4+ Months in, they finally ask for feedback...

[Shadowwolf]

[blizzard author=Ghostcrawler link=http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2452061]We addressed our views on dungeon difficulty several weeks ago, and in the interim many players have asked for us to comment on raid difficulty.

I chose to use the word "progress" in the title for this blog quite intentionally. We think progression is the key to players having fun. When groups stop making progress, the members get frustrated. When individuals feel like they are stuck, that's when they start to lose interest. I don't think it strictly has to do with the flow of loot being shut off. A big part of it is the sense that as you climb up that mountain, you are getting closer and closer to the summit instead of just sliding back down to base camp at the end of each day.

Let's consider two extremes. If you complete the raid content very quickly and have Sinestra on farm and everyone has acquired their best in slot items, then you're probably ready to take a break from raiding. If you worked really hard to get to that point, as many of the current "finished" guilds did, then you're probably pretty happy about resting until Firelands becomes available. However, if that break point happens too soon, too easily, for too many guilds, then the raiding game can feel empty. Players run out of content before they are ready to run out of content, if that makes sense. Now let's consider the other extreme, where a guild just has no realistic chance of ever beating a boss. This can be particularly demoralizing if it's the first boss, but it can happen at any time. That guild might not feel like they are making progress. Many guilds are willing to put in a few weeks trying to master a new encounter, but if it gets to the point where they are wiping for months, there's a good chance they'll start to see burnout and thinning ranks. The sweet spot in raid balance for us to hit is that everyone feels like they can still make progress. Content that is too hard or too easy doesn't meet that goal.

Raid encounters, to some extent, nerf themselves. This is because every week, the raid members acquire more and more gear. Secondarily, the community acquires more and more knowledge and experience, which translates into better videos, strategy guides, or even UI mods, as well as just more players who have experienced the encounters firsthand. Each week that you are able to kill any bosses, your group's gear improves overall, through Valor points if nothing else. When Firelands is available, everyone's gear will quickly take a step up in quality. This will give you an even better chance to beat those bosses that are blocking you now. We wouldn't be surprised to see some guilds try the first few Firelands bosses one night, while using the next night to go back to get the head and chests from Nef and Cho'gall in order to complete their set bonuses, that is until acquiring new set bonuses becomes feasible. On some bosses, though, better armor and weapons may not be enough because some mechanics just can't easily be outgeared. To mitigate that problem, our tendency is to nerf content over time just to make sure a wide variety of players see it. The trailblazers get to see the fights before anyone else, but we don't lock the dungeon door behind them.

Having said all of that, there are some encounters that still need adjustment. Heroic 10-player modes can often be the hardest to balance, because those groups just don't have access to the sheer number of tools in one group that the larger raids have. You've probably seen some hotfixes go out recently and we might make more adjustments in 4.1. We'll continue to monitor progress and make adjustments when we feel the time is right.

Overall, we are pretty happy with our current raid balance. Most guilds that are trying seem to be making some progress. On some realms, we're seeing pickup groups for at least the earlier bosses, which seems appropriate for where we are in the content cycle. The Heroic versions are particularly challenging, though even in that case, there is a gradient with easier and very difficult bosses. For those of you who feel like you are stuck on progression, we'd like to hear more about why. Are you trying to PUG the encounters? Do you have a very casual guild with a lot of different players each night? Is the problem that you're undergeared or that the mechanics are too unforgiving? What are the mechanics that are really hard for raid leadership to explain or even understand? Are your tanks exploding, or are your healers running out of mana, or are you failing the berserk timers? We have data on all of this, but it's useful to hear it from your point of view as well. Remember, our goal is that you beat the fight because you understood the mechanics and executed your tanking, DPS, and healing around those constraints. If you're just kind of powering through a boss ability or phase that you don't really understand, then it's going to be a lot harder for you. As always, feedback on which encounters you are enjoying and which ones you never want to see again is also appreciated, though we've gotten a lot of that already, and are designing your Firelands foes with that in mind.

P.S. I am as excited about the Firelands encounters as I am about the current ones. We can't wait for you to wipe to them, er... see them.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer of World of Warcraft. He wipes to the elevator boss.[/blizzard]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2452061

[Shadowwolf]

TBH, this reads exactly like his "Heroics are hard" post with the exception of it being a little less accusatory and less nasty but still far too arrogant.

Looking at the comment thread of it, damn near every single comment says the same thing which is not surprising to see really. One can only hope they listen to the feedback instead of ignoring it and telling people if they dont like it to go away like they did in the past.

[Zario]

Makes him sounds kind of like a jerk.  I think it sounded like "we ramped it up for the hardcore, no-life players.  You regular people will get your shot at it 6-months after the initial cata release when we turn it into easy mode." 

My issue is that there wasn't a decent transition between 5-man heroics and the intro raids.  It feels like you can't start a raid until *everyone* is rock'n BIS gear from 5-mans.

[Lord Entropy]

Yeah, it's frustrating.  Blizz has a lot of tools to provide a variety of difficulty levels for everyone from hard-core to pugs, but they didn't use them effectively.  There's no real entry-level raid besides BH, which doesn't really count IMO.  They could have at least added a boss or two at the beginning of one or two of the instances that could be done with, say, an ilevel 333 raid.  It doesn't even have to be an entire instance that's easier.  That would give people raiding experience (necessary to develop group coordination for more difficult fights) while providing another small source for gear and valor points.

[Shadowwolf]

Its all that pooled with many other things really.

1 rez per combat is, for lack of any other way to describe it, stupid. Thats merely another way to make encounters unnecessarily harder. That kind of limitation should be left to Heroic modes, it has no business in regulars because honestly, who is really exploiting combat rezing?

1 Pot per combat needs to go away and the linking of pot types as well. This was a Wrath change done to try and make raiding in wrath more challenging and it had virtually no impact at all because things like mana were too easily regenned back then. Now...its a hindrance because mana regen and whatnot sucks so badly that being able to use short cooldown short duration pots like [item]22839[/item] and [item]58146[/item] would actually have a value now like they did in BC but they dont, because most classes cant afford to waste the linked cooldown on them and instead save it for a health or mana pot.

Damn near every boss in Cata is an "interrupt on time or DIE" fight. Its all the same crap mixed in with recycled boss mechanics. If you miss an interrupt or move out of place at the wrong time, not only do YOU die, the raid wipes and there is virtually no way to recover that try. Almost all of the interrupts needed to be controlled are on a 2sec cast time, which scientifically, it takes at least 1 second for your brain to process the info and another second to actually initiate the click to stop the cast. Leaving absolutely no room for delay at all and requiring everyone in the raid responsible for those interrupts to possess twitch like response time and see exactly when the cast is begun to catch it in time. If you miss it by a fraction of a second, you will fail. Almost every fight is that way. Halfus, BoT Council, Cho'gal, Onitron bots, Nef, etc etc etc. Upping the cast time or removing the requirement that each one MUST be interrupted will help things immensely.

Reverting those 3 things there would increase the amount of people who could actually be successful in raids by a lot without trivializing raid difficulty.

[Lord Entropy]

Shadow,

I think we agree - all the things you list would tend to make the content easier and more accessible.  It seems to me there are multiple ways to bring that about, my point was that Blizz simply chose not to employ those ideas (and others) which created a pretty big gap between heroic dungeons and normal raids.

[Shadowwolf]

I wasnt arguing with you, was just venting thoughts.

I think its being intentionally not done to extend the life of the expansion. For every bit of Cata that lasts longer than projected, thats 1 less or not just 1 less but "less" in general they need to make for content patches till the next expansion. We are kinda seeing that now with the delay of Firelands in 4.1 to 4.2. They have no need to put it in 4.1 because so many of us are barely into the 4.0 stuff. So from a business standpoint, which seems to be the sole governing decision maker lately in WoW, it makes more sense to keep things as-is because they have to create less.

I think their issue is they still think they are top dog in MMOs and that they can browbeat the player base into conforming to what they wish so thats why there is apathy in resolving what is clearly a problem. Unfortunately now there are games like Rift and up and coming Star Wars which threaten to steal market share away, but again, I dont think they truly believe it yet. Mainly because a lot of people pay quarterly in subscription cause it saves some money, and its easier, they dont see the decrease in play yet as most of the exodus to other games just started a few weeks ago. So its gonna be 2-3 more months yet till accounts are left to expire, which will be the June qtrly earnings report to the FTC. Unfortunately in the short term immediate sense, the effect hits guilds before it hits Blizz's bottom line as we see now. By the time they notice any drop in income from lost subscriptions, it'll sadly be too late to really fix it and I am hoping they dont procrastinate that long to actually do something. If they do, the player base for WoW will drop off and once you lose people playing to this kind of frustration and disappointment, its very very difficult to bring them back because people will just expect it to be the same or if it is fixed, to happen again and why change back to something youre unsure about.

I think its just a matter of arrogance, improper data collection and goofy mathematics. GC's posts on these subjects OOOOZE arrogance, his messages could easily be summed up as "this is how it is, if you dont like it too bad" which some Blue posts over the last few months have actually said. Some Blue posters were actually telling people they were just playing "bad" and that if they didnt like it, play another game which is the DUMBEST thing a company could ever say to its customer base "If you dont like it, find someone else". That is arrogance 10 fold to honestly believe you are able to basically just write off people like that without a care. The improper data collection is PTR and Beta testing. The only people who really play on the PTR and Beta realms regularly and heavily are hardcore players. Casual people like ourselves check it out to see whats up and coming and test the waters, but most of us dont bother joining guilds on PTR or Beta realms or try doing new instances outside of PUGs on them because we have social commitments on established realms and its silly to put that effort into a char only to have it deleted in a few months. So if they base all fights, adjustments, game changes on interaction and feedback from only those 2 sources, which lately seems to hold true, thats why things are so out of whack. And finally, mathematics. All fan sites who have studied the issue have stated that the math on spells/dmg in/dmg out dont add up but Blizz keeps contending that it does according to their numbers. This makes me wonder but also understand where if they are so messed up on math numbers for the game, I can see where they find it so easy to basically tell people to stop playing if they dislike it because they prob did some of their own math and think they make more money than they do =P