Horridon nerf a indication on underestimating the boost?

[Deleted]

It's called "tier 11".

It absolutely smashed server PuG scenes because it was far harder than what they were used to in WotLK with raids like the Obsidian Sanctum, Naxxramas, Trial of the Crusader, Onyxia's Lair and (of course) Icecrown Citadel. After only a few short weeks, server PuG communities had taken an extraordinary hit because of the tuning of tier 11, and many guild groups with a more social edge also bit the dust.

I honestly think the 10/25 equalisition crushed pugs more than anything else. What you had in WotLK was that you had 25 man guild doing 10 man pugs all the time, and 10 man guilds doing 25 man pugs. People with alts pugged both 10 and 25 man leading to pugs in general just being far more common. The shared lockout between 10 and 25 man in Cataclysm encouraged people to run raids with guilds and family rather than pugs.

[Firebert]

It's called "tier 11".

I already knew this. Blizzard already knew this.

But they carried on.

Also, a lot of your issues are simply a case of your inability to find a group and, honestly, I just can't see how a game designed for lots of people can be built around providing that same experience to those who won't try and make friends.

Sorry, all my friends left because T11.

Also, see LFR.

[Osmeric]

I already knew this. Blizzard already knew this.

But they carried on.

I'm reminded of Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly" (where "folly" is defined as "the pursuit [...] of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives.") Often folly is derived from internal contradictions of organizations. Again, I'd like to know what internal conditions led Blizzard to go down what was, to many, a path that was predestined to fail.

I wish some of the folks who have (we have heard) left the dev team with Ghostcrawler and headed to Riot would spill the beans.

[Raiju]

I'm reminded of Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly" (where "folly" is defined as "the pursuit [...] of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives.") Often folly is derived from internal contradictions of organizations. Again, I'd like to know what internal conditions led Blizzard to go down what was, to many, a path that was predestined to fail.

I wish some of the folks who have (we have heard) left the dev team with Ghostcrawler and headed to Riot would spill the beans.

Ghostcrawler wasn't present until end of TBC - in time to oversee wrath / cata / mop (presumably) but nothing earlier. I doubt he has much to say about why they were looking to go pre-wrath style, when the people who lead during vanilla/TBC didn't come back on till sometime during MoP to work on WoD.

[Osmeric]

Ghostcrawler wasn't present until end of TBC - in time to oversee wrath / cata / mop (presumably) but nothing earlier. I doubt he has much to say about why they were looking to go pre-wrath style, when the people who lead during vanilla/TBC didn't come back on till sometime during MoP to work on WoD.

I was talking about the decisions leading to Cataclysm, why Cataclysm was one way and not another. He was there when that decision was made.

[Pua]

I honestly think the 10/25 equalisition crushed pugs more than anything else. What you had in WotLK was that you had 25 man guild doing 10 man pugs all the time, and 10 man guilds doing 25 man pugs. People with alts pugged both 10 and 25 man leading to pugs in general just being far more common. The shared lockout between 10 and 25 man in Cataclysm encouraged people to run raids with guilds and family rather than pugs.

I certainly think the shared lockouts also contributed to the ransacking of server PuG communities. It's as you say; people would progress one setting with their guild, and PuG the other with those on the server who fancied it. Tier 11 wrecked that too and, again, thanks to a vocal minority that "didn't want forced to run two raids every lockout".

I already knew this. Blizzard already knew this.

But they carried on.

Something Morhaime himself admitted to. I think Osmeric has already linked the interview in this thread, actually.

Sorry, all my friends left because T11.

Also, see LFR.

LFR doesn't really have anything to do with this particular topic. We're talking about why you felt tier 12 was out of reach rather than arguing that everything should be in reach (which no reasonable person believes). And while I'm certainly sorry that Cataclysm saw most of your friends leave, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from making more and moving on from that time. I mean, you're still playing now which is a couple of years past tier 11 which means you've had more than enough opportunities to do so.

I'm not having a go at you here, I'm simply saying that content designed for lots of players can't also be farmed out for single ones - and, in an MMORPG, nor should it be. You're choosing to not make any new friends in the game and, honestly, only a few is enough to make the game hundreds of times better.

I'm reminded of Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly" (where "folly" is defined as "the pursuit [...] of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives.") Often folly is derived from internal contradictions of organizations. Again, I'd like to know what internal conditions led Blizzard to go down what was, to many, a path that was predestined to fail.

I wish some of the folks who have (we have heard) left the dev team with Ghostcrawler and headed to Riot would spill the beans.

I think you and I have discussed this before, but I've often been struck by the sheer stubbornness of what happened going into Cataclysm and has stuck since. We all blamed Ghostcrawler but, with him now gone and the direction not having changed with regard to raiding being "the" content, it might lead us to believe that he wasn't responsible for that choice after all. Alternatively, he could have left after the ship for WoD had sailed and the next expansion will herald the end of raiding as the game's primary content because it was Ghostcrawler that made it so.

It's a conundrum, it really is, and I'm personally interested in Hazzikostas' part in all this. I doubt he's the only one, but his design philosophy is certainly in the "hardcore minority" camp and he's calling an awful lot of shots these days. The fact he's a pretty lousy (and arrogant) designer doesn't help.

[Osmeric]

I think you and I have discussed this before, but I've often been struck by the sheer stubbornness of what happened going into Cataclysm and has stuck since. We all blamed Ghostcrawler but, with him now gone and the direction not having changed with regard to raiding being "the" content, it might lead us to believe that he wasn't responsible for that choice after all.

I don't think I ever thought GC was to blame (although you might find posts where I expressed some anger) for most of the Cataclysm design. He was a public face and scapegoat for some.

What I really want to know is what the decision making structure inside Blizzard and the WoW team looks like. For example, are they planning by consensus? By vote? Is there a small number of actors at the top who call the shots? Is Morhaime making the big decisions? And how was the Cataclysm design process affected by resource constraints (the expansion had an air of pennypinching around it)? Who was responsible for that -- Kotick and the board?

[Tipton]

I honestly think the 10/25 equalisition crushed pugs more than anything else. What you had in WotLK was that you had 25 man guild doing 10 man pugs all the time, and 10 man guilds doing 25 man pugs. People with alts pugged both 10 and 25 man leading to pugs in general just being far more common. The shared lockout between 10 and 25 man in Cataclysm encouraged people to run raids with guilds and family rather than pugs.

It crushed casual guilds as well. Casual 25 man's took advantage and downsized to their 10 best players. Casual 10 man guilds used to the easier Wotlk 10 man's didn't last long.

Even Blizzard admitted this, with the introduction of Flexi they lamented the death of Friends and Family guilds that we're left without any content in Cata.

[Osmeric]

Even Blizzard admitted this, with the introduction of Flexi they lamented the death of Friends and Family guilds that we're left without any content in Cata.

And with little end game guild content in pre-5.4 MoP, either. You don't need a guild to run heroic 5 mans or LFR, and these guilds were overmatched by T11/12 normal mode raids. The reintroduction of harder heroic 5 mans in WoD, and the addition of Flex (soon to be Normal in WoD), are squarely targeted at these guilds.

[Deleted]

I certainly think the shared lockouts also contributed to the ransacking of server PuG communities. It's as you say; people would progress one setting with their guild, and PuG the other with those on the server who fancied it. Tier 11 wrecked that too and, again, thanks to a vocal minority that "didn't want forced to run two raids every lockout".

Wat? The reason for the shared lockout was because players wanted to earn the same rewards in 10 man and 25 man. 10 man raiders felt like they were forced to join 25 man guilds. You are blaming to wrong vocal minority here.

[Pua]

Wat? The reason for the shared lockout was because players wanted to earn the same rewards in 10 man and 25 man. 10 man raiders felt like they were forced to join 25 man guilds. You are blaming to wrong vocal minority here.

I'm not "blaming" anyone.

It's a fact that one of the major reasons they started sharing lockouts was because (according to Blizzard) players didn't like feeling like they had to raid both settings every week. I didn't say it was the sole, or even the primary, reason; but Ghostcrawler himself cited it multiple times. We could debate the truth in this assertion but it wouldn't matter, because it's what was stated at the time and it had an impact on server PuG communities.

And yes, you're quite right. Another reason included the fact that 10-man players didn't want to feel that they needed to upsize to 25-man but, again, it's hard to see just how big an issue this really was. Given that 10-man is by far the more popular setting, and was throughout WotLK (after its inception) by an extraordinary distance, we have to be sceptical of what Blizzard thought the issue was.

We've never been presented with any evidence of these claims, so what were they? Feelings? Hunches? Guesses? The decision-making process that Osmeric just posted about is where this all sits. We hear about "data", but all the data points clearly to the fact that raiding was never the mainstay of this game for the majority of its players. Did the designers simply make a philosophical argument going into Cataclysm, in lieu of the actual facts, and then just give it the ol' "college try"?

We don't know.

What we do know, is the result.

Server PuG communities smashed, casual guilds ransacked, and raiding becoming an activity for the elite until tier 13 and LFR. And even now, it's pretty clear that Blizzard intend to keep pushing all their resources into organised raiding, despite it never being more than a niche activity that completely turns off the majority of players who try it.

Funnily enough, this brings us all the way back to the OP in a roundabout way. Horridon was a nuisance for LFR groups because his major mechanic (or one of them) simply didn't translate well into a setting where the majority of people will just blindly tunnel the boss. If Blizzard didn't decide to change a hugely successful formula that they stumbled on in WotLK, we'd never have ended up with LFR and the problems it brings with it.

[Deleted]

Well, I have not exactly saved blue posts from that era. But I recall hearing blue posts stating several times the reasoning was to put 10 and 25 man on equal footing as 10 man guilds felt like second hand and wanted to be competitive aswell. I never once heard the reason was that "I cant be arsed to run two lockouts per week".

[Tipton]

Well, I have not exactly saved blue posts from that era. But I recall hearing blue posts stating several times the reasoning was to put 10 and 25 man on equal footing as 10 man guilds felt like second hand and wanted to be competitive aswell. I never once heard the reason was that "I cant be arsed to run two lockouts per week".

Yes, and it didn't work out for the majority. Guilds had to become a lot more competitive to survive, most social raiding guilds didn't make it through Cataclysm. The dumped players found they had no raid content suitable for their skill level or time commitment, which Blizzard tried to band-aid a year later with LFR.

Whereas LFR broke the 'Not running the content same reset in different formats' commitment - Blizzard then reversed a lot of the Cataclysm raid changes in the Far East at the beginning of MoP, where 10 man became the less difficult/less rewarding format again and shared-lockouts were removed. In WoD they've gone for 20 man being the more rewarding/more difficult format, even against the wishes of a vocal majority.

Blizzard are rarely truly honest with the player-base, or own up to past mistakes. But from their actions it's clear that they regret the Cataclysm raiding changes.

[Pua]

Well, I have not exactly saved blue posts from that era. But I recall hearing blue posts stating several times the reasoning was to put 10 and 25 man on equal footing as 10 man guilds felt like second hand and wanted to be competitive aswell. I never once heard the reason was that "I cant be arsed to run two lockouts per week".

I'm not saying that they didn't make this point, they did. I just distinctly recall Ghostcrawler (and a few others) speaking about players having to run the same instance twice a week.

Blizzard are rarely truly honest with the player-base, or own up to past mistakes. But from their actions it's clear that they regret the Cataclysm raiding changes.

Aye, actions speak louder than words. They know, full-well, that Cataclysm was a complete balls up with regard to raid design; it's a pity they repeated it with Mists of Pandaria and thought LFR would catch everyone. It's why I consider Warlords of Draenor to be the next era of raiding (the third, with the first ending after Ulduar and the second ending after the Siege of Orgrimmar).

[Deleted]

We've never been presented with any evidence of these claims, so what were they? Feelings? Hunches? Guesses? The decision-making process that Osmeric just posted about is where this all sits. We hear about "data", but all the data points clearly to the fact that raiding was never the mainstay of this game for the majority of its players. Did the designers simply make a philosophical argument going into Cataclysm, in lieu of the actual facts, and then just give it the ol' "college try"?

We don't know.

What we do know, is the result.

Server PuG communities smashed, casual guilds ransacked, and raiding becoming an activity for the elite until tier 13 and LFR. And even now, it's pretty clear that Blizzard intend to keep pushing all their resources into organised raiding, despite it never being more than a niche activity that completely turns off the majority of players who try it.

Funnily enough, this brings us all the way back to the OP in a roundabout way. Horridon was a nuisance for LFR groups because his major mechanic (or one of them) simply didn't translate well into a setting where the majority of people will just blindly tunnel the boss. If Blizzard didn't decide to change a hugely successful formula that they stumbled on in WotLK, we'd never have ended up with LFR and the problems it brings with it.

This was my experience of it as well, in fact I gave up raid leading in any real sense in T11 because of how massively overtuned it was compared to everything that had gone before.

I'll quote me own blog on it -

Recently, I’ve taken a back seat from raid leading – this is after pushing on through Naxx, Ulduar, Totc and ICC.

Why?

Put simply, WoW has changed. Back in the day, there were no add ons, no ventrillo, no DBM, no recount – no EJ to check for optimum specs and the game was made without those things in mind. My basic raid leading style has always been “rock up and find out how it works for ourselves.” My basic philosophy has been (and still is) that it’s up to each player to sort themselves out, leading should largely be a matter of administration, selection and sorting the loot out. And it’s worked for a good long time, we’ve had some great raids and a lot of fun.

While leading without telling anyone what to do might seem couterintuitive and the urge to tell people what to do is overwhelming, I found that telling people what to do was a recipe for repeatedly telling people what to do – as they weren’t learning anything but to react to being told what to do, which I consider to be a waste of my time and I also personally do not enjoy in the slightest. So I never did it, and it worked out pretty well anyway, once people learned for themselves. (Usually the first thing to learn was that they had to learn…!)

Towards the end of ICC I could feel it slowly drain away as an effective way of raiding, however. The fights were getting more complex, newbies were struggling to learn the new mechanics a little (not helped by the fact that the heroics were so faceroll that there was nowhere else to learn mechanics but during a raid) but it still was working out alright. Not great, but alright.

With the advent of cataclysm, however – the raids are obviously tuned baseline for people with all the trimmings – and this has meant my old skool way of doing stuff has become far from effective. So, after a bit of a struggle and a fair bit of frustration I admitted defeat and have handed the raid leading over to other guildies.....

Blizzard are engaged in an arms race with very elite players and it's fucking their whole game in. Every time the elite get a new tool, blizzard responds by making their top line content harder (and seemingly they move everything else up in line with it.) Once that process had gone too far and they'd forced out people who wanted to raid but who no longer had what it took, they then made LFR, when all they really had to do was dial back on the arms racing against the best.

Check out what's been pushed under a bus in favour of giving heroic raiding community ever harder raiding -

Travelling the world
Levelling
Dungeons
The RPG aspect
Crafting
Farming to sell on the AH

All of the above have been made piss simple so as to get a new toon to endgame and raiding asap so that the elite players can have 47 alts to raid with. Everyone else has been left holding their dicks with nothing much meaningful to do. Except LFR or irrelevences such as pet battling. (Which is great but come on...)

[Candescently]

I do recall a lot of blue posts saying that raiders felt "pushed" to do 2 lockouts per week, and that they didn't want it to be "mandatory" anymore. Ironic, in light of the current 3 lockouts per week, moving up to 4 in WoD.

I did a lot of PUGing during T-11 and Firelands. I was on a low/mid-pop Oceanic server, so finding a guild group with suitable raid times was a huge struggle. I often wound up doing a few bosses with a fairly-low ranked guild, then doing cleanup later in the week either with other groups, or making my own. Toward the tail end of FL, I got recruited by one of the PUGs I joined to lead a regular alt/newbie run, which I also did all though DS.

I agree that WoW is way more fun with friends! I've met a lot of cool people through LFR and LFD, as well as the official Forums (directly or indirectly through people on OpenRaid recognising me), PUGs, former guilds, etc. I wish Btag let you have more people on it.

[Dreknar20]

encouraged people to run raids with guilds and family rather than pugs.

thats how it should be

[cabyio]

Put simply, WoW has changed. Back in the day, there were no add ons, no ventrillo, no DBM, no recount – no EJ to check for optimum specs...

You are so full of it. There have been addons, vent (or voice chat of some sort) and ElitistJerks almost since the beginning.

1. Addons
DBM - http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/deadly-boss-mods Listed creation date: April 2008, which is mid/late TBC.
Recount - http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/recount Listed creation date: August 2007, mid TBC
Hell there are even some that were created before TBC like Auctioneer.
So unless "Back in the day" only includes vanilla then I call BS.

2. Ventrillio/Voice Chat
Vent was initially released in August 2002 which was before wow was even originally released. Vent has been used in wow since the very beginning. So again... BS.

3. Elitist Jerks
They have been around as a resource since mid BC - See ferel thread here started in Oct 2007: http://forums.elitistjerks.com/topic...al-megathread/ So again I call BS.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm reminded of Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly" (where "folly" is defined as "the pursuit [...] of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives.") Often folly is derived from internal contradictions of organizations. Again, I'd like to know what internal conditions led Blizzard to go down what was, to many, a path that was predestined to fail.

I wish some of the folks who have (we have heard) left the dev team with Ghostcrawler and headed to Riot would spill the beans.

I have no doubt it was developers working toward building a game they wanted, which I am extremely happy they did, otherwise we would have hello kitty adventures by now.

[Deleted]

You are so full of it. There have been addons, vent (or voice chat of some sort) and ElitistJerks almost since the beginning.

1. Addons
DBM - http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/deadly-boss-mods Listed creation date: April 2008, which is mid/late TBC.
Recount - http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/recount Listed creation date: August 2007, mid TBC
Hell there are even some that were created before TBC like Auctioneer.
So unless "Back in the day" only includes vanilla then I call BS.

2. Ventrillio/Voice Chat
Vent was initially released in August 2002 which was before wow was even originally released. Vent has been used in wow since the very beginning. So again... BS.

3. Elitist Jerks
They have been around as a resource since mid BC - See ferel thread here started in Oct 2007: http://forums.elitistjerks.com/topic...al-megathread/ So again I call BS.

I was talking about my raids and the fact that we could clear everything pre T11 without any outside help (though by the end of ICC it was getting pretty tough to do). Pre t11 the way we raided was to turn up and find out for ourselves.

While all the stuff you mention was there, you didn't really need it and we didn't use it. Good fucking luck getting your average friends and family guild to kill anything these days by going in blind with no one watching a tac vid and not using voip or add ons*. T11 was the dividing line when it simply became impossible to go in blind with just the basic resources wow offers and expect to get anywhere with average players playing a few hours a week. t11 was when blizzard really started to tune their shit with the idea that the entire raiding playerbase was on voice comms, using add ons and watching tactic videos. i.e. what would have been seen as a super hardcore 1337 raiding mentality and set up in vanilla became the baseline. I can see why blizzard did that, because most players were using those resources. But, as I said last post, chasing the rainbow of elitist raiding has fucked the game in general over.

Please don't read the first sentence of a post and then knee jerk into "calling BS", read the whole thing. Context matters. You've basically insulted me 4 times in one post because you are too lazy to read what's in front of you. I won't expect an apology, but you owe me one.

*You probably can in flex though, because flex is the answer to the removal of Wrath ten man difficulty. Shame it's years too late, but at least it has arrived.

[Raiju]

While all the stuff you mention was there, you didn't really need it and we didn't use it. Good fucking luck getting your average friends and family guild to kill anything these days by going in blind with no one watching a tac vid and not using voip or add ons*. T11 was the dividing line when it simply became impossible to go in blind with just the basic resources wow offers and expect to get anywhere with average players playing a few hours a week. t11 was when blizzard really started to tune their shit with the idea that the entire raiding playerbase was on voice comms, using add ons and watching tactic videos. i.e. what would have been seen as a super hardcore 1337 raiding mentality and set up in vanilla became the baseline. I can see why blizzard did that, because most players were using those resources. But, as I said last post, chasing the rainbow of elitist raiding has fucked the game in general over.

I was doing this up until t14 (when I took a break) with no problems for normal modes. Heroics I would check out the fights moreso just because I was looking forward to them than to actually find out exactly what to do. Do you think most people in raiding guilds even know tactics now either? They don't. They do what they're told to do and only a handful per guild tend to actually understand the fight properly. Because of this (which has been present since I began playing late vanilla), it's easy to lead people through raids without them having seen a video or even have addons. Most people I know raid with some sort of encounter mod these days, but when I used to lead into new fights I would assume no knowledge no assistance in the past. T11 included.