Cata was great for what it did to the old world and the leveling experience. I hear it had a bad endgame but I never engaged with it so I dunno. But Cata was the perfect example of the level of disruption to the status quo that I find most exciting.
I thought every other expansion was "the good one."
Every last expansion is "the good one". The current expansion is bad until the next one comes out and people hate it and oh man that last expansion we had was so good can we go back to that
I thought CATACLYSM was fine, which seems to put me in a distinct minority.
I think legion was garbage but apparently people fucking loved it. Cata sort of started the whole "instead of logging in once or twice a week once you're max level, you should really log in every day." They never really expanded it until legion hit. Legion's world quests being a daily thing and taking WoDs table and make it just worse in every way to further that world quest nonsense really put a sour taste in my mouth for the whole game.
Like I like some of the ideas it had with the weapon and the class hall and all that but it really penalized people who couldn't be on every day.
As much talk as there is about "respecting your time" modern wow definitely doesn't do that at all, and hasn't since wrath or BC.
Legion was also the start of the shift in design philosophy to nearly outright hostility towards alts that they haven't really done much to remedy since.
which part was more hostile to alts? legion was the first time I actually leveled a bunch of alts to cap.
Legion was considered very hostile to alts for three key reasons:
A) The rep gating, specifically in Suramar, but also when the Legionfall patch came out as well Leveling the artifact being so time consuming
C) The steep requirements on Artifact skins
Those three things combined made the expansion very unfriendly to alts. Just getting a character to level 110 alone was not good enough. You also had to grind rep just to complete Suramar, getting AP was insanely difficult at first. Obviously they massively relaxed that last point late in the expansion life cycle when single AP tokens were giving billions of AP. But at Legion launch, it was pretty much impossible to maintain more than one character with any level of competitiveness. And the steep requirements on artifact skins meant that you pretty much had to beat the game and do a lot of pretty hard activities on every character you wanted skins for. (Example, totally made up, not real at all. "You want the blue glow on your scythe weapon, gonna have to grind out 300 battlegrounds on your alt to get that." Or "You want the red glow on a specific tier? You have to completely max Archaeology on your alt and do a 4+ month archaeology quest chain.")
Legion was considered very hostile to alts for three key reasons:
A) The rep gating, specifically in Suramar, but also when the Legionfall patch came out as well Leveling the artifact being so time consuming
C) The steep requirements on Artifact skins
Those three things combined made the expansion very unfriendly to alts. Just getting a character to level 110 alone was not good enough. You also had to grind rep just to complete Suramar, getting AP was insanely difficult at first. Obviously they massively relaxed that last point late in the expansion life cycle when single AP tokens were giving billions of AP. But at Legion launch, it was pretty much impossible to maintain more than one character with any level of competitiveness. And the steep requirements on artifact skins meant that you pretty much had to beat the game and do a lot of pretty hard activities on every character you wanted skins for. (Example, totally made up, not real at all. "You want the blue glow on your scythe weapon, gonna have to grind out 300 battlegrounds on your alt to get that." Or "You want the red glow on a specific tier? You have to completely max Archaeology on your alt and do a 4+ month archaeology quest chain.")
FWIW, I remember fully gearing + getting all Mage Tower (the actually important ones) skins for a Shaman and a Monk that I made on 7.3 after I got sick of my Paladin. Didn't found specific artifact skins that important, and the Archeology skin is fully optional. But that's late on the expansion cycle, so may not be the best example.
Yeah, doing stuff in 7.30 was literally a year and a half after Legion launch. 7.30 is NOT what people are talking about when they say Legion was unfriendly to alts. By 7.30, the floodgates were open and everything was EZ-MODE.
They tried two different systems for making reputation grinds less painful, and for whatever reason, they decided they didn't like either option. They'd rather that reps be the worst thing ever, because that means sub retention and that's all they care about. They don't care about developing fun systems. They care about developing carefully measured drip-feed systems that are designed to string people along for months at a time and retain as many subscriptions as they can. Fun doesn't matter.
The two rep systems I'm talking about are the ability to wear a tabard and champion a rep. And the other was the MoP thing where once you maxed a rep once, you could buy an heirloom token that put a little icon by that rep for your entire account, and it significantly reduced the amount of rep gains needed to max the same rep on an alt. Both systems were great. Championing was great because it actually gave a practical purpose to tabards and it also encouraged dungeon running for rep. And of course pretty much everything they did in MoP was pure gold, including their rep heirloom system.
wrath's tabard thing was superior, the only one you really had to grind was SoH, even then, as long as you did the quests in the area you got the welfare shoulder enchant that was 90% as good as the high level one
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
It's because Ion Hazzikostas seems to genuinely believe that the reason why anyone would make an alt is so they can redo all the content, including rep grinds. And since almost every player has at least one alt, well...
Yeah, doing stuff in 7.30 was literally a year and a half after Legion launch. 7.30 is NOT what people are talking about when they say Legion was unfriendly to alts. By 7.30, the floodgates were open and everything was EZ-MODE.
oh yeah I did all my alt shit in the last half of the expansion's life, started fooling around with them around tomb of sargeras because of the mage tower.
BC was better than Vanilla because the hybrid tax was phased away for the most part, change my mind
BC environments were too plain (shadowmoon/hellfire/netherstorm are almost pallete swaps), the raid transitions were awkward (40 > 10 > 25 > 10 > 25), no thought was put into the transition from 60 to 61 gearing, it was the start of "i level up and get weaker" paradigm, and it was the grindiest of all expansions or at least felt that way to me. I have mained a rogue since 2004 so the hybrid tax was irrelevant to me.
I thought every other expansion was "the good one."
Every last expansion is "the good one". The current expansion is bad until the next one comes out and people hate it and oh man that last expansion we had was so good can we go back to that
I thought CATACLYSM was fine, which seems to put me in a distinct minority.
I think legion was garbage but apparently people fucking loved it. Cata sort of started the whole "instead of logging in once or twice a week once you're max level, you should really log in every day." They never really expanded it until legion hit. Legion's world quests being a daily thing and taking WoDs table and make it just worse in every way to further that world quest nonsense really put a sour taste in my mouth for the whole game.
Like I like some of the ideas it had with the weapon and the class hall and all that but it really penalized people who couldn't be on every day.
As much talk as there is about "respecting your time" modern wow definitely doesn't do that at all, and hasn't since wrath or BC.
Legion was also the start of the shift in design philosophy to nearly outright hostility towards alts that they haven't really done much to remedy since.
which part was more hostile to alts? legion was the first time I actually leveled a bunch of alts to cap.
I leveled every class to cap on legion because i wanted to see all the class halls, every spec's legendary weapon, and the story that went with those two things. And to get each class mount.
I only bothered with Suramar on my main.
Smrtnik on
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
BfA is a confused mess that doesn't know what it wants to be about
With BFA, we can clearly now see when upper management stepped in and told Ion and the developers to stop messing up and take seriously their job of running a fun game that players enjoy.
Isn't Activision Blizzard's upper management the scourge of all evil, greedily stuffing loot boxes into every corner of every game they can?
I forget what collective opinion we're on at the moment.
BfA is a confused mess that doesn't know what it wants to be about
With BFA, we can clearly now see when upper management stepped in and told Ion and the developers to stop messing up and take seriously their job of running a fun game that players enjoy.
Isn't Activision Blizzard's upper management the scourge of all evil, greedily stuffing loot boxes into every corner of every game they can?
I forget what collective opinion we're on at the moment.
I feel it's blizzard upper managers aka J. Allen Brack saw the general opinion of BFA was bad and how classic took off like a rocket. I feel since he was the former head of Wow's development team he took the reins back in a way.
BfA is a confused mess that doesn't know what it wants to be about
With BFA, we can clearly now see when upper management stepped in and told Ion and the developers to stop messing up and take seriously their job of running a fun game that players enjoy.
Isn't Activision Blizzard's upper management the scourge of all evil, greedily stuffing loot boxes into every corner of every game they can?
I forget what collective opinion we're on at the moment.
I feel it's blizzard upper managers aka J. Allen Brack saw the general opinion of BFA was bad and how classic took off like a rocket. I feel since he was the former head of Wow's development team he took the reins back in a way.
BfA is a confused mess that doesn't know what it wants to be about
With BFA, we can clearly now see when upper management stepped in and told Ion and the developers to stop messing up and take seriously their job of running a fun game that players enjoy.
Isn't Activision Blizzard's upper management the scourge of all evil, greedily stuffing loot boxes into every corner of every game they can?
I forget what collective opinion we're on at the moment.
I feel it's blizzard upper managers aka J. Allen Brack saw the general opinion of BFA was bad and how classic took off like a rocket. I feel since he was the former head of Wow's development team he took the reins back in a way.
i loathed TBC and didn't keep at it (left for a while then came back for sunwell). Having been a raider and having a green drop in the first zone be better than what i had spent time raidng chaffed me bad. Then there was the flying. Then there were even more rep grinds and the weird raids and ...I really enjoyed wotlk because i felt the solo and 5 man stuff was much better, also, 10 and 25 man stuff was it, no more 40+ people (except wintergrasp /sigh).
For someone who hates this expansion so much, I've put in quite a bit of playtime in the past few weeks.
I've been working on Draenor flying, so I can finally quit thinking "I should work on Draenor flying" every time an alt hits 90. After reset, I'll be done with it.
I've also been working on leveling several Alliance alts from 110 to 120, I guess...because? It's not like I have anyone to play them with atm...
But anywho, NE priest (I already had a VE at 120, but my Horde priest is BE and it felt like a waste?) done, human DK done, and NE druid done in a few minutes. Shaman's slowly getting up too, but I have no motivation to play shaman at 120 knowing that it's the worst M+ heale. Even though I haven't been doing endgame, and definitely wouldn't be doing it Alliance side atm...
For one faction, anyway, my Horde healers are like...2 paladins and 1 druid at 120, Monk at 91 (did you know a monk can do 80-90 in Hyjal alone, with rest+heirlooms+monk bonus?), Priest at 80, Shaman at 110 but I always forget him cuz male orcs are cool but I don't really wanna play one it turns out...
This may seem like madness, but you have to understand.
What I've actually been doing lately is rewatching Lie to Me, catching up on Ducktales, looking through a few old LPs, catching up on podcasts...the game is just a comfortable way to keep my brain distracted so the ADHD doesn't make me pause the video every three seconds.
The last like, four xpacs have been criticized for being alt-unfriendly.
This is largely because Blizzard designs systems and either don’t consider alts or assume people sincerely enjoy doing it over again at the same pace. MoP had the farm, shitloads of rep grinds, and the time-gated conquest points. WoD had garrisons. Legion had artifacts, world legendaries, and class campaigns.
At this point it may be a sincere strategy to retain players; only relaxing the grind on alts when demand is high enough
The last like, four xpacs have been criticized for being alt-unfriendly.
This is largely because Blizzard designs systems and either don’t consider alts or assume people sincerely enjoy doing it over again at the same pace. MoP had the farm, shitloads of rep grinds, and the time-gated conquest points. WoD had garrisons. Legion had artifacts, world legendaries, and class campaigns.
At this point it may be a sincere strategy to retain players; only relaxing the grind on alts when demand is high enough
I also noticed that they seem to ALWAYS bring these things out that are pretty much horrible to alts, then next patch or two suddenly its super alt friendly. This seems to happen many, many times in a row. I figure its intentional. It makes players feel like they are being given a gift, when in reality it was just something they took away from the beginning.
They insist the Azerite powers will have no alt catchup, but will be shocked it 8.3 doesn't have something that makes at least getting them on alts not start from rank 1.
I mean, I'll take the modern rep grinds over having to grind Cenarion Circle rep out in Silithus.
oh my god so many tomes.
And you *had* to do rep to be able to turn in some of the set items from AQ.
You don't have to do anything in classic, the stuff gated behind rep is not really required for anything, there's nothing super special there either. The set items are nice, but are not game stopping either.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Did they stop making 8.2.5? Why has the news cycle for this game dried up?
A new build went up for it recently on the PTR, but the juicy datamining stuff (cutscenes and whatnot) are supposedly encrypted to the point where people haven't been able to see it yet.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Also 8.2.5 is looking to be a pretty small patch. 8.3 is the next time we're likely to get any real meat.
The last like, four xpacs have been criticized for being alt-unfriendly.
This is largely because Blizzard designs systems and either don’t consider alts or assume people sincerely enjoy doing it over again at the same pace. MoP had the farm, shitloads of rep grinds, and the time-gated conquest points. WoD had garrisons. Legion had artifacts, world legendaries, and class campaigns.
At this point it may be a sincere strategy to retain players; only relaxing the grind on alts when demand is high enough
I also noticed that they seem to ALWAYS bring these things out that are pretty much horrible to alts, then next patch or two suddenly its super alt friendly. This seems to happen many, many times in a row. I figure its intentional. It makes players feel like they are being given a gift, when in reality it was just something they took away from the beginning.
They insist the Azerite powers will have no alt catchup, but will be shocked it 8.3 doesn't have something that makes at least getting them on alts not start from rank 1.
Honestly just make some of the essences you have to buy from vendors account bound. You did the work to get access to it and they take up resources so they are not free. There would still be a number that you would need to do stuff for but it would at least give you a reasonable set of essences for alts for different roles that would be solid if not the best in slot.
I mean, I'm of the opinion that nearly everything at this point should be account bound. Pretty much only experience and loot should be the only things not. And when I say loot, I mean primary gear loot, as in your armor and equipment. Not lootable things like essences. Those should ALL be account bound.
Things like rep, essences, AP levels, garrison, all of that should be per account and only have to be earned once.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Say what you will about Warframe, but one of the problems that game does not have is alt hate. Making all of these characters essentially just "You" and giving "You" a level as well as the warframe is pretty genius. It feels a lot like they designed the fluff around the game.
I think that's why WoW doesn't do account-level reputation. It's too wrapped up in the fluff of who your character is. This character is exalted with the trolls, why would your alt be exalted with them as well? That's not their story.
I think the problem is less about the rep and more about what they lock behind it. Like races.
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
There is a small part of me that is thinking there could be a SLIM possibility of BFA not having an 8.3 patch. Like, what if this was just the end? Big cinematics to end the war campaign into the next expansion? If you don't like the downtime, everyone is having fun on classic over there.
I know it is insane, but so is this dry spell. I can't remember the last time Blizz held ALL their cards into Blizzcon since they started being so liberal with the PTRs.
It's September of 2019 right now. We do not expect the expansion until like Summer 2020, probably late summer if they follow their recent history of releases. It seems that they release new expansions just in time to help college freshmen fail out of college.
And anyway, there's no way Eternal Palace is going to be the final tier of advancement for what could be another 8-10 months.
Posts
nobody was holding a torch for Warlords.
which part was more hostile to alts? legion was the first time I actually leveled a bunch of alts to cap.
A) The rep gating, specifically in Suramar, but also when the Legionfall patch came out as well
C) The steep requirements on Artifact skins
Those three things combined made the expansion very unfriendly to alts. Just getting a character to level 110 alone was not good enough. You also had to grind rep just to complete Suramar, getting AP was insanely difficult at first. Obviously they massively relaxed that last point late in the expansion life cycle when single AP tokens were giving billions of AP. But at Legion launch, it was pretty much impossible to maintain more than one character with any level of competitiveness. And the steep requirements on artifact skins meant that you pretty much had to beat the game and do a lot of pretty hard activities on every character you wanted skins for. (Example, totally made up, not real at all. "You want the blue glow on your scythe weapon, gonna have to grind out 300 battlegrounds on your alt to get that." Or "You want the red glow on a specific tier? You have to completely max Archaeology on your alt and do a 4+ month archaeology quest chain.")
FWIW, I remember fully gearing + getting all Mage Tower (the actually important ones) skins for a Shaman and a Monk that I made on 7.3 after I got sick of my Paladin. Didn't found specific artifact skins that important, and the Archeology skin is fully optional. But that's late on the expansion cycle, so may not be the best example.
The two rep systems I'm talking about are the ability to wear a tabard and champion a rep. And the other was the MoP thing where once you maxed a rep once, you could buy an heirloom token that put a little icon by that rep for your entire account, and it significantly reduced the amount of rep gains needed to max the same rep on an alt. Both systems were great. Championing was great because it actually gave a practical purpose to tabards and it also encouraged dungeon running for rep. And of course pretty much everything they did in MoP was pure gold, including their rep heirloom system.
But I cannot imagine that anyone says "Golly gee wiz that rep grind sure was fun, I can't wait to do it again on an alt!"
oh yeah I did all my alt shit in the last half of the expansion's life, started fooling around with them around tomb of sargeras because of the mage tower.
bowen remembers
BC environments were too plain (shadowmoon/hellfire/netherstorm are almost pallete swaps), the raid transitions were awkward (40 > 10 > 25 > 10 > 25), no thought was put into the transition from 60 to 61 gearing, it was the start of "i level up and get weaker" paradigm, and it was the grindiest of all expansions or at least felt that way to me. I have mained a rogue since 2004 so the hybrid tax was irrelevant to me.
I leveled every class to cap on legion because i wanted to see all the class halls, every spec's legendary weapon, and the story that went with those two things. And to get each class mount.
I only bothered with Suramar on my main.
Isn't Activision Blizzard's upper management the scourge of all evil, greedily stuffing loot boxes into every corner of every game they can?
I forget what collective opinion we're on at the moment.
I feel it's blizzard upper managers aka J. Allen Brack saw the general opinion of BFA was bad and how classic took off like a rocket. I feel since he was the former head of Wow's development team he took the reins back in a way.
What, two weeks ago, when classic took off?
nintendo is doomed, you know
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
I've been working on Draenor flying, so I can finally quit thinking "I should work on Draenor flying" every time an alt hits 90. After reset, I'll be done with it.
I've also been working on leveling several Alliance alts from 110 to 120, I guess...because? It's not like I have anyone to play them with atm...
But anywho, NE priest (I already had a VE at 120, but my Horde priest is BE and it felt like a waste?) done, human DK done, and NE druid done in a few minutes. Shaman's slowly getting up too, but I have no motivation to play shaman at 120 knowing that it's the worst M+ heale. Even though I haven't been doing endgame, and definitely wouldn't be doing it Alliance side atm...
For one faction, anyway, my Horde healers are like...2 paladins and 1 druid at 120, Monk at 91 (did you know a monk can do 80-90 in Hyjal alone, with rest+heirlooms+monk bonus?), Priest at 80, Shaman at 110 but I always forget him cuz male orcs are cool but I don't really wanna play one it turns out...
This may seem like madness, but you have to understand.
What I've actually been doing lately is rewatching Lie to Me, catching up on Ducktales, looking through a few old LPs, catching up on podcasts...the game is just a comfortable way to keep my brain distracted so the ADHD doesn't make me pause the video every three seconds.
This is largely because Blizzard designs systems and either don’t consider alts or assume people sincerely enjoy doing it over again at the same pace. MoP had the farm, shitloads of rep grinds, and the time-gated conquest points. WoD had garrisons. Legion had artifacts, world legendaries, and class campaigns.
At this point it may be a sincere strategy to retain players; only relaxing the grind on alts when demand is high enough
oh my god so many tomes.
And you *had* to do rep to be able to turn in some of the set items from AQ.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I also noticed that they seem to ALWAYS bring these things out that are pretty much horrible to alts, then next patch or two suddenly its super alt friendly. This seems to happen many, many times in a row. I figure its intentional. It makes players feel like they are being given a gift, when in reality it was just something they took away from the beginning.
They insist the Azerite powers will have no alt catchup, but will be shocked it 8.3 doesn't have something that makes at least getting them on alts not start from rank 1.
You don't have to do anything in classic, the stuff gated behind rep is not really required for anything, there's nothing super special there either. The set items are nice, but are not game stopping either.
A new build went up for it recently on the PTR, but the juicy datamining stuff (cutscenes and whatnot) are supposedly encrypted to the point where people haven't been able to see it yet.
so
Honestly just make some of the essences you have to buy from vendors account bound. You did the work to get access to it and they take up resources so they are not free. There would still be a number that you would need to do stuff for but it would at least give you a reasonable set of essences for alts for different roles that would be solid if not the best in slot.
Looks like 8.2.5 is primarily worgen/goblin model revamp, refer a friend revamp, party level sync and war campaign.
Things like rep, essences, AP levels, garrison, all of that should be per account and only have to be earned once.
Right, pretty small.
I think that's why WoW doesn't do account-level reputation. It's too wrapped up in the fluff of who your character is. This character is exalted with the trolls, why would your alt be exalted with them as well? That's not their story.
I think the problem is less about the rep and more about what they lock behind it. Like races.
I know it is insane, but so is this dry spell. I can't remember the last time Blizz held ALL their cards into Blizzcon since they started being so liberal with the PTRs.
It's September of 2019 right now. We do not expect the expansion until like Summer 2020, probably late summer if they follow their recent history of releases. It seems that they release new expansions just in time to help college freshmen fail out of college.
And anyway, there's no way Eternal Palace is going to be the final tier of advancement for what could be another 8-10 months.