It was odd that I just watched a video called " How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves" on Youtube.
Here’s the part of video that stood out to me:
There’s a famous story about World of Warcraft - in the story, Blizzard didn’t want people to play the game for too long - so they introduced a system in the beta where the longer you played, the fewer experience points you’d get for killing monsters and whatnot. But players hated it. They hated seeing the numbers going down. It felt like a punishment for playing the game. So Blizzard did something pretty clever: they flipped the system on its head.
Now, players can build up a rest bonus whenever they’re not playing the game, and then get an experience points boost when they next log in. It’s essentially the same numbers, says Blizzard, but making it a reward rather than a penalty made it much more agreeable to fans. So, it’s often better to encourage the behaviour you want, than discourage the behaviour you don’t.
This is exactly what I had covered in another thread and where many people gave some great ideas that oriented around a reward system rather than a punishing system:
Blizzard - please avoid punishing systems. Take the ideas from players around rewards and implement them in place of the restrictions and punishments currently planned for covenants and being able to swap them.
How, precisely, do you think you’re being “punished” for picking one covenant over the other? And do you feel that by rolling a monk, you were “punished” by not having access to a real combat res, bloodlust, a permanent pet to tank for you, a ranged dps spec, etc, etc, etc?
Many people have already posted that one of the specific reasons they like the system is because of how punishing it is for players, especially when they enjoy playing competitively across the different formats in PvE and PvP and when they chose their class primarily because they could tank, heal and dps across all of those formats.
Restricting the covenant system adds an additional layer of restriction to those already in place when you choose your race and your class.
While other MMORPGs exist that don’t even restrict a players’ character to a single class - I think many players are ok with the line being drawn at class/race in WoW, especially since there are various account-wide features. But expanding and pushing that line beyond class/race is where it understandably feels very punishing.
Dude, it’s pretty simple. Let’s say I’m playing my Bear. If I could instantly swap to any other tank class, and Warrior was meta, the officers in the guild would say “Sentenza, swap to your warrior spec NOW”. What if I don’t want to play my warrior? Too bad, I can swap, or I can get chewed out and possibly g-kicked for knowingly playing wrongly and being stubborn.
Forcing myself to be locked in takes away any bad actors. Like when master looter was removed in favor of personal loot - if I can’t give you my loot, you can’t put pressure on me to give you my loot. If I’m far enough along with my Covenant that switching is not feasible, I simply won’t get pressured to switch because they’ll know it isn’t reasonable in any way to ask.
So what you’re saying is, Blizzard simply needs to figure out how to reframe the debate so that people like you stop saying they’re being punished, and you accept punishment with absolutely no changes made on Blizzard’s side? Because 100% XP while rested and 50% while not rested, or halving all XP gains, and then giving you 200% XP while rested are literally the same, you understand this yes? Blizzard literally didn’t have to do anything except change some labels.
You are not supposed to switch Covenant on anything resembling a regular basis. You should not believe you cannot, you shouldn’t be doing it. Whatever the situation, what you think you should be able to do runs counter to Blizzard’s design.
Again, you should not be changing Covenant. If Blizzard offers big enough incentives that changing Covenants sacrificing those incentives hurt you enough that you will almost never change, you will still call it a punishment because most likely, especially in 2020, players believe they’re obligated to receive things, especially things you would get “for free”.
Because many players don’t want an rpg, they want a game like Fortnite. They want to be able to log in, do the content they want, log out until next time. They don’t want anything to do with character progression, it’s getting to the point where they don’t even want power progression.
Leveling doesn’t matter it got an end so the bonus would be gone when you reach endgame and doesn’t matter at all for end game.
So if you think people would agree with a system like any of the example you proposed for endgame, I personnaly think you are wrong. This is way more impactful than the example you said, players don’t need to be punished in any way and giving a boost is often seen as a penalty if you don’t do it, warmode bonus anyone?
The better solutions and possible compromises for me like I always repeat:
Make abilities/soubinds freely switchable but lock covenants.
Make covenants earnable with rep or challenge (like mage tower).
Make covenants switchable each day, making it so you can decide what you’re gonna do each day if you’re one to like to optimize.
I like the idea of covenants, but I don’t like the idea that covenants being directly tied to your power. Like, yes I want to pick one that is thematically cool, has a neat transmog, and a cool class power that fits me, but I don’t want to be punished for choosing the most OP covenant.
I think something that might be a decent consolation prize would be if covenants also gave a passive group buff that gets stronger when grouped up with players from different covenants. I’m not keeping a close eye on the covenants because I want to be surprised, but I do know there’s one with some weak ability that players are not likely to pick.
But let’s say that covenant also confers a party-wide buff that speeds up your mana or resource regeneration by 10% on a critical strike, and for every party member from a different covenant, that mana regeneration goes up by another 5% or so, to a cap of 30%. That group buff might discourage players from going all-in on one covenant - that is, if Blizzard can avoid giving the covenants with already-strong packages the best group buffs. The less personal utility and power a covenant offers to the player, the more impactful that group buff should be.
Learn to play an rpg the way it is made, you build a character for a JOURNEY.
You are allowed to build your character for one specific boss fight, but you are gonna need to spend more effort for it, aka level 4 of each class.
Covenants are a great thing for players who enjoy the game and play it without pretending to be world first raiders and acting like wannabe elites, you dont need the best covenant, if you want it that badly then level 4 of each class.
I build my char in the best modern RPG of all time DOS2 and I could respec on my JOURNEY as some fights needed different abilities on the hardest difficulties.
No, but we’re going to keep going on about RPG elements in WoW when they wrote the battle for Undercity with the greatest military minds in the alliance not preparing for the Horde to use plague when 3 of their cities had been plague bombed already.
No, didn’t you get the memo? We’re building characters for the jerrrrnee of sitting at endgame with characters who are significantly worse at doing certain types of content simply because of what should only be a cosmetic and story choice.
But hey, what do I know. I’ve just been playing RPGs since the 90s and don’t know what an RPG is.
