"Agree to disagree. First; I don’t think you’re forced. You have the option to play more, but it will spread out your time across them; a consequence of your choice.
But then there’s also that I just don’t think it’s a good thing to allow anyone to easily swap to just any other character whenever they want without a draw back. First of all because of the RPG reasons I stated earlier, but also because a considerable part of this playerbase has proven that they can’t handle such freedom without it being abused and morphed into something toxic. It would become ‘meta’ to have an army of alts ready to go and I believe that’s incredibly destructive to the game as well as the community."
First of all I’m sorry for the formatting, I’m fairly new here and I’m not 100% sure how to quote specific sections.
What you’re saying about the system being abused and morphed into something toxic, I would appreciate some examples of what you mean. I’ve tried to think of some ways that these suggestions could be abused but I can’t think of anything in particular that would be relevant. My alt is geared entirely from opening vaults after roughly 2 months? Okay what can I do with it that can be considered abuse or toxic? If anything this will help with the whole ‘meta’ issue that people have as if your class currently isn’t a top performer and feel like you have to reroll (a lot of healers will know what I’m talking about) then at least that character you actually want to play once it is more viable will be able to catch up to your main, whereas with the way things are currently, that is not possible without an unreasonable amount of time invested.
"No. It’s not. It’s the basis of an RPG. In the vast majority of RPGs you play a singular character. Yes, you can do multiple playthroughs with different characters/classes, but for most of them that will require you to actually put the time into that new character and play the game again. "
This argument may be true for a lot of RPGs, but again, the whole point here is so that you don’t feel discouraged but rather feel encouraged to play an alt. As you mentioned in other RPGs you can do multiple playthroughs with different classes/characters and that is what I’m saying, it’s not possible to do this with the way WoW is currently. There are simply not enough hours between seasons where you can ‘catch up’ your alts to your main. Currently the cap on gilded crests is 720 for example. If you wanted to cap a fresh alt, where the upgrades cost 10 per upgrade that equates to 60 TIMED +8 dungeons to catch up to your main. On my main I have capped crests and still I haven’t fully upgraded my gear so that’s what you will need, not even counting the other crests you would need before gilded.
Your argument might be that it shouldn’t be possible to do this but what I’m saying is, why not? To me it’s more toxic to think it’s OK to restrict and limit people’s choices on how to spend their time in the game rather than to encourage it and as you said with the changes they’ve made so far, alts are currently in the best shape they’ve ever been in, this would just be another step in the same direction.
“I think it’s crazy to ask for other classes to be given power just because you got that power on another class you played first. I really, truly can’t understand how you can believe that that is reasonable.”
If you think it’s crazy then you must thing the game itself is madness because there are plenty of examples already where this occurs that have been introduced in the last few expansions. For example, various methods to skip legacy content and questlines were introduced for alts, crest and valorstone cost reductions for alts, literally the whole concept of warbands and having tradeable currencies between alts. It’s just more of the same.
“It already is. The numbers you’re using are hugely inflated. You can catch up to a reasonable level quite fast without a huge effort.”
Maybe if your goal is only playing delves and quests and collections where gear isn’t much of an issue to you can you can make do with lower levels of gear, sure (although even they would benefit from this change). But if you’re a mythic plus player or a raider or anyone that’s looking to do any of the more difficult progressive content, then the numbers are what they are. 720 crests is not a made up number, it’s there and it is what my main has and he still has upgrades to go (remember it costs 90 crests per 636 crafted item).
If you’re a mythic plus player or raider for example the way things are currently this far in the patch you will be far behind other players on your alts unless you have farmed these 636 weapons and other pieces of gear. This may not be the biggest issue but it then limits you to only being able to play and maintain 1-3 characters as I stated and that’s with significant time invested on the two alts. You disagree and say it should limit you to one or two characters to ‘bond’ with but that goes against the whole philosophy that Blizzard is trying to adapt to make it easier to catch up on alts and currently even with the changes it still feels like a chore and I’m sure many of players would agree.
“Pure entitlement, imo.”
When you pay to play a game, saying that the game is limiting and restricted you to choosing and playing 1-3 classes out of 13 with the content that you enjoy playing when it could be allowing you to play all 13 of those classes with much more ease isn’t entitlement. It’s asking for accessibility, playability and an overall more freedom to pick and choose what you play and what you enjoy playing. I’m not demanding that Blizzard copy and paste my crests and gear on my main to my alt, I’m just saying, why not make it easier? That’s what they seem to have been doing so far and so, why not continue in this direction without making it completely free.
“As I said in my previous post: The game is more accessible to alts already. In fact, it’s more accessible to alts than at any time in its history. Asking for even more just feels incredibly greedy and entitled to me; sorry. But I suppose that’s what a lot of society is about in this day and age: More, more, more.”
Saying it’s more accessible to alts is only half true. It’s only currently accessible to a set amount of alts due to the time it takes to catch up on these characters as explained above. Saying “it’s more accessible than before” is fine but saying “it’s fully accessible” is a lot better. The more options the better and if you don’t agree with that then, why don’t we just go back to the Legion or Shadowlands state of play where there was no point even considering alts as you had 6 hours of dailies to do per day. Now that it’s more accessible than it’s ever been is the perfect chance going forward to open up the options, playability and fun that you can have and what I mention is only a small, logical (in my opinion) step towards achieving that and it would benefit every player in the game as well as Blizzard by giving the game more ‘replayability’ and keeping people interested in playing throughout the expansion.
