“guys we dont’like the way you’re playing the game you only get to play it this way”
Getting BIS gear is just another form of a completionist playstyle, by the same logic mount farming, pet farming, HK farming and all the other forms of farming are just as unhealthy
If you’re also against it, stay away from it, don’t adhere to that playstyle, but don’t go around taking the posability from other players while waving a finger at them going “THIS IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH I’M DOING YOU A FAVOUR” because no, you’re not, you ruined something that made this game enjoyable for a large minority
This is probably the best way to put it, you’re giving players who don’t deserve high ilvl gear high ilvl gear, this means average ilvl will go up across the board.
This also means that people will simply ask for more because the people they were trying to avoid were just given a mechanic ingame that allowed them to bypass that selection requirement of ilvl
Because it resulted in high ilvl players whose skill wasn’t onpar with the content they were doing because of a bloated ilvl, io became a thing.
io is the direct result of titanforging being a thing or at the very least not being capped at idealy +10, max +15
“guys we dont’like the way you’re playing the game you only get to play it this way”
Getting BIS gear is just another form of a completionist playstyle, by the same logic mount farming, pet farming, HK farming and all the other forms of farming are just as unhealthy
Look, I don’t care what you do. It’s your time. I’m just telling you that setting unrealistic goals is only setting you up for inevitable disappointment.
There’s more realistic ways you could go for BiS: ignore TF. If you get the best non-forged version of the item you want for a certain slot, then you have your BiS. But unfortunately there are people who will not settle for anything than the best. Sorry, but that’s just not realistic.
I’m not making anyone do anything, because I’m in no position to do so.
I’m just telling people who adhere to such a way of playing the game, that they are setting themselves up for disapointment. If you choose to play this way, fine. But don’t come crying on the forums saying it’s impossible. You were warned beforehand. That’s my point.
It’s not for you to decide who deserves what.
People will ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS go the path of least resistance. It’s basic human nature. Now you’re blaming a basic human trait on TF? Right. Okay.
No. Players being stupid is what caused it. IO should not be a thing. Blizzard should block such info from being used. Imo it’s a breach of privacy.
But this is another topic for another discussion.
This doesn’t match with your earlier arguement where specific ways of filling in someone’s time equals unhealthy behaviour. If you take my quote and give this as a reply yes my quote will look dumb
It’s the games job to do it, it’s the difficulty of the content that is supposed to do that job and titanforging is actively undermining the difficulty system, I’m just pointing a finger at it and saying 'see, it’s happening ’
Players have always been stupid, people have always been stupid, imagine how stupid the average person is and imagine that half of them are even worse, the same goes for WoW. Before they were however never able to get a high enough item level because there was a requirement to getting the ilvl equal to a raid tier which was not being stupid, if you couldn’t get out of the fire no one would take you to the next raid where the next tier of ilvl would drop
Mind you however that it’s not just titanforging, warfront giving 370 gear is just as bad, the real issue is when the reward of the content doesn’t match the difficulty of the content, titanforging is always an addative on the actual reward, meaning it always undermines
Granted most of them have quit the game already but what’s really sad is the fact that this is apparently funny to you that some people had an optional playstyle taken under them just because they wanted to make that guy who can’t differentiate between fire and floor a shot at getting a higher ilvl too
This is actually false, water does this, electrictiy does this, but humans are generally known to take roads of resistence because of the extra merrit that comes from it, if this were true we wouldn’t have science, algebra, maths, the whole package. Psychology aside tho;
Your comment implies that there is no difference between picking the highest ilvl players you get vs setting the minimum ilvl requirement to a height like 20 ilvls above the ilvl reward of the content, I’m not sure if that’s what you intended to imply, but that’s what it’s implying.
To me it feels like this happens;
People who weren’t good enough to overcome the difficulty that was required for the gear are left behind
These people are generally not taken along to more difficult content because they simply do not have the skill to make it past
Thunderforging was implemented as a way to overcome a raidboss a group was stuck at
It became a mechanic that allowed groups to bruteforce what they couldn’t beat by being overgeared
People who had these lower ilvls and skills to go with it suddenly got lucky with this system because suddenly it’s everywhere
They seep into the m+ higher key brackets, loads of m+ dungeons simply fail between specific key difficulties (thought it was 6 to 9) because of the amount of people with bloated ilvls who cannot play as competetively as the content they’re engaging requires of them
People are tired of wipes and an alternative is born (io)
The alternative becomes immensely popular inspite of the fact that we can easily see ilvl
ilvl is now no longer an indicator of skill
ilvl cannot be trusted anymore
I also say it’s not a breach of privacy because I cannot extract personal information of you by that and before you claim that to be personal information as well, I’m talking about what the (or atleast my) law regards as personal information because contractually that’s the only thing that counts
I’m sorry I argue in favour of things I am in favour of instead of being your definition of “objective” (i.e. pandering to what you want without you giving me convincing reasons)
You know, there is a line where your irrational dislike of titanforging makes you look like a complete lunatic. You just crossed it and i don’t think there is any reply to that statement that would lead to a productive discussion on the matter.
That’s fine and all and yes I hate titanforging with a passion but atleast share your wisdom on what you mean with natural progression because I see people here mentioning it without defining it as if it’s already agreed upon on what it means but man I have no clue beyond what I believe to be a natural progression path
I already did and you already quoted me, we’re running in a circle here. It doesn’t mean anything and that’s why nobody defines it, it’s a buzzword people use thinking it gives more weight to their argument, claiming the highground.
It’s the same as using words like “interesting” or “fun” in discussions regarding talents/abilities, nobody explains what exactly makes/made them interesting or fun but it almost seems like they know what they’re talking about.
In general the first thing you see (especially when it’s the only one you know for a long time) makes you think that’s the proper or right way, might even call it natural.
edit:
for example because endgame has been for a long time ONLY raiding, people compare item level with raid progression, even though we now have M+ as alternative.
If from 2004 until Legion we had both raids and M+ available for gear progression and then Blizzard would remove M+ leaving ONLY raiding, people would freak out and say it ruins the “natural” progression.
So natural is whatever you’re used to.
I feel this is the cause. They didn’t like us targeting specific gear which worked best for our specs. So they destroyed the ability to have BiS with TF. However now they have digs about us ‘obsessively simming’ xD.
To my mind, “natural progression” is what you would see in a traditional RPG. You start off with a basic set of gear which you use the overcome a basic challenge. Overcoming that challenge gives you a better set of gear which you use to overcome a more difficult challenge, which in turn rewards you with even better gear, and so the cycle continues.
WoW used to do this very well with tier sets. In Vanilla you started off your end-game gear progression by going into the 5-man dungeons and getting your dungeon sets. This allowed you to go into Molten Core and collecting it rewarded you with Tier 1 gear. After that you went to Blackwing Lair which dropped Tier 2 gear, which you needed to do AQ40 and Naxx.
There was a very clear path of progression for your character and the game would tell you what content your character was suited for by the gear it rewarded. If you were doing content that rewarded you with worse gear than you already had, the game was effectively telling you to do harder content.
This doesn’t apply anymore because of the way gear is distributed and mechanics like Titanforging mess it up even further. In BFA each area of the game has a set difficulty curve which goes as follows:
Normal dungeons → Heroic Dungeons → Mythic Zero Dungeons → M+ Dungeons
Each new level gets increasingly harder and as such drops better and better rewards. The problem is that you can easily get to 350ilvl without ever stepping into a dungeon which ruins this progression. Using the same logic as in previous expansions, if you have 350ilvl the only place you will get rewards is from M+5 Dungeons, which is near the end of the progression curve. You essentially skip past the content that is designed to teach you the dungeon mechanics and go right into the hardcore stuff.
Aside from ruining character progression this has the added effect of putting players into an environment they aren’t prepared for. Your character might be able to do the content, but you as the player can’t.
How does World of Warcraft fundamentally keep you engaged? What’s the core loop?
It is:
Explore
Conquer through combat
This gives items and experience
Unlocks another, or perhaps many, locations to explore
The excitement itself comes from the exploration. When getting an item, it implies that you will be able to do more, and that’s exciting, hence you want items. Items can also be interesting in and of themselves, and of course so can the combat abilities.
This dance of abilities, gear, and exploration is the essence of what makes World of Warcraft fun. I think we all agree on that.
Now, let’s go back to titanforging. Titanforging rewards you, and therefore compels you, to repeatedly explore content you have already fully explored and get items you already have. These items will then have bigger numbers, but there is no exploration of new items or new playstyles associated with them, hence they’re basically boring stat sticks.
What Blizzard has done is base the entire game around repeatable, scaling content, such that you can derive no joy from exploration past a few months. Blizzard already admitted many years ago that WoW’s subscription had become cyclical, and this stands to reason.
Warforging mandates that every item scales with item level, as a system. Thus warforging mandates that all relevant numbers on the item can fully scale. Thus, the range of possibilities for interesting items has been severely limited. So does all the world scaling, but that’s another matter.
Furthermore, an item is supposed to work as a badge of honour for conquering content. If people who haven’t conquered the content you have conquered have the same badges you have, you cannot, in any way at all, derive a sense of reward from the items that are already incredibly boring due to their limited design space due to the scaling.
In this way, warforging, and the technologies that enable it, fundamentally undermine everything that makes items interesting by limiting the design space, and then proceeds to undermine everything that makes items rewarding by handing it out randomly to players who haven’t done the content.
Furthermore, this can put players into a position where they are not ready for the next piece of content, but cannot get upgrades from what they are currently able to do. Thus, instead of realising they’ve hit a roadblock, they start pulling the slot machine millions of times. In some cases, the roadblock isn’t even their skill, but just Blizzard’s design, such as with weekly M+ caches or PvP caches and the like. This is frustrating and random, and the player will never get prepared for greater challenges. They basically get cought in a slot machine in a hollowed out progression system and nothing tangible left to explore. They get bored and frustrated.
This has been explained dozens of times in this thread, but if reading the word “fun” stops you dead in your track unless you have a precise definition, which is almost impossible to do and realistically comes down to genre preferences, then we cannot help you. This is the closest I think I can get to explaining it from the ground up.
We skip much of this now. I can’t remember the last time I bothered doing a heroic dungeon on an alt unless there is a WQ in it that will give a newly dinged an upgrade.
Even on my main we were travelling in guild groups to dungeons to enter heroic manually ( we couldn’t queue for it as we were too low ilvl) a few times, before just switching it up to Mythic 0. We were all undergeared and it was challenging but it was fun with friends.
It’s different from player to player, this is why Blizzard adds all kinds of content, from mythic raiding to pet battles.
TF has the same chance of occuring from all types of content, in no way stops people from exploring. I’m not aware of people who only do world quest or stopped doing anything past heroic dungeons because they got 1 titanforge once and now are running heroics over and over and gearing only from there.
This idea is kinda ridiculous and i don’t see anything to back it up.
Actually an item is supposed to be a tool that makes you more powerful and enables you to defeat more powerful bosses.
If you see items as badges of honor, as trophies to show off, that’s your problem and this explains your distaste of TF. You feel like you can’t stand out now, you can’t feel better than others, you have nothing to show off in order to make people respect and appreciate you. It sucks i guess but in a way it’s rather pathetic if you ask me.
I bet you thought that was really clever, but what you didn’t realise is that pet battles and mythic raiding have same reward loop.
Find and explore pets and their abilities
Conquer other pets through combat
This gives your pets items and experience
This unlocks the ability to go to harder zones or even pet battle dungeons
and thus the cycle repeats.
No, it doesn’t stop you from exploring - it is one of several factors that makes you explore too quickly, to the point where you run out of things to explore.
And don’t tell me you haven’t noticed all your friends quitting 3-4 months into every single bloody patch and then come back for the next one.
Titanforging, and scaling items in general, is Blizzard’s way of making all items exist at all item levels. This is what undermines the exploration of items, and it also makes the game so open-ended that there are no challenges left other than the challenges you’ve already conquered scaled up to match you, undermining your sense of progression.
Also, that 1 TF you get, can undermine your ability to get the item you really wanted. If I want crit and mastery, and I get a haste versa 395 titanforge early in the expansion, any attempt for me to get a 385 drop from Uldir will be cut short because I already have a better upgrade, and that feels terrible.
Actually, it’s supposed to be both. It used to be both until Titanforging came along. Also, calling it pathetic that people want others to know what they’ve achieved without openly bragging about it is itself pathetic. Literally everyone feels this. This is the reason the middle class doesn’t walk around in patched up clothes stinking of piss - because they can.
First of all, you’re clearly not into pet battles, that’s ok just stop projecting your ideas on content you have no interest in.
And secondly are you telling me that WE NEED MORE GRIND? You think there is a magical spot for pacing and you know exactly what is it, or that vanilla devs nailed it on the first try. Again i’m going back to the “natural” discussion, yes we had a slower progression back then but that was due to not having enough content, dev team had less resources to work with and the rate of progress was set to maximize subscription time. Yet you confused this with good game design.
You can still the item you want, what items you have equipped has no impact on boss drops or whatever. At best this is a social issue and i can see why someone in your raid can have priority on that item because of your TF, but this is a different discussion.
Actually it’s because of social norms, but then again that’s real life in a civilized society, this is a game and it’s sad that i have to remind you of the difference.
Just cause you have nobody in your life that respects or appreciates you or the work you do, it doesn’t mean you have to bring that frustration in game by prancing around city hubs in your shiny new gear, literally begging for attention. That’s pathetic.
I’m not projecting my ideas into pet battles. I have no interest in pet battles or to influence them.
However, I know what the core reward loop is. It’s based on Pokemon, which I love, and Pokemon is an RPG.
Depends on how you define grinding. If by grindng you mean doing the same menial task over and over for small gains, then no. If by grinding you mean having a longer progression curve where you get interesting rewards, including items, locations, and powers, over a longer period of time, then yes. And I don’t like how titanforging undermines this.
Firstly, vanilla had more content at launch than BfA, unless you count all the trivial stuff from previous expansions.
Secondly, vanilla had dozens of unfinished or nearly finished zones that were never added because Blizzard agreed, at their offices, that the game had more than enough content already. How do I know this? The World of Warcraft Diary. The developers have literally written a giant book and told us!
I’m not the one who’s confused - you don’t even know the genre of the game you’re playing!
No, it’s not.
Have you noticed that this game contains within it several million civilized people, and that we’re all playing avatars that represent ourselves in a world space?
The exact same psychology applies in this game and in the real world when this game is working as it was originally designed - in other words when this game succeeds as an MMORPG.
I am perfectly capable of knowing what’s a game and what isn’t, but just because I’m playing a game doesn’t mean I have to throw away everything that excites me as a human.
The fact that you believe saying this is indightment against me is most sad than you can possible imagine. You literally just said to me that it was sad that I derive pleasure from advancing myself and being kind and presentable just because I chose to do it in a virtual world, without knowing whether or not I do it in the real world.
And by the way, is anybody else blown away by the irony - or hypocrisy - of taking away reforging, gems, enchants with the excuse that they want people to equip gear immediately, and then coming out with traits so obscure and abstruse that it’s not possible even to estimate their effect without relying on people doing hours and hours of actual testing before they can even be incorporated in a sim? There aren’t enough facepalms for that one.
I’m gonna leave out all your kindergarten responses and i’m sorry you can’t see how the monetization model influenced the progression and pacing of the original game. And yes the base game has more initial content than an expansion, i’m shocked.
Anyway this is rather funny because in a previous post i mentioned how clueless people use the word “interesting” in an attempt to give weight to their arguments but if you really want to go for quantity here, to count the steps in gear progression and new locations, please do so by comparing the end game content of Vanilla with Legion and explain how Titanforging undermined this.
How exactly is titanforging preventing us from having “interesting items, locations and powers”. Or you’re saying that we have these things but we’re getting them too quickly? and even if this true that’s more than your opinion because…? Do you have any idea what you’re even talking about anymore? and is there no end to blaming titanforge?
I think this would be easier if we start with the perceived problems in this game you DON’T blame on titanforge.
It matches perfectly tbh. I haven’t said anything differently. It’s Blizzard that doesn’t want you to do it. I agree with them, but I very well understand that at the end of the day, it’s you who’s paying your subscription and you can play the game any way you like (within the user agreement rules of course).
Agreed.
And here’s where we disagree. Yes, that is how it used to be (and still is for the most part, frankly). It’s your opinion that it’s supposed to be like that. I think otherwise. I like that that archaic way of distributing gear has been partially turned on its head.
Look, I understand where you’re coming from very well. The thing just is; I don’t do higher difficulties. I loathe that whole ‘I’m better than you’ attitude that some players have. So, even though I am against websites such as IO, my opinion on this matters very, very little since I’m not using it, I won’t be using it and chances of me ever getting turned down for specific content is very, very low. I just have an opinion on it, that’s all and that opinion is mainly due to the fact that it helps enforce that attitude I mentioned earlier.
Websites that tell people who’s better? Sounds very wrong and very scary and very reminiscent of certain things back in the late 1930’s early 40’s. I’ll leave it at that.
No, no, you misunderstand. The emoticon was referring to the contradictory terms being used there. ‘A large minority’ doesn’t exist. It’s just a minority. If it’s a large part of the playerbase, it ceases to be a minority. That was all. No malice intended whatsoever.
As for the rest of your points; again, I get where you are coming from.
I’ll stop discussing IO because its existence means nothing to me on a personal level. I’ll gladly keep discussing the merits of Titanforging though.
I’m not sure what you are on about here. In TBC we had a total of 16 unique dungeons and 8 unique raids. At the end of Legion we had 13 dungeons and 5 raids…
Tbh i didn’t make list or comparison so that particular statement may no be totally accurate, however i’m not talking about just raids and dungeons. I’m aware there was plenty of content back in TBC, especially at start.
However your assessment is also misleading, a comparison between the two isn’t as easy. Magtheridon’s lair is a “unique” raid but it has only 1 boss, Gruul’s has 2, there is a lot of difference between raids/dungeons in TBC and Legion, both in quantity and quality, some of the bosses back then in today’s game are slightly tougher trash mobs.
Anyway my point is that today Blizzard has better metrics and has a better grasp on how to pace content in order to keep people engaged. Back then they preferred playing it on the safe side.
