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Burning Crusade Impressions Roundup
With the Draenei out of the bag, the news sites have taken some time to reacquaint themselves with the new corners of Azeroth. From the Gamespot hands-on report: "To navigate these vast new areas, the expansion will add flying mounts, such as winged dragonlike characters that can run along the ground even more quickly than the fastest epic mounts in the game and also take to the air at any time and fly anywhere. Though you'll need to have a character at level 70 to get your own flying mount, you'll enjoy increased freedom of movement--and apparently, Blizzard's content team is also designing out-of-the-way pockets of content and monster camps to be discovered by adventurous players who don't mind exploring the new areas." More impressions below if you Read More.
I'm not saying that 15% is necessarily accurate, but you're making faulty assumptions in the other direction. Not everyone who's killed Nefarion has been on all the learning runs. Once a big guild gets good at BWL, some of the regulars start slacking off, and they start taking new 60s in the guild, or friends of the guild, or whatnot. I've never been in a BWL-capable guild, but there were people in my old guild who would sometimes run it with a bigger guild when they needed a fill-in.
Basically, what I'm saying is, there are probably a lot of people who have killed Nefarion who haven't spent months in BWL.
Believe it or not, Blizzard doesn't have infinite funds, nor infinite manpower. They can't _possibly_ provide an endless stream of new content, so your level 60 character can go through a dozen new quests per hour like you did at level 1 in Northshire Abbey. Even if they had 10 times the total content in WoW, you'd still run out of it in a couple of months at that rate. Then what?
So they developped as much content they could afford, and messed with how much they give you at each level. If you plotted a graph with the time along X and the percent of content you've seen as Y, let's just say it would look like very much an asymptote. It starts by going up pretty quickly, but then it slows down, and it takes more and more time to get closer to that covetted 100% spot. By the end of it, huge amounts of time are required to make even the tiniest of progress.
I fondly call it the "boiling a frog alive model". They say that if you put a frog in hot water, it will just jump out. But if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it up, it will stay in and get boiled alive. Now I don't know if that's true with frogs, but it's certainly true with about half the WoW players. Because that's what Blizzard does.
In the beginning you're not up against any major challenge, farming or grinding is entirely unnecessary, travel times are 1-2 minutes, and you get to do new quests and see new content all the time. And you're as happy as a frog in a pool of cool water. (Some people may whine that it's cooking pot shaped, but you're sure it's only whiners/fanboys/whatever.)
It's a _great_ game at that level. And it had to be like that, because that's what gets people addicted.
But unfortunately they can't afford to keep it like that for ever. They just don't have the funds, the manpower or the infrastructure for the insane quantities of content that would be required.
So from there it goes slowly downhill, and more and more time-sinks are worked in. Gradually you need more time spent travelling, more time farming for your next weapon or recipe, more time waiting for a good group for that instance, etc. But still, you work your way slowly towards that 100% point.
Until eventually there are only 2-3 instances left total, and that's it. That's all that separates you from finishing the game, getting bored, and cancelling your account. You've consumed everything else already. So all they can do to keep you busy (and paying the monthly fee) is to make you do those over and over again for months.
That's, in a nutshell, why it becomes repetitive.
Why does it require large groups too? Well, for various reasons. Among others, because:
- it's viral marketting. It's a way to make people beg their friends to keep playing. In other games it was just the thought of "oh man, but all my online 'friends' are in this game" that kept you playing. But in this one said friends _need_ you. They start sending you tells or even emails that you're _needed_ for that 1000'th MC raid. You may even feel like you've failed your friends if you can't log on for that raid. It can make it very hard for some people to cancel their account, even long after they stopped having any fun in WoW.
- to further dillute the rewards. Even if you hit that 1% jackpot and the boss drops that item you were after, too bad, you're one of maybe 8-12 people rolling for it. (Or even more fun, you may know from the start that you're not going to get it, because your guild implemented some "contribution points" system. So you can know from the start that although you've played for 8 hours a day, someone else who's played 16 hours a day is ahead of you, and you'll only get that item if they don't want it.) Time to do it again next week.
Or maybe that boss doesn't even drop anything you need, but you're helping someone else get it. So hopefully they'll reciprocate and help you get yours. Well, that's even better. That's some hours for each of you which didn't get you any closer to your own goal. You're still as far from th
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
My clan runs BWL a few times a week, and a high level raid every night, HOWEVER, the same players go to every raid. Every 40 man raid is compiled from the same pool of about 55 players that do raids. The rest of the guild rarely, if ever, takes part in these long extravaganzas. In fact, most people might have time for a strat/scholo/ubrs run (2hours-ish) once a week. The people that have time for 6 hour marathon sessions are the exception rather than the rule.
If the WoW team doesn't give some development time to players who can only play about an hour a night, they risk losing a big part of their fanbase, and wacky estimates like this just contribute to that problem.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
Most folks debate whether the 25% number is inflated or not. They say "No way 25%, it's probably more like 15%!"
That shouldn't even be the point of the argument. If ONLY 25% of level 60s have downed the boss of the easist raid dungeon in the game, why the hell do they keep making more raid dungeons?
Look away from the textbooks and consider the real world for a moment. Consider the GP's "According to the NYT interview, Jeff Kaplan thinks that about 25% of WoW players with level 60 characters have killed Ragnaros, and 15% have killed Nefarion.". Data analysis from Excel or SPSS is not needed. 99%(*) of your statistics textbook is not needed. The key thing that I believe you are missing is that sampling is not required. Given that this is an on-line only game that only plays from company servers means that they can simply observe the *entire* population. Record who killed Nefarion, count uniques accounts, divide by total accounts.
The world is usually more complex that we think, but sometimes, on rare occasions, it is much simpler than we think.
(*) Yeah, a made up number but we are talking statistics so that is appropriate.