Is Raiding too Easy in Wrath?
Posted January 27, 2009 at 12:34 AM by Warpy
Tags raiding
There's been a lot of fuss about Ensidia's 2-Day Waltz through every boss in Wrath of the Lich King's initial release. Two months in, some of my guildies are starting to complain that the raid content is not challenging for them. I'm afraid I'm solidly on the side of accessible content, even if “bads” and “scrubs” are being allowed to PuG the once-hallowed halls of Naxxramas, formerly restricted to the elite of raiding guilds.
I remember how shrill the complaints were when attunements were lifted for the first time in the Burning Crusade and Tempest Keep: the Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern were open to all level-70 raiding guilds. But those instances were in danger of going the same way Naxxramas did before the expansion: unseen by the customers who had paid for them. And that's just plain bad business.
Remember that only 5% of all raiding guilds had collected loot from Sunwell before patch 3.0 (according to WoWJutsu). The numbers may have been even worse for Naxxramas, and I have no idea how many thousands of hours it took highly-trained computer professionals to design it in terms of story, construct the three-dimensional models, create the artwork, animate the elements, and then to finally test it. Strictly speaking, Blizzard probably lost money on Naxx before the expansion, because it only kept a handful of subscribers interested in the game. Molten Core, ZG, and AQ20 were probably far better investments in terms of maintaining happy subscribers.
There are those who feel entitled to enjoy nearly-exclusive content that has to be paid for by their fellow gamers. None of the arguments I've read make me sympathetic to the would-be elitists. I've heard some insist that only 5% of all raiders “deserve” to raid Sunwell, because they put in the “work” that casual raiders often do not: farming for consumables, gear, repair gold, and then reading up on all the strats and repeatedly wiping on the trash on the way to the first boss and on Kalecgos himself. Unless the players are working for Blizzard or a game-review publisher, that's not work, it's just play that they may not enjoy very much. Work produces or protects real-world value. The only way to justify exclusive content, in my opinion, is to pay for it with real-world money or real work. I keep hearing that “Raiders are the core” of the WoW subscription base, and it would not surprise me if hard-core raiders kept their subscriptions longer than most casuals, but are they keeping them 20 times longer on the average? In fact, given the disparity of numbers, it would take an even bigger difference than that.
The other argument I'm hearing is that people are getting bored farming the content. I'm not having this problem, but I haven't done that much raiding. When the Burning Crusade was released, Gruul's and Magtheridon's lairs were extremely difficult for the top guilds and inaccessible to the rest of us. So, once enough of us got attuned (the Master's Key), we ran Karazhan once a week, generally spending three or four nights on it and really struggling until we'd collected a lot of gear from there. This expansion is very different; you can run six raids/week without attunement, and two more once you've cleared Naxx: a veritable purple rain. Purples drop in heroics now too (well, one/instance). No wonder hard-core raiders were able to gear up so quickly, and no wonder they've started to burn out so fast. The content is definitely easier, we haven't had to wipe a hundred times on any of these bosses, but Blizzard's in the game business, and games need to be fun for all of their customers.
Total Comments 7
Comments
-
Very good post, and i totally agree. Due to RL problems and traveling i was unable to buy the expansion as early as most people. It took me 6days to get to 80 and then another 6 days to full epic out my warlock. 6days! I ran Heroic naxx pug 2days ago and got 5 peices of epic 25man raid gear. It was a very experienced group who knew me and my mate so they let me in with shocking gear, half blue half green still. I was surprised to find i was 5th on the dps meters, with GREENS. We ended up only getting to the four horsemen before abandoning.
I still remember back when bc came out trying to do gruuls and mag for the first time. EVERYONE had to be uber geared from kara and even then we wiped over and over. I'm hoping the next raid that blizzard decides to bring out is extreamly hardPosted January 27, 2009 at 08:43 AM by ultimo
-
It is a fine line between too hard and too easy, and no matter what people are not going to agree on where one ends and the other begins.
Personally, I do not agree with the notion that everyone should be able to access all of the content. At least, not right away. If there is no challenge in raiding anymore, blizzard will lose customers. One may argue the flipside that if it's too challenging, blizzard will lose customers, but historically speaking that's not quite as true.
To start, using a guild like Ensidia is the worst anyone can do to look at anything relevant in this game. They get paid to play with dirty oil money from some anonymous dubai company. If only we all got paid to play warcraft day and night. ;)
So, let's look at "real" guilds; IE unsponsored guilds. You have guilds that are going to try and burn through content as fast as possible, and those players have a ridiculous amount of time to play every day. Then you have casual players who only play maybe a few hours a week. Blizzard can't really cater to either extreme, as neither is simply a big enough "chunk" of the raiding population.
Achievements help make "easy" content more difficult, but at the same hand, it's not quite the same as downing KT in the original naxx. I think the best answer is to make the content difficult enough so that the top 10% of raiders are challenged. This means the next 10-15% will be very challenged. And so on.
I think a good current example of this is 3 drake sarth. And then, the way that content is made more accessible to lesser skilled raiders is through the next content patch. Ulduar should have 1 or 2 "gimme" bosses for people who are at least appropriately geared. This gear would then allow those lesser skilled players to go back and kill the previous content more easily.
And so on.Posted January 27, 2009 at 11:44 AM by Fallenman
-
That is an amazing picture of Sartharion, haha. Well done!
I have been up and down both sides of this argument and I feel pretty talked out about it. I'm enjoying working on Sarth with multidrakes, and after that gets easy.. who knows! I might just take a break.Posted January 27, 2009 at 11:55 AM by Jive
-
I remember Naxxramas from Vanilla Wow. I also remember spending weeks working on getting attuned to that horrid place, only for the expansion to come out a little bit later, and it was all but forgotten. I sit on both sides of the fence on this issue. When I hit 70, I was already as far as i could go into doing my Kara key quest, and was attuned the same day i hit 70. Most might argue that i'm a hard core raider, but i'm not. I work at night during when most raiding guilds raid. and during the day i take care of my duaghter, which pulls my attention away or doesn't even allow me to be online.
I use that as an example of how a casual player can get stuff done, if they set out to do it. I also did what i could to get all my keys for heroics. So when they changed all the requirements for attunements, and keys, as a casual raider i was extremely upset. Do i feel that people shouldn't get what they're paying for? Not at all. But to take all the effort out of it, makes the work that most of us did to get into somewhere meaningless, other than pride of doing something.
It was at that point that I totally left WoW, (well it turned into a 7 month break) And as i contemplated my return, The above issues is somethign i thought about. Most casual raiders, still won't see true endgame content such as sunwell, because it's ramped up pretty good. But at least now they'll get a shot at know what it's like to wipe a hundred times, spend countless gold on repairs, and see that you do need to be on top of your game for end game content. And hopefully that inspires those casual gamers to become better, and learn their classes inside and out, as well as those hard core raiders realizing that if your down a toon or two, that you might be able to pug a replacement.Posted January 27, 2009 at 01:25 PM by Mollytov
-
I think the big problem here is not the difficulty level of the content as much as that the content was known previously. For those that were around during Vanilla WoW Naxx is just a repeat. For those of us that were not around during that time period it is much more difficult.Posted January 27, 2009 at 01:29 PM by AballahSon
-
Most of my thoughts on this are on my blog. Shameless plug incoming...
Shifting Perspectives - The Warlocks Den Forums
I agree with Fallen. To compare anything the rest of the world does to Ensidia is wrong. That's the top .000...0001% of the game population, and aside from the rest of us laughing at them (and crying, wishing we got paid to play), they don't mean a thing.
Another point to make in all this is that while Naxx may be repeat content to many, the simple fact is that we have FAR more content available to us now than we did at this point in The Burning Crusade. Right now a lot of people were still in Kara, and fighting against poorly tuned Gruul and Mag. Today, we have a large instance, and two Ony style dragons, all of which are well tuned. I'll continue to maintain that we can't pass judgment on Wrath's raiding scene until we actually see it in Ulduar. Naxx really isn't Wrath content.Posted January 27, 2009 at 05:22 PM by Kiralyn
-
Honestly, there are enough chalenges in wrath even now.
I agree that every encounter is easy.
But there are some things you can do to keep wow challenging.
sarth 3d in 10man? hell yes, it's hard.
Then there are some achievements.
Thaddius one, Loatheb one. As far as I know until now nobody did Loatheb achievement (kill him without spore buffs)
Also immortal achievement is a nice chalenge.Posted January 28, 2009 at 04:48 AM by jesterlock
