Something just smacked me right in the head…figuratively of course.
“After a lot of thought and deliberation, we’ve decided to remove the attunement requirements to enter Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep: The Eye. While many of our attunements in the Burning Crusade have been good progression checks, a few of the attunements have turned out to cause unnecessary stress on guilds either doing the content or attempting to do the content. With Black Temple and Battle for Mount Hyjal thriving, we want to encourage (rather than prevent) new guilds and raid groups to attempt Serpentshrine and TK. We are going to leave the current attunement quests in the game so that players can still engage in the challenge and the lore of those quests should they choose to. At a later point, we are considering adding a final reward step to those quests as well (that way those who have already completed them would not miss out on a *new* reward). We’re listening to feedback from you guys constantly and your opinions are important to us. We want this game to be the best possible MMO experience for our players. Enjoy Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep.”
My comment to that over at Brent’s site was something along the lines of “Hell hath frozen over”…and it really has. This is the first case that I know of that Blizz has listened to the majority of its customer base. This is a great move and it’s one step closer to fixing a terrible attunement implementation.
Why even have attunement for instances? I never really got that. Shouldn’t the challenge lie with completing the actual dungeon, not with just opening the door. OK…maybe there should be some challenge to opening the door, but should it be this crazy? No. Let’s kill a dragon who swallowed a key somewhere or solve a riddle and be done with it. Most just want a dungeon craw experience. I see those attunement charts and I think of a mouse who needs to go through a 10km maze just to get some cheese….and it’s not even cheddar!!
Some will say. “Well, the attunement is a chance to give you the lore of the dungeon.” Bullshit! You can put the lore of the dungeon IN the bloody dungeon. You can put the lore of the dungeon in the stomach of the dragon wrapped around the bloody key that opens the bloody dungeon. There are many ways to tell the story of a large raid-sized crawl without making the player jump though hoops of triathlon proportions.
…and don’t you dare comment that this is easy mode again cause its not. Even if you kill the stupid dragon and get the key or solve the riddle, you still need to traverse the actual instance and master some very difficult encounters to get your loot. How would taking away attunement make that part any easier. Answer? It wouldn’t.
I’m sure the Grandpa Simpson effect of this announcement will be felt and expressed by a large amount of players who feel that this kind of stuff is good for a game….but I for one say “good day to you sir.”
D out.
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June 20th, 2007 at 7:40 am
Blizzard really gets alot of undeserved scorn, I don’t understand where people get this idea that they ignore and hate their customers. I can think of plenty of examples of them listening to the majority of their customer base. Less than a month ago they radically changed consumables to make the prospect of preparing for raids much much easier….in the long run that’s a far bigger and more meaningful change that makes player’s lives easier than removing attunement requirements for 2 dungeons.
It still is a great change though, and takes a ton of work out of the logistics required of GM’s and raid leaders.
Totally agree with you on the Lore aspect though…if nothing else you’d think they’d have a quest chain for each dungeon that has you kill each boss in turn, just to provide a way to give some of these seemingly random bosses a little context.
June 20th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
I do wish they would have made this decision earlier, before people put in the ungodly amount of hours it took to get attuned. Now the people that did put in the time will complain that they got the shaft and that blizz is ignoring them in favor of the “carebear types”
Oh well, PoTBS can’t come soon enough for me.
June 20th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Well Matt, this could be a good sign of the next expansion. Given enough feedback, Blizz may very well reduce the requirements so that more can see the higher instances. I really would love to smack Illidian (spelling??) around.