"Value Preservation" CC Thread

[Qyune-exodar]

@Magfalena-wyrmrest-accord

The reason I refer to you as an elitist type of player is your attitude toward anyone pointing out that your specific view on ‘communal value’ for items is due purely on rng exclusivity.

@Blastkrizzle-moon-guard

I’m sorry Qyune but you are a public figure now who represents the player base as a member of the council and give Blizzard a better idea about their community so they do not waste so much time reading the regular forums.

I understand there is a desire to find a way to summarize a viewpoint, but you have to very careful not to present it in a manner that oversimplifies and distracts from the actual topic. For example, if you were trying to explain why hotdogs were unhealthy for children less than 3 years old, then I came along and said, “Oh, he / she is just a vegetarian, you know how they can be.” It may or may not be true that you are a vegetarian, but that has nothing to do with the potential choking hazard a hotdog can be to very young child. However, everything that you say may be dismissed, because I gave you a label (name-calling). And of course, this doesn’t even address whether or not that label is true.

There are a lot of posts within here that disagree with me this past week. And I am 100% ok with that, but the reason I jump in now is that this manner and style of conversation will become 1-dimensional if left uncheck. In other words, yeah, me posting my thoughts and suggestions on the internet makes them fair game for critique. However, the name-calling does you an equal disservice too, right? If you blindly accept that label without understanding the topic (which you do not understand - I am not saying this in a mean way, but rather just basing it on your response, but we will get to that later), then you are vulnerable to misassumptions.

I am glad both of you responded, because this gives me a good chance to discuss value. First, let’s get an understanding of value.

@Blastkrizzle-moon-guard

I never understood how people can be so prideful about things they do not own. How often does it need to be said? All our characters and obtained ingame prizes are owned by Blizzard and we lease the account for a monthly fee until the servers get shut down. These are not vintage retro items from an online auction you won, these are digital goods. Their opinion is not grounded in reality and it makes really hard to understand such people who are out of touch with required changes to make the game more attractive to everyone.

@Blastkrizzle-moon-guard

These rewards do not represent value although it requires skill and time investment. You’re talking about a non-physical video game and not about a painting which hangs in a gallery with actual market value. Nothing matters what you do in the game. Blizzard owns it, not you. Your actual reward is the experience made and the time invested in this digital Disneyland but nothing else related to the reward and the game.

Blizzard owns Blizzard IP. Nobody is saying anything different. However, the term value can have more than one meaning right? If I told you that your mom values you, then most reasonable people are not going to assume that she owns you. If I told you that Blizzard values you, then most reasonable people are not going to assume that value comes from the market value summation of all your organs.

In another example, if you and your high school teammates win a championship in basketball for your school, then the giant trophy that sits in the case doesn’t legally belong to any of you. However, you still value it right? Why? Because that was something you (as well as your teammates) put effort and time into acquiring. Furthermore, you are allowed value that trophy, whether you were the MVP, a starter, second string, third string, or you never played but participated in practice. In fact, you can even have some degree of value in that trophy if you were not on the team at all!

So, this whole Blizzard owns it… infinite supply… only digital… definition of value demonstrates a child-like understanding of value. So, again, the communal value for something is a naturally occurring value from the community that comes from the amount of time and effort required to earn that item. The preservation of this value maintained by adjusting the intensity of difficult in either skill requirements or time requirements. That is it at the end of the day.

@Magfalena-wyrmrest-accord

Things like world boss mounts (or even AotC/KM which are just a ‘who has the gold to buy boosts’ via being an AH baron or having irl money for token to gold) aren’t the result of a game of skill, but rather a game of chance and skill really doesn’t factor into it in the slightest.

I will make this easier for you and just discuss the content that is primarily Time-Based Difficulty such as the MoP mounts and Balance of Power appearances. Having items and content in the game that require almost no skill and nearly 100% time is OK. With a playerbase in the millions, there are a lot of people who simply cannot have the skillset or the environment for them to participate in Skill-Based Difficulty content. I will give a few examples,

1. Players who work long, irregular hours or rotating shifts
2. Players who suffer from physical complications (sports injuries, etc)
3. Players who suffer from mental complications (social anxiety, etc
4. Players who may be elderly
5. Players who have lower grade computers
6. Players who have inconsistent / interrupted internet
7. Players who have none of these and just prefer this style of content

The time and effort that place into acquiring items should not be devalued just because the content doesn’t require a high degree of skill. They still placed a lot of time (and let’s be honest, for some that have made a lot of alts to increase their changes – a lot of effort has been made as well) into acquiring that item. The same intensity you feel of about Skill-Based Difficulty content, they have toward Time-Based Difficulty content. Just like on Mythic raid teams, members are not gatekeeping. In fact, most of them are willing to go out of their way to help you out. Again, same thing in the collection community - most people are happy to see you get something super rare. It is not about keeping an item away from others, but rather it is about preserving the value of items for each community in WoW.

Therefore, a communal value can be derived from the time and effort it takes to earn that item. In fact, not only can a communal value be derived, but it can also be transferred between Skill-Based Difficulty and Time-Based Difficulty. If you would like an example of this, feel free to look at the Glacial Tidestorm in my first post. Finally, a communal value is absolutely necessary to take into account when discussing changes made to content, because this value in should not be vulnerable to whims of the individual player or even the majority of players.

@Magfalena-wyrmrest-accord

One of my guild mates finally got Invincible the other day after years of trying. They weren’t excited by it. They didn’t feel a sense of pride and accomplishment they only felt relief in that they didn’t have to keep blitzing ICC one a weekly basis.

So, out of the 800+ mounts to go after, your friend chose to chase the one that didn’t make them excited to receive? Should we be upset if they hate the Tusks of Mannoroth and hate leveling, but then they decide to level more alts at more chances at the Tusks of Mannoroth?

@Magfalena-wyrmrest-accord

TL:DR the ‘communal value’ you keep parroting about things like World Boss mounts and such is entirely based on people not having it, not on the people with it liking the thing for the thing it’s self, which in and of it’s self, is the problem people take with your view point, and that’s why I refer to you as being an ‘elitist’.

This is incorrect. The communal value comes from Skill-Based Difficulty and Time-Based Difficulty content. The preservation of this value comes from the transferring and balancing between these two difficulty metrics. So, everyone in the game is welcome to have the item – I am just saying they should have more ways to acquire it that are equally in difficulty.

In other words, this tool functions as a way to take content that primarily required skill and make it available to those who have little skill but some time. At the same time, it takes content that some within the community do not care about, and it protects it from arbitrary and random devaluing. So, giving more access to content while protecting the communal value of content some do not care about is an odd form of elitism.

@Magfalena-wyrmrest-accord

old gladiator titles are better than the new due to needing to be in the top .5% of pvp players to earn it which is a result of a contest of skill between players.

That, however, seems pretty elitist.

@Blastkrizzle-moon-guard

Don’t you remember? The discussions about WoD flying and pathfinder? You can fly in the content now, even if you haven’t finished the pathfinder.

How many discussions did you observe about the “unfair change”? Not many, because this was a good change going forward and so will also be making Balance of Power account-wide.

I have already addressed these types of changes here: Discussion: Skill-Based Difficulty, Time-Based Difficulty, and Value Preservation - #10 by Qyune-exodar

@Qyune-exodar

What does Communal Value not cover?

So, let’s stop here for a second and specifically talk about what this communal value cannot be used for:

1. Items / content removed from the game
2. Items / content adjusted for engagement purposes
3. Bad luck protection

1) Items / content removed from the game. You cannot preserve the value of something that no longer exists in the game. I will cover removed items in a later post.

2) Items / content adjusted for engagement purposes. Let’s use two examples here. The first of which will be the reduction / removal (I forget which) of reputation requirements to gain access to the original Allied Races. Since I am not on the development team, I don’t know the internal metrics, but it could have been possible that they found the initial requirements too much for the playerbase. Potentially, the number of people leveling Allied Races were too low at the time. So, maybe lowering the requirements gave more players a reason to level alts – another reason to play the game. In other words, due to potentially low participation levels, they found the initial requirements prohibitive to leveling gameplay and the subsequent continued gameplay. So, they removed some of them – benefitting the game as a whole (the overall community).

Another example is allowing players to simply have WoD and Legion flying. In a few of the comments in the thread linked (Balance of Power Acc Bound ), someone stated that we should not care what other people feel about the time and effort it took to earn something, because Blizzard did not care about them when WoD and Legion flying requirements where removed. However, in full context, the game was being adjusted so that you can freely choose between all expansions equally as possible to level alts. If you were not able to fly in WoD or Legion, then the playerbase would likely always skip that content. So, it would devalue the choice between expansions. So, yes, maybe it did hurt some feelings that this was given away, but it was for the benefit of the game as a whole (the overall community).

The important thing with both of these changes is that while they made certain things easier to acquire, it was done because it improved the quality of the game and the overall community. Conversely, simply getting another 11 Class’s Balance of Power appearances only benefits the individual who found them not worthwhile to earn anyway. If anything, it negatively impacts the game. For example, if someone isn’t working on the Balance of Power appearances, then giving them the rest of the appearances for all classes isn’t going to change that. It is taking a player that is not participating in content and giving them 11 additional reasons not to.

3) Bad luck protection. While it is definitely possible to preserve the communal value of an item through Skill-Based and Time-Based Difficulty, there is and always has been a vulnerability with RNG. This vulnerability is that a person is limited to how lucky they can be, but they are unlimited in how unlucky they can be.

For example, you will never log into the game and have Invincible just fall into your bags. You will always need at least 1 attempt by clearing ICC. So, you can never earn the mount with 0 attempts; there is a hard start at 1. However, some people may need 1,000 or more attempts in order attain Invincible. Do I consider that potentially unfair? Yes, but that is not what we are talking about here. We are discussing the standard bell-curve of odds to 2 or 3 standard deviations. Outliers will be addressed in the future in a separate post. However, this tool, the communal value, cannot be used to address that problem.

@Blastkrizzle-moon-guard

Fairness is a two-way street and it’s about time to open up the catalogue to the players and make the rewards more accessible in older content with less unreasonable approaches and more common sense carrot-on-the-stick philosophies.

“It’s about time to open up the catalogue to the players.”
“Make the rewards more accessible.”
“Less unreasonable approaches.”
“More common sense carrot-on-the-stick philophies.”

I will add some too:
“They need to listen to the community!”
“They need to stop wasting our time!”
“They need to focus on fun more!”

These are all really agreeable phrases, but they are vapid and trite. Which player are you basing these statements on? The person with all the skill and no time? The person with all the time and no skill? The person who prefers collecting? The person who prefers seasonal gameplay? All of them? What about the majority?

I am asked some pretty specific questions earlier that were just glossed over. I just want to know, where is your line here? What are you specific answer to these questions, and how do you get your answers? I will even bring them down here so you don’t have to go back:

@Qyune-exodar

Same thing with Balance of Power, do you think people would have taken several characters to get the different appearances on different classes, if they knew those would be made Do-1-Get-11-Free? Furthermore, how do you know where to stop without a guidance system of communal value? For example, if you can get all 12 sets of Balance of Power appearances with 1 character, how do you justify not giving all 9 Molten Core tier sets to a player if they complete it on 1? Do you consider the time and effort players took before you randomly made this easier? What drop rate would you change the MoP World Boss mounts to? How did you come to that number? What do you say to those who disagree with your number?