Not going to lie, I’m pretty anxious when I think about the price of black lotus in the long term. Currently, it’s not a problem. ~100g for a black lotus? I can handle that easily. Hell, if Blizzard were to somehow magically freeze the price of black lotus at ~150g for the entirety of Classic, I’d consider that a bargain.
I’m far more worried about what the price of black lotus would be in 6-9 months from now, when AQ and Naxx are out. You currently don’t really need to flask. Sure, tanks flask for smoother runs, everyone flasks for speedruns, and some people flask for higher parses in general, but that’s mostly vanity. Yet despite flasking not really being necessary at all right now, prices are still at ~100g. So if it’s this high now, just how high will it be when everyone’s raiding AQ and Naxx and flasking is considered mandatory? 300g? 400g? More?
I think someone told me there are sixty different guilds on my server that have cleared MC. Sixty! Was there a single server during vanilla where even half as many guilds cleared it? I doubt the average server had even ten. Unless Classic has another major population dropoff before AQ or Blizzard boosts the spawn rates of black lotus, this is going to be a major hurdle for a lot of raiders in the future, and probably cause a lot of people to burn out and quit, and guilds to disband due to lack of membership.
If a guild can’t have the common sense to back off with this requirement, if it turns out to burn out guildies in the long term, then it deserves to disband.
People who want to compete at the highest tiers are often forced to engage in destructive behavior to stay competitive, it’s a kind of a race to the bottom, really.
This reminds me of something a buddy mentioned happened in retail (I stopped caring about retail raiding a whole decade ago, but he kept it up until like Legion) to him. Apparently guilds forced people to keep gearing up several characters so they can do split runs and feed the main core the best gear so their #1 team stays competitive with other guilds’ #1 team. Since the last two expansions included AP grinding, this meant that he was forced to do the weekly AP grind on all those characters, and couldn’t handle it anymore, burned out, and quit. According to him it happened to a lot of people. So they were forced between choosing being left behind by other highly competitive guilds, or suffer a greater player attrition as it makes people sick of the game. If Blizzard made AP account-wide instead of character-wide, this could have been avoided and he (and many others?) would probably still play the game and raid hardcore.
World boss monopolization? Speed run record holding bragging rights? I don’t see how, for example, racing to have the world’s fastest MC clear or whatever any more ridiculous than, say, racing to be the first guild to clear the newest raid in retail on mythic difficulty.
If people burn out and quit because they feel the urge to output worldbreaking parses every raid, it’s their own fault, not the game’s. Classic is not built around favoring or encouraging people to go for high parses - otherwise stuff like wbuffs and crazy expensive mats wouldn’t even exist.
The argument in favor of increasing black lotus spawn rates is based on the idea of making Classic be a more authentic vanilla WoW experience.
If vanilla WoW servers were able to hold 4000 players (I don’t know if this is the exact number, just using it as an example.) and you had 100 black lotus spawn a day (Again, I don’t know if this is the exact number, just using it as an example.) and Classic can currently hold 8000 players (Again, inexact figure, you get the point.), then Classic should have 200 black lotus spawns a day to keep a vanilla-like spawn:population ratio.
I don’t think this is an unreasonable request to make, nor that does it trivialize the price of flasking. Flasks will still remain far more expensive than they were back in vanilla.
Stacking wbuffs and flasks in MC to aim for high parses is not an “authentic Vanilla experience”. Back in Vanilla, using flasks on the whole raid was an unheard concept before C’thun
It’s an authentic vanilla experience because it was possible back in vanilla. Whether people actually did it doesn’t really matter. If it was possible to get one black lotus per twenty players a day in vanilla, and in Classic it’s only possible to get one black lotus per forty players, that’s a failure of Blizzard to provide us an authentic vanilla experience. We already know Blizzard introduced dynamic respawns to deal with the higher population cap in Classic. This follows the exact same reasoning.
What you don’t seem to understand is that, even with a Vanilla-like population, the Vanilla-like spawnrate of Black Lotus would still be utterly inadequate if everyone flasks constantly.
The Vanilla-like spawnrate of Black Lotus, iirc, is 1 hour average per Lotus, 1 Lotus per zone with 4 zones. That means that, assuming every Lotus is picked up instantly, you get 42476 = 672 Lotus per week (doing calcs in my head, I hope I didn’t miscalc). Assuming each hardcore raider uses 2 flasks per week, those Lotus are enough to supply a measly 6 raiding guilds. Even on a Vanilla-size realm, there would be a LOT more than 6 raiding guilds nowadays. Just following your figure above, if you cut 60 by half you still end with 30 raiding guilds.
Yes, black lotus would still be rare and flasks would still be expensive. I am not asking to have them trivialized. I’m asking to have them be what they were in vanilla, comparatively speaking.
And I’m telling you that the problem you raise above (flasks going above 300-400g, raiders burning out and quitting etc) would still exist even with Vanilla-size realms.
But hey, feel free to keep competing. I’ve seen many “hardcore” guilds burning out and failing before even BWL, and I’m sure many more will fall the same way - all while many “relaxed” guilds will comfortably clear Naxx.
Double the supply would still mean significantly lower prices. If I have to choose between paying 400 gold or 250 gold for a flask, obviously I would go for the latter.
That being said, don’t expect any further replies from me here. I, quite foolishly I guess, assumed you were interested in a genuine conversation on this subject, but your last line clearly shows you have some kind of a chip on your shoulders about there being guilds with higher standards than yours.
I never said I was against reducing the size of servers or doubling the supply, though I’d prefer to reduce the size of servers as that would tackle other issues as well.
I’m just saying that your problem would still exist due to the game not being tuned for so many players doing it hardcore. Sorry if this observation rubbed you the wrong way.
And I’m afraid this is the truth, the mentality changed with the years and nowadays with easier content and OP gear most classes want to shine on the parses, guilds want to brag about their clear times …
So yeah with smaller population players would think they get more shots at lotuses and the competition would increase tremendously
