My thinking about Alex normal/savage. Issue IMHO inside

[Velhart]

snip

That is why they need to be careful in design with what they can release. Right now the developers are in the wrong mind set making effortless content. Things like 24-man raids I can understand, but dedicated 8-man raids should be hard. In an ideal world, people are fighting hard but progressing through Alex(Normal) over time while the best of the best are struggling to get Savage done. While it's release pattern was awkward, Second Coil did this right. The normal version was challenging enough and the Savage version was over the top in difficulty, but gave the people who crave that something to do.

Alex(Normal) right now was beaten by most people in just a few short hours and immediately became a chore to go in every week. Yoshi-P said it is suppose to prepare us for Savage, but that is only true in terms of gear. There is no content that gets you properly ready for Savage. The difficulty spike is massive. Difficulty settings currently are "Slam you head on your keyboard" Easy or over the top difficult. What I would of done is have Alex(Normal) on the difficulty level of AS1/2 and then make AS1/2 even harder on Savage.

To people wanting story modes in raids. You are doing nothing to help end game. LFR helped destroy what was good about raiding in WoW and the same process is being repeated here. People clear the normal mode, get their story, then not motivated to take on the more challenging content. Then you say "well if they were not going to do Savage before....". That is definitely an ill argument. Developers should give you incentive to try the next level of difficulty in content and help guide you there. Making Normal mode as it is, it is basically saying that you can just do this hold my hand baby mode and never have to worry about Savage. Video games should always be creating incentive to wanting you to test your limits.

I would arguably say there are more midcore than hardcore players and they have been almost completely shut out with the new raid structure. SE tries too hard to make both extreme ends happy when they should be focusing on the middle ground just as much as the other two. Right now you are either hardcore into Savage or your character is AFK at Idyllshire. Fun times.

[xnonamex]

Personally I do not necessarily find the savage coil overly challenging in terms of using brain to be honest (cuz let's face it - everyone except top tier raid groups watch a video and since the fights are so heavily scripted...). It's more wipe-repeat type of grind until evenyone in group gets enough muscle memory to do the fight brain-afk mode. That is also a problem. Hard content can and should still be fun to do IMO.

[Ibi]

To people wanting story modes in raids. You are doing nothing to help end game. LFR helped destroy what was good about raiding in WoW and the same process is being repeated here.

Raiders in WoW will tell you that raiding is as good as it's ever been. It's the rest of the game that's suffering.

People clear the normal mode, get their story, then not motivated to take on the more challenging content. Then you say "well if they were not going to do Savage before....". That is definitely an ill argument.

Except that it's completely factual. The majority of the people who run Raid Finder difficulty in WoW (especially now that they've removed almost all the non-story incentives from it) are people who aren't interested in organized raiding. They never have been, they never will be, and it doesn't matter what you do or what incentives you add to organized raiding, they're never going to make that transition.

Go back and look at any of the graphs of participation levels in organized raiding content that MMO-Champion.com has put out over the years. Raid Finder's increased the total exposure of the population to raids, but has done little to nothing to increase or decrease the organized raiding participation.

Developers should give you incentive to try the next level of difficulty in content and help guide you there. Making Normal mode as it is, it is basically saying that you can just do this hold my hand baby mode and never have to worry about Savage. Video games should always be creating incentive to wanting you to test your limits.

That's a noble goal in theory, but it simply doesn't work in practice. Go look over any of Ghostcrawler/Greg Street's comments on it over the years on twitter. Blizzard found (especially in early Cataclysm, with the heroic dungeon difficulty at the time) that if you raise the bar and try to force people to come up to meet it, most people will just quit and go find something else where the bar is at a comfortable level for them.

That's even more true when you have a situation like the current one, where there's simply nothing that even comes close to bridging the gap between the hardest content outside of raiding (Ravana Extreme) and the start of raiding (Faust).

[Colorful]

Raiders in WoW will tell you that raiding is as good as it's ever been. It's the rest of the game that's suffering.

The raiding in Warlords has topped most, if not all expansion pack's raids. You tend to see far too much people claim WoW raiding is dead on here even though that's entirely false, hell I'm not sure if they've even stepped into WoW raiding after it "died" in Cata. But you know what, people will agree with him because they've never played, or haven't played WoW in sometime and anytime you dare say anything good about another MMO on here you're going to get shit on. Say anything bad and you'll be praised. Prime examples would be FFXI and WoW, "Can we get this feature from FFXI?" "Go back to FFXI and leave this game alone!"... "Can we get raiding similar to WoW?" "I stopped reading at WoW". /rant

If anyone claims that raiding in Warlords raiding was a poor experience, then I'm honestly not sure how you find any of FFXIV's raiding enjoyable. The first tier wasn't the best, but it was miles ahead of Alexander in every way possible, and guess what? It had an LFR mode and a normal mode which is easier than Coil.

[Velhart]

Raiders in WoW will tell you that raiding is as good as it's ever been. It's the rest of the game that's suffering.

snip

Sorry if I did not explain myself correctly. The quality of the Normal/Heroic raids in WoD are still miles above what other MMO developers make. I speak of the structure, not the raids themselves. This is an argument on adding an easier mode to raids. Its not the end of the world that LFR exists, it just decreased some values raiding has. I say that and it is subjective, but that is just how I look at it from my perspective, rather if it is successful or not. I apologize, maybe saying destroyed was over excessive.

Except that it's completely factual. The majority of the people who run Raid Finder difficulty in WoW (especially now that they've removed almost all the non-story incentives from it) are people who aren't interested in organized raiding. They never have been, they never will be, and it doesn't matter what you do or what incentives you add to organized raiding, they're never going to make that transition.

Go back and look at any of the graphs of participation levels in organized raiding content that MMO-Champion.com has put out over the years. Raid Finder's increased the total exposure of the population to raids, but has done little to nothing to increase or decrease the organized raiding participation.

That does not mean you should not be trying to. Just because a person is not interested does not mean you should not be promoting all the content the game has to offer to them. Sure some cannot be convinced, but if a developer is not trying to create that incentive or not encouraging you to try the content, then it becomes more their fault than the user.

I am not saying that an easy mode does not work in theory. Its hard for me to explain without going paragraphs about it, but in short, there are certain elements to raids that are earned through the challenge of it, making what you earn have more of a reward factor like the story for instance. Each player has their own preference, but when you add things like a story and its easily obtained just by doing effortless content and not taking the time to earn it like BCoB before, then the value of it drops and why I say that it decreases the value of the raids. How much the value decreases depends on the player, but to me, it drops a lot.

That's a noble goal in theory, but it simply doesn't work in practice. Go look over any of Ghostcrawler/Greg Street's comments on it over the years on twitter. Blizzard found (especially in early Cataclysm, with the heroic dungeon difficulty at the time) that if you raise the bar and try to force people to come up to meet it, most people will just quit and go find something else where the bar is at a comfortable level for them.

That's even more true when you have a situation like the current one, where there's simply nothing that even comes close to bridging the gap between the hardest content outside of raiding (Ravana Extreme) and the start of raiding (Faust).

I wouldn't argue it, but again, does not mean you should not be upholding yourself to these standards. If the charts show that people are not getting any incentive to build themselves into harder content, then they need to go to the drawing board and find a way to. Of course you do not want to force people to do this content, but at the same time you want to give them reasons to. More like encouraging if anything.

If we had Easy > Normal > Hard in FFXIV, while I don't agree with the structure, it would at least give that bridge. However FFXIV is simply Easy > Hard and this is the main problem that developers need to look at.

[Ibi]

I wouldn't argue it, but again, does not mean you should not be upholding yourself to these standards. If the charts show that people are not getting any incentive to build themselves into harder content, then they need to go to the drawing board and find a way to. Of course you do not want to force people to do this content, but at the same time you want to give them reasons to. More like encouraging if anything.

How much of the population that isn't currently interested in organized raiding would participate if a reasonable incentive even existed? Presumably it's some subset of the people running the CT series in 2.x and Alex Normal in 3.0, but it's hard (if not impossible) to say how large that group is.

More importantly, how much time and effort should SE be trying to put into pulling that group into this one specific activity, rather than developing more content that could appeal to a larger segment of the population?

If we had Easy > Normal > Hard in FFXIV, while I don't agree with the structure, it would at least give that bridge. However FFXIV is simply Easy > Hard and this is the main problem that developers need to look at.

It's part difficulty, part scale. The easier the transition is from what people are currently doing to whatever the next step up is, the more likely they are to make that transition.

Other people have said it already, but the small number of fights at any difficulty level sort of backed SE into a corner. If they want to last fight to be very difficult, they have to either make the steps between the fights very big or set the starting point too high.

[melisande]

Oh. My. Please, all of you, just please, go back to WoW.

[Velhart]

How much of the population that isn't currently interested in organized raiding would participate if a reasonable incentive even existed? Presumably it's some subset of the people running the CT series in 2.x and Alex Normal in 3.0, but it's hard (if not impossible) to say how large that group is.

More importantly, how much time and effort should SE be trying to put into pulling that group into this one specific activity, rather than developing more content that could appeal to a larger segment of the population?

It isn't raiding in particular. It is all their content that should create incentive. Raiding just happens to be the subject at hand.

[Colorful]

Sorry if I did not explain myself correctly. The quality of the Normal/Heroic raids in WoD are still miles above what other MMO developers make. I speak of the structure, not the raids themselves. This is an argument on adding an easier mode to raids. Its not the end of the world that LFR exists, it just decreased some values raiding has. I say that and it is subjective, but that is just how I look at it from my perspective, rather if it is successful or not. I apologize, maybe saying destroyed was over excessive.

Fair enough, misinterpreted your post. I still disagree with you entirely, LFR did not, and will never have any negative impact on raiding in WoW or any other MMO... or rather for the majority of the players. There are always some who cry that other people get to access their content, but at the end of the day that's 10% of the 10% who actually raid. People still raid Normal, Heroic and Mythic and guess what, you don't even need to step into LFR. LFR also has a staggered release, 4 bosses every 2 weeks. If you haven't cleared Normal by the time LFR has been in released in its entirety, then I really have no idea why you would complain. The only thing WoW suffers from is the lack of content raiding and elsewhere. Also, I can't be bothered to dig up the quote, but I specifically remember that one of the developers stating that if it wasn't for LFR there is no way they could justify developing raids on the scale they are at now, something to think about. It's a win win for almost everyone involved.

Oh. My. Please, all of you, just please, go back to WoW.

None of your recents posts have contributed to the discussions on these forums, they're just "Go back to WoW" or some senseless garbage like that. If you're not going to contribute, why bother at all?

[Ibi]

It isn't raiding in particular. It is all their content that should create incentive. Raiding just happens to be the subject at hand.

But even in 2.x, raiding already had as many incentives as any other activity in the game, especially relative to its participation, and it still wasn't attracting a large segment of the population. There has to come a point where you accept that no matter what incentive you provide, there are some people that you're never going to get to engage in the content, particularly if it's too far beyond their skill level.

Also, I can't be bothered to dig up the quote, but I specifically remember that one of the developers stating that if it wasn't for LFR there is no way they could justify developing raids on the scale they are at now, something to think about. It's a win win for almost everyone involved.

Ion Hazzikostas (Lead Encounter Designer):

LFR justifies the creation of more raid content when millions of players are able to see content. Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel'thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing. The reason Mists of Pandaria is starting with 18 bosses and adding larger raid tiers than we have had previously is because many players are going to see the raids through LFR.

Hopefully the same philosophy should apply here, and the fact that hundreds of thousands are seeing Alexander should allow them to provide bigger, more varied raids in the future. Hopefully.