Unobtainable items and a possible fair way to obtain them in retail wow

Community General Discussion
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The issue of prestige rewards, no longer available items and how to make them available ‘fairly’ to all…

Since the return of the lucky quilen pup to the Blizzard store, a pet you could only get with Mists of Pandaria collector’s edition, there has been a return to the topic of whether being able to get prestige / unobtainable items is a good or bad thing.

On one side, you have the long term players who have been around since the beginning and have completed the required content when it was live, or the WOW TCG collectors who were lucky enough to pull a Swift Spectral tiger out of a booster pack (that now due to the extreme rarity cost anywhere north of $4000 per intact card). The players feel, and to an extent rightly so, that these items have a certain amount of prestige to them and tough luck if you don’t have them. You weren’t around at the time and that’s just tough luck!

On the other side, you have players who have only just started playing wow or people who just weren’t lucky enough to be around when xyz was available. You have completionists who love competing collections and games who now turn away from World of Warcraft because they know it’s a hopeless task. World of Warcraft is 15 years old and there’s a lot of content to miss. Is it fair that they cannot now gain some items due to reasons beyond their control? So from this position I also understand these players’ agitations also.

So the question is, is there any way of coming up with a way to make these items obtainable again whilst not pissing off the player base who legit got them back in the day? I think there is!

So how does Blizzard go about making removed game items available to all whilst ensuring the people who have them don’t feel pissed off. And yes, there will be those people who believe that these items should never be made available to anyone, it’s their toys and they ain’t sharing… Well to you, I respect your stance but i’m also going to ignore you lol.

I believe the answer to keeping everyone happy is to lock the items to the amount of effort you are willing to put into the game. As most of these items were originally locked behind a significant amount of effort or money. And remember, effort = time & time equals money, friend!

So what do I suggest that Blizzard do?

I think this would have to be a real challenge for players to accomplish for anyone to agree that this could be implemented. It would have to be possible yet so hard that probably only a small minority of the player base would have any chance of doing it.

So with that in mind here is my suggestion…

The introduction of the ‘Ultimate Azeroth Legend’ achievement (name up for discussion lol). This achievement would be granted on the competition of the following…

-Complete all currently achievable achievements in current WOW (excluding feats of strength)

-Collect all obtainable mounts, pets and toys

  • Reward - The ‘Ultimate Legend’ title & all unobtainable mounts, pets and toys are added to your collection. Congrats! You have it all.

Now there are some obvious issues here that would need addressing, and in turn would (in my opinion) be good changes to the way RNG works for drops. Currently, the percentage drops on some items is so low that this would never be achievable due to RNG. So I would suggest bringing in a type of luck protection for all drops. With each failed attempt at a drop, the percentage chance of a drop would rise by 0.2% per character. This would ensure that the more you tried for a mount, the more chance it would have of dropping. This would be a percentage increase per character and would not stack account wide. Ensuring that alt runs did not add to the overall drop chance.

I honestly think that this is such a hard achievement to achieve that almost all players would be happy to add this to the game, without taking away from the personal achievements of people who already have these items. It also gives hope to new players and completionists, that although this is ultra bloody hard, that there is hope of gaining these no longer obtainable items.

So what are your thoughts all? Suggestions and (constructive) input is welcome!

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i would love to get the -atiesh-greatstaff-of-the-guardian -Maybe they should add vanilla wow to timewalks as well.And add a questline for timewalking vanilla legendaries. I like to collect legendaries from old expansions, especially if they have a vanity value, or small utility.Alas, it is unobtainable at this point.*sadface *

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I like that there are unobtainable items. Makes the game feel like it has a meaningful past.

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No offence but it sounds like a terrible idea.

On one hand the requirement is crazy (just take nazjatar for instance. It takes more than 3 months of grind to get the hardest achievements and with the RNG involved you may not even get the meta achievement) and on the other hand you’d reward basically more stuff from one single achievement (even if it requires all the others) than from all other achievements combined…

There’s a need for balance and for the reward/investment ratio to be reasonable.

Some unavailable stuff should come back in one way or another (stuff lost in the cataclysm for example), and others shouldn’t imo (unique rewards from challenging content ?).

But offering that as a reward for all achievements is unrealistic.

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it’s a no from me

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You’d have to start off by adding caveats from the get-go. PVP mounts and appearances come to mind as an obvious no-no. And once you define that PVP mounts should stay special because of the skill involved, you’ve set the limit: now nothing else that came from skill should come back either. But that’s the majority of removed items then.

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Couldn’t agree more.

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This is such a ‘‘you think you do but you don’t’’ thing.

The entire reason why people want these items is BECAUSE they can’t have them, thats the entire allure.

If everyone had Benediction, or T3, or gladiator mounts, or ‘‘Famed Slayer of X’’, then they would be completely pointless, and they would be as epic as a questing green from stormsong valley.

Let rare things be rare, thats what gives them their value. Be honest with yourself, no one transmogs into Benediction because it looks good today, it has the pixel count of one boot from BFA, but its because so few people have it in retail that people still use it, so even though it looks like crap it has infinitely more value than something better looking because it is rare.

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@Maarkel: No.

And then the long version… Your idea does not work for multiple reasons… First, not everyone has or is willing to play multiple characters and there are achivements related to that. Second, there are achievements related to professions, not everyone has all professions and if they play few characters, they are not able to get all. Third, there are mounts (and pets) that are available, but depend on RNG and many dedicated collectors still do not have them after many years of trying. Fourth, there are certain things that are only available to part of the player base, but are still available to some. And so on…

EDIT: Forgot something of critical importance… Lots of things have to be bought with real money. Just no.

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How on Earth are people supposed to that? Before someone could finish half of the achievments, the next expansion comes out with more achievments.

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I disagree, I’m a collector, I want theese stuff either because they are cool, or because they are necessary to complete my collection.

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I’m in, even if it’s stuff I already have I don’t mind other people having them.

My life doesn’t revolve around virtual items exclusivity. There are bigger fish to fry.

If it makes people happy, go for it.

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But you can still earn it though.

Yea it’s one month of daily grind but it’s not removed.

This is what I’m saying, make it obtainable. Not easy, not free, but let the people earn it.

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Is it exactly the same pet or is it distinguishable from the original? I find recolours are the best way to reintroduce old exclusives

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If everyone had everything, no-one would have anything.

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There are people who have all achievements (check google, they’re famous, xirev I think, someone else), there are people who have all obtainable mounts (niixten on eu is there or thereabouts, shaker on us is definitely there, possibly more), it’s doable but requires an insane time commitment and in the case of some stuff, especially achievements, you really need to be good at pvp or buy a boost, you will need to get 2.700 arena rating, that’s a thing very very few can do.

And indeed, overrewarding, I wouldn’t mind if some more of those were added to the BMAH, look at the plagued proto, zulian tiger and old raptor, I found them an interesting hunt back in wod\early legion, could do with more, however ofc this only rewards “rich” players, there could be other ways too, example black proto isn’t back yet, used to be in naxx, what about making it a super low drop rate from every boss, timereaver style, 1 in 4.000?

I personally don’t like rng, but we’re looking at various options here, right? Surely a 1 in 4.000 drop where you can do multiple tries each week is better than no chance ever!

I know it was a skill achievement originally but I don’t know how they’d accomplish it again, naxxramas timewalking? And in that case balancing it right would be crazy hard, either they make it so hard hardly anyone can get it or they make it lfr style and it becomes super common!

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Same, even though I’ve missed out on some.

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You know like it or not and rage how much you want, this is the truth:

The sought after items from Naxx 40 and pre-Cata quests unobtainable items were never meant to be prestigeous by purpose, they became it due to design a oversight that few could have forseen that transmog would be added. The real reason Naxx 40 was removed was because very few guilds cleared it back in 2006, so the raid was reworked in 2008 when WotLK came, and was made into a raid in which many would be able to experience it fully. It was never to make items prestigous.

I don’t agree either that items are special when they are unobtainable. What if people were unavailable when these were still obtainable, for example being too young to know proper English to be able to communicate ingame.

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This. We’ve already seen a dozen people wearing the same unique weapon in Legion and it completely broke the status of them.

Some stuff should just remain the stuff of Legend, or it becomes mundane.

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Even if t3 was made exclusive becouse of oversigh its only good. Game have barely any valuable and exclusive items. In fact Blizzard should remove mythic raid tier in moment content becomes absolote becouse its just stupid that players can own same stuff what others progressed towards for weeks.

Nobady absolutly nobady wants old exclusive gear becouse of its looks. People want it becouse they dont have it and others do and most people will always hate when someone have something special and they dont. And these type of players will rather see those items value destroyed than accept fact not having them. Its nothimg but entiltement.