Hey devs, with how bonkers the numbers are for sanctified gear with the trinkets, there’s a ton of pressure to do invasions for the Naxx launch, but the invasions are really really unfun and make me not want to play the game at all if that’s what I have to do to help my guild clear.
Seriously: I hate these invasions. I’d rather you just give me the trinket and cleansing gear and increase its level each week like the ICC buff that it obviously is.
The design is… not good. These invasions were designed in the year 2005 for servers with a couple of thousand total players on them. The player densities on their new mega-servers (with horrible or complete lack of layering technology) are at least an order of magnitude higher.
And yet the design and mechanics are identical. They didn’t increase the number of zones the invasions happen in, or the number of crystals, or add shared tagging on the Shadows of Doom.
The shared drop mechanic for the Remnants of Valor was a step in the right direction but even that implementation was not executed well - it’s a normal occurrence for the doom crystals to despawn before being able to loot because of “that object is busy” errors from the literal 400 people crowding the area. (Blizz, you have the tech for interactable objects to create items into people’s inventories that are unique - hello Soulwells! - why not do that instead of this old broken method?)
The best(only) way currently to make any sort of substantial progress on the chests or collecting necrotic runes is to do invasions at 4 am and have macros/autohotkey scripts set up to talk to the NPCs. But not everyone can, or should need to, go to measures like this.
When I’m at a crystal and I see people run up and say “inv” I literally laugh to myself. What possible incentive do I have to invite someone to my group? So they can improve the chances at tagging a Shadow by a negligible amount, and decrease my chances of winning 30 runes and whichever chest drops from 100% to 50%? Absolutely not. The design incentivizes people to be toxic to each other, and I hate it. I hate when the game forces me to choose between [not being a sociopath] and [any reward whatsoever]. And this is coming from someone with a near 95% successful tag rate on Shadows from my macro setup and good ping. I personally had no issue getting the runes and epics I needed. But I only got those things at the extreme expense of others, and I hate hate hate it.
The big argument from Blizzard or others might be “there will be plenty of time to collect your runes etc. over time and the competition will die down later” but how is that an excuse to make interacting with an event an absolute nightmare for any interim amount of time? The binary between “enormous rewards” and “basically nothing” in direct competition with hundreds of other players is horrible design and they should know better by now.
So yeah, Blizzard, please use some creative problem solving to redesign some of these mechanics since it is a system you are actually intending players to interact with for several months into the future (i.e. Remnants for Seal of the Dawn progression). Alternatively, turn on your sharding tech. No one in SoD cares about gameworld immersion (mostly because you killed it yourselves with mega-servers and layering in Classic). Constraining layers to be world-wide and not zone-specific is totally incongruent with these types of player densities in hyperlocalized areas.
lol. i’m too busy now to do anything in game. i’ll just wait for the catch up mechanic.