I came here today to state a plain simple fact, which is:
MMO communities hate RNG.
People play MMO’s of our type (WoW, GW2, Rune Scape) because of the grind and consistency, they expect to put in the time and get consistent results out of it. Otherwise, they feel like their time is being wasted and that is the reality of our game right now. They don’t want to worry about whether their loot is going to be ruined by chance. People who chose an MMO as their main game are usually not addicted gamblers but the very opposite, these are people who want to see their goals and path towards those goals guaranteed.
P.S. tell Activision that WoW audience is not like the one they encounter in the CoD franchise.
I agree ashes of al’ar in TBC should’ve just been bought with gold and killing bosses shouldn’t drop RNG loot (which then you have to win against many people, too) they should’ve just made them cost gold becuase I ain’t no gambling addict or anything great idea
I feel like I’ve read this exact thing before, so I’m assuming it was you both times.
Players who ask for vendors are not looking for gold options to buy every single piece of loot.
They’re looking for insurance against a run of bad luck.
It is horrible to run the same raids/M+ over and over again and get nothing. It feels bad to have a glaringly low item that you simply cannot seem to get rid of, or to have an item that you know is amazing for you and it never, ever seems to drop. Most galling of all; it does drop - but for other people, and none of them can or will trade it.
What people want from a vendor is the knowledge that, if they put in a reasonable amount of effort, run their dailies and dungeons for weeks on end, then one way or another they can get the item they want. They want some level of reassurance that no dungeon run nets them absolutely zero returns. It should always be some amount of progression towards a goal, even if it is on 10% per week.
For the height of the game it never worked like that, especially vanilla and TBC where you could go weeks with no loot from raids and dungeons. Even in WotLK vendor gear was nothing but a massive settlement that if translated to today’s items was like settling for an LFR trinket because Heroic just does not want to drop it.
But when people talk vendors they don’t want LFR gear, they expect Heroic, nay saving up for Mythic loot!
Truth is if unlucky people were willing to settle like in ye olde times they’d see that the time they went without their BiS trinket they likely had their chance to settle with less good but still better than LFR trinkets and are in a far better situation than back in the WotLK days.