Oh, heck yes. Old PnP RPG players tend to divide into two equally annoying camps – Munchkins and Rules Lawyers. The arguments about what constituted cheating were legendary. (“Aha! Page 151 says equipped daggers can be used to parry with feat X, and page 223 of the third supplement says I can equip up to six extra daggers by strapping three daggers to each arm! I AM IMMUNE TO EVERYTHING!”)

That’s why Blizzard invented this really neat system called “raid IDs.” They (get this) save your progress so you can come back another time! How handy is that? I mean, it’s like Blizzard sat down long and hard, realised that people actually don’t have eight hours or so to raid in one sitting, and designed a system that allows people to go in and try a few times in a week!

How nifty eh?

Better yet, they allowed people to go into these raid instances *any time they want.* How awesome is that? It means you could spend one day watching the boss strategy (15 minutes) and reading talent/gearing guides (10 minutes) and applying that to your character (15 minutes) and then the next day you could go in and use all those 2 hours on the raid. How awesome is that? I mean, it’s like Blizzard went out of their way to make raiding extremely accessible compared to other incarnations. But that can’t have happened surely; I mean, raiding is just for no-lifers.

And I certainly get where your coming from with the content complaints. Blizzard had the nerve, THE NERVE, to ship with THREE raids, and they only shipped with five new levelling zones and complete revamp of virtually every levelling area. SO unfair to levellers!

And don’t get me STARTED on fees. £8.99 per month? I could buy 1.5 fillet tower meals at KFC for that. Outrageous! It’s shockingly expensive, and, worse yet, they don’t even give me ANY new solo daily content to do in their big, fire-based patches.

I mean, I could’ve said all this without being a snarky bastard, but then when you can’t even be bothered to scroll up and find out my name. Please, do go ahead and grumble. I’ve had fun here.

I don’t know whom that was pointed at, quit reading at one point or another. Fairness would be design based equality of content: the more you do, the more you get. But it should also be by design so that the more you use the content, the more you pay. I – casual leveller type – pay for the hc raiding people who complain how the content is used up so fast, and I never even get to see that content because I cannot fit all the requirements into that two hours I spend playing.

Sorry. I’ll go back home and play the way I like, grumbling about the unfair system and flaws in design.

C out

It’s not that bad in all of them, but is quite noticeable in some of the early zones.

I’m not sure that they can build exactly enough quests, however, as players who do instances or even just gather herbs or ore will still level up ‘too quickly’. An alternative might be to have the story quests not provide enough XP to level, then have some non-story quests as ‘filler’ for those who don’t gather or do instances, but that seems a bit… cheap, I guess, like doing chores.

Though as to whether carrying on with quest chains after 85 makes sense or not depends rather on what one’s playing the game for. If the storylines are the game, then level really doesn’t matter. If leveling up to do the end game is the game, then the storylines don’t matter. Fortunately, one can view it either way in WoW.

I still think they could do a better job of matching questlines to leveling, though.

The issue with progression curve content is that It tends to die off hard. If you ain’t in the right place at the right time, no matter how good you are you are never, ever going to see that high level content because the people who can’t get past the start are all that’s going to be at the start and if you come in new, you’re going to be stuck with them.

If they had a progression curve that had nice, easy, accessible wing-based raids but simply increased in difficulty the further you went, Blizzard could point out that:

a) you’re not good enough to do them, and

b) that’s the norm in games. In the real world.

I really don’t understand the “I deserve to see all this shit either.” Just because you pay for gym membership doesn’t mean you can instantly waltz in and lift 100kg…why is it somehow different here?

The reason players try to find all the quest givers and insist on doing all of the quests is because Blizzard put a lot of effort into making them do exactly that, what with the much more strongly story-based quests. If all the quests were unrelated and mostly meaningless, there wouldn’t be a problem, but that’s not the case. Take the dwarf clan questline in Twilight Highlands – if you start the zone, you’ll most likely hit 85 before you’re halfway done with the story, which is just silly. Are you supposed to carry on with it *just* for the story? That seems to be what Blizzard are suggesting.

This doesn’t mean I agree with nerfing content; quite the opposite. I, too, like the feeling of accomplishment when my raid group downs a boss, but if we do it easily and knowing the boss has 20% less health I feel somewhat cheated.

However, if we struggle for weeks and still only just manage to do it even with the nerf, that’s fine – we overcame a challenge that was difficult for us, and I don’t care if ‘hardcore’ raiders would find it trivial.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: raiding, for me, is about the sense of *personal* accomplishment, not relative to the WoW population as whole.

“I genuinely cannot understand why they don’t just make a progression curve, rather than a 3-tier system.”

Because the ‘M&S’ would bitch and moan that they never get to do the latest raid content and are stuck forever doing the ‘easy’ raids. Blizzard clearly want to make all raid content accessible to all people, and the only way they can do that (so far) is to let anyone get current-tier gear with little effort, which obviously has the unfortunate side-effect of making older-tier raids obsolete in terms of challenge.