So most people know I'm really into WoW. Thought I'd share a point of contention that arose in our guild a little while back.
WoW sometimes uses "attunements" to govern progression. For example, beating Dungeon A attunes you (gives you the key) for Dungeon B. Over time, sometimes Blizzard removes the attunement requirements to make content more accessible to people. This is probably a pretty good move from a business perspective; it gets more people into previously unaccessible content, giving them more reason to play (and therefore pay). However, every time an attunement requirement is removed, there's a pretty decent outcry from the "hardcore" raider contingent, who feels removing the attunement diminishes their accomplishment; they "earned" the right to be in the higher content by beating all of the lower content, and now all of a sudden every scrub and his mother can just jump into higher content.
So onto the current situation. There are two final dungeons in WoW, Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. Before the last major patch, you had to beat the final bosses in the previous two dungeons in order to get access to them. These two end bosses were very difficult encounters, and guilds would often break up when they realized they could not take them down. When it was announced that those requirements were being removed in an upcoming patch, the debate started.
We had already beaten one of the bosses required to move on and were working on the second. We had about 2 weeks to beat him before the patch came along. So, the question was if we don't have the boss down by the time the patch came, do we still beat him before moving on or do we just skip him and move into the higher end content? Some (myself included) strongly advocated sticking to the boss and beating him before moving on. Others wanted to move on and see the new content. To me, this would have been cheesy, tantamount to using a game genie or level select code to advance because I couldn't beat the previous level. One player said that the difference was that Blizzard allowed it, so it wasn't really bypassing anything.
In the end, it didn't matter because we beat the boss before the patch, so we had a legitimate claim to the later dungeons. But if we hadn't beat it, I would have been embarrassed to move on without clearing the previous content. When I see guilds who are moving on without beating those last two bosses, I feel sort of an elitist attitude, like I want to tell them, "Your victories in the endgame dungeons are meaningless, and even if you WERE to go back and beat those two bosses, those kills are meaningless as well because you're basically outgearing the encounters."
It might be different if the early bosses in those last couple dungeons were some sort of "check" encounters (you need a certain level of gear or skill to beat then), but they are all very easy bosses, sort of a fodder reward for having beaten two of the most difficult bosses in WoW.
I guess if there's any satisfaction, it's seeing guilds who bypassed these bosses getting creamed when the encounters start getting harder (e.g., the fourth Black Temple boss took us about 7 tries to kill, whereas our "rival" guild who skipped one of the attunement bosses has given him about 30 tries and is still nowhere near beating him).
WoW sometimes uses "attunements" to govern progression. For example, beating Dungeon A attunes you (gives you the key) for Dungeon B. Over time, sometimes Blizzard removes the attunement requirements to make content more accessible to people. This is probably a pretty good move from a business perspective; it gets more people into previously unaccessible content, giving them more reason to play (and therefore pay). However, every time an attunement requirement is removed, there's a pretty decent outcry from the "hardcore" raider contingent, who feels removing the attunement diminishes their accomplishment; they "earned" the right to be in the higher content by beating all of the lower content, and now all of a sudden every scrub and his mother can just jump into higher content.
So onto the current situation. There are two final dungeons in WoW, Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. Before the last major patch, you had to beat the final bosses in the previous two dungeons in order to get access to them. These two end bosses were very difficult encounters, and guilds would often break up when they realized they could not take them down. When it was announced that those requirements were being removed in an upcoming patch, the debate started.
We had already beaten one of the bosses required to move on and were working on the second. We had about 2 weeks to beat him before the patch came along. So, the question was if we don't have the boss down by the time the patch came, do we still beat him before moving on or do we just skip him and move into the higher end content? Some (myself included) strongly advocated sticking to the boss and beating him before moving on. Others wanted to move on and see the new content. To me, this would have been cheesy, tantamount to using a game genie or level select code to advance because I couldn't beat the previous level. One player said that the difference was that Blizzard allowed it, so it wasn't really bypassing anything.
In the end, it didn't matter because we beat the boss before the patch, so we had a legitimate claim to the later dungeons. But if we hadn't beat it, I would have been embarrassed to move on without clearing the previous content. When I see guilds who are moving on without beating those last two bosses, I feel sort of an elitist attitude, like I want to tell them, "Your victories in the endgame dungeons are meaningless, and even if you WERE to go back and beat those two bosses, those kills are meaningless as well because you're basically outgearing the encounters."
It might be different if the early bosses in those last couple dungeons were some sort of "check" encounters (you need a certain level of gear or skill to beat then), but they are all very easy bosses, sort of a fodder reward for having beaten two of the most difficult bosses in WoW.
I guess if there's any satisfaction, it's seeing guilds who bypassed these bosses getting creamed when the encounters start getting harder (e.g., the fourth Black Temple boss took us about 7 tries to kill, whereas our "rival" guild who skipped one of the attunement bosses has given him about 30 tries and is still nowhere near beating him).
