Eliminating time sinks was a major bad move and I’m glad they’re correcting it. Not everything should be a massive time sink. But they should exist in the game.
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You can play the game in nearly any way you want, from causal to hardcore.
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bangs gavel
Sentenced to SHADOWLANDS
Poor design is not in indictment of time sinks or grinding.
alright mr we should run torghast for leggos
Nobody likes prerequisite grinds for baseline power. People like grinds for cool stuff. It’s pretty simple.
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Wow…imagine if that is what we are talking about…wouldn’t that be crazy but you want your grinds…go level some conduits.
You can pretend away what I’m saying to you all you want, you are the one that looks like a fool. Renown in Diablo 4 was also a bad idea. Nobody likes prerequisite grinds. People like grinding for cool stuff and power beyond a baseline.
Starting to emerge as a low grade troll.
It’s a pre-patch event, they’ve always been terrible. As far as grinding, it’s been like that since attunememts and heroic badges back in TBC. That’s not something that’s been introduced recently
Always - reputation, Honor, Marks
TBC - Badges, dailys, arena points
WOTLK - Emblems, Crusader coins,
Cata - Valor, Legendary Daggers.
MoP - Valor tied into rep tied into dailies, Legendary Cloak
WoD - Garrisons, Legendary Ring
Legion - Weapons and Legendaries
BfA - Apex Gear
SL - didn’t play
DF - just started
Because the first M in MMO is massive. That massive indicates there are numerous players playing the same game at the same time.
“an online video game which can be played by a very large number of people simultaneously.”
ReMix and Plunderstorm were designed to be time sinks. Being a time sink is the only reason why those modes were made and getting the items from the became easier over time with buffs. MMOs and RPGs are time sinks by their nature so some grinding should be expected.
Some high end crafting regents always had a cooldown this is not new. Even the ability to craft the item may have been locked by rep and/or going a dungeon or raid for mats. I don’t see anything wrong with this but I do not like the soulbound nature of the items. I also do not like the overpriced vendor mats for items either. I get this is to keep people from claiming P2W since Blizzard does sell gold.
M+ seems to be eating at every aspect of the game…
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Are you saying the m+ and delves aren’t a positive for the gearing of casual players?
Where previously your only option was joining a raid guild?
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I’m going to post a lengthy reply, try to focus on each point you’ve presented. Please bear with me.
Player engagement is the desired effect, with an emphasis on ‘longer term.’ Any data one might parse to gauge which development knobs to turn, none of them really match up with ‘concurrent subscriber count’ or ‘box sales.’
Yet, these two figures are now difficult to find for even Blizzard, who no longer reports complete metrics with these included. Unfortunately, Blizzard chooses ‘participation metrics’ as their tool to design with, which leads to the problems you see here today.
When a player logs into wow, particularly as a new player or after a long absence, the content they will do will not be something from long ago, something with nostalgia to help keep the player engaged for a longer term.
They will encounter new content, largely truncated and disconnected from anything they did before. This content will have very little staying power for any player, simply because it’s quantity over quality, pushed out at regular intervals, rather than polished and synchronized with meaningful game changes.
Players will engage with whatever ‘work’ needs to be done to complete the new grinds, or get bored in the process, rarely ever finding long term play value in this design. Then Blizzard must recapture some level of lost players to increase annual revenue numbers to be able to continue operating a game studio able to put out something new.
Because these temporary events are being developed by a separate ‘live update’ team who can jump in and help bridge the gap between content, typically working on smaller features and holiday events. They produced Plunderstorm, Remix, and helped facilitate the SOD development with the Classic team.
The main issue with this design methodology: Temporary game states are not a valuable potential long-term time commitment for anyone with self respect and other activities competing for their time.
The grinds are meant to generate player participation metrics. More numbers > less numbers when you have no other method of making design choices (no coherent leadership). People who make arbitrary design choices that break precedent and create unreasonable paradigm shift in moment to moment gameplay opportunities, are the ones who steer development at blizzard.
Because they think that will increase player participation metrics, where they think learning something is the thing they do at Blizzard… as if it’s hogwarts for game design. Rather, they should have spent all those precious resources redesigning professions to include new and different game modes that add functional gameplay to otherwise empty profession design.
By ‘empty’ I mean ‘I clicked a button in a UI and the game spat out a finished product’ rather than ‘I played through a fun activity where I crafted a shirt and went through the actual steps of measuring, clipping, and sewing fabrics and other clothing elements, and it was fun!’
Instead, adding more progress bars, rep grinds, and things you babysit while you watch netflix, is what they did. How Fun. Much Engagement.
In their quest to generate player metrics, they forgot to add activities that are better aligned with ‘fun’ and lesser aligned with ‘work.’ Often times players will talk about how much ‘effort’ or ‘work’ it takes to accomplish a task in game.
Games development is meant to be an exercise in generating meaningful play opportunities, not generating work opportunities. Any change you make as a dev needs to be parsed through the lens of ‘play opportunity =/= work opportunity.’
This is where they continue to misstep.
They are making an effort this time around to try and do exactly this… add evergreen content and respect players time. The only problem with that is you can’t really push out another new expansion (or 3) and accomplish the desired effect. Not unless these expansions break from the precedent set by the last 6 and establish a new paradigm that actually results in an evergreen game.
This is unlikely to happen during TWW or World Soul, due to the point we are currently at, combined with the lack of apparent paradigm shifting game design. Prepatch is live, expansion is around the corner, and we get:
- New continent.
- New raid zones.
- New dungeons.
- New questing hubs.
- New leveling Cap.
- Additional profession cap.
Looks like every other expansion to me, with zero regard for anything that exists in the game, currently, or was developed prior.
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Wow, now, more than ever, feels casual friendly. I’ve never enjoyed wow as much, being a bad and a scrub combined into one awesome package of failure. This is simply because I can casually make my way about and do what I want and still gear myself in decent gear.
Wasn’t always like that. There was a time that if you weren’t doing end game raiding you were playing the wrong game.
Oh yeah thats why when classic came out no one speed ran anything and it was perfect and wonderful.
Also, pretty sure weekly lockouts have always been a thing. Nothing about that is organic.
Literally spouting nonsense.
I don’t think it can get more casual then 5 man dungeons being endgame content I guess they can throw them on the LFD tool
I wish I knew how I went about it, but I am decently geared, not impressively, decently geared and I didn’t even do M+. Delvs don’t even exist yet. But I managed to gear up well enough to accomplish my “out-in-the-wild” goals.
It would be interesting to see a separate version of WoW without mythic raids, high keys, or ranked PVP. Just casual queue’d content and world quests/events. There are probably a lot of players that would rather play that version of WoW than what we have now. There are also a lot of players that would never play a version like that.