Should raiders be angry about the Emblem of Conquest change?

Disclaimer: Everything I say in this post in my own opinion, and though I make sweeping generalizations about raiders in this post, I am not making an assault on your own character with this post. In other words, don't take what I say personally.

The last major patch brought a pretty big change to the game: emblems of conquest now drop from heroic instances. Many raiders who got these emblems the hard way through Ulduar were not happy about this change, as they saw it as trivializing the gear they had worked so hard to obtain. Were they justified? It's a difficult question, but it begs an even bigger one, in my opinion: what is the purpose of gear? After all, the purpose that gear serves is fundamental to how valuable it is.

The way I see it, the only practical application of gear is to make encounters easier and thus allow the player to see more of the game. However, if that were the gear's only purpose, then the Uduar raiders wouldn't feel as indignant about non-raiders sharing their gear. They may feel that Blizzard's making good gear easier to get makes the encounters easier and thus trivialized their achievements, but as Windwalkêrs's recent downing of Yogg-Saron in only blues shows, gear only plays a small role in raid success, and thus making good gear available to more players does little to make the encounters themselves easier. Thus, this could not be the reason that raiders are so indignant about the emblem change.

So, what's the purpose of the gear? Since skill is really more important than gear in determining a player's usefulness to a raid than gear, the only reason left is one that's pretty obvious: the gear is the best way for raiders to show off that they raid and that they raid successfully. Achievements do serve the same function, but they are inferior to gear as a way to show off successful raiding. It's easier for a player to admire his gear than his achievements, and gear is much easier to show off to other players than achievements.

Of course, the idea that gear can be used to show off raiding achievements begs the question of why raiders should want to brag about their conquests at all. This is an easy one to answer; anything that a person puts a lot of work into, that person is going to feel proud of, and pride generally leads to a person wanting to some how show off what they have achieved. Still, many a wise man will tell you that genuine pride results in humility, and only hubristic pride leads to bragging. In fact, those who brag often do so because they have doubt in themselves and need to reaffirm their baseless self-esteem. Whether this theory applies to WoW, I'm not qualified to say, but my suspicion is that it does.

Bringing that all together, are the raiders who want to keep raid gear to themselves selfish? No, they're probably just insecure about their achievements and fear that their gear (which symbolizes their success in raids) becoming more common will somehow trivialize what they have accomplished. Will it? Not really, because gear has nothing to do with what you have achieved. It may symbolize it to you, but that's your own thinking, not that of the player-base as a whole.

Why hard modes are a better option than hard raids

Wrath of the Lich King brought many new things to WoW. One of them was the advent of Hard Modes. Although they became more prevalent with the addition of Ulduar, the original hard mode battle was Sartharion with three drakes. For those of you who don't know, Sartharion was the last Wrath boss before Ulduar was added. His lair contained him as the main boss and three drakes as sub-bosses. The drakes could be killed before Sarth, or they could be skipped. Each drake that wasn't killed would help Sarth out during the battle, making it more difficult as more drakes were left alive. If all the drakes were killed, however, Sarth became an easy run for easy epics. The rewards for leaving the drakes up were better loot, and if you left all three up, a chance at a drake mount and titles to show off just how badass you were.

Ulduar followed this model for many of its bosses, allowing 10 of the 14 bosses to be engaged in "hard modes," making them more difficult but allowing for better loot, as well as achievements, including this meta-achievement that rewards a cool-looking drake. This is a departure from the vanilla and BC model of raiding, in which the raid bosses were just very hard, meaning only well-coordinated raiding guild could kill them. It amazes me that this was Blizzard's design philosophy for raids for so long. After all, the majority of new content that we got from patches came in the form of raids, and yet raids were inaccessible to most people. This was especially true in the days of 40-man raids. Burning Crusade changed this somewhat when it allowed people to ease into raiding with the 10-man dungeon Karazhan and made the rest of the raids 25-man. Still, many guilds were not able to make the jump from Kara to the 25-man raids. Though organizing 25 people is significantly easier than organizing 40, the few people who knew that first-hand probably made the jump with no problem, while the rest of us were left behind in Kara. Thus raiding was still the land of the few.

Wrath of the Lich King changed this in multiple ways. First, Blizzard implemented two versions of every raid: a 10-man and a 25-man version. Although the belief that the 10-man versions are easier is debatable, that wasn't the purpose of implementing two versions of each dungeon. The purpose was to allow guilds to raid the way they are most comfortable raiding. Although the 25-man versions do give slightly better loot, the fact that these dungeons could be done in 10-man versions meant more people would actually see the raids. This makes a lot of sense from a design perspective. After all, why spend the majority of your time on content that the minority of your player-base is going to see? As I said in one of my other posts, Blizzard's main goal with Wrath of the Lich King seems to be to get more players into raids, and making each dungeon doable with ten people certainly makes that possible.

As I said before, Sartharion was also implemented with a hard mode so that casual players could enjoy seeing the battle while serious raiding guilds can still have something to brag about. Blizzard liked this idea so much that Ulduar got the hard mode treatment, meaning less serious guilds can still see the fights, experience the lore, and be amazed by the art design, while hardcore raiding guilds can still feel special about the difficult fights they have beaten. From a business standpoint, this is a really good idea, as it allows a wider swath of players to see the work that Blizzard puts into its content without completely taking out the challenge or denying the hard-core guilds the chance to show off just how good they are.

Some hardcore players felt quite indignant that raids, previously their own exclusive right and domain, were now being downed by more casual players PUG'ing their way through. I can understand their anger that raids themselves were once their exclusive right and no longer are, but I think they are being selfish. Asking Blizzard to continue to develop content for a small percentage of its player base is quite selfish on the part of those who got to raid in the old days. Besides, the one thing they always seem to complain about is that there is no more glory in being a raider. Now that anyone can raid, saying that you have full tier gear doesn't have the same impact it used to, nor does saying that you have finished a certain dungeon. This belief of theirs implies that there is less glory to be found in beating a hard mode encounter than simply beating a hard encounter. Perhaps this is true, but if you raid for the glory of it anyways, that's a pretty bad reason to raid. The true fun of raids is the personal satisfaction of defeating a difficult encounter, and I fail to see how defeating an encounter that is difficult itself is somehow less satisfying than defeating an encounter that you chose to make difficult. They are both equally difficult (I need a thesaurus, I know), so they should thus give raiders an equal amount of satisfaction. If they don't, I think the difference is really just in the raider's head.