Remove Time-gating

Community General Discussion
1

And just slow down experience gain?

Thoughts?

Rather than playing through the story and only doing 10% of the quests before moving onto the next zone and only doing 10% of those quests and heeeey you’re max level already.

I know you’ll still have your people who’ll stay up for 48 hours straight and do their mad rush to the end, but did it feel better when it took longer to level?

Did you feel more immersed in the game? Did you take a look around the zones more? Pay attention to quest text/story lines with more interest?

And can we bring back gear enchants tied to reputations again? :slight_smile:

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2

It’s people no lifing the entirety of a currents patch story in a week long marathon then complaining there isn’t content they are try to avoid. Slowing down the pace to 60 wouldn’t really solve that.

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3

Right, I fully understand that. Like I mentioned, you’d always have those people doing that anyway.

But for your average player, would it feel better to take longer and see more of the quests/zones in the leveling phase. That way we don’t hit max level in a day or two and get thrown into max level vicious cycle?

Just draw it out a little so people aren’t complaining 2 days in that they “have to wait a week to do more story”, when in a weeks time, they’re still leveling and doing the story?

4

This is just another form of time gating.

It’s one you can brute force, but it’s still a time gate.

In a game like WoW you can’t escape time gates, they are integral to a subscription based MMO. WoW players just picked it up as a dirty word a few years ago and never stopped.

5

You wanna know the issue?

Blizzard likes to punish everyone for the select few who takes certain advantages.

Why does torghast have torments? Cause they are worried that everyone will sit and wait for all CDs for each and every pull.

They want you to play the way they design it…

6

Who has that kind of time!? Lol

Yes but no. Time gating means you can’t progress until a specific time has been met/passed. Slowing down experience gain leaves it open to you and your pace. You can “no-life” it and do it in 3 days, or go at a pace you’re comfortable with and do it in 3 weeks.

Time-gating is “no matter how fast you go and how much you do, you cannot surpass 3 renown the first week, 6 the next, etc etc”

But I do get what you’re saying.

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7

People are already complaining about nothing to do. Do you really think lifting all the timegates so these maniacs can rush everything in an afternoon is the solution?

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8

Time gating is a tool that has its place. There are some instances where, if used properly, it’s fine enough as a stop-gap to ensure players aren’t going too fast for what content is available.

However, the extent of time gating the current dev team is using (and most likely mandated by the executives and marketing team) goes way beyond acceptable for the average player, and is only highlighting just how little content has actually been made.

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9

Some people are crazy, but that’s like what? 1 in 100,000 players?

I can’t remember where it was, but this was literally what blizzard said they were worried about.

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Not a solution for “nothing to do”. Just curious if slowing things down and lifting most of the restrictions would help people feel more involved in the story and the game.

Everyone who’s focused strictly on the end game will do what they can to rush it (I’m even guilty of this). But I just remember there being a sense of “thrill/enjoyment” when things took a little longer to do. When you were forced to do more quests/explore more zones (or more of the same zone).

And that’s why I think slowing things down, and although it’s simply an illusion, making it seem like there’s more to do, before hitting that time gate would make things feel better/smoother for the average player

So let’s assume 6.5million players. That would 65 people. Blizzard is worried about 65 people?? Lol

11

Found it.

“and to solve a problem that arises when extremely difficult content meets our often cooldown-based class design.“

Source: https://www.wowhead.com/news=316073/blizzard-response-to-torments-in-torghast-not-to-make-torghast-time-constrained-

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12

Nope. Time gating is needed to keep people playing mmos. You should really learn how much goes into developing content. From time, money, hours etc. Time has been here since the beginning in some form or another. The reason why it might not have felt like it in Vanilla or BC etc. is because it was non stop grinds and the only end game was raiding or pvp. You had to grind resist gear, rep etc.

I don’t think you understand how this works. If there was no time gating, people would have everything they need by now and be gone. It wouldn’t just be those who play 48 hrs straight. It is impossible to keep up with content so they have to gate it.

Sorry you can’t handle it and need everything available asap but can’t do that in today’s mmo. Those f2p ones that don’t really gate are why their servers feel dead because everyone is done and it takes them quite awhile to release new content and when they do, it only takes a few hours to do and then rinse and repeat.

13

I guess it was worded poorly. I understand there needs to be some form of time gating. I didn’t mean to lift all restrictions.

It should be reworded to put more of an emphasis on slowing things down so you don’t hit the time gates near as fast. They’re still in place. But the slowed down process makes them less relevant or at least not as noticeable to the “average player”

I don’t care about time gates. I enjoy the game as it is, and with my limited time, time gates help me keep up with everyone.

I was just thinking more about slowing things down a bit and allowing people to get more immersed into the game instead of looking directly at max level and max ilvl. More or less the goal of my original post.

14

It would only work if more of the story is pushed in to the leveling range and not blocked off to maximum level. In Shadowlands that means being able to start the Covenant storyline before you hit 60. Since some of those also require the max-level dungeons, they would have to be opened up, to.

In Legion, that would be like going in to Suramar with its Heroic-minimum dungeons despite being less than 110. For BfA, that would be like getting access to most of the war campaign before 120 instead of just the footholds.

If that is something you think is good, it can be supported, but I’m not sure it will work out as well as you think.

Time-gating in the last few expansions has actually helped keep me engaged with one character more than just maximizing and then going straight for my next alt. As it is right now, most of my guild has dropped off the face of the planet as soon as the last story time gate was finished. As a guild, we never got farther than the Huntsman on Normal in Nathria.

Of course, there is the time-gating of TBC where you had to jump through one of the most intricate amount of hoops to unlock everything, and some of it was so random it was unreliable for brute forcing.

Now, once someone has completed certain stages of time gating, it should unlock for the account for alts, which is something that Shadowlands has done much better than an previous version of WoW’s gating before. For the first character, there is the gating, but once completed, you can go to your alt and then progress them to a point they are caught up with your main.

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15

With how they have dungeon scaling while leveling up, the same thing could apply couldn’t it? So while not heroic minimum, it can still be played through while leveling.

They may have to bring back “level appropriate” zones though so that they play in order and the dungeons can unlocked before hitting max level.

Then as you suggest, as you hit certain benchmarks, they can start unlocking throughout your account for alts?

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At the time, Suramar’s dungeons were Heroic minimum, in other words, they would have to be reworked to have a Normal version of them. Since they were Heroic as a minimum, then one couldn’t tackle them before one had spent time gearing or had a friendly group to carry them (which is impossible if you’re one of the first to hit them).

Admittedly, the story only called for tackling them after a month’s time-gating (at minimum), so one MIGHT be ready to tackle Heroic dungeons by the time the story called on it, but if one was just running straight through, the first ones in to a Heroic minimum dungeon may be forced to hold off till gear would let them handle it.

That would almost be going back to Vanilla or TBC way of time gating, but I still think we’d see patch burn out happen too fast to justify to the money crunchers.

Edit: On the other hand, the gearing rate is one problem. At this point, I honestly think the game would be best to keep characters at level 60, and use storyline unlocks for improved gear, much like how Renown was used to gate WQ gearing, but this time link it directly to the story.

In Threads of Fate, this would be based on tiers of progression in areas, such as at 50% in your first zone’s completion, the iLevel progresses to 120, and when you complete the zone’s progress, the rewards you get are now set to 125.

Well, in Legion, if you were leveling an alt, once they were in Suramar, they would complete a time gate, and then be done with Suramar for the week in terms of story. It became better in Suramar once the BfA pre-patch hit because you could burn through it.

I’ve completed a max-level character through the Suramar storyline to awaken the Arcandor with about 4 hours of work (I didn’t track the time, and I was doing the Balance of Power questline at the same time), whereas that was about 4-6 weeks of time-gated progression before.

Shadowlands isn’t quite requiring the main to be time-gated, specifically, but locked the Renown progression to a weekly unlock so that if someone started NOW on it, they could complete the Covenant storyline within a week or two, as opposed to everyone who has been playing since Shadowlands launch.

17

Nope. Not me. If anything I’d rather do the smelling of roses after I’m maxed.

18

See, and I’d be fine with that. Granted it’s a big part of the story line, and doesn’t exactly stop characters power progression once they’ve but max level.

And with the current expansions experience paradigm, they can be caught up in a weeks time. But if you reverted the experience to something slower, that wouldn’t be the case. It’d still take longer to catch up. But that would also be dependent on the person and their level of play time available to them.

And since it doesn’t hinder power progression, they wouldn’t really be held back or be left behind exactly. And the “account-wide” achievements could still be in place so that way starting an alt mid-way through an expansion or patch doesn’t take an entire expansion to catch up

Different strokes for different folks I guess haha. When at max level, I’d rather focus on that and pushing myself instead of backing up

19

Yeah, I’m thinking more something to do at the end of patches

20

Alts!! Lol