I still think they should be available without the rep grind, and no amount of comments like “Well I did it so YOU should have to do it” and inane plot excuses such as “it doesn’t make sense for them to join your cause immediately” will make me think otherwise.
Buff trolls are pretty cool tho
Back when the concept first came out I had them all immediately because of playing the game. Thought surely they would only be rep-locked until BfA came out, but no.
It’s been over a year now and I’ve gotten more of the races and still think the unlock requirements are stupid. It drives people away from the game and it seems like a big waste of development time when they could sell far more race swaps if the races were just available from the get go.
Yes, but don’t you feel
accomplished?
Yes. And proud!
AR requirements aren’t an issue for me, and I think they’re fine as is. Legion AR’s have become easier to unlock with buffs to reputations gained, and BFA will surely get the same thing at some point.
Speaking personally (that’s the important part), I find AR’s fine because I always grind my reputations to exalted anyway. Nothing ever stops me from doing that. I have always been a completionist in that manner.
That being said, if someone finds something to not be worth it or too much trouble, then simply don’t do it. But I don’t think the requirements themselves are an issue.
I have all the reps done and I would not care the least if they removed the requirements tomorrow. It is just poor game design.
I am actually feeling a bit confused. Here I main Horde, yet have unlocked DI’s and KT’s. The first allied race I’ll unlock on Horde side will be fuzzy goblins. 
I’m sorry you don’t see the value of hard work.
The only Allied Races that should have their grinds retired are the ones from past expansions. Velfs, Lightforged, Nightborn, and Highmountain really, really need to get unlocked from the start now, but as long as it’s BFA, DID, Kultirans, Maghar, and Trolls should 100% have the grind.
The grind is only an issue when you’re running dead and irrelevant content for an evergreen reward.
MMOs basic features have always been grinds and timegates. Lore is built around these things that are meant to keep you playing and subscribed.
If someone is unwilling to do a very basic grind of unlocking an AR then they didn’t really want the AR that bad and smart money would bet that they wouldn’t be subscribed much longer if they even had the AR.
The unlocking should make sense, like how it went for the Zandalari, KT or Nightborne. The storylines fit and rep is appropriate. The rep required should be less, OR they should give you more for doing the storyline.
DID, Velf, LFD, Mag’Har… they all seem so… unconnected and far more annoying to grind.
The problem isn’t the grind, but the fact that there’s only one efficient way of doing it, and that’s through dailies.
Like, I get it. It’s an MMO. Grinds are somewhat intrinsic to the concept.
But why give us only one real avenue of achieving these things? More importantly, why timegate it?
I think I would have significantly less of a problem with allied races if they just stopped me from getting them in the time span I want to get them. It feels so counterintuitive to just tell a player, who is actively paying for this game, “no sorry you can’t get access to this content until you tediously log in for the next month, maybe sooner if RNG is kind to you”.
Okay I’m with you on this. This is pretty inexcusable. Timegating is pretty much universally bad, but Kultirans, Zandalari, Dark Iron, and Mag’har pretty much just get passively unlocked through endgame play. The principle of timegating is bad, but for the current content races, I think it’s paved over slightly. The Legion ARs are the biggest issue because they’re timegated and behind content nobody in their right mind wants to play.
That is just…untrue.
They put in some nice extras in Naz. Where you can find (cursed) items you can turn in for rep/goodies. They should include such things in future rep grinds.
For Zandalari, they could have made blood trolls drop totems or other items you could turn in for rep. Drop-rate much like the items in Naz or like the Essence of Mortality.
Things you can farm that make sense to the reputation required.
Dailies have always been the main form of reputation grinding since this game’s original incarnations. Remember TBC and grinding out Skettis rep for your Nether Ray? Or remember doing Netherwing rep in SMV?
How about Wrath? Argent Tournament grounds and the like. Cata? Your Firelands dailies, of course. MoP? Patch 5.0, World of Daily Craft.
You get the point. Sometimes you can just grind mobs. But the entire point to reputations and attaining said reputation throughout WoW’s history over the course of expansions has been daily quests after you complete the stories.
But it’s not about what you want. It’s never been about what we want. X has a requirement. Y must be done to meet X. It is up to us if it is worth doing Y and achieving X.
I don’t think this is something that has to be said either. Allied Races are unlockable content in video games, just like we played Resident Evil for hours after practicing routes to unlock the infinite rocket launcher and just like we played the tournament modes in Twisted Metal over and over in the hopes of unlocking Minion.
AR’s are no different.
Considering that there is an interview out there where Ion explicitly stated that future ARs (BfA ARs) would NOT be rep grinds unless it made sense (and then explicitly said the Zandalari are one such that will have a rep grind), but that most of them will just be quest chains or other unique achievements, that we wouldn’t have to do the same mindless rep grind for every AR…
He lied to us all.
I’ll always find it funny that people complain that you have to /gasp play the game to earn things in the game.
Grinds yes, timegates, no.
Classic WoW was cleared in 5 days because it wasn’t time gated. Does that mean they didn’t grind? No, they grinded harder than anyone else. OP’s issue is that there are daily hardcaps for rep, which don’t allow him to persue the allied races at a pace he wants to do.
In Classic, to get my BiS gear, I played 8 hours every day for a few days, just slammed it out, and when I came out the other end, I was in BiS gear. Uncapped grinds are generally just better, it lets casual players unlock them slowly at their own pace, it lets players who want a less casual approach to insert their IV drip of Monster Energy into their arm and just grind for 18 hours straight to unlock it.
That is a very, very shallow and misleading explanation of how games work.
Except these games have different variables and are intrinsic to that repetition, as they rely on further playthroughs being different from the last.
Mastering all routes in Resident Evil is a challenge. Doing the same daily quest for weeks in WoW is not.
Ya but previously it was for a mount or a tabard… nothing as major as a playable race.
People didn’t buy TBC for a chance to earn the Nether Ray, people bought BfA to be a void elf or Zandalari troll…