My Corner of the Interweb

Send in the Ogres

Mood: Good.
Music: In Quintessence, Squeeze
Game: World of Warcraft (60 Rogue, 15 Priest, 9 Warrior (PvP))
Book: Prisoner's Dilemma, William Poundstone
Muffin: Nope. No muffin. Was tempted by a Krispy Kreme Doughnut. Had an apple instead.
Punchline: Hm. Nope. No punchline.

World of Warcraft is patching the servers. The long awaited patch has finally arrived.

There's lots of cool stuff in the patch...the part that I think I like best is the fact that they're capping the maximum number of people that can be in an instance. Why is this good?

Well, most of the MMORPG endgame has to do with dealing with huge monsters and big dungeons. Events, as it were. The easiest way to deal with a big problem is to throw more firepower on it. Tactics are important and all that...but if you're having trouble, just throw more people at it. And these so-called "raid guilds" do just that. They trivialize the content in most of these instances by merely overwhelming the encounters with more players. This gives the huge guilds advantages over smaller guilds, such as ours.

At any given moment, we can muster 5 people...and maybe 10 with organization. A "raid guild" does nothing but cycle these instances with as many people as they can, and so they chew through content with little difficulty. It makes tuning the instance difficult for the developer, because they can't make it just possible for a group of 5 people without making it trivially easy for a group of 20 people.

So what Blizzard is doing is saying "OK, for this instance, you can only bring x number of people." And for the vast majority of the instances, that number is 10.

So all of a sudden, the raid guilds are going to have to think about who they bring. They're going to have to work. And they're going to have to coordinate.

We know everyone in our guild, we're not formed randomly, and we use voice chat for comms. In short, our group of 10 will work better than most any group of 10 the larger guilds can muster.

While we'll still have trouble with Molten Core and Upper Black Rock Spire, the rest of the instances will be tuned to 10 players, with Dire Maul being a 5 person cap.

They're basically making smaller guilds as effective as much larger guilds with this move.

I'm pretty excited about it.

There are many many other changes, some of which are very good...like adjusting the difficulty of some of the encounters in instances, changing loot tables, adding flight paths, decreasing flight times for some paths...all good stuff.

Now if only they can keep the servers from lagging and crashing all night....

Posted by Glenn at March 22, 2005 02:21 PM