On Limited Attempts (or lack thereof!)

Just last night, after a night’s worth of work on BQL, I turned and looked at Brade and asked “do you think we will get more than 20 attempts this week?”.  His response was that he felt it was unlikely.  I tended to agree with him.  However, when I woke up this morning, and began poking about in my usual morning routine, I saw it screamed from a number of places:  Limited Attempts on Normal Mode ICC bosses have been removed.

I will get to my thoughts on their removal in a minute, but before I did that I wanted to point out a comment from the blue post that I find intriguing:  ” especially since the Heroic difficulty has been unlocked by a significant number of raids.”  Why do I find this intriguing?  Because the last time I checked 25 man progress, only somewhere around 15 guilds in the world had killed The Lich King.  I’m sure that number is higher in 10 mans, artificially inflated by the swarm of 25 man guilds that ran multiples of 10 mans, on mains and alts, to get practice in for their 25 mans; but I doubt the number is much higher if you look at the strict 10 man progress. 

I guess what baffles me is that Blizzard apparently considers 15 guilds a “significant number”.  Actually, my guess is that they don’t really consider that number to be significant at all and would have preferred to keep the limited attempts much longer.  My guess is that they had an issue having the attempt counter differentiate between normal and hard mode attempts, and it wasn’t “working as intended” which would cause issues for guilds that wanted to work hard modes, and clear the zone each week.  Ultimately, I think the limited attempts were removed because of a programming problem that Blizzard couldn’t resolve, or perhaps thought they had more time to resolve.  Again, this is just my speculation going here, so don’t take anything for gospel!  It’s just what I think.

My Thoughts on The Removal of Attempts

Thank. Fucking. Christ.

I have disliked the limited attempt mechanic since it was first introduced.  I think that it was a poor way for Blizzard to artificially extend the life of content.  But that isn’t even the biggest reason that I disliked them.

• I did not think that it was Blizzard’s place to regulate how much time people spent in the game.  While it has definitely shown that some folks will push to unhealthy limits to be “first” the majority of us do not.  We do not need Mother Blizzard looking over our shoulder telling us when it’s time to stop and go to bed.  The majority of people playing the game do so in moderation, it was unfair to “punish” those folks to try and regulate the minority.
• They caused un-needed stress for raiding guilds.  (I think this was my number one reason I disliked them).  Hey, everyone is human.  People fuck up, it happens.  Even the best players have bad nights (hell, our last putricide attempts I ate 9 goos throughout the course of the night).  I think that a positive, constructive atmosphere is a much better place to raid than somewhere everyone is on pins and needles all night.  Limited attempts put additional stress on everyone to be “perfect” or waste the guild’s efforts.  If someone screwed up, even if it was the first time that person ever screwed up, they potentially wasted the attempt….and then felt like shit about it.  Not only that, but it caused everyone else in the raid to jump harshly on people who screwed up.  It sucked.  It was not a fun raid environment.
• Blizzard’s shit was bugged.  We lost our entire first week’s worth of Putricide attempts as a result of Blizzard’s bugged content.  It was unfair…and there wasn’t a single thing we could do about it.  We just had to shrug it off and say “better luck next week”.  Hell, we lost progression on Anub when his floor wouldn’t drop the week he was released, and had our BQL fail to spawn.  These are not even close to isolated incidents.  Having limited attempts on content that isn’t properly QA tested is unfair to those that are expected to perform within those attempts.
• Disconnects and Lag happen.  Another factor that is frequently out of anyone’s control, but often caused people to “waste” attempts.  People disconnect.  It happens.  And I am sure that we are all familiar with that giant lag spike where the entire raid goes “um….”.  These uncontrollable factors, sometimes as the result of Blizzard’s servers, are more reason why “limiting” was unfair.

We are not a guild that competes for world firsts.  We are not a guild that would have stayed up until 3AM just to beat someone else to a kill.  Hell, it will probably still be a few weeks before we can hang Arthas’ head to our wall, limited attempts or not.  We have our strengths and weaknesses, and for us the limited attempt mechanic just added stress to our raid environment that didn’t need to be there, and quite frankly probably caused more poor performance from nervous people than we might have seen otherwise.  It certainly caused a fair number of folks, myself included, stress.  I am 100% glad that they are gone.  Then again, I didn’t think they should have been there in the first place.

What do you think?  Glad they are gone?  Mad they are gone?