Fine you listed some but WoW is not the same as those. WoW has always played like an action game since Vanilla . It is not anywhere comparable to D&D or any dice rolled turn base game.
RPG does not mean things have to have a set way of how things are done . RP for each person is different and as others have said you think everyone should play how you think rp should be done.
If that’s what you got from what I said, I’m dumbfounded that this is your interpretation given the clarity of my response. Let’s make this crystal clear to you.
What you just admitted is that you can play unoptimally, by design, in roles and content in virtue of your class choice without being “screwed” if the content is easy enough (as Classic was). This tells me that the problem with covenants “screwing you” has nothing to do with the covenant system itself (as I suspect the difference between a warrior / pally tank in Classic is far greater than a mere covenant choice) and everything to do with how the content is tuned in light of the player’s choices. That’s all I’ve been arguing, you made my argument for me. I’ve won.
No one is getting screwed by this system if Blizz tunes endgame content right. And if they don’t, that doesn’t prove “this” system is bad, it proves that they’ve tuned two systems to be in mutual conflict with each other, which would result in failure regardless of the particular systems under discussion.
Oh please you are so full of it . No one wants to intentionally be punished .
No it simply hasn’t. Interrupt every once in a while and stay out of fire is far far different than the extreme ramp in raid difficulty since the first tier of Cataclysm. It’s night and day.
No, I discussed how best to design an MMORPG to cater to a large subscriber base and why certain RPG elements are necessary for making the game enjoyable for more kinds of people and building more robust social systems / server communities. That was all in my post, you just didn’t read it carefully enough.
Without scarcity, life is boring.
Hey Blizz can you hurry and release Classic Wrath so we can get this person out of retail
Not true.
There are some big “RP” fanatics that play WoW and don’t use flying mounts or transmog.
The difference between players like myself and them is that they don’t want flying or transmog to be removed from the game because they see that other people value those things.
We on the other hand want to make sure everyone else is forced to play how we want to play.
Same goes for real life when people like using hand wood working tools over power tools, or straight edge razors over disposables.
Sorry your mental gymnastics won’t work on me. There is no “I’ve won” here in your stance. Because it seems like you haven’t been reading anything I’ve stated. So let me make this crystal clear to you.
Mythic Raiding isn’t going anywhere. They’re made no statements that they will be nerfing the content and have done their best to avoid the same situation as Emerald Nightmare where it was cleared within the first few hours of its release. They want to challenge the players by having them play optimally to clear the raid and achieve Cutting Edge.
They still have Rated PvP. With rankings that go from Challenger all the way up to Rank 1 with exclusive rewards and now its own gear progression system that I can assume will be dictated by your current rating within each season.
So since both of these things still exist and Blizzard clearly makes content for players who want to play optimally, the system will fail.
Your Classic analogy does not align to what goes on in Retail. They’re 2 completely different experiences. You want to support dumbing down the game to Classic levels then okay fine. The Covenant system would work just fine because your choice doesn’t matter. But it does in Retail. Because Blizzard creates content for the players who crunch in the numbers and finds out which ability is great in some areas of the game while also either decent to horrible in other areas.
Your support for this system because of how Classic would only make sense if the game was just like Classic.
And there it is!
In the short run, that would make everyone happy. In the long run, Blizz is eventually going to want another critical mass of people playing WoW 2. There’s the pre and post Cata model of doing things, and if Blizz wants anything close to its original success back, what I said will necessarily be relevant again.
Hmm yeah don’t put me in your particular community. I care less about how people play and more about what kinds of interacting systems make healthy server communities and a critical mass of people playing in endgame and enjoying themselves.
I can fully admit that if Blizz doesn’t substantially relax raid tuning, the covenant problem is going to be a problem and I’ll be forced not to stick to my guns if they don’t cave. Blizz, like the players, is operating under constraints, and they can’t have their cake and eat it. The rest of the game has to be inline with this decision, and if not, I’ll be with the people in this thread asking them to undo it, because they haven’t appropriately changed their systems to be consistent.
Then great. WoW will continue to be a more and more niche game as time goes on until it eventually dies, just due to how it’s designed.
Or Wrath as the middle ground target. But fine, I’ve admitted this much for the whole thread.
Translation : We have fun when we can see others not enjoy the game.
What kind of childish mentality is that
?? This isn’t news. Ralph and all of us other proponents have been saying this loud and clear for months. Why are you acting like it’s some revelation.
Those interacting systems and your opinion about “healthy” communities along with people PLAYING in endgame is rooted in how people play. More accurately how they’re allowed and restricted in being able to play.
What you think makes “healthy” communities and endgame gameplay is exactly the kind of punishing and restrictive systems that I enjoy players being exposed to.
They could go the RP route and just choose to be loyal like the RP fanatics do/will and how they currently do in regards to transmog and flying. But it’s “better” if everyone is forced to do it together.
It’s the kind being supported by the gameplay systems currently being implemented and the game you’re paying money to play.
Nothing is great because it lasts forever. It’s why WoW players cling so heavily on WoW Classic because they want to get that feeling again but it’s essentially gone. You can’t be in elementary - high school and staying up late playing WoW with your friends anymore. That time is past. It’s a tough pill to swallow and it took BFA to shake me out of it.
Retail WoW is definitely salvageable but is it ever going to come close to Wrath numbers? No…there are too many competitors now and they’re starting to get it and create playerbases of their own that are hitting the millions. WoW now has competition.
If they changed how the game worked from the ground up to support the system, I’d be more inclined to give it a chance. But as it stands they’ll both clash with one another and cause even more hemorrhages to the sub numbers.
Wrath was the culmination of 3 RTS games and 2 expansions leading up to the big bad. And keep in mind again that there really weren’t any other strong competitors for WoW to compete with.
And what’s this middle ground that you speak of? Content in Wrath housed difficult encounters that was appropriate for the current level of skill within the playerbase.
Because it’s an opinion that should never be taken into account when discussing a game that houses many different playstyles. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it should be edged out of the experience all together.
And yet it’s a game design that’s being doubled down on by the devs.
Maybe
is some advice you should take for yourself.
Or just keep paying a company to shove something you don’t like down your throat. Because that’s not being childish.
I’m not trying to edge anyone out of the game. You are. You said…
Well fun fact. I actually have done tons of RP during my time on Emerald Dream. And guess what else? During our campaigns we’d take ground mounts because we didn’t want our adventures to be 2-5 minute journeys across the continent. And guess what else!??! If we had a certain look we needed for an RP campaign we put on RP clothes to look the part.
And guess what the best part of all that was. It was our choice to do so.
We had the experience that we wanted without hindering how others enjoyed the game. So yes I do put my own advice into practice. Thanks for noticing!
That’s true, but that’s true only insofar as any change to a game’s rules affects how people have to play, unavoidably. It’s a difference between ends and means. By how you’re interacting with people here, it looks like the ends for what you want is just compliance to a certain play standard, the ends and means are identical.
My ends are to try and get the game healthy again according to various metrics, and it just so happens the means by which that’s done alter a few rules. It’s an unfortunate side effect of what ought be done, not the primary objective as you seem to make it.
Yeah but this is a copout. People come back expansion after expansion but leave within a month in the expansion. Why? Blizz surveys them. Bet you gobs of cash one of the big answers is “I wanted to see the story, raids aren’t for me, I’ll sub for a week when the new patch comes out and quit again”.
We have the sub trend post Wrath. We’ve run the experiment. There was no “natural decay” of subs due to boredom, except the players LFR stabilized in Dragonsoul that unsubbed during the drought. After Cata launched it was an instant, and yet unrepaired plummet. And we know from the TIME what those causes were, and we know it because the blogs Blizz had to write, and all the ways they changed the game (emergency nerfed dungeons and firelands repeatedly) in their patch notes. It’s not rocket surgery.
So for you to throw your hands up and say “well it’s just an act of God, there’s nothing that could have been done!” is just inconsistent with the data. Blizzard gambled, lost, and the community in this game is STILL cannibalizing itself due to Blizzard trippling down on these decisions.
Yeah but that doesn’t explain the rise in trajectory through BC, a further rise through Wrath, a steady plateau even during content draught, and then the instant crash that happened in the first weeks of Cata. If your model was right, we’d expect people to start leaving en mass after they beat Arthas. But they didn’t. They left during Cata when their guilds literally died because stuff was too hard.
The current skill hasn’t really changed, which is why they’ve created two “pre normal” raid difficulties since Cata, and I give them 3 years before they make a 3rd. That’s not something you’d expect on a model of rising player competence.
An interesting way to try and minimize how vastly punishing the “side effects” are.
But I guess if you’re cool with it, I obviously have no issues. Just seems awfully convenient to try and justify something which is detrimental to so many players in the name of a “healthy game”.
Kind of like administering a lobotomy in the name of a healthy human, except it’s not just a human it’s an entire community.
Based on your posts I can’t imagine you’re being willfully ignorant about it, which would put you in our camp of knowing full well what the side effects truly are. Perhaps you’re just not comfortable embracing and admitting it.
I don’t think it’s really that punishing. In the grand scheme of things, there’s a bunch of ways to really make things punitive.
Lockout covenant skills and conduits for a short time (we’re here).
Lockout covenant skills and re-design conduits to only buff talents, and lockout conduits for a short time (would soft lock talent choices).
No covenant system at all, just make a new row of talents, but lockout talent choices for a week.
Like 3 but make talents permanent.
If my goal was just to punish players and restrict the way they play, I could choose anything on this spectrum, in fact I’d probably jump straight to 4, since my goal is just to punish players, and for no other reason.
I’m happy with 1, on certain assumptions, and with caveats and provisos to help iron out kinks and facilitate player experimentation because I’m trying to change things as little as possible to start moving the game in a different direction psychologically, without being overly punitive.
Yeah this is why I use Wrath -> Cataclysm data to justify my arguments. If I didn’t have reasons for thinking this model worked, I wouldn’t argue for it. In fact I’ve argued for something like this since MoP, because I knew all the hell the post Cata model was bringing (massive server merges, everyone rolling Horde, raider_io, I called all of it years and years ago).
No I know what the side effects are. My GOAL isn’t to screw with how people play, you’re basically on the record at this point admitting that yours is. My goal is to bring back what worked pre-Cataclysm (with the numbers to back it up). It happens that certain restrictions might be necessary for that, but my purpose isn’t a crusade to bring about a particular set of restrictions, and in fact I’m not attached to any particular kind of restriction. There are probably 3 ways they could do this, off the top of my head, that are more lenient but still get the job done.
And while you all enjoy getting punished by the game, I do not. I did not get into this game thinking what content do I want to restrict myself to. I played the game when you had freedom of choice. I could level an alt and they would be able to help the guild with little more than just a quick gear grind. Come Legion, they added an AP grind. BFA added and AP and azerite power grind. Come SL, you and all them are thanking Blizzard for taking away my ability to take this one character into all aspects of the game like he used to. Since WotLK I was able to both raid and pvp. Now, I have to choose, do I want him to raid or pvp.
I’m already losing out on story, mogs and mounts by selecting only a single covenant. Why do I have to suffer being unable to do more than raid? Because it’s fun for you? F that! You can play as you want, if you want to play suboptimally, go right ahead, but stop trying to act like you wanting to force me to play that way is a good thing.