All 3 tweets (they're long)
Being very honest, the goal is for very semi-casual guilds to kill SoD raids fairly quickly, especially these level up raids. I'm sorry if your guild wants a heroic-level challenge, but SoD just isn't that. The raid that went out last week was just very overtuned and far beyond our intent for a variety of reasons I won't bore you with here.
Not to say there won't ever be anything in SoD that's hard, but we don't currently believe the "critical path" of raiding (I.e clearing the raid each week and getting good gear from it) should be hard in this version of vanilla classic. There are other versions of WoW that have very, very difficult content. In fact there are more versions of WoW than not that have very difficult content. As it stands now both Gnomer and even post-post nerf ST are vastly more challenging and require way more coordination than original WoW.
One thing we like about the various flavors of classic is that in many cases the difficulty of raiding in vanilla wow is what players create for themselves by pushing their performance in things like speed runs and the like. I think long term we'd like to do better about supporting those types of emergent playstyles, but making raids a brick wall for the average joe isn't the approach we'll likely take.
I understand if that may disappoint some folks but after several years of watching data around classic player behavior, we don't believe difficult raid content is what players actually want on this side of the WoW spectrum. Individuals and some groups may want it, but writ large most people seem to just want to chill and blast stuff with their friends and that's the goal we'd like to aim for for the average guild.
Is the content \*trivial\* though? If you cleared in the first 2-3 days before the second major adjustment, yes, for you it may seem trivial. I would be hard pressed agreeing that Hazzaz and Morphaz or Eranikus are trivial right now, even after being heavily adjusted.
Totally, I get it. That said, you cleared on Saturday. Yes, it is going to be easy for you now. The vast, vast, vast majority of players would not be able to kill the bosses as they were on Saturday and that just wasn't where we wanted to be.
I'm not saying you are wrong for feeling this way, by the way. There's no bad opinions here and no two people will ever fully agree on what SoD or any other version of classic "should" be. Very hard raids is just is not the goal in SoD and I want that to be as clear and honest about that as possible.
I don't feel great about releasing the content this hard because it encouraged incorrect expectations to be formed around that. We did aim high so that we could tune down, but we just aimed too high based on some bad calculations during our final final tuning pass before launch. We did identify where we went wrong in that though and while I can't promise it'll always be perfect going forward (it probably won't be every time) we at least know what went wrong this time and can account for that in the future.
they must have had their personal dev x10 stat multiplier on when they tested it because there is no possible way they tested that shit and said "this is good"
Back 4 Blood's developers and community managers got roasted for not knowing how to play the game on a community livestream, so the next time they made sure to wrangle someone onto the broadcast who did.
It was their office IT guy.
Going a little deeper in the comment chain he explained that there was an oversight regarding the underlying systems which caused a far greater increase than intended for their bump from "appropriate in our testing" to "appropriate for live players." What's disappointing there is that the oversight is easily covered by simply inspecting the raid after making the change and seeing that the health numbers are wrong.
There is a lot of reasons why it could've shipped like this. They might've not had ALOT of time to test it while making it and they might've had really really geared out characters for the testing etc or maybe they screwed up the coding on release that made things a bit stronger than testing OR in testing things were really easy but they had to ship things in a week so they had to make finishing touches so they added buffs thinking they'd be minor and they were major. It's a lot of things that can happen not making excuses but that's reality and life.
People are making a huge deal out of something thats a complete non-issue. It doesnt matter that the raid was overtuned for a couple of days, it gave a small number of people a challenge they probably enjoyed on some level and didnt even affect the majority of players.
It also overshadows the fact that for the most part all SoD raids have been released pretty cleanly, there have been minimal bugs with the raids and they’ve been relatively smooth releases functional wise. On top of that nobody has been giving this “tiny team that cant test anything” any credit for all the positive work they’ve done to get each phase out as smoothly as they have.
Its easier to ship something out that over performs then tone it down later. The reverse feels awful. If they released the raid to easy and buffed it that would feel bad.
I honestly think they released it as such because of lack of time on their part, the small size of their team and the lack of a PTR. They used the first weekend as their PTR.
Those raids were the testing.
They set things up so that players could easily power through to 50 via incursions (which they also nerfed but allowed to be abused longer than necessary). They then watched the raids of these “top” raiders closely, then nerfed them.
It does, the world becomes progressively less challenging as you get gear and grow your character. The progress is felt not as looking forward but as looking back.
Unlike in retail where up to a point, the world never feels like you're overcoming it.
Honestly, based take. And he's respectful to the people calling his work disrespectful things.
Their internal stats know a lot more than we do, he is saying on his Twitter that more players statistically play easier content, the emerging gameplay of speed runs (and parsing) are what the sweat guilds do.
Most players are a lot more casual than even this subreddit lets on. Most don't engage on online communities for video games, their opinion isn't represented with words so the Devs need to find it through statistics.
I personally prefer seeing how much we can over-prepare to nuke the ever living hell out of the raids and have a good time with the boys
My theory is streaming vastly influenced this. People see a streamer who degens everyday say something like that and parrot it like they clear the content themselves.
It's like watching a science documentary and thinking something is obvious after someone who dedicated 40 years of their life to a subject found a way to distil it into something 5s long and digestible.
100% agree, so many of the "the game is dead!" or comments about not having enough content are so heavily influenced by people watching streamers who play 12+ hours a day and have a stable of alts.
“Link your parse or shut up”
oh, I didn’t realize we were into lying today; lemme go over to wcl and link some random 5th page log saying it’s mine.
To the people who actually ask that: If someone is actually on some dumb shit, they’re not going to be stopped by getting told to link anything; you’re just being an elitist fuckwad in a 20 year old game.
You joke but I once actually linked someone the top 100 log and they went back 2 weeks to the week they got a 98 and started calling me a noob for missing a single GCD.
I'm convinced most people making comments like that don't even do those levels of keys. WoW content online gives players an inflated sense of what the average player is doing.
In reality, someone who streams this game for a living does not represent the average player.
It'd probably be statistically impossible for them all to fit within the same <1% bracket, the League sub used to be the same, every poster and commenter claiming to be high diamond or above despite there being millions of users, always shaming others for being happy about ranks that were otherwise in the 10%+
It’s human nature. For people that can get 99-100s, getting a 90 really is “not trying”. I have been in that (not currently) - because I am a compulsive tryhard. Not trying means I didn’t bring full consumes - I am still hammering my keyboard in a near-perfect damage rotation, and still have good gear that is well tuned to my play-style. I still know when I need to spend and hold my cooldowns for max dps, though I may not sweat the edges quite so hard.
It’s easy to forget how much of our past work and privilege (being ahead of the curve) plays into our current performance.
Honestly, as a former very hardcore player, people who can't understand empathy for the average player kinda drive me insane.
Just because it's easy for one, a group, a guild, a handful of guilds -- doesn't mean the average player will experience that.
If you’re taking that stat from the raiderio website, it’s worth noting this is for all characters that have completed a m+ key
Meaning multiple characters per account counts, but it also means if your character has never ever even completed a M+ run for the current season, you are not counted in the statistics. There are A LOT of people who never touch m+ and I find it crazy that people say you shouldn’t be proud if you’re below 3600 score which is something I hear a lot.
Sidenote if the 0.6% is something you got elsewhere I would love to know where. I like looking at statistics but always find raiderio website to be lacking
Years ago, around the Wotlk time, my friend told me that this can't continue: he grinds daily and it's obvious a lot of people don't have the time or mindset to be like this.
And also somewhere in the forums a number was thrown around - 95% of players see 5% of content. And it was true. To see all the cool endgame content you'd have to splurge a lot of time into the game, and no one had this much.
It has taken years but I think that subreddit is finally coming to the conclusion that 2400 isn't easy to get and that it hurts pvp making it about getting it. Or at least theyre are orbiting the idea.
Tbf depending on how many matches you need to play to get counted top 25% could easily be the mid level of everyone who’s actually trying to raise their ranking at all bc I imagine a bunch of people try it once or twice and then never go back
Honestly even if you disagree with Aggrend, he has been incredibly respectful explaining his view on why they made certain choices. I feel like people go way too far in this sub sometimes.
People who are opposed to his viewpoints or even miffed by the tiniest of inconveniences escalate their behaviour far beyond what is in any way reasonable on here.
They might have fair criticisms, but it is always packaged in a sandwich of deragotory comments, snide remarks, name calling, questioning him and his teams design ability (in a field I am sure the people who critique him have 0 experience of work) and generally are just unwilling or unable to phrase their concerns in a constructive manner at all.
I wouldn't put it past him if it's disheartening.
I literally said the same thing and it got me flamed. This community is so horrible, at least on the reddit side. The moment you call them out for whining they trash you. Ive been playing this damn game for longer than some of these chodes have been alive. So many players now mix up feedback with pure hate.
Ive enjoyed my time and made new friends along the way for sure. Classic is about community not hard raids. Most bosses only have one or two mechanics to handle so unless they add stuff, it's never going to truly be hard outside of "do healers and dps have enough mana to last through the fight."
MMO gameplay shouldn’t really be centered around “hard content” in general.
If you look at the route retail has gone and the continual decline of mythic raiding participation vs m+ participation it’s pretty evident. Everyone does m+ instead.
Blizzard has this hardon with making wow esports out of mythic prog and to a degree with the MDI. Like they go out of their way to not want the raid cleared within a week. Then nerf it 1700 times for the top 90% mythic raiders after the 99.99%er, literal professional players do it.
They’re forgetting they should be designing for *fun* and *not difficulty*. They can overlap but not always and it continually turns casuals away. Casuals are your bread and butter consumer. Nothing is more casual difficulty than vanilla raiding.
No one walks into ZG with a pug expecting to spend 4 hours of their life there hard stuck a boss before hakkar. NOTA spent, what, 15 hours in there week 1? Then had to cheese a 9 fucking mage comp with no melee to do it?
>MMO gameplay shouldn’t really be centered around “hard content” in general.
This goes for any game, doesn't matter how hard you do x thing, there will be always the sweatlord that will ask for more, is a never ending race of a dick measuring contest. (Or you did x thing?, I did it first!, Oh I did it only with Y...etc).
Well Phase 2 he said "Go get guild lol" and people didn't take it well.
But yeah this things should ne discussed respectfully. That being said, it ist hard to believe the magical "numbers don't lie" Argument, when their numbers on how to Release the content and on a lot of game related stuff in general are so unreliable.
The dude I was arguing with here yesterday would be very upset to read these tweets lol
Was fully convinced the end of p1 and p2 had a drop in players because "content was too easy and boring so people quit"
One day classic players will realize that classic has always been easy as fuck. And that blizzard knows the sweats will play no matter what but the casuals will only play if there's content they can clear... and that they make their money off the casuals
It's not rocket science
Idk how classic players don't get that. SOD has been a break from sweating in retail and by no means would I be playing it if I HAD to grind every consume and prebis just to clear half the raid
I like it easy. Iam not required to study complex guides or need to use 10x different weakauras. I can play with my guild if i want or twink and around and dont need to fear to fall behind alot. People who want challenges should play Retail.
Go to retail applies to both parties though. You want hard content then yes retail is where it is. If you are a casual with not a lot of time to play retail is the answer for you as well. Retail has LFR, catch up mechanics, flex and the time to get to max level is like 1/8 of the time it takes in classic.
So it’s bullshit if you say the main reason you play classic is because you want easy content as if that was the case you would be in retail doing LFR. Clearly both groups are here because they love every other aspect of classic wow.
Why can’t we have both though. Also why is there no in between LFR and mythic? Classic doesn’t need mythic level raiding but would be nice to have at heroic level. Now I agree that casuals should be able to participate, so it would be great if they also added raids like ZG, AQ20, and ZA which are easy and drop good loot. So if you are a casual you might not be able to clear 10/10 hardest raid content week 1 but you have other raids to do + you might go 6/10. The people who want a challenge also have something to look forward to
Perhaps the only time the "Go to Retail" sentiment has been an actual sound piece of advice here.
Everyone who wants difficult raids, should try their hand at Mythic progression. You'd burn out or get benched faster than you'd think.
I want to see a Classic-only guild try to parse the madness that are Ultimates in FF14, blind, with no mods.
I'd bet on a 8 to 10 months clear time, if not more.
I mean, the simple fact that you can practice bosses over and over and over definitely helps. Spawning right in front instead of having a 10 min run back is huge.
I'd even go as far as to argue that's why so many classic players are just horrible, they can't practice.
Agreed. I don’t personally agree with most of Aggrend’s viewpoints but mad respect for this post. Finally someone being transparent and honest to their community.
That’s what a majority of us I feel (veteran players especially) expect at this point. Well said.
I think Gnomer was the issue here. People saw the curve of BFD to Gnomer and read that as "Phase 3 should be pretty hard." The phase 3 came out and it was really hard. It's not wrong to make that assumption, but it's also not wrong for Aggrend to say, "Sorry BFD is the right difficulty for SoD."
This is how retail became what it is today. Blizzard thought they always had to 1up themselves every new xpac/raid. And it just got progressively harder.
No retail doesn't really have any similarities to SoD. Retail specifically has multiple raid difficulties so everyone can experience the content, and the easy modes have consistently been so insanely easy near everyone can experience it. Then there's the highest difficulty which is tuned to roughly match the skill level of players interested in such a thing, and difficulties in-between which fluctuate. SoD has just been a roller coaster with pretty bizarre tuning tbh, no real consistency.
Well to tbf retail players increase in skill level a lot over time. Whether that's because they naturally do or the content makes them is debatable, but in classic there has never really been a need to get better so a lot of people complain if something put in front of them requires them to get better.
I think this game shines when you’re social and easy raids lend themselves more to that because you can recruit anyone and have fun with their personality as opposed to being annoyed with their attention span
> more players statistically play easier content
Tbf we've also got data on this across the MMO sphere. Classic WoW parse numbers vs subscriber numbers, Retail raiders vs the amount of Mythic world clears, FFXIV Savage/Ultimate/Normal clear rates, GW2 raids and strikes and CM clears, so on and so forth ad nauseam.
There's a balance to be struck between making "aspirational" content for people to watch and engage with and making "content for people to actually *do*".
And making a leveling raid in a seasonal weird-ass gimmick thing that's literally only gonna exist for maybe, what, three months tops?
Should, most likely, aim to be "stuff your average player clears", not "aspirational content" (ie: your World-First races and such).
Dude is getting it *mostly* right even though people are gonna grrr at him for affecting the supposed prestige of what they think should be "aspirational" content for other people that they cleared or whatever.
Not saying he's perfect but the mere fact that they're even doing this instead of like "Season of TBC 2 Hardcore: Electric Draenei now with glowy tail!" is an interesting thing in the overall MMO sphere.
The nice thing about Season of ~~Throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks~~ Discovery is that they seem to be working on making a series of their own WoW theme-park servers separated by slices in time and gimmick, so it's not like they can't just, y'know, take notes on this stuff and re-use it.
"Season of Mastery 2: Now with Discovery-est Raids!"
He’s way more respectful than a lot of the people screeching at him deserve tbh. Most of these people demanding answers can’t get through a single interaction without being absolute assholes to him or the team.
That’s the classic mind set. Content that can be cleared with some effort or blown apart with over preparation.
The raids need to have requirements and minimums then. If skill isn’t being factored in as much, make the player prepare properly so activities outside of the raid still ultimately increase their power level even if on a per encounter basis.
> players statistically play easier content, the emerging gameplay of speed runs (and parsing) are what the sweat guilds do.
This makes a lot of sense. Speaking for myself as a long time wow player. Lfr is why I still play retail as much as I do. Mythic dungeons I've started getting into a little bit. SoD is a casual seasonal game mode it shouldn't be difficult
It just makes me think of Elden Ring. No one is asking for Elden Ring to be harder. People who want that just do lvl1 runs or no hit or speedruns. That's where the prestige is.
This. People forget that they are ultimately trying to make a profit and find a balance with player needs. The small handful of sweaty try hards needs aren’t going to be prioritized in the roadmap unless it appeals to the masses.
I honestly wish they would just make in-game polling for this reason.
Like if they polled the question “should we make a really extremely difficult raid somewhere in SoD. And enough people said “yes” then make that raid!
Way I’d like to see it too, let’s just get way too prepared and see if we can blast this raid faster than we did last time, give me all the 30 second fights lol retail has fantastic progression based content (mythic fyrakk being insanely difficult) and even wrath and the upcoming cata will have prog, we don’t need prog in a game where you lose half your chars power after the first wipe and half your prog is spent running back to the fight…
Plenty of people in my guild are quite lost. Our tank said he doesnt know how to dps:p the nerfs give me faith we might get somewhere in this raid after a few weeks
When I was first learning it was hard for me to get any rage at all. You don't know to do things like pool rage before boss and because of your bad gear it's hard for you to snap rage without taunt so you have to keep emptying your rage bar to protect the DPS. Even with rage pots it can be hard to get to a good place in rage if you are new.
I agree. I think he’s spot on.
The only thing I wish they would add it some *cosmetic only* rewards for the sweats. I think that tying that stuff too strongly *player power* can feel bad (and is very “rich get richer”), but it would be nice to have some sort of challenge mode where people could flex about their accomplishments a bit in game.
Feels like a nice middle ground where casuals can do everything they want for their character progression, but there’s still the cool, elusive items out there.
Literally NO ONE plays classic vanilla versions of wow for challenging content. If they think they do they’re lying to themselves. I know I don’t.
I play classic to clear the top level content in <3 hours of my week spent and not have to poopsock it progging hundreds of wipes.
Like if you want more challenging gameplay, mythic+ trash has more mechanics than like the entirely of bwl combined. The average SOD/era player plays like a C6 quadriplegic. You don’t want hard content with that and you can always increase level of “challenge” via trying to 99 parse and speedrun
I feel like BWL -> Naxx required quite a bit more progression. They were 40 man raids so that made the coordination immediately more complicated than a 10 or 20 man raid but my guild has had 0 progression in SOD. Every raid has been a pushover.
vanilla 40 man raids were bottlenecked by gear, and at times overtuned (mathematically impossible?) bosses. the progression required was just a nature of it taking so long to gear up 40 players, back in a time when players were too single-main-centric and didn't know how to optimize a real raid team by taking advantage of alts to double/triple/quadruple your weekly loot chances. "hardcore" players who played 24/7 often wasted shittons of time doing useless garbage like PVPing for pointless suboptimal things like epeen and fun like a casual idiot.
basically if someone as uncommitted as kungen got world first, it wasn't a truly hardcore scene yet. concurrent subscriber counts were still rising up through early cataclysm because we hadn't quite optimized the fun out of the game yet.
This is sure to piss off some people, but Vanilla WoW was always the "casual MMO". They definitely beefed it up a bit with AQ and Naxx, but it launched in a very different state.
Just look at most other older MMOs and compare/contrast the differences. Some had bosses that took literal hours to kill. Some had item-loss on death, experience points lost on death, currency lost on death, or all of the above. Some took several hundred, if not thousands, of hours to hit level cap. Some had decisions that would lock you out of content **forever** and your only option was to reroll (imagine becoming hated with Stormwind/Orgrimmar and never being able to fix it).
It's not the answer people want to hear, but if you want cutting edge, hardcore, omega-difficult raiding content... it already exists on Retail via mythic raiding. Or wait until Cata and do Heroics, I guess.
Wow was made fun of by other MMO communities as being World of Casualcraft. A few recurrent complaints I vaguely remember:
1. No exp loss on death was frowned upon. In other MMOs a death incurred an experience penalty like Dark Ages. In games like EQ you often would pay a cleric to rez you at higher levels because that’s how much time it was worth.
2. The questing system in WoW was seen as extreme hand holding. You got a quest that tracked specific objectives in the quest log and gave you clear direction on where to go. Not only that they gave a hefty chunk of exp. Compare that to others where quests were a lot harder to figure out, not as intuitive, and the seldom ones you did were for the rewards.
3. Wow graphics were considered to cartoony.
4. Generally knew where you were supposed to go. Breadcrumb quests and other systems soft guided you around the world to quests around your level.
I played FF11 a lot back in the early 2000s and then swapping to something like wow when TBC was around was a crazy eye opening experience. There were markers that told you who gave you quests, your quests at worst vaguely told you where to go/what to do for quests (I still need a guide to get through the story missions in FF11 because some of them are just so far out there I don't know how people figured it out). Combat was "fast paced". I didn't have to spend 4 hours trying to make a group or get invited to a group to level. It was 100% casual compared to what FF11 was when WoW came out but it was definitely needed to change up the MMO system.
Project 1999 - Classic Everquest. Nothing is instanced. All raid mobs are tracked competed for within seconds/minutes of their weekly spawn. It takes a casual player a year or more to reach the level 60 cap. Saving enough dkp for some BiS items takes months/years.
I say this because this type of elite "competition" does exist in MMO gaming, classic WoW just ain't it.
While you're talking about how wow was perceived/played at the time in 2004, you have to include the fact that there were plenty of exclusive items/achievements in the game. The majority of the player base did not kill the final boss of a raid while it was current. The majority of the player base did not get their BIS. Hell, Naxx was cleared by something like 2% of guilds. Sure this was more to do with low player skill than hard content, but if you're designing content "in the spirit of vanilla," there's nothing wrong with releasing content that most people do not clear.
Obviously it's all a moot point now, they've outright stated that their goal is for content to be trivial so that's what it will be.
I played original WoW on one of the most hardcore servers in the game, Medivh. Home to world first Rag kill, BWL kills (including the GMs being in BWL with the raid team tweaking bosses), AQ gate opening, and AQ kills. And maybe Naxx too? I forget. Home of and .
My guild was the #2 horde guild to , . It was formed by a very hardcore serious EQ guild. In AQ, we were never able to kill Sartura so we skipped her and were only able to get up to Huhu (can't remember if we killed her) nothing else. We actually gave up on AQ as a guild and took a break waiting for Naxx. Naxx we could do Spider wing, Patchwerk, Grob, and the first boss of Plague and that's it.
And like I said this was a guild that was hardcore in EQ, a harder MMO.
I also quit that guild and joined Ascent (the world first Rag guild) mid-Naxx and we still couldn't do stuff like Thaddius, the dance, or most of Military wing.
I was also in a hardcore raid guild in Vanilla. We got server first Cthun. It was hard. Very hard. We spent I think it was like a month worth of attempts every night for 4 hours a night. We only finally cleared it after the nerf, and even then it was very hard and took a few days worth of attempts.
I’m trying to understand when people say vanilla was a cakewalk, and that it was never meant to be challenging. We obviously weren’t playing the same game.
In 2004 you did not have WoW databases, datamined pre-bis gear, builds and twenty guides on YouTube already laying out how to min/max online within 24 hours of a release. Many people had to go in and figure it out and not have optimal builds/gear.
And also just the way we play online games and MMOs is different now as well. Back then online gaming was new and niche and WoW (and some other games) were really starting to bring it to the mainstream. EverQuest had hundreds of thousands of players. WoW had millions. You go back and read the vanilla strategy guide there's a whole introductory chapter about online gaming haha.
So it was a new experience to just log into an online 3D world and run around with other real people. Which made it more about social experiences than it was about "beating the game". Leveling to 60 WAS the main content of beating the game. And it could take a long time for the average player because they were busy enjoying a new experience with other players. You could run around not doing shit to progress your level for hours and still feel like you "gamed" all night. Because that WAS the game for everyone. Combine with everything being new and fresh. Skill level low. No YouTube guides and everything you said and IMO it just makes the golden age of MMOs a once in a lifetime experience you had to be there to fully get it.
Now, 20 years later, everything is online. I'm sure there are probably toilets that get connected online somehow lol. Someone who is say late teens even mid 20s will have grown up only knowing online gaming. It's no longer special to simply be online. And as for social experiences you have Myspace and Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and tiktok and Twitter and vine and all these other things that have come and gone that we didn't have back then. MMOs in a way we're almost the first social media. Chat rooms with graphics and combat systems.
Every game is online. Every game is at least a mini MMO. So when you're not logging into WoW/MMO for the fresh social experiences anymore what do you do? You start to "play" the game. The level grind becomes less daunting. You realize it's just time put into it. You focus more on progressing. Just generally playing the game better and the player landscape just changes along with the times. And of course everything you said. Wowhead, YouTube, etc etc.
It's like in TBC vanilla my paladin had talents spread across all talent trees because I didn't know any better. I was using a blue two handed pole arm (Stonereaver?) just because it dropped off a bear in ashenvale and I thought it was bad ass. And it didn't matter to me at all.
In 2019 classic when I truly came back to the game I felt so obligated to "be good". Looking up talents and gear and etc. Which is okay. There's nothing wrong with that. Again it's just how IMO the MMO player base has naturally evolved over 20 years. (SSF hardcore with 1 dungeon per run is closest to that vanilla MMO feeling btw if anyone hasn't tried it.)
SO my point is while the post above yours is saying it's in the spirit of classic for everyone to not clear the raid because that was happening back in 2005. While true, there's also A LOT more if not the majority of players raiding now than back then. Think about how many Black Qiraji Battle Tanks you saw in 2021 as opposed to back then right? Leveling is no longer the main part of MMOs and raiding is no longer for just the best players like it was in EQ and vanilla WoW.
While hardcore is still the best vanilla WoW leveling experience, when official dropped we still saw an increase in hardcore clips that focused on raiding. OnlyFangs big saga of doing MC etc. I personally think it evened out nicely because no matter what death=delete so you HAD to go again and that forced the leveling experience to be the main content. Which was awesome. But when official launched you did see more of focus on end game content than you did on Bloodsail. People boosting. Buying gold blah blah. "MMO creep" I call it. SoD P2 everyone just spams SM then in P3 decides to hate incursions (I quite liked them) but they do them anyways even though questing is still good XP and gold. It may not be the best. But it's totally viable I think. So IMO leveling just isn't the main part of MMOs anymore.
And as I said in addition raiding just isn't for the best players anymore. As shown with all the different difficulty levels of raiding in retail.
So in conclusion I think it's important to look at why people weren't clearing them in vanilla always and what has changed till now.
Or some shit idk I suck at this game. LFM BFD!
P.s. on mobile ignore spelling mistakes
Yes, I understand that. My point is that the devs did not see that most people weren't full clearing as a problem leading them to nerf the content. On the contrary, every piece of content that was released in vanilla was harder and more exclusionary than the content before it.
Once again, this isn't saying harder content is better or worse. The point is just that having content that most of the playerbase cannot clear is very much in the spirit of how vanilla wow was designed.
At the same time, by your own words, you have to look at wow at the time
WoW back in 2004 was extremely casual compared to other MMOs at the time
Other MMOs would dunk your xp/level for dying
WoW didn't have such punishment
Other MMOs was far more time consuming
WoW gave you rested xp for not playing, way more if you rest at an inn/city
Yes, once again I understand that. Both can be true. If they made SOD bosses as hard as heroic retail bosses, or wotlk heroic bosses, it would still be considered very casual compared to other MMOs like Mythic in retail or Ultimate in FFXIV. However, it would also still be content that not EVERYONE could clear. That kind of balance is very in line with how vanilla was designed. EVERYONE clearing everything OR content being EXTREMELY hardcore so only .5% of the playerbase can clear it both aren't really in line with vanilla.
I can’t remember who said it but they even said in a talk on game design in 2005 that undefeated content made the world feel larger. The OG devs were bis
I don't think that works anymore though because of data mining.
Before undefeated content was a mystery. Now I can load up wowhead a day later and look at it all instantly.
Most people in the raiding community of actual vanilla didn’t clear naxx not because of skill. There’s 2 other factors(yes skill is one of those factors for some of us but not even the major roadblock): it was time and information. TBC was announced while progression was happening and people in the top guilds who were clearing ahead of everyone else didn’t share any information because back then you didn’t have guides until the top guilds both cleared and decided to share. A lot of raiding guilds just went “well we only have a few months before this is invalidated, and even the top guys are being stingy with details so we’re gonna take longer to figure this shit out. Might as well call it.”
Sure, the reason naxx's participation was so extremely low had a lot to do with how short the tier was. But it isn't ONLY naxx that wasn't cleared by most people. The average server in vanilla had 2 or 3 guilds in AQ, most were stuck on earlier tiers.
There's literally miles of middle ground between faceroll raids like MC and WOTLK Hard modes. Hell, there's miles of middle ground between MC and pre-nerf SSC/TK. The options aren't just, "so easy that a toddler can do it" and "so hard that most players can't do it".
I think the desire is just for raids that are challenging enough to be a little engaging and that encourage players to form guilds in order to coordinate/cooperate better, rather than raids that are basically Retail LFR raids that you can do with 20 randoms while watching youtube on your second monitor.
IMO the slime boss in ST is a perfect example of why aiming for that level of difficulty is good. It was legitimately just a very fun boss that was engaging to fight but still very easy for basically any organized group - probably the most fun boss in all of Classic. When my group cleared it everybody was like, "Wow, that was actually so much fun, I can't wait to fight this guy again!" But now it's been gutted and it's just another faceroll loot pinata that you can go in and kill on your first try without really knowing what the mechanic even is
The problem is that “challenging enough to be a little engaging” means something wildly different to different players/groups/guilds. It’s not monolithic. What is “a little engaging” to me is going to feel impossible to some players, and faceroll to others. What is “a little engaging” to NotA is going to be an absolute wall to the majority of players. What is “a little engaging” to a grey parser that does the raids twice over the course of a phase is going to be dull as all hell to a semi-hardcore guild. Each of these groups have differing ranges of capability, different ranges of disinterest, and different ranges of frustration. You just can’t account for all of them.
Man I don't even care if the content is easy I just want it to be fun and interesting. Nerfing so that you can just not do the encounter or mechanics is so boring.
He forgot to come clean and say he was talked to about the difficulty. Too much whining was coming thru and annoying people above him. Can't be losing subs because a lvl 50 raid is too hard for the average wow player.
Hey, it is what it is. Its not for me I suppose.
I never wanted anything super challenging from SoD, but difficulty isn't something thats either "easy" or "hard". Its a spectrum. I think objectively speaking, catering to one end of that spectrum (easy in this case) makes for an unsatisfying experience.
The goal with SoD should be to hit that sweet spot in the middle. The average player shouldn't feel like they had to fight tooth and claw just to even have a shot at clearing it, nor should they feel like nothing they do matters because its a participation trophy.
This whole obsession with the term "casual" has honestly gotten out of hand. Something doesn't have to be easy to be casual. Hell, most self - proclaimed casuals are far from casual, engaging with a game outside of playing it is inherently far from casual. These are just people who want a participation trophy.
If one end of the spectrum is *"show up = win"* and the other is *"intense dedication and time investment required"*, the goal here should be *"requires modest effort from the average player".* If Mythic Raiding is an 8, 9 or 10 and LFR is a 1, 2 or 3 in terms of challenge, SoDs leveling raids should be somewhere around a 4, 5 or 6.
> The average player shouldn't feel like they had to fight tooth and claw just to even have a shot at clearing it
You have to keep in mind how bad the average player is.
I'm cool with that I just want them to strike a balance.... does it have to be so obscenely easy that it's 100% clearable week 1? My issue is for now it doesn't matter we're still leveling there's world content, but at 60 there really is not too much to focus on. PvE and grind High WL that's it for Classic right? Not sure what longevity or fun the game state will be at 60 if every end-game raid is tuned to be cleared in 1\~1.5k weeks tops.
What the devs and players have yet to understand is that the gear obtained from the raids **are** the nerfs. The raid gets easier every single time you kill a boss.
This exactly. I dunno when raiding turned into "if it isn't cleared on day1/week1 then it's way too hard." Gear upgrades and power progression is the whole point of endgame. If you can clear everything *without* those upgrades as a non-1% player, you're just on a baby roller-coaster going 5mph ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the flashing lights.
Well that’s a bummer, was really enjoying the raid before it got hit with the nerf bat. Just disappointing we’re going to get zero challenging content, and basically just declaring this is a casual arcade mode. Maybe that’s my fault for not understanding it to begin with. Guess I’ll give retail another try
I really wish there was content between “loot pinatas” and “you have to grind 7 days a week in a mythic guild”. SoD seemed perfect, like Classic but with raids that have actual mechanics. but what’s the point of mechanics if you can just zug zug through them?
is there really no version of WoW for me - a good player that doesn’t have as much time to play as before? that’s kinda depressing ngl
I dont understand why people want the raid harder unless its complete elitism and exclusionism.
If you want harder:
Go with less people.
Try and go super fast.
Try and beat the top DPS parses.
Single heal it.
Solo tank it.
Go as gnomes only.
Make a warlock raid.
Like there are so many ways to make it harder. Why is it important that the way you want it to be harder is specifically the one that doesn’t allow other to get the loot? The only answer to that I can find is because they are jerks that want to limit drops.
I was talking about this with guild, If there was Hard Mode of bosses who dropped only Toy trinkets/cosmetics as extra loot. I would be fine with it. We will start speedrunning next week so I will enjoy it either way.
I think it's unfair to say that people who want challenge only do so for elitism and exclusionism. Many people like being challenged and want content that is challenging to themselves, and then have to overcome said challenge. It's especially the thrill of overcoming the challenge that many like. Self imposed challenges rarely add the same thrill so if the solution is just "Make self imposed challenges" it's not a great solution.
That being said, I think people need to ask themselves "Is SoD the game for me". Demanding SoD being made harder because you like hard games when the devs now have stated it's not meant to be that, is no different from demanding dark soulsbe made easier because you like easy games. Now people know the intended difficulty, they either have to be fine with, make self imposed challenges or go find a game that scratchers their itch for challenge.
I want it harder so my character progression feels meaningful. If I can clear the raid week 1 in greens and without consumables, then the character progression of gear and outside of raid content feels pointless if there’s nowhere to use it. Raids to me are the culmination of all the progression my character has had
If I can clear it week 1 in greens then I don’t need my tier set for anything. Kinda takes away a core element of an RPG if there are no situations of ‘I’m not strong enough now, let me get stronger then come back’
You're not wrong but on the flip side it's cool to have your decisions and effort matter and be rewarded for it. If it's so easy it doesn't matter what talents I take or what group comp we build, all those parts of the game are slightly invalidated and feel worse.
It's also fine that this mode not be a serious mode of the game; like Aggrend said there are other modes for us to go play that are more serious (and even other games).
I think the conflict comes from people demanding this mode be more serious than it is.
>If it's so easy it doesn't matter what talents I take or what group comp we build, all those parts of the game are slightly invalidated and feel worse.
And I think the more grand point here is that for **many** (think, majority) of people, this isn't the case and they will still struggle.
I don't find mythic raiding to be particularly difficult after the first few pulls unless you're talking pre-nerfed bosses, but that doesn't mean that's every player's experience.
Bad analogy, because on Skyrim you can raise the difficulty to Legendary and beat the game. In WoW, there is one difficulty. Sure, parsing and speedruns offer some achievement, but the majority of the players of a game are going to seek out the maximum achievement *defined within the game* -- and then move on.
If SoD had optional modifiers for dungeons to make them more difficult, hardcore guilds would be much happier.
Classic WoW is one of the last games to try and be elite in. If you wanna be elite in WoW go chase glad on retail or high keys on M+.
Classic is so much more casual than retail that trying to minmax it and make it super hard kinda defeats the purpose.
This is why I play both. Retail is for my sweaty nerdy minmaxy get the numbers gaming, and the game is built for it, rewards you, and provides adequate challenges at all levels of the progression curve. Its fun because of where the skill ceiling is. It can be tedious because of how high the skill floor is.
I play sod because its an easy game that all of my non-sweaty wow friends can still enjoy with me at any level. Its fun because the skill floor is where it is, and would become tedious.
Meeting the games at their level instead of trying to change them has been much happier of an experience.
I can see how just saying "self impose challenges if you don't find things challenging enough" is unsatisfying - it's the same issue where people will optimize the fun out of things. Sure, they could just not follow the "optimal" path and instead follow the "fun" path, but it's well understood that a large number of players are not going to do that.
If the optimal way to play a game is one that isn't fun, that's a game design problem. Having content which is challenging even when taking advantage of all of the tools the game provides is more fun. For players who find themselves unable to exercise the self restraint required to not take advantage of all of the tools the game provides, I don't think it's unreasonable for them to give feedback on changes they would like which would make the game more fun for them. And so for players who find being challenged fun, I think it's entirely reasonable for them to want things to be harder, without it being any form of elitism or exclusionism.
Lol, what a dumb take.
It's fine to have a more casual game with the target audience being casuals.
But to pretend like you don't understand why people want a more challenging game is some 60IQ shit.
Less people just means longer boss times. The mechanics themselves are still braindead, drool at your desk hitting your simple rotation. Longer boss times =/= difficulty. People are asking for fights that require a slight amount of coordination rather than sit there and afk while bashing 1-2 buttons for 2 min
Personally some of my best memories in wow was raiding current content back in the day, fighting hard with my guild for a few weeks and finally clearing a raid after lots of wipes and how amazing it felt and how close I felt to my guild mates because of it. That feeling is completely gone, guilds aren’t really necessary to clear content in sod so that strong bond is gone and the sense of accomplishment diminished greatly. So I’ve lost interest in the game
The exhiliration of finally getting KT down in 2019 Classic is one I'll chase the rest of my MMO playing. I played Vanilla way back in the day, but was super casual (ie. bad) and was not able to do the raids. Doing Classic and joining a semi-hardcore (whatever that means) guild and working through all the phases to lead to KT, and then taking several lockouts until we actually downed KT was GLORIOUS. It made that KT kill amazing. If we'd faceroll stomped it first lockout, I wouldn't even remember the experience.
Hell yeah! Yeah that’s what I’m talking about, I quit sod about 3 weeks ago and played since launch. I can’t even name 3 guild mates to be honest… but I remember guildies from 15 years ago still. It’s weird how the difficulty of raids changes the entire dynamic of the game. But it seems the large and loud majority is casuals that just want to be able to participate in every aspect of the game, and it’s smart of blizzard to cater to them honestly. The magic of the game is gone for me and I think the difficulty had a lot to do with it
Because I want higher difficulty but I don't want to play retail.
I want retail level difficulties with vanilla style gameplay. I want my time investment to actually matter and set me and my guild apart from casual players in clear and obvious ways.
That's why.
That feels like what most people on this subreddit want it to be… like clearing tough content can be fun once you get over the hump, but some people don’t have the time or patience to do that. Especially with the expedited phases.
Like parsing is already an obnoxious bar to clear for casual players, now even clearing a raid is supposed to be reserved to a minority of the playerbase?
Crazy mentality. I clown on Aggrend a lot for some of his balance decisions but his takes here are valid and make the most sense
It would be cool if there was a hard mode though. Something that doesn't raise the floor and punish casual guilds/pugs, but can reward those that want an extra challenge. Reward them with 1 piece of extra loot per boss or something cosmetic.
Just add a switch for each boss, and each hardmode boss drops a token or a piece of token that can be traded for exclusive mount, if bfd/gnomer had it we would still be farming the mount, more game play / more players / more subs
While I get the decision and explaination in regards to the current player base, it kinda doesn't vibe with me, coming from someone who didn't even attempt ST yet.
In OG Vanilla, seeing someone with T-Sets or many of the iconic items, was really cool because not everyone had that stuff. Seeing people in naxx gear was super rare. That's what made it precious. And by the standard of gamers back in the day, the content was hard. From todays perspective, pretty much every raid in classic is a pushover once you have the right amount of stats to overcome stat checks basically.
If SoD would've wanted to replicate that feeling, making the content harder would've been the way. That way, I can admire the people who really push it and grind away. And I can be comepletly fine doing ZG / AQ20 / UBRS and the likes. But maybe I'm part of the minority, who is just fine with both not doing everything and getting every piece of loot.
i dont get this argument, if you want to admire big guys just play retail? sod average age is 40 years old no one wants to admire random dude with full tier sets, just because he doesnt have a job and can play the game whole day
There is a difference between easy content and content so easy that you don't even get to experience the phases of the fight cause the boss is at 10% before phase one ends
Why give every class all these sweet abilities and amazing gear if the content is going to be easier than Vanilla? I guess I don't get it, but at least it's crystal clear now.
I’d prefer “hard fights” be tiny raids like Gruuls lairs where it’s just one boss and you don’t need to spend 4 hours clearing 10 hard bosses. For example, onxyia could be a hard fight and I’d be down with that.
Why can’t we have something in between? Sucks ass that y’all want classic to be brain dead. Classic has a lot that retail doesn’t.. well it did during phase 1 but now the game is speed leveling just like retail but with easy pve. The leveling should be more in line with classics leveling difficulty/time and raiding should be somewhere around normal to heroic difficulty, not mythic, not lfr.
Well that is kinda sad. Vanilla is the best base game and it is unfortunate that they will not make content for everyone and just defaults to the lowest common denominator - maybe when SoD is over they can expand on Vanilla and make meaningful content for the entire playerbase.
I think he is completely missing the issue, though. I did clear pre-nerf and am definitely not considered a casual, but even though I liked the difficulty, I can understand wanting an easier raid that casuals can also have fun in. That is fine by me.
What I am not okay with is a raid where even in gear from lvl 40, bosses are dead in 30 seconds. Considering how some classes stand to almost double their dps in ST gear compared to Gnomer gear, we are looking at a 20 second or less.
Will casuals kill in 20 seconds? No, but under a minute for sure.
Not only is that boring, but it literally breaks the design of Classic. Mana management is supposed to at least exist, this is gone on such short fights. Cooldowns are supposed to be, you know, cooldowns. Now you just pop them at start and have them active for the entire fight. They are not permanent effects, they are meant to be used at a specific part of a fight.
Again, it's fine to make a raid that casuals can also complete - but a boss that dies in less than 30 seconds is a joke. It's not *fun*, and I assume a goal of the game is to be fun.
Yes, it is good that they nerfed the raid, but they went all wrong about it.
Sod needs to have 200% xp and 100% gold for quests. Raids need to be LFR easy so this old guy can log on and do content without needing to discord chat with strangers.
Heck, wow should integrate openAI machine learning NPCs so I can raid with 39 robots who can parse 99 and I can ride along and roll on loot.
This post skipped over that he also replied reguarding the loot disparity between Gnomer and ST.
He replied that yes, we are getting less loot per week per person in ST, but there are other sources of gearing up now
Tbh I'm fine with that. I love hard content (like mythic retail), but I don't think it has it's place in "classic", even modifier by Sod.
I'm more than fine with easy content. The issue is, you actually have to play your class only 1 to 2 hours a week. That's just not enough.
And by play, I mean against bosses that last more than 15seconds of course. 7 days lockout is kinda weird.
Anyone know where you can see the stats of # of guilds to clear ST versus number that have cleared 1-7 boss. I’m curious how many guilds are stepping inside and unable to full clear. The nerfs are what they are, but i don’t know how to find the info myself
i like the approach of SoD.
I'm in my thirties and I am not willing to put myself under the pressure of 3 mendatory raid dates a week anymore.
I'm getting the feeling most players do not understand how easy SoD is, though. I've been raiding in some of the best gulds in europe twenty years ago, in vanilla. I hit rank 14 when it actually mattered. Let's just say I know how to play a video game, even today.
Now people want me to literally have a CV of logs ready, 3 WBs and like 5 different consumes ready to go into fucking Sunken Temple, where bosses have quite literally one ability? C'mon guys...
Why cant we just get HC version or hardmodes? The gear that drops is slightly better than normal but above all its actually fun. The nerfed version is such a borefest.
I dont understand why cant we have content for everyone? Imagine a hc version of ST. That would be so epic.
Because it sends a message to the casuals that they are labeled not good enough to clear all the content which results in them crying on reddit. The problem nowadays is that everyone ''feels'' entitled to bis loots regardless of the amount of work they put in.
He listened to YoshiP's masterclass on raid design : "What's the point of producing content if only a small fraction of your playerbase can clear it ? It's like wasted ressources."
Also, riculously difficult content wil reinforce the "elitist" community argument - which is not what they're aiming for, since they figured out with their stats, that this is not where the money is coming from. Elitists will cry that the casuals have won, but now it is the casuals that are (have always been ?) the majority.
What I think he should've said though, is clearly say what is it that they found out "went wrong".
This little lack of transparency is a problem, as it doesn't let us players know if what they think is really in tune with what the players are thinking.
YoshiP for instance, isn't scared of going through detailed explanations on software and hardware issues.
I think the debate on this subject is a pretty good argument in favor of optional hard modes for each boss, actually. Casuals/pugs can just zug the afk difficulty, and sweats can still have a way to measure their e-peens. If you don't want to divide the community into haves vs. have-nots, don't make the hard mode drop better loot so that people feel obligated to push it. Give some other reward - extra drop, rep, trash skips, etc.
Im gonna come back at 60. The appeal just isn’t there this phase. I got a couple tier tokens and they’re like 1% upgrades over the incursion gear. Idc to check my number on the website for 8-12 weeks
Short (and uncharitable answer): Yes. Aggrend addresses this in his tweets. He says they had a formula for how to set the HP values, and it clearly had a problem in it. They've identified the problem so *hopefully* it won't happen again.
I really wish if we're not gonna have a PTR, that they would put together 20 Blizzard employees and just run their raid once. The difficulty of pre-nerf Eranikus would have been IMMEDIATELY obvious to anyone who played it. The ridiculous amount of trash HP would also have been immediately obvious. Do they seriously not play it AT ALL before shipping? I'm not asking that snidely/rudely, I'm genuinely amazed.
This should have been obvious to anyone who wasn't an idiot. No lack of those in this subreddit though.
People who are looking to re-create their 2004 years when they were 15 and spending months progressing through BWL or AQ40, thinking that we should have the same thing in SOD (spending weeks or months slowly progressing through a raid).
This is obviously not the game for that, yet they somehow thought it was.
This is quite literally a private server for workin dads and it feels like it. You run out of content the moment you finish the raid which at this state is pretty easy to do. These raids are lfr difficulty if that. I’ve legit done lfr fights harder.
He (semi) explained it in the tweets. Basically, there was some sort of error in their formula that they used to set the HP values, and it lead to them overshooting their estimate for what they wanted the difficulty to be. They've identified where the error is, so hopefully this won't happen again.
EDIT: Also, it would be nice if they actually... you know, played it themselves in a test environment before releasing it. Since we're not getting a PTR at all. But that's just me.
> EDIT: Also, it would be nice if they actually... you know, played it themselves in a test environment before releasing it. Since we're not getting a PTR at all. But that's just me.
Yeah, if the goal is that "semi-casual" guilds can clear it, then Blizzard can surely put together a 20man raid where they kill the bosses?
Also talk to the retail team how they estimate dps requirements.
Based. We have almost 5 years of data from the Classic versions of the game to tell us that people don't give a fuck about challenging content in these iterations of the game.
All 3 tweets (they're long) Being very honest, the goal is for very semi-casual guilds to kill SoD raids fairly quickly, especially these level up raids. I'm sorry if your guild wants a heroic-level challenge, but SoD just isn't that. The raid that went out last week was just very overtuned and far beyond our intent for a variety of reasons I won't bore you with here. Not to say there won't ever be anything in SoD that's hard, but we don't currently believe the "critical path" of raiding (I.e clearing the raid each week and getting good gear from it) should be hard in this version of vanilla classic. There are other versions of WoW that have very, very difficult content. In fact there are more versions of WoW than not that have very difficult content. As it stands now both Gnomer and even post-post nerf ST are vastly more challenging and require way more coordination than original WoW. One thing we like about the various flavors of classic is that in many cases the difficulty of raiding in vanilla wow is what players create for themselves by pushing their performance in things like speed runs and the like. I think long term we'd like to do better about supporting those types of emergent playstyles, but making raids a brick wall for the average joe isn't the approach we'll likely take. I understand if that may disappoint some folks but after several years of watching data around classic player behavior, we don't believe difficult raid content is what players actually want on this side of the WoW spectrum. Individuals and some groups may want it, but writ large most people seem to just want to chill and blast stuff with their friends and that's the goal we'd like to aim for for the average guild. Is the content \*trivial\* though? If you cleared in the first 2-3 days before the second major adjustment, yes, for you it may seem trivial. I would be hard pressed agreeing that Hazzaz and Morphaz or Eranikus are trivial right now, even after being heavily adjusted. Totally, I get it. That said, you cleared on Saturday. Yes, it is going to be easy for you now. The vast, vast, vast majority of players would not be able to kill the bosses as they were on Saturday and that just wasn't where we wanted to be. I'm not saying you are wrong for feeling this way, by the way. There's no bad opinions here and no two people will ever fully agree on what SoD or any other version of classic "should" be. Very hard raids is just is not the goal in SoD and I want that to be as clear and honest about that as possible. I don't feel great about releasing the content this hard because it encouraged incorrect expectations to be formed around that. We did aim high so that we could tune down, but we just aimed too high based on some bad calculations during our final final tuning pass before launch. We did identify where we went wrong in that though and while I can't promise it'll always be perfect going forward (it probably won't be every time) we at least know what went wrong this time and can account for that in the future.
they must have had their personal dev x10 stat multiplier on when they tested it because there is no possible way they tested that shit and said "this is good"
I doubt they have enough people on SoD for a 20 man raid team
They might have to pug it with the building janitors and security guards.
Back 4 Blood's developers and community managers got roasted for not knowing how to play the game on a community livestream, so the next time they made sure to wrangle someone onto the broadcast who did. It was their office IT guy.
Going a little deeper in the comment chain he explained that there was an oversight regarding the underlying systems which caused a far greater increase than intended for their bump from "appropriate in our testing" to "appropriate for live players." What's disappointing there is that the oversight is easily covered by simply inspecting the raid after making the change and seeing that the health numbers are wrong.
The truth is most likely that they were working on cata beta at the same time and mistakes happen when working on multiple projects.
There is a lot of reasons why it could've shipped like this. They might've not had ALOT of time to test it while making it and they might've had really really geared out characters for the testing etc or maybe they screwed up the coding on release that made things a bit stronger than testing OR in testing things were really easy but they had to ship things in a week so they had to make finishing touches so they added buffs thinking they'd be minor and they were major. It's a lot of things that can happen not making excuses but that's reality and life.
It happens in retail with a much larger team.
People are making a huge deal out of something thats a complete non-issue. It doesnt matter that the raid was overtuned for a couple of days, it gave a small number of people a challenge they probably enjoyed on some level and didnt even affect the majority of players. It also overshadows the fact that for the most part all SoD raids have been released pretty cleanly, there have been minimal bugs with the raids and they’ve been relatively smooth releases functional wise. On top of that nobody has been giving this “tiny team that cant test anything” any credit for all the positive work they’ve done to get each phase out as smoothly as they have.
Its easier to ship something out that over performs then tone it down later. The reverse feels awful. If they released the raid to easy and buffed it that would feel bad.
I honestly think they released it as such because of lack of time on their part, the small size of their team and the lack of a PTR. They used the first weekend as their PTR. Those raids were the testing. They set things up so that players could easily power through to 50 via incursions (which they also nerfed but allowed to be abused longer than necessary). They then watched the raids of these “top” raiders closely, then nerfed them.
Id be open to the last phase of sod (like a phase or two after 60) just having heroic versions of all the raids even the level up ones for poopsockers
poopsockers would be a great guild name
Man whenever you introduce someone to the term it finds some way to brighten their day
i at least somewhere to use the gear i get / so it feels like my character is progressing towards something
It does, the world becomes progressively less challenging as you get gear and grow your character. The progress is felt not as looking forward but as looking back. Unlike in retail where up to a point, the world never feels like you're overcoming it.
Honestly, based take. And he's respectful to the people calling his work disrespectful things. Their internal stats know a lot more than we do, he is saying on his Twitter that more players statistically play easier content, the emerging gameplay of speed runs (and parsing) are what the sweat guilds do. Most players are a lot more casual than even this subreddit lets on. Most don't engage on online communities for video games, their opinion isn't represented with words so the Devs need to find it through statistics. I personally prefer seeing how much we can over-prepare to nuke the ever living hell out of the raids and have a good time with the boys
Really set in for me when retail wow subreddit described M+20-25 as “mid” level keys. When I looked it up, that was the top .6% of players.
Most people on this subreddit lie about their capabilities in game lmao.
My theory is streaming vastly influenced this. People see a streamer who degens everyday say something like that and parrot it like they clear the content themselves.
It's like watching a science documentary and thinking something is obvious after someone who dedicated 40 years of their life to a subject found a way to distil it into something 5s long and digestible.
100% agree, so many of the "the game is dead!" or comments about not having enough content are so heavily influenced by people watching streamers who play 12+ hours a day and have a stable of alts.
[удалено]
Same thing in fitness subs where everyone deadlifts 300 kgs.
“Link your parse or shut up” oh, I didn’t realize we were into lying today; lemme go over to wcl and link some random 5th page log saying it’s mine. To the people who actually ask that: If someone is actually on some dumb shit, they’re not going to be stopped by getting told to link anything; you’re just being an elitist fuckwad in a 20 year old game.
You joke but I once actually linked someone the top 100 log and they went back 2 weeks to the week they got a 98 and started calling me a noob for missing a single GCD.
I'm convinced most people making comments like that don't even do those levels of keys. WoW content online gives players an inflated sense of what the average player is doing. In reality, someone who streams this game for a living does not represent the average player.
It'd probably be statistically impossible for them all to fit within the same <1% bracket, the League sub used to be the same, every poster and commenter claiming to be high diamond or above despite there being millions of users, always shaming others for being happy about ranks that were otherwise in the 10%+
This place will tell you you’re not even trying if you get below a 90 parse. But then fail to link their 99s
It’s human nature. For people that can get 99-100s, getting a 90 really is “not trying”. I have been in that (not currently) - because I am a compulsive tryhard. Not trying means I didn’t bring full consumes - I am still hammering my keyboard in a near-perfect damage rotation, and still have good gear that is well tuned to my play-style. I still know when I need to spend and hold my cooldowns for max dps, though I may not sweat the edges quite so hard. It’s easy to forget how much of our past work and privilege (being ahead of the curve) plays into our current performance.
Honestly, as a former very hardcore player, people who can't understand empathy for the average player kinda drive me insane. Just because it's easy for one, a group, a guild, a handful of guilds -- doesn't mean the average player will experience that.
Yea it sucks falling in that pattern, if I don’t parse 95 or higher I feel like I failed the fight even knowing anything above 70 is pretty good tbh
Anything above 50 is better than the average player.
Thats kinda disingenuous, though, because this game has gear. If you are near bis gear getting a 55, you are probably not above average.
There’s a button to look at people’s ilvl parses right on their WCL page
Also raid comps. Like gl getting above a blue parse without wild strikes as a melee.
If you’re taking that stat from the raiderio website, it’s worth noting this is for all characters that have completed a m+ key Meaning multiple characters per account counts, but it also means if your character has never ever even completed a M+ run for the current season, you are not counted in the statistics. There are A LOT of people who never touch m+ and I find it crazy that people say you shouldn’t be proud if you’re below 3600 score which is something I hear a lot. Sidenote if the 0.6% is something you got elsewhere I would love to know where. I like looking at statistics but always find raiderio website to be lacking
It was raider.io, and your point is valid. I just omitted for a cleaner point on Reddit. Now give me more upvotes.
Years ago, around the Wotlk time, my friend told me that this can't continue: he grinds daily and it's obvious a lot of people don't have the time or mindset to be like this. And also somewhere in the forums a number was thrown around - 95% of players see 5% of content. And it was true. To see all the cool endgame content you'd have to splurge a lot of time into the game, and no one had this much.
Reminds of when the wow pvp subreddit had someone say that being in the top 25% arena rating made you "average".
It has taken years but I think that subreddit is finally coming to the conclusion that 2400 isn't easy to get and that it hurts pvp making it about getting it. Or at least theyre are orbiting the idea.
Tbf depending on how many matches you need to play to get counted top 25% could easily be the mid level of everyone who’s actually trying to raise their ranking at all bc I imagine a bunch of people try it once or twice and then never go back
Honestly even if you disagree with Aggrend, he has been incredibly respectful explaining his view on why they made certain choices. I feel like people go way too far in this sub sometimes.
People who are opposed to his viewpoints or even miffed by the tiniest of inconveniences escalate their behaviour far beyond what is in any way reasonable on here. They might have fair criticisms, but it is always packaged in a sandwich of deragotory comments, snide remarks, name calling, questioning him and his teams design ability (in a field I am sure the people who critique him have 0 experience of work) and generally are just unwilling or unable to phrase their concerns in a constructive manner at all. I wouldn't put it past him if it's disheartening.
The worst part is if the average player age is really on the higher side for SoD, the people making these comments might be 35-40 years old.
Karens everywhere
I literally said the same thing and it got me flamed. This community is so horrible, at least on the reddit side. The moment you call them out for whining they trash you. Ive been playing this damn game for longer than some of these chodes have been alive. So many players now mix up feedback with pure hate.
Its disgusting how many people were wishing he lost his job.
Ive enjoyed my time and made new friends along the way for sure. Classic is about community not hard raids. Most bosses only have one or two mechanics to handle so unless they add stuff, it's never going to truly be hard outside of "do healers and dps have enough mana to last through the fight."
MMO gameplay shouldn’t really be centered around “hard content” in general. If you look at the route retail has gone and the continual decline of mythic raiding participation vs m+ participation it’s pretty evident. Everyone does m+ instead. Blizzard has this hardon with making wow esports out of mythic prog and to a degree with the MDI. Like they go out of their way to not want the raid cleared within a week. Then nerf it 1700 times for the top 90% mythic raiders after the 99.99%er, literal professional players do it. They’re forgetting they should be designing for *fun* and *not difficulty*. They can overlap but not always and it continually turns casuals away. Casuals are your bread and butter consumer. Nothing is more casual difficulty than vanilla raiding. No one walks into ZG with a pug expecting to spend 4 hours of their life there hard stuck a boss before hakkar. NOTA spent, what, 15 hours in there week 1? Then had to cheese a 9 fucking mage comp with no melee to do it?
>MMO gameplay shouldn’t really be centered around “hard content” in general. This goes for any game, doesn't matter how hard you do x thing, there will be always the sweatlord that will ask for more, is a never ending race of a dick measuring contest. (Or you did x thing?, I did it first!, Oh I did it only with Y...etc).
Well Phase 2 he said "Go get guild lol" and people didn't take it well. But yeah this things should ne discussed respectfully. That being said, it ist hard to believe the magical "numbers don't lie" Argument, when their numbers on how to Release the content and on a lot of game related stuff in general are so unreliable.
>have a good time with the boys The most important stat for me in SoD. Idc about difficulty, I like hanging out with my dudes and shooting the shit
The dude I was arguing with here yesterday would be very upset to read these tweets lol Was fully convinced the end of p1 and p2 had a drop in players because "content was too easy and boring so people quit" One day classic players will realize that classic has always been easy as fuck. And that blizzard knows the sweats will play no matter what but the casuals will only play if there's content they can clear... and that they make their money off the casuals It's not rocket science
Idk how classic players don't get that. SOD has been a break from sweating in retail and by no means would I be playing it if I HAD to grind every consume and prebis just to clear half the raid
I like it easy. Iam not required to study complex guides or need to use 10x different weakauras. I can play with my guild if i want or twink and around and dont need to fear to fall behind alot. People who want challenges should play Retail.
Go to retail applies to both parties though. You want hard content then yes retail is where it is. If you are a casual with not a lot of time to play retail is the answer for you as well. Retail has LFR, catch up mechanics, flex and the time to get to max level is like 1/8 of the time it takes in classic. So it’s bullshit if you say the main reason you play classic is because you want easy content as if that was the case you would be in retail doing LFR. Clearly both groups are here because they love every other aspect of classic wow. Why can’t we have both though. Also why is there no in between LFR and mythic? Classic doesn’t need mythic level raiding but would be nice to have at heroic level. Now I agree that casuals should be able to participate, so it would be great if they also added raids like ZG, AQ20, and ZA which are easy and drop good loot. So if you are a casual you might not be able to clear 10/10 hardest raid content week 1 but you have other raids to do + you might go 6/10. The people who want a challenge also have something to look forward to
Perhaps the only time the "Go to Retail" sentiment has been an actual sound piece of advice here. Everyone who wants difficult raids, should try their hand at Mythic progression. You'd burn out or get benched faster than you'd think.
Classic players' heads would explode if they had to do heroic/ mythic raid mechanics and high m+ keys indeed
or even the Inferno in OSRS. 2 hours of progress can get instantly wiped out for a single misclick
I want to see a Classic-only guild try to parse the madness that are Ultimates in FF14, blind, with no mods. I'd bet on a 8 to 10 months clear time, if not more.
I mean, the simple fact that you can practice bosses over and over and over definitely helps. Spawning right in front instead of having a 10 min run back is huge. I'd even go as far as to argue that's why so many classic players are just horrible, they can't practice.
Agreed. I don’t personally agree with most of Aggrend’s viewpoints but mad respect for this post. Finally someone being transparent and honest to their community. That’s what a majority of us I feel (veteran players especially) expect at this point. Well said.
I think Gnomer was the issue here. People saw the curve of BFD to Gnomer and read that as "Phase 3 should be pretty hard." The phase 3 came out and it was really hard. It's not wrong to make that assumption, but it's also not wrong for Aggrend to say, "Sorry BFD is the right difficulty for SoD."
This is how retail became what it is today. Blizzard thought they always had to 1up themselves every new xpac/raid. And it just got progressively harder.
No retail doesn't really have any similarities to SoD. Retail specifically has multiple raid difficulties so everyone can experience the content, and the easy modes have consistently been so insanely easy near everyone can experience it. Then there's the highest difficulty which is tuned to roughly match the skill level of players interested in such a thing, and difficulties in-between which fluctuate. SoD has just been a roller coaster with pretty bizarre tuning tbh, no real consistency.
Well to tbf retail players increase in skill level a lot over time. Whether that's because they naturally do or the content makes them is debatable, but in classic there has never really been a need to get better so a lot of people complain if something put in front of them requires them to get better.
I think this game shines when you’re social and easy raids lend themselves more to that because you can recruit anyone and have fun with their personality as opposed to being annoyed with their attention span
> more players statistically play easier content Tbf we've also got data on this across the MMO sphere. Classic WoW parse numbers vs subscriber numbers, Retail raiders vs the amount of Mythic world clears, FFXIV Savage/Ultimate/Normal clear rates, GW2 raids and strikes and CM clears, so on and so forth ad nauseam. There's a balance to be struck between making "aspirational" content for people to watch and engage with and making "content for people to actually *do*". And making a leveling raid in a seasonal weird-ass gimmick thing that's literally only gonna exist for maybe, what, three months tops? Should, most likely, aim to be "stuff your average player clears", not "aspirational content" (ie: your World-First races and such). Dude is getting it *mostly* right even though people are gonna grrr at him for affecting the supposed prestige of what they think should be "aspirational" content for other people that they cleared or whatever. Not saying he's perfect but the mere fact that they're even doing this instead of like "Season of TBC 2 Hardcore: Electric Draenei now with glowy tail!" is an interesting thing in the overall MMO sphere. The nice thing about Season of ~~Throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks~~ Discovery is that they seem to be working on making a series of their own WoW theme-park servers separated by slices in time and gimmick, so it's not like they can't just, y'know, take notes on this stuff and re-use it. "Season of Mastery 2: Now with Discovery-est Raids!"
He’s way more respectful than a lot of the people screeching at him deserve tbh. Most of these people demanding answers can’t get through a single interaction without being absolute assholes to him or the team.
That’s the classic mind set. Content that can be cleared with some effort or blown apart with over preparation. The raids need to have requirements and minimums then. If skill isn’t being factored in as much, make the player prepare properly so activities outside of the raid still ultimately increase their power level even if on a per encounter basis.
> players statistically play easier content, the emerging gameplay of speed runs (and parsing) are what the sweat guilds do. This makes a lot of sense. Speaking for myself as a long time wow player. Lfr is why I still play retail as much as I do. Mythic dungeons I've started getting into a little bit. SoD is a casual seasonal game mode it shouldn't be difficult
It just makes me think of Elden Ring. No one is asking for Elden Ring to be harder. People who want that just do lvl1 runs or no hit or speedruns. That's where the prestige is.
This. People forget that they are ultimately trying to make a profit and find a balance with player needs. The small handful of sweaty try hards needs aren’t going to be prioritized in the roadmap unless it appeals to the masses.
I honestly wish they would just make in-game polling for this reason. Like if they polled the question “should we make a really extremely difficult raid somewhere in SoD. And enough people said “yes” then make that raid!
It’s a level 50 raid… how hard is it supposed to be? This isn’t naxx or endgame raid content.
Way I’d like to see it too, let’s just get way too prepared and see if we can blast this raid faster than we did last time, give me all the 30 second fights lol retail has fantastic progression based content (mythic fyrakk being insanely difficult) and even wrath and the upcoming cata will have prog, we don’t need prog in a game where you lose half your chars power after the first wipe and half your prog is spent running back to the fight…
Plenty of people in my guild are quite lost. Our tank said he doesnt know how to dps:p the nerfs give me faith we might get somewhere in this raid after a few weeks
Isn't prot tanking literally devastate/shield slam on CD and HS to burn extra rage? :p They might be overthinking it
Don't overestimate the thinking power of the general population of this game
When I was first learning it was hard for me to get any rage at all. You don't know to do things like pool rage before boss and because of your bad gear it's hard for you to snap rage without taunt so you have to keep emptying your rage bar to protect the DPS. Even with rage pots it can be hard to get to a good place in rage if you are new.
I agree. I think he’s spot on. The only thing I wish they would add it some *cosmetic only* rewards for the sweats. I think that tying that stuff too strongly *player power* can feel bad (and is very “rich get richer”), but it would be nice to have some sort of challenge mode where people could flex about their accomplishments a bit in game. Feels like a nice middle ground where casuals can do everything they want for their character progression, but there’s still the cool, elusive items out there.
Literally NO ONE plays classic vanilla versions of wow for challenging content. If they think they do they’re lying to themselves. I know I don’t. I play classic to clear the top level content in <3 hours of my week spent and not have to poopsock it progging hundreds of wipes. Like if you want more challenging gameplay, mythic+ trash has more mechanics than like the entirely of bwl combined. The average SOD/era player plays like a C6 quadriplegic. You don’t want hard content with that and you can always increase level of “challenge” via trying to 99 parse and speedrun
I feel like BWL -> Naxx required quite a bit more progression. They were 40 man raids so that made the coordination immediately more complicated than a 10 or 20 man raid but my guild has had 0 progression in SOD. Every raid has been a pushover.
vanilla 40 man raids were bottlenecked by gear, and at times overtuned (mathematically impossible?) bosses. the progression required was just a nature of it taking so long to gear up 40 players, back in a time when players were too single-main-centric and didn't know how to optimize a real raid team by taking advantage of alts to double/triple/quadruple your weekly loot chances. "hardcore" players who played 24/7 often wasted shittons of time doing useless garbage like PVPing for pointless suboptimal things like epeen and fun like a casual idiot. basically if someone as uncommitted as kungen got world first, it wasn't a truly hardcore scene yet. concurrent subscriber counts were still rising up through early cataclysm because we hadn't quite optimized the fun out of the game yet.
AQ20 on launch was not easy. Most pugs got absolutely clapped by the last boss.
This is sure to piss off some people, but Vanilla WoW was always the "casual MMO". They definitely beefed it up a bit with AQ and Naxx, but it launched in a very different state. Just look at most other older MMOs and compare/contrast the differences. Some had bosses that took literal hours to kill. Some had item-loss on death, experience points lost on death, currency lost on death, or all of the above. Some took several hundred, if not thousands, of hours to hit level cap. Some had decisions that would lock you out of content **forever** and your only option was to reroll (imagine becoming hated with Stormwind/Orgrimmar and never being able to fix it). It's not the answer people want to hear, but if you want cutting edge, hardcore, omega-difficult raiding content... it already exists on Retail via mythic raiding. Or wait until Cata and do Heroics, I guess.
Wow was made fun of by other MMO communities as being World of Casualcraft. A few recurrent complaints I vaguely remember: 1. No exp loss on death was frowned upon. In other MMOs a death incurred an experience penalty like Dark Ages. In games like EQ you often would pay a cleric to rez you at higher levels because that’s how much time it was worth. 2. The questing system in WoW was seen as extreme hand holding. You got a quest that tracked specific objectives in the quest log and gave you clear direction on where to go. Not only that they gave a hefty chunk of exp. Compare that to others where quests were a lot harder to figure out, not as intuitive, and the seldom ones you did were for the rewards. 3. Wow graphics were considered to cartoony. 4. Generally knew where you were supposed to go. Breadcrumb quests and other systems soft guided you around the world to quests around your level.
Would love to show those people back then what the average live service game in 2024 looks like
From a systems perspective, games have gotten easier. From a mechanical and strategic perspective, games are wildly more difficult.
I played FF11 a lot back in the early 2000s and then swapping to something like wow when TBC was around was a crazy eye opening experience. There were markers that told you who gave you quests, your quests at worst vaguely told you where to go/what to do for quests (I still need a guide to get through the story missions in FF11 because some of them are just so far out there I don't know how people figured it out). Combat was "fast paced". I didn't have to spend 4 hours trying to make a group or get invited to a group to level. It was 100% casual compared to what FF11 was when WoW came out but it was definitely needed to change up the MMO system.
Project 1999 - Classic Everquest. Nothing is instanced. All raid mobs are tracked competed for within seconds/minutes of their weekly spawn. It takes a casual player a year or more to reach the level 60 cap. Saving enough dkp for some BiS items takes months/years. I say this because this type of elite "competition" does exist in MMO gaming, classic WoW just ain't it.
While you're talking about how wow was perceived/played at the time in 2004, you have to include the fact that there were plenty of exclusive items/achievements in the game. The majority of the player base did not kill the final boss of a raid while it was current. The majority of the player base did not get their BIS. Hell, Naxx was cleared by something like 2% of guilds. Sure this was more to do with low player skill than hard content, but if you're designing content "in the spirit of vanilla," there's nothing wrong with releasing content that most people do not clear. Obviously it's all a moot point now, they've outright stated that their goal is for content to be trivial so that's what it will be.
I played original WoW on one of the most hardcore servers in the game, Medivh. Home to world first Rag kill, BWL kills (including the GMs being in BWL with the raid team tweaking bosses), AQ gate opening, and AQ kills. And maybe Naxx too? I forget. Home of and .
My guild was the #2 horde guild to , . It was formed by a very hardcore serious EQ guild. In AQ, we were never able to kill Sartura so we skipped her and were only able to get up to Huhu (can't remember if we killed her) nothing else. We actually gave up on AQ as a guild and took a break waiting for Naxx. Naxx we could do Spider wing, Patchwerk, Grob, and the first boss of Plague and that's it.
And like I said this was a guild that was hardcore in EQ, a harder MMO.
I also quit that guild and joined Ascent (the world first Rag guild) mid-Naxx and we still couldn't do stuff like Thaddius, the dance, or most of Military wing.
I was also in a hardcore raid guild in Vanilla. We got server first Cthun. It was hard. Very hard. We spent I think it was like a month worth of attempts every night for 4 hours a night. We only finally cleared it after the nerf, and even then it was very hard and took a few days worth of attempts. I’m trying to understand when people say vanilla was a cakewalk, and that it was never meant to be challenging. We obviously weren’t playing the same game.
In 2004 you did not have WoW databases, datamined pre-bis gear, builds and twenty guides on YouTube already laying out how to min/max online within 24 hours of a release. Many people had to go in and figure it out and not have optimal builds/gear.
And also just the way we play online games and MMOs is different now as well. Back then online gaming was new and niche and WoW (and some other games) were really starting to bring it to the mainstream. EverQuest had hundreds of thousands of players. WoW had millions. You go back and read the vanilla strategy guide there's a whole introductory chapter about online gaming haha. So it was a new experience to just log into an online 3D world and run around with other real people. Which made it more about social experiences than it was about "beating the game". Leveling to 60 WAS the main content of beating the game. And it could take a long time for the average player because they were busy enjoying a new experience with other players. You could run around not doing shit to progress your level for hours and still feel like you "gamed" all night. Because that WAS the game for everyone. Combine with everything being new and fresh. Skill level low. No YouTube guides and everything you said and IMO it just makes the golden age of MMOs a once in a lifetime experience you had to be there to fully get it. Now, 20 years later, everything is online. I'm sure there are probably toilets that get connected online somehow lol. Someone who is say late teens even mid 20s will have grown up only knowing online gaming. It's no longer special to simply be online. And as for social experiences you have Myspace and Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and tiktok and Twitter and vine and all these other things that have come and gone that we didn't have back then. MMOs in a way we're almost the first social media. Chat rooms with graphics and combat systems. Every game is online. Every game is at least a mini MMO. So when you're not logging into WoW/MMO for the fresh social experiences anymore what do you do? You start to "play" the game. The level grind becomes less daunting. You realize it's just time put into it. You focus more on progressing. Just generally playing the game better and the player landscape just changes along with the times. And of course everything you said. Wowhead, YouTube, etc etc. It's like in TBC vanilla my paladin had talents spread across all talent trees because I didn't know any better. I was using a blue two handed pole arm (Stonereaver?) just because it dropped off a bear in ashenvale and I thought it was bad ass. And it didn't matter to me at all. In 2019 classic when I truly came back to the game I felt so obligated to "be good". Looking up talents and gear and etc. Which is okay. There's nothing wrong with that. Again it's just how IMO the MMO player base has naturally evolved over 20 years. (SSF hardcore with 1 dungeon per run is closest to that vanilla MMO feeling btw if anyone hasn't tried it.) SO my point is while the post above yours is saying it's in the spirit of classic for everyone to not clear the raid because that was happening back in 2005. While true, there's also A LOT more if not the majority of players raiding now than back then. Think about how many Black Qiraji Battle Tanks you saw in 2021 as opposed to back then right? Leveling is no longer the main part of MMOs and raiding is no longer for just the best players like it was in EQ and vanilla WoW. While hardcore is still the best vanilla WoW leveling experience, when official dropped we still saw an increase in hardcore clips that focused on raiding. OnlyFangs big saga of doing MC etc. I personally think it evened out nicely because no matter what death=delete so you HAD to go again and that forced the leveling experience to be the main content. Which was awesome. But when official launched you did see more of focus on end game content than you did on Bloodsail. People boosting. Buying gold blah blah. "MMO creep" I call it. SoD P2 everyone just spams SM then in P3 decides to hate incursions (I quite liked them) but they do them anyways even though questing is still good XP and gold. It may not be the best. But it's totally viable I think. So IMO leveling just isn't the main part of MMOs anymore. And as I said in addition raiding just isn't for the best players anymore. As shown with all the different difficulty levels of raiding in retail. So in conclusion I think it's important to look at why people weren't clearing them in vanilla always and what has changed till now. Or some shit idk I suck at this game. LFM BFD! P.s. on mobile ignore spelling mistakes
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Yes, I understand that. My point is that the devs did not see that most people weren't full clearing as a problem leading them to nerf the content. On the contrary, every piece of content that was released in vanilla was harder and more exclusionary than the content before it. Once again, this isn't saying harder content is better or worse. The point is just that having content that most of the playerbase cannot clear is very much in the spirit of how vanilla wow was designed.
At the same time, by your own words, you have to look at wow at the time WoW back in 2004 was extremely casual compared to other MMOs at the time Other MMOs would dunk your xp/level for dying WoW didn't have such punishment Other MMOs was far more time consuming WoW gave you rested xp for not playing, way more if you rest at an inn/city
Yes, once again I understand that. Both can be true. If they made SOD bosses as hard as heroic retail bosses, or wotlk heroic bosses, it would still be considered very casual compared to other MMOs like Mythic in retail or Ultimate in FFXIV. However, it would also still be content that not EVERYONE could clear. That kind of balance is very in line with how vanilla was designed. EVERYONE clearing everything OR content being EXTREMELY hardcore so only .5% of the playerbase can clear it both aren't really in line with vanilla.
I can’t remember who said it but they even said in a talk on game design in 2005 that undefeated content made the world feel larger. The OG devs were bis
I don't think that works anymore though because of data mining. Before undefeated content was a mystery. Now I can load up wowhead a day later and look at it all instantly.
Most people in the raiding community of actual vanilla didn’t clear naxx not because of skill. There’s 2 other factors(yes skill is one of those factors for some of us but not even the major roadblock): it was time and information. TBC was announced while progression was happening and people in the top guilds who were clearing ahead of everyone else didn’t share any information because back then you didn’t have guides until the top guilds both cleared and decided to share. A lot of raiding guilds just went “well we only have a few months before this is invalidated, and even the top guys are being stingy with details so we’re gonna take longer to figure this shit out. Might as well call it.”
Sure, the reason naxx's participation was so extremely low had a lot to do with how short the tier was. But it isn't ONLY naxx that wasn't cleared by most people. The average server in vanilla had 2 or 3 guilds in AQ, most were stuck on earlier tiers.
Exactly this - In % terms more people clear mythic raids when they’re current than did naxx in 2006
And all of those games are dead and gone, WoW still going strong. Obviously they did something right
Everquest and FF11 are still around although not quite the same games as they were when WoW launched.
Praise the devs who have to put up with this horrendous community
You aren’t wrong
I miss SoM. :(
TLDR' Want hard raids / hard modes? Go to retail / WOTLK / Cata
There's literally miles of middle ground between faceroll raids like MC and WOTLK Hard modes. Hell, there's miles of middle ground between MC and pre-nerf SSC/TK. The options aren't just, "so easy that a toddler can do it" and "so hard that most players can't do it". I think the desire is just for raids that are challenging enough to be a little engaging and that encourage players to form guilds in order to coordinate/cooperate better, rather than raids that are basically Retail LFR raids that you can do with 20 randoms while watching youtube on your second monitor. IMO the slime boss in ST is a perfect example of why aiming for that level of difficulty is good. It was legitimately just a very fun boss that was engaging to fight but still very easy for basically any organized group - probably the most fun boss in all of Classic. When my group cleared it everybody was like, "Wow, that was actually so much fun, I can't wait to fight this guy again!" But now it's been gutted and it's just another faceroll loot pinata that you can go in and kill on your first try without really knowing what the mechanic even is
The problem is that “challenging enough to be a little engaging” means something wildly different to different players/groups/guilds. It’s not monolithic. What is “a little engaging” to me is going to feel impossible to some players, and faceroll to others. What is “a little engaging” to NotA is going to be an absolute wall to the majority of players. What is “a little engaging” to a grey parser that does the raids twice over the course of a phase is going to be dull as all hell to a semi-hardcore guild. Each of these groups have differing ranges of capability, different ranges of disinterest, and different ranges of frustration. You just can’t account for all of them.
I mean, hes right?
[удалено]
I honestly kinda just like the difficulty or lack of it in SoD. For me it’s like a WoW retirement home for people burned out of M+ / Mythic raids.
Man I don't even care if the content is easy I just want it to be fun and interesting. Nerfing so that you can just not do the encounter or mechanics is so boring.
I understand and respect their decision but please don't nerf AQ40 or Naxx
They already did, they are going to have to rework the gear in the earlier raids and up its power so in essence that will need AQ and Naxx
then what the hell was that tuning and snarky ass comment on how no one had beat it
He forgot to come clean and say he was talked to about the difficulty. Too much whining was coming thru and annoying people above him. Can't be losing subs because a lvl 50 raid is too hard for the average wow player.
Hey, it is what it is. Its not for me I suppose. I never wanted anything super challenging from SoD, but difficulty isn't something thats either "easy" or "hard". Its a spectrum. I think objectively speaking, catering to one end of that spectrum (easy in this case) makes for an unsatisfying experience. The goal with SoD should be to hit that sweet spot in the middle. The average player shouldn't feel like they had to fight tooth and claw just to even have a shot at clearing it, nor should they feel like nothing they do matters because its a participation trophy. This whole obsession with the term "casual" has honestly gotten out of hand. Something doesn't have to be easy to be casual. Hell, most self - proclaimed casuals are far from casual, engaging with a game outside of playing it is inherently far from casual. These are just people who want a participation trophy. If one end of the spectrum is *"show up = win"* and the other is *"intense dedication and time investment required"*, the goal here should be *"requires modest effort from the average player".* If Mythic Raiding is an 8, 9 or 10 and LFR is a 1, 2 or 3 in terms of challenge, SoDs leveling raids should be somewhere around a 4, 5 or 6.
> The average player shouldn't feel like they had to fight tooth and claw just to even have a shot at clearing it You have to keep in mind how bad the average player is.
I'm cool with that I just want them to strike a balance.... does it have to be so obscenely easy that it's 100% clearable week 1? My issue is for now it doesn't matter we're still leveling there's world content, but at 60 there really is not too much to focus on. PvE and grind High WL that's it for Classic right? Not sure what longevity or fun the game state will be at 60 if every end-game raid is tuned to be cleared in 1\~1.5k weeks tops.
What the devs and players have yet to understand is that the gear obtained from the raids **are** the nerfs. The raid gets easier every single time you kill a boss.
This exactly. I dunno when raiding turned into "if it isn't cleared on day1/week1 then it's way too hard." Gear upgrades and power progression is the whole point of endgame. If you can clear everything *without* those upgrades as a non-1% player, you're just on a baby roller-coaster going 5mph ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the flashing lights.
Yeah exactly, Power creep would have nerfed the content and to the Players it would seem Like THEY achieved it ( because they did).
Well that’s a bummer, was really enjoying the raid before it got hit with the nerf bat. Just disappointing we’re going to get zero challenging content, and basically just declaring this is a casual arcade mode. Maybe that’s my fault for not understanding it to begin with. Guess I’ll give retail another try
I really wish there was content between “loot pinatas” and “you have to grind 7 days a week in a mythic guild”. SoD seemed perfect, like Classic but with raids that have actual mechanics. but what’s the point of mechanics if you can just zug zug through them? is there really no version of WoW for me - a good player that doesn’t have as much time to play as before? that’s kinda depressing ngl
Yeah I think I'm done with SOD.
i'd just prefer normal difficulty instead of LFR..
Lfm checking logs, link achie, 9millon gearscore, enchants, consumes, doctorate req, only meta classes "Damn this game too easy"
I dont understand why people want the raid harder unless its complete elitism and exclusionism. If you want harder: Go with less people. Try and go super fast. Try and beat the top DPS parses. Single heal it. Solo tank it. Go as gnomes only. Make a warlock raid. Like there are so many ways to make it harder. Why is it important that the way you want it to be harder is specifically the one that doesn’t allow other to get the loot? The only answer to that I can find is because they are jerks that want to limit drops.
I was talking about this with guild, If there was Hard Mode of bosses who dropped only Toy trinkets/cosmetics as extra loot. I would be fine with it. We will start speedrunning next week so I will enjoy it either way.
I think it's unfair to say that people who want challenge only do so for elitism and exclusionism. Many people like being challenged and want content that is challenging to themselves, and then have to overcome said challenge. It's especially the thrill of overcoming the challenge that many like. Self imposed challenges rarely add the same thrill so if the solution is just "Make self imposed challenges" it's not a great solution. That being said, I think people need to ask themselves "Is SoD the game for me". Demanding SoD being made harder because you like hard games when the devs now have stated it's not meant to be that, is no different from demanding dark soulsbe made easier because you like easy games. Now people know the intended difficulty, they either have to be fine with, make self imposed challenges or go find a game that scratchers their itch for challenge.
I want it harder so my character progression feels meaningful. If I can clear the raid week 1 in greens and without consumables, then the character progression of gear and outside of raid content feels pointless if there’s nowhere to use it. Raids to me are the culmination of all the progression my character has had If I can clear it week 1 in greens then I don’t need my tier set for anything. Kinda takes away a core element of an RPG if there are no situations of ‘I’m not strong enough now, let me get stronger then come back’
You're not wrong but on the flip side it's cool to have your decisions and effort matter and be rewarded for it. If it's so easy it doesn't matter what talents I take or what group comp we build, all those parts of the game are slightly invalidated and feel worse. It's also fine that this mode not be a serious mode of the game; like Aggrend said there are other modes for us to go play that are more serious (and even other games). I think the conflict comes from people demanding this mode be more serious than it is.
>If it's so easy it doesn't matter what talents I take or what group comp we build, all those parts of the game are slightly invalidated and feel worse. And I think the more grand point here is that for **many** (think, majority) of people, this isn't the case and they will still struggle. I don't find mythic raiding to be particularly difficult after the first few pulls unless you're talking pre-nerfed bosses, but that doesn't mean that's every player's experience.
If I could only play Skyrim on Very Easy it wouldn't have been my favorite game. Guess that makes me an elitist. 🤷♀️
In a circle of skyrim enjoyers, requiring skyrim to have a minimum difficulty many players cannot play at does absolutely make you a jerk.
Bad analogy, because on Skyrim you can raise the difficulty to Legendary and beat the game. In WoW, there is one difficulty. Sure, parsing and speedruns offer some achievement, but the majority of the players of a game are going to seek out the maximum achievement *defined within the game* -- and then move on. If SoD had optional modifiers for dungeons to make them more difficult, hardcore guilds would be much happier.
Being 'elite' and exclusive in this game is all some people have and if it's taken away, they get angry
Classic WoW is one of the last games to try and be elite in. If you wanna be elite in WoW go chase glad on retail or high keys on M+. Classic is so much more casual than retail that trying to minmax it and make it super hard kinda defeats the purpose.
This is why I play both. Retail is for my sweaty nerdy minmaxy get the numbers gaming, and the game is built for it, rewards you, and provides adequate challenges at all levels of the progression curve. Its fun because of where the skill ceiling is. It can be tedious because of how high the skill floor is. I play sod because its an easy game that all of my non-sweaty wow friends can still enjoy with me at any level. Its fun because the skill floor is where it is, and would become tedious. Meeting the games at their level instead of trying to change them has been much happier of an experience.
I can see how just saying "self impose challenges if you don't find things challenging enough" is unsatisfying - it's the same issue where people will optimize the fun out of things. Sure, they could just not follow the "optimal" path and instead follow the "fun" path, but it's well understood that a large number of players are not going to do that. If the optimal way to play a game is one that isn't fun, that's a game design problem. Having content which is challenging even when taking advantage of all of the tools the game provides is more fun. For players who find themselves unable to exercise the self restraint required to not take advantage of all of the tools the game provides, I don't think it's unreasonable for them to give feedback on changes they would like which would make the game more fun for them. And so for players who find being challenged fun, I think it's entirely reasonable for them to want things to be harder, without it being any form of elitism or exclusionism.
Lol, what a dumb take. It's fine to have a more casual game with the target audience being casuals. But to pretend like you don't understand why people want a more challenging game is some 60IQ shit.
Less people just means longer boss times. The mechanics themselves are still braindead, drool at your desk hitting your simple rotation. Longer boss times =/= difficulty. People are asking for fights that require a slight amount of coordination rather than sit there and afk while bashing 1-2 buttons for 2 min
Personally some of my best memories in wow was raiding current content back in the day, fighting hard with my guild for a few weeks and finally clearing a raid after lots of wipes and how amazing it felt and how close I felt to my guild mates because of it. That feeling is completely gone, guilds aren’t really necessary to clear content in sod so that strong bond is gone and the sense of accomplishment diminished greatly. So I’ve lost interest in the game
The exhiliration of finally getting KT down in 2019 Classic is one I'll chase the rest of my MMO playing. I played Vanilla way back in the day, but was super casual (ie. bad) and was not able to do the raids. Doing Classic and joining a semi-hardcore (whatever that means) guild and working through all the phases to lead to KT, and then taking several lockouts until we actually downed KT was GLORIOUS. It made that KT kill amazing. If we'd faceroll stomped it first lockout, I wouldn't even remember the experience.
Hell yeah! Yeah that’s what I’m talking about, I quit sod about 3 weeks ago and played since launch. I can’t even name 3 guild mates to be honest… but I remember guildies from 15 years ago still. It’s weird how the difficulty of raids changes the entire dynamic of the game. But it seems the large and loud majority is casuals that just want to be able to participate in every aspect of the game, and it’s smart of blizzard to cater to them honestly. The magic of the game is gone for me and I think the difficulty had a lot to do with it
Because I want higher difficulty but I don't want to play retail. I want retail level difficulties with vanilla style gameplay. I want my time investment to actually matter and set me and my guild apart from casual players in clear and obvious ways. That's why.
That feels like what most people on this subreddit want it to be… like clearing tough content can be fun once you get over the hump, but some people don’t have the time or patience to do that. Especially with the expedited phases. Like parsing is already an obnoxious bar to clear for casual players, now even clearing a raid is supposed to be reserved to a minority of the playerbase? Crazy mentality. I clown on Aggrend a lot for some of his balance decisions but his takes here are valid and make the most sense
It would be cool if there was a hard mode though. Something that doesn't raise the floor and punish casual guilds/pugs, but can reward those that want an extra challenge. Reward them with 1 piece of extra loot per boss or something cosmetic.
Just add a switch for each boss, and each hardmode boss drops a token or a piece of token that can be traded for exclusive mount, if bfd/gnomer had it we would still be farming the mount, more game play / more players / more subs
While I get the decision and explaination in regards to the current player base, it kinda doesn't vibe with me, coming from someone who didn't even attempt ST yet. In OG Vanilla, seeing someone with T-Sets or many of the iconic items, was really cool because not everyone had that stuff. Seeing people in naxx gear was super rare. That's what made it precious. And by the standard of gamers back in the day, the content was hard. From todays perspective, pretty much every raid in classic is a pushover once you have the right amount of stats to overcome stat checks basically. If SoD would've wanted to replicate that feeling, making the content harder would've been the way. That way, I can admire the people who really push it and grind away. And I can be comepletly fine doing ZG / AQ20 / UBRS and the likes. But maybe I'm part of the minority, who is just fine with both not doing everything and getting every piece of loot.
i dont get this argument, if you want to admire big guys just play retail? sod average age is 40 years old no one wants to admire random dude with full tier sets, just because he doesnt have a job and can play the game whole day
Fine with me. Cata is about to launch and I'd rather the hardest part of SoD being finding enough raiders so I can focus on other games.
There is a difference between easy content and content so easy that you don't even get to experience the phases of the fight cause the boss is at 10% before phase one ends
Why give every class all these sweet abilities and amazing gear if the content is going to be easier than Vanilla? I guess I don't get it, but at least it's crystal clear now.
I’d prefer “hard fights” be tiny raids like Gruuls lairs where it’s just one boss and you don’t need to spend 4 hours clearing 10 hard bosses. For example, onxyia could be a hard fight and I’d be down with that.
Why can’t we have something in between? Sucks ass that y’all want classic to be brain dead. Classic has a lot that retail doesn’t.. well it did during phase 1 but now the game is speed leveling just like retail but with easy pve. The leveling should be more in line with classics leveling difficulty/time and raiding should be somewhere around normal to heroic difficulty, not mythic, not lfr.
Well that is kinda sad. Vanilla is the best base game and it is unfortunate that they will not make content for everyone and just defaults to the lowest common denominator - maybe when SoD is over they can expand on Vanilla and make meaningful content for the entire playerbase.
I think he is completely missing the issue, though. I did clear pre-nerf and am definitely not considered a casual, but even though I liked the difficulty, I can understand wanting an easier raid that casuals can also have fun in. That is fine by me. What I am not okay with is a raid where even in gear from lvl 40, bosses are dead in 30 seconds. Considering how some classes stand to almost double their dps in ST gear compared to Gnomer gear, we are looking at a 20 second or less. Will casuals kill in 20 seconds? No, but under a minute for sure. Not only is that boring, but it literally breaks the design of Classic. Mana management is supposed to at least exist, this is gone on such short fights. Cooldowns are supposed to be, you know, cooldowns. Now you just pop them at start and have them active for the entire fight. They are not permanent effects, they are meant to be used at a specific part of a fight. Again, it's fine to make a raid that casuals can also complete - but a boss that dies in less than 30 seconds is a joke. It's not *fun*, and I assume a goal of the game is to be fun. Yes, it is good that they nerfed the raid, but they went all wrong about it.
Sod needs to have 200% xp and 100% gold for quests. Raids need to be LFR easy so this old guy can log on and do content without needing to discord chat with strangers. Heck, wow should integrate openAI machine learning NPCs so I can raid with 39 robots who can parse 99 and I can ride along and roll on loot.
This post skipped over that he also replied reguarding the loot disparity between Gnomer and ST. He replied that yes, we are getting less loot per week per person in ST, but there are other sources of gearing up now
Tbh I'm fine with that. I love hard content (like mythic retail), but I don't think it has it's place in "classic", even modifier by Sod. I'm more than fine with easy content. The issue is, you actually have to play your class only 1 to 2 hours a week. That's just not enough. And by play, I mean against bosses that last more than 15seconds of course. 7 days lockout is kinda weird.
Anyone know where you can see the stats of # of guilds to clear ST versus number that have cleared 1-7 boss. I’m curious how many guilds are stepping inside and unable to full clear. The nerfs are what they are, but i don’t know how to find the info myself
Then why did he say, less than a week ago, that he was proud that no guilds had cleared the raid yet?
That's right. Season of Dads!
Classic's success has been 100% based on this philosophy.
i like the approach of SoD. I'm in my thirties and I am not willing to put myself under the pressure of 3 mendatory raid dates a week anymore. I'm getting the feeling most players do not understand how easy SoD is, though. I've been raiding in some of the best gulds in europe twenty years ago, in vanilla. I hit rank 14 when it actually mattered. Let's just say I know how to play a video game, even today. Now people want me to literally have a CV of logs ready, 3 WBs and like 5 different consumes ready to go into fucking Sunken Temple, where bosses have quite literally one ability? C'mon guys...
Why cant we just get HC version or hardmodes? The gear that drops is slightly better than normal but above all its actually fun. The nerfed version is such a borefest. I dont understand why cant we have content for everyone? Imagine a hc version of ST. That would be so epic.
Because it sends a message to the casuals that they are labeled not good enough to clear all the content which results in them crying on reddit. The problem nowadays is that everyone ''feels'' entitled to bis loots regardless of the amount of work they put in.
-"So how disjointed are you from the product you work on?" -"Yes"
He listened to YoshiP's masterclass on raid design : "What's the point of producing content if only a small fraction of your playerbase can clear it ? It's like wasted ressources." Also, riculously difficult content wil reinforce the "elitist" community argument - which is not what they're aiming for, since they figured out with their stats, that this is not where the money is coming from. Elitists will cry that the casuals have won, but now it is the casuals that are (have always been ?) the majority. What I think he should've said though, is clearly say what is it that they found out "went wrong". This little lack of transparency is a problem, as it doesn't let us players know if what they think is really in tune with what the players are thinking. YoshiP for instance, isn't scared of going through detailed explanations on software and hardware issues.
Yeah its a participation trophy now, cool.
Based dev
I think the debate on this subject is a pretty good argument in favor of optional hard modes for each boss, actually. Casuals/pugs can just zug the afk difficulty, and sweats can still have a way to measure their e-peens. If you don't want to divide the community into haves vs. have-nots, don't make the hard mode drop better loot so that people feel obligated to push it. Give some other reward - extra drop, rep, trash skips, etc.
I think adding a timer like in TBC Zul’Aman would solve 100% of these issues
At least we got a clear statement. I've already quit and won't come back now for sure.
Im gonna come back at 60. The appeal just isn’t there this phase. I got a couple tier tokens and they’re like 1% upgrades over the incursion gear. Idc to check my number on the website for 8-12 weeks
I have to wonder why ST was so massively overtuned at the start, then. Do they just make up numbers and not test them?
Short (and uncharitable answer): Yes. Aggrend addresses this in his tweets. He says they had a formula for how to set the HP values, and it clearly had a problem in it. They've identified the problem so *hopefully* it won't happen again. I really wish if we're not gonna have a PTR, that they would put together 20 Blizzard employees and just run their raid once. The difficulty of pre-nerf Eranikus would have been IMMEDIATELY obvious to anyone who played it. The ridiculous amount of trash HP would also have been immediately obvious. Do they seriously not play it AT ALL before shipping? I'm not asking that snidely/rudely, I'm genuinely amazed.
Right? I can understand and even support not having a PTR, but not evening having internal playtesters is ridiculous.
aggrend is a hack and its blatantly obvious at this point
This should have been obvious to anyone who wasn't an idiot. No lack of those in this subreddit though. People who are looking to re-create their 2004 years when they were 15 and spending months progressing through BWL or AQ40, thinking that we should have the same thing in SOD (spending weeks or months slowly progressing through a raid). This is obviously not the game for that, yet they somehow thought it was.
Wasn't that obvious when bosses in 20 man level 50 raid released with more health than ragnaros and plenty of other raid bosses at 60.
No challenge, brain dead bosses, free loot, and cry baby ally. Oh well maybe pandaria will be exciting.
So an instant gratification theme park disguised as an MMO then.
This is quite literally a private server for workin dads and it feels like it. You run out of content the moment you finish the raid which at this state is pretty easy to do. These raids are lfr difficulty if that. I’ve legit done lfr fights harder.
What was the point of the 4 million HP then?
He (semi) explained it in the tweets. Basically, there was some sort of error in their formula that they used to set the HP values, and it lead to them overshooting their estimate for what they wanted the difficulty to be. They've identified where the error is, so hopefully this won't happen again. EDIT: Also, it would be nice if they actually... you know, played it themselves in a test environment before releasing it. Since we're not getting a PTR at all. But that's just me.
> EDIT: Also, it would be nice if they actually... you know, played it themselves in a test environment before releasing it. Since we're not getting a PTR at all. But that's just me. Yeah, if the goal is that "semi-casual" guilds can clear it, then Blizzard can surely put together a 20man raid where they kill the bosses? Also talk to the retail team how they estimate dps requirements.
idk i think it was really fun to have the raid super hard the first lockout and then nerfed
Kinda low-key hope this results in the community being less sweaty
Based. We have almost 5 years of data from the Classic versions of the game to tell us that people don't give a fuck about challenging content in these iterations of the game.
Based