Nihilum/SK Gaming Beat World of Warcraft Expansion, Go On To Establish Peace In Middle East, Save Madonna's Marriage
The question in all our minds right now is if we could do this, how soon until the rest of the top guilds in the world clear all the raid content that WOTLK has to offer? Did Blizzard miscalculate in the tuning of these encounters? Or is this Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders?
Early trenchant commentary comes from Quarter To Three:
I see one of the raid bosses dropped a rather large entitlement complex as loot.
Further analysis from the ironically named Elitist Jerks community:
No one will ever be satisfied. SSC/TK were available at TBC Launch and everyone thought it was a mistake in retrospect. The fact that the two top guilds in a unified effort cleared the ENTRY LEVEL RAIDS, once they hit 80, shouldn’t be a shock to anyone.
Their insinuation that this is a failure is pathetic. Lich King is not about hardcore end-game raiding, and never really has been; all the changes made have reinforced quite the opposite. This used to be their (SK/Nih) niche, and Blizzard toned it down. I’ll worry more about difficulty when we get past the Karazhan of LK. In fact, I’d be more worried if this took longer than 7 days.
It should also be noted that the penultimate raid (the one where you can kill the aforementioned Lich King who has been wrathing it up all over the place) is, in time honored MMO fashion, To Be Patched In Later. (Blizzard followed this same model the last time, of course.)
But the larger question SK/Nih/CombinedGuildTheyFormedBecauseTheyJustWeren’tUberEnoughAlready poses – “is Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders” – is fairly easily answered.
Let’s look at the numbers, shall we? Courtesy of those XML parsers at Wowjutsu, we have, out of guilds that have members with loot from Karazhan (the basic 10-man raiding dungeon that is so accessible even *I* can participate):
- Black Temple, the “end-game” raid for Burning Crusade: 19%
- Sunwell, the “post-max” raid patched in near the end of Burning Crusade’s life cycle: 5%
Gosh. It’s almost like the numbers are telling us something. What could it be? You think maybe Blizzard focused its efforts on the majority of the player base instead of 5%? Those horrible, horrible bastards, ignoring the Everquest 1 paradigm of aspirational content that the masses can worship less than 1% of the player base for completing!
Of course, if you REALLY beat down WoW like a red-headed stepchild and feel bored with the universe, other options do exist.