Pwincess, I want to piggyback your post to real talk all of this challenge mode stuff. Hold on tight.
WoW’s dogged focus on the few percent of hardcore raiders and M+ hardcore runners is appreciated by a lot of people. It needs to be said, however, that for a very long time, the whole game got swirled into that small part of the overall game world.
The beloved vanilla WoW experience was an open world RPG first with raids as an accidental success. Blizzard’s very own happy mistake… like Halo Multiplayer. It was auspicious at the time because it filled a gap that the end of the game didn’t even have quests to top up.
The major world events, wars, and long quest chain to begin a long awaited SEIGE with thousands of others turned into stationary calandar-bound portals with ilvl attachments. The surprise, tension, and anticipation left with the expectation of a raid.
WoW at its most foundational is an MMO RPG… Blizzard is at is worst when it’s feeding the challenge beast, and at its most beloved when it’s enriching the world and allowing the playerbase to chase the wonder this world has to offer. Raids included.
As a very long-winded way of saying that challenge modes and “tiers”, their rewards, and the fanfare around them receiving such a pressing point of contention from Blizzard has been like like watching a friend turn partying into substance addiction. The point was and is always the party and the people in it.
The thing that upsets me most isn’t that Blizzard locked away these skins, it’s that I view it as a symptom of a generation of WoW developers who were making a dungeon game and not a WORLD game. Chris Metzen’s return was so beloved because the difference in game design philosophy is so distinctly noticeable.
Legion was and is a high point in the game that I think War Within has been shaping up to be. Long story short, I come here to live the fantasy, and this kind of stuff is so jarring… It just rips me out. I’ve heard talk that Blizzard should force new players to play through every expansion one-by-one and complete the main campaign before being allowed to run current content… It’s worth considering, even if it’s crazy to expect of anyone.