Only 2 or 3 days left and you will be rid of me don’t you worry.
How do you propose they do this?
I don’t like your analogy, at all, but, working within that to try to have a conversation:
Then ask yourself this:
- Why did the C-players leave?
- Why do the D-F players stay?
The C players no longer like the game.
The D-F players do like the game.
And this is WHY the D-F player likes the game, and the ability to do this within the rules is a game design decision, yes?
As to why the C-players left? We’ll never know for sure because Blizz would never publicize exit poll data, but, just look at how the game has evolved. I started in mid-late BC. If I try to picture the path the game has taken, how it has changed, over the years, I see a couple of trends that have been consistent:
- The game has less content that is simple but grindy
- The rewards have been heavily moved to more difficult content
- Content/story/gear/everything gets more and more timegated over time
- The margin for error in top content is being consistently reduced in all end-game content
So, essentially, all the satisfying rewards are being funneled into progressively harder content, over time. Is this why the C-players left? Again, we don’t know, but, if they liked it before and they left, this has to play a significant part. Did Blizz WANT them to leave? No, obviously not. But, by whatever logic, Blizz has sacrificed them and built a game that is desirable to the whales. Maybe that’s just pure ignorance. Maybe, the progressively harder content with less rewards for anyone else is just how they envisioned the game growing and they are completely oblivious to the effects that has on the player-base. But do you think most trillionaire companies are run on incompetence or ignorance of what they’re doing in a business sense?
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What you are leaving out is they suggested the grindy way as a parallel alternative route. They don’t intend to take away the current gear system, they want a co-existing alternate path. This is because not everyone has the same priorities as you. For them, your content is completely unappealing, so even if it’s more efficient, it would be no fun to play. They are not asking you to play their way, they are simply asking that they have that as an option for them.
I have no problem with Blizzard giving us time-based rewards that are good. TBC does a lot of this through badge gear and if all you do is dungeons for the entire expansion you will be able to get a respectable chunk of gear by the end of it (especially if you can find time to do ZA when it launches).
Except traditionally you haven’t gotten the best gear from these systems anyways. Good gear, and safety nets for bad RNG from raiding, but typically not the absolute pinnacle of loot. Any BiS loot that comes from it tends to be far and few between.
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Oooo, an ‘expert.’ Tell us, oh wise one: how did you come by this information? Oh, wait… it’s just your opinion.
Which is wrong.
I don’t know much about this, but I’m willing to be schooled: did ranking-up require winning or was it simply about how many PVP games a player participated in?
I’m assuming it did not require winning, just slowly amassing honor over time, hence your comparison.
I like having different “lanes” of gear acquisition, where the lanes are slow, medium, fast, and those lanes are relatively porous. That way the game has clear incentives to acquiring stuff players may want (gear in this case) in various degrees of expediency with the trade off being more intense methods.
However, I also don’t think it’s deleterious or negatively impacting players if there are certain rewards - such as gear or visuals - that are only obtainable via certain methods.
For one thing, you should be able to buy excellent gear from a vendor after you reach exalted. When I reached exalted with all the factions in BFA, world quests and catchup boa were like 400, but exalted gear was expensive and only 358 blues. It was a real shame to be honest.
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Everything was how much Honore you earned. How many kills. Grand Marshals got the best gear, and it basically meant you had to be logged into battle grounds about 20 hours per day, which meant that peeps took turns playing one toon for 3 months, then after that the friends all picked the next toon, till they each had a grand marshal. I had a rank 12 and 10 or something and I had to be logged into battlegrounds all the time. No skill required at all.
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Basically the issue was a kind of “Honor Arms-Race” where any time not spent honor-farming meant that that character was going to be behind? This is what propagated the fact that you had to be logged in for excessive hours in order to maintain an advantage?
And thanks for the insight. I didn’t play during Vanilla and am ignorant to all that jazz.
On a side note, as soon as this whole PVP rank system came out, I went to forums asking for a skill based system. Arena was eventually implemented after a ton of input on the topic. Oddly enough, after arena was implemented, I wasn’t a big fan. I wanted to buy gear with honor. Blizzard just can’t win.
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This really depends on what else the game is offering.
MMORPGs traditionally have been about immersing ones self into a fictional world vast and open ended with many other people.
Somehow it morphed into E-sports over the past few years and has suffered enormously for it. More difficult content with fewer people has been the message and it has sucked the life out of the game.
I argue the opposite. Less difficult mechanically more difficult numerically and in the open world is the answer for MMORPGs. So no cap on participation but some world raid mobs might require 80 or 100 people to get done. You can have some mechanics but mythic mechanics are out.
As said it’s really supposed to be about immersion and having fun in the world. Few people are having fun in the world now because the game has been steered into E-sports and away from MMORPG design principles.
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The reality of the matter is the time spent grinding to death for a piece of gear exists. Spam low mythical for gear, join yolo rbgs and you’ll easily get 1600.
If you want solo gear that’s what conduit and renown farming is. A solo style of power progression. Adding no life gearing style is inherently toxic towards the game.
I’d advocate for the ability to get high ilvl catch up for Alts and mains towards the end of the patch. This would make pvp and pve more active towards the end of a patch cycle.
Part of the reason everyone is buying carries is the fact that there’s no other way for less-skilled players to make progress.
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“No way”?
1> Some percentage of them, I have to think, have the skills they’re just too lazy to make it happen. Buying carries is path of least resistance. Well… TS. Not an excuse for the negative impact on the game.
2> The “general” rebuttal of: TS. If you can’t time 15s … why should you get a reward for timing 15s?? If you say you have the skills … then see #1 above.
3> I would allow some latitude in the very general sense of this issue, in that Blizzard could do a lot more to help those skilled players in group #1 get teamed up with other good players. The gf is a tool for this, it’s just not a very good tool. Because you can easily get me to agree on one thing: skilled players should have a path to play the content they want to play without having to jump through tons of hurdles. WoW is NOT good for that.
But for this MOST part (80%+?), people fall into #2. If you don’t have the skills … TS no cookie. Do what every other player that is carrying you did-- watch some vids, read some class discussions, practice and get better. This game isn’t that hard.
They aren’t skilled enough to Korthia quest their way to 230?
230 is going to be garbage in about two weeks.
Absolutely. The learning curve for new players has been deliberately made harder.
You act as though the A players used to help the C players out of the goodness of their hearts. Not on your life. They needed someone who was more than a warm body to fill a raid spot and to get anybody there that players needed to help them.
The A players are still here. Some of the C players have moved up to that position. But they don’t have time to help anyone who can’t pay them in return, who can’t carry their alts for them. The A players are too busy doing chores and logging off exhausted.
You like to pat yourself on the head for being a good player. It’s those bad players out there who refuse to learn. Those lazy sluggards are the problem. They didn’t want to spend 15 years dragging themselves through the system like you did. How dare they expect to be able to play your game??? Those lazy players created carries out of thin air to buy. Nobody sold them those carries by endlessly spamming in trade chat and putting ads in the group finder, no sirree. Those players who wanted to buy carries created them!
The game is designed to be harder to learn than ever to encourage players to buy tokens to pay for carries. Blizzard’s biggest profit center is tokens. Token sales that turn into gold carries provide free gametime to mythic raiders and players who push high keys. Also design intent.
If you enjoy patting yourself on the head for just being “gud” even though you’ve had more than a decade to get where you are, and also enjoy trashing other players who haven’t earned ksm on their own with no help the day after they learned to move their character across the screen, you are the problem with the community.
I was reading your post with an open mind until that.
MOST of the Mythic Raiders in my group started in Legion, and a smaller few of them started in BfA.
Again, WoW isn’t some crazy hard game. It has a skill curve, but it’s not that hard.
The problem isn’t that it’s hard. The problem is that people are LAME.
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I’m not saying the A players stood around the Capital city and asked who needed help.
What I’m saying is that MOST of the raids I’ve been a part of have great players, and not so great players.
The not so great players then fall into 2 groups. 1> Those that think they’re amazing, even though they’re terrible (this group is almost non existent now with raid logging). 2> Those that realize they’re middle of the pack, and ASK FOR HELP.
And unless you’re in a raid with some SUPER DBags, when people ask for help and ACTIVELY WANT TO GET BETTER… the A-list players offer their help. Because the RAID AS A WHOLE gets better.
I’ve been in a lot of raids over the years and I have yet to ever see one exception to this rule. You raid with your friends. When people ask for help… you friggin help them.