As you might heard, I'm playing WoW again after a year of hiatus due to the automatic group finder feature that allow finding team members at any time.
Using this feature I killed Garrosh Heroic (the endboss on the second highest difficulty) and claimed the heirloom war staff. I also have 551 item level, only 2 less than available from this difficulty.
While it looks awesome, it's not. I returned two weeks ago, with ilvl 497. I got most of my gear by being AFK. Literally. I went to Tol Barad, the World PvP zone from the previous expansion, which is now abandoned by everyone and AFK-ed to receive 450 honor per "battle". From that I got ilvl 550 PvP gear, which is almost as good as PvE gear of the same level. 6 of my items are still PvP gear. I got two from the new 5-man instance, the rest from my only one heroic raid, using the now endlessly available bonus roll tokens. During my two weeks time I collected 70 epic pieces that now wait in my bank for the disenchanting NPC in the garrison to come.
But the really interesting thing comes from the WoWprogress stats:
I have a theory for that, but that will need further examination. No, it's not "95% of the players are morons and slackers".
Using this feature I killed Garrosh Heroic (the endboss on the second highest difficulty) and claimed the heirloom war staff. I also have 551 item level, only 2 less than available from this difficulty.
While it looks awesome, it's not. I returned two weeks ago, with ilvl 497. I got most of my gear by being AFK. Literally. I went to Tol Barad, the World PvP zone from the previous expansion, which is now abandoned by everyone and AFK-ed to receive 450 honor per "battle". From that I got ilvl 550 PvP gear, which is almost as good as PvE gear of the same level. 6 of my items are still PvP gear. I got two from the new 5-man instance, the rest from my only one heroic raid, using the now endlessly available bonus roll tokens. During my two weeks time I collected 70 epic pieces that now wait in my bank for the disenchanting NPC in the garrison to come.
But the really interesting thing comes from the WoWprogress stats:
I have a theory for that, but that will need further examination. No, it's not "95% of the players are morons and slackers".
25 comments:
I don't know if you are going to find the difficulty you are looking for by running Heroic with group finder. The current philosophy seems to be that Normal will take the place of the old LFR (faceroll), Heroic should be able to be completed by an organised group (slightly less faceroll) and those looking for a challenge should be doing Mythic (I don't think this is available in group finder?).
Interesting to see that 5% of the playerbase has done some form of organised raiding in this expansion. Compare that to the number of people who stepped foot in Sunwell in BC it is a marked improvement.
"ilvl 551 .. 2 less than available from this difficulty"
umm... wouldn't 575 technically be available?
The same items can be upgraded with non-raiding activity and the 616 back rises a lot on the ilvl. That is available with insane amount of non-raiding and LFR grind.
I'd be curious to see how many players killed the bosses on the lowest (LFR) difficulty.
Without taking into account the luck required for warforged items, the actual item level in heroic is 569, because the 4x4 upgrades in item level are practically free since 6.0.2 as they don't require the weekly limited valor anymore.
PvP gear can't be upgraded, so it's effectively slightly worse than normal gear which is 556 with 4/4 upgrades.
Since I'm pretty sure everybody would upgrade their PvE raid loot asap, because it's ridiculously easy and a huge performance boost, I'd consider the upgraded item level baseline.
Also, I wonder how you come to this conclusion: "Players who raided on one char did the same on alts too."
But considering that the 70% value for guild-raiders might even be lower for solo players, it should even out to your 5%, even if not every player raids with all their 90s.
I was just wondering where you got the data for that or if it's just an assumption.
I was surprised as well by the non-rising numbers. Garrosh heroic has been nerfed so hard, it's easier than the old flex Garrosh now. Combined with the 100% Heirloom drop chance, I'd guessed the kills would've risen significantly, but they didn't.
My guess would be that SoO has been out for so long, that most players who actually want something from it already got it and the rest doesn't care, because they didn't care before either.
@Exocon: upgrading isn't free, it's 50 lesser charms. Upgrading 16 slots 4 times is 3200 lesser charms. I hope you aren't one of those people who say that killing 3-4000 frogs is "free".
Wowprogress tracked characters on the armory. Found 840K Immerseus killers. There are much more characters than players. We can rightfully assume that behind these 840K characters there are alts on the same account. My gilfriend killed Garrosh HC (old normal) on 6 chars and killed Mythic (old HC) Immerseus on 4.
So I guessed that 4-500K accounts are behind these 840K chars.
Maybe some people don't want to raid. I find raiding incredibly dull, and so rarely do it if I can avoid it. I prefer to aim for tough achievements to go for that involve running around the open world rather than being cooped up for hours in an instance. Some people prefer PvP, some prefer just levelling up characters or running trade and professions. So when you say top 5%, your really ranking yourself against people who aren't trying to rank themselves in the same way. It would be interesting to see how many unique players actively raid as a stat to measure against.
Of course it's not free, time is a valuable resource, but getting your valor capped each week to upgrade one item to 4/4 wasn't free either and much more limited.
3200 lesser charms is a lot, but so were 16.000 valor points, which took several months to acquire. And by just doing your weekly raid on one alt, you didn't cap that valor so you had to resort to other activities as well.
Of course some or a lot of these 840k chars are alts, but there's no way to know the ratio. Or is there?
Gevlon surmises that 5% of players have killed Garrosh on (the new) Heroic mode, and wonders why there has been no jump in that number since the 6.0.2 patch came out.
Could it be because 95% of players are not interested in raiding? Many may even have stopped playing until next month. Just because you like raiding, Gevlon, it doesn't mean everyone does.
Actually, I was suproised by your findings, that there wasn't an uptick in Garrosh kills recently. On my realm, it seems there are loads of opportunities; combined with the new LFG feature, I expected to see a real upsurge.
However, on checking wowprogress updates for characters who I know have actually made progress in the last few weeks, I notice that wowprogress has not recorded their recent kills. And why is that? Because the Armory is currently a little bit broken.
If you take a look at Glotan's character page on wowprogress, you'll see there is no record there of your kill. It'll probably turn up later, once the Armory is fully operational.
Even if i and everyone like me were suddenly interested in checking off some outdated content, you'd still be in top 10% at worst.
This seems like a case of most players just focused on what they see in front of themselves in the game and not even considering possibilities of earning gear through say pvp.
The reason that kills did not increase is quite simple, most of the players that did not kill him before have about the same interest or maybe even less in killing him now, new expac is out in about 3 weeks, and quite honestly I just CBA to do the effort of slogging through SoO just for an heirloom,.
instead I am using this time to get all my alts to 90 since i stopped playing one month after xpac was out and came back last month, and since blizz reports that last quarter subs were up by 500K (or something like that)I'd imagine there a few others like me.
wowprogress does not track China, but the 7.4M figure includes China active subs. So you can't compute the percentage as you were doing.
SoO appears to have suffered an extreme nerf after 6.0.2; people are selling heroic Garrosh carries for 10K gold now.
While there are indeed players who didn't even want to raid, - besides serious PvP-ers - I can't really fathom what can they do. The same dailies every day for a whole year?
Also, the "they don't want to raid" is misleading. I don't want to play basketball. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm bad at basketball. I can't say to a basketball player "you are no better than me, since I'm not even trying".
In other words: it's not a sin to be bad in a video game. One can choose to not even try to raid. But it doesn't change the fact that they failed in WoW, just like I failed in basketball by not even trying.
"While there are indeed players who didn't even want to raid, - besides serious PvP-ers - I can't really fathom what can they do. The same dailies every day for a whole year?"
You named (Killers) who PvP either seriously or casually already.
(All types)
- Pet battles (I think this is huge)
(Achievers)
- (The Insane) All reputations to exalted
- 250 Mounts/All pets collection
- Timeless Isle rare drops collection
(Achievers & Explorers)
- Loremaster (Complete all quests)
- Explore all areas
- Collect all legendary items
- Collect those raredropping hard-to-get lore objects from old raids
(Explorers)
- Level all races/classes for those special quests
- Collecting transmogrification gear sets
(Socializers)
- All of the above, far less seriously
Progressing the character via max-lvl content is the obvious goal, but not the only one
You don't look at the 2nd-highest-Garrosh kills actually. You say "70% of the guilds that killed one boss also killed the endboss, if we assume the same for players", and this is not safe to assume. The players surging to kill 2nd-highest-Garrosh in 6.0.2 are the players who killed 2nd-highest-Immerseus (but not Garrosh) in 5.4.
In other words:
pre-6.0.2
2nd-highest-Any-Boss kill, characters: N
2nd-highest-Garrosh kill, characters: N*0.7
6.0.2
2nd-highest-Any-Boss kill, characters: N + n (n = newcomers to raiding)
2nd-highest-Garrosh kill, characters: N + n*0.7 <-- everyone who killed anything before killed Garrosh now, invisible on the graphs you look at
I think you might be failing to see how "casual" the WoW playerbase has become. I was a raid leader and guild leader in Cataclysm. We tackled all Cataclysm heroic content when it was still current content. At some point in MoP we all just burned out.
I have yet to clear SoO on LFR mode, let alone normal or heroic. I've considered doing so but it all seems like a massive waste of time to me. As you are quick to point out, my gear won't matter in less than a month so why grind it? That said it is not like anything else I do in WoW, or any other game, is not a waste of time.
My current WoW play time comes when I have a bit of spare time after my kids are in bed and I would rather play it than Destiny, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone or even watch TV (though honestly most things can be done while focused on a television show). I bang out an old raid solo, which used to be my main fun prior to the latest patch and them gutting old raids. I do some pet battles for mindless entertainment. Maybe I do some old dailies to get a pet, mount, toy or achievement I don't already have. Sometimes I'll drop into a BG because at least that has the potential of being a challenge.
I guess the bottom line is that WoW is becoming more and more of a playground. You can still do the "end game" if that is your thing but it won't take much time to complete. After you finish it you are left to decide what aspect of the game you want to fill your time with. You can grind the best gear, collect things, PvP, get achievements. What it is not anymore is a place where I can dedicate 10+ hours a week to raiding. I can jump in, do a few minor things towards some mundane goal and then pop out as my time demands. I think that's where a lot of the older playerbase is and why you aren't seeing these "easy" raids completed.
@Gevlon
"While there are indeed players who didn't even want to raid, - besides serious PvP-ers - I can't really fathom what can they do. The same dailies every day for a whole year?"
No, they are simply playing in whatever way they feel is enjoyable to them. You say "the same dailies", yet in raiding you are just killing the same bosses. So what's the difference?
"Also, the "they don't want to raid" is misleading. I don't want to play basketball. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm bad at basketball. I can't say to a basketball player "you are no better than me, since I'm not even trying"."
This is true, however when you say you are in the top 5%, you aren't saying top 5% of people who raid, your saying top 5% of the total game population, which is a useless stat. When they rank basketball players, they don't take into account people who don't play basketball in those rankings. If they did, then everyone in WoW is the top 5% of everything they've ever done in WoW. Anyone who's completed even a single raid is in the top 5% of WoW raiders, since the population of the earth is about 7.2b the 5% is 360 million people.
"In other words: it's not a sin to be bad in a video game. One can choose to not even try to raid. But it doesn't change the fact that they failed in WoW, just like I failed in basketball by not even trying."
Someone who chooses not to raid in WoW has not "failed in WoW". Raiding is not the be all and end all of WoW by which player success is measured. It's merely one aspect of a multifaceted game.
Sure I could kill Garrosh heroic but I'd rather spend my pre-expansion time on relearning how to effectively play all the classes (several alts) since the prepatch had major changes to character skills and rotations.
Hey Gevlon,
You piqued my interest with your few posts about wow so I used the 7 free days offer to come back to the game last weekend.
(Did not play since Aug 2011)
I started by doing the basic MoP questline (I chose my old 85 druid) but soon realized that the fastest way was to chain dungeons. I'm double specced tank and heal, so I never had to wait more than a minute to enter. That brought me to 90 in 6 hours or something like that.
Right after that, I did a few heroics (Well, if you can call them "heroics") But they are kind of pointless considering the loot dropping there (ilvl 450-460).
So I went to timeless isle and litteraly grabbed 5-6 ilvl 496 items off world chests. I also did the WoD blasted lands questline for 3 ilvl 515 items, and spent a few golds in the shadow-pan assault reputation shop for a necklace and trinket.
So in two days, without even pushing that hard, I could queue for the raid finder (I chose to focus on my guardian spec thinking tank would be the scarce ressource, but it seems to be healer) and so far I killed about 12 boss, looting a few parts (and some of them are useless in comparison to timeless island freebies...)
Now what? Do I continue grinding the raid finder and timeless isle until I'm full 496 and do SoO?
I'm not into afking in pvp battleground btw :>
I am not sure whether this is a *new* WoW problem.
TBC had a 20% nerf to raid bosses across the board at the end. Illidan 25 still remained the domain of the top 1%.
WoTLK suffered from the ever-increasing 30% player ICC buff, yet out of the countless number of players that killed Gorehowl, only 10% of them even killed LK on the easiest difficuly, 10M normal, let alone heroic or unbuffed heroic.
Haven't checked Cataclysm, cause I took a break.
Anyway, the point still stands, that it doesn't seem to matter how easy things get, I guess. Whoever had any interest of killing, did so. Rather, not difficulty is the gating mechanism, but something else, something absolutely constant throughout WOW expansions.
@Lyxi
The undergeared project showed a long time ago that raw numbers don't matter, just competency and knowing the "dance." The buffs make little difference, a retard who dies in the fire does 0 damage no matter how you buff him.
Drawing conclusions based on irrelevant content is at best disingenuous and at worst grossly misleading.
Let's be very clear - you did not clear the content when relevant.
You used a catch up mechanism released post patch (550 honor gear was not available until after 6.0.2).
You cleared the boss with randoms after massive, massive, encounter changing nerfs, especially to accommodate the new healing system.
Catch up mechanisms have always existed in WoW ever since TBC. Justice badges, whatever, they've always been available.
I don't actually believe the player base has changed at all in WoW. Similar figures abounded in previous expansions of who cleared the content when relevant, so I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove... Are you simply stating you cleared irrelevant content with a pick up group?
Good for you, you've been able to do that since TBC came out.
What I'm stating is that I cleared this content and 95% doesn't.
I clearly accept that I'm in the very bottom of the top 5% and everyone who did the content while relevant are above me, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm in the top 5% and the others are not.
I killed Garrosh on Normal (as was) on my main some time ago. I have not killed him at all on my other 6 alts, and have no desire to.
Also, I can't be bothered to go back there, even if it has been nerfed. It's not all about getting gear.
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