There’s a difference between needing to play once a week, and every day.
When you need to play every day to maximize it it feels much more like chore/work. It makes you feel like your falling behind any day you can’t play.
Yet with raiding if you miss your raid day for some reason you can find a pug.
Your schedule changed and you can’t make raid day any more? You can try to find another raid to regularly go to, maybe even change guilds?
You can work around one or two days a week of play to get your raids done. But needing to spend 2-3 hours a day to “keep up” makes it feel like a chore more than a game you play for fun.
Or it breaks an otherwise completely monotonous grind up into bite-sized chunks while also motivating people who would otherwise never start, to actually hit Exalted.
Blizzard has opted for this model for a reason.
You needed to spend 2-3 hours a day in some form or fashion to “keep up” anyway unless you were a one-toon-only-raid-logger kind of player.
From what I’ve been told, the BfA grind was terribly received, so I doubt they’ll repeat that specific plan, much like they scaled back how MoP funneled everyone into Vale dailies to even access other things. MoP also brought us the daily stuff with the farm, which people loved, so we got the farm-on-steroids with Garrisons, which people… only kinda liked. It was awesome for the solo player, but terrible in how silly strong it all was and how it dominated the non-raiding time, so they scaled back and we got the Class Halls in Legion… and so on.
The game began as a hodge-podge of concepts and ideas, and Blizzard chased the most popular and well received of those, sometimes to their detriment, but always iterating further. However, one consistent concept they’ve not let go of ever since TBC was the idea of daily lock outs, daily quests, daily chores, iterative content. They’ve also consistently, but less obviously at times, stepped in to more or less curb behavior and habits they didn’t like, for a variety of reasons. The Ulduar progression race stands out as a particularly egregious time that gave us the overcorrection of limited attempts in the Trial, and alleviated somewhat in ICC, and finally we got the wing gating we’ve had since on select instances.
/shrug
Their game, their rules, but this is more or less a core facet of WoW now. Vanilla’s unfettered and untempered and undertuned state is the rather extreme outlier now, not the norm.
And yet we came to classic for vanilla design and content. Which they are trying to “update” in a way that removes the core design values from the game…
The original devs of vanilla made an April fool’s joke of having daily instance limits.
Not only did classic devs add something to the game that the original devs thought would be a joke change, they made it even more restrictive of 30/day vs the jokes 40/day limit.
When it goes directly against what the vanilla devs thought at the time was good/bad for the game it does go directly against the design goals of vanilla.
Many changes could be argued that they didn’t do X or Y because of limitations but this change was shown to be an absolute joke in the eyes of the vanilla dev team. Proof is the 2006 April fool’s joke…
Each character on a player’s account may enter the same dungeon up to three times per day, and may visit a total of five dungeons over the course of a twenty-four hour period. Keep in mind, each character on your account is flagged separately so with eight characters, that’s a total of 40 dungeon-runs per day!
You only got 40 a day if you had 8 characters to spam dungeons on, and each character could only do repeats of a single instance 3 times in a day. If you’re going to reference the joke notes, don’t lie about them by omission. The joke notes instance lock was substantially more restrictive.
I couldn’t care less about WoW-Originalism arguments, notably when lessons learned and assumptions about player behavior has evolved substantially in the last 15 years.
If and only if you pare out the various absurd parts of the joke notes to make them appear less restrictive than our current scenario… sure…
No they didn’t. You keep citing a small snippet of that joke.
New Dungeon Visitation Limitation System
Each character on a player’s account may enter the same dungeon up to three times per day, and may visit a total of five dungeons over the course of a twenty-four hour period. Keep in mind, each character on your account is flagged separately so with eight characters, that’s a total of 40 dungeon-runs per day!
Natural language, especially English, often does not follow the rules of logic. English is extremely inconsistent and depends heavily on context. It’s also extremely easy to trip up when using the language, or to play linguistic games to cloud the true meaning of an issue. Case in point is when President Clinton disputed the meaning of the word “is” in his statement to the special prosecutor regarding his affair with Monica Lewinsky:
Q: Mr. President, I want to, before I go into a new subject area, briefly go over something you were talking about with Mr. Bittman. The statement of your attorney, Mr. Bennett, at Paula Jones deposition, “Counsel is fully aware” – it’s page 54, line 5 – “Counsel is fully aware that Ms. Lewinsky has filed, has an affidavit which they are in possession of saying that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton”. That statement is made by your attorney in front Judge Susan Webber Wright, correct?
A: That’s correct.
Q: That statement is a completely false statement. Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was “no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton,” was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?
A: It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. If the – if he – if “is” means is and never has been that is not – that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.
I don’t know, this guy seems well on his way to being a successful lawyer provided he gets the right judge. And there’s plenty of dumb judges out there lol.
Of which have no bearing on the meaning of this sentence as interpreted.
There is literally a SCOTUS decision about the meaning of the phrase “to carry” and it resulted in Justices arguing multiple dictionaries, works of literature, and the Bible, for sussing out the full meaning and use of the words.
But that being said, the use of the word “and” is not strictly Boolean as Seally pointed out. A list is provided and can reasonably be interpreted to mean separate types of gameplay: exploitative only, automated only, and exploitative and automated together.
Finally, this is subject to Blizzard interpretation, not your own. They have in the past curbed exploitative gameplay specifically. They’ve also curbed abusive, harmful, toxic, unfair, unreasonable, and automated gameplay as well (and to be sure, this list is also not boolean either).
So it’s left to common sense to conclude why the it was phrased as “exploitative and automated gameplay” rather than as “exploitative gameplay and automated gameplay”, or even as “both exploitative and automated gameplay”. The sensible conclusion is that the sentence in referring to gameplay that is both exploitative and automated.