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Migey

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Btw, to the guy who said that pugs dont work, i beg to differ.

On my server at least, pugs are at least as prevalent as proper guilds. Pugs routinely down ToC25 without wipes. 25man ICC pugs can usually get at least 4 bosses. the properly constructed ones can do 6 or 7 if they are good, and the really lucky ones can get down 8. ToGC10 pugs can almost always get 4/5 down. And some can get 5/5 down. It all depends if they can down champs. ICC10 pugs will always get at least 7/12 down, some 8, and some of the better ones can get up to 10. One pug i know of even got 11 down.

There are only really 6/7 guilds in our server that are actually competitive.. or wait...5/6 really. im not too sure.

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0.o your servers PUGs dont get past Saurfang? Our server has LK pugs and ICC hard mode PUGs. We had Insanity TOC25 PUGs as well.

I can see both sides: both the ones wanting harder content and the ones liking the casual bits. I hate that the guild bit is being so penalised. But I also hate that encounters are being dumbed down for the muppets, and that instead of creating successively harder encounter, you just have the same, boring old boss, but with a hard mode. Dull.

I DO agree with the people who think gearing up needed to be simplified. It did. I think it's gone a little bit overboard, but it's definitely better than before.

As for attunements. They were a royal pain in the arse. Trying to do timed Shattered Halls with anything but a pally tank was nigh on impossible unless you ran with three mages or brutally overgeared the instance. It was dumb and penalised non CC classes and people who tried to progress but had half their DPSers, their warrior tanks and a couple of randoms unable to complete the encounter, or really hard pressed to do it.

Sure, all the people who are hardcore and have been playing for years will do fine, but what about the people you recently got to play it? Say you got 4 mates who started and you want them to raid with you, since they were awesome in your old Quake team. But you get cockblocked by months of gearing and attunement. It's no fun for anyone.

I was a member of one of the fastest progressing raiding guild on our server back in TBC, even though we started like almost a year after everyone else. And one of the major reasons for this fast progression was that eventually the attunements were lifted and we could fast track our newer members.

My main gripe with WotLK is that guilds aren't worth anything. Fix that, and I'm happy. The Random Dungeon tool is amazing. I think Ulduar and ICC are really good raid instances. Sure, Naxx, EoE and ToC are dull as hell, but that might just be cos I grinded Naxx and EoE way too much.

And oh, who said EoE wasn't challenging? If you pressed on with the attunement (yes, this instance had an attunement) and did it as soon as possible, with people having no clue how to deal with the drake vehicles and partly in old T5-6, it was a total debacle. You may also remember that in the beginning, pre-nerf, every guild worth their salt had their shammys and pala healers sit out, since it was impossible for a shammy and pala to heal the vortex phase. It's interesting to see how fast people forget.

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I havnt forgotten EoE.

The 'attunement' was a key which only one person needed. I do not deny that it was a decently hard fight... but what? For a dragon aspect, i expected WAY more. Its not so much the boss fight that i dislike, its that there was NO RAID INSTANCE. I expected a massive raid instance with a good 5/6 bosses, trash, etc. Not one platform in space that requires 1 guy with a key to enter...

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Jurble said it nicely in the last thread. Remove resilience and people will be crying to get into raids, especially hardmodes. (OMG HARDMODE 2HANDER FOR PVP!!!)

In Vanilla I was lucky enough to be in a good guild and got to see everything, bar C'thun and the final 6 of Naxxramas. We were actually still getting people in on progress nights and we were debating going for C'thun or finishing Naxx before TBC came out. Bang. Before the Storm patch dropped.

Raiding suspended for the last month or so because 60% of the guild was grinding honour for their fake GM/Warlord gear.

I know I'm looking back through tinted spectrecles, but giving epics away so freely through pvp and arenas was a very bad idea. Hell, its an Arena. Half nekkid with kilts and maybe one grey piece of armour and a grey weapon only can compete.

Aah I remember my first AV. The Battle for Snowfall Graveyard took 2 hours and when we finally pushed the treacherous horde off our lil mountain we slowly started grinding their bones beneath our boots and were assaulting Dreks keep 2 hours later. Horde rogues and druids recapped the southern GYs and all of a sudden people started screaming that Lokholar the Icelord had been summoned. We eventually won, but damn it was so much fun.

ETA: We had a pug on Sylvanas down LK on Saturday. I believe theres one on the Horde side that does it too.

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Oh god i hate you tyrellius fror brinign back those memories.

For all of vanillas faults, the one thing i miss most of all was the old AV. OH BRING IT BACK PLEASE.

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ETA: We had a pug on Sylvanas down LK on Saturday. I believe theres one on the Horde side that does it too.

For everyone who talks about pugs of this calibre, are they truly pugs?

We have a group that downs 12/12 ICC 25 on saturday nights. One night, about 4-5 hours, Heroic lootship. Otherwise just normal.

BUT, I wouldn't call it a pug at all. Everyone who goes has seen 3/4s of the fights with their progression guild, and everyone is on extremely well geared alts except for 2-3 toons.

Which IMO makes it an alt run composed of 75% members of the top two Horde guilds on the server, and about 25% members of other guilds who are in ICC.

I'm extremely dubious that it is an actual pug "LF 1 Shaman DPS 2 Healz, 1 non pally Tank for ICC 25 11/12 run then G2g"

But then, Terokkar is a backwater, and only 3 horde side guilds have ever downed LK 25, so perhaps I'm basing that on my experiences, and your servers actually do have pugs running that deep into ICC.

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And oh, who said EoE wasn't challenging? If you pressed on with the attunement (yes, this instance had an attunement) and did it as soon as possible, with people having no clue how to deal with the drake vehicles and partly in old T5-6, it was a total debacle. You may also remember that in the beginning, pre-nerf, every guild worth their salt had their shammys and pala healers sit out, since it was impossible for a shammy and pala to heal the vortex phase. It's interesting to see how fast people forget.

Don't forget Naxx (Northrend version). You couldn't do 4H with 2 pally tanks since (originally) they couldn't taunt off each other. Mind you, with gear, it got easier to just burn Thane down before the Marks stacked up.

Anyway, while I do agree that Guilds became more of an option than a necessity, I don't think it was all that bad a change. Finding a guild that can match your schedule, dedication (or lack thereof), maturity level and room for your class/spec could be frustrating. Even if all the other factors work in your favor, you could end up with a dick of a GM or officers who you just can't tolerate.

I think Blizzard programmed themselves into a bit of a corner. Multiple venues and directions for gameplay is great, but it splits the playerbase. Increasing the opportunities to collect gear helps bump up the numbers of potential like-minded players, but it can hurt the quality of the playerbase, which can lead to having to make encounters too easy or accessible. ...or something.

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For everyone who talks about pugs of this calibre, are they truly pugs?

Yep, I am on Sylvanas EU as well, and it happens here. Seems Tyrellius and I are now on the same server. :) (Altough my char is a transfered ex hordie from Argent Dawn.)

Although it seems to be made up of "known" entities mostly, as in people who know people loosely. But it is still a PUG in the sense that it's not guild organised, no setup "Wipe nights" as I understand it, which you basically needed before.

That said, PUGing is really common here and the population is huge so there's a lot of people to choose from. Not surpising when a lot of the raiding guilds you see recruiting are 13/14 in Ulduar (that always makes me LOL. Some bossfights are hard to just muscle through I guess). Normally the PUGs have severe GS demands as well. I was baffled when I came here from AD that you needed +500-700 GS more just to do VoA than you did on AD. I've seen people demands 5.6GS for an ICC 10 PUG (wich basically means you don't need anything from normal ICC 10 apart from maybe LK).

I'm extremely dubious that it is an actual pug "LF 1 Shaman DPS 2 Healz, 1 non pally Tank for ICC 25 11/12 run then G2g"

Nah the serious PUGs inspect you in Dalaran before you go and check your achievements. Like, you can't get into a serious TOGC PUG without the real achievement, cos they inspect you and sometimes armory you too (I have been on my priest) so you can't UnderAchiever everything.

Anyway, while I do agree that Guilds became more of an option than a necessity, I don't think it was all that bad a change. Finding a guild that can match your schedule, dedication (or lack thereof), maturity level and room for your class/spec could be frustrating. Even if all the other factors work in your favor, you could end up with a dick of a GM or officers who you just can't tolerate.

Oh, I agree that the old skool vanilla WoW raiding setup was extremely prohibitive to

1. New people

2. People who didn't play a healing class

3. People who played a class with healing spells but didn't want to heal

4. People on low pop servers

I rolled my original toon on a low pop server with exactly three raiding guild in total Horde side. Good luck getting in there unless you rolled a Holy priest.

Don't forget Naxx (Northrend version). You couldn't do 4H with 2 pally tanks since (originally) they couldn't taunt off each other. Mind you, with gear, it got easier to just burn Thane down before the Marks stacked up.

LOL I had forgotten about that. Bit of an oversight on Blizzard's part. :P We only raided with one regular pally tank at that point, so it was never an issue for us. But the healing leader was a pala, so we got to hear A LOT about the EoE limitations.

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Oh god i hate you tyrellius fror brinign back those memories.

For all of vanillas faults, the one thing i miss most of all was the old AV. OH BRING IT BACK PLEASE.

Yeah, you people are sick in the goddamn head.

"OMG, I loved 12 hour AVs!!!!".

Fucking insanity.

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@Shrike & Ini : Your dreams of casual everything are my nightmares. Why not just have a vendor where you can buy whatever epics you want for free?

Ahh yes, the bullshit hyperbole. Where would "I want to be in the top 1% and everyone else should be FAR FAR beneath me" arguments be without you.

And three nights a week is not a lot.

Yeah, it is. That's almost half the damn week.

I think it honestly depends on your guild experiences here. My guild was in a terminal decline because we were bored out of our skulls. We would clear the entire of ICC 25 HM in about 3 hours, then wipe on LK for a bit and then have way less signups for other nights because people just get bored and frustrated with wiping for ages when they know that's the only activity left for the rest of the week. Since a few people emo-summer-quit and we had to pull things together we started mixing in raiding TotGC, Ulduar with Yogg-0 and weirder achievements and all kinds of stuff and attendance is going way back up. Because... shock fucking horror some people actually enjoy raiding. There's absolutely none of those precious epic pixels that so many people obsess all their goddamn lives over in it for us to do those raids, but they mix the experience up and give us something to do inbetween LK25HC progress.

You've beat the game basically. Congrats. How is this any different from previous expansions?

And Ini, I don't feel like responding to your post in full, but the downfall of the guild as a mandatory organisation is a disaster. What is a guild more than a group of friends who play together?

A group of people you join to actually see any of the endgame content in WoW?

It really isn't that hard to get into raiding as it is:

Do some 5 mans and some pugs.

Get some badges and some free 5-man welfare epics.

Actually learn to play your class, you can do this via the internet.

Join a guild that doesn't contain imature fuckwads. Enjoy.

Step 3 is too much for many and Step 4 is really really really really hard to do.

Seriously, there's not that many great guilds out there. Only a minority of guilds are full of competent people and only a minority of THOSE are full of competent people who are actually nice.

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I was part of a pug that did all the Ulduar hard modes. It was kinda fun.

Our ICC pug was more successful than about 50% of the guilds on our server.

No one pugs ToC, but I think that's mostly because no one cares and they can do ICC instead.

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Ahh yes, the bullshit hyperbole. Where would "I want to be in the top 1% and everyone else should be FAR FAR beneath me" arguments be without you.

I didn't say that, don't put words into my mouth please. I think people should be able to play the game at their own pace and I've never ever taken an attitude that someone is a moron or a scrub based on gear or lack thereof. I certainly judge people but based on their behaviour rather than their gear. I don't really care about gear especially because everyone and their mom is in full welfare epics now.

Yeah, it is. That's almost half the damn week.

It is not super hardcore either. And as I said we are clearing the majority of current tier hardmode content in one night. The other nights are for fun raids. Stuff we don't do for gear but because we enjoy raiding together.

You've beat the game basically. Congrats.

Thank you :)

A group of people you join to actually see any of the endgame content in WoW?

I don't understand exactly. You claim that my earlier statement was hyperbole but you want every single person to be able to pug every single encounter in the game? Nothing then should require any coordination whatsoever, based on my experience of pugging on my server, or indeed require anything other than a brute dps zerg and trolls spamming "GO GO" "WHAT IS UR GS!?" "LINK ACHI OMG"

Step 3 is too much for many and Step 4 is really really really really hard to do.

Seriously, there's not that many great guilds out there. Only a minority of guilds are full of competent people and only a minority of THOSE are full of competent people who are actually nice.

There are over five thousand guilds in the world that have at least killed Lord Marrowgar 25 man on hardmode. There are a lot out there if you want to do that. As for step three, if you don't want to learn how to play your class properly then why should you expect to be in that top 1% that you mentioned earlier. Many guilds at this point in time (summer) are opening recritment on all or many classes and specs, now is the ideal time to get a trial in one of them and start raiding rather than having to slog through bad pugs.

It really only takes 30 mins to go onto mmo champ and read the sticky on your class, maybe another hour to go onto EJ and learn a bit of theory. If you don't want to bother doing that then well... I wouldn't say you're casual. I'd say you are a troll. I know plenty of casual people who actually play well, but don't do much more than dungeons and some pugs and stuff, maybe some 10 mans with friends, just don't have or want to invest any more time in the game. They act like y'know normal decent people? Pretty much like me infact. You seem to have a big ol' chip on your shoulder based on the fact that you aren't a hardcore raider: I'm really not out to get you or put you down based on your progress or gear or whatever. But if you come up to me in game and act like a moron then I'll tell you to fuck off then stick you on my ignore list regardless of if you're in a full set of ICC25 Hardmode gear or quest greens.

Of the three groups of people in this game I really think there needs to be more differentiation in the lazy language use that has melded Trolls with Casuals. Trolls are 90% of the people in trade who qq about elitist cunts like me and about eachother and about how everything is fail and too easy and too hard and spend most of their time pugging and complaining in pugs ruining any hope of an atmosphere there. Most Trolls are more hardcore than me. They spend more time in the game than I do at any rate.

A casual on the other hand, for me is someone who doesn't for whatever reason spend a lot of time in the game and I certainly think there should be plenty of content for them to enjoy. But Casual=/= bad player. I don't think people who just plain suck at a game should be given anything that could be an indicator that they don't suck. If you suck at Portal you don't make it to the final chamber. If you suck at Halo then you never make it to the last level. If you suck at most games in fact, then you don't get a free pass. If you play them casually then you get there in the end, however long that takes you, be it a week or a month compared to a hardcore gamer finishing it in a day. A troll will just throw his controler down, kick something, go look up some cheat codes or start posting shit on the internet.

I think there is plenty of content for people who want to play casually right now. Y'know those raid instances that are dotted around? If you want you can save your instance and kill one boss a week, only play for a night or an hour, and you will progress. Actually playing the game and not being showered with purples is required which is why trolls don't enjoy this.

I have no understanding or sympathy for people who don't actually, at the root of it, really want to play the game, for those who don't want to put any effort in to playing, and yet feel a sense of entitlement, that they deserve to get simply by showing up and holding down their shift key the same rewards as people who have worked at as you put it 'winning the game'. If you play badly then you don't win the world cup. If you suck at Mario then you never rescue the princess. You don't deserve to kill the lich king if you aren't willing to try and kill him, therefore you don't deserve his loot. He is a totally accessible boss for anyone who wants to kill him - he is a coordination check, not a gear check, on normal mode anyway. If you are a casual player you still have the exact same brain as a hardcore player so are equally able to learn that dropping defile on your raid is bad. If you are skilled player then you can learn to avoid doing that regardless of spending 100 hours a week on it or 1.

Here's the problem though. Most people do not want to play the game. They want instant gratification. They don't really enjoy raiding. They only enjoy purple pixels, gearscore and higher itemlevel. Big shiny numbers.

I know the whole deal with stuff like the Lich King fight needing more than just one player to complete is horrifying because you have to get a group to do it, but the hint is kinda in the genre title massive-multiplayer-blah blah. And as I said earlier, what a guild is to me is a group of like minded people. If you look around with an open mind you can find people like you but yeah you need to wade through all the tools that play this game. If you only want to raid 1 night a week for 2 hours then you can find 9 other people who share that goal. And if you want to raise your gearscore as quickly as possible because omg epix well you can find a nearly infinite stream of similar people in trade, but it's your own fault if you run into lots of morons.

What I'm trying to get at here is that I think that if your sole interest is getting gear than my statement about giving away free epic was not hyperbole, and I hate your attitude to this game. If on the other hand you like to raid and enjoy playing and fighting bosses and such but don't want to spend 5 nights a week on it then I sympathise with your point that yeah it can be a pain to just do the logistical side of things, but think that the guild is the solution not the problem. A guild solves those problems. Initial work is yeah required to find some people with a similar attitude and goals to you, but then you have those people there to play with and get to know and do fun stuff with. And in the long run it's a lot less painful than putting together pugs from trade each week, and you'll probably have a lot more fun with a regular gang anyway. To say that a guild is a requirement for endgame raiding is to say that coordination is a requirement for endgame raiding, it's to say that a group of people available to play together at similar times and willing to put in a bit of effort and brains is required for endgame raiding. Do you really think that endgame raiding - the hardest things in the game - should require neither brains, coordination nor effort?

I've been posting this for a few hours and I haven't really bothered with any editing or whatnot so I feel like I've probably repeated myself. Bottom line - hardcore : should have stuff to do and content catering to their fun, Casuals : ditto. Bottomfeeding trolls : /ignore.

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I've been posting this for a few hours and I haven't really bothered with any editing or whatnot so I feel like I've probably repeated myself. Bottom line - hardcore : should have stuff to do and content catering to their fun, Casuals : ditto. Bottomfeeding trolls : /ignore.

I was all about hardcore for quite awhile. I've got nothing against it. All the same, hardcore is always going to be a minority. While it's Blizzard's game to create and implement what they please, they're going to create content that speaks to the majority. Whether it's kiddies with a purple fetish or casual-attitude players, they're the first priority.

Casuals don't learn the encounters on the PTR prior to release, nor do they create secondary (or even tertiary) characters for the sake of extra attempts on a boss. There's supposed to be 11 million people playing WoW. Supposing 35 players in each of those 5000 guilds see Lord Marrowgar 25H, that comes out to 1.59% of the game's population. Way I see it, there's still plenty to do for the average player.

If the hardcore crowd wants more, they need to start creating their own unofficial achievements, be it 20-manning the lich king, wiping algalon in 3 minutes, or whatever. Blizz is already creating wank (sorry, I'm sure I mean swank) for extra cash, be it services, pets or mounts. If their content isn't within reach of the majority of subscribers, they're not going to invest time in it. That's why Naxx got put on repeat and ToC5/10/25/H were introduced: It cost Blizz little to create or reuse, but kept subscriptions active for months on end.

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@Shrike & Ini : Your dreams of casual everything are my nightmares. Why not just have a vendor where you can buy whatever epics you want for free?

I don't think you've really thought through what you're asking for.

A raid fight requires coordination, barring severe outgearing. This is true for all current raid content. Everyone has to know what's up, and on many of the fights in ICC -- Rotface, Blood Queen, Blood Princes, Festergut, I could go on -- not knowing your shit can and will wipe the raid. These are not simple fights. You can't just walk in and faceroll them.

There is no good reason I can think of why you shouldn't be able to take 10 people who have all cleared a fight independently, put them in a group -- class makeup permitting -- and clear the fight. A team that isn't used to working together might have to wipe a few times while they get used to how each other works, but there is no reason they shouldn't be able to do that. I don't even know how you'd design a fight such that that's not possible.

And three nights a week is not a lot.

If you honestly believe this you are out of your goddamned mind. That is almost half the week that you cannot make any other plans, every single week. That is a huge time commitment for a video game.

If you really want to raid less then maybe the problem is either your guild or that you actually don't enjoy raiding. I know it feels like an obligatory part of WoW but if it doesn't interest you then don't bother.

I really enjoy raiding, which is why I do it. I love raid nights. But I have other things to do, and other hobbies.

And Ini, I don't feel like responding to your post in full, but the downfall of the guild as a mandatory organisation is a disaster. What is a guild more than a group of friends who play together? And honestly, if I weren't in a guild I wouldn't raid because pugging is like dragging myself over broken glass with all the gearscore talking recount linking fuckwads that play this game. Being with my guild, my friends, chatting on vent or whatever while we raid is as much a part of the fun as doing the bosses. I have no clue why you yearn to a) expose more people to these aforementioned fuckwads and B) give these fuckwads more EPIX 6000 GEARSCORE OMGZ to epeen about by making content even more blatantly puggable than it already is, which is really a lot. It really isn't that hard to get into raiding as it is:

I raid with a regular group that started out as a pug. I would not pug ICC weekly. They do not have the coordination, generally. I'm quite happy with how things are now -- it's very easy to get geared to start current content, and anything past that takes effort. I think that's how it should be.

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I didn't say that, don't put words into my mouth please.

The only person doing that here is you. As I quoted before, you said:

@Shrike & Ini : Your dreams of casual everything are my nightmares. Why not just have a vendor where you can buy whatever epics you want for free?

Which neither me nor Inigima even came CLOSE to suggesting. So drop the bullshit.

It is not super hardcore either. And as I said we are clearing the majority of current tier hardmode content in one night. The other nights are for fun raids. Stuff we don't do for gear but because we enjoy raiding together.

That's 3/7ths of your nights. That's alot of fucking time, no matter how you try and downplay it.

I don't understand exactly. You claim that my earlier statement was hyperbole but you want every single person to be able to pug every single encounter in the game? Nothing then should require any coordination whatsoever, based on my experience of pugging on my server, or indeed require anything other than a brute dps zerg and trolls spamming "GO GO" "WHAT IS UR GS!?" "LINK ACHI OMG"

Never said that. Not even close. Please drop this bullshit too.

My point is, you ain't downing Lich King without a guild. Or a pug composed of a bunch of alts of people you know, which is essentially a defacto guild anyway.

A guild is not a group of friends that play together. It CAN BE, but in general a raiding guild is a group of players that come together to raid. They may or may not like each other. That's a plus, not a requirement.

As for step three, if you don't want to learn how to play your class properly then why should you expect to be in that top 1% that you mentioned earlier.

I didn't say I didn't know how to play my class, but if you've ever played WoW at all, you know as well as I do that ALOT of the players don't.

There are over five thousand guilds in the world that have at least killed Lord Marrowgar 25 man on hardmode. There are a lot out there if you want to do that.

Cite? Also, even if we assume that, that puts the total number of people who have even started HM ICC at .... like 2% of the population of WoW or something. Even accounting for how many of those players aren't 80 raiders, you are still looking at not the biggest population. How many guilds per server are doing HM ICC? How many players does each need? That's not alot of spaces. And then, by your point 4, we have to eliminate all the guilds with fuckwads. And that REALLY drops the number of available guilds.

It's easy enough to get into raiding. It's not that easy to get into raiding with quality players. And it's really not that easy to get into raiding with quality players who are nice people.

I mean really, both me and Inigima (and apparently Foreverland too) are happy with the way shit is. This all started with people bitching about how the game was too easy now, not us bitching that it was too hard. I think me and Ini and Foreverlad pretty much agree that they've got a pretty good thing going right now. We're not the ones complaining, remember?

Right now raiding is easy to get in to but tough to "finish". And that's the way it should be. PUGs can clear the front third/half of ICC. Any half decent guild can at least get 10/12 ICC. And good guilds are all over the place from 11/12 ICC to 12/12 HM ICC. And the very best are hammering Heroic 25 LK to death. What's wrong with this?

The only issue right now that they haven't already told us how they are fixing it in Cataclysm is lower tier raids being useless. And the (hopefully) lesser amount of ilvls in gear in Cataclysm should solve that.

I mean, people still raid 25 TOC for a chance at a few choice pieces (mostly trinkets) and if the gear levels were closer together, you'd probably see a TON more of that type of thing. Which is why we'll probably see more of it in Cataclysm.

The future of raiding is looking damn fine to me. Some of the complaints here are frankly crazy. WoW has only gotten better and better with each expansion and the next one is looking to continue the trend.

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Casuals don't learn the encounters on the PTR prior to release, nor do they create secondary (or even tertiary) characters for the sake of extra attempts on a boss. There's supposed to be 11 million people playing WoW. Supposing 35 players in each of those 5000 guilds see Lord Marrowgar 25H, that comes out to 1.59% of the game's population. Way I see it, there's still plenty to do for the average player.

There are 11 million subscribers, but I'd say the actual number of people who play is much lower. And cut out at least a million of those for botters, gold farmers, scammers etc.

Also, I think you have a skewed perception of hardcore. The truly hardcore as you put it are maybe the top... 10? 20? 50 maybe, guilds. I doubt anyone outside of that very very top do anything like raising alts for extra attempts on a boss. I don't ever play the PTR, noone in my guild does as far as I am aware. We show up, find out what's going on with the boss, work out some tactics and then kill it. If we run out of attempts we come back next week.

Paragon's players would probably find our attitude casual. We never change our professions or gemming to give ourselves the absolute edge in a fight. We show up with our brains and, at least after a few initial pulls an idea of what we're doing and how we intend to do it and we get on with having fun playing a game.

Your definition of Hardcore - those who learn encounters on the PTR, raise extra characters for more attempts etc. is less than 1% of all the guilds who have access to hardmode content, much much less. And then everyone else is casual, it seems? So I'm casual too? \o/ I am casual. I play for fun and that's it, I enjoy playing the game and being kinda alright at it.

In some ways I wish that classic had never happened. It has ingrained into people the idea that any real raiding guild is bunch of elitist super-hardcore never-see-the-sun basement living geeky cunts who want to shit on everyone else and flex their e-peen around. Even people who never played in classic seem to have this idea which simply isn't true any more and hasn't been for years, if it even was in Classic which I doubt was entirely the case. Certainly my experience has been that members of raiding guilds are the least likely to be the epeen types, and it's all the random gearscore-chasers who care about that and enjoy rubbing their big numbers in people's faces.

A raid fight requires coordination, barring severe outgearing. This is true for all current raid content. Everyone has to know what's up, and on many of the fights in ICC -- Rotface, Blood Queen, Blood Princes, Festergut, I could go on -- not knowing your shit can and will wipe the raid. These are not simple fights. You can't just walk in and faceroll them.

There is no good reason I can think of why you shouldn't be able to take 10 people who have all cleared a fight independently, put them in a group -- class makeup permitting -- and clear the fight. A team that isn't used to working together might have to wipe a few times while they get used to how each other works, but there is no reason they shouldn't be able to do that. I don't even know how you'd design a fight such that that's not possible.

A real pug will never survive three wipes. Most random people you find in trade expect to be carried to some degree or other, do not know and have no interested in learning tactics and will ragequit after any number of wipes greater than zero. Welcome to the majority of the WoW playerbase. The only way to make content more accessible to these people is to make it ridiculously easy because they have no interest in learning anything or putting any effort in. They want to raise their gearscore and get the shinies so they can go around being jerks to other people with less gear. It's these people who are the gear-based elitists not the "hardcore raiders" that you refer to.

And how, if you have no guilds, will you find 10 people who have independently cleared the fight anyway? Instead of having the logistical issue of getting a guild together once, you have the problem of getting 10 quality people together each week. And if it's the same team, the same 10 people each week, then you are a de facto guild in any case and you should get yourselves a guild tag and tabard so you can all see when eachother are online and have your own /g chat.

If you honestly believe this you are out of your goddamned mind. That is almost half the week that you cannot make any other plans, every single week. That is a huge time commitment for a video game.

Don't tell me I'm out of my goddamn mind.

I really enjoy raiding, which is why I do it. I love raid nights. But I have other things to do, and other hobbies.

Then raid one night a week, or one hour a week and be satisfied with it?

I raid with a regular group that started out as a pug. I would not pug ICC weekly. They do not have the coordination, generally. I'm quite happy with how things are now -- it's very easy to get geared to start current content, and anything past that takes effort. I think that's how it should be.

As I pointed out above a regular group is a guild in all but name, that isn't a pug. You should make it official, it'd make communication and logistics of getting your regular group together much easier.

Both you and shrike seem to have something against guilds, what exactly is it? A guild is a group of people who want to play together because they have similar goals, just like your regular group. A guild is a good thing that makes it easier to play not harder.

The only person doing that here is you. As I quoted before, you said:

What you suggested was that I'd said this : "I want to be in the top 1% and everyone else should be FAR FAR beneath me" which I clearly hadn't and you manifested from your own inferiority complex.

Which neither me nor Inigima even came CLOSE to suggesting. So drop the bullshit.

Ini said that he welcomes the downfall of the guild as a mandatory organisation. If a guild (Eg. a regular group of the same people) isn't required then that means that coordination cannot be required, or basic communication, because these things just do not happen in a real pug. An encounter cannot be both hard and completable by 10 randoms from trade, the only time this ever works is if the 10 randoms all happen to be members of guilds that have cleared the content or their alts and so have already put the hours in to wiping and working out + learning the tactics. Any fight which contains no requirements for coordination or basic tactics is a loot piñata, why not cut out the middle man?

That's 3/7ths of your nights. That's alot of fucking time, no matter how you try and downplay it.

My nights tend to be considerably longer than the time I spend raiding. I've still got plenty of time to go out after. And I repeat, 1/7th of my nights (or more like 3 hours of 1/7th of my nights) as you put it is what we spend on current tier content, the difficulty and accessibility of which is what we're talking about. If you aren't even willing to spend one night, not even one night actually - a few hours of one night, half an evening - if you aren't even willing to do that, then I just don't get it. How little time do you think anyone should have to put into this game each week to see the endgame, since three hours is too much...?

Never said that. Not even close. Please drop this bullshit too.

My point is, you ain't downing Lich King without a guild. Or a pug composed of a bunch of alts of people you know, which is essentially a defacto guild anyway.

A guild is not a group of friends that play together. It CAN BE, but in general a raiding guild is a group of players that come together to raid. They may or may not like each other. That's a plus, not a requirement.

Please articulate your point more thoroughly then. Do you or do you not think that the hardest fight in the game, the endboss of this expansion should be killable by you and any 24 randoms you pick up in trade or not? You say that your point is that this isn't possible which implies that you think it should be. Please explain why, preferably in a manner that doesn't involve your every line of text inserting an ad hominem attack. If all you've got is to tell me I'm full of shit and an arrogent moron then there's no way we can have an actual discussion about raiding, its difficulty and its accessibility. Because at the moment it seems like getting a paragraph out of you that isn't laden with vitrol is impossible.

I didn't say I didn't know how to play my class, but if you've ever played WoW at all, you know as well as I do that ALOT of the players don't.

A lot of people don't know how to play. In vanilla, even in TBC I can understand people gemming MP5 on their hunters or something, but these days there's the entire internet full of web pages telling people how to do it right. You have an official realm forum, official class forums with guides in them and links to better guides, you have mmo champ, you have elitist jerks - a website whose attitude I despise, by the way, but nonetheless it is very informative. There is so much content now for people who don't know how to play and don't want to learn. You can do one of ten million dailies, you can collect badge epics, and stuff from the higher level 5 mans, you can do all sorts of random dungeon finder shenanigans, you can do VoA and with the 20% buff anyone, absolutely any 25 of Trade's Finest can kill at the very least the first 4 bosses in Icecrown Citadel, and as an extra bonus if they have someone half way competent in the raid who wants to give them free epics they can do gunship on hard mode for extra free stuff.

That's pretty damn accessible right there. Literally anyone, any of the millions of people who play, any of those people who have a 71 point talent build and gem spirit on their ret paladin, they can all see fully a quarter of the hardest content that the game has to offer, probably more as the buff increases. Do you or do you not want endgame content to be even more accessible. eg. do you think that the majority of the playerbase should be able to clear even more bosses in a pug or not?

Cite?

Link.

Encounters

H: Lord Marrowgar (25): 5440 (9.66%)

H: Lady Deathwhisper (25): 3352 (5.95%)

H: Gunship Battle (25): 5628 (9.99%)

H: Deathbringer Saurfang (25): 4283 (7.60%)

H: Festergut (25): 4718 (8.38%)

H: Rotface (25): 5248 (9.32%)

H: Professor Putricide (25): 1787 (3.17%)

H: Blood Prince Council (25): 4647 (8.25%)

H: Blood-Queen Lana'thel (25): 4725 (8.39%)

H: Valithria Dreamwalker (25): 4452 (7.90%)

H: Sindragosa (25): 1659 (2.95%)

H: The Lich King (25): 87 (0.15%)

Lord Marrowgar (25): 41770 (74.17%)

Lady Deathwhisper (25): 41617 (73.90%)

Gunship Battle (25): 41607 (73.88%)

Deathbringer Saurfang (25): 41542 (73.76%)

Festergut (25): 26841 (47.66%)

Rotface (25): 25092 (44.55%)

Professor Putricide (25): 17427 (30.94%)

Blood Prince Council (25): 19398 (34.44%)

Blood-Queen Lana'thel (25): 13224 (23.48%)

Valithria Dreamwalker (25): 17173 (30.49%)

Sindragosa (25): 10039 (17.83%)

The Lich King (25): 5958 (10.58%)

The numbers in brackets are the percentage of guilds which are listed on that website. I believe that in order to be listed you need to register your guild, but so far as I am aware this website is the most popular and widely used one for tracking progress; certainly almost every guild which steps into ICC even semi-regularly is listed there and most of them wouldn't describe themselves as progress guilds.

Also, even if we assume that, that puts the total number of people who have even started HM ICC at .... like 2% of the population...of WoW or something. Even accounting for how many of those players aren't 80 raiders, you are still looking at not the biggest population. How many guilds per server are doing HM ICC? How many players does each need? That's not alot of spaces. And then, by your point 4, we have to eliminate all the guilds with fuckwads. And that REALLY drops the number of available guilds.

It's easy enough to get into raiding. It's not that easy to get into raiding with quality players. And it's really not that easy to get into raiding with quality players who are nice people.

Hardmode is not a part of seeing the whole game though. There is no obligation to do it, and if you do you are putting yourself amongst the hardcore - the game is finished when you kill arthas for the first time on any player setting, if you come back after you've won the game with the dials turned up to 11 then I wouldn't say you were a casual player. Hardmode is by definition the bit that caters to the 'hardcore' if we look at how many guilds have downed normal 25 Lich King it's slightly more than heroic marrowgar... so that's how many have seen and defeated all the content, essentially winning the game. Nearly double that number have killed Sindragosa, Putricide and BQL and are able to fight if not defeat Arthas. 25,000 guilds have cleared 6/12 on 25 man.

I'm pretty sure that you've been asking for raiding to be more accessible, saying that it should be easier to be ready for current tier content and that more people should be able to do it and beat it. Yet here you are derriding all the 'fuckwads' and generally accusing me of being an elitist because I think at least a part of the content should be inaccessible to people not willing to put in any effort, but here you seem to have spun a 180. You want to raid with 'quality' people and remove the fuckwads... but it also seems like you want the game to cater entirely to the fuckwads, and leave nothing for those 'quality' (your word) people to do.

With regards to spots in raiding guilds. I'll say that even on a scummy backwater server (mine) we have 9 guilds that have cleared at least 12/12 normal mode, and 18 on 11/12 normal mode. As well as 2 guilds from each faction on 11/12 hardmode. Our server has a very low population. A big server will have significantly more. How many spots does a guild have? I'd say it varies but a hardcore guild will tend to want around 35 'raiders' (maybe more, maybe less) in order to be able to make a reasonable setup from the signups you get, and to account for not everyone being available to raid even as much as three nights a week. But a guild as a whole can probably find 25 people for any given night who do not have plans and so can continue raiding. A less hardcore guild will probably have a lot more spots. Certainly not every guild will have a spot for any given class and spec, but many will, and especially over summer will be looking for any decent application.

I mean really, both me and Inigima (and apparently Foreverland too) are happy with the way shit is. This all started with people bitching about how the game was too easy now, not us bitching that it was too hard. I think me and Ini and Foreverlad pretty much agree that they've got a pretty good thing going right now. We're not the ones complaining, remember?

Right now raiding is easy to get in to but tough to "finish". And that's the way it should be. PUGs can clear the front third/half of ICC. Any half decent guild can at least get 10/12 ICC. And good guilds are all over the place from 11/12 ICC to 12/12 HM ICC. And the very best are hammering Heroic 25 LK to death. What's wrong with this?

Hold on. That right there is my point. You were the one only a page ago cheering the downfall of guilds and complaining that a guild was at this time essential to down the hardest endgame content.

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A lot of people don't know how to play. In vanilla, even in TBC I can understand people gemming MP5 on their hunters or something, but these days there's the entire internet full of web pages telling people how to do it right.

Actually, pre-SSC you prolly did stick AP/mp5 in your blue slots since mana was a severe issue for hunters in T4 - T4+ back in those days. I certainly always raided with mana oil on my big axe and jumped with joy when Legacy finally dropped. So, mp5 was not at all as bad then as it is now, just sayin.

As for raiding evenings, I raid 3 nights a week, normally and it's about what I can manage. A lot of our guild consists of people with jobs, commutes, long work commitments and kids. It doesn't matter if we WANT to be as hardcore as Paragon, there is no way ever we could be. So yeah, for a lot of people three nights a week is a lot. We normally start our raids 9 pm server time since people haven't got home before that. Which gives our eastern Europeans around 2.5 hours before they need to go to bed. Such is life. Thinking we're not putting in the effort just cos of time zones, working hours and commutes is pretty ridiculous. We're putting in as much as life allows us, and it doesn't make us scrubs. It doesn't make us "unworthy" of endgame, I think. WoW is a hobby after all, not a penance institution.

Maybe that's not how you meant it though. *shrugs*

I'm definitely with Inigima and Foreverlad here tho. Each successive patch have made WoW better: not worse. Sure, gear inflation makes some scrubs get some shinies, but that was the case in Vanilla as well, only they were now a warm body in a raiding guild of 40 people. The difference is semantics, really. It also doesn't take away from my enjoyment that some scrubs are getting epics. It doesn't make it less interesting for me to beat new encounters.

I also think it's weird that you think the current hard mode content is accessible to all and sundry. It really isn't so your wish that some content should be "inaccessible" to casuals is already true.

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