The concept of winners and losers has been persistent in every game since, i don't know, the dawn of time? And Blizzard are constantly trying to ignore that.
"The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming! On we sweep with threshing oar, our only goal will be the western shore."
Who is a hardcore? Who is a casual? Is it a class we pick when we join WoW? Do we pay different monthly fees? Put on different dresses when we log on? or we eat different meals? Who here classifies the 11.5m into casual and hardcore? How many of the 11.5m are hardcore?
I'll use an analogy.
You have a group of friends. You meet after school/work at someone's house and kick a football around in the backyard. You do it every afternoon. Its not scheduled, theres no training sessions. Its just very relaxed.
Now lets take a different scenario where this group of friends instead of going around to someone's house to kick a football join the local football team. Theres organised training sessions, usually 2 a week, and a match day. People have to wear uniforms. You practise skills to make yourself better. You talk tactics. Theres a coach, captain and referees when you play. You try your best to win. When you lose you feel disappointed and want to try harder the next week.
Now, the guys from the first scenario might actually play more football more during the week than the group who play in a league. So its not about time /played.
People complain because the content is not as difficult at lvl 80 and there isn't really a purpose for it now, people want more raids more casual raids yet I think this is what WOTLK is starting to give..
People complain because the content is not as difficult at lvl 80 and there isn't really a purpose for it now, people want more raids more casual raids yet I think this is what WOTLK is starting to give..
People complain about anything, including the absence of something to complain about. So its not the max lvl, the difficulty, its just that they need to talk about something.
Lvl80 raid easy? Is it? Try do naxx with 19 then or 16. It can be as easy or as hard as you dare try. Go into a 10man naxx with 10 players in full lvl 213 gear, can it be hard. Try naxx 10 with 10 players only in blues, can it be easy.
The game is just a platform. The player makes the game. If those guys are serious and creative, they can make the game. If all they do is babble, they will never stop babbling.
at this point you will be lucky if you find a spot for a Raid in WoW, simply because guilds are looking for GEARED toons. Now if you dont have the Achievement, they don't even consider. So to the player that just hit level 80, good luck.
I have plenty of time to play, joined guilds who disbanded, then when I hit level 80, I can't raid because I need better gear, but then cant find players to do heroics either. Also contacted a guild that re-rolled not long ago, and because I didn't have experience in some raids, they wont consider me. So in my case, there is a lot of content that I will never see, and this is my last month as I canceled. I did like the new expansion though.
i play casually.. i think i wont be having ulduar experience so much as I did for naxx. waiting for it to go obsolete to get to see it? whats the fun in that?
seriously, only a handful of the servers population will raid ulduar successfully. Why has it to be this way?i loved it when I could get online wait 30 mins and go do a 25naxx. I mean if the core raiders found it too easy the could always scale the difficulty, do it with achievements/ less people and stuff(like for sarth), but when its hard, how to scale it down so that other players can enjoy it too?
i play casually.. i think i wont be having ulduar experience so much as I did for naxx. waiting for it to go obsolete to get to see it? whats the fun in that? seriously, only a handful of the servers population will raid ulduar successfully. Why has it to be this way?i loved it when I could get online wait 30 mins and go do a 25naxx. I mean if the core raiders found it too easy the could always scale the difficulty, do it with achievements/ less people and stuff(like for sarth), but when its hard, how to scale it down so that other players can enjoy it too? oh well... /rant off
There is nothing stopping you from doing ulduar just like you did naxx. It might take a little longer to advance through the dungeon in comparison to naxx, but that is the nature of something new.
Ulduar is doing exactly what you propose. Guild can scale the difficulty by fighting the bosses on hard mode. Some you speak to an npc for normal mode and another npc for hard mode, some you kill certain things in a certain order, etc. You can still do very well as a casual raid and I'm not sure this is something to rant about yet.
well i agree with you but its still way too difficult. its like normal mode = hard mode and hard mode = nightmare ...
the 'average' player just wont make it.. I agree naxx was super easy once everyone is geared but it was supposed to be like that because at 80 u had mostly blues when steppin in naxx early on..
Maybe people actually forgot what it is like to have any level of difficulty at all in the game and are just freaking spoiled now?
Patch 3.0 made all the content in burning crusade unbelievably easy for months? Reducing boss health by 30% and the extra talents and raid changes made everything super easy. It was fun to watch my casual alliance guild one shot just about everything they were incapable of doing prior to the patch and no one really minded since the expansion was right around the corner.
Lich king for the past 6 months has been cake walk almost across the board with few exceptions.
This is exactly what I said would happen to some people as a result of the changes.
When was the last time your guild was actually stuck progressing on something? The last time a boss took more than a few hours to defeat after initial contact? Ulduar isn't so hard that people need to be kicked for screwing up unless they are terrible players. It is the same basic formula and if guilds are breaking up over this I think it says something.
Heal, dps, tank or AE adds, stay out of whatever glowing effect hits the floor, perform whatever movement dance the strategy reqruies. Nothing drastically different than naxx was.
That is a gross over simplification, but if your group was doing content in naxx then they should be smart enough to do the content in ulduar it is just going to take time to get familiar with the new encounters. The only real difference is the trash is much harder.
I've ridden in the left hand multiple times in a row. Swam in the pot consecutive times. We beat both encounters the first day we fought them. The iron council is the first encounter we did not clear within the first 2 hours of first contact, but we got damn close.
Sorry zondorf, I am not going to agree with you that ulduar is so hard. It is about par with burning crusade.
This discussion is gooing somewhere, and interesting. I try to throw in my 2cents.
The new VoA boss is a bad design. Indeed he should be in another instance, or he should not be tied to the easy VoA boss in terms of being saved. Some people want the easy boss for gear lottery, they only want to be saved to the easy boss. Some others do not want to be saved unless they kill the hard boss first. Its getting hard to start a 25 VoA raid now. 25 people going for easy boss only, or going for hard boss first, is hard to assemble, even in a guild raid.
Ulduar is hard, very hard. Its very hard, like naxx was at start, even harder. But its still progressive. In naxx, guilds clear out spider wing very fast, but KT and sapph, or even thaddius took many guild months to get on farm. Fact is, the 4 hoursemen alone caused some younger raids a lot of hardship. Same for ulduar. The tank fight (FT, the first boss) is really not hard, and a load of fun at first. The other bosses are progressively harder, but at this point we are only beginning to learn the bosses. Our guild has gone thru 4 (consistently) bosses already, clearing 4 and trying others every week. It does take time to learn the bosses and quite a lot of coordination to get the bosses to farm status.
You are right. gear is not really the point, lvl 213 (25man naxx/OS/VoA) gear is good enough for ulduar. Its the new coordination, new tactics, group work and so on that take time to learnt. When everyone is new to the fight, one mistake wipes.
Originally posted by Zorndorf And casual guilds can't sustain a 10 or 15 times wipe PER boss per session. That's 50 wipes on one boss per week to get the basic fight NOT done... for those guys. I have seen it before. Not good. Not good at all.
As I said earlier, it is no harder than things were in burning crusade and plenty of guilds did just fine. I would actually say easier due to 10 mans, normal modes, etc.
Ulduar has been out for 3 weeks now and it is your scientific opinion that it is somehow destroying the fabric of casual raiding? 3 weeks is hardly enough time to start spouting doom and gloom and the first few bosses are fairly easy.
If a group is consistanly wiping 10-15 on each boss every trip in, then the group has issues. Odds are they are just out of shape. Maybe a few more runs through naxx to get in shape and take it seriously. Moving out of fire, positioning to avoid breath weapons, managing mana, killing adds, watching timers, etc. Mechanically it is all the same thing in ulduar as it was in naxx. If you can do it in one you can do it in the next. The power balance is just a little more close in ulduar between players and the dungeon.
Crying that something is ruining gameplay after only 3 weeks makes me believe people just gave up as a result of the game being so easy for so long and just don't want to put any effort into playing the game. They simply want to win.
As for arenas, who knows. I never enjoyed them. The game is not balanced for 2v2 3v3 play and maybe people just got tired of season X over and over. Some may love it, but I think more did it just for easy epic level items. You can join arenas, never do a single point of damage or healing and still get rewards. It is what it is.
You might not agree but you are now actually advocating my key point of critique against WotLK - proper content progression. Out of the box almost everything was easy with WotLK (5-mans, heroics and Naxx) with Sarth as the key fight that required more. This resulted in that most players cleared WotLK at blazing speed - even more casual players.
New content release...and now Blizzard need to throw a bone to the raiders: Ulduar (both normal and hard-mode and Alganon as the ultimate fight).
By not creating proper content progression in the WotLK release (half of naxx on Normal quite easy and then a steady increase in difficulty to KT - so you can take the dungeon through learning the encounters or gear up for the first 2 months in the easy half ; and 5-man heroics at different diffculties and loot levels) Blizzard basically got forced to release a more challenging raid dungeon.
Now you have hard-core raiders that are a bit angry at the content release schedule (large time gap between Sunwell and Ulduar) and casual players that have cleared WotLK but feel that Ulduar is too hard.
This is in essence my key point in my posts before Zorn. The AQ release is still the golden nugget in terms of content progression: zone with quests, 20-man dungeon with quite easy fights apart from final boss and 40-man dungeon with first half of bosses easy and second half incrementally harder. Something for everyone - perfect. Sunwell was a stab at the same but without the smaller raid.
Originally posted by Zorndorf I am not crying. I can only see the attitudes of the GM's I know. One in RL is hanging just this minute on my phone (again). His guiild was raised back in May 2006 and he feels it. The guild DID down the TBC content before the big nerves - except Sunwell - which was a wall too. He is now going to limit the groups of Ulduar to ... 1 x10: assembling " the best of the very best" out of his 50 actively playing players. Going straight to disaster as a raiding guild I think. But I could say it's not my problem. I think it is a problem for Blizz though.
The solution with Sunwell back then ... were the BG's and newly introduced dailies and arena compettion. I think LW is now a good alternative (but hampered by VOA2 again), but Arena starts now at 0 points. Before even reaching 1400 it takes a lot of fights for the average players. Those who want to try it are also climbing a wall in Arena. I am somewhat sad about your picking on balance of arena's. In the lower, middle to higher ends. There are few balancing problems as the mediocre players styles and faults far outweigh the so called balancing of classes really you can see in the absolute top of top. ----- Always think about this: 90% of ALL players are mediocre at best ... and ONE fault of ONE player in an Ulduar group of 10 is mostly a wipe (certainly if it's a healer or Tank/OT). The raiding groups formed in Wotlk can no longer be compared with the raiding groups of TBC (much more people raid now than before tx to the "difficulty" ...and if a raiding guild of TBC sees problems, guess what will happen to those "easier" newer raiding guilds. The "hard" people should be going for achievements, not complaining about NAX being played massively by "normal" "noobs". Blizzard could include BG PvP weapons again, like they did in TBC, but they have the stats: expect changes in the future and ... think about the 90% not so good players when posting. MMORPG's are NOT about dying, they are about adventuring. The challenge is to survive, not to die too often. That's for the pure videogames that get played for 3 weeks. We both defend the game, but I want to see the 90% average players to be satisified. Even in Raids. Another view, another opinion, but I think there is a far bigger and satisfying market outthere than pure hardcore based on player elimination. My heart bleeds when I see it. Our guild senior of 60 didn't make it. He left yesterday, after 3 years it is understandable, but Ulduar was too much for the old wargaming mate.
If your friends guild has resorted to extremes of raid exclusion after only a few weeks then your friend is a failure of a leader. I'm not going to sugar coat it. His desire to win is greater than his desire to lead. Simply as that. No one should be so disheartened after a few weeks that despair sets in to this degree. You friend is spoiled by the last 9 months of no challenge in the game.
As for your bleeding heart, no one was complaining that "noobs" are doing naxx. Almost everyone was complaining about naxx being to easy as well as most of lich king. Even casual guilds were seeing a decline in player activity, because the lions share of the games content was easily conquered. Ulduar is not about satisfying some elite level raiders in the game. It is about offering some sort of challenge, because honestly if masses of people were clearing ulduar in a few weeks like naxx then people would just stop logging in again as there is no new content for some time coming.
The root of your argument is that people are complaining about ulduar after only 2-3 weeks and frankly I find that sad. Sad that people are so soft that they cry or guilds are breaking up after only a few attempts in new content. To me that says people want easy content and expect they expect easy progression based on the last 9 months of warcraft. Personally I think you are just falling into the hysteria of a vocal minority who have to deal with a slightly harder reality. I doubt it is anywhere near 90% you think it is.
I'm certain that people will adjust and once they start clearing content again all will be fine.
As for the pvp talk, I don't think it is relevant to the issue.
I understand that pvp is an additional option for players to partake in. However it does not change anything about the actual raids in wow. Thus not very relevant.
Don't be obtuse and ask if anyone has the raid on farm yet. Is my guild deeper into ulduar now than it was into SSC/TK in burning crusade, yes. Easily twice as far. Is my group farther into ulduar now than karazhan at a similar time frame, yes.
Were people stopping to log into the game, because they conquered the very easy content lich king offered, yes. Having everything easy is just as much a of a problem as having things be to hard. Of course people are timid about pugging the new raids, because they are not total easy mode. At the pace things were going at least.
So many months of easy content has made people lazy.
I think its hilarious all these people with kids and wives or husbands are complaining about not being able to raid on WoW. I have friends in FFXI an entire family that plays together, their kid is 24, they're both in their 50's one is a nurse. FFXI is a LOT more demanding when it comes to amount of time it takes to set up a raid or party. Yet they manage it with very busy schedules. They even play with their son, imagine that family activies!!! Never played with a more fun group of folks than this family of gamers.
Once people reach 27/28+ priorities change. Or rather they stay the same but life changes around them.
Scheduling time for a game is very much secondary to other things that are going on. Be that baboes, spending time with friends without talking through a keybopard and screen, or just going to the pub or watching tv. Gaming is secondary.
I could say that I will play WoW every Tuesday and Thursday night for 4 hours but I wouldn't dream of it. I would cut the plug off my pc first. Even though I spend probably 30 hours a week doing it, gaming is a filler to me and I do it on my own terms - not what a game demands.
it's a different perspective when you are 18 to when you are 36. Life changes, you change. Priorities shift and rl friendships that once might have seemed disposable become important.
Friends + Family + real life interests > gaming.
end of.
If your mate is in the unique situation where his family and most of his friends all play the same game together good luck to him. but he's the exception not the rule.
_________________________________________ You can walk the walk but can you talk the talk?
I noticed no one responded that I have known people with family, jobs, very active social lives, sporting committments and managed to raid to a schedule? Why can they do it and you can't? Thats a rhetorical question actually. Since I know the answer. They were motivated and organised people who like to think for themselves and decide how they wantd to live their lives rather than the suburbanite slobs that make up the mindless drones that we call the masses. And again no one has told me what is so fascinating and brilliant about their lives that they can't committ to a very lenient raid schedule. D
I dont want to commit to a raid schedule. This isnt work if you havent noticed.
Motivated and organized are two things that I dont apply to "FUN".
Whats so fascinating about my life? LOL ITS not you thats for sure. Its not listening to you bark orders in a raid full of morons. Its not downing boss number 450 for the 1000th time.
Its not ignoring my wife while I give my attention to the OMG all important raid. And why am I raiding again? So that I can get loot that makes me better for another instance that will give more loot for the next instance and on to infinity with that same mindless loop?
Your attitude toward this game is definitely skewed. You talk about conforming to a raiding schedule like were bettering ourselves for doing so. Its not my obligation. Raiding in WoW doesnt get me closer to God or make me a better citizen.
I noticed no one responded that I have known people with family, jobs, very active social lives, sporting committments and managed to raid to a schedule? Why can they do it and you can't? Thats a rhetorical question actually. Since I know the answer. They were motivated and organised people who like to think for themselves and decide how they wantd to live their lives rather than the suburbanite slobs that make up the mindless drones that we call the masses. And again no one has told me what is so fascinating and brilliant about their lives that they can't committ to a very lenient raid schedule. D
I dont want to commit to a raid schedule. This isnt work if you havent noticed.
Motivated and organized are two things that I dont apply to "FUN".
Whats so fascinating about my life? LOL ITS not you thats for sure. Its not listening to you bark orders in a raid full of morons. Its not downing boss number 450 for the 1000th time. Its not ignoring my wife while I give my attention to the OMG all important raid. And why am I raiding again? So that I can get loot that makes me better for another instance that will give more loot for the next instance and on to infinity with that same mindless loop?
Your attitude toward this game is definitely skewed. You talk about conforming to a raiding schedule like were bettering ourselves for doing so. Its not my obligation. Raiding in WoW doesnt get me closer to God or make me a better citizen.
Things are getting a little blurred with all the back and forth of attitudes in the thread.
Basically there is a mindset of some people that they cannot, should not or will not raid, but at the same time feel they are being denied the rewards of raiding.
The reality of raiding has changed. Don't want to commit to a schedule then don't. Just grab 9 other people and run the instance whenever you feel like it. Don't want to commit to hours and hours, no problem. You can accomplish several boss kills in as little as an hour. Don't want to do this every specific day? No problem, the instance is saved to your last point of progress for when you are ready to return.
Most of the old stigmas that surround raiding no longer apply. It can be done very casual, without planned schedule and in short time chunks. There is very little effort required to raid if someone wants to.
Now if that isn't someones personal preference, then not much can be done about that. However chosing to not partake in a games activities should not be used as grounds to expect those rewards. If someone doesn't enjoy raiding there are plenty of other activites to do and some fine rewards.
Your missing the point. Unless you have a dedicated group, nobody is going to see any raid content let alone actually get epic gear. Warcraft is know for its afkers, its ninja players, its leave early players, and its noob players who don't know how to raid. This is why I left that game. Pointless to play it since there is no way I will ever see any of the raid content or ever get epic gear. Less than 10% of the players who play are actually part of dedicated groups that help each other out. The other 90% are those I referred to earlier. If it wasn't for the welfare epics in the expansions I would not of stayed as long as I did.
Comments
The concept of winners and losers has been persistent in every game since, i don't know, the dawn of time? And Blizzard are constantly trying to ignore that.
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!
On we sweep with threshing oar, our only goal will be the western shore."
I'll use an analogy.
You have a group of friends. You meet after school/work at someone's house and kick a football around in the backyard. You do it every afternoon. Its not scheduled, theres no training sessions. Its just very relaxed.
Now lets take a different scenario where this group of friends instead of going around to someone's house to kick a football join the local football team. Theres organised training sessions, usually 2 a week, and a match day. People have to wear uniforms. You practise skills to make yourself better. You talk tactics. Theres a coach, captain and referees when you play. You try your best to win. When you lose you feel disappointed and want to try harder the next week.
Now, the guys from the first scenario might actually play more football more during the week than the group who play in a league. So its not about time /played.
People complain because the content is not as difficult at lvl 80 and there isn't really a purpose for it now, people want more raids more casual raids yet I think this is what WOTLK is starting to give..
People complain about anything, including the absence of something to complain about. So its not the max lvl, the difficulty, its just that they need to talk about something.
Lvl80 raid easy? Is it? Try do naxx with 19 then or 16. It can be as easy or as hard as you dare try. Go into a 10man naxx with 10 players in full lvl 213 gear, can it be hard. Try naxx 10 with 10 players only in blues, can it be easy.
The game is just a platform. The player makes the game. If those guys are serious and creative, they can make the game. If all they do is babble, they will never stop babbling.
at this point you will be lucky if you find a spot for a Raid in WoW, simply because guilds are looking for GEARED toons. Now if you dont have the Achievement, they don't even consider. So to the player that just hit level 80, good luck.
I have plenty of time to play, joined guilds who disbanded, then when I hit level 80, I can't raid because I need better gear, but then cant find players to do heroics either. Also contacted a guild that re-rolled not long ago, and because I didn't have experience in some raids, they wont consider me. So in my case, there is a lot of content that I will never see, and this is my last month as I canceled. I did like the new expansion though.
i play casually.. i think i wont be having ulduar experience so much as I did for naxx. waiting for it to go obsolete to get to see it? whats the fun in that?
seriously, only a handful of the servers population will raid ulduar successfully. Why has it to be this way?i loved it when I could get online wait 30 mins and go do a 25naxx. I mean if the core raiders found it too easy the could always scale the difficulty, do it with achievements/ less people and stuff(like for sarth), but when its hard, how to scale it down so that other players can enjoy it too?
oh well... /rant off
There is nothing stopping you from doing ulduar just like you did naxx. It might take a little longer to advance through the dungeon in comparison to naxx, but that is the nature of something new.
Ulduar is doing exactly what you propose. Guild can scale the difficulty by fighting the bosses on hard mode. Some you speak to an npc for normal mode and another npc for hard mode, some you kill certain things in a certain order, etc. You can still do very well as a casual raid and I'm not sure this is something to rant about yet.
well i agree with you but its still way too difficult. its like normal mode = hard mode and hard mode = nightmare ...
the 'average' player just wont make it.. I agree naxx was super easy once everyone is geared but it was supposed to be like that because at 80 u had mostly blues when steppin in naxx early on..
T_T
Maybe people actually forgot what it is like to have any level of difficulty at all in the game and are just freaking spoiled now?
Patch 3.0 made all the content in burning crusade unbelievably easy for months? Reducing boss health by 30% and the extra talents and raid changes made everything super easy. It was fun to watch my casual alliance guild one shot just about everything they were incapable of doing prior to the patch and no one really minded since the expansion was right around the corner.
Lich king for the past 6 months has been cake walk almost across the board with few exceptions.
This is exactly what I said would happen to some people as a result of the changes.
When was the last time your guild was actually stuck progressing on something? The last time a boss took more than a few hours to defeat after initial contact? Ulduar isn't so hard that people need to be kicked for screwing up unless they are terrible players. It is the same basic formula and if guilds are breaking up over this I think it says something.
Heal, dps, tank or AE adds, stay out of whatever glowing effect hits the floor, perform whatever movement dance the strategy reqruies. Nothing drastically different than naxx was.
That is a gross over simplification, but if your group was doing content in naxx then they should be smart enough to do the content in ulduar it is just going to take time to get familiar with the new encounters. The only real difference is the trash is much harder.
I've ridden in the left hand multiple times in a row. Swam in the pot consecutive times. We beat both encounters the first day we fought them. The iron council is the first encounter we did not clear within the first 2 hours of first contact, but we got damn close.
Sorry zondorf, I am not going to agree with you that ulduar is so hard. It is about par with burning crusade.
This discussion is gooing somewhere, and interesting. I try to throw in my 2cents.
The new VoA boss is a bad design. Indeed he should be in another instance, or he should not be tied to the easy VoA boss in terms of being saved. Some people want the easy boss for gear lottery, they only want to be saved to the easy boss. Some others do not want to be saved unless they kill the hard boss first. Its getting hard to start a 25 VoA raid now. 25 people going for easy boss only, or going for hard boss first, is hard to assemble, even in a guild raid.
Ulduar is hard, very hard. Its very hard, like naxx was at start, even harder. But its still progressive. In naxx, guilds clear out spider wing very fast, but KT and sapph, or even thaddius took many guild months to get on farm. Fact is, the 4 hoursemen alone caused some younger raids a lot of hardship. Same for ulduar. The tank fight (FT, the first boss) is really not hard, and a load of fun at first. The other bosses are progressively harder, but at this point we are only beginning to learn the bosses. Our guild has gone thru 4 (consistently) bosses already, clearing 4 and trying others every week. It does take time to learn the bosses and quite a lot of coordination to get the bosses to farm status.
You are right. gear is not really the point, lvl 213 (25man naxx/OS/VoA) gear is good enough for ulduar. Its the new coordination, new tactics, group work and so on that take time to learnt. When everyone is new to the fight, one mistake wipes.
As I said earlier, it is no harder than things were in burning crusade and plenty of guilds did just fine. I would actually say easier due to 10 mans, normal modes, etc.
Ulduar has been out for 3 weeks now and it is your scientific opinion that it is somehow destroying the fabric of casual raiding? 3 weeks is hardly enough time to start spouting doom and gloom and the first few bosses are fairly easy.
If a group is consistanly wiping 10-15 on each boss every trip in, then the group has issues. Odds are they are just out of shape. Maybe a few more runs through naxx to get in shape and take it seriously. Moving out of fire, positioning to avoid breath weapons, managing mana, killing adds, watching timers, etc. Mechanically it is all the same thing in ulduar as it was in naxx. If you can do it in one you can do it in the next. The power balance is just a little more close in ulduar between players and the dungeon.
Crying that something is ruining gameplay after only 3 weeks makes me believe people just gave up as a result of the game being so easy for so long and just don't want to put any effort into playing the game. They simply want to win.
As for arenas, who knows. I never enjoyed them. The game is not balanced for 2v2 3v3 play and maybe people just got tired of season X over and over. Some may love it, but I think more did it just for easy epic level items. You can join arenas, never do a single point of damage or healing and still get rewards. It is what it is.
You might not agree but you are now actually advocating my key point of critique against WotLK - proper content progression. Out of the box almost everything was easy with WotLK (5-mans, heroics and Naxx) with Sarth as the key fight that required more. This resulted in that most players cleared WotLK at blazing speed - even more casual players.
New content release...and now Blizzard need to throw a bone to the raiders: Ulduar (both normal and hard-mode and Alganon as the ultimate fight).
By not creating proper content progression in the WotLK release (half of naxx on Normal quite easy and then a steady increase in difficulty to KT - so you can take the dungeon through learning the encounters or gear up for the first 2 months in the easy half ; and 5-man heroics at different diffculties and loot levels) Blizzard basically got forced to release a more challenging raid dungeon.
Now you have hard-core raiders that are a bit angry at the content release schedule (large time gap between Sunwell and Ulduar) and casual players that have cleared WotLK but feel that Ulduar is too hard.
This is in essence my key point in my posts before Zorn. The AQ release is still the golden nugget in terms of content progression: zone with quests, 20-man dungeon with quite easy fights apart from final boss and 40-man dungeon with first half of bosses easy and second half incrementally harder. Something for everyone - perfect. Sunwell was a stab at the same but without the smaller raid.
If your friends guild has resorted to extremes of raid exclusion after only a few weeks then your friend is a failure of a leader. I'm not going to sugar coat it. His desire to win is greater than his desire to lead. Simply as that. No one should be so disheartened after a few weeks that despair sets in to this degree. You friend is spoiled by the last 9 months of no challenge in the game.
As for your bleeding heart, no one was complaining that "noobs" are doing naxx. Almost everyone was complaining about naxx being to easy as well as most of lich king. Even casual guilds were seeing a decline in player activity, because the lions share of the games content was easily conquered. Ulduar is not about satisfying some elite level raiders in the game. It is about offering some sort of challenge, because honestly if masses of people were clearing ulduar in a few weeks like naxx then people would just stop logging in again as there is no new content for some time coming.
The root of your argument is that people are complaining about ulduar after only 2-3 weeks and frankly I find that sad. Sad that people are so soft that they cry or guilds are breaking up after only a few attempts in new content. To me that says people want easy content and expect they expect easy progression based on the last 9 months of warcraft. Personally I think you are just falling into the hysteria of a vocal minority who have to deal with a slightly harder reality. I doubt it is anywhere near 90% you think it is.
I'm certain that people will adjust and once they start clearing content again all will be fine.
As for the pvp talk, I don't think it is relevant to the issue.
I understand that pvp is an additional option for players to partake in. However it does not change anything about the actual raids in wow. Thus not very relevant.
Don't be obtuse and ask if anyone has the raid on farm yet. Is my guild deeper into ulduar now than it was into SSC/TK in burning crusade, yes. Easily twice as far. Is my group farther into ulduar now than karazhan at a similar time frame, yes.
Were people stopping to log into the game, because they conquered the very easy content lich king offered, yes. Having everything easy is just as much a of a problem as having things be to hard. Of course people are timid about pugging the new raids, because they are not total easy mode. At the pace things were going at least.
So many months of easy content has made people lazy.
Once people reach 27/28+ priorities change. Or rather they stay the same but life changes around them.
Scheduling time for a game is very much secondary to other things that are going on. Be that baboes, spending time with friends without talking through a keybopard and screen, or just going to the pub or watching tv. Gaming is secondary.
I could say that I will play WoW every Tuesday and Thursday night for 4 hours but I wouldn't dream of it. I would cut the plug off my pc first. Even though I spend probably 30 hours a week doing it, gaming is a filler to me and I do it on my own terms - not what a game demands.
it's a different perspective when you are 18 to when you are 36. Life changes, you change. Priorities shift and rl friendships that once might have seemed disposable become important.
Friends + Family + real life interests > gaming.
end of.
If your mate is in the unique situation where his family and most of his friends all play the same game together good luck to him. but he's the exception not the rule.
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You can walk the walk but can you talk the talk?
Things are getting a little blurred with all the back and forth of attitudes in the thread.
Basically there is a mindset of some people that they cannot, should not or will not raid, but at the same time feel they are being denied the rewards of raiding.
The reality of raiding has changed. Don't want to commit to a schedule then don't. Just grab 9 other people and run the instance whenever you feel like it. Don't want to commit to hours and hours, no problem. You can accomplish several boss kills in as little as an hour. Don't want to do this every specific day? No problem, the instance is saved to your last point of progress for when you are ready to return.
Most of the old stigmas that surround raiding no longer apply. It can be done very casual, without planned schedule and in short time chunks. There is very little effort required to raid if someone wants to.
Now if that isn't someones personal preference, then not much can be done about that. However chosing to not partake in a games activities should not be used as grounds to expect those rewards. If someone doesn't enjoy raiding there are plenty of other activites to do and some fine rewards.