[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] PvE Raiding in WoW (Was Re: Activity Duration in MMOs )

[cob at goblinworkshop.com]

Michael,

Overall, I think your response sounds like an angry forum rant. :-)  
You make quite a few sweeping generalizations in your response to
Damion's post.  I know it's very vogue to bash on Blizzard on this list,
but all in all I think you are selling them short.  It is easy to
criticize, but they are a lot more savvy than people give them credit
for.  They make mistakes, just like any other game development shop, but
they are passionate about their game, they have their finger on the
metaphorical pulse, and they are not clueless about what to change.  
I've attended both BlizzCons, and having heard the developers talk about
the game and their intentions, I feel like I have a different
perspective.  (I have also played since beta, run a wow database, and
raid three nights a week, I guess I'm a bit of a fan.  To my defense, I
don't own any collectible card games.)

My responses are below, just my two cents;

Michael Hartman wrote:
> Damion Schubert wrote:
>> FIrst off, I think that's completely inaccurate.  Raiding in WoW when it
>> shipped was much better than raiding in EQ when it shipped, and they've
>> made significant improvements in the Burning Crusade.  There are
>> definitely things I'd like to see improved upon still, but to say
>> that no
>> progress has been made is very misleading.
>
> Much better? Much better how?
>
> And how was BC an improvement? There were barely any changes at all.
> In some ways it was made worse.

In some ways yes, but you are overlooking significant changes.  The drop
in raid sizes pushes the threshold for raiding down considerably making
it attainable for smaller family size guilds.  The 25 and 10 member raid
size was a huge improvement.  Another thing they tried (cribbed from
EverQuest really) was the tiered attunements, where you have to work
your way up the chart to get into the upper raid instances.  They
noticed that this was a mistake and fixed it.  I think they
miscalculated the initial popularity of the 10 member raid content, and
obviously they are working on adding more things for this group size.
(Zul'Aman in the next content patch.)   At BlizzCon 2007, during the
raid panel Tigole had a slide showing the number of Karazhan instances
running on any given night and it was absolutely huge.

> It is still the same thing. You have to get a ton of people together,
> they have to have the right classes, build, and gear, and then one
> person herds cats requiring that the majority press the 1 button for 3
> hours. Oh, and then as a final bonus, you get to quibble over loot,
> since the drops are always stingy as heck and idiotic concepts like
> Bind on Pickup mean if you don't happen to have people there you can
> use it, it is trash.
>
> And yes, I am speaking from actual experience. I was founder and GM of
> a raid guild on WoW and was the main tank (and frequent raid leader)
> for it all the way through Gruul's Lair. Then I just couldn't do it
> any more. It is not fun. It is not interesting. It doesn't feel epic.

I can see your point here.  Organizing and leading raids seems to have a
high burnout rate.  A lot of people are simply content to 'consume' the
raid content, without putting in the work.  I'm sure feelings vary from
guild to guild and what sort of responsibilities they have.  In my guild
there is a lot of embarrassing screaming and cheering over TeamSpeak
when we finally manage to drop a difficult boss.

> I felt like an extra in a movie. There was a set of rote maneuvers I
> had to do, and I just had to perform them over and over again. The
> amount of trash killing was prodigious and boring. The fact that
> wiping on a boss 10 times to figure it out was "game design" was just
> an absurd laugh.

Trash mobs in WoW are designed to allow class abilities that they can't
allow in boss fights to shine (my rogue's stuns for example), and to set
the pacing of the dungeon.  The trash mobs and respawns are also there
to let you know that you aren't ready to kill this boss, and you should
call it a night.  Blizz has also acknowledged that they don't get this
right off the bat a lot of the time, (this includes 5 party member
dungeon crawls as well) which is why you frequently see them thinning
out the dungeons from time to time.

> I was lucky that I actually played the one role (main tank) that had
> the most "freedom" to act. For DPS characters it is even more boring,
> since they do nothing but assist and press their 1-3 attack powers.
> They do this for HOURS. If they do even the slightest thing of their
> own free will - including standing somewhere a tad off - the whole
> group wipes and everyone is pissed off. Oh, and oftentimes this also
> means the group gets to clear another hour of trash or just call it a
> night. YAY! FUN!

Maybe this was true prior to Zul'Gurub, but WoW boss fights have evolved
from being "tank-and-spank" to a variety of fights that target specific
class roles.  Overall they have a variety of styles they use.  I'm not
sure if I am remembering all of these properly:

*Endurance fights, such as Nightbane, where your 'staying power' is
tested.
*DPS checks such as Gruul, where you have a limited amount of time to
burn the boss down before an enrage timer goes off.
*"Weakest link" style fights where your entire raid has to be on their
toes and react to changes.  An example of this is Prince Malchezzar in
Karazhan, where infernals fall from the sky randomly and everyone has to
run around avoiding them.

> So no, raiding in WoW is not significantly different from EQ or from
> any other fantasy RPG raiding. It is just as boring and just as
> tedious as it is everywhere else. You spend 3 hours listening to one
> person give orders over TS/Vent and have virtually zero free will
> whatsoever. You don't get to "think on your feet" at all. You do
> exactly as the raid leader tells you, or the raid wipes.

In EverQuest, high end guilds protected their strategies from each
other, because they were all competing for the same content.  Only one
guild got to kill the dragon, and there was no limit to the number of
people you could bring to the fight.  In WoW the high end guilds compete
by inventing and publishing strategies and videos for raid content.  
It's their source of street cred. ;p

Last night while we were attempting to kill Magtheridon, I noticed that
he will un-target the main-tank right before he begins to cast his blast
nova (which requires five players to all simultaneously click on cubes
in order to interrupt the spell.  This gave us an extra second or so to
react, and we got a lot better at it.  Over time, I learned that I can
save my team from a lot of grief on the channelers if I kick the
shadowbolts and I let the other rogue and the warriors bash the heals
they cast.  These sorts of things are all personal innovation, not
something I picked up from reading the boss strat on WoWWikki.  There is
tons of 'thinking on your feet' and dealing with sudden changes in the
encounter.

> Compare that to, for example, the end game content of DAoC. Every
> single player had to be on their toes. Every single player had to be
> thinking about what they were doing, coming up with ideas on how to
> perform, and reacting to the battle field. Yes, this is partially
> because it is PvP, but the point is this was actually interesting
> content.
>
> If someone wants to come along and make fun end game "raid-ish" PvE
> content, they need to drop this inredibly painful raid style method
> that currently exists.
>
> I don't want to memorize a script like an actor in a play and just
> follow it through identically 9,000 times so I can get UBER ITEM X to
> drop.
>
> I want to be able to feel like a real player who reacts to situations.
> I want to use MY OWN JUDGMENT rather than simply slavishly obey a raid
> leader for 3+ hours, who in turn is slavishly obeying a guide on some
> web site.
>
> I haven't even gotten into craptacular concepts that arise like DKP,
> loot tracking, raid scheduling, raid rostering, and other garbage that
> is absolutely NOT FUN and makes playing the game feel like working in
> some cubicle farm as middle management.

Rostering and scheduling is not fun.  Smaller party sizes obviously help
for this. Having written a zero sum DKP system for my guild, I don't
feel like loot tracking is a huge issue.  As long as you have an
established precedent that is not arbitrary it settles a lot of
malcontent over spoils.  And really, a lot of the 'uber items' aren't
worth arguing over.  ;)  

>> First off, they tend to dominate the forums of the game because they
>> tend to be the most devoted customers of the game.  When devoted
>> customers reach max levels, they don't want to walk away from their
>> characters.  They aren't ready to say their character is done - they
>> want to continue to move their character forward.
>
> I dispute that they are the most devoted. They just play the most and
> have the highest percentage of their life wrapped up in the game, but
> their "devotion" is questionable and quixotic at best. The heavy forum
> posters are often the biggest trolls and "haters" you will ever find.
> They are the first to jump ship when something new comes along. If, as
> a game developer you think your heavy duty forum posters are your most
> devoted customers, you are in for a nasty surprise.
>

I very much agree here. :)  It's dangerous for a game company to cater
to the board warriors.

>> Secondly, it's not as tiny a minority as you think.
>
> Actually, it is indeed as tiny as I think. Even Blizzard has admitted
> that the raid population is a small overall percentage of their
> customers. Most of their customers do not even have a level 70
> character. Before the expansion, the majority of their customers did
> not even have a level 60.
>

As they've said before, having 'undefeated content' makes the world feel
larger for everyone.  I'm not sure if I agree with their
raid-reagonomics philosophy, but that is Blizzard's position.   Not many
people saw the inside of Naxxramus before TBC was released, and I doubt
my guild will see Mt.Hyjal, let alone Black Temple, let alone the Sun
Well before Wrath of the Lich King comes out.

>
>> As an example,
>> 879K pieces of armor from Attumen (the entry boss in Karazhan, the
>> entry level raid for WoW) have been spotted on the WoW Armory
>> over time by WoWJutsu.
>
> Wow. That's it? Just 879k? That isn't even 1 piece of loot per 10
> accounts, and you know as well as I do that raid loot is concentrated,
> not thinly dispersed.
>
> In the first 2 months of raiding Karazhan, our one guild killed him
> once a week, sometimes twice a week (when we added a second team
> running Karazhan). He drops 2 pieces of loot. That is 18-36 pieces of
> loot right there from one guild in just 2 months. People have been
> raiding Karzhan heavily since February - approximately 35 weeks. A
> single group of 10 people could have killed him 35 times by now,
> generating 70 pieces of loot.
>
> You would only need 12,577 characters to generate that much loot over
> the last 35 weeks. Not accounts.... characters. Most raiders I know
> had at least 2 raid capable characters, and often a lot more who were
> Karazhan attuned. I had 4 Karazhan attuned characters. If you
> conservatively assume the average raider has 2 raid characters, now
> you only need 6,288 accounts to generate 879k pieces of Attumen loot.
> If half the loot is garbage, and gets dested, you are only back up to
> 12,577 accounts needed. Considering Blizzard claims 9+ million
> ACCOUNTS, your information just points out how trivial the raiding
> population is compared to their actual population. 1% of 9 million is
> 900,000. So we're talking about somewhere in the ballpark of 1/100th
> of a percent of accounts needed to generate 879k pieces of Attument loot.
>

Keep in mind WoWJutsu is just US and EU servers, iirc.  You probably
should look at the numbers for just EU and US servers and 'any piece of
loot'.  With random drop tables, I had gear from everyone else in the
tower before I had gear from Attumen. :)

> Yes, you can say "but not everyone raids Karazhan every week" and
> you're right. But the point is that it only requires a VERY SMALL
> percentage of their customer base to generate that much loot. And
> since the hardcore raid population IS the group that raids constantly,
> using every raid reset available, that just further illustrates my point.

Most hardcore raiding guilds wouldn't recruit you if you haven't already
finished this dungeon in another guild. :)

>
> Those numbers indicate that the % of people with even a SINGLE piece
> of loot from Attumen is incredibly small. And as you said, he is the
> entry boss of the 1st raid dungeon. Honestly, now that you've
> presented that data, it is clear that the % of raiders is even more
> miniscule that I suspected.
>
> Is it really good business to focus the majority of your development
> on something 1/100th of a percent of your customers will see? Look at
> some of their latest development. They are adding MORE raid dungeons
> at the top end of the scale. These are dungeons that the overwhelming
> majority of their customers will NEVER, EVER see. Most *RAIDERS*, not
> to mention average players, never even saw the last 2 or 3 raid
> dungeons of the pre-expansion game. And yet they continue to invest
> enormous amounts of resources into adding more and more higher end
> raid dungeons for the top .00001% of their customers. Genius.

Yeah, as someone pointed out, the last '5 man dungeon they added in a
content patch was Dire Maul'.

>> * Raid bosses require complex strategies to beat, with much
>> experimentation and learning.  This appeals to Explorers.
>
> Exploring what? The Web? Nobody "learns" the bosses. A raid leader
> reads the strategy online and then dictates it to the group on
> Teamspeak of Ventrilo

Explorers can show off their depth of knowledge by being intimately
familiar with an encounter.  But, I'd say there isn't too much in WoW to
feed this Bartle type.   It's a bit of a stretch.  I guess knowing where
to find out of the way ore deposits is an explorer perk.

>> * Raid bosses drop ph4t loot and give bragging rights, and are
>> one of the few things in an MMO which are truly HARD, appealing
>> to Achievers.
>
> What bragging rights? Maybe the top 2 or 3 guilds on an entire server
> have bragging rights... that's it. That's an infinitesimally small
> percentage of your population.
>
> As for the loot, have fun fighting over it, wrestling with DKP,
> arguing who should get a piece of loot, being mad that the character
> you left home was the one who really neded it, but it gets
> disenchanted since it is Bind on Pickup, and all sorts of other things
> that ruin what little nugget of joy the "loot" might bring.

I'm a heavy achiever type.  As you gear up in WoW, your character looks
more and more imposing.  I get my individual achievement out of the way
with the arena and pvp battlegrounds.  With raiding, I get immense
satisfaction from the growth of the guild week after week.  Your issue
is you are looking at achievement on a global scale, I look at it on a
personal level.

>> * Raid bosses require cooperation between players, and require
>> coordination, socialization and strong incentives for group play,
>> appealing to socializers.
>
> There is almost no socializing. There is one person giving orders and
> everyone else following. In fact, in many raid guilds (and almost all
> the top ones), socializing is expressly FORBIDDEN and speaking
> privileges are limited to the raid leader and a couple of assistants.

In my guild, we crack jokes between attempts, rib each other: "Maybe we
should all go stand outside the gate and force Raz to practice his
countdown/pull by himself").  We have a druid who shifts into bear form
and humps any dead orcs she can find.  (Oh god, don't rez Afra!!)  We
are chatting in raid channels, party channels, guild channels and on
TeamSpeak when we're not in the middle of business.  We are swapping
strategies, healthstones, food, whatever.  I'd rather wipe with my
casual/hardcore guild than burn my will to live in the hardcore guild
you've described above. ;)

>> * Raid bosses create a strong metagame on a server, which acts
>> as a huge motivator between guilds, as evidenced on sites like
>> WoWJutsu.  This appeals to killers.
> What metagame? You can't just call it a metagame without saying why it
> is one. Nobody cares about sites like WowJutsu. Those sites are places
> the top .00001% of players even know about. Heck, I had never even
> heard of it and I ran a pretty hardcore raid guild.

Agree here.  Killers are over on the PvP servers camping dungeon
entrances.  What he is talking about is bragging rights, which is just
another achiever perk.

> WoW is a huge success IN SPITE OF its painful, crappy raid system.

What would you do differently with the raid system?  I can't really
think of anything other than smaller group sizes.

> In fact, they are darn lucky that such a tiny percentage of their
> population raids. If more of them did, then they'd actually have
> problems. But luckily for them, the overwhelming majority of their
> population is in that 1->69 range where the game is actually quite good.

I know people who have five level seventies.  I guess I prefer the game
at 70 where I can just tool around without any real limitations.  IMHO
the reason WoW is so popular is because it has a bit of something for
most everyone.   It's not all about raiding dungeons, it's a massive
international movement. ;-)