The game structure isn’t exploitative though? Raid tiers were always like this by the time Cataclysm rolled around, once Dragon Soul came out, you weren’t running Firelands anymore except for easy achievements or for getting the casters a legendary but since it was a time commitment, a lot of players who weren’t in super high-end guilds with extra raid nights who were late to the party just didn’t get the staff until they could solo stuff.
The entire complaint has been saying attaching a number to content (which people have been doing since content existed in the game) was psychologically manipulative, which was their way of saying “Seasons are FOMO” without using “FOMO.” So. How is that considered anything but outrage posting?
The “RPG spirit of the game” is trapped in a phylactery on Ion’s desk in his corner office.
Any “RPG spirit” in the game is just doing lip service to covering for the fact that this is nothing but an esports game. If you want it to be what it used to be, they’ll let you pay.
The game structure is exploitative. But we allow ourselves to be exploited and we pay to do so in return for certain things–gameplay, immersion, narrative, fantasy. Reducing the game back to numbers and statistics and lazy “Seasonal” framing grinds away at these things and turns the focus away from the players’ imagination to something less beautiful
Not what we’re arguing. I said it could be debated. I’m not interested in doing so.
My favorite part about you and the troll over there desperately trying to get me to stop defending OP is that OP gave me a reason to stop before either of you did.
I completely agree with you it creates a negative mental setup. I detest E-sports wagging the game the way they do. I don’t think they add much of anything positive for the vast majority of players. The problem is, when WoW started, there were expansions and those were the only 100% power resets. As you went through vanilla or BC (for example) you slowly grew in power over the course of the entire expansion without a hard reset midway through. If you had some amazing trinket from Old Instance ABC, you could keep using it if you wanted. You could continue to use an old gearset for a bit. This has changed over time to full on ROCK HARD POWER RESETS every stupid tier instead of at an expansion, which makes actual sense.
One week you’re fine, next week better hope you’re not on vacation somewhere because when you come back suddenly NO ONE will want you for groups because all your gear is WAY FAR behind!! (I’m looking at you, BfA patch which added the heart essences.)
The reset is also on crafting too. Oh, you can make all the alchemy potions?? Well now there’s this BRAND NEW HERB and a BRAND NEW ORE which have somehow never ever been seen before and you need it for absolutely everything!! … … Really? How are there this many completely unheard of sources of material? In the same area we or some other native race has been wandering around for thousands of years? What makes this plant so much more ungodly powerful than a combination of those plants? There’s a limit on suspension of belief.
So, frankly, they might as well call them seasons, because every single tier their only goal is to completely demolish anything from the previous “season” (same expansion or not) from being useful in any way whatsoever. It’s extremely annoying and makes for a very jarring playing experience. Not to mention irritation at “needing” to RE-acquire the same low drop rate items, just at a higher level. Oh look. I need an Unbound Changeling… AGAIN… … … FOR THE THIRD TIME. That is not interesting or fun. Blizzard saves a lot of bucks not thinking up anything new, but I’m increasingly thinking about how their paychecks should be coming from creating something new and not riding the coattails of devs from decades past.
(As a sidenote… This kind of “seasonal” mentality is exactly why my husband and I stopped playing Magic the Gathering… it went from just using the cards you had from whenever to “okay we’re in a new set and you can’t use ANYTHING AT ALL from previous sets”. That was obnoxious, tiring and annoying. Maybe Magic is getting money from someone else, but not from us anymore… I highly doubt we’re the only ones.)
So I agree with you… but if they’re going to do these run-headfirst-into-a-brick-wall power resets, they might as well call them seasons. Because the former feels worse than the latter. So until they get rid of the former, the latter doesn’t make a difference.
The thing is, that was pretty much the case back BEFORE they started in on the mid-expansion hard power resets. People who had been playing Molten Core went into Blackwing Lair when it opened and there were some guilds still running Molten Core who might move into Blackwing Lair later and that was fine. It wasn’t a problem.
But now Blizzard is like OMG WE CAN’T HAVE PEOPLE PLAYING OLD CONTENT!! They’ll complain if they “”“have to”“” play old content!!! The whole reason for this mentality being they can’t have some amazing thing in old content which is mathematically 0.00001% better than the things in the new content and the E-sports mentality tells everyone that is the best so they need ONLY THAT. I say, if someone has THAT big a min-max mental issue going on, who cares?? Let them run the old content. I would not in any way miss that kind of person in the game. To give an example WHY, I will just point out that the people racing to a certain first boss to drop group and re-queue when they don’t get a certain trinket (something which Blizzard themselves considers a problem!) are that exact demographic of player.
No matter what you call the raid tier, the first raid of the expansion is the first raid of the expansion, narratively and progression wise. Competitive PvE and PvP content are all just seasons now, released at the same time. The raid story and all the other campaign quests that push the game narrative are the same as they have been since I started playing ages ago.
We are playing The War Within. In Season 2, we will be playing The War Within: Fancy patch name. In Season 3, we will be playing The War Within: Extra fancy patch name. It will repeat for Midnight as well. S1 we will be playing Midnight. S2 we will be playing Midnight: Edgy patch name. Etc etc etc.
You can say you don’t like Raids/PvP being released at the same time (which might be an unpopular opinion for players doing one mode to get an advantage in the other), or that you just don’t like the seasonal nature of the game and would rather go back to the old days of attunements and having to slog through every raid to get gear to catch up (another unpopular and new-player unfriendly game design). But to say it’s exploitative when they keep introducing means to follow the story even if you miss the season it is current content (Story mode raid) and improving solo/queued content so that players can easily catch up to the current tier rather than being stomped by players who have been playing every season until they grind and excessive amount tends to be a net-positive for new and returning players.
Log in to a new “season” and you essentially have to re-learn the game (which really just means, learn what the artificial tuning and economy is for this period of time). It puts more attention on brief metas instead of long-lasting experiences. Instead of having characters with trophies of experiences from meaningful places and times, we are stuck in phases. It’s like our characters become ghosts unless you are constantly learning a new economy or ability meta.
Obviously the company will not change the structure of the game as a time-gated hand-held tiered power curve, but it would be an improvement if they sought to cover it up and hide it as much as possible. Remember when ilvl used to be a hidden quality? The variation in player ability and performance was way more diverse. Even though there was a meta within the structure of how people could gear up, the obvious data was not available nor was it shoved in our faces. A small but meaningful effort would be the invention of a name replacement for “Seasons,” because face-value is the first step to impressions and experiences.
Unironically interesting. A creative and poetic element to the expansion’s perception. Are things not what they seem? Is there a sublayer of meaning? Is there a a fervor in the air? God forbid we invoke the arts and creativity to shape a video game fantasy experience–even if it must be seasonal.
It used to be phases. then tiers. Tiers a commonly used term for many things imo. As other games used that for stuff like tech tree stuff.
also it ran its course at as wow progressed on. Check out the t9 gear! Umm, can you convert that to normal terms for the converts like me. The raid cycle/expac its from would be nice really.
Its like parents. at some point you give your kid a proper age. Yeah this is my son, he is 168 months old. Yeah, no. 14 works better.
the only thing that matters is if they can keep you coming back. 1000 angry posts on reddit or forums means nothing to them when they look at player analytics in the game and see 1,000,000 returning players.
the only real solution is to get more people to not return until whatever thing you want is changed for the better because that hurts them where they actually care. don’t ever forget, its always about that green cash money.
