Icecrown Citadel Raid Access Progression

[PopeJamal]

The problem is, for every 1 true WoW fan pissed about this (and might eventually stop playing), there are 10 new players who will sign up to try World of Warcraft who have never played it before.

Sucks doesn't it.

Actually, no. It sounds like a fairly stable business model. $15 bucks is $15 bucks. "Casual" money spends just as well as "hardcore" money.

As for your so-called "True WoW fan": A true "fan" probably wouldn't have a tantrum and quit because they couldn't get all of their toys to play with at once.

What I think you meant was "Hardcore Raiders, and people who are "hardcore" anything are usually a pain to deal with because you can never really please them. There's ALWAYS something to complain about. The sky is ALWAYS falling somewhere. EVERYTHING is ALWAYS being dilluted, compromised, or ruined.

Now that I think about it, I don't know how they manage to drag themselves out of bed every morning...

[Pepsodent]

Enjoy wasting your monthly subscription fees because artificial time limits have been imposed.

Now i'm glad i don't play anymore.

HaHaHaHa, you're all addicted and your being forced into wasting your money.

I feel sorry for those that can't stop playing :-*

This betrays a vast ignorance of why people play WoW at all.

[Mascotte]

Fuck this limited attempt bullshit. This shit is just lazy.

[Cazualcraft]

For all of you who were bored as hell during the one-boss-per-week release of ToC... I hope you will enjoy the next 4 months before you met any kind of challenge in ICC.
First Hardmode Kill in April I guess.



Welcome to world of casualcraft, the place where Hardcore Guilds raid less time than Casual guilds.

[Erom]

Blizzard started milking wow since WotLK reliase. Most changes are cosmetical, casual friendly. You should log in into game and feel like a knight on a white hourse with a shiny blade, feeling like outsider among others is bad so here comes ingame comunism.

People who played through vanila WoW should know how did game change during these years. From loosing EPIC feeling of raiding throught MC, BWL, AQ to total casualisation of any part of the game. Why make content for both casual and hardcore gamers when you can just choose one and the choice is onbvious. Fun for masses = more money, easy as that. And now even raid content is being manualy longered in order to milk players even more.

Blizzard's next steps : you cant level up your proffeson for more than 50 points a week.
you cant level up your charecter for more then 5 levels a week if its an alt.
you cant get more than 7k honor a day.
you cant earn more than 300g a week.
you cant raise your arena rating for more than 50 a week.
+ Cataclysm sounds like a HUGE masked recycle fest. Change some locations for abit, change some quest routes, add some new quest, remove some old quests, draw few new locations , add 2 new races - here you are, new expansion with epic story is ready.

Im so glad i quit this game for good

[Pally4ever]

I'm going to feel sorry for the poor guy who (for any reason) will cause a wipe on IC

[frequency]

Im so glad i quit this game for good

Then what do you care? Why are you here?

[Nexiom]

I don't understand why they don't just allow the heroic version of the bosses after you've completed either the wing the bosses are associated with or the actual boss. So you kill Lord marrowgar in the first week on normal and then next week you can kill him on Normal and Heroic.

Seems like a better thing to do.

[DrRight]

I like it! Seems like a good way to make Arthas last longer then 2 weeks, even on normal mode, without making him so hard that casuals couldn't kill him, and without having to rely solely on the lame gate mechanic.

[Tiorda]

IMO this has more to do with Blizzard bridging the gap between ICC and Cataclysm. I was hoping ICC would take a good while, a Troll raid would open (Gundrak) to make a T10 8set and we would head into Cat. It looks like Blizzard is lazy and wants ICC to take eight months.

[Malevolence]

Terrible idea, force people with more than half a brain to sit around and wait to actually do something challenging. Then they only give you 5 attempts for a brand new encounter that you could be completely oblivious to of strategy. The funny thing is that casual raiders get fucked out of clearing normal with the "attempt" limits and then the more hard-core people are forced to wait with thumb-in-ass until the next "gate" is taken down, or until they have an actual reasonable amount of tries left for the last bosses.

If you only get 15 tries for the last 4 bosses in hard-mode...I don't even know what to say about that. This shit makes PTR raiding so much more important, and I fucking hate the ptr raids.

Welcome to world of casualcraft, the place where Hardcore Guilds raid less time than Casual guilds.

QFT. I clear everything worthwile in 1-2 nights of raiding atm. It's seriously that easy...

[Erom]

Then what do you care? Why are you here?

Just because i played this game for nearly 5 years, and im still playing alot but not wow anymore. So im still interested in gaming and how it develops, and as wow is biggest and sadly best mmo out there atm, i read news here. why not?

[Xentropy]

As someone in a basically casual raiding guild (we don't have the rdps to down Heroic Beasts25, basically we've got about 15 awesome raiders carrying 10 people who stand around in fire), I'm very unhappy with this method of gating. I was looking forward to ICC specifically so there'd be MORE bosses to see every week, instead of the same 5 bosses on 25-reg, 10-reg, and 10-heroic week after week after week, with no progression path available to us (since the heroic 25-man beasts aren't a slight progression bump, they're a 50 foot brick wall without 95k rdps). Now I find out instead of being excited about ICC and 12 new bosses, some of which may give us troubles but we could just move to another wing, I find out for the first "several weeks" (several to me reads at least 3, and possibly as much as 6 or 7) I'll have the same FOUR bosses (instead of 5, even) to fight twice a week, and if there's raid time remaining when we hit the gate (which there probably will be), I get to go back and one-shot ToC25 on normal for the eleventy billionth time.

In addition, once there ARE more bosses available, if we decide to work on a given wing's end boss, we're losing the ability to even attempt another wing's end boss once we're out of attempts. "Oops, 10 wipes, you're done with both this guy *and* the other two. Enjoy more ToC25!"

I'm freaking SICK of normal ToC25, but basically I'll be forced to continue to run it most weeks until Cataclysm's release, since once we're out of attempts and/or bosses that don't require attempts to fight, we get to go back and do normal ToC25 again. And again. And again.

Not fun. At all. And with 10 people who love to stand in fire, and ICC having far more positioning requirements than ToC25 does, the limited attempts are likely to mean I never get to see Arthas, because I've only got 15 chances for the fire never to target one of those people instead of being able to spend 4 hours there waiting for the lucky attempt where only our 15 good raiders get targeted with avoidable damage.

Most people can just switch to a better guild if they know their guild is carrying people. In my case, my only available raid nights are Weds-Fri. Good luck finding a second guild in the world that fits THAT schedule (almost everyone takes Fri off, and almost no one doesn't raid at least one of Sun-Tues, at least in the US, where Tues is the first raid night of the week for 99% of the guilds).

[Prudencio]

Love all the post "omg im so glad i quit this game"

what u still doing checking forums and reading the news?

[Offhand]

Logical reasons for this:
1) Cataclysm is far from coming out, there's no planned 3.4 patch (although there likely will be). Content needs to be artificially extended because you can't come up with a new expansion this fast.
2) There's an increasing trend of people who only bother to resub when new content is released. Only paying for about half the time you "should" be. This is an excuse to get people to keep playing consistently.
3) Content is too easy. Most hardmodes would likely go down in the first week or two if it wasn't for artificial cock blocks. Gives the content a false sense of longevity.

None of those reasons sound like they're designed to make the game fun. Besides the bads masquerading as "casuals", no one really thinks this is a good idea. This isn't fun, this is limiting and irritating. Funny that "Let everyone progress at thier own pace" becomes "you must progress at exactly this rate".

Anyway, we've all been duped into farming ToC. You're going to get to farm easymodes for full 264's before even bothering to try difficult content again.

[Tinykong]

Blizzard realized that the 1% of the hardcore population is never going to be satisfied, and that they ultimately will make tons more money making the game more accessible to new, and casual players. The gated release of the content is going to allow a huge number of casual players to amass huge numbers of triumph badges and get full T9, maybe 9.5 if they continue to pug 25s.

Blizzard is a business, and that business wants to make money. In order to do that, they have to keep the largest amount of players subscriptions active.

Hardcore players will never quit...they will complain, QQ and whine up and down, make "This is my last post" threads on forums...but in the end, they will keep an active subscription and continue to play long after they threaten to leave.

Casual players are the ones who blizzard has to try and keep, these players get bored and cancel for other games. How do they keep them active? By dribbling out gear they can pick up at an easy, do-at-your-own pace and making them feel like they can pay the $15 and log on whenever they feel like it and have something to do.

This is only going to become more prevalent in Cata, get used to it.

[PopeJamal]

How can they make it challenging when you only have 5 attempts per week on the boss?

That sounds to me more like they're limiting the challenge of the fight, because if it's too hard, people'll blow through the attempts week after week, get frustrated, post tons of whining, and cause Blizzard to nerf the fight.

Artificial limitations on attempts, especially when coupled with existent disconnect bugs (we still have players, for example, that disconnect every time when Thorim is pulled, or at certain points in Anub'arak and Onyxia) is not a good way of promoting challenge and urgency.

Good way of promoting challenge and urgency are things like hard modes and speed kills. The limited attempts mechanic is just rife with ways that players can be screwed by things completely out of their control, such as latency and disconnects.

So what you're saying is, if they don't make the game hard in exactly the manner you prefer, then it's not OK?

Nothing says hardcore like being limited by things beyond your control. Does that mean that, GASP, by some people's standards, your typical "Hardcore", "Srs Bzns" raider could be considered...GULP...a "Casual Baddie"???

Nooooo! It hurts!! Ahhhhhhhhh...
/faint

[Sneek]

World first just become more useless.

Wrold First Lick King, weak buff, 30 tries
World First Lick King, no buff, 15 tries

and so on and so on.

[Vasz]

Although i dont like the idea of slowing my guilds progress, i can see why it was done. In 2-3 weeks Ensidia or STARS would of become world first, vids on MMO-champ and youtube, and the whole world knows how the story unfolds. Its about keeping players on tender hooks, a bit like Prison Break or some other TV show.

[weirdingway]

This has nothing to do with Cataclysm.

Was Rag or Ony the last boss in Vanilla?
Was Illidan the last boss in TBC?

There's going to be one more raid after 3.3. Blizzard loves them some extra raids beyond the "last boss" poster guy of the game. That being said, 3.4 won't be done in 2 months so obviously they are going to stretch it out. You can't whine about how long it's going to take until dates are released.

Oh and world-firsts are stupid anyway. At least this gives NORMAL people who are also very skilled at the game a chance to be recognized like the rest of the poopsockers who dump every single one of their vacation days (and that's being generous to say they have a job) into fresh content in a single video game.