Here as constructive criticism I would like to list my top 5 anti customer game flaws.
These are flaws that are obvious and easily fixed and are designed to purposefully take away customer satisfaction.
Timegating
Placing a time restriction on how often you can do anything is purposefully preventing your customer doing something at their pace in the name of balance or content longevity. This leads to only the negative experience of reputation grinding, daily quest grinding, and mandatory play time. I realize this is a condition of the basic MMO structure and the solutions if any are complex and possibly not realistic. It however is still a very real ant-customer experience.
The Random Number Generator
Instead of a system rewarding hard work, time invested or skill the random number generator is the lazy game developers way of adding âbalanceâ to any system. Whether its the chance of getting the loot piece you want or need, the amount of effectiveness of skill or ability the random number generator leaves it all to chance, forcing an indifferent at best time gate and anti customer experience.
Thoughtless Loot Tables
Partly due to the RNG the rewards you get from world quest, dungeons, raids and even quest are designed to frustrate and time gate you. Why they made it mandatory for you to wear and develop a legendary neck and cloak, and then continue to drop neck and cloak items. It is also my suspicion that the lack of weapon drops are due to a change in the drop rate in Legion because of their now obsolete legendary status and the loot rate was copy/pasted without thought. Why every item in the game scales with difficulty but not your item level like every world quest is a design choice.
Trade skill Irrelevance
At the start of the expansion BFA did well in some areas making almost every trade skill viable, desirable and relevant. But taking away key mechanics such gem slots in gear is a prime example of anti-customer policy. (again an RNG victim) While some retained utility at least while the expansion developed, most became pointless to level or develop as they maintained no reason to pursue from a story standpoint or a statistical or beneficiary goal.
Enabling profiteering
In response to many of the above issues the game and social feed has become rampant with a burgeoning industry of rampant carry for gold businesses. This is in no small part a response to the profiteering behind the WoW token. By allowing this in game under the pretense of real world cash is not being used, is sophistry at best. Real world cash is still being exchanged for gold, and gold collected is sold for real world cash or game time in lieu of cash. This has further defined negative socioeconomic class division among the player base and in my opinion outweighs any benefit.
Itâs funny that you call these things anti-consumer but most of them are the exact reason people play MMOs.
If I wanted an RPG that I could be done with in 100 hours there are way better ways for me to spend my money. I play WoW or any other MMO for the long term time investment that is provided by the grind, timegating, and loot tables.
I would be more upset if everyone could finish all the content in 3 weeks so they could stop playing.
Every single one of these things has been in the game since day 1. Oddly enough, this game was one, and still is one, of the most popular video games in the world.
None of that is for âbalanceâ all of that is to keep us playing for longer durations.
Itâs quite simple, they canât make content faster than we consume content so MMOs have ALWAYS used RNG and other ways like time gating to delay us from achieving our goals to extend our subs. Not sure why people donât understand this. If you donât like it, donât play⌠thereâs plenty of other games you can consume in a single day/week/month.
Some see it like you , some see it like a brake so that the no lifer dont get ahead so much from the rest , making it pretty clear that if you dont no life wow = ya bad.
RNG always has been a part of mmorpg , nothing more fun than farming 1 item for it to drop on the 15th run âŚagain personal taste not anti customerâŚ
Because people wouldnt do much except the easiest part of acquiring gear , because people didnt want to do the cloak quest , wouldnt be fair if they were stuck with a cloak lvl 119 just because âŚ
Sure tradeskill are quite bad in BFA , but you naming jewelcrafting ⌠nothing worst than having to buy gems every piece of gear you get ⌠actually glad it was random + gouged eye of nzoth ⌠I have enchanting/engineering and im so glad i do , free enchants for the entirety of BFA , crafted helm and brez alongside fun toys âŚ
I canât say on that on , i almost have to agree with you , feels weird but hey , im not ashamed of having a diversified opinion either , wow tokens made carries a lot more rampant than before âŚ
Edit: also wouldnt it be anti consumer and not anti customer ? Curious because my english is bad and would like to know ^^
A Blizzard customer is a consumer of Blizzardâs products. So, both terms mean about the same thing. Google turns up 606 million results for âanti-consumerâ versus 933 million results for âanti-customerâ, so both terms are pretty popular. Google even pulls in the anti-consumer results if you search for anti-customer, so it views them as synonyms also.
The only technical issue to point out is that the terms should have a hyphen in them, since âantiâ is a prefix, it canât stand on itâs own; and the compound terms havenât been normalized into a single word yet.
Instead of going to TacoBell and demanding they carry hamburgers, you have to come to the realization that if you want a hamburger you have to go elsewhere for it.
The genre has followed a core set of principles since the creation of it in the 90s. Itâs not going to change. If you donât like it then maybe you should look for what you want elsewhere.
The game has to have it, itâs necessary to keep playing. It can be extreme though.
Thing about it is that when youâre new to the game you donât notice the time gating.
Not really. Thereâs so much going on, to do that it doesnât really catch your notice until youâve been playing awhile or youâve played through all the expacâs and thatâs when you notice it.
The longer youâve played can make it seem more extreme, too.
They did take too long to bring PF2 into BfA. Thatâs what I noticed.
RNG is a crucial aspect of many games, especially if it isnât meant to be a played a single time. However when going to far the game just starts to feel like a casino and thatâs not good at all.
Timegating is pretty horrible because by design itâs meant to limit the amount of content available to the player at a given time. While a casual player wonât notice it, people who play more will constantly run into it. Basically youâre being punished for playing a lot.
Tradeskills in wow are next to useless but that has been the case with wow for a very, very long time. It doesnât come anywhere near other mmos but how would you feel if someone could just craft BiS items without ever stepping into a raid? Iâm sure that would make you cry on the inside.
I highly doubt the developers sat down and said, âOkay, we need to come up with ways to take away customer satisfaction. Whoâs first? Joe? Youâre a spiteful person, I bet you have a laundry list of ideas!â
This goes all the way back to PnP RPGs where dice were used to the same purpose in order to create a more realistic, undetermined and challenging experience. So sorry, no.
I like RNG. I think removing RNG results in an anti customer game flaw - i.e. grind, grind and more grind.
There is nothing wrong with carries. And people have sold carries from the start so tokens have very little to do with this. If 1% of the people selling carries end up selling them for real money, blizzard will catch them evenually.
say what? what exactly are you trying to make carries into now?
Sometimes itâs amazing how many weapons you get out of old raids.
Iâm convinced that devs think it is good for our souls to go without weapons for an extended period of time, in the same way that monarchists thought it was noble to be poor.
Or the idea that getting a quality offhand when youâve got a grossly inadequate two hander should feel like winning the lottery. More like play stupid games win stupid prizes.
I will agree that Tradeskills being crap and the unimaginative loot tables and RNG loot distribution are flaws with the current iteration of the game, you almost lost me at time gating
Time Gating ensures that players who donât have the free time to spend 6 hours playing video games every night can still enjoy their time in the game without being miles beyond everyone immediately.
The only real change Iâd like to see is moving most daily gates to weekly gates (for the sake of those that can only really play on Weekends) and for World Quests to shift to a more GW2-like system with quests rotating every 10 minutes or so, again for the sake of Weekend players. There could be a weekly rep cap implemented to maintain current pace since WQs would no longer be on a longform respawn timer.
TL;DR: Time Gating is bad for one group of players and good for another group of players. Itâs not automatically anti-consumer.
RNG on attacks ensures a stat like crit has value. The RNG outside of crits is minimal.
RNG ensures content that wonât change for 4-6 months lasts more than 3 days. As much as you and others whine about time gating, this is a necessary evil and not anti-consumer. MMORPGs need longevity to survive. If everyone did their 3 days and bailed, the genre could not function.
RNG ensures a bit of excitement from completing content. If you knew what you were getting every time, itâd just be a list of chores to become BiS (like I said, in 3 days or so). I have played FFXIV every expansion, and the #1 thing that keeps me from enjoying playing long-term, is that I know EXACTLY what gear I will be wearing and when from day 1, because the BiS gear outside of their equivalent to Mythic Raiding is from a currency vendor. It feels soulless, and I legitimately prefer RNG, even if WoW often goes TOO far in that direction. There IS a middle ground.
I agree with this one. I wouldnât call it âanti consumerâ though, just incompetent. Herbalism paired with Alchemy has ALWAYS been a consistently strong profession combination. Everything else is sometimes okay sometimes straight garbage. Blizzard has always been terrible at making professions feel good.
Even when we had the combat bonuses, the professions themselves werenât good, itâs just something most people grinded out real quick for the free bonus.
You have a point here, but realistically, WoW isnât an economy simulator like EVE, or even Runescape. For that reason, under normal circumstances, the token isnât a huge deal, outside of maybe the first tier of an expansion where the usual sources of BoEs + world drops + darkmoon cards are all still relevant at the same time.
However, the prevalence of paid carries has gotten out of control over the last few expansions. A combination of cross-realm groups becoming more known and accessible thanks to the Premade Group Finder and the Token opening up an avenue of âlegalâ RMT (the sellers are not making IRL $$$, but the buyer is often spending it) has made it so.
I donât think the solution is gutting the token.
I DO think Blizzard needs to take a firm stand against paid carries at this point though. It goes against the nature of the game, token / RMT or not. Make it against the ToS. Add a report option to right click in chat (in addition to the existing one in Group Finder). Spend the rest of BfA handing out 2 week bans with a warning that the standard suspension for this offense will increase in Shadowlands. Make it start at like 3 months starting then, doubling for repeat offenders like chat suspensions do.
Paid Carries werenât much of an issue when it was just âthat one guildâ on your server back in MoP or something. But itâs become far too rampant.
(note: bans would be for the ones advertising. If it became clear that a guild was circumventing that, banning the entire guild (at least the ones participating in the runs) would be on the table. I understand thatâs harder to prove though)
People buy carries all the time IRL. Good employees can raise your company up by a mile.
I donât buy carries (because why would I? The whole point of the game is to progress) but I see lots of them being advertised. So you are correct, there is a large market for them and it is weird.
No. Iâm not reading what you said, but just no. Time-gating is perfectly fine.
This is a D&D inspired RPG. RNG loot tables are an expected staple.
You suspect wrong. Ion has a specific fantasy about weapons, that players want to be excited to get weapons. Which is, in part, true, although I think it is taken to extremes.
Possibly true of BFA, but Shadowlands is forcing people to use crafted items via legendaries for the entirety of the expansion so this is mostly fixed.
âabove issuesâ? Nothing you said leads into this point.