KeyWord: Blizzard, World of Warcraft Date: 03-14-2008
Summary: Ron, a newswriter shared some thoughts up over at Gaming Today on World of Warcraft\'s various attunements. His article is called Don\'t Worry, Blizzard Isn\'t Dumbing Down World of Warcraft.

Ron, a newswriter shared some thoughts up over at Gaming Today on World of Warcraft\'s various attunements. His article is called \"Don\'t Worry, Blizzard Isn\'t Dumbing Down World of Warcraft\". Enjoy it and if you have an opinion on the subject, feel free to leave a comment.

So, as a World of Warcraft player and a person who follows the gaming world fairly closely, I tend to read a lot of forums. With the upcoming 2.4 content patch currently on the Public Test Realms (hereafter referred to as PTR), the WoW Test Realm Forum (found here) is a great place to see how players are liking the upcoming content and class changes.

Judging from the forum posts I have seen, one of the more controversial changes coming in the 2.4 patch is the removal of attunements for the Mount Hyjal and Black Temple 25-man raid instances, and the introduction of gear that can be purchased with Badges of Justice that is on par with Hyjal/Black Temple drops. At first glance, the non-MMO player would wonder why this, of all things, would be a point of contention. Personally, I wonder what mindset makes players think this is a bad idea.

A perfect place to see what I am talking about is this thread. A player named \'Fsgadgdsafhg\' offers up the following opinion:

All the T6 raiding guilds old and new are dumbfounded and hung up on the insane devaluing of their arcievements. Everything we worked for raidnights after raidnights, week after week is getting handled out for frickin Badges.

Its one thing that attunements are lifted... Trashmobs and early bosses will take care of the trash guilds. But for christ sake why hand out gear, and now gems too for as much effort as running Heroics. How is it comparable to the countless hours of attunement process, the consumables,the effort?

At least pretend that hardcore raiders are important and introduce some kind of reward or recognition.

This represents what I believe to be a fundamentally flawed viewpoint. This represents the elitist, exclusionist attitude that many casual players have long said makes MMO\'s less fun for them. The idea that giving more players access to dungeons or loot devalues the accomplishments of those who have already completed those challenges is ridiculous. Why? It\'s simple.

Let\'s say you hand me a list of guilds that play regularly on my server. With a small margin for error, I have a decent idea of the progression level of most of those guilds. I know that the Alliance side of my server has a number of MH/BT guilds, including 2 of the top guilds in the US. I also know that we have a few guilds on Horde side working on Black Temple as well. After this patch, I will still know who those guilds are, and what they accomplished. I will still know that Risen cleared Black Temple first on our server (Even if they are Alliance, you still have to respect that). No matter what my guild, or any other guild does after this patch, what came before still remains.


To truly understand why these changes are being made, the players have to step back and look at things from Blizzard\'s point of view. Blizzard pumps a ton of time and design money into all the content they release, and as such, they want players to be able to experience it. Think back, if you will, to when Blizzard released the 1.11 patch (Patch Notes). They added in what is widely considered to be the best raid dungeon they\'ve ever designed, Naxxramas. Unfortunately, due to the difficulty of the dungeon, the gear required, and the looming release of the Burning Crusade expansion, only a minuscule fraction of the raiding population got to experience it.

I\'m sure you\'ve heard by now that Blizzard plans to move Naxxramas to Northrend for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, and to make it the first 25-man raid for level 80 players. In an interview with MMO-Gamer.com, World of Warcraft\'s Lead Designer, Jeff Kaplan, talked about the move, saying,

\"Now, in regards to some of the more difficult raid content, like Naxxramas, or like Black Temple, I think there is some validity to what you\'re saying, that not enough people are getting to see the content. In direct response to that, we want to take Naxxramas, what we felt was possibly one of our best dungeons in terms of game design, in terms of cool encounters, great art, it had some of the best music out of any of our zones, and a lot of people missed it, and I think they missed it for a couple reasons: One, it was super hardcore, it was our hardest dungeon of original World of Warcraft, the other reason is that it came only a few months before The Burning Crusade. I think a lot more people would have gotten the chance to experience it if they had the time to progress, but since they didn\'t, they missed it.\"