I think you’re just linking that conclusion to it because of your dislike of TF.
In Legion TF was objectively worse than it was in BfA (certainly for those who dislike the system). Yet the subnumbers for Legion as well as the general opinion on that expansion are much better than BfA.
So it has much more to do with BfA’s content quantity + quality and not with TF. You can dislike it sure, but I don’t think many people would quit because of it.
What claim is that? You don’t know how to read the numbers, nor do you have access to them. People has been saying this all the way back to WotLK(at least, could be earlier too), and do you know what? Everyone claims the thing they dislike about the game, to be the reason why “numbers are falling”.
Edit: Typed in the wrong expansion name.
Good point Tahra. I didn’t even think of that, but yes, Legion had much better(or wrose, depending on PoV), titanforge rates.
We don’t know the numbers for Legion either, but it is seemingly one of the more popular expansions.
Aye true, but Blizzard did at some point say that Legion had the best ‘subscription retention’ numbers. So that says something; people stayed subbed to play. I know I did as well.
Popular Expansions? you know the general public had access to sub numbers there was even a chart that came out during the WoLK published by Blizzard when they hitted the 12M subs. the last published official Sub number by blizzard was 5.5M subs in 2016. Nobody released any public numbers after that.
Anyway i am not going to comment this anymore because it is completely offtopic.
I am just expressing here my opinion and alot players that i came across with (guildies/non-guildies) addressing the TF/WF issue.
Anyone who feels disappointed when an item does not roll a small percentage chance successfully is the problem, not TF/WF.
Are you disappointed every day where you don’t find some lost money on the street on your walk home?
Are you disappointed whenever you flip 4 coins and they do not all land on heads.
Are you disappointed whenever in your life an extraordinarily rare positive outcome doesn’t just happen at a given moment it could have however unlikely?
The vast vast VAST majority would answer those with a no, despite some of those being more likely than a Titanforge.
The fact that people exist who actually cannot get their heads around how unlikely a TF is and actually feel disappointed at the base result, nay disappointed when they get an upgrade that had extremely low chances to be better, should have no bearing on whether TF is a bad or good system.
Even people to whom the lottery is a literal weekly tax at least have the basic understanding they will not see even small returns most of the time(but would feel crushed if their usual numbers were drawn any week they didn’t play). When literal addicts can wrap their heads around a concept detractors of TF cannot, I can do nothing but shake my head.
My goal is always to get the baseline ilvl in all the slots pf the difficulty I am actually clearing. Back in Uldir that meant clearing out M Taloc’s whole loot table, and I didn’t feel an ounce of disappointment when after triple boots I had them all without a single bonus on them, because math says it’d be incredibly unlikely even if I got hundred drops from Taloc to actually get a warforge out of him, because Gambler’s Fallacy is a thing…
People need to stop setting unrealistic goals or caring about what someone doing LFR gets once in a blue moon. And the argument that you can’t tell if someone is skilled via ilvl just proves the system is working, as people who get lucky try higher difficulties otherwise they’d not be in your queues, do please try and convince me that people trying to get into higher difficulty content is somehow a bad thing 
…and I have the oposite experience. Most people I encounter don’t mind titanfordging at all, when the subject is brought up.
Regarding the sub numbers, they should not be tied to titanforging. That’s all we are saying. People always have, and seemingly always will, blame whatever they do not like about the game, as the reason for declining sub numbers.
Im in bfa the most casual between casuals. But tf is an unjust system.
Unjust? Why?
No, I’m disappointed at the end of each month everyone at Blizzard doesn’t get payed a random salary from a number generator with a random chance of getting more money or vastly more money capping at - 15% higher than the highest payed personal in the company. Let’s see how that works out and how many people would like it.
Best part of TF; even the same-difficulty-level items can differ in ilvl when both are titanforged…
Result in the group from a +5 I just did:
Mythic 5 TF trinket: 400 ilvl
Mythic 5 TF ring: 405 ilvl
The whole WF/TF is just a mess, another stimulant to do the same content over and over and over again. Hoping to see that magical word “Titanforged” pop up. Just remove it already. Nobody (not true, but you get the point) wants to receive a 400 ilvl item for doing a Mythic 5 …
The reactions are always mixed. The two sides rarely agree and it’s something that doesn’t have a clear ‘winner’.
Although I don’t think it’s a good system, Blizzard refuse point blank to get rid of it, no matter how many times it’s brought up.
I have no idea what kind of support either side has. It’s mostly raiders that feel it’s detrimental (though not exclusively) and it’s usually the more casual player base that like it (again not exclusively).
You are comparing a statistical improbability to a statistical impossibility. That literally worse than apples and oranges.
Good thing Vanilla didn’t have a chance someone got far better loot than some of the raid drops from just running dungeons and getting incredibly lucky. Though in the back of my head I have Foes made out of some minerals and this stick from a School of some kind that a certain class very much wanted trying to remind me of just some examples from a time when bosses didn’t even drop each of their gear at the same chance
I’m just going respond to all of Bornakk’s posts over here. I wanna thank him for engaging the community on this issue.
I wish I could say the same, but I don’t enjoy when I get a 5 iLvL warforge and I have to go to Simcraft to figure out if the current item is better than the new one, and then also being unable to trade it because it was 5 iLvL higher and personal loot.
Getting an amazing warforge or titanforge on an item you fundamentally don’t want does not feel good, and it forces me to equip items on my character that I would’ve never opted for otherwise. This actually drags me further away from a cohesive, complete set of items.
Of course, getting that good TF can feel good in the moment, but does it also feel good every time you don’t get it to know that you could’ve gotten it?
To ponder over? There is precisely one correct answer as to which is best, and that answer is best answered by SimCraft.
If the items actually did something interesting where it depends on how you move your character or what content you’re doing, then we could be talking, but that’s not the case with the 4 simplified stats we have today.
On precisely what universe are we from that anyone has asked for getting their character gear capped within 2 weeks?
We’re asking for the removal of random procs on gear AND lower drop rates.
Careful not to take him so literally. He means with considerably less effort.
It entirely depends on the difficulty of acquiring the item, not which game mode it comes from.
Yeah, I do. It inspires me to get to his level. Ask Jeff Kaplan how he feels about this - he’ll give you an earful, I’m sure. ![:slight_smile:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
If you’re in an even remotely decent guild, of course you’ll trade items if you already have a better item. In many cases, you’ll trade it even when you don’t, just because you know it’ll make a bigger difference to the team in the hands of another player.
Raiding is a team effort. Anyone who doesn’t understand that can go ahead and do one; I’m not raiding with them!
There is no clear answer to this. It’s a difficult balancing act and one of the hardest things to do when making an MMORPG. WoW has always had the ability to get pretty decent gear outside of raiding or high end PvP by spending a lot of time farming materials, playing the auction house, and crafting. Raiders would get some of the recipes from raids so they’d get their just reward too, even as they spread these great items around the economy.
You replaced all this community interaction and control with lootboxes on a weekly lockout, debased the value of gold via the WoW Token, and completely destroyed the professions by making every decent item BoP and require materials from raiding, so nobody who doesn’t raid could get them, but they can get the little effort titanforges.
As you did this, you destroyed the economy, destroyed professions, robbed raiders of a significant source of income, and debased the value of items across the board.
It’s frankly unbelieveable that we have to explain this to the studio behind Classic. Eherm, sorry regains composure
You should consider everyone. It’s about difficulty. You have to be able to answer questions like “is it harder to do the raid or the PvP title?” The answer probably lies in percentages of participants who complete the activity. The lower the percentage, the better the items - to a degree. There needs to be a cap around the 5% best players mark or so I’d argue, but the higher up you are at the top, the faster you should get your upgrades.
Because you put all the best items on separate weekly lockouts, thus the more different stuff I do, whether I enjoy it or not, the more I will get rewarded. I don’t get rewarded for putting lots of effort into what I enjoy compared to how much I get rewarded for putting a little effort into lots of things.
This is basically your weekly lootbox doing its thing. It needs to go.
Oh. Right. It only affects you if you’re trying to progress through the game without unnecessarily delaying yourself.
I don’t think that’s quite what he meant. I think what he meant is that there’s a huge set of weekly “chores” that give great rewards that he has to tick off, and trying to actually push into any of it in particular doesn’t reward him as much as ticking off the boxes does.
You know what rewards more? Doing both. Specifically, doing 1 warfront, and killing Jaina once. There is no reason to spend any more time in the raid, and there is no reason to spend any more time in the warfront. If you happen to not like one or the other, well you’re just SoL.
Personally, yes - but that’s just me being biased due to playing Mythic.
Absolutely. Back in tBC I couldn’t push the latest raiding content, and thus I didn’t get to see all the content in the expansion, but I still got to see a lot and I had a great time.
People who play less will be behind in progression. That’s fine. Don’t worry about that - you’ve already given them a path to go through. Just throw them a catch-up bone or some open world or easier content every once in a while and they’ll progress to the point where they can do the content that was too difficult before anyway, plus they get the new content.
It matters because it isn’t just about gear. It’s about skill as well. If someone has amazing gear but little skill, you don’t want them in your group. If skill roughly matches item level, then item level is a useful metric for PuG groups - otherwise it is not.
Personally, I don’t think the two should follow along perfectly, but there is a fixation on iLvL in the in-game interface which is not healthy for the game, in the same way that GearScore wasn’t healthy.
I don’t think many people have that, but many people do have full 400+ by just repeatedly running M+ 10, and M+, I’m sorry to say, is nowhere near as hard as even heroic raiding - at least the latter half of it, but you’ve actually made Jaina and Faction Champions drop the same iLvL, which is legitimately INSANE.
There’s a general problem with rewards not matching difficulty, and this is one such example.
Oh yes, this is a common feeling for me. Before titanforging and warforging, I really liked that feeling of “YES DUDE. I GOT THE BEST ITEM. Now I don’t have to worry about that slot for 3 months, because that slot is now awesome!”
It’s fun to reach a final goalpost sometimes; even if it doesn’t last for long. It’s fun to get that best item.
WoW always has plenty to do, but most of it doesn’t catch my attention because it’s too easy or doesn’t lead to a relevant reward.
I certainly feel like there is a distinct lack of hard open world content.
Aye. That’s probably the reason it’s not going away (just nerfed here and there). The casual playerbase is probably substantial enough to warrant it.
The general view is that most of those that are complaining about this system are mythic raiders. There are ofc others who do as well. And at the same time, all mythic raiders do not voice their complaints. All mythic raiders do not hate this version of the system. But many do.
This might come as a surprise to a few people but, most of the mythic raiders that voice complaints about this system, they don’t do it simply because they want to feel special, they don’t want the exclusivity of the best gear just to stand in a major city and show off. Most(not all ofc) mythic raiders couldn’t care less about this. What they care about is knowing that the amount of work they put in, the dedication and the time they spend pays off. The part that gear plays into here is mostly about the fact that they(those that put in the time and work) want assurance of getting the guaranteed best version of the items they do receive. Once they actually get an item.
With a system such as this one, you got to look at it from all perspectives. Because what type of experience a player has with for example the WF/TF-system will depend A LOT on the type of content as well as the level of difficulty they engage in.
Like I said in the original post, I do see the upsides with this system. But that doesn’t take away the fact that there are A LOT of downsides with the system if you look at it from the perspective of some players. I have no delusions when it comes to this. The WF/TF-system is here to stay, but due to the negative sides with it, some improvements can deff. be made to it that have little effect on the part of the playerbase that are happy with the current system.
In general, they are not. At least, this is not the main reason. For many people, the sum of negative experiences are usually why they quit. Some will quit due to a specific part of the game that has a negative effect on their gameplay, however, most people do not.
There are often multiple sides to all problems, or multiple viewpoints I should say. I believe that the system should stay as there are too many upsides with it for the more casual side of the playerbase.
But also, if you change the system to cater better towards those who in general put in more time and in turn want assurances for it, would there actually be a downside to it?
If someone doing for example LFR and get a crazy titanforged item up to what equals max level for that tier. They will probably be very happy. Now, if the max level for a tier is set to be equal to the base item level of gear dropping in mythic raids or if the cap is set 10 ilvls above mythic, this does not really matter as the player who just got their crazy ilvl-capped item will be happy no matter what.
And, if we have certain item slots on where you are guaranteed to have gem slots/sockets on them no matter what ilvl the item you get has. Will this have a major impact on the person who just got their crazy titanforge? Probably not.
In turn, if like I wrote in the original post, only certain items/item slots can have gem slots/sockets and the rest can’t then it wouldn’t really have a negative impact on perception anyway. Why? Because people will know that if they for example get a ring, that ring will have a socket on it. If they get a pair of bracers without a socket, that does not matter because noone else would have gotten it either.
Edit: also gonna echo Ishayu’s reply a few posts up from this. From my experience it’s basically spot on(Ultimately, I can only really speak for myself, noone else).
I think so much gear is thrown at casual players now they really don’t need TF anymore.
To a degree I believe this is true yes. However, we still have the case of: early on in an expansion or when a new tier just opened. Anyone who plays more on the casual side, no matter the catch-up systems we have a this stage, if they get a max titanforge on a new item they’ll still be very happy.
Those who plays higher up on the “hardcore-scale” will continue until they feel that they are done/ready for the hardest parts no matter what. Why? Because they feel that they have to get there in order to help the guild/raid/friends. Putting in a system that quite literally, to a degree, prevents them from doing this. I can’t overstate how negative of an impact this has on these players experiences.
But like you said, when it comes to character progression and to what is actually needed for you(if you play more casually) to overcome any challenges you might face, then no with todays catch-up systems I believe TF is not as needed as it was before.
Very few people like IAPs in games, and yet corporations abuse them. Very few people like lootboxes in games, yet corporations abuse them. Very few people like shallow DLCs, yet corporations abuse them. This is no different.
I don’t get that one. Unpack please.
IAPs, lootboxes, DLCs are direct revenue to the companies that deploy them. The simply make extra money by making the players pay extra for them.
If we could buy Titanforging at the in-game shop, it would be the same, but we can’t.
So what’s the connection?