From a preview of Wrath of the Lich King, the new WoW expansion, from the folks over at TenTonHammer... All credit for the following article is of course theirs.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/32708
"At this point, Kaplan stopped and really focused his attention on the press attendees. “We’re making a fairly major change to our raiding game that I’m really excited to talk about,” Kaplan began. “We’re going to have a lot of raid instances in Wrath of the Lich King, but rather than have some of them 10 person and some 25 person, all of the raid instances will use our heroic dungeon technology to be 10 AND 25 person instances.”
”In the Burning Crusade,” Kaplan continued, “Karazhan was our most popular instance. It was the one players run the most each week, but we also had all this great 25 person content. We found that players wanted a full progression through 10 person and a full progression through 25 person content. It wasn’t a matter of one being hardcore and one being casual; it was more a matter of what sort of social constructs are players comfortable playing with, who they played with, and what size their guild was.”
“So what we’d rather have is a scenario where the player decides how many people they’re comfortable with – 10 or 25,” he added. “We want to provide content for these groups on all tiers, both accessible tiers to the super-skilled, hardcore end-game. The 10 and 25 man raids progress completely independently of each other.”
Taking a breath, Kaplan continued his explanation of their system. “One complaint we did receive in the Burning Crusade was that our 25 person raid community didn’t want to go through the 10 person content to get attuned to the 25 person content,” he said. “They felt that they were a 25 person raiding guild, why should they have to go through Karazhan? They just wanted to move on to the next content. With them in mind, the 10 and 25 tracks will be completely independent. We won’t ever force the 25 person raiding guilds to do the 10 person content or vice versa.”
“That said, we do feel that getting the 25 person raid together takes a lot more coordination and effort, and we want to preserve the eliteness of the 25 person raiding,” Kaplan explained. “In terms of rewards, the 25 person versions of our raid dungeons will drop not only better loot by almost an entire tier, but also more of it. If you’re willing to take on the effort of coordinating the extra people, it’s much more rewarding.”"
I just want to say.... I called it!
http://mmorpg.com/blogs/heerobya/032008/1302_Difficulty-Settings-for-Raiding
http://mmorpg.com/blogs/heerobya/022008/1184_Casual-raiding-Typo-or-truth
I wrote a blog post (or two) here at MMORPG.com about how they should split up the raiding into Normal and Heroic... to make the group size adjustable....
And now Blizzard is doing it. Are they spying on me? Are they reading my blog here at MMORPG.com?
Maybe I'm just that amazingly awesome where I can predict the future... Or maybe I'm so smart that I figure out what Blizzard should do before they do!
But most likely I just had a lucky guess. I'm sure I'm not the only one that has talked about this or mentioned it as a great idea for them.
What do ya'll think? Blizzard is adding tons of new 5-person dungeons and all of them have normal and heroic modes, and now all the new raids have 10-person normal modes and 25-person Heroic modes. Will you be more into raiding because of this? Less?
Or do AoC and WAR have you so hyped that you don't really care what WoW does anymore?
User Comments
Actually, I really dont care about WOW anymore. Not that i'm hyped up on AoC or WAR, but is sure wish there was something good out there i didn't have to Raid or PVP to actually get nice stuff.
oh wait,.. i can craft one nice thing...oh wait again, seems i have to raid to make it really good. too bad.
But yes, this will be a great change for the Raid lovers of WOW. I'm glad they will be doing it.
Yeah I guess I forgot how much hate there is towards WoW on this website...
Hopefully AoC and WAR are good enough where I won't care about WoW come expansion time either, but this is good news for the WoW faithful, and it also proves that I'm awesome for thinking of this idea.
well, i don't hate WOW at all. I am just bored with it. As I am one of the dying few folks who play "SOLO" or very small group. And WOW at level 70 is boring if you dont Raid or PVP. to me at least.
I do hope AoC or even WAR have something else to offer, but i doubt either of them will for my certain gameplay style.
I wish combat didint have to be the your main focus to progress. I would love to see Crafting or social progression able to take you to end game in those respective areas. Maybe i would like to be a mayor of a city..or master craftsman who can actually make something useful at high levels..lol.
Like crawfishdad, I'm bored with it. Any expansion of World of Warcraft is a non-event. Now if they were to spend some time fleshing out Fishing, Mining, Crafting and so forth according to the structure that I talk about in my recent 'roles' blog article, I'd be interested in taking a look.
I might even take a look if they were to invest some effort in procedural instances so that no two are ever the same. Consider the work being done by the guys working on the Infinity MMO. You'd be amazed at what can be done with procedural content.
http://youtube.com/user/InfinitySupport
The ships are hand-crafted. The planets and rings are procedural.
But for pity's sake, stop asking me to repeat the same hand-crafted content that looks so amazing (the first time) but that still plays like EverQuest.
Congratulations on your prediction :)
It seems like it is slowly moving towards scaling to size ala City of Villains/Heroes. I would not be surprised if future MMO's start scaling content to party/raid size. Also, offering a switch for normal and hardcore including the scaling to allow for different degrees of difficulty.
Too AoC hyped to really care.
But, I must say, it's a wise thing they are going to do.
WoW is just aweful
Im glad its dying.
WoW sucks at end-game, but it's not even close to dying, so get that thought out of your head.
Also, I am glad they're adding the 10 or 25 raid option, so at least smaller grouped people can at least see the content, whether or not they actually get the amazing gear or not. If they continue things this way, it wouldn't matter anyway, 'cause the gear they can get would still be good enough for the 10-man raids and normal instances in the future. It would just be a slight hassle in PvP, but it's not a major thing.
my interest in the game died with the 40 man raids, this is just part of the spiral downward into ever easier content. Good for some, not so good for others. Oh well, I moved on long ago, but it sounds like these moves will keep a lot of folks happy.
I've always hated guild size + time = eliteness, and I hate even more the idea of loot = skill, which is what WoW is. I have no problem with loot being a specialty enhancement but in WoW it's usually an invisible buff. Tier 6 gives you the basic stats of someone projected in the 80's, meaning people in blues get smacked and one-shotted by you. Maybe if they had procedural content in the raids like JB said, I'd care. Or maybe if the raid was an arena fight with no trash and a boss fight or two, rather than hours of mindless clearing and then fighting a boss so you can clear more trash and do the same.
I don't know how many people looked at the mmogchart.com stats, but according to them the player base size is deceptive, with only 2 million North American players, 2 and half million European, and 6 Million Asian, but that to me was a surprise. Everytime they boasted their sub base, I hadn't calculated that the majority might be asian, as I believed it was unpopular there. Of course, 6 million Asian is a small fraction of a percentage of the total population.
The lack of hype and care surrounding WotLK should be concerning to Blizzard, BC was the most hyped expansion I'd ever seen, yet this one is relegated to the back pages by WAR, AoC, Spellborn, Earthrise, etc.
Lack of hype?.. the preview is on the front page of http://uk.gamespot.com/ http://www.tentonhammer.com/ and many others.
And with Blizzcon next month you can be sure of 1 hell of a media blitz.
But I am more interested in Starcraft 2 TBH.
WoW beat EQ for most things, but a 9 year old game still has it all over WoW in terms of raiding. Just copy EQ's formula, and you'll do fine. Raiding for gear and do PVE experience to have enough gear and powers to do the next level of raids... tried and true no reason to deviate from it.
Grim, you know nothing about MMOs.
If you think WoW even comes close to EQ, your sadly mistaken...
EQ paved the way for WoW lame ass game, respect your elders.
The most intriquing thing about this developement is the elite guilds falling into the trap. Why do content as a 25 man when you can do it as a 10? Is better gear the only reason? Why get better gear when you can progress with the inferior gear as a 10 man raid? Its not like the elite raiders can use it to PvP any longer. So why progress as a 25 man? Very few players do it for bragging rights, since the community (or lack of) is entirely too large.
Maybe they have some Power Ranger fetish? *shrugs
I cannot wait for the up-and-coming MMOs...
I'm sure it's been cited before, but the one consistent draw of Warcraft is it's community--the friends one has that are already playing it. I'm set to start playing Age of Conan (and if that doesn't pan out, Warhammer or Spellborn) and yet the news of the 10-man scalable content made me pause--I could easily jump back in there with my friends and start tanking again. Honestly though, it's more of the same; just as the Outlands became tiny and cramped in short order, Northrend will as well.
Different is by no means better until it's proven to be so, but I'm personally unwilling to give Warcraft another chance.
Blizzard keeps doing it. Adding content for the top 5% of the population, the 95% left have nothing again. That's why i left the game, was tired of never get any content others then 10-25 mans new dungeons.
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