There are no underhanded snide remarks (if you feel there were, when I made them that was not my intent anyway). I will extend an olive branch and explain. So, when I said, “…. Specifically to address your literal bottom tier ‘Name-Calling’.”. The reason I said ‘literal’ is because if you look at Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement, ‘Name-Calling’ is the lowest tier at the bottom. I even stated later in that same post. In this pyramid, ‘Name-Calling’ is the lowest form of a disagreement – it is the 7th of the 7 tiers. We can use numbers if you prefer, but felt like this was easiest.
Just to clarify, neither one of these comments called anyone bottom tier.
Now, Responding to Tone is the 5th of the 7 tiers (I was going to say mid-low tier, but I we can stick with numbers), which criticizes the tone of the writing. This leads into what we have now where the conversation forces the accused to defend themselves and/or specifically tailor their writing in such a way not to elicit an over-aggressive response. I had hoped with me taking the time to respond to you in a manner where I explain the concept in detail would imply good will - I felt like I expressed a positive feeling in engaging in conversation. This is all I have to say about this – there is no undertone or snide comments. Just the topic at hand.
If you truly believe this, then why are players killing MoP World Bosses thousands of times when they already have a mount of equal value (since they all equal zero value apparently)? If my logic cannot be applied, then how do you explain sentimental value a player has toward an item? How would you explain the negative feeling Mornnah has when the title for Layer 8 is moved to Layer 4? Do Not Nerf Tower Ranger Title 9.2.5
So, there is clearly value here, right? Something is incentivizing players to continue attempting for a mount or a rare set of shoulders to drop – despite the fact that “[they] have earned nothing because it’s not stored on your computer.” What is driving that? I am not really sure why we are discussing this, because rewards are clearly driving the playerbase to do things. People value their time generally, so it doesn’t makes sense to say none of these things have value.
The answer is perceived value, which I will come back to later.
This is only partially correct, but your order of operations are off. For example, if you take raiding, and you adjust the difficulty of the fight, would you take the ‘average player who represents World of Warcraft’? No, you would consider the thoughts and opinions of those who play that specific content. Similarly, if you ask the community, should we introduce an Elite Mythic raid tier, you wouldn’t ask the average player. You may not even ask those among your average raiders. You would ask those who would participate in that content, right? So, your Mythic raiders would be the average that you pull feedback. This all makes sense for Skill-Based Difficulty content, and it is a niche of a niche.
Likewise, playing the RNG game of earning mounts, transmogs, toys, and etc is a category of content just like raiding is a category. We have 800+ mounts, 65,000+ sources of transmogs, 550+ toys, and 7,500+ recipes of content that has a very wide range of RNG to it. Just as most raiders spend time and effort at a Normal and Heroic level, the vast majority of your drop rates are over 1%. However, there are a few items with a much lower chance of dropping. Or there is content that takes an exceedingly long time to complete (maybe weeks or months). These few items are your comparison to mythic raiding. It’s an outlet for some who enjoy this style of gameplay. So, it is not that you are going after a specific niche, but rather your niches (again, in this case raiding and RNG rewards) are so large that they create natural niches within themselves.
Well… let’s actually explain the story. Initially, when the Artifact system was designed, the Honor Levels were character specific. However, whenever Blizzard merged the levels from all the characters’ accounts, there was no way to separate them from that point onward. The reason nobody complains here is because they didn’t give out Honor Levels during the transition. You earned all the Honor Levels you had – even if you completed part of them on another character.
In what way is this comparable to getting the Balance of Power appearance on one character, and then getting them on the rest of the 11 classes? Furthermore, this change was done because players didn’t want to start from zero when it come to the Honor Level system. This effected the participation levels of PvP negatively. Here, if a person doesn’t get Balance of Power on a 2nd character, then no harm is done by not giving them the rest of the appearance, because they were not participating in that content anyway.
I actually don’t like doing this part, but I am going to play the role of the vocal minority, and see what kind of responses you would give. How do you appease those who are unhappy with your suggestions?
What about players who do not have a lot of achievements? Wouldn’t they be left out? So, I would need to grind achievements before I can grind transmogs? What about players who find the achievement system a waste of time, because they don’t like running old raids for old achievements? Isn’t this forcing players to play in a way they don’t want?
What if Ion only plays a Shaman, and he feels obligated to level alts in order to get all the obviously better looking Paladin sets? Isn’t that forcing players through content they don’t want to do?
Oh, great, another currency on another vendor. What if I don’t like the activity necessary to get that currency? Is the currency from endgame content? What if my connection is bad?
What if I hate gold making? Are you telling me that I am forced to either spend RL money or waste time grinding out gold? How is this different from grinding runs in a raid?
So, now I can answer this question. The Communal Value acts as the perceived value of an item within the game. This perceived value is driven by the time and effort players are willing to put into the game in order to acquire this item. Now, the perceived value is just the individual’s perception of value (shocking, I know), but the communal value is what the community’s perceived value. We get this value by the time and effort the average of community (that participate in that niche of the game) have already given to acquire this item. This value is naturally adjusted and finally set as communities participate in this content while it is current.
So, why is a point of reference for this so important? Because through the collective gameplay of players participating in that content, we now have the communal value benchmark. At this point, any reduction in the necessary skill will need to be made up in the form of time (again, taking into account Macro-level and Micro-level). This gives us two things:
- This gives the ability to allow more access to content to players with less skill. If players are willing to wait until the content is easy enough for them and a few friends to complete, then maybe they can wait a few months and complete the content at a lesser difficulty. If they are willing to wait longer, then they may be able to solo it at one point. Therefore, over the course of the contents lifetime, more access is given to more players.
- This allows players to establish a level of confidence in the communal value, where they can feel like if they participate today, their time and effort are not going to be devalued tomorrow. This will be true for Skill-Based Content and Time-Based Content. This system is immune to the biased preferences and prioritization of one type of content over another.
So, why should you take my posting into consideration? Because with a system such as this in place, you are not subject to the whims of a player who find achievements a worthless form of measurement for accessing more transmog. Conversely, you are not subject to someone who overemphasis the importance of achievements in progressing your collections. You do not have to argue arbitrary points like, should you be able to receive loot of the same armor type vs should you be able to loot everything with one character. Time-Based difficulty is basically, plug-and-play. Once it is set up, there is little to no maintenance in readjusting the value randomly. Am I saying this is a perfect system, of course not, but it is the most consistent we have at the moment.
The evidence is in someone’s actions. And there are a lot of people that find the Sha of Anger mount worth their time, because they are out there each week killing it. There are others who spend gold cap on it when it appears on the BMAH. So, it seems like it is still worth it to many.
Those that don’t probably have already forgotten about it.
What is fun will not only change from person to person, but from one type of activity to another. If I enjoy a soda, then that doesn’t mean I had fun drinking a soda. If I had fun competing in a race, then that doesn’t mean I enjoyed every footstep of the marathon. Furthermore, one cannot say that I hate sodas, because it wasn’t fun to drink it, nor can they say marathons are not enjoyable, because each step wasn’t a surge of fun. The same is true with various forms of content within WoW. While running the same dungeon, raid, or MoP World Boss doesn’t have the same intensity as pushing a new M+ high, it is still fun and enjoyable to many. Fun and enjoyment can come in many different forms and intensities.