I don’t think it does. Like i said before, both Player A who got Invincible in April 2010 (likely the first person on the realm to have it) and Player B who farmed it solo last week, they might have received the same item, but they didn’t get the same reward.
Player A was probably getting at least 30 whispers a day for months, from strangers drooling over his mount, he’d be a dwarf among midgets, the stuff of legend. People would brag about once having been put in the same dungeon as him by the group finder.
Yet last week, when Player B flew into Orgrimmar on the new steed that he spend the last 40 weeks farming (for only for 20min or so per run granted), nobody bat an eye at him. No whispers, no nothing. Maybe a “nice gz” from a friend after telling him what finally dropped.
All that stuff around getting Invincible is the part that mattered, not the horse itself. … man…i hate horses…
Mmm, I don’t know to be honest.
It’s not an unfair argument or anything, but i feel arguments of atleast equal weight can be (and are) made for the exact opposite.
I also can’t really picture a good way to implement it which isn’t subject to introducing a bunch of new problems.
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One of those problems (the big one)
Im just going to stick with Invincible as an example (the reward for killing the Lich King in ICC during WotLK), but obviously it applies all over.
If the changes you desire were implemented, Invincible would’ve only dropped during WotLK and stopped being available entirely once Cataclysm got released.
Now, back then, if im not mistaken, it was a 100% drop rate on 25hc (the mount doesn’t drop on the 3 other difficulties 10n/10hc/25n).
The world first kill LK 25hc was on 2010-03-26, Cataclysm went live on 2010-11-23, that’s about 34 weeks (so 34 resets). In order to have a team of 25 players capable of killing the hardest raid boss at the highest difficulty (let alone in a world first race), you need a raidteam/guild bigger than 25 players (sometimes people can’t make it, ppl have lag/issues, sometimes you need a specific comp in order to be able to beat an encounter, etc).
Let’s assume those top guilds only ran 35 players for the rest of the expansion (it was probably more) and nobody new got recruited. It would mean that 1 of those 35 guys (who helped get the world first kill), would not have Invincible.
Meanwhile, a couple lucky guys in some middle of the pack casual guild, who never bothered with ICC until they were in full Ruby Sanctum gear in september/october that year, they clear the raid a couple times and a couple of them get Invincible.
This is not a fair system at all, it does not reward those “who worked for it” at all. Killing the LK at the end of WotLK wasnt a complete a joke, but it would be on par with being able to do Uldir Mythic this week, in reach for plenty of people.
And sure, ultra casual players wouldn’t have had a chance of getting it (i don’t think thats such a good thing, but lets put that aside) but many many hardcore players who worked hard since day #1 would still not have it, while at the same time, many luckier players of average skill, who put in minimal effort actually would have it. Very bad situation if you ask me, keeping dignity isn’t how i would describe it. It would be way worse than the current situation. It might serve to “preserve those moments”, certainly for that 35th player in the worldfirst-guild who got screwed over, he might quit the game. And yea the lucky casual raiders who got one near the end, they’ll be loving it, but i don’t really see how they deserve any more prestige than the other 24 players that helped them get that kill (all of whom didnt get the mount).
Also note: the examples i used were extremely conservative. Obvously most competent guilds would be much slower than the #1 guild in the world at the time. They would have had fewer weeks to farm the Lich King, and thus much fewer mounts to share around, making the problem way worse than just the 1 out of 35 in my example.
Another problem, shortage of butts
Another problem, we only have 1 butt. We can only ride one mount at a time. Being one of those rare pro raiders who got Invincible during 3.3, you’re well positioned reach similar status in say Firelands and get the mount there. Now after a while you own a bunch of them, but you can still show off 1 at most, the other ones (that symbolize those huge accomplishments) are now just as unacknowledged/hidden as curve achievements are in the current system, which kinda diminishes a lot of the supposed benefits of the changed system.
Other side-effects
Massive content purge
Other (in my opinion negative) side-effects include that you’ve now basicly trashed like half the content that Blizzard spend the last 2 decades building.
Stand at the ICC entrance on a wednesday and look at how many people flock over there, i bet i could literally spot hundreds while i eat my breakfast. How many of them do you think would be going there if it wasn’t for invincible, 1% of them ? i wouldn’t be too surprised if it’s even less. Sure you could say “they’re only doing it for the mount”, sure, but they’re still out of their own free will spending time in the game and visiting areas they’d otherwise likely never go.
Bye Collectors
Filling the missing pieces in your collection (be it mounts or pets or achievements or w/e) is a fairly common activity. It’s not for everyone, sure, but it’s one of only a few key things that can keep long time players playing for over a decade (in fact, the only bigger reason imo is the friendships made with other players). Your change would almost entirely obliterate that aspect of the game.
It would send many veterans packing, with a cascading effect.
Neither were things like Mythic+, that doesn’t really mean that removing it from the game would make the game better.
I never really buy this argument.
That would imply that if they brought back all that old challenging content in say a timewalking-style fashion (where it’s scaled so its no longer as easy), then you’d be ok with people earning these rewards now.
Perhaps you are, but 95% of the people i hear making this argument usually arent. They just wanna pull up the ladder behind them after getting something they considered hard.
“Now that im rich after winning the lottery, i can see the level of taxation is out of control!”
I don’t think many raid leaders look at peoples feats either 
They could give some rewards with the curve-family of achievements, but it should probably be localized to the related raid instance.
The raid-skip-quests that many raid instances have (think hellfire citadel for example), could have been made curve-exclusive.
That would give a nice (time saving) benefit to players who did the raid atleast once while it was current, but it doesn’t lock anyone else out from anything (they just have to work harder now, killing useless bosses, than the person who put in effort back in the day).
I’d be ok with something like that (though i don’t really find it a pressing issue).
I don’t think blizzard is really encouraging people to do that necessarily.
That fact that you can improve your chances at getting something you want, by having more attempts is just inherent in reality. And if they were to make raid (loot)lockouts accountwide to prevent that, they’d be killing many many other (perhaps in your view more acceptable) forms of play.
Besides, if someone wants to put in 3x the work to have 3 rolls of the dice, i don’t see a problem.
More to the point, locking people into characters is bad, not for any altoholic reason, but just because very few players picked a class in vanilla and stuck with it all the way through to BfA.
Trying other classes keeps the game fresh(er).
People should be able to choose what they want to play based on what they enjoy the most (its a game after all).
The fact that they may have to put in some work to gear up their other character, fair enough, but stripping them of all their accomplishments because “it was on another character” isn’t something i think is good.
Maybe, but following that reasoning there are 50.000 other things that don’t make sense either, you can’t conform to labels perfectly.
I don’t think there are any rules a game should adhere to , just to fit neatly into its assigned category.
If Blizzard thinks of something new and it’s something players would enjoy without real negative consequences, they should roll with it. If that means that wow would be classified as a Flight simulator instead of as an RPG, then i could live with that.