mmorchive

August 6, 2007 elitistjerks.net

Praetorian:

I am tired of reading the same exaggerated “arguments” regarding Blizzard’s design:”Blizzard only designs content for 1% of guilds”
“If you aren’t in a hardcore raiding guild and have no life you’re never going to see X”
etc.

If you cite WoWJutsu statistics in order to support your “argument,” that makes it even better. And by “better” I mean “more painful.”

We’ve been seeing the same shit repackaged and reposted since sometime in 2005 when people were complaining about how the Ahn’Qiraj world event was just exploiting gullible idiots to make sure that Blizzard’s darling raiding children got more epics.

Stop.You don’t have a new and creative take on it. You aren’t saying anything special or important. Tigole isn’t going to read your post and say, “Oh my god, I never really understood what the players were talking about until I read this staggeringly articulate and brilliant exposition of the problem!”

Blizzard has a design vision for each expansion, consisting of solo content, 5-man content, 10-man content, and 25-man content. By necessity the 10-man and 25-man content is purely endgame content. They prioritize the solo and 5-man stuff and then patch in what they can’t finish at a later date. Black Temple was not the result of Blizzard devs sitting down and saying, “Oh no, Nihilum is almost done with tier 5 content! Guys, immediately stop working on your 5-mans and casual quests, we need a new raid instance STAT!” They in fact prioritized all the outdoor, leveling, and 5-man content over the raid content, releasing the former in a fairly polished state and the latter in an unpolished/incomplete state.

According to WoWJutsu, roughly 13000 US players are in guilds that have killed Kael’Thas. Kael’Thas has also only been killable for roughly 2.5 months. I wonder what percentage of US players/guilds had killed Nefarian in November 2005. (Hint: A similar one.) Was BWL exclusive content designed solely for basement-dwelling no-life raiders? No. Was AQ? No. Stop citing those statistics as “proof.” By contrast, 350k+ people are in guilds that have killed Gruul. 175k+ have killed Magtheridon. 750k+ raid Karazhan. Anyone who can kill Magtheridon can and will clear SSC and TK given the time. The forthcoming gear upgrades from Zul’Aman will make this even easier, just as Z’G and AQ20 made BWL easier for mid-tier guilds in vanilla WoW. This is content that is designed to be consumed over the full life-cycle of an expansion about which we are just now beginning to learn details (it was close to 1.5 years from the time we first saw the Blood Elf starting zone to the time TBC released). The fact that “hardcore” guilds have consumed it already should not be a surprise and does not mean it was designed for them.

Note that it is not my intent to censor or suppress a particular viewpoint — rather, can anyone really disagree that this particular topic/argument has simply been beaten to death?

Please, before you make a post, stop and ask yourself: “Is the major point of my post, or a portion of post, really just a regurgitation of ‘WoW shouldn’t cater to endgame raiding guilds as much as it does?’” If so, stop. Unless you really do have a staggeringly articulate and brilliant exposition of the problem that’s going to make every single person who reads it see the issue in a new light. Do you really?