Meh I personally don’t think it needs a soft timer either. Sometimes i wanna take my time to explore or analyze a pull or have a chat with my buddies about last night’s news before moving on the the next pull.
Yeah some people will “optimize the fun out of the game”
Too bad for them. I don’t care about them.
The thing that worries me is, are repair fees going to be the new gold sink?
(much more than we had in previous expansions, since dying so many times per floor gets added to everything else we do in the game, like raiding)
I understand that, I do. My problem is that when we, as WoW players, begin asking for something to not have timers we’re asking for it to not have timers like we have in other places in the game.
Which, ultimately, amounts to asking for a piece of content to not have “soft” timers. At the very least not the way they exist as is.
The problem is that, with Torghast, when we talk about timers the concept of “soft timers” will never be useful. You can create “soft timers” that limit momentary progress and prevent the best possible rewards. You can’t create timers that prevent a player from going as slowly as they want, period, without a hard timer.
If the goal is to prevent players from waiting on 1-3 minute cool downs in between pulls it’s going to have to be a hard timer. No matter how “relaxed” it is, it’s a hard timer. There are other options, mind you, like making longer cool downs once-per-floor (think Time Warp), and making short timers have a limited number of uses, that don’t specifically restrict the time you have.
Once we talk about preventing a player from taking the time they want, though? That’s a hard timer. Horrific Visions, for example, are hard timers. They’re a bit flexible, but it’s ultimately a timer that you can’t ever get past. There’s nothing “soft” about it. Mythic+ is a soft timer, though, because you’re not actually barred from finishing it if the timer comes and goes.
It’s better to create non-timed restrictions to prevent undesired behavior. Creating limitations to how many times a cool down can be used, for example, works. The moment you say “you only have X time”, no matter what the following qualifier is, is when you’ve made a hard timer. That’s not pleasant and it’s incredibly rare in WoW. The few cases where it exists are often disliked.
(Horrific Visions tend to be disliked because of the restriction to entry. Which, I think, says that if you insist on a hard timer that you can’t also insist on limited entries.)
I think this is a valid point to discuss, too. Will some people really burn themselves? Yeah, of course.
How relevant is that to the greater population, though? We’ve known for a long time that the majority of players are casuals; the least likely people to engage in that behavior. The people most likely to engage in that behavior are likely to be the 1-3%.
Torghast shouldn’t be designed for the 1-3% if it’s something everyone will have to do. Otherwise you’re just sacrificing the experience of the majority to cater to a very small number of people who are ultimately creating their own problems.
…so I’m considered old because I’m in my mid to late 30s? 
I hate timers regardless of game. Always have.
Majora’s mask, pikmin, pathfinder kingmaker… They make me hate games I would otherwise love.
Not too sure about the 1-3% number here. I would counter argue that most people who care to push the major content of any patch, even if only at a heroic raiding level, are going to min/max to the best of their ability. That number is certainly a lot higher than 1-3%. After all, most people don’t have much of a reason to play the game outside of end game PvE, whether it’s M0s or mythic raiding. If they don’t have access to mythic raiding gear they’ll just write that loot table off and make do with what is available, but optimisation is still the game.
Maybe it’s just me and the circles I dwell in, but if there’s an optimal way to do something in end game content, I can bet you that I, my guildies and what I perceive to be the greater WoW population will take advantage of it. It’s why strat videos exist for everything, why raiderIO exists to filter out the inexperienced, why every random you encounter in LFD follows a cookie cutter build. People don’t like to fail, so you can bet they will take the proven path of least resistance. It’s been that way since vanilla, and it’s not changing any time soon.
Soft timers mean mechanics you physically can’t live through, which change depending on your gear, talents, or buffs. No need to panic. Every boss has a soft timer.
As you said you frequent certain circles, but I think that’s inured you to a certain outlook.
“Casuals” have been widely understood to make up the majority of the player base since at least cataclysm. There was an MMO champion article, that I can’t currently find so take this as you will, that found that less than 3% of players raided heroic.
Since Heroic was the “Mythic” of the day, we can probably safely assume that it remains true. The Heroic of today is much harder to ascertain, but we know for certain that the majority of players don’t raid at all. In fact the majority of players, from all sources we can coalesce, don’t raid at all, outside of an LFR sometimes.
Let’s assume that a floor of Torghast consists of 10 pulls. Would you really be willing to wait almost two hours just to finish one floor? Or… would you only do that on the highest floors that you were having true problems with?
Could that not be solved some other way? Such as preventing you from using Lust more than once or twice per floor?
I also think it’s valid to ask the question:
At what point do we need to wonder if prioritizing that 1-3%, even up to 5% or 10%, isn’t beneficial to the population as a whole. Preventing a few people from abusing the game, at the expense of the majority being able to play the game the way they want, doesn’t seem wise.
Its almost like time played has never been the metric Blizz cared about and that was just a dumb conspiracy people made up.
We’re actually doing both. We’re fighting climate change by not traveling.
I’m not discounting suggestions for alternate limiters than time, I’m just saying that a lot more than 1-3% of people are going to min/max and optimise the way they play. On my server at least, I can easily see at any point in time that there are dozens of heroic pugs happening in group finder, which leads me to think that heroic raiding is quite ‘casual’. Sure the mythic raiding population might be a much smaller percentile, but it’s not like any content outside of mythic raiding has been designed strictly for that crowd.
If Torghast was completely flavour and had nothing but cosmetic rewards? Probably not. As it stands I 100% would if A) it was the difference between getting a significantly higher ilvl piece of gear for the week and B) it was the optimal way to complete the challenge. Again, this may be limited to my experience, but I believe so would many others, casual or not.
I’ve seen people literally sit in one spot for days to tag a rare mob; entire raids created to farm trash for BoEs; Loads of toons running around with “the Insane” title.; people turning into complete asshats and shafting others for purples. Heck there’s a multiboxer on my server with 10+ toons each with a brutosaur mount. Yes these are in the minority but never underestimate what people are willing to do for the right rewards and the most efficient carrot on a stick has always been gear.
I have no problems with player agency so I don’t really have an opinion here. All it comes down to is whatever mechanic has been put into play, someone somewhere will find the best way to solve it and that will become the norm.
Tbf, we don’t even know what kind of “soft timer” they want to use. Once we know that we’ll have a better idea if it’ll be good or not.
I honestly don’t get this line of reasoning from blizzard. If someone wants to waste 4 hours of their life waiting on lust to climb an extra floor for a negligible increase in rewards I’d say they’ve earned it. Maybe in the most inefficient way possible, but earned it nonetheless.
This is a honest answer. The game would be better for being open to all play styles.
I end up doing this a couple of times a week. This one is getting rougher than it used to be heh.
oy vey, the situation with modern men (as in how they have ceased to exist) makes more sense.
Raids do have them, but you are proving my point. Raids have them at an encounter level typically 5-15 min then at any point you can break if you need in between encounters. I’m not opposed to mechanic timers at the 10-20min level. I just really don’t want another piece of content I have to block out 30+ min of don’t talk to me I’m gaming time for.
I hate to break this to you, but the demon you call “gaia” has no ability to blow up the planet. you were lied to.
It isn’t about total time. It is about contiguous time. I have tons of time to play. It is just harder to have uninterrupted time to play than it used to be.
And I get that. At some point a line has to be drawn. Right now, that line is about about 25-35 mins. Sometimes even less.
Removing the timer because some people can’t play uninterrupted for about 30 mins has a domino effect.
“Making mobs smarter” isn’t really something that is feasible, and what does that even mean? Make the mob ignore taunt and target the healer?
Removing the ability to lust just means 1 or 2 boss fights are a little longer.
Removing the timer for things that have the timer (m+) makes it way too easy to remove the difficulty.