I never denied that you could get rank 6 rep in 4 weeks. But I did deny that you could upgrade to 233 in 4 weeks, because there was a Renown requirement that was hard timegated to take about 3 months.
You are changing the basis of the argument because you desperately want me to be wrong about something.
In 9.1, there was a true time gate. You were capped at 2-3 Renown a week. The grind was also very intense and RNG heavy.
By the time 9.1.5 came out, you could earn both rep and Renown without a hard cap. But most importantly, the grind was lessened.
I am criticizing 9.1 but praising 9.1.5. Nothing has changed.
Timegating is necessary to prevent the hardcore min-max types from playing all content nonstop and then complaining that they were forced to do it all.
No there wasn’t, because if you were behind the current renown cap, you could get as much renown as was needed to catch up to the current cap in the week, like how capped conquest works this expansion.
In a true time gate, you would be capped at 2-3 renown per week, even if you were behind.
They did not abandon, its just too easy to get 385 gear via storms . I will be replacing a couple of my low ilvls with it before the week is up .
The issue is how does one progress further ?Nothing , unless you group with ppl. In that case why even bother with solo progression model . It either go full blown or don’t.
The rep grind was roughly 4 weeks in 9.0 if you min-maxed every last rare and treasure in both the Korthia and the rift every single day. The rep grind did in fact take months for casuals who didn’t do every rare and didn’t do the Rift every day.
The rep grind took less than 4 weeks in 9.1, and quite a bit less if you shard-hopped to farm rares.
These are the facts. I claimed nothing otherwise.
Renown was indeed a grind. You had to grind anima and souls every week and finish your campaign quests. And if you came into the patch later, you had to grind Renown heavily because the chance of getting a catch-up upgrade was very low.
The ability to get max upgrades on Korthia gear didn’t come until months into the patch due to the weekly Renown cap, and due to the Renown requirement to upgrade. This is the part you seem to keep denying.
Renown in 9.1 was nothing like it was in 9.2. You couldn’t just max it instantly from any content you liked.
These are the facts. I claimed nothing otherwise.
Renown in 9.0 and 9.1 was the very definition of a timegate. The hard cap increased by 2 or 3 every week over the course of months. (The fact that you could catch up later doesn’t mean that the system was not timegated.)
Conquest and Valor are considered timegates as well, until the caps are removed.
Are you trying to claim that Renown in 9.0 and 9.1 was not timegated? That’s a pretty wild claim. Nothing was stopping your progress other than waiting for next week’s reset.
In the gaming industry, a timegate means that you have to wait a certain amount of time before more content is released or more progress can be made.
Renown in 9.0 and 9.1 was the most blatant and prolonged form of timegating that we have ever seen in WoW. Every week allowed access to higher Renown, resulting in more quests and soulbind abilities becoming unlocked little by little over time.
Yes, you could catch up to the current max. But guess what? You would then have to wait until the next weekly reset to make more progress.
No, a time gate is an amount of time that must progress before any more progress can be made, no matter when you do it. There was 1 actual time gate in SL at the launch of 9.1, but it hasn’t been mentioned yet.
What you’re talking about for content, is called a staggered release of content. One of the reasons it’s commonly used is so that solo players don’t blow through all everything in a day on launch, then complain that there’s nothing to do (since they are choosing to not participate in a large portion of the patch’s content by playing solo).
The slowly increasing cap on all those other systems (valor, renown, conquest) are also there to help the more casual players stay relevant longer in to the season. Otherwise, amount of time you can spend playing the game would put you even farther ahead, which creates it’s own set of problems.
I have read it. It seems very arbitrary and doesn’t make sense in the greater context of an MMO.
I’d argue that pretty much everything in world content short of super rares and mega hunt stages can be credibly solo’d which ~much like previous expansions~ is a hell of a lot of content and pretty much on par with most of the previous expansions.
The Part that seems lost on you is that everything you have listed here is going to have other players working towards those goals in the area; maybe you’re playing at extremely off hours, an incredibly dead server or on a private one, but outside of some rare instances I’ve found that the content gets belted out pretty easily with the only time I need to expressley join a party being when it comes to the weekly world dragon and even that’s mostly about the convienience of not having to wait for a pull to happen.
It’s a good thing that there is tons of solo content in the expansion then isn’t there?
Legion had the Mage tower which people consistently complained was too hard.
BFA didn’t have anything like what you are describing until 8.3 where people complained ad nauseum about the Visions being too hard and mandatory content with gating thanks to how it was tied to the cloak (which had one of the longest, most insufferable associated quests I’ve ever seen and I have both the hive mind and the lucid nightmare).
Can’t comment on MoP because it was released during my years long sabbatical.
I have no idea what you are talking about with Wrath since ~as with all expansions~ even the top tier crafted gear was inferior to what you’d get from running heroics, raids and BGs/arena.
Torghast would have just been horrific visions 2.0 wherein players would be screaming that it took too long, that it was boring to do, that it was mandatory content and that it favored some classes far more then others.
The abandonment of AP and the mission board is one of the highest points of praise that the game has in it imho; we don’t have to endlessly farm some arbitrary resource for statistically insignificant rewards (and if you don’t keep on top of them then it feels like you are just getting weaker relative to the people who have been grinding).
That you think there was some grand and glorious age of solo content is simply nostalgia brand glasses with rose colored lenses and expecting the devs to cater to this in general ~let alone when they’re routinely culled so that Bobby and the rest of the share holders can give themselves absurd bonuses~.
He means efficiently. Yeah sure I can do the storms on my shaman but it’s a rough time and the gains are slow slow slow. What you always see in storms is a whole RAID flying around killnig everything in sight. That’s efficient.