Every time I hear this I’m instantly reminded.
https://i.imgur.com/r9cveSV.jpeg
2 Likes
All a matter of opinion I suppose. Personally I believe the player should feel satisfied when creating their character. Feeling like you can’t choose a race you prefer aesthetically because of gameplay balance is bad design.
I do agree with you to a certain extent though but there’s a key issue. Classic players (and gamers in general) have a bad habit of optimizing the fun out of a game entirely. On Nightslayer Horde currently it is very hard to get dungeon groups past lvl 40 as most just want to run 4 warriors and a shaman or 4 mages and a healer which is ridiculous. However, you also have to look at the side of endgame.
With raiding, you have 40 people you need to gear, and when a powerful item drops like Onslaught Girdle drops who do you give it to? There are a few ways this will play out. Every guild will have people who put in all the effort, and those who just raid log. In that situation, it’s easier to give the item to the one putting in more effort over the raid logger but the situation gets compounded when you have to look at a situation where two players put in the same high level of effort/dedication. Do you give it to the orc warrior who has the optimal race, or the troll who doesn’t have edgies. Granted, it could be argued having items such as edgies is an effort thing, but I imagine you can see what I’m getting at.
This is probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read on these forums.
Same here, especially with the coalition of itinerant tree-dwellers, I think they are called elves.
1 Like
Eh, that’s mostly a player created problem. Especially in Classic where numbers aren’t really tuned to require super optimal setups for the most part.
Though the numbers are typically close enough you should just give it to the player who is more skilled, assuming your raid hands out gear in an attempt to hyper-optimize everything.
It’s still a problem non the less. Regardless of it’s origins, it still exists. The way it was created, has zero effect on how it effects players. Raids ARE extremely easy, that doesn’t stop people from gatekeeping based on metrics such as race selection.
The issue with classic is skill has a much smaller effect on performance. Typically in classic those who perform at a higher level depends on effort, preparation, and the players they are surrounded by. The skill ceiling for classic is very low compared to retail, the rotations are much less complex, and boss mechanics are non existent in most cases.
The point I’m trying to make is race choice is definitely a factor in who you give gear too. This leads to players being disincentivized to choose a race they would love to play because either gameplay balance or increased effort required to perform at a equal level to those choosing quote on quote “best race” this in in regards to non human warriors and edgemasters handguards. Lets not forget bosses only drop two items per boss, and you may only see one or two drops of items like Onslaught Girdle for the entirety of classic.
The point of calling it a player created problem is that players will always gatekeep based on something.
You could argue for the removal of everything that makes our characters different until we’re all functionally playing the same character if you follow that line of logic.
If players want to optimize to that absurd degree then there isn’t a whole lot that can be done about it design wise that isn’t massive amounts of homogenization.
100% agree. There will always be something players are gatekeeping each other for. However, race choice is not something that should be included. Hell, I’m even of the opinion that class choice shouldn’t be something to be included. Imagine a world where we don’t take warriors just because they are warriors. TBC had this issue with both warriors and rogues struggling to find a raid slot because of their class. No one should have hundreds of hours of playtime invalidated just because they wanted to play a class. This doesn’t mean homogenization is a good thing, but classes should be able to contribute in a way that validates bringing to raid.
This is a round about way of again pushing the point you shouldn’t be able to make mistakes at character selection, which ties into players being able to choose the race they want to play, which also ties into allowing for more class selection in retail.
I hope Blizzard doesn’t use this excuse. Not only is it a bad one, it’s objectively false by the standards of their own narrative. We are particularly exceptional mercenaries, essentially. A percentage of a percentage, focused on warfare in one of x classes’ styles.
The problem is that the only way to do that is to make them functionally identical.
For race it’s more of a personal preference. Racials aren’t that big of a deal even if the forums make them out to be sometimes. You could get rid of them and even if I think it’d suck, it wouldn’t change a whole lot.
Class is a lot harder because all it takes is for rogues to do more DPS than hunters and now hunters are called trash. You can say it doesn’t mean homogenization is a good thing, but it’s basically the only solution to this, because if everything else is equal then you might as well just bring the class performs best on the meters.
and since we’re now into stuff like M+ you can’t even do something like “Just enforce one of every class with a unique buff/utility ability”. Gotta balance for 5 player groups in a game with 13 classes and 39 specs.
Which specs are another thing: I really like Fury over Arms. Should I be forced to switch every time Arms is meta over Fury?
It’s pretty much impossible to do without homogenization, or the playerbase realizing that 99% of content doesn’t need that level of optimization.
One of which shouldn’t happen and the other wont happen.
You started as an adventurer of your tribe, with not much superpower than what your training gave you. This is where it began so it’s not surprising that a lower fantasy model was the base of this. The narrative has been wildly inconsistent since WoD, and when you haven’t really commanded armies since then while being a commander in WoD, or not leaded your class hall much when being its leader, or bing chosen one in SL for walking out of maw all of those didn’t really mean as much as those narratives have become obsolete outside of their expansions. In DF we went back to being adventurers, what we were at the core and TWW carries on with that.
Now I think it’s fine to have a different visions but I don’t think it’s wrong to make the claims I did.
This is covered in “mercenary.”
Adventurers do not, in any piece of fiction, represent a majority.
A mercenary can be an adventurer, but an adventurer is much more than a mercenary. I’m not sure I would say we were mercenaries but I think it could fit depending of your inclinations.
I’m not getting into semantics over mercenary / adventurer.
That’s pretty much what I’m saying the difference doesn’t matter much in this case.
I clarified what I meant with “mercenary.”
Adventurers, your preferred term, still do not represent a majority.
They can be a decent part of the population moreover in a fantasy setting where danger is more present. It makes sense that most of them would look like the general population if there’s overall that many of them.
You’re being vague for a reason. They can never be a majority of a population, nor can they ever be representative of a majority because their sphere of influence is entirely removed from that of the hoi polloi.
I mean we simply disagree with an estimation, but that doesn’t change the rest of what I am saying. Your training and your beginning is not extraordinary. Many people learn to be the class that you are, there’s a good amount of them. And so many of them that they become representative of the population, which you don’t need a majority to have something that looks like it. This is why you can make polls with a smaller amount of people to get a feeling of the bigger population, it won’t be exactly the same but it will most likely look like it. The smaller part of the population still comes from the bigger part and thus can be representative once it has a decent amount of members. There are hundreds of people like you in the lore if not more.
This is a bit beyond disagreement, you are objectively incorrect.
An adventurer cannot represent a majority by necessity of their profession. Even if you ignore that the PC inevitably becomes hero within an hour of gameplay, you’re still solving long standing problems in an afternoon, equipping gear the average being in Azeroth has never seen, and being the general ‘problem solver’ for the masses to rely on.
To be slightly goofy but pointed about it; as nice as it is for Obama to say “my fellow Americans” he was never able to represent the average American. Not only was he rich and not paying taxes, he held the most power of any American for that duration.
Adventurers are a little less extreme, but it’s the same basic concept.