Not certain if this may have been discussed or implemented as I have been out of WOW since WoD expansion - would like to see improved account accessibility when it comes to gold, materials, etc. tied to an account between different servers.
It sucks to want to try playing on a new server but have to start from scratch, can’t transfer stuff between characters if on a different server - such as gold and materials accumulated in previous server stays on that server (unless you do a character transfer I guess? but that still costs).
Make certain stuff deposited in personal bank accessible regardless of server you are on? If mounts can be accessed between servers, why not gold/materials?
I just pooled all of my resources on my old server onto an alt before xferring them to a new server. There’s a gold limit so sometimes you gotta buy some high ticket items on the AH then relist them after the xfer goes through to get your money back.
Still costs $25 USD per character transer I assume, such bull and tauren$hite…but yeah seems to be best and only way to do it. Point being…room for improved accessibility there.
Yeah I dunno why they don’t experiment with a shared account wallet of sorts for specific resources. Much as I get tired of seeing myself continually cite GW2 as an example, I have to, because they do it and it works well.
Honestly, I feel like the Allied Race experience should be the baseline once you reach a certain level of veterancy as a player.
Just starting out? You start at level 1 and go through the motions (and this experience is always available to opt back into). Leveled a bunch of characters before? Cool, here, you can choose to start at level 20 with some gold and equipment.
Speaking of which, it’d be neat if allied races started out with like ten gold. Just enough to slap on a transmog. It’s a minor annoyance, but every time I’ve made one I’ve had to log back out and send them some couch change to be able to have the look I wanted.
I keep in touch with a lot of my old classmates (we were in a game design program in our technology department), and some of them were adamant that for an MMO to be an MMO, it MUST be grindy, and while I can see how you can break any series of tasks down to a grind, there are bearable grinds and then there are the grinds which feel like a chore. I know for some people they can find them relaxing, but if I HAVE to grind something, I’d rather there be things attached to make it more fun.
Like folks have told me that leveling in this game is a grind which I dooooon’t know if I entirely agree with? I mean doing dungeons again and again can definitely constitute as one, don’t get me wrong, but the quests and exp to completion ratio is just so much better than how it was in vanilla.
Sure, but just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something.
And, indeed, grinds are inescapable in MMOs but there’s a huge difference between the grinds of, say, Burning Crusade and the grinds of Battle for Azeroth.
In BC, you had to grind for reputation to unlock heroic dungeons, for example. But you had a number of options for doing so: questing, objectives and multiple dungeons. And since you needed loot, anyway, running dungeons for the grind both geared you up and taught you the mechanics so that when you did find the heroics, you were set.
Whereas in BfA, the grind is the content. Once you’re done with it, all you get is an end to the grind. It’s like setting someone on fire and then offering them a fire extinguisher as a reward. Are they happy they aren’t on fire? Sure, but they would have been happier if they hadn’t been set on fire in the first place.
I never in my life imagined I would actually look back fondly on BC rep grinds.
I think part of it is because the grinds didn’t feel quite as central to the experience and quite as tedious (as you pointed out, there were multiple ways to complete a certain grind). And some grinds offered some interesting, flashy rewards, but you could absolutely forego them and move on. See: Netherwing.
Arguably the difference between something like the Netherwing grind and the grind to get the allied races for BfA is that unlike Netherwing, they were emphasized from day one as an important focus of the expansion. Their stories were central to it, after all. I just wish if there was going to be a grind, it wasn’t such a damn long one.
I see where you’re getting at, but I’m not so sure I entirely agree on your comparison between BfA and BC. One of reasons I felt 2.4 was the best patch of BC is because they got rid of attunements, or rather it wasn’t something you were gated out of. Back in the day, I knew a lot of people who weren’t able to progress due to not being able to kill the last bosses of TK/SSC, what have you (it’s been years. I’m going to have to look up the whole process again).
BfA’s grind feels much more passive, like you don’t have to go out of your way to partake in it. To me it feels more like a background thing, or at least AP and Reputations feel that way to me. Like you mentioned with BC, you needed loot so you’d just acquire things in what felt like a natural way. I’m not so sure how I’d feel if dungeon difficulties had a longer grind to get through. Then again, I suppose I did get Mythic SoB unlocked as early as I possibly could, so there’s that.
Part of me wonders if the grinding in BfA would be more tolerable if the story wasn’t so pants-on-head ridiculous. I didn’t really mind Suramar because the story was decent, the NPCs were likeable, and we just hadn’t yet tumbled straight into MoP II yet at that point.
I didn’t really pay much attention to the rep grind in BfA because there are so many different ways to gear and earn rep that it was more or less out of mind for me. And there are better rewards (long term) than the rewards for BC. There also were a lot more reps in BC as well and, to me at least, it felt a lot more grindy and tedious than BfA.
Part of this is because there was so much less content in BC. You basically had BGs, arenas, dungeons, heroic dungeons, raids, and daily quests. I was my guilds main tank so I remember running so many heroics trying to get fellow guildies geared and attuned. Anyone fell behind in rep and attunements, it kept your entire guild from starting a new raid on time. You’d log in, do your 25 dailies every day and grind dungeons until you could do heroics and grind them until you finished attunements and unlocked raids.
At least now heroics and raids and other content aren’t locked behind rep grinds. And there are so many ways to get rep. We went from having “kill 25 mobs” and “loot 15 items” dailies in BC to now having WQs for pvping, puzzles, raid mobs, crafting quests, dungeon quests, etc. If you play the game regularly you can easily meet any rep requirements by the time new stuff goes live. I don’t like mechagon that much so I skipped it for about a week and didn’t do but about half the dailies on the days i did go, never farmed rares or anything, and still somehow unlocked flying about a week ago. Rep comes pretty fast now and feels mostly passive (to me at least, others definitely might experience it differently).
Yeah, that’s one of the important things for me. Reps back in the day were pretty much mandatory if you wanted to experience the rest of the content (again, thank god for 2.4). I didn’t really do much raiding outside of the odd Kara back in the day, but it was something I had been wanting to do for some time way back when. Having to do all that work though? I mean, sure, it was “optional”, but I dunno… back then it didn’t feel like it.
These days it feels much more automatic. There’s always that initial period whenever a new patch drops that brings new reps, but since Legion, it’s never felt all that bad to me. Hell, most of the time I’d hit exalted, it resulted in a “Oh, hey. Neato.” I haven’t really paid it much mind this expansion either, and it’s made the game a lot more enjoyable tbh. Flying’s cool and all, but I got burnt out pretty bad last time I went about binging the content as quickly as I could, as if I had some sort of obligation to do it (which is part of the reason why I don’t do mythic raids anymore >_>). This game’s a lot more fun when you don’t make it a job.