Feedback: Island Expeditions

Community General Discussion
62

#1 the extractors works fine
#2 islands were NEVER “go and explore” but “HURRY HURRY fill up the bar as the first!”
(yes I know Blizzard LIED in the preview and claimed you would go there and explore when in fact they are so horrible done, noone ever wants that cause who wants to lose an Island Boredom?)

Island atm are terrible especially for people took the “get more coins” perk as you now get around ZERO per island contrary to the 20 I got for 4 hc islands before 8.1.
the pet drops are still WAAAAAY to low (yes we all know you dont give a … about collectors) and they drop way to many useless TMOG
I dont know ANYONE who does Island Boredom for TMOGs…

63

Haven’t really cared about the mounts, pets and mogs. Bonus that I don’t have to hear about it now.

The thing I like about islands is the timeless isle style avoidable attacks actually being worthwhile avoiding. Unlike world content where it is an error to step out of telegraphed attacks.

It is slightly better with the creature spread.
On mythic the events now play out way better.
The new objectives (control points) doesn’t seem to make an impact.

I would like to see the AI team pose a genuine challenge on mythic.
It is a problem with ilvl scaling once you get a bit into the tier you overpower mythic islands.

I am one of the older players who can see through the 15-20min reward loop structure. I would like some more challenging, exploration and slower paced content, like remember when the world was dangerous and you… but that is beyond the scope of this thread.
I still buy the items on the boat because I do not care about the ugly mounts.

1 Like
64

The Island Expeditions have definetly become one of my favorite parts of BfA so it’s great to see more improvements made to increase their versatility both in rewards, maps, enemy variety and so on. Being able to predict what kind of rewards you might get based based on the islands inhabitants since 8.1 is a nice informative indicator for the player. However, in my opinion, the biggest and most frustrating problem about how it all works is still the vast amount of layers upon layers of RNG preventing you from getting specific desired rewards.

Here’s an example:
If I want to get the new awesome Island Thunderscale dragon mount I need to hit that queue button and:

  1. Hope for the new map Jorundall which is 1/3 chance ONLY when it is available in the weekly rotation.
  2. Hope for the new Storm Dragon enemy type which currently ONLY spawn in Jorundall with low chance considering the vast amount of other enemy types that can spawn in its place.
  3. Finally, win the island and hope that you roll that specific number from the vast amount of OTHER rewards available from that island’s inhabitants.

Sometimes when I get any other map than Jorundall I feel tempted to just leave the group and wait out the deserter buff just to save my energy. Naturally it’s alright to have some randomness to games and various systems but when that randomness is the only way to get those specific rewards that we want, the player’s skill and dedication to the game becomes nigh irrelevant and things start to feel unfair.

Patch 8.1 added the doubloon vendor which is a very nice and dearly needed addition to Island Expeditions, granting players more use for our doubloons and a more straightforward and predictable way of getting cool rewards like the mounts. As a bad-luck-protection system it would be very much needed to see ALL island expedition mounts and other rewards being added to the doubloon vendor with relatively high costs. A mount like Island Thunderscale could cost 1000 to 5000 doubloons, for example.

That is all, thank you! :slight_smile:

65

Not noticed any changes that improve the experience. Its still run around, kill stuff, die by one shot+cc combos, respawn, repeat, win anyway, get no loot. Repeat.

I want the rewards so i do them over and over, and its depressing. WoW is like this in general now, I thought we’d made progress with RNG in Legion. Lessons not learned - BFA is a great expansion burried beneath zero reward which makes it much less fun than WoD & Cata - at least with the Cata Valour system i had some way to earn rewards. RNG is a cancer killing this game.

66

Maybe use a time out system like in overwatch would be better than the vote kicked. I run a lot and been kicked out twice for reason I never understood. It is uncommon but still not fun when it happends.

67

Islands don’t feel very different. It still feels like running a dungeon without bosses and gear. The reason I somtimes do them is to a)level an alt or b)get azerite. And I don’t like azerite-farming in general.

Is it possible to remove the other faction in the islands? They feel redundant. Just another pack of slightly harder trash. That would turn this “race” into “exploration”.

Can little puzzles be added or something? Like in Zelda. (+rewards for doing the puzzle)

Can the rewards be more determined instead of chances and randomness. It’s way cooler (in my opinion) to explore and find a special place on the island that rewards the same thing (or group of things like a loottable).

2 Likes
68

It has improved. Fewer trivial enemies and more special events make it more interesting. Player effort now goes into planning which point to pursue next, not wading through a swamp of mobs, which is great.

To further improve expeditions, an overarching strategy element should be included. More information should be given to the player about the map at start, so they can plan whole routes accross the island during the initial count-down.

“Do we get the extractor first or do we go straight accross for those 3 rare camps there? We gotta decide quick, team!”

A planning/strategic element would make the islands more intellectually engaging and make the initial count-down time matter. Due to the random nature of island generation the resulting pathing layouts are likely to be reasonably varied as is, I think.

1 Like
69

Even with the trait for increased dubs gettinng 5 total from 5 heriocs is not enough .

Mobs 1 shotting players is not good.

Rewards still dont drop enough the mount drop rates are silly low .

There are to many rewards yet none of them drop and to buy what i want im running 5 chars per week because yet again dubloon drops are silly low.

Look we understand you need to keep us hooked but you are pushing your players away instead of making them stay.

Wise up grinding hasnt been fun for 14 years.

Get rid of the diablo devs and bring in devs that care for wow.

UP THE DROP RATES OF CURRENCY AND MOUNTS!!

70

-Hello, so personally more reward, less reward, no reward mean nothing to me if the game play if fun. And this is where the fix should be!

-8.1 Island Expeditions are an improvement to 8.0 but the fact that island A,B,C,D…X,Z all provide the same game-play just in a different environment is just boring , ie. gather a pack of mobs and AoE them down with the occasional mini-boss which you gather mobs with and AoE them down then you rinse and repeat.
Now the fact that we have different type of mobs that provide different weather effect is nice but the fundamental game-play is still the same.

-Now my suggestion, is that you should revamp all the islands and give each one(or 2) of them a unique game-play.

For example, island A is a capture the shrines/important Azerite gathering locations , kinda like Arathi Basin BG game-play so the team that capture the most areas for more time wins.

Island B is capture carts, so the RP for it could be that nagas, tolvir, valkir. fire elementals…have came first and gathered the Azerite and stock them in an area, and now the alliance and the horde is going to take it from them to there ships which are close to each others. so the team that captures more carts wins.

Island C is what ever the islands are now just gather mobs and AoE

Island D is Boss fight island, so you get there and you find a boss and the faction that kills it and loot it wins (here i suggest that the boss have a random agro table). Ofc we will have different boss each time with different mechanics.

And on top of that we have different types of mobs that do different types of attacks and give different weather effect (low vision fog, fire bombardment, etc…) that makes it that even if you went in to island A 2-3 times you are gonna get a different experience.

Bonus suggestion: give each player a random buff each island like speed, or cast on the move or less dmg taken and of course the enemy gets them to.

Now this is what a bit of my brain storming came up with, i’ll make sure to edit this post if i came up with something else.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day!

2 Likes
71

I do not know how to even access the expedition

72

After almost 600 attempts I have 0 mounts and only 300 dubloons on my main char.
I hope they increase the drop chance of both items.
I’ve been lucky with pets, but I still miss 3 pets to complete the achiev.

73

My experience is mostly anecdotal but I’ve mostly done islands on a horde shaman and an alliance rogue, over time I would say that the number done on each should be about equal. It’s definitely better after the update in that it seems the game play is not really as rushed as before however the implementation of the loot change feels iffy. My shaman has seen almost no rewards and very few dubloons while my rogue is swimming in pets, dubloons and transmog. With the same trait to increase dubloons on both, my rogue received 12 dubloons at most, while for my shaman 4 was max.

74

Many of us a are still looking to hear about 3v3 PvP ranking system for these islands. Although, I recognise the difficulty in having Azerite and potentially Conquest rewarded for the same content being a bit too rewarding, I personally would have thought it would make the most sense in an expansion that is revolving around the faction war. Queuing for 3-4 wins of PvP islands would also be much more satisfying.

75

As an avid collector of pets, mounts and toys the islands were clearly designed for me. Yet I despise them, it’s everything wrong with grinding and collecting items.

Layers upon layers of rng in order to get loot. Boring and mind numbingly repeatable content. It’s designed to inflate player time but it seems to have the opposite effect.

Collectors are being driven from them because they are getting screwed over time and time again by the insane amount of rng present in them.

4 Likes
76

Its better since looting stuff is your main goal now to finishing fast since u dont have to care about what u kill. Problems still exists.

  1. Vote kick system is still BROKEN. It works for dungeons which are straightforward trash-boss-trash-boss. Also dungeons have 5 guys so u need 3 votes. Island has 3 guys. If there is angsty teen who thinks you are “playing wrong” he vote kicks and 95% of time third guy autoaccepts. Also because of u fooled around with loots people still think u need rares for loot and if u mine nodes people just vote kick u like 33% of time in random islands.

  2. I dont actually personally care about vendor, but version u did is just stupid…
    No one actually wanted more stuff on vendor. What people wanted was ALL stuff on vendors since farming it all would take u playing these islands for next 5 expansions.

  3. So u tried to fix vote kick system by removing mob targetting which was kinda interesting and made it more mindless grind and bt doing that u opened people a window to AFK farm Mythic island and get all the mounts…and to fix this u messed up droprates again to not punish people taking advantage of mess u made, but to punish everyone else… Brings to my mind classic Exploit early and often mantra because eventually u just F*** up everyone else.

  4. I dont actually care about AP which makes it actually kinda good system, but what bothers me is that I play M+ a lot which basicly rewards no AP. I dont see how it makes game good to force people spam Islands/WQs for AP instead of rewarding it more even from every source instead of trying to force player behavior. U afraid your island content would be so bad that no one would play it without forcing it?

77

Another point i forgot to add on was, There are sandscalp trolls that aren’t flagged as rare or elites which cant be interrupted and do massive damage and slow you with this cast. These should be flagged as elites or something if they are going to be like this.

78
  1. Variety and flavour. Just making different islands on which to do the same thing (kill mobs click nodes) is not engaging variety. There should be different mechanics for collecting Azerite on different islands. Some ideas include: making hunting the other faction a key part, capture the flag/escort the payload, making some centred on fewer, more powerful boss monsters etc etc. I’m sure there are plenty of better ideas than those but then I’m not paid fat developer $$$$$$.
  2. Difficulty. Now, Islands are both incredibly easy yet annoyingly dangerous at the same time. Some things on the islands have one or near-one shot mechanics (often with difficult to spot ground animations) which means it’s very possible to die doing them. In a way, danger is good. However it just becomes annoying when you know there’s no or very little chance of you actually losing because of it. Make losing an option.
  3. Massively incentivise people to do PvP islands. By far the most potential fun in the expedition system. Also make these solo queueable.
  4. Rewards. 'Nuff said
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79

The islands feel alot more dynamic now that the elemental isn’t the win condition basically.

The islands aren’t really rewarding as the common drops continually drop (shocker) and theres no way to spend dubloons for the stuff I want for achievement progression or the mounts which keep continually getting away due to % chance of dropping

The amount of loot which drops based on the difficulty is alot better, when you do get rewarded atleast.

Personally having more islands in the rotation would be fun.

The PVP islands as a mixed bag cause some teams go afk knowing their still rewarded.

Seeing more enemy faction teams and perhaps neutral enemy teams also dynamically exploring the island instead of being bundled into groups afking on the spot they’ve been given could be cool - just a wish, not a must have. Cause it feels somewhat static with how things are laid out but never the less overall its still fun.

80

Not played many yet since the changes, I would say that I used to just spend currency at the start of a island on the ship vendor because there was no reason not to, now kind of feels like its not worth wasting them on that vendor as you want to save for out of island vendor. And the currency still doesn`t seem to drop that much or in great amounts, Think I have played maybe 4 islands and got maybe 10 currency out of all four.

Would be better to scrap that ship vendor and instead maybe have those items they sell hidden away on the islands to go find.

1 Like
81
  • How have the changes felt?
  • Have things improved?

8.1 brought good changes with not having to target specific mobs for rewards anymore. This way both people who want to rush for weekly AP and pets/mog/mounts collectors don’t have 2 conflicting playstyles anymore. Dubloon vendor is also another nice change, however it’s not nearly enough stuff available for purchase. Islands drop way too many things to be able to get things we want just by having to rely on rng to favor us.

More objectives and azerite machines is good change. But killing azerite mobs still feels very unrewarding since they spam their shields and knockback players, so killing them takes a while. Azerite received for this doesn’t justify time spent dealing with them.

New map reward for completing weekly is nice, but… reward is too random, again. Option to be able to choose one out of the few map options (for AP, pet/mount, mog, residuum etc) would be nice.

  • Has anything gotten worse?

Bad things - opposite faction team is way too agressive. They repeatedly keep going after players and chain ccing. There’s no diminishing returns on those either. It’s very annoying to have such “real pvp experience” in pve mode. I’d much rather have new pve mode with timer only (no pvp npcs) in which we have to gather azerite. Pvp option already exists, so people who wish to pvp can do so.
Faction ships are often way too close to each other, which results in pointless repeated enemy encounters.

Some mobs have too strong abilities or abilities that are nearly impossible to dodge, e.g. snakes melt tanks like they are made out of paper. Cone attack from them is nearly impossible to dodge. Depending on mobs/terrain some abilities are very hard to see - like void abilities on void ground from old gods mobs, or frost/fire elementals. Ranged mobs deal much more damage compared to melee attacks, which makes doing reasonable pulls almost impossible if there’s more than 3 ranged mobs (like trolls for example).

Inability to target things we want and can’t buy them from vendor. Mounts should be tradeable and sellable on AH since everything else (minus toys I believe) is.
Barely getting any dubs since 8.1, it’s often only 2-4 from dubs bag which drops maybe every 2-3 islands. Either make them base reward for winning (like AP is) or have higher difficulties drop significantly higher amounts.
Vendor on ship isn’t worth using anymore. Perhaps make different currency to buy these. Since amount of dubs we currently get doesn’t justify spending any, even if it’s to speed up the island run.

  • What rewards have you been getting?

Only few new pets I didn’t have before, countless duplicate/common pets (such as elementals, Inky, Snapper etc) that go for like 200g on AH. Plenty of transmog duplicates as well, with some nice new items, including few plundered weapons. No mounts at all in 8.0 and in 8.1. I don’t count how many islands I did, but I have more than enough dubloons to buy everything from vendor.

Overall, first week of 8.1 felt good in terms of rewards, but every since it’s back to grinding and getting nothing for multiple islands. Having rng to decide everything is bad. Having goal to work towards to would be much preferable option, even if it takes more time to get it.

Thanks for reading & hopefully we’ll see some new good changes in coming patches.

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