Couldn’t they just offer ‘options’ in the way items/etc would be purchased?
Item A could be sold via three methods:
RL Cash
In-Game Gold
“Housing Currency” (new type of currency?)
Blizz loves cash. We all know Blizz also likes to create useless currency that doesn’t get carried from one expac to the next. They also love time-gating everything. Allow for all of them?
If you want item A:
RL Cash gets it in your hands immediately
Gold gets in your hands when you’ve accumulated enough
“Housing currency” will get it to you eventually
That way everyone would have the option to obtain Item A, some sooner, some later.
I’d expect it to be a mix of up front gold costs for basic items but everything else locked behind achievement rewards, drops from dungeon bosses and other things to bait people into doing current content.
Then any sorta rep grind or currently with shadowlands a renown rank and anima grind.
The drops could be literal items or maybe profession recipes. Also I’d expect profession recipes requiring mats that come from dungeons or current mission tables or current currency grinds
Also quick edit but limited seasonal items like ww see with pvp sets and raid mounts.
But thats how I see it working. Sure people could buy a buncha tokens but that nice sin dorei chair or spiked orc chair would be locked behind achievements that require people to do something like a million hours of pvp in WSG or a. 0000% drop from Karl Thas in Tempest Keep.
For me it’s everything you mentioned and getting rid of scaling. The sense of progression doesn’t exist anymore. I hate that getting a higher ilvl and leveling up means absolutely nothing because the mobs… get harder with me improving my gear and leveling. This is less RP related and more game related. Scaling in an RPG just feels especially awful and takes away from the RPG elements so much. And in an MMO? While it’s somewhat nice that my level 59 buddy can dungeon with me at 51 and we get the same EXP, it also sucks lol. Because we’re just… the same level. But we aren’t. But we are.
Scaling doesn’t work. I liked the idea enough for former expansions because it just let you do more and made the zones somewhat more relevant-- it doesn’t feel good when it’s implemented in current content. And with the new system where going to to Exile’s Reach and leveling through BFA content is the easiest, most streamlined and “fastest” leveling experience, it completely nullifies the ENTIRE former worldspace. It’s too much of a pain to specifically timewalk in order to experience old content and no one is doing it anymore for these reasons-- trying to queue old content LFGs is terrible. Blizzard could, quite literally, do what Bungie did and just delete old content to save GB space because as much as it sucks for the nostalgia… no one goes to those zones now. Like actually no one. I thought it was a meme before but all of the old dungeons, all of the old quest zones, it’s wasted GB space now and probably the only reason it isn’t removed is Transmog. Yet most people aren’t going to Mara, to Tempest Keep, etc, for mog. So again, made so useless with the new system in place to get people into relevant content faster.
I get it. But it didn’t feel good. All I can say is that it made me not want to roll alts anymore, as a 16 year-long altoholic. I didn’t enjoy anything about BFA other than Drustvar. But it’s the fastest and people only queue those dungeons.
It’s also too much to ask, but not making everything beyond collectibles utterly useless once a new expansion comes around. WoW is, I think, the only MMO that does this. Where nothing about the previous expansion or two is any sort of relevant to new content. Trying to make new expansion quests send us back into old content isn’t what I mean, either. Old enchants, old food recipes, old mats, etc, is what I mean. Continuing to keep these things relevant; which makes all of the old world more useable.
Now implemented by the genius developers at ActiBlizzard HQ: The Character Life Support Borrowed Power
Pay $15 a month or your character’s steady supply of energy that is used to gain talents you already had two expacs ago runs out, killing your character and deleting them from your roster immediately.
However, you can pay $70 dollars to boost a new character with 1/4th of the progress of your last character and giving you a six month sub to make their subscription numbers look better than it actually is!
so much talent has left that ign felt compelled to do a write-up on it
and i’m wondering at what point people are going to stop pretending that blizzard isn’t dealing with some serious issues behind the scenes (if you can call any of this “behind the scenes”)
also lol @ the forum mod who moved my wra-specific ffxiv thread to the general gaming sunforum, meaning i can no longer post in the thread i created
It has been literal weeks Blizzard, are y’all just that backlogged in useless forum report drama or did one of the suits catch that FFXIV has a lot of engagement on blizzard’s forums?
Fight me mods.
Puts a 0 back on top of the “this many days since blizzard moderation did something nonsense” tracker
I will die on the hill that Blizzard forum mods are abusive, petty, and generally cruel unless you’re gagging down Kotick’s boot polish
What kind of salt monster just kills a perfectly healthy discussion without drama or arguments, relevant to the players of the realm it’s posted on, purely because it was about another game
But why am I shocked? We’ve seen people given thousand year bans for things OTHER people say to them.
Perhaps if instead we made a thread rp where goblins invented a hypothetical MMO called Final Fantasy 14 and we talk about all the new cool stuff in it it will stay here.
I think the thing that gets me is that we’re all currently irritated at a completely nonsensical action taken on behalf of a nonsensical company but like… You can break it down pretty easily like this;
Things that have historically not been a pressing issue or danger worthy of moderation; Racism, sexism, threats of actual violence, a complete disrespect for human life
Things that have been a danger enough for blizzard moderation to take action; Discussion of moderator action, common human decency, discussing other competing products, decrying human rights violations
It uhh. Paints a pretty clear picture. I’m here to meme about it but really it’s not even remotely surprising or unexpected. Discussion of another product in the “wrong” forum seems pretty cut and dry barring any of the actual context but we already know that context is not something Blizzard has ever been bothered with. I can’t necessarily blame them so much as just kinda just roll my eyes and go “really huh? Now this?”
Wouldn’t be surprised if someone mass reported it in an effort to get it either moved or removed. I mean, it’s awfully curious that earlier today someone (who had earlier made it clear he deeply disliked FFXIV) was spouting nonsense about how “the community’s are the same and just as toxic” and I pointed out in no uncertain terms that that’s simply not true… and then a few hours later the thread is mysteriously moved to a different subforum.
Heck, I used to be able to post pictures and then suddenly after I told two people in the same guild to stop being weird in a different thread of mine my ability to do so magically vanished, which is apparently what happens if you get reported enough times (even if said reports don’t result in being actioned against).
I’m not sure Blizzard’s (no doubt incredibly underpaid) forum mods are really the ones at fault here. I think some people are just lashing out at criticism (or anything that might be perceived as criticism, or anything that doesn’t echo with enough praise) directed at Blizzard/WoW, while of course failing to realize that that sort of behavior isn’t going to suddenly fill people with the urge to re-sub and re-populate Stormwind.
I think it isn’t even about re-subbing and re-populating anything at this point. The WoW community has been - and will always be - insanely tribal in its approach to other MMORPGs and being the #1 MMO. It’s almost a batch of pride, and anything that attacks this status quo is criticized severely.
I remember conversations about MMOs where I said that I genuinely like SWTOR and some of it’s features, only to hear: “Oh, that WoW killer that failed horribly?!”
First of all, nobody in this conversation said anything about it killing WoW. That was a vocal minority about a decade ago. Secondly, what point is there to bring up ten-year-old history at this point? It’s like the moment I turn on League of Legends, I suddenly need to tell everyone it’s the top MOBA out there.
However, that doesn’t really summarize the problem Blizzard has at the same time: if Blizzard is required to take action on ten things, you can guarantee that they will screw up on nine of them and choose the option that annoys players the most.
It’s at a point where I’m not really inclined to give them leeway on anything anymore. The “fun detected” meme isn’t so much a meme anymore as a prime example of Blizzard’s operation procedure, and it’s to be expected when you consider who’s running the show. Listen, Kotick wanted to “take the fun out of game design” and “put the living fear of a Great Recession into staff.” Does anyone thing it is a coincidence “fun detected” got so out of hand in the past four years?
True and fair. I was actually joking in a Discord I’m in about the LoL MMO, and how if it’s successful I fully expect the WoW community and WoW’s devs to go full meltdown mode over it.
That’s not something I actually want to see, since as I’ve said all I really want is for WoW to be the best it can possibly be, but if the game and its community are gonna implode at least it would be really, REALLY funny if it happened in response to the anime waifu MOBA giving birth to a wildly successful MMORPG.