Mudflation 4TW

Posted on March 1, 2007 by Scott Jennings| 9 Comments

Given the raging storm and fury about Blizzard’s balancing practices having all the foresight of sex-starved bonobo monkeys still thundering in the last post’s discussion, I think a link over to another view – specifically Damion Schubert’s insightful praise of TBC mudflation is in order.

So to say I was happy about getting something that was, objectively, about 5 times better in every way that actually matters to a priest is a vast understatement.

The gravy train didn’t end there – new robe, new pants, new pimp hat — one by one, all the new quests raise the level of gear. Why? It’s easy – it makes it POSSIBLE for the designers to actually balance the content.

Blizzard certainly hasn’t been shy about shaking up the state of the game in this Brave New Ver 2.0 World. As someone who played a warrior, I’m not wildly happy about the way things shook up for my little dwarf, but I also haven’t really delved much into the new content, either… been busy either slowly leveling up a Draenei and/or playing other games and/or insanely modding still other games. Oh, and I’m finally surrendering to the inevitable and picking up an Xbox360 this month. Expect me to whine about achievement points in 3… 2…

As Damion says, Blizzard’s approach is an interesting way to deal with a balkanized playerbase. Simply buff everyone up to 10% better than the highest tier. Free toys for everyone! It does cause resentment among the hardcore who earned that highest tier, but especially given the raw numbers Blizzard are dealing with? Not an issue. They lose 50,000 raiders and keep 3 million casuals. Hmm. Basic math.

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  • http://midnight-guild.org Mist

    I think you’ve got some bad information there. A good number of people in my guild are still wearing up to half of their pre expansion tier 3 gear, and they’ve been level 70 for a month now. The only thing the expansion mudflation did is punish the not-so-hardcore raider (otherwise known as the people who play as much as the hardcore raiders, but are just worse at the game,) who only had tier 1 or 2 gear going into the expansion, because that gear didn’t hold up much past level 65. And the not-so-hardcore raiders are much more likely to quit over such an issue, because they actually thought they were spending their valuable time getting something useful, where the actual hardcore players knew 6 months prior what was going to happen when the expac came out, and kept raiding anyway because they actually enjoyed the content.

  • Walter Yarbrough

    I agree with Damion, it’s a good approach.

    Long term, the limiting mechanisms appear to kick back in quickly after hitting level 70.

    In other words, those casual people who can’t do a five man – will quit again.

    The 70+’s will bang out a few instances, but stop short of the massive keying/faction investments to hit the later instances.

    And the 70++’s are already bitching that they have topped out.

    -Walt

  • http://midnight-guild.org Mist

    >>In other words, those casual people who can’t do a five man – will quit again.

    And its sad, theres a lot of people that bad. The way Blizzard has designed the expansion, there are large numbers of players who cannot do a normal, plain old level 70 instance with 5 level 70 characters. Proving no matter how user friendly your MMO is, you just cannot design around bad players.

  • Amaranthar

    I resent the flipped off way the term “casual” is being used! I am a casual player. It’s a play style, not a time (or lack thereof) issue.

    I mean, if you’re talking about sex, “casual” does not equate to abstinence. So get a grip. Many of you are “casual” game developers, and should really know better.

  • Wolfe

    mmm, I ditched my naxx geared warrior for a greenbean warlock and Im happy I did.

    After levelling the warlock to 70 I took my old warrior out for a testdrive, works great on some level 58-60 gimpass deamon mobs. Dosnt work very good for levelling through quests tho. Many quests have you fighting mobs with armor, or more than one at a time and that just sux.

    If you got a warrior just ditch him, Blizzard dont like you. :P

    Or wait, if Blizzard does like you why do they put a high variation on the armor and melee dmg output on mobs of the same level?

  • http://vengeance.parryfive.com Axecleaver

    > And its sad, theres a lot of people that bad.

    Enjoying solo/2 man/extra-casual content does not equate to a lack of skill. TBC design takes this into account — there’s a lot more 2 or 3 man quests, and even the 5-mans are 45 minutes to an hour, and very accessible.

    Nothing really changed, they made the new stuff better than the old stuff so people would be incentivized to play through the content. That’s a tried and true model. At 70, the hardcore are getting totally uber raid gear and we’re back where we started (post 2.0 class balancing weirdness/scaling issues notwithstanding).

  • http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless_

    It cracks me up to see 1337 raiders talking about other players being unable to play the game. Pick up groups are infinitely harder to be succesful with than an organized, hand holding raid. 50% of a raid usually has no idea what to do other than hitting the buttons that the raid UI indicates. The patch that borked the UI mods PROVED THIS BEYOND ANY DOUBT as raiders suddenly couldn’t get past “farm status” bosses.

    How many failed raids does a new guild go through? Several! Why? Because working with new people in a group setting for the first time is hard! Give a pick-up group a few attempts at a 5-man and I bet they complete it just fine. Just like that new guild will probably conquer that raid dungeon after several attempts.

    Some pick up groups do just fine. Some new guilds come out of the gates solid, balanced, and focused. However, the majority do not. There is a learning curve. A period of time to adjust to the other players and the new approach to the content. I’ve been in a ton of pick up groups that completely fell apart on a first attempt at a dungeon only to return and dominate it the second time through. Unfortunately, most people don’t give a PUG that second chance.

  • http://midnight-guild.org Mist

    You have the ability to form complete sentences. That puts you significantly above the baseline of most people unguilded or effectively non-guilded you will find in your average thrown together pickup group on your average WoW server. A lone player, using the built in LFG tool or an LFG channel, on your average PvP server, will not be able to complete any of the level 70, non-heroic, ‘entry level’ content.

  • Ironwood

    Harsh.