World of Warcraft: Current Year

Neranja

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Thats like every game ever. Why do people still play csgo when they can just watch pro events??
In the current state of things WoW raiding for world firsts doesn't seem to be capped by player skill (from a viewer perspective, like in CS:GO), but degenerating into an "who can put in most effort" with split/alt raids and now "who can shoulder 100 million gold debt".

That's a pretty bleak outlook for the future.
 

Vimeseh

Trakanon Raider
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If you don't think those players have a high skill I don't know what to tell you

Sure they are skilled. But unless your guild can drop 30kish in real life dollars worth of gold for BoEs you aren't going to compete for world first unless something goes really wrong. So thats what three or four guilds with that luxury?
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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Sure they are skilled. But unless your guild can drop 30kish in real life dollars worth of gold for BoEs you aren't going to compete for world first unless something goes really wrong. So thats what three or four guilds with that luxury?
Yeah I guess, but then there's 1-200 guilds right behind them not spending that money. I guess my point is the mythic raid game is still enjoyable even if you aren't in the 1% of 1% of raiders
 

Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
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Yeah I guess, but then there's 1-200 guilds right behind them not spending that money. I guess my point is the mythic raid game is still enjoyable even if you aren't in the 1% of 1% of raiders

Speaking purely as an outsider "boy howdy we sure are having a good time here in mythic come on down and get yourself a handful of this fun" has never been the message I've gleaned from my observations.
 

Neranja

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If you don't think those players have a high skill I don't know what to tell you
From a purely viewer perspective you can't really tell. Remember, it's an RPG: You don't whack that boss with a sword, your character does, and the damage you deal is determined by statistics and dice. Method and Limit spent a lot of gold to inflate those stats.

Also, the WoW combat system doesn't really lend itself to displays of twitch/reaction skill.
 

xzi

Mouthbreather
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I think you're far too familiar with modern wow if you really think that is true because I'm still in several classic discords full of people that haven't played the game in over a decade even talking about how insane that fight looked when it was being streamed. You can tell that they are significantly better players than the rest of the population, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Also the community are the ones putting on the race, not blizzard. Blizzard isn't putting any focus on it at all, and thank god because it would fucking suck if they were. Also would be far less money in it for those involved as well.

I don't think it's a "blizzard only cares about top end raiders" scenario, I think it's more like.. raiding is the only thing they've ever REALLY excelled at as far as gameplay goes and they just dropped the ball on everything else this expansion. I'm sure they're aware of that pretty general complaint from top end to low end.
 
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Arbitrary

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Watching the fight from the raid leader's perspective with the comms helped the viewing experience. I was able to decipher enough of what was going on to follow along without a ton of time spent watching which helped build some investment in the outcome. Just wandering in to a Method stream during progression given the amount of mechanics in any particular fight and the whole thing is really opaque.

Again, just my view as a spectator.
 
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Khane

Got something right about marriage
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Also the community are the ones putting on the race, not blizzard. Blizzard isn't putting any focus on it at all, and thank god because it would fucking suck if they were. Also would be far less money in it for those involved as well.

Well, they aren't putting any viewership focus on it, but they certainly have been focusing on trying to make it as difficult as possible for the world first raiders for a while now.
 
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Noodleface

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From a purely viewer perspective you can't really tell. Remember, it's an RPG: You don't whack that boss with a sword, your character does, and the damage you deal is determined by statistics and dice. Method and Limit spent a lot of gold to inflate those stats.

Also, the WoW combat system doesn't really lend itself to displays of twitch/reaction skill.
I disagree to an extent. You're sort of right - but you're commanding your character to do this stuff in an optimal way. In FOH we had people parsing 10-13% on bosses and people parsing 99%. Sometimes we had someone rank on a fight. The difference between those two players was night and day.

It's not like classic wow or eq where you watched your character auto attack for 7 minutes, or stared at a wall casting gheal over and over
 

Jox

Molten Core Raider
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I think viewership in the mythic race translates very poorly to gaining new players, probably detracts from it honestly. Even for people who have raided in the past and no longer play, I don't think they watch this and think "man, that looks fun, I want to raid for 16 hours a day."
 

Noodleface

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I think viewership in the mythic race translates very poorly to gaining new players, probably detracts from it honestly. Even for people who have raided in the past and no longer play, I don't think they watch this and think "man, that looks fun, I want to raid for 16 hours a day."
It made me want to raid. I'd only do 16 hours a day if I was getting paid like they are
 

Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
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It's got me planning on playing some retail WoW in the near future but no world first race has ever made me want to try my hand at mythic. In that regard it has always been the opposite.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
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Hearing about what Limit and Method were doing leading up to it (yet again) just makes me less likely to ever re-sub. I'm still on the fence about even purchasing Shadowlands. I have no faith in Ion and "the team" to make a fun game and I really, really don't give a shit about raiding anymore. The current state of Mythic has sucked all the fun out of it and raiding Heroic is entirely pointless since I can just do Mythic+ instead.
 
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Neranja

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I think you're far too familiar with modern wow if you really think that is true because I'm still in several classic discords full of people that haven't played the game in over a decade even talking about how insane that fight looked when it was being streamed.
I don't want to diss on those classic people, but classic isn't the best benchmark for raid design. WoW design really took off once Burning Crusade refined a lot of the systems, and raid encounters went up in complexity from there. It has reached a point where viewers - when not familiar with the encounter already - are basically dumbfounded what is going on.

Also the community are the ones putting on the race, not blizzard. Blizzard isn't putting any focus on it at all, and thank god because it would fucking suck if they were.
But Blizzard watches these tries, fixes bugs and even despawns bosses when something goes wrong. If that isn't committing a lot of work into it I don't know what is. This is supposed to be the pinnacle of WoW, the olymp of the playerbase. If they don't pay attention to those players they have no future. But at the current level they are paying too much attention on mythic raiding, making the game worse for players that do this for fun.

I disagree to an extent. You're sort of right - but you're commanding your character to do this stuff in an optimal way.
As I said, it's not the player skill, it's the translation to the viewer to make it interesting and enjoyable. Without a doubt these players are all very skilled, but could you really tell what Limit did better than Method? There's just too much going on all the time.
 

xzi

Mouthbreather
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But Blizzard watches these tries, fixes bugs and even despawns bosses when something goes wrong. If that isn't committing a lot of work into it I don't know what is. This is supposed to be the pinnacle of WoW, the olymp of the playerbase. If they don't pay attention to those players they have no future. But at the current level they are paying too much attention on mythic raiding, making the game worse for players that do this for fun.

This is the weirdest take honestly. Should Blizzard go back to letting the bosses be broken for 3 weeks until Furor (or Ion now) gets to it and then they should fix it? lmao
 

Neranja

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Wasn't it your take that Blizzard doesn't care about the world first race and it's a community thing? They clearly care at least so much that they try to fix their product ASAP to make the race as fair as possible.
 

xzi

Mouthbreather
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I don't know if fixing bugs counts as caring as much as it is delivering something you fully expect from a videogame you pay for, but sure.
 

Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
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I would sorta like them to rework their difficulty scale or otherwise introduce a tier above mythic that was the competition tier. People feel like the game is too often balanced (at least at the start of a content cycle) around the top 0.01% of players. To alleviate that and the "you beat it after it was nerfed" comments that always show up as a tier progresses there could just instead be a competitive difficulty. The bosses drop no loot with the only prize being an achievement, a title and a mount for completion. The content is fixed if bugged but never has its difficulty lowered through changes. Once a set number of guilds worldwide beat it than it becomes unavailable. You're either in the world first race or your not. The guilds not in the race do not have their play experience impacted by it in any way.