If a system needs a catch-up mechanic, it is a bad system

Community General Discussion
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It is the pre-Dragonflight times where we all want to throw our wishes in Blizzard’s general direction and hope something sticks. This also needs to be said.

If a system needs a catch-up mechanic, it is a bad system and it should not be shipped with the game. Catching up is perfectly fine - players now can skip whole expansions if they wanted. Nothing wrong with that. With gear seasons, players can jump from 160 questing ilvl to 239 in no time. All of that is organic catch up that comes from community progress and the ability to carry people. This is fine.

What’s not fine is having to boost drop rates for new players, boosting rewards and renown levels as time goes on. Because this punishes people who play on release - the same reward MUST be obtained, but you can do it in 1/5th the time. You could play for months getting your 2-3 renown levels a week, or you can play right now, getting 2-3 renown levels an hour.

This can all be avoided by removing weekly and daily timegates and making time-gated systems not mandatory, like how Archivist research or Pocopoc research works. These systems don’t need a catch up mechanic, because they are side activities for people to partake in at their leisure. And in fairness - this is what makes me want to engage with these systems.

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I don’t feel punished at all just because someone else two months down the line does what I have already done a lot faster… I already reaped the benefits of doing it prior to him starting it.

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A catch up system punisheses those who play since release…?

In terms of time spent… Uhm no?

When it comes to end game raiding and m+
Players who played since launch will awlays have and edge and step ahead on those who didnt.

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Certainly you enjoyed getting the 3 renown levels a week.

Up until 9.2 I thought renown was the weakest part of Shadowlands. It is this patch that made me realize renown is fine. The timegated nature of it is bad and made it feel like a drip-fed slog that served only to waste players’ time.

And here’s the thing - if it was fine on release, why did they speed it up? It is an admission the system is a failure.

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And dont think I have forgotten that Popiagloria… The classic andy I argued with ages ago who was for renown leveling and conduit energy…

Your the classic andy who so value in all of these above… remember? They brought meaning and all that?.. What changed?

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so according to you someone new should go through 3 months of time-gating where they upload 1-2 renown ones a week to, at the end of the current season, be able to make content? I mean, what you want is to kill the game, I understand.

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He used to argue that free choice between covenants and even conduit energy was a bad thing for the games health… That these things brought value. Back in the day at launch of Shadowlands when we all made 3seperate characters for the same class. to play the end game we wanted…

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I was (and still am) for conduit energy as I am for limiting talent respecs. Still. I don’t remember being for a battle pass.

If someone wanted to do let’s say Castle Nathria, they had 2 options - play since release, log in every week to get their 3 renown levels, put in god knows how many hours in just that, or… come at the end of the patch, get their renown in a day and then just blast the raid. It was better in the sense that it took much, much less time to get the exact same experience out of the game. Nobody enjoyed renown farming.

People make all the builds to run through content quicker, to get a raid finished in 2 hours or a dungeon in 20 minutes. And with renown, the best build was cancelling your sub and coming back at the end of the season and getting everything in like 2 weeks. And people who played the whole season would have only a marginal advantage.

In that sense, the dps of those who unsub is much higher than the dps of those who stay and play. And all because of a bad system. And a good way to know if a system is bad is if it needs a catch up.

Look up my posts saying Amonet was right. Literally the only reason I am against these positions now is renown farming and covenant progression. I’d be fine with restricted covenant switching if switching a covenant didn’t more or less reset your whole expansion progression. This is why renown is the worst system in the expansion.

And my argument for talents was that there needs to be some cost, but Blizz didn’t want it to be gold because of the WoW token and the reaction to azerite reforging. Which I argue is a good system too, because it drained inflated gold out of the game. People complain the token buys you like 300k gold, but fail to realize this is only due to the gold inflation done in WoD, which Blizz has done nothign to fix. My argument is that gold sinks are good and WoW does not have real gold sinks. Classic’s respec system is great.

And all those arguments, and I’ve said it before, happen because WoW doesn’t have talent trees. I have talked, to you I’m almost certain, about how borrowed power needs to exist because of the lack of talent trees. 10.0 is pretty much what I have a) predicted it was going to be and b) what I want the game to be.

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Youve got your own entire game now… All up untill soon to be wotlk classic.

Campaiging for classicing down retail didnt work back then. It wont work now either…

Sure there are things retail could learn from classic. But lets not get extreeme here.

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I am just searching for the part where the game is actually fun in your post :grimacing:

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We did i can confirm… You said then that you didn’t think being locked into a a endgame content based on covenant choise and energy wasn’t all that bad. At the time you even said that brough more value to you behind your choises… I respect that.

But that didn’t apply for evrybody. And your classic wow examples back then didnt either appeal to me in retail wow back then when shadowlands launched. When I wanted to raid. PVP and m+…

But I Share your hope and optimisim for Dragonflights talent trees. I hope they meet both of our needs. and dont restrict us to one end Game or the other.

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The game without catch up would be so much worse, it’s not like the catch up gear is anything amazing either. Like in ZM you get a base level of 226. That’s nothing.

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Systems should be designed in a way that doesn’t need a catch up. Sometimes that can mean complete content skips - like how you can skip whole raid tiers and expansions. I am talking more about renown - which let’s be fair, isn’t content, it is just time wasting, especially when you need to farm 2 gear seasons’ worth of it. And you can’t really skip it in a coherent way as it is so ingrained in the game’s narrative.

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The game would need to be one season long if it was never going to add anything new. I am sorry I just don’t see the problem with the current system.

I do understand that some people don’t like seasons or getting more powerful but I think it’s a crucial part of WoW that keeps people playing.

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honestly suprised to read you say this,. But i welcome it.

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This is just false unless you have a guild who takes you through the raid and basically carries you because you’d have no clue what you’re doing than nobody is gonna accept you in their raid. You say it as if you’ll guaranteed get a spot in a pug raid when you have 0 kills, 0 gear and max renown. And guess what, you’d still need people who put in the effort from day 1 to even get you through it.

That’s a pretty delusional look on how the game actually works.

Best you can do is get a boost for gold, and if you class that as the same experience as raiding yourself with your guild then you’re even more wrong.

Renown has never in any raid that I’ve entered been a factor in whether or not you’re allowed to join.

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Seasons are fine. Imagine if someone just starting had to grind Castle Nathria and Sanctum just to get the right to play in the new patch. This is more or less the situation with renown.

I have no problem with players skipping content through community progression. This is what allows players to skip raid tiers - and that’s perfectly fine.

Shadowlands would’ve been a much, much better expansion if covenant construction was server or realm-wide, or worked like Broken Shore buildings. And if renown didn’t exist at all - only because of its timegated nature.

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if you think that raising the renown to 80 is comparable to having to do CN or SoD to play the new patch… I am sorry to tell you that the problem is not with the system but with you for not having any idea of what you are talking about.

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Yes - renown is way worse. At least the raids are fun and actual content. Renown farming is just garbage.

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Renown, nowadays, is easier. I don’t understand your point in making old content instead of playing the new stuff and raising renown quickly. Not by far renown is worse than swallowing 2 full raids with their complexities not only in terms of finding people to do them but learning their mechanics to get worse gear than the current one… I really don’t understand your eagerness to destroy the game by making it a thousand times more tedious.