He wasn’t hating the game, you’re putting words in his mouth. The idea of increasing gold sinks actually has benefit for the player base.
We already don’t have anything to spend gold on right now. What in the world are you spending your gold on? I buy consumes like candy off the AH, and I still make more profit than I can spend. I got my flight on both my characters, my hippogriffs. What else can I buy? I have two firefly pets on my characters, those weren’t cheap but hey. What else can I spend it on?
People are winding up with too much gold than they know what to do with as this content drags on and nothing is added to spend it on. This wouldn’t kill a thing.
We need permanent gold sinks, not the one off mount and flight speeds that you purchase once and you’re done. That’s a temporary sink, what happens when the majority of the player base has bought it and everyone is still making gold off dailies, farming, etc? The gold isn’t going anywhere, it simply exchanges hands. That means many players are just hoarding it, not even intentionally. That’s not a great thing.
So is the exalted reputations grind, the heroic badge grind…everything is literally a time sink in this game. That’s…rather the entire point. To waste your time so you’ll pay $15 a month to continue doing it.
It doesn’t mean I’m arguing to remove reputation barriers to heroic keys, or remove the badge costs of gear.
Similarly, the respec cost is just that, a time sink used as an asking price for a desirable thing to acquire/do in the game.
I think I’m starting to agree with something another poster said, I think it might have been Kerg?
The central issue here is some modern players have a desire to strip the game (or even worse, disfigure it with “corrective surgery” by adding things it never had) of everything other than features crucial to endgame raiding or endgame pvp elements, so that there’s no grind for anything, which is actually starting to make a bit of sense.
Could boil down almost every single activity in this version of the game that isn’t actively wiping/progressing on a boss or queueing for BG/Arena to “just a time sink”. It still doesn’t mean it has to be removed, neither should it be.
EDIT: After continued reading I see you aren’t exactly pro-dual spec? So consider my post to be more using yours as a launch pad, not aiming at you.
I don’t mind reputation grinds, or badge grinds. You get other things done while doing that, I can do those with my friends or even help my friends with getting theirs done. There’s value in that time spent. I understand what you’re saying, and I agree. What I don’t agree with is the pointless time sinks.
I can farm rep and badges at the same time, and chill with Onyx, Aca’, etc while I do it. There’s some social value there. There isn’t in traveling about the world to change something temporarily on my character, only to be slowed down from getting to my main goal, and therefore I typically avoid doing said action. So I wind up being gimped a bit, I can deal with that, and then that time/gold sink just simply doesn’t exist. Probably one of the reasons I’ve amassed gold, I don’t like wasting my time, and therefore I try and maximize it. Obviously there are times where I “have” to go to the trainer, but those are aren’t as common as you’d think.
Were they to remove that portion of it, and instead increase the gold cost, then it will indeed make me spend more time later down the line farming for gold. That becomes a time sink for players, and they actually feel rewarded/inclined to do so. They benefit from playing their character to the best of their ability, can still spend more time with friends, or just grind away at whatever goal they’ve set for themselves.
I suppose right now I’m trying to hold the line at the mere 50g cost to people who want to completely circumvent that.
If we lean too heavily in changing the game to suit our desires then we just became no different than them, idealogically.
I can see farming 50g as an activity you can still socialize while doing.
In fact I very vividly remember on my Paladin alt back in retail-TBC, long nights chatting about as I farmed primal waters to respec between holy/ret/prot for various activities.
Why can’t players of today…just do that? Instead, they want that barrier completely removed, robbing them of some of the only value that TBC has to offer…wasting your time farming more primals
Well like I’d said earlier. Dual spec could be a thing for every player. But that cost would be much higher than if they were to go to their trainer in a city. If I were farming primals out in Nagrand, and all of a sudden you guys (the alliance) start taking Halaa, I might feel inclined to spend 200-300g to quickly swap spec’ to hop into the fray with a couple buddies and kill a bunch of you. Lol
Right now, their option is hearth home, run to trainer, respec for the 50g, search for a mage, port to Shatt", then fly over and hope the fight is still going strong so they can grind with everyone else.
It’s either that or fight in pve spec, which I end up doing allot of as I don’t like doing that.
If we had that cost for dual spec, but also kept the trainer at the normal price, both types of players would have that option. Would you like to save some gold and waste some time, or waste some gold and save some time?
Either way it’ll be work for you in the long run, it just changes how that grind feels.
Edit: And this obviously comes with a gold sink for players like me, so the other players can be happy knowing I just spent several times what they spent just because I didn’t want to go all the way home. That gold sink would help everyone imo.
Incoming slew of daily quest hubs will completely invalidate the annoyance of the respec cost anyway, so adding anything to circumvent it now would be extremely trigger-happy.
What they could do, to supplement these players further, is add a way to save loadouts at the trainer. Meaning, when they visit the trainer to pay their 50g fee, they can pick from recently used talent builds or saved talent builds that they “registered”, and each choice will load up a set of action bars and talent options that you registered that loadout with.
I feel something like this would leave the TBC design completely untouched, while giving these players half of the desired outcome (easing the annoyance of the respec process).
As Riger told me, there’s an addon that basically does that for you already. I also hated clicking my talents 61 times every time I retrained lol… Apparently I’ve been doing it wrong when I actually make my way to the trainer.
Think he said it’s “Talented”. Just so you can look into it.
Oh, was just poking fun at the fact the he was basically saying, “Hey my wife isn’t ideal, but at least I put up with her.” And using that as an analogy for TBC Classic.
The 50g respec is not “TBC design”. It is a carryover from Vanilla that went unchanged. Ghostcrawler took over game design about halfway through TBC. A little before Sunwell was released.
From the way Ghostcrawler speaks, dual-spec was something they had been discussing for a while. If the game’s design changed, that change began long before WOTLK, and really had nothing to do with WOTLK.
For instance, it wouldn’t surprise me if Ghostcrawler wasn’t the reason they added the PvP items to reputation vendors, or reduced the reputation requirements for heroics and got rid of many attunements. He seemed focused on making more of the game more accessible to more players.
It might even be that had Ghostcrawler joined TBC earlier, dual-spec would have been added in late-TBC instead of early WOTLK.
Blizzard has been adding quality-of-life changes left and right. I would put the odds of them doing something about the respec situation(maybe not dual-spec) at about 50%. There is a 0% chance that change will be raising respec costs.
It may have started in vanilla, but it stayed all of tbc, and guess what? Even in wotlk it was 50g to respec, dual spec was an ADDITIONAL OPTION added in wrath. But even wrath kept the 50g respec. Saying the 50g respec was not part of tbc design is like saying flying wasn’t part of wrath design. There were areas in wrath you needed flying to access and it was needed for quests, raids, exc. You’re basically saying anything that existed before tbc wasn’t part of tbc design…which is nonsense.
The 50g respec cost was part of tbc design, even if it was carried over from vanilla, it was chosen to have it that way all of tbc.
