spawn timers have been a thing since the beginning of MMOs. pretty sure they were the birth of time gating. But that was by necessity, I believe.
The REAL problem is people used to love this game and WANT to enjoy this game but every decision the dev team made for BFA has been total complete and utter garbage. The fruatration is players aren’t treated like players they’re treated like sheep to be herded into the “correct path” by the good shepard Blizzard.
Wow isn’t about an adventure anymore it’s an on rails "how can we slow you down and take away features only to “award” them back to you after a long time gate such as flying.
I know I WANT to enjoy wow right now but I, along with a ton of others, just do not enjoy BFA at all.
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Thanks for linking that, was scratching my head wondering why on earth they’d decide to make this change.
For me, there’s just enough small things to keep me coming back every now and then (dungeons, PvP), but the adventure as a whole is so mired in roadblocks and annoyances that I can’t quite get into it as much as I used to.
I don’t mind if you want to slow me down, take my time through content and really think about it - but you can’t just give me mindless, borderline AFK-able content and then tack on things like this in some vain effort to keep me ‘engaged’. It won’t work.
Give me rares, rare-elites, things that are a challenge to find and fight without being outright impossible for a more casual sort of player. Don’t just fill the zone with tight packs of mobs that leash for 5 miles after you.
I’ve said it before, but Timeless Isle seems to be the thing they want to recapture, yet every time they add a new iteration it seems to entirely miss the point. Timeless was a bit of a slog to get through in itself at times, but the zone was so tightly designed, and the individual enemies had enough mechanics that fighting your way through didn’t feel quite so awful.
It helps, too, that class design in general was much better in MoP, but that topic’s done to death.
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- A multitude of various rewards.
- Designed so you could do your dailies and leave or hang out all day.
- Relatively easy to travel.
- Packed with mobs, but with enough space to weave around.
- Normal mob mechanics encouraged you to play well but weren’t overly punishing and thus taught you how to deal with their elite counterparts.
- The multitude of rewards guaranteed that mobs were in a constant state of dying and respawning.
- There were the occasional game type events.
- Decent drop rate of BoA gear tokens via mobs, greater drop rate via easy to find and reach chests.
- Drop rate for gear tokens was higher for lower geared characters.
- Timeless Armor of the _____ wasn’t super great, but the drop rate of tokens made farming for the better/best stat combinations less obnoxious.
- Shrines with buffs that stacked with other buffs.
- Consumables, via drop or island currency vendor that also stacked.
- 1 hour duration all stat buffing crystal, that also stacked.
- End up being super powerful stacking buffs.
- A bajillion toys, pets, and cosmetic items.
- FFA PvP if you choose.
- World Bosses with 2 pieces of tier.
- An extra World Boss with max item level gear (that’s 2 per week instead of 1).
- Classes were more fun.
- Classes had more abilities, particularly useful and/or niche utility that made combat against mobs with mechanics more interesting.
- Gear upgrade tokens that had a low drop rate but guaranteed from at least one chest.
- Island currency could be used to buy weapons or gear caches for when you were lacking tokens in addition to the other items.
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lolol 100%
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I feel like I’m almost starting another topic entirely, here, but solid list. You actually reminded me of some reasons I liked Timeless Isle that I had totally forgotten.
IMO, it stands as the peak of catch-up mechanics in WoW, providing a way to earn the gear that is fun in its own right. Which really, should be the goal, period, when designing content for a game.
The gear wasn’t the best, but the process (dare I say it, the grind) of acquiring it was satisfying, and there was just enough variety that it didn’t get completely soul-crushing. I even went there on an alt, semi-recently, just to get them some gear for WoD. Pointless, but still fun.
To swing things around and segue back into the topic at hand, it almost illustrates my point. It’s fun, snappy and doesn’t get in your way overly much, allowing you to complete the goals (acquire gear) at your own pace, without much in the way of roadblocks. Sure there’s dailies, but you can continue to explore the island even after their completion, and eke out a little more if you want to.
That last part I feel is the absolute crux of the issue, the backbone good content lives or dies on. You should be doing it because you want to, not because you feel you should.
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Well. Hmm. All right. Pack it up guys, this ones resolved.
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Who did make the change then? Someone on the development team made the change, must have talked about it as a group and went through with it. So who made the change?
Someone on the dev team went rogue or made the change prematurely and got caught?
How does such a person make this change without anyone knowing until it gets caught by the customer?
The software must be very unsecured if someone is able to just make a change without permission.
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They thought they were going to get away with it… until someone found out!
“Ooops, our bad! totally unintended… we promise”
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Yes. Every single bug in the history of programming is intentional. Every single time something is changed in programming, it has never had unforeseen sideffects.
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They actually did report it as a bug. So your claim is already contradicted not only by that fact, but also Ion’s own words that they chose not to tell us about it.
They did not say it was a bug. Someone went in and changed it and they have to change it back now.
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They said it was not intended.
Typically when you program something, and something unintentional happens. Its a bug.
If someone went in and changed it. Intentionally. Then it was intentional.
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Huge assumption and white knighting on your part. They did not say it was a bug, but something unintended. Unintended can just as much = a change they did not want to see happen now.
And given the past history of their deceiving the customer on changes to the game, I bet it was discussed and someone went ahead and make the change, got caught, and they back tracked and said it was not intended.
Blizzard dev team has zero credibility in my book after WoD, they are not trustworthy.
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Got it. We can only use huge assumptions if the assumptions are anti-Blizzard.
Man. And you got on to me about huge assumptions.
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Given their history, YES - they do things often without telling us that changes the game dramatically. Like ilvl scaling and raid lock outs for legacy raids.
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Ok. Thanks for showing so quickly you won’t consider any viewpoint unless its over the top anti-Blizzard. I can easily move on knowing no worthwhile discussion was going to take place.
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Incredibly relieved to hear this. Thanks for the communication.
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Minus the time limit they basically did do that. He acknowledged the problem, said it was not intentional, and then said it would be fixed asap on the ptr. The only fix is just to revert it back to normal.