Actually the money goes to blizzard before the token goes on the AH.
I suspect economics are driving what weâre seeing as much as stubbornness (although that one guy seems pretty stubborn).
But, grinds are cheap to make. And if the reward is good enough (think Pathfinder, silly mounts, God-like abilities) people will pay to do it. And we do.
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Time gates? Whatâs time gated in 8.3?
COUGH That has GOT to be sarcasm, bro. You can, for the most part, ONLY get vessels with coalescing visions. One vessel is 10K. each quest reward for CV is⊠50, apart from one per day that awards 1K⊠if you succeed. And there are only a handful of quests that provide any CV at all. IF you grind like mad, and kill every rare you stumble across, and donât fail the nightmare vision quest for 1K, youâre still only going to get about 3 shots at horrific visions per week.
Look- i love the new content, and Iâm casual-core. I play a LOT, but Iâm not a badass, and I donât have a big social group or guild to carry me. I failed my last nightmare, and for failing, I was literally punished by being told, âno cake for YOU today, missy. Git Gud. LawLâ. I donât care about having max gear. I donât need to be competitive in PvP or raids.
I JUST WANT TO PLAY THE CONTENT.
Instead, Iâm spending stupid amounts of time waiting for quests to reset, so I can maybe get a chance to try to gain the currency to spend⊠like, 7 minutes or something, inside that content, getting my butt whooped. All Iâm saying is, let me get my butt whooped as much as I WANT to, Blizz. Seriously. And yes, Resh, thatâs called TIME GATING. Timegating and grindgating. And they suck. And donât even get me started about how the new content is melee-skewed, and unfriendly to squishy range players. Thatâs a whole other rant.
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World of Waitcraft? 
Iâm pretty satisfied with my life. My wife and I are both gamers, and been WoW players for years. We spend our time also playing D&D on Saturday nights with friends, and do a lot of geeky stuff otherwise.
Iâm frustrated at the sheer grinding and time gated nonsense going into 8.3. My wife has refused to renew her sub, and is back to playing League instead. Iâll agree sometimes folks get extra salty, but there are legitimate complaints and issues with this patch. Plus, the extra bugs arenât exactly helping sell the deal for Shadowlands.
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You didnât translate the announcement they made at Blizzcon:
âWeâre aware that you guys have faced so much issues in unfriendly gameplayâŠhmmâŠso get over it lol weâre doing it anyway. Problem officer?â
While ultimately I think itâs a good choice given the way 8.3 is structured, there is time gating.
- the cap on max available ranks on the cloak. (Again, while it feels bad, after this week it should remove some of the pressure to farm coalescing visions as we will have fewer ranks to pursue in a given week.)
- the availability of quests that reward coalescing visions is a built in time-gating as it in turn limits access to Vessels of Coalescing Visions.
- War Mode bonuses being turned off for assaults gates PvPers, ensuring they donât end up with dramatically more coalescing visions, and thus more Vessels of Horrific Visions, than players who decline War Mode. (Missed opportunity to increase world PvP here, but cest la vi)
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True, that is what their actions are saying rn in 8.3, and considering they are testing corrupted gear so they bring can if if they can bring it to shadowloands, it is pretty hopeless
Mmm. I can see that. I understand the content a lot better than I did when I wrote that and truth be told I wouldnât say quite the same declarative statement now.
At the risk of sounding insensitive, but isnât it expected to be punished for failing content? The most general punishment being you donât get the reward. That aside, youâre not permanently behind for failing one vision. The timegating actually works in your favor in this instance. We get cloak ranks 1-6 this week but every future rank releases 1 week at a time. That gives you two extra visions a week that you can use to catch up if youâve fallen behind. Or if youâre already caught up, letâs you play riskier.
If I may ask, when you failed your vision how many side objectives were you going for? The visions seem structured very much like a push yourself to the limit type of deal so you can either play risky or play safe. If you just go straight for Thrall and nothing else then you have to kill like, 5 enemies and a pretty easy boss. If youâre just looking to make sure your cloak gets caught up might that not be better for safety?
Iâll admit I was wrong in my earlier post though. I was comparing it more to the âone quest a weekâ nonsense we got in the broken shore. The cloak ranks are more true to that form but the rest of the content is a little different. Either way I donât hold the same opinion now that I did then so for what itâs worth I take that back.
Itâs kinda become a buzzword at this point,can they tone down future grinding a bit? Sure but in this case itâs safe to say itâs a catch 22 at this point. Reduce it and let everyone get all the things of day 1? Gnashing of teeth due to ânot enough content/nothing to do because raids are the only content that matters.â Add mechanics to get people to slow their role a bit? Gnashing of teeth for âartificial gates to prevent players from playing their way because again only true content are raidsâ.
There really isnât any winning for Blizzard at this point as no matter what they do,theyâre perpetually villified by players whoâll never be happy. Rushing to endgame and ignoring everything else is a big contribution to this problem leading to people complaining that game devs somehow hate fun,at this point I keep asking what fun is to these lot and still radio silence.
TLDR- I just see more buzzwords coming out of the woodwork from perpetually salty players who wanna lash out at Blizz because reasons. Bushings the norm and if you disagree youâre scum for not conforming to the anti Blizzard echochamber.
Iâve said it before in relation to other games and it works equally well here, every game on earth has some form of repetitive gameplay loop. I find that the distinguishing feature between whether or not that loop is considered fun or a grind is how engaging each player individually feels that loop is. So it tends to be a pretty varied metric.
Weâve definitely had far worse offenders in WoW in terms of grinding/timegating than 8.3. Iâm still not even sure I would call all the things 8.3 is accused of timegating a true time gate in the truest sense of the word. I suppose itâs difficult in my mind to separate horrific visions in my mind from any other weekly or daily content that we have in WoW. Are we going to call raids timegated for instance since I can only loot them once a week?
Isnât that the truth. I remember back when Ghostcrawler would interact on the forums about class issues and the like. Those days are far removed
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I donât mind a game being a little âpunishingâ in the classic sense, but to be punished by⊠not being allowed to play? Thatâs just beyond stupid. And I should point out, I was specifically talking about failing a quest goal in a lesser vision, thus missing my 1K coalescing reward, which seriously limits my ability to get vessels, which seriously limits my ability to play Horrific Visions, which is arguably the main content of the patch. I wasnât trying for any side objectives, I just got mobbed, and died, because Iâm a solo hunter without maxed out gear and a perfected rotation. Like I said- Iâm no badass, just a gal who wants to play the content.
I killed Thrall my second time in, died the third, got my second goal on the fourth. I didnât love that, but it wasnât my complaint. And if youâd read my post youâd have noticed I said- âI donât care about leveling my cloak on timeâŠâ Better cloak will give better protection and give me more time in the visions, actually playing the content, plus, ranking up makes the thing look like an epic instead of a dishtowel, but no, thatâs never been my concern. I want to play. And Blizz punishing failures by denying us the ability to play is⊠asinine. Itâs like they looked at a bunch of Pavlovian mobile game mechanics that jack players up so theyâll pay cash instead of waiting it out, and said, âYEAH! We want that! We want to addict our players, without offering them any means of satisfying it. THAT is the model we actually want.â If there werenât 14 years of OTHER, still great content to play, while we sit on our hands and wait to be allowed to grind a bit more coalescing visions, Iâd be gone. Maybe that was the point. Get everyone to go entertain them selves instead of making the devs have to do it.
Had to edit to add a little footnote here: I hate the terms everyoneâs using, âfall behindâ and âcatch upâ. Because Iâm pretty sure plenty of us arenât playing on a raid schedule, or worried about being âcompetitiveâ. There is no way to âcatch upâ on fun you didnât get to have. If you tell little Billy, âno, you didnât get an A on your math quiz, so you donât get to go out and play with the other kids todayâŠâ You canât make it up to him by not punishing him tomorrow. This is what Iâm saying. We, as gamers, are conditioned to, when we fail, dust ourselves off, maybe adjust our plan, and get right back on the horse. Theyâre specifically not letting us do that, and itâs my single, biggest, (kinda huge) argument against the system.
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Thatâs completely disingenuous; if you do absolutely every quest, rare, chest and event you can find you will have enough currency to do 3-4 visions a week (with that 4 being a heavy grind). In theory maybe you could grind for a 5th but if you did the maths I suspect there are not actually enough hours in a single week to do that.
So while if you want to be anal about it, sure it isnât a pure, defined time gate but it is an effective time gate for essentially 99.999999% of the server population. I play an absurd number of hours per week and I will rarely get 4 runs done. So in the vast majority of cases if anyone wants to play more than 3-4 Visions per week they are out of luck.
Practical time gate.
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thatâs because GC had something called integrity
I walked this back a little bit this morning but back when I wrote that I actually didnât know that the big caches that give 500 visions could only be opened once a week. Hence why I thought grinding for visions was perfectly viable. I wouldnât write that again today.
I still wouldnât call it a time gate in the strictest sense of the word but I definitely wouldnât push against the idea anywhere near as aggressively. Iâm not afraid to take my lumps and admit when Iâm wrong. So Iâll say it as many times as I need to in this thread. 
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They straight up said at Blizzcon that they wouldnât have time to change this until 9.0 and that 8.3 would continue on the path they had before. You canât listen to only part of what they say and expect to be happy.
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Lol⊠Iâm still trying to unlock Flying in one zone â havenât even thought about the other zone yet, and whatnot. I canât even focus on this corrupted stuff. Too many grinds and I canât let myself play an alt and further distract myself until I have at least flying âŠ
Ummm no it hasnât. When I started playing the game in cata your player power never came from time gated rep grinds. You simply raided and did dungeons to gear up which was enjoyable for gear and that was it.
Now if you want to remain relevant you need to do your chores and if you donât do them on a daily basis you are severely behind.
Thanks to these terrible gates I donât even bother with any of my many alts raid on my main and log out. Nobody wants to spend 50% of there game time doing dailyâs for a obscurely huge piece of player power. Progression systems feel worse than ever right now and frustrate players to the point of unsubbing and playing other games.
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The reason for the grinds changed, but the grinds remained the same.