That IS true for many of us - especially when it’s punitive.
Making the covenant system flexible would take away the value for a lot of us that prefer to see players be punished. We want everyone to play how we want, in a way that limits players agency and spreads consequences across the game as much as possible.
Having a flexible system would still involve consequences and meaningful choices, and it would increase player agency - but it would completely get rid of the punishment that we derive our value from.
Great, but they also locked most of the Legion abilities behind talents when they should have been given to us as baseline abilities. They didn’t fold in a lot of the gold Artifact traits. I am confident in saying that BfA has the worst class design of any expansion.
But we already have the option to play the game in this manner.
My guild and a couple communities I’m a part of play the game specifically in this manner today. Covenants being swappable wouldn’t get in the way of us being able to continue playing with that approach.
The only difference is that the system would impose that style of play on everyone. Which is completely unnecessary.
Flexibility is the opposite of meaningful. People can argue definition but ‘meaningful choice’ is widely accepted as making a choice with lasting consequences. If you can change based on the situation there is no lasting consequence. What you eat for lunch is not a meaningful choice. Who you marry is a meaningful choice. Both of those have been given as examples earlier in this thread and serve to show the difference well.
That may be the criteria you place on “meaningful choice”. But that’s not what everyone uses as their criteria.
For those other people - that’s where the punishing nature of the system comes into play. They are essentially chastised for wanting to play the game across various contents and roles.
They are forced to play the way we want and they enjoy the game less for it.
Some of us value this about the system specifically because of this objective aspect of it. It’s needlessly punishing when players could still choose to play in a more restrictive manner if they’d prefer.
I haven’t heard anyone accept you say you want to punish others. I’m only hearing people who like the way RPG’s used to be designed before the newer generations of people whined their way into having developers make RPG’s the way they want them. Ion has expressed interest in returning to the games RPG roots through the comments he’s made in the interviews and many of us are glad for it.
Not all of WoW’s community places Diablo 3 as the pinnacle of RPG goodness, where you can swap everything around freely as the situation dictates. Many of us place RPG’s that forced you to choose x, but that means you don’t get y, but you’re still perfectly viable to beat the entire game as the pinnacle. Many of us just think if you’re given everything, then it’s boring, versus having to make a choice and getting creative to excel in that choice, or grouping with others to mitigate the consequences of that choice, which a fun part of MMORPG’s.
Ralph, Argorwal, myself and a handful of others have expressed our values being on forcing others to play the way we want.
Everything you stated in your second paragraph is still possible and currently exercised by players in the game today. Allowing for flexibility doesn’t prohibit players from still going about the game in a more traditional fashion. That’s why the current system is valuable to many of us - it’s needlessly punishing when everything you listed could still be available to players.
When you can choose anything freely anytime you want, it becomes a non-choice. The ability you HAVE to select is the ability that the team expects you to select to get an invite to the group.
This is in contrast to if everyone is having to choose 1 covenant, and thus everyone is in the same boat. Excluding another player based off their covenant choice is moronic when you know someone else can do that to you when you apply for a group your covenant isn’t the best at. How do I know people will adapt? Years of experience in MMORPG’s, including WoW, where due to the difficulty in changing specs or classes, they invited anyone into the group as long as they had the gear for the task.
I’m in favor of the system because it punishes players needlessly.
I respectfully disagree with your argument. It’s ironic that I can see the logic of the arguments posed by those against the system and still be in favor of it, yet you continue to push with the “being able to choose is not a choice” argument.
I’m not really sure how to even go about responding to that kind of logic when it, at it’s premise, appears to not use definitions for words that are the exact opposite of what I’m familiar with.
Choosing inherently has choice and free-will tied to it.
No one HAS to select anything they don’t want to. Players in current retail already play the game this way. They play with specs and talents that make no sense for competitive play, and are happy doing so. Did the game need to force everyone to choose a spec/talent combination to be stuck with in order for this to happen? Nope.
And that’s where the value for some of us comes into play - the system is needlessly punishing. If that makes you uncomfortable for some reason - I guess that’s on you. But objectively - it’s accurate. You don’t need to force players into playing how you want to play, when you can already play the game in that way.
No it doesn’t.
It gives you meaningful choice more often when you can change.
You choose to spec to PVP, or to AOE, single target raids, short fights, long fights, hard fights, easy fights, etc.
All covenant does is make you pick the common scenario and hope your choose isn’t too bad when you want to do other content.
Covenants would be more of a personal choice without the abilities. That’s a fact. Not an opinion.
This. Having the option to change things up is meaningful for many players, including myself.
You may feel that restrictions add to the “meaning” of the choice - but other people feel that the freedom to think, strategize, or even just diversify adds “meaning” to our choices.
The ability to actually have on-going choices throughout the expansion and across tiers is also something we feel that contributes to “meaning”.
The game already locks you into your race and class - there’s no need to compound a new system on top of these restrictions.
In a perfect world you all would be correct. Unfortunately, WoW brought a lot of players into the market who place a higher importance on optimal performance over being inclusive. Therefore, we have an illusion of choice under your proposal. You have to choose the most optimal if you want to increase your chance of getting accepted to PUG raids/mythic+. That’s the elitist community choosing that, not Blizzard.
You give people hard choices that aren’t easily switched, and everyone has to live and let live, because they’re in the same boat. Then everyone is free to choose based on what they jive with more or find most fun. This is consistent with every great RPG out there. Swapping abilities as you see fit is not.
If you want that kind of gameplay, there are better genres for that. I recommend the ARPG Diablo3, and MOBA’s like LoL. Shooters are also better for the competitive scene.
I think people will still decline and remove players from groups just like they do now. Forcing players to stick with a covenant isn’t going to stop group/raid leaders from discriminating.
Retail WoW doesn’t lock you into your race and class. Everything about retail WoW makes it very easy to swap to what’s most optimal for any given raid tier or piece of content you’re wanting to run. It takes days to level up a new race/class combo if that’s what’s most optimal. You can switch your spec with a click of a button if that’s most optimal. Same with talents.
Now years ago, it wasn’t easy to do any of those things. So you saw more diversity in group compositions, which makes everything more interesting, and thus more fun to me. The greater the barrier of entry is for swapping your choices, the more players have to adapt and learn to progress with what’s not optimal. To me, that’s more fun than just picking what’s mathematically the best solution to every problem.
Those of us who value the RPG way of playing the game wouldn’t want to be a part of those kinds of elitist groups in the first place.
We’d much rather just play with our friends that play with the same mentality.
Giving players the option to choose which style of play they’d prefer doesn’t impact those of us who value an RPG oriented style of play, because we’d actually have a choice.
If you force players to play one way - those of us on the RPG side of the line don’t really gain anything for it, and those on the other side of the line get punished when they want to change roles and types of content.
For content purists, those who only play in 1 piece of end game content, you may be right. But most players don’t play that way. For the majority of players, in one piece of content they may have what’s optimal, but another they may not be. Since everyone understands that, I doubt they’ll discriminate due to covenant choice, because if they do that discrimination will only come back full circle and bite them in the butt.
It also wasn’t necessary because the game was a lot easier and didn’t require optimizing the way it does today.
But even under that dull environment - it wasn’t more interesting or fun for a lot of players. I mean back in vanilla it may have been at least better than other games that existed back then. But it still had the potential for all the improvements we’ve already seen over the years.