Risen - a Alliance guild on the Alleria Server

TLDR

Posted on 03.11.08 by Failure

To start off, I am making this post to hopefully clear up a number of misconceptions spreading around. That being said, I am fully aware that the same people who are so hopelessly lost now will stay lost, due to their inability to understand simple English.

1. Those of us that quit, did so because we were no longer having fun with the game.
2. Games are meant to be fun, in their entirety.
3. When a person who primarily raids in the game is no longer having fun, it is very likely related to raiding. In no way does this mean this is the only part of the game. It means this was the part of the game the individual speaking was interested in.
4. Nowhere, anywhere, was it said "casual" was a bad thing. Nowhere was the line between casual and hardcore drawn. Nowhere was it said that I cared one fucking bit about the WoW community, what they thought, or that I even cared if they read my post. Now, I do care. My post was aimed at people that cared why we quit. If you don't care about why we quit, then fucking stop reading our fucking website. No Risen member posted this -anywhere- except in response to others who either a) cared or b) pretended they cared.

Ok, now that those points are out of the way, I will continue. Elaborating on (1): If you are doing something for fun, and it is no longer fun, you should quit. If you are doing something to make money, and you are no longer making money, you should quit. If you are doing something to break your toe, and you are unable to break your toe, you should quit. Make sense? We were playing for fun. It was no longer fun. We quit.

Moving on to (2): We all agree we play this game for fun, right? If you don't, well, stop there and reevaluate what you are doing in the game. And before someone starts to try to say that Risen raided 40 hrs a week and it was a job, I'll clear that up for you too. We've been raiding something like 6-8 hours a week. Since TBC came out, we raided 7 days in 1 week roughly 2-3 total times (In 60-70+ weeks). We do not raid anywhere near what would be required of a full-time job. Furthermore, there are actually people out there that enjoy their jobs very much. So even if you want to compare the time investment to a part-time job, so what. If it's fun, power to you. If it's not, find a new hobby. It was fun to us, back in the day.

In any decision, there is some amount of weighing to be done to come up with the decision. To people saying we are behind the times, no, we aren't. We weigh the positives vs the negatives, and make a decision on what we feel is in our best interest. In this case, having fun was the main interest. Up to this point, we were still having fun, and perhaps ignored the future a little bit, because again, this is entertainment. At some point, those scales got tipped, and the "not fun" won out. At that point, it was an amalgam of reasons as to why it was no longer worth playing. Some of these reasons may be old; some of them may be new. It takes a lot more than 1 piece of straw to offset a balance that has a brick on the other end. It is pointless to pick out 1 piece of straw from the stack and ignore the rest. If nothing else, understand this fact.

I bring up (3) because yes, when I made my post, it was from a raider's perspective. It was why Risen, a raiding guild, was no longer raiding. Nowhere was it stated that these were the only problems with WoW. Nowhere was it stated that these were problems everyone had with WoW. It was merely stated that these were some of the things that contributed to the end of a PvE raiding guild.

Do you want the truth? Blizzard is giving nobody that pays for a subscription to WoW what they deserve. With the amount of money they are making, they should be putting out at least 4 5-mans and 1 10-man per month and 1 25-man every-other month. Not to mention they should probably be adding 1 new battleground each month, and 1 special tournament every other month. I even PvPed too, ended S1 on a Gladiator 5s and 2s team. Was in a top3 5s team for the first 1/3rd of S2. I got annoyed with PvP for the same reasons I stated in my initial post with raiding. Seasons dragged on too long, it meant nothing to be at the top, and farming honor for gear was far worse than the 8th month of Black Temple (and just as meaningless). I also have a character on a different server I played casually. I got the best badge gear I could back in the day, I got some Kara gear. I never got a 25-man raid item ever. To be honest, I'm more irritated with this badge loot bullshit on that character than I am on my main. No, I really really don't want to do more Kara, more of the same heroics, or anything else that gives badges. That is OLD CONTENT, regardless of the rewards.

Do people that enjoy 5-mans and heroics not enjoy seeing different encounters in different instances? Do they not enjoy seeing new things and seeing things slightly more challenging than what they did before? If nothing else, can people that are not raiders understand this basic desire? Don't apply it to raids and say they shouldn't be designing content just for raiders. Do you not like to be challenged, and to overcome that challenge? Do you not just get a nice feeling inside yourself for succeeding at something that you believed was a challenge? Some of the most fun times in this and many other games is when something goes terribly wrong, and yet you still manage to recover and pull it through. The challenge there is what made it fun. As was said earlier, -everyone- should be getting content. Yes, there are enough raiders who have seen Illidan to make it worth Blizzard's time to continue to create content for them. No, nowhere was it said that 5mans, 10mans, and even solo content should be excluded. It is all being put out in this game slower than it is in AC1, and AC1 has been out for what, 9-10 years, and has less than 1% of the player-base of WoW.

Finally on this topic, as I said, my post had to deal with raiding, and only raiding. I neglected other aspects of WoW in the first post because well, they had little to do with the guild as a whole ceasing to raid. I am sorry if you think something I said was not a problem from your perspective. Sadly, your perspective didn't matter to Risen, nor does it matter to other raiding guilds. And no, that doesn't say your opinion doesn't matter. I'm merely saying your opinion has nothing to do with whether or not Risen continues to raid. Your opinion also has nothing to do with whether any other guild continues to raid. Also, our guild had stopped raiding 2 full weeks before that post was made. The post was -not- made to get attention from Blizzard. The post was not made to try to get anything changed. Many of our members had canceled their account, found a new guild, and/or transferred just to play casually with friends when that post was made. So please, don't think there was any intent there to screw up the game for you.

This brings us to (4). I incorrectly assumed people would be intelligent enough to realize that I didn't type "I hate all casuals and everyone who can't kill Illidan." My bad guys. Well, I hate you if that's what you got out of my post. Casual is great, it's a fucking game. Playing more and trying to do well is also great, IF that is fun for you. It was fun for me, and I would go ahead and say it was fun for most all of the other members in Risen. I will even go out on a limb and say the people in DnT and Nihilum that still do that find it fun too. I'm sorry that it offends you so that we find other things fun that you don't find fun. For the record, I also don't find baseball or football fun, if you'd like to flame me for that, go for it. Soccer and basketball I enjoy, however. Oh wait, was that opinions I posted? Gee, my bad, forgot I'm not allowed to have those. Everything in life is obviously clear-cut black and white.

So in conclusion, the game wasn't fun. I'm not even going to try to type up a list of all the things I found not fun. I put a small handful of them in the last post, and people decided they thought we didn't have the right to quit (the only point of the post was that we were quitting raiding) because they disagreed with 1 or 2 of the points. They disagreed that something small was able to detract from the amount of fun we were having with a game. If you truly care about my reasons, feel free to talk to me, but they are opinions; and they only point to why it's not worth it for me to be in an end-game guild and raid in the current incarnation of WoW.

World of Casualcraft

Posted on 03.07.08 by Failure

Ok, so it's a shitty title, sue me. The idea is there, and everyone knows it's true. Blizzard no longer cares about the hardcore gamers, be that the raiders or the pvpers. Well, we're done with it. It wasn't just one thing really. While we were all excited to get some tier6 for our freshly 70 alts from this new badge gear, there's a part of you that just has to feel some pain when you look back at all the time you spent farming instances...for nothing.

About 2 weeks ago it became official. No, Risen is not a dead guild. We are a group of gamers that likes being the best we can be. Well, WoW isn't about that anymore, so we are taking WoW for what it is - casual. Some of us may be around running their casual content as they release it, others of us are taking an even more casual approach and deactivating until Wrath. It's kinda funny really. Shortly after making this decision, it was announced that Karazhan would now drop TEN epic gems per clear. Wow, that's more than we get in Hyjal half the time (not to mention that can be 10 spinels, not 9 emeralds and a lionseye!). I was just about to get pissed off when I read that, then I remembered it didn't affect me anymore and a wave of calm relief passed over me.

Not having been back in Black Temple for 2 weeks was kind of nice as well. As much as I loved still trying to complete our first warglaive set (along with Nihilum, DnT, and Vodka I believe?), it's nice not having to worry about it anymore. No longer have to worry that the 200th US guild to kill Illidan has 4x the warglaives that we have (3rd US?). And looking to the future, damn am I glad we won't have to farm Sunwell like we did Naxx. Not that we have anything to show for Naxx or BT. I'm sure Sunwell will be different, right?

But ya know, forget all that. What happened to the competition? What happened to the encounters that took time to learn? In BT PTR I said this, and people told me it would be different on live. It sure didn't seem that way to me. Nihilum praised the Souls encounter and Illidan both. Neither of those seemed even remotely challenging. Well, Sunwell PTR seems even worse. Granted, we quit before some of the later encounters...but if that instance is what we've been farming BT for 8 months waiting for then well, this post speaks for itself.

Well Blizzard, it was a fun 3 years. You want a casual game, we're playing your game casually. See you again in the expac. We'll give it another try most likely, see if anything has changed. In the meanwhile, if anyone has any suggestions for us, feel free to let us know (or if any devs from other games want a top guild to help with beta-testing! ^.^)! In the meanwhile, can look us up in other games (TF2, DotA, FFXI, and more).