No, you legally couldn’t sell that new. It’s against the law. It’s also a physical object, not lines of code.
It is lines of code. The only reason to remove items from the game is to create artificial scarcity. If your complaint is that it makes your stuff less exclusive, you need to get outside more. If your complaint is that the inherent nature of WoW will make the accomplishment less important later because someone can solo the content that you spend months grinding as a party of 20 people to complete… that’s a fair point. But your problem isn’t one of exclusivity but instead the fact that Blizzard aggressively devalues their own work.
As a point of reference, FFXIV has something called Palace of the Dead. It can be done with parties of up to four people and it’s mostly intended as an alternative to leveling in dungeons so that DPS don’t get bogged down in slow queues because POTD is structured around not having a healer. But you can also solo it. Soloing it to floor 200 gets you a special title. The catch? You can’t die, and POTD is sync’d content. Meaning that the experience you have today is (roughly) identical to the one you would have had clear back in Heavensward when the 200 floor achievement was added. To this day it remains one of the rarest achievements in the game. I wager most people would be OK with bringing back removed content like MOP challenge dungeons if they had that same treatment.
And on the other hand? If you just want exclusivity you are to this game what McMansions are to wealth. I’ve been playing since January '05. My two mains back in that classic era were a druid and a warrior. My warrior has the old UBRS key. My druid still has their tier 2 helm with the Zandalari enchantment on it. I mainly keep them as a, “I was there” sort of thing but would I care if people could keep getting them? No. My rogue has a full Blackened Defias set I got back in classic. Would I care if people could still get it? No. I mean, it’s ugly as sin if nothing else.
There should be a degree of exclusivity for the people who get the, “I did it first” type achievements like Ahead of the Curve, but that should be things like titles. Exclusive gear and mounts should be reserved for real difficult and real accomplishments that maybe .1% of the community can achieve. Championships for arena PVP for example, or World First accomplishments.
Anything else is McHardcore wanting to be catered to, and it’s kinda tacky. That, or the people who know that because these are timed exclusives they can make a bunch of gold selling boosted runs. Which… yeah, I am OK with people selling boosted runs but I don’t think Blizzard should actively cater to that community.
The assumptions some of you are making are a very slippery slope. I played from Vanilla, through TBC, but then has to step away from the game because of issues in my real life. Items that have been removed from that original time period, that I had, that have been removed, I no longer have, even though I “earned” them. So what then? I had the items, earned them, bought the things to get them, but because of REAL LIFE, I had to give them up. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to still have them, or get them, or something reasonably close to them, back through some means.
That’s actually the other part I never brought up.
Why on earth should a video game be reminding me of real life? Why should my real life investments be represented by what I don’t have in a video game? These are lines of code. Why am I not allowed to revisit content from when I took breaks from the game? Why am I not allowed to get gear from those times? I don’t have this, “something I got from the pre- Cata era is now gone” problem because I am a sentimental man and my personal banks are almost a memorial to days gone but I can understand why someone would be upset that stuff they had earned in previous content is now completely lost to them.
The fact that the game changes is actually a strong argument for keeping old content in the game. If there’s a point of frustration it’s that Blizzard still hasn’t really figured out a good system to mimic something like FFXIV’s sync system that can be used to keep old content challenging.
There’s nothing wrong with exclusivity but it should be exclusive. Not, “Ah, yeah, I had 500,000 gold to burn and bought a boosted mythic raid for my AOTC 'cheevo.”
Aye, but it does. I was in the same situation. I quit in TBC where achievements weren’t even a thing yet. I have a protector’s tabard and some Dark Portal opening stuff, buried deep on a character I refuse to play, those worked. My achievements? No BRD, while they register my Onyxia when this was keyed for access? A modicum of inferential logic should suffice, yet they applied none.
We should have to prove we did the event or had the item - except Blizzard didn’t know then we would be looking back 15 years in the future. So it is in fact broken, in certain places.
edit: But I’m not making a statement on whether I need to recover the items. Frankly, I’m not sure I care. I’m used to not having a full achievement bank. But it is broken.
I mean…a lot of the now-unobtainable stuff would fall into that category. Maybe not to the extreme degree of ‘.1%’ like you said, but aside from instances like Cata where entire continents’ worth of content was being rewritten and replaced, it’s pretty much all been stuff that wasn’t really just handed out back when it was available.
You said it, it does create exclusivity, because people can see what they have and remember being there at that time and earning it.
People put value on things, it doesn’t matter if it is lines of code or if it is a tangible object. People put time in to things, no one ever asked for those items to be removed, but they were.
So by saying, well I want those items too, even though I didn’t do anything to obtain them just seems silly to me.
But it again comes to opinions, yours vs someone elses, you can believe your right and the other person believes they are. It’s bashing your head against a wall trying to change it.
Because they have so little self worth irl. They think people actually go around inspecting people in game and wish to lord over them in some way since they will never be able to irl.
When I talk about exclusivity I mean stuff like unique transmog appearances and mounts. One of Blizzard’s biggest mistakes was that a lot of their exclusivity isn’t a measure of skill but instead time investment. Stuff like the Swift Zulian Tiger from old ZG or w/e it’s called was the wrong kind of exclusive because it created a mathematical situation where someone could grind for it. Someone could hard grind for it and never see it only for Blizzard to remove it from the game. And there are tons of examples of this, and many are still 100% available. The Karazhan / Return to Karazhan mounts, Baron Rivendare’s Steed, Ashes of Alar, VoA’s Mammoth, world bosses with sub 1% drop rates for mounts like Galleon and Famu.
Actively destroying the old content like the Pre-Cata world zones is stupid for it’s own reasons. Not the least of which because it’s very, very clear that the new zones didn’t get the same level of care put into them. The new human zones are awful and the dumb pop culture references in them aged like milk.
Otherwise if someone is supposed to be exclusive it should be because it represents the apex of a given discipline in the game or because it was the reward that an exceptional minority earned. So stuff like seasonal PVP rewards are OK, and stuff like- to borrow an FFXIV example- the necromancer title are OK.
So you’re saying that if Blizzard brought MOP’s challenge mode dungeons back but spent the time to perfectly (or at least as close as is reasonable) recreate class kits and challenge as was present at the time of MOP, you’d be OK with it? Because the complaint I see frequently is that people justify timed exclusivity because they don’t think someone who solo’s all of a Wrath raid should get the same reward as people who did the content when it was actually difficult.
100% agree. It sucks to be lied to, and people have the right to be upset about it when it happens to them. Therefore I will not advocate for people to be lied to AGAIN. Especially not just so that somebody with a toddler mentality can have the shiny thing they covet.
that is just such a weird thing to say…this is a fantasy video game, and we’re discussing one of the competitive areas of it…ofc people are going to lord over you here if you’re a scrub - has nothing to do with IRL lol
Losers with nothing else going on in their lives. As someone who also has quite a few of the removed items also, I would have 0 problem with every bit of the things I have been enjoying for Years now, coming back for others to enjoy!
I have always used this illustration; Let’s say Ferrari holds a yearly contest where one person wins a new Cherry Red Ferrari. You win this year. Now Ferrari holds the contest again next Year and your next door neighbor wins and exactly same Cherry Red Ferrari like yours. Are you going to stop enjoying the Ferrari you already have now just because your neighbor has one exactly like it? I sincerely doubt it.
If your enjoyment of a Rare Mount or Mog etc is instantly diminished because someone else gets now what you have had for Years, then honestly you’re just an awful person who needs to grow the fudge up and stop acting like a child throwing a tantrum.
obviously a troll post…i’ll give you a 3/10 because your comparison with the cars is flawed:
so the ferrarri example, if you’re trying to paralell it to unobtainable items: the first ferrari would have special, unique features, and become unobtainable. The second ferrari which the person won would NOT be the same as the first, and lack the same features. Not to mention - ferrari is not honda…they are limited, and meant to be limited vehicles, often with “FOMO” attached to them.
The two different vehicles would absolutely would matter to some people…car collections are actually the worst example you could use in this debate if you ask me lol…they emphasize rarity & exclusivity for value. sentimental value means almost nothing in that realm…or any collection really
That’s the crux of it right there. You don’t value it, therefor it must have no value? That’s not how the world works. I know a guy who’s really into cars and put almost 60k into this 80s box of a car. He’d rather die than lose it. It’s not great on gas, looks old, isn’t particularly fast or maneuverable. But he loves it. I wouldn’t take it if he paid me, and no one could pay him enough to give it up. Everyone values things differently.
If your enjoyment of wow collecting is instantly diminished because you can’t have what someone else had for Years, then honestly you’re just an awful person who needs to grow the fudge up and stop acting like a child throwing a tantrum.
The comparison doesn’t work because you’re trying to compare lottery psychology to exclusivity. People tend to place less value in something they won via lottery because they didn’t really do anything to earn it and they know it. One lottery winner doesn’t begrudge another because it doesn’t affect them.
It’d be more like asking if you think the people who first cleared the summit of Mt. Everest have had their achievement devalued by the fact that it’s now an entire industry with hundreds doing it each year.
Why can’t they have it though? Because most of the things people want aren’t ultra-obscure accomplishment related stuff like titles or timed-exclusive mounts. It’s stuff like the recolored Paladin Tier 2 armor Blizzard briefly offered with their Wrath of the Lich King pre-release event that hasn’t been offered in the game ever since, or the Swift Zulian Tiger in old ZG. It’s stuff which never really required any effort to begin with but for one reason or another someone couldn’t / can’t get it anymore.
If your argument is that the things should be exclusive, that’s insanely petty. Those are lines of code, it affects you in no way if someone else gets something you yourself made no particular effort to get.
If your argument is that the removal of challenge devalues your accomplishment, you would be correct, but that’s an argument for Blizzard to take the time and develop proper scaling / syncing technology. Blizzard’s already demonstrated they are perfectly capable of doing it with things like Time Walking.
But me thinks most of this has very little to do with the degradation of challenge in depreciated content and very much to do with the kind of person who falls for an NFT scam or who posts their beat up old car on Craigslist with the magic phrase, “NO LOW BALLERS I KNOW WHAT I GOT!” because they think that rarity instantly confers value to something.
And this is a video game discussion acquiring pixels once lost.
A friend of mine does, indeed, have a Chevy Bel Air with a brand new crate GM motor with electron ignition and the whole kit. It bolted right it, it starts every time, he loves it.
Not everyone is fixated on VIN numbers and collectability, some folks just want to drive a cool car.
Dozens (hundreds? thousands? how many of these have been sold?) of Cobra Replica buyers know exactly what they’re buying.
I have no idea. I don’t really care either way. People asking for everything back are putting down people who want exclusivity for being all kinds terrible. As if going on an internet crusade to collect all the pixels is noble cause or something.
If they bring back things, like they did with Mage Tower, which gives a recolor of T20, why not? Someone still has to do the challenge to receive said item.
It’s not that people, or in this case, myself, who care if someone has what I have. It’s that people want something that was fully intended as a timed exclusive.
In the same way people ask what’s the problem with having what others have. I ask what’s the problem with having things that others are unable to obtain anymore?
It doesn’t matter if it’s a video game and lines of code. People should be adult enough to recognize sometimes you just can’t have everything you want in life.
You can’t compare digital items to real-world items, you just can’t. An 80s car is a tangible item with real money value and potential collectible value for those who are a fan of that make, model, or simply cars from that time period. A digital item in WoW cannot be traded because RMTs are banned, so these mounts and other items have a dollar value of zero on the open market, and when WoW inevitably shuts down in twenty or thirty years all those items will go POOF anyway.
The only value these items are the memories we have of acquiring them and the fun we’ve had using them, and nothing can ever take those things away.
