There seems to be a feeling of regret floating around old school WoW raiders lately. I’ve seen it in other places, but this post over on Raging Monkeys does a great job of summing up the conflict. Syl writes,
“To this day, I am deeply resentful; resentful of Blizzard, of the game’s later raid designs that presented my own guild with such a reality. [...] Most of all, I resent them for making me that different person. A person with less and less tolerance for team diversity.”
Reading that passage the first time was striking because I lately have been feeling almost the exact same way. But is the “hardcore” raid culture really to blame?
The Cats were never traditionally hardcore, not even in our peak raiding days. I always believed (and still do) in recruiting smart raiders and then getting out of the way so they could do their thing. We didn’t yell or insult people for performance, and attendance was always optional. But as time went on, we — I — started getting more and more picky about who was and was not considered an essential part of the team.
That nice guy with a newborn who could only raid once a week? Accomodating him felt less important than keeping the experienced people together when faced with night 3 of Heroic Putricide. The woman from Australia with bad latency but awesome attendance? Taking her on a cloak run of TotGC put everyone on edge. Granted, in TBC we got a little more serious about raiding as a guild, but the folks who found themselves on the outside were generally the people who didn’t care that much. They didn’t have enchants, or “forgot to train taunt”. But in WotLK in particular I definitely started leading the guild in a more serious business direction.
So, why did that happen? Part of it was that I personally wanted to keep the ol’ progression train rolling along, and certainly the increased emphasis on fights where individuals can kill the whole raid was a factor, but I think there is another obvious culprit: Casuals. Yeah, that’s right. I said it.
Okay, that was a bit sensational, but I genuinely think the drive to increase the accessability of raiding actually made the culture of raids more focused on performance.
In TBC, after a certain point you had to raid to earn PvE upgrades. And because there were multiple tiers at once and no outside way to obtain the gear, you had to work through the tiers in order. Many tiers of content were valid at the same time. The lean, mean raiding machine with the army general leader could log on and work on their upgrades in Hyjal, while my guild with our not-ungenerous portion of dorks and drunks ( <3 ) could log on and obtain our upgrades in SSC. Usually by the time we worked our way to a boss it was ~10% easier beween nerfs and class buffs and we were loaded up with gear from the previous tier.
My guild, anyway, was quite satisfied with this system. I did not worry what Raidy McRaiderson was doing in Hyjal, because I was too busy securing a resist tank for Hydross attempts or other goals appropriate to our raiding dedication and ability.
In WotLK, Blizzard added two big (and totally successful!) initiatives to improve raid accessability in WoW: badge gear (technically introduced in TBC, but right at the end) and the LFD. The effect was, of course, people being able to gear up faster than ever before, almost to the equivalent of the latest raid content. Running previous raid tiers became obsolete overnight, and out with it went guilds clearing content at thier own pace.
Now every guild started the same raid at the same time, and stopped the same raid at the same time. The sense of being in direct competition, somehow comparing ourselves to them all, began to get hard to ignore. Additionally, the introduction of the simultaneous badge/raid system meant that raids were no longer released en masse, but one at a time. Instead of looking at a handful of raids and thinking we had 18 months or so (we averaged a new boss every couple of weeks), the window of opportunity for current content seemed to become smaller and smaller. Ulduar, for example, had 14 bosses, some of whom had 3 different difficulty modes, and a whole giant mess of achievements. It was current for 5 months.
So not only were we all forced to raid on the same timetable in WotLK due to having a badge system tied to raid tiers, but that time got a lot shorter. Is it any wonder that some of us started to get a bit squirrelly about failure?
Before you accuse me of being a jerk about raid accessibility, let me assure you that I’m all for it in theory. Play the game, raid the raids — I don’t care if you have better gear than I do or whatever it is I’m supposed to be all elitist about.
However, the specific ways that Blizzard chose to implement raid accessibility actually alientated a lot of the players they were trying to help, and encouraged leaders to be more stringent about individual performance. Sure, we did it to ourselves, but Blizzard paved the way.
WotLK didn’t increase the focus on raid performance. That was always there.
Pre-Wrath those that were raiding were the more hardcore players. By definition their performance was better. They worked harder and put in more effort. Then in Wrath, as raids became more casual friendly, new players started raiding who were more there for fun and less there for performance and achievement. End result – the casual/hardcore raiding debate.
Short windows where raids were relevant before most of their loot was replaced by the next, newer raid also put additional pressure on guilds and players. As you said.
Gobble gobble.
Bobturkey´s last post: Old Republic expectations and plans
Fair point, Mr. Turkey. People raiding in TBC were more likely to self-identify as “serious raiders”, and therefore more likely to put in the effort to be a strong contributor on raids.
PS: How are are you enjoying SWTOR?
I don’t know. In TBC I was a raid leader in a casual/family guild that ran its raiders through heroic Arcatraz and Black Morass to get enough people geared to run Karazhan, while being in a “serious business” server-top-5 (lol RP server) raiding guild that was hitting BT, Hyjal, and the first 2 bosses of Sunwell pre-nerf. I feel like I got a great cross-section of the TBC vibe, and what I remember from the non-Cats guilds were the guild-killing bosses.
You couldn’t keep people in the less-successful guilds ’cause gearing up for resist fights took weeks and then you lost ‘em. Raiding guilds would poach your best raiders based on their ‘logs and then do a Vials run for them, and bam! next tier for them. Raiding guild applications that went over 2 typed pages and required more math than the US HS graduation tests (low bar, but there you are) to get into a “ur ghey”, “lmfao pwnd!” guild chatting organization.
And you could never get past the 4/5, 5/6, 6/7 status, and it broke people. That’s what I remember about raiding in TBC. Obviously with the ‘Cats it was different, but I don’t see the halcyon days of raid design that stressed only a few people. Organization, recruiting, and retention were always issues where.ever I was, and performance was always a huge deal. That 4-week trial period in my last TBC raiding guild that was working on Sunwell, I couldn’t get any loot, couldn’t talk in /raid, and got assigned to spam holy light on the off-tank. That was all I did, all raid, for 4 weeks of farming runs in BT and Hyjal. It was stupid of me to be so into the game, but that culture has been there as long as I’ve been playing. Constructs? Running away during Mother Shaz? Any n00b could get targeted and wipe the raid: Defile Mark 1, if you will.
I disagree, but we clearly had different experiences in TBC!
You absolutely could keep people in the less successful guilds, one just had to build their guild around crazy stuff like camaraderie and social ties. If one builds their casualcore guild around progression and loot, then darn tootin’ people will leave for the next big thing. I’m going to bet that your casual/family guild that was working on Karazhan had some pretty good retention. The good guilds, with the good leaders who knew that (ummm, including me >.>), developed a loyal core membership and a great reputation.
A lot of the stuff you mention — not getting loot, strict assignments, elaborate applications — has always been part and parcel of the top raiding guilds, and it still is today. That’s the hardcore elite culture (and you were a hardcore raider! which is neat!), but my hypothesis is that the changes to the raiding gameplay in WotLK caused that attitude to spread through the “middle of the road” guilds, the middle class, where it was not previously found in such abundance.
I still believe TBC struck the perfect balance. It made the raid game extremely accessible, but maintained the guild stratification necessary to make them important to individual success. It did this with attunements. At some point in TBC they realized that there should have been more raids like Karazhan; small format and with incredible entertainment value. There hasn’t been another dungeon quite like Karazhan since Karazhan. The casual experience was really epitomized in what it offered.
Most of the casual guilds I knew stalled at Karazhan. It was a mix of not wanting to expand into 25s and being unable to get over the SSC hump. That was what 3.0 should have addressed. Instead, Blizzard decided to abandon 10-man progression in favor of making 4 difficulties of the same dungeon, with 10s offering the lowest rewards. They effectively killed all the momentum they had up to Karazhan.
Tolerance, as you said, got lower and lower as the game abandoned diversity.
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Doone, fantastic point about the 10/25 jump in TBC between Karazhan and everything else. That was really poorly implemented, and hurt guilds who would otherwise be perfectly willing and able to tool around in Mulguar or SSC.
I loved attunements, by the way. We had our first guild kill of raid-Kael (having already killed Vashj first) the NIGHT BEFORE the Black Temple attunements were lifted, and it is one of my favorite raiding memories ever.
I wrote a post about what I saw as the beginning of the decline of the raiding community in WoW a while back, just before they gutted Firelands.
http://childrenofwrath.blogspot.com/2011/09/difficulty-skill-gap-blanket-nerfs-and.html
Like you, I think that the big decline was instituted by development decisions in the back half of Wrath. I don’t think that it’s linked to the practice of instituting gear resets with each new tier, though. I believe that Blizzard’s decision to flatten, rather than smooth, the difficulty curve of raid instances through blanket nerfs and buffs to players gave rise to unrealistic expectations, and engendered a lot of players to assume that they should be more progressed than they would be under normal circumstances. ToC created the expectation that every group should be able to clear an instance on Normal Mode, and the protracted amount of time spent in ICC with the 30% buff created the expectation that every somewhat competent guild should be able to go 11/12 heroic. These unrealistic expectations create resentment when reality doesn’t meet up with the expectations, and the resentment creates friction within the group. This is what has been surfacing in Cataclysm.
I do agree with Doone that some aspects of Burning Crusade raiding were deeply flawed. The T4 transition was horrific for guilds, having to break their 40 man raid team into 10 man groups for Kara, and then to bulk up to 25 to do Gruul and Mag caused more guilds to explode than any tier before or since. Another problem was the creation of “tiered guilds”, where a guild running BT would have to replace a player, so they pull one from a lower progressed guild, thereby condemning that guild to have to pull a replacement from a Kara guild so that they could continue running TK. It made guild leading much more machiavellian, and stunted the progression of a lot of guilds unnecessarily. I think that those were some of the problems that the idea of gear resets were aimed at and were succesful at limiting.
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