Hardcore Ecosystem

[bryant]

At the moment, on the order of 423 United States World of Warcraft guilds have completed all the available content. If we assume that each of those guilds has around 40 raiders, which is a slightly generous estimate, then about 17,000 people have seen Illidan die.

There are over 2.5 million WoW players in the US. That makes that ratio of players to players who've completed the content roughly 150:1.

The usual question at this point is why Blizzard should care about the hardcore guys. Shouldn't they put more effort into the casual player?

Earthen Ring has 109 guilds partaking of raid content. Call that 4,300 characters (note: not people), but that's low because a lot of those guilds are more diffuse than the hardcore raiding guilds. Let's work with it. There are something like 7,000 level 70 characters on Earthen Ring. A majority of level 70s raid at least a little.

It gets too uncertain to extend past that. There are around 26,000 characters total on Earthen Ring, but some of those are bankers, some are alts, and an RP server is probably a bad baseline after all.

On the other hand, Blizzard clearly has enough content for people who are under level 70, sort of by definition. So maybe I won't worry too much about that; the question is what to do for the level 70s. Raid content is, as we return to the thrust of the discussion, most of what Blizzard works on.

(Not all. PvP content happens, five-man content happens, etc. But the majority of the work goes to extending the raid game.)

OK, where were we? 4,300 Earthen Ring raiders. Two guilds have cleared all the content; four more guilds are currently experiencing the highest-end content. Call it 240 people. Blizzard is blithely working on even tougher raids, which will be experienced by those 240 people plus perhaps another six guilds. 500 people total on my server will kill a Sunwell boss.

That's a small minority of our raiders. 10%, probably, when all's said and done. We're back at the main question: why should Blizzard make content for those 10%, of which I'm admittedly a part, when the other 90% of raiders might get more out of a new raid instance at the same difficulty level of the stuff that already exists?

There's a lot of really good commentary on this, including this post from Sandra Powers, which makes a good argument that's always bugged me. So unto the point: what's missing from the analysis?

The answer, I think, is that the actions of that 10% has a major impact on the other 90%. It's not about recruiting, it's about how easy it is for the 90% to raid. Most of those people rely heavily on strategies written by the top of the 10%. I may be in the bottom chunk of the 10%, and certainly my raid group would be a lot further behind if we didn't have strategies to read. I get a lot of my insight into appropriate tactics from a high-end raiding guild's message board community.

Raiding is more satisfying for me, and less frustrating, because the super hardcore guilds exist. Without them I think I'd have less fun, and I think that holds true for a lot of the rest of the 90%.

So it's important to keep the 5% happy and busy. (Note: the page I just linked makes the assumption that raiding is taking away from the time Blizzard would spend on content for levels 1-69 -- but again, there already is content for them.)

I'm not going to swear to my numbers, because they're not official and the player/account distinction is tricky, etc., etc. I think the point about high end guilds enabling medium and casual guilds to see content is, however, important and perhaps even new.

Comments

[bryant]

Here's to lousy itemization!

Did you see the video of a balance druid tanking Gruul?

(Hm. Yeah, it really is about raiding as a spectator sport.)

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

I saw that video; it's a stunt, and I think at least partly inspired by the fact that for a long time most decent moonkin gear was pvp gear.

A fantastically geared moonkin can tank, as long as the boss only does physical damage and doesn't fear or silence, and if the druid has amazing healers. But when an actual tank spec is only 50 gold away...yeah, it's a stunt.

[bryant]

Yep. 40 priests killed Onyxia pre-BC; also a stunt. And in a lot of ways not as hard as the 5-man pre-BC Onyxia kills.

I have this outline for WoW raiding as an ESPN sport, with drafts and seasons and so on. I think it's a mistake to assume that PvP is the only thing that anyone would watch.