That’s not even what I think about this subject. Don’t tell me what I want. You don’t know.
Well it certainly doesn’t look like you prioritize it over your dopamine hits from getting rare mounts, you can phrase it however you want.
I answer this with some trepidation, because you always seem to get upset and angry when I reply to you Nannexx (and I thought I was on ignore?), which makes me question why you engage with me in the first place. But nevertheless, it’s not a matter of Blizzard trying to prevent WoW players from anything, but it is a matter of Blizzard making efforts to maintain a competitive product/service during a time of increased competition. That’s pretty normal business behavior. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m just saying that the nature of the design of these events that Blizzard does, is to capitalize on the players’ time (and sometimes money) in a way that I don’t think is reflective of good game design.
What Blizzard are offering is to give us higher mount drops in return for our time. We want their mounts, they want our time. And they want our time because then their competitors can’t get it. But at the same time, the way our extra time commitment tends to be translated these days, is into more grinds and farms. That’s the lever Blizzard relies increasingly on – making players slog away at long grinds or rare drops to keep their engagement high.
I don’t think that’s praise-worthy game design. But that’s just me.
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It’s not the 12+ age rating that should limit these policies, but the fact that it’s a game with a box price, a monthly subscription AND a shop on top of that.
I can understand it for a F2P game, but for WoW it’s inexcusable, and anyone defending it is either a paid shill or someone whose only success in life is in just getting specific pixels in a video game.
…that’s exactly what they do though.
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So? I farmed a lot Too and I Aprove of this Event! It is great actualy.
Because I dislike people dragging peoples/devs reputation through the dirt based on false accusations and a warped point of view triggered through extensive brain acrobatics…
As if it’s not been a main pillar of MMOs gameplay to…“capitalize”…
… on players time. One needed to invest insane amounts of time to obtain stuff from the dawn of MMOs, that’s nothing new to WoW…
How about you detangle your thoughts and try to imagine devs do something because they think it’s fun and palyers would like it because they’ve know for long that there has been demand for this for a long time and they tried to figure out a way to do something in that regard?
Nooo, that’s completely unrealsitic, it’s only Blizzards greed and lazyness that content caters to.
Stop hating for the sake of hating only because you fight a personal war against Blizard.
No it’s not.
Annual subs are tied to greed. Those up there planning monetization and all that stuff don’t care how many people are logged into the servers, they only care how many people are subbed when they make their quarterly cash counts.
The Shop is tied to greed, but WoW’s shop, despite having tried to monetize on TP Tenders, is very, VERY tame compared to other copmpanies.
The content on the other hand is tied to devs thinking it’s fun and trying to give us something to do while we wait for bigger contents.
Can’t you wrap your head around devs feeling good when players like their product?
51k achievements but you only got a few curves achievements and your account’s only a few years old.
Sounds SUS AF 
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The devs of course feel good when players like their product. But you are missing 2 crucial details here.
One detail is that Blizzard does not employ developers and designers who care pationately about WoW. They employ devs who are good at what they do, but not passionate about it. It’s not in the current Blizzard’s interest to have passionate developers.
Pationate developers add easter eggs and references to them in their games. Even when publishers didn’t want devs to do that, developers who cared about their product would find ways to hide them. This goes all the way back to the days of Atari in the early 1980s.
Blizzard, especially after their fiascos in 2019-2021 period, has gone in full authoritarian design mode of their game. Nothing is pushed to even the PTR unless it has been checked by their “Does this align with our curated view” committee; no art, no sound effect or music, no enemy design, no NPC character line, no item description, nothing!
The second point is that drop rates are not chosen by the developers. They are chosen by the managers with guidance from the Lead Design team according to what will mathematically lead to highest player retention.
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I won’t argue that MMORPGs haven’t always been time sinkers, because they have.
But I will say that the trend, also for WoW, has been toward accelerating the time sinking to the point where the past is quite distanced from the present.
If I remember right, then Vanilla WoW had 1 rare mount – Baron Rivendare’s Charger. A 1 in 1000 drop I believe.
Today WoW has more of such rare mount drops than I can recall, and new ones get added on a pretty regular basis.
So I will say that Blizzard, and other game companies, are pushing in a certain direction.
And it makes sense from the company point of view. I mean, in the old days the companies only earned money from box sales, so all that really mattered with regards to the game design was that it made for an enjoyable and satisfying game experience.
These days with Live Service games it’s different, right? The companies earn money based on online stores, battle passes, subscriptions, and so forth. And that is all very dependent on players constantly spending time on those games so they’re frequently confronted with stuff to purchase.
Likewise, because everyone competes with everyone in a digital world, capitalizing on the players’ time is just as important as capitalizing on their money.
The sum of all that is that the game design no longer just has to provide an enjoyable and satisfying game experience, but also one that retains players and constantly engages them and occupies their time and attention, and entices them to spend more money, and so forth. It’s just the reality of the business of the game industry.
And whilst that’s all well and good for the companies – and they can compete with each other just fine regardless of the circumstances of that competition – then it does seem to be to the detriment of gamers because their interest in a good gaming product has become secondary to the company interest of a competitive business product.
And those two interests seem to be less and less aligned as time goes. At least that’s how I see it.
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Precisely. And this “small” fact we often overlook, opens the door to a deeper and sobering truth about modern MMO design.
But that’s a rabbithole for another time.
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Cry me a river. I have been farming them for years with no results, why is your time more important than mine?
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Am I though?
Sure about that? Or is that just you being bored about WoW’s content?
Thats not the main thing about being a passionate designer/dev. Where do you get that idea from…
And our earth is flat, I know. That’s a tad overbaord, you know that.
Earth’s gotten even flatter *shooked*
They’ve been pretty bad a maths then if this were the case, looking at the constant ups and downs of player count completely unrelated to item drops whereas drop chance schemes have been pretty much the same from common to legendary over the last decades 
WoW is 20 years old with an ever growing world…what did you expect? One rare mount per expansion? The amount of ideas grow over the years, in every system and industry, and the more ideas you have the more cluttered it get’s. That’s a natural process. And every content type gets their own rares so everyone has a chance to get a rare. It’s not meant to be “Everyone is supposed to get evry rare from every content”. That is just for “100% run” players. It’s more like “Everone has a chance to get a rare in the specific content they like to attend”
You really, REALLY need to get off this thought process “everythign is designed and added so everyone does everything”. It’s spread out for a reason, to cater to a broader palyerbase. This is where “greed for money” might be the main reason, but you can also argue that they like to provide to a widespread playerbase because they like to see us players enjoy their product.
And why can you argue this over “greed”?
Because if Blizzard were really so bloody greedy (they are, every company is, but not to this extent as you lot think), they’d binned the sub based model ages ago, bloated the shop, added the TP as monetized “battle pass” and the likes. Not even the token caters to the amount of money they could generate with a bloated shop and monetized TP.
Where we get to this point
WoW made money with being a live service since Vanilla. Every sub based MMO made money from being a live service from the beginning.
PLUS they made money, just like today, still, from box sales.
Where, WHERE is it any different nowadays campared to 2004? They had box sales plus sub back then, too.
They “capitalized” on playertime with low drop rates, long pre AQ events, long gearing periods, long farming times, high crafting cooldowns for high end resources, etc. from the very start …
Nothing got reinvented to “capitalize” on player time…everythings been there from the very beginning…
To OP : Tragic. And to think no one, absolutely no one, asked you to do it.
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I just responded to that in the context of you saying that MMOs have always been time sinks. You said this:
I just made the point that whilst it’s true that MMORPGs have always been time sinks, there’s an order of magnitude of a difference between the MMORPGs of old (like Vanilla WoW) and the modern MMORPGs like The War Within.
As you yourself remark now; WoW is 20 years old.
So it’s not like the MMORPG time sink we went into 20 years ago is the same MMORPG time sink we’re playing today. A lot has happened in the gaming industry in those 20 years, and WoW certainly reflects that.
I haven’t said anything like that, or tried to convey anything like it.
What I have said is that Blizzard ultimately has an interest in our time and our money and that their game design reflects that, and that their interest as a company is not well-aligned to ours as gamers (vis á vis excessive grinds and rare drops, among other examples).
That doesn’t mean that “everythign is designed and added so everyone does everything”. And I quote you on that because it’s what you wrote. You quote me for it, but I haven’t written it. Don’t make false quotes of me in the future again, please.
I think Blizzard are quite happy with their subscription model. It makes sense to keep it so long as the cost / benefit analysis deems it preferable to any other model. And I assume that the reason why Blizzard still maintains the subscription model is because it is still the most beneficial to them. That’s the only logic that makes sense from a business perspective.
The moment the subscription model is no longer the best business model for Blizzard, then I’m sure they’ll change it immediately.
I was speaking of games in general. You know, in your 90’s when you went down to your local supermarket and browsed their section of video games. The developers of those games only made money from their games being purchased - nothing else. So the only goal of their game design was to produce an enjoyable and satisfying game experience so that the next time you were in the supermarket to buy another game, maybe you’d buy another one of theirs.
That feels different from today where these big forever games out there, like WoW, Fortnite, CoD, and so on, provide a constant flow of income, and therefore the developers need to constantly keep players engaged in those games and entice them to spend time and money on them.
You don’t just pay for a game anymore and get a product that you enjoy. You are constantly engaging with a running business operation that always wants your time and money - not just once.
And yeah, in 2004 Blizzard also had a subscription, but that was also all they had. So in the 20 years that have passed they have piled on with more business and more ways of making money from WoW, which means that engaging you and I as customers has become increasingly more important to Blizzard’s business. That’s sort of the direction the industry is going toward, which is increasingly more business through the game products. And like I said, I think that company interest aligns increasingly less with the player interest.
You are all missing the point.
This is another example of Blizz reheating old content. Collector’s Bounty isn’t reducing the grind, this IS the grind.
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I am not bored about WoW’s content, otherwise I wouldn’t be spending so many hours of my free time on it. Criticizing specific points does not mean I do not like all of it, neither does giving suggestions on how to improve certain areas.
It’s not the main thing but it’s quite prevalent. Other games continuously have such easter eggs with references to the developers: Doom, Sonic, Final Fantasy etc. games released in 2020s contain many such references if not direct copies of developers in-game.
WoW used to be like that too. Up to when paintings were replaced with fruit, NPCs were renamed, and areas retconned to be called something else.
Ok, that one was a hyperbole. But there have definitely been guidelines to the developers to not attempt anything the past developers did.
They have literally been modifying acquisition rates of item level every patch exactly trying to find the balance between people leaving and people coming. DF S3 had 90 crests every week, somewhat equivalent to 1.3ilvl per week. DF S4 changed that to 120 crests/week or 1.7ilvl/week. TWW S1 reverted it back to 90 crests/week. TWW S2 kept it at 90 but implemented extra ilvls mid-season to keep players grinding, and changed acquisition rate from Delves.
And on the subject of older content, they haven’t modified drop rates with some extreme rare exceptions like the Seasonal mounts (Love Rocket etc.) which now have a significantly improved chance to drop the first attempt of the day, but they have been implementing skips in raids exactly so that players get to roll the d100 dice faster.
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Always funny when people tell others to educate themselves when its clear as day the account is clearly bought and paid for
Take your own advice, pal.
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Looks like mine is bought and paid for as well.
Is mine bought and paid for?
Yes, obviously.