Blizzard has a toxic attitude towards it’s playerbase for the last, i wanna say, 8 years?
Why on earth they talk about their customers like they are idiots is beyond me, yes there are idiots out there that play the game, but you don’t design the game around them, doing that will only lead to failure on all ends.
Ok, we’re going to get no farther than that it’s your opinion than the people who believed Azerite armor was going to carry BfA must have had some experience that made them believe that vendors aren’t ideal. It’s far from your original statement of “always ended up running into numerous issues”, but no point is trying to get more. I think we can just write that one off.
But here’s a question to you or anyone else who can fill me in: I watched Travis Day’s original, then Preach’s rebuttal, then Kevin Jordan’s comments, and I am still no closer to understanding: Why did Travis Day say that the Wrath system was a “train wreck”? He said it was, but gave no reason. I could see Preach’s WTF? meter exploding in his video at this point, and mine pretty much too. Travis gave no reason, produced no data, recounted no anecdotes, not even a personal reaction. I don’t understand why he said it. Preach doesn’t understand why he said it. If Kevin Jordan understands why he said it, he’s keeping that to himself. Was it just because there were multiple vendors, that people couldn’t find?
Yes, that’s my assessment. Opinion if you will.
That is still my belief. I thought I gave examples to elaborate on that as well. Stone of Jordan in Diablo II. Dragonwrath. Fangs of the Father. RMAH in Diablo III. And the currencies and such mentioned in the video I linked.
That pile is enough for me to say that whenever Blizzard have attempted deterministic rewards, it’s always resulted in numerous issues – by Blizzard’s own accord.
And at the end of the day, then it’s sort of their design philosophies and experiences that dictate the game development. There’s no objective truth to game design – different companies approach it differently.
Blizzard have their design philosophies (many of them known to us) and are surely guided by experience and past lessons learned as everyone is in their field of work. And I would be very surprised if the atmosphere within Blizzard was all: “Whoo!! Yeah man! Let’s do more gear vendors and deterministic rewards, because that’s never given us any headache in the past! Go for it!!” Of course not.
Not going to answer? Figures…
Sure, I can answer.
So PvP gearing boils down to 3 systems:
And the main PvP activities in the game are the following:
(plus Brawls and Island Expeditions)
The Weekly PvP Chest and the Conquest Bar Item can be obtained by doing any or all of the above PvP activities.
The Strongboxes cannot be obtained through Warmode.
So you don’t have to be a Gladiator doing Rated Arenas 24/7 to experience the PvP gearing system to its fullest. You can actually get the exact same experience of gearing through just doing Random Battlegrounds.
I personally do mainly Warmode (Faction Assaults and such), Random Battlegrounds, and Skirmishes.
With PvE the gearing is a bit more specific to the activities. If you want the loot from Battle for Dazar’alor, then you have to do that raid.
With PvP you just have to do anything that involves PvP.
I heard its hard to open your map and check the world for a icon that look like a shield from your faction…/roll eye’s.
Srsly, pandaria kinda did this, they marked PvP and Valor point vendor, surely ppl will have a hard time missing those NPCs :P?
You are just explaining how the gearing works?
That didn’t have much to do with my point that your experience is SEVERELY limited in how the gearing works since you ”gear” through assaults, yet you proclaim this system as superior.
And if I want battle of dazar gear, i can do couple dungeons and turn in a quest.
Whilst killing the mobs in westfall i realized the pve gearing system now is better without master loot and unable to trade higher ilvl pieces within the group. (This is how you sound when you proclaim the pvp gearing system is superior to the old one when you only do assaults, see how stupid it sounds?)
Well yes. You seemed to insinuate that you needed to do a specific kind of PvP activity in order to have an informed opinion about PvP gearing. But you don’t. PvP gearing is universal across all the different PvP activities. It works the same regardless of whether you’re doing Random Battlegrounds or Rated Arenas.
You must have overlooked the part where I said the following:
That’s 3 out of 5 PvP activities. That’s not severely limited. I realize that by putting Faction Assaults first, it makes it seem as if that’s my primary way of gearing. It is not. I probably manage to catch 2-3 Faction Assaults per week, for a grand total of ~100-150 Conquest.
I would say my primary source of acquiring gear through PvP comes from grinding Random Battlegrounds.
It would sound stupid if I only did Faction Assaults. But I don’t, so it doesn’t.
But then all the gear you get from the bgs is severely limiting you since it’s just 360ilvl, how is it a superior gearing system then?
I’m lost.
I’m still missing something.
Yeah, and then, guided by experience and past lessons learned, they believed Azerite Armour was such a great idea they were going to build an expansion on it. Ri-ight.
I do love it when a consensus of experts comes up against reality and goes splat. Experts are as fallible as anyone else. If someone can point to how and why something went wrong, and then document the ill effects, we can have a conversation. Until then, there is nothing to talk about.
imagine basically calling your playerbase so retarded that they can’t even find a simple PvP vendor
imagine calling a class’s population so retarded that they can’t manage to press more than 3 keys in a fight so you completely erase that spec
welcome to Ion Hazzikostas
The best-designed PvP gearing system isn’t necessarily the one that gives me the biggest upgrades the easiest way.
For me personally, then a well-designed PvP gearing system revolves around a few principles:
You could summarize these as saying there should be a correlation between quantity vs. quantity and quality vs. quality.
Then there are a few more:
I would describe these as ensuring that PvP gearing doesn’t feel dethatched from the rest of the game, but helps maintain the sense that WoW is one single game – also when it comes to the process of gearing up.
Those are sort of the things I’m looking for in any gearing system. The reason why the current PvP gearing system is better than the one in Legion for example, is because the one that currently exists checks more of my boxes, so to speak.
The gold income from doing any run was fairly fixed, so you could calculate how many runs you would have to do before you had enough gold to buy the Legendary item you wanted.
Or in the case of money, it was simply a matter of being able to afford the price of said Legendary item. When you had enough money to spare, you got your gear upgrade.
And like in WoW, gold and money became interchangeable.
It made the acquisition process feel like a grind, because you knew you just had to farm Firelands or Dragon Soul x amount of times until you completed the associated quest and got your weapon. Same with Val’anyr or Shadowmourne.
That wasn’t exciting, that was just a drag, because you could predict the day you got your item (think a 25man Heroic guild could get a Dragonwrath every 8 weeks, correct me if I’m wrong), so it simply became a process of grinding them out for your roster of Mages, Warlocks and Rogues. Keep running those Fireland runs until your eyes bleed and you’ll keep getting those Dragonwraths! Not fun.
That was a bizarre thing to say. You’re saying that because they got Azerite Armor wrong, then they’re wrong about everything else too. That’s a weird deduction.
Except when it comes to PvP gearing, then Blizzard have changed their approach 7 times so far – once for each expansion. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they change PvP gearing once again in the next expansion, based on the player feedback.
But one thing they have never done – not once – is to change the design of PvP gearing in the middle of an ongoing expansion. And, I would say, for good reason.
So we may very well see PvP vendors. If it’s what the playerbase wants, Blizzard tends to indulge it, even when they probably shouldn’t. But it won’t happen tomorrow or in the next patch or the patch after. It’ll happen in the next expansion.
You know better than that. I’m not. I’m saying that they got one very major thing very wrong. This is, I think, indisputable.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are wrong about everything - obviously, they’re not - or even necessarily wrong about any one specific thing, but it does show that their judgement is far from perfect, and not to be relied upon unquestioningly. Nor was it the only case; I’m sure we can both cite other missteps where they have admitted error. For that matter, which “them”? We heard about distinct differences of opinion betwen Travis, the current team, and Justin in that video.
As for the acquisition “issue” you assert for Dragonwrath, and Fangs of the Father, I’d call that a feature rather than a bug. Maybe that particular process was too deterministic for some tastes, and if that was the only process in the game, then the game would have been too homogenous, but it wasn’t.
My point is just that it’s their judgement that counts in the end, not ours. And they may change their minds every now and then – or iterate as they say – and do things differently. But that too is driven by their own judgement, not ours.
We’re armchair developers, not actual developers. Whichever one of our opinions comes out on top in a forum discussion is secondary to the opinions within the design team itself.
Though as I also said, Blizzard do sometimes seem to indulge the community and grant them their wishes, rather than sticking to their own gut feelings (I find this to hold especially true in regards to PvP).
Such is game development, I guess.
I found Ghostcrawler’s comment on them in the Post Mortem he wrote for Cataclysm years back, which sort of echoes my thoughts:
“Speaking of raids, we also weren’t particularly happy with how accessible legendary items became in Cataclysm. Multiple characters in a single raiding guild were getting, and worse, expecting a legendary weapon. Legendaries are supposed to be rare and exciting, not a bar you fill up like some reputation grind, and certainly not something you feel entitled to get because it’s “your turn.” Dragonwrath in particular was usable by a large variety of class specs, which coupled with the guarantee to completion, just made them too ubiquitous.”
Yet you aren’t wearing pvp items on your character, which makes me think you are simply talking out of your @ss about them. If the pvp gearing system would at least be good for you (it doesn’t seem to be good for anyone else), you would surely use it, but you don’t. I think you are just trying to play some sort of misguided devil’s advocate right now, you know full well how garbage this system is, but honestly all you do is infuriate people even more. You aren’t helping at all whatever cause you think you have.
I do PvP on a regular basis – at least regularly enough to get my 500 Conquest per week.
The reason why I don’t wear a lot of PvP gear, is because I invest more time into other aspects of the game, and I tend to do those on a slightly higher level than the PvP activities I do. And since all gearing in WoW follows a formula of effort + skill = reward, then most of my rewards come from other activities than PvP.
That doesn’t mean the PvP system is bad, it just means I have limited time and I choose to devote it toward other activities than PvP alone.
If I were more inclined, then I could put some serious effort into 3v3 Rated Arena, get a rating high enough for the Gladiator bracket, and swim around in item level 415 gear.
It just so happens that I’m not inclined toward rated forms of PvP, so I don’t get that gear. That’s no different from how Mythic raiding gear is also out of my reach, because I don’t aspire toward doing that content either.
It’s just choices.
For what it’s worth, I did actually propose my own idea for all things gear and cosmetic rewards in PvP on the old forums, about a year ago. You can see it here:
https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17617882261
And it’s entirely vendor based. But it’s not purely deterministic, because there’s still an element of luck involved in the gear acquisition. And that’s very much as it is today. A balance between the two.
(though it’s worth pointing out that this was before Blizzard had revealed much of their design for BfA, so it’s very outdated and doesn’t really mix with the way the game appears now in regards to item design)
So not devil’s advocate, not this time.
And now let’s imagine you have to have be at least 1k+ on raider IO in order to even begin getting loot.
That’s PvP for you.
Saw this and had to reply.
Gladiators aren’t swimming in ilvl 415 gear. Can you find a gladiator that has at least 5 pieces of ilvl 415 from PvP? The current R1 3v3 player in EU has 3 pieces.
The majority of 415+ gear comes from M+ or titanforged heroic raiding.
Is getting 415 pieces at at snail’s pace, for being part of top 0.5%, justified when someone who’s a bit above average can farm M+10 all day long?
Well of course you’re fine with pvp gearing Jito, as unranked player you get the 375 gear as expected, but for people that take pvp as main dish, and go 2k+ they solely rely on RNG granting them a drop, and the 500 conquest thing is utterly useless as it does not scale up, even with 1800 rating I got a 355 piece from 500 conquest (season1, now 375).
Pvp vendor is the only way to go with pvp gearing, otherwise everyone relies on M+ to gear them up.
Ok well last I played I wasn’t as inclined as you to put so much effort, but even with my weak powers I was over 2.2k, even though below 2.4. You know how many items from pvp I was wearing? Two. Everything else was pve drops, and mind you, the pve I was doing was one dungeon per week, nothing more. In my mind, it doesn’t get more ridiculous than this.
If you would actually try to gear by pvp, you would see how ridiculous this system is.