The CC-topic is well thought out but they haven’t discussed not much about the “journey” players should have.
Is it really fair to farm endlessly the very same dungeon/raid for a transmog/mount/etc? A better solution would be to have an overall carrot-on-the-stick situation but this would require additional achievement ui changes and edits.
I wrote about this recently in another topic:
The bigger problem is that the game is not rewarding enough so people can relax more.
- Almost every cosmetic reward is either on a timer, too hard to get (no guaranteed drop like in FF14) or inaccessible
- The whole gameplay focus is on performance, there is no permanent Gold Saucer, nor does WoW encourages trying other races out
- The Achievement System is outdated. It does not offer regular rewards (every 100 points = new transmog/mount/whatever) and it also does not encourages to try new features out.
Generally speaking, people are not enough encouraged to do other content because the system does not support this. They tried to change their stance a bit with Battle Pets but there are neither great tutorials (+ free starter Pokémon, I mean, battle pets) nor rewards which goes hand in hand with the effort put in.
And this philosophy can also applied to almost everything when it comes to the rewards. The developers are asking too much from its players and give too little when it comes to vanity items. Just take a look at the Shaman forms from the Night Fae. The prices are ridiculously high and you also need even offerings to unlock them while there has been year-long request to give Shamans more wolf forms. And the biggest offender is: You cannot even use them permanently, only within a rest zone or a short time.
I also brought up a scenario where things go crazy in the current system:
BfA was surely a total miss when it comes to vanity items:
- Faction pride items are either locked behind rated PVP, FOMO or too hard to get
- Simple recolor mounts from MoP costing up to 60k gold (Alliance)
- Interesting mounts “gold sinks”, costing up to 333k.
- FOMO mobile AH vendor for 5m, although this was one of the few mounts which would have been justified being put into the cash store.
On a personal level, I think that Qyune tries to hard too justify bad game design. The solution is actually pretty simple: Encourage the player by giving them everything over time and feel happiness while also keeping the carrot up. It shouldn’t be about luck but invested time and doing all the content because nobody of us owns the items and characters we have, we agreed to this in the EULA.
Include a pity counter for failed attempts and give the rewards to the people over time so they can start farming another mounts/transmogs they want to have. To keep the ball rolling, encourage them to do so by having an overall achievement system which will unlock more benefits and vanity items based on how much they have done in the game:
- Every 10k achievement points should reward a 20% EXP-increase in Chromie and Timewalking scenarios.
- Every 5k achievement points increases the heirloom armor quality.
- Every 1k achievement points unlocks a mount recolor.
- Having many different race characters leveled provides them with alternate heritage weapons and armors colorizations.
These are just a few examples how such a system can work but people should be rewarded for doing all the content the developers have programmed. Blizzard was always about making games accessible, so why not apply the philosophy to all the game features and the reward system? It feels not only more natural but with the right rewards can also bring a more healthy MAU to the game.
