[GameRatty] tag: tbc

Questioning Expert Opinion

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:17:32 +0000

Incoming wall of text.

Back in May I asked whether or not WoW was an unstoppable train. To sum it up briefly and simply, I didn’t think so. With today’s news of Blizzard selling 2.8M copies of WotLK and breaking their previous first day sales record of 2.4M with the launch of TBC, I am starting to rethink things a bit. That is 400k more copies, which can be represented as a 14% increase.

I was basing my earlier theory on a bit of expert opinion by none other than MMO Chart‘ s SirBruce. This guy has been analyzing the MMO scene for a long time here and he had put together a presentation with the following:

The MMOG subscription market continues to grow; 16M+ now, 20M+ in 2009 (pred. 2006), 30M+ in 2012
World of Warcraft to peak at 11M – 12M by 2010
Most retail-launched MMOGs have an initial growth phase during the first year, followed by 1 – 3 years of a more stable, “mature” subscription base, and then a noticeably and often sharp decline.
New markets grow subscriptions, but expansions packs mostly cover churn and provide a retail presence.

I don’t know about the overall subscription market, but I’m going to assume it is growing. Also, Blizzard recently announced that they now have over 11M accounts (however you slice ‘em up), which is pretty much on par with his second bullet. We’re on the brink of finding out what will happen with the third bullet as WoW celebrates its fourth birthday. Will it ring in the next 12 months with a “sharp decline?”

I’m most interested in the fourth bullet. According to Sir Bruce, MMO expansions cover churn, aka, player loss. Well, since the release of TBC, WoW’s population has shot up from 8M to 11M, an increase of roughly 3M players. Obviously, you release expansions to keep your customers in new and exciting content, but are they also serving the purpose of helping World of Warcraft grow? Without TBC, I don’t think we’d see the current numbers at 11M…

Let’s talk a bit more about player retention here. My WAR guild is made up entirely of ex-WoW players. We were a WoW guild that moved to WAR (even though I had quit WoW a long time before WAR was even in the picture). At one point we had 69 members in our guild. We now have about 20 “active” members (active yet ultra casual). Where do you think the other ones went? Back to WoW for the most part. The most I have seen online at prime time these past couple weeks has been 8 players. Most of the time it is 3 to 4.

This isn’t an isolated occurrence either. Last night I did a quick server check and found about 70% of them to be low/low, 30% of them to be med/med (or some variation of med/low or low/med), and none of them was showing a “high” value anywhere in the entire list. During WAR’s first free month it wasn’t uncommon to see dozens of “high” and “full” values.

Having spoken with another blogger who shall remain nameless (protect the innocent!), he went from having a guild of 150 to about 20 actives as well. Even one of his best friends and a family member quit - though I don’t think those two in particular went back to WoW. Most of the rest? You guessed it.

You can blame some of this on the fact that these people weren’t enjoying WAR enough to stick around regardless and that many of them may not have run back to WoW, but you’d be a complete fool to say that WotLK hasn’t had a huge impact on WAR’s retention rate…

WotLK is definitely addressing WoW’s churn issues.

I think the next 12-months will be exciting for both WoW and WAR and we’ll start being able to see where the chips are falling. A couple of the original bullets are a bit conflicting on second glance: First he says that WoW will grow to 11-12M by 2010 but then he says that most MMOs see a sharp decline in their fifth year. Will WoW be able to break the industry norms by actually continuing to grow into their fifth year (2010) and beyond? Could the expansions help this to happen rather than simply addressing churn?

If I had to make a prediction, it would be this:

WoW will do extremely well for the next 6-12 months and may even reach that 12M peak, but without another expansion on the horizon for an additional 6-12 months beyond then, they will start to see that sharp decline SirBruce talks about. No MMO launch since 2004 has yet managed to make a permanent dent in WoW’s subscription figures, including both Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. There’s still a chance for these MMOs to gobble up the players getting bored of WoW in the next year, but I don’t think it will be too substantial (maybe a total loss of 1-2M, which is still pretty good). They’ll also have to share those fleeing subscribers with a number of other MMOs, including those joining the scene.

Both WAR and AoC are in a subscription slump compared to the momentary peaks they attained in their first months of launch, however, the numbers are bound to rise back up again as people experience all or at least most of what WotLK has to offer. And as I said, I believe this will happen within the next 6-12 months, but it could happen even sooner.

I’ve personally been so up and down with WAR lately because I have no other MMO to run back to. I’ll never touch WoW again and I don’t feel the slightest inclination to start up a new MMO. The game has immense potential and I know it will be 10x the game it is today within the next few months. The trouble is that WAR is highly population-based as an RvR game and right now the servers are feeling dead to me. Ostermark was a destination server for many of the recent transfer pushes and yet we’re still maxing out at Med/Med. Even at that number, oRvR seems dead most of the times I log on and I usually spend 10-20 minutes in the scenario queue before anything pops. The PvE is sub-par at my current-rank and until I can get into Bastion Stair, it’s just painful to do.

I know it’s a difficult thing for Mythic to do, but they truly need to merge servers ASAP. Mark shot off his mouth about the state of your game being not-so-hot if you have to resort to server merges rather than adding new servers shortly after launch, but he should take the blow to his ego and help out his players.

Waiting 4-12 months for the slow trickle of WoW-quitters to fill these servers back up again isn’t a smart move. Listen to the people playing your game. Listen to your paying customers, man… Otherwise you’ll see a slow trickle the other way - people getting fed up and quitting WAR for something else or nothing at all.

If you aren’t having fun - why are you paying/playing, right? Here’s a quote from my May WoW-Train article:

I’m not trying to pick on World of Warcraft specifically with this post, but it’s a proven fact that time has been the dark red line creeping slowly towards the heart of every MMORPG to date. Time allows for competitive growth. Time leads to player complacency and boredom. Time is what makes the present become the past.

I think the same can be said about not responding to big game issues quick enough.

I should also mention this little anecdote: When I quit DAOC for WoW, it didn’t take the first time. I spent about 3 months in WoW then went crawling back to DAOC for several more months. DAOC eventually lost its charm and I went back to WoW, where I spent almost 2 years. I would imagine the same thing is happening with a lot of people who are leaving WoW for other games: their first or second attempts may not work, but eventually they’ll break the habit.

Is WoW an unstoppable train? Right now? Perhaps, though I haven’t really been a part...
Upping the 30-day free trial to 90-days? Here’s an interesting idea: I firmly believe companies like Mythic...
Playing the “WHAT IF” Game… Syp asks some interesting WHAT IF questions, so I decided...

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Wrath of the Lich King - The easy expansion?

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 04:04:00 +0000

You might have heard about the world's biggest WoW-braggard getting to level 79 in 13 hours, before being banned for exploiting. Or the guy who then reached level 80 in Wrath of the Lich King in a legit way, in 27 hours. That all was to be expected, after similar stuff happened in The Burning Crusade. But what came as more of a surprise was Nihilum going together with another hardcore raiding guild, forming TwentyFifthNovember, and clearing Naxxramas on heroic difficulty after only 65 hours and 30 minutes. Now their raid progress will have to wait for Blizzard to patch in the harder raid dungeons.

On a more personal level, I noticed that the non-raid PvE content is much easier now too. My level 70 warrior soloed level 77 mobs. My priest made it to level 73 this weekend, and was playing catch-up with his loot: I had already done several dungeons with guild groups that were up to 4 levels too high for us, and carried around several pieces of loot where the level-restriction prevented me from wearing it. I still need one more level before I can wield the staff I found in Drak'Tharon Keep.

So, is Wrath of the Lich King the easy expansion? It certainly seems so right now. But is it too easy? I don't think so. The dungeon runs I did were certainly challenging, with the 5-man bosses having far more "raid-boss-like" abilities, combat in multiple phases, and skill checks. And of course the people I played with were experienced raiders, and wearing TBC epic gear. These dungeons would have been a lot less easy wearing greens.

Naxxramas is only the first raid dungeon. It *should* be easy, even on heroic, so not-Nihilum guilds have a decent shot at it in both 10-man and 25-man mode. The harder stuff will be patched in later. Sorry, TwentyFifthNovember, Blizzard can't design difficulty just for you, they have to design around the majority of players. If that means that raiding isn't just for the elite few any more, but accessible to a much wider audience, so much the better. Well done, Blizzard!

Raiding thoughts at the end of TBC

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:01:00 +0000

My guild is doing a farewell tour of Burning Crusade raid dungeons, including places we haven't been to yet. So I had the opportunity to visit the Black Temple for the first time. We killed 4 bosses, each on the first try, of which the third and fourth boss were "guild firsts". The third boss, Shade of Akama, was so easy after the recent nerf that he dropped dead before we had really started. The fourth boss was a bit harder, but we managed very well, and he dropped a robe for my priest. So now I'm running around in a fancy BT robe, which wasn't a huge upgrade for me, but looks a lot nicer.

I wonder why exactly Blizzard made raiding so much easier, so late in TBC. Just to give everyone the chance to see the places he couldn't visit before? I'm all for accessible raiding, but isn't it a bit late for this? Furthermore, while I think that Karazhan 3.0 is about as difficult as a starting raid dungeon should be, Black Temple 3.0 is too easy for a end raid dungeon. If raid dungeons had been this way all the time in TBC, most guilds would have finished Black Temple and then Sunwell Plateau long ago. Guilds generally shouldn't be able to one-shot a new boss the first time they see him. I'm not saying that wiping 10 times is fun, but wiping once or twice before learning the encounter heightens the achievement of finally beating the boss.

This close to WotLK I obviously wasn't raiding for the gear. It was nice that I could get that robe because nobody else wanted it, but in this case it wasn't gear that was needed to advance further. Gear will be more important when Wrath of the Lich King raiding starts. What worries me a bit is that in our raid we had 5 priests and 7 mages, and due to the changes of spellpower we all needed the exactly same gear. I'll be competing for gear with every other priest, mage, or warlock, because there isn't anything like "cloth healing gear" any more. I hope Blizzard considered that when itemizing those new raid dungeons.

The hardcore raiders often talk of raids being all about "skill checks", or even "idiot checks". But if every guild suddenly gets much further in the raid circuit after the nerf, it proves that much of the raid difficulty is strictly numerical. The bosses all still have all of their abilities, they just have 30% less health. So if guild which couldn't kill them before now can kill them, it is hard to argue that these guilds suddenly acquired a lot more skill, or that they were "idiots" before to not be able to kill that boss. One good example for a pure gear check is the first boss in Black Temple, who hits the whole raid for 8,500 damage. If you don't have 8,500 health, there is nothing you could do, you simply need the gear with the stamina that gives you enough health to survive. Of course there are other cases where you can compensate lack of gear by playing better. But I haven't seen any encounter yet which can't be made trivially easy by being much overgeared.

And as outleveling and outgearing a raid dungeon makes it trivially easy, this is also why the proposal to train raiding in raid dungeons 10 levels below you can't possibly work. That is why the initial raid dungeon has to be easy enough to train average player in raiding, without completely frustrating them. I certainly don't expect to clean out Naxxramas on the first try, wearing still green quest armor. But a casual raiding guild with people in blue gear should at least be able to down some bosses after a few tries, gear up by that, and then slowly advance further. Later raid dungeons can then be harder, and I don't mind if the last raid dungeon in WotLK will be as hard as Sunwell Plateau before the nerf. There should be raid content that is challenging for many different types of players, not only casual or only hardcore. The important thing is to get people into raiding in the first place, even for those who won't be able to raid several nights per week, so that they can develop from there. We'll soon see whether Wrath of the Lich King manages that trick.

The Daily Grind: Do expansions cheapen all that hard work?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Filed under: World of Warcraft, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Expansions, Opinion, The Daily Grind

It happened with The Burning Crusade -- players had spent months raiding at level 60 to get the very best gear, and when TBC came out, people were getting green drops with better stats than the best raid drops after only a couple of levels. A lot of hardcore players were annoyed, while some just accepted it as the natural motion of things.We've got at least three big expansions coming up in the next few weeks -- Wrath of the Lich King for World of Warcraft, Mines of Moria for The Lord of the Rings Online, and The Shadow Odyssey for EverQuest II. With the level caps going up in WoW and LotRO,...

The Daily Grind: Do expansions cheapen all that hard work? originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The importance of being epic

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 07:54:00 +0000

Whenever a discussion about raids starts to get a bit more heated, the argument of "you just want more epics" gets tossed around. Hardcore raider leaving his old guild to join a more advanced one? "Just wants more epics". Casual raider arguing that raiding should be more accessible? "Just wants more epics". Someone in guild chat complaining he didn't get a raid spot? "Just wants more epics". This often repeated argument gives epics a bad name, and leads to even more derogatory terms like "welfare epics". So everyone claims he isn't doing whatever he is doing "for the epics". Only that isn't true. Epics are an important part of the raiding game. Not to strut around with in front of the auction house, but as entry ticket to further raids.

The larger part of most raids depends very strongly on the numerical stats of the participants, not their skill. Yes, there is skill involved in learning how to react correctly to every special ability of every boss. But the better your stats, the easier it gets to get it right, and the better are the raids chances of survival if things go wrong. The abilities of Moroes and his henchmen in Karazhan are still exactly the same as they were when TBC came out. But his health got nerfed, and many raiders visiting him now have much better epic gear than the first time they met him. So suddenly you don't have to set up crowd control for every henchman up, you just put the skull raid mark on the one who heals, and AoE the others. Moroes's Garrote still does the same damage as before, but due to epics players have a lot more stamina, and survive it a lot easier. And due to epics the damage output of the raid is generally much higher (and, as I said, the mobs health has been lowered), and the fight is over sooner.

Special abilities of bosses aside, a raid combat isn't significantly different from any other combat in WoW: The players' dps is measured against the mob's health, while at the same time the mob's dps is measured against the players' health and ability to heal. As epics increase the players' health and dps, they automatically make the fight easier for the players, and increase the chance of the raid to down the boss. A guild advancing through the raid circuit from one boss to the next, and from one raid dungeon to the next higher one, is not just due to players learning the boss encounters; it is also very much a function of the players equipping themselves better, and everyone having better epics.

So of course everyone who wants to raid will want epics. They are his ticket into the raid. Without a certain level of gear the player will not be accepted into the raid group. For the casual raider being invited into a raid means not only that he'll learn the encounters better than he possible could by reading tactics on some website or watching a YouTube video; it also means he'll end up with some better gear that will enable him to be more useful for a future raid. The hardcore raider who feels he needs to leave his guild to advance further is not just frustrated that his guild is getting past raid dungeon X, he is also stuck because he already has all the gear from dungeon X, and needs to visit dungeon X+1 if he ever wants to have a chance to see dungeon X+2. Even the best raiding guilds in TBC all had to start with Karazhan and follow the same raid circuit from there to Sunwell Plateau. Without the right epics, visiting Sunwell Plateau just won't work, even if you are a great raider.

And this is the reason for much guild drama: If you don't get invited into a raid in the first place, or you participate but don't receive the epics, it becomes even harder for you to get invited into the next raid. Every guild has different rules, and some even rather complicated DKP systems, on how to distribute raid spots and epics. But no system is perfect, and none removes the fundamental problem of whether it is better to concentrate the epics in the hands of a few, who will advance faster, or whether it is better to distribute them as widely as possible, to make raid attendance easier, and thus more widespread and stable, but slow. Giving somebody epics opens access for him to harder raid dungeons, but that access is a personal one, and there is a risk that the receiver uses that entry ticket not in the guild he is currently in, but in the next one. Concentration of epics, quite often in the hands of a main tank, can propel the whole guild forward, but also set them back significantly if the MT defects.

Badges help to spread the rewards. But Wrath of the Lich King also introduces one BoE epic on the loot table of every raid boss, which has certainly advantages, but also a huge guild drama potential. Do you give it to somebody in the raid for whom it is a minor upgrade, or to somebody who wasn't in the raid due to lack of equipment, enabling him to come next time? Some guilds might even have rules in which regular raiders not in the raid have priority on BoE epics over casual raiders in the raid.

In summary, epics are important, as they give access to more raid content. And it is often the raid access people are after, not the epic itself. What looks like a petty squabble over loot might well be a much more fundamental argument over the opportunity to participate in guild events. And what looks like a simple problem of rewarding people for their raid participation by handing out epics can well lead to problems with raid participation in the future. If you can't get a raid full, are the other players in the guild unwilling to help, or are they simply unable, having never received their entry ticket of epics?

New Last Remnant shots released

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:58:31 +0000

Gamekyo’s got 22 new Last Remnant screens. It’s all looking very pretty and Japanese. It’s out next month for 360 and it’s TBC for PS3. And that, as the actress said to the bishop, is that.

LocoRoco 2, Resistance 2, more dated for Europe; first-party November release schedule revealed

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:25:47 +0000

Relatively late as LittleBigPlanet will be heading for Europe, the Three Speech blog is doing European gamers justice by conveniently listing all of next month's first-party game releases for the PlayStation 3, PSP, and PS2.

Some of these dates were already individually announced already, but just in case you missed it, here it is. Also, it doesn't hurt to see them all lined up in one comprehensive list. Take out your calendar, we've got more red letter dates for you to fill in!

PS3

Buzz Quiz TV Special Edition - October 31st
LittleBigPlanet - November 5th
MotorStorm Pacific Rift - November 7th
SingStar Volume 3 - November 14th
SingStar ABBA - November 14th
Resistance 2 - November 28th

PS2

SingStar Singalong with Disney - November 7th
SingStar ABBA - November 14th
EyeToy Play PomPom Party - November 14th
EyeToy Play Hero - November 14th

PSP

LocoRoco 2 - November 21st (TBC)
Buzz Brainbender - November 28th (TBC)

If I'm not mistaken, "TBC" in this case means "to be confirmed" (well, either that or "to be continued" which doesn't quite... make sense). This list coming from Three Speech, Europe's "semi-official" PlayStation blog, we may have to wait up on further announcements on the TBC releases.

My WoW today and tomorrow

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:46:00 +0000

In the open Sunday thread Spinks asked "What about Wrath of the Lich King are you most excited about/looking forwards to? And which character do you plan to level first and why?". Good question, but I'd like to first tell you all what I am *currently* playing in World of Warcraft, before moving to my plans for the expansion.

My number one priority at the moment is to experience all parts of the world event leading up to the Wrath of the Lich King. The motivation behind that is simple: This event is only happening now, it will end with the release of WotLK, and anything I missed I will never have the opportunity to do later. Yes, there are parts of the event that are annoying: Logging on a bank alt and finding the banker having been turned into a zombie, or dying to a zombie attack myself. But then, I timed the respawn time of a flight master, and it turned out that he respawns in 2 minutes. 2 minutes! That is really a minor inconvenience compared to the greater good of making this event feel like a real invasion. I got more annoyed when it took me forever to do the new quests to gather necrotic runes and kill a shade of doom, because it turns out the shades drop epic gear, and as soon as a zone is under attack the undead there get heavily farmed, and the shades killed, which end the attack. The scenes at the summoning circles reminded me of the scenes at the dark portal when TBC came out: A horrible kill-stealing fest. Most annoying was when I spent 8 necrotic runes to summon a shade, and then somebody tagged it and stole it from my group. And these summoning circles don't respawn in 2 minutes, the timer seems to be over 1 hour.

When I'm not doing the pre-WotLK event, I'm enjoying the other new features of patch 3.0.: Inscription, achievements, and easier dungeons and raids. Big news: My warrior, who I nearly had given up upon before, is fun again. Before the patch he was stuck in a vicious cycle, where I wasn't invited to raids or heroics because my gear sucked, and I couldn't get better gear because I wasn't invited to raids or heroics. Now there are far more "casual" raids and heroic groups organized. And I'm doing some silly stuff, like tanking Onyxia, and finally finishing Magister's Terrace on normal, in case I ever want to do it in heroic. Plus I'm dealing more damage in solo play now, in spite of still being protection spec. So I went to Karazhan with both my mage and my warrior, and my "raider" priest even got to the third boss of Mount Hyjal. I got a couple of epic upgrades on all my characters, but honestly that isn't the most important for me right now. The important thing is playing in a group with strong cooperation, having fun. The gear is likely to be replaced soon.

Which brings me to my plans for Wrath of the Lich King. Because my motivation doesn't change, just because some expansion comes out: I still want to play PvE in groups, overcoming challenges that can only be beat by coordination of the efforts of several players. I'm looking forward to the new dungeons of Northrend, and I'm very interested how accessible Blizzard is going to make those first raid dungeons. From that motivation comes the answer to what character I'm going to play first: My priest. There is nothing to suggest that healers will be any less needed in WotLK groups. Maybe even more, if the addition of the Death Knight really solves the tank shortage there will be a healer shortage just behind. And I'm comfortable soloing and leveling up with holy spec, even if that might not be the fastest way. Given how many players who have a character who *could* heal will be using some non-healing build to advance fastest, I think I should be able to easily get into dungeon groups on my way to 80.

Most probably I will play the warrior and mage a bit in parallel, for example for their tradeskills, but the priest is certainly the first one I want to get to level 80. Which character will be the second depends very much on how things develop on the tanking front. I mean, if I hear a lot of shouts looking for a tank for dungeons, I'm certainly going to log my tank on and play. But if there are hundreds of Death Knights, and everyone considers them sufficient for tanking purposes, my warrior will be unemployed. That is the big disadvantage of preferring group play: It depends on what everyone else is playing, and who they want to invite into groups. That is especially true for me as casual raider, if I want an invite into raids although I'm not a regular, I have to be of a class / build that there is a shortage of.

I've played a Death Knight a bit in the beta, and it was great fun. The "phasing" nature of the first two levels, in which the Death Knight learns all of his spells and talents, in combination with telling his personal story, is one of the best parts of World of Warcraft. But it only covers two levels, and every Death Knight experiences the same destiny. And then he'll have to level up from 57 to 70 using content I know all too well, after already having played three characters to 70. In addition to that, Death Knights will be "flavor of the month" for a good while, and I don't foresee groups searching desperately for a Death Knight in preference of any other class. So I might make a Death Knight as an alt, for fun and for doing some tradeskills I don't have on the others, but I don't think I'll play that one very much, or level him to 80.

I don't know how long all this is going to entertain me. Probably several months. Which, one the one side, is great news, I'm having something to look forward for months. On the other side I'm pretty certain that Blizzard will not bring out a third expansion in 2009, and that I will get bored with WotLK before the next expansion comes out. I'm not really making plans what I'll play then. LotRO Mines of Moria? Warhammer Online? Some other MMORPG? Single-player games? I don't know. I'll decide that when the moment comes. In spite of what some other players think, choosing a MMORPG is not the same as choosing a religion. It's just a game, and the most important feature is to have fun. I'll play what is most fun at the moment. That might be WoW right now, but it won't be WoW forever.

Redefining Raiding

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:30:00 +0000

What you can do or not do in a single-player game is strictly defined by the program code. A massively multiplayer online game adds a social dimension to that, there are things that are theoretically allowed by the code, but practically not possible due to other players. The more players are involved in any given game activity, and the more they depend on each other, the more important the social rules for that activity become. In World of Warcraft raids are the activity that requires the most cooperation, and has thus been subject to the most social conventions and rules. But raiding changed from the original game to the first expansion, and it will change again in the second expansion. While the social rules aren't hard-coded into the program, they are nevertheless a logical consequence of the coded game rules. And as the code changes, so will the social rules. Whether we are considering ourselves as "raiders" or not, we will need to rethink the social rules of raiding. How do we define raiding in the new context of the Wrath of the Lich King?

The first thing to do here is to carefully separate what are actually coded rules for raiding, and what are only social conventions. For example you might be surprised to find out that many TBC raid instances can be entered at level 65. The "you need to be level 70 to raid" rule is a social convention. And did you hear the story about the druid soloing Onyxia? Well, we know for a fact that he needed *some* help, because you can't enter a raid dungeon unless you are in a raid group, for which you need at least 2 players (even if the second player stays outside). If they aren't hard-coded, why do social rules exist? Players make up criteria for inclusion or exclusion in reaction to the difficulty of the raid encounter. If 10 random players at the level cap can't beat the first raid dungeon, players have to organize a raid with a better mix of classes, talent builds, and equipment to improve their chances. That results in two lists: One list of inclusions of what you absolutely need to succeed, for example 2 tanks, 3 healers, and 1 warlock for a banish during a special encounter. The other list is a list of exclusions: You don't accept anyone who is not at the level cap, who has not a certain quality level of equipment, who does not have a certain talent build for his class, or who is not available to play at certain times for a certain amount of consecutive hours. Even if you exclude the hard-to-measure variable of player skill, there is something like a perfect raid composition for a given raid boss. The difficulty level determines how far you can stray from that perfect composition and still succeed.

In the Burning Crusade, when it came out, two factors made raiding relatively hard: The raid size was reduced to 10 players for the easiest raid, Karazhan, so after filling your list of must-haves, there wasn't much room left. And the difficulty level was high, so that as long as people were wearing blue gear, the raid composition couldn't be far off from perfect to still succeed. There were even guilds who changed raid composition for each boss, because they didn't have one composition that was able to beat them all. That strengthened the image of raiding being an elitist activity, that the average WoW player shouldn't even attempt. And raiding being only for the "elite" of most dedicated players was even supported by the developers, to the point that when other sources for epic gear were introduced, Tigole called those "welfare epics". But what is important to realize here is that raiding is *not* inherently elitist. This has been well proven by patch 3.0.2., which made raiding a lot easier by reducing all raid mobs health by 30%. Given that change, and the higher probability to nowadays find somebody who is well-geared and knows Karazhan already, the chance of success of a "pickup raid" to Karazhan is now much, much higher than last year. Guilds are taking their alts raiding, and while it isn't quite "raiding for everyone" yet, Karazhan is much more accessible to the average player now than before.

And if we believe what Blizzard tells us, raiding is supposed to remain more accessible in Wrath of the Lich King. And if they want to do it, there is nothing to suggest that it can't be done. Of course a raid dungeon which is easy enough to be completed by a pickup raid full of casual players will be way too easy for those who were into hardcore raiding before. But so what? There is more than one raid dungeon, every raid dungeon exists in two difficulty levels (easy for 10 people, hard for 25), and if the first dungeon is too easy for you, you just try the next, and the next, until you find one that is challenging enough.

This is a huge opportunity for Blizzard to redefine raiding as a possible activity for a much larger percentage of players. The difficulty of the raid dungeon determines the social rules of inclusion and exclusion that guilds and players will draw up to say who can raid and who can't. If the difficulty is low enough that most players can at least kill a couple of bosses in the first raid dungeon with minimum requirements of raid composition, gear level, and time commitment, then the image of raiding will change. The more people are participating in raid content, the better the business model of Blizzard that offers raid content as main course for the endgame holds up. Whatever else you think of WAR and its PvP endgame, at least that PvP endgame is totally accessible to anyone at the level cap, and nobody will be kicked out of a group for having the wrong class or talent build. WoW can't afford to keep their endgame exclusive for a small elite, they must open it up to a larger public to hold onto more players for longer.

If Blizzard really makes raiding a lot easier in Wrath of the Lich King, the only remaining barrier is in the heads of people. Social rules are slower to change than coded rules. Some people who didn't raid before will continue thinking that raiding isn't for them, even if they would perfectly be able to succeed in a raid. And some of the old raiders will resent not being that much of an elite any more. Which is silly, because of course the more hardcore players will always advance faster and further than the average player. It is just the entry into raiding that gets more accessible, and that can only be a good thing.

WoW server stability bad at the moment

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 06:05:00 +0000

I had a lot of fun this weekend in WoW, but didn't play as much as I wanted to, and not always where I wanted to. Because since patch 3.0.2 the European server I'm playing on, along with others in the same battlegroup, and some other server clusters, experiences lots of problems. This weekend there were several maintenance downtimes and rolling server restarts, and that was just the "planned" outages. There also were login server problems on Saturday, and on my server the whole Sunday long the world server for Outlands and all TBC content was down. We wanted to raid Mount Hyjal, but that instance wasn't up. We then wanted to go to ZA or AQ40, and these instances weren't up either, at which point we cancelled the raid. Anyway, there were several people who couldn't have participated, because their characters were in Shattrath, which was also down. Lots of players seeing lots of "World server down" error messages.

The WAR servers this weekend were in a much better state than the WoW servers. Too bad I didn't feel like playing scenarios.