are you serious blizzard, what is this insane time gating.is this just to keep people subbed ( you hope to ) . SInce when timegating stuff made a good game? isnt games supposed to hook you because of their quality not because of time gating>
also who cares about maxing out a ring when by the time you max it out its a new patch and season? WHO is responsible for this design? how can you be so tone deaf the whole expansion?
this is worse than shadowlands by far. at least in shadolands you were stubborn as a mule but you communicated and at least the game design was much much better and u also delivered one of the best m+ seasons and the best raid up to date ( castle nathria) whats up man ,fix your game
9 Likes
Did they really timegate it? Why do they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
2 Likes
Iâm also unsure what the ring is even good for if it takes us 6 weeks to max it out.
Either S1 is going to last way longer than weâd expect or weâll have the ring maxed out for 2 weeks before the new season hits, which will render the ring useless again, I suppose (?).
Will we be able to take the ring into S2 aswell and upgrade it there?
Probably a consequence of when they release the expansion. Late August - Early September wasnât a great time to do it. As 3 months later is Christmas and this isnât a good time to release more content, especially a gearing system that could give other players advantage. A lot of people will have to travel or have other family commitments over xmas.
So leaving a new season until late Jan or early Feb is sensible although probably not very popular.
Did they really timegate the ring?
Iâd be surprised if it wasnât timegated
Didnât 8.1 release just before Christmas with bod early January?
It really feels like six of one and half a dozen of the other. They could have let you have all the quests on the first day and players would have steam rolled through them. Not game breaking but could have led to âis that itâ moments. They have chosen to release a set of quests with an upgrade a week. Either way it does not matter because the upgrade of the ring, much like the azerite drops from BFA, would have been capped per week taking six weeks to upgrade anyway.
I think the rational behind the way they have chosen to go has everything to do with the final quest reward : Wings of the Siren. They simply donât want you flying on the island and want to delay this for as long as possible. In which case I would have just simply hidden that reward behind a long Island meta achievement. Though you would sill have had grumbling and moans.
if they have to stagger almost everything to not have people say ââIs that itââ then maybe they should focus on content instead of BS store mounts and promotions.
8 Likes
That would probably get more grumbling.
Those things are always so filled with RNG and grindiness. They really arenât fun.
A few weeks wait is ok compared to those.
wait did they really timegate a filler patch between season?
Are they really let people grind for a ring? 
i understand achievements and unlocking zone but to have a ring you gonna lose in the moment new season starts kinda cringe
My point exactly and would likely have taken some if not most longer. Either way you still going to get grumbling.
I think a lot of content these days is designed to hold people over until the next content comes out, so peopleâs subscriptions keep running.
The expansion box content holds people over until the anniversary patch, and the currency grind there is supposed to hold people over until the Siren patch, and the timegating of the ring is supposed to hold people over until the Plunderstorm arrives, and then the grind in Plunderstorm is supposed to hold people over until Undermined comes out.
And so and so forth.
It is a subscription game after all, so Blizzard of course wants players to stay subscribed, and will naturally steer the game design in a direction to accommodate that.
It is what it is.
3 Likes
Well it is content aint it ?
My own thoughts on this is that they are getting younger devâs in and they kinda learnt this format from mobile games they played and so believe its the way forward. It takes a very strong willed person to break away from conditioning.
My own choice is to move on from complaining about it as I am neither compelled nor forced to partake. As is this a filler patch most likely littered with cosmetics and I think I have enough for now as I am drowning in it.
Edit: and what they said 
Just wanting to remind that crests, sparks and crafting concentration are timegated as well.
The new ring will be upgradable to 639 if Iâve understood correctly. This means that, since it will be customizable, it will be probably better than any ring up to and including the Heroic version of the new raid despite those rings having a small item level bump; which in turn means that it will be replaced only when a player acquires both BiS rings at their max item level from the new season.
Also the gems that are time gated have passives, which I am guessing are mostly for the island. Would be cool if the âdetect invisibilityâ worked in PvP. Can now smack those ferals and rogues ride out of the shadows
The real time gate is actually the upgrade of the rings ilvl and the passives.
the ring is garbage anyway. better use a crafted 636 ring. if you use stat gems you have the same stats after week 6. otherwise boring random procs that arenât OP to replace it. maybe its worth but i doubt it 
OFC it is. They do this with everything in the game now. A delay is a lot cheaper than providing content.
I firmly believe this is why Mythic + is the way it is. Currently player can wait up to an hour or even more to find a group. All of which slows the gearing down to a crawl and prolongs the subscriptions. The LFG has huge delays built into it. I have lost track of how many times I have seen the satchel pop for both healer and tank. I queue for a healer on one account and a tank on a second account. Only to see the group fill without the healer and tank on the other screen. And yet both can be waiting 3-4 minutes for the queue to pop. Even if Blizzard was using a 386 for their database servers, it should not take that long to match 5 people together.
My attitude will be to start the island in 5 weeks time. Unless someone starts to show the ring is actually worth it, which I highly doubt for anyone except 2-3 classes and low geared alts.
not even surprised anymore
And if they didnÂŽt timegate things, then the same go-hard people currently complaining about timegating would be the same ones whining after 1 week that therÂŽs nothing more to do, just like the hard pushers started complaining last month about the season being over and boring, when it was barely 5 weeks old.
I mean no offense to anyone, but of WoW is too casual for you or you have that much of a problem with itŽs design, then FFS just play as long as itŽs fun and then quit until you feel itŽs right to return⊠just like millions of well adjusted adults already do 2-3x year since the beginning of Open Beta.
Current patch cadence is 80 days. 6 weeks = 49 days. That leaves 1 full month for people that needed the power boost to complete their goals and /or are going for the final title pushes in M+ or PvP⊠The ring is not aimed at nor designed around people like the OP or myself that completed most if not all of their primary season goals weeks ago, but rather at the people that are still having problems reaching them a month before it ends, while still giving a bit extra for those that rightly care about ever .5%⊠everyone else can completely ignore it and not care or suffer any ill effects. 