I dont think exclusivity is particularly useful in games. In the end for me games like this are for advancement. The shiny raider in neat gear is only an inspiration if the same is also attainable for me. If its unrealistic say due to time constraints for me to also get cool shiny gear then its more of a turn off than anything.
To me the original nax was one of the turning points for when the game got worse, and its not really about exclusivity of content because its ok for there to parts of a game not everyone will see. The real issue as I see it is that for wow and many other mmoās the main form of advancement at max level is all about gear. When the gear becomes too unbalanced thats when I find things get really out of hand.
At the start of the game levels are just as important as gear and you can get better gear from questing, random drops, crafting as well as dungeons. By then end the only sources of advancing are raids. Look at how much powerful nax gear is than any other source and its clear that the game was seriously unbalanced at that point. Honestly though, even at the bwl/aq40 stage people with that gear were already so much more powerful that those without. When you play in a game with and against other people if you dont keep some sort of balance you get a class of players that feels like they are not able to make a difference in anything. Its like when npcās show up at the end of raid fight and kill steal, what the point when you cant actually pull your own weight.
The beauty of classic vs the other expansions was that it was a much much larger game than all the expansions so it took people so much longer to run into the raid or stall wall because you could still be busy leveling or seeing dungeons for the first time.
Best time I had in this game was BC, I was decked out in blues with a single (crafted) epic, looking with awe at raiders in my city and wondering what I had to do to get there. Worked my way (solo/pug) through the T5 attunement and finished the expansion having cleared BT and poke my head in Sunwell. It was a grand adventure.
Most bored Iāve ever been in this game, last few expansions, level a toon and get it decked out in a week and have nothing left to do.
Vanilla was by far the best.
TBC was fun
Wrath was fun but not as good as TBC
Cata ruined the game for me but i kept playing because i hoped it would get better
Pandaland made it worse
Warlords made it a turd
Legion made it a polished turd
BFA made it a watery turd
I totally agree. In my mind BC, WOTLK, and maybe even Cata had a strong balance between accessibility and exclusivity. 10 mans were easy enough to draw in a lot of pugs and more casual players, so you could justify the resources it takes to build out big, engaging raids like Ulduar and ICC. But 25 man was tough enough that it was meaningful. And the badges system would let you get some tier, not all tier pieces. That gave somewhat of a catch up mechanic without trivializing raid gear by dropping raid equivalent gear from World Quest chests, like we do with Azerite pieces today.
I think exclusivity is very useful as a motivational tool for player participation in content.
I think the best presented content is accessible with the illusion of exclusivityā¦ or the iphone principal. Originally they were seen as high end exclusive devices yet everyone had oneā¦
Classic and TBC handled progression very different, to the rest of wow. In classic/TBC the world was there and you explored it at your own pace, end game progression built upon itself, thus the world got bigger as more and more content was released.
In wow today blizzard has players all in the one content tier by design. All because they are doing an (increasingly disneyiefied) narrative. This means the world always stays the size of the current content tier because previous tiers become meaningless and invalid by their reward structureā¦ you dont need the rewards from the old content to get/progress into the new content. For many there is no feeling of progression or rite of passage. Very different feel.
I feel like the iphone effect is what we have now. I think you can have actually exclusive content, the key is just to have progression elements up to that point that are accessible. So letās say there is this very difficult end game raid. You will have a hard time finding a group without the right ilvl, and even if you do itās pretty hard to pug, so set raid groups have a much better chance. So how do we resolve these gates?
Rep gates: What? You mean I have to get revered with X faction to even step foot in raid? True, that could come across as a pointless grind. But what if you brought back head and shoulder patches like in WOTLK? You unlock your blue patch at honored, unlock the raid at revered, unlock epic patches at exalted. The rep grind is not a pointless attunement, it actually makes your character stronger and has implications beyond just raid access.
Guild incentives: there should be incentives outside of just raiding to join guilds. I mean beyond just a guild bank, heirloom gear, and having money for repairs, there is not a lot of reason for people to guild up. Blizz largely abandoned the guild cosmetics/achievements/consumables after Cata. The key is to make guilding up feel like an integral part of the game experience. And I donāt mean do stuff like throw in crap loads of group quests. I mean create fun activities and goals that just are enjoyable to every type of player and encourage guilding up whether or not you plan on being hardcore.
If you have to trick people into playing a game, its not a very good game. Exclusivity is divisive by definition and business tactics designed to increase profit margins based on peoples big ego are not the way I would go if I was trying to build a good community
The big difference between vanilla and now is the amount of time it took to outfit a raid of people. Between multiple difficulties, less wasted drops and the smaller raid group sizes there is so much more loot to go around now then there used to be. People ran multiple tiers in vanilla because of legendary mats and simply because people were not done with collecting sets for bonuses and the like. Most people I know took alts into farm raids if they were done gearing their main. The only people bringing mains were those that were after legendaries, those that still wanted a specific elusive piece and those that didnt have alts.
You are welcome to your opinion but I disagree on pretty much all points. Tricks can be allot of fun and being tricked into something can also be enjoyable (the knock knock joke is built on it). At its base elements, the concept of any game is to have winners and losers. When everyone is a winner its a boring game because there is no risk in the game, no excitement (thats my subjective opinion).
In terms of divisiveness and community building, you are aware the central premise for this game is to pit half the community against the other half right?
This game is far more about co-op than being pitted against someone. Other than pvp which has never been the main focus of the game, competition is never directly against another person.
This started in TBC with Badge gear, my dude. Badge gear made old content irrelevant from a challenge standpoint; the only reason the old content existed was to farm badges. No one was running Kara/Mag/Gruul because they needed the gear in there to progress. Wrath only exacerbated that by making each raid tier irrelevant when the new one came out. All you had to do was get to 70 and farm Emblems for a day or two to hop into Ulduar/ToC/ICC.
Vanilla WoW was really the only iteration of WoW where truly linear progression was the norm all the way through.
Not gonna lie. If there is not a high amount of exclusivity - even if Iām not a part of it, I wonāt play. The feeling of āthere is so much more out thereā is very important to me.
Itās one of the turnoffs of retail. Everyone is transmogged, LFR gear looks similar or decent compared to Mythic. As far as Iām concerned, LFR should look like garbage and only the top tier gear should look amazing.
What this does is give the people doing LFR, the illusion of achievement. When in reality, they have so much further to go.
It started in the end of BC/beginning of Wrath. (At least for PVE) In Burning Crusade 1-2 percent of the population was seeing content that took up a large percentage of their time to create. The expense wasnāt rationalizing the participation, so they needed to modify it so the metrics started making sense. So, they removed attunements (which usually required you to complete previous content before moving into new content), started introducing gear vendors, allowed for varying raid sizes, and in Wrath, introduced a new differing difficulty system.
This access to all mentality, like it or not, continued and is why most of the things people complain about are in place today. WoW, as a business, chose to offer more to the āaverageā player (not saying casual, that is too subjective).
I think using the word ādivisiveā is a little misleading. I mean competition has been a strong source of of motivation AND enjoyment since the beginning of time. People enjoy competing and climbing ladders. That is in general a positive thing. Just because WOW is an RPG, does not mean that it should not incorporate that element of competition and prestige, which in traditional sports and esports actually DOES help build the community. Heard of League of Legends?
The mistake here is in treating wow as if itās a traditional solo player RPG like Skyrim or early Final Fantasy. Itās an MMO, and as such that multiplayer aspect should be an inherent part of the game. And where you have multiple players, they will find ways to compete against one another just by human nature. And this is not a bad thing.
Most people enjoy the winning not so much the competing. And while you can certainly build communities based off that kind of structure its not actually the kind of community that people always talk about when they are fondly remembering communities they have been a part of (unless of course they were part of the winning side). Co-op is just as much multiplayer as head to head, and the best head to head communities Iāve ever been part of are the ones that had no rewards for winning.
I would argue that that the idea of you being part of a guild or raid group to compete against another group is Co-op no? Or you me pure PVE with no system for comparison or rewards?
I find that statement interesting because the time when I felt most connected to not only my personal community of guild members, but to my server and my faction as a whole was when I was a very competitive raider in a top 4-5 on server progression guild. I think trying to decide whether people prefer a competitive community vs a pure co-op experience is too general, people will have vastly different preferences and thus we cannot make general statements. Iām simply pointing to the thousands of years of history we have of competition being one of the primary, if not THE primary, form of entertainment for civilized cultures.
Let me tell you, seeing all those high levels with stuff I couldnāt get got me hyped to try harder and put in more time and effort. Exclusivity is a good thing for the game provided it isnāt āthe first 100 people get this and then we are NEVER having anything like this ever againā as that does the opposite.
This. Something more to work for is good, something you wonāt be able to get not so much. Although the occasional item like the AQ tank mount is ok, having a series of such things would not be good.