There’s a difference though between having it so there’s no rewards for anyone- and having it so everyone can earn rewards.
The OP is asking why bother doing N/H Raiding for your rewards when you can get N raid level gear for not raiding. But you still get better rewards, faster, and more of them for doing the raids.
Basically- you don’t have to stifle someone else’s fun to have fun yourself, and you don’t have to play for only one thing.
Giving everyone options on how to get rewards, giving everyone chances of rewards, and still having better - albeit not by absurd amounts like it used to be- rewards for the top mythic guilds is fine.
When you have choice, you’ve a better chance of enjoying what you do, how you do it, and what you get. Being forced to do a single thing- like raid- means a lot of people may enjoy the reward… but they’ll hate the rest of it, and that just doesn’t make for a fun game.
Because if you do not do them. You are stuck like my main at 388 for the last two months. it takes a very long time to get that high. Then add the gear is subpar and you have a nightmare. Do not even tries to min and max gear that does not coincide with each other. Do just world things/war front and no lfr, mythic or anything else. See how bad it can really be. One of my alt is actually stuck at 356 for 4 months. but I only play him every 3day.
While transmog is a legitimate reward that motivates many people, the designs still need to be something that people like. With the exception of Warfronts, most BfA gear looks absolutely terrible. Most of the Mage Tower appearances were fantastic, which is why so many people wanted them.
Yeah, but the problem there isn’t people’s enjoyment of cosmetics- but the lackluster showing this xpac… which honestly I think is the case just in general, this xpac is on the whole not as good as Legion was.
edit- Which is kind of a shame, since the art department did do a great job on NPCs and other art assets… it’s mostly the stuff we’re getting that have been a bit shoddy.
I had the same thoughts and posted a thread last week that had a lot of people echoing that. It’s disappointing when you want to keep playing but have no real incentives to do fun content.
Lol this exchange is making me laugh and just in the slim chance you’re unaware, Blizz is releasing a Classic WoW Vanilla patch 1.12 client this summer.
Ill be honest OP something told me to take it easy in WoW BFA happy i listen to my gut all my alts are in the 380s ilvl range and my main is at 390 ilvl no regrets feels good man!
That’s sort of the entire point- if you don’t enjoy doing something, don’t do it. If you look at something and say to yourself ‘well, I could get gear just doing WFs every couple weeks and emissaries’, then do that, if that’s what you’d prefer to do.
Maybe this is where we differ. I dont buy into equal rewards for unequal efforts
Right now in the games current progression you can easily get geared enough to step into a heroic raid without doing any M+/raiding at all as OP has stated and shown with their 393 gear despite no end game content. This means that WQs, emissarys, and WFs, which are all obscenely trivial, are rewarding more than normal raiding can. Which leads to the statement of why even bother doing something like normal raids, if lesser content is giving equal or better rewards?
If the answer is “tO cHaLLeNge YoRseLf”
Then i come back to how successful would this game if there was no rewards at all? As much as enjoyment matters, properly weighted rewards matter as well
Honestly, I want something like mage tower again that I can work towards for maybe an amazing looking gear set. Appearances are a major form of progression for me and many others - i’m sure Blizz has a mage tower 2.0 in the works.
My answer to the OP is why do you play a game? For fun. It’s a game. It’s not some real life situation where only the hardest raiding folks prosper. It’s a game we all play an equal amount of money to play and enjoy. The absolute only reason you should be paying and logging on to play is to have fun.
If you think you’re paying for some kind of competitive, real life simulation of gritty life, then I guess you paid for and logged into the wrong game because that game wouldn’t make much money. People deal with trash like that on a daily basis.
They log into a game like WoW to enjoy it. That means you raid because it is fun, not because it is required to enjoy the game and obtain quality gear. If you want to go pay for some other kind of experience, I’m sure it’s out there.
And that’s fair enough- you don’t think it’s rewarding enough for high end raiders or, alternatively, too rewarding for those who don’t raid. I think it’s at a good point.
Do you think that challenge isn’t a suitable motivation for people? Keep in mind that there’s a mix of reward for each piece of content.
I’ll be perfectly honest- regardless of the level of gear, I’m more motivated to raid something like BoD than Uldir simply because it’s more enjoyable to do.
But- at the end of the day, if people are more content doing emissaries to get their ilvl than doing raids… then do it. Instead of looking at yourself not being motivated to raid because you don’t get a gear advantage over filthy casuals any more being a bad thing- maybe look at it as a positive thing. You’re no longer chained to having to raid.
Because you reach a point where you can’t improve if you only do what you listed.
I’m currently at 382, and I understand that if I want to improve (gear-wise), I need to either raid or start mythics (I’m not a big PvP fan other than farming for transmog).
That’s just an opinion. A few of them were very concept, like the flail, or the Druid ones. I didn’t like the furbolgorilla look, so I didn’t bother, even though guardian is pretty much all I play. I ended up getting sparklekitty, which I probably won’t play, and the disc priest one, which I have lots better stuff already in my closet.
A lot of people did them because they’re addicted to collecting transmog.
Yes, CMs were fun… M+ is also fun and it has nothing to do with it being an “esport”. It’s more about grouping with my friends when we’re not raiding and having challenging end game content to play.
Except it isn’t. It’s an MMO, where the sense of “fun” to most comes from meaningful progression. The gameplay itself used to be some fun, but they made sure to screw that up this expansion, too. If you’re doing it “for the gameplay”, there are about a billion other games in other genres that do that better than any MMO.
If people can lick windows to get the same quality gear as people who spend dozens of hours wiping in a raid, it kills a large part of the incentive to spend this effort. It would be like if there was a sports tournament, but every team got paid the same amount and got a huge trophy whether they forfeit every game, or are number one. It kills the incentive to get better and compete when none of it matters.
The huge drop in players shows this to be true; the question is, how long can the idiot whales keep them afloat?