Thread: Raiding.

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  1. #121
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    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    That's not an issue for proper guilds where members understand that sometimes they need to sit out.
    Two guilds. One guild is a "proper" guild that every reset clears flexi so all it's members all get to raid. The other guild expects some of it's members to float around in orgrimmar doing fuck all while the best ten players get to have fun.

    Who would you join and why?
    But you're right, this isn't aimed at proper guilds, but instead at guilds that are struggling even with normal modes. Although the flex raids have two elements: dumbed down from normal difficulty and flexible number of people. Honestly the latter would make sense for heroic raids as well, perhaps flex between 22-28 or something like that.

    But my point was that it's going to stop those kinds of less-than-properly-organized guilds from failing, while those who are running only LFR now will mostly continue doing so even after flex modes are put in.
    There will be two kinds of guilds, imo - those who do flexi and then some normals and HC guilds. Running just normals will crash most guilds that try it in 5.4.

  2. #122
    Exclusivity-based (or EverQuest-style) MMO raiding has been limping badly for years and is pretty obviously in its death-throes, to the point that I'm surprised to find anyone who believes otherwise. It's been heavily marginalized in WoW ever since the introduction of LFR, and "serious" raiders praying to the forum gods that Blizzard will somehow remove or nerf LFR and force everyone into "real" raiding are engaging in the worst sort of naive wishful thinking. Meanwhile none of the other recent WoW-alike MMOs (Rift, SWTOR, etc) have ever even really caught on in the first place.

    You see the haggard "epics used to be epic" evangelists on the General Forum all the time, trying to reign in their condescention long enough to tell the LFR masses that they aren't really having fun and that Blizzard just needs to nerf LFR and force them to try "real" raiding in order for it to thrive again. Inevitably they end up downvoted and pelted with rotten fruit. I've seen their ilk before in many different games over the years, arguing over many different issues, and let me tell you, the evangelists never win. When you see them out there working a cause you support, you know you're in trouble.

    LFR is here forever. Forever. Whether the game goes down in subscribers or goes F2P, LFR will be there to the end. Blizzard will scrap Normals long before they dream of touching it. And there's no utopia over the next hill. There's no smash-hit hardcore raiding game for disaffected elites to flee into, no bastion of exclusivity stocked with peasant casuals to feel superior to. There's nothing.

    Serious-business raiding is slowly but surely walking down the same path trod in previous years by "free-for-all PVP with corpse looting" and "XP loss on death" and other game mechanics no one outside of Korea has touched in ten years. Almost everyone seems to quietly sort of know it.

  3. #123
    Quote Originally Posted by Grimble View Post
    Exclusivity-based (or EverQuest-style) MMO raiding has been limping badly for years and is pretty obviously in its death-throes, to the point that I'm surprised to find anyone who believes otherwise.
    In case you didn't get the memo, WoW, since the casualization and accessibility trend started, has been steadily losing 2M players per year. WoW had significantly more players in BC than now. Clearly increasing accessibility is not all that great of a strategy.

  4. #124
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    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    In case you didn't get the memo, WoW, since the casualization and accessibility trend started, has been steadily losing 2M players per year. WoW had significantly more players in BC than now. Clearly increasing accessibility is not all that great of a strategy.
    Clearly, given the numbers involved raiding doesn't have a lot to do with that either. Like most everyone else who's not clinging on to ideas that don't make any sense, the total collapse of the P2P MMO market outside of WoW, game age and competition from F2P MMO's is having more of an effect than anything else.

    But stay in your bubble and believe what you like.
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  5. #125
    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    Clearly, given the numbers involved raiding doesn't have a lot to do with that either. Like most everyone else who's not clinging on to ideas that don't make any sense, the total collapse of the P2P MMO market outside of WoW, game age and competition from F2P MMO's is having more of an effect than anything else.
    What real P2P MMO market has there ever been outside of WoW? It's a highly hit driven genre by definition. And I don't get this "it's an old game" nonsense. You paid for a box like a year ago (+monthly fees), correct? If Blizzard put garbage in that box, then that's just their failure to produce a good game.

    Of course the there are tons of factors that have caused gamers to no longer see WoW as providing enough value for their money, nobody is disputing that. But it's incredibly naive to claim that the major changes to the game systems (i.e., casualization), which caused major changes to the social structures (e.g., death of 25 man guilds) and play style (from raid guilds that lived for years to essentially soloing in LFR/LFD) had no significant negative impact on the subscriber numbers.

    But stay in your bubble and believe what you like.
    Likewise.

  6. #126
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    I for one think it is more healthy to a game to try to be unique then to try to be like every other game. What stands out the most in WoW right now compared to any other mmo is the organised PvE content. I think the only MMO that I enjoyed the party content in more than WoW was Global Agenda, though I have still not found a game with raid content that I consider to be superior to WoWs. The only MMO I played that had solo content that was better than WoWs was Dragon Nest (and Global Agenda). If WoW were to lose their advantage in having good PvE content, especially raid content, I honestly see no reason for me to keep paying a monthly fee when I can go play any f2p mmo to get the same out of it.

  7. #127
    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    What real P2P MMO market has there ever been outside of WoW? It's a highly hit driven genre by definition. And I don't get this "it's an old game" nonsense. You paid for a box like a year ago (+monthly fees), correct? If Blizzard put garbage in that box, then that's just their failure to produce a good game.

    Of course the there are tons of factors that have caused gamers to no longer see WoW as providing enough value for their money, nobody is disputing that. But it's incredibly naive to claim that the major changes to the game systems (i.e., casualization), which caused major changes to the social structures (e.g., death of 25 man guilds) and play style (from raid guilds that lived for years to essentially soloing in LFR/LFD) had no significant negative impact on the subscriber numbers.



    Likewise.

    Yeah, I think the "old game is old" argument is probably the worst argument out there, as WoW is always reinventing itself and providing new content. Personally I think subs are dropping because they catered too much to casuals - you can see all of the story line in a week or two in LFR and you don't have to put in any sort of effort besides hitting the queue button. At that point I can imagine a lot of players saying "what is the point?" when they find out about normal modes lol, they just read the last chapter, why go back?
    That and blizz killed off the social aspects of the game with LFD, LFR, and cross realm BG's. Before you'd have to actually team up with people for even simple things like quests, and chances were you'd get a guild invite and make some friends a long the way. Now you are put into a queue with strangers that often times will roll on your gear even if they don't need it just because they can lol. WoW has gotten pretty far away from the fun game it used to be, there's still a few traces left, but I don't think it will be long before casuals demand those are removed as well.

  8. #128
    As a Heroic/Normal Raider here are my 2 cents on the current setup.

    LFR - A Joke, I understand the need to see content, but perhaps instead of making the drops purple make them blue (OBVIOUSLY WITH THE SAME STATS) to make users work for the purple/epic loot.

    Flex - A great addition. This is very handy, especially for myself and my server. I can do pugs with people in trade, get my name out there, and play with lesser skilled friends and still be rewarded for it as such. See ICC10 before the nerfs.

    Normal - Typical Raid Mode. This is also handy, useful for getting to know who you raid with in your guild and for discovering new friends and guild mates (see Flex), users are capable of obtaining epics while still fighting and working for them.

    Heroic - Hard Raid Mode. Used by guilds who believe they have to the skill to literally beat the game. Very complicated at times, but overall fun for the whole crowd if you have the right guild or friends.

    So bottom line. I would say LFR just needs a very minor change to get people wanting to visit Flex and then we can see a valuable raiding system in the game.

  9. #129
    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    In case you didn't get the memo, WoW, since the casualization and accessibility trend started, has been steadily losing 2M players per year. WoW had significantly more players in BC than now. Clearly increasing accessibility is not all that great of a strategy.
    Ultima Online peaked when it was six years old.
    EverQuest peaked when it was five years old.
    Final Fantasy XI peaked when it was six years old.
    Lineage peaked when it was five years old.
    World of Warcraft peaked when it was six years old.

    Absolutely nothing unexpected or out of the ordinary has happened. Very few games have continued to grow past the six year mark, and those that do are usually weird little indie titles, not market leaders. Attempting to pin blame for the game's inevitable subscription decline on any particular design issue is specious. Attempting to pin it on the hurt feelings of raiders who wish the game were harder is outright lunacy.

    Old game is old. Just like every other game that kept adding stuff but still got old.

  10. #130
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    Quote Originally Posted by RickJamesLich View Post
    Yeah, I think the "old game is old" argument is probably the worst argument out there, as WoW is always reinventing itself and providing new content. .
    It really hasn't. In fact it's more about the same old shit (raiding) than ever. In an effort to make raiding more cost effecitive more people are shoved into it. For wow to really reinvent itself it will likely have to discard raiding as well.
    The hammer comes down:
    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    Normal should be reduced in difficulty. Heroic should be reduced in difficulty.
    And the tiny fraction for whom heroic raids are currently well tuned? Too bad,so sad! With the arterial bleed of subs the fastest it's ever been, the vanity development that gives you guys your own content is no longer supportable.

  11. #131
    Quote Originally Posted by LeperHerring View Post
    That's not an issue for proper guilds where members understand that sometimes they need to sit out. But you're right, this isn't aimed at proper guilds, but instead at guilds that are struggling even with normal modes. Although the flex raids have two elements: dumbed down from normal difficulty and flexible number of people. Honestly the latter would make sense for heroic raids as well, perhaps flex between 22-28 or something like that.

    But my point was that it's going to stop those kinds of less-than-properly-organized guilds from failing, while those who are running only LFR now will mostly continue doing so even after flex modes are put in.
    Uhh... the majority of guilds DON'T bench people outside of obvious underperformance (e.g. healer who can't keep up during the AOE phase of a boss). Only guilds I have ever known to bench or maintain a rotating roster is the hardcore guilds where you try to cheese comps to maximize the chance of killing the boss.

  12. #132
    WoW is, at this point, incredibly obsolete in terms of core design and business model. The remarkable part isn't that it's losing subscribers, but rather that it's managed to keep as many as it has as an aging game in an era where the subscription model has mostly ceased to exist.

    I mean, huge amounts of pointless leveling followed by raiding for endgame gear, with a subscription fee besides?* What is this, 1999? That sort of gameplay wasn't even cutting edge when EverQuest did it; they ripped it off from text MUDs. The huge amount of polishing and quality-of-life work that Blizzard has done is the only thing keeping WoW relevant at all.

    LFR represents a last-ditch effort to keep raiding alive in some sort of diminished form. The days when an MMORPG would spend 50% of its effort making raid content for 5% of its players are over and are never coming back. In order to justify the creation of new raids and the continuation of the existing paradigm, pretty much everyone needs to get something out of them. Hence the nerfed versions and the auto-queue.

    I mean what, does anyone here really think that if LFR just didn't exist and raids were harder, all 12 million players would come back and WoW's "nineties text MUD" game mechanics would reign supreme forever and ever and ever?

    * Incidentally, what do you get when you take WoW and subtract the pointless leveling, the gear, and the fee? League of Legends, and that's where everyone who quits WoW ends up going, not to some mythical game of super hard raids where casuals are inspired to play by gazing in awe at raiders in their epic epics blah blah blah.
    Last edited by Grimble; 2013-08-19 at 09:07 PM.

  13. #133
    Quote Originally Posted by Seriss View Post
    The problem is that many people don't understand the difference between

    A. a boss is easy
    and
    B. I'm outgearing a boss by 20 ilvls

    and then they start to whine that things are too easy.

    The difficulty of a new raid is ridiculously dependent on how well your guild did during the previous content (exception being the first raiding tier of an expansion, and that was, as we all have seen, filled with cockblocks and gating mechanisms for the average non-hardcore WoW player).

    If you killed enough heroic bosses in the outdated raid, the gear alone makes it easier when you venture into the shiny new raid. And if a guild barely managed to clear previous content, they're bound to have problems in the current raid tier. Most WoW players aren't Paragon who clear raids while undergeared, making up for the lack of gear with an abundance of skill and ideal line-ups.

    I think, sooner than later, normal mode will just be what you switch to when you don't want to try a boss on heroic yet. Many normal mode guilds will downgrade to flex for convenience and being able to not have to bench someone. Because when a guild isn't striving for Ahead of the Curve and such, that's the most fun thing to do. No stressing about line-ups, no stressing about benching anyone. Just fun with just enough challenge for it to feel rewarding. And no stressing about with a normal mode that feels like you're trying a heroic boss, just because you don't have ilvl 515 but only 490 (see Horridon when ToT was new).

    As an afterthought... Would it be a realistic scenario for a flex-raid bunch of people to say after a few weeks "we got some gear now, ilvls are decent, let's try normal mode and get Ahead of the Curve?" Flex could be an awesome catch-up mechanism too so that people could get into normals with way less frustration!
    Like it is hard to catch up on gear. Those "20 ilvls" those heroic raiders had is nothing a few weeks into the new tier. Random HC scenarios, world bosses and one with a quest which gives you a nice item, valor items... and ofcourse LFR ToT. But you are probably going to tell us how unlucky someone got and still didn't improve his/her gear.
    I gained 10 ilvls in 3 weeks without even really trying and I was already wearing full normal T14 gear and about 4 pieces of heroic T14 gear.

    I will be honest, I haven't raided ToT normal yet and I don't have much of an idea how Horridon normal was like in ilvl 490 gear but logic tells me that 490 is plenty to go into normal ToT. From my experience on forums and with raiding the problem that guilds have is 90% of the time execution and not dps or healing. Gear doesn't make you dispel debuffs or move out of fire or being able to properly tank adds. And all those things don't require years of experience, especially nowadays, to master. I also don't think everyone who tries normal mode is completely new to WoW...

    I know there are people who just never learn but that is mostly because they just don't want to. I don't think tuning encounters based on people not willing to even try to improve is a good way to go. If you want that then you got LFR.
    Afterall this is just a simple videogame and you don't need to be top 50 dps on worldoflogs and master your class to perfection to get through normal mode. I'm just saying that if someone really wants to clear normal then just try a tiny little bit harder instead of blaming the content.

    Call me an elitist if you want...

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Grimble View Post

    * Incidentally, what do you get when you take WoW and subtract the pointless leveling, the gear, and the fee? League of Legends, and that's where everyone who quits WoW ends up going, not to some mythical game of super hard raids where casuals are inspired to play by gazing in awe at raiders in their epic epics blah blah blah.
    So you are saying they should just change genre? lol... Ever thought about just changing games yourself?

  14. #134
    Quote Originally Posted by Darkblazer View Post
    About raiding.
    Does anyone believe that we're gonna have an increase within Normal/Heroic difficulty population in the next Patch, or even in the next expansion seeying the Major changes we had ?
    Despite the Amazing raid that we currently are less and less people are willing to do any fight in normal at least mode..
    But simply wonder does anyone believe we're gonna reach a higher appealing number of raider's within next patch or simply a downfall without an end?

    Rather 2 say in less than 2 Year's we have ended from 90 raiding guild's to 3 raiding guild's and from last week to 2 raiding guild.
    I tried other server that atm is in 1 patch from 24 raiding guild to still 14 raiding guilds. And the guild that i was casualy raiding i no longer raiding.
    Normal will stay about the same as it is now. I personally don't see flex raiding taking off (it's a great idea that needed a bit of a different implementation), LFR will have an initial burst, and then a pretty big drop-off, as this is the last raid of the expansion, so the 'why bother' factor is going to set in, as more folks go back to leveling alts prepping for the next expansion.

    /just my guess.

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