Raiding, Logistics, and the Problem with Progression
In the marshmallow glow of hindsight, I feel I may have been a little hard on the Dickhead of the Week. I do, in fact, understand that running a raid with a bunch of people who haven’t read the strategies and don’t have the right gear must be infuriating. On the other hand, it’s perfectly easy to say “sorry guys, I was looking for an easy, casual run, I’d rather not do this with folks who haven’t done it before” instead of waving your bare-minimum Achievements around like a moron.
As well as “is that a real question, I’m so leet” guy, we also had somebody who kept insisting we should try Ulduar instead. Despite most of us being, to be honest, slightly undergeared for Naxx 10.
The thing is, I can totally see where she was coming from. Ulduar’s the new thing, and we’re being constantly told how what matters is seeing the content, man, seeing the content. Of course walking into Ulduar with ten guys in quest greens really would be a recipe for a big repair bill, but here’s the question:
Why should it?
This is why I’ll probably never get into serious raiding. I just can’t be arsed with the logistics chain. I like the idea of more complicated dungeons with tougher bosses and more interesting fights, with more to pay attention to and more to co-ordinate. That strikes me as genuinely fun and interesting.
What doesn’t strike me as interesting is having to grind Heroic UP until I get the damned Staggering Legplates, and grind dailies or farm herbs so I can raise the 60 gold a pop that it takes to fill out a red gem slot. I certainly don’t want to be running Naxx every damned week just so that I can stand a chance at Ulduar.
A complaint that is constantly made about us casuals is that we “just want free epics”. This is not true. I *don’t* want epics. To be honest, I’ve have been perfectly happy to stay in the DK starting greens all the way to 80 (gotta dig the robe-and-cowl look). The reason I would actually like to raid is because I want to try some tougher fights, not because I want the phat lewts that drop from said fights. The problem is that *without* the loot from those fights, I can’t do any other fights.
It’s a basic flaw in the concept of progression raiding or, if you prefer, a basic flaw in Blizzard’s insistence that progression raiding has to be *for everybody*. The hardcore raiders (that is to say, those who rate above 3 on the hardcoreness scale) find everything too easy, while casual players find that everything still has pointless, arbitrary requirements. The hardcores aren’t happy, and the casuals still don’t get to see the content.
