14 DAY TRIAL // The second installment in the series chronicling World of Warcraft's raid design changes talks about how the team took the lessons they learned during Wrath of the Lich King and translated them into a more approachable raiding experience in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria.
The upcoming expansion to Blizzard's massively multiplayer online role-playing game will introduce a lot of changes to the raiding environment, and the team decided to showcase the many variations that the PvE content has seen throughout the years, in order to put them into proper perspective.
The second dev diary reveals that the Raid Finder was Cataclysm's biggest achievement when it comes to raid accessibility, but it also raised some unforeseen problems regarding balance.
The team reveals that their biggest mistake was making almost no changes to the raiding structure while going into Mists of Pandaria, the experience being basically the same it was at the end of Cataclysm, which in retrospect was a miscalculation on their part.
Cataclysm removed a difficulty tier from the game by raising the 10-player raids to the level of 25-man encounters, which left a lot of players without raiding content suitable to their level. The introduction of the Raid Finder also saw the return of the three effective difficulty levels, and the devs assumed that the rising popularity of the feature that allowed random groups to get together would eventually solve the problem by itself.
The fact that it did not prompted the team to analyze the typologies of players participating in organized raiding, and divided them into three levels, observing that the current state of affairs left the more casual type of player without much satisfying content.
As such, the Siege of Orgrimmar introduced Flexible Raiding to the world, tuned to be easier (numerically) than the regular raiding mode, while preserving all the mechanics and the rest of the experience intact, and also making use of a scaling system that adapted the content to any raid size between 10 and 25 players.
The team's goal was to remove as many obstacles as possible that might get in the way of groups of friends who just wanted to be able to raid together, without diminishing the experience by having to invite a group of strangers to tag along because of the constraint regarding the number of players in a raid.
Flexible Raiding was a success, and the team is satisfied with the way the feature was met by players, with the entire medium being back to the three basic tiers of difficulty that cover all the major kings of organized raiders, from the casual to the hardcore raider.
Now, the entire 10 years of experience that the development team has acquired will serve in delivering the best possible raiding experience in the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion, scheduled for release later this year.