Because they actually believe it will level the playing field and they’ll magically be invited to groups because “Big Blizz took away the mean raider’s choices! Now they’ll HAVE to be unoptimized and then they’ll stop caring so much about stupid .IO and stuff and I’ll get into those groups with my cool transmog!”
Don’t worry - the reality will set in that the game is going to be as unfriendly to casuals and alts as BFA was, and they’ll all come screeching to the general forums.
And what about the Guy (Me) that has to Choose Nightfae, because you cannot PVP without it and take a 25% damage Reduction for Both ST and AOE, for the Utility.
We should just uninstall right?
They will. The Gate is useful in raids still and the Solebind with a 4% flat damage, and 15% to enchants and pots, is pretty hard to beat.
I know a lot of people have chimed in on this already, and people get very heated about this, but my opinion is essentially the same as Tettles. It’s not about covenant swapping, it’s about not wanting to be forced to be suboptimal. I can’t post the link to the clip though.
Are you trying to tell casuals that they should not try to be good? Why can’t we strive to be better too?
As a Semi-Casual, the system actually matters LESS to me:
I’ll simply pick the one that is best for my soloing playstyle/junk I mainly do.
I feel sorry for raider/mythic types, who will be the ones who feel more pigeonholed.
I dont do high end content or much group content for that matter, so yeah I dont care. Im just watching the tears and having a good old laugh.
All good RPGs are based around choice and consequence.
“Casuals” for lack of a better term are generally people who just want to have fun and experience the game. They’re not hardcore min-maxers, they dont care about world firsts or getting to that top 1%, they just want to have fun and play the game for what it is (or what it was supposed to be, anyhow: an RPG).
When you remove all choice and consequence, there’s really no motivation left anymore. You end up playing through the game just clicking on whatever because none of it means anything. Oops, you clicked the wrong covenant? Just change it, no biggie. This creates lazy gameplay, and by extension boring gameplay.
A true RPG forces you to make many decisions, and there are both positive and negative consequences with each and every decision you make. How you work around the negatives builds character, and encourages creativity in gameplay (or, what I like to call “fun”).
Think to another RPG you may have played in the past. For example, dragon age. You’re questing along, fighting darkspawn, and you get to the mage tower. You decide to purge the entire tower alongside the templar of the chantry, letting no mage survive. Later on you realize it might be nice to have some mage allies for that final battle, but guess what: you killed them all! Now you have to make do without.
What the non-casuals want is for that choice to never really matter. Yea, they killed all the mages, but they can just go back to town, talk to an NPC, and suddenly all the mages are alive again and can help them in the fight. How does that make sense? How does that make for an interesting story, or engaging gameplay?
If your choices have no consequences, they have no meaning. Without meaningful paths in the game, why are we even playing?
Neither do I. Will be interesting to watch it play out and see how it goes.
Only in the most superficial definition. A classic tabletop expression:
RPG stands for role playing game, not roll playing game.
If stats and progression made an RPG, you could call a lot of sports games where player stats improve, “RPGS”.
Back when games were 8 bit, RPGs were limited mechanics. Now that the technology can allow actual player agency (however limited), the definition of RPG has widened a bit.
Who needs meaningful anything? It’s a game. There’s enough meaningful out in the real world.
No it’s not.
WoW is not a true RPG, and it never has been. Even true RPGs have save points, so if you decide you didn’t like your choice, you reload and try again. In the worst case, you restart your game and make better choices. WoW, on the other hand is a persistent world MMO with characters that have histories dating back 15 years in some cases. You can’t just decide you didn’t like your choice and reroll. That’s why the paradigm you seem to be advocating for simply won’t work in WoW.
The problem with modern-day Blizzard is that designers are building the game they want, not the game players want. Blizzard of 2004 realized that travel is boring and that players want to feel safe, so they added flight paths, a Hearthstone, and roads that players could stick to in order to avoid fights. Blizzard of 2014 decided that they want to game to feel dangerous and that they wanted players to fully experience the world, so they stripped away flight and packed the world with mobs and twisty hills to maximize the time that players would spend going from point A to point B. Oh, and when they finally added flight back, they added stupid mobs that served no purpose except to nerf your flight speed just to F with players. The key difference is that the earlier design decisions were made with players’ preferences. The later decisions were made with no regard whatsoever to what players wanted.
It feels like the Covenant system design is consistent with modern Blizzard philosophy, which could give F-all about what players actually want. Who even asked for a new system?
Know what really takes away consequences and meaningful paths? Making all our gear obsolete every patch drop and stripping powers from the equipment we worked so hard to buff every expansion. Why even bother grinding the cape to rank 15 knowing that a few months from now it’s going to be worthless?
Spends time not caring. Cares so little that they make a thread on the topic