(Related post: Max level does not mean Skilled.)

There’s a class of player who feels that their status in the raiding game means that they’re Right. They label other people noobs, and the silly thing is that people believe them. “I have this awesome item, you don’t, therefore I know what I’m talking about and you don’t.” This frustrates me a great deal.

My guild recently brought in a new recruit. Her main is a holy priest, just like me! I’ll call her Mary. She was very personable, online a lot. She had raided a lot in the original WoW, all the way through AQ40, which I’ve never seen. She had taken over a year off from the game, and in her return was looking for a more relaxed playtime requirement while still playing at a high level. A perfect fit!

One of our top dps’ers had levelled a priest to maximum level and was looking for a rundown of how to heal as a holy priest. (He wanted to be able to fill out a heroic instance or raid in the case that we were short healing) He posted in our guild forums, asking how to manage mana, which spells were good where, the differences between instancing and raiding, and so on. The other primary holy priest in the guild and I posted a decent overview of general strategy and how to use the various tools in the priest’s toolbox.

Mary, still in her first week, posted a lengthy and emotional rebuttal to what we wrote. Her entire priest healing strategy is: Flash Heal. As far as she’s concerned, it is the only spell anyone needs as a holy priest. Her defenses were long, full of passionate and anecdotal evidence, and even had bad math to back her up. (I love bad math of all kinds) She was fully entrenched, she downright took offense to the thought of using other spells, and basically framed her argument such that to disagree with her was to start a fight. (I’m not going to go into details about why she’s wrong, just take my word for it.)

Needless to say, she didn’t stay long.

We chuckled about it, but I didn’t understand how she was going to find what she wanted. How was she going to even pass the application to a mid-tier raiding guild?

The answer: Mary could succeed in raiding, because her other healers could heal around her. I remember this in painful detail from the 40-man days. But there’s no reason that it couldn’t continue in 25-man or even 10-man raids. So Mary moved right up to a SSC mid-tier guild, where she’s no doubt the 25th person in some raid. They’re probably progressing, too. She’ll get overgeared and then be back to her elite flash healing self, and looking down at everyone who isn’t geared like she is.

The funniest part of this is that Mary could only ever find success in large raids. Not smaller group play, not ever small raids. And yet, raiding is supposedly a prestige environment. Raiders are serious business. They’re seen as elite players. I mean, these people have zomgepics that are simply inaccessible to most. They have to know the game, right?

Ah well.

Now don’t get me wrong–there is a tier of players who by definition of where they are must know what they’re doing. They’re the ones pushing new content as it’s released, who write the wowwiki articles, and write and tune the spreadsheets. The rest of us are, for lack of a better term, scrubs who execute well-defined strategies. I’m not saying that raiders don’t know what they’re doing, I’m just saying that their position in raiding guilds doesn’t mean that they do. They’re hit and miss, like everyone else.

(The title of this article really should have been “Mid-tier raiding and below does not necessarily mean Skilled”, but it wasn’t catchy.)

I’ve been reading Tobold and Potshot lately. They’re talking about loot and game design as it relates to endgame guilds, specifically guild hopping and progression problems due to it. I haven’t seen a decent explanation of the problem, but as a guild officer/leader I’ve seen it in action twice now, once with the original WoW endgame and now with the TBC endgame. I don’t have a solution, but I can frame the problem.

For me, the most fun time in WoW is right after an expansion hits, when there’s limited collective endgame exploration. All the content is new and fresh, then I find myself grouping with not just my long-term guild friends, but also my friends who left to get on the progression roller coaster. It’s glorious! This is what the first two months of TBC was like.

Then, endgame progress starts to happen, and a tiered system begins to form.

Some guilds progress quickly while others progress slowly. Before long, you have some small percentage of guilds at the top level, a larger percentage slightly below them, and ultimately many at the bottom. Now let’s follow a person, Mike, through his ascent to the endgame.

First, Mike belongs to a leveling guild. He groups with and rides that guild up to the maximum level, but the guild doesn’t have the wherewithal to group up for the endgame content, for whatever reason. Ultimately, Mike decides that he wants to see some of this content, so he joins pick-up groups, and he finds that it’s fun. He does a little research and applies to an entry-level endgame guild. Mike is accepted! Wait, why is this endgame guild recruiting?

Entropy is constant in all guilds. A personal dispute can’t be resolved, or someone can’t afford to fix their computer, or they get divorced, or die, or become parents, or get sent to jail, or change jobs, or any number of other real-life reasons. Or they simply get bored with the game and never log in again. Regardless, even good people with no other issues leave the game. Every guild’s membership is never constant, and therefore every guild must constantly recruit.

At Mike’s first endgame guild, he learns to group, and the guild is sweeping through EndgameA content and is trying to get through EndgameB content. Mike is getting loot upgrades at a decent rate in EndgameA, because the guild has that under control. The goals of Mike and the guild are in perfect alignment for this time. Let’s define these goals. Endgame guilds are easy:

• The goal of an endgame guild is to raise the total level of gear of its members so that they can explore the next level of content. The ability to run endgame content is dependent on both the size of the group and the collective loot level of that group. This means that taking a slightly-underequipped person is acceptable, because it’s better than the empty spot you have that threatens to kill your guild’s basic ability to raid.

Players are harder. Each endgame player is a combination of the following three goals:

1. A loot-driven player wants loot upgrades. Zomgepics.
2. A socially-driven player wants to play with their friends.
3. An exploration-driven player wants to see all the content available.

(There are obviously more goals, but bear with me for the purposes of this article.)

Mike participates and gets all the gear available at EndgameA content. After some variable amount of time (due to the randomness of loot drops), Mike has nothing left to gain from EndgameA. He finds that his guild’s progression on EndgameB–where progression is not easy and where the guild is currently stuck–is simply painful and too slow. Unfortunately for Mike’s guild, Mike would rather see new content or get loot sooner without the struggle of doing it the hard way. His goal ranking is: loot/exploration first and social last. The people in his guild don’t matter as much.

Luckily for Mike, there is another guild on the server which is exactly one step up in progression; they have EndgameB conquered and are working on EndgameC. The minimum requirement for gear to be successful in EndgameB content is EndgameA gear. Thanks to the random loot system, most of this new guild is still gearing up in EndgameB, so it’s fine for a new applicant to simply be in EndgameA gear. Thanks to the effort of his current guild, Mike has EndgameA gear! The door to his second endgame guild is open.

After some amount of sweating, Mike leaves EndgameA guild to join the more-progressed one. The new guild gladly looks the other way at how the player came to them. Who can be certain what happened? The new guild is hoping for the best, so they welcome Mike with open arms and a big cheer. After all, this new guild is trying to get through EndgameC and needs active participants, because they keep getting poached by EndgameD guilds, who are getting poached to EndgameE guilds. And so on.

The problem is that the best situation for people who are loot driven is to be in a guild where the average level of gear of its members is higher than his own. This grants access to higher level content without the difficult part of sweating through it the hard way. Loot-driven people like coasting easily through content. They like getting rewards for minimal effort.

As you can see, this leads directly to guild-hopping. And endgame guilds, in their state of constant recruitment, make the problem worse with their constant poaching of each other. If they don’t recruit this player, then some other guild will, and increase their chances of progression, which is just another guild to poach from them.

Thus, soon after endgame is explored by some, a guild stratification system sets in. A clear path through guilds emerges. Start in guild 1, jump to guild 2, then guild 3, and so on. This continues until the ladder is reset at the next expansion.

Blizzard has taken steps to combat this: reputation levels with instances; attunements; badges of justice; tier set tokens; exchanges for pve to pvp gear. Each has helped, but the problem is still there. The individual gets all the rewards, regardless of the relative efforts involved.

So while people say that Tobold’s “loot belongs to the guild” idea is crap, that’s not the point. There has to be a better way. Any suggestion is better than no suggestion.

In the meantime, the system churns on and the socially driven players who are close friends in an endgame guild–like mine–end up bitter that they’ve helped so many people up and along their own personal ladder, while the guild progresses very slowly because they hang on to a fraction of the people who pass through. Remember, we socially-driven people aren’t purely social, we want to get upgrades for our characters and see the next endgame, and the one after that. But we won’t give up friends just for loot or to visit another part of the game. Our only options are: 1) continue to hope that we can find enough like-minded people to get momentum to clear our current hurdle and experience the joy as a group; 2) give up on the endgame altogether. Giving up isn’t a good solution because raiding is fun. Seeing new content is fun. Clearing obstacles with your friends is fun.

So we loyal ones stick together and keep recruiting, hoping to find the rare person who values camaraderie over loot, while we quietly look forward to the next reset (the next expansion). The ladder won’t exist for a little while, and we can play in ideal environment, briefly.

I’m cheering all of you on, Tobold and Potshot and the rest.

(edited on May 2 for some grammar flubs)

Ran it for the second time with my guild, again on my healing priest. This time I better appreciated its virtues, I think. It’s a fun, interesting, and relaxing instance, perfect in length. It runs like a greatest-hits version of Burning Crusade boss-fight design.

Of course, both times I’ve healed it have been with a very talented protection paladin doing the tanking. Protection pally tanking everything is easy-mode for everything but boss fights. I haven’t had to heal the group with a protection warrior yet, which I’m guessing would be (cough) a bit harder due to the aoe encounters. The sad state of warrior tanking is well known. We had a mage, rogue, and hunter, which gave us ample crowd control. The hunter was one of those lovely people who like to put an ice trap in front of me instead of him. Just a nice run from start to finish, and the reason I like the game. Group up with guildies, laugh through an enjoyable instance together, where effective teamwork matters.

I forgot that someone gets a zomgepic just for completing normal mode. Last night that someone was me, when I lucked into [Kharmaa's Ring of Fate] off Kael’thas Sunstrider. The socket (on a ring, whee!) goes perfectly with the quest reward gem ([Teardrop Crimson Spinel]). I’m not sold on priest healing with spell haste yet because priest healing is a mix of instant/non-instant spells, but I’ll experiment to see if it’s better than my [Band of Halos]. Not that you can actually tell most of the time. More on that later.

An interesting healing note is that in both wins on the Kael’thas, two dps’ers died. It actually got much easier after that, when you have only three people to keep alive instead of five. Most of the time when someone dies, that means that the full damage of that part of the encounter then turns to someone else. This event has constant global damage, so the group takes 100% damage with five people, 80% damage with four, and an easy-to-heal-through 60% with three. I’ll shoot for four teammates alive at the end of the next run.

This is a very fun instance. I’m looking forward to trying this on heroic.

When I was raid lead in vanilla wow, I arranged and lead many many runs on Molten Core, a few on Blackwing Lair, and many in Zul’Gurub and AQ20. When news of The Burning Crusade’s reduction in raid size came out, that the new raids would be 25 and 10, I cheered. My guild thought I was being sarcastic (a reasonable guess), but honestly I was thrilled. I still am. Larger raids are for masochists.

Imagine the game as a series of eight 10-man instances instead of this strange mix of 25/10.

My wife and I were running Magister’s Terrace for the first time a couple weeks ago, and part of that instance is a preview of the Sunwell Plateau 25-man raid instance. It’s beautiful. Stunning! Epic! And so on! It made us both really want to go there. Then we remembered that we’re not in a guild that’s capable of 25-man content. We’ve stepped into Gruul’s lair once, a toe in the water for our guild. Unless something remarkable happens, I’ll never see Gruul’s Lair, Magtheridon, SSC, Mount Hyjal, or Black Temple, never mind the new hardest-of-the-hard, Sunwell Plateau. So another 25-man raid instance doesn’t do anything for me except make me wish that the game were designed differently: namely that raiding wasn’t trying to coordinate a guild of between 25-32 dedicated people or 25-50 casual people. There are six 25-man instances, and two 10-man ones. Many, many more people go to the 10-man ones, just like many more people went to Zul’Gurub and AQ20 than ever went to Naxx. And yet, look at that ratio in total content!

I have friends in 25-man raiding guilds. My guild, being a small-sized casual/raiding guild, is somewhat stuck with the stepping-stone problem. People come here, learn to raid, and either stick around or move on to 25-man raiding guilds. My friends in 25-man raiding guilds say that managing larger groups is more work, and less fun. I raided Molten Core, and you could have so much dead weight during a run that it was painful. In all but the most driven raiding guilds, you still have this problem.

If Blizzard wants to look at its game like a sport (still a terrible idea), then let’s take a quick look at sports. Ok, step one: get 39 of your friends and have everyone playing on the field, on the same team, at the same time. Wait, I’m not aware of any sports like that. Ok, let’s bump that down to 25 people playing on the field, at the same time, on the same team. Again, nothing remotely like that comes to mind. Could we shoehorn a 25-man team into any popular sport? You could play football (soccer), just stack the extra 14 in the goal. Never mind.

The reality is that most team sports have 11 or fewer people playing at the same time. Why? Because more than that is unnecessary and unwieldy. At that size, everyone matters. I mean, part of what makes football (american) so incredible is that you have a large group of specialized people working toward the same goal, with frequent substitutions based on the play of the game. Actually, this part is similar to progressing through new raid content. But not the size part.

So why does Blizzard have these huge raids?

Before WoW was a game called Everquest (EQ), which I have never played but that won’t stop me from talking about it. EQ had these monstrously large, funless endgame experiences where you stacked 5000 people side by side and about the best thing you could say about that is that ‘you were there’, one of a zillion pissants providing a tiny fraction of the group’s utility, and that’s if the person actually plays. When I think of my days leading 40-man raid content, the biggest thing I remember (aside from “can’t we just go to ZG again? it’s fun!”) is that one-third or more of the raid was absolute crap at playing this game. I raided with someone who methodically cast fire spells at a boss immune to fire, blithely ignoring the “immune” “immune” “immune” text flashing on his screen with every spell landing. He was a nice guy and a SPHO. Every raid guild has people like this to different degrees, and every raid leader can tell stories like this. Larger raids mean that more of a percentage of people can suck, go afk or just in general be lame and yet the group will still find success, which means that more people will be inclined to invite their 95-year old great-grandparent to raid with the guild because he has nothing else to do and he will always be there.

Back to the original thought. Blizzard came along and didn’t want their game to be derided as the mini-everquest. Never mind hiring one of the elite endgame raiders from EQ to design their raid content. So, when it came time to design their endgame, they went big-group too, although not quite as big. Remember, Blizzard actually thought there was a chance of failure in their WoW experiment. Their design reflected current trends at that moment, which was EQ. Of course, then they did destroy every other MMORPG, as then went cookie monster all over the rest of computer gaming, and basically print money now. People who learned to play WoW came to think of endgame as this huge-group thing.

So why not change? The answer is risk. Yes, the developers spend an inordinate amount of time designing content that less than 10% of the playerbase will ever see. But regardless of whether you agree with my opinion that small raiding is a better game experience than large-group play, there’s limited financial incentive to make such a large change. Blizzard is making piles of dollars with the current model, with no gaming contender in sight. A change to endgame raiding isn’t going to get more people to sign on, but it might cause some percentage of the base to leave. What does the company have to gain from such a move? Higher satisfaction from the people already playing isn’t worth a risk in decrease to revenue stream.

So even though large-group play is not any more fun than small or mid-group play, that’s what we’ve got. Inertia wins.

In other news, I’m looking forward to World of Warcraft 2. Maybe they’ll ditch the whole huge-group play altogether on the reset.

I’ll start by saying that Magister’s Terrace (MrT) is wonderful from start to finish. It’s beautiful to look at, the music is great, the bosses are fun, and the gear potential makes me want to bring all my characters there. If it were none of those, it’d still be a new place to go with my guildmates. But it’s great, so kudos to Blizzard.

(Also, the in-game cinematic should be something that they do ALL THE TIME. Not just in instances, but quests. ALL THE TIME. When you create a soulwell, or a ritual of refreshment. You should get an in-game cinematic when you click your hearthstone. Just get that world of warcraft narrator talking, and you feel epic.)

The game mechanic corrections and tweaks are all welcome, as always. New crafting rewards are welcome, new faction, new zone. New combat log, new portals coming. New zomg epics. I was glad to see the excitement of my guildmates as they purchased Nether Vortexes (Vortices?) and upgraded their crafted gear.

All good fun.

Maybe I’ve been following the game’s development too much, but I’m still underwhelmed. Not by what’s been given, but by the long barren months between here and the next expansion, which is presumably six or more months away. The new 25-man raid instance is going to keep the high-end guilds happy for a while, but it means absolutely nothing to me and my wife, as well as our guild. I’m guessing that it took Blizzard a while to make.

The dailies? Well, they’re mostly kill X quests. Yes, the quests eventually open up new parts of town, and it’s fun to progress as a server and feel actual community with all these people I’ve been bumping shoulders with for a couple of years. But the Ogrila quests themselves were more fun: you have a roping quest, a bombing quest, a portal quest. Here, you have a bunch of kill quests and one bombing quest. I’m just saying, we could have some story quests mixed in with the unlocking of phases.

Oh, a note on the Sunwell bombing run: get a partner. Otherwise I don’t see how you could do it in one pass (it’s taken me three tries every time when I’ve tried it solo). With my wife, we did it in one pass.

I’m really looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King. It’s a long way away. In the meantime, I’ll be doing the dailies and enjoying Magister’s Terrace.

The game indicator of winning in WoW is receiving an epic item.In vanilla WoW, the vast majority of epic items came from 40-man raiding. Granted, there was an epic hunter quest, and a few limited crafting bits, and world drops, and a top-level pvp set that only a handful of people could get. But in all, the reality was that if you wanted a reliable way to get epic gear (and win), you hooked up with a raid guild and started raiding… whether you liked raiding, or not.

Compare with the current WoW, TBC. The reliable ways to get epic items include:
25-man raiding
10-man raiding
heroic five man instances
crafting
participating in arena
participating in battlegrounds
purchased at a vendor with tokens (Badge of Justice) obtainable from 10/25-man raiding or even daily questing
and also the world drop/auction house

People who play in hardcore raiding guilds miss the days of when they were the only ones with epics. Despite their complaining, Blizzard has consistently introduced more ways to get epic items, not less. They’ve made the game more accessible to those who can’t or won’t hardcore raid. This is great for players like me: a new father, full-time working, and so on. If I get spend one or two nights a week online, I’m happy and will continue to keep my account active. And the game will reward me for it. And when I do participate in raids, my gear won’t be a liability, only my rustiness.

With 2.4, every last crafting profession yields BoP benefits akin to useful epics, even alchemists. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next expansion, Blizzard expanded the BoJ purchasing scheme even further, allowing (in essence) crafted Badges of Justice.

The best part is that these paths to success aren’t finite anymore, either. Now when a higher-level of loot is released to 25-man raiders, a waterfall of upgrades cascades down to those who aren’t involved in 25-man raiding. New heroic loot, new badge of justice rewards, a new arena season, upgraded battleground gear, another tier of crafting or relaxation of material requirements. Basically, they’re giving everyone new ways to continue improving, without ever having to set foot in a 25-man raid. You’ll never have gear as good as all those dedicated raiders, but you won’t be left in the cold, either. Blizzard now adds loot across the board.

In short, there are many ways to win.

This hurts guilds trying to build up to 25-man raiding (including my own), because in vanilla wow you had a lot of players who were in raiding guilds solely for the loot (again, like my own). The primary reason the people are in my guild stick around is because they like each other! This makes my guild more fun, and therefore the experience of playing the game more fun.

I’m looking forward to the next expansion to see how this trend continues.