If they don’t matter, nobody would’ve bothered to use cosmetics. Nobody would’ve cared if Shadowlands has customization options and Blizzard wouldn’t even make them in the first place if they don’t matter.
Can we kill this untruth now?
This has what landed us with politicians looking to ban lootboxes in video games, because of silly defenses like that that allows corporations to get away with it to a point where we have EA’s battlefront 2, which after all that mess happened, the game industry scaled back to just mircotransactions and it worked because now it doesn’t look so bad in comparison to lootboxes along it’s “Just cosmetic”, yet half of the companies don’t even keep their promises.
The fact you put Challenge mode next to your “it’s just fact” line, makes it non-factual and goes against your previous point, confirming that cosmetics do matter for people so much that their willing to do challenge modes to get them. I mean, what does challenge modes have again? It’s certainly not a huge amount of power last time i check.
If Cosmetics doesn’t matter, why bother doing Challenge modes?
I think it’s just odd for you to say “Cosmetics don’t matter” then turn around and say “Real-money transactions are bad for the game”… Unless your alluding to the fact that if it’s “Pay to win” or “Gameplay effecting”, then that’s when you have a problem with real-money transactions, but if it’s cosmetic, then suddenly it doesn’t bother or concern you.
Microtransactions of any kind should concern you, cosmetic or otherwise.
“Look at how smart I am. I have these thoughts that are shared with other people, but I am better than these other people who share thoughts but are totally wrong. We are totally better than those guys, aren’t we guys? Hive fives in the echo chamber all around”
Are people wanting WoW to function like Starcraft? As in, fewer choices to balance. Effectively, 3 core specs/races to replace the others.
These core specs would have a toolkit to combat each other equally with no advantage nor disadvantage.
Like SC, you get placed in an environment like a BGH map with mirrored resources and equal starting foundation. Essentially, the only real measure of skill would be your APM.
Yet, and this is where I get petty, do people really want even APM restricted much like a GCD so that almost all actions are boiled down the most infinitesimal difference?
My clicking. 002% faster vs. Your .001%.
What kind of bland, non RPG, non group weigh strengths with balances, non lore friendly atrocity version of WoW would this be? Player choice friendly?
What if we all just play terribly and need to adapt and overcome using what we have at our disposal? Too much of a challenge? Unfair to a class I want to play not need to play?
TLDR. As devil’s advocate, we are not supposed to do well in all content and against all scenarios. Make an alt. Make 10 alts. Blizz wants your time played to be high.
This… yes, you’ve got it. Why do challenges modes? Answer: you don’t. You didn’t play challenge modes, and that’s why they were replaced with M+, a system people actually play. You got it. You got the point, good job.
You can think they don’t matter all you want, thats just you. But the people who did do challenge modes did it mostly for the cosmetic reward. Why you think so many people want Mage towers back?
I want mage tower back to practice playing them (run with lower ilvl, different setups). And I really only want to do that because blizzard did not create mage tower to be run several times over for a spec. I don’t think a great deal many people did the challenge and then abandoned the quest to run it again. They just immediately turned the quest in and got the appearance.
That lack of blizzard creating the “need” to run them multiple times (unless I wanted all the specs), is why they were superior to visions and I just know what torghast will end up being about 2 months out.
But yes appearances do play a role as well (like a secondary reason for me).
To devils advocate your devils advocate. If the game was designed so that I could get an alt up and running to the level of my main in no time flat… I’d be fine with it.
Taking BfA as an example… in order to get an alt to the same competitive level of play as my main, I have to currently grind:
-Gear
-AP
-Essences
-Corruption
-Get the legendary cloak
-Level up the legendary cloak
Just make an alt would be fine… if just making a single alt wasn’t a large time investment in the first place.
I don’t think anyone wants WoW to be “overwatch with raids.” We also don’t want it to be “skyrim with raids.” Skyrim… a game where you can make your character into a completely pitiful barely able to function class, ooor… you can make it into a literal god. It only works in that game because… it’s a single player game. So whether your a god or how you interact with the game is directly a function of your own choices. What you do in that game affects no one but you. WoW isn’t a single player game. It’s an MMO, with a top end difficulty that demands a moderate amount of min/maxing.
Make retail content as much of a joke as classic content or skyrim content… and no one will care about this. But it’s the fact that it isn’t tuned that way and the competitive nature of the online community that dictate why it shouldn’t be made this way.
Maybe that’s what defines the RPG genre. Established hubris for the sake of following a story.
If we homogenize all classes and specs equally then there’s no reason to develop nor to gain player improvement. I’m assuming this balance reflects the abilities of both good and bad players.
Gone are borrowed powers, item levels, scaling would put LFG on par with Mythic, until there’s nothing really to separate you from the next person.
Perhaps you are right. Blizzard’s didn’t invent this hubris, but they can control the FOTM. If they lose this hubris then we might as well play WoW on our phones as a 1 button spammer.
Tbh, I don’t follow you here Sentenza. People want the mage tower back to earn the cosmetic rewards from the mage tower. Heck mage towers and their cosmetics were pretty much heralded as a resounding success in the eyes of almost everyone who played in Legion.
Sentenza seems jaded because he played in MoP (Towards the end) and missed out on Challenge modes, I’d be angry too honestly. Maybe you should have done some content there Sentenza.
You know the picture of the fox looking up at the apple in the tree and then being all I didn’t want it anyway.
Be honest Sentenza, you’re trying to convince yourself appearance stuff doesn’t matter.
Oh man… I still kick myself for not getting into challenge modes during MoP. I heard about them and thought they were stupid so didn’t partake. Then tried them out in WoD and LOVED them. Freaking loved them. Wish I’d gotten all my classes custom armors as well. Some of them were reeeallly good.
Yes, if Covenants were in BFA, the Covenant system would be an utter trainwreck. BFA uses the “play one character all the time or FOMO” mentality. This design is completely incompatible with the design of Covenants.
However, Blizzard is going lengths to avoid this and allow players to maintain multiple characters. They are continuing to iterate on the reward structure of the expansion to make it alt-friendly. Very recently they reworked the torghast grind. If you go into the highest level wing of Torghast and knock it out in one attempt, you will earn ALL your currency for the week. Similarly, they mentioned in an interview you only need to complete two emissaries a week to stay on top of some Covenant-campaign related grind. Similarly, they said you only need to visit The Maw for about an hour and a half per week, more or less depending on whether you’re playing alone or in a group.
They understand that the expansion must be alt-friendly for this design paradigm to work, and they’re taking feedback to improve on that front. Feedback like “15 Mythic+ Keystones per week is way too much to upgrade my cache” is the kind of feedback they need.
If the expansion is alt-unfriendly, Covenants will fail. There’s a big burden here, and also a shift in mentality that has to come from players.
