Lots of diablo comments regarding how much content was available at launch and how fast people went through inferno have come up lately and so I thought it'd be a good topic to explore since it's fairly deep and I started to talk about it last week.
To start I'd like to contrast, briefly, SWToR and WoW. SWToR had an amazing leveling process. It was in-depth, exciting, engaging, and coherent. There was a single quest line that took you through your entire leveling experience. There were side quests and additional environments outside of the primary plot line but it was different for every class and they interacted with each other, it was a really well developed leveling experience. On the other side of this coin, Warcraft uses leveling to introduce you to the game, it's mechanics, and the class that you've chosen. This is helpful to you later in the game and while it is also fairly well developed the major intent behind this game is the endgame. I get the impression that SWToR was aiming for the same thing but failed to deliver the endgame content.
So what exactly is endgame content? Anything that you do that is designed to be completed *after* you hit the level cap. This is usually organized pvp, dungeons, and raids in mmos. In Diablo 3 this was inferno mode, technically late content in hell felt like you should be capped simply because you enter hell mode at 50. The point here is that anything specifically designed to do once you are done leveling is considered "endgame." Endgame also creates a sense of requiring more than just raw time to continue progressing in the game. While leveling you can really just continue to kill really simple things and you'll continue to gain xp, continue to do quests which a mostly a time sink that may provide useful rewards after level cap but the primary benefit to them is through the experience gained.
The important piece of information here is that endgame content is what drives mmos. It is the driving force behind warcraft and, while I'll talk more about motivations behind people playing games and specifically warcraft or other mmos, what brings the boys to the yard so to speak. Sure levelling characters can be fun and some people just love to level characters, however the majority of design time and design decisions are made to reflect the game after everyone has hit the endgame.
Last week I looked at where the design team aims for the endgame content. There's the super hardcore progression raiders who chase world/region/server firsts and those who just log on occasionally to have fun with friends they may not live near anymore. There is also every sort of player in between those two. So how does a developer create a compelling experience for everyone while avoiding alienating either extreme. To put this into perspective the people who play less often or less seriously or, lets face it these people are out there, the people who are just bad at the game may not complete the content and feel left out or punished for not spending more time in the game when they may not want to or are unable to even though they'd like to experience the content the game has to offer at the very least at a lore level. To juxtapose this there are those who ran through the entire content before some groups had even gotten through normal, before some groups had even really gotten through half of the instance. I mean these groups are done normal modes on the first week that it's launched.
So there's a gradient between these two extreme types of players. I've been part of these different groups over my wow career so far and I've settled in a spot I really enjoy. I've played the game and tried to raid without a raiding guild and it's doable, but you have absolutely no chance of really experiencing content outside of LFR (which isn't always the most fun or engaging way to experience content especially with the attitudes of many people who use this feature). I've been in very relaxed raiding guilds and we had problems like 1 healer doing over 40% of the total raid's healing in a 25m raid, but it wasn't something we really cared about because we were just playing the game to enjoy the fact that we were raiding. Now I'm in a guild that really pushes hard and is trying to get past that US100 mark. There are so many different people playing this game that there are those in almost every situation that want to experience the game.
So how do you build content for all of these people? I think the first step in this has already been taken. Heroic modes allow everyone to participate in the real raiding experience to get to the end of content while still providing the incredibly difficult and rewarding content that those of us who really push hard to get those world/region/server firsts. I have a bit of a problem with heroic modes though that I think has come up in several situations previously that isn't restricted to the difference between normal and heroic modes.
To start off, it's a very clear line between heroic modes and normal modes, and I think the difficulty gradient could be a bit smoother (which is very important) but the point is that once you've cleared the instance on normal you are now doing heroics. There's no real small step up that you can make seamlessly. I mean sure looking back on DS H Morchok was extremely easy compared to Spine/Madness on normal, at least in my opinion. As a tank I barely had to consider cooldown use once I figured it out. Just rotate these cooldowns that you have and it's almost no different from any DPS optimizing his dps cooldowns for parts of the fight where it matters (think combustion + impact for fire mages or anyone timing things for feedback on hagara). The numbers weren't too bad and neither was the strategy.
Even outside of raids though I feel that it's extremely important to get the gradient right. Many people get concerned about the jump from 5m dungeons to 25m raids, even to 10m raids it's a fairly large jump, especially for healers. It's daunting and often a large barrier to entry for players who want to start raiding. LFR was a great step in this direction but it also runs into another problem of having the same content over and over again (I will probably spend several weeks on something like that so I wont start) and getting bored of it, which is a problem everyone faces and I've touched on before but if I ran LFR every week on my main in addition to the regularly scheduled raids I'd go insane.
Back to gradients. How do you make a gradient like that. Well Challenge modes sound like phenomenal ideas. It's more intense than 5m dungeons. They get you thinking different and they up the difficulty so it still encourages and inspires you to perform better and strive for more out of you and your character, which is in my opinion the very essence of these types of games. However after challenge modes are done you run into the same problem as before with a slightly different twist.
I will preface this as opinion. I love 25m raids. I wouldn't ever imagine going down to 10m raids for my progression, it just doesn't feel right. I'm sure a lot of that is where I started raiding initially but they are two completely different animals. I think a major problem facing 25m raiding right now is population. During Wrath there were so many 25m guilds that you could basically find one at your level on your own server for the most part. The server on which I play had more than 5 raiding guilds that did 25m alliance side that were consistent and progressing, come to think of it a lot more than 5 alliance side. Now we're down to only 2 guilds on the server (last I checked anyways, which is to say several months since completing DS) counting both horde and alliance. In fact there aren't even any horde 25m guilds anymore. This drastically reduces the player pool for 25m raids and the jump from 5m dungeons to 25m raids even more daunting and pushes a lot of players into 10m raids.
But I digress, this gradient of difficulty is really important and I'll probably spend a lot of time talking about it. This is something that blizzard needs to work on. I think for the most part DS was pretty good with that difficulty gradient which means they're getting better but there were a few hiccoughs in my opinion which made for some awkward going. I liked that the order in which you kill bosses on normal was almost the same as heroic, it gives a good sense of progression in the instance and helps raid organizers. These are tough problems. I think a lot of it stems from the fact that, as I mentioned last week, having heroic encounters as basically the same as normals but "upgraded" really hamstrings you in some respects while allowing you to have a ton more dev time. I don't have an elegant solution to that problem that works with both sides of the everyone can do it and new stuff for hardcore/progression raiders coin.
I'll come back to this next week but in the meantime if you have ideas for how to address the problem of letting everyone see the content while providing fresh intense content for the hardcores out there I would love to hear it. See you guys next week.
25 June, 2012
18 June, 2012
Heroic only raid instance
So last week we went over why it's important to have new content coming in quickly and I just wanted to mention that there isn't a whole lot to say other than it shouldn't come too quickly. From theorycrafters who would have to change their spreadsheets and sims more often than they do now (and congrats to you guys for the jobs you do with them), to the people who log on every couple weeks or less who have to re-learn some class mechanics or numbers every couple times they log on. You want people to get through the content and avoid it getting stale.
That said, on to this week's topic. Heroic only encounters. Judging by the dungeon journal information that's recently been released we have 4 bosses that are exclusively for heroic. This opens up a whole can of worms on several fronts. So here are the concerns that come with something like heroic only encounters. EDIT: so it looks like I was reading it wrong and it's just a heroic instance (5man) but the points raised still stand and have merit, also I'm good at reading things I swear.
1) Content for those that clear all of the other content really fast (thinking guilds like vodka, paragon, blood legion etc)
2) People who want to see all the content
3) Encounters that don't exist on normal or are drastically different from normal (and other normal/heroic encounter comparisons)
4) Heroic only Loot.
5) For whom is raid content designed.
There's more that you can take out of this but that's plenty for discussion and anything more would take this to several weeks worth of topics.
I'm going to start with addressing 2. People who want to see all the content, and that blizzard has stated that they want everyone to see the content. This is counter to that idea. It also brings up a minor notion of how do you access the heroic only dungeon since normally one has to clear it on normal, which brings some other interesting questions such as will we be able to work on heroics from day 1? But the idea that everyone should be able to see the content is a direct counterpoint to creating content exclusively for the hardcore raiders in this fashion. Creating things like sinestra is also in the same bracket. I loved the sinestra fight and having normal version of the hardest fights in the game does restrict what sort of encounters we will see, however there is still a very small subset of players that have actually gone through that encounter, even more so when the content was considered "current." Sure there might be nerfs over the course of the tier of content but that's not really the spirit of this discussion and another topic all together. I personally think that the "content for everyone" mentality is a great one, especially since my goals before ICC were simply to see all the content, to beat it all. But when getting through the normal mode content takes you a very short time (top end guilds all obviously have normal down within the first week) "clearing the content" takes on a very different meaning. I don't like nerfing the heroic content, simply because it defeats the purpose of heroic content, I'm fine with the Cata T1 style nerfs (normals got nerfed 20% when 4.2 went live). In fact those are IMO the best type of nerfs. If people still want to go through that content they are more than welcome to and it avoids interfering with the groups that are progressing late into the patch cycle.
But I digress, the idea of a heroic only raid instance isn't new. Algalon and Sinestra were huge successes in some ways and in both cases I think much was learned. That content is great for the heroic mode crowd. It's extremely difficult, you're not constrained by normal mode mechanics or even normal mode flavor to fights. Look at halfus for example. He had 5 dragons, normal mode brought out 3 of them. There is really only 1 way to go for heroic that makes sense and feels right. Bring out all 5. This is the reason fights like sinestra would be really difficult to create on normal then make the jump. I mean you could do things like have wrack last half as long, the whelps don't drop the puddles, everything does less damage. That sort of thing, while effective in some cases like ultraxion where the bigger numbers defined the encounter, is awful for things like sinestra. Imagine if the only things different for the warmaster blackhorn fight, or the theraliona fight or the majordomo fight (oh wait) were simple larger numbers and a tighter enrage timer. They just feel uninspired and identical to their normal mode. While I had some fun working with neat tricks on majordomo staghelm ultimately it was just "do the same thing you do every week, but be better about it." This is not the way heroic encounters should be approached. Granted not every encounter can have simple changes like Omnotron to drastically change the encounter and increase difficulty, but you don't need that every time. I also know that creating and designing fun and challenging encounters is not easy. If you've every DM'd a dungeons and dragons game, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you haven't just think of players who are actively trying to abuse every system in your game to trivialize what you thought would be difficult while avoiding making impossible bosses (it's an incredibly thin line and I applaud blizzard for doing the job they do).
Most of the bosses in firelands felt this way to me, the difference between heroic and normal mode were extremely small. Shannox was to kill the boss instead of the dogs. Beth'tilac added broodlings and a harsh enrage timer, broodlings being annoying and killed people but nothing really exciting about it. Rhyolith...I can't even remember the differences between normal and heroic except more damage and annoying RNG. Alysrazor, 3 hatchlings instead of 1 but approximately the same total health per tornado phase and meteors on firestorm. Baelroc was probably better than the others in terms of change for heroic. Spreading torment was a real mechanic that changed the way you approached the boss on some level (especailly combined with countdown) and while it was a minor change it made a huge impact. Staghelm, I've already talked about him. Ragnaros is in a league of his own and another problem I'm sure will come up again.
Compare this to things in DS or CataT1. Morchok was amazing, splitting the raid in 2 has been a favorite concept of mine since ulduar's Thorim encounter. It's just fun and should be used extremely sparingly or else it will get annoying very fast. That said, it was an easy encounter but felt very different from normal. Yorsahj was uninspiring but made it drastically more difficult. Zonozz was also a simple change that added huge layers of difficulty. I'm glad there was an encounter where the simplest mechanic of "range" was used to make a huge difference. It's been a while since we really had to worry about healer placement. Hagara was neat but uninspired for the most part. Ultraxion was straightforward but when you have a big DPS check encounter (and healing for that matter) the only real way to up the ante is making the numbers bigger, no complaints there, looming darkness was appropriate as well. Warmaster deck fire and goriona's bag of tricks were again a good step up if they could have avoided the plague of bugs that came with that encounter including fake fire, handicapped gnome firefighters and an evading goriona. Madness had basically 2 new mechanics that needed to be addressed and the numbers got jacked up so much that they became a mechanic all on their own. Impale specifically. I'm not even going to address spine right now since it's almost in the same league as heroic rag.
So you can see where the problem comes in with designing encounters to scale up with heroic mode. You can have extremely boring encounters that are nearly identical to their normal mode counterparts or you can have wild swings in the encounter while keeping the flavor. In some cases it works, in some cases it doesn't. Ultimately the idea of heroic only encounters frees you from this consideration and as long as they aren't pivotal to the experience. For example, one might see madness as a good nominee for this heroic only treatment but then without doing that heroic encounter many people will find a lack of closure in the content which is important.
Heroic encounters also require heroic loot. One thing I have found a bit tedious in cata raiding is that you come across bis lists that have heroic loot on them, then you look at the normal mode loot and the bis list not counting heroics is identical minus the heroic tag on the item and possibly gemming for the hit thresholds. I would absolutely love to see a completely different bis list when adding 4 boss encounters to the table. Especially now that tanks need hit and expertise, trying to balance your tank stats will be much more fun than if it was the same as "get the same loot but higher ilvl." It just makes the gearing game more interactive and more in-depth than it has been before, it makes progressing more about balancing your gear and messing with it, tinkering with gem/enchant choices to find optimal setups. This, in my opinion, is good. The only danger is having something like the shard of woe from sinestra all over again. Options are just not dropping trinkets since they always seem to be far more powerful than intended for various reasons. Specifically I'm thinking of death's verdict, shard of woe, and one of the tanking ones early wrath that had some insane amount of defense on it. Another consideration is that previously heroic-only encounters have been something of a super-heroic difficulty level and have had higher ilvl loot. This I think is a bad thing and runs counter to what I mentioned already. If it's higher ilvl almost everyone will say "take the higher ilvl stuff, balance the rest of your gear around those pieces." So we'll still have to see what loot comes out of heroic raid encounters but these are things to start thinking about since the beta is starting to become more polished and the classes are getting numbers tuned meaning that we're likely to see a launch date being announced soon.
Lastly for today I wanted to cover a concept that has cropped up in some things said in either blog posts or interviews or forums posts. For whom does the bell toll. With the redesign of 5 man dungeons perhaps raiding content is next on the block for some slight refocus. It has been stated recently that there will be no level 90 5man normal dungeons. There will be heroic dungeons and the challenge modes but nothing like grim batol. The intent here is to allow people to play the dungeons and not go through crazy hoops just to complete them the way the first month or so of cataclysm, the people who are looking for that, they say, is challenge modes. So what does this mean for raiding. Are we going to see normal mode encounters become the normal mode dungeons of raiding?
Raid content is designed as content for those that have reached level cap and are looking for challenging game content to tackle. With so many people playing the game, that is a huge skill gap, the best players in the world kill bosses within weeks of them being launched, while those even right on their tails sometimes take a couple months to get through it while some even further back don't even complete it. Now for many it's not that they aren't good enough, a large group of players who love to raid may not have the time. Real life exists and it does interfere with playing the game, for better or worse. Those players must be kept in mind as well. The kicker comes in the place where there's really not a fine line between any groups that would make it easy to separate normal and heroic mode content. Many guilds and players will end a patch cycle having not completed an instance. Firelands is a good example. I didn't get heroic rag down before 4.3, I know friends who were only 3/7 H and still progressing, there are people that might have only gotten heroic shannox down. The point being that there's a gradient of players out there and a gradient of guilds. Back to the question, for whom is this content designed?
It's clear that the heroic only content is designed for the elite. I would love to get some of those server first titles and I could go on and on about 10m vs 25m and how they shouldn't be counted the same and not be competing for server first titles, but at the same time those are the laurels of progression raiding. This content is clearly designed for those that constantly push what the developers expect from us. Yogg 0 is a perfect example. There were those out there who thought it impossible to complete, with some sketchy math to back up their statements, that the numbers were just too high and that with available gear there was no way to get through it. Along comes some guild who changes the game and kills it without any exploits as blizzard was contemplating nerfing the fight. Heroic only encounters are for these guys. Can they be for others as well? I think there's room for others to experience the content before it gets nerfed but making things difficult for those guilds means that there will be some who just don't have the means to get through it. Is that ok for content that exists only on heroic? These are great questions and ultimately it comes down to the players themselves to discuss it. It's really hard to avoid bias in this because previously there has been a very clear divide. One heroic only encounter means you either have killed it, or you haven't, it puts you on one side of this argument. Having 4 heroic only encounters will help the gradient form and hopefully create a more open and less polarizing discussion on the topic. They are also great topics for the comments!
See you guys next week.
That said, on to this week's topic. Heroic only encounters. Judging by the dungeon journal information that's recently been released we have 4 bosses that are exclusively for heroic. This opens up a whole can of worms on several fronts. So here are the concerns that come with something like heroic only encounters. EDIT: so it looks like I was reading it wrong and it's just a heroic instance (5man) but the points raised still stand and have merit, also I'm good at reading things I swear.
1) Content for those that clear all of the other content really fast (thinking guilds like vodka, paragon, blood legion etc)
2) People who want to see all the content
3) Encounters that don't exist on normal or are drastically different from normal (and other normal/heroic encounter comparisons)
4) Heroic only Loot.
5) For whom is raid content designed.
There's more that you can take out of this but that's plenty for discussion and anything more would take this to several weeks worth of topics.
I'm going to start with addressing 2. People who want to see all the content, and that blizzard has stated that they want everyone to see the content. This is counter to that idea. It also brings up a minor notion of how do you access the heroic only dungeon since normally one has to clear it on normal, which brings some other interesting questions such as will we be able to work on heroics from day 1? But the idea that everyone should be able to see the content is a direct counterpoint to creating content exclusively for the hardcore raiders in this fashion. Creating things like sinestra is also in the same bracket. I loved the sinestra fight and having normal version of the hardest fights in the game does restrict what sort of encounters we will see, however there is still a very small subset of players that have actually gone through that encounter, even more so when the content was considered "current." Sure there might be nerfs over the course of the tier of content but that's not really the spirit of this discussion and another topic all together. I personally think that the "content for everyone" mentality is a great one, especially since my goals before ICC were simply to see all the content, to beat it all. But when getting through the normal mode content takes you a very short time (top end guilds all obviously have normal down within the first week) "clearing the content" takes on a very different meaning. I don't like nerfing the heroic content, simply because it defeats the purpose of heroic content, I'm fine with the Cata T1 style nerfs (normals got nerfed 20% when 4.2 went live). In fact those are IMO the best type of nerfs. If people still want to go through that content they are more than welcome to and it avoids interfering with the groups that are progressing late into the patch cycle.
But I digress, the idea of a heroic only raid instance isn't new. Algalon and Sinestra were huge successes in some ways and in both cases I think much was learned. That content is great for the heroic mode crowd. It's extremely difficult, you're not constrained by normal mode mechanics or even normal mode flavor to fights. Look at halfus for example. He had 5 dragons, normal mode brought out 3 of them. There is really only 1 way to go for heroic that makes sense and feels right. Bring out all 5. This is the reason fights like sinestra would be really difficult to create on normal then make the jump. I mean you could do things like have wrack last half as long, the whelps don't drop the puddles, everything does less damage. That sort of thing, while effective in some cases like ultraxion where the bigger numbers defined the encounter, is awful for things like sinestra. Imagine if the only things different for the warmaster blackhorn fight, or the theraliona fight or the majordomo fight (oh wait) were simple larger numbers and a tighter enrage timer. They just feel uninspired and identical to their normal mode. While I had some fun working with neat tricks on majordomo staghelm ultimately it was just "do the same thing you do every week, but be better about it." This is not the way heroic encounters should be approached. Granted not every encounter can have simple changes like Omnotron to drastically change the encounter and increase difficulty, but you don't need that every time. I also know that creating and designing fun and challenging encounters is not easy. If you've every DM'd a dungeons and dragons game, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you haven't just think of players who are actively trying to abuse every system in your game to trivialize what you thought would be difficult while avoiding making impossible bosses (it's an incredibly thin line and I applaud blizzard for doing the job they do).
Most of the bosses in firelands felt this way to me, the difference between heroic and normal mode were extremely small. Shannox was to kill the boss instead of the dogs. Beth'tilac added broodlings and a harsh enrage timer, broodlings being annoying and killed people but nothing really exciting about it. Rhyolith...I can't even remember the differences between normal and heroic except more damage and annoying RNG. Alysrazor, 3 hatchlings instead of 1 but approximately the same total health per tornado phase and meteors on firestorm. Baelroc was probably better than the others in terms of change for heroic. Spreading torment was a real mechanic that changed the way you approached the boss on some level (especailly combined with countdown) and while it was a minor change it made a huge impact. Staghelm, I've already talked about him. Ragnaros is in a league of his own and another problem I'm sure will come up again.
Compare this to things in DS or CataT1. Morchok was amazing, splitting the raid in 2 has been a favorite concept of mine since ulduar's Thorim encounter. It's just fun and should be used extremely sparingly or else it will get annoying very fast. That said, it was an easy encounter but felt very different from normal. Yorsahj was uninspiring but made it drastically more difficult. Zonozz was also a simple change that added huge layers of difficulty. I'm glad there was an encounter where the simplest mechanic of "range" was used to make a huge difference. It's been a while since we really had to worry about healer placement. Hagara was neat but uninspired for the most part. Ultraxion was straightforward but when you have a big DPS check encounter (and healing for that matter) the only real way to up the ante is making the numbers bigger, no complaints there, looming darkness was appropriate as well. Warmaster deck fire and goriona's bag of tricks were again a good step up if they could have avoided the plague of bugs that came with that encounter including fake fire, handicapped gnome firefighters and an evading goriona. Madness had basically 2 new mechanics that needed to be addressed and the numbers got jacked up so much that they became a mechanic all on their own. Impale specifically. I'm not even going to address spine right now since it's almost in the same league as heroic rag.
So you can see where the problem comes in with designing encounters to scale up with heroic mode. You can have extremely boring encounters that are nearly identical to their normal mode counterparts or you can have wild swings in the encounter while keeping the flavor. In some cases it works, in some cases it doesn't. Ultimately the idea of heroic only encounters frees you from this consideration and as long as they aren't pivotal to the experience. For example, one might see madness as a good nominee for this heroic only treatment but then without doing that heroic encounter many people will find a lack of closure in the content which is important.
Heroic encounters also require heroic loot. One thing I have found a bit tedious in cata raiding is that you come across bis lists that have heroic loot on them, then you look at the normal mode loot and the bis list not counting heroics is identical minus the heroic tag on the item and possibly gemming for the hit thresholds. I would absolutely love to see a completely different bis list when adding 4 boss encounters to the table. Especially now that tanks need hit and expertise, trying to balance your tank stats will be much more fun than if it was the same as "get the same loot but higher ilvl." It just makes the gearing game more interactive and more in-depth than it has been before, it makes progressing more about balancing your gear and messing with it, tinkering with gem/enchant choices to find optimal setups. This, in my opinion, is good. The only danger is having something like the shard of woe from sinestra all over again. Options are just not dropping trinkets since they always seem to be far more powerful than intended for various reasons. Specifically I'm thinking of death's verdict, shard of woe, and one of the tanking ones early wrath that had some insane amount of defense on it. Another consideration is that previously heroic-only encounters have been something of a super-heroic difficulty level and have had higher ilvl loot. This I think is a bad thing and runs counter to what I mentioned already. If it's higher ilvl almost everyone will say "take the higher ilvl stuff, balance the rest of your gear around those pieces." So we'll still have to see what loot comes out of heroic raid encounters but these are things to start thinking about since the beta is starting to become more polished and the classes are getting numbers tuned meaning that we're likely to see a launch date being announced soon.
Lastly for today I wanted to cover a concept that has cropped up in some things said in either blog posts or interviews or forums posts. For whom does the bell toll. With the redesign of 5 man dungeons perhaps raiding content is next on the block for some slight refocus. It has been stated recently that there will be no level 90 5man normal dungeons. There will be heroic dungeons and the challenge modes but nothing like grim batol. The intent here is to allow people to play the dungeons and not go through crazy hoops just to complete them the way the first month or so of cataclysm, the people who are looking for that, they say, is challenge modes. So what does this mean for raiding. Are we going to see normal mode encounters become the normal mode dungeons of raiding?
Raid content is designed as content for those that have reached level cap and are looking for challenging game content to tackle. With so many people playing the game, that is a huge skill gap, the best players in the world kill bosses within weeks of them being launched, while those even right on their tails sometimes take a couple months to get through it while some even further back don't even complete it. Now for many it's not that they aren't good enough, a large group of players who love to raid may not have the time. Real life exists and it does interfere with playing the game, for better or worse. Those players must be kept in mind as well. The kicker comes in the place where there's really not a fine line between any groups that would make it easy to separate normal and heroic mode content. Many guilds and players will end a patch cycle having not completed an instance. Firelands is a good example. I didn't get heroic rag down before 4.3, I know friends who were only 3/7 H and still progressing, there are people that might have only gotten heroic shannox down. The point being that there's a gradient of players out there and a gradient of guilds. Back to the question, for whom is this content designed?
It's clear that the heroic only content is designed for the elite. I would love to get some of those server first titles and I could go on and on about 10m vs 25m and how they shouldn't be counted the same and not be competing for server first titles, but at the same time those are the laurels of progression raiding. This content is clearly designed for those that constantly push what the developers expect from us. Yogg 0 is a perfect example. There were those out there who thought it impossible to complete, with some sketchy math to back up their statements, that the numbers were just too high and that with available gear there was no way to get through it. Along comes some guild who changes the game and kills it without any exploits as blizzard was contemplating nerfing the fight. Heroic only encounters are for these guys. Can they be for others as well? I think there's room for others to experience the content before it gets nerfed but making things difficult for those guilds means that there will be some who just don't have the means to get through it. Is that ok for content that exists only on heroic? These are great questions and ultimately it comes down to the players themselves to discuss it. It's really hard to avoid bias in this because previously there has been a very clear divide. One heroic only encounter means you either have killed it, or you haven't, it puts you on one side of this argument. Having 4 heroic only encounters will help the gradient form and hopefully create a more open and less polarizing discussion on the topic. They are also great topics for the comments!
See you guys next week.
11 June, 2012
Back from the void
After some eventful moving it's time to get back into this and as such it's straight to the point of the matter.
Being gone for a week made it painfully obvious how hard it is to keep up with things if you aren't checking some of the pages every single day (as I'm used to). I didn't have access to the internet for almost 2 weeks and upon getting back there were updates in the double digits. Unfortunate for me that meant several pages of patch notes, data mined information and community updates for me to look into. It took me a couple days to catch up simply because I can't sit around all day and watch videos and read pages of mmo-champ or diablofans.
I'd like to mention that D3 being recently launched and MoP being in beta has drastically amped up the community activity and developer notes. This was an atypical week but it gets one thinking about how fast things should be changing and how fast is too fast before people have trouble keeping up.
Lets face it, with 10 million active subsribers, warcraft isn't just for the hardcore progression guilds. I know a lot of people would like to believe those people are the player base but there has to be a large bunch of players from which we can make a bunch of money selling BoEs. There's nothing wrong with that, it's a valid play style and I have several friends who log on sporadically and I could go on about why people play the game and what is in it for those who don't try to "beat" it.
From design and marketing standpoints the release scale is hugely important. Too fast and those who aren't logging in every morning and checking the patch notes several times a day get confused and lose their place when their abilities don't function the way they expect them to one day. Too slow and those who are pushing the boundaries and are in heroic raids on week 2 get bored with nothing to play. Clearly there is a middle ground and finding it may not be all that easy.
Mists Launch (4.0.1): 12 October 2010
Zandalari (going to call this a mini patch even though it has a full version number 4.1): 26 April 2011
Firelands (4.2): 28 June 2011
Dragon Soul (4.3): 29 November 2011
(Dates taken from the wowwiki)
6 Months from Mists launch to the Zandalari patch, another 2 months until Firelands. This means 8 months with only one tier of raid content. A lot of people were pretty sick of it by then. 5 months in the Firelands. We've been in dragon soul for nearly 7 months.
What do these times mean? Using the MoP beta as a guidline we waiting a fair amount of time going from 86 to 87 in terms of what we had for a level cap. People got pretty used to what was going on before that increase came along. From there we had a much smaller gap in the remaining level increases. There are several reasons for this including people getting used to what the beta was showing among other things but the point here is that there was time for people to experience things before new content came along.
Along the same vein we need to consider how much is there to experience. For example we had 12 (13th on heroic) bosses with Mists launch. 8 months might have been a bit long but in my opinion it was a fair time for that amount of content, on the same token it being the first set of bosses in the expansion it's lifespan is somewhat extended due to the need to progress (for most people) through the heroics and to a lesser extent levelling.
From there we had Firelands for 5 months. Again I felt like I was sick of firelands by the time dragon soul came around. I know I don't have a lot of hard evidence around it but as someone who raids progression and spent every night on heroic rag for several weeks near the end I was done with it. I think at that point most raid groups had either completed what they were going to complete, or had already done it all. The nerfs are another story and can modify how much people finish, again another topic. However, with 7 bosses, a relatively small number, and uninspiring heroic encounters that short time was still a lot for what we had.
I'll probably comment more on DS after Mists launches but I'll suffice it to say I've been done with it for several months now. What it comes down to though is how much time can you spend in a give spot without getting bored. This extends to individual bosses as well. We had spent a couple weeks in early DS due to some crazy raid roster changes including losing 7+ raiders in a week, and I was almost fed up with spending time on Zon'ozz or Yorsahj, and then we made some really good progress and really caught up through the back half. Everyone has a different measure of how long they want to stick to some content before it gets old. Looking at the Zandalari patch we had the same 2 dungeons (which can be run over and over) for 2 months. Most people were fed up with them after barely a month, the QQ on the forums were endless.
So the amount of time you have for content is really important. This is almost an entirely different problem for people who aren't playing the game at least every week (for example just logging on for raid) or those who aren't even on every month or might take an extended break from the game. This could be voluntary or involuntary and I've known several people, many in the military, who were deployed and when they came back had a hard enough time adjusting to the content changes, but I think that's an entirely new post that I'll continue next week since I'm running out of planned space.
I feel I've shown that while it isn't a strict "this much is too long," there are clearly intervals in which people run the course of enjoyment on a set amount of content and that they desire more content. This interval seems to be somewhat similar from various viewpoints but without a terribly large sample size I can't really make a call. Please comment on this if you have opinions, let me know what your gameplay schedule is normally like (3 night a week or chilling out in /g with your buddies running heroics). Next week we'll take a look at how fast is too fast.
Being gone for a week made it painfully obvious how hard it is to keep up with things if you aren't checking some of the pages every single day (as I'm used to). I didn't have access to the internet for almost 2 weeks and upon getting back there were updates in the double digits. Unfortunate for me that meant several pages of patch notes, data mined information and community updates for me to look into. It took me a couple days to catch up simply because I can't sit around all day and watch videos and read pages of mmo-champ or diablofans.
I'd like to mention that D3 being recently launched and MoP being in beta has drastically amped up the community activity and developer notes. This was an atypical week but it gets one thinking about how fast things should be changing and how fast is too fast before people have trouble keeping up.
Lets face it, with 10 million active subsribers, warcraft isn't just for the hardcore progression guilds. I know a lot of people would like to believe those people are the player base but there has to be a large bunch of players from which we can make a bunch of money selling BoEs. There's nothing wrong with that, it's a valid play style and I have several friends who log on sporadically and I could go on about why people play the game and what is in it for those who don't try to "beat" it.
From design and marketing standpoints the release scale is hugely important. Too fast and those who aren't logging in every morning and checking the patch notes several times a day get confused and lose their place when their abilities don't function the way they expect them to one day. Too slow and those who are pushing the boundaries and are in heroic raids on week 2 get bored with nothing to play. Clearly there is a middle ground and finding it may not be all that easy.
Mists Launch (4.0.1): 12 October 2010
Zandalari (going to call this a mini patch even though it has a full version number 4.1): 26 April 2011
Firelands (4.2): 28 June 2011
Dragon Soul (4.3): 29 November 2011
(Dates taken from the wowwiki)
6 Months from Mists launch to the Zandalari patch, another 2 months until Firelands. This means 8 months with only one tier of raid content. A lot of people were pretty sick of it by then. 5 months in the Firelands. We've been in dragon soul for nearly 7 months.
What do these times mean? Using the MoP beta as a guidline we waiting a fair amount of time going from 86 to 87 in terms of what we had for a level cap. People got pretty used to what was going on before that increase came along. From there we had a much smaller gap in the remaining level increases. There are several reasons for this including people getting used to what the beta was showing among other things but the point here is that there was time for people to experience things before new content came along.
Along the same vein we need to consider how much is there to experience. For example we had 12 (13th on heroic) bosses with Mists launch. 8 months might have been a bit long but in my opinion it was a fair time for that amount of content, on the same token it being the first set of bosses in the expansion it's lifespan is somewhat extended due to the need to progress (for most people) through the heroics and to a lesser extent levelling.
From there we had Firelands for 5 months. Again I felt like I was sick of firelands by the time dragon soul came around. I know I don't have a lot of hard evidence around it but as someone who raids progression and spent every night on heroic rag for several weeks near the end I was done with it. I think at that point most raid groups had either completed what they were going to complete, or had already done it all. The nerfs are another story and can modify how much people finish, again another topic. However, with 7 bosses, a relatively small number, and uninspiring heroic encounters that short time was still a lot for what we had.
I'll probably comment more on DS after Mists launches but I'll suffice it to say I've been done with it for several months now. What it comes down to though is how much time can you spend in a give spot without getting bored. This extends to individual bosses as well. We had spent a couple weeks in early DS due to some crazy raid roster changes including losing 7+ raiders in a week, and I was almost fed up with spending time on Zon'ozz or Yorsahj, and then we made some really good progress and really caught up through the back half. Everyone has a different measure of how long they want to stick to some content before it gets old. Looking at the Zandalari patch we had the same 2 dungeons (which can be run over and over) for 2 months. Most people were fed up with them after barely a month, the QQ on the forums were endless.
So the amount of time you have for content is really important. This is almost an entirely different problem for people who aren't playing the game at least every week (for example just logging on for raid) or those who aren't even on every month or might take an extended break from the game. This could be voluntary or involuntary and I've known several people, many in the military, who were deployed and when they came back had a hard enough time adjusting to the content changes, but I think that's an entirely new post that I'll continue next week since I'm running out of planned space.
I feel I've shown that while it isn't a strict "this much is too long," there are clearly intervals in which people run the course of enjoyment on a set amount of content and that they desire more content. This interval seems to be somewhat similar from various viewpoints but without a terribly large sample size I can't really make a call. Please comment on this if you have opinions, let me know what your gameplay schedule is normally like (3 night a week or chilling out in /g with your buddies running heroics). Next week we'll take a look at how fast is too fast.
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