One of my biggest issues with Shadowlands is how unrewarding it feels to play. It FEELS like it has a lot I COULD do, right? So why does it feel SO unrewarding?
Then it hit me. Shadowlands’ biggest reliable casual reward is gold. You mostly get gold for callings, you only get gold for working hard on your professions, etc…
But the token has given gold a real world value. $20 = 189,756G right now.
So if I were to take the time to complete a Calling, let’s say that takes 30m with all of the traveling and with how tedious some of the quests are, and that calling gives me ~3000 gold.
30m of my time = 3000 gold = $0.32 USD. I just did a chore for $1.04 an hour.
In what world does that feel rewarding? How is this enticing?
How hard do you have to work to sell that legendary? To build it up to a high enough level to be worth $20-40 at most?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I feel no joy in receiving gold as a reward anymore, and it feels like Gold is the only reliable reward in this expansion.
Perhaps that’s why I can’t find any of the content interesting. I’m a reward driven player and I’m getting offered pocket change in a video game.
Responding to your claim that gold is unrewarding as a reward and how to fix that. Shadowlands systems (as a whole) feel unrewarding, I agree with that premise. I’m sure there were a lot of reasons why this is the case, but personally I think is bad developer/management judgment. My biggest issue is lackluster systems, lazy development paths, timegates, anti-alt, low loot drop rates, bad vault design, among many other.
Professions to craft legendaries take work. You need materials, you need to craft enough of them to level them, etc… You can just buy the materials, sure. Spend money to make money. But how long does it take to make that money back?
The point is, the only value to professions is gold. And gold has a real world value. So why would anyone put the effort into doing professions for gold when you can just buy the gold?
If you have any sort of disposable income at all, then gold has little value. The more disposable income, the less value it has. If you don’t have disposable income, then you’re getting cheated, because you’re getting rewarded with pocket change.
See where I’m coming from? The token makes gold a really lousy reward.
Tokens are fine. I just treat the video game like a video game. I pay my sub with money, I earn gold in game and buy stuff in game with it or occasionally convert it to store balance to get a shop mount.
Blizzard has never been good about rewards. They stuff in a bunch of mounts/mount recolors which honestly have kind of lost their excitement as a result. But maybe that’s just me. They’ve also bungled up the transmog rewards with pretty subpar transmog, and especially in this expansion shoehorning players into only two sets (the original and it’s recolors along with the 9.1 one and recolors) outside of pretty subpar raid sets (again, only two sets with varying colors). So transmog isn’t rewarding, mounts numbers are severely bloated, pets aren’t for everyone, and that just leaves…what?
They focus so much on power rewards that are fleeting and temporary that there’s nothing to really pursue of interest. We could have Druid forms, spell effects, hell even emotes or customization options to pursue. Instead, all we’re really given are mounts. This expansion in particular has been bad.
I don’t know if that’s similar to your issues with rewards, but this is mine. The power reward system bores me because I’ll just replace it soon. Once I have Sylvanas down, I don’t care about power rewards anymore. And since mounts have stopped interesting me, there’s no reward for me to really pursue right now. Why do I need gold, everything is bought with anima. But why do I need anima, I have the sets of armor and weapon trandmog I want. Why do I need research? Nothing there really catches my attention. There’s stuff to grind, but it just doesn’t feel worth it.
The WoW token doesn’t bother me much as a result, I just think Blizzard is really bad about rewarding players with stuff.
Gold as a side thing isn’t bad. Gold as its own reward is. At least that’s my opinion.
Shadowlands depends very heavily on gold in its reward structure. I believe that’s one reason why Shadowlands feels very unrewarding.
The token has been around since WoD, but outside of WoD’s issues, the game progressed rather well without feeling unrewarding. But something is very off about Shadowlands, and I feel like this is it.
Maybe it’s just been in my face more with things like boosts becoming so prevalent, but gold alone does not feel good to get to me.
In RPGs, reward matters for me. It’s the pinnacle of this genre IMO, be it power, cosmetic or currency.
To be honest, it takes alot of of mats to make a legendary Plus it tier upgrade every time. May take weeks to acquire it ,do people have that much time? enters the solutions to most peoples problems (the wow token) just buy it with you money simple easy to get gold.bingo sell it on the AH, buy the mats and go.
Who’s making the profit? the player or the token seller? you could’ve farmed the mats save your gold but no there is no time,I want it now(considering everything will be gone in the next expanse) you want to play it now while you can.
I have been, but my time feels like I’m wasting it by earning things I could just buy outright.
I could make any avenue in my life harder for the sake of making it harder if I wanted to, but why would I?
I suppose this is one reason I don’t value mobile games. You can play the mobile games, sure. But their design is to get you to just buy the reward. WoW feels like this right now.
With each expansion we go through we lose everything we earned in power ,nothing is carried over to the next and it seem like a losing battle every time. Why ,couldn’t we have one power we can carry that has meaning to the players class .spec? This alone would be meaningful and rewarding,sort of heirloom of heritage .
Yeah, for sure. That’s definitely contributing to it.
Don’t misunderstand this post. This isn’t just a “token is bad” post. Like I said, I didn’t mind it until this expansion and I have been playing actively until BFA and then semi-actively until recently, where I only play kinda seasonally.
This is trying to constructive about the current reward structure and how I think the token plays into it.
You can’t get around it the token system was design not to be rewarding everything was built with it in mind from the start. In order to feel rewarding you must have a desire for like the legendary leggos there is no way to make them ,have them upgraded in time enough to use them before it becomes useless.
I agree. And the fact that the boost meta has made everything in the game available for gold makes everything less rewarding. This is why people found Legion to be more rewarding. Sure there were boosts, but there were also things you couldn’t boost without account sharing, such as class mounts, most artifact appearances, and the mage tower. Every meaningful reward in BFA and SL could be purchased with gold, which means all of it can be purchased via real money as well.
No, it doesn’t. You interpreting WoW as a job through the amount of money you earn through gold is not the fault of the Token.
The reason why gold feels superfluous is because it is. Nothing is worth buying unless you want to buy a run, which then completely defeats the point of playing an MMO in the first place.
Because of Blizzard’s fetish for multiple systems, those currencies are the reward; from conduit upgrades, soul ash, soul cinders, and those stupid domination shards. Throwing gold in after it is pretty much laughable.