World of Warcraft: Current Year

Caeden_sl said:

Dailies are fucking awful.

That said, I never minded them during Wrath or BC. Other than the shoulder enchant in wrath, they were optional. They need to offer rep options and tie reps with no other options to shit like Raptor SkyLion Mount of Whatever. I liked dominance offensive, the isle, and tillers. Rest can blow me.

However, the biggest bullshit was double gating gear with rep and valor!!!That fucking pissed me off. If I grind that rep, let me buy the gear with gold. Or let me grind valor for different gear. Jesus.

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What I find funny about the entire situation is that since Vanilla people have been bitching about stupid shit (just as the example you posted with double gating gear), and yet they continue to defend it when they know damn well they are going to change it at the very next opportunity. It just cracks me up. They endlessly defend their decisions and then change them all the next big patch or expansion... Why the hell do they even bother posting to defend shit anymore is my question?

Remember how long they defended Warlock soul shards? Like farming green con mobs for reagents was the pinnacle of game design and they said a big fuck you about them stacking, "here is your 20 slot soul bag, see 4 more than normal bags."

Agripa_sl said:

I do not see why games like this have to be socialist so everyone is equal, half of the fun is being better then the man next to you.

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What the fuck does it have to do with socialism? Designing anything for 0.01% of your playerbase is not only a terrible allocation of resources, but also just a big general "fuck you" to anyone that isn't the guild leader of the most hardcore guild on a given server.

And seriously, if you derive pleasure from "being better than the man next to you" in a fucking video game: you're a moron that puts too much importance on digital pixels.

The VP loot gating behind daily rep is rather crappy/alt unfriendly. Stuff like Shado-Pan Assault raid rep is fine. On my monk I usually just run the Thunder Isle dailies 2x a week...which is just enough to get Mogu runes for the week.

Seananigans_sl said:

How about, because they've discovered ratcheting up "community interaction" via forums and CM's spewing nonsense and whatnot, they increase player interaction with their game indirectly, thus resulting in higher sub numbers than if they just STFU and let people realize the game blows ass in that beautiful moment of silence.

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Right, because coming onto a forum and saying "you should like this because we do" really convinces people to stick with it. If anything I would think the half arrogant blue responses to poorly made design decisions would garner more animosity for Blizzard and drive subscribers away not retain them.

The ideal solution to rep is to make them all shared account wide. Got Brood of Nozdormu to exalted on one toon? All have it, have a great day. If you want to do a quick clear or two to get transmog armor set someday knock yourself out. If they want to do tomes, make it a 1 per toon thing and let it stack 9 times so every time thereafter you get 10x rep off everything. And go back and apply it to all reps in the game.

You assume that I wouldn't advocate for unique rewards to the point of wanting everyone to be a clone because I think that something designed for literally 0.01% of the playerbase is stupid? There's challenge and there's impossible. There's special and there's absurd. There are things to strive for and there are things that are pointless to even think about trying. Can you tell the difference between the two? I have absolutely no problem with things that are so fucking hard to do that there ends up only being a tiny amount of people that can achieve it. There being literally only one possible achiever per server of thousands? No.

I was an officer of one of the two guilds on my server that actually had a shot at having a Scarab Lord during the war-effort, and no matter what I might have done: Either my guild leader or the leader of the second guild were going to be the one to ring the gong. Yeah man, that's real fucking special.

The AQ gong was the shittiest thing ever. Anyone advocating that coming again can die in a fire. My guild was the one who rang the gong; one of our mages was one of the crazy motherfuckers (myself included) who grinded the cenarion circle rep when it was stupid retarded. He was also human, so exalted cenarion + human rep bonus = ideal candidate for AQ grind. (We thought that you might need exalted cenarion to get through some of the questline - can't remember if that ended up playing a part or not.)

Anyways, I think the guild behind us in progression also was fronting one of their humans for the grind, but in general, since we were both progression guilds, we decided it better suited our goals to just use our guy, in case rep mattered. So our guild, plus the next guild in progression, plus the next 5 guilds behind them + random people on the server that we actually invented contests for to grind shit all went out, ugh.

The guy was fucking awesome, and if anyone deserved it he did, but it was the collaborative effort of fucking hundreds of people to open a progression zone (And my most hated zone to date) with one person coming out with the unique title. Yea, if others had gone through the entire questline and rang the gong within 24 hrs of opening the gate you ALSO got the reward, but due to the fact everyone was funneling the chitin pieces and other crap to one guy, that didn't happen on our server.

That shit is nutty. Let's hope they fucking never do that again. What a god damn train wreck.

I should mention I don't mind things that EQ did, with say, legacy or artifact items that gave special titles etc. Most of that was random, or a reward for something that took only a few moments and a majority of people had a shot at it...but the AQ gate was fucking none of that. The memories of that grind literally sent me to the fridge for a beer. I kid you not.

I hated the AQ gate opening because I too had a chance at getting it but it didn't matter. I was out there with our human war healbotting him for hours as he grinded away those fucking annoying bugs and cultists.

HOWEVER, I looooooved the idea of having the whole server participate together in this huge chain of events to unlock the zone. I thought that was really fucking cool, but the fact that only one person (like mentioned, pretty much always guild leaders) could ring the gong was pretty stupid. Why not the whole party, raid, or even guild achieve that? I would be okay with that + giving an extra week or two for whoever else to ring it. It's not like what you needed to ring it was that easy to obtain, but way more than 1 person per server would actually get something.

I don't know, just the fact that it was an effort on everybody and only one or a few if you're lucky got rewarded for it was silly. But I was happy with just seeing the lore and the zone opening tbh.

(excluding the part where I had what I needed to ring the gong and then the event ended)

Content like that didn't seem to matter back in the day. I remember playing EQ and even if you were "casual" you would probably still occassionally (or often) do things that were not casual in any way, shape or form. MMO gaming was a pretty exclusive activity, so most people who played were probably the crazy motherfuckers willing to do 3 day fear raids. (Yea, I spent a weekend with my uncle back in the day, cleared that bitch a few times, having pizza delivered and my aunt bringing in steaming cups of coffee when our enthusiasm waned.)

When people look back at that, they were either 1) People who probably did a lot of top teir raiding/exclusive events etc or 2) Probably someone who was crazy enough to play an MMO and was just on the cusp of being insane enough to make it to the top.

But nowadays, MMOs try to appeal to everyone. Part of what led me to WoW was that many friends who thought I was fucking nuts for playing EQ actually gave wow a try and really liked it. The first time my "x-bro" like friend showed me his gnome in Ironforge, then went out to Westfall and started killing mechanical scarecrows, I mean woah.

It's just way different. I mean, I remember having crazy ass shit in EQ - things like the Mask of Deception before it became the Guise of the Deceiver, so non rogue/bard classes could use it etc. Things that you cannot get anymore drive people nuts. That didn't bother people as much. When you create content that is billed to be "for everyone" or legitimately and very enthusiastically say you want to appeal to everyone, those same people are really going to be put out when you then make content for only a few people.

The warlock quest was a great example of exclusive stuff done right; everyone has access to it, and while gear matters a bit it's more about skill and knowing the ins and outs of a warlock.

I'm already gritting my teeth at the heroic only ToT exclusive pet that comes from Horridon; my guild very rarely does heroic versions - it's possible we'll even do ToT heroic but I won't hold my breath. We tend to only progress through content to see it really. Knowing that means I'll have to be ready to drop some gold on someone from one of the few guilds that do heroic versions. Which technically is fine, since gold is so fucking easy to get but meh. It's a bit annoying.

Edit: lol meant gold instead of plat, fucking EQ talk.

Actual content itself I can understand how companies want that to be seen, which as much as I hate LFR, it's really a cool idea because everyone can see the zones, everyone can see the bosses and witness some mini events.

I don't have that much of a problem with stuff that is super hard to obtain though, as long as everyone does have a chance to get it, not counting class-specific things like the warlock or paladin mount. Now that you brought it up.. I actually miss class quests as well, haha. I wish they would have kept adding them in and making them difficult. Getting exclusives through those was pretty awesome.

Didn't mean to cause so much butthurt. I didn't ring the gong and I didn't have a shot either. We were the third server to ring it (zul'jin) and we all decided that one dude in some guild on horde side would do it and that's just how it worked out. Everyone pitched in, everyone tried to zone into the zone to watch the event. It was epic.

If you hated it, that's your opinion. Some of us enjoyed it as well!

Noodleface_sl said:

If you hated it, that's your opinion. Some of us enjoyed it as well!

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Yeah I agree. 'Everyone has access to everything' and 'everyone is the hero' is why single-player games exist. In a virtual world you are part of the crowd and imho most attempts to 'single-playerize' MMOGs end up being pretty lame.

Astral Projection_sl said:

Yeah I agree. 'Everyone has access to everything' and 'everyone is the hero' is why single-player games exist. In a virtual world you are part of the crowd and imho most attempts to 'single-playerize' MMOGs end up being pretty lame.

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That's such a bullshit thing though. Did you even DO the AQ gates? There's a difference between singular achievements; I really don't give a shit about those. EQ had a ton of them and I could have cared less. Grats to those guys, because at least those who had it either got them randomly (from GM events) or worked for them.

The AQ gate required the majority of the server working in concert so that only one person could end up with the achievement, the title and the mount. That's fucking retarded. I really don't care if it's fair, that's not what the argument is about. That's *retarded*. And quite a few people I knew who opened the gate don't even PLAY anymore.

If I told you my play time during the AQ gate grinding, you'd have seen how many of us technically should have been very close to opening the gate ourselves, if we had been selfish fucks. Except we weren't, because we were a progression guild, and getting the gate opened was all that mattered, because it was a shitty event that required you to have a second job to get to the next content in the cycle.

Sorry, there's a difference between singular achievements, legacy and artifact shit and the AQ gate. If you like the first one, that's fine, those are great. If you like the second one, you are bad and you should feel bad.

The AQ gate WAS about everyone being the god damn hero, because EVERYONE had to contribute or you got nowhere. At least on our server it was our mage who wasn't even a guild leader or a raid leader. Was just one of the cogs in the machine who was crazy enough to do the cenarion grind and got rewarded for it.

Edit: I should also make mention I am not talking about the event *itself*, IE when you rang the gong, because who gives a shit about that? Considering the amount of months that went into it, no one cared. All we wanted was for it to go faster so that the two guilds that actually had the gear and experience to zone in could. If you were raiding hardcore at the time I am flabbergasted as to how you cannot think the AQ event + the zone itself was not the worst fucking thing in the entire history of wow. THE WORST.

I thought it was epic in the sense that everyone had to contribute; lowbies, noobs, non-raiders, and people that played 24/7. I turned in so many goddamn bandages I can't even fathom how much money it was. To me it wasn't about getting a mount or getting a title, I didn't care about that shit. The event brought together our server, both sides, for something truly epic. I'm sorry that you feel that way about the event, but I enjoyed it. I was on every single night doing what we needed to do, I spent more time in Silithus than I would ever care to admit.

The argument is pointless though because Blizzard will never do something like that again. Everyone gets purples, everyone gets mounts, everyone gets titles.

Noodleface_sl said:

I thought it was epic in the sense that everyone had to contribute; lowbies, noobs, non-raiders, and people that played 24/7. I turned in so many goddamn bandages I can't even fathom how much money it was. To me it wasn't about getting a mount or getting a title, I didn't care about that shit. The event brought together our server, both sides, for something truly epic. I'm sorry that you feel that way about the event, but I enjoyed it. I was on every single night doing what we needed to do, I spent more time in Silithus than I would ever care to admit.

The argument is pointless though because Blizzard will never do something like that again. Everyone gets purples, everyone gets mounts, everyone gets titles.

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I think you have a very skewed perception of exactly how the AQ event went.

To the guilds, no one cared about the mount, the title, or the achievement. We wanted the zone opened. To get the zone open it required a massive effort, the top guilds working together instead of competing with each other, and actually convincing people for whom AQ meant NOTHING to help out.

Most servers invented contests, giving away MC/BWL runs, epics, gold etc to get anyone not in guilds helping out. This was a significant amount of people that you needed to convince, because the majority would get shit all by farming things like linen, and silk, and herbs etc.

On top of that, the only way to farm the chitin to raise the rep was to have the agent of nozdormu badge in your bags. The only way to get THAT was to have the person who was on the quest directly give it to you. It was why we badged tons of people, who would then ONLY mail the chitin to the one person was working their rep up.

It also meant scheduling farm days with the guilds with badged people; it meant scheduling the major events during the questline with badge people for extra stuff, (and because you needed more than just the normal 35-40 people to actually succeed at most of the events). It meant getting items to drop from Ragnaros and Nef and all this other bullshit.

The people farming the stuff, AQ was not epic. I mean, it's great if that's how it was for you, but you either don't remember correctly or weren't one of the major farmers and one of the people on call for it.

And i'm not trying to be a dick either; I am truly astonished someone liked it. Anyone I knew who did the event universally reviled it and was pretty annoyed at Blizzard for the shit we had to do to get in, and then the fucking massive letdown of a zone (including an unkillable c'thun) once we were.

I'm sure anyone not amongst the few guilds had a grand ol time.