We often see this mantra used when describing people’s clever usage of game mechanics and players often get blamed for it when they very much should not. Especially with Dragonflight being designed the way it is, some of the heavy handed nerfs you’ve dealt to rep grinds leaves a lot of questions and very few answers.
-Disturbed dirt, expedition packs, and other various treasures have seen some substantial nerfs dealt to them multiple times since a few days into the xpac. The problem here is that by the time the nerfs were dealt, it was already reported on WoWhead that people were reaching Renown 19+ with several factions and unlocking their campaign quests and cinematics. 4 days into the expansion. After these nerfs it became pointless to try and farm the treasures as you would’ve previously but yet it was enabled and allowed for the beginning days of the xpac. You knew in testing this was a thing but didn’t stop it until it was already live and people had taken advantage of it. Myself included. So now everyone else misses out and is behind.
-Wrathion and Sabellian rep grind nerfs might be the most atrocious i’ve ever seen. Nerfing the spawn rate of mobs in the basement and upstairs to reduce how many kills people could get resulted in the weekly quests taking forever because spawn rates were higher and health scaling was lower - several of the single kill quest adds exploded on spawn and you had to wait another 10 minutes for another chance. This is assuming 1 of the competing 5 groups downstairs or up top didn’t steal the tag ahead of time on spawn. Who were you trying to hurt with this nerf? Me? The person that did this early and often so I already have max rep with the one I wanted? Because you can’t prevent me from farming a rep I don’t need to farm anymore. You’re only hurting the people who didn’t partake in this until it was too late. Now again, they feel like they’re behind.
This behavior from you with these nerfs is confusing and frustrating. You know it exists before the xpac even goes live and yet you wait until after people are doing it for long enough to be done that you decide to nerf it. Meaning anyone who wasn’t in my group or another’s group to do the grind is now behind and has no way to catchup in an equal way. Exploit early exploit often is supposed to be a behavior you try to curb but instead, you actively teach people to take advantage of these things early and quickly. Don’t spend the early days of the xpac exploring and having fun, spend it grinding renown and quickly because if you don’t, you will be significantly behind everyone else for absolutely no fault of your own. I would say it’s embarrassing but I think you and everyone else knows that.
Either you need to learn, as developers, to tame this beast you created and allow people to do these grinds if they choose to by having them always available at 100% capacity. OR you need to figure out in testing that it’s possible and then cage the beast before it even goes live. Because this strategy of letting people do it for the early days and then taking a hammer to it is not working. I’ll close by mentioning as well that you have no consistency on this either. I’m renown 25 with the centaurs by spam farming the grand hunts for reputation. The fact that it hasn’t been nerfed yet honestly floors me considering how heavy handed you were elsewhere. How is it that the centaurs renown is considered lesser to Valdrakken and Dragonscale? How is it that cenaturs renown is lesser than Wrathion rep? You recently added in the ability to buy renown with the Tuskar by turning in fish. Actually paying gold to beat the renown grind. How is that okay but farming mobs and treasures isn’t?
My current renown breakdowns - Centaur 25, Dragonscale 21, Valdrakken 22, Tuskar 15. Wrathion 6/6, Sabellian 3/6. I am saying this as someone who has taken advantage of many of these grinds before the nerfs.
Consistency needs to be key moving forward with this please.
Exactly. Once people do something, to “nerf” it just screws over everyone else. And at that point either leave it “Broken” for all, or roll those people back.
With beta and such, no excuse why things go live then get patched only after people benefit.
Since you can now commission people for those epic patterns they tried to gate behind rep… what exactly are they trying to protect? Transmogs and drake customizations you can’t even see when blurring past people at mach 90?
Honestly I’m glad some people burned the reps down, I can just commission those patterns and not bother with rep grinding at all.
Bunch of control freaks run blizzard I swear, who cares if someone wants to grind til their eyes bleed to have a black scaled highland dragon or whatever cosmetics are now the only things locked behind rep if you use the commission system?
(Oh darn I was thinking as a sensible person again, not a scammy company trying to sell a year’s worth of sub time all at once to prevent sub bleeds $$$ how could I forget the true reason for time gate$$$)
This is the core of my issue as well. These rep grinds were 100% known during testing but still allowed to go live. My other core issue, is that killing mobs for rep for Wrathion or flying around and exploring the world for treasures for Valdrakken and Dragonscale were deemed to be too broken. But afking a grand hunt for 190 rep per hunt for free is okay? Doing absolutely nothing for the rep is okay? Literally BUYING fish for Tuskar rep is now okay and you can do it without problem? Where is the consistency with any of this? Is the dev team now making a de-facto tier list of which reputations are important and which aren’t?
I find the nerf disgusting after so many farmed it so quickly. Had we known it would be nerfed, and we didn’t have two weeks to do it – more people would have done it. How were we supposed to know that Blizz would only let a set number of people benefit from THEIR OWN IMPLEMENTATION of a rep farm.
This is why I very rarely agree with banning people for exploiting unless it is extremely egregious. Because 99% of the time they are simply doing something that was designed to be allowed and the only reason it’s called an exploit is because the design behind it was terrible and enabled behavior that is frowned upon. Which then causes the question of why design it like that in the first place?
It also makes it seems like these ‘bugs’ make it through launch to give a certain segment of the playerbase an advantage. Then once they reap the benefits, nerf it so that everyone else has to play a watered down version of the game and fight for scraps.
I was not considering buying this expansion, but all my guildies told me how easy renown was to earn etc, and that it wouldn’t be a long grind to get it. I should have looked at WoWHead for changes I know since most who have played this game long-term (as my guildies have) really just want to keep the clique in place.
This isn’t true, or everybody would have been taking advantage of them.
Certain players were disproportionately likely to know what they were going to need to get done and pass around the info to their closest friends (ie guildmates) on how they all could make the most of this.
Basically it’s a perk to top players, who are likely to be the most informed on these things and ready to swoop in and get what they need. The casuals get screwed.
Disagree. Not everyone participated in BETA so of course everyone didn’t know. Blizzard has all the data. They saw what happens in BETA and they just chose to not address any of it till live for some reason.
Even the tank nerfs should have been addressed in BETA.