While people often default to just talking about the presence of grinds in a broad sense, when it’s looked at more in depth, a more accurate way to phrase the complaint is not the presence of grinds, but the failure to cap out the grinds.
In other words, every expansion had grinding. Out in the world, I’ve experienced grinding reputation for instance since Vanilla. But the difference is that once I hit “Exalted,” I’d be done with grinding that faction for good. Hitting “Exalted” with TBC or WotLK factions meant the daily grind with those factions was fully over for me. I wouldn’t go back and keep doing the dailies. In the present, doing faction quests out in the world (whether world quest or daily quest or events) are designed to be semi-permanently relevant.
Gear drops have always been RNG, but you’d be done with dungeons in fairly short order within an expansion, and with raids being on a weekly lockout, the grind for gear wouldn’t go much past the weekly raiding nights. And if an item did drop, there was no variance in its stats. In MoP and WoD, upgrades to gear could have slight variance with a warforge (single small boost to the ilvl of the item, which dropped frequently), but other than that, the main upgrading primarily came through the valor upgrade system. Valor upgrading was a grind, but one without RNG, and the gear upgrading would cap relatively quickly again.
Compare titanforging - how often did someone hit the “cap” on what titanforging could do? Now we’ll have corruption instead of titanforging. But the principal still seems to me “draw out the grind forever by increasing how much RNG matters.” A lot of players would greatly prefer it if the RNG was just about whether the gear piece would drop, rather than additional RNG aspects being wrapped up with the gear.
I do think Blizzard’s been shortsighted lately. Temporary boredom is less dangerous to the game than permanent burnout, and I’ve been seeing more people burning out this expansion than ever before. I’m actually surprised at how few people I’ve seen (who left earlier in the expansion) that have returned for 8.3.
When Blizzard’s slow at releasing new content, their solution seems to be to try to stretch out every bit of content they do release with grinds designed to lack caps and to be stretched out by excessive RNG reliance.
The RNG in paragon caches can stretch several months past when you hit Exalted. To the extent that’s a cap, it’s being set out a lot further than how things capped for me in expansions like MoP. Earlier in this expansion, doing the Emissaries stayed relevant for a very long time just for the Azerite Power. Similarly, with 8.3, the relevance of the daily and weekly rewards are wrapped up not just with reputation, but in the currency for running visions. Visions are unlikely to cease being relevant for anyone the rest of the expansion.
When I think about MoP or Cata or WotLK or TBC, I’d be done with grinding the outdoor faction content and dungeon maybe 1/5th of the way into a patch, and then my “to do” list would consist mainly of raids, PvP, and alts. Maybe some profession stuff, but usually not much. That doesn’t mean I might never do any dailies somewhere - I might do them if it felt quick and I needed a bit of gold - but the zone content really didn’t feel like it was trying to stretch out its relevance.
The other thing Blizzard does these days, which isn’t called out nearly as much, is trying to stretch out the relevance of these zones by saturating them with rare drops on rare mobs. This isn’t new to BFA, and can really be traced mostly to Timeless Isle in MoP as the first time they really leaned heavily on this method. But they’ve definitely been relying on it more in BFA than any previous expansion. The Warfront patrol zones are basically giant “kill rares for RNG drops.” Mechagon was almost entirely built around RNG drops. Uldum and the Vale are full of RNG drops, which will cycle between different rares depending on what invasion is up. Past expansions had RNG drops, but never quite in this volume. When I think back to pre-MoP expansions, collectibles seemed like they were 95% based around just hitting Exalted with factions and buying them from vendors.
Though I know most people are mainly focused on character power design rather than the collectible side of the game. So to just go back to character power - Visions won’t cease being relevant for the rest of the expansion, the outdoor content plays pretty permanently into the currency for running visions, and gear power isn’t limited to the RNG of whether gear drops, but uses multiple vectors of RNG to massively slow down the likelihood of a player ever feeling “done” with their gearing.
I do think a lot of these bad trends really started in Legion rather than BFA, but Legion got enough other things right that people were willing to overlook some of the bad long-term approaches it was initiating. I feel like BFA is when the long-term implications of this design approach are really sinking in.
Imagine if Diablo 3 was an MMO… one GR a week. Not sure why I’m still playing this… certainly not for fun. Although I had like 5 minutes of fun this new patch.
Maybe not but they do care about the overlap of their 6 month sub bonus offers and dragging out retention after the last patch of this expac (Ion was in an interview yesterday, go check, 8.3.5 is not coming).
2 new Allied Races added right after the anniversary EXP bonus ended is a total coincidence?
Pressing X to doubt.
And the sad part is with Vulpera and Pandaren Dks I would love to play WoW, but the game is now just focusing on forcing players into content they dont want and punishing them if they dont do their chores.
Quite sad, especailly when in swtor I can do anything, have fun, get rewarded with gear and also take a break if i want with no worry i ll be staying behind the huge grinds.
It’s very disappointing the new grinds. Especially the rep grinds for Uldam and the Rajani are AWFUL. Like it will take months to hit exalted by the pacing we’ve seen this week. 225 rep a day, LUL.
Oh yeah, and there are rank 3 essences locked behind exalted. WHICH THEY JUST SAID THEY REGRET DOING. HOLY FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.
I completely understand not being able to reflect larger changes of things that were announced at blizzcon, but to do the exact same time gated rep grind bullsh*t that you just said was a mistake?
I mean, how many ghost worm mounts and transmog sets have you seen running around? I’ve seen a ton. I’d say about 3/4 of my guildies were grinding out that transmog set.
And more work on the players part. I guess you can call it “playing” for gold but if I go out of my way to make gold especially to replace real currency, it’s working.
It’s pretty clear he learned the word liquidity and now thinks he knows everything, similar to those people who worship bs like ‘the free market will fix itself’ or ‘muh supply and demand’ completely ignoring human greed.
Not exactly. Every token purchase makes $5 more for Blizzard than your ordinary sub. It’s the in-store token buyers who a bringing in the bux. Folks who purchase the game time literally get it in exchange for in-game gold, which doesn’t make Blizzard any money.
Yeah people who use tokens for game time don’t pay anything but blizzard profits more than if both payed a sub.
The token costed 20$, that gave a gold farming person a month’s sub
Now you have to remember that the person who bought the token to sell in the AH ALSO pays for a sub…
So overall blizzard made 35$ from 2 players subbing in the game compared to the 30 they would make if both just payed with real money
