specs and builds. We had to figure the fights out as we went, because we didn't have Fatboss and Tankspot videos or the Dungeon Journal.

It was a very, very different environment, and that's not entirely on Blizzard.
"They'll figure it out, and I think knowledge is the best advantage that they can have."
So many of the encounters we see lately are SO MUCH harder and more complex than anything we saw in classic. The difference is the availability of knowledge.

[Darsithis]

Today, if you wipe once in a dungeon the first time you enter it, the casuals will start crying.

Really? I did a heroic today, pulled two groups of those stupid Scarlet Treasurers, wiped us, and we all walked back in and finished it. No one said a word.

[tylenol]

I don't think when you wipe in dungeons the casuals are the ones who cry...

[Xeraxis]

WoW: made for casual players, still catering to casual players to this day. Seems to be working for them.

[Xothic]

Really? I did a heroic today, pulled two groups of those stupid Scarlet Treasurers, wiped us, and we all walked back in and finished it. No one said a word.

This, It's extremely rare for someone to actually speak in a Heroic, let alone complain about anything in my experience. At my you'll get someone say something akin to "Well, fuck." When we wipe, but beyond that, nothing.

[Soulstrike]

Really? I did a heroic today, pulled two groups of those stupid Scarlet Treasurers, wiped us, and we all walked back in and finished it. No one said a word.

they were consumed by the sha of happiness!!!!

@OP who cares if more people get accessed to raiding and dungeons -_- its what the game needs subscribers!!!!