toxic community? oh, Ralph’s definition of toxic: anyone who disagrees with me.
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Conduits are not the typical “meaningful choice” you make in an RPG though. I guess, in a game like this, it may be the only vehicle with which to provide the player a consequence for their decision, but this isn’t the norm.
I don’t want to be insulting to anyone. There are people who are indeed much more skilled than I am at WoW, and I want them to have fun. The part that makes me sad is when their idea of fun is being better than others, because, reframe: their idea of fun is when everyone else is worse.
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Players don’t innovate in a game like this. They simulate and then disseminate.
Why do you want to vilify competition?
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WoW started out as an RPG and it is returning to its RPG roots. It has not been an RPG for many years. Ghostcrawler in fact proudly said “Bring the player not the class” as if that wasn’t a direct rebuke of what an RPG is. WoW stopped being an RPG for a period of time. WoW was an action game during the late cata, MoP, and WoD eras. Ghostcrawler viewed WoW as an action game, Ion is bringing it back to an MMO. Your “appeal to conservation” doesn’t work because what WoW was, was fundamentally wrong. WoW has only seen growth when it has been an RPG and seen the majority of its decline while it was an action game.
Cata, MoP, WoD, these have all been expansions that have seen a decline in subs. WoW has seen its only non-expansion uptick in subs within the last year.
Using the argument that non-RPG elements are RPG elements is nonsense. The game was proud of itself rejecting its own RPG roots. You’re allowed to have a different vision of the type of game WoW is, you may want WoW to be an action game, but it isn’t a “punishment” for WoW to be an RPG, it will simply be what it is.
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I don’t play WoW to compete. That’s not how this game started and it’s disgusting that it has turned into this.
But my problem is with forced competition. If you want to defeat the baddies, you need good gear. And to get good gear, you need to do things that foster a stressful and competitive atmosphere.
If anything Wotlk dks talent trees and how they worked for me was the pinnacle of wow. People could tank and dps in all specs. It was very innovative.
Wow started as a mmorpg that was made very casual friendly, unlike other mmos at the time and shined because of how the game punished you less for you choices/decisions/failures than other mmos. And it kept going that way.
I can guarantuee you that there would be more people joining a server where you can swap covenants and conduits don’t break than not.
I assure you, no one competing cares about anyone that’s sitting on the sidelines. Your own insecurity is causing you to feel this way.
Look at Zoumz progression. Do you think he cares about competing against us, with no mythic content down? He’s competing against the people participating in the race.
Pretty much, these people might not want to admit it but Ion is being quite clear on how rpgs and WoW is supposed to work, if they dont like the RPG direction the game is headed they probably shouldnt be playing any games with RPG in their genre.
His own quotes:
“The decision of how to customize your soulbinds in a way that hopefully makes you a little be different than other people”
“The build you have gravitated towards that has these strenghts and weaknesses that ther eis a core of RPG customization that lies in those differences”
*"“As opposed to if it is just a checklist and everyone ends up ultimately being identical and you are either following the ““right”” path or you are doing it ““wrong”” and there’s conformity or you know going your own way and thus doing it ““wrong””. NOTHING IS TERRIBLY INTERESTING ABOUT THAT”"
“Product of choices YOU MADE”*
Based on those quotes it is clear he doesnt want people to obsessively min max therefore having identical characters with no difference and that people should themselves gravitate towards a build they enjoy instead of copying what icy veins tells them.
These are the wordsof the lead dev, like it or not.
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And it also lost a ton of subs. If one is to say that the game was meant to carry on its trajectory, the trajectory would have taken it to an early grave based on what we can see in the data. I would say a line of logic that supports WoW killing itself in order to make the game more and more and more casual friendly is probably not the one you want to be making.
Pay to win games also generate a lot more revenue than buy to play games because it turns out people like making things easier for themselves. I guarantee you that you will see a lot more people joining a server where conduits are completely open and free than a one where they’re locked. This doesn’t really help your argument, it simply shows players prefer an easier road.
If you want to do a random BG for fun, you have to do this stuff to be relevant. I don’t want to have to do competitive PvE content to enjoy/not get one-shot in random BGs with my friends.
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For many reasons. Trying to pinpoint one is a game you can’t really win.
Yes basicly. Players are ready to disreguard rpg values any second that they have a negative impact on them. Players don’t care that much about those. It’s only an added difficulty it doesn’t bring anything interesting to the game for a lot of people.
That’s another problem entirely. I’m sure most PvPers are unhappy they have to PvE to get gear to compete in PvP. You’re not the only one in that boat.
This is a serious issue I agree with.
EVERYONE NO MATTER HOW CASUAL SHOULD HAVE A WAY TO SLOWLY UPGRADE THEIR GEAR.
Not only does it gives casual players something to do, it makes players spend more time in game and feel they have something to do instead of log in 2 nights a day for mythic raid night.
As a person with 470-475 pieces from m+ and mythic raid bosses I do not feel threatened that a casual might manage to upgrade their gear to the same ilvl through ultra slow grinds.
I am not afraid of casuals having gear because gear is a tool of the game, NOT YOUR SELF WORTH DEPENDENCY (Yet it becomes clear gear is what they put their worth in, because they tell themselves they are “worthy” and “deserving” and if a casual gets a mythic ilvl peace they dont “deserve” it, the words show how this is about their self worth being attached to gear, if everyone has access to gear, they cant feel special anymore)
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Yes, because the class was flexible (although also overpowered).
But, in an effort to solve balancing problems that was taken away. No more warrior arms tanking, for example.
They “solved” the cookie cutter problem by making every spec cookie cutter, the only choice we now have is what color sprinkles to put on top. Also, some sprinkles are colorless and/or made of arsenic. Also some cookies are default smaller than others, and they won’t fix it because you get 2-4 cookie molds per package.
It’s not about getting the max gear but making all content have rewards. Raids always have been about gear. If you want to add really cool cosmetics instead on each boss I’m open but it won’t happen.
And as long as gear will be the main rewards of raids, then no you can’t get all of it outside of it. It’s about playing the world of warcraft, the whole word. Not only farming the same content for perfect bis.
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Not sure where you’re going with this, as long as there is a choice there will be a cookie cutter choice. But giving the opportunity for people to go outside of it is better than making the choice for them by not letting them switch. How often you should be able to make that choice or how you should be able to is to consider, but going about it like it should be punishing is not the way to go.
Making it too easy to switch to whatever the community decides is the optimal configuration means people will be expected to switch. All the time, every time.
The more difficult, slow, or expensive it is to switch the less likely the community will apply that pressure, outside of say, mythic progression guilds.
That seems to be the direction they are taking now, and I think it is a good one.
When there is essentially one (or in rare cases, two) builds for a spec, you have people giving each other crap for talent choices in LFD content. That’s stupid, and a problem blizzard created - they should have known better with this game’s community.
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This is an odd mindset to have.
The people you do dungeons or raids with aren’t your enemies. With personal loot, you don’t even have to compete against them for loot.
There’s no competition within PvE unless you seek it out, whether that’s having a leaderboard mentality, whether it be for progression or parses.
If your goal is simply to do the content at your own pace and improve over time, you’re competing against nobody but your past self.
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