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by Mike Schramm 
Jun 9th 2008 at 8:00PM
Drysc gave a little insight into how the Arena seasons are scheduled over on the forums -- I had always thought that the Arenas were running on their own schedule (with the spaces in between augmented by when patches got released). But apparently the timing of Arena seasons has more to do with PvE content than anything else.Strange, no? But true -- Drysc said that they want Sunwell Plateau gear to "circulate" a bit more before introducing a new Arena season. That means that the players running PvE content are actually calling the shots for when the Arena season ends -- if guilds take their time getting through the Sunwell raid, it may be a long time before we see any signs of Arena season 4.
That's interesting -- obviously a lot of players consider PvE and PvP to be completely different parts of the game, but not so with Blizzard. Apparently they consider them very much two sides of the same player base, so much so that even something as arbitrary as PvE gear distribution determines timing of the Arena seasons.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Guilds, Instances, Raiding, NPCs, Arena
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 3)
Daimon Jun 10th 2008 9:03AM
lol dude, u made a biography? too long to read.. anyway GOOD JOB BLIZZARD, about time to consider pve the leading faction. 3 cheers!
zappo Jun 10th 2008 11:08AM
I think most of what you say is spot on, and despite the fact that I started well after BC was released I can see the effects myself. Pre BC you could drag 20 other people though instances, however getting enough people got to be a pain. In BC 25 man content allowed for far fewer people, but were much more demanding on individuals. Unfortunately this sort of imploded as the top end skilled players quit and were replaced with incapable, or at least under skilled people.
I myself am currently capable of being a fairly good raider, but I'm rather attached to my current guild (which can't even handle heroics to be honest) and I'm not particularly interested in the drama / stupidity that usually goes along with raiding. In fact I can't wait for S4 to hit so I can get my S2 weapons.
So I am wondering this. As you've been through so much of the game, do you think that 10 mans is going to solve anything? Personally I think this is the perfect size, however WoW has taken heavy damage on the player front (for many reasons). It may be too late in some respects
ErsatzPotato Jun 10th 2008 3:38PM
"Re: DnT, please read the post on this site entitled "Death and Taxes Guild Disbands" where it is noted that they also were having recruitment problems and that contributed to their decision to disband."
...after many of the good ones they had quit or got lazy because of lack of content.
I'd forgotten there was that big a delay on the consumable changes, so you have a point there. It's not however a current problem, and the even later addition of dailies (much as I hate them) make gold a non-issue for most.
While it's difficult to remember when presented with all the new shiny options, tossing six days a week at the expansion's content is consuming it far, far more quickly than it will be replaced. Burning out at that point makes sense: you've already seen the bulk of what's available. Dripping the raid releases into the game would directly address raiders being ground to dust, but those same raiders did choose six nights over three. I've done both, and find three a heck of a lot more fun.
Lemon Jun 10th 2008 3:58AM
This actually makes sense when you think about it. Arena players may log a lot of hours, but hardcore raiders play a heck of a lot more than almost any arena junkie.
The simple fact is raid loot is random and it might take a few tries (or twelve) before you get the loot you want, and considering you can only kill a specific boss once a week, this makes progression very slow and time consuming. whereas in arena you know what you're going to get. If you wanted you could simply play your ten games and then log off for the rest of the week.
WoW is a game that rewards time spent. There is some skill involved but when it comes right down to it he who plays more will pwn more.
They just want the raiders to enjoy a period of ridiculous power (because they play more) and then the pvp people (who play less (generally)) will get their time in the sun too.
This system really sucks actually. they should just make it like pre-BC and have raid and pvp gear be synonymous. That way if you just got out of clearing the entire Sunwell you don't get ganked in the face by some1 simply because they have a bit of resilience and you...don't.
chuckie Jun 10th 2008 5:22AM
Im stunned reading this tbh, WoW atm is failing it is uttely boring if all you do is PVP or Arenas (which i do).
Im having a very hard time keeping any interest in WoW at all at the moment and SEason2 for honour is nearly the only thing thats keeping me interested and now we hear that "Raiders" are calling the shots? What the hell are Blizzard thinking? Do they want people to quit for AoC which i have purchased now since wow is no longer any fun.
Im so close to quiting wow for good and WOTLK no thanks.
chuckie Jun 10th 2008 5:24AM
I also want to add that why would raiders even bother raiding now anyway? I mean WOTLK is how many months away? Why waste all that time and effort only for it to be wiped out in the expansion?
Aelwythe Jun 10th 2008 5:57AM
Because it's fun.
Dawn Jun 10th 2008 5:50AM
@ chuckie you and many other people seem to forget wow is a PVE based game, if you do not like that then please do change to those other games out there you will not be missed. Put it simply if the game is not fun do not play it.
IMO wow should stay pve based unfortunately TBC has made wow more and more pvp orientated, which is still not even close to being balanced even after all this time.
chuckie Jun 10th 2008 6:47AM
I used to raid but i realised that it was a waste of time. Drop rate were insane and just not worth the effort.
Being tied to 4 hours of non stop raiding isnt my idea of fun anymore it used to be. Now i just do PvP maybe ill raid again more than likely i wont and i doubt i can be bothered with WOTLK. Starting from scratch again? No thanks. While you wont miss me, Blizzard will and thats all that matters tbh.
Im aware WoW is PvE based thanks for clearing that up and if there were no PvP wow would see a huge drop in players but thats another argument.
Markainion Jun 10th 2008 5:54AM
Knock, knock, gear is going to be the deathblow to World of Warcraft. I mean gear is so over done in WOW, it is the main reason people play it and it is sad, because it is so much effort for something that so quickly become obsolete. If Warhammer come out before Wrath and I like it I wont even bother playing it, I if I do play Wrath first, I am only going to take one or two charters to 80, and get them decent gear and put and end to WOW forever.
In Warhammer, from what I have read they’re at least trying to come up with new concepts, such as “guild levels”, which grant guilds addition abilities each level the guild advances, which is useful for the PVP mixed PVE game Warhammer is trying to be. It also gives guilds extra incentive to recruit members and keep them, because members won’t simple be able to grab the loot and run off, and the larger the guild versus other guilds would also always result in being a major advantage in a PVP based game. So guild leaders will like always be trying to keep you for the pure number advantages, and you wont likely leave because the advantages is more than gear alone.
I really don’t know what MMO will replace WOW, but if any off them can make a game more balance with respect to the entire game, and not simple gear and class, but make all players valuable in the game from casual player, to the off hour player, being useful as much as the hard core raiders or arena members are currently in WOW. I think WOW would be quickly replaced. I am not sure Warhammer can do that, but from what I have read, I think they recipe to do it. So Wrath is like the end of WOW for me, unless they can find away to make the game more than who has the better gear game, I am done with it.
jerzz80 Jun 10th 2008 8:47AM
This whole idea that the PVE gear needs to remain par with PVP in terms of effectiveness and timing is DUMB. Flat out.
Its all nonsense Blizzard is using to distract us from the FACT that they are just milking its users.
Its a shame and this type of communist thinking will lead to the downfall of WOW.
ErsatzPotato Jun 10th 2008 3:40PM
"Its a shame and this type of communist thinking"
I don't think you know what that words means.
jerzz80 Jun 10th 2008 10:58PM
ErsatzPotato quoted my line, "Its a shame and this type of communist thinking"
And said, "I don't think you know what that words means."
Guy, I know exactly what that word means. Dont try an challenge me on semantics you nerd. Go raid something.
But for you to think that Blizzard can continue with this nonsense, you're wrong.
WOW will be going away soon. Its jumped the shark. Nobody I talk to has been happy about anything since BC came out. This Season 4 crap is really hurting them.
We're bunch of slaves to our master Blizzard. And with every day that passes and there is no season 4, that hatred for our slave master will continue. Its shed light on the fact that no matter what, you gotta keep doign the same things over and over and over to wind up back at the same place. Waiting for the game to give you a token.
If they were smart they would release WOTLK tomorrow. Im not excited about paying 40 bucks for a patch that is going to make me level again, change the rules based on their own wims.
Wow doesnt stay true to wow. But what can you expect from a game that copied almost every aspect from something else and hasnt had an orignal idea since LOTR came out.
Mia Jun 11th 2008 12:32AM
@Zappo who asked "As you've been through so much of the game, do you think that 10 mans is going to solve anything?"
Quite frankly it's not the size of the raid, it's the choreography. People complained about the "tank and spank" nature of old raid instances like Molten Core. But the benefit of that fight style is threefold: you can carry people who are inexperienced, as long as you have a core of experienced players; you can carry people who are undergeared, as long as your tank(s) and some healers and some dps are decently set up; and finally, you can tolerate a lot of "internet issues". Meaning somebody can go afk, or fall offline during the fight, and unless it's your MT, you probably won't wipe.
I can't tell you how many times my guild wiped on "farm" bosses in BC because a single player disconnected and we were relying on them for an irreplacable function. Like tanking or interacting with an object or somesuch.
BC raiding is just completely intolerant of "average" players. You have to have low latency, no connection drops, no distractions, expert coordination, and the entire raid force has to be geared in similar tiered stuff (ever watch an undergeared healer try to kill his shade? :x). So much of BC raiding is a complete "gear check" that taking undergeared people into a high level raid almost never works out. This also singularly created the problem of poaching people from other similarly progressed guilds, which has created a lot of bad feelings in certain circles. If you didn't poach somebody in t5 already, then you had to go guild some guy in greens and go back to farm Kara for him and help him gather badges and all that other stuff, which just added to your already busy schedule.
At any rate - unless Blizzard "pads" the fights as they did pre-BC, whether it's 10 man or 20 man won't make a difference to me and mine. If all 10 people have to be online to click objects or stand in a beam or kite and tank and cc, then you have created a fight that's intolerant of the internet and it's vagaries and you ought to be canned.
@ErsatzPotato, re: the content consumption... unfortunately the reality is that players will gobble the content like happy little gluttons as soon as they can. Yes, I agree that guilds took the BC raiding too fast, and it ultimately cost them a lot of good players, and cost Bliz some good customers. Bliz is the parent, we are the kids, and raids are the candy. It's up to Blizzard to make good decisions about release schedules in order to properly pace their content releases such that people don't burn out and cancel their accounts, in order to max their bottom line. They failed at that in 2007, big time. In their eagerness to release a bunch of stuff at once with BC, they didn't take into account what the raiding base was going to do: race for world firsts.
When I think about what I would have done in their place, it is this:
January, BC release, release Kara and outdoor bosses
March, drop Gruul into the game
April, drop Magtheridon
June, drop SSC
July, drop TK
Sept, drop ZA
Oct, drop Hyjal
Nov, drop BT
March, drop Sunwell
The pacing would have been such that even the most hard-core guilds would have had 4 weeks to master an instance and get quite a few epics out of it before the next one came along. And with a 4-week schedule for much of the year, people would not have cancelled their accounts, since even if you hated SSC, well in a few weeks there's TK to try out. As a guild officer it would have kept our attrition rates lower and given us "breathing space" in between releases to help people get geared up.
And yes I agree on the three nights. Officially we only did 3 or 4 nights a week. Unofficially we kept spending the other nights helping gear up the constant stream of newcomers with t4 stuff though - we literally burned out, in flaming glory.
Hopefully Bliz will do better next time. Really the raid instances need to be more tolerant of varying skilled people and they ALL need to be shorter with much less trash. Tank-and-spank does, in fact, have its place in an online game that's subject to the inherent problems of the internet, when combined with moderate extra tasks but those extra tasks should not require every person in the raid's attention, because then a simple, single disconnect makes the fight unwinnable.
Lastly... I played with friends. I like my friends. Some of them are amazing gamers who live to crunch numbers and min-max. Some of them... like pretty toons. The former are great raiders. The latter come to raids because they are our friends and we like spending time with them. Pre-BC this was fine. We could carry Bob's wife and get her some pretty gear. And we could take the deaf guy in our guild who could not hear any rapid-fire instructions in Vent. And in a 40 man raid that all worked out just fine.
In BC, taking our friends into a t5+ raid became a liability. It made us really unhappy and very angry at Blizzard. We kept people in the raid who really truly struggled with the raid content. We wiped for them a lot. We really grew to dislike Blizzard's handling of raiding post-BC, because we felt raiding should be more inclusive of all players, and less exclusive of people who might have slower physical reaction times, or an occasionally flaky internet connection, or whatever.
A bunch of us are playing LOTRO now. Some are in AoC. We're all waiting for WAR. The jury is still out on whether any of us will buy or play WoTLK. I know we won't do it on release day; we'll probably wait a few months and see how things shake out. By then we may be so attached to WAR it won't matter anyway.