Six Words that Terrify Blizzard.

"I Just Want to Kill Arthas."

Yesterday, Blizzard formally announced their plans for Icecrown Citadel progression, and a lot of what they did in ToGC is carrying over. To recap quickly, they're releasing Icecrown one wing at a time, with "several weeks"* in between wings being ungated. On top of that, hard mode Icecrown won't be doable until Arthas dies on normal mode, meaning hard mode Icecrown won't be released until all 4 wings are. On top of *that,* attempt counters are back for the final boss of each wing, only with a couple new twists: You get 5 attempts per wing boss, carrying over from the previous wing boss to the next, all the way up to Arthas. Oh yeah, these attempt counter exist on normal mode, as well.

While it's easy to be shocked and dismayed that Blizzard would betray their fanbase, anyone who has been paying attention this expansion will feel this is par for the course. This is Activision at work, pure and simple, and all the talk of lore making this necessary, or expanded enjoyment making this necessary is whitewash to cover one simple fact: This expansion sucked.

The leveling was nice, the zones were cool, and the events were fun, but on a whole, up until Icecrown we've gotten one legitimate new raid zone: Ulduar. Naxxramas was a retool of old content. Trial of the Grand Crusader was reused models and a reused final boss (really, Blizzard used Anubarak on a level 72 5 man only to bring him back as the penultimate raid boss? This shows foresight and planning how?). Maylgos, Sartharion and the Vault bosses were hole-in-the-walls, so aside from Icecrown, the only real new raiding content that wasn't a band-aid was Ulduar.

Trial of the Grand Crusader has been such a disappointment, guild leaders such as myself spend a lot of time talking to their players trying to keep them interested in going. On a whole, this expansion, with the 10/25 man split, the normal/hard mode split, and the lack of content for months at a time has made running a successful guild incredibly challenging. At this stage of the expansion, many people are moving on, finding much better value for their entertainment dollar (sadly, a lot of which ends up going back to Activision.) Many of those left are here for one reason:

"I just want to kill Arthas."

It's clear Blizzard is aware of this. To quote the blue post about the Icecrown plans:

"We believe a staggered release of the content will allow players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace."

Daelo is telling the truth for two-thirds of that statement. This will make their game subscriptions more sustainable, and the pacing more measured, but it sure won't make it more enjoyable. As a guild leader, in fact, it's going to make it a nightmare. But Blizzard realizes this expansion has been little more than a public beta for their B-team of developers to try to figure out how to make a dollar out of 79 cents. They know a lot of people are just hanging on to finish what they started many years ago with TFT. They want to kill Arthas, and as soon as they do, they're going to bounce and take their subscriptions with them. By stretching Icecrown out, they accomplish a couple of things: they close the gap between content from 3.3 to Cataclysm, and they force a multiple month schedule required to kill Arthas. That's multiple subscription months, as opposed to one month that it'd probably take many serious or semi-serious guilds to kill Arthas.

Let's project this out: For the sake of argument, say Icecrown comes out Decemeber 1st, just to make the math easy. On Dec. 1, we get Wing 1. Now, Blizzad's wording on the release of new wings is "several weeks." To me, several weeks means more than 2, so I'm going to say 3 weeks between release of each wing. That puts wing 2 at December 22nd. Three more weeks puts Wing 3 at January 12. Finally, Wing 4 comes out February 2nd. If your billing cycle starts on that same December 1st, you pay for December, January, and February--three months--just to *see* Arthas, provided you and your guild are good enough to get past the extremely limited number of attempts you will initially get in Icecrown. Then, you kill Arthas that week, let's say, because you're that good. The week of February 9th is when you can start hard modes. Start. A raid initially released on Dec. 1 will allow for hard modes to begin on February 9th. My powers of prognostication and experience as a guild leader / recruiter say that many, many guilds will not survive hard modes.

That's how Blizzard sees this: How can we get the most money--not enjoyment, but money--out of this content. How can we make sure we milk our greatest asset left--Arthas--for maximum value? Blizzard keeps insisting that Activision isn't up in their business, but it's just another lie they tell you or themselves to convince either party they still make a good game.

From a guild leader perspective, as I said above, this is a nightmare. I'll take it a piece at a time.

Gating:

At this point, the gear level escalation has made old content completely irrelevant. Ulduar hardmode gear is in most ways inferior to ToC normal mode gear, with a few exceptions here and there for the true min/maxers. Going back to do Ulduar has no value from a guild readiness standpoint, and for content that's been out since I believe April, many find it painful to even step foot in there anymore. What gating does is extend the need to do this old content to keep people on a solid raiding schedule. It also gives people a taste of the new content, which causes a distaste for the old content. Part of the problem is just how bad Trial is, with 5 bosses, no trash, and a trophy system that has people getting tier 245 gear for third offspecs.

There simply isn't enough to do while we wait for these wings to open.

Another real problem will be that if there are in fact 3 weeks between wings, We'll have killed the initial bosses around 10 times before we even see Arthas, making half of the instance old crap we've farmed. We'll be sharding the limited loot from these guys in those later weeks while we hope deeper bosses drop the other pieces we need.

Attempts:

The real problem, however, is the attempts system, especially on normal mode. This has huge ramifications for any upper middle class guild that still has to carry a few people, doesn't have everyone on state of the art hardware, and still plays a buggy, crash-prone, disconnect prone game. With 50 attempts, so long as you aren't going for Insanity, you have some leeway on things like DCs. With 5/10/15/20 attempts per raid week, every problem and mistake gets magnified intensely.

The first three weeks, when we have 5 attempts, one wrong disconnect costs a guild 20% of it's resources for fighting a boss. Read the tech support forums, or hell, just play the game. You'll see that random disconnects have plagued raiding this expansion. Right now in ToGC there is a nasty bug that will hit someone at random, making them DC, and unable to log back in without an immediate disconnect until the fight is over. Do I tell these long standing, unlucky raiders that the wow gods have deemed them too risky for attempt fights on normal mode? Have they just been marginalized by Blizzard for something that is Blizzard's fault?

What about the new recruit I got? How does he learn the fight? Do I risk attempts with him in the raid, or just keep the same raid comp I had when I killed it the first time, since they have kill experience? What about those people who are long term raiders but missed the first kill for whatever reason? Do I tell them I can't bring them to the fight for a while because it's just too risky? If I do bring them, and we fail, what do I tell the rest of my guild; that I had the means to kill this boss, but I decided to forsake that to make this one person happy? How do I win?

And what happens when someone does the inevitable and stands in the fire? Currently, I want for sustained sloppiness before I get in someone's face about it, because, frankly, this is a game and people are human, and I shouldn't have to go d-bag mode from the outset (it also makes d-bag mode less effective if it's always on.) But now, if someone stands in fire and wastes 20% of my attempts, what choice do I have but to crap all over them? I mean, the alternative is to tell my guild NO MORE RAIDING FOR THE WEEK. How do I tell them that? How do I keep people in the guild in the face of that?

This also gives a huge advantage to people who've gone to the PTR. They've seen the fights, and can already start planning it out with their guilds. For some guilds, including my own, a lot of the fun is to go in there and figure the fight out over the course of a night. It's a great thrill to see your raid learn to dance step by step. While pre-pull planning is a valuable and necessary part of progression raiding, you're going to force people to take it to the extreme. People will be frapsing attempts and going over them on the spot; running alt fodder thru the instance first to get more experience with the fight; waiting for every last cooldown to be up and ready (which really starts to explain their changes to cooldown timers.) Kicking people with bad connections that night, or who are prone to too many AFKs. It causes the raid/guild leader to become an instant d-bag because he has to manage the precious resource of attempts as efficiently as possible.

And this is all on *normal* mode.

Now, Blizzard has also said the following:

"In the weeks and months after all twelve encounters are unlocked, additional attempts against the final four boss encounters become available. This represents the Ashen Verdict growing more powerful and gaining a stronger foothold in Icecrown Citadel. To further help raids, Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream will begin to provide assistance by inspiring the armies attacking Icecrown Citadel. This is represented as an additional zone wide spell effect applied to all players that will increase their hit points, damage dealt, and healing done. This effect will also increase in effectiveness over time. Players may opt out of the spell's effect if they so wish. "

Now, they've made the lore convenient, but what they're really saying is they want to release the content now, but only make it doable for the majority of the raiding population many months from now. They're basically telling you "stick around and we'll guarantee an Arthas kill. Stick around, and you'll be able to faceroll thru the same content more dedicated players shed blood sweat and tears over."

Tell me how I'm supposed to keep a guild together in the face of that? Why not just cancel my account, and come back in 4-5 months? What's stopping anyone in my guild from doing just that? This takes Icecrown from a guild killer, with all the stresses it will put on individual performance, and turns it into a pughouse, where anyone with even remotely required gear will be able to facerolll thru with increased health, damage, and healing.

The best analogy to all this I heard on the forums was "what if they said you could only play 30 arena games a week? What if they said you could only gain 3 levels per day?" How do you think the community would react to that? Raiding is one of the prime reasons people play this game, and we're being told we can only play it a certain amount, at certain times, and under certain conditions. It's ludicrous.

WotLK has been a guild killing expansion from the start. I've watched the recruitment forums out of necessity, and out of macabre fascination. The turnover rate for players is higher than ever. The attrition rate is thru the roof. All these changes to Icecrown make it even harder to keep a legitimate, upper middle class guild going. It really makes an unpaid job out of guild running, and is a punch in the gut to anyone looking forward to hitting Icecrown's new content. All in the name of profit, and keeping accounts open. All this ill will to get a few more months of payment out of people. All to try to string us along until Cataclysm because Blizzard lacks the resources or desire to generate content at a faster pace (they say they like the size of the team they have, and making it bigger would jeopardize the team spirit they have, but if this expansion is what team spirit creates, then some jeopardy of said spirit is definitely in order.)

Icecrown is the pinnacle of Warcraft. It's the connection from the end of Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, to World of Warcraft. It's what many people picked up wow to see. Ironically, it's also the pinnacle of Activision's taking over of Blizzard, and turning it into the cash focused beast it is. We've got race changes and faction changes for cash. Vanity pets for cash (which Blizzard is so big about, they give half the money to charity. Half. I guess the other half has to feed their kids, right? Without that panderan, kids all over california whose parents work for Blizzard would starve. Please, either go all-in with charity, or don't bother. It just makes you look duplicitous.).  Now we have Arthas *****d out for maximum return. The irony is a bit cheesy, and maybe somewhat obvious, but Icecrown represents a once good entity finally succumbing to a greater power it swore it could control, thus becoming that which was feared most. Blizzard has succumbed to Activision, and it's not long before we won't recognize the former anymore.

That's right Blizzard, you're the Lich King.