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Originally Posted by random  You have to know where you've been to get to where you wanna go. All the things you listed are important but to say their experience or lack of knowledge of end game raiding isn't important seems a bit naive? If they were not clearing the content in a reasonable amount of time how do they know how the encounter really worked? |
Same thing happened with EQ2 and its poor raiding game, and overall game direction. They had people not only out of touch with raiding and what makes it challenging/fun, but also people out of touch with what their entire playerbase was interested in. This is why Desert of Flames was such a giant mess and nobody wanted to play it, and why tons of raiding guilds left (including mine).
Get people with little raid experience designing raid content, and you get that kind of mess. It wasn't until they actually hired people with a clue about high end content that the game picked back up. But by then, the damage was already done and once you lose those people you rarely if ever get them back. With the dynamic raid content Blizzard has put out, and maybe I'm just overly pessimistic, I can't seeing people topping it as far as quality and interesting design goes, since they actually have people who know a) what people have done in the past and b) how to challenge them in new ways in the future since those guys were also high end raiders. The same old boring ass random_dragon tank and spank encounters won't likely hold those who have raided extensively in WoW, no matter how great Joe Cool is who has no experience and thinks *in his mind* how great it is. That disconnect of fun to designer and fun to gamer has always been a big hurdle, and probably why WoW has been so widely popular because they have identified that better than others.
My only problem with WoW, and it always has been, is the kiddie bullshit. No, not the cartoony graphics, the lack of immersion in the game world. Its a mirror of pop culture, which makes me want to vomit. Paris hilton jokes, Mc hammer dances, all that shit just makes it fail to be an actual fantasy world that I enjoyed reading about growing up --Dragonlance, FR, WoT, the Eddings books etc, I'd like to play in a world that isn't tied in every 10 feet to MTV.
