Another of the large "discussions" on the forums is about content consumption and who deserves to see what content. I'm going to state right now that I do have a clear bias towards hardcore raiding but I'm going to try and be as neutral as possible.
First, a couple of analogies that have been thrown around the forums make me kinda sad. The blue posts included something to the effect of: once a guild kills the boss you can't get to it any more. I think this is overstating the opinion being presented. The counterpoint is that casuals are getting the same rewards as raiders without putting in nearly as much effort. I think this is a complete misunderstanding of guilds that are not as good as those making the comments.
I'm going to throw out my own analogy. You're really excited for a brand new game, lets say Final Fantasy 13 or Space Marine or Mass Effect 3. The night these things launch you pay 60$ or so for them. They really good games and you're super excited to have them, but you have to pay a pretty hefty price for them. A couple months down the road, the game has been out for some time now and usually the price drops a bit. Some games down to 40, others all the way down to 20 depending on the popularity. This is a bit like the nerfs. Are you upset that someone else only paid half the price you did for the same game? Sure you are, that's the same experience for less money, it's unfair on some level. The counterpoint is that you got to enjoy that game first. There is a lot to be said about having things before other people. You gained a lot by getting that game early but you also paid for it.
I think that analogy works pretty well. Both players may want that same experience and the same game, but to get things earlier you have to pay a higher price. That price may not specifically be dollars. It could be time invested in the game, as can be seen in one of the raid documentaries that have been produced, or it could be money in a new gaming rig. Whatever that price is you're going to have to pay it to get your things first. There's a bunch of benefits that others don't have. A lot of guilds are now selling runs and fattening up their personal or guild banks. There are benefits but when people see that someone else has killed the same bosses it throws up red flags, and I don't think that's fair to either party.
Something that comes up in recruitment is how far you may have gotten before the nerfs kicked in. It's not huge but it definitely puts you somewhere on the list. People who get the bosses down pre-nerf really do have benefits.
The second thing that comes up is that players feel invalidated when others who are, to their view, less skilled kill things they have. This is simply misguided. You got it first, you worked very hard for it, that's not to say the other people didn't but you got it earlier. This timing thing I feel is being very overlooked. Secondly, time to farm gear. For killing it earlier you will have a lot more gear than those that simply wait for, or can't kill it until, the nerfs. To put it this way, I'm sure there are some people that can kill heroic madness right now with their guild but since they are really close to it, they may opt to buy a run from another guild that has it on farm for a much better chance at a 410 weapon.
I do like the nerfs in that it makes re-clearing things easy. After 4 months of farming 8/8 H I don't really feel like putting all of that effort into the raid. This is where I enjoy the nerf.
Now, I still disagree with the way the nerfs are coming in. In many cases it feels like the nerfs "rob" you of the legit kill. For example, we were almost done with ultraxion when the 5% nerf came in. We had a couple soul-crushing sub 5% wipes. The nerf comes in before we get back into the instance, and we take 3 attempts and kill it. It didn't really feel like we overcame that last 5% hurdle that we'd been fighting against for the previous week or so. It just felt like we were handed the kill. This is the problem I have with the nerfs. The second problem I have is that it interacts with rankings due to how early in the week people raid. These ranking websites are important to many people, the competition between guilds and between all wow players is what drives a lot of raiders to raid. So being ahead of a guild you've been pacing for some time only to lose in the rankings to them because they raid earlier in the week is a bit demoralizing.
I get the impression much of my raid team feels the same however I can't actually speak for them. I can say however that I would much rather be progressing for another week or two without the nerfs than to get the nerfs to make things go by a bit quicker for the new content, if that is even the tradeoff. So here lies the crux of the problem. What solves both sides of getting people through the content before new content comes out (at least in terms of the final raid tier) while ensuring that those who progress through the raid for realm firsts or even at a fairly regular pace, don't feel like they are robbed of the kills they have worked so hard for.
When it comes to non-final tier content I think the t11 method worked really well. New content came out and the old stuff got nerfed pretty hard to make it available to everyone and to help people get into the new stuff. I think that was wonderful. Another option is targetted nerfs. Try and get a feel for what is really tripping people up. Going back to ultraxion for an example. Maybe his hour cast time is slightly too long, maybe his health is slight to large or maybe the armor debuff on the tanks should be smaller. I'm not saying these are the targetted nerfs I'd go for but they are options. Find out what people are having the most issues with and fix those. Also, while I'm on the subject, please fix bugged encounters. Gunship has been extremely bugged for us since about the 15-20% nerf. The fire just doesn't despawn at all. We've adjusted but it's not how the encounter worked when we reached the fight but please, bugs shouldn't be part of the encounter difficulty. But I digress. Another example would be gunship, perhaps increasing the gunship's health or slightly reducing the number of barrages cast or reducing the sapper damage to the ship.
In any case targetted nerfs are a real option and I think it might take a bit more effort and may not be the best option. I would put forth a somewhat more complicated notion that may not work in reality. Nerf the bosses sequentially instead of the whole instance at once. Imagine seeing morchok all the way up to hagara being nerfed over the course of a couple weeks. More people get stuck at ultraxion, he's up next week for a nerf. It allows those progressing ahead of the nerf to stay ahead of it, and those behind it to ride it's wave and experience fights at their own difficulty. Now there are some problems especially if you fall into the narrow waves where you kill a boss during one nerf and have to wait from nerf to nerf to get your appropriate boss difficulty, this is a problem even though it sometimes feels this way with the current nerfing mechanism.
My conclusion is that there really is no good way of handling the nerfs. I think that they do need to happen at some point and the best solution is to find out when that point is. I appreciate the effort to wait for a large number of guilds to get "stuck" on a boss, that is to say the number of new boss kills a week drops below a certain threshold, but the analysis done on mmo-champ clearly showed that those most impacted by the nerfs were guilds already in heroic working on 3-5/8. At the time I feel those were not the people who needed the nerfs. Alternatively nerf normals before nerfing heroics to give us some time. Perhaps just wait longer in general before nerfing the content.
In the end the content is for anyone who wants to play the game, and in my opinion not getting to experience content while it's current is tough, but it happens. I narrowly missed sunwell by 1 boss (guild collapse with our best illidan attempt around 30%) and I wish I had gotten there, it would have been an experience I was not likely to forget soon. However, that being said I can always go back and check it out. I mean some people just can't play the game for the time that content is there, and while it's unfortunate for them that's not something blizzard should really take steps to help with. I'd rather they didn't nerf the content at all, and let the gear inflation fix those problems after the content is old. While it may be another problem looking at DS type raids where it being old means a new expansion, that doesn't stop people from going back later and having fun in it. Sure, turn down the mount drop rates to give us something special, but please don't ruin our experiences because we happen to fit into this middle ground in raiding where we don't finish the content before the nerfs, but don't require the nerfs to finish it. To put this into perspective, I raid at roughly the same level as those in Elitist Jerks. We finished gunship maybe a week after they did at most. We're looking at, while not the top, a very competent and skilled group of players.
The "you can turn it off" argument sucks and I'm appalled that blizzard still puts that forth. Competing in this game is what makes raiding fun. I raid because I know I'm good at what I do there and it makes me feel good to have some form of measurement that can equate to some form of prestige. Turning off the buff will do nothing for this because the only thing that matters in those ranks are kills. This isn't something the community can change either because you can go and get amazing gear with the nerf active, and then fly through the content again with 410 weapons for example. "You can turn it off" is something nice to have to go back to to experience the content un-nerfed after clearing it but for the most part I think it's a very weak argument that feels like a last resort for a bad solution to content consumption.
Final thoughts:
Nerfs serve an important purpose. I feel that they've been implimented too soon and scaled too quickly to avoid unwanted side-effects. I ask of blizzard, slow it down, give us players a bit more time to work on these things and let us go through them before forcing on us a helping hand.
UPDATE: Apparently there was a formatting error where a bunch of text was white on a white background, this has been fixed.
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