My thinking about Alex normal/savage. Issue IMHO inside

[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.

[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.

[melisande]

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

[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.

[Rin_Kuroi]

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.

I'm 100% okay with alex nm as it stands now. A lot of people in my fc who never raided before are now doing alex nm. It's a big win imo. My real beef is with savage. Specially, the massive wall at a3s. They need to figure out some way to keep all three tiers of people happy. I want to say SE should forget about the hardcore world first players. It might be a bit unfair but the midcore raider's shouldn't be left out in the cold. They are the ones who actually attract new raiders to the scene.

[Ibi]

I'm 100% okay with alex nm as it stands now. A lot of people in my fc who never raided before are now doing alex nm. It's a big win imo. My real beef is with savage. Specially, the massive wall at a3s.

Alexander Normal starts in a good place. Alexander Savage finishes in... if not a good place for most people, probably not a bad place for the toughest fight of a raid tier (from what I'm told, at any rate. A soul crushing 0.5% A3S wipe is as far as I've seen personally). The problem is getting from point A to point B.

They need to figure out some way to keep all three tiers of people happy.

They could stick with a two-tier raiding system if the raids were longer. Rather than two big steps up from A4 to A1S and A2S to A3S, they could have a much more gradual gradient over the course of, say, eight normal bosses and eight savage bosses.

That would probably be a more satisfying alternative, for almost everyone, to adding a third difficulty of the same raid.

[Madjames]

I think we need large raids like in other games.

Take away the raid timer and allow us to move through the raid at our pace for the week before it resets.

The raids are not really raids in their current state. They are primal bosses, thats it. Maybe I am looking for more but Wow did raiding a lot better.

[Rin_Kuroi]

I think we need large raids like in other games.

Take away the raid timer and allow us to move through the raid at our pace for the week before it resets.

The raids are not really raids in their current state. They are primal bosses, thats it. Maybe I am looking for more but Wow did raiding a lot better.

yeah. i don't understand why we can't have raids like ct but for 8 man groups.