When did it become too much?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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So I want to bring up a topic that is super hot right now, which is accessibility vs exclusivity.

Back in the day exclusivity was the main carrot on the stick not just for WOW, but many other games. You see someone with a cool title, awesome gear, that BIS weapon, a rank way higher than yours, etc and you’re like “Man that guy must have done some awesome stuff. I want to be like him someday.” And then you do tons of content, increase your skill over time, learn more about the game, make friends to help you out, etc. And then one day kaboom you are a very competent player and other newbs are drooling over you.

So at what point did WOW (and some other very competitive online games) start asking too much of their players? WHEN DID WE START ASKING TOO MUCH OF PLAYERS? When did the carrot of exclusivity stop being good enough? Is it a change in the attitude of today’s average gamer?

I know a lot of what is making it to market has to do with business decisions and the investment to revenue ratio, I get that. But on the forums for every post I see talking about how old systems are better…I also see one complaining that leveling STILL takes too long and that they shouldn’t have to group up to do top content and that they shouldn’t have to do really time consuming and difficult stuff to get high end gear. So what caused this paradigm shift? Was it primarily initiated by the audience or the game producer?

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I think it’s a trickle down effect of participation trophies + many games being more instant gratification oriented.

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This was never the case, except in the minds of the people who AFKed on the Ironforge bridge and thought everybody must be looking at them in awe, when in reality nobody cared, or maybe just thought “What a self-absorbed d-bag,” as they ran past.

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I was using illustration to demonstrate reverence for actual achievement. That sense of accomplishment after having worked hard to do something awesome.
The same reason why coming up with an amazing invention and selling it for $10 million is way cooler than winning a lottery for $10 million.

Why do you think players have dropped that in favor of loot box and ilvl chasing?

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I don’t think players have dropped anything for loot boxes. Its gambling by another name. They have just been pushed forward as another RNG mechanic.

Personal loot almost takes the same form - where you are almost always guaranteed something and you never have to share. This however, devalues (as an experience) anything else you could gain due to saturation and the lack of input in deciding who gets the item.

You might feel like you have accomplished something, and the game didn’t recognise that for the base game and the first expansion. It was up to the player how they felt they were progressing.
Sense of self accomplishment is diminished by the achievement system. Anything you do isn’t valuable until you get that shiny pop-up on the screen and 10 points.

Something similar can be said about the forced inclusion of the quest trackers. Telling you exactly where you need to be - little thought is required to get to your destination and you can ignore the quest text.

The game would say that you earned $10 million. It doesn’t distinguish how you got it.

You don’t need your friend’s praise when you do something “cool” because the game does that for you.

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Well from my experience growing up being so anti-social and not having control over my schedule getting good gear was neigh impossible even though I played all the time. So I’d assume when blizzard figured out allot of players were in the same boat is when they starting making the switch

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Getting good gear and such in vanilla required you to play well, and to do so with a group of up to 40 people. If your schedule allowed for this, then great. If it didn’t, you were looking at a server transfer at best (was that even an option in vanilla?). If you hit 60 and found the raiding scene dead or locked out on your server, well tough luck. On the other hand, if you were on a server with one or more raiding guilds that took less-hardcore players in to get unwanted drops, you were in a good position.

Alternatively, you could go for the pvp honor grind. That didn’t require scheduling and a group of 40, but it required a metric f-ton of time, and even then you probably needed help from friends or guildmates.

There were no other options to get epic gear, that I can recall. I tried Guild Wars 2 this summer and in that game, you have multiple paths to their equivalent (“ascended” gear). You can get it by crafting(!), in scaling mini-dungeons (fractals), through gaining achievements, and some you can just buy with the right in-game currencies (I don’t think you can pay real money to get ascended gear, most of those purchases are QoL and cosmetic). All means of getting such gear require significant investments of time and effort by the player, but every player can eventually get ascended gear.

Now Guild Wars 2 has a lot of problems, as far as I’m concerned, but accessibility of end-game gear is not one of them. (They also got mounts, even flying mounts, so right. You should try GW2 just to see how they did them, although that requires playing through the Path of Fire expansion.)

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So many people over the years have posted in these and in other WoW forums to say the exact opposite. They say that they were amazed at seeing players with tier and weapons with enchants and it inspired them to keep going.

I don’t know what’s so controversial about such a statement. In an environment like vanilla’s, nice-looking gear really DOES stand out and IMO, only a d-bag would ascribe the term “d-bag” to anyone they see sitting in a city with good gear.

Edit: I’ll add that I’m not easily impressed myself, but late last month I was playing a character on Lightbringer, and a bunch of players from SALAD BAKERS were in Ironforge doing banking activities (as was I). Man, seeing multiple people right next to you in full t3, a couple with Atiesh and Thunderfuries out around you-- now that’s a sight you don’t see in retail. Ever.

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63 Cats. Would be nice if you elaborate a bit more.

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I played WOW in WOTLK and as far I’m concerned they solved the issue of having reasonable access to end game gear without spending 8 hours in raid each week.

You could get welfare epics with heroic badges. So you were pretty much guaranteed a baseline of gear that would make you plenty strong enough for stuff like dailies/questing/achievement hunting, and you still got stronger over time. Then there were valor badges and crafting which could potentially get you 2-3 pieces of top end gear, although you would still be noticeably behind a high end raider.

So it’s odd to me that they felt like they needed to remove the “earning” system in favor of RNG to meet this need as it had already been addressed while retaining the gate of actually accomplishing something to get the gear, be it farming badges or gold.

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But… why do you need access to end game (raiding) gear if you’re not doing end game content? You sure didn’t need gear from one raid tier behind (T9 vs T10 in ICC) at the end of Wrath to do Heroics or even the older raids.

When Bliz started crapping out badges and tokens for so much catch up loot is when the game went off a cliff for me. It started at the end of TBC but really went into full swing later in WotLK.

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For me it started in WotLK. 10 man versions of every raid meant suddenly all content was for all people.

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So with all the feedback on these forums pointing to the idea that most players preferred a system where accomplishments and achievement was a real thing.

Why do you think Blizz moved to a “participation trophy” style of game? Thinking it is mostly an internal business move? Maybe trying to keep up with the shift in gaming trends out there? Or do you think they really are trying to address player feedback and they just have access to data/responses that tell a vastly different story from what is on these and other WOW forums?

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Well it was a limited flow of gear to be able to do up to date content but not full on end game gear.

To illustrate, back then top end gear would have been full 25 man tier gear with 25 man heroic pieces rounding out the rest of your set right? So that would be the equivalent of full Mythic raid gear in today’s set up.

But they retained exclusivity because typically you could really only get the weaker 10 man tier with badges, and only after farming a lot. And valor would maybe get you 2 pieces of 25 man tier, but you had to raid to get the other 2 pieces. And you could craft like 1 piece of 25 man equivalent gear with farming what was back then a lot of gold.

So really outside of actually doing top end raiding, you were looking at only 3 pieces of truly end game gear for your whole set. This system works because it’s just a trickle of high end gear without raiding, and it takes a grind to get it. You would be able to fill in weaker pieces that are not high-end, but still serviceable relatively easily (although again that required a bit of grind too).

So that system allowed a noticeable gap between high end content pushers and more casual players to retain exclusivity, but also trickled down gear to the casual players so they could do things like the new 5 mans that came out with TOC and ICC or pug 10 man normal raids.

It was truly a win win system. A great man once said, “Not a lot baby girl, just a little bit.” He wasn’t talking about passing gear down to casual players, but still applies.

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It was initiated by players, but…

It was encouraged by the game devs under the assumption that it would make them more money. What I mean by this is they bought into this simple formula:

Content = Money, therefore: More Access to Content = More Money

This access had a price, so to speak, to name a few:

  • instant gratification
  • lowest common denominator systems
  • automated affiliation (LFR/LFG are big here)
  • equal accomplishment for all

That’s kind of weird that you think that. Do successful players (or people irl) make you feel small or something?

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I know we are talking about a video game here, but it bleeds close to how this dynamic works in real life.

Some people are lucky, some aren’t. Some people work hard, some don’t. Some people follow, and some people lead.

In Vanilla WoW, you have to lead and follow; either yourself, or others. You can work as hard as you want, or as little as you want. And sometimes you might get lucky with a drop.

Elitism and entitlement aside, players in Vanilla used to work towards certain goals that were deemed mandatory or ideal by the societal structure. People played for all sorts of different reasons. A player might have simply enjoyed fishing and ganking, and encountered someone who had a lot of epic gear. This either led them to continue what they were doing without care, or caused for some careful introspection.

“Wow, how did he get so geared? Maybe I should ask him. Maybe I should try out that Onyxia raid. How do I get there? Oh wow, you need 40 people? This is going to take a little bit of effort.” ; worth or not worth was entirely dependant on their own self.

When Naxxramas crushed the hearts of 95% of the high end raiding community, and TBC was looming, Blizzard thought it prudent to begin looking at raid exclusivity. They stayed on the same structured path into Sunwell, where they dismantled gating to previous tiers, while simultaneously gating the content ahead (you could only do Kalecgos once, and if you wiped or finished him, that was it, until the next week, when they made Brutallus, or Felmyst, or Muru available, so and so forth).

Blizzard had a difficult choice, but made the necessary one to grow their wealth and deliver more content. They made raids more available, and destroyed the exclusive nature at the top. They had badge gear implemented, and they looked forward into WotLK with an idea they could break content into basically easy and hard mode; but in such a way, everyone could achieve virtually the same thing.

PvP was never wholly balanced, and as they struggled to deliver balance to PvP, they made sacrifices to other content to bring everything in harmony. As the years grew, the problems became worse. The game became too stretched thin, as Bilbo Baggins says; “like butter spread over too much bread.” We all know how it has culminated. Content is devoured and the only mitigating factor for that guy fishing and dreaming is locked behind repetitive RNG, ironically, fishing for gear. It’s just bad game philosophy. A lot of people don’t mind fishing for gear, or doing dungeons many many times for gear, but when said gear drops and it’s not that piece you needed, because it didn’t roll titanforged max ilvl, not only are you viewed as not progressive by the elite, you are soured at the experience. When an item dropped in Vanilla, it was blanket good or bad for you.

In real life, you reap what you sow. If you work hard you’ll see results. Anyone who was fat and is now skinny will be happy with the result. But the ones who did it the hard way, the authentic and original and Vanilla strictly diet and exercise way, tilling their own garden, will glow. When you work at hard at your job, and your boss gives you a raise, you are satisfied. If he gave everyone a raise because they worked hard, you’d still be satisfied. If he gave everyone a raise and half of the people were irritated that other people who had 3 or 4 times as many sick days also got a raise, the exclusivity is diminished. You’re ok with this because you got paid, but it never sits well. You might look for growth opportunity elsewhere after a decade or more of this. And that’s modern WoW. A game where everyone is given everything regardless of merit.

Whose to say what merits reward? I’d argue the playerbase, who have been clamoring for Vanilla. A chance to not only enjoy the game that captured their journeying nature, but their RPG roots, their social ability, and their enjoyment, almost entirely derived from being unique in a world of unique players.

Retail WoW is just a giant sandbox of kids where everyone has the same Snake Eyes GI Joe figurine. A lot of those kids leave the sandbox.

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Good post. I agree.

My thoughts are that it came down to a business decision by the devs, more accessibility = more money (more subs, more MT revenue), it also justified where they were placing the lion-share of their dev resources to make content (raid tiers). As long as they were printing money, they weren’t going to get pushback from higher ups this was a wrong-strategy.

For the players… it was the time-sinks getting old and complaining, and the devs implementing tools to circumvent those time-sinks.

I don’t think you can have a ‘hard-core’ end-game (forced grouping with no in-game aid, with large number of players) with a large playerbase for an extended time. Just not a large population of people that enjoys that in 2018. Vanilla will ultimately end up being a pretty niche product in the long term is my feel of it, and the lack of accessibility to end-game activity is a big reason for that.

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This is super interesting to me just due to the idea that Vanilla and BC were so successful. And even WOTLK was a bit of a middle ground. WOTLK introduced the idea that you could still grow and progress without becoming a hardcore raider and dumping 30hrs a week into the game. BUT…

There was still a noticeable gap between the player who was working hard and the player who was just out fishing and ganking. Yeah the fisher player could quick spam some 5 mans to get some badges and buy gear, but here is the main tipping point for me and why the game philosophy declined heavily AFTER Wrath:
That badge gear was what I call “welfare epic” bottom tier epic gear. Stuff to get you in the door and allow you to be invited to pug groups and 10 man (more casual) raids. You couldn’t buy a full set of gear from heroic badges, and certainly none of it was BIS. With Valor badges you could buy some tier gear but not all. In the end if you got everything you possibly could with badges you’d be looking at a motley assortment of serviceable gear, with maybe a couple pieces of “end game” gear. So exclusivity is retained at the top end because of 25 man and hard modes, and the retention of a very obvious gear gap. But a sense of progression is retained for the more casual player, they just have a much lower ceiling. A true win-win.

What Blizzard has been doing since Cata is slowing raising that ceiling until now there is basically one universal ceiling that has nothing to do with skill, and very little to do with time invested. And that is the issue.

As a newish Dad and husband, I absolutely understand that it’s sad when you really love a game but just can’t really see what the game has to offer without dumping literally all your free time into it. But at the same time for that carrot to retain its value, there has to be a sense of rarity and uniqueness to it. A true sense of accomplishment. I always say, a diamond isn’t worth squat if they just grow in your back yard.

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