Can raiding content really last as long as it has in the past?

[zyZ]

Back in WOTLK or BC, raiding wasn't the only meaningful content for most players. Dungeons were a fun challenge. PvP (in BC at least) wasn't so gear dependent. You could farm for mats to make some decent gold or get a mount (top mounts through BC actually took effort). Some people would work towards some cool mounts or cool toys. Heck, it was actually fun to help Paladins and Warlocks get their mounts. World PvP still happened through BC. Raids really were the culmination of playing through a lot of other content, and once you started raiding, your rewards for success was a new raid.

dungeons weren't that great. they were brutal for melee, everything cleaved.

pvp not gear dependant? http://i.imgur.com/ZjGeyTI.jpg
4pc pvp + 4pc raid set, warglaives, and trinkets vs normal pvp gear was a joke lol

ppl just get too caught up in nostalgia and forget the old game had its issues too

[Xirrohon]

People that complain like the OP are ones that do LFR>Normal>Heroic. Usually just LFR>Normal. If youre doing those 3 raids, then yes, its going to feel the same. Mythic is quite different than those tiers of difficulty on quite a few bosses. Honestly, LFR is the culprit but Blizz is not going to get rid of it.

[Deleted]

One of the big reasons raids don't last so long (Compared with Classic/TBC) is that bosses drop massive extra quantities of loot which vastly reduces the amount of time it takes for players and entire guilds to outgear the content and defeat it through the "brute force" approach. In the past you'd get 1 drop from a 10-man boss, and 2 from a 25-man boss. These days, you can get 5-6 items from a 20-man boss; especially the tier bosses who drop tokens in addition to the regular loot table. There are also the bonus rolls which are a significant contributor, and being able to get the occasional item from Garrison followers too.

Players no longer expect to spend 3-4 months gearing up to the current tier because they will do it in 3-4 weeks. Loot has a fairly significant impact on whether content feels relevant or whether it feels 'done'.

I have fairly mixed feelings on this. On one hand, it used to be frustrating to spend 6 months wearing a blue item because that one bit of loot just wouldn't drop. On the other hand, I feel like they've gone too far in opposite direction now; we're at a point where even being in a guild which makes decent progression still causes you to vastly outgear the latter bosses by the time you reach them for the first time, because you and your entire guild will be fully geared up by the time you've cleared the first half of the raid a few times.

The amount of loot which we get 'showered' with goes way above and beyond bad-luck-protection, and has a negative impact on gameplay IMO. The same is true with gearing up when you first hit max level - it takes a matter of hours to outgear the heroic dungeons, and be "raid ready" because there are dozens of very quick/easy ways of gearing up which makes most of the content irrelevant.

[l33t]

Yes it could, but it would require Blizzard to:
1. stop inviting players to PTR, and make testing with internal stuff only, which will lead to:
2. bosses would be terribly overtuned, so most guilds would have to up ilvl a lot until first kills happen; and
3. to prevent boss tactics from appearing on youtube, tactics must be reworked, way more random abilities must be included up to the point when its impossible to remember the whole boss tactics by a common person, so all you can do is learn to react to basically anything boss throws at you. Kinda like PvP. Though, I seriously doubt anyone will enjoy killing such "content".

[psyquest]

I think the solution is simple:

make normal / heroic / mythic on same tag, ie you cannot do all 3 each week.

make progression more natural so that guilds starting a normal can progress eventually (eventually being important here) through heroic and mythic.

The real race in mythic last at most 2 months, after that the various races become within servers. After 2 months implements an icc style debuff to avoid stagnation.

also, mythic must be more "flexible", 20 man requirement should be changed after x week to become flex or set it to 15 man.

[Tomana]

Back in WOTLK or BC, raids lasted a fair bit

No, they didn't. M'uru was killed in about 5 days. KJ about the same. BT was cleared in a week.
The only thing that slowed top guilds down were overtuned boses. Vashj was unkillable because of bugs, KT was overtuned as well.

As for LK, all the release tier was cleared in less than a week, iirc.

If you want to bash your head on an overtuned and buggy boss, up to you.

There wasn't the feeling of running the same raid over and over in the same week.

Problem is, you are pretty much forced to design raids this way, because they are extremely expensive to develop.
And if you restrict a character to only one difficulty during a given week, you'll be the first to complain.

[Thetruth1400]

Actually it didn't last "long". World firsts happened fairly quickly and ...saaay..BT was already on farm for the best guilds for 9 months before SWP hit. Just don't let yourself be fooled by artificial gating....

The average guild ofc still takes a long time o clear mythic or heroic. Not sure why a quick normal clear or a semi-fast heroic clear spoils it for you in Mythic, but then again I was used to run places again and again and again when there was only one difficulty.



And even M'uru was down in 4 days....

It lasted an extremely long time. You're using one of the shortest bosses turn over rates, lets look at some of the longest. Ouru, took 87 days, or almost three months since the death of Twin' Emperors. That's not since the raid launched, but since the death of a previous boss. Chrommagus and Ragnaros each took 74 days from the death of their previous bosses. Yogg-Saron - Alone in the Dark took 70 days since the first attempt at that difficulty.

No matter if you like it or not, content was harder back then and the player base was a lot larger all the way through WotLK. There was a reason to log in to the game, because there was always something for your character to do, because they weren't being handed the gear on a silver platter with Blizzard going, "You're special and saw all the content too!"

Back then, you actually had to put in some sort of effort to see things, and if you couldn't make the commitment, which wasn't really that time consuming, to progress your character, you weren't rewarded the same. If you fell behind, you found a new guild that was on the same level of progression you were and everything was fine.

Yes, in WotLK with the 10 and 25 model, some guilds "forced" their members into raiding both each week, but not all of them. So as for the OP's question, yes, raiding can last as long as it did in the past, but only if Blizzard makes the hard decision to stop catering to the lowest common denominator and thinking four difficulties = more content. It's the same content, with a switch flipped to make things harder. It's an artificial amount of content, not real content.

The only other way they're ever going to bring the old way back is to have all of the modes share a common lock out and stop with all the free catch up mechanics. If they all share one single lockout, you can't then run it on LFR, then on Normal, then Heroic, etc. Likewise, without the gear catch up, aka welfare epics, you'll have to actually see all of an expansions content, not just the current patch only.

No, they didn't. M'uru was killed in about 5 days. KJ about the same. BT was cleared in a week.
The only thing that slowed top guilds down were overtuned boses. Vashj was unkillable because of bugs, KT was overtuned as well.

As for LK, all the release tier was cleared in less than a week, iirc.

If you want to bash your head on an overtuned and buggy boss, up to you.


Problem is, you are pretty much forced to design raids this way, because they are extremely expensive to develop.
And if you restrict a character to only one difficulty during a given week, you'll be the first to complain.

It wasn't all about overtuned bosses any more than LFR is exclusively the reason things are so easy today. Raids back then were harder in difficulty on average, not based on mechanics, but sheer difficulty. Likewise, you're comparing the top end raiding to the average player. Now, the average player can see and do all within a few weeks to a month in LFR. That's backed up by looking at reports from Blizzard themselves who have shown that a ton more people are currently seeing and beating the content.

Back in the day, there weren't as many people seeing the content because it wasn't so trivial to do so.

I do agree with you though, that players are forced to raid or die now because that is all that Blizzard is developing. I disagree with you though on the reason of, "They're too expensive to develop" as in the past we saw more content that was varied with a smaller staff and most likely smaller budget. If it were a case of too much money to develop, we'd be seeing more difficult content currently to artificially inflate how long it takes, not the opposite.

Blizzard, as a company, should want to keep people around as long as possible each patch, and having such trivial content with dozens of catch up mechanics isn't the way to do that. They're basically putting in the minimum effort now, and using sound bites to defend their actions.

[Baconeggcheese]

I actually really want them to share loot lockouts across all difficulties because having to raid the same raid multiple times early on definitely spoils the raid for me much quicker.

Being able to re-run normal and heroic to help people is chill, but being "forced" to run them to farm up extra gear isn't.

[Thirteen]

Imo - no it can't. If you mean "who gets the first kill in the world" progression, it's unlikely because of PTR. Previously you'd zone into the instance and have no clue where to even go. Now we see guilds having fully devised strategies months before the patch is being launched. If you mean individual player/guild progression - they can't because there's too many difficulties and upgrading items is too easy. Raiding heroic? Stuck on boss 7/10? Just go mythic and get gear from the first 3 bosses which are complete pushovers compared to the last 3 on heroic and drop gear that's 15 iLvls higher. There's also the fact that you can get warforged loot.

also, mythic must be more "flexible", 20 man requirement should be changed after x week to become flex or set it to 15 man.

Nope. We had it in Cata and MoP, and raids had never been less balanced.

[Tomana]

It wasn't all about overtuned bosses any more than LFR is exclusively the reason things are so easy today.

Yes, it was. Why do you think MH was untouched until may 2007 despite being included with the original release? Because KT was unkillable. When it got fixed, Nihilum downed it and the first few bosses in MH and BT in a couple of days.

Raids back then were harder in difficulty on average, not based on mechanics, but sheer difficulty.

Dude, I raided all of BC, I know how it was. Raids today are a million times more difficult than BC. BC raids were difficult because of retarded itemisation (the guy who invented MP5 should be fired), crappy overall class balance (bring 4 shamans for bloodlust or die) and stupid drop tables ("hey, I still have my Kara healing mace in BT because Vashj is craptastic and nothing else drops before Illidan").

Likewise, you're comparing the top end raiding to the average player. Now, the average player can see and do all within a few weeks to a month in LFR. That's backed up by looking at reports from Blizzard themselves who have shown that a ton more people are currently seeing and beating the content.

Because that's precisely the point. You don't invest millions into developing raids so that no one will see them. It's absolutely pants-on-head retarded.

Back in the day, there weren't as many people seeing the content because it wasn't so trivial to do so.

And it is pants-on-head retarded. Basically, BC was like serfdom: 95% of the players were paying subs to see dailies and battlegrounds and financing 5% of nobles who saw the current content. Sunwell was seen, IIRC, by less than 2% of the playerbase. If you think it's a perfect model, look how it turned out for Wildstar.

I do agree with you though, that players are forced to raid or die now because that is all that Blizzard is developing. I disagree with you though on the reason of, "They're too expensive to develop" as in the past we saw more content that was varied with a smaller staff and most likely smaller budget. If it were a case of too much money to develop, we'd be seeing more difficult content currently to artificially inflate how long it takes, not the opposite.

Two things. First, back then, the game was new and for a lot of people were content with just leveling a toon to 70 and then doing dailies and BGs. This is no longer the case with the playerbase change and a competition from much more casual games, MMOs or no.
Second, if we talk about BC, it may have varied content, but economically speaking, it culminated into Shamanwell plateau. By then, I think even the most mentally challenged financial controller in Blizzard said "hey guys, why are we wasting millions into a raid no one will see? Maybe we need to re-evaluate our ROI a bit?".

However, I will not deny that the devs became lazy. Maybe some of the game designers should be assigned to something else and new blood put on the job.

Blizzard, as a company, should want to keep people around as long as possible each patch, and having such trivial content with dozens of catch up mechanics isn't the way to do that. They're basically putting in the minimum effort now, and using sound bites to defend their actions.

It is more and more complicated to keep people around in an MMO, period. Instant gratification syndrome is a powerful thing.

[CloudedInSanity]

I think the main question we need to ask is, longer for who?

It certainly could, but that all depends on what Blizzard tries to do. If they removed PTR testing, made bosses require a few weeks of gear before they would be killable, and got rid of the dungeon journal, sure content would last longer for the bleeding edge guilds. The question then becomes what happens to overall guild representation in these instances? Eventually videos would get released detailing mechanics and how to deal with them, but it might mean even less guilds see an end-tier boss on the hardest difficulty.

[Deleted]

It certainly could, but that all depends on what Blizzard tries to do. If they removed PTR testing, made bosses require a few weeks of gear before they would be killable, .

No, what would stop the top guilds is they'd be bugged to Hell.

[CloudedInSanity]

No, what would stop the top guilds is they'd be bugged to Hell.

Not necessarily, they could do internal testing. Other games release bosses that do not go through a form of "PTR" testing, only internal, and they come out with no bugs. Maybe a bit overtuned though.

[Deleted]

Not necessarily, they could do internal testing. Other games release bosses that do not go through a form of "PTR" testing, only internal, and they come out with no bugs. Maybe a bit overtuned though.

Yeah, they used to do that. The raids were bugged to Hell.

[Baconeggcheese]

You'd need to hire a significant number of people to collect the data to properly internal test.

It's not like you just send 1 group in there and boom! yay internal testing done everythings fine! You're getting hundreds of players testing on the ptr.

Even with them doing the current PTR model top guilds are still dealing with bugs early on that often get fixed before the community at large gets to those bosses. Basically having a 2nd round of PTR on the live servers.

[Binko]

I think there are a lot of players who simply don't have the tolerance for grind and repetition that they used to have.

Many people just don't want to do the same thing over and over again because, frankly, it's boring. And games should be fun and exciting.

Ten years ago when WoW was new and exciting the number and variety of online games was small. We were willing to endure a lot in order to be part of this great new online world. But now there are hundreds or thousands of options for online game play. So why do stuff that is repetitive and not especially fun.

I think this changing dynamic does not bode well for the traditional MMO. Games like WoW need to change structurally or they might just fade away before too long.

[Baconeggcheese]

I think there are a lot of players who simply don't have the tolerance for grind and repetition that they used to have.

Really its how the grind is packaged that matters. Every game is a grind of some sort, its whether or not it feels like a grind that makes content good or bad.

[Halicia]

Really its how the grind is packaged that matters. Every game is a grind of some sort, its whether or not it feels like a grind that makes content good or bad.

thats really not true.

Telltale games come to mind, even though 'interactive movies' are nothing new... a singleplayer game can be like a book or movie, fun for one 10-20 hour playthrough, but with no intention of 'replay value'.

MMOs suffer from the fact that keeping ppl subbed for years means they need to find a balancing act between people that play ALL THE TIME and need more content than can be developed, and entry level players that might not even play games more than once a week, let alone a specific game/platform.

[Unionoob]

Raiding would last longer if each content patch wouldn't make previous tier useless. With current raid difficulties you can just skip previous tier completely and just do new one. And this way you really get burned out when you finish your only raid in this patch.

Sure there will always be people who will finish previous tier before new content patch and get bored with game but majority of people don't achieve that.

[Baconeggcheese]

thats really not true.

Telltale games come to mind, even though 'interactive movies' are nothing new... a singleplayer game can be like a book or movie, fun for one 10-20 hour playthrough, but with no intention of 'replay value'.

Story progression is an example of nicely packaged doing repetitive things aka grind.