Do people actually prefer this content model to what we had in Legion and BFA?

[Dibbelz-draenor]

@Vomlir-nagrand

Endless grind is never good for me in the game. You might feel you are getting rewarded and therefore incentivized to do it, I feel like a hamster on a wheel running without end in sight.

Now that i finished with the mandatory grinds in DF I can choose and enjoy the content I like at my leisure and I love that. Because I care about having fun, not getting some more vertical progression out of it…

They were truly endless, there were always clear diminishing return points that made it obvious to non-obsessives that you could stop for now and until artifact knowledge caught up. The problem is that many obsessive people play these games and they will stop at nothing if a sliver of min-maxing can be extracted from a thing, ruining it in the process for everyone else.

Also, people do find vertical progression fun, that’s why they engage in it and seek gear/power. This is not a single-player game as you and others have pointed, rewards are the intrinsic part of the experience.

@Vomlir-nagrand

I needed to do all quests in Korthia every single day in order to unlock everything Korthia-related (which gave some useful armor pieces as well)

Why the HELL would you ever need to do everything Korthia-related? What useful armor did it provide that you couldn’t supplant through raiding and M+? This is exactly the kind of obsessiveness that lead to people spamming Maw of Souls 100 times a day.

@Jito-turalyon

These days it’s predictable. I know what a Season entails. I know what I have to do. I do it. And then I’m done. It works for some games, but I don’t think it works well for an MMORPG like WoW. It’s not a design direction I approve of.

I do agree that the seasonal model is predictable and boring because that’s what Blizzard has been doing, a new boring public event, a new raid if we’re lucky, and maybe a new dungeon once per expansion, but it’s not so much of a design direction as in the gameplay model that a vertical progression model devolves into.

What are the alternatives? Moving to a horizontal progression model would make a ton of people, me included, stop playing because I do find gear and character progression fun. If you have vertical prog and no seasons (or tiers as they were), then what are you doing but running the same content for 1-2 years?

@Vomlir-nagrand

Some quests and world events give you adventurer gear and Emerald Dream world bosses can drop champion level gear. If you don’t push M+ stones or Raids I am not sure how better gear than that is useful to you in any way though…

Because getting gear is fun, that’s all there is to it. No one except status-seeking pushers and certain types of organized guilds goes after gear only because they need it to succeed, people want it because hitting harder and getting stronger is fun (which is then partly invalidated by scaling but it’s still happening).

@Jito-turalyon

if you ignore all the progression and rewards and just look at the gameplay content at face value, then it’s garbage. You would never ever in a million years engage in any of WoW’s gameplay content for its own sake. It’s simply not compelling enough.

Well yes but no, the reward IS the part of the equation and there is still a hell of a lot of difference between gameplay even among MMOs, that’s why the reward structure is so important. I do love how WoW plays even though I don’t do any activities that don’t have associated rewards, but I wouldn’t play FF14 and ESO because I can’t stand how they play for an example.

[Vomlir-nagrand (Vomlir)]

@Dibbelz-draenor

What are the alternatives? Moving to a horizontal progression model would make a ton of people, me included, stop playing because I do find gear and character progression fun. If you have vertical prog and no seasons (or tiers as they were), then what are you doing but running the same content for 1-2 years?

We are polar opposites as players then. I would love more horizontal progression than vertical one. Vertical progression is B-O-R-I-N-G to me. It’s just a means to an end, nothing more, nothing less. And yes, my monkey brain likes to see numbers go up as well, but eventually I grew out of it.

@Dibbelz-draenor

Why the HELL would you ever need to do everything Korthia-related? What useful armor did it provide that you couldn’t supplant through raiding and M+? This is exactly the kind of obsessiveness that lead to people spamming Maw of Souls 100 times a day.

Because I was a casual player with not even a guild back then? So I had to rely to world content to do gear up. Not to mnetion it had some collectibles I liked as well.

Df has some collectible too. But DF will take 20 days at max to collect everything from a faction/zone whereas Korthia needed MONTHS! And I was turned off by that.

[Dibbelz-draenor]

Then why are you playing the literal prime example of a vertical progression MMO when most others have moves to horizontal progression my dude. There’s only WoW and FF for vertical pretty much, and FF is so mind numbingly boring in player customization and progression that only WoW remains.

There is nothing to “grow out of”, it’s like saying liking action games is juvenile and you have to graduate up to liking RPG and RTS games. Character progression is the main core element of an RPG, and that’s equally important to both single player ones and MMO ones.

[Vomlir-nagrand (Vomlir)]

Keep believing that… I just explained there are activities in the game which do not offer vertical progression. Activities I prefer and I spend most of my time doing them.

[Dibbelz-draenor]

Then…why do you care about player power and the “mandatory grinds” if you already don’t like vertical progression and the associated grind.

[Vomlir-nagrand (Vomlir)]

@Dibbelz-draenor

Then…why do you care about player power and the “mandatory grinds” if you already don’t like vertical progression and the associated grind.

Who said I cannot do both…? Yes for me it’s horizontal > vertical. But I engage in vertical progression too, I just don’t sweat over it.

[Breaths-twisting-nether]

@Vomlir-nagrand

Yes for me it’s horizontal > vertical.

i really don’t want to sound offensive here and i respect your choice. HOWEVER , the things you think that are horizontal progression are not the definition of it. PLEASE try other mmos like ESO & GW2 to see what we actually mean by horizontal vs vertical progression. what you do is totally OKAY and part of the game but that’s not end-game you don’t need a level 70 to do most of the things you listed. also things that players create like RP are not part of the game this is not a GTA5 RP server or a DnD game this is a plain mmo . you make it RP and that’s great !! i really appreciate it but until blizzard officially recognizes & adds content towards that like housing etc. that doesn’t mean this game have that kind of content. again, i don’t want to sound mean here. i just suggest you to try horizontal progressing mmos, a google search will help you find more

[Vomlir-nagrand (Vomlir)]

@Breaths-twisting-nether

i just suggest you to try horizontal progressing mmos, a google search will help you find more

@Breaths-twisting-nether

HOWEVER , the things you think that are horizontal progression are not the definition of it

What’s the definition of Horizontal Progression then? Care to enlighten me? Because you don’t explain how am I wrong, you just make a point about something being “end-game” content or not which I think is irrelevant. And btw, wPvP IS end-game content since it’s more active on level 70.

@Breaths-twisting-nether

i really appreciate it but until blizzard officially recognizes & adds content towards that like housing etc. that doesn’t mean this game have that kind of content.

What do you mean here exactly? Pretty sure there are RP servers because Blizz does recognize the existence of RP. Now if you wanna tell me that RP is the most neglected part of WoW, then yes I agree. But that’s different from what you said.

@Breaths-twisting-nether

PLEASE try other mmos like ESO & GW2

Crappy combat mechanics, yes ESO is more of what I like out of an MMO-RPG but its combat and world are just “meh” to me. Same goes for GW2.

[Dralkharn-draenor]

There is a rule of thumb for breaths: when he starts to talk about other MMOs that he likes (it’s usually ESO and GW2), start questioning why they aren’t popular like wow or ffxiv and one of them even receives barely any new content.
It’s always very funny to see him trying elaborate all this

[Anulire-the-maelstrom]

How could you put BFA in same rank with Legion? Everything that cames after Legion was absolute and complete trash. Including this, “Friends” expansion with no story finished.