I see alot of threads and posts related to player skill level and I have came across a very concerning find.. Alot of players (That I have seen) are asking for the difficulty of encounters to be reduced, I find this very counterproductive, in terms of both the counter communities opinion (The "hardcore" players) and in their own interest.You see..When a new raid comes out, a players instant responce is "lets do this, i want the gear" this is a good response, it shows a good level of motivation and passion and in correlation a need for success, this is all positive and is needed for a great community - however.. nower days when a player cannot perform to the standard needed to complete said raid, instead of picking themselves back up, learning from their mistakes and in term becoming a better, more skilled player - they ask for a nerf.
This is very counterproductive as I said before, as a players and in extension the communities skill level will never increase, it can surely only decline "use it or loose it" with the "it" (obviously meaning their current level of skill) - So as a players skill keeps decreasing in correlation the difficulty of each pre-existing raid and new raid will have to decrease to keep the players in their comfort zone.. this is a dangerous cycle that will only lead to a community who due to their lack of will and motivation have in term landed themselves with a type of learnt helplessness.What about if I'm not talented enough?Well, for the longest time, I never believed that talented existed (on a mental and cognitive level) and most definetly didnt believe in the idea that some people were destined to be outshined by others or in anyway had a mental "limit".
This burning believe lead me onto study neuroscience (science of the brain and its functions)This braught me to a new discovery by some very well documented scientists.. this discovery was "neuroplasticity" Neuroplasticity in basic words refers to your brains ability to change its structure according to your believes, experiences, thoughts, ideas and most importantly specific types of training (diliberate practice) You see, when you put diliberate practice (try until you fail) into effect, your brain starts to create new neurons across something called a neuropathway, this neuro pathway links to hemispheres of your brain together, allowing you to become more efficient and in term better at that task.. as you brain can constantly create new neurons, in theory, this means that there is no real limit to yours or anyones ability when it comes to a purely psycological standpoint.
Yes but I just cant do it!Listen to this real life story - In iceland there was a man, a farther to a loving son who suffered from a stroke, this stroke destroyed 97% of the hemisphere of his brain that controlled movement and intelligence, the poor man was reduced to a vegetable - his loving son not being able to bare to see his father this way began to contemplate a way to cure his farther (the doctors told him he would never be able to string together a real thought, let alone walk)So the son thought back to how a baby first learns to walk, first they must crawl - so with this in mind he put his farther onto the ground and moved his arms and legs until he would eventually rest in the crawl posistion, after time the farther could move his arms and legs good enough to crawl - with time the farther began to regain his lost senses and in term began to rebuild this hemisphere of the brain.The remarkable man and equally remarkable son kept up this practice until the dad could eventually walk once again, time passed by and the farther reached the point where he could mountain climb, how amazing! Even his lost intellegance got rebuilt by this process and the farther became a neuroscientist, after suffering a stroke that unfortunetly caused a loss of 97% of that particular hemisphere of the brain.
So let me ask you again, can you really not do it?
Another diliberate practice and in correlation neuroplasticity real life story.Rupert gam - A self confessed hopeless student, he could not do maths to any basic level - he couldnt add up the simplest of sums but through diliberate practice, he strengthened this neuropathway and stimulated to such an extent that he became what is known as a human calculator, a person with the ability to calculate sums of increadible difficulty in a very short space of this - with no assistance what-so-ever.This in my opinion out rules and disproves the idea of people having any limit on a purely psychological matter.With all of this in mind, I employ the community to see reason, Do not ask for a reduced difficulty level, please do not create a learnt helpessness and in extension throw yourself into a dark hole of your decreasing skill level...Rise up! Be motivated, be passionate and with time and diliberate practice.. Be the best!
Thankyou.
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For some people it is. Some people only want some mindless fun. Something they can do to relax rather than having to set their mind on overcoming a virtual challenge. That's one of the many reasons why invoking majorities in online discussions just doesn't work. We all have our own reason to do what we do. Some want to test themselves and improve their skill, some just want to relax and have some fun time with their friends. Some don't even know what the concept of hardcore and casual gaming mean, let alone "skill" or "competitiveness" in something they may not even consider a hobby.
You can't really asky others to not enjoy the game so you can enjoy your own vision of the game. Neither option is right. Sure, there are areas of the game specifically tailored to a particular group of players (Heroic Raids are better fit for the hardcore crowd), but that shouldn't stop you from trying something different and find out if it's fun or not for you. And YES it are the unskilled losers who ask for nerfs. Deal with it. There you go, the "unskilled losers" ask for nerfs. That's a not very nice way of putting an etiquette over a group of players that may have difficulties overcoming a challenge in the game. There's no real reason why you should go out of your way to also say that then real life for those players must be incredibly difficult. We get it, you consider yourself a very skilled player in World of Warcraft, that's great. But in a game with as many players as World of Warcraft has, you have to realize that people come from very different backgrounds, some have been playing games for years, some are just starting to discover this world... Therefore, they have different expectations of how they would like to enjoy the content. Of course, it may look selfish to ask for nerfs if you can overcome the content at its current difficulty, but, isn't it equally selfish to deny others content just because they don't have your skill? |
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Since you mention normal difficulty, I think it's a good opportunity to mention this blog article by Watcher where he explains how developers tune the raid encounters: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/7065831/Coffee_with_the_Devs_Encounter_Tuning_by_Watcher_-17_01_2013
If you give that person an infinite amount of time (and will) they'll probably overcome the encounter at some point, sure. But what actually happens is that, rather than keep at it, most players stop trying at some point out of frustration. The will to persevere and continue battling a foe that feels like an unavoidable obstacle is actually not as common as you may think among gamers (otherwise, why would we even have difficulty settings in most games anyways? :P) |
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Then why bother with a game based on progression and challenge ? There are several scales of challenge (and progression). On this game you can even progress solely on PVP or PVE if you so wish. So, this is not really an argument. Everyone knows at which pace they want to play the game, and if they don't know, they'll eventually find out as they encounter things that annoy them and things that don't.
The developers get their information from plenty of sources, it's certainly not just becase "20 people throw up a moany post on the forums". Otherwise, based just on the posts you can find on this forum, you'd see game design change from one extreme to the other with every single patch, which is not really the case (even when the developers change the direction on which they're taking the game).
As I mentioned on my previous post, the blog post I linked explains the reasoning the developers use to adjust certain fights. But you can huh? Or where you trolling when you said this? : There's quite a difference between not being able to do (defeat) something and refusing to use the tools the game offers to do a certain piece of content :) |
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Skill has nothing to do with it imo. It's the mentality of most players. Well, those "terrible players" do pay as much as you do, so that much is true and can not really be used as an argument. But you seem to correlate the presence of epic rewards on certain areas of the game with mentality of these players, which is not necessarily the case. A player can be incredibly hardcore in mentality and just not have the time to devote on his life to get into the content tailored to the hardcore audience. It's not mutually exclusive.
By this definition, we can assume that Warren Buffet and Carlos Slim are very skilled hardcore raiders with all content on farm since day 1... It doesn't make much sense, does it? That's the issue with these kind of arguments, it's just demeaning for the sake of it. One could argue the exact opposite and it'd be just as bad (successful in a game = failure in real life), so, please, please, store this arguments somewhere safe, cast them into the depths of the sea, and never use them again.
Perhaps you're looking at it from the wrong perspective? I mean, it sounds like you believe it's the players that are interested on doing just The Tillers and taking care of Sunsong Ranch the ones that want to do heroic raiding and have issues with it. Why not think about those players that are progressing through heroic raids and just can't overcome a particular boss? Would you prefer they'd rather quit altogether if they become blocked somewhere? What benefit do you get of it in that case? (assuming you have progressed through that boss, of course).
Do you think most of the players back in vanilla wanted to become better at the game?
First, you assume "player B cares not to improve". You just can't know. You assume it's not the case because in your opinion, if he cared, he'd take down the boss. The fact is, it's much more complex than that. Even if player B wants to improve, he may not be able to devote the amount of time he'd need to improve. Then you mention "blame is laid to player A to being selfish", which is not the case, at all. Why would player A be blamed at all in the first place? What's been said, though, is that, more often than not, player A will go and say "No! Don't nerf it! Make them climb the same rope I had to!", despite player B indicating that he just can't.
Let's imagine you have 50 raid groups, and you are designing 10 bosses per raid, 1 raid per tier, for 5 consecutive tiers. On your first raid, 47 groups clear all bosses, 3 quit because they got stuck in boss 7 and after weeks of trying, they've got the memo: with the current gear, they don't have the skill for this game, and they'd rather spend their time elsewhere doing something fun than wait weeks to be behind others anyways. On your second raid, since it went so well (47 out of 50) you decide to tune content a bit tighter, and 39 out of those 47 clear all bosses. On your third ray, again, you tune content a bit tighter than before, 26 out of 39 clear it all. On your fourth raid, one notch more in difficulty, and 12 out of 26 clear everything. By your fifth raid, your original audience (50 groups) has been reduced to 12, and the time invested in each raid, has been increasingly wasted. If you look at it that way, it might be easier to see what the negative effect would be in the long run if people get left behind; which is kind of what happened in The Burning Crusade with Sunwell Plateau or Naxxramas in Classic, as raid groups were encountering walls on a given boss, they were unable to progress at all or for extended periods of time, so, by the time the 4 Horsemen first kill was achieved, most of the raiding groups hadn't even stepped into the instance. |
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Perhaps it was an example a bit too simple, you're definitely right, not every guild that can't clear an instance in heroic while it's current content vanishes. It wasn't an example related to WoW though, but rather on why one could have an interest in revisiting fights and lowering the difficulty of some of its aspects.
When we play a new game (which WoW was to all of us in vanilla) there is a sense of discovery, of confusion/lack of familiarity and so on, that slowly fades over time as we get familiar with the game. It's certainly a feeling that I miss myself from time to time. That is something people seem not to understand including the blue here. They have given us the content - and regardless how much everyone pays they do not need/deserve same reward just because they pay the monthly fee. The "they do not need" part might be easier to discuss. Some players just don't need PVP content at all (in fact they wouldn't mind if it was entirely removed from the game, the same aplies to PVE content from the perspective of some PVP players). But... they do not deserve? That's a really tall claim. By what order? What gaming principle does make a player worthy of completing something?
But this hyperbole, as much as it gets thrown around when these topics come out, is just not true. Noone is rewarded just for logging in. The only thing a nerf does is set a lower bar, you still have to overcome a certain level of challenge and perhaps diminish the sense of achievement of players that defeated a boss on its harder incarnation. But that's quite far away from "being rewarded just for existing as an entity". So basically what this teaches them is that you dont have to work for things in life. How about we let the parenting of kids to... their parents? No, seriously, World of Warcraft is a videogame. Gaming it's supposed to be a fun activity (if you have that fun through challenges, social interactions, etc is completely up to you). Not some kind of "School of Hard Knocks about the Real World".
Yeah, you're totally right. As I said, it's a simplistic example that didn't take into consideration many things to avoid making it overly (and unnecessarily) complex. If a guild has full (100%) gear from NHC and can't beat every boss in HC, then so be it. Not every guild has the will to keep hitting that wall, neither accepting as a fact that "here's how far you can go" is a very appealing reason to play. "Hey, we've got to this boss, and we can't progress any further. It's all good!" In most cases, those players will just stop playing to have their fun somewhere else. |
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Normal modes and LFR don't exist so nothing has to be tweaked ever again. LFR is tailored towards players that can't participate in organized raiding, and therefore, it's tuned accordingly (25 complete strangers, with little to no team play in most cases, and wildly different skill levels and gear). Of course, if you regularly play in organized raiding, LFR does not present a challenge. at. all. If you consistently raid Heroic bosses, then probably LFR looks just hilariously easy to you. Because you're not the target player. Normal modes are for players that participate in organized raiding, and Heroic for those guilds that want to put their skill to test, but, this doesn't mean that even on its own scale, a particular boss might need tweaking in the opinion of the developers, or simply, they just feel it's time to tone something down so players that have been stuck on him for some time can progress.
It's not just time. Interest and investment into the game is also important. Take a theorycrafter for example. That kind of player will devote a big amount of time trying to understand how the mechanics of a class work so they can get the maximum DPS/Survivability/Healing out of his character. In turn, this becomes a guide that helps players with less time to dedicate to better play with their characters. So, it's not about just dismissing those with more time either. If I had to guess, I'd say that what separates players is how important to them is what they do in the game. |
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Picture a group that is stuck on a boss at 30% hp constantly for, I don't know, two months. They'll definitely consider it progress when they finally move past him, and it's fine. For you that's not true progress because they didn't kill the boss on its hardest version, and it's a valid point of view as well, but that can't be a reason to block people from moving on, particularly if we keep in mind what the developers have seen when this happens: while there are guilds out there that have the will to keep on trying for as long as it's required, it's a rare treat in most other guilds, and they eventually give up. While many people think they would easily make it into any of the Top 10 world guilds, the truth is most of them aren't.
Would you really think you had? The fact you have killed a boss 30% easier doesn't mean you have become Paragon, far from it. I wish my personal experience was of any use in this case, because from what I've seen, most people in those guilds did feel they had accomplished their personal goal (killing an end boss) but definitely didn't feel they were in the same league as the best guilds in the world. But my sample is terribly limited, so I'm not going to generalize and say that's the case for most guilds in that situation, because it'd be an outright lie.
The Gladiator title is specifically tied to the 0.5% best players on a PVP season, so it's not the same thing. There's nothing that specifies "the Heroic end boss of a raid tier is meant to be killed only by the 0.5% best raiders of the tier", and we're talking, in any case, about something that happened on a different moment and on a different environment. WoWProgress shows Heroic Madness was defeated by around 14k+ guilds worldwide, sure, it looks like a lot, but the raid was available for almost a whole year. Fast forward to today, and this same website indicates that 260 guilds have killed Sha of Fear in Heroic (and they are getting as well the "Cutting Edge" achievement. So, if at any point the boss is nerfed, and the criteria is no longer met, they would be able to show that achievement to prove they did it without any nerfs. Times have definitely changed in that regard (in my opinion, of course). I am self mainly motivated by new boss kills and I do not mind really what other raiders kill or do. I have my own speed, pace and so on. I do not mind if 10 other DK's wear gear as I do, when they do content I do. Makes sense, yes ? However I roll eyes, when see that AFK guy in LFR run around with almost identical gear as I do. Without transmog feature you barely would make difference between me and the AFK-Hero, who does most cases 25k dps if not less. The diference is that your AFK hero is wearing gear that is 26 item levels lower than yours and doesn't have stuff you do, such as vanity rewards (Glory of the Pandaria Raider and Guild Glory of the Pandaria Raider come to mind as an example). Also, if you fancy doing challenge modes, it's very likely your AFK hero won't have the transmoggable set of gear you can get access to either. Do not be too upset on me. You are talking to the player, who did not quit after 5 weeks of Kael'thas wipes on bench, nor 6 weeks of mu'rus wipes. And I lived trough 15-20 minute Nefarian respawn timer on vanilla, as well the complete hilarious wipe fest of Firefighter, Shadowtraps on Lich King and I sm sure am not scared of tsulong or Sha of Fear (which I believe might be block my team for a while). I am not a top raider even. I am just one of those 'raiding masses' - average Joe's of HC raiding, if you will. You may not be a top raider in some community world ranking. Your dedication is certainly rare among players though. If you track back to M'uru, you'll probably remember that guilds were falling apart before reaching 6 weeks of wipes on him and Kael'thas was seen by many as a massive hurdle. So even if your progress spells "average Joe's of HC raiding" the fact is, when it comes to dedication, you have plenty of it, and hopefully your guild does too :)
Oh, please, don't try to hyperbole my posts. Toning something down eventually so more people can complete it doesn't mean turning the game into a "console game", which, in the other hand, is a weird comparison, since there're plenty of challenging console games out there. |
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World of Warcraft is neither the first MMO to have varying levels of difficulty, nor the only one. You can't compare it to a completely different game (Call of Duty) as it doesn't even share the same genre nor the same design philosophies or game design. If you look at the MMO world you'll see other titles do also adjust the difficulty of their content, in fact, there's a very popular case of such a boss in another MMO, which I won't name here for obvious reasons. You killing normal Elegon doesn't effect my HC Elegon. When you come and ask MY elegon to be nerfed, then it affects my game. Otherwise i wouldn't care less what they do with 'your' Elegon as long as I can try and kill 'my' Elegon or wipe on 'my elegon' till i learn to move from the floor in time :) It's not "your" heroic Elegon though (neither "their" normal Elegon). But there's something that has been said on this thread that is true. As much as some hardcore players love to blame the casuals when 'their' content has been nerfed in the past, the fact is, you'll rarely see threads asking for heroic bosses to be nerfed. Sure, you'll find the occasional thread here and there, but it's far from common.
3 weeks earlier? Did they turn the debuff off? Because in fact, it took 3 months for the debuff to go from 0% to 15%: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3599256 (5%, January 31) http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3746119 (10%, February 28) http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3899863 (15%, March 26) But still, it's a fair point that your accomplishment felt diminished because of a debuff tackled on the boss. That's the reason why in Mists of Pandaria there're the "Cutting Edge" achievements for the three final Heroic bosses of the current tier (in fact, on the Patch 5.2 PTR they currently read "defeated before the discovery of Throne of Thunder), so although this isn't Dragon Soul and there're no nerfs in place, you have a good reason to actually try to chase those kills and earn a reward that will, no doubt, be rare among raiders come 5.2. You'll be able to show that Feat of Strength and say "I killed it before 5.2". Also, we didn't have the Item Upgrade system that is available right now (although it'll be going away with the arrival of 5.2, at least temporarily), so the panorama you're looking at right now is vastly different than that of Dragon Soul, even if it feels like not that much has happened since then :-) |
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Why can you name Call of Duty but not another MMO? I named it on my Twitter account, so for anyone wondering, you can just go there and check it. If you've been following the MMO scene for the last few years, you've probably heard about that boss anyways :)
There aren't really different audiences that you can put on neat little boxes, though. Of course, hardcore players will get first to the Heroic boss, and will have an easier time fighting him. But there's nothing that prevents a "normal" player from becoming "hardcore", the thing is, that's something progressive, you don't become a hardcore raider overnight, so what is just hard enough for you as a Heroic boss is still easy for the person to your left, but too hard for the person to your right. This means it's not as simple as saying "hey, if you can't kill Elegon Heroic, stick to normals, that's your place". Because there'll surely be players that are right in-between, normals too easy for them, heroics still too hard. |
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As simple as searching for my nickname on Twitter, and then checking the description of the two whopping accounts that show up on the People tab :)
I didn't imply at any point you have claimed that, sorry if it came across that way. We improve in life and in game trough experience (and personal perks), but if experience is too simple and fire does not burn and voidzone does not kill - we do not learn to move from fire. If dragon's tail does not bend, we do not learn to stand on its side. This is definitely true. The gaming scene has changed a lot over the last 20 years, though. While it was something very restricted to people with computers and an interest in videogames back then, now it's something mainstream where a grandmother or a complete illiterate in computers can insert a disc and start playing. And so the games, the genres, and the media itself has adapted to its new demographic. A decade ago or so, a MMO with varying difficulties, tools to find other players in a convenient way, etc, would have been seen by many as unconceivable, yet nowadays, there're players that pretty much expect those things to be in a game before they consider trying it. |
