164 Responses to “10-man Raiders: Second Class?”

1. Adam Bowen Says:
   May 13th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

   If I understand you correctly, you have no issues with rewarding content proportionally to the challenge, but argue that there’s no reason 10 man (or 5 or 2…) content cannot be as challenging as 25 man content. Since many find it more enjoyable the challenge and reward should be developed to an equivalent level at all scales.

   Having read your articles talking about how game designers prefer symmetry and players prefer asymmetry, one thing that occurs to me is that Blizzard’s designers probably find it easier to create challenging 25 man content because they can make broader assumptions about the group make-up. Taking it down to 2 man content, producing something that would be challenging for all combinations of two classes (or even just the majority of them) would be, I suspect, rather difficult.

   Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it of course, I for one would love to see something more difficult than killing 10 boars that I could grab whatever friend I had to hand and wade into. Unfortunately I suspect Blizzard see the ‘value’ they’d get out of such content as much less than the amount of effort they’d have to put into creating it.

   And incidentally, I’m one of the two people that raids for the sake of raiding and not for the items.

2. Sirlin Says:
   May 13th, 2008 at 3:42 pm

   Adam, your argument is also a very old one on the World of Warcraft forums. At one point, a blue poster explicitly stated that it’s not the difficulty of creating 2-man dungeons that prevents them. It is, rather, the belief that they are not the right direction philosophically. This was in the era of 40-man raids though.

   If you like large raids for their own sake, then more power to you. Enjoy them, and smile that fortune has decided to reward your tendencies disproportionately. ;) In some alternate universe, the you who lives there curses that he must do 5-man dungeons to get the best rewards.

3. Butler` Says:
   May 13th, 2008 at 3:53 pm

   “Kaplan (lead designer) explains that 25-man raids are much harder to coordinate, have more logistics to worry about, and are more work. No argument there, I think we all agree with that.”

   Then you go on to say:

   “You can have just as much challenge (and require just as much time spent, if you like) in any of those sizes.”

   Am I missing something or is there a glaring disparity there?! I think the point is it is innately harder (and thus more “challenging”) to complete raid dungeons in larger numbers (25, 40).

   I get what you’re saying, and I agree, there just seems to be some sort of disparity in your argument.

4. 2000AD Says:
   May 13th, 2008 at 4:11 pm

   Personally, if they offerered 1-man versions of all the big dungeons with absolutely no loot at all I’d do them.
   I’ve been playing Warcraft since well before WoW and I like the story, which is why I’m so annoyed with the massive time sink of end game.

   “Ah, the Hero who commanded our forces against Kel’thuzad in the 3rd war, would you like to continue your battle against him? Sorry, you need to have spent days getting reputation with the Argent Dawn, have lots of money (and time to get that money), gather 39 other people and on top of that you need to have already gone through a simular length of time to do stuff like this for a different dungeon, just to make sure you have good enough equipment.”

   I was drawn into the struggle to beat the betrayer Illidan, but am I ever going to see the end of the story? Probably not.
   What’s that? I can finally take it to Kil’Jaeden? Oops, guess not.

   It’s like I’ve been reading a series of damn good books but at the end of the last one it says:
   “And now to find out the end of the story you have to go to the cinema, where we’ll only be showing it at specific times, it will cost more and we’ll only show it if we sell out all the seats. By the way, you can almost guarentee that at least one of the people accompanying you will take a cell phone call in the middle of the film and the people behind you will not shut up and keep spoiling the plot. Oh, and if you leave part way through then you’ll have to go through the whole process again, no starting from where you left off.”

   I’m still having fun playing WoW, but the fact that for various reasons I’ll probably never be able to get near the end game story content is just really annoying.

5. NimbleRabit Says:
   May 13th, 2008 at 4:42 pm

   I pretty much agree with everything you’re saying here, but I do have to say this is one of your most poorly written articles I’ve ever read Sirlin. It’s just not very clear or concise.

   “If there were challenging 2-person dungeons that I could play with my girlfriend, I’d still be playing World of Warcraft today”
   100% agree

6. Trewdo Says:
   May 13th, 2008 at 5:32 pm

   God but i hate this same old crap, no offense to you personally sirlin, other than your mmo stance, i enjoy and agree with most of what you’ve wrote (that i’ve read anyway). However i have heard this same tired point dragged around in every mmo i’ve played (eq, eq2, wow, daoc, lotro, uo even). Two things immediately come to mind.
   1. Not everyone is as good as your average “gamer” at video games. I’m talking in a pure reflexes / tactics sense, most people who fall in this category only even try one type of game… mmo’s. Sure a dungeon could be tuned to be just as difficult solo as grouped or in a raid, but for who? Do this and you either have to make it too hard for all the non-gamers, or trivially easy for the gamers, it would be kind of foolish for an mmo to alienate either.
   2. If something like this was implemented, and all the rewards were equal, no one would ever do anything but the solo version unless they were with pre-existing family or friends. If you ever asked a guild for help with something because, i dont know, you actually like to be social, i’m 100% positive you would get told “just do it solo, its the same reward / just as good”. This would suck badly for those of us (far far more than two, not to burst your righteous bubble) who actually like to group and raid.
   In summation, there are hundreds of games in every genre, with dozens more released every year, where the rewards and play are balanced around solo or small group play. TitanQuest, Guild Wars, Neverwinter Nights, Sins of a Solar Empire, just off the top of my head. Whereas mmos offer a fairly unique experience that rewards large scale cooperation and the ability to deal with different kinds of people, not something you can readily find in most games. In addition there are maybe, maybe one or two good mmos released in any given 5 year span, so why not just accept that some people like it that way (hell personally i wish it would trend back more towards eq, with 54-man raids and soloable mobs few and very far between) and stop trying to make one type of game with a fairly large audience conform to the standards of games with a far smaller player-base.
   Just my two cents as a fan of the genre since its inception with meridian 59.

7. Robert August de Meijer Says:
   May 13th, 2008 at 7:24 pm

   Woohoo, Sirlin attacking WoW again, time to make some links :D

   Now, I totally agree with you on everything. My answer in the end was this:
   Don’t raid, just do what you enjoy and find some folks that enjoy the same thing.

   I had a causual+mature guild and we mostly did dungeons (5 players) and it was alot of fun. We tried all classes, tried all kind of strategies, did that crazy dungeon set quest, none of us raided, we became such good friends we met each other multiple times in real life.

   Then came heroics, which we originally loved because it proved we were just as good as the raiders. But then something bad happened: some of us started getting concerned about their gear. Some wanted to fully deck their character with heroic gear, making normal dungeons not exciting anymore (they became too powerful). Then some decided to take on Karazhan (10 player raid), while others wanted to stick to small and casual dungeons. So some went to Kara guilds and some of those even went to big raiding guilds. With my friends being split between raiders and casuals, I decided to quit.
   The problem is: even my mature friends were fixated with gear. I myself just took the rares that randomly dropped, but never wanted to go the distance for raid gear. So my gear started to “suck” and limit me to dungeons.

   So yeah, I totally feel what you’re saying. I wish my preference of small groups wouldn’t punish me. I had a comparable thing with PvP: I don’t enjoy Arena, but loved Arathi Basin, so half my gear was “bad”.
   I’d probably still be playing WoW if gear didn’t mean anything. I’m back to playing Street Fighter now, waiting for the day that I can play Arathi Basin with all classes sans gear.

8. Waterd103 Says:
   May 13th, 2008 at 7:44 pm

   I sometimes wonder why sirlin waste time in a MMORPG

9. chucklyfun Says:
   May 13th, 2008 at 8:06 pm

   I don’t have much experience with MMORPGs, especially endgame, so if this is completely off-base, forgive me.

   Why does WoW balance the difficulty relative to the number of players? In many other cooperative games, such as cooperative Serious Sam, Halo, and so on, adding more players makes the game easier, not harder, and people tend to have more people join the game if they’re having real trouble. On the other hand, if it gets too easy, they increase the difficulty or drop some players.

   My point here is that they could create a series of difficulty levels that aren’t tied to the number of players in the party. This would actually be easier than balancing for specific party sizes, because they just increase the number and strength of monsters for each level. They don’t have to worry whether the difficulty is playable for a certain number of characters. Even having some nearly unbeatable dungeon would inspire unique approaches and bring a legendary status to the game, without alienating people.

10. Greed Says:
    May 13th, 2008 at 8:21 pm

    Honestly, as long as gear is heavily involved in pvp for MMOs, there will never be a fair sense of balance. The funnest MMO I ever played was the early days of Planetside. Essentially everyone was the same power level. For example, at level 5, you would have two different setups and could use only one setup at a time. At level 10, you would have like 4 different setups, leveling only gave you more options, no real increase in power level. As bad as Planetside became, ideas like that need to be implemented in more MMOs.

11. Bleat Says:
    May 13th, 2008 at 9:12 pm

    I have not played WoW in some time. I used to think I liked 40 man raids, but now that I’m away from it I can see Sirlin’s point and agree with it. If I could get amazing gear in 5 and 10 man raids I might consider playing wow again. As it stands though, I just would not want to get involved in 25 man clans and all the pressure that goes along with it. I used to feel so bad if I missed a night because I felt like I was letting someone down. With smaller groups, this feeling seems like it would melt away.

    I think it would actually be okay if they gave a little nod to the extra coordination in a different way. For example, I t hink it would be fine to give a few pieces of extra gear on average to the 25 man raid, but still let the 10 man raid get the same quality of gear.

    Further, to foster the competition they could allow competitions between 10 man raids and other 10 man raids and 25 man raids vs. other 25 man raids. Essentially, time trials where maybe plaques or statutes of the raids are constructed for the record holders.

    My point is, there are lot of ways to reward and foster 25 man play, without making it strictly better than smaller raids.

12. Archon Shiva Says:
    May 13th, 2008 at 11:08 pm

    Disclaimer: I despise actually playing MMOs, for some of Sirlin’s reasons, and then some others.

    Honestly, I can see where there’s a culture thing at work in there, and how there are expectations of better loot for larger groups coming from what is perceived as a large portion of the user base, and how Blizzard can feel insecure about the consequences of offering better loot. My limited MMO experience matches Trewdo’s prediction: Solo until you realize it’s not worth it, and only then join groups. Groups happen because they’re more than the sum of their parts.

    I can even see how Blizzard could feel forced grouping is what eventually retains most players, be it true or not.

    However, I don’t see why rewards for 10-man should be a whole tier lower. How about mixing tiers? How about, on average, larger groups get proportionately more higher-tier loot, but any size group can still hope to get the same loot, eventually? Basically, a 10-man group has a 50% chance of getting the same-tier loot as a 25-man group, and 50% or 75% of getting one tier lower. A 2-person group has a 10% or 30% chance, or something. Speed and efficiency is with the larger groups, but smaller teams can still get something as worthy, eventually.

13. Sirlin Says:
    May 13th, 2008 at 11:15 pm

    Bleat, good points and 2000AD, funny analogy.

    Trewdo, your comments only prove the point even more. If equal rewards (for equal time spent, equal difficulty) meant that no one would do 25-man’s, then doesn’t that tell you something? If there really were so many people like yourself who want the social fun of that experience, then there’s no problem. You can play with all the other people who want that social fun. You just wouldn’t have the unhappy people tagging along who would much rather be in a 10-man situation, or 5, or whatever. Wouldn’t you rather they be gone anyway, off doing whatever they enjoyed more?

    Your other point is a purely nonsense straw-man argument. No one is saying the average gamer is super skilled. No one is trying to make a game that’s too hard for them. In fact, the inclusive game I propose is easier for them, not harder. It allows them to progress by either doing exactly what they already can do in the current game, or with other options in smaller groups (those other options being first-class rather than second-class). It’s more choices rather than fewer, so it’s strictly better for casual players with low skill (and for all other players, too). You seem to imply that casual gamers with low skill are best catered to in a game that only gives top rewards to 25-man groups.

14. Chad Miller Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 12:29 am

    Bleat and Archon: My immediate response to this article was the same as yours. Why not just make it so that the 25 raid drops the better gear at a higher rate? If the 10-man gets 1/3 the gear the 25-man gets, that means that each individual in the 25-man is getting proportionally more/better gear, but they’re not getting anything you can’t get through a 10-man.

    Or, if they ever go to the “raid token” system some raiders have been begging for (where you get X points per encounter, and can collect enough to buy gear with it) you can do something similar, 25-man gets 3 times what 10-man gets or whatever turns out to be “fair” given the extra coordination involved.

    Trewdo: Your argument makes no sense. “This is fun, but people have to be bribed into doing it.” Your talk about Sirlin wanting to force his way of playing on everyone is bullshit; you’re the one who wants to coerce people into playing your way or being cut off from certain parts of the game forever.

15. Harald Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 12:30 am

    Do gamers know what they want, though?

    In Starcraft, you were hard pressed to find any public game that wasn’t on the (Big Game) Hunters map. Yet a large group of players were sick of that map and wanted to play different ones. Blizzard pretty much forced map randomization (by standardizing ladder play which had it) and Warcraft III is better for it.

    If a 40 man raid was just as much fun and provided the same rewards as a 5 man dungeon, the player base would not be split 50/50 between the two: everyone would play the 5 man dungeon.

    People, as a group, are dumb critters. We don’t think in advance. There’s a large immediate cost to creating a raid, and we get blindsided by it. It doesn’t matter that after the steeper hill there might be a deeper experience waiting for us.. all we see is the work that has to be done to set it up.

    It’s the same reason why coders don’t spend much time meticulously designing automated tests. Everybody knows that they pay off in the end (a bug caught now is worth two hundred later), but again we only see the immediate cost.

    The problem is compounded by the vicious circle that our shortsighted laziness causes: as more people choose the easy 5 man raid over the difficult 40 man one, it becomes even harder to organize the latter.

    As another example: consider the sub 60/70 instances. It’s much easier to blaze through those by taking a high level player along to clear the way. Is that any fun? Of course not. Yet it’s quite hard to get an “as intended” group for those dungeons.

    World of Warcraft solves the problem by changing 40 and 5 man dungeons from two routes to the same goal to two routes with different goals. Unfortunately the best (only?) way to do that in WoW is by having the large raids drop better gear*.

    *They could maybe do some jig where the two types of raids drop complementary equipment like hats in 40 men and boots in 5 men, but I doubt that noone at Blizzard has ever thought of and subsequently canned that idea…

16. Sirlin Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 12:44 am

    Harold, your arguments are thoughtful, but I think you’ve got some apples and oranges. If a designer wants to say that the game of Starcraft is healthier on these maps with normal resources the game was made for rather than this other map that has way more resources than the game was designed for, then ok. It’s dangerous ground telling people what they’d be better off liking when they already like Big Game Hunters, but there is some basis for it there, so ok.

    A similar argument would make sense in saying WoW dungeon X should be about this hard, and have about this challenge. Designers can choose those settings and help us all out, sure. But choosing whether the experience is 10 or 25 man is, as Kaplan said in the video, about your social comfort level, not really about the game challenge. So no, I don’t need anyone telling me that I would he happier in 25-man groups. The thought is ludicrous and I can safely reject that.

    That said Harlod, your heart is in the right place. Yeah people seem not to know what will make them happier in a lot of things, but here it’s pretty natural for each person to sort out him or herself which group size is right for them. Artificially rewarding one group size over another is a troubling value judgment to make, and World of Warcraft seems to acknowledge that by greatly improving the situation from two years ago.

17. Majidah Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 1:19 am

    Doesn’t this lead us back to D.S. Principle #29: If it’s not working, play another game until it does? There are other mmos with that handle high level content better, like Guild Wars and EVE, why worry that WoW isn’t measuring up?

    I think that like most of their games, Blizzard assimilated the MMO format with all of the crazy moon-logic that most MMOs use about grinding and grouping. They want to re-skin and smooth out some of the glaring deficits, but not change the core experience. Originally, MMOs had n-man raids, where you just had to bring as many people as possible to defeat a difficult foe. Once instances went in, this changed to the modern 40-25-10 style raid format, and old habits die hard.

18. Sotek Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 1:42 am

    I think that given the design of the game of WoW, instances smaller than five man would not work - the game is designed around tank/healer/dps, and the general ratio of players is such that healers and tanks are the limiter when it comes to making groups.

    That said, I see little reason that 10-man raids should not be equivalent in progression to 25-man raids. They have a bit larger design space for 25-man raids (a 10-man Magtheridon raid would not be able to be functionally the same.) but if they’re making them “equivalent” in difficulty …

    … the idea of giving three times as much loot in a 25-man as in a 10-man seems the correct solution to me.

19. KingMob Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 2:54 am

    “Personally, if they offerered 1-man versions of all the big dungeons with absolutely no loot at all I’d do them.”

    I’m with this commenter. It always rankled to miss out on the plot of WoW because I was in a small, casual guild.

    I think the experience of raiding would be just as deep in a 10-man as in a 25-man. Have the rewards be the same and see what happens.

20. Forty Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 4:36 am

    I agree with the general theme of your article about not treating people who participate in larger raids as your “chosen people.” However, in this specific case, I don’t think the 10-man raiders being treated as “second class citizens” will necessarily be a horrible decision. If the 10-man encounters are balanced appropriately for the 10-man gear progression, then the fact that the gear is weaker should not really matter, since raiding is not explicitly a competitive environment.

    PvP — where having competitive gear vs. your peers is paramount — should be designed such that the best gear for it is obtained from engaging in PvP itself, as opposed to raiding, so that weaker 10-man gear is not a factor in the one truly competitive aspect of the game. For the most part, Blizzard has done a better job of this now than they did two years ago — although they still seem to have some mental hang-ups that those who want to PvP should still have to engage in a significant amount of PvE in order to be optimal (beyond just leveling to the level cap).

21. Claytus Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 6:57 am

    I still agree with the general idea, as well, but specifically implementing it in WoW just has a multitude of problems.

    The current situation is just too broken as is, in terms of not favoring 25-man raiders. Once you’re in BT territory and such, you’re talking easily 9-15 hours per week, just to even clear all the way up to illidan, much less kill him… and then you’ve got a random number generator controlling whether you get loot, so it can take months to see one instance of a particular piece of gear drop.

    Compare to that guaranteed badges from all 5-man content for their best gear, without a time restriction, since 5-man instances can be completed in a single day rather than being reset every week. And pvp’ers also collect guaranteed points, and need to put in only an hour or two a week to be earning at least some points for that week.

    It’s already the case that 25-man raiders are basically doing it just for the love of the WoW PvE environment, because in terms of time spent vs. gear obtained, it’s easily the worst method in the game. I wouldn’t mind giving versions of that loot to smaller groups, if they can somehow balance that time spent component. It’s just too depressing as is, doing the hardest, most time consuming things in the game, and watching everyone else walk around with equal or better rewards from a more casual experience.

22. Chad Miller Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 11:28 am

    @Claytus: Your post is exactly why I support some kind of “raid token” system, where anyone who is present in a raid gets something like “Illidan bucks” in which they buy gear from an NPC vendor. That’s how it works for basically everyone else already. I’m sure some people will complain that it’s not as immersive or flavorful as killing some deadly knight and winning his sword as a prize, but by that logic having an instanced dungeon where that knight spawns every week (and regularly gets killed by a copy of his unique sword) is equally retarded.

    @Harald: You make a good point, but notice that War3 doesn’t prevent you from playing whatever map you want, it just denies you ladder standings if you want to pick your map every time. That’s fundamentally different from denying something that serves a gameplay function like gear.

    Also, I’m all for designing for large-scale raids. I’m even all for encouraging them. But “encourage” is not the same as “force.” To me the golden ideal would be to create a system where 25 or 40 man or whatever raids happen, but not by using gear progression to coerce people into devoting their lives to the game.

23. Claytus Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    Chad: Your idea is honestly what I expect to happen. Though, in my ideal world, here’s what I would do. Make arena gear not usable in instances, and make raid/instance gear not usable in BGs and arenas. They’ve already created a full set of gear progression for each different activity. The problem is “forcing” people to do one event to acquire something for use in the other one. If they just remove the possibility of doing that in the first place, then everyone’s happy, and everyone can aggressively pursue their own form of fun, and safely ignore what they don’t want.

24. Sirlin Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 12:19 pm

    Claytus, it is quite a different game now than it was. Considering the tokens in 5-mans and the attainable PvP gear, maybe raids really are being done by the people who like raids. That’s great (unless the pendulum has swung too far, as you imply). Even accepting all that, it’s still not quite on the level to keep the higher tier of gear out of 10-mans. If I had to guess, I’d wager that raids will indeed adopt a similar token system and all raid sizes will use their tokens to buy the same stuff.

    And then it will cost way more 10-man tokens to buy Sword X than 25-man tokens to make sure people still play the 25-man versions, ha. Hard to let go of that design ideal, isn’t it? (That bigger group = chosen ones, I mean.)

    That’s what will actually happen, but what I wish would happen is this. 1 and 2-man versions of all the content, hopefully with the ability to play it on super-hard if you want. You gain no gear, but you do gain some badges or something that show that you did it. I’d leap at that. Is it even World of Warcraft anymore, you’d ask. Yes, because no matter how you slice it, the game is still a big chat room (and I mean that in a good way), it has a nice control scheme, good art direction, interesting class design, and Blizzard polish. An awesome series of 1 and 2-man dungeons would do nothing to hurt any of that and only the most backwaterish of players (and MMO developers!) would say that it would no longer be an MMO. What it would be is great fun.

    And PS, if it’s too hard to design content like that, then give me some NPCs mercenaries in my group to heal me. Now you say, “but then it wouldn’t be an MMO,” to which I reply yet again, “yes it would be, and it would be great fun.”

25. Claytus Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 12:41 pm

    My opinion is that you’re leaving out how dynamic the gameplay can be. For example, at the moment, 5-man dungeon badges (these same badges can be acquired in 25-man dungeons, alongside other, unique gear, as well… but I digress) gives gear rewards that are more than good enough to be used in all but perhaps the highest ranked 25-man dungeon of them all. The badge gear is generally better than the bottom ~4 25-man gear rewards.

    However, I don’t think it was done as a “balance gear between casuals and hardcore” thing. It was done because Blizzard got really, really burned when they released the last expansion, and noone had cleared naxxramas yet, and everyone was mad that the “final dungeon” got seen by almost noone in it’s original form. I think the new badge gear is a move by blizzard to hand a whole bunch of epics to people so that they’re stats are high enough that they can walk into black temple before the next expansion comes out, and not instantly get killed.

    But, the same general ideas apply to many, many things they do. For example, you get locked into raid instances for a week. Once you’ve joined one group, you can’t run the dungeon with anyone else. It makes it very important for players to establish a consistent group of people everytime they go into dungeons. So, quickly transferring guild members between 5/10/25-man dungeons is very difficult. Everyone doing 25 hates 10s, because 5 people just get to sit out and do nothing each week. Blizzard made a very clear decision with the last expansion to say *first* you do 5-man, *then* you do 10-man, and *last* you do 25-man. The difficulty is only harder in 25-man because it purposely you required to acquire 10-man gear before you entered. It’s very much serving their community of players to organize things this way, but it’s a level above the type of design goals you’re talking about.

    The other question becomes *why* do they need equal gear rewards. The point of the PvE gear progression is specifically that… you don’t run a whole bunch of 25-man dungeons. A guild generally runs 1 (maybe 2 if they have lots of time) dungeon per week, and when they’re done farming up enough gear, they completely move on to the next content. If some people only do 10-mans, then they have no actual need of, or use for, 25-man raiding gear. 25-man gear is only useful specifically for running 25-man raids. I think you have to give them a little more credit for thinking things through before you call “unfair” on their system… this is an inherent different between PvE and PvP, where in the latter, gear differences really are unfair.

    If the issue is just “I want to see the inside of black temple without collecting 25-people”… well, again, that’s a seperate issue, accept it as such, and accept that gear requirements and therefore gear rewards, are allowed to be different for accomplishing that goal.

26. Sirlin Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

    That’s a lot of great info, but when you got the core issue, I don’t get it anymore. Why do 10 man raids need gear as good as 25 man? Answer: so they can do the next 10-man raid. Why do they need gear that good to do the next 10-man raid? Answer: because the next 10-man raid is presumably designed exactly such that it requires that gear.

    Would it be possible to create a different gear standard for 10 and 25? Yes it would. But it’s kind of crazy to do so. The reasonable answer is that if you are at Dungeon 12, you need gear of X strength. 10-man dungeon 11 AND 25-man dungeon 11 gives you X strength gear. If you do it any other way, it creates the perception of bias for no real reason. Surely you can see that. Tuning 25-man to need better gear just feeds gear envy for not good reason because it’s just as easy to tune the 25-man to beatable with X strength gear, rather than X + 1 strength as you seem to assume.

    Maybe the confusion is that I’m specifically talking about the video linked in the original post that says each dungeon will come in 10 and 25 man versions. You might be talking about past dungeons where there were completely different progression tracks.

27. Claytus Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    Yeah, I was talking about the existing dungeons. It’s not just that there are different progression tracks, it that there’s only 1 progression track. All 5-man, 10-man, and 25-man dungeons are somewhere on the same track, it just happens that 25s are generally clustered near the top, and 5s are generally at the bottom.

    I’m still not sure that I see what you’re saying as innately better. There is an existing problem in the game with pvp gear becoming equivalent to raid gear, and yet being less time consuming to obtain. It means new players can put in their 1-2 hours of arena per week, and after a month or two, they’re suddenly geared well enough to jump straight to 25-man dungeon #5. What happens to all the new players that didn’t like pvp, and started working through the 5-mans, and the 10-mans, and then couldn’t find a guild on their server still doing 25-man dungeons #1-4. Then say a guild that’s currently in the fifth 25-man dungeon loses a member, and decided to start recruiting. Suddenly it’s in their best interest to recruit someone in pvp gear that’s at a similar gear level, and the players who liked pve, and have patiently waiting to join some 25-man guild at all are screwed because they’ve been unable to obtain the proper gear. (It’s the opposite of the old problem you talked about… now people have to pvp to be able to pve, it just doesn’t get quite the uproar, because now the less time consuming option is the one forced on players)

    The same thing is potentially happening in your system with people jumping between different “tracks” unless you explicitly seperate the types dungeons somehow (such as by giving different gear rewards).

    Again, the issue is just how dynamic the game is. Dungeon difficulty changes constantly as blizzard nerfs and strengthens boss fights. Guild membership changes constantly, just due to the nature of MMOs. If everything was constant, your ideas would be perfect, but as is, it seems to me that it’s just as easy to create biases with your system as with blizzard’s old system.

28. Sirlin Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 2:37 pm

    This is all a red herring to the original point. Should PvP rewards be in-line with the rest of the game? Yes. No one ever said otherwise. It’s neither here nor there when it comes to future 10-man raids getting a full tier lower gear than 25.

    “It’s just as easy to create bias with my system as with Blizzard’s old system.” I don’t even know what that means. No it isn’t. I’m saying something very simple that I think you’re turning into something complicated. I’m saying that when one gametype is less fun and less played, a bad solution is to give more powerful gear-rewards to “fix” the situation. That shouldn’t even be controversial or deep. Fixing pvp rewards would have to be done in any system. And you can forget about 5 -> 10 - > 25 man progression because neither Blizzard’s video above or my post was talking about that.

    Incidentally, I’m secretly extremely happy that raiders are getting shafted and shafted bad according to your description. I played for far more hours than I can commit to putting in writing here and it was impossible (as in, mathematically impossible) for me to earn even one single purple-quality item from the original pvp system. At that time, numerous (deluded) raid players told me that it was actually easier to earn pvp rewards. Ha! So I will secretly say “cry me a river” if it’s cutting the other way now. But in all seriousness, after my brief moment of sadistic joy, even I want it the rewards for all types of activities to be as close to balanced as possible so that people can choose what they want to do rather than what a game designer says they should want to do.

    I have to say again though that PvP has nothing to do with my original point. Either 25 man raids are intrinsically great fun or they aren’t. If they are, they don’t need better rewards. If they are not, they also don’t need better rewards, they need to be intrinsically fun. I think the truthiest guess is that they actually are intrinsically fun to the right demographic of players, so there really is no problem of lack of fun. The problem is why the last bits of large-group bias haven’t been stomped out yet in favor of fully inclusive design. You can tell me how actually pvp rewards are too easy to get or whatever, but that’s a separate problem. The point at hand is comparing the future 25 man dungeons to the future 10-man dungeons. It’s a pretty difficult position to take that it’s a-ok to have a tier difference in gear, given all the other advancements the game has made in being inclusive.

29. Archon Shiva Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 8:21 pm

    One element that’s been slowly crawling into this conversation is worrying me. Some proponents of better-gear-for-25 have let into their argument that harder difficulty (i.e. larger groups) should entail better rewards, and seem to think it’s just a fact of life. I’m really not so sure it should be. More frequent rewards, sure, but let’s be honest: nobody is playing WoW hoping to be level 59 or 69 and have the second-best gear. The real goal is well-known (top level and top gear for your build) even to beginning players, and people know fully well when they don’t have the “top” gear. The intrinsinc reward of being a better player should be success where others fail. The secondary benefit can be a faster growth, even much faster. But better players should not be rewarded with exclusive gear that makes them even better: It’d be like saying the top Ryu player get a cancelable SRK for use in all his future games - the guy is already winning! Give the scrubs access to everything, eventually. Some action games do this by time-release (Rez, Gradius), which is perfectly fine, if terribly boring: you’d better play good if you don’t want to play 20 hours before you unlock weapon edit, but everyone *can* get it, eventually.
    This works in real life, as well. We all get paid the same money. People with better jobs don’t get special “Ferrari Money” — they just get more money per unit of time, and thus are more likely to be able to afford expensive goods faster. But given an infinite time investment at any job, anyone can buy anything, eventually.
    Badges are perfectly fine. Achievements, sure. Titles, great. Special cosmetic stuff, probably only if it’s quirky rather than something everyone is going to want - A special yellow-striped version of an armor to denote outstanding skill is okay, but probably not a special black one: everyone should have access to cool. But there is no way being a better player should grant you exclusive access to restricted gear that makes you better yet.

30. Robert August de Meijer Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 8:24 pm

    But didn’t you have like ten alts, Sirlin? :P
    But yeah, WoW demands a large amount of time being played… and continued play. A friend of mine who was an excellent player took a break after the release of the expansion. When he came back, he had to level to 70, and collect 14 or so pieces of gear (which took two months of alot of playing!) before being allowed to join an Arena team of his level of play.

    Any game design ideas that would make 25 player instances as “fun” as smaller instances?

31. Butler` Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 9:02 pm

    I’m still not following. You seem to be linking 25man being played by a lower % of people with ‘less fun’ - when I’m sure that’s not the case (quite the opposite in fact). It’s just that it’s innately less accessible and some people might not want to put the extra effort in that’s required to succeed.

    And that’s the point, 25man takes more effort than 10 man (organisation, teamwork, co-ordination) so surely it should be rewarded justly?

    All this talk of 1man instances in an MMORPG just… makes me phase out.

32. Forty Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 10:42 pm

    “It means new players can put in their 1-2 hours of arena per week, and after a month or two, they’re suddenly geared well enough to jump straight to 25-man dungeon #5.” - Claytus

    Kind of a nitpick, since as Sirlin mentioned, PvP gear is rather irrelevant to the discussion of 10-man vs. 25-man gear, but I feel compelled to set some facts straight.

    Realistically, a new player putting in 1-2 hours of arena per week would take over half a year to get the 6 or 7 major pieces of gear that are obtainable from arena play. He’s also going to have to put in a couple hundred hours of play time in battlegrounds to obtain the other PvP rewards.

    “What happens to all the new players that didn’t like pvp, and started working through the 5-mans, and the 10-mans, and then couldn’t find a guild on their server still doing 25-man dungeons #1-4.”

    And “badge of justice” rewards are really the solution to this scenario. In fact, the best badge rewards are better for raiding than their equivalent (and realistically obtainable) arena rewards.

33. Claytus Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 12:14 am

    A couple clarifications.

    First, I was playing devil’s advocate a bit. Forty is also generally correct. Another very positive argument is that 25-man guilds *want* to find people with appropriate gear to join them, and not have spend their time running old, outdated, dungeons, just to gear up a small number of new members. It’s a “you take the good with the bad” issue… not a “this is bad” issue.

    Second, archon shiva: I was very careful about my wording earlier, so reread it. Noone, as I saw it, said 25-mans were harder… they just literally take more time investment per single piece of gear obtained. If the time-spent issue was balanced, it would be fine… but as it is, 10-man dungeons should drop 10 pieces of gear in the same time a 25-man dungeon drops 25 pieces of gear, or you’ve inherently got some issues.

    Third, to sirlin… Blizzard’s currently existing system is that they expect each player participate in every type of experience if they want every piece of gear… they actively want everyone to participate in 5-mans and 25-mans. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but it doesn’t feel to me like a bias against a particular group. If you want to only do arenas, you can get appropriate gear from arenas… if you want to only do 10-mans, you get appropriate gear from 10-mans… and so on, and so forth. You’re stance seems to be that they should seperate everything. If you want to do 10-mans, you deserve the same gear as people doing 25-mans, even though it allows you to progress through the “25-man” track without ever participating in an actual 25-man. That’s my issue… there’s no particular good reason to make the rewards equal, as you said, as long as 10-man gear is always exactly what you need to experience more 10-man content. The gear doesn’t have to be just stronger in 25-mans to accomplish this either. Maybe they can tune fights that 10-mans need much more defensive stats for some reason… they’ve already shown the ability to make similarly good gear thats “optimized” for just pvp or pve.

    My personal opinion is that they should make the gear different just to give it some meaning. If you have magical sword X, you did the hardest 10-man thing in the game, and can show it off to everyone. If you have magical sword Y, you did the hardest 25-man thing in the game, and can show it off to someone. Since, there isn’t the “unfair” issue that exists in PvP, they swords should be different, because the show different accomplishments. It’s even worse, if say, I’m someone who successfully completed all the 10-man content *and* all the 25-man content… and now I have nothing to show for a greater display of skill than someone who’s only able to complete either one or the other…???

34. Forty Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 12:39 am

    “If you want to only do arenas, you can get appropriate gear from arenas… if you want to only do 10-mans, you get appropriate gear from 10-mans… and so on, and so forth.” - Claytus

    Man, if the game actually worked that way, I would have no major complaints with it. But after three-and-a-half years of it not working that way, I kind of doubt we’ll ever see that point. Maybe in the StarCraft MMO, eh?

35. Sirlin Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 1:22 am

    Claytus, I think I’m still not communicating one nuance to you. Imagine the new dungeons that can all be played as 25 or 10 man. Imagine that if you ONLY do the 10 man, the gear you get is perfectly fine to progress. If you ONLY do the 25 man, the gear you get is fine to progress. Furthermore, the 25 man gear is 1000 times more powerful. Is this ok? I mean, if you just do 10 mans, you don’t need 1000 times more powerful gear, so it’s fine right?

    No, it’s not fine. First of all, it prevents you from going back and forth between 10 and 25. Second, it creates the perception of favoritism that only 25 man is “real.” Why do either of these things when it can just as easily be tuned so that equal gear is appropriate inside a 10 man and or 25 man version of the same dungeon? Your separate tracks concept is bad because a) it creates separate tracks between 10 and 25 when there is no reason to do so in the system described in the video in the first post and b) it creates needless envy issues where one activity gets better gear that’s not needed. You say it is needed, but we could just as easily create a 10 man progression that required 1000 times better gear than the 25 man and that would be equally silly.

36. Archon Shiva Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 3:38 am

    Claytus: “it is innately harder (and thus more “challenging”) to complete raid dungeons in larger numbers (25, 40)” (post #3) strikes me as, at the very least, strongly hinting that 25-man raids are harder.
    Now, I do agree with the implied idea of your next item: Time invested in a 25-man raid should yield *at the very least* as much reward as a similar time investment in a 10-man raid, or any other raid size.
    However, I wasn’t making a point specifically about MMOs. The only thing I’m really pushing in that post is this - Don’t lock people out of content completely simply with a skill barrier. Medals and stuff are fine, but you shouldn’t *entirely* prevent someone from unlocking a secret character or whatever, especially something useful, just because they’re not good enough to succeed at a certain task on a certain difficulty. It just kills a potential audience by making parts of the game inaccessible, and increases the gap between superior and inferior players, by making it MORE than just a skill differential. Note that easier supers in SSF2THDR are exactly along those lines.

37. STCAB Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 4:07 am

    About this:
    “And if I’m wrong about this, why not still make the rewards equal? In that case, 25-man versions will be full to the brim anyway because raiders love the intrinsic rewards of completing a logistically difficult task, after all.”
    Eventhough “hard-mode” is there, there is little point in playing it if there’s no more rewarding than playing the easy version. This creates a psychological effect among players that hard mode is pointless to do.

    However, we talked about this on the forums somewhat indirectly. Although the rewards are the same, there can still be “minor” rewards for completing the hard version of the raid. A unique pet? Different skin for a weapon (symbolizing to others you did it the hard way)? Or some other reward of that type. I know that for some players that such rewards do have a motivating effect. It’s like getting a small trophy for finishing a race or somthing. It might not be real gold, but it symbolizes you accomplished something.

38. Sirlin Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 4:21 am

    STCAB, as explicitly stated by Kaplan in the video, there can be 10-man dungeons that are easy and others that are hard. There can be 25-man dungeons that are easy or hard. It’s more about how many people you feel like hanging out with, he says. So your premise that 25-man are the “hard mode” is thankfully not correct. In fact, he’s saying hard mode *is* there. There’s hard mode 10-man and there’s hard mode 25-man and presumably those give better rewards than easier 10-man and easier 25-man versions.

39. STCAB Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 4:40 am

    I was just interpreting the 25-man version as “hard-mode” due to organization dificulties etc. I might just have been away from WoW too long, but “hanging out” with 25 people does not seem like something that happens pretty casually… So I was merely suggesting there’d be minor additional rewards for the 25-man versions so there’d actually be a point… But then again it’s probably just that I don’t see the “hanging out with 25 people in a raid” as the most plausible sitation in the world…

40. Majidah Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 5:37 am

    Sword A does 50 dps. Sword B does 100 dps. Sword B is better.
    Sword A adds 10 Strength. Sword B 10 spirit. Sword B is different.
    Sword A is black with lightning coursing along it. Sword B is beige and floppy. Sword A is more prestigious.

    Different MMOs choose to distribute high-level loot on betterness, difference or prestige. Betterness is portable; you will be rewarded everywhere in the game for using better equipment. Difference is situation-specific; sometimes you’ll be rewarded for the strength, sometimes the spirit. Prestigious is only intrinsically rewarding; the game doesn’t care what color your sword is, but you do.

    If an MMO chooses to have a loot gradient at high level based on betterness, it is probably impossible for it to be allocated in a way that pleases everybody. Either the best loot is given out according to some conditions (and it’s unlikely that everyone will enjoy those specific conditions) or it’s given out just for playing (and people will complain that harder things or their favorite conditions should be rewarded more).

    Essentially, the only way to make everyone happy (and I use the term happy loosely) is to give out difference or prestige rewards. These are not portable, so they don’t impact game balance as much as the objectively better thing.

    Personally, I think it’s just fine to give out the same rewards to 10 player and 25 player raids, but I appreciate how it disrupts the ladder-climbing of WoW. The best equipment has to be SOMEWHERE, and if 25 player raids are more rarer, that means less best will be given out, and players will have to climb the ladder longer. If we decide it’s OK for best to be given out by 10 player raids, we should still introduce a prestige system or a difference system to give non-overlapping reward players who choose to do both, or who choose to pick their favorite.

41. Sirlin Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 5:46 am

    Majidah, same point to you that I made to STcab. As stated in the video, there will be easy 25-mans and hard 25-mans. The best loot has to go somewhere, yes. How about it goes in the hard dungeons? Specifically, the hard 25-mans and the hard 10-mans.

    Again, if the 25-man dungeons are not popular enough on their own merits and they “need” better rewards to entice players, then it’s a very strange solution to a problem. (Should even better rewards then go to even more tedious and unfun tasks?) If the 25-man dungeons are, in fact, fun to a lot of people without needing better rewards (than the 10-man equivalents), then apparently it’s not necessary to give 1 tier higher rewards there. Either way, it seems the answer lies in accepting that 25 vs 10 is a social choice, not a game difficulty choice. The extra hassle of coordinating 25 people’s real life schedule is “hard” (or should I say, annoying and work-like rather than fun and game-like), but if that is such a sticking point for anyone, 10-mans could be slightly harder or give slightly fewer tokens. But to give 1 tier lower of gear is kind of against the whole rest of the new inclusive philosophy I’m seeing.

42. Tim310 Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 5:48 am

    I think we may all be jumping to conclusions here, as we haven’t seen any of the rewards for the 10 and the 25 man raids yet. From the interview it sounds like a 10 Man Raid is “one tier lower” than the 25 man raid. From what I understand it’s NOT that the 10 Man’s are getting worse rewards, it’s just you have to go to the NEXT 10 Man to get similar rewards from the past 25 man. I.e. prentend there are three dungeons DungeonA, DungeonB, and DungeonC.

    Dungeon A 10 Man Rewwards = Low Tier Stuff
    DungeonA 25 Man Rewards = DungeonB 10 Man Rewards
    DungeonB 25 Man Rewards = DungeonC 10 Man Rewards
    …

    and so on.

    What this means is that after you finish DungeonA, you can either progress to DungeonA 25 Man, or DungeonB 10 Man. It’s simply giving players more options.

    You’re right they CAN make DungeonA 10 Man as HARD as DungeonA 25 Man, and give the same rewards…but WHY would you want to do that?

    Now, they can get twice the content with the same amount of coding. If stuff has the same difficulty levels, and the same rewards…well players are only going to do one of them. If you mix up the rewards and difficulty…then people will have incentive to try different things.

    If you give TOO many options. I.e. 10 Man Easy, 10 Man Hard, 25 Man Easy, 25 Man Hard…then it’s going to be too hard to find a group that wants to play the same dungeon as you.

43. Sirlin Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 5:52 am

    What I’m saying is no more or less content. As a 25-man raid participant, we’d expect you to spend X hours to get Y sword. In a 10-man raid, I’d also expect you to spend X hours to get Y sword. This is not less content, that has nothing to do with anything. You might also say “but it’s hard to balance those two things to be equal.” Yeah it is. But I suggest trying, rather than committing to a 1 tier difference automatically, before you’re even out of the gate.

44. Claytus Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 6:19 am

    Another clarification… the existing game doesn’t seperate tiers quite in the way you’re saying. It’s not “the best” loot is all in 25-mans. It’s actually that the best armor pieces are in 25-mans… the best trinkets are in 10-mans… the best offhands are from 5-mans. So, again, it’s an inclusiveness idea. There’s more “best” pieces available in 25-mans (because at the moment there’s just more bosses in all the 25-mans put together than in all the 10-mans put together, but that’s a seperate issue). I still think they can divide up gear in this new system you’re responding too as well, while still providing the 1-tier lower gear for any armor slots where the “best” item is in the other dungeon, just for people that don’t like doing both sizes of dungeon.

    As for the other stuff above… my point, to be 100% clear, is that I don’t believe making gear rewards the same is either necessary or sufficient to also address the dungeon size biases that you’re referring to. You’re right that it seems to be one way to solve the problem, but there are many other as well, and depending on how that solution interacts with other design goals blizzard has in mind, it might not be the best solution.

45. Sirlin Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 6:37 am

    I’m still not getting it then. When I say that giving a tier higher rewards (yes, for the armor pieces that are in there at all, not trinkets) is a “solution” I meant that in a backhanded, jerky way. If something isn’t popular, giving better rewards for it is not a real solution at all. If something would be popular without the better rewards, then the better rewards aren’t necessary either.

    Claytus, I’ll try to be even simpler. The system outlined in the video, to me, takes steps away from group-sized bias, but not the final step. Taking the final step is better than not taking the final step. After you take the final step, there might be other problems in the game (such as pvp rewards too good/not good enough) but that’s neither here nor there. On the issue of whether 10-mans should give same tier rewards as 25-man, I still see several things on the side of “yes, should be same” and virtually nothing I can understand on “no, 25-man needs to give better gear.”

    The only thing you or anyone is going to offer on the side of “25-man rewards SHOULD be a tier higher” is either a) group-size bias or b) because 25-mans are harder. And when you say harder, note that you do not mean gameplay challenge such as how many hit points a boss has or something. You mean coordination and real-life scheduling challenges. Completing those challenges does merit some bragging rights, but to give a tier higher gear is going right back to the very original problem of “bigger group is judged to be better by designers.”

    Several better solutions exist: a) gameplay difficulty and rewards in 10 vs 25 are the same. The extra coordination challenge is tough luck. If you enjoy the social aspect of 25, that is why you’ll do it. b) same as above, except 10 man has harder gameplay challenge to make it “fair.” c) same as a) except 10 man requires longer grinding (more token collection for example) to get the same reward, to make it “fair.” d) same as a) except 25 man gives you some badges have no effect other than to brag that you completed the challenges of organizing more people’s real-life schedules (congratulations?).

    Bad solution: 25-man gets a whole tier better gear, preserving the group-size bias when there is no need to do so. As Kaplan said, group size is a social preference of how many people you feel like hanging out with, not a gate that should prevent your progress or count against you.

46. Tim310 Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 7:08 am

    Well I think the deal is, if the rewards are the SAME in both 25-man and 10-man…why would you do both?

    Right now, you can do both 10-man and 25-man and get different things. As Claytus mentions, the 25-man stuff isn’t strictly better than the 10-man stuff. There are unique rewards in each.

    I think you’re tending to bias toward the group size you want to play, but a lot of players like to do all sorts of different things. Many people like to PvP, Solo, 5-man, 10-man AND 25-man.

    If all those avenues provided the same rewards…well then people wouldn’t do the other ones. If you make them different, then people are motivated to go to the other content. If there are 5 Dungeons with two settings (10/25 man), with the SAME rewards, then people are just going to have 5 dungeons to play. If you make them vary with difficulty and rewards, then people have 10 dungeons to play? Isn’t that better? Why would blizzard balance things to be equal, when it would take less coding to make them different, and provide “twice” as much content?

47. Tim310 Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 7:17 am

    Before you say “people won’t play the same content over again”, People did exactly that with the Heroic Dungeons. (and will again when Naxxaramus is re-released in the new expansion) It was an easy way to add twice as much content to the game with minimal coding on Blizzard’s part.

48. Sirlin Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 8:36 am

    Tim, I see now that i misread something that Claytus said. He was saying 10-mans have the best of a certain type of item and 25-mans have the best of another type. Ok sure. I’m not really objecting to that (well…much…it still seems not quite right but it does have the legitimate good effects you mentioned so ok). If that were the whole story, then fine.

    The video above implies to me that that is not the whole story. It sounds like 25-man Dungeon X has Shoulders Armor Tier 7 or whatever, and 10-man X has Shoulder Armor Tier 6. That 25-man X has Chest Armor Tier 7 and 10-man has Chest Armor Tier 6, and so on down the line. That’s what I take away when I hear “the 10-man dungeons will have a tier lower of rewards.” So while not objecting to Tim’s point, I still have to ask, isn’t my description just now the impression you also get from the video?

49. Claytus Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 9:25 am

    I think there’s a possible problem just in terms of vocabularly. If you’re right, and then mean exactly what you just said, tier 6 = 10-mans, tier 7 = 25-mans, it still doesn’t *necessarily* indicate the exact problem you described.

    A “tier” in WoW so far is a single armor set, made to match in both appearance, and provide set bonuses when used together. It has generally been the case that higher tier means better gear… but it’s not actually guaranteed. Especially when you get into complications like set bonuses earned from using the gear together… I think there’s actually classes now where the “best” set of armor actually involves combining multiple tiers. Anyway, my point is, even doing it that way, there’s ways for them to make the armor “different” and not “strictly better”. They just need to also balance difficulty of obtaining items correctly.

    Honestly, my impression from watching the video, is that the designers have already had this discussion, and they’re still going back and forth, and they’re mostly likely going to come up with solutions beyond anything we could mention.

50. Tim310 Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 9:39 am

    Yeah, I think this sort of brings me back to my point that we really don’t know exactly how the armor is going to be divided out until they release loot tables. Right now, tiers are actually divided up between 10/25 man, but then again right now there aren’t TWO versions of the raid dungeons.

    Now that I hear it, I see what you’re saying. But I think it’s sort of vague because it’s probably still changing around right now.

    I see your point and concerns, but I’m guessing blizzard also knows them as well. I doubt it’ll be a straight up “strictly better” gear between the two, but who knows it might. Then I can come back and say “see sirlin said so” :)

51. Tim310 Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 9:39 am

    Yeah, I think this sort of brings me back to my point that we really don’t know exactly how the armor is going to be divided out until they release loot tables. Right now, tiers are actually divided up between 10/25 man, but then again right now there aren’t TWO versions of the raid dungeons.

    Now that I hear it, I see what you’re saying. But I think it’s sort of vague because it’s probably still changing around right now.

    I see your point and concerns, but I’m guessing blizzard also knows them as well. I doubt it’ll be a straight up “strictly better” gear between the two, but who knows it might. Then I can come back and say “see sirlin said so” :)

52. Thomas Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 9:59 am

    It seems to me that the problem for the WoW designers is that here is that there are two separate and distinct aspects of the difficulty of large-scale raiding. On the one hand, there are the encounters, and on the other hand, there’s the social challenge of gathering together a group of unruly, selfish, and often very young people. A lot of people, including, I expect, the designers, would enjoy the challenge of completing 25 man encounters if it didn’t mean they have to build their lives around the game — which isn’t intrinsically more difficult than a smaller group, but is certainly a different experience. As a game design problem, the issue is how to take advantage of the design space having many players creates without allowing the social challenges to prevent anyone from raiding. The solution heretofore has been to bribe players to play in large groups with superior gear.

    So if raids are fun, but raiding isn’t, what are the designers supposed to do? I tend to think it’s an insoluble problem. Encounter design, no matter its quality — and Blizzard’s quality has been very high — can’t eliminate the hassle of keeping a big guild running. Player matching systems, which have been only moderately successful for 5-man groups, won’t be able to scale up to those sizes, and player-matched groups couldn’t complete a 25 man raid anyway. As Sirlin has convincingly argued, bribing players to perform unfun tasks by offering stronger characters is a pernicious and terrible design that destroys fun and creates an unhappy, addicted player base. And raiders are the last people who would do something just because they enjoy it; they are the kind of powergamers who are really controlled by economic motives (minimizing risk and maximizing reward at all costs.) Raids are fun, but raiding isn’t: if designers can’t get people to raid without bribing them with gear, then raids shouldn’t exist.

53. Babe Bridou Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    In the end, I guess the truth is in the amount of people that play and keep playing the game. To have people play the game and enjoy it, you need the power balance to be relatively even throughout the population while feeding it with new rewards. That’s lever #1. You can’t afford having some very successful characters skyrocket above the level that fresher ones cannot even hope of reaching any time soon.

    The most absolute pointers to look at for lever #1 is the gear level of PVE “tanks”. Right now the difference between a fresh level 70 tank (”noob”) and a seasoned level 70 tank (”pro”) is horrific. At the moment, “pro” is reaching the point where he is litterally immune to incoming damage. “noob” gets two-shot by bosses. The problem is, no one will ever want to play with “noob”, and “noob” will never get his gear upgrades done to even reach the next instance level requirement. Unless he has countless friends willing to dedicate their time to help him out. And the game needs to reward helpers for their time.
    If the gear difference is easy to cross, then the reward for helpers doesn’t need to be especially good nor game-breaking - a simple title or some vanity pet will do.
    But if the gear difference is so large as to require litterally months and months of grinding, or very large raids of dedicated helpers to coordinate over a couple weeks, then you really need to reward the efforts of the helpers substantially, by offering them top quality upgrades as well.
    So that’s why, in essence, guilds have to keep “farming” old content: because some people leave, some people are unavailable, and they need to keep quality character in the bench for those times where their starting line-up is incomplete. And to achieve that, they need content where individual skill and gear quality matters less than the overall team coordination and community spirit. And that is obviously better suited for larger groups. The planned 25/10 men content&reward layout is a middle-ground: either you progress as a solid 10-men group at the current content difficulty level, or you play catch-up in previous difficulty levels as a not-so-solid but larger 25-men group.

    The key is there, that lever #1, the “monty haul” lever. They need to keep rewarding their customers, so they need to keep pushing the lever. But they still need to get new customers to play as well, so they need mechanics to help them catch-up somewhat seamlessly. Should they tune down that mechanic, they will be forced to pull the monty haul lever at the risk of losing older players in the process.
    And that in my opinion is the critical business reason behind keeping larger-size raid instance rewards above that of smaller-size ones.

54. Claytus Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    Thomas: That’s not the problem. Raids *are* fun, that’s already been established, get your personal biases out of here. But, organizing large groups of people can be a headache, so players legitimately want something to show off that they were successful at it.

    Babe Bridou: You sound like you quit the game pre-expansion. Blizzard put a lot of work into tuning TBC bosses so that you can’t just have one crazy geared tank soak up damage, while everyone else tosses pebbles at the boss until he dies (which was often how things worked in the old days). Guilds actually tend to have roughly equivalent gear levels across the board, and damage mitigation is no longer such an extreme bottleneck that a lesser geared tank can’t effectively take over when necessary.

55. Batox Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    Mr. Sirlin, I find your position summarized in the following excerpt from Schiller:
    STAUFFACHER: In unity the weak are mighty too.
    TELL: The strong man is most mighty when alone.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to value individual player skill over everything else. If that’s true, then my blunt reply to you is - go there and solo (or two-man) the endgame instances. Tell is simply wrong in the above statement, there are things which cannot be achieved by single individuals, no matter how strong they are.

    For me, this lesson is the whole point of a MMORPG. There’s a plethora of games out there which reward individual player skill. Why is it neccessary to turn a MMORPG which is uniquely suited to reward team play into just another game which is all about individual player skill?

    And, btw, if you insist on playing “alone”, Blizzard permits multiboxing. You and your girlfriend each buy five accounts, and voila, soon you’re able to clear Karazahn…

56. RobisWaiting... Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

    Sirlin, I don’t think you’re taking into account the very nature of WoW, which is it never ends and there always has to be a sense of progression… There must always be a “hardest level”… There can be hard, harder, extremely hard, but ultimately there MUST be a hardest, to give everyone something to strive towards… And that hardest has to keep changing every major patch update… Can we agree on that? If not, if you are saying “Why does there need to be a Top/Hardest Dungeon/Raid/Instance? Why can’t there be 5 different types (size requirement) with all of them being exactly the same really-hard difficulty?” Because this is an adventure role-playing game and people want the challenge/bragging rights to say that they beat the absolute hardest dungeon… That, and the gear, are the reasons 8 million people are still p(l)aying… Anyway, if you agree there has to be a “Hardest” (and there does), then it only makes sense that it would be the raid experience that is hardest to coordinate… Whether you are playing a 25-man or a 10-man, typically, on a boss, if one person makes a mistake/pulls aggro/dies then more often than not the entire group wipes… Obviously you can understand why that makes a 25-man inherently more difficult; there’s 15 more people involved that, if they make a mistake could kill everyone… You seem to be saying, “I personally don’t like the stress and time commitment of 25-man raiding and as such I don’t think I should be penalized for not doing it.” Even as you recognize that it is more difficult. I know you think it’s a different less-fun kind of difficultly, but it is still inarguably more difficult… Personally, I don’t like the stress and time commitment either, which is why I only do Kara and ZA runs these days, but I don’t begrudge my friends who are doing it and are being rewarded for their efforts…
    And really, what it all boils down to is the loot… If you can just get over the fact that by doing the 10-man raids you are merely getting the “Really-Amazing-Nearly-The-Best-Awesome-Epic” Gear, but not the “Absolute-Singularly-Best-Gear-In-The-Game” Gear” then it becomes a complete non-issue…

57. STCAB Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 5:46 pm

    “d) same as a) except 25 man gives you some badges have no effect other than to brag that you completed the challenges of organizing more people’s real-life schedules (congratulations?).”

    Well, as I said, these types of rewards don’t really need to be a sort of badge, they could be stuff like a fun trinket with a minor ‘fun’ ability, a pet, etc. It seems pretty minor (and it is). But it’s still motivating for those people who want to do the 25-man raid for the challenge and bragging rights. To me it really seems like a good solution if you’re gonna make 10-man and 25-man raids both drop the +99 fire DeathSword of Doom.

58. Thomas Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 7:18 pm

    Claytus: You obviously didn’t read what I wrote very carefully; that’s the exact distinction that I was trying to make. I do think playing in large raids is fun! Organizing them is hell. The problem is that WoW, which has succeeded by streamlining away the boring and unfun elements of other MMO’s and retaining their core interest, fundamentally can’t streamline away the social obligations of raiding, which can be fun at smaller sizes but are inevitably a headache in a large guild. It’s one of the few aspects of the game Blizzard can’t control, and in my opinion gear rewards in 25-mans are an attempt to design around it since they can’t fix it.

    Try not to think of it as rewards for the difficulty of performing a certain task; that’s a canard. From a design perspective, the carrot on a stick is just one part of the package of a game event which is supposed to be fun when taken altogether; this social problem causes it to take on too much weight in raiding because it has to compensate for fundamentally unpleasant activities. I like the idea of vanity items as rewards for raids, but I assume the reason Blizzard moved away from them (according to interviews, they were in the initial design for 40-mans in WoW) is because they didn’t provide enough motivation to get people to raid. That’s a sign that the raiding experience is fundamentally broken.

59. Sirlin Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

    It’s amazing that no matter how many dozens of times I say that it’s more inclusive to give similar rewards for all group sizes, someone comes here and says “you want 1 and 2 man versions to have all the best rewards, why are you playing an MMO?” Sigh. For the 100th time, I never said smaller groups should get everything fast and bigger groups should suffer. That would be just as against my point as doing it the other way around. Batox, seriously, get on the same page as what’s being said here. Also, you have misunderstood what an MMO is in the first place, but that’s for another time.

    I throw all my support to Thomas. He’s explained the situation very well.

60. Claytus Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 11:55 pm

    I still think Thomas is being too harsh on the designers. You’re forgetting that in the game, currently, there are 2 10-man dungeons, and 7 25-man dungeons. That’s a real big glaring imbalance right there, and it would be nice if they solved it… but there’s already several pieces of really good gear rewards in those 2 10-mans that can’t be replaces until possibly the hardest of the 25-mans has been completed. That doesn’t, however, mean that they’re “bribing” anyone to complete content due to gear. It’s just naturally that more gear is in 25-mans because there’s more 25-mans total. There is a gear-locked progression in place as well. As I said before, you collect gear in 25-mans for the explicit purpose of completing more 25-mans. Now that PvP has it’s own seperate gear rewards, there’s no other use for 25-man gear. I don’t understanding how they even could be bribing players when it’s such a self-contained system. If you don’t like 25-mans, you don’t do it, and you won’t lose anything.

    As for prestige items… Blizzard seems to have made a very clear decision to make those rewards for something beyond simply clearing a dungeon. Amani war bears are the best current example I know of. They’re found only by clearing the 10-man dungeon ZA without wiping. Just clearing things yet getting a prestige item, seems outside of their current design goals. Prestige items are innately kind of pointless once everyone has one, and I think blizzard realized that.

61. PoisonDagger Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 12:18 am

    “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to value individual player skill over everything else. If that’s true, then my blunt reply to you is - go there and solo (or two-man) the endgame instances. Tell is simply wrong in the above statement, there are things which cannot be achieved by single individuals, no matter how strong they are.”

    My big problem with WoW is that it’s explicitly designed to require groups, but in kind of a contrived way. The designers even tell players how the group is expected to be built - tank, heal, dps. It’s what I call the bad kind of teamwork, where each player is a part of a machine that, if one part breaks, the whole thing becomes useless. In real life, teamwork isn’t quite as easy as “follow our pre-prescribed tasks and we all win!”. Maybe in physical labor or some other menial tasks, but not in anything that requires ingenuity.

    Compare that to something like Gears of War on Insane difficulty. The game is significantly easier on co-op mode because of the extra target for enemies, more firepower, and revive ability. Nobody is stuck doing a specific duty - both players can, at any point, express their personal abilities to benefit the team (if someone’s good at chainsawing, for instance, they can do that and save everyone’s ammo - but nobody’s ever *required* to do it). If one player dies, the other player can adjust to his situation and carry on, eventually reviving the teammate if he gets in the right position. Compare that to WoW. What if nobody wants to play a healer? Too bad, someone does it or else some other person who wants to will take someone else’s place. Also, if the healers die, the whole team is fucked. In Gears, the game is never over until both players are dead. Nothing prevents the living player from making a comeback from a sticky situation.

    Oh and in Gears, the task is harder with one player, but it can still be done. WoW purposely locks out solo-ers by requiring tank/heal/dps, not by making it technically possible but really difficult like Gears on Insane.

    I think co-op shooters teach far better lessons about teamwork. They’re easier when working with other players, but you’re still allowed to accomplish stuff with your own ingenuity if the situation calls for it, and you can always accomplish stuff on your own if your teammates fail. Those games aren’t just “stick to the plan and we all win”.

62. Forty Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 12:38 am

    I’m pretty sure that Blizzard’s raid design (or even just the presence of raids) is barely a factor in WoW’s 9+ million subscribers and status as arguably the most successful MMORPG ever.

63. Forty Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 12:48 am

    “Now that PvP has it’s own seperate gear rewards, there’s no other use for 25-man gear. I don’t understanding how they even could be bribing players when it’s such a self-contained system. If you don’t like 25-mans, you don’t do it, and you won’t lose anything.”

    I wouldn’t really say this is exactly true in practice. Some of the top arena teams have some players using some amount of equipment from 25-man raids. Admittedly, this observation might be dismissed as it is not really provable if that setup is optimal, but there is still a huge (non 25-man) PvE investment required to be optimal in PvP. I believe I’m repeating myself here, though, and I’m definitely drifting off the original topic.

    I just won’t be surprised if history repeats itself and WoW finds itself in a situation where optimal PvP performance requires large scale raiding.

64. Sumason2 Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 12:58 am

    Wow, lots of comments fast. I haven’t read all of the comments so I apologize in advance if I bring up a point that has already been made, just ignore it.

    A little bit about my background, I used to play wow over a year ago in the age of 40-man raids. I was in the top guild of my server, became my class officer and was very chummy with all of the administration of the guild. The administration and I moved to another top guild on another server where the guild eventually completed the final 40 man dungeon. I dropped out of the guild after completing the 4-horsemen encounter because I met my wife, and thankfully I never went back.

    There was a major difference from the two guilds, the first one had members who were caught up in getting gear for the sake of having the gear, while the second guild was focussed on progressing through the game. The second guild viewed gear as a stepping stone to accessing new content. The second guild ultimately experienced every 40-man raid encounter in the game. The second guild was, ready for some ego stroking?, Playing to win. I’m talking about this because I want to talk about why I think MMO players do the things they do. There are many types of players, but for the sake of this comment I’ll generalize them in two categories, Scrubs and Players ( just to keep the terms consistent ).

    I don’t mean to berate these kinds of players, so I’m going to try to talk about them in the least confrontational way.

    In my opinion a scrubby player is one who wants the shinny object, he wants the item to show to his friends, he’s the person who will rather enchant his weapon with a glowy-proc instead of the best enchantment in the game. He’s not concerned about doing things for the sake of challenges. While a player will try to accomplish the impossible, for example the group that did a 5 man raid on Onyxia ( A dungeon with a single Dragon named Onyxia at the end of it ). I for fun used to try so solo or duo whole 5-man dungeons, just to see how far I could get. There’s nothing wrong with being either a scrub or a player, but in the days of 40-man raid a scrub never got to see first hand the beautifully designed encounters of Naxrammas.

    I agree with Sirlin, I believe that all content should be accessible to everyone - even if you want to solo it. I don’t believe this is a monumental request, and I believe it will result in more subscriptions.

    One solution I was thinking of when I was reading the article is:
    1. Monsters/Bosses need to be scaled to the number of people in your group. ( I believe this shouldn’t have to be stated, but I will state it to be blatant. )
    2. All drops should be possible in the dungeon regardless of number of people in group.
    3. Number of drops should scale with number of people in group,
    4. Number of drops in a given boss’s loot table should increase as to reward bigger groups for completing the more difficult encounter.
    5. Boss A.I. will need to be scaled
    6. Option for small group to take on harder difficulties, in essence technically increasing the group size, like typing players 8 in a single player diablo2 game.

    I will explain:
    2. This is what the article is about, If I didn’t argue this point there would be no use commenting.
    3 & 4. One of the things that really turned me off of raiding was that I needed to repeat dungeons for people hundreds of times before they got X drop. In my opinion it was a waste of time. By increasing the number of drops based on group size it gives a more fair feeling to the group and speeds up the gear requirements for later dungeons for new members of the guild. To keep the scarcity of the rare drops you’ll need to expand the loot tables.
    5. This is the double edged sword. While I’d like to be able to experience all of the tactics and challenges, some encounters aren’t possible solo or 2 man even if I was immortal. For example the Onyxia encounter at 2/3 health the dragon starts flying into the air and stays there until she reaches 1/3 health. If I can’t hit her she’ll never reach 1/3 health and I’ll be stuck. So for this encounter I would have to make a rule that says if the group size is less than 5, Onyxia will only fly for 30 seconds, instead of waiting for her health to drop to 1/3. So the A.I. will need to be tweaked. This also rewards bigger groups with new challenges - if you’re into that type of game.
    6. It’s time for a challenge!!!

    I believe with the above changes a husband who only has maybe an hour or two to play on the weekends can experience all the content, while occasionally inviting a group of friends for an extra challenge. And the hardcore Challenge seeker can still raid with his guild and race against other guilds on the server to complete X dungeon before they do.

    Thank you for your time, and your server space,
    -Sumason2

65. Babe Bridou Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 2:08 am

    “Babe Bridou: You sound like you quit the game pre-expansion. Blizzard put a lot of work into tuning TBC bosses so that you can’t just have one crazy geared tank soak up damage, while everyone else tosses pebbles at the boss until he dies (which was often how things worked in the old days). Guilds actually tend to have roughly equivalent gear levels across the board, and damage mitigation is no longer such an extreme bottleneck that a lesser geared tank can’t effectively take over when necessary.”

    Claytus: I didn’t quit the game pre-expansion, and I don’t deny what you’re saying, but you should try to gear up a newborn tank these days. Do you remember that, near the end of level 69, your warrior had about 9k health, 10k armour, 30% avoidance and 15% block for about 150 blocking value, and that “near the end of 70″ your tank has nearly doubled each of these stats, making him essentially ~ten times as powerful? Yet it’s not like your character “jumps” to that level instantly with his last ding. You actually need to work a long time for it, a lot of patience, and a decent number of partners helping you with that “project”.

    Also, tanks are just an example in my demonstration. The monty haul factor affects every class, every role, and at such states of gear difference you, as a game designer, need to design seamless, accepted shortcuts.
    I consider giving larger raids better rewards as one of those “seamless shortcuts”.

    Anyway, Sumason2 has a point about the scaling difficulty, but misses it by a tiny bit on the “scrub vs play to win” one. I believe that being greedy in this game is also a part of “playing to win”. If your team is made of players with very different playtimes, you would be a fool to stay in that same team. You would be a scrub, as I was back in the days, for refusing to play with people you don’t know “because you’re saving yourself for a raid with your friends that might not happen”. And if you actually get to play with people you don’t know, you would be a scrub by not caring about the items that drop. You’re not helping anyone of your friends by not only going to an instance without them but also not grabbing some upgrade to make it easier for the one time when you get to raid together with them. In that sense, you’re not playing to win if you don’t behave like a lootwhore from time to time, when the occasion presents itself.

    In the end, the people who got to see the last instance in the game are the people with the most consistent playing schedule & skill all around, for whom gear didn’t matter, only success, whenever they were playing together, but to whom shiny gear and individual progress was everything whenever their teammates were offline or busy.

66. Sumason2 Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 4:25 am

    I didn’t make it mean to sound like it was the only criteria for being a scrub, I just wanted to make a point that players do things for different reasons.

    Ugh loot caused so much drama in that game.

67. Claytus Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 8:53 am

    PoisonDagger: It’s another facet of what makes WoW, WoW, in my opinion. FFXI is another example of a very popular MMO, where things aren’t explicitly defined. I was gonna write a lot more about them, but it’s too complex, so I took it away. Anyway, my point is, WoWs system isn’t needed for a succesful MMO… it just turned out that WoW was the most succesful MMO, so it’s also the most popular system. Either the rest of the game is really important, or there’s something about WoW’s endgame that people like over the more “expressive” battle systems found elsewhere… I’d lean towards the former, but it’s worth considering the latter is true.

    Babe Bridou: Maybe I read too much into your comments, sorry. My point was that damage mitigation used to be the single most important “bottleneck” to passing boss fights… and it’s just not anymore. A weakly geared tank can do fine, if all your healers are uber. I’m just not sure what your complaint is… since everyone has to collect good gear before their useful, and people with less than sufficient gear doing any task can still fit in, as long as not everyone in a raid is undergeared.

    Sumason: I mostly agree with what you said. I do think there’s a minimum point where blizzard isn’t required to make *everything* accessible, though. I remember hearing complaints when ffxi expansions came out, and the entire expansion was for level 60+ players. Lots of new guys, or people who had never leveled to 60 pre-expansion were sitting around going “where’s our new content… everything needs to be fair”. And the simple truth was, the game had a completely sufficient amount of content for people who were under 60 already. The expansion focused on people beyond that, because only people beyond that had already done everything the game had to offer, and actually needed more. The guys under that level hadn’t bothered doing what was available, and were just sitting around going “we don’t like what the game has to offer, give us something different”. And at some point it really is valid to just say, “Then go play a different game”. Same in this situation… the husband who plays 2 hours a week, doesn’t need to see the inside of black temple. He’s got the 500 hours worth of stuff that all the raiders in black temple were doing every day before they made it inside.

    It’s a valid complaint when you have people ready to enter an instance, that can’t merely due to inability to schedule with 24 other people correctly. But the “I don’t play as much as you, but I want be at the same level you are” issue is kinda crossing into different territory.

68. PoisonDagger Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 10:54 am

    Claytus, I totally agree that role-based teamwork is part of makes WoW what it is. It’s also part of what made old-school MMO’s like EverQuest what they were. Basically, knowing that you’ll have an important role during endgame instances is one of many carrots dangled in front of your nose as you level up. “I can’t wait until I have all my healing skills and gear so I can give it all I’ve got during raids!”. In fact, it makes you feel important during the raid itself as you fulfill your prescribed tasks. It’s the enjoyment of doing as planned and not letting the team down, with little (or at least less) room for enjoyment of doing more than people expected of you (as I’ve experienced in Gears co-op countless times with reviving, sniping, chainsawing, and more).

    The reason I even bring this up is that with this take on grouping, it’s making it harder to design dungeons for smaller groups without forcing specific class combinations. Take a two-player dungeon, for instance. What if both players want to DPS? Too bad. Someone has to heal even though both players don’t want to. Diablo II scaled well because all classes are designed for a single end: monster killing.

69. Claytus Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

    I wasn’t really referring to the role-based teamwork. FFXI definitely had tank/healer/dps. The issue is that it wasn’t so tightly prescribed as regards who could fill what role. FFXI has that subjob thing, so, like, melees could throw on whm as a sub, and suddenly cast useful healing spells. There were some really weird combos of jobs you’d see in endgame, when people were appropriately geard. Bards and red mages could make amazing tanks, for example, despite being designed as healers. Summoners were great healers despite being a dps class. And so on and so forth… the game allowed more creativity, but at the expense of a much looser design in general.

70. Batox Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 3:11 pm

    Thomas and Sirlin, you both remain wrong. “Raids are fun, but raiding isn’t” is nonsense. Raiding is not fun for self-centered individuals who feel that everybody else sucks and only tags along. It would indeed not be fun if there was a direct relation between time spent grinding and raid success. In the original game, these views may have had some justification - MC indeed matches that description. But in the TBC instances, there are many encounters (we’re currently learning Archimonde) which cannot be beaten by grinding or just investing more time, but where every single player has to fulfill their function, nobody must make a mistake, where each member must intelligently learn the encounter.

    If the concept of “25 mans yield the same rewards with the same effort as solo play” would be realized, 25 mans would have to require lower individual player skill than small-group or solo play. As I said, in TBC there are a lot of bosses which require 25 people with high individual skills. This combination duely awards the best loot.

    Thomas, “If designers can’t get people to raid without bribing them with gear then it shouldn’t exist” is the culmination of nonsense when discussing WoW, thought to the end this leads to “Gear rewards are bad” and “Gaining power through leveling is bad”. There are MMOs which are based on that concept (e.g. Eve, A Tale in the Desert or WW2 online), but gear rewards and leveling are a central concept of WoW, so if you claim these should be removed, you’re asking for an entirely different game. Again, these games do exist, just go there, but leave WoW alone.

71. Brian Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 10:02 pm

    I’d still be playing WoW happily if I could just keep doing the 5 man instances all the time with my friends. For me, that’s the pinnacle of fun. But Blizzard thinks I’m a slacker, and should be joining a raid guild if I want the big boy loots. So, I left.

    Petty? Yes. It’s not like the strictly better gear the raiders had made my gear any less capable of getting the job done, but there is something deeply frustrating about that situation. And for me, it was frustrating enough to make me stop giving them money.

    Whats so bad about:
    Time * Challenge = Reward

    Why must it be:
    Time * Challenge * Player Count = Reward?

72. Anthony Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

    Yeah, I think that the coordination is actually the point. Managing complex, large groups is one of the gameplay elements of WoW… it’s the whole point of the game at the higher levels. What would you expect, that ten man raids would get the same rewards as 25? Then why would anyone ever bother amassing a 25 man raid?

    I didn’t raid much, but I can tell you that when I did I was very impressed with the epic scale and coordination of the venture. Yeah there was a crazy amount of waiting, but the raid content was definitely some of the most exciting in the game for me.

    I just think they need to make sure there is content for all types of players… something for everyone to do, even if they don’t like being social or if they don’t have the time to coordinate a huge raid. Epic five man, even solo content, in the end game would really benefit WoW.

    One thing to note is that event though gear rewards are more significant in higher number raids, they are split between more people. So there is an inherent balancing in this system: if there were epic solo quests where the gear was good but not quite as good as raids, they would still be worthwhile, because you’d be guaranteed that EVERY drop would be yours.

73. PoisonDagger Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 11:32 pm

    No, that is not inherently balanced. If you want the best stuff, which everyone does, you’re still forced to do 25 mans. As argued, the number of players you raid with should be about personal preference, not about what rewards you’re after.

74. Claytus Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 11:33 pm

    Batox: I don’t think you actually understand what they said. You’re clearly just putting words in their mouths. It is possible for blizzard to create solo or 5-man content that requires a high degree of individual skill. The game currently doesn’t have that, but supposedly the designers will add it in WotLK. Try rereading the original arguments and drop your biases.

    Brian: Same to you. The problem is not how you defined it. In the game, currently Time*Challenge = reward, this is always true. The problem is that there is not a single challenging 5-man instance in the entire game at the moment. Seriously, they’re completely jokes compared to anything that needs higher numbers of players. That’s a serious problem, that many people want addressed… but the fix is not to award better gear to people who only play 5-mans, just so they can feel ‘included’, when they haven’t actually done anything to earn it.

75. Sumason2 Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

    Claytus: In regards to the FFXI scenario… inevitably when you release an expansion it has to be geared toward the people who have experienced the already existing content, but you can still throw the others a bone. For example by trying to drive it into their head “Play the older content!!!” by giving them a new class or new race which they have to repeat the old content, with a splash of new, Hahahaha.

    As far as not being able to see the inside of the black temple, what happened to Naxrammas was a crime to developers as much as players. The dungeon was out for about 6 months before expansion came out and then became obsolete, I’ve heard rumors that they are redoing it for level 80, but I’m sure that’s going to be “real raider” material. It was the best dungeon pre-BC, there’s so much rich story, background, setting, Ooo… It was just cool to walk around an empty dungeon and hear all the music! And it was locked away from people unless they were in a high-end guild. If I had helped developed that dungeon and went to say for example Blizzcon and I told people, Oh I worked on the functionality for the fungal spores… and I got a blank stare from everyone I’d be upset.

    So - In my fantasy world -
    Even if I had to go through the dungeon having very little chance of getting the items I wanted, only progressing through it 2hours at a time in a very dumbed down A.I. version of the encoun