Ready to give up

Isn’t what like 2 weeks now? Getting rep is much faster now in Argus, but still requires a long quest chain.

Getting rep on the Broken Isles is a little faster than what it was before, given that people can only do so many quests in a day before their eyes start to bleed.

I see a lot of people who are envious of those who make different choices than they did in playing a video game. Sounds like you feel threatened by the existence of people who play differently than you.

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I think you are exaggerating a hair about how complex it is.

Plus wowhead has step by step guides for unlocking the races.

As for pathfinder, it is the same as it was in the prior expansions, rep to revered, explore, campaign quests, zone quests.

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If you just play BFA, you’ll unlock flying at some point. If you don’t have any progress towards Pathfinder, you won’t be flying in the next couple of weeks. It’s going to take time. Just play the game.

Come through for us next expansion Blizz! Pathfinder is fine, just us have flying < 6 months from release. Remove raider IO also please!

They also have a tracker where you can import your character and it will tell you exactly what need.

I think it’s a bit more systematic and complicated than fixing one issue or refining one aspect of gameplay.

Alt gameplay right now is the number one unaddressed “engagement motivator” in the game, and this has been an issue since Vanilla. It’s no one’s fault, but rather a consequence of a lingering endgame for a number of expansions.

The reality is that alt gameplay is here to stay, and most people want alt gameplay to be more generous and with opportunity to swap classes for end-game as an expansion’s end game evolves. This will require Blizzard to revisit not just how time sinks are constructed, but how professions are designed and any number of discrete gameplay elements that aren’t discovered until you really sit down on an alt.

I’ve said numerous times that Blizzard’s ignoring of the Bartle taxonomy is a huge missed opportunity for engagement. Let’s look at Wildstar’s model, where each character had a “job” based on their preferred gameplay, and that flavored each toon’s run through. FFXIV makes professions an engaging gameplay in its own right. These are two systems that Blizzard could adapt with the understanding that maybe if the main character didn’t take a particular path, an ALT most certainly would.

The days of grinding to do raids and only raids is long over, and Blizzard needs to evolve the ideas of reputations, professions, et. al. to reflect the changing desires of the community - not just for our sake, but to drive daily, weekly and monthly engagement.

That said, here are the problems I face as someone with 11 alts.

  1. Gating professions against reputation grinds that took up a significant chunk of my main’s time, when I no longer have the free time on my main to dedicate to an alt.
  2. Gating professions behind hard to acquire or BoP items, especially when those BoP items are on toons that do not have professions that use them.
  3. Gating professions behind a “Sophie’s choice” of either getting the BoP item or the reagent, with the result of having not enough of anything (looking at you, Enchanting).
  4. Gating professions behind perpetual dungeon crawling.
  5. Making you choose between empowering specs and empowering alts by requiring you to do the same time sink multiple times for different roles.
  6. Dearth of materials to get even the basic professions leveling done.
  7. No depth of gameplay with professions to make a crafting alt a new and interesting approach to the game.
  8. No time to spend leveling the new allied races because of the colossal time sinks on your main and the unsustainable identical sinks on alts.
  9. No interesting or compelling rewards for reaching Exalted as most of the cool rewards are gated behind massive gold or currency requirements. this in and of itself isn’t horrible until you realize that the time sink necessary to get those rewards competes with the time sinks to get your alts into any condition to be functional or at reputations to advance their professions and/or leveling those cool new allied races.
  10. No large-scale personal reward system.

All of these things can be addressed by mechanisms currently utilized by Blizzard in the past.

  1. For now, reputation boosts for alts without requiring grinding on your main. Once you unlock exalted, your alts should automatically get a boost, with additional boosts for each paragon level your main attains, up to 200%.
  2. For the future - a new reputation model. 9.0 is set up to really go to town on reputations, if Blizzard plays their cards right - by repurposing each racial reputation and have players build embassies in each capitol, and when you’re exalted with the embassy in an opposing race’s capitol, you gain access to that race for your faction. For the hawks of WoW, you build out a spy network. The embassy evolves for you like the half hill farm.
  3. Tear down and rebuild professions from the ground up, making it its own gameplay with its own gearing and stats. I wrote a treatise on this elsewhere on the forums on how this could be done.
  4. Real, player housing needs to be a thing. What I would do is allow the player to choose one zone in each of the start zones of your faction. So quests and scenarios to fix the area, and have that gifted to you by that faction leader (with bonuses if you match your racial faction to the location). This would be in keeping with higher level classic D&D. Let the player’s alts be NPCs in that keep.
  5. Stop requiring dungeons and raids for crafting. What you do is you have a token drop that converts crafted gear into a dungeon or raid floor level item. So anyone can craft a piece without stepping foot in an instance, but you have to do the dungeon or raid to get the item empowered. Put those tokens on vendors later on as a catch up.
  6. Make reputations enticing by putting cosmetic alterations based on that faction on vendors, at reasonable prices. So maybe silver priest spells, or green wrath on Night Elf vendors, and Argent Dawn/Crusade cosmetic weapons and armor on those vendors.
  7. Add cosmetic recipes to old content, that lets you craft appearances you otherwise can’t transmog. So all that old white gear from Vanilla drops as cosmetic recipes in Vanilla dungeons. Or maybe reputation themed armor and weapon recipes on those rep vendors.
  8. Use your cities to create craft halls, and provide locations for people to do the restricted crafting.
  9. Have representatives of each of the existing factions going back to Vanilla wandering about the cities (all of them, but let’s start with the Big 2), with maybe central locations in specific spots. Let those representatives provide breadcrumb quests to get players started.
  10. Just…BoA those BoP materials, period. Alts are here to stay, and you need them to keep people playing, so just let us move the reagents instead of having multiple toons with useless items taking up bag space.

At the end of the day, Blizzard measures success in terms of engagement. Alt gameplay IS that engagement. We’ve had 8 iterations of ignoring alts with no success. Perhaps it is time that Blizzard looks at what the player base is doing NOW instead of trying to shove the players into a play style that was envisioned at the turn of the century.

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No, just return to the way it was and stop taking away, leave the new and return the old.

Ease the ingress and egress to help the new players and to keep the old.

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Trust me, reading through achievement lists is a lot more fun compared to the endless boring rep grinds you are about to do for races/flying.

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Can you make main quests a different colour in the quest log?

Because I just transferred from
Ally to horde and have to start again and it’s driving me nuts also.

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Is there a MVP course at blizzard about anti-consumer relations? To be frank, I find way too many of you rude and lacking empathy. How do you honestly get given this privelege? Proving you can drive the number of subscriptions lower than the devs doing sub-par work?

You have no idea what is easy or not for another person - that shouldn’t take someone with a background in education to point out. MVP’s though, you guys just seem to love putting people down. I’m only holding you to account rather than the ordinary poster, because you do have a position of privilege in this system, and quite frankly I can’t figure out why you lot are considered special?

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I’m not ready to give you up.

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I would be happy if they:
-Stopped gating flight behind pathfinder and reputations
-Made classes fun to play again
-Focused on making the game fun instead of making players play longer

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They’re not confusing in the least, and wow head has in depth guides. Quit whining

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Sorry the fun of wow was being able to play multiple classes with out spending a whole expansion gearing, not being punished to play one toon

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Well its how they roll these days. Most things promised aren’t even ready at launch. They use the time gating periods to complete it. It’s their way of reducing cost and upping profit.

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yeah they read a book on customer interactions and on the first page in large red lettering it says do everything the exact opposite

Generally speaking, I completely agree with the basic sentiment that for those who like playing alts for whatever their reasons may be, this game has become far too time consuming per character. I see that as the basic problem overall.

I think the design team needs to spend time reviewing this issue and implement solutions to it that do not in any way hurt or compromise the game play experience but rather improve it by making the enjoyment and development of alt characters along with a main a satisfying and doable experience for the average person who has a full time job, family to spend time with and other interests besides WoW. This does not mean the game has to be watered down to the extreme of ruining an engaging, fun experience that can keep one playing year after year. It’s all about finding a balance between enough variety of interesting and fun things to do and reasonable amounts of time spent to have multiple characters who are not hindered from attaining reasonable goals for them such as full crafting capability.

At this point, I find it far too time consuming to cover all crafting and I don’t think that should be the case. I don’t think pathfinder should be a thing for previous expansions once a new one ships. I don’t think crafting recipes and mats should be locked in group or raid content at all. On that last point, what you can make should not compete with the best group or any raid content either. If you are not doing that content, you do not need that gear but it would be nice to make low end epics if only in color purple frankly, for end game quest content and entry level gearing for group play.

Those are just a few basic suggestions I toss out as simple ways to make the game more alt friendly again without compromising the end game at all for mains.

Of course, all MMOs by design are loaded with various repetitive grinds but I think WoW has gotten out of hand with these for a game that has so many different activities to pursue at this point (theme park) and a player base that largely loves playing multiple characters.

Ultimately, if the time to get anywhere in the game for the average person with a life outside of it becomes too much, the player population will slowly but surely dwindle because there are only so many people who can or will spend the ridiculous number of hours it takes to actually get a crew of 120s (at this point) with full crafting capability, flight and a main who raids even LFG. Never mind any fun alts who just gather and sell.

As for the money sinks, the elephant in the room is that 5 million gold mounts (check the inflation there since the previous two expansions!) are the obvious result of WoW tokens being the new clandestine form of loot boxes. The only difference is, the players make the loot and the publisher just takes a cut on the sales. The tentacles into player wallets are just the same in any case.

Somebody may come along and chastise me for saying some or all of this no doubt. They may inform me that they can do it so therefore it certainly is doable. Well, yes it is doable. That doesn’t make it a reasonable thing for the majority of players to embrace, the state of the game as it is now. Thus you see this recurrent theme complaining about it.

This is a legitimate complaint at its core without picking apart which particular items are discussed. The whole game needs to be toned down time requirements-wise or it really will bleed player base slowly but surely.

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Having alts is one thing, but it seems many people want an army of mains. It should not be trivial to have a roster of a dozen characters who can all perform near the level of a dedicated main.

That said I am wholly against the entire concept and execution of allied races that OP complained about.

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I do agree with you there. I think there should be a clear distinction between a single main character who takes on the highest level content a player decides to engage in and an army of alts or even a single alt really. That said, I guess what I am trying to point out is that even doing what I regard as basic stuff like crafting has become too much of a time consuming chore, particularly if you focus on a main who raids.

You are right. The game does not need to nor should it attempt to give players the ability to field a full army of mains. What is a main then? Nothing. They are just one of many of alts or is that mains? At that point they might as well go the one character does it all route of Final Fantasy (please no).

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