Black Raven Dragoons

[Tirian]

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/15/na ... hnovember/

Seriously people, WTF! The game has been out for TWO DAYS!!!

This is absurd.

Okay, I need to go back to paper writing.

[Zancarius]

That's insane.

I often wonder about some people.

[Sonikku]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php

Not just naxx. All of Wrath's 25 man content that shipped has been cleared.

As usual, raider fanatics are freaking out at how their number one raiding guild in the world has beaten the Wrath equivalent of Kara and Gruul. You'd think they wanted Blizzard to retool the entire game of 11 million players just to appease their own wants and needs. =/

[Zancarius]

Thankfully, appeasing them isn't economically viable considering the developer overhead.

[Tirian]

I'm usually not one to judge, but if you're already level 80 AND maxing out the highest-end raiding content 60-some hours after launch, it's not Blizzard that has a problem -- it's you.

And with that, I will resume my all weekend paper writing crusade, fueled by Diet Coke and Totino's Pizza Rolls.

[Zancarius]

I agree, Tirian. There's one thing for being a "competitive" player and another thing entirely for attempting to clear all of the content that took Blizzard a good two years to produce.

[Zancarius]

As an addendum to what I said earlier, the individuals who hit L80 some 27 hours after release would have had to be making in excessive of 600,000 experience per hour. I'm not sure how that's humanly possible unless they had been making preparations for months.

[Tirian]

Rumor has it they had. Also, the first reported 80 (Nyhm on Magtheridon-EU, I think) said in an interview that he was aware that a person who was leveling faster than him had been suspended and reset to 70 for using an exploit, so however Nyhm did this, I expect it had to be legit within the terms of service if Blizz slammed the guy ahead of him. The All-Seeing Eye of Blizz watches us all - don't level too fast kids.

[Zancarius]

This comment on Slashdot is rather interesting:

This story is not news.

TwentyFifthNovember is a guild made up of Nihilum and SK-Gaming (aka Curse). Both guilds had members that experienced Naxxramas at level 60 (when it was originally released), and most of the bosses in Naxxramas (retuned and re-released for level 80) are largely unchanged since that time. Both of these guilds had very significant presences in the Closed Beta, where this raid content was available for anyone who could gather enough players. Many of them killed these bosses for weeks and months, before the game went live. The slight differences between these bosses at level 60 versus these bosses at level 80 is minor enough that even those who DIDN'T see the retuned content would still know how to get past it.

Raiding in World of Warcraft is more about skill than gear (although there are a few hard gear checks, such as needing 8.5k HP to survive Naj'entus area-effect nuke). These guys certainly are skillful, but there was never any doubt that they would steamroll all of this content as soon as they hit 80. The slightly bigger concern is that they managed to get 25 members to level 80 in ~65 hours of gameplay. Still, with the first 80 after 27 hours, it wasn't unexpected. People were hitting level 70 in Burning Crusade in about the same amount of time, and once the strategy for doing so was optimized, anyone (with a lot of time, and/or friends) could grind out the levels.

One thing to note is that these guys don't yet have the ultra-rare achievement awards, for example:
http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=2138 [wowhead.com]

Heroic Glory of the Raider involves a series of moderate to very hard challenges in Naxx, with the reward being an exclusive Proto-Drake mount. Until they get that, it's not news.. and even if they do get that, they've STILL got the qualifiers mentioned earlier.

Which is really rather true. The only incredible feat is that they were able to level 25 players to 80 in as short a period of time as they did. Since they were already well aware of the content, it shouldn't have been much of a surprise. Maybe it's the snide side of my personality, but this comment really put things into perspective.