It’s gets brought up A LOT in “Remove LFR” posts. The simple fact is that LFR is not a good stepping stone into raiding. LFR doesn’t really teach you what WoW’s raids are like on a social level. Normal mode is very accessible as is.
Most of the folks who want to raid, but can’t, don’t raid because they have real-life responsibilities that simply don’t allow them the time to sit down and play for a couple hours.
As for a TF item inspiring thme to do harder content – I disagree. Most players aiming for Heroic and Mythic raids are competitive in nature. If this player isn’t already trying to seek out upgrades by tackling more challenging content, then I simply do not expect them to step into any type of progression raiding environment.
If you had quoted the whole piece, you would have probably realized it was somewhat tongue and cheek. But, that said, that one in a million player who does get inspired makes the whole system worth it…
So it’s a feeling thing for you. At worst it’s a feeling thing. You said it yourself it doesn’t take away anything tangible, and in your example it’s just the way you look at it that makes it anything other than positive for you. You look at it as welfare, and it’s not welfare. It’s just a neat little bonus. Good for you, doesn’t hurt anyone or anything.
The whole “casuals don’t need X” argument is really tired. It would be different if we were talking about full sets of gear or something, but over the course of an expansion a super casual might get one or two nice pieces. Who does that hurt? Nobody. It’s pretty neat for that person though. Now it’s really hard to re-cork that bottle too, because if I’m completely honest if they did away with Titanforging I’d probably be much less interested in playing the game. Or at least I’d login, do whatever my content is, logout, and see you next week. At least this way there is a very small chance that I might actually get a reward for doing other stuff.
So small that it’s absolutely not worth farming for in any way. I mean look at the world first race, those people went to extreme lengths to get every piece of gear they could, and they never touched anything below heroic, or at most they ran normal once. That’s how not worth it fishing for TF gear from lower content is.
Probably one of my favorite things they’ve added to the game in recent years. Right up there with M+.
If you have a look there are also other threads about similar interactions caused by the gearing systems in WoW currently, such as
Explaining why it’s “not just a feeling thing”.
The availability of high end gear makes a lot of forms of content worthless in today’s state of the game.
WF/TF isn’t the main or only culprit absolutely, but it something that contributes to it being more over the top.
Completely disregard what I say and nitpick what you only perceive. You turned something I said into something you want it to be interpreted as but you’re not even addressing anything I’m pointing out. It’s not even a different perspective or take on what i’m saying. Intangibility does not only mean just a feeling, but experiences are also values and key components to structure and how something overall lives. MMO’s are living things in a way but when you have systems where you’re rewarded for the bare minimum you’re taking experiences away for superficial rewards. Also, feelings don’t discredit the argument.
This is the problem the system inherently creates, you’re now feeling entitled to rewards you do figuratively nothing to achieve. That’s taking away from the MMORPG element.
You said it very clearly, outside of rewards you don’t feel like it’s a game worth investing into and this is a big problem that has nothing to do with TF. The game has effectively implemented too many meaningless systems to inject superficiality to make you “happy”. At what point does that even sound like a game anymore? Sounds more to me like a carrot on a stick for your money. One carrot won’t make you happy.
What I’d suggest is just cap titanforging to not even touch mythic quality loot. There needs to be a fine line drawn, and regardless of who is wearing what the point should be that rewards should be given based on being able to clear appropriate content. It does not matter how small a percentage of people getting mythic quality gear. The principal of rewards matters in all MMORPG’s, games like final fantasy do it right. As a casual in that game, you can work your way up to savage and ultimate level of gear but you do have to actually play the game and not just get lucky. You earn tokens and fragments of those tokens to eventually create a piece of gear. It’s a lot like TBC/wotlk the justice points system. Not trying to compare the games but point being rather than just a random piece titanforging, I think working on upgrading your gear would be better. But again, it’s as you said, it’s very hard to re-cork that bottle since it’s been open and self-entitlement will always trump the overall health of the game.
Back in the day we didn’t have to be hoping and guessing, we were rewarded and earned it through extended content, challenging raids that weren’t cleared on mythic the first week.
There was a sense of progression that wasn’t insane like it is today, going from a blue to an epic after weeks felt great. Now it’s just a number.
? Its pretty clear and 99% of human would agree that Warfront difficulty isnt even come close to Heroic raiding or 2.1k arena rating.
Also you could literally just press queue Warfront and let go your mouse for 20-30 min, that might not be 0 effort but it does seems pretty close for the reward its giving.
What are you talking about? Of course what you do has an input on the outcome. If you don’t do the content, you get nothing. If you do, you get a chance of titanforging. Without titanforging there’d be no possible reward.
The reward without titanforging is the base item. I’m assuming content is any form of gameplay in the current expansion that gives loot. The base reward for gameplay is base ilvl loot, within that there are different items which creates a variable reward structure - this in and of itself creates a complete system. We increase the reward variability by introducing titanforging.
Game design psychology recognizes that the more scarce rewards get, the less the participation. This occurs in games when stagnation hits, like end of a raid tier of expanion. This period is usually associated with a drop in players.http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php covers the topic in more detail. IMO the main reason the behavior stops is because the time investment is an inherent negative operator (decreases liklihood of behavior continuing) that discourages continual use. Overplay of any video game adds problems to sleep, work, social life outside of the game etc…
So how does Titanforging interact with this?
Titanforging as a system accelerates the gearing process pushing players into end game faster and creating the effect described in the last paragraph. There is a fixed item level cap for every raid tier, Blizzard intentionally does this to control power creep as their character power growth model is exponential. The natural character progression model is linearly progressing through each difficulty, but TF/WF gives loot that gains item levels that can exceed the relative base power in the next step in gameplay/difficulty progression up to the 425 ilvl cap. This essentially invalidates the base reward of that next step in difficulty requiring the player to rely on titanforging alone for an upgrade when they make that next natural step. If they skip that next step to get to the next base ilvl that is an upgrade, their jumping up the ladder faster than intended. As a side note, if a player doesn’t get enough time at a given difficulty and doesn’t learn the mechanics, they get punished at the next step. This get’s into gear as an ineffective learning crutch being used to accessing content the player isn’t ready for, but this is another discussion topic entirely. Assuming the player has to continue linearly in difficulty (which is supported by IO and how pugs form), we come to a point where the only real upgrades are titanforing and warforging which are scarce. If upgrades are too scarce they don’t provide an adequate incentive for players to continue, and on principal TF/WF pushes the player to that point at a faster rate than would normally be achieved through standard gameplay. As a system of RNG this will always be the case because excessive scarcity in skinner’s box models in RPG’s don’t work as a gameplay model. I miss phrased what I was trying to say but my point in a nutshell is that titanforging as a system is inherently counter productive to the goal of retaining players and, that as a system by itself, it doesnt provide adequate incentive to play the game just due to relative scarcity.
It’s not possible for you to know the first part of your claim (that forging is inherently counter productive to the goal of retaining players). That’s entirely speculative and based upon your own bias. To the second part regarding forging as a system by itself…you’re intentionally judging forging out of context of the actual reward system. Doing so doesn’t give an honest assessment as it doesn’t function in a vacuum as it’s designed to function in concert with other systems not as a standalone system. What it does as a standalone system is absolutely nothing.
You said, “it doesnt provide adequate incentive to play the game just due to relative scarcity” but people do chase forges. And if they do (which we all know people do and many people have attested to here) how does that by itself, disregarding anything else, not demonstrate that point to be wrong? Forging is an incentive, in conjunction with other systems, for people to do content even if they would normally not receive an upgrade from the content.
The important thing to look at if you want to assess how successful forging is is when are the rewards even with the possibility of forging not worth it. Figure out what point that is for people on average. Then assess whether the added content from forge chasing increases player activity or decreases it overall in comparison to how much content people would have if forging didn’t exist. My guess is that this depends on the person you’re talking about as to what the outcome of that question is going to be. On the average I’d bet people typically get non-marginal increases in content lifetime from forging and other systems combined than they would without forging, though there are probably some who consume less content. Specifically people who only want to raid and don’t want to do any other content. For M+ specifically I think it vastly increases consumed content.
Yeah, he’s trying to apply a principle from an article he read to forging alone, out of context of the game as a whole without regard for commentary made in the article he cited. Here’s the conclusion from that article. It explicitly makes the point that behavior is a complex thing. Isolating a singular element gives insight about behavioral responses, but that insight isn’t necessarily something that can be simply applied to a singular element of a complicated multi-layered reward system.
“The application of general rules to a specific case is always tricky, especially in situations where there is more than one type of contingency operating. Most experiments in behavioral psychology are designed to illuminate a single phenomenon, like an X-ray revealing the bones of an arm. The skin, muscles, and so on aren’t shown, so the resulting picture is incomplete. But even with just the bones, we can make a good guess about how the arm works, its limitations and flexibilities. The behavioral principles discussed here should be understood to have similar benefits and limitations. There are numerous other things that influence players, but the basic patterns of consequences and rewards form the framework which enable all the rest.”
I once spammed 7 classes on one trinket quest just for a chance of a forge out of it i gotten 2 warforges and one titanforge was worth it everybody plays different here and thats ok.
![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
everybody plays different here and thats ok.