As some one who seriously burnt out doing a hideous amount of content to AP farm and get a legendary every week in Legion I very much appreciate weekly caps.
Many did ridiculous amounts of Island Expedition spam in BfA.
I know that I’m never going to fall behind because I didn’t to a gazillion activities that week.
No timegating = people complain about not enough content/burnout.
Timegating = people complain about not being able to progress quick enough.
It’s a double edge sword that has for and against arguments either way. I personally prefer a healthy mixture of both and would like it to be like that in SL, but I don’t know if it will be based on the systems we’ve seen so far.
Timegating is just a very sad excuse to hide low quantity content and its not the answer. In fact it made me quit WoW for long periods of time.
It’s a complex matter that involves many groups.
Timegating content slow the game progress, meaning the same stuff last longer, and gives pretty much every week something to brag about to streamer and content creators.
Then there’s the myth race, timegating slow down the progress, elongating the streams and the talks etc.
Then there is the fact that many when the content is over, just freeze and do something else, so less subs.
Its a lot of money that needs to be preserved.
Then there is the huge gap between a nolifer and a casual. Arena aside, pvp is not bracketed by ilvl and gear, so no matter how much you use template and such, if the nolifer are geared to bis spec in 3 days they’ll crush everyone else and this potentially can draw players away, not something blizz want.
And so on, there are many other examples that can be made on this but minor to these.
I don’t think time gating is problematic, the catch up is. I like the upgrade system for the cloak and assaults, it’s a weekly thing and you can bang it in a few hours which allows all sort of players to be up to par in that regard.
The problem is catch up, I don’t think there should be a limit of you’re behind. If you started now I don’t think you’d be able to ever have the same corruption resistance as someone that has been caught up from the beginning of the patch.
After BfA I wouldn’t mind having little to do lol. BfA was a major burnout.
Tbf if the content is weekly and not daily gated I 100% agree on it.
Get new tires.
Those things are EXPENSIVE!
Why I cannot do everything in a week on my main character in old times and then go to do this on my alts? Because in Legion and BFA I still need grinding, and grinding on main. Because there is timegate or unlimited levels of upgrade.
False argument.
There are plenty and by plenty I mean dedicated guilds and solo players that don’t do hardcore and still reach the top, be it PvP, Arena or PVE.
No-lifing the game doesn’t mean no one will beat you, nor does it mean you’ll reach an unobtainable height.
Also, why would people be affected by a random 1% or even less of the population if said population wants to power through all the content? I have yet to see a convincing argument.
It’s that same as saying casuals getting BiS gear, Titanforging to max ilvl and getting BiS corruptions from trivial gear does not effect hardcore players.
But then again, I don’t understand why there needs to be a category for player types, let people play the game how they see fit.
You did
a hideous amount of content
only because we had infinite trait, not because there was no cap.
On other hand i did not do more that i wanted.
I don’t see how those two are any different.
If there had been a cap I wouldn’t have done all that content.
Sometime I just want to do pvp and not bother with dailies etc. Other times I want to do plenty of dungeons. Honestly things like M+chests weekly quests and dailies suck. I wish for them to be gone. I want to do reputation in a way for example pandaria lorewalkers. That was a good rep - a finite ammount of tasks you need to complete that actually have engaging gameplay. I dont want to be forced into doing M+ for the week because otherwise I wont get chest. I want to do them because I decided to. I dont want to be forced to do 5 timewalking dungeons for reward, because they are damn boring. Or arena skirmishes etc. I want to experience content because it is fun, not for rewards. Rewards should be the cherry on top. Good examples are arenas. Do you think players who enjoy them do them in order to get gear? No, they do them because they enjoy them. They enjoy the combat, the adrenalin and the feeling of thriumf.
Do you think M+ dungeons had success because they suddenly provide up to raid level quality gear? No they are fun and challenging, unlike previous iterations of faceroll dungeons.
Raids are the same thing. People do them week after week to push themselves and get better logs.
Horrific visions were awesome because they are again - challenging.
Doing challenging, engaging content for reward = fun. Being forced to do boring content for reward on daily and weekly basis - not fun.
Island expeditions are not fun, because they are too freaking easy and are designed with time pressure that beats the whole purpose of exploration.
Warfronts are not fun, because you cannot lose there. It requires absolutely no skill to win it.
In regards to AP grind burnout - well there is simply the fact that in order to get AP you had to do uningaging content. That is what sucked. Yet you were forced to do it, because it was a way to progress your character.
Of course it is neccessary for a more relaxing content to do - proffesions, collecting stuff, story quests, exploration etc. But they need to be engaging in other ways. For example treasures - its fun to explore places and find hidden riches, its not fun when its shown on your minimap and contains nothing of interest appart from completing your daily q.
Not entirely true or rather needs more context, what burnt out AP farmers was the content offered through which to farm it. In Legion you got enough of it from plenty of content that you hardly ever needed to go out and chase it, unless you wanted the highest of the highest, then you ran Maw of Souls until you’ve lost all joy in life because it was slightly better then other options.
In BFA it was because they forced that grind behind a 3man PvE scenario, meaning that if you wanted to keep up, instead of doing what you wanted to do, you had to go do islands instead of what you wanted to do which was what caused more burnouts in BFA
I didn’t have a burnout because I didn’t commit to either in both expacs, but choosing not to do Maw of Souls AP runs I had a way easier time in Legion keeping up then I had in BFA after not choosing Islands
Also to say that either in both expacs weren’t time gated is false, it wasn’t a hard timegate but the AP knowledge system is a soft timegate on AP gain
Regardless of contradiction or not, I agree with the message of the OP
I think reasonable level of timegating at the beginning of a patch is fine but then the gates need to be removed after some time. Malefic cores should always drop from a full clear of a vision. Plus assaults should be grindable. Ive already done all this stuff before, now I want my just dinged 120 rogue to be ready and doing arena, not having to spend a gazillion months to get there and oh whooops its end of the expansion.
The problem is that with ‘trying to avoid burn out’ they are causing another kind of burn out - ‘forced log on’ burn out. Both of them go hand in hand.
I.e. visions are limited entry, right ? But you have to do them per week, or you get behind on cloak. It would be ok, but you have to do your corrupt resist run NOW because next week you have to also kill Nzoth and when you do neither you are behind like you mean it.
And so they start cascade, where you feel forced - not just on main, but also your main alts as most raiding players have an alt - i.e. melee players have ranged alts and so on.
Time gates cause also burn outs due to game-play and chore that feel mandatory.
To avoid burn outs they just should limit the progression needed - i.e. cap neck levels, cap corruption resist etc etc, but of course they do not want to that as otherwise players would run out tasks to do and they’d need to add more content. This is artificial way of them keeping subs, none to do with being worried of our well being.
Time gates and content on a timer is the top two horrible things I hate the most about BFA. Other over the top restrictions also a pet peeve.
Still not pre ordering shadowlands especially since they talking about restricting covenants and adding time limits to new content in SL.
You seem to have a complete misunderstanding of why people did not like the artifact power system.
People do not like it because it is essentially a bar that tells you wether or not you can compete on an equal footing AFTER you have already spent all the time leveling up.
Because of this, the game feels like an endless levelling process and since people generally do not like levelling, they are obviously not going to take kindly to having to fill out another experience bar that will drastically affect wether or not they can stay at the same power as their friends despite the fact they should already have reached their characters base power ceiling and thus only need to seek out the best gear, without having to worry about wether someone is going to be permanently ahead of them via the ap bar.
nobody actually cares about an endless grind itself as people generally do not complain about their reputation bonus boxes, however, people do care about reaching an achieveable power ceiling as their baseline for playing with or against other players and if this is never reasonable and more importantly not hard capped at the start of the expansion then people burn out knowing they will never be to play the game as they are too busy grinding this bar to do what they would otherwise actually want to do.
Just to get to a point where you can take on bosses in nya
Get to 120.
Gear up. Time gated most likely unless you have mates that will carry you in M+ to gear up. Most wont so have to go through time gated WQ’s to get to a point where they could do M+ to gain gear.
Essences. If you do not have a main who has most if not all then this is just another grind. This means doing 8.1 and 8.2 content even before you get to todays content. This suits blizzard just fine as this could potentially prolong your sub for another two months as you grind old content to get to a position to tackle current content.
Buy essences from mother. Welcome back to another grind. This one so you can buy them if you do have them on alts.
This game is just one continuous, never ending, run up a hill with no end in sight. And if you manage to get close blizzard removes the goalposts and adds a new treadmill.