| Vollstrecker |
2007-08-05 05:32 AM |
I really think they focus too much on ~1% of their playerbase.
Edit: Seriously, let me copy over something posted on our guildsite.
http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t13331-c...p5/#post421777
Quote:
Well, there have been interminable threads about "casual" and/or "average" progression on this board. It strikes me that in Wowjutsu we actually have a correct answer to this question, for some value of "correct".
As of the latest update (16th July 2007), the stats are as follows:
# Total Guilds: 15349 (median of all raiding guilds is #7675)
# Ranked Guilds: 12191 (median of all progressing 10-man groups is #6096)
Percentage of guilds with at least one kill in Gruul's lair = 58.88%. This is the percentage of ranked guilds, thus we deduce:
# Guilds with at least 1 25-man kill: 7178 (median of all 25-man groups is #3589-3590)
Percentage of guilds moving into the T5 instances is harder to estimate. Void Reaver skews the numbers considerably, so let's leave him out, and define a semi-serious guild as one with at least one kill in SSC. That's 13.42%, thus we deduce:
# Guilds entering T5 instances: 1636 (median of all T5-capable groups is #818-819)
The beauty of Wowjutsu is that we can now go and look up these exact guilds. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...
THE GLORIOUS AVERAGE GUILDS OF TBC RAIDING
1) The average raiding guild (#7675)
Wicked Legion - Llane.
Has cleared up to Prince, but not Nightbane.
2) The average ranked guild (#6096)
Bloodline - Arthas.
Has cleared Karazhan (excluding Nightbane), but also has loot from 3 Maulgar kills.
3) The average 25-man group (#3589-3590)
Illuminati - Stormscale.
Greymane - Corruption.
Both have cleared Karazhan including Nightbane, and have killed Maulgar and Gruul.
4) The average Tier 5 capable group (#818-819)
The Fallen - Burning Blade.
Ðark Moon Templars - Crushridge.
Both have cleared Karazhan, Gruul's Lair and Magtheridon, and both have killed Hydross, Lurker, Morogrim and Void Reaver.
Conclusions:
"The average raider", whether you look at all guilds or only the ranked guilds, has just about completed Karazhan, but has not been able to make the transition to 25-man raiding, apart from occasional Maulgar kills. They are stonewalled at the logistical hurdle of growing in size enough to do 25-man raids.
"The average 25-man group" has killed Maulgar, Gruul and nothing else. It has not killed Magtheridon, and has not entered any of the major 25-man instances. They are stonewalled either at the logistical hurdle of attunements (now lifted, so may change in subsequent weeks), or the encounter complexity. The lack of Magtheridon kills would suggest the latter rather than the former, since Magtheridon never needed attunement. And it most certainly is a stonewall rather than simple progression effects. Note that moving up almost two and a half thousand places in the ranking (from 6096 to 3589) nets you one more boss: Gruul.
"The average Tier 5 capable group" has killed the easiest 3 bosses in SSC, and the easy boss from TK. That is, they have not killed anything much beyond the so-called "loot pinata" bosses.
Hyjal and BT are a niche market and don't have any bearing on this post.
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http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t13331-c...p5/#post421777
Quote:
Repeating the exercise a week and a half later...
Bracket Number
0 - 25 0
25 - 50 8
50 - 75 5
75 - 100 15
100 - 125 21
125 - 150 12
150 - 175 19
175 - 200 27
200 - 225 27
225 - 250 24
250 - 275 24
275 - 300 15
300 - 325 9
325 - 350 2
350 - 375 3
375 - 400 3
400 - 425 4
425 - 450 2
450 - 475 0
475 - 500 0
500 - 525 0
525 - 550 2
Comparing this to the previous curve, what do we see? Well, the front runners have moved on by around 50 points. In BT, the top end bosses are worth about 35 points each for a first kill. This would seem to indiate that on the front-ranking realms, each of the top 10 guilds has killed about 1.5 new bosses.
The main peak is now at 200, up from ~185. At that level, first kills look to be worth about 20 - take that with a pinch of salt as that's only a guesstimate. Even so, it looks as though the rate of progression here may well be less than 1 boss per week.
We still have the big subsidiary peak at 100-125, corresponding to realms where guilds are struggling to get beyond Gruul/Magtheridon. If anything, this peak is getting more pronounced as the absolute tail-enders catch up to the "wall" around 125.
What conclusions can we draw? At this point, nothing much beyond the obvious.
1) On some servers, it's hell on a stick just getting into raiding at all.
2) The majority of servers are progressing through SSC/TK at less than one boss per week.
3) Progress in BT appears to be considerably faster.
Now, there's two possible explanations for (3). It may be that BT is flat out easier than SSC and TK. Or it may be due to guild stratification. The better guilds (and by extension the better servers) progress faster because duh, they're better.
My feeling is that there's evidence for both. If you look at the top tail, you can see there's evidence of bimodality. There's *more* servers at a 412 average than at a 340 average. That's what you'd expect from a very rapid dash through BT after getting past Kael. However it still is only the very tail end of the server distribution that's pushing through, which is what you expect from the "server stratification" scenario.
It would be a lot more informative to run this kind of analysis on the raw guild distribution, rather than just the average of the top 10 guilds on each server - however as I said, I'm not cutting and pasting 127 pages of lists unless I get very bored at work some day.
With regard to that point though, I'd say that the image of the "average" progression as SSC/TK is falsely rosy, since this is the average of the top few guilds on each server. We're only looking at 2220 guilds out of 12762 ranked guilds. Eyeballing the main lists, it looks to me like the absolutely dominant story is the block in the early hundreds, in moving past Maulgar/Gruul. It's large enough to show up as a subsidiary peak in the above analysis precisely because on some servers even the top 10 guilds are blocked right at the start of 25-man content.
Edit: Further eyeballing again shows a "No shit, Sherlock" scenario. The three big blocks are:
1) Getting into SSC and TK
2) Killing Kael
3) Essence / Mother Shahraz
The list of upcoming nerfs looks like it's addressing 2 and 3 - Blizzard presumably intend for a large proportion of the people that got into SSC to progress into BT.
From my perspective, I'm much more worried about (1), since it's by far the biggest block. Blizzard presumably believe that the majority of this is people that don't actually want to raid 25-man. Hence ZA coming out as 10-man and being an alternative progression. And to be fair, ~40% of rated guilds (i.e. well progressed in Kara) haven't killed Maulgar, and might conceivably prefer to stay as 10-man groups.
However, I think the fact that the clear majority of ranked guilds (almost 60%) have killed Maulgar, and at least 50% have killed Gruul, is ample evidence that there's a large population who want to progress into 25-man content and (for whatever reason) are unable to get properly stuck into SSC and TK. Early days since the attunement lift, of course, so that may be part of it. But I think that unless we start to see *many* more people in SSC and TK soon, there will be another round of nerfs incoming to these instances. Perhaps even to MC levels, where you can actually enter before you hit the level cap and still kill things.
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