Sometimes it helps to get it out of your system when one has to literally gripe out about how they feel when something they love is being systematically ripped to shreds by every “new” (more like bad) idea to “Improve the Player Experience”. Here’s a short list of some of the things I personally don’t want to see continue to be a part of WoW with the release of TWW. Comment on the crappy in-game things you personally don’t want to see any more of. Hell, comment on cool in-game ideas that you want to see return. Keep it serious but don’t get big mad over something you like but Joe Blow from Kokomo (literally implying any random person) says that he doesn’t.
Power creep, seasonal raid tiers, loot starvation and paid run/levelling services.
Power creep, makes one feel powerful in a creepy way, doesn’t it? Naw, not really, I’m just tired of slow gearing my character in the MOST ARTIFICIAL WAY POSSIBLE. Seriously, Blizz this is what you came up with to keep people from becoming too powerful too fast? Oh, I’ve got an idea, why don’t you put a weekly cap on iLvl increase while you’re at it just to tighten the screws some more (That was sarcasm, not serious about that). Increasing one’s iLvl is the same kind of situation, too high a level of content difficulty has kept a lot of folks from making it past certain gear level points. Everyone wants that 3000 M+ score before they’ll let you in their aspect crest farm runs (Hmm… Makes me think of a certain raid achievement almost everyone wants before letting someone into a paid heroic or mythic raid run)
I’m also no longer down with waiting for a raid season to change over for the next highest ilvl to drop and it’s getting old. I’m personally tired of throwing away a bunch of gear each season that I busted my butt for. Seasonal raid tiers have led to seasonal upgrade currencies and the sheer amount of differing currencies I already have on a single character is staggering, for DF it is specifically because of the power creep and seasonal raid tiers.
As for loot starvation… I’m tired of being hungry all the time and TWW is Blizz’s last real opportunity to fix this problem (and yes, for those of us that invest our time, practice and rote effort into the game, it is a problem), in the eyes of not just me but of a lot of players. Using another game as an example, ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) uses a system where the loot rewards from each dungeon run give SOMETHING OF SUBSTANCE to each and every player that completes it. The rewards are pretty much guaranteed to contain something the player can use or turn into a nice bit of gold by selling to others through the Auctioneers. The concept of a dungeon/raid loot item being character bound is only implemented once the item is used or equipped. You want gold sellers out of business? You want AH prices to actually be more reasonable? You want some schadenfreude watching AH hedgers lose out every time they run through Stormwind or Orgrimmar for their weekly AH murderhobo buyouts? Eliminate loot starvation entirely, retroactively as well. You can remove a vast majority of some of the most toxic players from the game simply by shaking up one of their biggest stakes in the game, the AH economy.
Paid run/levelling services? Pretty self explanatory, it’s a Blizz-permitted player practice that has literally RUINED M+ and Raiding. I don’t have 200k gold (neither do a large portion of players either) to just sling at some rando that may or may not ensure that I complete the Mythic raid run and get the loot I’m trying (and paying) for. And therein lies the greatest problem, paying for a loot drop that one may or may not get… How does that work by the way? Seems kinda sus.
Also, how does the same guy manage to get top number in every single loot roll in the raid when he should have no ability to need at all for anything he’s rolling for, especially when the gear is not even part of his own spec? That seems really sus to me, sus enough to question the integrity of the code-injection monitoring software that is supposed to be a part of the game client.
To Blizz, if anyone there actually reads this, stop and think about the players this coming expansion, not your annual bonuses. Think about what keeps the players with you and ask yourselves if you’re doing something that appreciates the the value of the players in your game instead of solely your pocketbooks, because I guarantee you that whatever you do in order to appreciate the value of your player base, that effort will make your pocketbooks grow alongside said player base. Granted that business strategy isn’t much for the “right-now, right-now” but the payout when “later, later” comes will be tremendous and I daresay much bigger than “right-now, right-now” business tactics.
Now I can hear some folks in the replies gonna say “Buh, but you can farm a hundred thousand gold in an hour by doing this on seventeen different characters! Git gud with your RNG! Buh!” And I’d reply with something like “Dude, shut up with that jazz, I’m not a bot farmer like you.” This is why I said get over it if you read about something that you like but literally anyone else commenting about that something does not. I’d like to see people’s honest opinions about systems in WoW that they don’t like or are seeing problems with that should not be carried over into The War Within. Who knows, maybe some GM or Dev at Blizz will see your comment about some esoteric RNG system and be like “Yeah, that system wasn’t intended to work out like that when we implemented it and thanks for noticing so we can fix it.”
