I’m gonna be suggesting something that I know a lot of people will hate, so bear with me and voice your opinions freely.
Ever since the introduction of achievements, collections and lastly, appearances, WoW has effectively been a completionist’s hell for me and I imagine quite a few other people. I love this game like none other and I love its history, both internally lorewise and externally patch/expansionwise. It’s for that reason, coupled with my obsessive completion habits, that it digs at me how some collectibles are locked off forever. Collector’s editions, pre-expansion events, birthday rewards etc.
With Classic finally out, I’ve been wondering…is there any possible way that these items can somehow again be earned by newer players? Players who didn’t even have cash allowance by the time Cataclysm came out, completely missing out on every one-time collectible that had come before.
We can’t help at what time we come to the game or when we’re born for that matter.
I’m familiar with the arguments and one is of course that these items are gone for a reason, they were essentially trophies for those who earned them at the time. A big part of playing WoW though has often been to look at the gear or mount that someone else has earned and say to yourself “One day I’ll get one of those myself!”
But of course that will never happen in this case, that is if you ever even lay eyes on one to begin with. The players who earned the Amani War Bear or the Black Silithid are mostly gone from the game, if you happen to be a proud owner of one of these I salute you but I don’t see why I couldn’t just put the same effort into getting them as you did.
Now that Blizzard has set the precedent with Classic, one has to wonder if they will do the same one day for other expansions. And if they do, I personally want to know if they will somehow let us try our hand again at all that swag we missed out on.
because its a feat of a once current content, period.
blizzard has stated numerous times that classic will not have any cross mounts/titles/mogs whatsoever.
as you are familiar with all the arguments against this, honestly, just collect what you can and get over the fact that there will be some items that you ll never be able to collect in retail, as it should be.
if you missed out on some stuff or started playing at a later date, tough sht.
the sooner you come to this conclusion the happier you will be.
but for goodness sake people really need to stop bringing up this topic over and over again, its really getting pretty frequent lately.
The only item that is not fair to me is “Alanna’s embrace” special robes color that was available for tmog at only 1 patch aka 4.3 since the next patch was 5.0 and it got removed with the revamp of Scholomance.
Short answer as the previous poster stated most of what I was thinking is NO.
I accept as someone who has played the game 11 years that other people got things I was never able to find the time to get and accept it and I would expect that it’s part of life.
I also think it is massively disrespectful towards those who did in some cases have to really strive and put a lot of time and effort into getting what ever objective that took that time to do as well.
The sense of entitlement in this idea is astoundingly wrong.
I will start pasting my exact reply to threads like this.
Items getting removed for a reason each expansion .
To make them special and non obtainable to future generations so we have something to admire when we inspect someone else.
For example,each time i meet a Priest with Benediction , i wanna kill myself because i didnt play back then to aquire that gem…
Removed items should stay in the past FOREVER to mean something .
I dont like your suggestion , sorry.
Keep in mind that i also miss many items / titles and its so sad for me that they removed them forever but thats the beauty in the game and thats the beauty when i inspect someone to gasp on his/her acomplishments.
Imagine if everyone was running with ZG Tiger or posing with the Immortal title.
Where the fck is the uniqueness ?
In a matter of miliseconds , every single UNIQUE item or title will lose its ability and turn into another common green quality item or common title.
Yes, there were exclusive items that were removed that don’t make sense to bring it back, but there were many items that were removed with Cataclysm and they are not special and probably they are not in the collection tab of most players that play back them.
For every item like Benediction are hundreds of world drop greens and blues that are unobtainable not because are exclusive, simple because they drop from enemies that were removed with Cataclysm. The same for many quest rewards for low-level quest. The same for easy to get items from old dungeons, like Defias Sets or Stratholme set, those were so trivial that not even those who play that time have those items in the collection. Over the years I have obtained more than one time every item of Defias Set and i dont have it as transmog.
Remember Transmog collection was added in Legion, but most of those unobtainable items were removed in Cataclysm. The launch of Cataclysm and the removal of the old world can’t be compared in terms of removed items with any other expansion, because at that moment almost all the content was removed, not just exclusive things, the grant majority of removed items were just common green or blue items, and those things are not removed when the expansion end.
We could exclude things like Benediction , Tier 3 or Corrupted Ashbringer because those are things that probably no one who did it delete it, or even those items were acquired with quests. But for much other, more mundane and trivial items, not even people who play back them have it in their collection.
Removed mounts, titles and achievements should stay removed. Removed transmog items that we can say are exclusive and unique like Benediction , Tier 3 or Corrupted Ashbringer should stay removed.
But remove trivial tranmogs should return, specially given the fact they were removed many years before adding transmog to the game. And the same for removed quest chain, it should returns to allow players to enjoy the story, they could make so there is no achievements and rewards for doing those quest now. I want to repeat so much Pandaria Legendary quest chain.
If you would look up some news you would notice that Blizzard adds some old removed items back in some way from time to time. So far they were mostly crafted items like in Legion they added a lot of old removed craftable weaopns back to blacksmithing.
I was a completionist but I just stopped after a serious realization that there is just too much stuff and I never complete it all in reasonable time. Another realization was the uselessness of this task. Why bother collecting thing I will never use. So I mostly focus on getting things I want to actualy use on one of my characters. It’s much healthier.
To be honest I find the whole obsession with collecting mounts to be ridiculous. I could understand the “I’m gonna unlock X mount because I’m gonna use it all the time” of old, but not the wanting to unlock hundreds of them.
while this argument has merit in my mind, im not “massively” sure where i stand on removed items. if it was only 1-2 per expansion, then i am quite sure i would be 100% ok with it being a case of “they were a reward for being there at the time”. but so many items keep getting removed all the time that it does become a bit silly.
HOWEVER, as a lot of these items might not show up in the collections tab as greyed out, then it dont matter to me.
but your request goes at a bad direction to how it started off. yes, if you had stuck with your original premise, i think you would have a lot more support. completionism and collectibles need some SERIOUS loving if they weren’t meant to be done, then blizzard should never have brought out the greyed out section of collection tabs. any argument against helping/buffing collectors fails right there, as blizzard created the situation.
i wish i could 100% come to terms with this. i know it in my head, but i cant manifest it in my gameplay that might be one reason why i am liking classic atm. i know that the only real “goal” of the game is to do instanced content/pvp and have fun. no other things hovering over me saying “well, invincible is greyed out still. are you SURE you dont want to farm him another 250 times even though he probably wont drop”.
What I don’t like is when Blizzard removes things from the game and that they seem to automatically assume that all players have played non-stop since 2004, and that everyone already have the unobtainable items.
I don’t think that it’s fair that only a very small percentage of the playerbase can buy tier 3 sets and other rare items with gold on the black market auction house. To acquire tier 3 sets before they were removed required serious skills, even in TBC- and who would know back in TBC that transmog would be added in late Cataclysm? Where is the game skills to use gold to buy armor sets? Rethink and do it right.
Just like you said: Many were simply not old enough to play a game like WoW at the time before many items were made unobtainable. Or for example they couldn’t simply play due to work or military service.
Some say that it’s a way to show off that they “were around at the time”, but there simply is no reason to remove things from a game when we all pay the same subscription fee and expansion costs.
I used to be a completionist in every game, WoW fixed that by making it literally impossible to achieve completionist status so I gave up trying.
Eventually that filtered through to the other games I play and now I’m cured. Now I consider a game complete when I’ve seen all the story and not some arbitrary achievement of collect x number of x.
I’d add, I usually make extensive use of wowhead dressing room until I build up my perfect transmog, then I make a plan on how to obtain all of the parts (or mounts eventually) and that’s about it. I won’t ever dare myself to try to be a completionist because with wow it can easily develop into a sickness since the grind won’t ever end and it’s just straight out impossible to have everything (and if you do, it’s not worth all the time invested).
That said, I also have a critic about removed gear and whatsoever. I get it that it conveys a feeling of uniqueness, but honestly I don’t find it a good thing. I can’t see a valid reason to drive people to be envious or jealous, eventually bolstering overall discontent in a videogame. Not even from a marketing point, since you could let them do all the tasks needed to get them and actually play the game. I get that some people are attached to it, but I really can’t think of it as a serious or even valid motivation.
Still, since I don’t care at all (I usually always manage to have everything I want with normal equipments and mounts) I won’t argue and try to change things. But honestly, I thought about this when I got the mount from bfa pre patch event, that awesome undercity bat: I really didn’t have to do anything difficult, just a very easy quest at the right time. I was sad for my friends that came later and really wanted that mount. I wasn’t anyone special, it wasn’t hard to obtain, hell I’m not even using that mount since it doesn’t fit my Horde characters, yet they won’t ever be able to get it. It’s a shame.
I’m glad that I at least got to sample people’s opinions on the idea directly. Thank you all for taking the time to respond and hope you enjoy playing the game however you see fit.
if they weren’t meant to be done, then blizzard should never have brought out the greyed out section of collection tabs. any argument against helping/buffing collectors fails right there, as blizzard created the situation.