That’s not how their performance would be judged. It’s if they met performance expectations, or if they made missteps that clearly (in the eyes of their management) reduced the $$$ that would otherwise have been made.
I’m not fighting the gameplay perspective. That’s not what I typed out. What I typed out was that it feels odd saying
“Hey Kyrian. I’m going to pledge myself to you guys. But for now, I’m going to pull some skeletons out of the ground with the Necrolords abilities. Hope that’s alright”
At that point the choice of the Covenant becomes far less impactful to me because while I am indeed Kyrian, their abilities suck so I’m going with the Venthyr/Nightfae/Necrolord.
I am not advocating for Covenants to be locked. I am pointing out that the decision for Covenants to be a thing and the choice to be a part of character progression in the expansion now gets drawn into the gameplay vs lore aspect. Which to me both sides have very valid arguments. Hence why I think it’s impossible to cater to everyone.
You’re preaching as someone who loves gaming and who wouldn’t agree… but we’re dealing with shareholders so it’s not that accurate.
Im not going to pretend to know all the secrets but I do know myself and many others enjoyed the game when it was less democratic.
It’s to no one’s surprise most ideas people have are completely terrible
Deactivate them in PvP.
Craftable Legendaries as well. So that’s three of them right off the bat.
We’re at a place where the systems are the game. If we want to get at the actual content like M+, PvP, and Raids we end up having to spend more and more time wading through systems before we get to the actual good stuff.
Then, finally, after years of doing system chores to keep up with the ability to do actual content - those systems get deleted and replaced with another gimmick.
No wonder so many people have checked out.
1 Like
How is this different from what happens with classes and specs already?
There are preferred specs for certain types of content. If you want to have an easy time pugging m+, then certain specs are better than others.
It’s been possible to reroll for small power advantages, and the associated grouping advantages, thoughout the game’s history. That’s also been a recipe for burnout and unnecessary a lot of the time, especially once the devs committed to making all specs viable in a given role.
If a player doesn’t want to deal with inflexible pugs, and related frustration, then finding a good guild or playing with friends is a solution, one that improves the game in a lot of respects, even outside of balance concerns.
The scenario in which a pug group chooses player X over player Y is happening regardless. If it’s not the Covenant, it’s the spec or the class. Or the raider io score, or having/not having AotC.
This is essentially the same discussion that was already had around class utility, buffs, etc.
There can be reasons to choose one thing over another. It doesn’t break the game.
What gets me is that they’re somehow so out of touch with the average player that they think some of their ideas will be well received, sometimes i read about something and think to myself “This is going to go over like a lead balloon”, then it does and the devs end up walking it back or making some changes or afterwards come out with the old classic line “we could have done better with that”.
Like, how did they not see it? Are they all just so wrapped up in their own little hordie raider bubble and have so little contact with the average player that they’re absolutely oblivious to how the community will feel about things?
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Well that’s what happened.
WOTLK Blizzard:
“We made WOTLK and delayed it to Soon to make sure it was a masterpiece, we listened to all your feedback and as gamers for gamers, we tried to make the most epic game possibly and fix the imbalances of horde vs alliance by giving the unpopulated monster race horde a appealing class to help their populations, made epic fights, cool zones and the epic Blizzard polish you know us all for.”
15 years later:
BFA Blizzard: " We openly troll half the races by giving ourselves ingame benefits, 5 chooseable racial traits with a 100% heal in arenas for zandalari, but we gave you fat people as a new race that took maybe 5 hours to make, that’s a lot of time. I mean for the price of a expac you could get a customized 3d model with highly detailed fur details of a saberon from a fan artist for 30-60$ made just for you. But here at blizz we believe that it should cost us 60$ x 1,000,000 to select the fat slider on character customizations still behind what people did in 2010 with guild wars 2. "
“By chinese overlord game investors, for chinese game overlord investors. The player doesn’t matter unless they’re giving us money to skip the horrible unrevamped content we left in like dying raiding scenes when even top 10 pop servers have no raiding guilds and people are dying during a pandemic waiting for three months of timegating. Gotta extract the money from their souls next. That’s what being a game dev is all about.”
Look all im saying is WTF happened to this game over the years. You know when the original people who made it, and the passion gets sold or bought out, then you’re just left with a soulless product. Wow and wow classic is like Runescape 3 EoC Mark Gerhard all over again. He got put in by foreign investors who didn’t want long term growth, but to gut the golden goose, extract all revenue from the game and leave a once 100,000 active anytime pop game dead with maybe 553 people playing it a few years later. I just hope we don’t see it happen again run to the ground for a quick buck.
Now it’s not enough for a 90$ 6 month sub and 60$ expansion box every year or two, they want to sell 30$ faction transfers, 30$ level boosts, siphon millions of dollars from charity pets and mythic prize pools. They have to openly mock half the player base by after hearing feedback on ‘diaper gnomes’, putting them in and laughing about them on the way out.
You know the old blizzard polish just seems to have been taken over, we all knew it was a cash cow once, now it’s like dead and re-electrified like zombie simpsons, a procedurally formula of the month reanimated hash that’s lost all original sense and spirit of what made it fun and loved by players, and now it’s just a hollow reminder of what used to be.
4 Likes
You are type of person I seriously question how they still have a sub. This goes beyond being disappointed in the current game. You actively despise and think nothing but the worst of the company with seemingly zero faith in them.
Somehow you still give them money though…
WoW’s two main drivers are cosmetics and gameplay. There is a very likely scenario where I will need to compromise my gameplay for cosmetics, or my cosmetics for gameplay. I hate the Nightfae. I hate the Kyrian. There is a 50% chance, as a player who cares about my gameplay most, that I’ll get locked into a covenant I hate the aesthetics of, just because they slot into my prefered content. That is not good. I want to participate in the lore and my prefered storyline and endgame hangout as well as have a character that isn’t arbitrarily gimped for choosing the wrong Clubhouse when i hit level 60.
For a major expansion feature, that alters your narative, questing, xmog, and endgame, being locked out of the faction you want to play or suffering a major throughput loss is absolutely unacceptable.
I mean just look at the class Cov abilities. Some are obviously better for M+, raid, PvP, or open world content. The problem with Covenants is that there WILL be a meta choice that’s 5 to 25% better than the other choices at any given aspect of the game. There’s no actual choice for people who want to have the best character they can have.
I’m entirely holding off on my class choice for Shadowlands until we hit 9.0 and get some rough numaricals. I can’t pick my class because I don’t know if the covenants I want to play are going to be effective. I don’t want to play an ineffective character. Right now, if I want to participate in the Covenant system and have a powerful character, instead of picking my class first, I’m choosing my mode of content first, followed by the covenant, followed by the class. This is broken. The covenants are a major feature and selling point of the expansion, it fundimentally can’t ship the way it is. There’s no recovering the system.
And okay, say we have a meta, it’s broken, and one covenant needs a nerf for a given spec? What about the patch cycle? What happens when Jimbob who picks Nightfae for the fluff gets his class’s Nightfae ability nerfed, and now the Necrolord ability is absolutely BONKERS overpowered for one reason or another? Jimbob hates the bones and the plague and the gross stuff, he likes flowers and gardens and nice things. Does Jimbob, who hates Necrolords, feel pressured enough to respec into Necrolords because of numaricals on his class? Does blizz expect everyone to eat that punishment? Does blizzard expect players won’t respec out of their preferred covenant if it goes from the best to the worst at what a player enjoys?
Top end players are already planning on having 4 of each class that they play as a primary. It was half-joked about by some MDI players on the Titanforged Podcast. If I were planning to be pushing +20s and playing in a top 50 guild, I would also feel compelled to have 4 of the same class capped and ready.
The covenant system as it is right now is incredibly degenerate and offers pseudo choices (similar to Classic WoW talents (which were removed due to the same Pseudo-Choice BS), feel free to pick off meta, but expect to be excluded from compatent groups) . Covenants should be a fluffy system that determines storyline and cosmetics dominantly. Putting any player power behind it incentivizes players who care about content and character power to play covenants they don’t thematically enjoy, effectively rendering it a non-choice.
In regards to it being ‘chosen like a class’, no, that’s just not how it’s playing out. You pick your class first, and then once you have your class, you get an extra kit of passives and abilities from your covenant. But here’s the thing, the covenants are one size fits all, bar the class ability. That extra kit will be better or worse on any given spec. A spec with weak synergy with its covenant will be bad with that covenant, and likely better with another one.
3 Likes
It’s easier to expect to be dissapointed then to hope to be right and be proven wrong the last 20 times. Hoping for a good saurfang story, character you recognized as the father of Saurfang Jr of wotlk. Wasted. Waited 20 years to see what would happen to Bolvar, wasted.
Wanted to see what would happen with anduin having a character arc growing jaded or turning into a interesting character. Wasted.
Decide to play the game and give it a chance. The last three months have just been waiting for something to happen, cross servers opening up or something. There’s been some xp sure and alt support but it still doesn’t address how you’re still expected to do months of 8.2 catchup to keep up with 8.3s cloak grind and then running into a drought where the first thing you did at the start of the expac is the same at the end.
Sure M+ was fun but the time spent and wasted spending 20 hours a month on a game i played for 2 hours felt wasted. it was gold ground paid sub and playing other games sure there’s ups and downs and fumbles. But it’s really hard seeing how WoW blizzard doesn’t seem to be flat out leaving the ball on the ground, snoring, and waking up to have the referee pick up the ball and shoot it at his own team.
What’s even all this about “integrity of the game” where they had a mythic race, and started despawning the final boss of the others since they weren’t doing it the ‘right’ way, but allowed the other guild to abuse spellsteals and game mechanics and rocket jump racials to skip entire mechanics? I’m just saying once blizzard to be the golden standard, but if you spend all that time trying to hope to be impressed by bfa, i have very low standards.
I would love a saberon head put on a worgen race if i wasn’t half skeptical anything even remotely interesting will go to class xyz. Half of the endgame is denied at the character creation screen if you roll any of the 900/910 dead servers or don’t play in china.
Other games just focus on being the game, you log in, you play, you have communities, you meet someone irl or on reddit or discord, you play together. You play on Wow and you’re segregated by server, can’t help if they’re on say horde xyz and you’re alli, or vice aversa. I gave it 2 months, i have literally, LITERALLY just been playing for at best 2 hours a month, logging in, doing a weekly dungeon, and then logging out to play other games. Bewildered why i’ve been paying this sub to try and find something to do and there’s literally nothing to do. I love dungeon and new content updates, but there’s been no new Dungeons, or 5 man cata Zul’gurub or 5 man deadmine style miniraids added.
There’s literally nothing to do or the other players to do anything and it’s still a server in the top 10 pop and it’s completely dead. The sub for the last 6 months has been for trade chat since the players are great, but doing the calcs, it feels like 150$ down a pit that even with trying to be hopeful with relatively low expectations, a stick, a bone, maybe wotlk OG “mechagnomes”, it’d be better.
But how on earth do you wait 6 months, see no improvements. Hope for something better, and they grab a shovel and start digging lower? I don’t want a game i played in childhood to turn into a dump. But it’s really feels like it’s just in a dead cash cow sent off to the butcher now to squeeze out every last piece of meat from it. I’m not like fuming or anything i just feel honest in saying that sure other expansions flopped, but at least they tried and had some good things in hindsight. I just feel like BFA flat out isn’t making effort at all to improve, and actively relishes letting people down or making systems no one really wants in a game just to break the wheel after they found it.
2 Likes
Addictions are tough to overcome.
They make people do funny stuff all the time.
That’s sad. You should seek help. It is especially concerning that you don’t understand the source. Without knowing that it is very unlikely you will be able to overcome this on your own.
Good luck!
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Your negative reaction to the system is exactly what those of us who favor the system value in it.
You’re punished by the consequences of the system that limits player agency and maximizes the repercussions of a one time selection.
If they change the system to be flexible - this value and enjoyment for us also goes.
They should keep it as is.
Unless i missed it in that wall of text I still don’t know why you are here. Everything points to stepping away and waiting to see how SL shapes up instead of sitting here with a sub feeling despair.
I already said it but I will repeat:
Therefore removing the point of having Covenants at all.
So reducing the importance and challenge of the choice.
Aesthetics are important. But having them be just window-dressing makes them simply an affectation. I like more meaning in my aesthetics and this system, if it does play out as advertised, will give me that.
I am interested in the Covenant system as advertised because making a choice that will actual have lasting impact in-game will add to my gaming experience.
If it plays out as advertised, I will enjoy figuring out how to work within a system the same way I enjoyed figuring out how to work within the various classes my characters have. And it will make me feel like I am actually a part of that Covenant, something that was sadly lacking in the Scryers/Aldor choice.
My opinion is not in reaction to others; this is my opinion standing on its own feet. And my gaming experience of (1) making a hard choice, (2) enjoying the benefits of that choice and (3) overcoming the limitations of that choice, will be enhanced (if, of course, it plays out as advertised).
And again, not a punishment, a challenge. Setting limits in a video game is not punishment, it’s making game play challenging.
So please stop presuming to know other people’s minds. You don’t. You only know your own so you should only speak to your own.
This is basically the same discussion that led to class homogenization, removal of profession perks, utility, buffs, etc.
Too often the devs have come down on the side of diluting or removing features because of small imbalances, or because a particular class ability might be desirable in a certain type of content.
Of course that is a concern. It’s not negligible. But it can’t be the sole consideration.
Ultimately, some concession to that mentally will probably have to be made in the case of Covenants, and that is fine, but I hope that the devs can preserve the basic concept.
And gradually push back against that mindset in general. But they will have to make a concerted effort in that direction over time because Blizzard has itself cultivated that way of thinking and done almost nothing to keep it in check over the years.
Nope - there’s still lots of value to the covenants in terms of rewards, mounts and transmog that tie into the RP/Story of the expansion.
I don’t think it reduces it - I think it waters it down when you make a selection once and then can’t change it.
The current approach removes the potential for players to try new things and explore different ways of playing for differing scenarios and just for fun, diversity over an expansion.
It also eliminates a lot of the potential for players having to plan and think about what part of the game they’re about to play. All of that potential for planning and coordinating goes out the window - dumbing the game down.
We can still have that gamin experience without needing to impose a restrictive system on others.
As a casual role-player, I can enjoy figuring out how to work within the system the way you describe even if others can change their selection. Just like I can enjoy being restricted to ground mounts by choosing not to use flying mounts without having to impose that way of playing the game on everyone else.
This is where we differ - I don’t see it being challenging for a lot of players. In a flexible system - we could choose to be restricted to our choice and gain value from that choice while others can choose to change things up for their own value.
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Leave the Covenants as they are. But don’t make the punishment to switching them be tied behind an entire quest line and rep grind. That’s just insane.
Once you reach exalted on your covenant, you should be able to switch to the other Covenant by another means.
Couple of examples -
Paying a tithe: Starts at 5k, goes up by 5k each time to switch back to that Covenant. Decays 5k every 30 days down to 5k. Example - I’m in Covenant A. I want to switch to B. It’s 5k. I got back to A; it’s 5k. I go to C; it’s 5k. I go back to B; it’s 10k. I go to D; it’s 5k. I go back to B; it’s 15k.
Just the questline completion: after you’ve reached exalted with your main Covenant, you can switch to the other ones after doing their entire quest line. No rep grind. Once you’ve completed all quest lines, you’re able to switch any time. Switching resets rep to 0. You cannot wear Tmogs or use mounts outside of your current Covenant.
A combo of both.
Paying a fee would stil lbe punishment and wouldn’t be very RP.
Hey Covenant X - I know you’ve already taught me how to use your special ability after I’ve earned it; and I’m about to run some M+'s with fellow heroes to get gear that will help slay the big bad guy we’re all trying to take down.
Yeah sure - but pay me. with a Good Fellas accent.
Instead - Of course! Use what you’ve already earned and hurry up! We need to kill the bad guy!