What next for Liquid/Limit?

[Zyky]

No, it's insanely silly to imply a WF guild with the kind of resources that Liquid has will be disbanding due to circumstances nobody could have predicted. This isn't Team Aster.

Except we've seen it happen with guilds in the past, claiming that it 100% won't is just your bias speaking. Guilds like Echo, Method, ect will and have poached players from guilds such as Blood Legion, Vodka, or Paragon. The players are more inclined to leave the guild because of the shit performance that happened this tier, in turn would make them have to recruit new players for their roster. It's a cycle and eventually a guild just falls apart due to something significant like being a "world first guild" and then falling to world 5th lol.

[Relapses]

Except we've seen it happen with guilds in the past, claiming that it 100% won't is just your bias speaking. Guilds like Echo, Method, ect will and have poached players from guilds such as Blood Legion, Vodka, or Paragon. The players are more inclined to leave the guild because of the shit performance that happened this tier, in turn would make them have to recruit new players for their roster. It's a cycle and eventually a guild just falls apart due to something significant like being a "world first guild" and then falling to world 5th lol.

The guild is still head and shoulders above anything else in the NA raiding scene. There's simply nowhere else for the players to go. This isn't the EU where there are multiple S-tier guilds all competing for WF. (See also: Most of WoD/Legion's RWF.) On top of that, the race was still insanely profitable for the organization so I doubt they're too upset with the performance even considering the loss. It just doesn't seem like a realistic take to think that a guild like Liquid would disband given the circumstances surrounding this RWF.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Kinda silly to think they will fold. Contracts basically would make it a legal nightmare for a lot of parts of the machine for one. It isn't like these people and organizations just met up on the internet and play games. Ink is on pages. Next is it is accomplishing its root goal. It makes and made a lot of money. Mission accomplished. Yeah of course they want to win the race. They have ones in the past. They have gotten second a lot. This time they fell a bit. This is actually pretty common in spots. You don't fold up a professional sports team if they don't win the championship every season.

[Eli85]

Kinda silly to think they will fold. Contracts basically would make it a legal nightmare for a lot of parts of the machine for one. It isn't like these people and organizations just met up on the internet and play games. Ink is on pages. Next is it is accomplishing its root goal. It makes and made a lot of money. Mission accomplished. Yeah of course they want to win the race. They have ones in the past. They have gotten second a lot. This time they fell a bit. This is actually pretty common in spots. You don't fold up a professional sports team if they don't win the championship every season.

Professional sports teams don't fold, but when teams have championship aspirations, and they fall well short of the mark (much like how Liquid did), major changes often follow. It would behoove Liquid to make significant changes, as for a guild that sees themselves as #1/#2, but fell to #5, that is embarrassing and unacceptable.

[Guttamasta]

Glad it wasn’t steamrolled

[Biomega]

Professional sports teams don't fold

Hi there, a professional WoW guild just folded this week.

Now, I agree that it's probably not going to happen for Liquid, but it's not like it's IMPOSSIBLE.

[Radaney]

Hard difficulty does not steer people away from raid content.

Yes it does. You're factually wrong.

That's why raid participation goes down progressively difficulty wise, and also why raid participation has gone down over the games life cycle as raids have got harder.

[Zyky]

The guild is still head and shoulders above anything else in the NA raiding scene. There's simply nowhere else for the players to go. This isn't the EU where there are multiple S-tier guilds all competing for WF. (See also: Most of WoD/Legion's RWF.) On top of that, the race was still insanely profitable for the organization so I doubt they're too upset with the performance even considering the loss. It just doesn't seem like a realistic take to think that a guild like Liquid would disband given the circumstances surrounding this RWF.

You realize that players from US go to EU teams all the time right? lol

[Relapses]

You realize that players from US go to EU teams all the time right? lol

Oh yeah, US raiders are chomping at the bit to play with 200 ping.

[Eli85]

Hi there, a professional WoW guild just folded this week.

Now, I agree that it's probably not going to happen for Liquid, but it's not like it's IMPOSSIBLE.

A professional WoW guild is not a professional sports team. So, no, I'm not wrong.

Yes it does. You're factually wrong.

That's why raid participation goes down progressively difficulty wise, and also why raid participation has gone down over the games life cycle as raids have got harder.

Ah, yes, I'm factually wrong when you do not present facts whatsoever.

No, difficulty is never why raid participation goes down, especially in WoW. There have been four tiers of difficulty for a long, long time. No matter what your personal skill level is, there is a difficulty tier that you will find satisfying. This is not driving people away. What drives people away? People being unable to find a guild of equally skilled players, people being unprepared for the time commitment, the schedule etc.

[Biomega]

A professional WoW guild is not a professional sports team. So, no, I'm not wrong.

Okay my bad. You were talking about something entirely unrelated to WoW, I thought you were drawing parallels to something that is in WoW, since people aren't saying Liquid the eSports organization could fold, but that <Liquid> the affiliated WoW guild could. I guess you weren't talking about that.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Professional sports teams don't fold, but when teams have championship aspirations, and they fall well short of the mark (much like how Liquid did), major changes often follow. It would behoove Liquid to make significant changes, as for a guild that sees themselves as #1/#2, but fell to #5, that is embarrassing and unacceptable.

Wont happen. Rats would already be jumping if the ship was on fire and sinking. You greatly under estimate the number of dollars finding their way to peoples pockets and how motivating that is to give it another ago.

[scrappybristol]

Losing to TPS when the next savage tier opens in ff14

[Radaney]

No, difficulty is never why raid participation goes down, especially in WoW. There have been four tiers of difficulty for a long, long time. No matter what your personal skill level is, there is a difficulty tier that you will find satisfying. This is not driving people away. What drives people away? People being unable to find a guild of equally skilled players, people being unprepared for the time commitment, the schedule etc.

So you think people don't do Mythic because it's harder than heroic? Do you have a single brain cell in there? Lmao. I didn't even know people could even get this dumb.

[exochaft]

Oh yeah, US raiders are chomping at the bit to play with 200 ping.

This is why aussies, despite being heavily Alliance, stick to their OCE servers: playing WoW at a higher latency is terrible, especially the more difficult the content and reactive you have to be. Same with the South Americans tending to stay on their regional servers. I remember back during 25H Deathwing we had a few South Americans playing with us, and every time they'd jump over the pits between platforms they'd just fall to their deaths because the bounce-up mechanic was late due to latency. Tends to happen with the Blizz favorite of "detonate your bomb into an endless pit and bounce back up from the explosion"... they worse your latency, the higher the chance you will not bounce out correct (or at all). The tighter you tune the raids and their mechanics, the more latency will impact your ability to perform well... and it's insanely frustrating if the reason you're screwing up is legitimately a latency issue.

So yeah, expecting players to willing take on an extra 200ms (or more) latency isn't feasible. Forget just reaction and responsiveness of mechanics, some class rotations feel/play completely different with a higher latency. The spell-queue system helps a lot, but it doesn't solve everything.

Ah, yes, I'm factually wrong when you do not present facts whatsoever.

No, difficulty is never why raid participation goes down, especially in WoW. There have been four tiers of difficulty for a long, long time. No matter what your personal skill level is, there is a difficulty tier that you will find satisfying. This is not driving people away. What drives people away? People being unable to find a guild of equally skilled players, people being unprepared for the time commitment, the schedule etc.

There's enough 3rd party evidence to show that there's correlation between harder raids and reduced participation. Even if you ignore all that, Blizz has mentioned on several occasions that players will tend towards the path of least resistance and not rise to the challenge.

While you mention people being unable to find skilled players, unable to find people with the time commitment, etc... that all ties into the difficulty of mythic raiding, as there's the logistics difficulty and the content difficulty. This is why some of the fixes I've advocated for over the years has been the removal of RaidIDs for mythic raids, just make raids cross-realm when they open, make raiding cross-faction if necessary, and so forth, as the logistics side of mythic raiding is very prohibitive for many players.

However, based upon recruiting players for nearly 10 years for hardcore raiding, the #1 reason I get for highly skilled people not wanting to mythic raid (either for new recruits or retention of raiders) is that the mythic raid difficulty itself is getting way too high and keeps increasing. Basically, the amount of time/effort/gold/etc. you need to put in to mythic raid effectively in a patch isn't worth it anymore.

There's a reason M+ is as popular as it is: it's way more efficient to gear through M+ for most players, without all the logistical and content difficulty of mythic raiding with only a fraction of the time investment. I guarantee if you make M+ parity of mythic raiding in terms of logistical and content difficulty, you'd kill a lot of the M+ participation.

There's ways to have mythic raiding be in the game, have it more accessible to players while still having high difficulty without negatively impacting other aspects of the game. As an example (aside from the other aspects I advocated above), capping the ilvl of gear in an patch to heroic ilvl goes a long way towards making mythic raiding more accessible to the masses and having mythic raiding drastically reduce its impact on the rest of the game in negative ways. This also allows for better tuning, less ilvl/power creep, less extreme swings (or the elimination of many swings) in power and difficulty via buffs/nerfs/natural progression, and so forth. You'd have to adjust mythic raiding in terms of a reward structure, although personally I'd rather go back to hard modes on some bosses that would be mythic difficulty to allow more effort to be spent elsewhere... regardless, as long as there's no power gain for killing a mythic difficulty boss, you can officially say it's all about skill while making having BiS gear a lot more feasible for everyone who craves that goal.

There's other ways to do it, but the main point is that the activity of mythic raiding is way too difficult in many aspects, and players are being driven away from mythic raiding for any number of these aspects, the difficulty of the fights themselves being a large reason even if it's not the only one.

[Zyky]

Oh yeah, US raiders are chomping at the bit to play with 200 ping.

That's not how that works lmao, but keep living in fantasyland over there. Several players from EU play on US realms and vice versa, this isn't a new concept and they don't have "200 ping".

[Relapses]

That's not how that works lmao, but keep living in fantasyland over there. Several players from EU play on US realms and vice versa, this isn't a new concept and they don't have "200 ping".

...obviously a few players here and there might be interested in raiding overseas but it's the exception and not the rule like you seem to be implying. And the point still remains, if you're looking for a competitive RWF guild in NA there's literally only one choice. The closest guild to Liquid in NA (BDGG) killed Jailer the day before the fourth reset. The fanbase, the resources and the organization are unparalleled for this region. The guild isn't going anywhere.

[Alvito]

Naw, didn't mean 100% great but I like to see a race come up to the 100-200+ pull attempts to kill a Mythic boss.

It was inflated due to them not being able to beta test ahead of time and doing fights much closer to blind than they ever do

[Zyky]

...obviously a few players here and there might be interested in raiding overseas but it's the exception and not the rule like you seem to be implying. And the point still remains, if you're looking for a competitive RWF guild in NA there's literally only one choice. The closest guild to Liquid in NA (BDGG) killed Jailer the day before the fourth reset. The fanbase, the resources and the organization are unparalleled for this region. The guild isn't going anywhere.

You're wrong, but whatever lol. Players go play EU if they get offered a better spot in a better guild with better pay. Liquid blew this tier, period.

[Eli85]

So you think people don't do Mythic because it's harder than heroic? Do you have a single brain cell in there? Lmao. I didn't even know people could even get this dumb.

Whoa, look at this guy, personal attacks. He must have a valid point.

Seriously dude, you're not comprehending what I'm saying. People don't do mythic because of raid schedules, time commitment, preparation etc. Nothing to do with the actual difficulty of Mythic.

There's enough 3rd party evidence to show that there's correlation between harder raids and reduced participation. Even if you ignore all that, Blizz has mentioned on several occasions that players will tend towards the path of least resistance and not rise to the challenge.

While you mention people being unable to find skilled players, unable to find people with the time commitment, etc... that all ties into the difficulty of mythic raiding, as there's the logistics difficulty and the content difficulty. This is why some of the fixes I've advocated for over the years has been the removal of RaidIDs for mythic raids, just make raids cross-realm when they open, make raiding cross-faction if necessary, and so forth, as the logistics side of mythic raiding is very prohibitive for many players.

However, based upon recruiting players for nearly 10 years for hardcore raiding, the #1 reason I get for highly skilled people not wanting to mythic raid (either for new recruits or retention of raiders) is that the mythic raid difficulty itself is getting way too high and keeps increasing. Basically, the amount of time/effort/gold/etc. you need to put in to mythic raid effectively in a patch isn't worth it anymore.

There's a reason M+ is as popular as it is: it's way more efficient to gear through M+ for most players, without all the logistical and content difficulty of mythic raiding with only a fraction of the time investment. I guarantee if you make M+ parity of mythic raiding in terms of logistical and content difficulty, you'd kill a lot of the M+ participation.

There's ways to have mythic raiding be in the game, have it more accessible to players while still having high difficulty without negatively impacting other aspects of the game. As an example (aside from the other aspects I advocated above), capping the ilvl of gear in an patch to heroic ilvl goes a long way towards making mythic raiding more accessible to the masses and having mythic raiding drastically reduce its impact on the rest of the game in negative ways. This also allows for better tuning, less ilvl/power creep, less extreme swings (or the elimination of many swings) in power and difficulty via buffs/nerfs/natural progression, and so forth. You'd have to adjust mythic raiding in terms of a reward structure, although personally I'd rather go back to hard modes on some bosses that would be mythic difficulty to allow more effort to be spent elsewhere... regardless, as long as there's no power gain for killing a mythic difficulty boss, you can officially say it's all about skill while making having BiS gear a lot more feasible for everyone who craves that goal.

There's other ways to do it, but the main point is that the activity of mythic raiding is way too difficult in many aspects, and players are being driven away from mythic raiding for any number of these aspects, the difficulty of the fights themselves being a large reason even if it's not the only one.

There is 0 evidence that shows a correlation, never mind causation, between raid participation and difficulty of said raids. Ghostcrawler's Cataclysm comments come up here a lot, but that wasn't even referring to raids. Furthermore, your anecdotal experiences of recruitment issues does not constitute as evidence.

Also to be crystal clear: when I'm talking about difficulty, I am specifically referring to the challenge presented within the encounter itself. Everything else, from preparation to time commitment, does not factor into the difficulty I'm speaking to.