Harder Content = Better?

[HardCoder]

And I also like how the pro-dumbing down crowd probably spend more time on WoW than I do (tip: if you cap VP even on 1 toon you do) and yet cannot commit to raiding real content.

Oh I guarantee you I have spent a lot more time on WoW (at times) than even hardcore raiders. How many days /played do I have now? Not sure. 500 maybe?

But with a 300-500ms ping FROM INTERIOR ALASKA and an unreliable schedule which mostly has me online after midnight Pacific I will never be raiding "real" content.

So. It's simpler to look at the world from your own eyes, but if you want to know how other people view things, you need to get beyond that.

[RickJamesLich]

Once again, LFR isn't intended for people who do regular raiding, so ... what is the point of this question?


If you're disappointed that your dad let you win when he played ball with you, then YOU ARE THE PERSON WITH ISSUES, not the rest of us. Normal people just remember that their dad played ball with them, and treasure that memory.

I think you misunderstood... I was mentioning to someone that said LFR is like regular raiding... how many fun moments do you have in LFR though? Be honest lol

As for the second point, I was just mentioning, when LFR is set up so you always win.... well, a lot of the old school wow players don't find that stuff very compelling. Personally, if I couldn't raid, I'd prefer blizz make 5 mans at least challenging enough to hold my interest or something... LFR is just re-hashing content.

[alduron]

Oh I guarantee you I have spent a lot more time on WoW (at times) than even hardcore raiders. How many days /played do I have now? Not sure. 500 maybe?

But with a 300-500ms ping FROM INTERIOR ALASKA and an unreliable schedule which mostly has me online after midnight Pacific I will never be raiding "real" content.

So. It's simpler to look at the world from your own eyes, but if you want to know how other people view things, you need to get beyond that.

I have a similar problem: it's not how much time i can play, it's WHEN. My work schedule changes week to week, sometimes nights, sometimes mornings, sometimes overnight.

[Tomana]

In the couple of threads I ever read on these forums there are always the same people who somehow have inside knowledge of what every WoW player does and dismiss everyone else's opinion as "you are crazy brah, nobody raids, get real."

Just check out WoWprogress and divide the numbers by the number of subscriptions (w/o China ofc). The percentage will be pretty low.

And I also like how the pro-dumbing down crowd probably spend more time on WoW than I do (tip: if you cap VP even on 1 toon you do) and yet cannot commit to raiding real content.

Yes, people have jobs, families etc... which can lead to very irregular gameplay. Not that surprising.





---------- Post added 2013-02-28 at 01:01 AM ----------

I think you misunderstood... I was mentioning to someone that said LFR is like regular raiding... how many fun moments do you have in LFR though? Be honest lol

Farming a regular raid is not fun either. I can assure you that BC and all, farming BT for the 20th+ time is by no means fun.
Sure, when you down the boss for the first time it is, but those moments are not 100% of the time, far from it.

As for the second point, I was just mentioning, when LFR is set up so you always win.... well, a lot of the old school wow players don't find that stuff very compelling.

Then don't run it.

Personally, if I couldn't raid, I'd prefer blizz make 5 mans at least challenging enough to hold my interest or something...

That's what challenge mode are for. Making regular 5-mans difficult is not defensible, as early Cata proved.

LFR is just re-hashing content.

Re-hashing from what? You have 3 levels of difficulty. ZA in 4.1 was re-hashing, this is different.

[Firebert]

I have a similar problem: it's not how much time i can play, it's WHEN. My work schedule changes week to week, sometimes nights, sometimes mornings, sometimes overnight.

Just applied to a guild...

"X: yeah, your app seems OK, just ask you to attend if you actually sign up
Me: so when do you guys usually raid?
X: 1900-2300 tue thur fri sun
Me: Oh, sorry, can't do most those, I work shifts, half the time I won't be back till 2200 and half the time I've got to be up at 5am so can't go till 2300
Me: Can you guarantee me a spot every other Sunday though?
X: No, take people in order of guild rank
Me: Thanks for your time"

[Grogo]

Maybe it is not the game that turned me off after 7 years of straight subscription, I think it was this new generations player attitude. It's like all the shoppers at Walmart decided to suddenly subscribe to WoW.

[Deleted]

So you want applicants to have 600 cooking, farm the AH for a large amount of time and to not have a job.

Can you see why that's slowly becoming unreasonable (considering your large percentage of poor-quality applications)?

A) You don't need to have 600 cooking yourself - if that's really too much for you to do. You could always find someone in the guild to make it for you.

B) You don't have to sit in front of the AH the whole day to make gold. You should have 2 crafting professions (yes yet another harsh demand) and as such you can make gold from those.

I will agree, that in this Tier farming has been brutal. Cooking, the Farmville and last but not least the freaking dailies. And I will agree, that it makes the gap between people who've never been used to do these sorts of brutal farming things and people who're used to just suck it up and do it bigger. But I was giving an example from my own guild, and though we haven't killed Heroic Sha, we're far above the average raiding guild. So for someone completely new or inexperienced, my guild would really not be the place to start.

I don't think you'll find many semi casual raiding guilds, who will actually demand that you use the best buff food available or that you cap your VP every single week. Those are the same guilds who probably won't really mind (or notice) that your reforging isn't spot on and those guilds would fit better to the subject I guess.

But if you wish to join any guild, you must know what you're applying to. If the guild doesn't have a website, ask for the GM or an officer to tell you about the rules. Make sure that your expectations match. Because the applications we even remotely consider, even if they use a wrong talent or a wrong glyph or even if their reforge isn't spot on, are the people who at least bothered reading the guild rules and overall makes a good impression.

You can't expect raiding guilds to lower their standards, just because you want to join. My felling is, that a lot of time when people get declined from a guild, it's due to something they could have done better themselves or it's because they aimed too high. Nothing wrong in that but you really can't expect raiding guilds to just accept every piss poor application they get.

[Firebert]

You can't expect raiding guilds to lower their standards, just because you want to join.

I'd expect raiding guilds to lower their standards when they can't recruit with their high standards. However, the extra dimension here is that the gap between LFR and Normal raiding is too large, such that there exist too many players that want to get into Normal raiding but cannot with the tools available to them. It's quite obvious, with Normal raiding controlled majoritatively by raiding guilds, that they're at fault for at least widening this gap.

Either there's a way to allow LFR players to progress (like Normal raiders can progress) via the community, or Normal should be queuable.

[judgementofantonidas]

I'd expect raiding guilds to lower their standards when they can't recruit with their high standards. However, the extra dimension here is that the gap between LFR and Normal raiding is too large, such that there exist too many players that want to get into Normal raiding but cannot with the tools available to them. It's quite obvious, with Normal raiding controlled majoritatively by raiding guilds, that they're at fault for at least widening this gap.

Either there's a way to allow LFR players to progress (like Normal raiders can progress) via the community, or Normal should be queuable.

Ok. so lets put this in the perspective of the raid leader you just asked to allow you to fill a spot in his raid group that runs 4 days a week assuming 2 hours a day to be generous.

You asked him to allow you to participate 2 hours of of every 16 that they devote to learning content and gearing players in order to be able to progress through more content. Of course they are going to choose to put gear on someone that can support their effort more than .125 of the time.

---------- Post added 2013-02-27 at 11:56 PM ----------

I'd expect raiding guilds to lower their standards when they can't recruit with their high standards. However, the extra dimension here is that the gap between LFR and Normal raiding is too large, such that there exist too many players that want to get into Normal raiding but cannot with the tools available to them. It's quite obvious, with Normal raiding controlled majoritatively by raiding guilds, that they're at fault for at least widening this gap.

Either there's a way to allow LFR players to progress (like Normal raiders can progress) via the community, or Normal should be queuable.

There is no gap. This is something that you repeatedly state that has no basis in fact. LFR is not meant as a gearing step towards normal raids. Five man dungeons, reputation gear, and crafted items are.

[Mormolyce]

Those old bosses weren't harder. By modern standards they were piss easy bosses in fact. Hardly anyone saw them because at the time raid management was a nightmare, organising 40 people and all the grinding for mats etc. Plus the game was new so a larger proportion of the player base was content to level toons and so on and not necessarily take part in the endgame but now it's all anyone cares about.

And don't underestimate guides, addons and so on. Back then there was none of that, but now raiding has been refined down to a science and the game mechanics are very well understood. Vanilla and BC raid bosses wouldn't stand a chance against a modern progression raid group.

[hyphnos]

I'm sure if I added it up, it would be a disturbing number. So I'm not going to do that.

The trick is to get one character to 1000 VP as early in the week as possible, so the others get the 50% boost.

LOL was just curious what number you'd come up with. I've capped three tons on valor a few times thanks to the 50% boost but never managed doing that and taking all 3 through LFR fully.

My personal estimate for the first char is 450 valor for 5-6 hrs of LFR with queues. 5 x 80 VP dungeons at 30-40 min each with queues and 4-5 x 12 min scenarios.
If all goes super efficient and well, merely getting in LFR and valor capping on the first character is 10 plus hrs without allowing any time to gather lesser charms or fiddle around on the AH, do professions, tend farms, do battlegrounds/Arena etc.

10 hrs overhead is pretty steep considering it doesn't allow any interchangeable time, except maybe trading a dungeon or scenario for the same VP worth of dailies.

So even with the boost - doing 2 extra chars to valor cap is pushing 20 hrs and for a game that is theoretically alt-friendly, 20 hrs is pushing a part-time job and really I think everyone should be able to at least keep up with their metered currencies in less than 10 hrs a week. Granted, Blizzard has a lot more pay by the hour customers now than they have in the past - I just don't think burning out NA/EU customers to keep Chinese players online is going to play out well.

More time input isn't exactly equal to harder content, but it is harder for people to keep up with simple currencies and charms with the current rates of payout, which I think will just lead to as much burnout as the 10 months of Dragon Soul ever thought about.

[Deleted]

Was browsing the Dead Space Reddit and came across this article, it's somewhat relevant to the discussion, even though it is related to other titles.

http://leviathyn.com/games/editorial...n-denominator/

[Eats Compost]

It depends on what content you're talking about and how it's delivered. WoW's community combined with a random dungeon finder, for example, is utterly incompatible with any form of remotely challenging content. It just doesn't work. It was fine in BC because the groups were random, but when LFD became a thing, baseline difficult heroics became impossible without colossal QQ.

Generally, challenging content can actually generate a more skilled community, but WoW's problems with that are A) the initial experience, the questing experience, lacks any form of challenge and strikes down any benefit that difficult dungeons could have, and B) it would likely result in the downsizing of the community which, even if it was ultimately good for the community, isn't what Blizzard wants.

I know I'd like an MMO with more challenging elements as baseline (heroic raiding exists as a challenge, but it is a teammate-reliant challenge and only a single aspect of the game, not to mention one that is normally done on schedule) but that's a hard thing to make. The first thing that such an MMO would have to do is make it painfully clear that they're not competing with WoW, which none of them seem to be able to stomach. Then comes the developer having to make an MMO which is actually good, which is even harder.

[Wheelz]

This argument leaves out the obvious: that the difficult challenges are inherently more rewarding... IF they are completed.
But the more difficult they are, the fewer people will complete them. So, for many people (increasing in number as the challenge increases), making the content more difficult doesn't increase the reward, it reduces it.

This kind of "cater to the elite" game design is superficially attractive, but only because most people wrongly overestimate their own competence, and so wrongly think they'll be in that elite.

The idea that it's so hard, that you have to say IF is what intrigues me as a player. It's what makes me actually feel like working my ass off to actually accomplish something that I know not everyone else will be able to. The vanilla slowflake feeling. But why should everyone get to complete this, if they aren't willing to put the effort into it?
- The more difficult they are, the more I want to do them, because the more spcial snowflake I become. And I recently read a post here, on mmo where I know many people would agree on that.

Was browsing the Dead Space Reddit and came across this article, it's somewhat relevant to the discussion, even though it is related to other titles.

http://leviathyn.com/games/editorial...n-denominator/

Yes, very relevant to the conversation, especially the part about dumbing down games .

[Deleted]

There is no gap. This is something that you repeatedly state that has no basis in fact. LFR is not meant as a gearing step towards normal raids. Five man dungeons, reputation gear, and crafted items are.

No one is arguing that LFR should e a gearing step.

The argument is (and it's correct) that there is no smoothing of the difficulty curve between LFR and normal modes.

There is LFR stone guards (stack, aoe) and then normal stone guards (welcome to wipe city.) There is no intermediate raiding step between LFR and normal modes where stone guards are easily explicable, yet slightly challenging - i.e. you still have to swap them but if you miss half of them it's nor fatal, shit on the floor will kill you if you bathe in it but won't annihilate your ass very quickly and the chains are still harmful but don't need extremely fast reaction times.

The same is true of all the other bosses. There is LFR windlord (tank and spank) and then there is normal windlord (tactics, tactics, better have a plan, better have everyone pulling great DPS, standing in shit is almost certainly fatal.)

An analogy with the raiding environment moved over to the smaller scale content would be if there were only scenarios, pre nerf blood furnace style heroics or challenge modes.

There is definitely a content gap - what is missing is a raid where people can learn to raid without everything being such a pain in the ass or so stringent on the DPS/HPS requirements.

[Seriss]

There is no gap. This is something that you repeatedly state that has no basis in fact. LFR is not meant as a gearing step towards normal raids. Five man dungeons, reputation gear, and crafted items are.

He wasn't referring to a gap in gear. He was referring to too large a gap in difficulty between LFR and normal. And normal raids ARE significantly more difficult than during the past expansions, at least when you're not outgearing them. MoP has no entry raid for new people. It has no Karazhan, no NaxxV2.

[Deleted]

It has come to a point where new players don't feel the need to learn anything because nothing is punishing in the game no more, not even dieing because you release spirit pretty much on top of your corpse these days for an instant ress. So yeah, harder content is good. I wouldn't mind them bumping up the difficulty of heroic 5-mans and LFR, as long as those are still easily accesable as they are. That would actually make people improve themselves.

Of course a load of people will cry about how things are too hard, but that will pass as long as Blizzard would be consistent in their design choices. Going from challenging content in TBC to faceroll in WotLK, back to challenging content in Cata only to nerf it so it can be facerolled again to complete joke in MoP, isn't really helping anything.

[Deleted]

It has come to a point where new players don't feel the need to learn anything because nothing is punishing in the game no more, not even dieing because you release spirit pretty much on top of your corpse these days for an instant ress. So yeah, harder content is good. I wouldn't mind them bumping up the difficulty of heroic 5-mans and LFR, as long as those are still easily accesable as they are. That would actually make people improve themselves.

Of course a load of people will cry about how things are too hard, but that will pass as long as Blizzard would be consistent in their design choices. Going from challenging content in TBC to faceroll in WotLK, back to challenging content in Cata only to nerf it so it can be facerolled again to complete joke in MoP, isn't really helping anything.

The playerbase (in general) doesn't improve in the face of harder content. The playerbase goes and does something else entirely - they go and play something else, instead.

Why?

Because unlike the hardcore crowd, the average player is playing because the playing is itself fun to do. When it ceases to be fun, they stop playing.

[Seriss]

It has come to a point where new players don't feel the need to learn anything because nothing is punishing in the game no more, not even dieing because you release spirit pretty much on top of your corpse these days for an instant ress. So yeah, harder content is good. I wouldn't mind them bumping up the difficulty of heroic 5-mans and LFR, as long as those are still easily accesable as they are. That would actually make people improve themselves.

Of course a load of people will cry about how things are too hard, but that will pass as long as Blizzard would be consistent in their design choices. Going from challenging content in TBC to faceroll in WotLK, back to challenging content in Cata only to nerf it so it can be facerolled again to complete joke in MoP, isn't really helping anything.

You know, that's what people said when WotLK was the current expansion. And Blizzard made Cata and bumped up the difficulty. And people whined and ran away. So they nerfed Cata. And people whined again! Other people. And now we have MoP where you have LFR and then a steep step up in difficulty into normal modes. And normal modes are brick walls to newer players. And most new people aren't like "I need to improve!" They're "I want to have fun... but that's too hard for me. I'll just do the easier stuff." And that easier stuff will soon be too easy for them because they're not actually all that bad players, just inexperienced and not working at 100% skill level. Where do they go?

When normals aren't what introduces them to a style of raiding where things start to hurt but won't one-shot you, where to? When normal modes have berserk timers that are ridiculously tight for a normal mode, where do they go? Normal modes don't need as hard dps checks as we have at the moment. They don't need to be so punishing that you ask your PuG to show you their 'clear achievement' before you invite them.

Leave gearchecks, hps-fests and tight enrage timers to us heroic raiders. That's OUR thing. We want it no different and we're getting it just like that.

Leave normal mode to people who want to just have fun with a few friends and pick up people from trade. Because that's something that LFR doesn't fulfil. You can queue with friends, but it's nothing like sitting in TS together, figuring out stuff and then finally succeeding in downing Empress, Sha, etc. with a group of people from your server, present friends and guildies and some new acquaintances.

And I don't mean to dumb down normal modes. Just make them 'normal'.

[Zaphiron]

I don't really see anything wrong in making content available for everyone, some ppl will just burn through content like it's nothing. Others will struggle ( Lfr helps to explore boss abit and tactics) and why would that be? Because everyone plays differently and there is always heroic for those who feel the need for a challenge. Since heroic ain't as easy as everyone thinks as even the top guilds took a while to finish the content, so I'd say things are on the right track since there adding a heroic only boss so I'm not really complaining. They made it so that ppl are able to play for bits and still gain something even if there not able to play the game on a daily basis. The fact there changing gruff to adjust to multiple playstyles is still a good thing imo, why care how other ppl play? It's the way you want to ah that really matters.