So I know that on the class thread for the 5.2 ptr it was stated that tank gear isn't going anywhere for now and I'm really not likely make a change of opinion but I really wanted to dive into exactly why tank gear is an issue (will likely touch on int-plate as well).
So there are 4 different armor types in the game right now. Cloth/Leather/Mail/Plate. They really only serve to create a distinction between classes and separate the enhance shaman and hunter from the feral or rogue and the various healers from each other. Aside from that it doesn't do much mechanically.
The game has also expanded quite a bit over the years and we now find ourselves with 11 classes. Keep in mind that each faction only started with 8 (pally and shaman being exclusive prior to TBC). Back then with raids of 40 people loot distribution really only had to follow the class distribution, you also could expect 5 of each class, that means at the very least one of each spec. There would very rarely be gear that didn't go to someone.
These days it's a very different situation. The game has 34 specs, and the largest raid size is 25. Clearly we can't have one of every spec. So lets narrow it down to different types of gear. I'll separate it by primary stat since that's really the major difference between gear these days, spirit counts as a major stat and dodge/parry are a bit special.
Cloth: Spirit, Non-spirit
Leather: Agi, Int
Mail: Agi, Int
Plate: Str, Int, Tank.
So in total that's 9 different types of loot for anything with an armour class. For things without an armour type on them.
Healer, Int dps, Agi dps, Str dps, Tank.
So this is primarily for weapons/trinkets/cloaks/jewellery. So basically half the gear, this doesn't count tokens. That counts 5 different gear types.
Lastly lets check how many specs (yes specs, not raid slots just yet) are on each item type.
Cloth spirit - 3. Cloth non-spirit 6
Leather Agi - 7. Leather Int - 3
Mail agi - 4. Mail int - 2
Plate tank - 3. Plate dps - 5. Plate int - 1.
Couple things of note here. Seems a 2-1 ratio (roughly) is a pretty good setup for these low numbers. Especially since a lot of them are inflated by "pure" classes. Locks and mages would change cloth non-spirit to 2, counting holy and disc as the same would also bring that to 2. So lets do that since it seems pretty fair. Next up agi, I'll count rogues as 1 spec and it suddenly drops to 5. Still close to 2:1 but not too bad. Main is in the same boat, hunters inflate numbers. Lastly comes plate, and this is where it's a bit interesting. Both warriors and dks have 2 specs so lets drop that down to bring plate a nice even setup.
Cloth 2:2
Leather 5:3
Mail 2:2
Plate 3:3:1
As you can see just in terms of the class distribution there's obviously an outlier in plate int. Lots of leather agi wearers also. Otherwise everything falls under the umbrella of 1:1 while slightly above for leather and a lot below on plate.
Lets examine it another way, in terms of specs for the non-armour typed pieces.
Healer - 6
Agi dps - 9
Str dps - 5
Int dps - 9
Tanks - 5
Pretty even split there nothing special but this really doesn't mean much the same way that class representation doesn't mean much. It's much more important to see what raid comps are like and what you will actually see in a raid group. I'm not going to say that I'm an expert on all of this because I don't manage a raid but I do keep an eye on what we have and can think of a rough guideline of what to expect.
10 man raids, going to make some assumptions on dps mostly to reflect the available classes and what works. Primarily this means balancing ranged and melee:
2 tanks
2 healers (main spec anyway)
1 str dps (gotta be plate)
3 int dps (at least one cloth, maybe 2. Other would be moonkin on leather or ele on mail)
2 agi dps (one could be a hunter, if that's the case maybe one more of these and one less int, lets assume one mail one leather)
Looking at the dps shows us that roughly speaking, there's not too big of a problem. Sure there's not much wiggle room to optimize gearing choices for a 10m but that's part of organizing 10m. I have a hard time finding sympathy for trying to manage one when looking at 25m. That said I do understand that loot distribution is rough on them more so than on 25m.
So since dps is pretty malleable, there's no difference between a warlock or mage or in most cases an ele shaman for that matter. Remember that belt, boots, and bracers are the only pieces that have an armour type not on tier sets. Not to say that alleviates anything but it does have an impact in giving people choices. Doesn't help that gear is going to get DEd.
There's still an alarming problem here. You have 2 types of gear that are going to drop that have no representation really. You have 2 main spec healers. What are the chances that one of them is a holy pally? Assuming that you're randomly getting your healers, there's a nearly 10% chance of this happening. Knowing that you don't randomly select your healers, and no one is going to want to take 2 pallies to heal. Pallies are also strong healers in a lot of ways that bring utility. I have no way of actually knowing what sort of representation they have among 10m guilds. I'm not a healer so I dont' know.
So lets take another gander at your dps class because maybe he's got an off-spec for healing. Well he'd have to be a prot or ret palladin in that str dps or tank spot. Tanks almost never have healing off specs because there's never been a fight to my knowledge that required you to both drop a tank and bring a healer. It's far more likely that you just have to drop a tank. So lets assume it's a ret. That's a 1/5 ish (I think ret has lower representation lately so maybe even as low as 1/10) chance of you having a ret. Sure that's a lot of guilds with rets out there but that's even more of them without one. This means that no matter what, you're going to not use that piece of int plate that drops just because you don't have a raiding pally with a holy spec.
Same thing goes for tanking gear, though there's an easier fix for it. Chances are, you have 1 block tank (warrior/paladin) and one "face" tank (the other guys). Your tank gear drops will go to someone, and your str dps probably has a tank offspec. That's not a huge deal, but I'd bet there are guilds out there running guardian/brewmaster or double of one of those classes, quite rare I'd imagine though.
Again this really isn't an issue for the non-armour typed pieces since they've got good representation. Even in a 10m the only thing you're in danger of with dps is the str dps pieces. You're not always going to have one, and it kinda falls into the same category but I think that most 10m raids will have some of these and it's a fair assumption that their representation is relatively high. It could still potentially be a problem.
I could give numbers for 25m but I'll stick to the relevant ones. The dps stuff is mostly covered by sheer numbers. We have 4-5 str dps, roughly the same amount of agi dps and maybe closer to 10 int dps in the raid. These aren't hard numbers just rough ones since we like to keep rosters in the low 30s. The healer issue is also *mostly* alleviated since there are other specs that will use the healer gear and again the larger amounts of players will combat the problems mentioned earlier.
So we're down to tanks this time. Int plate is in a similar situation, in fact I'd say almost the same. You're highly likely to have 1 tank or holy pally. You're somewhat likely to have 2 holy pallies or 2 plate tanks. You're not going to have 3 holy paladins, you're not going to have 3 main spec tanks since the game doesn't support that. You're also really unlikely to have neither a plate tank or a holy pally.
In a 25m raid these numbers get exaggerated in the other direction. You are dropping so much loot that a good portion of it is going to get DEd, or your tanks are going to be missing gear if the drop rates are slightly lower for that gear, same goes for pallies.
That said tier tokens make a lot of this less of an issue, in fact they nearly remove the issue. The problem is people need to have alternatives to their tier sets. You can't offer only one piece of gear for a slot in a given tier. People don't like that, it's not good for the game. I think the case for plate int has been made in other places so I'm going to leave that alone. I'm going to stick to plate tanking gear for now.
I've tried to make an argument for the down-sides of plate tanking gear from a raid comp type perspective. There's one more way I'd like to approach it, so lets look at secondary stats for various classes/specs.
Str tanks - 5 (not counting the "dps" stats)
DPS - 5
Healers - 4
Pretty fine so far, basically everyone takes either hit/expertise *or* spirit. They take haste/crit *or* dodge/parry and everyone benefits from mastery. So we're back to tanks and dodge/parry. Our leather wearing cousins don't use it because previously there were so few of them (2 str tanking classes, then 3 compared to the 1 back then) and I'm not entirely sure they were "supported" by the game design back then the same way shaman tanking isn't supported now and to a lesser extent pally tanking wasn't even really supported until tbc and even then they made sure warriors were still the tanks.
So we know that non-tank stats can work for a tank. We have great examples of this in the form of druids and monks. I think the monk system where crit and haste actually give you defensive benefits in the form of elusive brew and more energy with which to either self heal/guard/shuffle is wonderful and could be applied to other tanks without feeling homogeneous or awkward. I'm less familiar with guardians but I do have a druid so after looking at their tool-kit briefly they do scale with both haste and crit in the form of more rage for each.
Those are the types of tools that are neat. Going back to plate tanks, we have to worry about dodge and parry. For the most part you either gear for dodge and parry and ignore everything else like the plague, or ignore dodge and parry in lieu of mastery (or in the paladin case haste and mastery). This leads many to feel as though dodge and parry are stats that make them bad. Strictly speaking this isn't true, those aren't bad stats as theck has pointed out several times but for skilled tanks the arguments have been made that haste/mastery (haste specifically) just give us more bang for our buck.
Lastly, dodge and parry are not exciting stats. They are completely 100% passive. They do not encourage cleverly using your classes mechanics. Now I'm sure some could argue that the other stats don't change how you play your class but I guarantee you that someone with almost no haste would approach their holy power very differently than someone with full hit/expertise and maybe 25% haste. The other argument for dodge and parry is that they *feel* like tanking stats. This is important in this game. Feeling awesome is about as important, if not more than, being awesome. I'm not convinced that many people feel awesome seeing a dodge or parry pop up on their screen. Dodge and parry are also not really noticeable as stats. The random nature of them means that you could gain dodge yet still get hit more often the following week simply by "bad rng."
Crit is a bit different in that you can see more crits, many specs (lookin' at you fire and balance) really let you feel the increase in crit rating. I'm not saying that every spec has to have this but it's not the same as dodge or parry. Warriors get things like revenge and so you might feel it but I'm not convinced that just changing it to some type of crit benefit would feel any different, maybe even less random.
So lets say we get rid of dodge and parry on future gear, and do some design around making crit and haste attractive to the plate tanks. Simple things like critting with ability X gives you Y chance to dodge and/or parry for the next Z seconds. Maybe warriors could get crit rating applied directly to their crit block chance (at an appropriate rate to avoid scaling issues). DKs could crit heal themselves on death strike and perhaps pallies could get something like sacred shield or SOI critting, maybe even crits make your next shotr buff do X% more damage reduction. These are the sorts of things that I don't think would require too much changing, I can imagine adding crit chances to sacred shield might be a bit harsh but you get the idea.
I know I already said "lastly" but there's one more thing I'd love to address. If you want tanks to scale with crit/haste as it's fairly obvious you do want by making hit and expertise attractive to us, then we're going to have to be taking dps gear from dps classes in some slots. Hit/mastery gear we can both get. Hit/expertise gear we can both get etc. The argument I've heard from other dps classes is that they are upset that we have other options but are still taking the dps gear. From their perspective, it's not fair that we have access to more gear than they do and aren't letting them have the pieces they want since we can be just as effective with the other gear. If we don't have other gear then I'm sure after a short transition period people wont feel estranged anymore. It'll also help new players by keeping them focused on the same stats as they level up. Introducing dodge and parry just to the tanks can get a bit confusing for newer players.
I think something I want to do is take a look at some proposed BiS lists this coming tier (5.2) and compile a list of some sort, do some analysis on the data in my spare time and try to come to some conclusions. If anyone has a way of getting better class representation numbers for raids please let me know, I'm not even sure if that data is readily available since I haven't found anything on the major progress tracking websites.
So that's more than I had intended on writting and I feel like the more I type the less coherent my arguments are getting so I'll end it here for now. I think I have to complain about vengeance again later but that'll probably wait until there's no more content for my to progress on since I'll be focused on that starting tomorrow.
Enjoy the patch coming up and I hope you're as excited for the new content as I am. Until next time, keep being awesome.
04 March, 2013
11 February, 2013
Justified
Last week I talked a lot about what would make a real change to 25m raiding to bring it back into prominence and since then there's been a few blue posts about it. Seems some other people either have the same ideas or were being really nice and posting these ideas on the forums. From the blue feedback it appears that they disagree with what I think on a much more fundamental level. That is to say they think it should be about making 25m more appealing to players instead of making it just as easy to be a part of, or run for that matter, either raid size. I'm not convinced this is the case, but they have a lot more experience and numbers than I do. Either way we'll see how the thunderforged pans out. I think it'll be a great way to see which direction people are leaning.
So now that I've outlined what I think are good solutions to the problem, another question comes up. Why is it so important that 25m raiding sticks around?
I'm going to try and break things up a bit more because this question really is a multi-parter.
1 - Narrative.
This game tries to deliver a certain narrative of the game world. There are grand struggles that you, as an adventurer and hero to Azeroth get to experience. This is where the old-school players would bring up 40m raids feeling truly epic. 40 people is a lot of people. Bosses that need 40 of you to take down feel a *lot* more epic than bosses that require 10. This is probably one of the stronger arguments to me for why 25m raiding is a more central or important part of the warcraft raiding game than 10m. Bigger groups feel grander. At a certain point other factors start to dominate the feeling of epic but delivering on this story of enormous scale really requires more than 10 people. Part of this might be because I'm so used to 25m that being in a 10m raid just feels empty, like there's not enough going on, but I think it's more than that.
2 - Population dynamics
25m raiding sets up an interesting population dynamic, lets break it down a bit.
Main specs (not including switches for os tanks and the like).
8% Tanks (2/25)
20-30% Healers (5-7/25, in some cases 8)
62-72% DPS(The rest of them, which is 15-17 usually)
Swingers.
10% of your dps will likely have a tank OS. (2 or 3)
20% of your dps will likely have a healing OS.(usually 3 or 4)
30-40% of your healers will have a dps OS.(2-4 depending on the raid group, I find it varies a lot).
Interesting setup there I think, now lets take a look at 10m.
Main specs.
20% Tanks (2/10)
20-30% Healers (2-3)
50-60% DPS (whatever's left).
Swingers.
10-30% of your dps will have tank OS (that's only 1-2 of your dps)
10% of your dps will likely have a healer OS (usually only 1, on rare occasions 2)
33-66% of your healers will have a dps OS (again only 1 or 2 depending on the raid group).
That's a huge difference between the two models. I think the first setup (25m) feels more natural where the 2nd setup (10m) feels a bit more normalized. In an average population of fantasy characters you're not going to get that RPG mix of tank/healer/caster/melee. I've played DnD campaigns with ranger/cleric/rogue/warlock. No tank there. I've played other campaigns with knight/duskblade/paladin/druid. That's just about as strange in comp. These aren't even that a-typical for these sorts of games.
3 - Design space.
I know people don't like encounters with mind control but it's a mechanic that's not so easy to duplicate without actually taking control of players. Think about this mechanic for a bit, in a 10m raid it's really easy to suddenly take all the healers out. If you MC too many people you're making it incredibly difficult. Not enough and it's barely even a mechanic. In 25m that window is a lot larger. Lets say the right number is 2 or 3 people in 10m. They happen to be healers and you have no healers while you break them out. None are healers and you may not have enough dps to break them out. In a 25m raid that's not even a concern until you get it up to 5+ players and has a much smaller chance of happening. Vizier showed us exactly this problem where in 25m the way you can split your raid made a fairly big difference.
Other mechanics like meteor effects. Blade lord unseen strike is a good example of this. In 10m if it landed on a spriest they could just dispersion it and take the whole swipe. On 25m even stacking cooldowns up on them wouldn't work for it, it's just too much damage. As a designer you have to consider these types of things. This is the sort of thing I call design space, the room you have to where things are in the sweet spot is a lot larger and allows for not only a larger variance in difficulty but also a smoother difficulty curve and a larger pool of mechanics that are still engaging. Also I'm going to predict that dark animus has a similar problem based on my very rudimentary understanding of the fight.
4 - Community.
A lot of people confuse what drives the game decisions by what brings home the top dollar. This isn't always so obvious or in some cases not even the right way to look at things. How does blizzard get new customers to play warcraft? I'd hazard a guess at 2 primary ways of getting new players.
The second one is where it gets a bit complicated. It's really easy to say that they wouldn't do something to see a drop in subscribers but sometimes that's what you have to do for the long-term health of the game. It's hard to give specific examples because even though in some cases they say "We know this isn't popular but it's going to make a better game," it's a bit more veiled than that.
Creating a world where people can get together and really develop a community, an out-of-game culture that comes from the game and develops around the game is something that can really really drive sales. How many times have you seen tv shows or something that had some secret society and thought "Oh man I'd love to be a part of one of those." It's somewhat similar, though obviously not the same, to say that you want to be a part of a large community that is based around this game. Again there's more to it than that but to put it simply this does sell a lot of subs and gets people to play the game. It wouldn't work if the game wasn't that great but there are *tons* of people out there who play the game because they get to be a part of some large social group or even just to play with their friends. A bad community would really ruin that, not saying it's the greatest right now but look at all the fan art and fan websites. Look at things like the entire curse network of websites or wowhead or shows like convert to raid or PST.
Well it seems I've gone and done a big wall of text again. I'm going to try and work on that a bit in the future but for now you'll have to suffer through the walls. Also 5.2 is expeced in 2 weeks. (26th of Feb). I'll try and continue to keep things rolling.
So now that I've outlined what I think are good solutions to the problem, another question comes up. Why is it so important that 25m raiding sticks around?
I'm going to try and break things up a bit more because this question really is a multi-parter.
1 - Narrative.
This game tries to deliver a certain narrative of the game world. There are grand struggles that you, as an adventurer and hero to Azeroth get to experience. This is where the old-school players would bring up 40m raids feeling truly epic. 40 people is a lot of people. Bosses that need 40 of you to take down feel a *lot* more epic than bosses that require 10. This is probably one of the stronger arguments to me for why 25m raiding is a more central or important part of the warcraft raiding game than 10m. Bigger groups feel grander. At a certain point other factors start to dominate the feeling of epic but delivering on this story of enormous scale really requires more than 10 people. Part of this might be because I'm so used to 25m that being in a 10m raid just feels empty, like there's not enough going on, but I think it's more than that.
2 - Population dynamics
25m raiding sets up an interesting population dynamic, lets break it down a bit.
Main specs (not including switches for os tanks and the like).
8% Tanks (2/25)
20-30% Healers (5-7/25, in some cases 8)
62-72% DPS(The rest of them, which is 15-17 usually)
Swingers.
10% of your dps will likely have a tank OS. (2 or 3)
20% of your dps will likely have a healing OS.(usually 3 or 4)
30-40% of your healers will have a dps OS.(2-4 depending on the raid group, I find it varies a lot).
Interesting setup there I think, now lets take a look at 10m.
Main specs.
20% Tanks (2/10)
20-30% Healers (2-3)
50-60% DPS (whatever's left).
Swingers.
10-30% of your dps will have tank OS (that's only 1-2 of your dps)
10% of your dps will likely have a healer OS (usually only 1, on rare occasions 2)
33-66% of your healers will have a dps OS (again only 1 or 2 depending on the raid group).
That's a huge difference between the two models. I think the first setup (25m) feels more natural where the 2nd setup (10m) feels a bit more normalized. In an average population of fantasy characters you're not going to get that RPG mix of tank/healer/caster/melee. I've played DnD campaigns with ranger/cleric/rogue/warlock. No tank there. I've played other campaigns with knight/duskblade/paladin/druid. That's just about as strange in comp. These aren't even that a-typical for these sorts of games.
3 - Design space.
I know people don't like encounters with mind control but it's a mechanic that's not so easy to duplicate without actually taking control of players. Think about this mechanic for a bit, in a 10m raid it's really easy to suddenly take all the healers out. If you MC too many people you're making it incredibly difficult. Not enough and it's barely even a mechanic. In 25m that window is a lot larger. Lets say the right number is 2 or 3 people in 10m. They happen to be healers and you have no healers while you break them out. None are healers and you may not have enough dps to break them out. In a 25m raid that's not even a concern until you get it up to 5+ players and has a much smaller chance of happening. Vizier showed us exactly this problem where in 25m the way you can split your raid made a fairly big difference.
Other mechanics like meteor effects. Blade lord unseen strike is a good example of this. In 10m if it landed on a spriest they could just dispersion it and take the whole swipe. On 25m even stacking cooldowns up on them wouldn't work for it, it's just too much damage. As a designer you have to consider these types of things. This is the sort of thing I call design space, the room you have to where things are in the sweet spot is a lot larger and allows for not only a larger variance in difficulty but also a smoother difficulty curve and a larger pool of mechanics that are still engaging. Also I'm going to predict that dark animus has a similar problem based on my very rudimentary understanding of the fight.
4 - Community.
A lot of people confuse what drives the game decisions by what brings home the top dollar. This isn't always so obvious or in some cases not even the right way to look at things. How does blizzard get new customers to play warcraft? I'd hazard a guess at 2 primary ways of getting new players.
- Recruit a friend type things (not neccessarily the one in-game but just people bringing friends into the game).
- People who see the community online.
The second one is where it gets a bit complicated. It's really easy to say that they wouldn't do something to see a drop in subscribers but sometimes that's what you have to do for the long-term health of the game. It's hard to give specific examples because even though in some cases they say "We know this isn't popular but it's going to make a better game," it's a bit more veiled than that.
Creating a world where people can get together and really develop a community, an out-of-game culture that comes from the game and develops around the game is something that can really really drive sales. How many times have you seen tv shows or something that had some secret society and thought "Oh man I'd love to be a part of one of those." It's somewhat similar, though obviously not the same, to say that you want to be a part of a large community that is based around this game. Again there's more to it than that but to put it simply this does sell a lot of subs and gets people to play the game. It wouldn't work if the game wasn't that great but there are *tons* of people out there who play the game because they get to be a part of some large social group or even just to play with their friends. A bad community would really ruin that, not saying it's the greatest right now but look at all the fan art and fan websites. Look at things like the entire curse network of websites or wowhead or shows like convert to raid or PST.
Well it seems I've gone and done a big wall of text again. I'm going to try and work on that a bit in the future but for now you'll have to suffer through the walls. Also 5.2 is expeced in 2 weeks. (26th of Feb). I'll try and continue to keep things rolling.
06 February, 2013
Thunder forged (The big 25m problem)
I've been missing lately, and there's a good couple reasons I promise. First I was in the market for a new guild since my raid times basically took away what little sleep I had, second I've been trying to figure out a way to handle this next topic properly and since thunder-forged gear got announced I really couldn't think of a better time. So without further adieu, this is it:
In the interest of full disclosure I do play 25m.
The problem:
So the problem right now, or at least the one that everyone is seeing is that the 25m raid scene is slowly coming to an end. Not to sound dramatic but it's been in decline every since wrath came out with both of the difficulties. It didn't start nose-diving until cata but this is essentially the problem. There are more 25m raid teams that are going extinct or turning into 10m raid teams. Take a look at Dream Paragon, or Exodus/Vodka to give a more recent example, than there are new 25m raiding guilds forming. This is fairly simple math since new guilds < dying guilds means every cycle we have fewer 25m raiding guilds than we did before. This is not a stable population.
Blizzard has stated they want to fix this and I applaud them for it since I do play 25m raids and I feel that this game was almost built on them. Sure it was 40 back in the day but the game didn't really hit it's stride until TBC/Wrath. I mean the world first races didn't even really hit the main stream wow population until TBC, and that was with Black Temple.
This is the most simple way to express the problem. Now it's time to understand the problem. Why are we seeing this trend and what are some possible causes.
Causes:
10 and 25 sized raids are considered equal in terms of difficulty and prestige. I like to think of them as separate but equal. I don't think it's far to rank people from one bracket against the other. I'd be like comparing lightweight to heavyweight in boxing. You just don't do it. It's not that one is easier, or considered the "better" one. It's just that they are two different, it wouldn't be right to pit the two against each other.
This is what opened the doors for the problem in my mind. Once people felt like they could play the game and consider themselves going up against the "hard" content, that is the hardest content available in the games to them, on any raid size they wanted to it was an obvious choice for many players to switch down to 10. 25m just isn't desireable to a lot of people. Smaller groups appeal more and that's just fine for them. This isn't the cause of the problem this is just something that set up the problem in the first place. I don't think going back to 25m = "real raiding" would be a viable solution at this point and it's not fair *but* I'll talk about that in a bit.
Once this paradigm was in place we have to consider what the equilibrium point might be. The point where both populations are stable, the 10m and the 25m. The next bit here is probably going to be the most controversial in what is going to be said however I know it's been mentioned in other places though I just can't remember them at the moment. Credit goes to them for getting some of these ideas out there.
10m raiding teams are easier to run than 25m raiding teams. Have you ever tried to make a cat do something it didn't want to do? Have you ever tried to make 2 or 3 cats try and walk in the same direction at the same time? Nearly impossible unless you've got food (or in this case possibly gear) at the other end of the path. Now think about doing it to 10 or 25 cats. Not going to happen without a lot of work. Us humans are basically the same. Try getting together 25 skilled players that all have a similar attitude and can work together as a team. Now try getting together that same group but you can stop at 10. In reality it's closer to 14 and 30 ish considering raid teams have to be a bit larger.
I could go on and on about why a 25m is more difficult to maintain, manage, and organize but I'm sure you guys get the idea. I can clarify more in the comments below if it's really an issue. Now lets take into account some of the ways the game itself creates the distinction between the two in managing it.
Food: There are two different feasts that need to be made. The 25m one requires double the mats. Sure this makes sense initially in that you have more than double the people so it's more efficient. However in a lot of cases, especially the ones that are using feasts (which is probably a majority of the raiders out there) you have 1 or 2 people taking care of feasts for the raid. This usually boils down to using guild resources to buy feasts or to cover farming them yourself etc. So why make it more difficult for the 1 or 2 people in a 25m raid just because they have more underlings? This doesn't make sense upon scrutiny.
Additionally with food now you have this silly idea about asking people to spend insane amounts of time and resources just to get an extra 25 stats (bit more for stam). Sure it sounds silly to a lot of you but heroic mode progression raiders are going to require it. It's a lot more effort to make sure 25 people are doing that than 10. It's just a numbers game at this point. This particular point isn't such a big deal but the feast thing really highlights the issue that it's significantly harder to worry about a 25m raid team than a 10m.
Flasks: Many guilds just ask raiders to get their own flasks. This is reasonable and requires minimal effort on the part of the officers except to make sure people are using their flasks. However some guilds will provide flasks for their raiders. This was largely due to the cauldron mechanic from Cata. Many guilds set up this structure in the guild and it's stuck around. No more cauldrons makes managing flasks for the guild basically a nightmare for 25m teams and really not that bad for 10m teams. Sure it's not easy for them either but just looking at numbers and resources it's a lot of effort. Consider potions here as well but just think how many potions, especially with pre-potting, people can go through on a given night. Don't want to talk about this much since it's basically the same as both food and flasks so you get the idea by now.
Funds: Repair costs for 10 and 25 raid teams varies greatly. You're getting ~2.5x the repair costs (think in the realm of 100g per wipe to 250g per wipe straight to the gbank) on a night that has maybe 20-30 wipes for difficult fights, plus battle rez during the fight. We're talking in the order of 5-7k vs 2-3k per night of repairs. Sure it's not that much but 3x that per raid week we're talking a difference of up to 15k per week. Some guilds just don't have the income to support that. Yes you get 5% or whatever of looted gold going to the gbank but in general the size of the guild itself doesn't change that much. You might get a bit more there but it's just a drop in the bucket so to speak.
Recruitment: This is where it gets interesting. It is incredibly difficult for a 10m raid team to up-scale to a 25m raid team. This would require getting 15 (roughly speaking, in reality it could be slightly less depending on your current bench or slightly more if you want a decent bench for 25m) new members in relatively short order without any also deciding that they don't want to sit for the first bit while you make the transition. Now you are a 25m and you have to maintain that roster. After raiding since mid-TBC I can say with absolute confidence that raid teams are, for the most part, very transient. I mean to say that you will not be with the same 25-30 people for an entire expansion. It's extremely rare that you'll have an identical raid team for an entire raid tier. People's schedules change, people burn out from the game, people have real life things come up. Some people get injured or worse. It happens in the game and it's something you have to deal with.
Sure comp is a pretty big deal in higher end 10m guilds but I'll get into that in a bit also. Maintaining a roster is rough, and lets say that you drop down below the "I need this many people to put a raid together" threshold, how easy is it to switch to a 10m raid, cherry pick the best people you have and keep on going strong under the different raid size. Some guilds do this on a regular basis to push extra progression nights or do clean up. I've done this before and this isn't a shot against the 10m raiding scene but making that switch is almost too easy. We have killed bosses on 10 and not managed to get back to them on 25 for *weeks* or cleared things in a half hour that would normally have taken us several on 25m. This is probably the biggest long-term cause for the raid scene switch.
Lastly I wanted to talk about raid comp: Having raid ready alts is a big deal and with guilds competing on the realm/region/world first level, whatever it may be. Throw in requiring top level food for all those alts and flasks for them all. This is rough, and it isn't limited to the 10 or 25m raiding scene. Imagine new people wanting to raid, seeing this and thinking to themselves "this is way too much for me." Not that hard to see. I think I might take a step back if I was required to have an alt that was just as raid capable as my main at all times. That's a lot of time on the game. This also leads a bit into the idea of varying amounts of healers/tanks for certain encounters but that's basically the same thing and has more to do with bench team than alts. Not related to the problem.
What isn't the cause:
I also wanted to take a moment to discuss what things aren't causing the problem we're seeing. While I mentioned that the equality of the two raid groups was a catalyst for this, it is in no way a cause to this problem. Sure if 10m wasn't there everyone would be 25m but we'd have a drastically smaller raid pool in general. We all want more skilled players in our game for a variety of reasons including more people to play with, better players to recruit, more enjoyable and meaning competition. These are just a few things and I'm sure you can think of more. This is an MMO, and that second M is for multiplayer. The more of us the better.
I really don't think gear is a problem anymore. More and more of the people I talk to point at killing bosses and the experiences as the reason they'll play these games. Sure there are a lot of people who kill bosses just for the loot and I'm not saying that they are bad or don't belong here. I'm just saying that they aren't necessarily a majority of the player base and that if there was some weird disparity in gear (that managed to mechanically fit and not disrupt the balance) we wouldn't see a major shift.
Ease of content. Easy content will make a lot of people shift but I'm fairly confident in saying that the two difficulty settings are, as I said earlier, equal but separate. The design team has spent *far* longer working on 25m raid content than they have for 10m. 2 Full expansions actually. They have a better idea when it comes to certain aspects of encounter design in 25m. I'd like to point specifically at DPS checks. I've found time and time again that on 25m the dps checks are really well tuned. Sure it might come out a bit rough like garalon but when progressing on the fight it feels like it's right where it should be. I can't say I have any real experience with it on 10m but all of the "progression" I've done, primarily on alts, it's felt almost exclusively a healing tuning. The dps checks were almost laughable in some cases during DS (more than a minute on enrage for our first ultraxion kill) while the healing was wonderfully tuned with our healers commenting on strat changes that made it almost bearable.
Fixes that, imho, will not work:
Anything gear related. You're either going to alienate every 10m guild out there by shifting gear to the 25m guilds, or let a tear drop into the ocean. This thunderforged thing they announced isn't even remotely in the right direction for a fix to this problem. I also have to agree with some other videos I've been watching that say this isn't likely to be their initial plan. I have a feeling it might have been that the thunderforged gear wouldn't drop in 10m but they changed it. This particular change actually makes other problems for both 10 and 25m guilds, but that's a topic better left to another of my boring gear distribution days. With a change like this, you're not going to get anyone switching from 10 to 25. People aren't going to switch from 10 to 25 just to have a better chance at gear, in fact most might not even want a garunteed chance at better gear if the shift isn't big enough, but too big and you run into the problem of alienating people again.
Throw support behind 25m raid teams and ignore 10m. Like I mentioned in the previous block of text, you're just going to alienate the vast majority of your raiders and lost a whole ton of subs and gamers. This is obviously a bad idea and I wish people would stop wishing for a return to the glory days as they put it. Going back to 40m is stupid as well.
Achievements. I'm not convinced this is the right way. I'd love them to split the realm first achieves but this wont cause anyone to switch either. There's also no elegant way to solve the situation of a 25m getting realm first, then just dropping to 10 the next week to pick that one up as well. Again a topic for another day but I'd like to see a revamp of the way they do realm firsts and I'll talk about this in a bit but to stay on topic it's just the same as mentioned before. Achieves are not going to make people switch to 25m, nor are they going to stop people from dropping down to 10m.
Finally, we come to the section that people have been waiting for. What can be done to fix it.
So sure opinions on this are a dime a dozen but I've been thinking about this for quite some time and you'll just have to judge my points on their own merit.
Another disclaimer here. I don't think this is going to be solved by one big change. I think this really has to be solved by many smaller changes and possibly some big ones as I'll mention in a bit. Problems like this aren't going to solve themselves and I really don't think there's a band-aid style fix. This is why I think steps need to be taken now and they have to be effective. So, here we go.
1-Consumables. Cauldrons should make a return. The fact that you don't have to worry about which flasks or how many of each ones or whatever is amazing and works wonders for the people organizing guilds. Same goes for feasts. Make it one feast that doesn't have a cap on how many people it feeds. Make the cost non-prohibitive and easy to manage. Fix pre-potting, this is a huge drain on my wallet and time that doesn't need to happen. I could write another wall on pre-potting and those type of effects but suffice it to say that getting rid of them would help this problem.
2- Another small thing but, drop more gold in 25m raids. I mean drop more per person. It doesn't have to be a lot but something a bit bigger to accommodate the difficulty of putting things together. Also perhaps consider rewarding more VP per boss on 25m. I know this might not sound like it's popular but 25m raid officers likely put more time into the guild than do 10m. At the very least it's more man-hours (total time spent not time spent per person). This could help them by giving more time outside of raid for other things like real life.
3- Vanity items. Things like a garunteed drop on the fire hawk in 25m and a 10% or something in 10m would be neat. Other things like "costumes" dropping would be amazing. I know a lot of people who love the orb of the sin-dorei. I'm curious why more haven't been put in. These things are hugely popular and would be something to incentivize people who want them early (not an expansion later). Again it's a small thing but it's along the lines of rewarding people in 25m, this is a dangerous road as mentioned earlier since you don't want to alienate 10m raiders.
4- Gearing up for the bigger ones now. This is the one that will take a lot of effort and dev time from blizzard but I think is really really worth it, along with the next one I'll mention. Official guild rankings. This could be something as simple as having a list of guilds that have defeated boss X and ordering them by number of bosses killed. Sure people may not agree on the rankings but it's simple and you would be able to *show* the community that you think 10 and 25 are separate and incomparable by putting them on two different lists and never putting them together. This would tell the world what you think of the two brackets and lead into the next section.
5- Revamp your LFGuild and LFPlayer forums. They're a mess. Within 10 minutes on the general LFGuild forum posts are essentially buried. The search system doesn't tell you anything and requires people to edit/bump/repost to update new boss kills. Imagine for me a system basically like wowprogress, but officially tied to warcraft. You could even have in-game tie-ins through the guild ui that guild masters or officers could have control over. I'm not going to try and design the way it would work but an official page of progression for guilds and a way to facilitate recruitment would a HUGE boon to the raiding community for both 10 and 25 raid teams. Most of the guild searching I did was through wowprogress, it's a great system that has the flaw of not being official which means many people might not know about it. Especially if you're just getting into the raiding scene. Get new players to see things like this might increase the raiding pool significantly and help get people to where they want to be. I'd love to be able to go to an official wow channel and pick options like "looking for guild at least X/Y Heroic, I can/can't raid between times AA:AA and BB:BB and am looking for Z times per week." Sure this would require a lot of effort to be done right, as I know blizzard likes to do (not faulting you guys for it I just want to clarify that this would take a *lot* of time and work) so maybe not soon but I think this would be the greatest single change that could effect the situation.
6- Also related to recruitment this one is something that I know is a bit bad for business but who knows what the numbers look like. Lower transfer costs. There is nothing so prohibitive to joining a new guild at the right progression level than server/faction transfer costs. This is insane. I had to pay 55$ just to move a character to a new guild. To put it into perspective, that's over 5 hours at minimum wage. That's almost 4 months of warcraft's subscription cost. That's also only for 1 character. Players that have many alts, or are required to have alts are going to have to pay more. Lowering the costs doesn't even have to be by a lot. Simply offering combo-deals is a huge way of making it less of a problem. For example you leave the server transfer at 25$, drop the faction transfer to 25$, and make it so that doing both only costs you 30 or 35. Again I'm no expert on the sorts of costs that go into this however this would let a lot of people move more characters. Also for those with lots of alts. Give us a deal where it's something like 25 each or everyone on that realm gets to move for the cost of 3 or 4 transfers.
In summary. I think it has a lot more to do with the infrastructure that is 25m raids than with anything else in the game. This is why my suggestions are geared towards this change. I'm very much invested in keeping 25m raiding alive and going. The more of us there are the more reason there is to generate content directed towards us, so please if you feel my points had any merit or even gave you something to think about. Forward it on to other warcraftians you know, and get people talking about this. If for some reason you don't play warcraft and made it this far send it to someone who does.
As always feel free to comment below. I'd love feedback on some of the suggestions. Hopefully I'll get back into posting more regularly especially with 5.2 coming. In the meantime, best of luck with your raids and may your rng be ever so slightly above normal.
In the interest of full disclosure I do play 25m.
The problem:
So the problem right now, or at least the one that everyone is seeing is that the 25m raid scene is slowly coming to an end. Not to sound dramatic but it's been in decline every since wrath came out with both of the difficulties. It didn't start nose-diving until cata but this is essentially the problem. There are more 25m raid teams that are going extinct or turning into 10m raid teams. Take a look at Dream Paragon, or Exodus/Vodka to give a more recent example, than there are new 25m raiding guilds forming. This is fairly simple math since new guilds < dying guilds means every cycle we have fewer 25m raiding guilds than we did before. This is not a stable population.
Blizzard has stated they want to fix this and I applaud them for it since I do play 25m raids and I feel that this game was almost built on them. Sure it was 40 back in the day but the game didn't really hit it's stride until TBC/Wrath. I mean the world first races didn't even really hit the main stream wow population until TBC, and that was with Black Temple.
This is the most simple way to express the problem. Now it's time to understand the problem. Why are we seeing this trend and what are some possible causes.
Causes:
10 and 25 sized raids are considered equal in terms of difficulty and prestige. I like to think of them as separate but equal. I don't think it's far to rank people from one bracket against the other. I'd be like comparing lightweight to heavyweight in boxing. You just don't do it. It's not that one is easier, or considered the "better" one. It's just that they are two different, it wouldn't be right to pit the two against each other.
This is what opened the doors for the problem in my mind. Once people felt like they could play the game and consider themselves going up against the "hard" content, that is the hardest content available in the games to them, on any raid size they wanted to it was an obvious choice for many players to switch down to 10. 25m just isn't desireable to a lot of people. Smaller groups appeal more and that's just fine for them. This isn't the cause of the problem this is just something that set up the problem in the first place. I don't think going back to 25m = "real raiding" would be a viable solution at this point and it's not fair *but* I'll talk about that in a bit.
Once this paradigm was in place we have to consider what the equilibrium point might be. The point where both populations are stable, the 10m and the 25m. The next bit here is probably going to be the most controversial in what is going to be said however I know it's been mentioned in other places though I just can't remember them at the moment. Credit goes to them for getting some of these ideas out there.
10m raiding teams are easier to run than 25m raiding teams. Have you ever tried to make a cat do something it didn't want to do? Have you ever tried to make 2 or 3 cats try and walk in the same direction at the same time? Nearly impossible unless you've got food (or in this case possibly gear) at the other end of the path. Now think about doing it to 10 or 25 cats. Not going to happen without a lot of work. Us humans are basically the same. Try getting together 25 skilled players that all have a similar attitude and can work together as a team. Now try getting together that same group but you can stop at 10. In reality it's closer to 14 and 30 ish considering raid teams have to be a bit larger.
I could go on and on about why a 25m is more difficult to maintain, manage, and organize but I'm sure you guys get the idea. I can clarify more in the comments below if it's really an issue. Now lets take into account some of the ways the game itself creates the distinction between the two in managing it.
Food: There are two different feasts that need to be made. The 25m one requires double the mats. Sure this makes sense initially in that you have more than double the people so it's more efficient. However in a lot of cases, especially the ones that are using feasts (which is probably a majority of the raiders out there) you have 1 or 2 people taking care of feasts for the raid. This usually boils down to using guild resources to buy feasts or to cover farming them yourself etc. So why make it more difficult for the 1 or 2 people in a 25m raid just because they have more underlings? This doesn't make sense upon scrutiny.
Additionally with food now you have this silly idea about asking people to spend insane amounts of time and resources just to get an extra 25 stats (bit more for stam). Sure it sounds silly to a lot of you but heroic mode progression raiders are going to require it. It's a lot more effort to make sure 25 people are doing that than 10. It's just a numbers game at this point. This particular point isn't such a big deal but the feast thing really highlights the issue that it's significantly harder to worry about a 25m raid team than a 10m.
Flasks: Many guilds just ask raiders to get their own flasks. This is reasonable and requires minimal effort on the part of the officers except to make sure people are using their flasks. However some guilds will provide flasks for their raiders. This was largely due to the cauldron mechanic from Cata. Many guilds set up this structure in the guild and it's stuck around. No more cauldrons makes managing flasks for the guild basically a nightmare for 25m teams and really not that bad for 10m teams. Sure it's not easy for them either but just looking at numbers and resources it's a lot of effort. Consider potions here as well but just think how many potions, especially with pre-potting, people can go through on a given night. Don't want to talk about this much since it's basically the same as both food and flasks so you get the idea by now.
Funds: Repair costs for 10 and 25 raid teams varies greatly. You're getting ~2.5x the repair costs (think in the realm of 100g per wipe to 250g per wipe straight to the gbank) on a night that has maybe 20-30 wipes for difficult fights, plus battle rez during the fight. We're talking in the order of 5-7k vs 2-3k per night of repairs. Sure it's not that much but 3x that per raid week we're talking a difference of up to 15k per week. Some guilds just don't have the income to support that. Yes you get 5% or whatever of looted gold going to the gbank but in general the size of the guild itself doesn't change that much. You might get a bit more there but it's just a drop in the bucket so to speak.
Recruitment: This is where it gets interesting. It is incredibly difficult for a 10m raid team to up-scale to a 25m raid team. This would require getting 15 (roughly speaking, in reality it could be slightly less depending on your current bench or slightly more if you want a decent bench for 25m) new members in relatively short order without any also deciding that they don't want to sit for the first bit while you make the transition. Now you are a 25m and you have to maintain that roster. After raiding since mid-TBC I can say with absolute confidence that raid teams are, for the most part, very transient. I mean to say that you will not be with the same 25-30 people for an entire expansion. It's extremely rare that you'll have an identical raid team for an entire raid tier. People's schedules change, people burn out from the game, people have real life things come up. Some people get injured or worse. It happens in the game and it's something you have to deal with.
Sure comp is a pretty big deal in higher end 10m guilds but I'll get into that in a bit also. Maintaining a roster is rough, and lets say that you drop down below the "I need this many people to put a raid together" threshold, how easy is it to switch to a 10m raid, cherry pick the best people you have and keep on going strong under the different raid size. Some guilds do this on a regular basis to push extra progression nights or do clean up. I've done this before and this isn't a shot against the 10m raiding scene but making that switch is almost too easy. We have killed bosses on 10 and not managed to get back to them on 25 for *weeks* or cleared things in a half hour that would normally have taken us several on 25m. This is probably the biggest long-term cause for the raid scene switch.
Lastly I wanted to talk about raid comp: Having raid ready alts is a big deal and with guilds competing on the realm/region/world first level, whatever it may be. Throw in requiring top level food for all those alts and flasks for them all. This is rough, and it isn't limited to the 10 or 25m raiding scene. Imagine new people wanting to raid, seeing this and thinking to themselves "this is way too much for me." Not that hard to see. I think I might take a step back if I was required to have an alt that was just as raid capable as my main at all times. That's a lot of time on the game. This also leads a bit into the idea of varying amounts of healers/tanks for certain encounters but that's basically the same thing and has more to do with bench team than alts. Not related to the problem.
What isn't the cause:
I also wanted to take a moment to discuss what things aren't causing the problem we're seeing. While I mentioned that the equality of the two raid groups was a catalyst for this, it is in no way a cause to this problem. Sure if 10m wasn't there everyone would be 25m but we'd have a drastically smaller raid pool in general. We all want more skilled players in our game for a variety of reasons including more people to play with, better players to recruit, more enjoyable and meaning competition. These are just a few things and I'm sure you can think of more. This is an MMO, and that second M is for multiplayer. The more of us the better.
I really don't think gear is a problem anymore. More and more of the people I talk to point at killing bosses and the experiences as the reason they'll play these games. Sure there are a lot of people who kill bosses just for the loot and I'm not saying that they are bad or don't belong here. I'm just saying that they aren't necessarily a majority of the player base and that if there was some weird disparity in gear (that managed to mechanically fit and not disrupt the balance) we wouldn't see a major shift.
Ease of content. Easy content will make a lot of people shift but I'm fairly confident in saying that the two difficulty settings are, as I said earlier, equal but separate. The design team has spent *far* longer working on 25m raid content than they have for 10m. 2 Full expansions actually. They have a better idea when it comes to certain aspects of encounter design in 25m. I'd like to point specifically at DPS checks. I've found time and time again that on 25m the dps checks are really well tuned. Sure it might come out a bit rough like garalon but when progressing on the fight it feels like it's right where it should be. I can't say I have any real experience with it on 10m but all of the "progression" I've done, primarily on alts, it's felt almost exclusively a healing tuning. The dps checks were almost laughable in some cases during DS (more than a minute on enrage for our first ultraxion kill) while the healing was wonderfully tuned with our healers commenting on strat changes that made it almost bearable.
Fixes that, imho, will not work:
Anything gear related. You're either going to alienate every 10m guild out there by shifting gear to the 25m guilds, or let a tear drop into the ocean. This thunderforged thing they announced isn't even remotely in the right direction for a fix to this problem. I also have to agree with some other videos I've been watching that say this isn't likely to be their initial plan. I have a feeling it might have been that the thunderforged gear wouldn't drop in 10m but they changed it. This particular change actually makes other problems for both 10 and 25m guilds, but that's a topic better left to another of my boring gear distribution days. With a change like this, you're not going to get anyone switching from 10 to 25. People aren't going to switch from 10 to 25 just to have a better chance at gear, in fact most might not even want a garunteed chance at better gear if the shift isn't big enough, but too big and you run into the problem of alienating people again.
Throw support behind 25m raid teams and ignore 10m. Like I mentioned in the previous block of text, you're just going to alienate the vast majority of your raiders and lost a whole ton of subs and gamers. This is obviously a bad idea and I wish people would stop wishing for a return to the glory days as they put it. Going back to 40m is stupid as well.
Achievements. I'm not convinced this is the right way. I'd love them to split the realm first achieves but this wont cause anyone to switch either. There's also no elegant way to solve the situation of a 25m getting realm first, then just dropping to 10 the next week to pick that one up as well. Again a topic for another day but I'd like to see a revamp of the way they do realm firsts and I'll talk about this in a bit but to stay on topic it's just the same as mentioned before. Achieves are not going to make people switch to 25m, nor are they going to stop people from dropping down to 10m.
Finally, we come to the section that people have been waiting for. What can be done to fix it.
So sure opinions on this are a dime a dozen but I've been thinking about this for quite some time and you'll just have to judge my points on their own merit.
Another disclaimer here. I don't think this is going to be solved by one big change. I think this really has to be solved by many smaller changes and possibly some big ones as I'll mention in a bit. Problems like this aren't going to solve themselves and I really don't think there's a band-aid style fix. This is why I think steps need to be taken now and they have to be effective. So, here we go.
1-Consumables. Cauldrons should make a return. The fact that you don't have to worry about which flasks or how many of each ones or whatever is amazing and works wonders for the people organizing guilds. Same goes for feasts. Make it one feast that doesn't have a cap on how many people it feeds. Make the cost non-prohibitive and easy to manage. Fix pre-potting, this is a huge drain on my wallet and time that doesn't need to happen. I could write another wall on pre-potting and those type of effects but suffice it to say that getting rid of them would help this problem.
2- Another small thing but, drop more gold in 25m raids. I mean drop more per person. It doesn't have to be a lot but something a bit bigger to accommodate the difficulty of putting things together. Also perhaps consider rewarding more VP per boss on 25m. I know this might not sound like it's popular but 25m raid officers likely put more time into the guild than do 10m. At the very least it's more man-hours (total time spent not time spent per person). This could help them by giving more time outside of raid for other things like real life.
3- Vanity items. Things like a garunteed drop on the fire hawk in 25m and a 10% or something in 10m would be neat. Other things like "costumes" dropping would be amazing. I know a lot of people who love the orb of the sin-dorei. I'm curious why more haven't been put in. These things are hugely popular and would be something to incentivize people who want them early (not an expansion later). Again it's a small thing but it's along the lines of rewarding people in 25m, this is a dangerous road as mentioned earlier since you don't want to alienate 10m raiders.
4- Gearing up for the bigger ones now. This is the one that will take a lot of effort and dev time from blizzard but I think is really really worth it, along with the next one I'll mention. Official guild rankings. This could be something as simple as having a list of guilds that have defeated boss X and ordering them by number of bosses killed. Sure people may not agree on the rankings but it's simple and you would be able to *show* the community that you think 10 and 25 are separate and incomparable by putting them on two different lists and never putting them together. This would tell the world what you think of the two brackets and lead into the next section.
5- Revamp your LFGuild and LFPlayer forums. They're a mess. Within 10 minutes on the general LFGuild forum posts are essentially buried. The search system doesn't tell you anything and requires people to edit/bump/repost to update new boss kills. Imagine for me a system basically like wowprogress, but officially tied to warcraft. You could even have in-game tie-ins through the guild ui that guild masters or officers could have control over. I'm not going to try and design the way it would work but an official page of progression for guilds and a way to facilitate recruitment would a HUGE boon to the raiding community for both 10 and 25 raid teams. Most of the guild searching I did was through wowprogress, it's a great system that has the flaw of not being official which means many people might not know about it. Especially if you're just getting into the raiding scene. Get new players to see things like this might increase the raiding pool significantly and help get people to where they want to be. I'd love to be able to go to an official wow channel and pick options like "looking for guild at least X/Y Heroic, I can/can't raid between times AA:AA and BB:BB and am looking for Z times per week." Sure this would require a lot of effort to be done right, as I know blizzard likes to do (not faulting you guys for it I just want to clarify that this would take a *lot* of time and work) so maybe not soon but I think this would be the greatest single change that could effect the situation.
6- Also related to recruitment this one is something that I know is a bit bad for business but who knows what the numbers look like. Lower transfer costs. There is nothing so prohibitive to joining a new guild at the right progression level than server/faction transfer costs. This is insane. I had to pay 55$ just to move a character to a new guild. To put it into perspective, that's over 5 hours at minimum wage. That's almost 4 months of warcraft's subscription cost. That's also only for 1 character. Players that have many alts, or are required to have alts are going to have to pay more. Lowering the costs doesn't even have to be by a lot. Simply offering combo-deals is a huge way of making it less of a problem. For example you leave the server transfer at 25$, drop the faction transfer to 25$, and make it so that doing both only costs you 30 or 35. Again I'm no expert on the sorts of costs that go into this however this would let a lot of people move more characters. Also for those with lots of alts. Give us a deal where it's something like 25 each or everyone on that realm gets to move for the cost of 3 or 4 transfers.
In summary. I think it has a lot more to do with the infrastructure that is 25m raids than with anything else in the game. This is why my suggestions are geared towards this change. I'm very much invested in keeping 25m raiding alive and going. The more of us there are the more reason there is to generate content directed towards us, so please if you feel my points had any merit or even gave you something to think about. Forward it on to other warcraftians you know, and get people talking about this. If for some reason you don't play warcraft and made it this far send it to someone who does.
As always feel free to comment below. I'd love feedback on some of the suggestions. Hopefully I'll get back into posting more regularly especially with 5.2 coming. In the meantime, best of luck with your raids and may your rng be ever so slightly above normal.
13 December, 2012
Some people are bad, but not you guys.
Holiday season really hurts the post count so I'll try and keep going but there's a high chance that my sparse posting will continue until after new years rolls around. That said, on to the juicy topics.
So a lot of the time you aren't on the same skill level as your friends. Sometimes you're just not willing to put that much effort into the game or your friends just don't get the game on the same level that you do. There's nothing wrong with either one but it's something a lot of people struggle with because you really want to play with your friends. So today I'm going to examine some of the systems in various games (again looking at warcraft primarily) and what you as a player can do or what sort of content you should be targetting to play with your friends to have a good time.
Step 1) Don't PvP. As much fun as you think it would be, you're both just going to get frustrated. Take a look at something like league of legends. They have a system in there for seperating people of differing skill levels, and while it doesn't work all the time things get crazy when groups of varying skill levels get together. I have some pretty unfun experiences in that game when I go to play with some of my friends who spend a fair bit more time in that game than I do. Just don't PvP. You may do it if one of you is a healer and one is a crazy dps pvper and you're doing bgs. Aside from that there's not much in it that will lead to fun engaging pvp.
Step 2) Don't play things with a skill difficulty too low or two high. This might seem obvious but I can't tell you how many times people who love the engaging experience of really struggling just find it annoying when others aren't keeping up with them. The same goes for playing in a situation that you find yourself in way over your head. Find that middle ground where you can both enjoy it. I find myself really enjoying situations that are mostly relaxing for me, and difficult enough that we both have to at least pay attention.
Step 3) Don't take any of it seriously. This is seen a lot in board games but bleeds over into all sorts of environments. I'm sure many of you have been there where there's one guy at a party that is taking any sort of competition way to seriously. I've lost friends to a board game called Diplomacy. If you've played it you'll know what I mean. You're going to regret taking things too seriously when you're just playing to have a good time with friends. This is also far more important for the person of higher skill level though everyone should go in understanding that this is just for a good time.
So what does all this lead to in warcraft? LFR. LFR is probably one of the greatest inventions for this. It's not so easy that you can go afk and kill, though some people do and there's a special place in hell for you right beside the people that talk or use cell phones during movies. This is a place where you can take things really lightly and still have a good time. Alternatively 10m raids, and this is where I think the 10v25 distinction really shines. 10m raiding is really really good for people who are on weird schedules to find like minded players with similarly odd skeds with which to raid. Challenge modes are also an amazing thing for these types of people. You don't have to go in there expecting gold. Aiming for silver with a group is just as good if that's what people are ready for. You don't expect to go in and kill heroic bosses the first time you see them, challenge modes, and most things in life, are going to be the same.
Lastly I wanted to say that if you aren't enjoying it, just stop. There's no reason for you and your friend to get upset with each other and storm off. It's just a game ultimately, especially if it's not where you guys normally game. If you normally play these games separately then just part ways and come back to it another time. You're not progression raiding, you're not going for gladiator titles. You're just aiming to have a good time with friends you don't normally play with seriously.
So like I said earlier I'm really busy lately. We just finished getting Garalon and Wind Lord down this week. Wind lord is really easy compared to garalon. Things just fall into place after you've been working on it for a night and he dies on a pull you didn't feel good about in the first place. That said I'm super happy to have garalon down and I'm not looking forward to re-killing him next week.
If I don't get a chance to say it, I wish everyone out there a happy holidays however you celebrate it. I'll see you all in the new year, and keep on rollin'.
So a lot of the time you aren't on the same skill level as your friends. Sometimes you're just not willing to put that much effort into the game or your friends just don't get the game on the same level that you do. There's nothing wrong with either one but it's something a lot of people struggle with because you really want to play with your friends. So today I'm going to examine some of the systems in various games (again looking at warcraft primarily) and what you as a player can do or what sort of content you should be targetting to play with your friends to have a good time.
Step 1) Don't PvP. As much fun as you think it would be, you're both just going to get frustrated. Take a look at something like league of legends. They have a system in there for seperating people of differing skill levels, and while it doesn't work all the time things get crazy when groups of varying skill levels get together. I have some pretty unfun experiences in that game when I go to play with some of my friends who spend a fair bit more time in that game than I do. Just don't PvP. You may do it if one of you is a healer and one is a crazy dps pvper and you're doing bgs. Aside from that there's not much in it that will lead to fun engaging pvp.
Step 2) Don't play things with a skill difficulty too low or two high. This might seem obvious but I can't tell you how many times people who love the engaging experience of really struggling just find it annoying when others aren't keeping up with them. The same goes for playing in a situation that you find yourself in way over your head. Find that middle ground where you can both enjoy it. I find myself really enjoying situations that are mostly relaxing for me, and difficult enough that we both have to at least pay attention.
Step 3) Don't take any of it seriously. This is seen a lot in board games but bleeds over into all sorts of environments. I'm sure many of you have been there where there's one guy at a party that is taking any sort of competition way to seriously. I've lost friends to a board game called Diplomacy. If you've played it you'll know what I mean. You're going to regret taking things too seriously when you're just playing to have a good time with friends. This is also far more important for the person of higher skill level though everyone should go in understanding that this is just for a good time.
So what does all this lead to in warcraft? LFR. LFR is probably one of the greatest inventions for this. It's not so easy that you can go afk and kill, though some people do and there's a special place in hell for you right beside the people that talk or use cell phones during movies. This is a place where you can take things really lightly and still have a good time. Alternatively 10m raids, and this is where I think the 10v25 distinction really shines. 10m raiding is really really good for people who are on weird schedules to find like minded players with similarly odd skeds with which to raid. Challenge modes are also an amazing thing for these types of people. You don't have to go in there expecting gold. Aiming for silver with a group is just as good if that's what people are ready for. You don't expect to go in and kill heroic bosses the first time you see them, challenge modes, and most things in life, are going to be the same.
Lastly I wanted to say that if you aren't enjoying it, just stop. There's no reason for you and your friend to get upset with each other and storm off. It's just a game ultimately, especially if it's not where you guys normally game. If you normally play these games separately then just part ways and come back to it another time. You're not progression raiding, you're not going for gladiator titles. You're just aiming to have a good time with friends you don't normally play with seriously.
So like I said earlier I'm really busy lately. We just finished getting Garalon and Wind Lord down this week. Wind lord is really easy compared to garalon. Things just fall into place after you've been working on it for a night and he dies on a pull you didn't feel good about in the first place. That said I'm super happy to have garalon down and I'm not looking forward to re-killing him next week.
If I don't get a chance to say it, I wish everyone out there a happy holidays however you celebrate it. I'll see you all in the new year, and keep on rollin'.
23 November, 2012
Shhh, it's a secret
This is the second half to the article from last time, you should check it out if you haven't already though it's not important.
I'd like to consider another of the major differences between cataclysm and mists. We knew what was coming for cata. We knew ragnaros was coming. We knew deathwing was going to try and destroy the world. We "knew" that the abyssal maw was going to be a feature once we got through the zone. The entire expansion had this build up and a lot of player foreknowledge.
Mists doesn't do this. Sure we know who the eventual bad guy of the expansion is, and sure it's not that hard to guess even if you don't already know. That said there is relatively little knowledge on how we're getting there or exactly what's going to happen in between.
I think this is a pretty big deal for a lot of games out there. How many games do you know that had promised certain features early on in their development cycle only to cut them later on because they couldn't get it done or found it was a lot more complicated than imagined or just didn't get around to it until it was far too late to do a good job of it so they dropped it from the game?
If we didn't expect the abyssal maw, we would never have been upset about not seeing it. I really do like the way mists is playing out in that I have absolutely no idea what the next raid tier is going to look like. I don't know what instance it's going to be, where on the continent we'll find it or even what sorts of enemies we'll be fighting. My first guess is some faction related thing like champs from ToC but for an entire instance but I have absolutely no basis for that aside from the feeling of escalating tensions between the factions and the content coming in 5.1.
I think this is an important part of MMOs specifically. This is because MMOs are constantly "updating." They are evolving and changing. We need to keep the mystery alive the way mists has been. I really think that not divulging things to the audience is a great way of keeping them engaged and excited. A little bit of knowledge is ok, take a look at the Wrathion legendary quest chain. I'm super excited about demons now. The conclusion I've drawn from that quest line so far is that I should be expecting demons for the next expansion. I am likely to be really disappointed when it hits should it not be demons but the next expansion is a topic for another day.
I know today's post is brief compared to others but I just wanted people to think about how much they know before hand. This can apply to anything including the encounters themselves. If you're a progression guild you really can't afford to ignore the PTR or previous strats but you can try and avoid spoilers plot wise. I try to avoid spoilers wherever I can. Sure I want to know real bad what's coming down the pipe but I find it so much sweeter when I take things in as they are meant to be revealed by those who are producing the content.
Lets hope mists keeps delivering the goods. Now that the biggest part of the progression race (the extra nights) part is over I should get back to a "real" update frequency.
I'd like to consider another of the major differences between cataclysm and mists. We knew what was coming for cata. We knew ragnaros was coming. We knew deathwing was going to try and destroy the world. We "knew" that the abyssal maw was going to be a feature once we got through the zone. The entire expansion had this build up and a lot of player foreknowledge.
Mists doesn't do this. Sure we know who the eventual bad guy of the expansion is, and sure it's not that hard to guess even if you don't already know. That said there is relatively little knowledge on how we're getting there or exactly what's going to happen in between.
I think this is a pretty big deal for a lot of games out there. How many games do you know that had promised certain features early on in their development cycle only to cut them later on because they couldn't get it done or found it was a lot more complicated than imagined or just didn't get around to it until it was far too late to do a good job of it so they dropped it from the game?
If we didn't expect the abyssal maw, we would never have been upset about not seeing it. I really do like the way mists is playing out in that I have absolutely no idea what the next raid tier is going to look like. I don't know what instance it's going to be, where on the continent we'll find it or even what sorts of enemies we'll be fighting. My first guess is some faction related thing like champs from ToC but for an entire instance but I have absolutely no basis for that aside from the feeling of escalating tensions between the factions and the content coming in 5.1.
I think this is an important part of MMOs specifically. This is because MMOs are constantly "updating." They are evolving and changing. We need to keep the mystery alive the way mists has been. I really think that not divulging things to the audience is a great way of keeping them engaged and excited. A little bit of knowledge is ok, take a look at the Wrathion legendary quest chain. I'm super excited about demons now. The conclusion I've drawn from that quest line so far is that I should be expecting demons for the next expansion. I am likely to be really disappointed when it hits should it not be demons but the next expansion is a topic for another day.
I know today's post is brief compared to others but I just wanted people to think about how much they know before hand. This can apply to anything including the encounters themselves. If you're a progression guild you really can't afford to ignore the PTR or previous strats but you can try and avoid spoilers plot wise. I try to avoid spoilers wherever I can. Sure I want to know real bad what's coming down the pipe but I find it so much sweeter when I take things in as they are meant to be revealed by those who are producing the content.
Lets hope mists keeps delivering the goods. Now that the biggest part of the progression race (the extra nights) part is over I should get back to a "real" update frequency.
13 November, 2012
Didn't make the cut
Early on in the cataclysm expansion cycle the players were curious about a place known as the abyssal maw. Shortly we all learned exactly what that place was meant to be. A raid instance. The events in the nearby zones of vashj'ir set up a clear story of what was taking place and a bunch of possible bosses, or rather some possible posses.
So what happened, why did we never get the abyssal maw as a raid instance. Why was it that we only got Firelands, as nice as that place was?
The short answer, is development time. It's something that comes up with almost everything I try and discuss related to the game, specifically with things related to projects the developers would need to undertake. This is a commodity. It is extremely scarce and extremely valuable. If something takes a small amount of dev time, then it's much more likely to get into the game. There's a lot that goes into how long it takes to develop a piece of the game, and one of those pieces is how far along you already are in the game.
Imagine you're writting a story. You have an assignment for class or perhaps taking part in NaNoWriMo (Nation Novel Writing Month). You get pretty far along over the first half of the month and then come up with a phenomenal way to change something have already written. You could have this exact same problem when writing any sort of essay for a project. It's much harder to change things once you've already started it. If you had the idea earlier on, not saying that you're bad for not having done so but inspiration isn't something you can control, you could have integrated it in your original design.
When designing a game this problem explodes and fractures into a thousand other problems. In a way it invalidates some previous time spent on the game, and in the game world, especially in an MMO where you are literally racing against the attention span of your audience, you need every moment you can get your hands on. As great as the people at Blizzard are, they are still human and have needs outside of running their game.
When it comes down to it you are left with a couple choices. You can delay the release of your content to change or improve what you have, but you can't do this forever. You do have deadlines and you do have to beat that attention span of your audience. You can drop the change or improvement you want to put in, provided it's not vital and you have the time for it. This is what happens a lot and while it's unfortunate, it often leads to better games. You can sometimes put it on the side-burner and work on it later. This is what they're doing with things like character models.
So unfortunately, as we saw, the abyssal maw was dropped from the raid release schedule. I'm not entirely sure I buy the whole "we wanted to see if 7 bosses would last people 5 months" argument because clearly that's absurd. There just wasn't enough time for the developers to bring enough new fights to cover two instances, at least not to do that and have it up to the same standard of quality we had been used to before then. Dragon soul was really a let down. In addition to the dev time to design fights for the raid, there was art time to make a cohesive set of armor for both instances. Sure they had the fire and water thing going on between the two, but that really restricts what you can do and forces you to make a lot of decisions that a lot of people might not be too happy with. The artists likely didn't want to create and entirely new zone that already has a fairly set theme to it. That's still a lot of work.
I haven't actually worked for or on any games that got past the "this is a great idea" phase, but my understanding is that this happens all the time. It's hard to see in games because part of their job is to make the game feel complete, to avoid making it feel like something wasn't included. It's really a shame because a lot of times some small adjustments might take a lot of work and there just isn't enough time in the day to get everything done.
Hopefully when asking for content in the future we can all be a bit more understanding of what goes on behind the curtains. They aren't trying to cheat us out of game material and they aren't slacking at their jobs. They work just as hard as you would, and are trying to put out the best game they possibly can.
I think there's more to this topic than what I've mentioned already, and specifically regarding the abyssal maw and firelands, but I'll save that for next time. Next week is rough with Terrace launching but I hope to have something more for you guys before too long.
So what happened, why did we never get the abyssal maw as a raid instance. Why was it that we only got Firelands, as nice as that place was?
The short answer, is development time. It's something that comes up with almost everything I try and discuss related to the game, specifically with things related to projects the developers would need to undertake. This is a commodity. It is extremely scarce and extremely valuable. If something takes a small amount of dev time, then it's much more likely to get into the game. There's a lot that goes into how long it takes to develop a piece of the game, and one of those pieces is how far along you already are in the game.
Imagine you're writting a story. You have an assignment for class or perhaps taking part in NaNoWriMo (Nation Novel Writing Month). You get pretty far along over the first half of the month and then come up with a phenomenal way to change something have already written. You could have this exact same problem when writing any sort of essay for a project. It's much harder to change things once you've already started it. If you had the idea earlier on, not saying that you're bad for not having done so but inspiration isn't something you can control, you could have integrated it in your original design.
When designing a game this problem explodes and fractures into a thousand other problems. In a way it invalidates some previous time spent on the game, and in the game world, especially in an MMO where you are literally racing against the attention span of your audience, you need every moment you can get your hands on. As great as the people at Blizzard are, they are still human and have needs outside of running their game.
When it comes down to it you are left with a couple choices. You can delay the release of your content to change or improve what you have, but you can't do this forever. You do have deadlines and you do have to beat that attention span of your audience. You can drop the change or improvement you want to put in, provided it's not vital and you have the time for it. This is what happens a lot and while it's unfortunate, it often leads to better games. You can sometimes put it on the side-burner and work on it later. This is what they're doing with things like character models.
So unfortunately, as we saw, the abyssal maw was dropped from the raid release schedule. I'm not entirely sure I buy the whole "we wanted to see if 7 bosses would last people 5 months" argument because clearly that's absurd. There just wasn't enough time for the developers to bring enough new fights to cover two instances, at least not to do that and have it up to the same standard of quality we had been used to before then. Dragon soul was really a let down. In addition to the dev time to design fights for the raid, there was art time to make a cohesive set of armor for both instances. Sure they had the fire and water thing going on between the two, but that really restricts what you can do and forces you to make a lot of decisions that a lot of people might not be too happy with. The artists likely didn't want to create and entirely new zone that already has a fairly set theme to it. That's still a lot of work.
I haven't actually worked for or on any games that got past the "this is a great idea" phase, but my understanding is that this happens all the time. It's hard to see in games because part of their job is to make the game feel complete, to avoid making it feel like something wasn't included. It's really a shame because a lot of times some small adjustments might take a lot of work and there just isn't enough time in the day to get everything done.
Hopefully when asking for content in the future we can all be a bit more understanding of what goes on behind the curtains. They aren't trying to cheat us out of game material and they aren't slacking at their jobs. They work just as hard as you would, and are trying to put out the best game they possibly can.
I think there's more to this topic than what I've mentioned already, and specifically regarding the abyssal maw and firelands, but I'll save that for next time. Next week is rough with Terrace launching but I hope to have something more for you guys before too long.
09 November, 2012
Been away for a while
Been a couple weeks since I posted. I'm pretty swamped lately with raid and the rest of real life. I'll be back in a bit.
In the meantime you should go check out a channel on youtube called extracreditz. If you enjoy what I have been writing about at all it's is more than worth your time to check them out. They are phenomenal and are talking about, what I believe to be, extremely important topics.
I promise there will be more in the next few weeks once the big progression race is done.
In the meantime you should go check out a channel on youtube called extracreditz. If you enjoy what I have been writing about at all it's is more than worth your time to check them out. They are phenomenal and are talking about, what I believe to be, extremely important topics.
I promise there will be more in the next few weeks once the big progression race is done.
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