The great vault FEELS better than bonus rolls, but it is not. At least for raid. There is also an issue with the randomness of it, in that it is not particularly random. I don’t know what the algorithm they use is, but I’ve seen too many duplicates for it to be properly randomized. I’m sure someone by now has made a spreadsheet to show how bad this is. I’m not a huge fan of M+ so rarely do enough to even get 2 options, and often skip weeks entirely. Yet I can think of at least 2 maybe 3 items I’ve gotten duplicates of just this season, and I had a number of them last season as well. I actually got one item 3 times last season, which worked out to something like a 1/200k chance if everything was equal.
^this. If you managed bonus rolls correctly they were vastly superior to how the vault works.
This isn’t, and hasn’t been the case at all. Drop rates weren’t nerfed going into Shadowlands, and have only been buffed to compensate the lack of Titanforging upgrades.
That’s the problem, players perceive it as bad luck protection but it turns it into a chore, you must do 10 runs otherwise RNG could be against you… Devs are just playing with our minds and addiction.
It will be better a currency and you just buy the gear that you want from any dungeon, then if the player want to push M+, its because they want to play the game and do it.
While his conclusion was that the Great Vault should be removed from the game, what I found interesting was his documentation of how most aspects of gearing in the game violate standard psychological principles of motivation.
Basically this game needs motivation like OW, MOBAS… you reach a BIS status or your ideal ilvl and then you play the game because you want to play it, during MoP/WoD due to the lack of these tons of systems and good pvp vendors, i level up each class, geared it with honor gear and do casual BGs every day with different classes. I didn’t have any reward besides my own satisfaction.
I feel like the game would be better served with someone else at the steering wheel. Leave Ion in charge of the raids, because the raids have been awesome.
The thing about the Vault is that the way it is currently set up is specifically designed to force players to maximize the amount of time in game grinding to try to get the rewards they want for it. RNG is an easy and effective way to accomplish this, as much as I personally dislike it.
Always remember that Blizzard wants to force players to maximize their play time in the game whether the players are actually having fun or not, with minimal development effort. If you always keep that in mind, every single thing about Shadowlands’ design setup makes perfect sense.
Lol what. drop rates were very much nerfed going into Shadowlands and the removal of WF/TF & bonus rolls were directly quoted as being the reason for it. Forums were spammed for months about complaints about it…
Do we know MS will have them reporting profits the same way? I haven’t checked out quarterlies from MS yet, but do we know MS is going to use the same metrics for reporting on profit?
The great vault system was intended to drive participation. I did it the first couple weeks and received duplicates. I never did it again as I can see how these devs try to string out poor content with locked rewards.
Kinda feel like Bobby was running a ponzi scheme with Blizzard. Instead of reporting individually on how each IP was doing we lump them all together, count MAUs as 2 if they play 2 different Blizz IPs, and then report on the profits from the store.
We were literally told by Ion that the great vault was going to be central to gearing in this expansion, and superior to all those things that were removed or nerfed.
They are out of touch with every segment of the playerbase. They have been flying on their preconceptions and prejudices and getting away with it (just barely if you look at the population trend since cata) for so long they think they know our minds better than we do. And they have cobbled together a number of psychological principles in such a way as to support what they wanted to do anyway.
I did PvP during wod because I wanted to and my gear permitted me to, not because I was waiting for a chance at a weekly upgrade.
The genre has been built around encouraging players to continue playing by making it feel like their time invested has been rewarded. I guess Shadowlands is the expansion that was designed to prove that was wrong, and ended up proving it was right.