Titanforging and Warforging make me upset

You can forget about ignoring people.

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.

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just remember that Naxx25 was cleared within 72 hours of expansion launch. And today, those guilds have ~6 weeks of gear going into the first raid.

? 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.

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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.

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lol its someones job to sift through all this and bring something tangible to the boss. gl whoever it is.

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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.

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Just ignore content you don’t like and do the ones you do simple.

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.

Funny he says that yet forges have retained my interest to playing WoW BFA but it’s not the only thing that has in BFA expansion there is more.

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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.”

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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 :slight_smile: everybody plays different here and thats ok.

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Meh, I am happy with it. It doesn’t make a bad player good, or a good player better. If you still die in mechanics you will die with your titan forged gear just as if you had none.

This is why I use RIO.

This is exactly what I dislike about the system. Players feel compelled to roll the dice at these small chances for an upgrade, and almost inherently feel bad when they don’t get them. Perhaps they don’t feel so bad the first time, but after a few passes the negative aspect of it does start to make an impact. I’d point out what many others have already about how all seven of your characters did the same amount of work, and yet three of them were given extra, one particularly moreso than the others. There’s enough RNG to getting loot in the first place that we shouldn’t need to feel any need to play a lottery on top of it all.

I would also argue issues with trinket viability, given that things like Spyglass have such a powerlevel that even a 360 is at least comparable to 385 BfD trinkets, but it’s an issue compounded by the WF/TF chances, and the game is overall still balanced around the capabilities of possibly having one with bonus WF/TF, even if you haven’t been so lucky.

The context of everything I had said was that when you’re out of base ilvl gear for the content you participate in, all you have left is to hope for forges. It’s not intentionally ignoring the rest of the system, it’s objectively reviewing the system as the developers have presented and their intention for it to function as an engaging method of progression beyond base ilvl - in this aspect as a stand alone system it provides a function. The only other system it affects is how players advance into more difficult content, which I touched on. If you want to actually discuss those implications we can. If there are systems that interact with it please feel free to correct me with a list of things I didn’t mention.

I never said that people don’t in that post. But we also went over this a few days ago, and by your same argument - I personally do not do them just for TF, others have also stated that they don’t. Therefore it’s right by the same amount as you may consider it wrong within that context. I’m not going into a circular argument on it.

I agree, of course it’s dependent on the individual, and I don’t disagree with an average metric being of value but its something that neither Blizzard or us can actually assess because players typically don’t even know themselves what their threshold is.

About the most that I can do is draw from with the information available. We know player counts dip dramatically as expansion progress, also as patches drag on. We also know that the fundamental gameplay loop and base principal of WoW -> Gear your character to kill bigger things to get more gear (yes there are side activities but this is the game at it’s core). It’s pretty safe to bet that when a game loses players it’s because at it’s core is not doing a good enough job. In WoW, this would be that the reward/incentive system that’s designed to keep players playing is not working as well as it could. I realize things like class design impact this as well, but I’m aware that for myself and players like me that enjoy the combat it’s that character progression stagnates. Given it only takes ~2 months (at least for me) to get to a point where the only significant upgrades come from WF/TF, the WF/TF system, it’s probably a good place to look for how the progression system can be improved for player retention of people like that.

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I only did it once im not addicted into trying to finding forges like alot of people do ingame only did it because my paladin really needed a trinket and it was easy to get too or i would have just done it once.Paladin got the trinket and it was a titanforge so worked out well for me.

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If I do that, I get out-ilvld and thus drop on rankings. So then I lose ALL enjoyment the game provides.

Nonetheless, you were compelled to do so on seven characters. And none of that takes away from the great example of the disparity that can happen between players with just your seven characters.

It wasn’t hard to do is the point and was right next to the flightmaster your looking wayyy to much into it sir lol my paladin had a low ilvl blue trinket would have been a replacement nomatter what forge or not.I don’t go looking for forges thats silly.

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