As far as I remember, there were no fights you couldn’t get help on from others on that part of the quest.
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Screw that. I have the same damn cloak I don’t even want to use because it doesn’t have the effect. And if I want to lord over the fact I did it in current content I would put on my title!
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As a general statement? I actually disagree
In this particular case… don’t know, I don’t think it matters, not even to people that say it matters to them not really (like sure, folks want it but there’s no overwhelming benefit or gain to those who want it besides getting to see Ordos once and then forget that it exists)
WoW has stayed relevant specifically because they don’t do what other companies do, which alienates some players, but keeps the vast majority playing
Could they? Sure
But, who would it benefit? The primary playerbase or folks on forums who proudly say things like “Haven’t played since X” and memes non-stop about “dead game” - with that in perspective, one can quite easily see why this hasn’t been ever a priority of Blizzard’s
These cloak toys are a good middle ground, where it retains relevancy, and provides more people with something they care about (because collecting toys)
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No, in a “Breeding the FOMO” sense.
Blizzard is horrible with FOMO and most other gaming companies have learned that it actively chases people away from their games.
Even a lot of battle pass games have started making it so you can buy the battle pass and work at it any time you want, so it’s a do at your own pace thing, rather than limited time. (If I support battle pass is another story, just saying that this type of system is better than the FOMO Battle Pass system)
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Who cares. Give back Saberon form to Druids. Then I might actually play one.
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I 100% agree with you, on both of your posts.
The irony to me is that FOMO in this game bothers me so much that I almost drop pursuing whatever it is I’d be missing out on purely on principle because I know it’s a business scheme to keep me playing. I get the game’s a business and they have to keep the lights on somehow, but it’s manipulative as all hell and I can’t help seeing FOMO tactics as turning me into a cashcow to me milked.
In a couple of weeks, it’ll be 10 year anniversary since MoP was released, and over the course of that time, I’ve met plenty of players who came to the game, fostered their skill to be way better than my own, yet found themselves barred from content they’d have had they only played back in X expansion. I’ve heard people tell me that it would be “spitting in the face of their achievements from back then” and I can’t think of anything more ridiculous than putting that much stock in pixels.
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Again, I’m telling you this: yes, the game has elements of this “fear of missing out” … and its been part of the game since Vanilla even to the point of promoting and encouraging harassment between people looking to have the Grand Marshal and High something-lord titles for a week
In terms of raids it was much more a case of “You sit out a raid you miss out on dkp and thus’ you miss out on future gear you need”, and a myriad of other things
Yes, the game has had limited availability to gear, titles, and more
The thing about “FOMO” though is that it exists in two aspects:
- A person-to-person interaction where someone is pushing someone else to do something ‘because its a once in a lifetime opportunity’ - this is the bad and dangerous part about it
- Limited availability of an item because it has limited availability
And as much as we can hate Blizzard and other games for doing this because digitalized mediums, means that there’s an infinite quantity of everything … but if you actually do this and treat people like this, you bankrupt yourself … because this goes against human nature, there’s several experiments where this kind of ‘upfront honesty’ and ‘removal of limited availability’ has outright killed entire franchises, one of the best case studies of this is JcPenny’s removal of sales, to eliminate this exact aspect that folks love to condemn
And this is why what you are saying here is such a false equivalence:
Other companies haven’t gotten rid of FOMO, they have changed how and what they make their game’s supposed target to be, and this has caused a lot of issues with other games, I can’t speak much for FFXIV as we are talking about MMOs but, let’s just say that the game is designed to not retain players - they want players to pick it up and put it down, and I’m not able to find a quote but I believe in Jesse Cox’s video where he talked about a year of FFXIV he mentions this and… yah’, I can believe that - because you do that with any RPG, you put it down and then later on when you want to play the story again you pick it back up
And in terms of games like ESO which would be another contestant for this when you look at the overarching design decisions of making all content relevant, you can make an anti-FOMO argument … except they have the store, which provides you with stuff if you stay subscribed, and you lose out on that if you unsubscribe
I love GW2 but they have events, they have the store again, they have sales, and so and so on
Games relies on the positive elements of FOMO … because without 'em, they can’t maintain a server, that’s why when folks make these types of arguments … you WILL always find a FOMO-aspect of a game if it has an online component, not if it has a ‘play with your friends’ element but if you can play against or with other players online, for all intent and purposes, all of those games will have FOMO elements tied somewhere in 'em, because they have to
Look, we can debate whether this is good or not, but we have to discuss that from a psychology perspective if we do that - not from a business or even design perspective first and foremost, sorry but FOMO isn’t bad, heck the only argument that I have seen that has some legs to it is that FOMO is ableist … and it is … if you are a person and trying convince someone else to do something which has limited availability … FOMO’s only argument against it, is if people say to each others (not companies, but companies certainly can do it as well, and that’s something one definitely can discuss whether it is informing players or if it has something else to it) to try to get people to do stuff they don’t want or even can safely do
But, Grimgears is right!
The problem is that… that’s actually the point of it
And its what’s keeping games online, so whether one likes it or not, unless one can find away around the human psyche … this is actually the reason to keep it ultimately
Again though, there are ways around it and these cloaks becoming toys is a good start, one can definitely do more, but its a good start, since folks love to collect toys (and for reference, yes, I never specified it but I am in favour of these toys providing access to Ordos - I don’t think its a selling point but, I think it would be a good thing if they did that)
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Except there WAS a time when the devs didn’t do this in many facets of the game. Only a few instances come to mind where they did it in the Pre-MoP days with things like a few titles here and there, and those were some of the most successful days of the game. FOMO had nothing to do with its survival - it was product innovation with a good USP that hooked people.
I think the first major instance of FOMO I saw in the game that was advertised more heavily than things like the A’dal title or the Naxx titles/meta mount was the addition of the MoP Challenge Mode rewards. The initial reasoning behind removing their acquisition was that there was no way the challenges wouldn’t be invalidated by power creep, even though the whole point of CM was to immunize the challenge to creep as much as possible. Rather than finding a work-around to keep the challenge valid, they decide to remove the method of acquisition, and we’ve had something like the MoP challenge rewards pop up and disappear over the course of the past ten years.
But now we DO have a system that allows for old content to be made relevant again, so if anything, now’s a perfect time to allow access to those challenges again. Having these things be made obtainable during things like Timewalking would be a good way of bringing a set of players back to the game and provide content to be reconsumed with minimal effort from the devs.
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Nice! I love the Mirror of Envious Dreams.
Sure, but you miss the entire point of what it is I am saying:
This has been the solution the entire time, and the hilarious part, is that its also a form of manipulating people into having limited amount of time to do it, but folks knows it comes and goes, meaning that folks who want to do it do it, and those who don’t, well they can always do it later, much later, but later
I would compare these cloaks, if they were to provide access to Ordos, to the Fractured Necrolyte Skull; the main selling point of the item is that it is a toy, and therefore folks will want to collect it
But it also provides easier access to the Black Temple, and Outland in general
This doesn’t have to do with FOMO sure, but this entire thing about the cloaks or Ordos isn’t about FOMO at all, not really, its about accessibility and availability to do whatever it is you wanna do - Ordos doesn’t drop anything that is exclusive to the big fiery beef man, so the idea is “I want to get in there, kill 'im, and then never come back”
Yes, one can provide means of providing people with access and availability to old content like these things, but you can’t use that as its selling point because it isn’t a selling point in WoW, as the game has had elements of FOMO since the days of vanilla, something more concrete was the first time they removed a raid namely Naxxramus to redeploy it in Wrath, so it was FOMO that allowed you to have more content for longer periods of time
Point is, I am all for this, but much like you can’t provide the old Mage Tower appearances directly, you can’t provide the cloaks or access to Ordos directly - you can do it through indirect means and that means that folks will actually care more about it, because there isn’t anyone who is actually thinking “I will only play this game if I get the old legendary cloak so I can enter Ordos arena” because if they did think that … they already left for non-MMO games
Shoulda seen the comments when they brought back the Mage Tower without the appearances. Wowhead is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Wish they would unlock purchase of the cloak account wide if you completed it on one character. It’s so good for TimeWalk, it would be nice to use on my alts.
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5 minute use 2hr cool I bet.
Ehh never got the legendaries. Shadowlands wings cosmetics way better then any cloak imo.
I’m not missing the point you’re making, I just disagree that the positive elements of FOMO is what keeps the lights on at Blizzard and is what primarily makes them money. You seem pretty convinced that is what keeps the game alive and I doubt I can convince you otherwise. Trust me, I do understand from a business standpoint why it’s profitable, but as a consumer, I find it annoying when they remove content.
The Black Prince storyline is a perfect example of this. It was a big part of MoP’s story, and the game is worse off with its removal. Agree to disagree I guess.
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Anytime someone thinks something digital is devalued you’re best off ignoring them.
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Then make an argument
My argument is that I agree with you but just not about FOMO as a whole because I don’t think people understand what the actual issues with FOMO is or how a digitalized market functions in relation to human psychology
If you can make an argument, then go ahead - I don’t think you have besides “There was a time before FOMO existed” and I vehemently disagree and stated why the game has had elements of limited availability despite being a digitalized product, meaning that they can if they so wanted to produce an infinite amount of quantity
I used an example in the original comment where franchises have tried to get rid of this ‘limited stock’-mentality and seen how the entire franchise went bankrupt as a direct result of it
Would this happen with WoW? We don’t know, but unless you can make an argument as to how to subvert the human psyche, you are kinda stuck arguing a point that has no alternatives unless you can actually find one
I stated why other games have FOMO-elements of it but we don’t refer to 'em as FOMO, we only hear about ‘fear of missing out’ on these forums because it was linked to a misunderstood article about social pressure and how it is ableist to try to pressure someone who would put their own life in danger to attend events they do not have the means, whether financially or physically, to do so safely
I miss the Black Prince’s storyline, I do
I don’t miss the grind but the alternative isn’t to put the quests back into the game, but to put a NPC that can summarize the story in-game, much the same way with Khadgar in WoD, Tirion Fordring in Wrath, the Dragon Aspects in Cata, Illidan in TBC, and whatever the mess of storylines one want to grab from original vanilla
You need to drive people to play the game, or else people leave, which is completely fine … if they didn’t have servers to maintain, so you either need to get subscriptions rolling in and/or subsidize the loss of income of subscriptions with for an example an in-game store
A lot of this sucks from a consumer perspective … but the alternative is essentially to not have it, at all, unless one can find a way to subvert the human psyche, and this is the main point I want to get at - we can find ways around it to make the game feel good for the majority of people by appealing to what folks actually want
Folks want to collect things? Oh-kay, here’s a cosmetic cloak from an old quest and hey, it has an additional benefit that it can be used to get access to the area - that would be neat, and even if they didn’t add the last part, its a cosmetic, its a toy, its a collectible, and that’s what the majority of WoW players care about
Were it the case that FOMO was the sole motivator to keep players playing, then I would agree with you, but the fact of the matter is that there’s multiple motivating factors as why people consume WoW, and the content being limited hasn’t always been a part of the equation. That’s just fact. Were it not for the content itself being revamped, pretty much all the vanilla raid instances would have remained in the game. Naxx 40 was only removed due to the purpose it served in Wrath.
And the cool thing about WoW is that they’ve driven players to play the game for years without limiting content. I used to raid way more back in Wrath through Mists, and the drive to get better gear and improve my character was the driving factor. None of that was time-limited and it’s still in the game for people who want to consume.
The motivation to keep people playing should come from the content being good and fun to play with, not by having a limited window of availability. You’re saying that it’s either having the FOMO or nothing at all with statement’s like this:
And again, I can’t begin to disagree more how the success of the game has been from things being limited or scarce. Were that the case, the game wouldn’t have found success to begin with. It isn’t what was keeping the lights on then, and it really isn’t now.
It was haha actually i’d like to see that questline available for any new player
The thing is that the game has always been supremely limiting towards players, and that’s not necessarily been a bad thing but rather just because some folks really has played WoW as a singleplayer game and back in the day everything was limited by the number of people who played the game
I don’t mean to insinuate that “FOMO makes WoW successful”, what I mean is that the design elements that makes WoW successful even to this day, almost 20 years later, is that it does its own thing in a very WoW-style of MMO, since now’a’days MMOs both work, feel, and play vastly differently
But that also comes into how availability and accessibility is treated in the game
And that means one has to talk about limited availability, which people on these forums have turned to mean ‘FOMO’ despite it not having anything to do with that (as ‘fear of missing out’ is a socially driven concept, where as companies drive engagement by limiting what’s available to consume on the market to control prices, in the physical its done through limiting physical access and in terms of digital elements its done by limiting the literally availability to it)
And things like Naxx being moved to Wrath is one of these things that increase the availability by making it no longer accessible in one of it’s forms - everything in the game has been time limited, we have known this ever since TBC, when they made going back to Azeroth a largely irrelevant portion of the game, of course we didn’t view in the same way but the entire game of WoW has always, come TBC, had elements of it that has been time limited, whether one wants to talk about titles, mounts, pets, or any myriad of different things but it didn’t feel like that back in the day because of the “hidden playerbase” most of the folks who naturally partook in these limited portions of the game didn’t know about (see how LFD in Wrath opened up dungeons to a lot of people for the first time and changed how the playerbase would interact with each others from then forward)