Ready Check, WWI Edition: Watching Nihilum Raid
by Jennie Lees 
Jun 29th 2008 at 8:30AM
This week's Ready Check comes live from the Worldwide Invitational in Paris, where top raiding guild Nihilum were shown live on stage doing what they do best.
The Worldwide Invitational is all about spectating. Watching live Starcraft, Warcraft III and WoW arena tournaments brings fast-paced action to anyone who cares to drop by, and even if you don't play the games themselves, it's fascinating to watch the experts at work. But does the same apply to raiding?
Yesterday Nihilum took part in a Kil'Jaeden raid live, over two 30-minute sessions. Kungen, Hath and Sniffy were raiding on stage, with Marilyn providing commentary. We never saw the raiders' screens; instead, three cameras inside the room provided multiple views of the encounter to give a cinematic feel. With commentary pointing out various aspects of the fight, the raid was a rare glimpse at a boss many players are unlikely to see.
The Worldwide Invitational is all about spectating. Watching live Starcraft, Warcraft III and WoW arena tournaments brings fast-paced action to anyone who cares to drop by, and even if you don't play the games themselves, it's fascinating to watch the experts at work. But does the same apply to raiding?
Yesterday Nihilum took part in a Kil'Jaeden raid live, over two 30-minute sessions. Kungen, Hath and Sniffy were raiding on stage, with Marilyn providing commentary. We never saw the raiders' screens; instead, three cameras inside the room provided multiple views of the encounter to give a cinematic feel. With commentary pointing out various aspects of the fight, the raid was a rare glimpse at a boss many players are unlikely to see.
However, the excitement of watching a live raid pales somewhat in comparison with watching live PvP, especially when you can't see the raiders' screens. From what little side-on glimpses we saw, we could tell that the players were raiding with a default UI and none had headsets (Nihilum raid without voice chat); Kungen's raid warnings rang over the sound system and we could occasionally see him typing furiously to the raid.
While non-raiders may be entranced by the pretty graphics and scale of the encounter, raiders watching may have felt something was missing. Without being able to get a feel for what was going on, seeing the raid suddenly wipe after hearing "Everyone's alive, this is going well" was incongruous; we had no idea what percentage the boss was at or how close a call the wipes were. When told by Kungen that they had needed 1% more DPS to save one particular wipe, did anyone watching really understand why?
A better question, perhaps, is whether they care. However, raiding is very much a first-person pastime, and watching it from a third-person perspective just takes a lot of the intensity away from one of the toughest encounters in the game. The audience reacted to events they understood -- Nihilum wiping, for the most part, and whenever every member of the raid managed to get inside the shield. Outside of the wipes it was fairly repetitive to watch, although Marilyn and the camera operators did their best to try and make it interesting. Perhaps if we could have seen the raiders' screens things would be more entertaining, but the cinematics alone of raiding don't make for a good spectator sport. Zooming in on someone's hand pressing 3 repeatedly, or the female member of the team (wait, what?) chain-casting Flash of Light, isn't really gripping television.
But, fundamentally, raiding can just boil down to performing a simple series of tasks (pressing 3) in a dynamic environment, reacting to events and hazards, and making many decisions on the fly (what to DPS, what to heal, controlling threat, debuffing the boss). None of this is really apparent from a third-person view of the fight, so perhaps these live raids are simply there to show off the visuals of the encounter and let everyone know just how scary the boss is and how complex the fight is, without really meaning to appeal to raiders at all.
Would raiders watch a famous player raiding using their normal UI? In many ways, we already do when we watch kill videos -- a video without a UI would hardly convey any of the information we need to gather about the fight. However, opening up one's UI, custom boss mods, raid chat, officer/guild chat, ventrilo conversations and specific strategy can really expose your guild's methods to others -- and for the top guilds in the world, keeping secretive is how they retain their edge. So live raids will likely remain more cinematic than involved, allowing people to get a glimpse of the encounter but providing little appeal to those who have already beaten it and want more specific insights from the event.
Filed under: Ready Check (Raiding), Worldwide Invitational
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
kabshiel Jun 29th 2008 9:11AM
I find those kill videos to be excruciatingly boring. They're long and repetitive and really don't make much sense unless you've done the encounter yourself. So yeah, I can imagine that an even more sterile version would be pretty uninteresting to watch.
PVP videos tend to be pretty boring too, but at least they're shorter and have more variety.
Takamuri Jun 29th 2008 9:12AM
They needed 1% more DPS to avoid a 3rd Darkness of a Thousand Souls at 25% or 55% (the marks that cause KJ to be pushed into the next phase) since you can only shield two of them.
Takamuri Jun 29th 2008 9:13AM
I am assuming Kil'jaeden began to channel Darkness at 26% or 56%.
zikko Jun 29th 2008 9:39AM
You had another stream than I had? Because I never saw KJ, no cinematics, nothing. The only thing I saw was a sideway glance on the screen of Hath and and some faces.
It was really disappointing. And they even talked while a conversation ingame (KJ or Kalecgos (spelling?)) was going on. This thing would have been really interesting...
csulok Jun 29th 2008 10:05AM
The realm they were playing on was a PVE realm that - as it turns out - block non-pvp flagged players to buff pvp flagged players or something, so their entire melee lineup was missing their buffs, including windfury, battleshout and unleashed rage.
Also the GMs couldn't copy all 25 players to the event realm, so they had to fill the holes with random players...
So even if you got the video feed, you wouldn't have understood the problem, unless you saw the raidchat were players were talking about this.
Edboy Jun 29th 2008 10:42AM
I take it that they will never do this again and the world is a better place for it.
Elmo Jun 29th 2008 10:58AM
I really don't understand how you can raid without some sort of Ventrillo...
Leviathon Jun 29th 2008 2:20PM
I doubt they don't raid with vent and that was just a assumption on the bloggers part. They probably just couldn't use vent at the event.
Dave Jun 29th 2008 2:51PM
Vent is a crutch for unobservant players who refused to install mods and/or just plain pay attention to the things that go on around them instead of just directly to them.
There's really no reason that through macros and in-game communication that you can't succeed as a raid. Unfortunately lots of people need to be told to get out of the fire, or beg for an innervate or reminded of this and that and so you have to use the voice communication as a fallback for paying attention to the raid.
The first time through a raid, sure you need to discuss what happens and what's happening. Maybe through the first successful kill or two. After that? Everyone should know what they're doing.
Unfortunately, reality sets in and most people just don't pay attention to things, they "forget" everything about encounters every time they do them and that's just who you're stuck raiding with most of the time. In a guild full of "pro" raiders, I'd suspect that their vent is surprisingly silent of anything except "good job guys" or "oh crap blah blah died". They should all know what they're doing the entire raid and definitely through the boss encounters. That's what separates them from all the rest of the scrub guilds.
ivan256 Jul 1st 2008 10:24AM
The guild I'm in raids with Vent, but during most boss fights the channel is silent. The only time people talk during boss fights is when somebody is being stupid and needs to be reminded of it. Between bosses, we're all chatty, and Vent is used for strategy and assignments before fights... But really if people don't know what to do without being told on the fly the fight usually turns out poorly.
CH Jun 29th 2008 5:41PM
This buff excuse is really lame. It's a special realm just for them -- everyone just types /pvp, problem solved.
Swarfy Jun 29th 2008 2:46PM
Nihilum does raid with Vent. My guess would be that if they were on a separate server from their home server and not all their raiding core was there, i doubt they would give their vent info out to random people.
It's bad enough they get spammed from people wanting them to link their gear(go to eu armory) or whatever else. I don't think they would want their vent known to everybody on the planet.
Kvant Jun 29th 2008 5:43PM
You can visit there website, most of them DO NOT raid with Vent, Kungen himself hates it, they do it all in RW, because you can miss hearing something in vent but you cant miss seeing giant letters in your screen
HolyLiaison Jun 30th 2008 3:07AM
How can you miss hearing someone on Vent?
And how have you not missed something flash up on your screen? There are just too many variables that can bring a raid down that doesn't use Vent.
Plus Vent brings your guild closer together. Getting to know people by their voice is a thousand times better than watching for some idiot to spam macros into raid chat.
Isambaard Jun 30th 2008 11:34AM
@HolyLiaison
Vent lag is separate from wow lag, so its easy to miss something on vent. Not to mention if two people key up at the same time and a time critical message is talked over by someone who wants innervate.
If you miss raid warnings, especially when in a situation where they are the primary method of communicating time critical data, you cannot raid at this level. You'll just as likely stand in the fire, miss a spell reflect, or do something equally asinine.
About the only fight where I'd really want vent is Arch, and the more I think about it the more I realize my guild's smoothest fights are the quietest ones even there.