You already are rewarded for loyalty. If you want to swap Covenants, you can level up multiple characters and swap between them on a per-encounter basis or have one character for M+ and one character for raiding. You are rewarded if you play only one character. Playing multiple characters isn’t a punishment, it’s how you play a video game if you want to min-max.
Folks need to simply accept that their “play one character” mentality is not compatible with min-max gaming mindset. Bring the player not the class was a mistake pure and simple, it bred entitlement and false expectation in players. WoW will never be a game that supports a player being 100% optimal in all content with one character. Warlock is one of the best PvP classes but one of the worst M+ classes. Blizzard won’t be able to resolve stalemates like that without screwing up either PvP or M+ in some way (PvP already has its own weird sub-culture of PvP only abilities and balances making it feel more and more disconnected from the game - war mode is probably one of the few things keeping it rooted in the world).
soulbinds are linked to a covenant and part of the covenant power/rp/aesthetic struggle problem. I don’t see how they would not, they’re just more of it. You don’t have acess to soulbinds of another covenants. Yes they let you switch with some of your covenants soulbinds, but not all of the other covenants soulbinds.
I’ve seen many players state that they don’t care. I’ve also spoken with many players personally that share that same opinion.
Specifically with covenants - they have said that others being able to swap their ability/covenant around wouldn’t get in the way of their “role-playing” because they could still be a “loyalist” and self-impose any RP elements they want onto their character.
I don’t recall seeing anything stated about what players get as a reward in any of the announcements.
Not being given anything and not being punished for choosing not to play in a diversified way isn’t really a “reward”.
That’s like telling someone - “Your reward is me not punching you in the face for wanting more of a service/product you’re paying for through a subscription.”
When you lock people into choices, on the contrary you’ll see more cookie cutter builds and the death of weird situational builds since people don’t want to make a mistake else they feel penalized. It’s so fun to feel that you can’t use 3/4 of the new stuff the game has added, that seems like a lot of wasted design energy.
If they’re going to restrict the covenants - the point at which you pick your covenant seems to happen way too early. Seeing how each of them plays out in arenas, dungeons, BGs, and raids is going to take a lot more time than when you first hit max level and finish the storylines.
If you raid on Sunday and get a piece of loot on your main, then next Sunday your character will be perform better in that raid because you stuck with that character rather than switched characters. It’s kind of the core premise of an RPG.
In Classic WoW, your class was a pretty strict choice about what you wanted to be, at least in a raid. If you played a Paladin or Shaman in a raid, you were 100% committing to playing exactly a healer. The fact that leveling took a long time compared to modern WoW meant this was a very serious choice you were committing to.
WoW Classic is beating Retail WoW. This is the first time in WoW’s entire 16 year history that Retail WoW has lost to another MMO. This time, it was losing to its past self. Blizzard is looking at what made WoW Classic create and incorporating some of that design into retail WoW. No more warforge. No more titanforge. Commitments that actually matter. Crafting that has actual worth. So on and so forth. Blizzard has always adapted to try to stay ahead of the competition, now it is having to adapt to stay ahead of its past self.
Do you get to trial every class at max level before you decide to play a character? No, not really. You simply have to decide you like what they’ve got going on and dive in and hope it works out for you.
We don’t have numbers proving that wow Classic is beating BFA, the main report we had was that BFA launch beated Classic launch in term of profit. Yes Classic is supposedly really big, for Classic, but it’s population will only go on the decline.
Moreover, you can switch spec easily in Classic, it’s only paywalled. Some people have thousands of gold it doesn’t mean anything for them. And people just use cookie cutter builds, there’s no place for innovations or choices really in CLassic, if anything people like that you can min/max more easily in Classic with gear not having corruption or titanforging. We see this also with warcraftlogs being used a lot in Classic even at some time more than retail and with competitions about clearing raids the fastest you can.
But players can try one class and progress on it to a certain point. Then switch classes without any cost or penalty and try something new. Then switch back to the first class and pick up where they left off, again without any cost, penalty, regrinding and/or re-earning. In fact - every time they switch, they always pick up where they left off without having to regrind anything that was already earned.
That’s not at all how the covenants seem to work. With covenants it would be like having to regrind to max level or regrind your gear each time you switched to a different character/class.
I think treating the covenants like classes and/or artifact weapons makes sense.
Make each player earn their way through each - but allow the ability to freely switch back and forth while picking up where you left off without having to grind your way back to what you’ve already earned.
So… like how Legion launch artifacts worked? People were salty dogs about the way the AP grind worked when Legion launched because it committed them to playing a spec and their off-spec was always far behind in power.
I don’t know if I would have a problem with Covenant “technically” being swappable but swaps being rare because maintaining multiple Covenants was so hostile. If your primary Covenant had a 400% multipler Anima power acquisition boost, your secondary Covenant has a 200% multipler Anima power boost, your third Covenant had a 150% multipler boost, and your fourth Covenant had no boost at all, that would probably cut down on people trying to maintain all of the Covenants on all characters while making it “technically” possible. It’d be more pragmatic to maintain alts for most people but people who do split raids and want to maintain exactly one character for world first progression content could poopsock all week to stay on top of their weekly anima grinds.
It makes it so that players still have to earn their progression through each covenant and would require more time to earn the ability to play in a diverse manner. To me, that makes sense.
Like you mentioned - it’s like classes; even if you boost one, you still have to grind and earn the gear on that new character. But whenever you switch, you can do so at no cost and with no obstacle in the way.
I don’t think there’s a need for a multiplier - players still need to go through and earn everything across each covenant, and for many people - that time barrier is already enough to keep them from using all specs/roles so soon after release.
I’m not really sure why you seem to want to slow other people down for playing across specs/roles.
1 - In a lot of cases, it’s probably why they chose their class to begin with. I know it’s why I personally chose a druid.
2 - Them being able to play across specs/roles doesn’t impact you in any way.
Are you one of these people that keeps getting referenced that just wants others to play the way you think the game should be structured?
The entire point of Covenants is that they’re not meant to be swapped. Giving people an avenue to punish themselves by trying to fight the current (while framed as a loyalty reward for sticking to one) is fine as long as it deters pragmatic players from trying to play that way for the most part.
I don’t want Shadowlands to be alt-unfriendly, literally the opposite, I want Shadowlands to be extremely alt-friendly. In my mind, the game is better when people are on the point of the curve of progressing, rather than sitting at BIS. BIS is the worst thing a player can attain, it in many ways destroys the fundamentals of the game. Current Retail WoW’s DNA is structured to make BIS impossible. My suggestion is to simply allow BIS to be possible, but to encourage people to not sit at BIS - to always be playing the game with new characters and improving their flexibility via new characters rather than flexibility via a UI option that changes their character’s identity.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of these “anima multiplers”. Staying on top of a 5 hour grind would be pretty easy. Maintaining two Covenants and grinding for 15 hours per week is starting to become a chore. Capping three Covenants would be a 28 hour grind, and capping all 4 would be a momentum 48 hour grind per week. World First Guilds could stick to one character and grind it out, but everyone else would have a relatively sane piece of weekly content to consume to stay competitive with their preferred Covenant.