Honestly I think a good way to do that would be to expand what Timewalking can do. Since Timewalking is for Legacy (4+ year old) content, why not have it allow you to get ‘time locked’ things from that expansion? Players who got them ‘at the time’ would have gotten their value via the 4 years they had the thing, and due to the stat/level squishing the dificulty would still be present.
Imagine people planning out raid groups/teams for going through say…WotLK time walking to get the full raid clears through the constraints of the time walking systems to get the old acheivement mount (or even a slight reskin) and getting an achievement of say: “Blast from the Past - [raid tier]” or something like that.
Please keep telling us collectors that instead of asking for a change on philosophies that were bad for the player base causing the use of alts just for more attempt, blaming that our behaviour is degenerative, instead of asking Devs for improvements and better designs around RNG, so we don’t have to use alts for more attempts… collectors and even some players that don’t collect have reasons like that they want just that mount because it’s their favorite color (Pink rocket) …etc but instead of being a good meta achievement that’s build on a good path of achievements, you must run the same instance for a limit time per year with multiple characters on a 1/3333 drop rate, I really like something like the greenfire that I’ll always remember as a good questline, challenge instead of mounts like the Sha of Anger that i got after 7500+ attempts, the game should provide a good feeling to all the playersand designs that are healthy with players time.
There’s a big gamble adiction effect that impact us and it’s not that easy as you mention that if you don’t find it fun, just don’t do it… just check other MMOs and how this cosmetics are being implemented, I tried FFXIV and I got some mounts from events that required a grind, questlines and a solo challenge (0 RNG), some of my friends playing that game told me that there’s rng but also bad luck mechanics and that even the RNG there’s mostly 1/100 and some of the mounts with more value are just big grinds or a challenge content with 100% acquisition.
“Players who play a game at a portion and to a point of their own dissatisfaction should not be able to dictate what other players find fun.” , It’s the same as Players that find value on something just because other players doesn’t have it, you can find value on anything from your own perspective, you don’t need this communal value from RNG, if there’s any communal value on this game is people with a challenge reward and that could be preserve like the mage tower but Blizzard doesn’t want to escalate old content.
There’s a lot of players with those rewards that want these changes, why? Because that means that this kind of grinds won’t be implemented in the future, so we can save our time later, I´ve the 4 MoP world bosses mounts and I notice that Blizzard didn’t implement any other world boss mount with those low drops, since Rukhmar has like a 1/200 and Mollie has even a better drop rate, since there’s so many points of view, we don’t have a clear communal value, but you’re forcing this argument like something that’s written in stone
Agreed, Qyune is legit an elitist and the type of player that makes new folks feel the game is toxic.
The: ‘Others not having it is what gives it value’ as the only reason he likes things, not because he himself personally likes them.
‘Community Value’ is the stupidest thing I think I’ve ever seen with how he says it. Do some people think certain mogs/mounts are better than others due to the looks, sure. But that doesn’t mean it would stop being valuable to those players if others have it, and if it does, then they are playing for the purpose of ‘lording things over’ others (you don’t have to brag/boast to do this, it’s entirely a mindset of haves/havenots based on when people were playing) and that makes the game a less enjoyable/accessible experience to others.
Imagine say, a card collector. They want a full set of 1st edition MTG cards. They don’t have to find and open endless packs hoping to get the complete set, they can instead, just buy the cards they need for their set through vendors and resellers, and with physical items, there is legitimately only so many that were produced, so it’s a real rarity, not an arbitrary rarity.
For goods in a game: the game just makes more. The supply is infinite, but, much like things such as Diamonds and Oil, the producers of the good are making it artificially rare to boost perceived value in order to bilk people for money through their subs.
Qyune mentions not killing mobs/doing activities without getting a reward. Perhaps a game should be fun and not just a skinner box designed to condition you to want the big shiny and willing to put yourself through misery to get it. Puzzles don’t give you a reward for completing them, you even see the finished picture on the box. Pong doesn’t give you a reward for scoring a point, you just see a number go up by one. Solitaire doesn’t give you rewards, nor does the OG DOOM game, but people still play the heck out of both.
The feeling that some one would only do something for a reward doesn’t pass muster. Nor does the ‘if people didn’t find it fun they wouldn’t do it’ bs. The truth of the mater is that it’s a conditioned thing with the alt army pushing to get ‘rare’ things that are old/no one really uses any more outside of fringe cases (of which I would be for the ‘savage pandaren’ rp char concept I want to do, which the mushan beast mount would be the best compliment for, but it’s either: grind pvp while using a toy (which I dispise pvp because of how unbalanced it is currently) or pray every tuesday for the saddle to drop)
This ‘takes a ton of time to do’ stuff, isn’t because you have to think or it’s a ‘slog’ but just because it’s designed to WASTE your time. If there was a clear way to set a goal in WoW for these items, you wouldn’t see so many complaints about it.
And Qyune: instead of huffing your own smug, maybe look up Gambling Addiction, Skinner Box, and Sunk Time Falacy.
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.
There’s a huge difference between obtaining something that requires your actually attention to complete and something that you half-pay attention to while you watch Netflix.
Thank you for the references. Many of them I am already familiar with, but I can take another look. However, I would highly encourage you to take a Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement – specifically to address your literal bottom tier ‘Name-Calling’.
So, one of the weakest elements of my discussion post is how long I take to explain the surface level details. However, I do this so that others can have a better understanding of the ruleset we need to preserve the communal value of items within the game.
The communal value of an item has nothing to do with how many people have it – whether it is 0.1% or 100% of the community, this has nothing to do with communal value. Communal value is the representation of a player’s skill and/or effort in acquiring that item – that’s it. Again, if we are exchanging material to read, considering reading the description of how the system functions here: Discussion: Skill-Based Difficulty, Time-Based Difficulty, and Value Preservation
If we ever have a version of WoW come out that rewards little to nothing for an activity, then I will be happy to have that discussion with you.
So, this is one of the reason’s Paul Graham places ‘Name Calling’ as the bottom tier form of disagreeing – because it oversimplifies the position taken by assuming all values of that label (or name) among other things.
The reason the preservation of communal value is so important is that it gives us a guideline to follow in what should be made easier, when should it be made easier, and what should not be changed. This guidance comes from setting up content with an initial value derived from skill and time requirements. A person’s time and their effort are valuable. These rewards represent this value.
Do you think it would be a good idea to make legacy raids 1-shot everything soloable as soon as the next expansion comes out? What about the consideration for those players who put in all that time and effort to complete that content a few weeks prior – wouldn’t that create of risk of them feeling like their effort is devalued? More importantly, do you think impending change would actively encourage people not to participate in that content the last few weeks before the expansion?
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?
Again, this is about having a system impartial to personal preferences so that it is fair to the community as a whole.
This is impossible. Even within a single niche of content like raiding, this is impossible. We know this, because we have 4 difficulties and 3 of those difficulties have entire guilds built around them. Just to be clear, having 4 difficulties is a nice option to have in choosing what to participate in and what not to participate in. The same is true for mounts, transmogs, toys, pets, and anything else deemed a reward. All this without touching the topic that different players have different degrees of available time and skill. Who would you center your changes around?
Now, preserving the communal value through transitioning from primarily Skill-Based Difficulty to primarily Time-Based Difficulty is the best way we have of preserving an item’s value while also giving access to more players. The players with less skill will likely have access to this content later.
This is a separate topic. What if part of the playerbase is addicted to outdoor pet battles? Should Blizzard then limit the entire playerbase to only 10 per hour, because a handful of people cannot control themselves? Blizzard setting behavioral limits for everyone to address the very few who cannot control themselves seems to be punishing for the playerbase as a whole. If I really care about the item, I will put in the time and effort. If it is not worth the time or effort to me now, then maybe I will come back to it later.
Yeah, I still stand by this.
I think this is a fair comment. Players could cut the time in half that they farm by going to Timeless Isle and farming up the necessary currencies for extra loot coins. Additionally, maybe Blizzard could look at reducing the spawn time from 15 minute to 5 minutes. Also it may be worth introducing an immunity bubble that reduces all incoming attacks down to 1 damage for the first 30 seconds of a spawn - just to reducing the annoying experience of 30 people waiting to 1-shot a rare.
Blizzard could look into reducing the daily limiter for each character for the X-45 Heartbreaker. Maybe through holiday currency, players could purchase extra loot tokens for the mount.
For Balance of Power rep grinds, player can wait until the Time-Walking week for the extra 50% rep. Or they could purchase some reputation tokens by doing Time-Walking from other expansions (if they really hate Legion that much).
Either way, there are thoughts and ideas to be had and discussed that do not simply obliterate the communal value of an item.
Impossible, when Devs added some rare mounts from covenants to a vendor too at the launch of Shadowlands ,that was an improvement from previous expansions on which you killed a rare and 0 progress, so you need it to try with multiple alts. 9.2 has a system that doesn’t need a bunch of alts just to pull the sloot machine, they already show some changes on rewards philosophy and now the same insane drops and mechanics from other expansio, we need that keep going into future expansion/patches.
You’re providing a bad example, we’re talking about rewards, doing hours of hours of something because you like it’s ok if you want to do that, but rewards trigger impulse on some players that want something and will try to reach some limits that are bad for them, that’s the Devs work to put some limits, like doing the drops reasonable, I already provided examples on which Devs changed things like mechadone achievement, korthia meta achievement also received some updates due to drop rates or rng elements, the world boss from anniversary changed from low drop to 100%, the Dev that created protoform systhesis asked for feedback which a lot of people provided and you can check that a lot of players hated rng elements like one schematic behind paragon, she agreed that some rng is bad implemented.
You’re just keep saying the same argument of skil/time based difficulty, when Devs can keep creating ever green content that won’t be impacted by time, Only Devs can define the value, community has multiple ways to see value and you keep saying “this is a separate topic” when both are related.
I do think they should do the whole “goes to 1% drop rate when it is no longer current content” thing a whole lot more, rather than removing the ability to get certain mounts/whatever entirely.
That way, it’s not exactly an easy/friendly “grind” to get it, but if someone REALLY wants it, it’s not forever out of reach either.
Not ideal to the people who want everything I’m sure, but a better solution to ensuring limited rewards are valued than just removing the thing afterward.
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.
This is essentially just a casino of have/have-nots.
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.
Community Value for things like say, Feats of Strength like Mad World or other such achievements I totally understand, that’s not something easy to do and is based entirely on your skill as a player, same with how people say 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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
First of all, nobody requested a one-hit change right when the last expansion falls into the legacy content. However, the game should support having an easier time the moment the expansion is over. The legacy rule needs to be further changed to reflect on the ever-growing game. The goal is to hook all kind of players on several features organically without having burnouts and not the other way around. FF14 managed the reward system superbly, so why can’t WoW follow a similar principle?
People already aren’t participating in content which is unreasonable. The 8.2 Uldum/Pandaria N’zoth events are a great example of a system gone wrong: Mini Bosses spawn irregularly between 15-120 minutes, the drop rate is minimal and even if you do the dailies, the reputation gain is less than what you got during Nazjatar. Compared to Mechagon, which is still visited regularly on the server I play, Uldum is empty and when people log into their account during certain bosses, like Rotfeaster, they do regularly discuss how awful this part of the expansions still feels. There must be a fine line between time investment and gaining the reward. The best scenario is allowing players to access rewards regardless of luck but time-investment after the expansion is over. This is why the developers need to revisit old content boss spawns and reputation gains similar how the requirements of the Allied Races have been loosened over time. But this is just one issue of several.
This is nothing new. Requirements and achievements have been made easier to reflect the changing nature of the game. If these time investments are so important, then why did they change the Pathfinder rules or the School of Knocks achievement or making non-class artifact transmogs more accessible? These changes are devaluations, after all. Because it’s just a game and people change. 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.
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.
This is a good system, yes, but it requires a FF14-like pity timer as well, where you get the drop guaranteed over time. The moment the Legion Paragon rewards were changed, I got the missing 2/3 of the mounts and the night elf toy instantly with each next chest.
I did not feel any happiness about the rewards because after farming Legion reputations token daily, I was just glad it was over. And this is something I wish for others players not to experience: The dread and lack of empathy when it finally drops. My experience with the paragon chests were so bad, I simply stopped caring about them going forward in Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. I do not care for these chests anymore.
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.
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.
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,
Players who work long, irregular hours or rotating shifts
Players who suffer from physical complications (sports injuries, etc)
Players who suffer from mental complications (social anxiety, etc
Players who may be elderly
Players who have lower grade computers
Players who have inconsistent / interrupted internet
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.
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?
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.
“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:
I’m more in the camp of: you mindlessly ran through the same raid 1,000 times while watching Netflix. There isn’t much communal value in that. If Blizzard made you do that mindless run 300 times instead, the value of the item isn’t affected because it didn’t have much value to begin with because you didn’t actually do anything to get it.
Do what you want because you find it fun or because you really want something. Don’t do something because you think it makes you superior to other players in some superficial way. I think, without any evidence to back it up, that most players couldn’t care less about mounts and appearances that were relevant and/or obtainable before they started playing the game, or requires significantly more time doing unfun things than they’re willing to play.