I agree with your points there’s more to it, but I think this would be cut and dry enough it wouldn’t take long on any of those steps.
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Character locked reputation is not a feature.
It’s an arbitrary lock on content to keep people in the game longer so they make more money.
I respectfully disagree with this assessment. I do agree, however, that having reputation be so strongly time-gated is indeed a measure to get people to sub longer to “stagger” content’s longevity.
I would quite like it if rep grinding wasn’t so time-gated due to being tied to dailies and wqs. I state unironically that I would most likely grind rep on more characters than just one if there was an option to turn in tokens etc looted from reasonably trivial content like there was back in, say, TBC.
While I’m here…
Possibly. I’ve given it some thought and then realized that making essences BoA is actually more work than the vendor system you suggested. This is because, I would theorize, they’d have to create separate flags and implementation scripts for essences and then make sure players with HoA are awarded those essences reliably.
Perhaps your suggestion might have some merit for its implementation. We’ll see - I believe there’s enough people making their voices heard about wanting BoA essences that Blizzard could start considering it.
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What do you mean? It’s literally not a feature. The only things about rep which is a feature is a reputation system itself.
Ok, I admittedly meant the second half of your post, should’ve quoted that instead of including the first half too. My bad!
And looking at the conversation history, it turns out I labeled it a feature when I meant property. This confusion is fully on me, I’m not a native English user. 
Anyway, confusion out of the way, I shall rephrase and reargue my point:
World of Warcraft started out as an MMORPG, and over the years it has seen a decline in properties enhancing the RPG-like feel of character growth and interaction with the world around you. The reputation system works out well as a means of unlocking various faction goodies tied to that faction, and making it account-wide would diminish the feel of becoming renowned with that faction. As an account-wide system it would be little more than a bar you fill with little substance behind it, especially if the particular character you’re playing hasn’t interacted with them until that point.
Granted, this weirdness already exists for 8.0 reps such as Talanji’s Expedition, Tortollan Seeker and their equivalents, but it is absent for Mechagon and Nazjatar reps, both of which are extremely time-gated, quest-locked and badly designed.
And all that above is leaving out the fact that the current design direction emphasizes world quests and dailies to time-gate rep grinds; as an account-wide system, you could hop from one alt to another to complete all the world quests and effectively bypass the time-gating completely, rendering its existence obsolete and force you to play multiple alts if you wished to reach higher rep levels, fast.
However, if time-gating was removed as a core concept and they reintroduced means of grinding rep nonstop, making reputations account-wide would be rendered nearly pointless.
Additionally, reputation rewards would have to be completely rebalanced, as they would turn from unlockable boons (such as the epic gear we got) into a catchup mechanic for alts, which, while not bad as a concept, would alter the reputation system’s interaction with the player character significantly.
I could write an even longer wall of text, but to save your brains from more of my waffling, I’m going to be kind and tl;dr it:
Changing reputation into an account-wide mechanic would necessitate a complete overhaul of the system, its rewards and its accumulation, which would nevertheless be made obsolete if they simply removed larger-than-life upgrades from Mechagon grind level reputations.
Let me put it this way:
There is a breaking point to many systems/features in the game when they don’t enhance experience anymore and become an unwanted, pointless or irrelevant tedious task.
Does the reputation system enhance our RPG experience? Of course, but only when you level character first time.
There is a group of things people can do in MMORPG when building their character which should never be repeated on a new character because those things are just too tedious they don’t give anything unique as a reward or in general are not fun long term for most people.
In case of essences, the level of absurdity is multiplying because on one hand Blizz is trying to encourage usage of alt’s but then they are kneecapping this encouragement by forcing you into repeating the same grind over and over. On top of that, you need to grind not only rep but also essences because they are either tide to the rep and bad RNG or the unlock progress is as long as rep grind itself.
If the progress of unlocking all essences was as streamline as e.g. unlocking Vision of Perfection then sure I wouldn’t mind Essences being character locked but it’s not like that and that’s why essences should be account-wide. They just take way to much time if you want to reroll to a different class and there is nothing fun about doing so much repeatable grind.
This point of yours, I’ll admit it’s a very reasonable take on the subject matter. And I do agree with you, in a sense.
However, I don’t agree that essentially removing it by making it account-wide is the solution - remember that we’re talking about a design that has been present since the game’s beginning and likely will be present for more expansions to come.
In my opinion, the best and most optimal way to tackle the issue of unfun, boring and chore-like reputation grinds is to make the grind itself fun, not just the end result. This said, I have no suggestions on how to accomplish that.
I’m in full agreement with this.
Thing with expansion-specific features like the essences is that it ultimately feels like a lot of wasted effort to get them up to speed on more than one character because the feel of lasting progression is essentially none. With gear, you can at least use it to enhance your leveling in the next expansion’s zones, but with essences, you’re more than likely to lose them as they’re rendered irrelevant by the next expansion.
We say NO…
The ideal solution is to give people the possibility to choose whether they want their Rep to be acc wide or not AFTER they have done it on at least one of their chars.
Grind is one of two - second being RNG - worst things which you can encounter in any game and we shouldn’t go out of our way to make grind more fun.
We should minimize grind by designing content which doesn’t feel grindy and at the same time, you feel like you are making meaningful progress.
For example, instead of locking rewards behind weeks of relatively boring questing let’s involve crafting system and open-world PvE, treasure scavenging, gathering resources, dungeons and raids in THE CREATION of that reward.
Sadly Blizzard idea of content is a pseudo-system of rewards hidden behind weeks or months of quest grind which is just depressing especially if you think about all possibilities 
I would have liked this for mounts. I was quite fond of my character-based mounts back before they made them account-wide.
Honestly, I feel that the devs are afraid of innovating too much. And sometimes when they do innovate something that’s actually fun to the players, they put it everywhere which makes that previously fun activity a chore to do among others, the fun of it diminishing with each replay.
It’s hard to design content that remains steadily enjoyable over longer periods of time. But in essence I agree with you.
See that’s why I would prefer an MMORPG where you have only one char and you can switch race/class if you choose to without making 10 alts 
Sort of like a book can tell many stories at the same time but it’s one book 
So, for example, you would share some things, e.g. gold, achis, collectables or rep while you switch race or class but then some thinge, e.g. gear would be class-specific. Well, it’s all up to how one would iron out details but IMHO it’s a fun alternative to have a more compacted account with the same functionality as standard MMO acc.
I think they lack understanding of what makes RPG’s genre great because if they did we wouldn’t get more and more oversimplification, grind and rng.
Instead, we would see crafting and professions, in general, being utilized to full potential. We would see even small systems having a deepth but we don’t because whoever runs the “WoW show” doesn’t get RPG genre.
That’s sadly an issue with any company making games because usually few people or even one person decides what is good or bad and if that person doesn’t get given genre or even have a bad taste then game gonna be screwed. “Echo chamber” is another problem where leading designer gathers and listens only to people who share his own view 
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Sounds like you’d enjoy FFXIV, at least in this vein! Your main character is basically all your alts in one, with the ability to swap classes to level or play on the fly, along with gear for them.
Me, however, I much prefer having different alts for different types of content. FFXIV didn’t suit me in that aspect - it had some good traits for sure, but overall I did not enjoy the 50+ levels (40-ish pugilist + 15-ish dragoon) that I managed to play in that game.
This seems to be a problem for many large development studios atm. Game development is oversimplified and mostly focused on the big, flashy features that sell well to investors and company heads. I’m looking at you, EA! >:(
This discussion has certainly gone places, lol. I’ll do my best to limit the off-topic from now on. But it has certainly been an enjoyable discussion, it has been very interesting to hear your thoughts on the matter - some of them that I agreed with!
I actually do have installed FFXIV but I can’t get past "console’ feel of that game 
I like fantasy part of FF but I don’t like how it’s executed as MMO. Oh well, many MMO’s to come and soon maybe Blue Protocol will make me happy because it does use crafting very well where mobs do not drop items but mats and you need to make everything yourself 
So true
Likewise!
After a few days of listening to people who miss the point of everything you say or spam posts without posting anything substantial, it’s nice to have a proper talk 
Cheers!
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To me it looks clear that Blizz is using this system and will not nerf it soon because it keeps old patches relevant and full with people.
Do you want to reroll or do you want to have fun on that mage or w/e you didn’t touch since March 2019? Then you’ll have to:
- grind Nazj for the essence
- grind Mechagon, not only resources, but also reputation
- want strife? want blood? grind pvp even though you may not find it fun to do on your alt, maybe you want to dungeon on your alt
- is CLF best in slot? Would you like to have fun playing it? get ready to try puggining EP
All this done in parallel is way too much. But look at Mechagon for example, people run it, I guess for the sole reason of getting that Protocol or some other specific essence.
Make Blizzard happy that a zone like that is not abandonware. But truth is players are tired.
They could have made all 8.3 essences, at rank 1, be better than 8.2 essences at rank 3, to have a full reset and whoever comes in the game with an alt or after a break, could just do current content. But then where would it be the sadistic fun of Blizzard designers to watch people grind old zones for a bit more power.
Quite disappointing choices. And even more disappointing is the part of community who cheers for these choices because they think that if essences would be easier to get at rank 3, by other players, would devalue whatever grand super thing they are working on, like savants in a laboratory to save the planet or something.
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I remember the time i played the absolute most was at the end of legion. I geared my main, did weeklies and dailies, raids etc. Then went on to play my other alts and gear them up aswell since i found variation was fun. I need a break now and then from my main
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I guess Blizzard are not planning on doing anything about this HUGE problem, i will stop playing WoW until they fix this.
Same here, currently playing the new expac to division 2
THEY ONLY WENT AND DID IT!
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Yup, and I’m happy about that! 
and dont you think that those green logs have anything to do with him performing subpar due to lack of incredibly powerfull essence x4 on r3 ?
or maybe you have no clue how logs work ?
its not a shame to admit that you have no clue how statistics work - most people dont understand math