So word has gotten out that Blizzard is fundamentally neutering the pre-patch Ghoul invasion after people voiced concerns over griefing. This honestly really bummed me out as I have fond memories of the original event back in 2008, and I was really looking forward to this one. But I am not going to act like I don’t totally understand where people who don’t like it are coming from either.
So here are a handful of possible solutions that I propose to try and give both parties what they want.
Create a vendor in cities that can give players an item that makes them immune from being infected.
Make NPCS in the Banks, Auction Houses, and quest givers immune to the plague and to being killed.
Create safe zones where there are Argent Priests or Paladins who have the ability to one shot the ghouls.
Restrict the event to a single city, so that those who want to rampage can have fun, while those who want to go about their business can just go to an unaffected city.
Make the event warmode only, as a means of filtering out unwilling participants.
I am sure there are more solutions, but this is just what I thought of at the top of my head so I encourage others to share their ideas in this thread. Like I said, I get where the other side is coming from but I really don’t think that they should have to defang this event completely.
That basically sums it up. You wanted open season for griefing under the pretence of it somehow being “an event we’ll remember forever” and the vast, vast, VAST majority said NO.
I don’t know why they felt the need to nerf it completely, when having the affected cities respond to the attacks would be so much more satisfying, and would keep the disruption for those players who absolutely don’t want to be involved to a minimum. After all, in a world like Azeroth, where there’s a world-ending threat every couple of years, surely they must have some idea of how to cope with these things, right?
It would take a bit of work, but I’d rather see the city guard with an organized response to a zombie invasion, setting up perimeters around “vital” locations (city gates, SW Keep/Grommash Hold, flight masters) and also safe zones around large public structures (the banks and AHs, SW Cathedral), where civilian NPCs and players can shelter. Add priests to these safe zones, and surround the pre-patch quest NPCs with their own guard and healer contingents to allow players to participate in the questing with minimal disruption.
I’d also suggest they scale all zombies, even player controlled, to allow everyone to participate (a la the Legion invasion prepatch), and possibly phase new arrivals from Exile’s Reach until they finish their initial quests, so new players aren’t being dropped into chaos.
This won’t please the “I don’t want to be bothered at all” crowd, or the “I want to grief everyone freely” crowd, but I think it would provide a decent balance of apocalyptic chaos and undisrupted play, while fitting the world better than “and then zombies attacked and literally nobody in charge bothered to mount any kind of defense despite being used to this kind of thing.”
I will be honest with you, if I had my way they wouldn’t change it at all. But I understand that there are people like you who don’t want to be griefed, and I think that the solutions I offered up are a reasonable compromise. At the end of the day, I hope we can both agree that we just want people in this game to have fun, so please don’t go throwing accusations around that my only interest is to ruin yours. Thank you.
I think you’re heavily taking what he said out of context. By “this honestly bummed me out” he is referring to the overall de-scaling of the event itself, not that he wants to actively grief. And there was a -lot- removed from it. He is well aware of how griefing isn’t fun, and is even offering other options. At the end of the day, a ghoul invasion is a ghoul invasion. It should be like the Walking Dead. Of course, with limitations and boundaries set so that people aren’t griefed if they don’t want to be. Like, keep inside Stormwind off limits for example.
It’s almost like they can make the event opt in, make questgivers, auctioneers, etc. immune to it and make everyone happy.
If you want quest givers, important NPCs like Auctioneers, etc. being infected and dying over and over, then your ONLY desire is to grief other players. Period.
Sure. Don’t log in for the duration. And stop paying for gametime, since forumgoers were adamant that they would track down everyone who was trying to avoid participating and spread the plague to them. They said it wouldn’t be fun if they couldn’t force it on people who didn’t want to participate.
So it was only going to happen inside the capital city auction houses and everywhere else was safe? Do you expect us to believe this, or do you really think that absolutely no one plays the game?
At the end of the day, a ghoul invasion is a ghoul invasion. It should be like the Walking Dead. Of course, with limitations and boundaries set so that people aren’t griefed if they don’t want to be. Like, keep inside Stormwind off limits for example.