f13.net

I love wow. I still think it's a fun game but after a couple months of coming back, levelling to 90, grinding reps and seeing all the current content I'm just...done.  I know new stuff is coming down the pipe, I'm psyched to see if Vol'Jin kills garrosh but I just can't justify paying $15 a month for this anymore,  there's just not enough meat on the bones for me.

but....I'll still probably bitch about it on the forums  :drill:

Anyone on blackwater raiders want stuff?

Yeah, I hear you.

As much as I've been enjoying MOP (and I think it's the best WOW expansion to date), I'm inclined to agree. I can't find anything terribly *wrong* with the expansion, but I'm just not as rabid about the game in general as I was over the last 8 years or so.

(so is this the 'what went wrong' thread for WOW? Also, insert random circling-the-drain boxing parallel here, WUA-style. :why_so_serious: )

I know exactly what's wrong. The top end content is extremely thin, and it's hidden behind a wall of daily chores.

I don't think that will be the same at all by January 1, but they released an expansion with pretty obvious cockblocks. I don't think many people ranked "reputation grinding" at the top of their fun list, but if you hate it, this expansion will drive you insane. And in the next patch they are adding yet another faction.

Another issue is that they made Justice points essentially worthless. Because everything in the daily grind gives Valor, and the heroics give Valor, and all the Valor rewards are epics, and all the Justice rewards are lower level than the Heroic drops, it makes no sense to use Justice at all. It's a weird middle ground that offers no real benefits.

This expansion released with one raid. It said it released with more, but the second raid didn't open until October 30th, and the final "release" raid doesn't open for another week.

If there was a phrase I would attach to the bad of this expansion it would be "artificially gated for no reason."

There's a reason it's artificially gated: Blizzard is literally incapable of producing content at a reasonable pace.

Ok, "artificially gated for no GOOD reason"

Also if their solution for gearing up for new raids is "Run the previous ones in LFR" or "use justice/valor/whatever to upgrade your ilevel" instead of actually producing new content I'm going to unsub.

It' worse than that. It's "Run the current raid in LFR, then run the SAME raid, to get the same gear only slightly higher ilvl, then do it again"

I was hoping pet battles would be more fun for me and while I like the actual combat, grinding my pets lvl was just no fun at all.  If you don't want to spend all your time in lower level zones you could try the random pvp pet battles but those only award exp on a win so it ends up feeling like a huge waste of time if you're doing it to level.

I log in as little as possible.  I can't put my finger on what's wrong either, if I wasn't in a raid group with people I like I'd have quit by now (even though we have yet to get past even the first raid boss).  The dailies are too much for my OCD I guess.  There is a certain point where getting reputation bars filled is too annoying and tedious to be worth filling up said bars.  I think I will have to wait until they nerf the first tier of normal raiding to have some fun doing that.

I'm also inexplicably annoyed about stuff that doesn't affect me like CRZ and PvP.  My subconscious seems to do this whenever I want to quit a game but don't have enough reason to do so, it will start making me angry about pointless crap until I cave in.  I don't understand why with all the negative CRZ feedback blizzard is sticking with it, their latest post was just their standard "we hear you, we're looking at it but we feel it's fine" nonsense.  I can only imagine they want to pretend it's good because it has an even bigger role in titan.

And with regards to titan I wonder if they will make the same mistake their competitors have by freezing the feature list at the start of development instead of allowing changes based on other games' good ideas.  I really, really want to see cooperative questing while out in the world like in GW2.  The current dailies in WoW make me hate the sight of other people where I'm questing, that's a pretty terrible thing in an MMO.  Every time I saw people in GW2 I was excited because things would go faster and better.

+1

I came back to MoP after a 9 month hiatus, had a blast the first month then just...stopped logging in. I ran the heroics enough to get my ilvl up for LFR (but never got in the few times I tried queuing), got Tillers/Lorewalkers exalted and Klaxxi/Cloud Serpents to Revered, then just decided that sitting in queue for 2 hours while doing dailies wasn't fun gameplay.

Honestly, I probably would have quit Cata sooner but I running a raiding guild so I at least had social ties keeping me in game. All my old guildies either quit or joined other guilds, and none of the raiding guilds on my server play on my schedule (which is the reason I'd started my own in the first place); I was faced with recruiting a whole new guild, server transferring to try to find one, or just not playing WoW anymore.

I stalled out somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd zone; the farm zone just bored the hell out of me.  On one hand, it's the most beautifully crafted environment they've done yet.  On the other, it's just damned boring. 

So boring, in fact, that I leveled a panda monk to 61 and hit the wall in Outland.  Then I started a rogue and I'm currently 35 in the old zones, seeing what they did to each zone's story in Cataclysm.  Sadly, the only reason I'm really playing is because my dad plays.  I feel like it connects us a bit across country to play together, but it's just not enough.  He likes it though.

Query: If you're leaving WoW, where are going?  GW2?  Secret World?  What do they have that WoW doesn't?  Not asking out of spite, but I actually wanna know, cause I'm kinda on the fence too.

Good question.  Not sure I'd go TO anything at the moment...

I'd be willing to try Secret World. If TOR's F2P wasn't so fucking clownshoes I'd check that out again.

Daily quests are the scourge of MMOs. I'm not sure if they were there earlier than that, but I remember the fanfare when they were added in WOW-BC (skyguard/netherwing/ogri-la stuff). Since then every other diku has decided to ape them (lotro with the trophies, rift with the mathosian/shimmersand dailies, swtor with the entire black hole stuff) and it's been turrrible. Srsly, if you want your players to do daily activities, take a look at GW2 - you can get the daily objectives done if you're levelling an alt, doing events at max-level, or doing pvp (wvw). The key thing is that it happens while you are actually playing the game doing the activities that you'd normally do anyway. But I guess that'd be like double-dipping in the fun jar, and that's a no-no or something.

fake edit: GW2 is definitely a great choice (and I do play it still, though not with the intensity I did during launch or during the Mad King event), especially since there is no monthly sub and therefore no 'commitment'. I am also looking at possibly reactivating swtor for a month or checking out the new Rift expansion. Neither of those games are perfect, but they both offer things that WOW doesn't (a decent story in swtor's case, and more interesting / dynamic pve in rift's case)

I still have GW2 on my pc but I feel no distinct urge to play it, I just wasn't impressed with it. Personally, I'm just done with sub based games I think, too many alternatives either F2P or single player.  Been playing a bit of LoL the past few days, still enjoy pvp that is balanced which is something you rarely find in mmo's.

I've started reading non fiction, it's that desperate a situation.  I would kill for an MMO that combined all the good stuff.  I see nothing on the horizon to have hope for either.

I'd disagree that the 90 content is thin. MoP has a lot of end-game content. Most people will get to 90 with 1 or more entire zones worth of quests left to do. Beyond that you have access to:

-a bunch of new dungeons
-3 new raids (yes they aren't open all at once, but they seem to be opening before most guilds finish the previous zone anyway)
-challenge modes
-pokemon
-7 daily faction hubs
-exploration stuff you missed

Certainly more end-game content than any expansion except for maybe TBC (which was almost exclusively raids/dungeons at 70). The problem is that the staples of end-game content continue to get less interesting to old players every year. The new stuff they tried either hasn't resonated with enough of the community (challenge modes, pokemon) or simply aren't fun (tons of dailies). I imagine a MoP where they invested in more dungeons instead of the daily factions, and people still would not have been happy.

The problem is that Blizzard doesn't know how to make compelling end-game content for non-raiders. It just becomes more obvious as people get tired of the other activities they usually did instead of raiding (alts, achievements, collecting).

The raid content is pretty great so far so I'll be sticking around, but I'd be out the door already if I wasn't in a raiding guild.


The best use of JP (for now) is filling out off-spec gear. It'll be nice to have a JP dump in 5.1 via the pet leveling/quality improvement items.

Tera Online :awesome_for_real: :pedobear:

No seriously the combat is a nice change of pace and a lot of the monsters are cool. Unfortunately the rest of the game is pretty meh.

I don't know if there's a point in saying there's lots to do, but most of it isn't fun. Ok...

Would you rather me say it's thin on compelling content? We're splitting hairs at that point. The major issue is that Blizzard didn't provide enough worth doing at the top end. If challenge modes for 5 mans aren't being done by a large part of the population, I guess that shows you how the population feels about "difficult" 5 mans, now doesn't it?

Yes, it does matter. The problem you suggested (not enough end-game content) has an easy solution (make more end-game content). That was the lesson they learned from players at level cap in Cata. The problem that actually exists in MoP (content that exists isn't fun enough) does not have an easy solution.

Everyone can see that the daily quest hubs feel like tedious grinds but it's much harder to determine what content realistically could have been made instead.

I, too, am an MMO burnout-victim. I keep trying new ones that are released, but I never really find any compelling reasons to stick around. I think I'm done with MMOs until one comes out that has more...hmmm...substance? I don't know. It's tricky to define exactly what it is I'm after or what I feel they're lacking.

I still enjoy the game and the expansion, but I have zero desire to log in and play regularly.  I'm in the middle of restoring a car so my weekends are pretty much occupied with that while my weeknights are devoted to family time rather than video games as they used to be.

Having played and dropped everything that's come out lately, I might go back to Rift for their new expansion. The big draw there for me is the deep character system (souls, whatever they call AAs); that's the only thing even on the horizon in the MMO scene that I've got any interest in. Realistically I've just gone back to single player games.

I suspect there will be a resurgence of MMO-like games when our generation retires.  That's the next likely time in my life that I will have to commit to them for the amount of time needed. 

I'll be going to SP/MP PC and console games.

When you can buy ilvl 450 player-crafted balanced-for-PVE PVP blues pretty cheaply, it takes away the point of JP gear almost completely...

Earnings call happens today, couple hours from now.

Every time I see these threads I wonder to myself if it's really more about DIKU than any particular game.

Yeah, dailies certainly have cons, but across the forums I read I see a lot of "meh" in MMODIKU in general.  It seems like every thread's theme becomes, "not this game, but not really headed anywhere else either."

I'm sure most of the people on these boards have played a DIKU (or at least were exposed to them) in the late '80s or early '90s, so maybe this is the natural progression of the genre:  there's only so much character building and internet chatroom monster killing we can take before we're bored with a game/genre/IP it seems.

Everyone has their tolerances.

Lots also seem to dig in and burn out on DIKUs for some reason.  Take 'em slower they last a lot longer.  I'm still enjoying but I stopped TRYING to grind out dailies and do a list of tasks every day.  When you do this you wind-up burnt pretty quickly.. but our achiever brains really push us towards it.

DIKUs are Achiever-crack.  It can hold people for a long time if it's a dominate trait.  The less Achiever they are, the sooner they're going to burn out if that is all that's offered.

Same reason that GW2 is Explorer-crack.  There's all kinds of places and systems for me to explore and it's not all spelled out, as long as I avoid how-to sites.

Earnings were up.

Panda power!

Speaking of how popular (or not) challenge modes ended up being, I've seen tons of new entries on leaderboards on my medium pop server in the last 2 weeks. I've started to see pugs forming for it in trade chat too. It seems like after people finished non-raid content that would provide power rewards for their character (daily grinds) they have opened up to doing content that doesn't. It's a pretty promising sign that we may continue to see CM versions of new dungeons going forward.

Yeah I've just had it with dailies. It is just a chore, not fun. Before at least I had fun running dungeons and knowing after a while I could turn in some points for some decent gear. Now I know I have to get these reps up to get anything good ... it's just not worth it, really that ennui after doing the endgame gear run too many times has just firmly set in and the expansion is only a couple months old and it already feels like pointless busywork. I really like the aesthetic of the expansion, and the questing to 90 was just fun enough, but meh. No longer have the urge to level any of my alts through this content either.

Yep, the grind of daily stupidity has finally wore me down. With SWTOR going F2P on the stories, I'm just playing an agent for the story shit I never saw, and logging in to do my one rep a day I care about.

Even then, I still don't log in every day to WoW. I've got 470 ilvl, so really I only need to log in on tuesdays when my group does LFR.

They did a really poor job with this total denial of daily necessity. The forums continually froth with how they like dailies, and the response from blues is "you don't have to do them if you don't want to."

Yeah, unless you want to just watch those valor points rot. I'm sure that's a lovely way of dealing with your customer's complaints.

I'm so against the rot of dailies I've been converting my pally and DK's  dungeon points into Honour and buying the base PvP sets.

Then I remembered how shit WoW PvP is :(

Why am I still playing this game?

They really need to make it a law that a company can't force you to answer a poll about why you are leaving before you are able to click cancel.  That's just fucking bullshit.

Oh and it's the eigth anniversary day so be sure to log in!

No idea what the gift is since it's broken, at least for people on my realm.  Since they started selling pets they don't give those away anymore so who cares what it is really.

Currently, the 8th anniversary is a complementary Timewarp.  You get to travel back in time to the 7th anniversary, and recieve the exact same in-game mail as last year!

The gift is a buff. You get an item (the WoW icon) in your inventory, and when you click it, you get the buff for 1 hr. The icon stays, so I expect it will stick around until the 8th anno is considered to be over.

The buff is 8% bonus to rep and xp from kills. So it will be most useful to your alts that have not yet reached the level cap.

A lot of people are mentioning that the bonus to rep is only for "rep from kills" (a'la the old tabard system) and does not affect the rep gained from daily quests (the new panda system).  Which severely reduces the usefulness of the buff.

It may be kinda-sorta OK for Black Prince rep (legendary questline) since that only gives rep from killing mobs in two endgame zones. That said, I did a full set of golden lotus / klaxxi dailies once (for scientific reasons only, DO NOT JUDGE ME :awesome_for_real:) and the rep barely budged. At that point I was well into 'fuck this shit, legendary questline or not' territory.

On a positive note, 5 minutes at a banquet table gets you a nice +10% rep buff for an hour during pilgrim's bounty, which DOES work on quest turn in reps.

I got to 431 cooking doing thanksgiving food, and I'm only 48.  Wow I wish I wasn't working I could level my alts even quicker.

How do you do that Thanksgiving food?

I got to 445 on my Panda Monk. Had to hunt a lot of turkeys to cook though. 5 more dailies and I can cook "cata" style.

I'm quitting finally. Been subbed since day 1. My daughter would like me to keep playing but I think she'll have to be happy with us doing Minecraft together instead.

The Blizzard CMs are frantically trying to convince the populace that you don't have to do dailies in order to progress, and that it wasn't a mistake in design.

I've heard this line of reasoning before. I also haven't logged in all weekend because I was actually having more fun playing SWTOR F2P since I'd never seen the Empire storylines. Also, I get to joke with my friends about what's actually hidden because subscription or cartels coins. The running theme is "Oh you want XXX? Ooops, that costs cartel coins!"

To be fair I'm still relatively enjoying the leveling experience. I imagine I'll get heroic geared a bit and then punch out after having a bad LFR experience since I plan on trying to tank.

SWTOR I may sub for a month or so to play a storyline. Dunno what I'll bother spending the cartel coins on.

Except that strictly speaking, they are right, you don't need to do dailys to advance.  A toon fully geared out in iLevel 463 heroic dungeon loot, who is properly enchanted, gemmed and reforged, is perfectlly ready for normal raids, and all of that can be achieved without ever doing a single daily.  And normal raids offer gear equivilents to everything you could get with rep + valor purchaces at revered.

The only things you truely NEED to do dailys for are Tradeskill recepies (if you want to craft the things yourself instead of buy them from someone else).

Most of it comes down to people bitching that they NEED Elder Charms to progress (they don't, they just give you a small edge) and the only way to get them currently is doing dailys.

Here's a few of the laughable things that cost cartel coins:

Want more than one default toolbar? That costs cartel coins.
Want to hide that stupid hat or show your titles? That costs cartel coins.
Want to put up more than 5 auctions? That costs cartel coins.
Want to equip purple stuff? That costs cartel coins.
Want to have more than 30 slots in your inventory? That costs cartel coins.
Want to not have reduced xp gains after level 10? That costs cartel coins.
Want to have sex with a companion? I'm not sure yet, but I'm betting that costs a lot of coins.

None of that stuff costs cartel coins if you subscribe, as he indicated he was going to.

I'm beginning to believe what Blizzard hints at every now and again with "not giving players choices" and just telling them what to do.  Oh?  

You wanted more crap to do instead of sitting in a capital city until you're whisked away by LFD/LFR/HG,WT?  Here's a bunch of stuff, enjoy!
Playerbase response:  "Why u force me?  QQ."

I'm not trying to Grunk this, but people complaining they must do dailies to progress aren't grasping the concept raid content is tuned for 463 IL in Mogu'shan Vaults.  That being said, I know plenty of guilds who can't down the first boss because their players aren't very good.  

I do see the bottleneck at 90 if you blow through the LFRs in one day.  I don't, however, buy into the idea that players are forced to do endless dailies.  Getting a reputation to Honored or Revered just isn't that much work.
  

No, most of it comes down to people earning valor points and not wanting to set them on fire just because they are hidden behind faction requirements, which are in turn hidden behind dailies.

So yeah, if you completely toss out the valor point system, and you rely completely on LFR and raiding lockouts (which you can only do once a week), then yeah you don't need dailies.  :oh_i_see:

It's ridiculous. The toolbar thing has almost made me uninstall the game out of disgust. Let me PLAY the fucking game please. Tradeskills are 100% not necessary to advance or even have fun really, but good luck playing most of the classes with just two toolbars.

Heroics give valor.  80 for the first of the day and 45 for each after that.  Same with Scenarios.  Run one scenario and one heroic a day a *poof* you're at the honor cap in a week.  Except you have to log on every day to do it. (Well, ok 6.25 days.  :oh_i_see:)

Complaints that "I have to do dailies" are related ENTIRELY to valor.  Whiny players who want to sit in the cities and do nothing but queue up for their 7 and be done with the game for the week.  That's all the bitching I see in my guild and on forums about it.  That's not the goal and Blizzard doesn't want that. I'm cool with it, get people out and doing more otherwise the game is a glorified dungeon lobby.

So instead, people are running dailies as a grind, thinking that because you get more valor for ALL dailies it's more efficient. It's not. It's the least efficient way of getting them, but dumbasses will continue to do it and bitch because - hey - they're dumbasses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqBkUqOMacA#

Merusk, the complaints about dailies aren't earning valor, it's SPENDING THE VALOR. That's the part that's hidden behind reputations.

Spending valor is in no way related to complaints I've seen - which admittedly are non-LFR-raider-related.  Valor gear only nets me - an LFR player - 3 pieces as "best in slot" vs LFR equip.   it does nothing at all for raiders as valor is shitty.

You'll see LFR players complaining about ability to cap with 5.1 when they have to hit cap every week to upgrade their gear, which looks to be taking 1500-2000 points per piece, and all pieces can be upgraded.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7004695067
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7200179987
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7200029981
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7200079964

There's some light reading from the last week. They all reference the same issue. Some are pro, some say l2p, some say BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO IT EVERY DAY.

They boil down to the same thing. Rep is hiding valor gear. It's the first time they've done that, and it's a stupid mistake. There's no reason to defend that choice.

It's not WoW unless there's some arbitrary cockblock to endgame content, even if it's "babby endgame" like LFR.

The biggest problem with the whole "rep is hiding valor gear" arguement is that other then August Celestials and Golden Lotus, it really isnt hiding all that much.
If you quest out Towlong and Dreadwastes, you are almost most of the way through honored before you finish.  Even morso if you do it while using a rep booster buff like the one from hallows end or Pilgrims Bounty.  Heck, once the patch comes through and you earn double rep, most people WILL hit revered before finishing those zones.

Golden lotus and August celestials are, admittedly, a bit more of a grind, but even then, I think i was revered with both mid way through the third week of the expantion.

Except that valor gear is not needed to progress.  If you are one of the small minority of people who both A: dont want to Raid and B: dont want to do dailys for rep, then why exactly do you need Valor Gear in the first place, since there is pretty much NOTHING in the game that you might want to do that would require that gear?

Valor gear exists for the PvE player who does not raid.  Raiders have better alterniatives.  And PvErs who dont raid basicly only have dailys to keep themselves occupied.

Nobody is saying you need it to progress.

Here's the issue. Blizzard made an entire system of advancement independent of drops. They called it tokens. Then, the renovated that to valor and justice points that rotate. Then, they've added new cockblocks on gear behind reputation gains. With 3 of these reputations (GL, Shado, August), they can only be accessed by dailies.

So, what you've done is now give out points to people for doing things they enjoy still (heroics, LFR, scenarios), but they are unspendable on the majority of items without running dailies, some of which are cockblocked behind one factions entire set of dailies.

My question is this: if Valor gear exists for the pve player who doesn't raid, and it was available to them for running heroics up to this very expansion, why is it not now? Why is this change good? Better yet, why in anybody's mind would this make the game better?

Because it's always like this at the start of a cycle, and raiders (even LFR-raiders) get to have better gear than those who  don't. That's the philosophy and has always been.  You're only complaining now that you don't raid, it seems.

We had the same bitches about lack of 'quality' purples (which is what valor gear is about) at the start of the last 2 expansions.  When we hit the next raid step, we'll see what happens with Valor.  I don't remember their plans beyond adding in the "level up your gear" VP grind - which is coming in 5.1.

What part of this are you not getting?

1 - They give you valor points
2 - Do dailies or your valor points you earned sit there in a bank
3 - Fuck you noobs

That's the answer? Really?

If you don't do dailies you still have some places to spend VP. There are I think 6 valor pieces that only required honored, which you can get for most factions just by doing the normal non-daily quests while leveling. I think you end up a few hundred rep short of honored with Shadopan unless you are a human, but you could buy or farm the peace-pipe from rare spawns to put you into honored. Those 6 pieces will take you months to afford, so it's not really true that people skipping dailies have nothing to spend their valor on.

You can also convert it to other currencies, spent it on pvp gear (which doesn't suck for pve in MoP), or cap and save it for the VP upgrade system in 5.1.

Personally the dailies did feel mandatory to me as someone who raids but I wouldn't have dealt with them otherwise. My panda shaman alt is almost 90 and I have no plans to do non-Tillers dailies on him even with the rep changes.

Run dungeons for full 463 > Run MSV LFR for upgrades > Run HoF LFR for upgrades > Run ToS LFR for upgrades. This is the easiest upgrade path for characters that aren't in a normal raid team and it doesn't involve dailies. If you want to accelerate it you can go for the honored VP pieces, but I don't know why you'd rush if you weren't doing normal raids.

To "finish" a character so you can move on to the next, most likely.

The biggest issue I have with that system is this. If you are going to make it tough to spend the points, just don't give them out so freely.

Why? Its not like there isnt: A: A weekly cap on how many you can earn and B: a maximum cap that further limits the ability to hoard them. I mean, sheesh, most of the heavily "gated" Valor items (head, chest, Legs) which are available only at revered require 2250 VP.  Thats 2.25 weeks worth of Valor.  If you have not managed to get at least one faction with valor gear to revered by that time, you are not really trying.  Klaxxi / Shadowpan are like 1 week to revered provided you quest through their zones at the same time.

I think quite a few players find the grind to Exalted to be weary.  My objection is the epic pieces are gated behind Exalted rather than Revered.

This might be part of the argument lost in our discussions at present.

That being said, I still think the idea of forced dailies is stupid.  They're not forced unless you force them upon yourself.  But, maybe since players are so achievement-driven it's Blizzard's fault they feel forced.  Kinda like I feel obligated to eat all my super-size fries and drink my bucket-o-soda.

Why should you have to "try" now. You didn't have to try to use the points before, cap or no cap. You just went to a vendor and spent them. Why are you defending this change?

It's not a great change but it's hardly the game-breaking issue you're making it out to be. If you do not want to do dailies, spend a couple months worth of VP on honored VP pieces or PVP gear. The end.

I also think you're exaggerating how easily VP is being given out. If you do the dungeon daily for 80 points (which was only recently buffed to 80 iirc) *every day*, you're at 560 VP. If you do both halves of MSV LFR that would only bring you to 740. That's doing all the "weekly" content you could be expected to do without doing dailies, and it's not even 75% of the cap.

The daily factions are not mandatory, especially if you are not trying to do any harder content that the gear would actually help you with. Remember that the VP gear won't even help you with Challenge modes because it is scaled down to 463. It helps you with raiding but if you're doing LFR the help isn't really necessary.

The bigger problem with MoP dailies is that they aren't fun, and they were billed as being revolutionary compared to the dailies from previous expansions. Turns out they are just the old daily quests from previous expansions but with *slightly* more quest variety between days and the occasional NPC assistant that makes the quests more difficult. As the primary format of solo content at 90, they're terrible. Fortunately, they're also pretty easy to ignore.

No epic gear is gated to exalted that I am aware of.  All of the exalted rewards are cosmetic (mounts, Xmog hats, tabards, and other fluff).  All of the Valor gear is available at either honored (for rings, capes, bracers and necks) or Revered (for everything else).

Why shouldn't you have to "try"?  Blizzard has quite clearly explained why they made the change.  They felt that having dungeons, which already reward you with gear, also reward you with valor AND rep at no additional effort was putting too much reward into one basket.  So they split the rep off and made it it's own little thing, then put the valor behind a bit of rep gating:  You still get gratuitous valor for running dungeons, but now you have to do at least a small amount of work in order to cash in that reward.  I really see no problem with it.  Especially since the "grind" to revered so you can spend the stuff is only really a grind for 1 out of the 4 factions (Celestials), with the other 3 being relatively easy to hit revered.

Glad yall think it's a great decision. It's not, and they will change it eventually when they pull their heads out of their asses over the backlash.

What horrifies me the most is how quickly some of you are to jump on the "it's just a little rep grind, get over it" bandwagon. Rep grinds were and always will be one of the dumber things they put into these games. And guess what? In the next patch we get another one.

That's not content.

Exalted Klaxxi and Golden Lotus get you a free 489 ring/necklace. Going from revered to exalted for these items was soul-crushing, and I'd have been much happier if they stuck with their original goal of having exalted rewards be 100% cosmetic.


Suggest alternative solo content would keep people subscribed (in other words, is repeatable) and wouldn't completely annihilate the time/budget of the game or accept dailies as business-driven content that isn't your cup of tea. You know, like raid content designed to be wiped on or farmed for months worth of subscription-fees. If the content isn't your cup of tea, don't do it. My partner hates dailies and has done exactly 0 of them in MoP. He's still progressing just fine using the other paths available for gear and the VP gear unlocked at honored.

For what it's worth, I actually liked the Tillers dailies. Quick, easy, and with a decent feeling of story progression. Anglers dailies were also a nice goal-driven way to level fishing. Not all the dailies factions were bad. I think it's possible for WoW to feature daily quests hubs that aren't completely awful.

They clearly tried to do the same thing with the other factions, but in an effort to make them last longer then gave the quests really pitiful rep returns. I think the "correct" reputation design for MoP would have been exactly what we got but double the pace.

Well, I also wouldn't cry if they removed August Celestials rep from the game. Some of those quests are actually pretty cool, but another two factions after Klaxxi/GL is a tough pill to swallow and I don't really get the story logic behind the rep in the way that I do for all of the other factions.

That's a bit of a stretch to lump the two quest reward epic rings in as gated content.  Especially when there are valor equivilants at honored.  If that was the ONLY place to get epic rings for non raiders, you might have a point, but it's not, so you really dont.  Those are free rewards for reaching exalted, not gated rewards (like honored / revered Valor gear)

Here's some better ideas than rep grinding Blizzard should add:

Solo scenarios. Why do these have to be with other people at all?
Renovating old dungeons/raids to offer other cosmetic rewards for clearing them solo (they are sort of doing this in the next patch with pets).
More daily server contests like the fishing thing. Perhaps a scavenger hunt on the server.
Better stuff in archeology like finding buried gems or trade items occasionally.
Add a gambling game or interface so people can play simple dice games with their gold or something.

Well, that's the point: they're completely free rewards equivalent to the VP ring/necklace. Reaching exalted is like being given 2500 VP to spend on other stuff. That's half a month worth of VP. It's certainly better than what you get at revered for any of the factions, which is only the ability to spend VP on other items.


-How would solo scenarios be any different from phased daily quests (which there are quite a few of in MoP)? What makes you think people will repeat them when they won't repeat regular scenarios? Do you really think scenarios cost the same to make as daily quests?
-This is a cool idea, but it is not character progression at 90. It would be unpopular compared to daily quests that do offer gear rewards for the same reason challenge modes didn't gain any steam until people finished the daily grind. Power rewards are more appealing than cosmetic rewards to most players.
-I hear mostly bitching about the existing contests. I don't think solo content that you have to schedule your day around is what most players that daily quests are targeted at are looking for
-Archaeology isn't character progression either, and it is fucking terrible. I think this is the only thing they could have done that would be less popular then the daily quests we got.
-Blizzard has been wishy-washy on whether they want to allow gambling, but I also don't see how you would consider this solo character progression.

Dailies aren't perfect but there's a pretty good reason they're in the game instead of something better.

LOTRO doesn't have that many Skirmishes in total but they're infinitely more fun as a repeated daily type activity than daily quests are, and they're mostly fully soloable. It blows my mind that WoW hasn't stolen them yet.

Scenarios aren't a bad design at all, the problem is that the rewards are crap for the time invested. If they gave appropriate rep, it could be a start. The only good daily is something that happens while you're having fun and isn't mind-numbingly repetitive, see GW2 or daily BGs/dungeons. Normal daily quests can die in a fire. (I've posted this about 2-3 times in other MOP threads already, but eh :p)

You should spend them on the gambling boxes, win a throne, and lord it over Ingmar.

If it weren't for signing up for twelve months for Diablo I would have cancelled already.  I hate daily quests. It's way too much like busy work.  On the other hand I'm quite happy to run dungeons with a tabatd for rep.  I run MV LFR which is a nice way to build loot but I don't play every day so capping VP is not possible.  All I ask is some way to progress that doesn't involve pecking the right buttons for a pellet.  I can't imagine I'm alone in that either.

Guess I level an alt until the nerf comes

The only ones left playing are rapidly becoming the ones who don't care about the changes.  You're arguing with a self-selected audience, Don Quixote.

Yeah, I suppose that's true. I tilted at windmills over the logic of the Cataclysm decisions though. To me, when the actual blue responses to a heavy portion of their gaming timesinks (rep, dailies, dungeons, or raids) is "you don't have to do that if you don't like it," I lose my mind a little.

I have to believe (and this is because I think they really do listen to their metrics) this is because most people don't mind dailies.  However, I'll admit the detractors are more vocal than other parts of the game.  I'll go out on a limb and say 15% of subscribers hate dailies.

But, if people hated them that much and Blizzard was wasting time making content nobody used, there's no way they'd inflict their subscribers that pain again in 5.1.

I'm finding the dailies to be enormously stupid.  I always did, but there were never this sheer amount of them with so little extra content.

Also, the grind for dragons and gardens and all that other shit....phew, it's a bit of a mess for me.

They aren't wasting time. Implementing rep grinds and dailies take no time. You essentially toss a hub out there with 10 rotating quests on it, attach a faction to it with a reward table, and you're done. There are no new art assets, no new crap. What's holding up the patch now is the new scenario stuff that goes with the new faction and dailies.

So in 5.1 we get more scenarios, new factions, more dailies with rep grinds, and a brawlers guild thing only a few people can join early on.

Scenario's while seemingly neat just felt like such a waste of time when I did them. The reward was just not there, in the time of one scenario I could do an entire hub of dailies which yielded much more reward in terms of valor/rep and items dropped from mobs.

5.1 was in development before they even had feedback on the dailies, it was too late to remove the whole faction the patch revolves around.  They are putting in some things to ease the rep grind to try and help.

I want to re-iterate that I don't hate the dailies themselves, I hate trying to do them when there are ten other people around me doing the exact same thing.  If it was a group event where instead of me having to pick up 8 swords everyone in the area had to pick up 30 I would enjoy them.  It would also be nice if the available dailies were randomly set per person/group instead of the whole server.  There are three or four different sets of shado-pan dailies, they should all be active but once you or your group talks to the first npc you are randomly assigned a set.  That would at least spread people out.

Wouldn't need to do the latter if the former were implemented.

While it's true that 5.1 was in development even as Mists was released, the patch itself STILL hasn't been released. It's been two months now, and the patch isn't adding raid content. I can understand holding thing back if they involve new tiers or whatever, but this? Even why they try not to take too long, they take too long.

Not sure if that was strictly true.  There were a LOT of dailys you could do in Cata.  You just had a 25 per day limit so you had to pick and chose which ones you wanted to do.  Then blizzard decided to release MoP with even more dailys, but remove the cap.  And once they removed the cap, everyone seemed to just turn into pellet gobbling crackheads with no self controll.  And then they bitch at Blizzard because it is some how Blizzard's fault that they cant pace themselves.......

I did precisely zero dailies in Cata (never even unlocked the Molten Front). Ditto WOTLK (never got past 'aspirant', haven't done anything with oracles/kaluak, etc.). I did the ogri'la and skyguard dailies in BC... in fact, that was what broke me.  :why_so_serious:

My annoyance is precisely about dailies being thought of as 'good content'. They're not - they're tedious busywork that offers little challenge and gets repetitive no matter what kind of random element is introduced (random companion, maybe the mob you need to kill chooses a special attack from a list of 4 every day, etc). I don't want to spend an hour a day on chores, tyvm. I don't really need the rep except for Black Prince, which requires you to grind a whole lot of mobs and you need it to advance the legendary questline.

I've said this a kazillion times, but the ONLY good way to do a 'daily quest' is by tying it to activities the player already finds fun, and accomodate as many playstyles as possible. Ideally a daily 'quest' would be something that you complete while travelling around the countryside hunting for nodes (if you're tradeskilling), killing enemies / winning BGs / arenas (if you're pvping), killing dungeon bosses or raid bosses (LFD, LFR), defeating some different types of pets (if you're doing pet batles), etc. Maybe even farming mobs, if some people find that fun. GW2 has the 'daily quest' problem solved pretty well: it's an account-wide mini-achievement where you have to defeat 15 different mob types, participate in 5 dynamic events, harvest 20 resources, and kill 60 enemies. All of those happen naturally while dungeoning (except for gathering), solo pve at max-level, levelling an alt, or pvp (wvw).

Pretty much that.  People used to bitch about "level an alt," being the endgame, but I'd take that over grinding dailies.

Some more character transferable shit between rep/token/profession systems would be very nice too so you don't have to deal with the entirety of the gear grind suck every time an alt hits max level.  It remains to be seen what Blizzard does with the blue pvp sets as tier inflation sets in, but a Blacksmith/Mining main definitely won't help gear up a mage alt.

In cata i seem to recall that after a season or two of PvP gear, they released a new set of patterns for craftable PvP gear (same mats, higher ilevel) so fresh newbies could get in without getting completely curb stomped by people in season full season 4 or whatever gear.

I imagine same rule will apply to MoP, and probably all expantions going forward.

My 1-year sub is up at the end of December. I've still been playing a bit, but it might be time to go back to other PC games when it hits. I'll come back to WoW in 6 months or so when 80% of the current bullshit has been removed.  :awesome_for_real:

Not quitting in anger or disgust, more a "fuck that daily-grind noise - I've got better ways to spend my time!"


edit -

I don't actually hate dailies. They're ok, but I preferred running dungeons for rep. If they allowed it both ways, I'd be reasonably happy. Well, except for the pitiful rate of some of the faction rep gains. "Mandatory" dailies can go fuck themselves and just result in me playing the game less and deciding not to renew my sub when the time comes.

Mmm, all this talk about rep grinds fills me with nostalgia and makes me want to buy MoP for the Xmas holidays...

I am ready for 5.1 to hit, and I'll get another 3 weeks out of it until the holidays. Then I'll probably take another month and change off until they put in something else new for 5.2 patch.

I can't believe it takes this long to add so little content. Did they literally move everyone to Titan or whatever the next expansion is?

I just want 5.1 so I can go into old raids solo and get my stupid dressup sets.

Yeah I want to do that too. I also want to do the new scenarios to see whatever the "story" is for the Sha of Why is this taking so Long?

If you've still got DIKU cravings and are tired with WOW, RIFT's new expansion is pretty amazing imo.  I suggest giving it a shot again, so many QOL additions and you don't even have to quest grind anymore.  I went from 1-50 in about 35-40 hours.

On the one hand, the MoP quests suggested that fleets would be arriving in "two months" and 5.1 will probably be arriving right around that mark. On the other hand, if it is taking them this long to do a small patch like 5.1, what does that say about the timeline we can expect on larger patches like 5.2, 5.3, etc.?

I remember hearing about the exalted rep changes and thinking "I wonder if I should just wait for the change before doing Klaxxi/GL exalted". I expected that change to go live two weeks later, not two months later.


Let's not pretend the new Rift expansion doesn't have it's own ridiculous grind problems. They toned down on the number of story quests per zone, so you aren't just reading a bunch of filler text. That's a good change. However, to make up for this, they added "Carnage" quests which are just simple kill quests without any story component. It seems like there are 5 "kill 16 of X" carnage quests for every 1 regular quest and it is completely sapping my will to play the game not unlike the daily quests in WoW when I was doing 5+ factions.

The housing system is pretty awesome though, "gameplay-relevence" be-damned.

Draegan's in FOH, correct?  I wouldn't suspect his experience is going to match the typical user experience. 

I can usually tell which games I won't enjoy when Draegan makes a fansite for it.

In name only, I play the game casually right now. I actually don't play any MMO hardcore at all these days.  Not enough time.


Sure, but that's the nature of the genre: being grindy.  I just actually enjoy the ideas of hunt rifts, onslaughts and other events they put into the game.  There is also a decent amount of 5-10-20 man dungeons.  Trion really did a great job improving their formula and the classic DIKU game.

The only thing the game is lacking, imo, is a LFR system. 


Seems about right.

I'm really spinning my wheels on MMOs- I can go back to LOTRO for about a week every six months (running around the Shire on beer quests is oddly relaxing), and I actually booted up Warhammer Online the other day.  Still fun in T1, but the game is down to one server.  I'd still probably play WAR somewhat if they had went F2P a couple years ago and maintained a stable population.  

Shocking no one, Greg Street released comments in an interview that MMO Champ summarized about Dailies and Questing. Turns out having so many reps and grinds probably wasn't a good idea!  :oh_i_see:

•Blizzard may have overdone the daily quests a little bit in pursuit of the goal of always having something for players to do when they log in. If they had to do it again, something like the Golden Lotus unlocking more and more areas would have been changed to just unlock a new area that replaces the old one, keeping the number of quests that you have to do every day the same.
•Golden Lotus and Klaxxi have enough daily quests to burn players out, while August Celestial and Shado-Pan have a more reasonable amount of quests.
•Lowering the rep requirements on some of the rewards was an attempt to make the amount of rep required before you could spend Valor Points more reasonable. If they had to do it again, it might have been nice to lower the requirements on some of the gear more so that there were some things to spend Valor Points on without grinding so many reputations.
•Historically, players would use alts as something to do after they were mostly finished with what they wanted to do on their main character. Mists of Pandaria's goal was to provide enough to do so that you never ran out of things to do, which is nice with one character, but less nice with many. Solutions to this problem are being looked at, but they want to avoid the extreme of giving every character everything or making everything account wide.
•One alternative being considered for reputation leveling is bonus reputation from your first scenario of the day.

On the bright side, it's only a couple of months and a minor patch in rather than Cataclysm's "year later and 2 milllion subs down" so they are paying attention this time around.

Now just double all rep gains from MoP dailies and then double Golden Lotus again.

He also said he realized that having people compete for the same spawns in the dailies sucks and that people should enjoy other people around not hate it, so hopefully we will get some GW2 type stuff.  That would be a major change and I imagine it will only happen come the next expansion.

Having to compete for spawns in the dailies sucks.

But it shouldn't be news to Blizzard. We've been competing for daily-quest spawns since BC.

Some kind of geographically based auto-grouping, a la GW2, would be an awesome thing for Blizzard to steal. Can you imagine this reaction: "What? Today's Iron Paw daily is Fatty Goatsteaks? Huzzah! I can't wait to get up there!"

It's odd that the only time I'm NOT excited about fatty goat is in WoW.

Oh that sounds interesting to me. I have avoided GW2 because I just don't care much about pvp anymore. But explorer crack sounds good.

Ghostcrawler Interview: http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3043-World-First-Pandaria-Raider-Dev-Interviews-Patch-5-1-Hotfixes-Blue-Posts-Comic

-A rough idea of how long patches will take: 2 months for a content patch and 4 months for a patch with a new raid and PvP season. This is just a rough target, as there are many factors involved in determining when players are ready and the content is ready.

Cool, a timeline!

-Raids may not see progressive nerfs this time around, as there are multiple difficulties and catch up mechanisms. It is likely that raids will not get any easier until at least Patch 5.2.

Welp. Can we just fire Ghostcrawler already because I can see where this is going. You're really fucked if you're a normal mode raidgroup that isn't on the cusp of being heroic-capable. People not in a raiding guild or not good enough for normal will likely stick with LFR and be fine, Grognards get their special snowflake content, normal raiders get to...grind fucking valor to marginally upgrade their gear and run LFR as their "nerf" mechanism if they're stuck on a cockblock boss or have to do what a lot of guilds do and sub people in/out who may not be as good or have as good of gear.

-Patch 5.2 will add some new architecture, geography, and a new story. A new raid is planned that will hopefully be similar in quality to Ulduar. There will also be more daily quests!

If this brings back tiered raiding in any conceivable way I'm out.

Also I guess here's more Ret Pallies than Rogues now...do rogues really suck now or something?

My dad started as a casual in early 2005 and got so far as to LFR in the last xpac.  He just let his sub lapse for the first time since then and was asking about Xboxes.  If he's dropping out, that's a bad sign for WoW.  I always pictured him as the exact middle ground subscriber they wanted to keep. 

I'm just mad because it always comes back to what killed my release-day guild. In the end it became about satisfying a minority of the playerbase, and ended with my guild having to tell people who flat out could not get better, "welp sorry we can either not raid at all or raid without you, because the content just isn't getting done with you in the group no matter how fun you are to play with".

Now those people have the alternative of "well you can check out the content at least but only with 24 random assholes who will hate you."

My "first to level" was:

Day 1 Vanilla: Hunter (Horde)/Pally alt (Alliance)
TBC: Shaman (Main)
WotLK: DK
Cata: Pally (now Horde since WotLK)
Pandaria: Rogue (youngest 'toon but had inscription)

I ditched my rogue as soon as I hit 90 but the writing was on the wall at 88. Terrible DPS and a whole heap of no fun to play. Every other 'toon saw action throughout the Core and X-pacs but rogues are just a whole heap of no fun. My Ret Pally on the other hand hits like a truck and is a whole heap of fun. Even more so than my DK (but can't solo content the way the DK can

Guild rewards killed my guild in Cata. Everyone wanted to raid after we had fun in LK, but everyone also wanted to work with their own guilds instead of with groups of guilds. And if your guild couldn't raid people just joined bigger guilds that could. It sort of reversed all the work that the smaller guilds had done to combat the Uber-guild concept of Vanilla and TBC. Nevemind that fact that the Cata raids were hard enough to cockblock them and they ended up quitting anyway.

Now we have LFR and nobody even wants to bother with the regular raids. The difficulty isn't worth going through all the fucking bullshit for most people when all they wanted was to be part of the process.

Not necessarily, it really depends on how much content they can pump out and how fast. My guiild finished T11 and then took a ~1 month break before T12 rather than working on Heroics. Nobody was really depressed about this because T11 had been long and very satisfying. There were enough bosses that, even if you were moving slow, you were making progress.

We're currently working on Garalon in HoF (so 6/6, 2/6, 0/4). I don't really expect that we'll work on heroics much, I think we'll finish the tier on normal and then take a short break. That's more satisfying than struggling on slightly-different but harder versions of the fight that often have very specific class/spec advantages.

Tl;dr: Progressive nerfs don't matter for normal guilds if the normal mode content lasts long enough without cock-blocking. This doesn't really work if we get short and shitty raid tiers like we got in Cata, which will be more likely as the expansion moves on.

They haven't fired Ghostcrawler yet?

My rogue is my 2nd 90.  While you still have the roguish parts of stealth and pick-pocket there's little else you gain from such a squishy melee class.  Druids and Monks wear leather too but have more survival tools and self-heals that are worth a damn.  With druids being able to stealth as well you can't really use the old "it would unbalance pvp!" crutch there.

Plus there's a shitload of AOE fights in Pandaria. Not just mob trash but bosses as well.  Rogues continue to blow at it. Your rotation is "Spam fan of knives, then your new crimson tempest AOE."  Woo.

There's parse info here (http://www.noxxic.com/wow/dps-rankings/realistic-dps) that shows them being bottom to middle of the pack, while actual parses shown here (http://www.raidbots.com/dpsbot/) say Combat is top 5. 

Still, to do ANY kind of decent dps you've got to keep all your short-duration buffs & Debuffs up.  Recoup, Rupture - which can't be ignored without fucking yourself, thanks GC! - , and Slice & Dice are all "Must maintain."   Juggling so many short-duration buffs when also juggling such a very small resource pool and worrying about positioning and survivability makes things far too complicated for a melee class.  It's a lot of bullshit to micromanage, boiling down to not fun at all.

No, and he's pretty desperate to slip his beloved Tigole/Furor original vision of WoW back in despite literally being publicly shamed for it with Cata.

It's still really baffling to me that you guys lay that 'vision' at GC's feet when he's the one who implemented all the shit that fixed it in Wrath.

I don't know how viable they are compared to other classes at 90, but I lost interest in my rogue after seeing the new talents. They're incredibly boring compared to every other class, mostly consisting of talents rogues already had but now have to decide between. It seems pretty clear that the developers weren't feeling inspired about Rogues in MoP and players have responded accordingly.

He was class designer in WoTLK and despised by the classes was in charge of for simply not knowing shit about them.  Now he's lead systems designer and you can lay a whole lot more at his feet, so it happens.

GC isn't in any way, shape, or form responsible or attempting to harken back to the original state of things.  He's responsible for the newer and occasionally very shitty things, like a bar full of cooldowns that don't actually cool down so much as they randomly reset.  Hope you're watching your bar: where all the important things are happening; rather than the rest of the screen.

There is that, and the fact that they took pretty much all of the difficulty out of playing a ret paladin, makeing them one of the easiest mele dps classes to play.

Ret now goes sort of like this: 
Single target? Put up your single target seal, Judge + Crusader Strike + Templar's Veriict at 3 pts + Exorcism whenever it lights up / comes off cooldown.  Keep up Inquisition.  Use wings / GoAK as needed.  Use Procs for TV or Inquisition as best needed.

AoE? Put up AoE Seal, Judge + Hammer of Righteous + Divine Storm at 3 Pts + Exorcism (with Mass Exorcism Glyph) whenever it lights up / comes off cooldown.  Keep up Inquisition.  Use wings / GoAK as needed.  Use Procs for DS or Inquisition as best needed.

There is literally almost no thought or real rotation changes needed when switching between AoE or Single Target Dps for Ret now.  You just change seals, and swap two buttons in your rotation.  It's kind of silly.

Managing inquisition can fucking die in a fire. Fuck mechanics that make you micromanage every actual second of gameplay.

You know, I was going to say this a few days ago and didn't.  But now that someone else has said it, I'm going to as well.  With Ret being really the only last class I enjoyed playing, this single spell is one of the reasons I don't play anymore.  I can't stand the micro involved, and without it I'd have a nearly perfect class to play. 

Oh well, cry more I guess. 

Eh, just get a mod like weak auras / power auras, toss off a quick display show your inquisition buff with a countdown timer, and use the Inquisiton glyph that doubles the duration on it.  Unless you are in a guild that requires you tweak your DPS to the max, no one is likely to notice the small dps loss from the glyph, and then Keeping inquisition up does not seem like that much of a chore.  Hell, compared to shit like managing the dots or other crazy shit half the Caster classes have to put up with, paladins have it in fucking easyland.  (I tried to bring my mage out of the backbench back in cata, and managing fire dots for combustion nearly made my head explode).

Maintaining short-duration self-buffs was what drove me away from playing feral dps on my druid back in WOTLK (fuck you very much, Savage Roar) and what makes playing a brewmaster tank overly busy and annoying (100% uptime on shuffle or you're a scrub!). Ditto rogues and slice/dice.

Dont try tanking on almost anything now then.  The new "active mitigatation" model they switched to turned just about every tank except DK's into cooldown watchers.  I am about ready to ditch my druid's guardian spec simply because constantly having to keep track of Savage Defense on top of every other survival cooldown is beginning to drive me nuts.  At least some of DK tanking seems to be "predictive / reactive" with trying to time your deathstrikes to occur after big damage spikes.  Paladins / Warriors / Druids now seem to be more of a "make sure to keep maximum uptime on your Block / Dodge buff or you go splat", which gets old quick.

It was enough to make me switch to fury as a long-time warrior tank. As per usual, they missed the point about tanking with mechanics. They tried to make dps matter more for threat, but tanks don't want to constantly manage their threat. Then they swung the pendulum all the way back to "active mitgation" so you're not worried about threat at all, but you have to spam all your cooldowns constantly. Great.

Honestly I'm surprised I'm not seeing more discipline priests about.  I hit 90k HPS on stone guard last week while two healing.

We're ridiculously broken if you can micro your rapture procs.  I can time it correctly to get 40k mana back off of one proc.

You don't have to do anything, especially as a warrior/paladin/bear tank, unless you're doing CMs or normal+ raids. Your passive mitigation is still high enough that you can roll though most content. Hell, with warriors in particular your rotation hasn't even really changed. You're still clicking the same abilities at the same times.

-Thunderclap to start fights? Check, only now you don't have to rend first
-Shield Slam on CD? Check, only now it generates rage
-Revenge on CD? Check, only now it generates rage
-Devastate on spare GCDs? Check, still your filler
-Shield Block on CD? Check, only now you decide between a damage absorb or guaranteed blocks.

Ultimately it's not a change to what you're pressing, only what the results are.

I can't understand anyone who looked at tanking in Cata and said "this is awesome". 90% of your abilities were about generating extra threat and a pitiful amount of damage when threat no longer mattered. You were a punching bag that might as well have been afk.

This is the model the game should have had in TBC onward, where the defensive role's abilities were actually about defense. If you don't like it, for some strange reason, the good news is that you can ignore it and still do fine. If you actually want to do more than press 2-3 high-threat attacks on CD, you now have that option.

Could always try a Jedi Guardian.  :why_so_serious:

Yep I did that at release.  :oh_i_see:

Yeah, but that kind of emphasises the point you are missing.  They designed pretty much all the baseline MoP content so that any even vaguely tankish class can "tank" it relatively successfully.  A fury warrior with a shield or a feral druid in bear form is just as effective as any tank for most non-raid content, hell, if they let Demonology Locks queue as tanks, they could prob tank heroics with their demon form glyph.   But once you actually get into a raid, you must be a tank, and as a tank, you spend the entire fight micromanaging your cooldowns to make sure you have maximum effective uptime on your baseline survival cooldowns or you die (or put an inordinate amount of stress on your healers).

In Cata, as a bear, I often rolled around with a baseline dodge of around 35% active all the time, and could hit 40-45% when procs from trinkets or enchants fired off.  In MoP, I have a baseline dodge of something like 12%, which means I have to constantly manage Savage Defense or i go splat pretty quick.

LFR also makes it so that only 2 tanks are needed, but 5 tanks equivilantly would be needed for dungeons. The math still sucks.

This isn't really any different from how any of the other roles already function though. If you don't do your rotation use your cooldowns correctly, you will do less damage/healing to the detriment of your group. It doesn't matter if you're facerolling keys for LFR or Heroic 5-mans, but it's going to cost your group if you try it in CMs or Normal+ raids. I don't instantly die on my Monk (the squishiest tank if you aren't using your active mitigation) if I let shuffle fall off or don't use a damage cooldown for a telegraphed high-damage attack, it just stresses healers further. Similarly, my group doesn't wipe if I spill coffee and stop dpsing for 20 seconds when DPS-spec, but doing so prolongs the fight which stresses healers. Why would you expect tanks to work differently in this regard?

The changes bring tanks into parity with other roles. There is now a palpable sense to gear progression for tanking, and a feeling that what you are doing personally in any given fight actually impacts the success of your group. It's a blessing for raids where tanking was a very boring and trivial role.

I get that some people don't want any added stress when tanking but it's only something you even have to deal with if you decide you want to tackle more serious content. Just like healers or DPS, more serious content requires more serious individual effort.

If you couldn't tell, I really like the tanking changes. It made a boring role fun again.

Conversely for me they're one of the biggest reasons I quit during beta. It's probably mostly just 7 year burnout, and I've liked all the class changes they made in general up to that point, but for the first time I was feeling a little NGE'd by this one.

I've never found tanking boring.

But since MoP rolled around I find it un-fun on my Druid and Pally and not as much fun on my DK. My warrior hasn't left 85 yet so I can't comment on it.

Given that fun is why I play the game and that tanking is the most fun I have got out of the game over the years up to MoP I foresee a problem and I'm logging less and less.

Yep I'm already down to logging in one day a week. I'm playing more D3 and Skyrim atm.

You're actually a pretty good indicator: if you like a change, chances are the majority of the player base hates it.

I don't mind it so far on my warrior but I'm not raiding. If deciding to shield barrier over shield block or vice versa and choosing wrong gets you killed reasonably often I'd be annoyed. Is it that bad?

Not that I've seen.  Hardest thing about tanking is the same as ever :  Other people being cocks and trying to tell you how to tank, despite nothing being wrong.


HURRY, HURRY, HURRY, BIG PULL, PULL MORE, OMG WHY SO AGGRO, FFS TANK, HEAL MORE, MANA BREAK, FASTER, SLOWER, HARDER, HARDER NOW THERE NOW THERE FUCK ME YOU BASTARD...

Ahem.  You get the idea.  I don't tank anymore.  People are such cunts.

Yep it's not worth the effort unless you have a group of regulars you like. And even then, the LFR rewards are usually better and easier.

http://darklegacycomics.com/368.html
(http://i.imgur.com/5eZIj.jpg)

And WoW still doesn't have fucking last names.

OT but the last panel still defines me. I never really liked crafting or raiding. SWToR class storylines comes the closest to what IMO are QUESTS (everything else should be labeled "busywork" or "tasks"  :oh_i_see:)

Original wow felt a lot more "questy" than it does now, a lot less handholding even if some things were still kill/collect they felt more immersive.

Regarding active mitgation:

Blizzard killed my interest in WoW with short, "maintain this buff or you're not being optimal!" abilities - regardless of class or spec. It reminds me too much of how horrifying it was to maintain 5 minute paladin buffs on 39 people in Molten Core. ::shudder::

It's not quite the same thing, and I know some people see it as more engaging and fun, but it makes the game feel like work to me. If I have to constantly watch the buffs I have up to make sure that x, y and/or z never drop off then I'm not really playing the game, I'm watching counters tick down.

Yes, exactly my problem with rogues.

Warrior shouts and banners are now like that as well. I'm not a fan. Just give me a buff and be done with it. Why the hell do we need to even have timers on these things? They should last until death or logout, and adjusted accordingly.

FIFY.   :awesome_for_real:

I get this complaint. "Maintaining a bunch of buffs" is what killed Warden tanking in LOTRO and Rogue tanking in Rift for me. As far as I know, this complaint could really only be applied to monk tanking, I don't believe any other tanks are encouraged to keep a buff up for the duration of the fight. It doesn't bug me on the monk either because it's only one buff that is quickly applied and maintaining happens to be your primary source of damage and your main spend of chi. It isn't something you have to keep juggling on the side, it's your focus. Unlike the Warden and Rogue tanking, I also don't feel like I'm going to die instantly if the buff falls off.

It would be totally obnoxious without a mod to track it though. Reliance on mods is a major problem with monk tanking in general.

I also did not mind maintaining buffs on my rogue in Cata (S&D, Rupture) so who knows.

Well, according to the monk forums, anything under 100% uptime makes you a scrub. Monk tanking as a whole is waaaay too buttonmashy for my tastes -- and if you happen to get stunned, you get blown up SUPER fast. By the way, screw those saurok in mogu castle that shank you for 5sec at a time. Yeah I know you can kite when you see the castbar or stun them... still, screw them! I save Xuen for those pulls so he gets to eat the stuns instead of me.

Also, Savage Roar on feral druids (the wotlk version, especially). Boo hiss, etc.

Not sure about paladin or Warrior, but as a druid, unless you are maintaining as near maximum uptime on Savage defense as possible, you are just being a massive Heal Sponge.  Savage Defense accounts for 45% of my dodge, or almost 70+ % of my "active" base mitigation (that being dodge).  Without Savage Defense, I sit at around 14% dodge.  If i am not keeping SD up as much as possible, i am failing pretty hard at preventing damage.

Welcome to how DKs tank.
(Also I'm still quietly amused that the comic artist in my last post a) set the EQ panel in a real and recognisable EQ zone, and b) bothered to draw an EQ gnome rather than a WoW one).

Warriors have a very similar spell in Shield Block which has the same exact duration and 'charge cooldown' as Savage Defense . I my mind, these aren't really buffs that you are supposed to maintain 100% the time (because that is not possible). They are also not abilities that you necessarily hit on cooldown, because you are not 'wasting' the ability by not clicking it, you continue to accumulate charges even if you already have one (think roll if you play a monk, or feathers if you play a priest).

In my mind it's a pretty big distinction because these are abilities that, while regular parts of your rotation, are meant to be used intelligently and not "always". I don't know if that is the reality, but it seems clear that you would be better off spending rage on frenzied regen instead of savage defense depending on what the enemy you are fighting is doing (spell damage, unavoidable attacks, etc.) If I have to think about what to use a little bit at any given moment, it doesn't feel like busywork like Warden buffs did. You also don't have paper-armor mitigation if the ability isn't being used.

Well, druids are fairly binary as far as the Savage Defense VS Frenzied Regen thing.  With the glyph on FR it is basicly a question of Dodge VS Physical attack bosses or FR vs Magical Attack bosses.  Or on the very rare occasions where you get hit for "massive" amounts of damage in slow hits (like Impale on Madness) you use unglyphed FR because you pop it immediately after the hit for a huge self heal.  Other then that, there is no real "thought" behind these.    You try to keep one or the other up as much as you can depending on the fight, otherwise you are just a Big Heal sponge with 13-14% avoidance and a lot of armor / hp.

Going for long periods of a mele damage heavy fight without SD on is a loss of 45% of your dodge.  I cant think of a single DPS class that would lose that much of an equivilent DPS boosting stat for not maintaining a buff.  Not having it (or FR) up as frequently as possible is the Druid Tank equivilent of a Hunter dpsing without a pet.

I play both as tanks and giving us a 60 rage thing we really need to use all the time while taking away rage from being hit is FUCKING CLOWNSHOES.

Another reason I don't tank is the healers complaining about this without understanding that my rage is sometimes better spent in keeping shit off them.

Re: Rep - http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/248597-tabard-rep-from-dungeons-now/

They are slowly getting it. Again.

I'm really shocked they have to relearn what's fun for people every single expansion. I mean I know some of it is trial and error on the populace, but did they really expect unending dailies would end well?

Or - to be more cynical - they know exactly what they're doing, and are staggering their "bring the fun back" patches to squeeze as many sub months out of their content as possible.

And like I've said previously, at least this time it's weeks and months rather than months and years before they admit they screwed up. And speaking of Blizzard working faster:

(http://i.imgur.com/Y8WhZ.jpg)

Probably going to be on that island that is on the Pandaria map but not accessable (up to the north west of Kun-Lai).

Given where the tomb was that would make sense.  Good call.

I thought about that, but I usually assume that it's not malicious, calculated intent when stupidity fills the gap nicely.

Never ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to incompetence.

Bingo.

Nod, I've stopped bothering to tank. I just go fury 95% of the time now.

https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/280725857054621696

 :oh_i_see:

He was a fuckwad who didn't know basic class mechanics when hunter lead, why expect him to not be so when he's got to pay attention to more than one or two classes?

Hes' a tool and bad for the game.  I've said it since WOTLK, despite Ingmar's insistence to the contrary.  WOTLK was in the bag before he took his current position and every bullshit idea since then can be laid at the feet of that marine biologist cum game developer.   

Pretty much.

Pity he doesn't read these forums. I haven't logged in 5 days because every time I did it was "I'm bored"

I logged in last I think well before the Steam sale started. Wow Armory says it was 12/9/12.

So it's been almost a month now, and I can't find a damn thing I want to do in that game right now.

I'm curious what MMO you guys have played recently where you actually did want to log in regularly three months after reaching the level cap. Not even just what expansion pack or update, which is a smaller incremental amount of content, but if you include even new MMOs with substantially more stuff to see. I really liked MoP, but I also haven't logged in since mid-Dec (when I was only logging in for raids with my guild anyway). I don't see that as a problem with MoP or some indication of failure on Blizzard's part though. The genre is stale and new content only lasts you so long. I see it as a success on Blizzard's part that I was able to last as long as I did, where I lost interest in the Rift expansion after 2 out of 10 new levels and SWTOR/GW2 in much shorter than 3 months.

If MoP didn't have the problems I complained about at launch (too many dailies, dailies not fun enough) I still wouldn't be playing right now. What were you expecting from another WoW expansion, exactly?

I agree with Rokal on this one.  The only expansion I played for more than a few weeks after cap was vanilla and WotLK.  And the only reason I played them so much was because I had friends who made playing with them more fun.  I lost that in Cata and didn't have it in TBC, so I didn't stick around that much then.  Now I have friends and still log in regularly, even if we aren't hardcore raiding anymore.  Because it's fun to talk to them and play a game at the same time.  It could easily be darts down at the pub or playing music with the same group, except the common thread just happens to be a game.

If I lose them due to RL issues or them being bored, then I'll move on to something else just like I've always done these last 8 years (ack, long time).

GW2 ;D

I'd say CoH, but I never actually reached cap in it.  I kept making alts.

World of Warcraft.  Vanilla, Burning Crusade and WOTLK.  I hit cap and remained subbed and active nearly daily until after I killed Arthas.  I certainly wasn't ever out for more than a week.  Then I took a break to catch up on a few single player games as Cata had only just been announced and I didn't want to farm Arthas for 6 months.  Came back in Cata and well.. it's been shit ever since. 

Prior to that was EQ.  On daily after level cap for long, long stretches of time until the Gates of Discord nonsense.  Stopped playing and went to find another game, bouncing around until Warcraft.

When a game gets it right I'll play forever.  Content doesn't get stale to me but bullshit grinds and artificial cockblocks to.    I don't bother to level alts in MOP because even with the xp boost they added it's still so much grinding to even get to the fun stuff at the end.  Raiding.   My thief hit 90 a month ago and still can't get in to the last tier of raids because "hey fuck you on heroic drops or valor gearing! grind raids!"

Not to mention, there's too goddamn many raids to run.  There's a sweet spot between too many and too few and 5 raids a week per character is too many when it also has to be done on top of dailies and dungeons to get valor for the new item upgrades.

I was on board with this Xp being good at the start.  Even the "daily grind" wasn't terrible so long as you knew to pace yourself and had other things to do.   They've turned EVERYTHING in to a grind that takes "X" number of hours to be able to do the fun stuff now though, and I'm sick of it.  Fuck grinding for motes, fuck grinding for valor, fuck grinding for rep and gear and you'd better do it all because that's what we're going to demand to get the rewards!   

The prior expansions were fun because you could keep yourself occupied all day if you wanted but it wasn't required.  Now? Now it's fucking required to be on a minimum of 2+ hours a day every day or you miss out.  If you don't log in today and do A, B and C you miss x% of your progression and, hey, too bad you can't make it up tomorrow or on the weekend when you have time!  I've gotten 300 valor points a week on my main for the last 3 weeks because I didn't have time during the week, only on the weekend.

I haven't gotten lucky coins on my SINGLE alt because, hey, I can't grind the minimum of 12 dailies a day on two characters.

I can't level a 2nd or 3rd alt and slowly gear them up like I used to because it means missing out on all of the above for multiple characters because I can't throw time down a black hole.

It's just not fun, punishes the casual player and rewards the catass so fuck Ghostcrawler.

This and


this



Pretty much sums up the whole game for me. I used to like levelling alts. By the end of Vanilla I had 4 60s, TBC I had 7 70s, by the end of TBC I had 9 80s, by the end of Cata I had 10 85s. Now I've levelled 3 to 90 and can't give a rats arse about the game as the opportunity to progress them is badly gated by grind on a main, let alone any/all of my alts. Getting my alts into raids even in Cata and prior was fun, as was gearing them.

BTW, I'm still playing GW2 post cap and while I miss the WotLK days of WoW and GW2 doesn't fill that gap, it's still good.

I'm really of the opinion that the whole MMO genre is stale and past its use-by date.

I wanted them to stop artificially capping everything, and go back to the Wrath model of "who gives a shit if they have gear? We can put in achievements for the hardcore."

Don't cap valor weekly. Don't cap justice. Don't cap rewards with faction. Don't keep hiding the gear behind more and more artificial walls and busy work. I wanted to run dungeons with my friends who would do it because they could get points that would eventually get them gear, not because they had to get capped for the week. I actually liked the idea of having a "daily dungeon" that was the same for all. It provided some form of unity. I liked the idea of having a server, not just a collection of idiots who you suffered for 30m to get a 25 man gear-up. The idea of LFD was fine. The idea of LFR has been a disaster for the game in my mind, rather than just making the raids easy enough to set up a weekly PUG with some semi-consistent friends you can connect with.

So your answer is you haven't enjoyed an MMO since WoW circa 2009, at which point you had been playing the game for 5 years. 3 more years have passed and you still expect the game to hold your interest for long periods of time?

I can sympathize somewhat, the last MMO I played where I logged in daily and felt like there was always something to do without an end in sight was TBC. Other games or expansions have come out since and moved the genre forward a few inches each time, but they felt like rehashes of games I'd already played rather than a leap forward like EQ1 and WoW/TBC. I liked Cata and MoP for different reasons, but I still ran out of stuff to do besides raiding after a month or two. I don't expect the same game (or rehashes) to be endlessly entertaining after so many years.


It's 3 raids divided into 5 chunks. 16 bosses compared to, in what was evidently the golden age of WoW for you, 13-16 per tier in Wrath. Do you really think LFR would have been a better format with 1 giant raid where people committed to runs for 5-6 hours or had to cross their fingers that they wouldn't get an in-progress run past bosses they needed? It also helps that this raid tier has staggered gear unlike previous tiers, so you really don't have much reason to be running the first two raids (parts 1 and 2 of MV) by the time you are running the last one (Terrace).

It's actually a much more casual-friendly model than any prior expansion's raid content. It asks you to log in for 2-3 hours a week to stay 'current', doesn't require a guild or scheduling, and doesn't ask you to run the same content for quite as long.


Your answer to the complaint that "I feel like there is too much that I have to do" would be to remove the barrier preventing players from doing more? If people feel pressured to cap VP at 1000 per week, what makes you think they won't feel pressured to log in more often and spend even more time earning VP without a cap? A laid-back marathon like VP gear upgrades would quickly turn into an intense sprint where you did as much as you could as quickly as you could, much like the old PVP system before caps were introduced, or you were left in the dust. Sure, people would be free to earn VP slowly if they wanted to, but there is nothing stopping them from doing that now. The caps exist for a reason: to discourage unhealthy behavior that is harmful for players and ultimately the game.


This is the same silly argument people make about LFD, "the game was better when there was a sense of community and you weren't just paired with random people you would never see again". LFD and LFR are the same idea applied to different types of content. The argument against LFD is just as ridiculous and narrow-minded as your argument against LFR. You're ignoring the players that aren't willing to join a guild or watch Trade chat to get into raid content simply because you want to do that content with a less-random group. If you want to do raid content with an established group of friends instead of strangers you can either queue for LFR with a pre-made (I've even seen LFR pugs forming on my server), or you can PUG the normal version of the raid. MoP didn't make the same mistake of having tough intro bosses like Cata, and everyone in your raid also has the benefit of learning the fight via LFR. This means that currently on my medium pop-server, you don't even need to have done the normal version of the raid to get invited to a PuG. There are more tools than ever to casually raid. If you don't want to join a PUG or ask your friends to follow more complex strategies, the good news is that you can still experience the raid content with your friends via LFR.


This isn't how any of the prior expansions worked really. You still had specific goals that encouraged you to log in every day or risk losing out on progress, whether it was daily dungeons for tokens, daily quests for rep, or trying to get that last drop out of an instance with a daily/weekly reset. MoP simply has more stuff to do besides raiding/dungeons, which is exactly what people were asking for. Whether you like that content is another matter, but missing out because you didn't log in has been the name of the game since TBC.

I haven't invested much in my alts for MoP either, whereas I played them quite a bit in Cata. In Cata I played alts because there was nothing else to do, and 1-60 is where most of the effort went for the expansion. In MoP I don't play alts because I'm not looking for more to do. 85-90 lasted a long time and there is still stuff for my main to do (which I'm currently chosing not to do). I think having too much content is preferable to having too little and being forced to replay the same content just to have something to do.

FWIW, most of the alt grind has also been removed since the last patch. Reps get to revered just from normal questing while leveling if any of your characters reach revered and buy the server-wide rep bonus. VP gains are increased by 50% server-wide as soon as you cap one character for a week, a big improvement over how VP was handled in previous expansions. I'm still not leveling alts because I've had my fill.

I'm not going to get into a big pissing match here, but Blizzard currently has the money and once had the talent to keep their games fresh and fun (ex. D2).  Simply from a retention perspective, it's Blizzard's job to keep making content that makes the general playerbase want to keep playing and having fun. 

What they've done since about a year into Wrath is pure fucking hubris and flies directly in the face of what companies should do.  There was a time I thought I would die playing this game, I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.  How did they lose me, and why did they never try to get me back?

Reaching revered in the first place is a problem, especially for the gated factions (where you need to hit revered with the vale faction first).

The last straw for me personally was having to grind mobs to raise my Black Prince rep to honored (legendary quest), and apparently you have to do it AGAIN to raise it to revered in a later step. I had enough of that shit in 2004 when you had to genocide furbolgs in felwood for timbermaw rep, tyvm. :oh_i_see:

It bears repeating.

(unintentional pun there too.  Bonus)

I understand what you are saying Rokal, but your a lone voice in the wilderness. The reality is that there are more people crying out that the game is busy-work rather than fun than there are the hard-core who want to invest in one character and have gear as an achievement.

I keep wanting to play the game, I have fond memories of WotLK but it's not going to last and when you start to lose your casual user-base to boredom then the game itself dies a little more. The reality is that were being told what is "fun" by Blizzard who obviously didn't learn from Diablo 3. WoW has a stronger base, but the rot is setting in.

As others have said, what I'd love is the WotLK structure of letting your audience have fun their own way, let them be happy with gear etc that keeps them engaged and give the hardcore their achievements/titles and mounts so that they can show the world that they are the hard core.

I'd disagree here. Blizzard's talent has always been polishing and refining existing concepts which set them apart in a market full of unpolished products. The average quality of games has gone way up in the last 10 years as the cost to make games has increased and publishers/developers rely on a few big hits rather than a legion of minor successes. Having a polished game is no longer enough, which is why (imo) Blizzard's last couple releases haven't seemed to match their legacy. D3 was an attempt to apply the Blizzard formula to an already-polished concept (loot ARPGs, D2 specifically) with disasterous results.


You get the rep automatically while doing most dailies. I finished Black Prince rep on my monk long before I finished golden lotus rep, just by doing golden lotus quests. The rep moves even faster in 5.1 with the new faction. If you are grinding mobs you are doing it wrong.

I WAS doing dailies. I did a week's worth (klaxxi and golden lotus only, since the others are gated) and I barely got halfway to honored. And tbh a week's worth of fucking mind-numbing excuse-for-content daily quests is a week too many, especially since I didn't get anywhere with either faction.

e: you'll also have to excuse me if I'm not jumping for joy about a new daily quest grinding hub in 5.1 making a stupid rep grind marginally less stupid just because you can grind rep while you're grinding rep, dawg. I also wouldn't be surprised to find out that you need to hit exalted with the Black Prince to finish off the legendary questline eventually  :oh_i_see:

On the other hand, playing SWTOR for a day has convinced me that WoW is still the most fun in town.

 :oh_i_see:

No disagreement here. Even though I did enjoy playing through the SWTOR class stories (which are actually pretty good), there's waaaaay too much BC-era quest filler inbetween them. And endgame at level 50... bleh. Ditto pvp (not that it's much better in wow, mind)

All the moves they made since Cata fell on it's face at launch have made the game more solo-oriented. You'd think that would be good, but it's not. The reason it's not is because when stuff gets more solo-oriented, you realize that the actual gameplay of WoW is pretty awful. The reason people stay subbed to these things for years and years is because of friends. I like giving players options, but I don't think one of those options should be tossing you together with a rag-tag band of assholes from other servers that could be faceless bots. It becomes the default. It's what 10 mans did to 25 man raiding. Now, it creates a situation where nobody wants to bother creating a 10 man because there's no real benefit in doing it. It's the path of lease resistance.

When's the lease up ?

 :facepalm: You know what, I'm leaving it there. I'll never learn otherwise.

Here's some blue defending the Valor Cap:


Yep, he used one of my favorite fucking dev-phrases of all time. Of course he's lying. It's exactly what it's supposed to be. An artificial gate to keep people from burning down the content, so they draw out the sub. It IS a punishment for those people with time, because they could be done with the game in a month. Also, if our choices matter so fucking much, how's that new talent system working out?

The more and more wow became casual friendly I began to lose interest but it' not exactly what you'd think.

All through wrath and the beginning of cat I was what you'd call hardcore but slowly as the game progressed it was less and less. For me the fun always came from the thrill of the challenges and of seeing something new. The more the game progressed those challenges became progressively easier, with the addition of 10 mans and hardmodes both making normal modes easier and now LFR, there was no great barrier, no mountain for me to climb.

I was never concerned with how easy others were doing it or what items they may have gotten, it was never a have/have-not situation.  I had those mountains to climb and they added an escalator, which is fine for others and good for them but once the escalator was added and I rode up it a couple times, all the thrill was gone and while I could stil climb up the hard way it seemed pointless.

I find it mildly amusing that in the same response he wants our choices to matter, but also wants us not to circumvent doing dungeons and raids gearing process by using our points. So your choice of spending points matters, but you have no choice on gearing the way we want you to.

Yes.

I used to be a huge WoW fangirl because they were so competent at keeping players happy. The apex of this was Wrath - as evidenced by the peak of number of players. Blizzard learned from their mistakes, and fixed them. I bought every expansion - the collector's version - 2 copies, in fact. Until MoP.

Cata taught me that Blizzard no longer is competent at keeping players happy. I've heard nothing about MoP that makes me want to even try it.  Ghostcrawler is the face of Blizzard's failures.

I actually hang 5 major decisions on really reducing my "fun" as a result. Most, if not all, of them are things that limit social behavior in the game.

1 - Conversion away from "Emblems of <blank>" to Justice Points and Valor Points. That happened in October of 2010, and it was the beginning of the points/cap/gear clusterfuck we're in now.
2 - Patch 4.1, "The Patch that wasn't" signalled that Blizzard could no longer deliver what they wanted. Firelands was obviously delayed, even though it was promised for Patch 1, so we got the bullshit about releasing stuff faster. Except they didn't. This was when I quit for Cataclysm.
3 - Raid Finder in late 2011. It's changed the game. You can argue for good or bad, but the days of getting people motivated to do anything but queue up for EZ mode are gone in my groups. The loot difference isn't big enough to make them care, nor do they enjoy leveling their pants with the points.
4 - Dailies as content. Originally they were added in TBC with a cap for 10, and were offered to appease the people who hated grinding mobs in order to earn reputations. Things began to get odd when they added the infamous dailygate for Sunwell. Then came Argent Tournament, which was also met with a lot of WTF WHY A RENFAIRE? Then in Cataclysm you got Molten Front, and in Mists you have Landfall and the Invasions daily hubs. In addition to your other daily hubs. Patch 5.1 marks the first time they've released a daily hub with no associated raid. The Patch that wasn't Part Deux.
5 - Guild levels. They stole them from a game that didn't keep subscribers for a fiscal quarter. It's made it so you have to go to a levelled guild, or you are an idiot. It broke my raiding alliance by making everyone focus on their own petty buillshit, and the game has never been the same for me since.

FWIW as someone not in a raid guild (and I suspect there are quite a few of us) I only had a problem with 4] and to a lesser extent 5] (my guild's still only level 14 despite having been around for-freaking-ever) from that list and I actually liked 1] and 3].

OTOH, 4] is HUGE and makes me want to stab things.

I dislike 1 because they are trying to carry over something that doesn't carry over. I have no problems with converting prior tokens at a set rate, because those rates can be adjusted. I do have a problem with caps and conversions because it limits the overall concept, and it decreases the usefulness of prior content. Also, if you want to, you can't "save" up points at the end of a cycle now, even though you were beating the prior content.

What I'd like is the ability to convert prior tokens that you saved up at a percentage rate into the next level. Maybe at 1/5 or 1/10. It lets you adjust the economies of tokens without doing it with a hard cap.

I also left out one thing I hate from way back:

6 - Hard Enrage Timers. Hate Hate Hate these. I'm ok with progressive buffs, progressive debuffs, or even add accumulation defining a soft "oh fuck we're doomed" moment. The whole 5m and you're toast concept can die in a fucking fire.

Yeah, Firelands was when it broke for me.  The abortion of dailies coupled with phasing was a frankensteins monster of utter suck.

Yes, there's a new area, but you don't get to see it until you WORK FOR IT PEON.

Fuck.  That.


And now there's a whole expansion full of them.

Swtor still sucks my dead grans clit tho.  Fucking awful.

A google search doesn't yield a whole lot: is Fernando Berriel someone of significance, or is Ghostcrawler responding to random_internet_guy0003938?

It's Paelos.  It's his Accountant Name.

It's like having a porn name, except shit boring.

Yeah I don't follow Ghostcrawler. Besides, my accounting name is Melvin Gold.

It's just random douche spamming GC. They pulled GC off regular forums because he was pissing off everyone, but he still has a twitter for now. I doubt that will last.

Sunwell was still the best daily hub they ever made in the end. It gave the peasants a desperately needed regular income for like 15 minutes of questing.

GC disagrees with you: "Cataclysm's dailies were a totally different beast until the Molten Front quests, which were very popular."

https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/282566075231649792

He disagrees ??

I'm SHOCKED.

 :oh_i_see:

Me too. I would imagine he's in lockstep with the players on this one.  :awesome_for_real:

Although even GC can pull a funny: https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/281875183554404354

MMO champ provides adequate fodder for my boredom on Fridays!

He knows how to play this game better than anyone. If only players would listen to him, they would have fun. If they aren't having fun, they aren't playing it right/don't have the right attitude/expect too much/need to try harder.

Honestly, 2 things have stopped me playing much and contributed more than anything else to my cancelled sub.

Too many dailies that appear to be a bit too important, followed by more dailies that are still a bit too important.
Fucking with protection warrior rage. I used to mostly quite enjoy tanking. Now I don't bother anymore.

I came back to WoW at the very end of Cata after maybe 6 weeks at the start (and not getting to level cap in that time or doing all the quests etc etc.) I played solidly and quite happily for more than 3 months after hitting the cap in Cata because I enjoyed tanking.

I just unsubbed again.

Sorry GC, I'm not autistic enough to want to grind dailies for the stuff I need to simply progress rather than the stuff I'd need to be 100% optimal.

And we're back at tiered raiding again; the instant I realized that was the instant I went an unsubbed. I guess I just refused to believe they'd honestly suggest running LFR for every single tier up to the last one with no catchup gear if they wanted to play with their guild or friends after being gone for a tier or more.

I unsubbed this weekend as well. I haven't played in a month now, and it can pretty much be laid at the feet of Dailies and LFR.

I actually reactivated 2 days ago :ye_gods: mostly because my guildies are checking MOP out for the first time. I am pretty sure I won't be doing any dailies, though -- will spend my WOW time dungeoning with guildies, levelling an alt, LFR... and cancel again in a month or two.

https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/285822556517330944

Ghostcrawler now reads minds:

-Linear progression was the worst idea you ever could return to.. you leave behind lots of alt-players and returners.

-Ghostcrawler: We understand that. But the alternative is that other players feel their accomplishments have no meaning if rapid catch up exists.

-Which players? Not the majority. I think you're seeing the tree and not the forest on this one.

-Ghostcrawler:We heard it a lot in LK and Cataclysm, and we could infer it a lot from what players were doing even if they didn't say it.

Oh FUCK OFF YOU UTTER CUNT.

I'm ok with someone giving me a rational argument and I'm even ok with someone giving me an informed argument with stats and graphs.

Giving me the 'Gut Feel' is WASTING MY FUCKING TIME.

Yearly pass 3 weeks to go. Unsubbed.

I don't log into this game for fun any more. In face, I have no idea why I log in at all.

I wonder if whoever said that Ghostcrawler gets blamed too much still thinks that?

Why is he not fired or at least laterally transferred? And whose brilliant idea is it to give him a twitter account?

Catering to the 20% (I'm being generous) will not help this game. I thought Blizzard learned that already.  Guess they value that 20% more than they value the 80% who are apparently quitting in droves.

It's pretty much only Ingmar that sticks up for him, because he believes he's limited in scope. True or not, he's a terrible mouthpiece.

EDIT: Also the new scuttlebutt on the PTR is that the next iteration of LFR currently has a 486 ilvl. Current LFR only drops 476 and 483 gear. People are freaking the fuck out. General blue response so far has been, don't worry it's PTR and subject to change.

I haven't played in months so I can't really speak with any kind of authority on what I think he might or might not be responsible for now. It does sound like the class design has taken a dive to go along with the stuff I tended to blame Kalgan and the content team for, though.

I shouldn't read that Twitter feed, it just makes me hate Blizzard as personified by this moron.

I don't think the linear LFR progression is as bad as everyone is making it out to be. There will inevitably be some catch-up gear outside of LFR to augment what you do get, and they've said they'll be increasing LFR drop rates for Tier 14 content once Tier 15 is out.

Forcing people to run Tier 14 LFR for 1-2 months before they could touch Tier 15 would suck. Forcing people to run Tier 14 LFR 1-2 times before they can run Tier 15 would be a nice way to let people see some pretty cool content, learn about raiding, and get some upgrades/transmog stuff. Wouldn't be surprised if Tier 14 was nerfed more in the next patch too.

I'm thinking back to Cata where people came back to the game in droves due to the SoR promotion for a free 80 and server transfer. Dragon Soul (Tier 13) was an awful pile of shit, and most of those players never got to see the vastly superior Tier 11 and 12 raids. As soon as a patch with a new raid came out, the old raids were instantly dead and buried. If they had needed to run LFR versions of those raids 1-2 times before doing Dragon Soul, wouldn't they have been better off?

Moving past the disposable content model is not a bad thing, the trick is in making sure that the old content is a minor speed-bump that encourages people to slow down and enjoy the ride rather than a stop sign that encourages them to quit. It all hinges on how long they expect people to do the content for (in other words, what the drop rate ends up being). 100% drop rate on every boss would actually work pretty well, as you'd only need to run the raid 1-3 times before you statistically see every drop you want for your spec. Of course, the drop rate on Tier 15 LFR would be a splash of cold water for anyone coming from a 100% drop rate, but that's another problem.

This is a good point. I was a subscriber for years before I came to the conclusion that I'm not the target demographic for WoW anymore based on things he's said and the direction the game has gone. That's probably not what they want out of their PR.

Not really. Most likely they've come back to play with their friends. Disposable content for raids is fine, because for the majority of people using those raids, they are interchangeable. There are always going to be unique encounters in each run, but for the most part, the content isn't ever going to be mind-bendingly revolutionary. The thing that makes them fun for the most part is doing them with people you like or improve your character. For a smaller subset, it's about the challenge. For an even more miniscule subset, it's about having a faster kill than everyone else.

Doesn't it also seem likely that the majority of people-coming-to-LFR-late are alts, as well?

I hope MoP starts losing subs the instant the new raid drops and people start realizing that alts will take longer to catch up than anticipated and returning guildmates will need the stupid fucking candy runs of old.

Oh wait, we tuned the raids hard this time so it'll still suck.

I pray this next content cycle is a miserable failure to the point Ghostcrawler and the braintrust behind this shit get sent out to pasture.

I've unsubscribed. Turns out I have a couple of weeks left because of a RAF month, so I'll play casually until it runs out. I particularly dislike the way that they've made the bonus dungeon rewards daily rather than 7/weekly. It seems to go against their whole stated "play the character you want to when you want to" philosophy.

I also think that Street having a twitter account is also a good thing for us. It's like players called "Pssyeatr". It lets you know how much of a fuckwit they are pretty quickly without needing to slowly work it out or guess.

I thought I wass on my last month of the annual pass - nope. Two months to go of not logging into this crap game - at least in Eve you get to "level" while not playing. I bought the annual pass for Diablo Three, working on the principle that both games would hold my attention and be worthwhile - who would have thought that they would both be shit?

If this is the state of Blizzard, there's no way in hell I'll be buying the SC2 xpac.

Wow is okay as a social activty if you don't have to pay for it. It's just not worht a monthly sub to me anymore due to cockblockitis and cockheaditis. Diablo 3 was indeed, shit.

For me, I'm amazed people are talking about 'alts raiding' when I have 2 90's and can't be fucking arsed putting all 8 of my other chars through this shit.

Dead for me.  While I HATE IT, I'm having more fun being a bounty-hunter in Swotor and it's DIRE.

Logging in to grow a garden and raid once a week for shinies I don't care about ?  No thanks.

You know what I'd like to see? Removal of gear stats. Completely!

Make the game about the player and not the gear. Work out different shinies that don't affect gameplay but demonstrate how e-cool you are.

Bring the player, not the class.

I'm going to get burnt at the stake for this one.

This thread could turn it around for vanguard... :grin:

 :awesome_for_real:

It all just feels so bland. I'm micromanaging my character so much I can't have fun or experience anything beyond, "oh press this one now.. oh that buff is going, wait for resources then drop it again.."   Plus the amount of time to gear-up is dreadful.  It honestly feels like the "random" drop isn't so random and there's a hidden modifier based on the last time you won/ what your current gear score is.   New characters I win 2-3 drops then it tapers off to one every few weeks (even with coins) and certain pieces just never drop.   It's all combining to be utter shit.

Put player buffs on gear, with the item level determining the level of spell cast.  While in a party you barely benefit from gear; in a raid not at all unless you're missing a class buff.

[Helmet of Blessing of Kings]

More fun with GC's Twitter!

Players: The problem is lack of viable options, in Cata there was only Dungeons, now it's only rep by dailies.
GC: You're going to have a hard time convincing me there are fewer options now. I think some of you just hate dailies period.

Players: tabards give rep. Put a daily cap on rep. Dailies or dungeons. Quit pretending solution isn't obvious.
GC: Obvious but not healthy IMO. Only queuing for instances from cities isn't good for the game long term. WoW needs a world.

Players: Do you feel like CRZ takes away the one advantage small pop servers had of less competition for rare spawns?
GC: We don't really want small pop servers to have advantages though. We think larger pop servers are more fun.

I don't see anything in those new tweets worth mentioning.


You should listen to Ingmar and Sjofn cry about dailies sometimes  :why_so_serious:

Okay, I wasn't really a GC hater before, but those 3 tweets make me RAEG.

1] fuck dailies. Dailies are terrible, this is a scientifically proven fact. I wrote a PhD thesis in dailyquestsuckology, but the professor asked me to sign the lab sheet every day. I stabbed him and bathed in his blood. aweriugyhjeghsdfjhg

(ahem)

2] GC should try levelling an alt on a small-pop pvp server sometime. Or trying to do pet battles. You know, the worldy stuff. (Protip: don't try to level alts in Mount Hyjal if you're on a pvp server, there is almost always a group of bored 90s running around 1shotting people. This is also prevalent in some of the old-world zones, but less so in BC and WOTLK zones, thank Cthulhu)

Um.  Yes ?  Which is what your player base has been telling you ?  You Cunt ?  You utter, utter fucking assclown ?

Man, this thread really is just turning into a copy of the "Cracks starting to show" Cata whining thread.

Not complaining about the content of your post Setanta, just the bizarre repetition in this thread where people are making the same arguments and having the same discussions they had 2+ years go.

FWIW, they actually did this with Challenge Mode dungeons and it's pretty cool. I don't think we'll ever see it affect anything outside of hardcore niche content because the gear treadmill and small power boosts are what make the game appealing for seemingly most of the playerbase. Rift tried something similar for PvP gear but canned it when they came to the conclusion that gear is what makes all parts of their game sticky. Until the genre shifts and the base gameplay becomes fun enough to keep people playing even without gear, gear will stay.


I can confirm that this is not the case, I still get 1-2 pieces of gear every time I run LFR even though I'm decked out in normal gear and end up vendoring most of the LFR stuff.  :awesome_for_real:


So... you do just hate dailies, proving his tweet correct?  :oh_i_see: What he said is accurate, there is more stuff to do than ever. Whether you enjoy all of the available stuff is another matter. I'm not going to pretend most of the daily factions were fun for me. I will say that I have a greater attachment to the zones in MoP than I did in Cata though and visiting them and exploring areas because of dailies was part of the reason why. You spend more time in them, you have more reasons to come back, and you are given incentive to explore them (lorewalker stories, rare spawns, grey-item treasure objects, etc.). Trying to get people back out into the world and give them stuff to do besides dungeons and raids was a good goal. Giving people stuff to do other than chaining dungeons, hitting 463 ilvl, and then saying "I have nothing left to do" was a good goal.
I'm not even sure what else to say at this point, rep-bitching reached :dead_horse: territory a few months ago. It has turned into the "Dungeons were too hard" of the Cata threads, where it stifles all other conversation and is brought up weekly. Paelos, you've posted near-identical quotes from GC/CMs about this on the last several pages, why was this worth bringing up again? Do you recognize that what you're doing is thread-shitting? Do you think, for example, the D3 sub-forums would be better if I made a new post every week complaining about how boring itemization was?


It's poorly worded, possibly due to trying to fit the comment on twitter, but it's the same way every MMO operates. It's the reason you see server merges in declining MMOs: they are more fun with other people. CRZ was a way to fix lower-population servers without merging.

I wish Blizzard would just suck it up and allow free server transfers, even if it did result in some servers closing. My raid guild has slowed to a crawl due to the holidays and a general apathy towards continuing to raid. If we decide to stop raiding, I have friends I could continue to play with on other servers but I would quit before I would spend $200 on server transfer fees only to end up in the same situation a year later.

I think you missed the point harder than he did.

Paelos continues to think that dungeons should give daily rep, Blizzard continues to think that there needs to be other attractive things to do at 90 besides dungeons and raids, I continue to be sad that the "discussion" keeps repeating. What did I miss?

I'm not sure how 'proving his tweet correct' (me: 'dailies fucking suck' GC: 'some of you just hate dailies period') makes dailies less bad -- btw, I think my hate of daily quests has been well-documented during the last 5 or so years. :awesome_for_real: Dailies are fucking terrible design, and it's not just WOW -- the daily quests in SWTOR, Rift and LOTRO were terrible as well. If you want to get me out in the world every day, take a page out of GW2's playbook. Also, fuck the rep grind in the legendary questline (this has been posted too, so I won't detail it here).


e: I will say though, a lot of this stuff IS being brought up over and over again. But then, if it's the thing (or handful of things) that made most people quit (despite them liking the rest of the game), doesn't that say something in itself?

Well, I for one missed what the attractive things to do at 90 are.  Because apart from dungeons and raids, I see makework.  A lot of fucking makework.

Also, the dungeons and raids ain't up to much either.  The scenarios are also woeful.  The item grind ruins all 3.

You tell me what I'm missing, because I think I'm missing the fun.  I used to have fun.  I'm not having fun.  Repeating the same random collection of 20 quests spread over a 5 quest dollop every day ain't fucking fun, no matter what the FUCK Ghostcrawler says.

I do hate dailies.  I can't see how anyone DOESN'T.  He wants us to continue beating our testicles and enjoying it and, frankly, I don't want to.  Because the first hit hurt and after that it just seemed stupid.

So what am I missing ?

I think you're underselling the SWTOR dailies. They're a convenient way to make money, without forcing you to do them to level a rep up or something, the better ones (usually the ones that take place inside instances) are more involved/interesting than WoW dailies, they're an alternate gear path (you can get stuff as good or better from other routes), and unlike WoW they actually improve when grouped. Arguably you 'have' to do them once a week for BH comms but that's pretty low pressure.

Also if by dailies in LOTRO you mean skirmishes, you COULD NOT be more wrong. They're the best system in the game and a continuing source of bafflement to me as why no other game has copied them.

Dailies are not attractive things, nor are they content. This expansion will be defined by one thing and one thing only: DAILIES.
Cata will be defined by HARDER CONTENT, WHOOPS MAYBE NOT.
Wrath will be defined by WELFARE EPICS
TBC will be defined by CLASS BALANCE? LULZ

That wasn't really my experience with SWTOR dailies (talking about the solo ones here on Ilum/Corellia[?], which were regular kill/gather solo quests, thus awful). The heroic 4+ ones I did were better simply because you grouped for them, but they were still just the same 3-4 mob pull about 10 times in a row, then a hp sponge boss. Granted, the group had to pay more attention to CC than in a regular flashpoint, but if I want stuff like that, I'll just do a flashpoint and get more interesting / varied enemies and bosses.

As for LOTRO, I agree that skirmishes are great, and I don't consider them 'daily quests' (it's more like the "first dungeon a day" bonus in WOW). Even solo skirmishes were somewhat entertaining. What I meant are the 'regular' daily quests that LOTRO has in abundance that are basically just gather / kill x quests you can do once a day. Also, Lothlorien, aka The Zone That Made My Entire Guild Ragequit.

Well, you only addressed one out of the 4 points I made about the SWTOR dailies, which I assume means you concede the other 3.  :grin:

I guess LOTRO does have repeatable quests as well but they don't seem to be a major focus - but I leveled through Lothlorien after it was already deprecated content so I don't know what the endgame expectations were when it was max level content.

Attractive only meant "people have incentive to do it". The rewards have to be attractive in order for most players to bother. For WoW this means gear or vanity items. MoP has the same activities any previous expansion offered (dungeons, raids, pvp, whatever quest zones you had left) only now they have added scenarios and a substantial amount of dailies too.

I am repeating something I've said 4-5 times now, but I didn't hate all of the dailies in MoP. Tillers was pretty awesome, the new horde vs alliance dailies in 5.1 were good (they'd have been better if I wasn't so burnt out on dailies), and every other faction had some positive moments. My complaint was that the game asked you to do too many, and that the grind took too long. I hated the Golden Lotus faction because of the grind. Out of all the daily factions in MoP, it is the one I remember least fondly. If I take a step back, even it had its moments. The way the zone unfolds for Golden Lotus, the small stories bites you get every week(ish) about the Thunder King, and the way the zone wraps up once you hit exalted were all pretty cool. What wasn't cool was being asked to do 15 quests a day for 100 rep a piece.

It's proof that, at least for me, dailies aren't automatically awful. The part that was awful about dailies at MoP launch (the pace) can be changed and improved upon. If MoP had 4-5 factions that were as interesting and paced as well as Tillers, I probably wouldn't have had an issue with them.


I thought the dungeons and raids were great. Good variety, excellent art styles in each dungeon/raid, and interesting fights even with appropriate (low) difficulty in the LFD/LFR tools. Scenarios are a great source of gear/VP now and I think they're pretty fun. I would have liked to see storylines leading up to them so you had some context (like the old Group quests pre-Cata), and the rewards sucked at launch, but they're a nice addition to the game at this point.


I don't know what would make the game fun for you. It doesn't sound like you liked any of the content in MoP, even content I thought was great. Maybe you should consider whether your complaints are about WoW or the genre as a whole.


Edit: MoP dailies are an alternate gear path. You can still do dungeons>LFR/raiding for better gear than what is offered from dailies. You can do scenarios for epic upgrades. You can buy or craft epic-level gear, just like you always could. It's an optional gear path that people have gotten hung up on. People aren't forced to do dailies, they just feel like they are.

Woo, derail!Well, to be honest I just didn't really care about the other 3 things to respond  :awesome_for_real:

More involved/interesting than WOW dailies: dailies are dailies, repetition is repetition. WOW has dailies with minigames too that are pretty fun and involved the first 5 times I do them (nb: if I have to do a daily quest more than once, someone is getting stabbed). RIFT has a large pool of traditional daily quests with the available ones randomized every day (sorta like wow, only a bit better), and I still can't stand it. OTOH, I could do Instant Adventures all day long.
Alternate gear path: I'm perfectly fine gearing up through PVP, crafting, or dungeons, but I don't mind if it's possible to gear up through dailies (though it's beyond me why anyone'd find that fun).
Making money: I hate doing solo questing after I'm max level, so if I want money for something, I do a dungeon, pvp (if it has monetary rewards), craft, whatever. Again, others may find this cool, but for me the luster of that wore off when I had to farm felwood for raid consumables.
Improve when grouped: (just repeating my prev post for consistency) They do, but I'll just do a flashpoint or pvp. Etc etc.

Is there a suitable distinction when 95% of the genre apes WoW?

This is where you always get hung up. What the majority of the customers "feel" is always correct. Even if there is a logical alternative. That alternative becomes irrelevant if you make your playerbase "feel" bad about their time in game.

You can't approach a service based entertainment industry with a completely logical mindset. Offering A, B, & C is the logical view. However, if the users feel that A & B suck and aren't fun, they are going to ask why you only gave them C? Then, you'll say, but we gave you A&B. And they will say, we'd rather have more C because A&B are pointless busywork. Then they cry and bitch and moan, and eventually pull their money out until you coddle them with promises of more C.

At the end of the day the logical truth is you offered options. The entertainment reality is that you didn't because two options that are terribly unfun aren't really options at all.

It's an important distinction to make, especially it you're trying to evaluate why an expansion pack or game isn't hooking you. If you're tired of the genre and don't find raiding/dungeons/questing fun anymore, the quality of the content in any given MMO is irrelevant. MoP (or Rift more accurately) might be the best & most polished dungeon/raid/quest theme park MMO ever, but you aren't going to find any of that stuff fun if you're burnt out on the formula.


If your customers also gave you the feedback "I did C and now I'm out of things to do and bored", the solution is to add more things to do. If they tell you those things aren't fun, the answer is to try to make them fun, not to remove them entirely. You're saying that daily quest hubs are never going to be something players enjoy doing, but the universal praise for Tillers proves otherwise. Fix A & B, don't scrap them.

Tillers aren't fun because they are dailies.

They are fun because they aped farmville, they aren't related to gear (except motes which you can get from mobs), and they are completely ignorable.

So yes, the key to dailies is to make them completely ignorable, and unrelated to the rest of the game other than fun cosmetic stuff.

I think you're wrong about why people find them fun/compelling. It isn't anything to do with them being ignorable or merely cosmetic, it's because they give you something persistent that is yours and you can see progress being made on your own special thing as you go. That's something WoW has never offered before, a feeling of ownership over a part of the world.

I figured that was a given when I mentioned they aped Farmville.

Also, people like the Sky Racing thing with the dragons. That falls into this category without offering you a piece of the world. It's a mount with a race.

They are the only daily faction which will continue to be useful for the life of the expansion (easy access to Golden Lotus for flasks). They are the only source of Spirits of Harmony besides grinding mobs once you get to 90. They are the least-ignorable daily faction in MoP

People like Tillers because:
1. the dailies are quick
2. the rep moves fast
3. there are frequent one-time story beats that show the progression the story (the rise of your farm and your relationships)
4. you get to feel like you have a slice of land to yourself, similar to housing
5. farming is a break from stale kill/collect quests and tab-target combat

Of those, #3 is the most important. Anything that makes you feel like you aren't just repeating the same quests is a huge boon to daily questing. They took this to heart with the 5.1 horde vs alliance reputation, which has 1-2 new story sequences every week playing out the primary storyline of the game at the moment. If all daily factions had been modeled after Tillers/5.1 we'd be having a different discussion right now.


Good point, people seem okay with the sky dragon faction despite the fact that it is awful. It has the least variety of any of the MoP faction dailies, it has annoying crafting quests for tiny rep gains, and the egg hunt where everyone on your server circles 5 islands trying to click first when one spawns is anything but fun.

So why did people like Sky Dragons? Pacing. The reputation faction moved fast and the story breaks where you interacted with your dragon as it grew gave it a feeling of progress.

Pfft, Iceblood Tower was clearly my personal property.

Rokal, it wasn't just pacing. It was the fact that those factions didn't cockblock useful gear. As such, they could set the rates at whatever, and it wasn't relevent to  their retention. That made them actually optional to the players, not fake optional like WELL YOU CAN RAID YOUR BALLS OFF INSTEAD LULZ!

This doesn't matter as much as whether the content feels like a grind. The 5.1 faction currently provides the best VP gear in the game. I haven't seen complaints about it because it moves fast and it has frequent story progress which makes it feel less repetitive. That's it.

If you don't like dailies and you don't like raiding then why are you worried about rep gear? You can scare up a set of JP (no rep needed)/PvP/crafted gear which is more than adequate for heroics, plus scenario grab-bags actually have gear in them fairly frequently now too.

Get to L90 and you'll have an ilvl of 430-440 or so just from questing* which is pretty much enough for heroics anyway, go do the Arena scenario for your free 450 weapon and go queue. Hey look, rep grinds totally not required.

*Oh look, proof. My warrior alt (http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/defias-brotherhood/Lulana/simple) dinged 90 about half an hour ago and has a current ilvl of 435. If I finish up Dread Wastes, I'll be pushing 440 easy.

I would ignore dailies completely and keep it to myself how terrible the entire concept of daily quests is (the huge waste of development time they probably were, etc) as I mostly did in WOTLK, Cata, LOTRO, RIFT and SWTOR... but they pretty much made doing them almost mandatory for advancing the legendary questline*. Fuck that with a Sons of Hodir-sized spork.


* the alternative is mindlessly grinding mobs. Fuck that with an even bigger spork.

Umm, What?

Not a single daily currently in the game rewards rep with the Black Prince.   The ONLY way to earn rep with Wratharian is to kill level 90 Mantid, Mogu, or Opposite Faction NPCs in the Krasarang Battlefront.   Doing the correct dailys simply gives you an excuse to kill said NPC's, and offers a tangental reward, but in no way speeds the process up, or is even required for it.  It is PURELY a mob grind.  Infact, the fastest way to level Black Prince rep is to simply grind the mobs.

For what it's worth, Tillers are slightly different.  Sure, the dailies contain everything bad about dailies, but not only does it have a POINT, but it gets broken up and has a final END RESULT.

And after that end result, you can just forget it unless you really, really want Valor and tokens.

I found the Insect guys interesting at first, but there's not enough breakup of the boredom and, more importantly, it's never really made clear WHY you're doing this except for getting rid of Valor item cockblocks.  And don't even get me started on that one.

The Dragon was OK, but it didn't move fast enough and didn't even have enough to keep my 6 year old daughter interested.  Think on that :  Here's a questline where you GROW AND FEED YOUR OWN WEE DRAGON PET and it can't keep a six year old interested because it's boring.  And she STILL farms the melons.

The Black Prince stuff is just retarded and takes me right back to AQ type stuff.  It's pure Ghostcrawler, in distilled form.

Rep should improve while you're doing something else fun.  You KNOW they're going to put in tabards so that you can do it while you do an instance.  You KNOW they will.  Why are we even arguing about this ?


Also :  I have to give them some credit for the items that make the reps faster on alts.  That's a slight help.

That's what I meant (check out the footnote). I pointed this out a while ago, including how stupid a rep grind it is, akin to the timbermaw rep, and Rokal said I was 'doing it wrong' and that I was supposed to kill the mobs while I was doing the dailies anyway so it didn't feel like a mob grind.

Never mind that in about a week's worth of dailies I haven't even gotten halfway to honored.  :oh_i_see:

I can't even be arsed to rant, that's how terrible the 'plan' for endgame content is.

WoW is reminding me of the last 5 seasons of Law & Order or CSI.  People in charge believe there's a formula that can be stuck to and provide compelling entertainment, but lost the creative spark and instinct for when to break those rules that made it in to entertainment instead of mass-produced garbage.

Ahh, well, i suppose that depends a lot on how "quickly" you want to complete the current stage of the legendary questline.   On my druid (my main) I seem to be progressing it so that I just about finish up with the current step just as the next one rolls out.  (for example, after today's reset, my next LFD dungeon will give me my 6k Valor achieve, which will then let me move on to the Do a few batlegrounds portion, which i should be able to finish up this week, and then i should be done till the next step unlocks when the next patch launches).   Most of the steps in the legendary questline seem to have a section that effectively "gates" the questline pretty independantly of the rep requirement.  I mean, in the first step, if you manage to collect your 10 + 10 sigils before you hit honored, you must have some pretty crazy luck, and in the second step, if you manage to hit revered before you collect 6k valor (which only starts counting from when you pick up the quest), then you pretty much arent trying.

Of course, this assumes that you are doing at least a few daily quest hubs (whatever gets you killing mantid / mogu) out of the regular bunch for the first step, and doing the Horde / Alliance Battlefront daily quest hub for the second step.

Because in the past, people had options to extend their character slowly through just doing dungeons with friends. They would get gear and points, and use those points on vendors. Nobody had to do raid, nobody had to do dailies. Things were just fine.

Just because you don't raid, doesn't mean you don't want to improve your character and doesn't mean you'll accept being told, "No you don't need to upgrade anymore."   This is the lesson that Blizzard has to keep relearning.

Not to mention that if you ever reach the uppermost limit of how far you can advance your character by doing the things you enjoy in-game, then get told that to improve further you have to spend a significant amount of time doing things you don't enjoy, why would you even want to keep playing? Beyond interacting with friends, that is.

Draztal, a community blue, weighs in:

Methinks he's missing the point. Also when asked if he likes dailies, he replied with the following:


He's obviously sick and needs our love and support to get through this difficult time in his life.

I don't mind dailies that unlock vanity rewards; I did the Tillers to exalted in MoP and every single rep that rewarded a mount from Vanilla up to Cata because I'm a mount collector. The thing about unlocking vanity items is that there's no pressure; if you don't feel like doing dailies today it doesn't mean you're hurting your guild's raid progression by not having your Ice Mammoth in time. Aside from tying good gear (and valor points) to dailies though, what ruined MoP for me is that the worst, shittiest set of dailies were required to unlock two more sets of fucking dailies. Golden Lotus was probably my biggest reason for unsubbing, because that faction was pretty much the definition of how not to do dailies. If I could have just skipped them and missed out on 1-2 items it wouldn't have been a deal breaker but gating two more factions behind that fuckawful rep was the last straw.

Yeah, that.

Dailies for vanity items? Great.  Dailies for money?  No problem (for me.)   Dailies for Valor to a cap I don't even mind - so long as there's other ways to get to that cap like heroics, dungeons and scenarios. 

Dailies for rep and locking my only gear upgrades behind both of them can fuck off.   Those are chores, not fun.

Yeah.  They already caved on one set of items behind dailies, that's what bothers me.

It's like saying 'Punching you in the face turns out to be a mistake, but we're not going to do anything about kicking you in the crotch'.

Fuck 'em.

Golden Lotus was a perfect storm of stupid: It was at the start of the expansion (so everyone was starting from scratch at the same time), it locked away two other factions, the minimum rep for gear (on all factions) was originally set too high, you couldn't start working on the rep until you finished levelling, and the design of the dailies was just flat out bad (faction increases only unlocked more hubs rather than anything more interesting which mean repping up just increased the grind).

It could have been fixable if they'd acted quickly (doubling the rep from quests, dropping the linked factions unlocks to honoured or even friendly, and adding more one-off quests would have been a decent start) but it's left such a bad taste now that about the best thing they could do with it now is puill all the non-cosmetic gear from it (and throw them on a less painful faction or even just on a generic JP vendor) and unlink Shado-pan & AC from it entirely.

I agree with the last part, and that should have been their initial fix. They should have unlinked the reps when they saw how big of a shitstorm it was creating in that region, and they should have moved all VP gear to a vendor in the city, not blocked by faction. They will probably end up doing just that in their own mammothly slow way sometime in April, long after we've stopped giving a shit.

They needed to stop making expansion release mistakes with Mists in order to earn the goodwill back from the Cataclysm release mistakes. They failed, and lost any momentum they gained with the D3 thing, since expires shortly.

I like most of these suggestions but I don't think unlinking the gated reputations or lowering the required rep level for the gate would have helped without huge changes to the factions. People would have had the option of stopping at honored (if it unlocked Shadopan and August Celestials) but they would have continued for the VP rewards or the exalted ring. If you thought feeling like you "had to do" ~25 dailies (Golden Lotus + Klaxxi) was bad, just imagine how bad it would be if you felt like you had 10 more dailies that "you had to do" on top of that for Shadopan and August Celestials at the same time.

The gating wasn't a bad idea. The reputation that served as the gate was the problem. Triple the reputation gains from Golden Lotus, retire the first hub when you hit honored (or was it revered?) so that you never have more than 10 quests to do for one faction and you aren't doing the same quests for quite as long, and avoid making the mistake again in the future.

Alternatively, if they did want to remove the gate, they could triple the rep gains from golden lotus and limit it to one 5-quest hub per day (that changes to different sets at higher rep levels), and people probably wouldn't feel as hostile about dailies. You're still only doing 15 quests a day between the three factions, but you get more variety and the grind wouldn't feel as slow.

Future daily factions need to move faster and have a lot more one-off story beats if Blizzard doesn't want the community to react negatively.

So say the next expansion comes out.  Why would I want to raise my faction rep with anything in MoP?

Maybe Ghostcrawler will get to bring his awesome vision to the next expansion and literally require a specific item level to enter it so you have to grind MoP factions. I mean, we wouldn't want everyone's "accomplishments" (his words) to be "invalidated" (also his words) would we?

My idea for that accomplishment thing without worrying about ruining people's accomplishments would be to make raiding achievements tiered instead of the raids themselves.

Example, complete a raid before the first pass of patches? Gold Achievement for the raid. Three months after it's released? Silver achievement. Complete it before the end of an expansion? Bronze achievement. Overlevel it two years later? Regular achievement.

Tie those gold, silver, whatever ratings to a higher level of achievement points and vanity crap.

I think there needs to be more ranting about the tiered raiding, because that alone kills any interest I have in coming back.

Here's the thing I don't understand from GC's tweets and defense of gating content behind dailies.  He says all you need to do is complete Dread Wastes and you're ready for heroics and then it's a short jump to LFR.  My experience was more painful than that. 

To run the first tier LFR you need ilvl 460 and finish Dreadwastes at say ilvl 440 (it's less but let's pretend) in each slot (would be lower for some but let's pretend).  With 16 slots you need 320 more ilvls of which you get 23 per heroic 5 man upgrade, 36 per PvP item, 49 per valor point upgrade, and 18 per justice point upgrade.  You could put crafted items with the valor items too if you have a lazy 20-30k gold lying around.

Realistically you're going to have 2 valor pieces from honored with Klaxxi (1250 vp) and Golden Lotus (1750 vp).  After 5.1 you could probably also add another from the invasion dailies (another 1750 vp).  Assuming just the two valor items we're up to 98 ilvls.

Now let's say you get 8 upgrades from heroics (184 ilvls) and a couple of PvP items (hope you're not a tank - 72 ilvls) - ta da you're there.

So really the "short jump" to LFR is really determined by getting 3000 vp. You get to honored with Klaxxi from Dreadwaste quests and Golden Lotus to honored takes about a week (might be longer).  Say 15 dailies (75vp), a heroic a day (80vp), pls a scenrio (40 vp).  Call it 200vp per day and you're looking at 15 days to qualify for Mogu'shan Vaults.

Geting to ilvl 470 for the next tier is a whole other ball of wax and really depends on you're luck with loot in LFR.  Personally I've had 36 boss kills, 9 bonus loot rolls for 3 drops but only 2 unique drops.  I've ground out Revered with Golden Lotus and am still short (ivll 467)but will be close once I get to Honored with Shado Pan.

And that's my frustratration with MoP.

Nice summary, not that GC would admit that any of it is true.

For me it's simpler:

Any gating makes the game no fun. It wasn't fun in Vanilla (Horde Ony quest line etc) or TBC (keys anyone?) and it certainly isn't fun now. I did it all, but I didn't enjoy it.

Fun is not what these retards think it is.

That is all.

The daily gating is just another form of attunements, I agree.

Dont forget that you get a free pair of 476 boots simply for killing the Sha of Anger at least once (and when faction wide World Boss tapping goes in, doing that will be even easier).  Getting into the second LFR raid tier can also be made MUCH easier if you get lucky in your first week or two of sha kills.  I got lucky on my paladin alt and got tier gloves on my first kill, which at 496 is a very nice Ilevel bump.

I think there is a fairly signifigant differece between an Expantion based gear / accomplisment "reset" and a mid expantion raid tier reset.   I mean, nothing says "hey, thanks for all that hard work you put in killing those difficult raid bosses" like adding 3 new facerollable 5 mans that drop loot of the same Ilevel just so the newbies can play catchup and get into the new upcoming raid tier.  Sure, there is probably a decent middle ground, but where that is, I dont know.

Yeah, it was.  Gating items is similarly retarded.  You just don't get what's turning people off ?

I loved Ulduar and my guild wasn't done with the hardmodes we wanted to do when Trial of the Crusader dropped. We went right on to ToTC and were perfectly fine with the fact the new tier was a super-easy loot fountain that "invalidated" all that swank gear we struggled to get. We just didn't like Trial of the Crusader because it was a boring and unimaginative raid after you completed it a couple of times, particularly after seeing all the pretty awesome art/design in Ulduar. So we got geared up, then geared up our alts in record time, then we fucked around doing Ulduar/Naxx achievements (facerolling the place in 10m with the 25m ToTC gear) and doing the tourney dailies.

The catch up never fucking entered our minds. We were never mad that people could get gear that was mostly as good/better then the stuff we got out of Ulduar in a 5-man that took all of 15 minutes to do.

Because we're not assholes.*

*well not complete ones.

This is part of the problem. Blizzard has all the data, which means they're looking at the over-arching numbers.  Yes, on average it only takes x number of weeks to gear-up and progress and 50% or more will be on that schedule.

That completely ignores the hundreds of thousands of players on the back end of the curve.  These players USED to be able to gear-up via valor points when the next tier dropped and progress.   That will not happen now and it WILL make people quit because fuck being told you can't do the new shiny because you had shitty luck.

In other words: It's not malice, it's sheer incompetence and lack of understanding of your mechanics as a whole.  It's design by spreadsheet instead of design by experience and understanding.

Seems to me that even when they try to add their own experience in, it's the experience of 'Well, I liked getting hit in the nuts'.

Yeah I meant holistic play experience rather than anecdotal experience.  Word fumble.  You can't design by spreadsheet, say "Well those folks at the back end who take 10-12 weeks just get fucked on progression" and expect to have a good game.

Gating content is a perfectly fine mechanic, it's just what unlocks the gate fun/notfun.  For example, having to grind a shitton of daily quests every day for a week or more just to raise a reputation to the point where it unlocks two more similar reputation grinds is awful, and retarded.  That's a fun factor of 1, or -10 whatever.

If the dailies become something entertaining that doesn't involve shit like kill quests or collection quests then the fun factor hits like 3 or 4 on a scale of 10.  Maybe.

However, I would mind gating factions or vendors or gear behind achievement scores.  Say there was an achievement for killing bears in a certain time.  Killing 10 bears in 30 seconds is a gold star, and killing 10 in 60 seconds is a bronze.  If you have a gold star, then you're done and the gate is unlocked.  Maybe it's a timed dungeon run, maybe it's a jumping puzzle, maybe it's something else.  Who cares.

The point is, you can avoid grinding for weeks on end doing the same shit over and over if you're good enough to do it in the first go.  The "good enough" can be any level of difficulty. 

I prefer playing the game and accomplishing things rather than mindless kill quests or collection quests. WOW has terrible "video game play" as it is (hotbar combat is incredibly non-engaging), make the game fun to play outside of killing an npc over and over.

The last time I dealt with any sort of gating was the attunements for Karazahn.  That was just fine because the act of getting attuned was actually kindof fun.  When it wasn't fun was when you had to beg, plead or steal to be able to get a group together to get attuned. 

Gating attunements are "okay" when it's a solo quest objective. If you start tossing in group components, it falls over on its face. If used correctly, a gating attunement that was a solo objective could be used as a story telling device. It could add into the content instead of just making it generic-bug-raid-4.

That being said, once you do an attunement, they have the ability to attune your account to that raid, on all characters. Making alts do any kind of gating content after it's been completed by another character is absolutely not acceptable.

Attunements would only be acceptable to me at this point if they were account-wide.

You needed groups to get the key for Kara.  Shadow Labs in particular needed a solid group to get through.

So. Many. Shadow Labs. Deaths.

One poorly-timed assassin.. plotz.   One fucked pull in the skeleton room.. plotz.  Slow dps on Murmor... plotz.

(http://i.minus.com/iiN4y9gCVc8Pg.gif) Labyrinth has no 's' in it.

I already explained my reasoning. What turned people off was not the gating, it was the gate (shitty long daily grind). If you want me to give you an answer you're going to have to give me a more substantial response than "no, gating is retarded".

On the subject of attunements, most the group components wouldn't have been a problem with the LFD replacing trade chat and scenarios replacing group quests. I wouldn't be surprised to see small attunement chains come back in the next expansion.

We are already essentially seeing attunements in the 5.0 raids since you have to do MSV before HoF, HoF before ToES, etc. Nobody really cares that there are attunements for these raids, even ones that aren't account-wide, because the process of getting attuned is not obnoxious and is something you'd have been doing anyway.

You're doing the "you don't actually know what bothered you, you think it was X, but really it was Y" thing. You probably don't want to do that; if people here say they hated the gating, best to take their word for it.

You liked auto assault though, what is your opinion worth!

I've heard people here suggest that removing the reputation gate for August Celestials/Shadopan or the VP cap would help fix the most common complaint with MoP which was "you're asking me to do too much stuff that isn't fun". People don't seriously believe giving people more un-fun stuff to do in a given week/day would have improved the game, do they? I'm trying to avoid saying "what you actually disliked was X", but it's pretty clear that people are trying to fix the wrong parts of the problem.

If you think gating is inherently bad and that removing the gate on Golden Lotus would have improved the problem, rather than making it worse like I suggested, then explain your argument.

No he has a point and I think a lot of people agree.

Gating content isn't inherently evil, hell in single player games content is "gated" through the story.  Gating doesn't need to be unfun and there's lots of ways to do it without repetitive grinding dailies, even group based attunements wouldn't be bad if getting the group was easy and painless.

Unfortunately, wow has not found a fun way to do it.

Gating is only called gating when it's not fun. When it's fun it's called progression or flow.

/thread

Scenarios should have, could have been a lot better.
The dungeons are just not interesting. I hate to say it, but Cata's ones were more engaging, and let's not even talk about wotlk.

Scenario's were utterly fucking disappointing.

It's not Risk V reward, it's TIME vs reward.

Rokal is right, here. At least in part. The fishing faction doesn't cockblock useful gear but is a slow, painful, long, boring grind.

I'm not attacking you just adding to your thought process. The idea of risk at all in a video game is fucking stupid. Fucking neck beard virtual achievers need to quit fucking the fun out of our pixels with that whole risk versus reward bullshit. Give me my treats as my reward for spending time in your shitty virtual world.

this

Fixed

Ironwood's post nailed it. The fact that I look back to WotLK dungeons as being great fun (even repeated) and Cataclysm (!!!!) dungeons as being ok/interesting, makes me wonder who the fuck designed the MoP ones. They are shit or rehashes.

But apparently end-game is raiding.

It's like Blizzard took all the good things from previous expansions and made a conscious effort to trash every single one in an attempt to improve the game - kind of like how D3 is apparently a better game than D2.

Yeah.  They still don't understand why some D2 die hards (like me) didn't like D3 and now play Torchlight.

Just like they probably don't understand why a WoW Addict like me is now playing SWtor and looking to download Secret World for a poke about.

They also have little idea on why someone like me is really, really, really swithering on buying the Zerg expansion even though it's a wet dream of mine.

And it really, really didn't and doesn't have to be that way.  I just have to accept the fact that this company is not the games company I used to support.  And it's time to move on.

But I CANNOT get me wife to do so.

I cannot wait for three months into the next expansion when the exact same burned-out vets are shitting all over the new content while claiming MoP was much more fun and the dungeons were so great and why isn't there as much stuff to do any more and so on.  :awesome_for_real:

And I'm still waiting for an explanation as to how running dungeons with friends for gear/JP has somehow become impossible.

So you prefer Cataclysm heroics and overall gameplay design to MoP? May I suggest you give Vanguard or EQMac a try, as your taste in MMOs clearly tends towards the masochistic?

It is funny to listen to rats try to negotiate with experimenters about the composition and schedule of the pelts in the Skinner box.

For one thing JP is generally useless. They messed up the points this time around. For another thing, the VP rewards are behind factions. Which are behind dailies in GL, which are then behind more dailies for Shadopan and August.

Does that help? Or do you need more? What people want is the way things were in Wrath. You run the dungeon. You get VP. You spend VP at the vendor in the capital city. Huzzah.

http://www.wowhead.com/npc=64607

Oh look, a vendor full of JP gear with no faction requirements.

So, yeah, JP are pretty pointless.   Also, as previously mentioned unless you get lucky with drops you have no mechanism for gearing.  My rogue has run about 30 dungeons and 8 weeks of Vaults raids and only *just* got the item level to be able to run the Klaxxi raids.  That's not fun.   My hunter is still wearing a blue shoulder because I can't win on the randomizer and there's no VP option.  Also not fun.

Vendor-sold gear was always supposed to be gap-filling, so being worse than heroic drops is sort of the point. As for not being good enough for raid gear...this started with a comment of "Why can't I just run heroics with friends?" so what do raids have to do with anything?

Because you glossed over the entire point, and seem to be putting your fingers in your ears. During wrath you could run dungeons, slowly earn points, AND BUY THE FUCKING RAID GEAR.

JP for a bunch of blues? Fuck off with that shit. People are earning these valor points by running dungeons already. They just can't spend them because Blizzard has deemed that prior model needed to be gated by factions.

You can use JP to upgrade dungeon blues until 5.2 hits and the upgrade NPC retires (permanently?). JP is pretty useful right now, especially for alts or characters that are trying to reach LFR without VP/rep items.

Just exchange Risk for Challenge. 

No, offense Rokal, but I think you and Simond are definitely not ever going to agree with the general arguments here. You guys are the demographic that is responsible for the mindsets that stole the fun from the rest of us.

Nah, I'm not hardcore in any way. I'm just a little tired of some people frantically searching for the Next Big Thing in MMOs coming back to the WoW subforum all butthurt (because their latest crush turned out to be mediocre and dead within a quarter) and then shitting all over the threads here because they've got nothing better to do.

I'm the first to admit that the current setup of factions & dailies is flawed - especially the ten days* worth of Golden Lotus dalies - but the whole "Waaah the grind" melodrama is overdone and in fact I am fairly certain that if MoP unlocked everything the second you dinged 90 some of the exact same people would be sat in here whinging about how there was no content left.

*For your first character, of course. Five days for alts.

Also, speaking of rep: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/251023-i-honestly-hope-blizzard-never-brings-back-rep-tabards/

So there you all go: ignore dailies and just do 1 heroic + 1 scenario and the Tillers work orders. Some people will need find a new reason to bitch about how they seem to keep coming back to WoW even though they despise it and the dev team.

You're really living in a glass house there Simond, condemning people continually bitching about the same thing over and over and over.

I'm usually right, though.  :awesome_for_real:

You mean you're able to predict failure in the gaming world? Holy shit, I'm surprised you haven't been contacted by Vegas yet to set lines!

It's not special. It's called playing the odds and waiting.

Yeah, true. It would be more difficult if the industry sucked less, of course.

Actually the big news in 5.2 is that they are reducing the cost of VP items by 25-50%. 50% for 5.0 items and 25% for 5.1 items.

Wood for the fucking trees.

I don't give a shit if they only cost on VP, if I can't get them.

Poster A has a long history of shitting up threads about games he hasn't played.

Poster B has a long list of complaints about a game he's played for 5+ years and sunk hundreds of dollars into, and is now angry about to the point where he repeats himself sometimes.

Poster A tells Poster B to stop shitting the thread up with his complaints.

The only appropriate response to Poster A:

Fuuuuuuuuuuck yooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Way to put words in a person's mouth. I focussed on the dungeons in that post.

Reading for comprehension is a skill apparently.

Umm... at launch in Wrath you could only buy blues that weren't that stellar at first too.  You had to hit the token cap (of 2/day) to be able to afford the raid gear (that generally took 25-30 days to get one piece) unless you actually ran the raids and killed bosses, and then could afford to upgrade quicker.  It wasn't until several patch cycles in that the EPICZ came into full swing of being easily affordable by the masses (which is likely coming in the next patch).

Don't get me wrong, upgrading your pants and gating things behind dailies and high faction reps still sucks ass, but Wrath didn't exactly make things easy at first either (fucking Hodir), it took a few patch cycles to work it up to great fun.  I think they are trying to repeat Wrath's cycle of high player retention but are missing the mark and making things too much of a dickpunch.

Wrath had the benefit of an opening raid tier that was incredibly easy.

I do.

I do.

I'm not sure if you're talking about more than one person here, but I think I can speak for some of us when I say that people come back to the WoW forum to complain about WoW because Blizzard used to do things differently than they do now; Blizzard used to behave differently. I liked that Blizzard - the one that was fairly nimble and responsive to players complaints (that was several years ago now). I don't like this Blizzard, the one that tells me that my problem isn't their game, I'm just not playing it right, and other people's accomplishments are more important than my own enjoyment.

Besides, where are people shitting all over threads here? Isn't this the thread for expressing disappointment? If you're happy, why are you reading this thread when it's bound to upset you.

I think Xanth has a point, if you are totally happy with blizzard and think WoW is peachy keen, this isn't the thread you are looking for...

Umm... Which Blizzard was this?

Nostalgia is corrosive poison.

NIMBLE?

What on earth?

Is this the Blizzard that took 18 months to do an initial balance pass at classes post launch?

Or is it the Blizzard that arbitrarily and oddly nerfed mages at the start of TBC for no apparent reason and then literally waited over a year to remove the nerf despite every bit of evidence showing the nerf wasn't needed in the first place?

Is it the Blizzard that left the horrendous Horde / Alliance disparity in vanilla exist all the way through the vanilla game despite the massive imbalances it was causing?

Blizzard have never, ever ever been nimble. Every expansion comes with promises of faster content delivery, and it never happens. Gross class imbalances are left in place for months and months, if not years, at a time. Players are left to endlessly grind the same content for 6+ months at a time. The only time you can use nimble and Blizzrad together is in the sentence "Blizzard are the opposite of"

Class balance is impossible, anybody that hammers Blizzard for that is a loon.

They are not quick on anything, that much is true. They are a slow trundling behemoth that needs to be moved in a direction. Often they know exactly how to fix a problem and can't correct it until months have passed.

If anything I think their PR has gotten worse because they are trying to give people a glimpse into the process now. Before they would just say nothing. The problem is that the glimpse often shows they have people that don't understand their own systems, or they have completely different visions of fun, or they can't anticipate at all how the average player will react to a situation.

This was when they were rolling out 2.0.  Good times.

"The game is fine you're just playing it wrong" and punishing players for having fun the wrong way is definitely a newish attitude at Blizzard. It's D3 and mid-life WoW Blizzard.

Yeah. I don't consider them to ever have been fast or responsive, but what Margalis said and part of what Xan said are spot on.

Part of Blizzard's issues of late is ego. The other part of it is many of the decisions they've made would have produced a better game in an ideal environment. More challenging content in and of itself is not a bad thing. Nor is the idea of repeatable quests, or guild levels, or faction rewards, or token points.

The problem is always in the unintended consequences of implementation. Blizzard holds fast to these ideas at times because they know they can improve the game, but the playerbase doesn't react the way they want. It's frustrating to them as designers because they think "if they would just do this, it would work so well." Hey, tough shit. They don't want to do it that way, and you should know better than to fight it by now.

Not class balance, class philosophy.

Nothing but a warrior should tank, all hybrids are really just healers, except warriors which are also pure DPS.


Then you have the Vanilla content philosophy of "What do you mean you don't like raiding? okay, how about a giant grind to unlock more raids FOR the raiders, you like that right?"



Blizzard has been telling us that we are playing their game wrong for a long long time.

It also doesn't help that apparently in everyone's memory, Diablo 2 sprung full-formed into existence with LoD 1.10/1.11 patch level stuff right from the beginning.

Diablo 2 was fun for me from the start.  Patches and LoD just enhanced that fun, they were never about fixing it.  Maybe others were hardcore enough they felt different.

Blizzard screwed with the graphics driver settings on a few of the early patches (1.02 or 1.03) and it really ruined my experience.  I wasn't the biggest fan of D2 honestly, I like D1 so much more and D2 felt like a giant letdown.  It wasn't until LOD 1.10 with the synergies that I actually enjoyed playing it again, but that was like 3-4 years after release...

And seriously, Blizzard hasn't changed their attitude towards the players of WoW in almost 8 years, it's the same story.  "More raids for the hardcore.  What do you mean you don't like raiding?" of Vanilla... some raids of which hardly anyone saw due to how difficult they were to get into or even attuned to.  TBC was not much better, with horrendous chain quests to get into raids and heroics which practically required raid gear to be done without wiping all night.

This ^^. Plus I never had graphics issues after patches (trying to remember if I was using a 3dfx Voodoo or Voodoo 3 card by then). I'd played D1 to death and found that D2 was better. LoD was even better, but I never faulted the original (well except for the Corpse Explosion nerfs on my necro).

Edit: On second thought I don't remember when I played Diablo 2, so never mind.

I never played LoD  :awesome_for_real:

So the new work orders are pure farming dailies and require 8 farm plots per daily and reward 300 rep per quest. :uhrr:

Yo dudes, we hear your feedback about rep grind and dailies so we're giving you more dailies that you can only do once you've ground out this other rep.  Oh, and we hear that you like playing wow to bash monsters for loots so you'll love this rep where you can grow plants by clicking twice on a pile of dirt and solving this awesome puzzle to germinate the seed.

Dicks.

Fuck.... me


Are you serious?

LOL. I left WoW in 2007 because I didn't enjoy fake gameplay that caters to players who feel entitled to rewards. I pop into this supposed exit thread in 2013 and find someone imagining that I'm a neckbeard looming over his pez dispenser.

Give me the adrenaline of catastrophic consequences for catastrophic failure. Unimaginable reward for total success. And everything in between. That's a game.

You described dating, not WoW.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/bale-ooh.gif)

Yah, that mentality.. no thanks. Once I could play these games like it wasn't some sort of half job, half practice in masochism; I never wanted it again.  There's a reason you won't see anyone trying to bring back EQ style suffering to market anytime soon; no one wants it.

edit:

Alas, old argument.  Not sure we need to rehash.  

Related to the topic: I'm still not getting drawn in by anything in this expansion.  I can really only think of one think that would 100% bring me back at this point, but it will never, ever happen.

Don't leave us hanging, you asshole, tell us what it is!  :heartbreak:

I'm guessing SWTOR style companions added, and the one for his class is voiced by Eve Myles.

That's your thing. He might just want Ashley.

I'm guessing precasting.  :why_so_serious:

That would be.. fantastic.   :Love_Letters:


Why not both?

If they announced some sort of story/solo mode for all dungeons/raids.  That'd be the thing for me.  Doesn't even have to drop loot.   That's my pipe dream.

Although, shit, that Merril thing would be nice as well.

People bitch about rep.
Blizzard adds a way to get 1200 rep of any MoP faction of your choice once/day for a couple of minutes time on your farm.
People bitch about 'having' to spend a couple of minutes time to get rep.  :awesome_for_real:

They have. (http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1253745-The-Blood-Solo-Thread-3-0)
(Sorry if you're one of the lesser, non-hero, classes) :smug:

Go play Vanguard.

Why would I play an old, bad game? I've been enjoying Planetside 2 quite a lot.


I didn't ask for a time-consuming game. The replies put that assumption on me. I don't have the time anymore either. I asked for the return of gameplay where I can risk losing everything, if the reward for success is worth it to me. That's not dating, that's gambling. It's poker. Double or nothing. Risks people take in games for fun and potential gain, if they are prepared to deal with the loss (or even if they aren't!).

It's not an offensive thing to ask for. Unless, apparently, you love living in a loot dispenser.

I wandered into this thread because I'd noticed it burning along to an 11th page in 2013 and wondered why. I'm still puzzled. Possibly also a bit freaked out by people playing WoW.

I'm puzzled why you walked into a WoW thread and expected to find the Kentucky Derby betting window.

I didn't, I found this comment and responded to it:

Well it IS stupid. Risk in gambling is money. You win or lose an asset. Risk in a video game? You're risking time, if that. Then you descend into a realm of Wargame-esque the only way to truly win is not to play.

If at the end of the day no matter how you play a game, the time you've committed to what's supposed to be a fun pursuit, you end up where you started except slightly older and/or entertained. Are you really living on the edge in a game you think has risk, or are you creating a false sense of risk by instituting completely arbitrary factors that will ruin your game? Perhaps others have to have their games ruined for it to be fun for you. Or perhaps you have to have the potential that you could be unhappy after playing a game. Or even worse, perhaps you seek false risk in a safe environment because your life is blandly mediocre.

There's no risk in chess. There's no risk in RISK. You have nothing on the line except pride. If you want true risk, play poker, or the stock market, or go overseas to volunteer in Africa.

In 1997 I got on an $850 bicycle in Scotland and cycled to Poland, mostly alone, camping most nights for four months, via Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and then newly post-communist nations Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Hungary again, Slovakia again, Poland. I sold my bike for $50, caught a train to tourist-unfriendly Moscow, then a train across Russia, Siberia, Mongolia and China, casually wandered into town from Beijing's northern railway station at 3:20pm on a Monday and found a hotel, then caught trains, buses and a boat on a journey to southern China.

I got sick in Hong Kong and had to come back to Australia, but in 1999, I went to Singapore and caught a local boat to Sumatra, ignoring the travel warnings not to go to Indonesia during their first post-Suharto election. I stayed with locals next to a mosque at Lake Maninjau for a while, swam out into the middle of the crater lake, then took local buses all the way to Bali, with people clutching their chickens in the aisles, eating Padang food with my right hand as they did, came home and a colleague introduced me to EverQuest, in which I became an enjoyably addicted raider and quite fat until I really couldn't take any more sitting around.

It was all more self-indulgent and less worthy than volunteering in Africa (I've volunteered on an Aboriginal settlement in the central Australian desert, if that makes up for it), but I think some of the things I've done in life have had risk. I recovered from a huge and bloody crash in Slovakia. I escaped an attack by gypsies in Romania. I'm now fairly settled with a good job, a mortgage and a new relationship. But when I take the time to enter the imaginary world of a game, I do not want it to be safe. I want to feel adventure and the perception of danger, which to me requires there to be the perceived risks I have described. Maybe I have become a different beast.

I'm sorry, but if a post ever demanded this response, its this one: Cool story bro.

The 'No risk in RISK' confused me.

Tale's follow up post just blew my fucking mind.

MY MIND.

I think it was his attempt to call Paelos to the carpet on his, "Or even worse, perhaps you seek false risk in a safe environment because your life is blandly mediocre. " comment.

It didn't work out.

Tale, good grief. I'm not even sure why in the world you felt the need to defend your life in an WoW thread, but come on.

Just don't wander into a subforum with a post of LULZ PPL STILL PLAY THIS? NO RISK NO REWARD YOLO!

I'm sure you've seen things people wouldn't believe, like, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, and c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All that aside what does your story have to do with how wow is now shitty because of people like you?

Haha awesome.


"Defend my life"? I told a story about the level of risk in my life, now and then.

You said if I wanted risks, I should go and find some in real life instead of games. I gave you an example of some risky adventures I've had, which were very rewarding. I theorised that now my life is more settled, where "risk" means "mortgage", my experiences have turned me into someone who enjoys increased virtual risk for increased virtual reward (or virtual catastrophe), rather than merely being rewarded for spending time in a game. In a thread about how WoW no longer does it for whoever.

Keep up :-)

I'm trying to think of a good way to compare pre-Trammel UO to the time me and my brother saw one of his best friends get ran over and killed by a drunk driver in front of our house.

Something something pk character permanence fethers

I don't think I've seen trolling this blatant since Sinij was banned.

Well it's about time someone stepped up their game then. You people think you can just log into F13 and have a nice daisy-chain reach-around circle-jerk where everyone agrees, and you get rewarded for just showing up? Didn't I ever tell you newbs about the time I got chased barefoot across the polar ice shelf* by a gang of angry Mongolians? You can bet your risk vs reward that I wasn't thinking about a video game then!

* (Uphill, both ways.)

Very sorry you went through that.

I should point out that my MMORPG experience began with the entry into EQ I mentioned above - I didn't play UO. So my perspective on risk vs reward is mostly about PvE, thinking of corpses stuck in Plane of Fear and the early days of SWG which had a similar dynamic (when the game even worked, that is). I know a lot of people don't like that kind of risk, but I'm a fan of it and I missed it in WoW.

It was like a billion years ago. Also you're the first person I've ever seen that liked the planes of hate/fear break in stuff. My WoW guild was ran by a bunch of EQ burnouts and they told horror stories about how shitty those were.

The experience was totally shitty, but for a 20-something with plenty of time it was unique and memorable.  Time gives all shitty things a rosy color, though.   

Nostalgia & the mind have this funny way of taking shitty experiences and making us say dumb things like, "Well I wouldn't be the man I am today if I didn't get caught in the drug cartel cross fire that killed my parents, wife and newborn son.  Despite the pain I can't imagine life any differently and wouldn't change that."

Because otherwise we'd boggle at the amount of wasted time and lost opportunities.

And yet, we can all agree on some things being completely shitty. Such as leveling any character in the absolute shitpile that was DOAC's pve.

We all knew that was shitty even when we were doing it though.

I couldn't get past the mid 30s.   I only got that far because I was playing with friends including my current roommate.   They continued to play until post ToA.   I consider myself lucky for getting out when I did.  

Mythic's PVE is fucking terrible.  Some of Turbine's attempts are just as bad, but at least you could exploit that shit at launch.

You'll find someone who remembers it fondly, or backtracks and says, "Well it really wasn't as bad as people made it out to be.  They were just upset by the justified XP nerf and made it out to be worse than it was."  Guarantee it.

Nobody thought there would ever be people who remembered EQ planar corpse runs fondly, after all.

I still remember a 5 hour + corpse recovery from a failed small group Plane of Life (or whatever the place was with the fauns) attempt.  I was so goddamn miserable.  I had a test the next morning or as it turned out.. 2 in hours from the actual finish.   Plus I lost like a week or two worth of EXP. 

FUCK YAH.

DAoC's PvE taught me and Ingmar a valuable lesson in pairing our classes properly, at least. Thane + Skald did not make for a good duo.  :why_so_serious:

I hated EQ planar corpse runs too! I hated limping 30km back to Krakow on a slow leak after multiple punctures, thinking what the fuck is this fucking shit I am doing with my life.

But I fondly remember drinking with people I met in Krakow and many other memories after that, between the lows. I fondly remember when I got my EQ corpse back. I fondly remember good times helping a friend who permanently lost his corpse re-equip. Re-planning a player city in SWG after the other team destroyed all our bases. I didn't get those feelings in WoW, so I associate higher highs with game design that includes the risk of horrible lows.

The standard F13 response over the years is the hammer-to-the-testicles analogy. Well, maybe I'm just one of those crazy people on Japanese game shows willing to try and dodge the hammer to the testicles if the TV station will reward me if I make it.

There was that one PvE server, but they basically had fake RvR vs. AI bots or whatever too.

Seriously?

Seriously what? I'm just making fun of myself for having such a different opinion to most of F13. I am serious however that I think gameplay with the potential for greater disasters provides greater highs when the player does well.

I don't like it when players get input on every design decision, because players fuck it up by always demanding more candy, and whining about everything that is not candy. I like designers to design. Damn the torpedoes.

You clearly need to be playing Eve, not WoW.

Eve isn't a hammer to the balls though.

It's more of a rusty nail hammered through your balls.

Here's the most important thing GC learned via twitter:

What's the problem with this?

Nothing, it doesn't have to be all bad points with GC. I know many of us wondered what some of the guys took away from Cataclysm.

Obviously he's in twitter so he can't go deeper, but I'd be interested to see if that kind of mentality lead to the stance on dailies.

I love a good Risk vs. Reward debate.

Most MMORPGs today, when you consider PVE, have nearly zero risk other than wasted time playing a game.  Of course you can expand to your argument that every is in blocks of time, but you really need to get up close and define time spent vs. time spent having fun.

In WOW, when you die, lose or wipe, you lose time.  A period of hours spent trying to beat a raid boss and getting nothing.  Or running out of playing time because you have responsibilities so you couldn't achieve whatever you wanted to do.  That's pretty much all you risk to lose.  Armor durability costs are essentially nothing now since money has been incredibly inflated.  So your loss in-game is absolutely zero.

IN EQ, when you died, wiped etc., you would lose experience and potentially, all your equipment.  This risk was diminished over time due to xp resses and corpse summoners and the like, however the risk is still time.  But MORE time.  When you died, you not only wasted time attempting and not completing your objective, you then would have to spend additional time the next day recovering experience.  When you lost loot, you lost an amazing amount of progress and could seriously be hampered by it.  This was mostly a reflection because gear was somewhat rare (vs. tons of gear in Diablo).

Yes it's still time, but there are variations.

I think what Tale is saying is that he wants a game that has high risk (read: challenge) versus reward.  There's a reason why slot machines are fun to a lot of people.  It's not a black and white system though, and you can go and argue how much or how little you lose or win etc.  Who cares.

The point is that Tale is right, there is room for a game that is equally punishing and rewarding.  Paelos boiled down the argument that all games should just be easy for the most part.  WOW has moved so far into the easy of play and ease of access it's impossible to work that model into the game these days.  But future games can certainly develop a risk of loss that doesn't completely smash you in the nuts every time.  It would be a welcome change/re-emergence, and obviously it wouldn't be for everyone.

I don't disagree that there's room for that game - if properly executed.  Vanguard had a lot of hype before it released as a shitty half-completed mess.  They, frankly, aimed too fucking high.  Seems to be a frequent theme for MMO devs. 

Perhaps someday we'll get someone who plans, narrows their focus and executes well this vision of using the big-boy slots vs the penny slots we prefer.  With the shift to F2P, however, this becomes far more unlikely since its advocates seemed focused on a sub model. 

Which is downright silly, because it would be incredibly profitable, so long as you properly balanced the Time vs Money risk.  In the EQ days people bitched that their jobs prevented them from competing with the kids who had 12-16 hours to chunk into the game.   Allowing people to have increased drops, better xp rates, corpse summons, etc for cash you allowed people to decide: Time or Money.  You just can't wall-off huge chunks of the game behind a pay wall when doing so.

You know.. kind of like how the Koreans have done for YEARS now.  :awesome_for_real:

Punishing the shit out of me for losing in a game just gives me stress, which is the exact opposite thing I play for.

Oh.. also meant to say - THIS ISN'T THAT GAME.  That boat sailed 8 years ago, trying to bring it about now is begging for an NGE-level drop in subs.

It doesn't have to be that drastic as penny slots vs. whatever.

Why not create a full loot PVP game?  Most people will think you're crazy because, "OMG FULL LOOT!" and then call the mental hospital or go sit on the other side of the room.  The reason why people hate it is because the focus of these game is highly weighted on gear or loot.

But what if you make games where loot is either de-emphasized or easier to get?  Why not make gear more prevalent like in Diablo or Borderlands?  There are other solutions that are pretty obvious and easy to implement if you get out of the rut of making your game all about leveling from 1-X over X hours and then creating a gear-centric grind.

Even in PVE games you don't need exp loss or gear loss to create risk.

Or why not create a PVE game like EVE?  Have a world where you have a core of safe zones.  It's littered with fast travel nodes like GW2. When you die you just spawn back at a node.  Then have surrounding zones that do not have fast travel access and are harder to walk through and travel through.  Dying pops you back into the nearest safe area node of your choice.  Of course you have to design your PVE combat experience so when you're much more powerful or durable that your WOW character.  One or two creatures usually can't kill you unless you're retarded.  Making fleeing/retreating easier.  The stuff you get in the harder areas is just as good as the stuff you get in safe areas, but it's less time inducing to get.  Safe area has smaller drop percentages or requires more tokens and harder areas have the opposite.

Now I'm getting way to devchair stupid but you get the point.  There are plenty of ways to create challenge, risk and fun gameplay that doesn't punch you in the nuts and throw your monitor out the window.

Challenge and risk are not the same thing. They're not even really related.

That's the thing though, what exactly "Punishing the shit out of you" mean?  There are plenty of single player games out there that give you a finite number of continues or lives.  Or forcing you to repeat content if you lose.  Sometimes you have to repeat a lot of content sometimes they make you repeat a single fight over again.

It really depends honestly.  Do I think players should lose a half a level that took 5 hours of mindless grinding to get? No way in hell because that's fucking retarded.  Grinding for 5 hours is fucking retarded and hopefully your game is a tad more imaginative than that.  In a game where the main purpose it to collect equipment and equipment takes hours/days/months to make or earn you should not ever have a chance to lose it due to game mechanics.

It all matters on balance of design.  I like the idea of a bit of risk other than "Run back from spawn" in some of my games.

In a vacuum?  No.  But in this context they are very related.

I think intractable difficulty in MMOs makes for a really small niche customerbase.

I consider anything where a failure state puts me in a position to do not fun shit to get back to doing fun shit. The worse the ratio of unfun:fun gets, the more annoyed I get.

I mean, I played WoW because my friends played it. It was a solid MMO in my opinion but I wasn't a super oldschool MMO burnout then. I got fucking annoyed with the game and ended by sub the first time after 6+ uninterrupted years because they made the game so hard I couldn't actually play it with my friends. You stratify your playerbase to the point where you're splitting up groups of people who want to play together and huh, people quit in droves.

And open no-holds-barred full-loot PVP is the whole "All wolves and no sheep" shit someone else summarized better than me on some blog.

I agree for the most part.  No game should make you do prolonged unfun shit to get back to the fun, it's an incredibly difficult thing to balance.  It very much matters how the game is played and it's hard not to put in the context of WOW or EQ.

I never played Cata.  My highest level WOW character is level 80 I think.  But from the minimal exposure I got from the Cata Heroics (youtube) I don't think the mechanics were very difficult, it was the math.  Blizzard didn't create the proper ramp up in gear power to heroics.  Either quests didn't provide enough gear or there wasn't a level of dungeons that could get you to that point.  So instead players were mana starved or getting hit too hard, or avoidance wasn't high enough.

I could be wrong though since I didn't experience it.  Was it really the mechanics that were too mind boggling?

As to full loot pvp, it's a game style plenty of people enjoy but doesn't really work in the realm of WOW/EQ gameplay.  But if you create a game that is more arcade-like and gear is not super special, it could make a very interesting game.  If you want to read a 3000 word idea I wrote recently for shits and giggles, I'll link it, but I doubt very much anyone gives a shit.

Thank you, please tie yourself to this stake and get the marshmallows ready.


I don't think anybody was asking for changes to WoW, just discussing what could be in a game, in the context of the WoW experience.

Tale inspired a new avatar for myself.

I have no problem with stratifed difficulties in games. I would have no problem if WoW wanted to introduce a kick-me-in-the-jimmy mode for people that enjoy that shit, go nuts.

Options are good. Gating is bad. Enforced difficulties are bad. Forcing people progress through prior content to get to new content is bad.

A little bit of that.

Moreover, they were linear corridors of particularly uninspiring design stuffed with ball crushing trash pack grinds with all AoE in the game being nerfed to shit in 4.0.

People who win the kick-me-in-the-jimmy mode would receive greater rewards than you. Would you accept that? You can't have one without the other.

Your post makes no sense.  Gating is fine as long as it's not retarded.  Not letting people do zone A until their level X is gating.  That's fine.  Whats bad about gating it putting content behind shitty boring mechanics that make you want to shoot yourself, like rep grinds behind rep grinds.  But some sort of gating is good because it shows progress and gives you something to work towards.  You just have to make sure that the process of going through the gates is really fun and accessible.

You just hate WOW gating, which has the track record of being awful.

WOW system of difficulty is bad though.  LRF, Normal, Heroic, 10 man 25 man Thunderforged, fuck that shit.  Sometimes more options is awful, dilutes the product and makes things retarded.

Yes you can. If you enjoy difficulty play. If not, fuck off with it. This isn't about your bizarro version of needing to be coddled to play hard mode. Give them cosmetics. Stroke egos. Give them shining lights that follow them around. Give them adjusted drop rates for the same stuff. Just don't fuck up the game for the rest of us with gating by gear.

First of all gating is stupid because if you believe that there is any modicum of skill involved, let the deaths sort out where you can go and what you can do. Not an arbitrary number.

Second, the problem right now is that all those difficulties carry different gear, not different chances at the same gear. The gear has numbers, those numbers are averaged and those determine who can queue for what. The stratification of gear is the issue, not the content. If there were different percentages to get the same gear, or offerings of different points for completion to buy gear, this would be less of an issue.

Nobody will take the risk of bigger penalties without the chance of bigger rewards for success. They won't do it for shiny lights.

Nobody wants harsh penalties in isolation. I don't even want changes to WoW, so I don't know why you feel threatened.

I just prefer higher virtual stakes in a game.

I'll let you play the martyr in your head then.

Some people play challenge modes (which are basically timed runs through harder versions of 5man dungeons where your gear scales down to the dungeon's level) -- it doesn't really give loot, but it gives recognition, shiny armor, mounts, titles, has its own leaderboards, etc.

Is that challenging enough?

Stay away from my gate.

Gating is not stupid, it's part of game theory.  You must do A before B.  You can't just buy WOW and hop into the latest raid; that would invalidate the whole model.  I mean if you wanted to get rid of gating, you could just be given a character, eliminate gear, and just play WOWRaid where you just sit in a lobby waiting for a raid to pop and just raid all night for getting scores and achievements and some other level of superfluous progression.

But the reality is you need gating to give a player a sense of progression if you're playing the whole traditional MMORPG.  You need to level.  You need to do heroics.  You need a certain level of stats before raid B then C.  I guess you can buypass tiers if you have friends willing to carry you, but those gates are still there forcing you to level to 90 or whatever max level is. 

Gates or milestones work as long as you don't do them retardedly.

To the second point its a matter of taste I suppose, but the way WOW has it set up with different levels of different raids with different numbers of people is just stupid.  3 Tiers of the same raid with like 4-6 levels of gear all layered in with each other?  Talk about shitty design.  I guess the game is old and you really can't do anything about it, but that shit needs to scale dynamically these days.  I guess it's a bandaid.  I hope any future game Blizzard makes that has raiding in it doesn't do anything this retarded again.

There's a difference between gating and just dying.

If you don't belong in a raid, you die. Don't decide for me on the front end that I have to have X amount of gear. What if other people have the gear? What if I have the gear and want to bring a friend in? What if I have an alt and we're rolling them through? The gating gets in the way of that.

You can put in progression without putting in gates. In my mind, gates are the artificial barriers to content. You must be level x to get in this, you must have ilvl y to join, you must do this attunement, you must have completed this quest.

As far as you argument that gates exist so you don't do things retardedly, I counter that the gates exist to restrict your flow as a monetary device and nothing more. The gates exist to keep you subbed. In a F2P model, the gates would be money paid to enter something, instead of time.

So what you're saying is you should be able to select any level you want in single players games? Or in games like Skyrim, just skip to the end boss if you want?  Needless time sinks are what you are talking about but not all timesinks are needless, because the journey can be fun too, if done right.

Single player games have the ability to select whatever difficulty you like in many of them. They don't have to offer extra rewards for this. Go play Dragon Age, there are difficulties. Go play Civ 5, or Mass Effect, or Fortix, or Total War, or whatever. People want to be challenged in many cases, and they have that option. Some people don't and they have that option. In the end, the game doesn't lock off them playing because they choose how hard they want it to be.

You are making a large logical leap between gating and ignoring all gameplay. You can make things happen in logical flow, and have people access content without necessarily being able to defeat. Some players can use their "skills" to defeat things faster than others, and at lower thresholds. There's not a compelling reason to decide for them on the front end that they can't walk in the door.

That being said, single player story games are different than WoW. That doesn't mean they are immune from stupid gates though. If you ever see a point on a map that says (must be level X) that's bad design in my mind. Also, SP games have a beginning, a middle, and an ending in many cases. You start, you play, you win, you stop playing. WoW lacks a true ending other than abject frustration or boredom.

Belonging in a raid: That's fine with me.  Does WOW prevent a person in green gear from entering a raid with a guild these days?  I know it's necessary for the LFR system but it shouldn't be in place for everything else.  I know it didn't used to be.  Keying is a mechanism that has it's place.  It allows developers to create a flow of content for the playerbase but as the content ages it just becomes fucking annoying.  The TBC keying structure was really retarded but looking back on it, I can see why devs did it.  They thought they were making a cool mystical story that players had to figure out.  They wanted players to put puzzles together.  It works really well if you're playing with the same 20-30 people and you work your way through. 

It sucks ass for alts and newer players and really really sucks as content ages.  So in reality it's awful unless you create some Account Bound or Guild Bound keying system and then it's just a bandaid.

Gates: How do you make a typical MMORPG that has levels and gear without certain gating mechanism?  They are either hard barriers (YOU CAN'T ENTER UNTIL LEVEL 90) or soft barriers (Hey dick, you're level 5 and this level 90 trash mob just one shot you, get out).  Hard barriers are mostly stupid if they are in strictly as a pacing mechanism, soft barriers are fine for me. 

If we're talking about raids and progression.  I like the idea of players, new to the game, having to go through each tier of raid for that expansion to gear up.  I hated the old mechanism of running heroics for tokens that allowed you to skip raids.  I would of preferred a LFR system like now that helped you get into older stuff.

However, I also think they should be able to skip it if they know people that are willing to drag them along the latest shit as an undergeared person.  In the context of WOW, every time there is a new tier or raids, the old raids should come off of timers and have a zone buff that makes them easier and faster to complete.  So if you want, you can grind the shit out of the old ones to catch up.

Raid timers as a whole are stupid anyway.

Running old raids to gear for new raids is flat out unworkable.  It's why there were content resets in Wrath.

People do not want to run old hat raids to gear up a new player.  Instead, they'll recruit from raiders at the current level, which has its own fun set of problems.

Exactly. In the tiered style of raiding, somebody walking away with all the gear is a total diaster, because you can't replace them. People feel like they have to hang around and farm shit forever because if they don't you will be screwed in the next tier, or you are cockblocked on the current tier, and a percentage of the raid is behind.

It creates unnecessary dissention in the ranks because you have to keep playing shit you were done with. In the old model if you lost a Karazhan player, or you had to change out for an alt, you had to coerce 4 people to do Black Morass again. And again. And again!

And let's not forget that strict progression utterly kills alts, and alt-friendly progression is a very powerful motivator for keeping people subscribed.

The next expansion will be brimming over with alt-friendliness but they'll then turn around and repeat some mistakes from WotLK (as MoP seems to be doing vis a vis TBC). The one after that will refocus on guilds and raiding, but totally misjudge difficulty levels.

And so on.  :grin:

Yep, which is what has killed my desire to play MoP anymore.  (in addition to the rep grinds)

I had 9 85s in Cata.  Once you got past a lot of the bullshit and they down-tuned heroics it was a pretty painless process.  Sure the dungeons still weren't fun but the raids were.   Gearing up all 9 alts to a level I was happy with was easily done.

Here, however, gearing my 1st alt, a Rogue, has broken me.  Amassing VP is a bit of a pain in the ass because queues take so long.  I can't run a bunch of raids because my GS is still too low for the 2nd tier after 10 weeks of being level 90.  Fuck it, I'm done trying there.  I certainly have no interest in doing the other 7 alts at this pace so I'm done with the game.

That's not good.

Just so we're clear, what was your idea of mistakes in Wrath?

Argent tournement.
Bad guy acting like a cartoon villain.
Not actually beating Arthas.
Splitting raids into 10/25 and not just sticking with one goddamn size which has complicated everything since.

+over a year of Icecrown.

That's not a design mistake, that's just slow execution and pretty much completely irrelevant to the discussion.

10/25 man raids + heroic versions of the raids was a design mistake they later corrected.  Sort of.

Even so, during Colosseum, I was raiding 10 mans, 25 mans, then 10 man heroics, with occasional hilarious forays into 25 man heroics.

I think the move to 10 mans was awesome. The only issue I had with Blizzard was not letting people do both anymore if they wanted. That's what killed 25 man raiding.

I also did the Argent Tournament raid, and we liked it for the most part (Champions obviously causing major issues with CC). I didn't really care for Ulduar, which seems to be held as the OMG BEST EVAH for a lot of folks, but I did like the final boss a lot.

Not actually killing Arthas was pretty clownshoes, I agree there. As far as him showing up everywhere like a cartoon, I thought that sort of tied the zones together. Here's the lich king, he's pissed and talking to you. I liked that interaction. Especially in the Fjord region with the Vykrul.

What do you guys mean when you say not killing Arthas?

To me, it seemed that Arthas took the Evil Overlord list as a how-to manual.  Plus, it seemed a really silly way to end the whole thing, with a guy we'll probably be beating up in two or three expansions jamming Diablo's soul gem into Arthas' helm onto his head.

I really enjoyed Ulduar, especially playing with our little 10 man that worked on hardmodes.  We never did make much of a dent on the extra boss.

What they mean by "not killing Arthas" is the fight was to get Arthas down to 5% or 10% (I forget which) at which point he insta-kills the entire raid, and some alliance guy comes strolling out and finishes Arthas with the power of love or some nonsense.

Wait.  Arthas' dad was involved too.  All the souls in Frostmourne were freed after Tirion destroys Frostmourne with Ashbringer, the raid is ressed, and Arthas is immobilized by them while you beat him to death.

It just showcased that the players actually never became strong enough to overcome Arthas, because he was just that much of an ultimate badass.

That's not actually what happens. You get Arthas to 10%, he kills the raid, Tirion breaks out of the ice and smashes Frostmourne, Terenas Menethil rezzes the raid and then you kill him. If you go afk for an hour Tirion will eventually auto attack Arthas to death, but that's not how it usually goes.

You do actually kill Arthas yourself, but Tirion has to save you first. The objection is it still takes agency out of the hands of the players and puts it in the hand of an NPC.

But - again, this is not a design issue. This is a narrative construction problem, and irrelevant to the topic at hand which is all about design.

Vehicles.

That's valid. There were WAAAAAAYYYY too many vehicle quests, and I remember that being bitched about, especially in that dragon-dungeon-which-must-not-be-named.

Most of the other things I remember were people bitching about "Welfare Epics" which imo was nonsense, and the TBC semi-hardcore being upset their stuff wasn't slightly better anymore. Also, people complained at the end of the cycle about facerolling dungeons, which I loved doing. AE to victory!

Overall, though I couldn't find a ton to hate about Wrath. It's why I pointed to it as the place they should start when designing an expansion.

Facerolling to victory and welfare epics were my favorite part about Wrath, particularly when it came to gearing alts.

The world pvp thing with the attached pve raids also didn't really work in my mind. Often it would crash the server for odd reasons. They finally had to scrap that idea.

WotLK was my favorite expansion because it was essentially like they sat down and said, "Let's design an expansion for Slap in the Face."

Looks like my post got ated my the interwebs:

Essentially what I was saying before is that WOW should bring back raid progression.  Now you guys were derping before when i said this and really did read my post, but I'll elaborate.

In WOTLK you had run run heroics endlessly until you had enough tokens to buy whatever tier was current that brought you up to the newest raid was.  That was boring as shit.  If I were Blizzard I would make people gear through raids to get to the current raid tier, but I would make things easy.

For example,  say there are two tiers of raids.  Previously you had to run heroics/rep/crafting to gear up for T1 raids.  Then when T2 was released they would add more gear for those points and you would ignore T1 raids.  What I would do is once T2 is released, you take T1 off raid lockouts and allow players to farm it endlessly.  Put in a zone wide buff for players and make that shit really quick.  So now instead of running LFD endless for heroics to gear up, you now run Heroics for a short while, then T1 for a while then finally you're ready. 

Then if there are four tiers of raids,  You would have to LFD dungeons then LFR T1, T2 and T3.  The older the Tier, the easier it becomes until it's cake walk like WOTLK heroics were at the very end.  By that time you could even short man the thing easily.  Anyway, as the tiers get older the buff the zone gets that makes players hit harder all increase drop rates.  So if if it took you 6 runs to gear up T1 stuff for T2 at one point, by the end it may only take 2 full runs all via the LFR system.  And you could probably get it done in a single afternoon.

I just hated the system of grinding shitty 5 man dungeons over and over.  I would of enjoyed different scenery and a sense of progression.

That probably would have been boring as shit, were it true. It wasn't, though, you could gear up for the new raids by running the new heroics they added with the raid tiers (minus Ulduar, but when Ulduar was new, running Naxx was not out of fashion yet) and using the drops that came from them, which was much faster than tokens.

That's fine, more options is good.  You either run new 5 mans endless, or you run older raids endlessly.  I mean you're just agreeing with me because you acknowledge that people were running Naxx as well to gear up.  I'm attempting to make it even easier by pulling Naxx off the lockout so you can run it like heroics. 

Essentially you boil it down to allowing players to farm and run older raids from the current expansion for better and faster rewards than older heroics from the current expansion.  Then with new raid tiers, add new 5 mans that drop/reward the same shit from the previous old tier so you can do whatever the fuck you want.  Raids would probably be better because there are more bosses.

Hell toss in rewards equivalent to old current expansion heroics in old previous expansion raids.  MOP just come out and don't want to farm heroics for tokens?  Go farm Molten Core or some shit.  Options!

I'm not agreeing with you, because there's no "endlessly" involved in the way it worked in Wrath. You could get geared up enough with a handful of runs, I did it several times.

Ah so you could ding level 80 in WOTLK and run heroics 5 times and you were good to run the latest raid?

Pretty much.

(Assuming the RNG didn't fuck you in the ass, anyway.)

The 10 man version, anyway. I don't pretend to know or care what was involved in going to 25s.

That's pretty much what we're going to get. Easy raids via LFR with increased drop rates to get to the next tier faster. Probably some catch-up gear mixed in too.

By the time the raid tier after Thunderking comes out, "Attack on Existing Art-Assets Orgimmar", we'll probably have new catch-up 5-mans again.

Yeah ok.

To get into 10 man Ulduar you had a few options:

1 - You could farm heroics to get drops from the last boss.
2 - You could farm Emblems of Heroism (2 per daily and 5ish(?) from bosses).
3 - Crafted Gear.

So crafted gear is a good shortcut if you are rich, have toons that can craft epics right away for you, have materials already banked.  
Or you could grind heroics forever since each piece of gear ranged from ~25 tokens to 80 or something.  So to get a belt, you needed like 5 runs alone.
Then you could shorten the grind by getting lucky with boss drops.

Yeah so that totally sounds like you could ding 80, run five heroics and you're all set for Ulduar.

Now if you're lucky enough to know people to bring you through Naxx undergeared for loots, you were pretty much resigned to running heroics to get ready for Ulduar.

Or you could, you know, do what I thought was cool idea, grind out Naxx a few times (or more) with the LFR system (guaranteed loot) and speed up the whole process.  Or if you hate raids, run more heroics.

edit:
For Ulduar 25 you needed gear from naxx 25, VoA, Emblems of Valor, and whatever 10 mans there were at the time that I can't remember.  Some website is telling me it was Malygos and KT.

Sounds good but it would of been nice if raids were taken out of timers as they get older.

Ulduar was the anomaly because 3.1 didn't introduce new 5 mans to go with the raid.

I wouldn't say it's the anomaly. No expansion pack has had new 5-mans to coincide with the second raid tier. Cata would have been the first expansion to do it with ZG/ZA remakes, but they threw those into their own patch months ahead of Firelands instead. They weren't exactly "new" or "finished" either.

So what, you still had to grind those new 5 mans for all that new gear.  Though that grind might of been faster.  Still falls in line with my previous statement. 

Ulduar was the ONLY raid in Wrath for which that was true and they changed their system largely because of that.

Most of the time it boils down to the fact that people prefer doing five mans with friends instead of old raids. The time investment is usually less, the setup headache is less, and the loot distribution isn't as complicated.

It makes logical sense. It's also generally more fun to play with people you like, doing the newest stuff you like.

Paolos: stop making sense!

Post after post from Draegon with theories etc and yet you can sum up reality in two lines.

Enough!

Oh sorry for the your day day setanta.

What you two dummies fail to process is that options are good. Allow players to farm old raids fir progression points or farm new 5 man's oe farm old raids. Farm whatever the fuck you want.

Also you still had to farm ic 5mans more than 5 times if you were a fresh 80 to do ic raid content.

Good options are good. Heavily biased or unbalanced rewards don't make for good options.

I never mentioned rewards. In fact I think I inferred equivalent rewards.

Wanker.

So, basically you admit you came into this thread just for a troll to keep you entertained. Now you're martyring yourself.  :awesome_for_real:
How's this - instead of telling you to fuck off and die, I'll suggest that instead of shitting up this forum, you open a thread in MMO-General about risk versus reward and stop shitting up this thread about how your life is/has been full of XTREME risks in between your volunteer work in disadvantaged communities and how MMOs need to be less softcock and more dodge-the-ball-peen -hammer-to-the-balls-and-epeen.

Needless personal attacks are 2 pages and 5 days ago.

It's never too late for a good sneak attack.

Especially from behind.

(http://wow.mmodb.com/images/icons/Ability_CheapShot.blp.jpg)

How dare you think that WoW is about this kind of fun? WoW devs know what is fun better than you do. If you aren't having fun, you aren't playing the game right. If only you'd play the game correctly, you'd have fun. Wrath was a mistake that WoW devs learned from; hence Cata and MoP.

I only check this part of the board late in the week. You'll just have to live with it whenever you pull a Broughen.

Here is what Blizzard is doing which kind of lines up with what I was saying.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7811402422?page=1#2

This only looks good because there's only two tiers of raids. When they shit out another one later if they expect people to raid T14 and 15 in order to get into 16 ahahahah yeah no, even if they quadruple loot drops and make charms give guaranteed loot.

^^  This.

Only if you can get more than one drop off of a boss would the linear progression - which is what this still is - be even remotely acceptable.

Otherwise they're just going to have to accept they'll be dumping gear on Valor vendors to get people caught-up once more.  Perhaps it'll be 2 tiers behind instead of one but it'll still be the same solution as they're saying they want to avoid.

It really depends how many runs you have to do.  
If I were Blizzard and when T16 comes out, I would at least take T14 out of raid lock so you can grind it all day if you wanted to, or once a night for a few days.  This allows you to move back into the 2 tier progression thingy they are writing about.  Another solution would be to add new 5 mans to T16 so the gear the drops there is the ilevel of T14 hardmode raids or slightly better than helps you kind of skip T14 and move onto T15.  Progression would like:

T14 Raids + T16 5Man >> T15 >> T16

The first stage can be done as fast as you can run the content.  So one day you can run a T14 Raid 10 times or 1 time or 0 times, and run T16 5 mans a bunch (like WOTLK) for tokens to get into T15.  Personally I'm for taking all raids off of lockouts except for the highest so you can do the same to T15 in this scenario.

Different ways of doing it, but all decent solutions.


Grinding T14 for a few weeks and then the same with 15 just to get to 16 is stupid though at a late stage of the game.  Doesn't matter how easy T14 is, if you have to take a long time to get through it, especially with an older gate mechanism like raid lockouts, it's bad.


Edit: Or you can do what Rift does an add 10 man supplemental raids (or single boss raids since everything is 10 man these days) to the previous tier of raids.  But that's more content which Blizzard doesn't do very well.  But if the world was perfect and you didn't suck at making content at a decent pace I'd do this in the above Scenario

T14 Raids (lockout)
T14 Raids (no lockout) + T15 Single Boss (lockout) >> T15 Raids (lockout)
T14 Raids (no lockout) + T15 Single Boss (no lockout) + T16 5Man >> T15 Raids (no lockout) + T16 Single Boss (lockout) >> T16 Raids

They haven't taken MC out of raid lock, so.. yeah.  There's your chances of that happening.

I've probably said this before.  I absolutely loved that my druid alt could wander into the Colosseum shortly after hitting 80.  That wasn't a mistake, it wasn't going too far, it's how the damn game should work.  I do not play WoW for a living, I play it for entertainment.  Telling me if I'm "months behind!" that I will potentially never catch up is more than enough to keep me from ever playing your game.

Because I'm not playing WoW to work.  I am paying for a service that provides me with entertainment.  The idea of trying to get into multiple T15 raids so I can do multiple T16 raids so I can finally catch up with everyone else, I do not find this fun in the slightest.  As I have also already said, current raiders aren't likely to spend time running raids they probably loathe at this point, they'll poach current raiders from other guilds.

It's not like I said it was likely to happen.   :awesome_for_real:

When you create a new character how far are you behind level 90?  I honestly don't know how long it takes these days.  I know you can start a DK at 55.  I know you can get a SoR for a free 80(?), I know you can get autoleveled by that friendship account link program (I forget the name). If you ignore all those gimmicks, how long does a fresh account take to hit max level?  How long does it take for an alt with and without heirloom gear take including a guild bonus?

What I'm getting at, there is a leveling process you can't skip.  I think the same methodology should be applied to gear acquisition.  

Once you hit level 90 and the game is at it's third tier of raids, you shouldn't have to play months to get to the point.  You should not be forced to slog through weeks of raiding one or two dungeons.  That process should be accelerated.  Using LFR to farm instances for a few days.  Then use it again for the next tier etc.  Make raid tokens account bound instead of character bound so that useless tokens on your main can be used for your alt.  Keep raid items account transferable as long as you don't equip them on a character.  I.e. loot a BOE druid item on your warrior and use it for a druid alt.  

But I like progressive structures in games and hate completely invalidating current expansion content.  I've said this before, I think you should be able to solo MC at level 90 for current lower tier raids (i.e. It's T16 and you can solo MC for T14 tokens).

edit:
I haven't played WOW since WOTLK and then it was only at the beginning and a small bit at the end.  So my perspective has blurred a bit.  You might be filtering my process around the old way of raiding where you raided A once a week for a month or two, then B etc.  That might confuse things.

Hahaha. In what way does it "invalidate" someone's "efforts" if you stop new players and alts from joining current raids until they've done the old stuff?

What that means is the usual hardcore fuckheads are shitting up the forums as ever and Blizzard are incapable of calling them out.

Glad I kicked this particular habit

I fixed this for you.

Come back to us when you've actually experienced the last 3 years.

The thing is, it's less about invalidating other players efforts as it is the developers efforts. "What's the point of all the man hours creating this content if we let people skip it? They should be playing the game we built!"

T16 will include 5-mans that either drop T14 or T15 equivalent gear. I'd bet money on it.

MUDflation is a bitch.  Maybe they should change their model if they don't like it.

Did we play the same Cataclysm?  Because I distinctly recall grinding four tiers of dungeons to get into DS with my alts.

There's gonna be some mighty, mighty bitching then.

Well, if they make it drop T14 so you have to still grind T15 LFR to go directly into T16 LFR/Normal I guess the special snowflakes would be alright with that but noooooo way would I ever resub again for it. That actually sounds like the kind of stupid shit Blizzard would do now.

For me it was only 3 tiers, and not so much of a grind.

 I came back with a scroll of rezz, got my shaman to 85 and had decent enough gear that one normal dungeon + the rep I had from quests gave me the gearscore for Heroics.   After about 3-4 normal Heroics I had enough VP & drops to buy my way into the Eternity dungeons.   Those dropped loot and VP enough that I think it only took me 2-3 days to get in to DS.    I was able to skip the bullshit of Troll dungeons entirely.

The nerfing of MoP is ahead of schedule it seems.

I think you probably have a serious case of rose coloured glasses, because 1000 VP would buy you a wand or totem/idol/libram slot item.

He said "...and drops".

And it really wasn't hard to get into the 3 late-addition dungeons.

Ok little girl, adults are talking, maybe you can come back when you learn not to be a brat.

Note to self:

*** deep breath ***

Count to 10

Relax

Cut it out you two.

Man, you guys sure do get worked up over a boring babby game.  :awesome_for_real:

Despite all the bitching, at least my stock in ATVI finally did something this last week.

Depends when you played. Towards the end of Cata (I skipped the first year or so of it) I got my Lock to 85, equipped a bunch of BoE PvP gear and a couple of tradeable-valor-purples, went into the 376-tier heroics for a couple of runs, and was in DS later the same day.

That's the other way I geared up to skip the troll dungeons. (On my Hunter as well as my lock, though this was in the final months of Cata pretty much. I pretty much had Justice maxed out from levelling through dungeons, so that equals 2 more slots, plus by this time I had the quests figures out (Chromie gave you a free ranged slot item from her quest, a couple more slots were filled with quests, but I forget exactly what.) Skipped trolls and went straight to the Eternity tier. I hated those trolls so did everything I could do to skip them...

Saw this and thought of this subforum:
(http://i.minus.com/ii1L3RWVcJzYe.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real:

We need a WUA boxing analogue here stat.  :why_so_serious:

Okay, my turn to whinge: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7810522218

Four max-capacity and locked threads (with no Blizzard responses) later, there's a rolling hotfix applied to the servers and suddenly Heavenly Cloud Serpents/Mini-Galleons start showing up. Hope nobody wasted charms on trying for the mounts! Like I did. :facepalm:

Hahaha. or Sinijj telling us the game is one more subscriber loss away from going to the den and being deleted from all of our computers as mercy to us.

Just think of all the fun you had trying to farm it before then? I mean, that's fun right?

Well, I did get an awesome skull-shaped barbute Greathelm of the Monstrous Mushan (http://www.wowhead.com/item=90414#dropped-by) from the only Galleon kill I was part of plus Galleon is essentially impossible to farm so that one doesn't bother me that much. Sha is pretty much "log in on Wednesday, wait five minutes for an invite & spawn, faceroll, loot" so it's not exactly PoWar bosses dropping cloth caps either. Just a little annoying.

WoW will die only after your grandchildren have faded into the dustbin of history.  And then it'll become FTP.  So yah, it'll never die.  Not completely.  I mean, heh.   EQ servers are running, right?  I'm pretty sure I can find a Meridian 59 server somewhere on the net, if I looked hard enough.

My point is that these games only die when they become irrelevant to us. 

Or if they're owned by NCSoft.  :cry:

Or they're SWG, Glitch, FF14 (sorta), ...

Though to be fair, DIKU-style MMOs do seem to live forever. I think all the grind is infusing them with power from the Negative Plane, so they just become undead instead.

Yes, it's so hard to find Meridian 59 (http://www.meridian59.com/)

Now I'm sad.  Again.

Well, when I did a search for them, back in 2002, 2003?  It was relatively hard to find.

I thought that they had shut down, but apparently not.  Good to know.

M59 was shut down for a while, but then started back up with a different company.  Wikipedia says shut down in 2000, reopened in 2002.

I have no idea what's on page 14 of this thread but my browser won't let me look at it.

"Danger: Malware Ahead!
Google Chrome has blocked access to this page on forums.f13.net.
Content from wow.mmodb.com, a known malware distributor, has been inserted into this web page. Visiting this page now is very likely to infect your computer with malware.
Malware is malicious software that causes things like identity theft, financial loss and permanent file deletion. Learn more"

Might just be Google being crap for all I know.

Probably a hotlinked image.

It's about raids and options and how people don't play anymore and then everyone starts calling each other names and shouting at some Australian guy... not Tale... and just the typical sort of posts that WoW seems to inspire.  Didn't see anything naughty, just stupid.  If your browser filters stupid, you're really lucky!

I just re-subbed for 3 months again.  Downloading the client now.  Why do I keep doing this? :facepalm:

I do the same thing. I get the itch, play for a few weeks and get bored. I've been trying to level my DK now and have encountered the dregs of humanity. I have never really had issues with LFD until now. Every time I run something now I either get someone spewing dick and fart jokes or I get someone who thinks my dps isn't good enough. Ignore list is only so big. sigh.

What's the new flavour of the week for DPS?  I suck at tanking and hate healing (I was pretty good at it though) so dps is where I'm headed.  I only have one 90, hunter, but I've leveled every class to at least 75.

Don't worry, I'll be joining you shortly. When 5.4 hits I'm going to be back playing.

Right Click > Report Spam.

It shuts them off from your feed and doesn't take up an ignore slot.


You hate yourself?  I haven't had the itch at all after unsubbing in.. uh.. February, I think.  Then again I've also picked-up other games to check out (Secret World, Gave LotRO another shot, TOR.) and don't have nearly the amount of free time I once did.

Well, it looks like I've been hacked.  All my characters have been stripped of their gear and everything in my bags and bank is gone.  Why did I do this again? :oh_i_see:

Didn't you have an authenticator?

No.  I've been trying to switch my account to another email address but its working out just yet.  On a positive note, at least my characters weren't deleted. :awesome_for_real:

Been there. It usually takes them a few days to restore all your crap as best they can, and they usually toss a few more pieces of gear on there than you actually had.

Because the gear deletion happened too long ago, they weren't able to restore anything.  I basically got the green 85 starter gear for my characters under 90 and my lone 90 got the green 88 gear.  They also gave me 500g for each character.  It's not too bad since my 90 hunter wasn't very well geared and anything my sub 90's had was going to be replaced anyway through levelling.

Well at this point you weren't sitting on current epics so it's less important. The gold will help some to outfit what's left over.

I love this thread. Every time I think about playing WoW again, all I have to do is come here and read it and BOOM urge gone.

Yeah, but if you did that for all the other threads on this board you'd never see any films, watch any telly, read any books, play any games, etc etc.  :oh_i_see:

Think of all the time that frees up!

More time for reading the forums...

Of course, the actually funny part is Xanthippe being put off by old posts full of bitching about MoP stuff which no longer matters in game. No VP loot hidden behind faction barries (except the handful of Shado-Pan Offensive items), no twenty million dailies, no long gearing grind, and so on.

Until the next expansion, when all of that stuff will be put back in place again.

That's a good six months away minimum, though.

Those aren't the parts that bothered me.