Awhile back Ion claimed in an interview that they can “pull the ripcord” if the covenant system fails, and allow us to swap freely. And just now, today, stated that it’s not possible because “pulling the ripcord” would destroy the system and was never possible to begin with. So which is it, Ion? Why do game devs feel the need to lie to their player-base like this? It’s just scummy, pure and simple. They think they can balance this out but without changing the fundamental design of certain covenant abilities they’ll never be balanced. And what’s with them not wanting us to be good at everything with 1 character? That’s what we’ve been able to do for 16 years, but suddenly they want to change that.
People are surprised? This is the same Dev team that said:
“We can just flip a switch and turn on flying if it’s really in demand.”
A truly significant percentage of subscribers leave citing no flying.
“We can’t give you flying for another entire patch cycle because we didn’t design the expansion around it and have to go back and rebuild the terrain.”
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Well at least that settles that
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The issue isn’t that simple, the integration of soul binds and other layers upon layers of systems that they’ve put in to prop up this shell of a game and poor class design has gotten them stuck into a corner, I don’t think they could “Pull the Ripcord” at this point and get the game into a functional state by release even if they wanted to.
At this point I’d prefer to see the game the way they originally intended for it to be designed so we can either mock or praise them accordingly.
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Chill, in the same post he said that it would take a lot of work if they needed to pull the ripcord. That doesn’t mean they won’t ever do it. They just don’t believe its necessary at the moment.
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Pretty safe to assume that the ripcord has been pulled - You can swap to another covenant freely without any punishment and two world quests to go back
Lol I remember when I said “there wont be a ripcord pulling because the covenants were too ingrained into the systems to be removed” and I was told I was wrong.
You guys need to learn how Ion more.
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Just let it go. Choose wisely. Whine less. Swap specs/talents/gear/etc every encounter in the raid. There’s just that one you can’t. Adapt or…
Quitting has always been an option.
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Those layers were in place when Ion mentioned that the ripcord even existed. It was 100% a complete and total lie.
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The discussion is around the fact that Ion himself said that the backup already existed. They had it in place and were ready to go in case the system implodes on itself. Now he’s saying it doesn’t, and would be a massive undertaking to even fix the problem if it does show up.
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The issue is conduit progression.
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If they have a system in place that makes it so it takes 2 weeks to swap a covenant, they can tune that same system to make it so it takes 2minutes to swap a covenant.
They’re lying.
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He never said the backup already existed. He said that they are prepared to have to do that. He never said that the solution was already pre-coded.
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The big problem is that if the system is a failure and they have to fix it that just means cut content from the rest of the expansion. They only have so many hours in a work week to devote time to. If they have to completely rework the covenant system then some other part of the game has to suffer as a result.
No, he specially did say that it was ready to go. In his own words, in an audio interview. That is still available on youtube lol
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They want people to play it as is, so they can be heroes that listened to feedback and worked super duper hard to fix it in patch 9.2.5. 
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Basically systemlands is on a collision course into the gutter.
Chooo chooo.
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Ion’s entire tenure as director has been him fighting with fans. Ignoring covenants and azerite, we can look at a topic that most of the community agrees with: pathfinder is bad. Nearly everyone agrees with it. But Ion still forces it on us expansion after expansion. And now it’s looking like he’s not going to add a flight whistle in Shadowlands.
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I suspect that the player idea of a “Ripcord” and the developer’s idea of a “Ripcord” never really aligned. And never will.
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Good god
What a rouse
I feel like the most annoying part of this is we are basically going to have two convents that we will have to bounce back between
Just let us god damn have our main covenant and let us have a secondary covenant or something that we can unlock the soul binds for but can’t get any of the cosmetics
Or just let us talk to a damn npc to borrow their power after we do a grind for them
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Is anyone surprised?
This is the same team that said ‘Sylvanas won’t be another Garrosh’.
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