That is as stupid an argument as the flying vs no flying crowd… you do not have to fly, run on the ground while the ones who want to fly, fly. If you give someone an easier path they will take it 99/100 times. It is human nature. If you view the possible current covenant design as ‘punishment’ then yes I guess you will be playing a punishing game. Many players do not however and those appear to be the players Blizzard wants to appeal to.
Oh, you’re so adorable. I wish you were right.
Not everyone has friends that play video games. Not everyone has 10’s of hours a week to commit to a guild to make online friends either. I wish I still could play that way, but I can’t. So for most of us, we have to make do with PUGs groups to accomplish group activities. This isn’t bad either. After all, while guilds have always existed since the dawn of MMORPG time, PUGing has been the bread and butter of cooperative play.
I don’t think that’s a stupid argument - specifically because I know many players that do exactly this.
Not just with flying, but also with transmog. And they don’t want those features in the game removed, because they realize that other people enjoy them. They just prefer to play the game without those features, so they exercise their ability to choose not to without having the need to force others into doing the same.
I agree with you. Because fun is subjective, there are probably people who had more fun min/maxing and playing with others that were of like-mind. The problem is that as the years have progressed, design decisions have been friendlier to people who min/max versus players who just want to choose what they want and have fun. That’s why players in the latter group are fighting for this not to be changed. We want a design decision to be made in our favor for once. We already have to swap talents and be somewhat optimal if we want invites to groups. It’d be nice to be able to choose what covenant we want and for that choice to have meaning at the character power level. Just like RPGs of old.
I think restricting the covenants is just going to add one more layer to discriminate players with and will make pugging that much harder.
Plus - if you’re all for a more D&D RPG style approach, I don’t understand why you’re pugging. Seems a bit hypocritical to be using “RPG” as your argument when your example goes against the more traditional RPG approach.
I’m in the latter group - and I would prefer it be changed because I don’t need the system to be restrictive for me to be able to play the game in a more traditional RPG manner.
Definitely not at the cost of forcing others to play the game in a manner that punishes them.
Traditional? DAOC, COH, and SWG is about as traditional as it gets for MMORPGs. Your character choices had consequences. You needed others to cover your weaknesses. We leveled up entirely through groups by grinding mob camps for hours. This was done primarily through PUGing. You made a lot of friends in the process. You PUG’d in raiding and in RvR/PvP. PUGing is the bread and butter of grouping in MMORPG’s. Guilds are nice and I’d love to join one, but those that drive to complete content don’t have friendly schedules for those who have real life responsibilities and commitments.
I fall into the casual side of things and I don’t like that people are penalized for wanting to play across different types of content and/or are willing to play various specs to fill the needs of their group/raid.
I can and do play the game for fun under WoW’s current setup and if the covenants and abilities were made to be changeable, I could still play the game exactly how I’d like as a casual RP player and have fun.
No, it didn’t.
You know what happened?
People literally weren’t invited to raids. It wasn’t interesting at all unless you were one of the lucky classes.
Old WoW is a great example of why Covenants will be bad.
You’re wrong. They were 100+ player raids; everyone from players who specced tank, off tank, cc classes, healers, buffbots, and hybrids.
What are you even talking about now?
You do not think it is a stupid argument to argue that people should purposely gimp themselves while others do not instead of forcing all players to have a deficit of some kind? I do not know how to wrap my head around a statement like that. I do not have numbers to back anything up, and we all know the forums represent a very very small percentage of the player base. That said I would argue that a lot less people have an issue with the current covenant design than do not. I make that statement based on the percentage of players who play all three types of end game at a high level. If you do not this would have little to no impact on you. Gameplay decisions should not be based on a minority. Very likely in the 3-5% range.
I have to disagree here.
Most of the players in my guild are more laid back and play the game for fun, not to be competitive. The large majority of us don’t like the system being as restrictive as it is.
Giving a one-time choice limits the huge potential for player agency and exacerbates the punishment associated with it.
That’s why it seems like most of the people in favor of the current setup come off as wanting others to play the game in one particular way. It’s punishing in a game with so many ways to play within it, and when there’s so much variety and tiers of difficulty.
It’s just not a fun premise to be so restricted.
He said that you played traditional MMORPG’s only with friends, I gave examples from MMORPG’s that were as traditional as they get that it wasn’t that way; he stated that people still discriminated, which he was wrong; and here we are.
Then I wonder why Ion has stated that there’s already large contention with the current restrictions within the dev team itself.
Their response is simple - because they don’t see it as gimping themselves. They see it as playing the game the way they want. Other people having the ability to use those features doesn’t impact them.
It’s like running - some people hate running. They might ask “why would anyone go out and run around when they don’t have to???”.
Those who like running would respond “Because we enjoy running. And we don’t need everyone to be forced into running x miles a day in order for us to get the benefit/enjoyment of running.”
But he wasn’t wrong.
People did discriminate.
They discriminated more back then than they do now.
It’s not a one time choice. Blizzard has offered a way to switch covenants. The penalty sounds just as harsh as switching specs at end game early days WoW, which is what I think a MMORPG should have. You have to make a hard choice, but because this is a MMORPG, balance patches happen, so there are ways to reverse that choice that involves a core MMORPG mechanic (grinding).
What you all are wanting is a ARPG like Diablo 3. If I wanted to play that I’d go play that. I want to play a MMORPG with design decisions that have been core to the genre since 1998. Modern WoW has gotten away from those core designs and the game has suffered for it and the subset of the community that plays gatekeeper on harder content has gotten more oppressive in their desire for everyone to be optimal to get in.
If content needs to be toned down some to compensate, then so be it. But the choice to bring a player should be based on the relationship to that player, not how optimal their choices are. Because the player should be free to choose what is most fun to them. The onus is on Blizzard to make sure that any choice we make is viable for all content and the content is tuned to allow for that.
Others don’t think it should be this way.
Casual players can still make those kinds of decisions. There’s nothing preventing us from doing so unless you derive benefit from others having to play how you prefer to play.
Some people think wow has benefited because of it.
Personally, I think the system as it stands now will just make the “gatekeeping” and “oppression” worse. It’s just one more thing to remove a player for.
No they didn’t. In DAOC we invited the first 8 people that were ready to group up while leveling. In RvR, we filled roles. No matter what class/spec you were, if you qualified to fill that role, you were invited. Same thing in SWG and COH.
WoW made a huge splash in the genre due to their success at getting a lot of non-MMORPG types to play in this genre. It hasn’t been overall good for the genre as we can see with all the copy cat MMORPG’s and eventually no new variety in MMORPG’s releasing in the past 10 years compared to the previous 10 years. WoW has changed even more to have heavy RPG elements to being more of a Diablo 3 clone in design elements.
People discriminated in vanilla WoW because the devs purposely broke hybrid specs and placed dumb design decisions on bosses, such as debuff limits. Previous MMORPG’s didn’t do that, so didn’t require raid teams to be more selective. Blizzard also created much smaller raids for their game with their 40 man raids, compared to the 100+ man raids in previous MMORPGs. There’s more history in this genre than just WoW and plenty of examples of players cooperating with weaknesses than how WoW has done things over the years.
I’m not asking Blizzard to make their game just like older MMORPGs. I’m just wanting them to go back to their roots of having meaningful character power choices that force grouping with other players to cover weaknesses. It makes grouping more interesting when everyone isn’t so cookie cutter. I had a blast as a Paladin back in the day when in 5 man content I could flex between tanking, healing, and dps and save a group from a complete wipe regardless of what spec I chose. These days, because of the removal of choice, we can only fill 1 role effectively.
Well, to start with WAY more people play video games now, back in DAOC days you’d just be happy to get people online to play with.
Classic WoW really was the first MMO-RPG to “blow up” and have a vast audience.
It’s pointless looking at the very first MMO’s in the market.
Debuff limit was a tech limitation not a design choice.
And it wasn’t just hybrid specs, it was pure DPS specs, talent builds, even down to the race you played really made a difference back then.
The game didn’t improve until things were more balance and there was more flexible choice.
Covenant abilities makes it harder to adjust your character and it will make things incredibly hard to balance, which you know yourself Blizzard struggles at.