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Whats with the dumbing down of Raid Content?
Ginkeq
Member Posts: 615
I used to play WoW a long time ago, back when they have 40 man BWL/AQ/Naxx as the final instances.
One thing I remember is that there was a pretty big deviation in terms of where guilds were in PvE content. 90+% of guilds were stuck in Molten Core, or wiping on BWL trash mobs. And the skilled guilds were the ones clearing BWL/AQ/Naxx.
Now if you go and play WoW today, you will see there are a lot of people with the same gear, doing the same PVE content as everyone else. Everyone's basically the same in WoW.
I was wondering why people think this is ok? The reason everyone is capable of doing the same content is only that the game has been dumbed down so much that anyone can do it. They reduced the amount of people required for raids, which is fine. But in the process they've made the content much easier. It's more of a matter of getting 25 people to show up to the right zone in order to get the loot.
Anyway, it just seems retarded that all of the PvE guilds in WoW have the same loot. What makes an MMORPG fun if everyone has the same character? If you can't have good players and bad players, there's no point in playing. They just want to make their game for everyone, and in the process they gave away everything for free. Total idiots and newbies have the best gear in WoW. It was never like that before. Wearing a piece of gear meant that player/guild had some skill..
And what fun is raiding when the content is so trivial? EQ raids could take an hour or 2 of fighting with no mistakes at all during the encounter. Now you can show up drunk to raids and not have any problems with the joke PvE content these companies are producing.
They've just dumbed their games down too much for them to be enjoyable/playable for players who were at the top. Instances are no fun in WoW, because there is no chance of not clearing an instance in WoW. Instances are trivial and encounters are too predictable.
Comments
So, WoW is not for you because you need to be different from the rest? Well, there are tons of games where you can be, why another thread on this?
Do you think wow would be where it is now if they hadn't dumbed down the entire game? Raids are made a great deal eaiser for the simple reason that it allows more people to feel "leet" and "epic" so by doing so more people will actually do raids. If they kept them at where you actually needed 40 people who all knew what the hell they were doing, the game wouldn't be where it is now. As i doubt you'd have more than a few "epic" guilds running raids. So they'd stop playing since there'd be nothing else for them to do.
And thanks to people like you, it was drowned in nerfs and added training wheels. So ask yourself, there are tons of games, why did people like you have to have them changed?
But I do agree, why another thread about this? None of the players will agree they're to busy playing the purple lottery where every number is a winner.
Back when we were raiding Molten Core in WoW, I was able to get into raids even with other guilds because I was a warlock.
There were not many warlocks back then.
Also, I had a friend who was "skilled enough" to raid Molten Core on his priest, but not on his hunter.
Funny how that works.
40 man instances cannot exist any more, mostly because wow has lost many players. Most guilds hardly have 40 people online and if there are 40 online im sure all 40 dont live upto raiding standards.
Also why would you want to get to end game and not be able to play it because your gear sucks and yo cant raid to get gear <cause your gear sucks>.
Just part of the overall easy mode that gaming is being switched too. The idea is that they will get more players if no one feels there is anything they cannot do. More players equals more money.
The only solution to this is to kick up a fuss in your games forums. If you feel that the game has become playable by your blind, one armed granny then leaving is an option. If gaming companies think they are losing customers because their game is a cake walk, then they will rethink the easy mode strategy.
Nowadays it's about the bottom line. I doubt anybody will intentionally alienate the massive cash cow that is the current gamer generation by making things more challenging.
It's going to take a generation or 2 for this to start to change. Sadly by then a lot of us will have moved on, or settled down with priorities that go beyond killing some time in a game. Read "wife" and "kids". I kinda find it interesting in a way to watch the downward spiral. I want to see just how far it will go.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
Hey, isnt Ever Quest and UO still open?
Good one.
What's your response to those that want wows original direction of progression?
Seriously, are these games the same anymore? No they are not. Your point is moot.
What a silly discussion altogether. Just because the vast majority of players don't have several hours to play every day they should be locked out of end-game due to lack of time and skill? When the market becomes larger there MIGHT be a niche for the hard-core players to make a game for. Since there's none on the horizon, it will take many years.
Your suggestion implemented today would lead to the death of the genre at worst or large price increases for the remaining players at best.
Really what game? I'm looking for a hardcore raiding game with a complete progression that players need to work through.
No, switching raids to hardmode isn't what im looking for.
PLaying: EvE, Ryzom
Waiting For: Earthrise, Perpetuum
Actually it is all in your head. WoW's raiding is still pretty much divided the same way. 90+% of raiders are stuck doing normal modes and the advanced progression guilds are doing the hardmode content.
What you are QQing about is merely the 'appearance of difficulty'. You see that people are killing bosses with the same name on normal and harcmode difficulty and assume that they are the same difficulty. In fact the level of difficulty is seriously increased between the modes. In fact the transition between normal and hardmode raiding is much harder than that between vanilla WoW MC and Naxx raiding.
I am also tired of you epeen-wankers complaining how every casual can get the best gear without even trying. That is a complete falsehood. The gear a hardmode progression raider can obtain can never be obtained by a casual normal mode raider.
I'm just wondering why it is that videogames now all of a sudden need to be anything but a realease of tension. Sometimes I want to sit down after my job and just zone out and have some fun, but just doing heroics over and over gets quite tedious; on the other hand, wiping on the same boss for progression is just as aggravating. I think the birth of the 10-man and normal/hard modes allows people to game and have fun even though they mayt not have as much time to devote to virtual land comparing EPEEN sizes.
If you want to do something that takes skill, learn the piano, or how to paint. Take up woodworking, do something that actually takes more skill than clicking a few buttons.
Originally posted by GTwander:
How are you an MMO? Or any of us for that matter?
I say we strike all users from the site for not being MMOs.
Whats with the dumbing down of Raid Content?
Best excuse I've seen so far are the I have kids, a job, hobbies, travel, pets, responsibilities, and no time to play games anymore. Seems like devs are catering more and more to this type of player. People want all the best pixels with the least amount of effort and time as possible.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
The real question should be: WHAT'S UP WITH VARIABLE DIFFICULTY SETTINGS?
Todays instances, at least in WoW and DDO, you have multiple difficulty settings. Sure, they are catering to everyone. In DDO on the normal settings, the caster mobs do very little, on elite settings they start casting lighting bolts that hurt.
Elitism is fine for the elite.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
I kind of chuckled when I read this. I know what you mean, screw those people that actually have lives. They are ruining "OUR" games!
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
I think there's two different things going on at the same time.
First, Blizzard of course wants to make raid content as accessable as possible, since content only entertains those players who can access it. And if some content can't be accessed by a large number of players, that means that those players are not entertained by the effort Blizzard put into that content, and that again means that Blizzard mostly wasted a large amount of work. Or in other words: a 1000 man raid dungeon where a single trash mob takes skilled and well equipped players 5 hours to kill and that drops a hundred legendary items might sound fun at first. But in the end 99.9999% of the people will never see or even try that dungeon. And having created a dungeon for only 5 people while millions of others don't care about it is simply not worth the effort.
The second thing is the "I want to be special" part. Back in the days, when we took the nefarian head and stuck it on a pole in Orgrimmar we were the heroes. Or when we ran around with those organic looking AQ equip nearly noone else has. Hurray for us. But then suddenly it was all so easy and everyone killed those bosses and whatnot and everything is too easy.
Now, the question is: why do people say it is "too easy". Do they say that because they don't want others to have the same successes, or do they say so because easy content might be boring? That easy content is boring is for most people not the case. That's why it's pretty unlikely to die in an average MMO. Sure, if you attack a mob a dozen levels higher than you or try to solo raid bosses you get probably kiled, but in normal situations, if you pay some attention, you don't die. Which means that the games are in general piss-easy. And people still enjoy them.
So most people say "It's too easy" not because they actually dislike the level of difficulty, but because they don't want others to achieve the same stuff. But... what impact does it have on my boss fight if other people do the same or not? Directly, it has no impact whatsoever. If a dozen guilds wipe on the first boss and give up, or if those guilds first-kill those bosses, doesn't change the way I play the dungeon.
So, in the end, it's not about the difficulty. It's all just about me wanting to show you that I am great and can kill the bosses and rub my shiny pretty equip under your nose, while you are a stupid noob who gets trampled to death within the first few seconds. And in the end that's what most of the MMORPGs are about. That's why people fish for hundreds of hours to get some stupid turtle. And that's why people kill thousand whelplings in a row to get some pet that doesn't help them the slightest bit. And that's why people stand with their mounts for hours on end on places where lots of other players come along, in the hopes of them saying "man you got a great mount, where do you have it from?" and you can reply "to get it you would have to do this and that and that and this. But the mount is not available anymore. So even if you would succeed, you won't get it. Now admire me some more and walk on please".
Easy dungeons? Dumbing down contents? Beeing different from others? Who cares. Showing off is all what it's about.You don't want to be different, you want to be better. You don't want content to be more difficult for you, you want content to be more difficult for others.
Blizzard knows that, and that's why they make dungeons piss-easy. They know that difficult dungeons annoy players. Like that magisters terrace or what it was called, that 5man dungeon before WOTLK. Before it was made piss-easy people complained constantly all the time how only classes with crowd control are taken there, and how they cant finish the dungeon, and that naga-guy on the third boss one-hits everyone etcetc.
Difficult dungeons is NOT what players want. Players want cinema like dungeons. A pretty light show with dramatic effects and good loot. The showing-off part was in the early days achieved by doing difficult stuff. Now it is achieved by doing stuff that takes tons of times. Which has the advantage that there is no difficult stuf anymore, and that everyone can get the show-off stuff if that person just wants to invest enough time.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
I kind of chuckled when I read this. I know what you mean, screw those people that actually have lives. They are ruining "OUR" games!
Hah yeah, eventually the majority of MMO will lead to RMT item malls. First you will have the convenience of not sitting for 2 hours in a dungeon by buying the high end items from a npc standing out in front for gold. Then they will move to actual real currency for the item purchases. No one will be able to tell how people got the item and server performance will go up because people aren't bogging down the dungeons over and over to get the items.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
QFT
Random Pug a 5man in WoW and you're going to get at least 1 person who has no clue what the hell they are doing.
That's why raids were dumbed down, people can't play, don't want to learn, so they bitch on the WoW forums that the raids are too hard.
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The number of MMO players that want serious raid content is probably not enough to encourage developers to design strategic, challenging and innovative raid encounters any more. And the serious raiders that do exist, are spread across games like EQ1, EQ2, Vanguard, WoW, etc.
I play Vanguard and love the raid content. But not many MMO players have the skill, patience or determination to crack it. For example:
1) Raid Mob A: All strategy, not as much brute force. This raid mob takes many attempts with the same raid crew to figure out all the nuances of the fight such as the mob summoning help, stances, enchantments, timing of attacks, spell identification and counters, etc. After every attempt the raid-force needs to break-down what happened try again and so forth. Might take weeks to beat the mob and ultimately that only happens when every single person in the raid knows their role and executes it flawlessly.
- Not many MMO players have the patience for that anymore.
2) Raid Mob B: A lot of brute force, less about strategy. Here, raiders either need to maximize their personal dps or increase their survivability using specific crafted potions, runes, etc. Figure out the optimal gear set for this particular fight, understand the key diplomatic buffs to put up at various outposts. The raiders also need to be willing to review the combat logs and understand the type of attacks, spells, etc. being used by the mob in order to survive. They also need to understand what the mob might be weak too and which spells, weapons and attacks exploit those weaknesses.
- Not many MMO players have the patience for that anymore.
I'm afraid the thinking person's MMO and raid content are on the decline. It's being replaced my 3-6 person instances that adjust to the players level
Well...if the raids in WoW didn't become obselete with the release of a new expansion pack, the difficulty bar probably could be raised. However, this is just not the case and Blizzard understood that locking the majority of your paying customer base from content just isn't good business. Blizzard has learned a lot about how to run a mmorpg over the years now. Look how popular ZG and AQ 20 were compared to the 40 man raids. Fast forward to BC and see how successful Kara was as a raid, which was also the first 10 man raid. Blizzard made decisions based upon what they saw as a trend in the amount of people entering raids outside of the 40 man.
Adding hard mode raiding is Blizzard's attempt at trying to offer the "elite" gamer an avenue of progression that meets their needs. However, when we see these same "elite" still whining about casuals ruining their raids....then we see where their argument really lies. They just want to be able to stroke their epeen while lording over the masses with their epic gear. Sorry...that version of WoW is dead, get over yourselves.
The main thing I felt was weak about WOTLK was more that there wasn't a strong delineation between "easy", "medium", and "hard" modes. Simply having achievements for hard stuff was a bit shaky. And while Three Drakes was an alright mechanic, it would've been more strongly presented if they'd just added a third difficulty...but I suppose that would make the instance less flexible and dynamic (because in the current system you can always kill drakes one at a time til you find the one which is the right challenge for your guild.)
It's great that everyone can see all content. I would almost say it's critical for everyone to be capable of seeing every raid instance, and beating it on the easiest difficulty.
But the problem comes when the difficulty settings aren't balanced so that there are 'tiers' of challenges which progressively eliminate more and more guilds from attaining them -- and some uber challenges for the most elite of players.
...all of which need rewards appropriate to their difficulty.
Back when Naxx was nearly the only raid content, things were just way too easy. With the addition of the other raids, I'm not sure how much has improved (partially because I've heard Tournament of Champions was easier than Ulduar but provided better rewards...which is terrible progression balancing.)
The last factor which is key to solid PVE progression is not requiring every single piece of content. The easy way to describe this being: what if you had to farm every single raid every created in WOW, repeatedly and in order, in order to finally advance to the endgame raids? It'd be pretty terrible and dramatically limit the pool of raiding players.
That isn't to say I'm against clever ways of re-using old content (as long as it doesn't force the people who farmed MC for 2 years to farm it again). Just that I'm against requiring the farming of that old content to reach endgame. The gap between reaching max level and being capable of raiding the middle-high tier raid instances should never be that large.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The real challenge has been, is and will always be PvP. Raiding is all about gear. When "best" gear is achieved, any instanced is facerolled anyway. Raiding is hardly worthy the label "challenge". Most of them who raids, are people who suck so much in PvP (mouseclickers) that they have no other choices than raid, cause they have no clue how to pvp.
But hey, if raiders belive that it is a "challenge" what they do, same for me. I could care less for them living in denial.
Make us care MORE about our faction & world pvp!