mmorchive

June 8, 2008 somethingawful.net

Corbet:

This is what happens when bleeding edge raiders get bored farming the same content for 8+ months. I doubt anyone at Blizzard really cares - you can’t expect Blizzard to release content that fast to keep up.

Saepiroth:

Honestly, you can lay a portion of the blame for the current culling of raid guilds on the way they decided to develop the badge and arena system. At it’s most basic, the trouble is that they gave access to raid-quality gear without raid-quality effort.

Now; that’s not to blame badge gear for the death of raid guilds. Anyone farming T6 content was easily getting items better than badge loot. However…

The easy access to t6-oid gear was the nail in the coffin of de-valuing all t5 content. The de-valuation of “Vortexes” and vortex craftables was the first major blow, in that regard, and the limited separation at that level of Arena and pure PvE gear was the second. There are probably still a few guilds doing t5 content, but I’d be surprised if there are almost any guilds that haven’t simply hurdled the places entirely and gone straight into Hyjal and Black Temple.

The trouble with that is, is that it removes exposure to what were major training grounds in terms of proper progression experience, for the purposes of t6 and sunwell raid encounters. That leaves us without any expected progression in terms of raid experiences, and it leaves prospective raiders without any motivation to follow that progression path. That means for most raid guilds who have had to recruit over losses, their (our) recruits lack some experience of the stresses of proper progression, since they most likely went straight from arena + karazhan farming to being part of a t6 farming raid group. And it’s very hard to find people willing to take on the necessary mindset of full progression, if they haven’t experienced that mindset before.

Personally, I think removing the attunements for t6 was a poor idea and a big contributor to this problem. They simply should have kept a proper progression path with attunement requirements. Easing access to higher content is good for the game, but they should have done it by continuing to progressively nerf the bosses needed to advance, not by removing those bosses from the progression path entirely. That means continuing to (further) nerf Kael’thas and Vashj, perhaps exactly as they already did (IE no longer requiring clear zones before you can attack them, so you can practice on them directly without farm time).

They also may have wanted to consider paired tokens by tier to link that PvE progression element. IE, to acquire the t5-equivalent badge items introduced so long ago, you had to have one “t5 badge” to go with your badge of justices. And that “t5 badge” would dropped by all the t5 content bosses and Zul’Jin + Malacrass.

In order to acquire sunwell isle “t6 badge items”, you’d need a t6-badge to go with your badges of justice, acquired from any t6 boss or a successful bear run.

It seems to me that in WOTLK they’ll be combining the two approaches, from what I’ve heard in snippets. They’ve spoken of “tiered badges” on multiple occasions, and of having individual attunement paths for 10man and 25man.

Right now, running Karazhan, the very first raid instance in the whole game, is the very best method out of everything in the game for acquiring absolutely anything you need badges for. I think that speaks to a fundamental design flaw in planning, since if what you want is a badge item of any sort, realistically you ought to do Karazhan for it. Regardless of your options in the full spectrum of content. And that’s silly.

Generally, I think their intent was good; to democratize the experience of top-end raiding so that players less capable of arranging a large group of players can see content. However, the actual implementation left something to be desired…

From what I hear, the WOTLK approach of having 10man and 25man progression paths, as well as a more robust “heroic 5man” level of content, will allow them to maintain proper progression routes for content while also allowing social clusters of all sizes to assemble the necessary organization required to perform on content. Hopefully that system will work better to motivate people at ALL levels of performance, if they can avoid cutting the legs out of raid guilds now that they see the aftereffects of their current implementations of the badge system and raid democratization.