Blizzard should gate features behind player power, not time spent farming

Community General Discussion
1

I was thinking about why everyone is consistently unhappy about how Blizzard releases systems and rewards and I think I figured it out. Gaining a reward most of the time is not tied to any challenge, it is purely tied to spending enough time in the game. Sure, you go and do different activities, but when those aren’t challenging, when you do them and have a streamer or a podcast in the background, it just feels like a chore. And nobody likes being made to do chores. Having some is fine, but there’s such a thing as too much.

Take gear - you just get it by doing an easy dungeon every week. It’s not a matter of you overcoming a challenge, it is a matter of you just logging on and doing braindead content. Everything is like this. Everyone can clear a heroic raid these days. It doesn’t feel like an achievement.

The problem with that is that players never feel as if they earned a reward. The feeling is closer to you getting your wage at the end of the week. “OF COURSE I’m getting paid, I worked for this idiot.” This is not a good feeling.

But Blizzards then needs to space things out so players don’t burn through the game too quickly… and how do they do it? By making you put enough time in the game. Because your time is a finite and very strict resource that Blizzard can use to design spreadsheets. Through being easy, WoW has conditioned players to feel entitled to rewards. And there’s nothing wrong with players for that - they’re right to feel this way. The game design is the problem.

Instead of making Horrific visions challenging, Blizzard decided to timegate you with the research system, with the cloak quest. Why not have players just get their fully upgraded cloak when they’re able to fully clear a vision? Just give them that objective and let them figure it out and make visions harder. For some it’ll take weeks, others will be able to do it right away. So what?

Mythic dungeon levels work perfectly - your key is tied directly to your performance with your team. If you want to do +20, you just burn through the content until you get to that key, there is nothing holding you back other than your own power.

This is how the entire game should be designed, but then you have the weekly chest… why? Just boost gear drops slightly and remove this reward for just putting in time. It’s not needed. The current game design is not too far removed from just mailing you a +5ilvl upgrade every week if you log in for 3 hours through the week.

Easy, time wasters should be a part of MMOs, and ideally they should be braindead - let me just farm in a zone for 3 hours while listening to old O&A clips, please. Why should I have to do visions, to load in and out of maps, to do dungeon and boss mechanics for my farming? Just let me farm in peace. If you’re gonna waste my time at least don’t pretend like you’re doing something more. Everything outside of farming mobs in the open world should be a challenge. And all reward and progression should solely be tied to player power. The Heart of Azeroth upgrades should’ve been tied to defeating bosses and clearing content, and how high you could level up your heart of azeroth should’ve been tied to how far you can go in said content.

Yes, when the server progresses more, new players will be carried to higher-tier content and skip the progression and that’s kind of the point. When you tie things to power, instead of time, the catch up mechanics become intrinsic to the game, and you never have to design them and make all the people who put in the Time feel like suckers for playing your game.

Or just stop pretending and send everyone a 475 every week if they just play for enough hours.

2 Likes
2

A lot of what you say makes sense to me, but then I thought well what about those that pvp, they want to just pvp and not pve, will that be restricting the Heart of Azeroth for them as they don’t defeat bosses and clear content? In a similar way there may be players who devote their time to Mythic+ but don’t actually raid. And the casual players, how will they progress and gear?

I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you think, the game isn’t and shouldn’t be aimed at just one style of play, what has always in the past been a great attraction about WoW is that they do try to cater to all players, even if it hasn’t always worked out as they thought it should :slight_smile:

3

Should be “effort gating”, not time gating. If I want to be done with something, I should have been able to get it done and forget it, even if it would take 48 hrs of playing or something like that. Not daily grind, not weekly grind, not RNG “rewards” that in like 99% cases get DE’d or scrapped. And there should be multiple ways to get something - dungeons, raiding, battlegrounds, arena, mythic, world quests, whatever else someone might want to do. But time & forced activity everywhere squeezed out of players is a thing this expansion, and probably the next one too. And it just happens that some activities are significantly easier/harder to complete depending on class/spec you play. Here’s a hint - there is a good reason why Havoc DHs are derided as the current ez mode faceroll and some specs are never seen in anything serious. And instead of fixing base class/spec mechanics & balance, Blizz focuses on more 1 patch gimmicky treadmills for the hamsters to run in. Again. Bad indie company doesn’t learn even from its own mistakes, period.

5 Likes
4

Thing you suggest have one problem. Its not acessible for 100% of playerbase which goes againts everthing Blizzard is doing with wow.

5

For PVP you can have Heart upgrades drop from wins. IMO losses shouldn’t bring in any reward.

For the rest - to be fair, I think WoW should more or less be designed as a complete package. Raiding, as the most challenging content should always give the best rewards. I think designing the game in a way where players can just ignore huge chunks of the game is wrong. For me, MMOs have always been like this - do dungeons to get the gear to be able to do raids. Do raids to obliterate everyone in pvp. Then you just have fun in pvp because it is competitive. Personally I don’t see the point in doing dungeons and progressing your gear if you aren’t going to use it in raids. M+ changes this, but not that much for me. I think at higher m+ keys, dungeons should change more dramatically - for example, have the entire map flipped horizontally, or have alternate bosses. So that for those who only want to do dungeons, there’s still some kind of “end” content that they need to overcome.

6

I think we will disagree, ignoring ‘huge chunks of the game’ is down to player preference. I know pvp players have screamed against having an essence that is great for pvp but they had to do pve to obtain it, same screams from pve players who had to pvp for an essence.

Forcing people to do content that they dislike is not for me a good MMO, now I don’t agree with the current grinds and I understand why there are so many complaints, but to be honest I think changing the system to what you say will raise just as many complaints. This is just my opinion, I know a lot of people will agree with you, but for me at least I think they do try and cater to all player types.

3 Likes
7

Yeah you obviously weren’t paying attention and i don’t think you figured out anything. The overwhelming majority of players WANT to “work” towards their reward and this has been repeated at nauseam when asking for vendors and currencies, just look at the corruption s#itshow.

8

none of that makes any sense, I do low end content only and im now stopped completely at 445 ilvl. I cannot go any higher. I don’t do mythic, I don’t do pvp. there is now way for me to progress any further.

Your entire post is based on you having addons aplenty to tell you what to do. Its not your skill that enables you to do high end content, its your addons.
The only solution to your posting is to have lfr (430 gear), normal (445 gear), heroic (460 gear) and then mythic (heroic with addons banned) (475 gear) because I bet 99% of the player base wouldn’t complete mythic anything and then 475 gear rewards would be an achievement for the very few, and something to aim for the rest of the players.
Do you concur with this … or are you too scared to face the reality that its not you, its your addons that are winning your gear and making life oh so tedious and easy for you … like 99% of the player base.

go on, I dare you … do mythic 5 with no addons whatsoever. Bet you cant do it, neither can 99% of the players out there.
The problem, as you see it, is you’ve made your own game too easy and lazy.

That’s not blizzards fault (well, you could blame them for allowing addons I suppose), that’s your fault.

9

If you don’t do anything, you don’t need better gear either.

3 Likes
10

I really like this. Because you can do ‘‘timegating’’ in one of two ways. And i think that Runescape does it perfectly.

Getting from lvl 1-99 in say Cooking takes 20 hours roughly if done with the most efficient method. However, those 20 hours can be plowed through in one day, or it can be spread out over weeks and months, the total time it takes to complete the task is fixed, but the time it takes each person is up to their investment.

11

Thats the challenge :stuck_out_tongue: My spirit is weak and Im too lazy to farm the same boring quests again and again and again everyday. Thats why I dont have Pathfinder.

1 Like
12

This looks like something modern Blizzard developer could do, something totally player unfriendly. Imagine how much alliance players would join BG if their win-loss ratio is 2-8 and they would know that there is no reward for their effort?

13

the only problem with 8.3 is that they didnt put echo vendors on 8.3 launch .

if they did by now people would have their bis and would be working towards more corruptions week after week.

i do think that they paniced on launch that virus will stop developement of SL till 2021 and thats why they delayed it.

2 Likes
14

I agree, players want less RNG and more certainty. But i don’t think anybody enjoyed the cape grind, or how Visions are time gated behind that stupid research. As I said in the opening - why not just mail items to players based on how long they’ve been online?

Because on an unconscious level we all agree, rewards should be tied to a challenge, not simply to existing online.

15

Sort of, because we have to reevaluate the definition of reward here.
Looking back we got used to gear being, not only a tool that helps you defeat bosses, but also a shiny trophy you can show off outside the AH, this is how gear works in classic.
But now, beside transmog having an effect on how gear is viewed by other players, we got more prestige rewards, like titles, mounts, which are for showoff purposes only. In a way i think it might be better this way cause these lasts forever, while gear is made obsolete in months. Nobody cares what gear you have back in vanilla when you killed C’thun, but a scarab lord title is easily recognizable.

16

Naah.

You may have figured out what bothers you, what makes you “consistently unhappy about how Blizzard releases systems and rewards”, but that doesn’t apply to anyone else.

I, for example, don’t relate to your statement at all.

I can name, point by point, what I don’t respect about various game systems, from the very basic ones to the ephemeral, just-for-one-patch systems. You know what? Nobody wants to hear it. There’s no reason they should. They have their own reactions, biases, preferences.

It’s useful to remember that other people are different from you, enjoy different things, respect different things, detest different things.

The devs try to navigate between these various preferences, in various aspects of the game, and produce a mix in which they hope they have something for everyone.

2 Likes
17

Not anymore becouse there ia just too many of them and can be easly bought for real money thanks to token.

Everybody cared becouse your gear was visual representation of your progress.

18

My main point is that this artificial time-gating needs to end. It’s not even about the rewards. I think Visions should have only been locked behind your ability as a player to clear them. As you got better gear, you could kill things faster, or not wipe on late bosses and clear more of the vision. Then as a new player, you could ask guildie to carry you and help you catch up quick. You can’t really carry players in horrific visions because of their sanity. They need to deal with the damned timegating. Then keep the same system for no mask visions being easy, and those who want to push themselves, give them the 5mask challenge.

I don’t think the majority of the game should be exclusive, and I don’t think the power gap between hardcore and average players should be as big as it is. But I think in general, the game should give and limit rewards based on your ability to clear content, not based on some arbitrary system limited by a weekly currency.

19

That’s a different issue altogether.

I said nobody cares, present.

20

Personally I dislike endless grinds. A big flaw since Legion has been this need to have a carrot on a stick that never ends. Endless sucks the life out of the game.

The artefact should have ended when you got all the traits and the nck should have had set caps for patches so you can be done.

1 Like