[WoW]Wotlk:Raid instances to have 10 and 25 man versions, Death Knight starts at 55

[GuardianX]

Originally Posted by Danth

Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth, Danth Danth Danth Danth. Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth. Danth, Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth. Danth Danth. Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth Danth, Danth.

Danth Danth Danth Danth-Danth Danth.

Danth

No, I agree completely with signing your posts. Its a good idea!

[Mist]

Prepare to get banned then. You can't get away with that on the EJ forums and you shouldn't here.

[Antoine]

Relax guys, if he wants to sign his post then it's his choice, don't give him any grief.

ANTOINE, TAMER OF SCALED CLAWS

[GuardianX]

to actually add to the discussion, I have said for a while now I bet they do the same thing with WotLK that they did with TBC. Promise a November release and delay to feb, this is all dependant on how many pre-orders they get and if they think they have a finished project.

This information comes from somewhat random sources IE their track record for patch / game releases.

from what i have seen and played in game I'm not sure if they can create all the content necessary to push a release this year, though we shall see. I mean this is a company that makes over a billion a year in subscription revenues alone...

[Itzena]

Originally Posted by Wombat

That Blizzcon timing (October 10/11) just seems really inconvenient for a 2008 release. They don't want Blizzon right after it releases as their programmers will be working on critical bugs (and they won't want to hear about balance changes). But you also don't want to hold Blizzcon while your programmers are in the crunch time month before it releases either.

So unless they're printing the discs during Blizzcon for a 10/21 or 10/28 release (and the staff just treats it as a celebratory party to get wasted on the 12th), the timing doesn't make much sense.

Early launch for Blizzcon attendees, with the rest of us getting it a few days later?

Besides, this Blizzcon is going to be about the Second Coming for Koreans anyway.

[FoghornDeadhorn]

Originally Posted by Mist

Prepare to get banned then. You can't get away with that on the EJ forums and you shouldn't here.

....yyyyyyyyeah.

Were you talkng to guardianX maybe? You really want people to start getting banned for signing their posts? Don't want to let them "get away with it"?

Wow.

[Mist]

It was a subtle mocking of the EJ forum policy. Perhaps a little too subtle.

[Etwynn]

Originally Posted by Danth

First off, while reading this post keep in mind that I do not consider 10-man content to be 'raiding'. I'm not trying to start a discussion on semantics, so just keep that in mind as you read the post.

Blizzard's announcement that all raid dungeons will now have 10-man versions gives me hope that we'll finally see *progression* available to non-raiding players. That's been one of my long-term gripes with the EQ-style MMORPG--progression was always reserved just for people who liked raiding. That sucks for me, since I most definately do NOT like raiding. In EQ, once you got to the level cap, you either raided or you stagnated in the same zones. Later, in pre-expansion WoW, it was the same story--players who didn't like raiding stayed stuck in Strath/Scholo/BRS for literally the entire duration of their gameplay. Burning Crusade added some small amount of progression with heroic mode and (much later) Zul Aman, but heroics themselves sill don't offer much progression since, generally, if you can do one of them you can do most or all of them. There certainly aren't any tiers in the manner of raiding tiers. They're more accurately described as scenery changes.

Hopefully Blizzard keeps the tiered progression system in practice with the 10-man versions of the new raiding zones so that, for once in this genre, players who don't like raiding finally have real progression to look forward to, and thus places to actually use the gear they earn.

Danth

Paraphrase:

I'm going to start a discussion about semantics, but if you disagree with me then i'm just going to say that you're arguing semantics.

[Elsebet]

Anyone else wonder if this 10/25 man raid switch in WOTLK is Blizzard's first experiment in moving out of a few large raid instances and making a bunch of tiered 10-mans in the future with varying ZA-style challenges instead of size to appease the hardcore crowd?

[Danth]

Etwynn--Don't read too deeply into things. I don't tend to use much subtlety or sarcasm on the internet because it translates so poorly in written form. If you disagree with something I said, feel free to say so. That's what these online forums are for--it'd be pretty boring if everyone agreed on everything. I posted my disclaimer because some folks have questioned me before about why I so strongly hate four-group-plus content, yet I'm okay with doing 10-man raids. The answer to that is that I don't even consider the latter to be 'raiding' at all.

It would seem my disclaimer may have prevented one such misunderstanding only to cause another.

--------------------------------------------

On the matter of release date: Didn't someone at Blizzard say that they fully expect players to get bored, take breaks, and re-subscribe later? I could swear I recall hearing that in some interview or another. If so, then I imagine that they're not worried about long-term retention as long as they can squash whatever competition comes along.

Danth

[Lost Ranger]

I was wondering that myself but I doubt they will move into 10 mans full time. I can't say that I would mind nothing but 10 man content but putting together a solid non-retarded set of 10 people is not difficult.

Part of the difficulty of these raids is human error and the more people you have the more chances you have of something going wrong. Not to mention that 10 man content would pretty much demolish most guilds unless you want the insane fucking headache of having 3-4 teams running the 10 mans all the time.

Spend a little time getting a solid 10 man "A-Team" and content would be eaten alive faster then it already is. At the rate they release content this could be a VERY bad thing.

[Ziggurat]

You're dreaming if you think it will be out before blizzcon.

[Northerner]

Originally Posted by Lost Ranger

Spend a little time getting a solid 10 man "A-Team" and content would be eaten alive faster then it already is. At the rate they release content this could be a VERY bad thing.

This is what I think may be interesting and a real problem. It isn't terribly hard to get ten good to very good players together nor even that hard to get ten who have a couple of max level alts each as well. That kind of solid group can absolutely dominate any content I can see them coming up with for 10 people.

Now, taking that to 25 is much, much harder and Blizzard has already stated that the best of the best gear will come from that route. I think we all know that the gap between 'best' and 'almost best' is something Blizzard likes to keep very tight however. For those that would rather run with a small tight 10-man group though (or find that the gear-gap is not worth the co-ordination issues), there will be a severe shortage of content.

[Akileese]

Originally Posted by Zerai

Because they still want that money from active accounts. Deactivated accounts generate 0 revenue.

And it's definately true. The summer, people will be playing less, will deactivate and if there isn't something there in the fall to bring them back...they might find something else to do. So I think Blizzard pretty much has to release by the end of the year.

My logic is the summer drop off is inevitable. As shocking as it is, people have lives. The 12-24 demographic are mostly people who are out of school in the summer time so they'll be doing things other than wow. Add this in with the lack of new content between now and November, and for a lot of people, there's not a lot of incentive to play in say August or September when they can get gear that will probably be better than their raid gear at level 72.

It's the same argument that came up a few years ago with TBC. It's gonna happen again now that Wrath is close.

[Danth]

"For those that would rather run with a small tight 10-man group though (or find that the gear-gap is not worth the co-ordination issues), there will be a severe shortage of content."

That depends on how you look at it. For us folks who don't do 25-man stuff, the next expansion may well have significantly *more* content that we want to do than had been available in previous WoW incarnations. On the other hand, as you note a raiding crew that scales back from 25- to 10-man may find they exhaust the content more quickly than they're used to.

The solution, as always, is to craft as many dungeons as possible, so here's to hoping that Blizzard makes lots of them.

Danth