PVP Vendors - I'm glad I can't choose wrong item

Community General Discussion
1

So the problem was many not-very-good players bought items in wrong order and couldn’t find vendor.

Solution is that you force items to players which they choose at (basically) a vendor.
So much for “I can’t find vendor”.

And yes, I could be retarded and buy wrong item. Your solution for it, is to force me the bad item? I have 390 legs on my pally. Now I am about to unlock 385 items.
So I am very glad, that you prevented me from being retarded by buying wrong item (that would’ve been only slight upgrade) by you being retarded and forcing me into wrong item (that’s not even upgrade at all and straightforward garbage).

Conclusion
Reasons given for vendors

  • “Couldn’t find vendor” - UNRESOLVED
    Status: same issue as with vendor, you still pick items at NPC
  • “Could buy wrong item” - UNRESOLVED
    Status: you could still buy wrong item
    Additionally, you can also get wrong item without being able to affect it.

So overall the sole two reasons given for vendors were NOT fixed, but it caused many, much larger issues.

45 Likes
2

Was people “unable to find the vendor” an actual reason given in removing them or is it just a meme? Please tell me they didn’t actually say that.

I know that buying the wrong item was something they did say, but…

9 Likes
3

Our developers are just lazy. Better force pvp players to do pve content…

2 Likes
4

They did actually say in the Q+A that players struggled to find vendors.

13 Likes
5

Well, my reaction to that would be something along the lines of:

OH MY F###ING GOD

It sounds like satire to me, what???

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6

Well, I remember in Legion, players being very surprised to learn that the crappy reward gear they got could be converted to currency, then spent at an upgrade vendor. I mean, most times I brought it up, casual players had no idea they could have had gear upgrades.

Thing is, I like vendors, but casual players need simple mechanics. Would be nice to make the easy earned gear a lower ilvl for the casuals, but high enough to keep those casuals in the grind, and have a vendor for better upgrades for less casual.

1 Like
7

If someone is struggling to find a vendor in time of wowhead and other things it must by below age required to play this game or worse (something involving mental condition) If you buyed something wrong from vendor you can sell it back for full currency spended but now when you choose piece of equip from npc after collecting conquest points you are screwed for good. So it is even worse now than it was with vendors.

15 Likes
8

Actual reason (or one of two) given by Ion when asked that question in QA.

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9

Of all the PvP vendors and PvP quest givers in the game, this new one I actually did have trouble finding.

I’m not a fan of the new system of getting PvP items, and would much prefer the flexibility and freedom to choose which slot I get items for. I dissed the weapon I got as the first item because I already had a better one.

2 Likes
10

Just put the vendor next to the pvp chest, how hard can it be to find?
If people can find a chest why can’t they find a vendor?
I can’t believe they are sticking to this reasoning, they are clearly just making it up.

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11

Wot a load of absolute tripe. They took the vendors away to make gearing your characters take as long as possible so that way your subscribed as long as possible.

Fact.

14 Likes
12

Problem with the pvp vendors is not the wrong selection but its failure of 98% of the population in finding them.

Do you know that in wotlk and cataclysm, only 2% of the population were able to find the pvp vendor?

2 Likes
13

For casuals, the vendor finding issue can be not knowing there is one. Hard to find something you don’t know exists. But ye, current system is for treadmill purposes.

1 Like
14

already answered

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15

Don’t you know only PvE players are allowed to buy the wrong items.

9 Likes
16

Hurrrrr… CAN’T FIND VENDOR… DURR!

If only we had… I don’t knooow… guards that could point us to a pvp vendor… if only.

4 Likes
17

I wonder if someone at Blizzard HQ would change the location of fridge, would those poor bastards die of hunger because they could not get food?

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It’s only there to ”balance” the pve vs pvp systems (argubly in favour of pve). The game design as it stands is that pve gear = pvp gear pretty much as both are viable in each system. If one system can hard target rewards (with a vendor) then it will obviously become superior to the other.

Pvp players will get vendors back when pve players get theirs.

The ”pvp players bought wrong item” excuse is obviously not the reason for this change. If you can manage to setup a wow subscription & download the game then you should be perfectly able to buy the piece that you want from a vendor.

If you happend to buy the wrong one, great lesson learnt, it wont happen again.

TL;DR pvp players gets no vendor because of pve, not because they cant buy the ”best item in the most optimized order”

2 Likes
19

It was an actual reason in some Q&A. :slight_smile: True, one of those “among other things”…

1 Like
20

I think people are latching a bit too much onto that particular Q&A answer.

PvP vendors and deterministic rewards has been a topic of discussion for more than a decade now, and Blizzard have commented on it for ages. Here’s a Ghostcrawler tweet from 2013:

We don’t like PvP rewards being so deterministic, but have yet to come up with a good design for an alternative.
https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/388718654063263744

I saw a video by Kevin Jorden (Vanilla WoW designer) commenting on a video by preach…where he comments on a GDC talk by Travis Day (item designer), expressing the same sentiment:


And I recall an interview with Rob Pardo, which I could probably find if I cared to google a bit more, where he considers a vendor-like mechanic of delivering loot to be the last option a designer should consider.

And there’s been countless more examples along the lines over the years. Ghostcrawler’s infamous example of being able to plot a date in your calendar as “that’s the day I get my Fangs of the Father” because the deterministic acquisition was so dominant.

I think it’s a case of Blizzard having gone down the path of having a deterministic reward structure several times in the past, and always ended up running into numerous issues.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Blizzard developer – across Diablo or WoW – who hasn’t had a negative view on deterministic rewards. I mean, as far as Blizzard history goes, it practically dates all the way back to the old Diablo II where you had the Nagelring -> Manald Heal -> Stone of Jordan gambled ring sequence, which was basically deterministic. And man did that cause a truck load of problems down the road.

So it becomes a case of fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

At this point asking a Blizzard developer to put an item vendor into a game is probably the equivalent of asking a vegetarian to eat a steak.

1 Like