[Retail][Grinds] Exploit Early, Exploit Often

Did you enjoy stuff like the mage tower? I really miss the Challenge dungeons from Mists of Pandaria a lot. Can you give some examples of open world Content that you would like to see?

Yeah, I did, but even those had the problem that you have done them once, and it was a clear-cut. It is good having them in a patch, but they never should be the main focus of a patch and be the thing that keep a player engaged with the game.

There are currently no examples in the game. Just a quick stone that I throw in a lake of ideas:

  • Update Superbloom as an activity over the duration of a patch - add new tasks and rewards as the story and zone progresses
  • Reflect what Fyrakk is doing in the zone having the invasion progress towards the tree having little quests tied to them as updates, maybe a short new activity (similar to the building of the Argentum tournament in WOTLK where you assisted them building the Colosseum.) This could be like to prevent the flames from spreading, f.e. that rewards you with a currency for some little cosmetics you can acquire from it but is still possible to earn from newer (activities).
  • Update the Renown on a regular pace with new renown levels (like 8 weeks into a patch, so nobody feels hectic about getting it to max) - f.e. introduce some upgrade item for the augmentation rune that gives you additional 5 Stats and other cosmetics. This way the whole dreamseed mechanic last longer and ppl kept doing it the whole patch.

TL:DR Don’t let the world feel like a static image that doesn’t change till a new patch is out.

A quick example with the valley of eternal blossom

Before sha corruption :

After Corruption :

4 Likes

That’s a really good take, nice feedback.

I seriously do not understand when people say “There is nothing to do”

Im not sure there is any other game in the world where there is more to do, except perhaps sandbox games

just using quests as an example, (its what I know best)
rounding to a roundish number there is around 20,000 one time quests currently

using dataforazeroth stats as an example, there is over 1.1 million accounts being tracked, only about 72,300 of those (across all characters) have completed 10,000 (about half), and 5,200 have completed 15k, (about 75%)

for a vast majority or people, at any given time there is thousands of quests they have never completed on any character that they could go play, and this is excluding quests you can play more than once,

And thats just quests, there are lots of other activities as well,

so saying “there is nothing to do” is nearly an impossible statement?

Totally get what you’re implying here - so when ppl say “there is nothing to do” they refer mostly to the new zone, which is true as it is currently as this content is meant to be lasting till a new patch comes out. You may have old stories and zones offering content, but that is not what everyone enjoys, it would also break some of the immersion of the storytelling going back to cata zones just to have something to do.

He meant the new zone, like when you complete all the main quests/sidequests other than worlds quests and the weekly events aside from the seed farming/rare farming he desires more. For me personally it’s just fine because I jump on alts etc and when Mythic + comes out and the raid ill be even more happy. But everybody has a right to an opinion and to provide feedback based on how they feel.

I always hated it when I was a kid, and I told my mom I was bored, she said ‘‘Well, you could do the dishes, clean up the garden, and do more homework, that way you won’t be bored anymore.’’

I was told elsewhere that when people say “There is nothing to do” they mean “there is nothing to do that I like”

Im not trying say their opinion is bad zeropulse, I just meant, the statement there is nothing to do can’t really be true in WoW :confused:

I very much do not understand only playing the most current patch content, I think not being able to see that view is heavily weighing on my perspective here

You could get this helmet from the treasure achievement in ED, it apparently got changed to the Dream On achievement, which requires renown 20 with the Dream Warden… Why change it???

1 Like

I wish they would have at least implemented a “Warning” system alongwith this rather… obtuse… hotfix for one of the staple things implemented within this patch.

A warning stating that I’ve already surpassed 5 seeds this week, and if I contribute a seed it’ll be for nothing and I should just save it for next week when it’ll get the full reward. Nothing feels better than utilizing an “Epic” seed to only get 5 whole reputation. like thanks, wasted a weekly lockout thing… for 5 reputation.

This hotfix is quickly becoming another Zaralek cavern hotfix, turning the brand new zone into a ghost town.

8 Likes

Apparently this even applies to 4fun game modes like MoP Remix, where the (completely lore appropriate) frog farming got nuked after people already used it to get a massive lead. Hopefully at least other sources got buffed to compensate, but I have my doubts.

1 Like

I’m probably gonna sound like a party crasher but if a fix is done to prevent something generally it means for me that what players did before wasn’t intended nor supported and is borderline bug abuse if not.

I think roll backs should be used more often for players that go so far to abuse a certain situation.

I think you’d have to be of serious bad faith to believe frog farming should be the main way to play a game, even if it’s a fun game mode. But with years and no punishment or rollbacks being applied we now have players that do not care if it could be an abuse or not hence “exploit early, exploit often” being used as a meme to represent the overall situation with this kind of stuff.

One of the more absurd situation that happened with this kind of exploit was the xp flask scenario in BFA which streamers publicly streamed (people could stack xp and stuff buffs) and some type of suspension was only applied way later letting tons of people participate in as the gain is rarely not worth the risk when it comes to this.

When it comes to mop remix I think the best solution would be to roll back cloaks to a reasonable cap, let people keep their bronze and gear. And in some kind of compensation buff every source of bronze another 25%, buff dailies by 500% and buff heroic and mythic raid by 500% and 1000% respectively.

1 Like

No bug was exploited, this was people doing something completely normal: farming mobs in an efficient spot that has been known since actual MoP. There should be absolutely no penalty for this behavior ever. What should happen is Blizzard doing a better job testing things themselves (again, this is a MoP-era farming spot) and acting on PTR feedback/testing. Given that they didn’t and allowed it to go live, the correct solutions are:

  • Leave it in, it’s a 4fun Diablo-esque mode, not serious content
  • Nerf it accompanied by massive buffs to other sources so people can actually progress their characters
  • Don’t nerf it but still buff other sources (which are basically all time limited in some way) so they’re better than frogs to compensate for being time limited

Now if people do exploit and bug abuse, yeah they should more aggressively roll things back, but most of the things in the category of “exploit early, exploit often” tend to not actually be things that warrant bans/suspensions/rollbacks. They’re oversights that somehow made it live and allowed players to progress faster than the devs intended. That’s not the players’ fault.

9 Likes

4x4 and hyperspawn farming has always been on the limit and if it didn’t cause issues they wouldn’t try to nerf it. From my own point of view it can easily fit in, if you have a different point of view that’s fine too. That this kind of issue could be seen in mop doesn’t excuse it. I strongly disagree with saying that this kind of issue can’t be compared to bug abuse or exploit. I’m not saying to ban or even suspend players but clearly if they went overboard something should be done and rollbacks for me are the best way to go around it.

Considering they, again, haven’t actually done anything to stop 2x4 farming or removed hyper spawns despite being a thing for years, clearly that isn’t really the case.

What’s inexcusable is Blizzard not catching this in their own internal testing or when people were doing it on PTR. When they added the Charm turnins, the very first thing they should’ve thought was “okay, how did people farm these a decade ago?” and then check if those methods were in line with what they wanted. They failed to do that, so it’s entirely on Blizzard that people ended up farming frogs on live, and any form of punishment for it would be unacceptable.

That’s punishing players for playing the game in a way that breaks absolutely no rules. It’s an oversight by the devs (an inexcusable one arguably, but still an oversight), not a bug or behavior that could ever be considered abuse/exploiting.

5 Likes

You can’t have a game with no issues or bugs, stuff like that is bound to happen. Some of it might be let go because it doesn’t break the game as much like retail 4x4 farming as it mostly done for ressources/gold while on remix it’s done for power.

Video games are also bound to have bugs or uninteded gameplay happen, you can’t fix everything. While for sure Remix can use more polish this doesn’t change that when this stuff happen not doing anything about it simply bolstering the “exploit early, exploit often” mentality.

I believe that the overall game integrity is more important than letting players abuse content and that their gain are thus illicit. I have said earlier that I think it would be some high level of bad faith to say that remix was balanced around you farming power/bronze/etc. from frogs as quick.

1 Like

No, because not fixing it entirely removes the “early” part of that. You just get to do it whenever you want. Instead of the situation now where a few people are gods that are months ahead of everybody else, with no way for anybody to catch up (especially because the people who farmed frogs are the only ones who can access the most lucrative sources of bronze). That is the problem with “exploit early, exploit often”, not that people are gaining things faster than the devs intended. It’s the uncatchupable gap that’s created by fixing the oversight without proper compensation.

It not being balanced around it doesn’t matter. The devs failed to catch it before it went live, and it’s much more unhealthy to allow a minority to stay massively ahead than it is to leave the frogs as they were. As a side note, I genuinely don’t know what power/bronze progression curve the devs did intend, because without frogs it’s absolutely atrocious.

2 Likes

Like I said I will disagree. I have a higher care about the integrity of the game than many and I understand that.

I don’t think people that manage to do stuff faster by exploiting is good for the game and that it only depends how much of it can affect you. I don’t think the Zskarn mythic situation was good for the game when they fixed the boss so it couldn’t be cheesed and while people didn’t “break the rules” (like it is often the case with exploits, they find something that work optimally at a unintended way) I don’t think they should be rewarded for it. While yes this is a funny game mode I don’t think concept-wise that this kind of stuff should be let go.

1 Like