Why is Exclusive content a bad thing to some people?

[Tomana]

Not true at all. I picked up the game after a long hiatus in around patch 2.4, and between badge gear, Magister's Terrace, Karazhan/Gruuls/ZA PuGs...I was able to get myself into a Sunwell raiding guild within a month of account reactivation.

Yeah, because they removed attunements ("zomg blizz catering to casualz zomg QQ" (c) ). Before that, getting into BT/MH was way more complicated.

[yjmark]

Stuck for an expansion? Quite an stretch. Even the durpy guild I was in back then was able to go into Gruul's Lair and clear that. Still, how is better that your entire playerbase is stuck in the current tier of raids in LFR?

Gruul's was T4, and not even the final one. Also, being stuck in the most current tier until the next one comes out = variety. Being stuck in a single tier for an entire expansion = no variety.

[fangless]

Gruul's was T4, and not even the final one. Also, being stuck in the most current tier until the next one comes out = variety. Being stuck in a single tier for an entire expansion = no variety.

Assume you meant Karazhan, but even then, how are you stuck in it? The rest of it was there to do. The entire expansion was there to do.

I would say that being stuck in a trainer raid for months, especially with no sense of progression at all, isn't any better than the former.

Yeah, because they removed attunements ("zomg blizz catering to casualz zomg QQ" (c) ). Before that, getting into BT/MH was way more complicated.

Not complicated, you just had to do all the tiers before it, heck, you didn't even have to full clear them. Nowadays that's basically expected anyway, for any non-lfr raiding players, that you've done the rest before moving on. It's just a small RPG thing that was interesting, and brought more life to the game than we have now.

[LeperHerring]

subs will continue to drop because the game is old, but without lfr or lfd it would have been far, far worse.

Or maybe it would've grown to 20 million subs, there's certainly enough gamers and the market keeps growing. The reality is that nobody knows what the impact of LFR/LFD was exactly on the whole, although you can sample from the individual experiences of people to get some kind of view.

[Harmann]

How was it perfect when a vast majority of the raiding playerbase were stuck at T4 for the entire expansion?

I do agree that things move a bit too fast nowadays. But I don't think TBC was good either.

I think the keys and attunements of T5 was handled poorly, but I don't remember anything like you described with lots of people stuck on T4. A lot of people were still running Karazhan towards the end of TBC, but I think that's more a matter of how good the zone was and how little the item levels inflated over the course of the expansion. Your alts would be running Kara and ZA with the lucky odd Hyjal/BT run, while your main was in Sunwell. I was still doing Kara/ZA on my main at the end of TBC despite being in nearly full Sunwell gear. That's a testament to how fun and enjoyable the zones were. Ulduar had slightly similar appeal in WotLK.

There's nothing wrong with 1st tier gear still being desirable by newer players, especially the the ENTIRE expansion only saw item levels go from 115 to 154. Now, we practically see spreads of that magnitude within a single tier...ie: a Kara/ZA/badge geared player was actually a better Sunwell candidate than a LFR/valor geared player would be now for Heroic modes.

If the content is challenging, and the loot is progressing your character, and there's lots of folks to party up with...is there really such a problem with what tier it happens to be in?

[alduron]

I think the keys and attunements of T5 was handled poorly, but I don't remember anything like you described with lots of people stuck on T4. A lot of people were still running Karazhan towards the end of TBC, but I think that's more a matter of how good the zone was and how little the item levels inflated over the course of the expansion. Your alts would be running Kara and ZA with the lucky odd Hyjal/BT run, while your main was in Sunwell.

There's nothing wrong with 1st tier gear still being desirable by newer players, especially the the ENTIRE expansion only saw item levels go from 115 to 154. Now, we practically see spreads of that magnitude within a single tier...ie: a Kara/ZA/badge geared player was actually a better Sunwell candidate than a LFR/valor geared player would be now for Heroic modes.

If the content is challenging, and the loot is progressing your character, and there's lots of folks to party up with...is there really such a problem with what tier it happens to be in?

Well when you initially had to kill the final bosses in TK and SSC 25 times to progress because they only dropped one vial each, that kinda sucked. Fortunately that got changed to dropping one for everyone on the quest. As for people still running kara even at the end, that was due to farming chanting mats, gold, and badges.

Oh, and 115--->154 is like a 35% increase. Tanks went from about 12k health at entry level to around 22k in full t6/SWP gear.

[Osmeric]

Or maybe it would've grown to 20 million subs, there's certainly enough gamers and the market keeps growing. The reality is that nobody knows what the impact of LFR/LFD was exactly on the whole, although you can sample from the individual experiences of people to get some kind of view.

There is no evidence that leaving the game without LFD/LFR would have had a positve effect. Those features were added for good reasons, driven by in-game stats. All new MMO-like games are forced to add something like LFD (GW2 is adding it now, I understand.)

[Harmann]

Well when you initially had to kill the final bosses in TK and SSC 25 times to progress because they only dropped one vial each, that kinda sucked. Fortunately that got changed to dropping one for everyone on the quest. As for people still running kara even at the end, that was due to farming chanting mats, gold, and badges.

Oh, and 115--->154 is like a 35% increase. Tanks went from about 12k health at entry level to around 22k in full t6/SWP gear.

Item level scales exponentially, so 10 ilvl is always more or less the same percentage gain in character power. Doesn't matter if you're going from 74 to 84 (Rank 14 to C'thun weapons) or going from 512 to 522.

[LeperHerring]

There is no evidence that leaving the game without LFD/LFR would have had a positve effect. Those features were added for good reasons, driven by in-game stats. All new MMO-like games are forced to add something like LFD (GW2 is adding it now, I understand.)

Except that when it (and the 10/25/easy/hard) wasn't in the game the subs grew every quarter. That's not proof of course, but there's no proof of LFD/LFR having a positive effect either.

[yjmark]

I think the keys and attunements of T5 was handled poorly, but I don't remember anything like you described with lots of people stuck on T4. A lot of people were still running Karazhan towards the end of TBC, but I think that's more a matter of how good the zone was and how little the item levels inflated over the course of the expansion. Your alts would be running Kara and ZA with the lucky odd Hyjal/BT run, while your main was in Sunwell.

I think many people have a hard time remembering TBC. It is true that a vast majority of raiders did not ever get past T4. That is exactly why WotLK had the easiest raids in the game (not including LFR), and faster catch up mechanisms. Blizz saw that many people were getting frustrated at not being able to progress between tiers.

The people who raided Sunwell during TBC were a huge miniority within the game. If you happened to be one of those people, then kudos to you. However, that was not common place at all.

EDIT- And for the record, I think exclusive content is a good thing - in moderation.

[Ronduwil]

Item level scales exponentially, so 10 ilvl is always more or less the same percentage gain in character power. Doesn't matter if you're going from 74 to 84 (Rank 14 to C'thun weapons) or going from 512 to 522.

Yes, as a percentage of the highest of the two ilevels that you're comparing, but if you normalize everything in terms of the latest ilevel, the percentages no longer work out to be the same. To illustrate:

Exponential sequence - 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512

Your claim:

Percentage stat gain for the 10th entry: 512 - 256 / 512 = 256 / 512 = 50%
Percentage stat gain for the 9th entry: 256 - 128 / 256 = 128 / 256 = 50%

However, if you're going to compare both percentages you need to consider that the latest "tier" raises the maximum stat from 256 to 512 and normalize your results accordingly. When you do that:

Percentage stat gain for the 10th entry: 512 - 256 / 512 = 256 / 512 = 50%
Percentage stat gain for the 9th entry: 256 - 128 / 512 = 128 / 512 = 25%

Percentages are tricky beasts and are often used to mislead. If you're going to compare percentages they need to be percentages of the same thing. In this case you need to compare the differences between tiers in terms of the maximum stats for the current tier, not in terms of the maximum stats for each tier. When you calculate them that way they don't work out to be the same at all.

[Harmann]

Yes, as a percentage of the highest of the two ilevels that you're comparing, but if you normalize everything in terms of the latest ilevel, the percentages no longer work out to be the same. To illustrate:

Exponential sequence - 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512

Your claim:

Percentage stat gain for the 10th entry: 512 - 256 / 512 = 256 / 512 = 50%
Percentage stat gain for the 9th entry: 256 - 128 / 256 = 128 / 256 = 50%

However, if you're going to compare both percentages you need to consider that the latest "tier" raises the maximum stat from 256 to 512 and normalize your results accordingly. When you do that:

Percentage stat gain for the 10th entry: 512 - 256 / 512 = 256 / 512 = 50%
Percentage stat gain for the 9th entry: 256 - 128 / 512 = 128 / 512 = 25%

Percentages are tricky beasts and are often used to mislead. If you're going to compare percentages they need to be percentages of the same thing. In this case you need to compare the differences between tiers in terms of the maximum stats for the current tier, not in terms of the maximum stats for each tier. When you calculate them that way they don't work out to be the same at all.

I'm not sure I follow what you mean here.

We're trying to just look at a pure and simple 13 ilvl increase, and I'm just saying that as far as I'm aware...13 ilvls always represents a similar percentage boost in gear power. So you've got n and n+13, and regardless of whether n is 150 or 900, when you add 13, you've increased the stats of that gear by roughly the same percentage in both cases; whether it's 150 to 163, or 900 to 913.

[Lumineus]

Assume you meant Karazhan, but even then, how are you stuck in it? The rest of it was there to do. The entire expansion was there to do.

You assume incorrectly. Gruul and Magtheridon were part of T4. You basically just said "it's OK if you can't make it in Ulduar/Firelands, you can 'progress' from Naxxramas/BWD to Sartharion and Malygos/To4W and BoT." Which is a meaningless distinction, as they are also part of the same tier.

[Aquamonkey]

You assume incorrectly. Gruul and Magtheridon were part of T4. You basically just said "it's OK if you can't make it in Ulduar/Firelands, you can 'progress' from Naxxramas/BWD to Sartharion and Malygos/To4W and BoT." Which is a meaningless distinction, as they are also part of the same tier.

If you are progressing, you aren't stuck regardless of how slow or what tier it is.

[Lumineus]

It is when the argument you are trying to make revolves around your guild not being "stuck in Tier 4" because "we killed Gruul!"

[khalltusk]

From a business POV its also madness to let everyone consume the content the 1st day its available in LFR.

LFR will be improved by making it less and less appealing compared to flexiraids.

Although Blizz stated that they currently have no plans to remove tier-sets from LFR, they sure will make some changes in the next expansion.

I do agree, I think the staggering of LFR release helps a lot in this regard and in fact it does work you can't clear all the content in LFR on day 1 its impossible as its not released. The issue is several months down the line i guess when its all available. They will make some further improvements to the raiding system overall which will help. They won't remove anything from LFR unless its a major negative. Flex/normal etc will get new additions to lure people into doing them which is a good idea.

[Flower Milk]

There's nothing at all wrong with it. In the end though it's an economics and design argument.

The obvious example is raiding content. Blizzard gets to make the call on whether or not to develop it and how much time and effort to sink into it. When 'raiding' as content was difficult to get into, i.e. more exclusive if you will, eventually it became difficult to justify the costs of creating it given the number of people doing it.

So they made a decision that if they could get more people into it in one form or another by making it less difficult--less exclusive--they could justify allocating more to it.

The move to make content 'less exclusive' is the natural result of a future in which it appears as if the game population will continue to shrink due to a number of factors. One can safely assume that exclusive content that is resource heavy to develop and which ends up having not much of an audience will be cut. That applies to raiding, PVP or any content really.

So the decision is really to make things accessible as a justification to keep them running or to keep certain things exclusive and if they fail to attract an audience cut them out.

This is the main point that the interview with the LOL content designer missed. Blizzard needs to make economic justifications for what they do because the nature of their game is simply more complicated than League of Legends with a lot more variety in content and moving parts.

I don't get this, because they had more subscribers in BC, and less people doing all of the content. Those people were all paying the same $15 a month and there were more of them, so they had the money to develop the content whether people saw it or not, the same amount of money was still there, in fact, even more money than (presumably) now.

---------- Post added 2013-06-18 at 03:25 AM ----------

Your babble here indicates that those players had nothing else to do, and that raiding was the only end game content to play with. You indicate that it was not economically smart for them to "exclude" millions of players, yet you cant explain why players continued to shell money at blizzard into the hundreds of millions as subscriptions continued to rise.

They continued to shell money at Blizzard because it took so much time and effort to reach the "exclusive" content that it kept people playing. This is how a P2P model works, and this is how it should be done. If they just want to have a model where they release content, and people devour it in a small time window and then unsub until new content comes out, they should consider either going B2P or F2P. Because you cannot sustain a population in a P2P game with a "see it and leave" style content model, P2P models are purposefully time consuming for this very reason. To keep people playing.

[Nobleshield]

Here's an interesting thought. What if you had the TBC model but without having specific raids being 25-only (i.e. the Wrath thru current style where you can choose 10 or 25)? Now bear in mind that I did not play TBC (I didn't even start playing until Patch 3.3) but it seems like having to have 25 people would have been a larger factor than attunements (although attunements seem pretty bad too) in why so many guilds were stuck in Kara until Wrath.

While I haven't played TBC I did play Rift for a while and that has a similar tier style (no attunements though, but there are strict gear/stat requirements for the tiers so it's similar). What screwed my raiding intentions more than anything else was just not having 20 people (not even getting into whether or not they were skilled enough) to do the 20-man raids, and only being able to run the 10-man raid (which was only 4 bosses to boot). I imagine it might have been similar in TBC where you could do Kara (and later ZA) with 10 but then you needed to find 15 other people who were attuned/geared/skilled to even attempt the other raids.

[Harmann]

Here's an interesting thought. What if you had the TBC model but without having specific raids being 25-only (i.e. the Wrath thru current style where you can choose 10 or 25)? Now bear in mind that I did not play TBC (I didn't even start playing until Patch 3.3) but it seems like having to have 25 people would have been a larger factor than attunements (although attunements seem pretty bad too) in why so many guilds were stuck in Kara until Wrath.

While I haven't played TBC I did play Rift for a while and that has a similar tier style (no attunements though, but there are strict gear/stat requirements for the tiers so it's similar). What screwed my raiding intentions more than anything else was just not having 20 people (not even getting into whether or not they were skilled enough) to do the 20-man raids, and only being able to run the 10-man raid (which was only 4 bosses to boot). I imagine it might have been similar in TBC where you could do Kara (and later ZA) with 10 but then you needed to find 15 other people who were attuned/geared/skilled to even attempt the other raids.

It did work like that in TBC for the most part, and speaking personally as a player on hiatus at the start of the expansion, having to play catch-up more than halfway thru...it was fantastically done.

I had to put in effort to get the gear I needed to begin applying to Sunwell guilds, but with things like 10 man ZA, long lasting loot from Karazhan, badge items, Sunwell reputation items, Magister's Terrace items (I fucking loved that zone, perfectly tuned 5 man difficulty), and the option to just straight up buy fantastic crafted gear from Sunwell patterns, or join SWP trash farming runs (and meeting a lot of cool people in the process)...I was up and raiding SWP within a month with a friends list full of great people I'd met along the way.

The pacing was perfect. I couldn't just log in for the first time in 8 months and jump into SWP within a week or two, but it also wasn't needlessly long and drawn out. Furthermore, the instance difficulty made me really feel like I'd earned my way into SWP...and that's very important for setting the scale of the game and pacing of progression. I had to be playing my Priest very well to get through the ZA runs, Kara, Magister's Terrace, and the few pickup group raids I was able to get into for SSC/TK/Hyjal/BT. By the time I set foot into Sunwell Plateau, I felt ready in every way. My gear was ready, my healing was ready, and my ability to work with a team was ready.

I feel like if I wanted to make a comeback now, the activities are much more brainless and don't really put a lot of emphasis on ANY of those skills. In fact, some guy did a great video where he hits 90 on a new Rogue, and literally gears him up for raiding while AFK. To prove a point in how ridiculously hand-out the game has become, he /follows through LFD Heroics, LFR, etc., and by the end of a couple weeks he's ready to raid current content without having ever dealt damage in a dungeon or raid, spoken to another player, followed any strategy, learned his rotation, or anything at all.

[Osmeric]

I don't get this, because they had more subscribers in BC, and less people doing all of the content.

They tried to go back to a BC-like philosophy in Cataclysm. It failed. And I think that failure shows that BC succeeded in spite of that philosophy, not because of it. It was much easier for WoW to grow back then, where there was a large population of potential new customers, and not a large population of ex-customers giving negative word of mouth.

Today, recruiting into the game is harder, so the game design has much less latitude for screwups.