I quit.

What I'm saying is, every expansion gave us some ways to pug the very first few bosses. I think they were given to us by the devs so the average pug can still raid.

Raid bosses aren’t designed with pick up raids in mind, but the bosses should get more challenging as a raid progresses through the instance. Naxxramas is perhaps not a good benchmark to set raiding expectations against for a couple of reasons. It was content that a number of players were already familiar with, and it was also tuned to a difficulty that was a bit lower than we would have preferred.

I too vividly recall the start of Burning Crusade, and pick up raids were anything but common at the start of that expansion. In fact, the idea of a pick up raid was flatly laughable for quite a while. They didn't really appear with any regularity until the mid-portions of the Burning Crusade expansion, and only after most of the participating players knew the fights very well, or just overgeared them by a pretty wide margin. Even in Wrath of the Lich King, pick up raids didn't start becoming super common until a tier or two of content had already been released. The scenario you mentioned in your original post, of constant pick up raid spam in trade, didn't really occur until a bit later.

We are starting to see pick up raids form for current content even though the next tier of gear hasn't been released yet. In that light, progression appears to be on track.

On the subject of progression, in 4.1 Valor Points should become more rapidly accessible too. As more players acquire gear of high ilevel, and as average gear levels rise as a result, it will be easier to find effective pick up raiding groups.

03/21/2011 12:58 PMPosted by Soothingrain

maybe they should be somewhat designed with pugs in mind

Raiding is the pinnacle of what can be achieved in World of Warcraft; on the PvE side, anyway. With that in mind, we feel that those encounters should be epic, with epic challenges and rewards to match. Cutting edge raiding should present a real challenge and feel rewarding for players who are dedicated to facing down that content on its own terms.

Nonetheless, we fully expect that raid content will become available to a larger population of players as time goes on. Our intent has always been that players will be able to see more and more content with less and less coordination as time goes on. Ghostcrawler’s recent blog on raid progression (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2452061#blog) states that very specifically, and it will result either from the natural proliferation of gear as time goes on, or if that’s not substantial enough, direct adjustments to difficulty. That’s really the underlining intent of our raid progression philosophy in Cataclysm: to strike a better balance between the hardcore raiding of yesteryear and the more accessible raiding of Wrath.

The solution comes down to timing. We want to keep it epic for the high end raiders, but also ensure that content becomes more accessible over time.

03/21/2011 1:53 PMPosted by Tanlos

Completely serious - you effectively laugh at us for wanting to PUG content

We certainly don't. In fact, I've explicitly stated several times that we fully expect the content to become available to more players over time.

Its just so bad that you do not even know your companies own history. When WoW came out it was an EQ clone for casuals. Guess what? It became a huge success. its why I stayed here after EQ, SWG, DAoC and CoH. Casual fun. and Blizzard got more sucessful. Now you really want to be an EQ clone with the difficulty level and timesink playsyle.

Do you really believe history will not repeat itself?

Please rest assured that I know the history quite well. I've been playing World of Warcraft since alpha. I was an avid player of other MMOs before I picked up World of Warcraft.

Have you actually compared what World of Warcraft is currently, to what it was in classic?

Personally, I found the game significantly more challenging then; both because it was tuned to a higher degree of difficulty, and also because the design has improved over time and characters have become much more powerful individually.

Except you're wrong... raiding is no longer the pinnacle of PvE achievement. Heroic raids are. Regular raids are not (and should not) be designed with hard-core players in mind.

Did you just tell me that I'm wrong about the design intent and direction of World of Warcraft based on your own assumptions?

I'm just checking. Did I really just read that?

Moreso, he's obviously right. If heroic raiding isn't the pinnacle, whatnhell is it then?

It was a rhetorical question.

I never drew a distinction between the two types of raiding; the poster in question introduced that distinction into the discussion, to support an assertion that my understanding of the design intent is incorrect and push his or her own perception of the design intent as though it were fact.

That's a little absurd.