Hello dear forum folks. Today I want to express my little worry about Warbands.
Warbands system is long awaited and hugely positive change, which the game was needed for long long time. Account wide reputation, achievements, warband-bound gear, currency transfer - that’s all is Great Good. With capital G. No doubt here.
But today a little worry came to my mind. We could agree, that with Blizzard you need to always stay alert and don’t trust it in a little bit. I was thinking, all this Warband godness could not come for free. By free I mean system, which brings nothing but quality of life and make everything easier for player, not harder.
And my main worry, that some game mechanics could change with keeping Warbands in mind. For example achievements will be designed with way of thinking, that default way of obtain them will be with several characters. Same with reputation, professions, some currencies farm, drop chances from event bosses, etc. Of course it will be possible with only one character, but will be much harder/longer. Remember new M+ affixes they cancelled not so long ago? Affixes which basically bench a lot of specs based on their major damage type for a giving week? I could see in this design an intention to force players a little bit to maintain several characters instead of one for comfortable playing.
I’m not assure of that - maybe it’s just my anxiety talks, but that’s what company nurture in their long term customers. I personally play seriosly only on 1 characters. I have other characters for just profs utility and some achievements, and will stick to my main character 90% of the time. Hope I will not be forced into playing twinks more because of Warbands.
What do you think about it? Should we stay alert?
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Sorry, but I don’t spend my waking moments on being paranoid about how Blizzard will totally abuse me by introducing a tiny little feature. So no, I do not think we should stay alert. If a game makes you “stay alert,” I’d recommend just dropping it.
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As of now we don’t have anything suggesting they will penalise people who don’t play alts, I wouldn’t worry about it
I’m not worried about it because nothing is going to happen, which will draw a negative light towards the majority of the player base who are now casual players.
Of course this will happen. We’ve already been told of some of this kind of stuff; like only get rep once on your account for certain activities.
So in regards to:
They’re putting limits in place to make sure stuff like that doesn’t happen. As they should. I don’t want to play multiple characters.
For me a character is still an individual and it’s that individual that I want to focus on.
I have no interest in ‘playing an account’.
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Wow, way to miss the point. He is basically asking whether this feature can be with some drawbacks that we are yet to see in the game. Just clinching onto a certain usage of a word or phrase is not the way to go, Argonius.
To the OP, you are a sharp pencil and yes there are signs of that being the case already in TWW and the achievements. Also with leveling being as easy as it is, Blizzard is designing the game with the fact in mind that most players have multiple characters.
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Blizzard has explicitly stated that they DON`T want people with multiple chars to have an advantage over people that don’t. For example many activties such as quests only give you rep once per account, even though they can be completed multiple times. So at least in that respect, I believe your concerns to currently be unfounded, though considering the history of the company not unreasonable to have some doubts, I still harbor some myself…
For ex. I’m not entirely convinced that the boullion hardcap was actually an oversight and its reversion not just a “Oh, they really don´t like this, do they… Let’s revert that really fast as long as we can still say it was a bug”… But considering the shift towards generally positive developments in this area since ca 9.1.5, I´m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt as long as they´re not being obviously stubborn and anti-playerbase a la the “You think you do, but you dont” pre-classic era. 
[edit] Removed, served no purpose but to vent some minor frustration I apparently stil harbored about a resolved issue
I think you’re probably over thinking it.
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We already have achievements which would require several characters to complete, like the profession ones. And, those have been with us for a very long time. Players doing limited time events with several characters also got an advantage. Or players farming world quests which award gold on several characters a week.
Maybe other features will also be affected, but for the most part, so far this feature is more a convenience, at least, to me. For example, I have a 100 exalted reputations and now all my characters will benefit from it. I didn’t touch rep on any of my alts before. With any luck, they will do the same to cooking, fishing and archaeology as well.
I used to focus on one main but now I won’t mind playing an account. From a role player’s perspective, finally, my characters are going to be a team, supported by game features too.
One thing that is likely to happen is that the “individuality” of each character might get reduced. This is displayed already on the character selection screen where the focus is on multiple characters: we do not just have one main character, but rather it is taken almost for granted that we are keeping up with more than one. Players are seen more as a collective entity playing multiple characters instead of “mains”.
I still think it did not need a rebranding. They could have just added more things to be account-wide. But I guess the work it took to develop it necessitated a rebranding. I will still refer to things as account-wide though.
I think “warband-wide reputations” means those in TWW and DF only so far. It seems many players expect all reputations to become account-wide. But with time they SHOULD include the others as well.
Yes, they have announced that they have plans to extend it to other expansions later on.
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I think it depends how you play. I’m only ever going to play this as a main. I don’t even gear an alt beyond farming some mogs in LFR.
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To be honest that would have been such a huge carrot given for free if they included all of them at once 
I think it needs more work behind the scenes to incorporate older expansions.
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One thing that is likely to happen is that the “individuality” of each character might get reduced. This is displayed already on the character selection screen where the focus is on multiple characters: we do not just have one main character, but rather it is taken almost for granted that we are keeping up with more than one.
From what I have seen, you should be able to tag just 1 character as your favourite and let them sit in the camp alone, if you would like to just focus on one. The rest can just sit patiently in the “others” section below.
Yeah and the issue some have raised about paragon rewards farming is pertinent: multiple characters at different points on the 0 to 10000 reputation road. How they solve that issue will be interesting.
I think with Warbands they can softly nudge you to play your alts too. Warband-bound gear accomplishes that effectively. I do not see many negatives here.
What I would prefer did not happen is something of the sort of “You have already completed this activity on your account for this week”.
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That’s actually a nice thought. An opposide negative effect of Warbounds oriented game designed. If previously players could increase their chances of obtaining something with the army of alts, now it could become more restrictive. We already saw this restriction in changes of Midsummer Fire Festival event, where chance of getting drakewatch manuscript was restricted only once per day for account.
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Remember that it was marketed as a good thing. And usually when players are playing a game they like, marketing is very effective. Actual data tells a whole different story though with respect to these mount drop rates getting significantly increased etc.
If your not alert during higher keys or raiding your dead
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My guess is that paragon levels will remain character specific, just like some minor reputations like Timbermaw will (because ýou’re not actually “grinding reputation” but rather “learning a language”). BUt yeah, the issue with rep lockouts for certain repeatable activities is a legit condern…
I think we´l just have to see how exactly that plays out and give them our feedback accordingly, as I´m sure many of the players that don´t engage with the forums or social media and don´t even expect the changes almost certainly will… If they get 20k “Why Can´t I farm Nightborne rep on multiple characters?? WTF” bug reports and tickets within the first 24h of the changes going live, I´m pretty sure tehy´ll take note of that… 