Why Tobold is Killing Me

Tobold is the best massive-game blogger around there, because he's brilliant ... and because he posts like three times a day. But, dude, you're killing me ...

And yes, while I defended Blizzard for making the STARTING raid dungeon easier, and still think that this is a good idea, I never wanted them to nerf hard mode for the more advanced raid dungeons. And I repeatedly said so, but nobody listened, because everybody makes the same mistake as Gevlon: They all think that 100% of the game should be designed to be exactly at the difficulty level they enjoy most.

This is something you see in the forums constantly. But let me tell you a little story about a Raid Dungeon in World of Warcraft. It was really hard and nobody could beat the final boss. So they nerfed it. Then a bunch of hardcore guilds started beating the raid. Then they nerfed it again, so even more guilds could beat it.

This raid was called Molten Core. It was the first raid dungeon in World of Warcraft -- it was in the game at launch. That was four years ago. Since then, every single raid dungeon has been nerfed at some point after hardcore guilds started clearing it.

Why does Blizzard do this? Well, really, who knows. But this is my view of it.

Take guild A. Casual guild. They raid twice a week for three hours, so they spend six hours raiding a week.

Now let's create an arbitrary measure of their raiding prowess in terms of consuming content -- let's say they could kill one million Hoggers in an hour. So they consume raiding content at a rate of 1 Megahogger per hour.

Now, consider guild B. Hardcore guild. They are better than guild A in every imaginable aspect of the game -- they have better gear, better buffs, better specs, more knowledge, are better organized, better at following instruction, and are more focused. In fact, they are ten times more effective than guild A -- in other words, they could kill ten million Hoggers in an hour. They consume content at a rate of ten Megahoggers per hour.

And, by the way, guild B doesn't raid for six hours a week like guild A. They raid for fifty hours a week.

So guild A consumes six Megahoggers of raid content per week, while guild B consumes an incredible five hundred Megahoggers per week.

So what happens if Blizzard wants a hardcore guild to take a at least two weeks to clear a raid dungeon? Well, they have to crank out a Gigahogger dungeon. That takes guild B two weeks. And guild A ... well, about that : It would take guild A a little over three years to get through this raid dungeon. They wouldn't get through it, in fact, because no guild is going to spend even a year trying to clear a raid dungeon.

I'm not factoring in the fact that guild A is going to start reading about the strategies that guild B used -- and guild A is going to start getting gear from the dungeon. So let's say, generously, that guild A gains half a Megahogger in raid efficiency per hour every week. So week one they raid at one Megahogger per hour, week two they raid at 1.5 Megahoggers per hour, etc. It would still take guild A about six months to clear the dungeon. Six months might seem "ok", but consider that guild B probably has a couple months head start on the dungeon to begin with.

Blizzard nerfs the dungeons because they have to do so. The reward for raiding is ultimately not getting great gear -- it's getting great gear months before everyone else.

I realize this makes guild B a little sore, but you'd think in four years they could have made their peace with this.