World firsts
Kel'thuzad, Sartharion, and Malygos world first kill by TwentyFifthNovember You might remember this news from a few days ago, most of the members from the top PvE guilds Nihilum and SK-Gaming merged in a single guild temporarily called TwentyFifthNovember. The question is, how much time will it take to see them getting world first kills on raid bosses ? Easy, about 65 Hours and 30 minutes. Wrath of the Lich King was activated on european servers at 22:00 CEST and TwentyFifthNovember killed Kel'thuzad today at 15:30 CEST, and they also killed Sartharion the Onyx Guardian before that. Only Malygos was left and he just died at 18:45 CEST. Yes we're talking about 25 man raid instances, it took them less than 3 days (68 Hours and 30 minutes) to get enough people to build a decent raid and down these bosses, it looks like the competition won't be easy in the future. It also means that they already cleared all the PvE content in Wrath of the Lich King and will have to wait for the next content patch 3.1 to have a chance to explore the Ulduar Raid instance. Below is a small statement from their site. We are proud to declare that all WOTLK PVE raid content has now been cleared. This is both a moment of triumph and a cause for concern. 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 miscalculated 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? Malygos down…

They all rushed to 75/76 and did this, all PVE content done.

When you have professional gamers (which is what that guild is composed of) you can't compare. They literally play ALL DAY and it's all they do. Not to mention, that they're literally some of the best players that play this game to begin with. Now obviously, Blizzard mistuned these encounters because they required 0 loot from the xpac. But then again every single one of these guys was COMPLETELY decked out in SWP gear. And SWP gear was supposed to be replaced by T7 gear (which I'm sure they're doing, but they were already sufficiently geared for all of the existing content). This game IS NOT DESIGNED for professional gamers, I don't know what else they expected....

Agreed, its just amusing to me, most of those guys have some form of day job, if you ever read SK gamings app. its pretty interesting some of the requirements.

Sure, they work 4-8 hours a day, (only some of them by the way, there are quite a few full time gamers in that guild as well) and then they play at LEAST 12 hours a day. Then they sleep the other 4-8 hours. This game is not and will never be designed around players like that. They refer to designing the game for casuals. Are they fucking kidding me???? By their description, every single guild on Uther would be considered Casual. Which while I can understand why they would feel that way is just flat out wrong.

Business game mechanics
Make no mistake, WoW is designed for casual players, because now is a huge money machine, and it is totally driven as a business. It is merged with Activision now, and we now this company makes good and bad games, they are just popping them as fast as they can trying to compete with EA http://blog.gameshadow.com/?p=92 Old WoW gamers remember how hard the game was at the beggining (My damn Arcanite Reaper took me like 6 months to get), but I cant tell you if that was good or bad, maybe 1st customers were rly insane nerds looking for challenges :P Now, even with our current T5-T6 gear first lvs are cake, we are OP for first instances (we cleared the Nexus in like 45 mins no wipes at all) Still, theres 1 card to be played, and thats heroics. This guilds cleared the "normal" PvE content, we still need to see the heroic one. Might be a way of Blizzard to give us the pain we love lol =)

I think the point is also that T3 guilds couldn't even get into Kara when TBC was released, and TBC is much more casual friendly. IMO I like the new content, and I could care less what the "Pros" think, the new starting area blows Hellfire and TBC zones out of the water, course I've only seen that and Nexus(which is lovely).

so far, i think this is 100000xs better than TBC. The instances have great designs, the starting zones are nice (I think the boat ride into Howling Fjords is by far the best I have ever seen in a game). I also think the fast respawn rates on mobs is great. I HATED TBC because it took forever to get the mobs you needed. I havent been able to finish all the quests in a zone because I am so excited to see the next zone.

Who cares what people whose penises have rotted off from disuse think?

PVE raiding needs to be more challenging, not guild breaking but challenging. Plus they should have released 3 full raid instances, not one full instance (naxx) and two single encounter raids. I think the instance design is a mixed bag. Boss encounters well done but WTF with the short zones? Gimmie some brd/strat part 2 style dungeon crawls. I don't want to open the door, bamn gimmie loot. That's what state wow is in currently everyone wants phat loots NOW! OMG world pvp? No go, can't get arena epix. Even though it was a lot more fun to me any ways. Don't get me wrong I still love wow and I'll be playing til they pull the plug most likely but it IS world of casualcraft.

Huge dungeons are terrible, and Blizz knows it. Wipe, have fun running back for 10 minutes, maybe Cthun is at the end of the tunnel. Or doing the same trash pull 10 times in a row before a boss. More time doesn't mean more challenge. The "Casual" part of WoW has been good for the game in general. It basically allowed people to play in smaller chunks of time and still get rewarded for it. And it also took out a lot of bullshit time sinks, like consumable massing, world buffing, attunements.

For once in my life, I agree with MeCh.