I had accidently posted a topic I meant to post here in the Community Council forums and despite this it drummed up a lot of discussion on the mistake the players feel was made in relation to the change of ZC rares very early into the patch.
We still to this day were never told what the primary objective of the caverns was and I think we deserve to be told at least this much.
I just hope that Blizz can learn from the huge mistake they made with the caverns and not do it again. Why make rares and put much sought after drops on them (pets, toys, mounts, drakewatch scripts) if they were not the primary objective of a zone.
I don’t understand what you’re saying the mistake is?
You’ve referenced it several times and not actually told us what the problem is.
I’m not even sure what this means. The primary objective of any zone is to tell a story, is it not? I believe Zaralek has done that with the questline leading up to Aberrus.
And since when are rares the “primary objective”? They’re hardly rares anymore (not like they were in BC/WotLK), they’ve been used as cosmetic grabs for several expansions now.
Were rares the main part of Tanaan Jungle? Of Zereth Mortis? of Nazjatar? No more so than Zaralek Cavern is. I consider all these zones to be very similar - which is objectively true because they all serve the same purpose. Unlock a new faction, tell the story about getting to the new raid, and offer some treasurers/rares/cosmetics to hunt down if you choose to.
Not sure what the big mistake is here, to be fully honest.
Sorry I just assumed everyone who’s been here since 10.1 release knew about the change they made to rares in the Caverns 2 weeks after the patch was launched.
They made a change to how rares worked 2 weeks into 10.1 patch being live and absolutely no body liked it. They made it so you can only kill rares ever 4 days since the last time you killed it and it destroyed the Caverns as a whole. On top of that they claimed to have increased the drop rate son rares to compensate for this but they really did not. It took a seperate post to highlight the issue using one rare as an example and they seemed to just take that example as the only rare with an issue and boosted only IT’s drop rate.
The mistake is that this change was even made.
For refrence Caverns had lots of people in it the first two weeks. After this change was made that severely dwindled making group content harder.
So I had asked if the team would address the fact that the rares are not easily solo’d and that the player base had moved on from the caverns. You can listen to Ion’s response here:
The answer he gives is to use the group finder feature… But it’s hard to do that when there are rarely any groups that are up in there.
I touched up on this in the GD discussion that the only reason some people go down there anymore is for one rare in particular; Karokta. Sure you might have someone put up a group finder that says “ALL RARES UP - ZC” but how many people will join for Karokta then dip? The answer is a lot.
The key point remains is that if the change to rares had never happened then the zone would still have a decent amount of people running through it without the need to look in group finder for a group.
Another thing that many pointed out in the GD discussion is that content patches are moving too fast. We dont have enough time to really simmer in the content before a new thing comes out and everyone flocks to that, however with the changes to ZC happening not even 3 weeks after it was released, it essentially killed that content faster before new content could be released to replace it. This is the mistake they need to learn from.
I guess TLDR: Content was killed before it had time to really flourish.
Idk how to quote but regarding your last paragraph, i don’t necessarily agree that this is the fault of content cadence. It is, instead, the fault of how that content is designed to remain relevant only until the next patch is out. If there’s a path of least resistance to something, players will always only take that - in this case the time rifts, but once before the forbidden reach and others. The cavern’s design, revolving around almost exclusively killing rares, was flawed to begin with, and wouldn’t stand a chance of people lingering if there was nothing else to do.
Would the answer to this poor design really be to just… Suffer it for longer by releasing content more slowly? I think ensuring that that content remains interesting through cosmetics, flat out interesting gameplay or other such things would be a better alternative.
The change to rares happened not even 3 weeks after 10.1 went live. This is when the Caverns died. 10.1.5 the replacement patch with Time Rifts came out 2 weeks ago. So basically we had a 2 months of people not going to Caverns after the hotfix to change how rares work because of how bad the hotfix affected the activity in the Caverns. People still did Forbidden Reach in this time. The hotfix in question MADE people suffer because of a poor developer choice. Before this hotfix Caverns had people in it every day of the week to kill rares and do whatever it is that caverns had to offer.
I will reiterate that they killed the Caverns way before 10.1.5 came out. This was not a recent change to how the caverns works to siphon people to do Time Rifts. It was a May 22nd Hotfix if you want to look for it in patch notes.
The lockout of rares and the drops you’re actually going for (mounts, pets, and dragon skins) seem to be very rare and I just gave up. It’s not worth it… Together with the fact that it takes ages to kill a rare due to the number of people actually being there.
This is not about using the LFG tool or not, it’s about yet another feature not respecting our time.
