Well, I’ve the FFXVI community as example on which they keep mounts on old raids and there’s players doing those runs, It’ll actually incentivize community engagement among some guilds to get the mount for a new guy, etc and obviously another source of income for carrys but that always happens. There’s another MMOs that doesn’t handle the same level of exclusive items like WoW does every season, expansion.
Devs should think about doing evergreen features with rewards that won’t change.
The FFXIV community is a different beast from WoWs though. They do a far better job in endorsing a sense of community in the game. There is at the moment very little to no benefit in joining a guild seeing how Blizzard has essentially dismantled the social structure of the game by adding in so much automation.
I personally wouldn’t care if that was their design philosophy moving forward, but I believe if they stated that something is gone forever then it more than likely should stay that. Except the Brutosaur mount that was some BS
The point is that it doesn’t matter if people can get FOMO items in the past or now (through a bug): It’s a digital good, it never had actual value to begin with. It’s no historical LP, it’s no out of print collector’s card with a late star’s autograph, it’s not a limited memorabilia, it’s a digital item which can be turned on and off with a switch. It cannot simply compared to actual valuable limited and out of print items, it’s not physical.
And to add to the point: I haven’t seen people lamenting that “latecomers” can get Bruce, the brawler transmog and the blood-soaked shirt either despite it being FOMO-items which they should not have access to. Why is that? Because it does not matter in the grand scheme. It never has, it never will. People have an emotional attachment to it but it has no value. We can see this with the brawler items. Where is the big drama? Why don’t people advocate to get it removed? Because it truly does not matter.
If it doesn’t matter to you, why are you so determined to strip my toon’s history and uniqueness away?
Because it’s your own personal history and it can be another player’s one too to make their own memories. Besides, it will automatically get stripped away from you when the game and server closes, unless you go and play on a private server which allows giving everyone the items they desire.
That’s not really a good example because I could also point to the ToV ensemble that got removed in Legion and present the question “Well if exclusives mattered so much why aren’t people advocating for The Chosen achievement to come back in its entirety?” The answer is, they don’t care about that set. They care about the Mage Tower which 2 almost 3 expansions later is still being talked about.
If you feel personally that these items have no value then that’s your prerogative. But it cannot be argued that others feel the same way when thread after thread after thread after thread keeps getting made on exclusives being removed.
You keep repeating this as if it’s meaningful. It’s not. I could die in a car crash tomorrow. I still treat today as if tomorrow will happen.
Everyone has a different opinion and what matters to them. Everyone can respect this. But making the items inaccessible? That’s a no-go and has to stop. I rather have a person more in the game who engages with the game longer than stopping to play.
I agree with you here but the hard reality is that we 1) do not own them and 2) will lose everything when the game gets closed. There is no denying to this and I rather face the hard truth and try to make the best out of it while the game lasts or I follow everyone else and try to defend a soap bubble which will burst. Not now, not tomorrow but in the future.
And that’s how the game could also operate. It could be closed tomorrow, like other MMOs, you lose everything. What will you do then? This the the big question which concerns me. What then? Will you just say “I had a good run” or regret having spent time in this game? Depending on the person you ask, some see this as their second life, a hobby or one of the best game they ever played. I do not think casuals will miss much but the more complex-oriented players will feel something, either good or bad.
This is why i want to make as much as possible accessible for all the players. The game will not last indefinitely, let’s have all a good time.
I don’t think it does. Making items inaccessible as we see adds value to the item. And for me it felt good to work hard and finally begin acquiring items of my own. I’ve played the game the same as everyone else and competed and failed multiple times and have missed out because of it. But that only pushed me to try harder and the payoff for me felt great to finally achieve my goal.
With that logic since we’ll just lose everything in the game, we should log on at the beginning of a new patch and be handed everything. At the end of the day, we are playing a game. And part of playing the game is acquiring rewards to progress your character or just to have cosmetics. The “we don’t own them” argument doesn’t really hold water to me because it’s built around devaluing the item since we “don’t own them” which we’ve already seen that they do have value. And the “we’ll lose everything when the game gets closed” is an extreme hypothetical that we “the players” have little to no indication is going to happen in the near future.
There’re even examples of objects in the real world that have ‘value’ to people despite them not having a claim of ownership to them. Sentimentality and accomplishment can be part of the ‘value’ of something, regardless of whether that something is directly owned/controlled by you. I’m not going to start telling my friends that I don’t actually value them because they don’t physically belong to me lol
And yet this argument can also turned around by saying the following:
These people aren’t pushing harder, they stop paying and showing an interest in the game. Lost revenue. I have seen both of these behaviors before in the game and with friends who played WoW casually. They haven’t come back in years.
Nobody rallied for something like this.
It’s not hypothetical, this happened with other MMOs in the past as well. They get closed and people move on to private servers. Or take Amazon’s and iTunes’ stance on paid digital tv show seasons. They even remove the show despite you having paid for it (unlike Steam where you still have access to removed content as long you made the purchase).
When you order or view Content and pay any applicable fees, you will be granted a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-commercial, limited license to access, use and/or view the Content in accordance with any usage rights contained herein and additional terms that may be provided with your devices and/or with such Content (“Usage Rights”).
[…]
“Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/you-dont-own-your-digital-movies/
The argument holds water because we have already seen other companies doing the unthinkable in the past. There are also court cases about this and I’m sure a few people will try to do this with Blizzard if the servers go down.
These things happen and ultimately they can happen in World of Warcraft as well. It is easy to theorize if Blizzard wouldn’t do this but we just rented the whole game on a monthly fee. The defending of digital goods makes little sense to me because they neither have a expiry date, nor they need to be permanently locked away either.
When we are already on a timer, then make at least more FOMO-stuff available for the players.
If there’s anything about the game that’s turning people away it’s the bad PR and decisions made by Blizzard like Conduits, lying about the Ripcord, still getting PvP vendors wrong, Choreghast ect. ect. If people are leaving because 1-5% of cosmetics aren’t available and blatantly ignoring the other 95% then I don’t know what to tell you.
I’m not going to jump into other completely different outlets of entertainment. It’s like comparing apples to oranges. What you pay for is access to play the game. And in said game, there are exclusives. We have no indication that the game is going to shut down servers, so yes it’s a hypothetical. An extreme one at that. So the stance that “we need to make stuff less FOMO because we don’t know when the game’s gonna turn off” is a fantasy scenario that we “the players” have no idea when it’s going to happen.
These items have value. And there are players that earned them. You may feel like they don’t have value because they’re just “digital goods”. But it’s clear to me that they do have value because people like yourself are on an endless campaign to have them returned to the game.
Let people have their trophies. It harms no one.
You may know what I think about these items but you don’t know how I feel about FOMO items but I do want them to be available for everyone, regardless of limitations and the time people played.
Fair enough, it’s a public forum after all.
I mean yeah. You’re fine in posting your opinion. It’s clear that others feel the same way but I think it’s better if Blizzard keeps their word. Let it also be known that I don’t like FOMO or manipulative tactics that make people spend money. LIKE the “See you Later” bundle.
And I’ve even put up that there are a few instances that an exclusive should be brought back like the Brutosaur mount.
The removal of things in general is bad for the health of the game.
I think this is a better post, still there’s things that i don’t agree and also you could provide examples like the covenant mounts that drop from rares but also you can buy the mounts with anima/grateful offerings that’s a clear example of a currency provided by the rare on which if you don’t get it for a while you can just buy it.
Also, you don’t talk about some negative aspects like the Alt army meta for attempts and how even the Devs know this:
Chimes even mentioned that the best approach is doing it with the max amount of characters every day even when this isn’t a good experience.
Hopefully, the reward design changes because the game should take in consideration players with few characters, if Devs implement a bad luck account wide that benefits from Alts, I’ll take advantage of that, the rewards should be implementes with the best approach in mind, so we don’t have changes like mecha-done, doomwalker boss drop or the X-45 Hearthbreaker in the future.
Also, personally i don´t like the combination of low drop rate % with large respawns, example, Soundless mount, this just put players in the position to wait AFK in a certain area for an attempt, that’s not engage content, there should be like a way to summon the rare or shorter respawn but the game shouldn’t be afk moments, same issue with worldbosses respawn, right now some are like 15-20mins and the engagement is just 1 hit, then repeat…they could just to save players time change the respawn to 5mins or something better even if they don’t want to change any drop or weekly lockout.
Thank you, and yeah, there are a lot more ideas out there that they could consider. The post is long enough as it is, so I didn’t want to put too many different ideas out there. The main point is to point that if a person is unlucky, then there is no protection for them. However, between the ideas and suggestions post here and there over the next week, I can write them down, and write up an update post with everyone’s thoughts and suggestions.
The reason I don’t talk about this is because that is a personal choice. If someone wants to participate on a meta level and level more alts, then more power to them. If they don’t think it is worth the effort, then they have the freedom to not do that content.
If they are having fun, then more power to them! If not, then don’t do it. I don’t want to level, gear, and min/max several alts in order to raid on the Mythic level, so I don’t do that level content. For now, I am content with Normal and LFR, but if I ever want to play at that intensity in the future, then at least the option is there.
Honestly, for me, I am not huge fun of Time-Lost Proto-Drake and Aeonaxx style farms. I hate the idea of just sitting there waiting for the mount to pop up. So, I don’t do it. Instead, I made a character on a quiet realm, and every morning at 5:00AM I would get up, fly through the zone looking through its flight paths for about 5 minutes. If it was not up, then I did it again the next day. If it was up, then my farm was over. I enjoyed that. It took about 2 months, but I enjoyed it.
As far as the spawn rates, I feel like that is a fair critique.
Right, this is why I said "I think most players couldn’t care less . . . " because most is a lot more than some. You’re arguing to preserve a system that is so extreme, most of the player base you’re trying to impress with your mounts/transmog/pets don’t even know or care what it is. If the Sha of Anger mount was less rare, more players would see it and go “wow, that’s a cool mount, where’d you get it?” which is what you want to happen when you ride that mount, correct?
I saw a lot of justification for attributing value to things that hold entirely subjective value. If its bop you can’t sell it unless you can’t sell your account, that’s against the tos last i checked so in reality by many metrics of “value” its worthless. At that point to me it boils down to “I don’t want other people to have it because I have it and its rare.” Having earnable items in game is fine, time locking things is a questionable decision and oftentimes the answer is this weak subjective value thing.
There are a great number of dated grinds that could be worked on and cool things that are just gone from the game that could function as rewards for content. Having deterministic but nontrivial grinds is preferable to having pure rng 1 in 3000, once a week per character grinds. Being able to push further in one season to get rewards from a previous season seems fair, if they did that with more then the pvp mounts I think that would be fair if there is a content type to work with. By a similar mark since the mage tower is about as hard as it ever was it should include the weapons in some manner, with upcoming m+ into pandaria and wod it might be worth looking at the challenge mode stuff to, possibly tying it to m20s or somesuch.
People become apathetic or frustrated with the current system. As another example, take the two available Vulpera flying mounts. One is locked behind a longer reputation grind in an off-color and another one is part of a world boss with irregular spawn times.
Given that several races still lack race- and class mounts, this is a lose-lose situation for everyone.