User:Quizzical/WoW

By now the problems with the raiding endgame have been thoroughly documented. This isn't just another "I hate raiding" thread, so if you truly aren't familiar with the problems of raiding (and some raiders do like to feign ignorance), you can catch most of them by reading the forums for a day, though some problems, such as good casual guilds being destroyed by the pressures to convert to raiding guilds, aren't as well documented.

But no, this thread is to discuss why I don't find the problems of raiding upsetting. In fact, though I'm not a raider myself, I think Blizzard made the right decision on the end game.

Illegalname, a level 60 troll warrior, departs Shadowprey Village, seeking new challenges in the untamed wasteland of Desolace. Something seems wrong with that statement, right? What exactly is a 60 warrior going to find challenging in Desolace? Yet if you substitute nearly any other outdoor zone in the game for Desolace, it still doesn't make sense. Sure, Silithus is a 60 zone, and maybe parts of Winterspring, Eastern Plaguelands, Blasted Lands, Burning Steppes, and... and then what? Having a raid boss occasionally spawn in Ashenvale doesn't suddenly make the entire zone suitable for players significantly above 30.

Suppose instead that our 60 troll warrior Illegalname instead grabs a 60 priest, mage, hunter, and shaman to try their hand against the mighty Charlga Razorflank, of Razorfen Kraul. That still doesn’t make much sense when you consider that all of those classes can solo the instance by the mid 40s. Instances are weighted more toward higher levels than outdoor zones, but still, a majority of the game's instances are unsuitable for level 60s.

The plain fact is that most of the game's content is unsuitable for 60s, and most of the content which is built for 60s is accessible immediately upon reaching level 60, even by a player whose gear is half green. Furthermore, players can reach this without having to do large amounts of painful experience grinding, or even small amounts of painful experience grinding. Simply go do quests, instances, and whatever else seems interesting, and you can get all the way to 60 without ever explicitly grinding or farming for anything but quest items.

And that is why the game is casual-friendly, in spite of all of the fuss about raiding. Sure, to many players, raiding is awful, but Blizzard didn't put the big raids in because they thought everyone would love them or should do them. Let's examine the alternatives.

The alternative that many non-raiders seem to be clamoring for is a non-raiding "end-game" that lets players who invest a ridiculous amount of time get epics comparable to Blackwing Lair loot without going raiding. The problem is that implementing anything big like this takes time. Would you prefer that instead of adding Dire Maul to the game, Blizzard had instead spent the time on a painful reputation grind like Silithus? The latter gives epics, but the former is more interesting.

You could say, why cannot Blizzard simply add both? But their resources are finite, and choosing to do one project can mean forgoing, or at least delaying, another. If Blizzard could readily press a few buttons and have another 50 instances pop out, all of which are cleverly designed, properly play balanced, drop suitable loot, contain no bugs, and provide substantially different challenges from what is already in the game, I have no doubt that they would do so. This (and analogous outdoor solo and group content) is what both the raiders and non-raiders truly want, but it simply cannot be done.

Keep in mind that what is now end-game content may well be wasted content come the expansion. Stratholme will remain a nice instance for players in the low 60s to do on the way to 70, the way players in the high 30s do Scarlet Monastery now. But what about Molten Core? Are players in the low 60s to stop for a few months to raid Molten Core rather than proceeding to 70? Raise the level on it and players who have spent months raiding it now will be decidedly unimpressed if upon hitting 70, they are sent back to Molten Core to raid it for months again, before proceeding to Blackwing Lair again, etc.

They can't just leave the instances untouched, or all the great epics that Blackwing Lair, 40-man Ahn'Qiraj, and Naxxramas drop will become trivial to get at level 70. In addition to more HP and mana, easier ways to gear up, and higher ranks of spells, the level differences give a level 70 an automatic 41% chance to fully resist a spell cast by a 63 mob, even if the player has exactly no resistance gear at all. Unless readily accessible new instances give even better loot than this, many players would completely ignore them.

Raid instances along the way in leveling simply aren't viable, as raids cut experience by half. Further, the only reason guilds can get 40 players to go do Molten Core is because there are many, many 60s in the game, at least when compared to the number of players at exactly, say, level 37. The only sensible thing that I see to do with instances like Zul'Gurub, 20-man Ahn'Qiraj, and Molten Core is to heavily nerf the mobs to make the instances 5-man, raise their levels so that the loot the instance drops is suitable for the level without changing items, reduce drop rates, and remove the raid lockout. That would at least get some utility out of the instances, rather than Blizzard having spent all that time designing instances that even raiders who happen to pick up the game after the expansion can never see.

Furthermore, the 40-man component is hardly the only problem with raids in their present formulation. If they were to make the end-game instances 5-man, but keep all the other problems, would that make for a fun instance? Raid lockouts, exotic resistance requirements, prescheduling, regrouping on multiple days, pigeonholed class functions, forced respecs, reputation grinds, DKP, guild drama, and killing the same mobs in the same orders using the same tactics week after week after week in a 5-man instance? No thanks. If that's what it takes, the mobs can keep their epics for all I care.

If the problem with the existing raiding end-game is that it's a boring time sink, then what is gained by offering the alternative of another boring time sink? Should a 60 with 100 days /played who still has trouble with Ragefire Chasm get epics just because he's a 60 with 100 days /played? If you got a thousand characters to level 5, would you expect epics for that? Emphasizing time spent over skill leads to mind-numbingly repetitive content, which is exactly what should be avoided. Surely it is better to spend that time creating real content even if it means only one boring end game path instead of several.

Perhaps for whatever the final expansion Blizzard has planned, it would make sense to have multiple end-game paths, so that players could advance to the very best gear via 40-man raids, 5-man groups, solo content, or whatever mix they prefer. But in the until then, it doesn't make sense to overdo the end-game content which will need a major overhaul later, instead of real content which will remain useful for as long as the game exists, and without needing to be completely rebalanced.

Another alternative would be to have no end-game at all. Put no raid instances or reputation grinds into the game, so that once you finish Stratholme, Scholomance, Dire Maul, Blackrock Depths, and Blackrock Spire, you're done. There's nothing left to do. That would be like Blizzard telling players, congratulations, you have beaten the game. Now you should cancel your account and go do something else. For obvious business reasons, they can't do that.

Let's not forget that Blizzard is playing a game too, here. They're trying to make as much money as they possibly can. This isn't an anti-capitalist rant; that's a good thing, not a bad thing. If Blizzard didn't care about money, they wouldn't care what players want, and certainly wouldn't adjust the game based on player demands. If you don't see the difference between this and what they do now, I suggest you go apply for some permit at a government agency sometime. It doesn't matter much which agency, so long as it isn't dependent on customer satisfaction for its budget.

Indeed, Blizzard trying to make money is the reason they made the popular level 1-59 section of the game the way they did. Blizzard’s great insight was that, even if it was necessary for the game to be painful grinding once the content had run out, many players didn’t want the painful grinding stage to begin somewhere around level 3. So they postponed it all the way until players had done nearly everything there was to do, and players loved it.

That is a big reason why the game has six million or so subscribers, and the company has (hopefully) made millions of dollars in profit. But players see that the grinding can be postponed, and want it postponed further, or put off indefinitely. A company that found a way to do that in a stereotypical MMORPG with heavily scripted content would make oodles of money off it. But trying that is perhaps a holy grail type of mission, and one for which neither Blizzard nor anyone else on the planet has a solution.

However, Blizzard knew that they could only add so much real content to the game, without making a bunch of ill-conceived garbage. The problem they faced was how to get players to keep subscribing after they have run out of content, or more commonly, skipped most of it. Their solution was the current raiding end-game. Look carefully, and you'll notice that that is exactly what the existing 40-man raids are built for, more so than to provide an interesting challenge.

There is the raid lockout, for example, so that a guild can't kill Onyxia 5 times per day and get everyone his tier 2 helm in a week, but rather, the raid "content" lasts much longer, even after Onyxia goes on farm status. There are the specialized resistance gear requirements, so that players have to spend much time farming for gear which is useless outside the instance in question in order to do the raid. The 40-man requirement itself forces much time to be spent on organizing and trying to build guilds rather than raiding.

And the most clever part of this is that if only so much time per week can be spent advancing a "main", it pushes players to create alts, to go back and redo content in a different way with a different class, or perhaps even go do content they skipped the first time around. That is, it pushes players to go do something fun. Imagine that.

Doing the same thing over and over and over again for loot is not real content. Forty man raids simply aren't real content in the sense that, say, Scarlet Monastery or Hillsbrad Foothills are. If any raiders want to disagree with that, then would you seriously clear Molten Core a dozen times per character if it dropped no loot, epic or otherwise? Not coincidentally, the same can be said of the various reputation grinds in the game.

After all, without epic rewards, players simply wouldn't do a very small subset of the content over and over and over again, even if it's the big bad end boss of the game, as it simply isn't fun. In Crystalis, did you save in the tower so you could kill DYNA a zillion times? In Zelda 3, did you save just outside Ganon (which is the default starting place in the dark world) and proceed to farm him dozens of times? Designers of some earlier games didn't even contemplate that some players might like to do this; beat Zelda 2 and your saved game resets all progress you've made in palaces.

So what about the epics? Doesn't it seem odd that, with the exception of pvp rank 14 weapons (a time sink and a half in itself), all high level epics come from 40-man raids? Well, not really. Blizzard put the "end-game" raids into the game to provide something to do for their less creative players, and prefers that players go raiding rather than canceling accounts. Putting the best loot in the game there ensures that the appropriate type of players will spend the desired amount of time in such instances, and hence keep their subscriptions active.

I’ll concede that the loot gap between raid and non-raid gear is awfully large and perhaps unnecessarily so; surely item level 60 epics for tier 1 and 67ish for tier 2 would have been high enough to push the players who want the best gear to raid for it. But the point remains that the best gear has to come from the end-game pseudo-content that Blizzard creates solely in an effort to prevent players from cancelling when they rationally ought to.

After all, most raiders are there for the epics, not for the challenge. Most won't say so, but many implicitly admit it when they argue that 40-man raids have to give drastically better loot than 5-man instances or else people wouldn't bother to do them.

Suppose that there were a "tier 3" legendary set for each class in the game right now. The only way to get it is to press the "q" key once per second for eight hours straight. You can't macro it, and if you take a break for two seconds, you fail and have to start over. Would you do it? Surely you know as well as I do that a lot of players would. Furthermore, if Blizzard later created alternate methods to get comparable gear, there would be an outcry from the people who already had the legendary set of how this was unfair, and the other people who wanted legendaries should have to "earn" their gear by severely damaging their wrists.

And yet, at risk of some of the more outspoken raiders not understanding this example, I should hope that it isn't necessary to explain why such a set is spectacularly bad game design.

And really, the concept of "earning" gear is quite a preposterous one. You "earn" things by doing something you don't want to do, in order to get something you want. If you aren't fortunate enough to have a job you love, then your job may still be worth doing in order to get enough money to buy an online game subscription--and not starve. For things that need to be done, such exchanges to make doing work worthwhile are quite useful.

But this is an online game, played for entertainment. If there are people starving in the world, it's not because your guild took too long to get enough fire resistance gear to take down Ragnaros. Computer games are supposed to be fun. The content along the way, and in particular, the means by which gear is obtained, ought to be fun in itself. To make yourself miserable in order to get epics in a game that you fundamentally hate cannot be "worth it" in any sane sense.

It is a rather maddening human tendency that people want epics, regardless of the means by which they are obtained. Raiders often accuse non-raiders of wanting easy epics. Usually they're right. It actually goes further than this, as what many players want is not merely easy epics for themselves, but also for other players to not get easy epics.

But raiders want easy epics, too. Witness, for example, the incessant whining about repair costs. Never mind that selling the bind on equip items (core leather, fiery cores, tier 1 bracers and belts, etc.) obtained in the raid itself would often pay for the entire raid’s repair costs many times over. Many 5-man instance runs or even solo grinding would lose money from repair costs if you didn’t sell anything you got on the way. Besides, a 10g repair bill should be a pittance compared to the hundreds of gold players naturally accumulate by the time they hit 60, except for the players who flunked economics and waste most of the resources they got.

Players often ask whether this quest or that is "worth it". Well, worth what? Worth half a sack of rice and two Argentine pesos? It is sometimes enough to make one want to grab the poser of the question firmly by the shoulders, shake him vigorously, and ask, what is wrong with you? Why are you playing this game if you don't like doing quests or instances?

So I'm not a raider and I don't have any epics. Poor me, right? Well, I had a few but I sold them on the auction house. But really, for what do I need epics? Do I need epics for Stratholme, or Scholomance, or Dire Maul? How about for Silithus, or Winterspring, or Eastern Plaguelands? Of course not. I would need epics for Blackwing Lair or 40-man Ahn'Qiraj, except that I just said I'm not a raider. There are no gear requirements in order not to do an instance.

The purpose of getting loot is to be well-equipped for future challenges. But there is only a finite amount of content in the game. At some point, there are no future challenges worth doing--meaning that at that point, loot becomes worthless. Many players have gone past that point without realizing it, and still want more and better epics. You can see them whining about it here every day.

So what about pvp? Isn't it unfair if one player is in all blue gear and has to fight another decked out in Blackwing Lair and 40-man Ahn'Qiraj epics? Yep, pvp is unbalanced. Duh. It's supposed to be unbalanced. You should have figured this out by the time you got your first character to level 2. Half the point of the leveling in a leveling game with pvp is to intentionally make the pvp unbalanced. If you don't like that, then don't pvp. Problem solved.

It goes back to how players want easy epics for themselves and not for others. Players want to win, and hence want winning to be based on whatever it needs to be based on in order for them to win. For players with more free time than skill, there are leveling games where whoever has the most free time wins. If you're looking for combat where the winner is based on skill, you're terribly lost. Try looking for a game with no concept of experience levels.

Blizzard makes pvp unbalanced because that's what players want. They have to deal with that reality in order to make money. As the saying goes, the customer is always right. And that's why complaining about pvp imbalances is stupid. Besides, if Blizzard were to implement all of the nerfs that players have called for when thinking of pvp, it would make much of the pve content horrendously difficult. And that would give players yet another topic on which to whine.

What other reasons are there to get epics, apart from pvp and pve uses? Ego, perhaps? While I tend to pity those who make a huge deal about either leveling or getting some particular drop, as though it were some great accomplishment, this doesn't make much sense, either.

Suppose that Blizzard were to add a new legendary set for each class which was undeniably the best gear in the game. All that players have to do to get it is upon reaching level 60 is to complete a trivial quest line which basically consists of the quest giver repeatedly asking the player if he is certain that he wants the set. There's one big catch, though: once you get the legendary set, you can never again enter an instance. No battlegrounds, no raid zones, no group zones, no solo farming instances, even. That is, you can get the set, but can't use it much. Interested? If the players who want gear want it for something other than pvp or pve use, then surely this would be quite a popular set, don't you think?

I can sympathize with non-raiders who want more non-raiding content added to the game. What I can't sympathize with is the people who use exploits to trivialize (and hence essentially skip) the existing content, and then complain that they've run out of things to do. You've seen what I'm talking about: take a 40 into Deadmines and a 60 into Scarlet Monastery. Such people would take an 80 into Scholomance if they could, but they can't, so instead, they take 10 players into a 5-man zone. And now that exploit is being cut off as well in patch 1.10, and they're screaming about it. Amusing.

It's not hard to find the problems with the people you don't like, and raiders have jumped on this to point out how ridiculous it is. They're right, of course. Where they go wrong is in claiming that non-raiders asked for epics for hard non-raiding content and are now complaining about it. The non-raiders who are complaining about the changes of patch 1.10 are not the same people who wanted actual challenges in non-raiding content, such as having to pay attention.

So let it be known, I'm not a raider and I don't want easy epics. What I want is to be able to attack one challenge until I get tired of farming it (and I have very little tolerance for grinding of any sort), and then, as a result of having completed the previous challenge (and the ones before it), to be properly equipped for the next. Whether the gear involved is green, blue, purple, or orange doesn't matter much.

And I do want the challenges to be, well, challenging, as opposed to monotonous time sinks. I routinely turn players away from groups I form for being too high level. A 56 wants to run Maraudon, or a 38 Razorfen Kraul? Not with me, they won't. Five man caps on five man instances are great. I wish Blizzard would fix the overleveled exploit and not let players more than 10 levels apart enter the same instance together, too.

Finally, I want for there to be a next challenge. Even if it's called an expansion. The game doesn’t need more time sinks. It needs more real content. Let’s let Blizzard create that without getting all antsy in the meantime about not being able to find a boring time sink that isn’t, well, a boring time sink.