Does exclusivity make a better game? Gating content

[Perkunas]

For the great majority of players it gives them an incentive to quit immediately. And Blizzard's behavior tells us that their stats show this is just what happens.

For a great majority of players MMO's aren't the genre they should be playing. If you don't have time to invest in said games and you want to see everything you are out of luck. How many MMO's on the market are there with Warcraft's level of convenience or greater for the bad player? Basically every direct competitor(save Wildstar)... None of them are as popular as Warcraft so it's obviously not just having an "idiot mode free loot" option that's bumping this game over the competition. It's not flight either because Final Fantasy has it now and we lock it down until towards the end of expansions now.

Let's get this straight for one second here. This is not a debate of casual vs hardcore this is a debate about entitled bad player vs non-entitled. I have been a casual for the last 5 years in World of Warcraft. I've had no real raid schedule, I've not pushed bleeding edge content, I've bounced from main to main, I PVP casually and pretty much avoid raiding since my last guild broke up at the end of Highmaul, and I haven't spent nearly the amount of time playing that I did from release through Wrath because I am no longer a mid-20's adult with few responsibilities. I didn't cry when Cho'gall popped in a Mythic raid that I wasn't going to clear because my guild fell apart after Twin Ogrons. I accepted it, watched the clip on youtube, and carried on. I did NOT fucking post on the forums and cut myself while threatening to unsub because I didn't get to semi-afk kill Cho'gall. I want to blame it on the generational gap like it's the young millennials who have been told how special they are growing up, but that's not it either because I know many of them who were and still are dedicated raiders. It's really just entitled asshats of every age who can't understand that they have now polluted a genre and twisted into a shadow of it's former self. They never belonged in this genre and I think it's Warcraft's fault for being such a zeitgeist. It got way too popular and started pulling in players who had no business ever playing an MMO.

[ttak82]

Depends on how it's handled, but for the purposes of the poll I voted no.

Edit: Voted no because, despite there being things I like, much of the "exclusivity" that remains is in one of the forms I dislike.

Forms of "exclusivity" I think are good:
-Skill checks
-Gating based solely on skill or completion
-Rewards that are rare because of cost (gold, valor, whatever the current currency is) or difficulty (Mythic-only mounts, gear, etc)

Forms of "exclusivity" I think are undesirable:
-Gating content based on time sinks
-Rarity based on "you didn't play at the right time"
-Rarity based on RNG, particularly if they're non-tradable
-Story exclusivity based on difficulty (i'm a huge fan of difficulty levels; if you're less interested in doing harder content because other people saw it on an easier difficulty, you're not really interested in the challenge in the first place.)

Forms of "exclusivity" I'm relatively neutral toward:
-Gating rewards based on time sinks (rep rewards from exalted, etc)

Having things that are hard to get at is good; it helps provide goals and motivation.... I actually enjoyed TBC's system for the most part, though it was a bit annoying when it came to alts (having keys for heroics at Honored or Revered, and account-bound keys at Exalted, would seem like an obvious compromise on heroic dungeon attunement.... ).

I only get really annoyed by things that are rare only for the sake of making them rare. Mounts, pets, anything that's non-tradable, comes from content which is now trivial, but has a low drop rate is huge here. Sorry, but your Phoenix from Kael'thas is no more impressive or boast-worthy than your racial mounts... neither requires any skill at all to obtain. I can even be ok with rare things that are BoE, because anyone who doesn't want them can sell them, anyone who doesn't have money can try to farm them.... there's potential interaction and value there. But BoP rare-drop stuff is only valuable as a time sink for collectors who don't have them yet.

I was not really going to post here until I saw this post. I agree with these sentiments (the bolded part hits home) and would give you a stash of Oreos if I could....

[Irefusetodie]

Exclusivity is good for just about every single thing so long as things aren't too exclusive. Exclusivity leads to competition. Competition leads to people trying to better themselves. People trying to better themselves leads to better things for those people.

If you didn't "have" to go to college or learn a trade to get a better job, would you have? Probably not. You did those things because the good jobs are exclusive and the only way to get those jobs was to compete with other applicants and better yourself until you were hired.

The same thing applies to video games. However, with video games, it's not something as important as a job. So you can't have too much exclusivity. There has to be a point where there's no exclusion because some people won't want to better themselves and won't put in the time and effort to get better at the game. If the majority of these people are your playerbase, then you no longer have a game because they'll just quit. There has to be a balance of stuff people who just want to log in and hit buttons in a random order and people who want to get world first parses on every single fight.

[Cheze]

exclusivity is fine; it isn't some great tragedy that more people don't have the cutting edge achievements or the mythic archi mount or whatever. The question isn't exclusivity, it's what makes the thing exclusive.

The BC attunements were stupid as fuck because while they made the content 'exclusive' or whatever, they brought a bunch of negative incentives. Whether you could raid BT had less to do with whether you were a talented enough player to do the mechanics than whether you had a raid group that could get you through Vashj/Kael. You know what wasn't fun? Having to devote raid time to going back and clearing old content to get trials and alts attuned, especially when doing V/K still meant clearing their entire associated instances. Recruiting people you otherwise wouldn't just because they had their attunements, etc.

if exclusivity is a reward for talented players (i.e. seasonal gladiator, cutting edge achievements, challenge modes, etc) then it's fine. If it's just drudgery that lets some average players hold themselves above other average players (i.e. the BC model) then it sucks and should be done away with

[HeedmySpeed]

exclusivity is fine; it isn't some great tragedy that more people don't have the cutting edge achievements or the mythic archi mount or whatever. The question isn't exclusivity, it's what makes the thing exclusive.

Glad mounts and T2 PvP gear were cool because of the exclusivity.
The PvP gear set was cool for maybe a week.

Legendary items and questlines were never cool. No need to remove.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

If everyone can have it with minimal effort, there's no sense of accomplishment. If it's so exclusive that I can't realistically even aspire to have it someday, that can be frustrating. Not always. I mean, I'm ok with congratulating other players on their accomplishments and moving on to other things. But sometimes a particular mog or title seems integral enough to a character I'd like to create, that I wish there was some way I could earn it.

In my perfect WoW, we'd strip most titles and some mounts from legacy raids and place them in new TW raids. You want to wear Starcaller or Bane of the Fallen King? Go back and do those raids with scaled down gear so you have a chance to earn it. Wouldn't that make it more meaningful anyway? No, it wouldn't be exactly the same as doing it back in the day, for lots of reasons. You'd still have a different spec with scaled down numbers, not the specs played when those raids were current. But you'd also lack for a cohort of fellow raiders who'd all had nothing better to focus on except that raid for months on end. We could still solo old instances for fun and gold, but the titles and some of the other special status symbols would require doing it with at least some challenge.

[Deleted]

Go play EQ1 and then say Vanilla wow catered to the hardcores. Because it sure as shit didn't. Everquest takes grind to a whole new level and makes Korean MMOs look like casual games.

What do you guys call todays wow if vanilla was casul? Ubercasul? Retard friendly? Keyboard faceroll?

Im curious? Really

[Perkunas]

What do you guys call todays wow if vanilla was casul? Ubercasul? Retard friendly? Keyboard faceroll?

Im curious? Really

Yes
(10chars)

[Deleted]

For a great majority of players MMO's aren't the genre they should be playing. ... They never belonged in this genre and I think it's Warcraft's fault for being such a zeitgeist. It got way too popular and started pulling in players who had no business ever playing an MMO.

Uh, it really looks like you are serious. Maybe you should ask Blizzard to apologize for becoming "way too popular".

[Deleted]

For a great majority of players MMO's aren't the genre they should be playing. If you don't have time to invest in said games and you want to see everything you are out of luck. How many MMO's on the market are there with Warcraft's level of convenience or greater for the bad player? Basically every direct competitor(save Wildstar)... None of them are as popular as Warcraft so it's obviously not just having an "idiot mode free loot" option that's bumping this game over the competition. It's not flight either because Final Fantasy has it now and we lock it down until towards the end of expansions now.

Let's get this straight for one second here. This is not a debate of casual vs hardcore this is a debate about entitled bad player vs non-entitled. I have been a casual for the last 5 years in World of Warcraft. I've had no real raid schedule, I've not pushed bleeding edge content, I've bounced from main to main, I PVP casually and pretty much avoid raiding since my last guild broke up at the end of Highmaul, and I haven't spent nearly the amount of time playing that I did from release through Wrath because I am no longer a mid-20's adult with few responsibilities. I didn't cry when Cho'gall popped in a Mythic raid that I wasn't going to clear because my guild fell apart after Twin Ogrons. I accepted it, watched the clip on youtube, and carried on. I did NOT fucking post on the forums and cut myself while threatening to unsub because I didn't get to semi-afk kill Cho'gall. I want to blame it on the generational gap like it's the young millennials who have been told how special they are growing up, but that's not it either because I know many of them who were and still are dedicated raiders. It's really just entitled asshats of every age who can't understand that they have now polluted a genre and twisted into a shadow of it's former self. They never belonged in this genre and I think it's Warcraft's fault for being such a zeitgeist. It got way too popular and started pulling in players who had no business ever playing an MMO.

How on earth it is players fault? They just played the game Blizzard offered to them.
Its Blizzard who made the game, not players.
Turn your guns onto those who are responsible for "making a game a shadow of itself".
And just now, you are "f**** posting" right now about your bitterness. How are you any better than them?

To me, game is better than ever, esp. upcoming Legion.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

Compared to the raids of the day the epics from the dungeons were easier to come by..

Comparing BC raids to dungeons is silly. We are comparing then, and now.

[Eurhetemec]

For a great majority of players MMO's aren't the genre they should be playing. If you don't have time to invest in said games and you want to see everything you are out of luck. How many MMO's on the market are there with Warcraft's level of convenience or greater for the bad player? Basically every direct competitor(save Wildstar)... None of them are as popular as Warcraft so it's obviously not just having an "idiot mode free loot" option that's bumping this game over the competition. It's not flight either because Final Fantasy has it now and we lock it down until towards the end of expansions now.

Let's get this straight for one second here. This is not a debate of casual vs hardcore this is a debate about entitled bad player vs non-entitled. I have been a casual for the last 5 years in World of Warcraft. I've had no real raid schedule, I've not pushed bleeding edge content, I've bounced from main to main, I PVP casually and pretty much avoid raiding since my last guild broke up at the end of Highmaul, and I haven't spent nearly the amount of time playing that I did from release through Wrath because I am no longer a mid-20's adult with few responsibilities. I didn't cry when Cho'gall popped in a Mythic raid that I wasn't going to clear because my guild fell apart after Twin Ogrons. I accepted it, watched the clip on youtube, and carried on. I did NOT fucking post on the forums and cut myself while threatening to unsub because I didn't get to semi-afk kill Cho'gall. I want to blame it on the generational gap like it's the young millennials who have been told how special they are growing up, but that's not it either because I know many of them who were and still are dedicated raiders. It's really just entitled asshats of every age who can't understand that they have now polluted a genre and twisted into a shadow of it's former self. They never belonged in this genre and I think it's Warcraft's fault for being such a zeitgeist. It got way too popular and started pulling in players who had no business ever playing an MMO.

Whilst I totally feel you, you are completely wrong to blame the players.

This is a matter entirely for the management of WoW. You literally cannot blame the players. It is simply an error on your part to do so. The problem, if there is one, is with the management of WoW entirely.

Also, you seem to believe MMOs must be one specific form - that's not an opinion you've logically justified or argued, merely stated as if it's a fact (not even really an opinion). So it's deeply unconvincing. As someone who has played since 1999, I'd say MMOs can be many different things, and WoW has succeeded because it found a model between a world and a game, and much closer to the latter. It's not the players that are to blame for that - it's management's desire for their money. I'd love to see some more "world-like" MMOs, which is how you seem to want them to be, but they don't make enough money to exist.

You talk about "players who have no business playing an MMO", and again, I totally feel you. I know who you mean. The hypercompetitive ragers, the content-drought guys, the people who think role-playing in an MMORPG is a crime worthy of punishment, and so on. But they are here because they were invited, not because they shoved in the door. Because Blizzard wanted their money.

More importantly though, what you seem to not get is that MMOs of the scale we see in SWTOR, GW2, FFXIV, WoW and so on simply could not exist without reaching a broader audience. Without reaching these "people who shouldn't be playing MMOs". So these MMOs kind of have no right to exist themselves.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't think it attracts people so much as it gives you a reason to keep playing. It's the carrot on the stick but it never detracts from the journey. The problem is the game is so focused on capped content that it completely devalues everything that isn't current for most players. We level far too fast, items for the most part are worthless because of heirlooms, old dungeons are irrelevant beyond speeding through for XP. I remember getting my dagger from SM Lib and the off-hand from the quest and celebrating. I had that thing for like two weeks until I managed to get the Charstone Dirk from Princess. That's dead and gone now; purples from the newest raid or get the fuck out and that's a shame.

It only gives you a reason to keep playing if you think you might get there one day. Naxx and Sunwell did not do that (even though I DID get to Naxx at the time!). Raiding in TBC in general did not really feel that way, imho.

So you have to be careful with it. "Purples from the newest raid or gtfo" is because progression-raiding exists as a focus of the game, not because of a lack of exclusivity. The era you're describing fondly is before it was much of an issue.

[Raelbo]

How exactly is it negatively impacting other players? It is restricting all players to a reasonable limit.

I have no issues with reasonable limits in the game. But this particular one was not a reasonable limit because there was no good reason for it. The limit was arbitrary and did not accomplish anything that it might have been intended to:

1) It does not limit the amount of gold a player can make from doing dailies - because they can simply repeat the dailies on alts, thus circumventing the limit
2) It does not limit how quickly someone can accumulate reputation or tokens or whatever it is that you are trying to accumulate because that is already happening due to the individual quests only being completable once per day
3) It does not prevent burnout - see point 1) above

What it did do was negatively impact some players because it forced them into a specific playstyle when they might prefer another. For example it punishes the player who doesn't log on every day, but prefers to play for longer sessions every few days.

Classic example: I focussed on one faction at a time, doing their dailies almost every day until they were done before moving to the next faction.
My brother, who can only log on twice a week, worked on three factions at a time, doing as many dailies as he could manage on the days he could log on.
Both of us were able to get enough reputation to stay ahead of the VP curve.

Raid loot lockouts are weekly, but they could just as easily be daily. If raid loot lockouts were daily, it is obvious that some people would take advantage of that fact and raid every single day until they finished progression. Why is it reasonable to limit their raid loot lockout but not limit the dailies?

Ok fine, let's use the raid vs dailies analogy. But this time, do a reasonable comparison:

Raids can only be done once a week. Dailies can only be done once per day. You can do every raid in the game every week. Why shouldn't you be able to do every daily in the game every day?

This is why I blame them for the massively flawed system, because they already have other systems in place designed specifically to avoid burnout being the most efficient route.

What part of my explanation didn't you understand earlier? The weekly VP cap was a perfect example of a system designed to prevent burnout from being the most efficient route.

While choosing to do 40+ dailies every day for weeks on end may result in burnout it is not the most efficient route. Nothing in the game was forcing people to do it this way, and there was no real advantage to be had by doing so. People who chose to do this, did it to themseleve. I already went to pains to explain this. It's time for you to either counter my argument with actual reasoning, or admit that your line of reasoning is built on a strawman.

Honestly, any player who burned themselves out doing 40+ dailies every day for a few weeks on the pretext that they were "being efficient" is an idiot. It's a travesty to place the blame for that on a system which actually made the game better.

[dakalro]

If everyone can have it with minimal effort, there's no sense of accomplishment. If it's so exclusive that I can't realistically even aspire to have it someday, that can be frustrating. Not always. I mean, I'm ok with congratulating other players on their accomplishments and moving on to other things. But sometimes a particular mog or title seems integral enough to a character I'd like to create, that I wish there was some way I could earn it.

In my perfect WoW, we'd strip most titles and some mounts from legacy raids and place them in new TW raids. You want to wear Starcaller or Bane of the Fallen King? Go back and do those raids with scaled down gear so you have a chance to earn it. Wouldn't that make it more meaningful anyway? No, it wouldn't be exactly the same as doing it back in the day, for lots of reasons. You'd still have a different spec with scaled down numbers, not the specs played when those raids were current. But you'd also lack for a cohort of fellow raiders who'd all had nothing better to focus on except that raid for months on end. We could still solo old instances for fun and gold, but the titles and some of the other special status symbols would require doing it with at least some challenge.

Actually the reason I went hardcore raiding was that this statement is false. I gained a lot more free time by raiding hardcore than by being in a so so guild that progressed.
The time invested in raiding went down about 4x. Sure you need a month or two of serious time investment (5 sometimes 6 evenings of 5 hours) but after that it's 5 hours/week. And this is manageable with a job and social life, for some even with a significant other.

I'm a complete casual now but that's because I have no more control over my free time anymore but would still do hardcore raiding if I had some control back (instead of a more laid back guild).

[TEHPALLYTANK]

What part of my explanation didn't you understand earlier?

It isn't that I don't understand your explanation, I just entirely disagree with it. I blame the manufacturer when they make a faulty or poorly designed product, simple as that.

[Demeia]

I think they should actually make super-difficult gates for mythic raids ONLY. Something like the BC system, requiring you to jump through all kinds of hoops and follow a three page flow chart. That ought to destroy the special snowflake syndrome for an x-pac or two. "We can't run because two people quit. Our new recruits need 2+ resets before they can join us." I think that will be enough to dampen enthusiasm for this idea once more.

Mind you, I'm very positive towards special snowflake and mythic raids in general. Kudos to you, mythic raiders. I respect skill greatly. You deserve your better gear and mounts. But complex attunement gates were just a bad idea and it seems like the only people who want them back are mostly mythic raiders. So let them deal with them. And let them remember why the were such a terrible idea.

[Raelbo]

It isn't that I don't understand your explanation, I just entirely disagree with it.

It was a rhetorical question.

I blame the manufacturer when they make a faulty or poorly designed product, simple as that.

As do I. But I am not going to blame the manufacturer when the defect very clearly lies with players, simple as that.

[shrunken]

I don't see any need to entice mediocre players to get better. It's a computer game. It's meant to be fun and not everyone wants to spend their time trying to beat an impossible challenge

these challenges are only impossible if you lack a spine or remote intellect.

[Deleted]

I think they should actually make super-difficult gates for mythic raids ONLY. Something like the BC system, requiring you to jump through all kinds of hoops and follow a three page flow chart. That ought to destroy the special snowflake syndrome for an x-pac or two. "We can't run because two people quit. Our new recruits need 2+ resets before they can join us." I think that will be enough to dampen enthusiasm for this idea once more.

Mind you, I'm very positive towards special snowflake and mythic raids in general. Kudos to you, mythic raiders. I respect skill greatly. You deserve your better gear and mounts. But complex attunement gates were just a bad idea and it seems like the only people who want them back are mostly mythic raiders. So let them deal with them. And let them remember why the were such a terrible idea.

Attunements were not simply about raiding though, it was to prevent burn out on content, so for eg, you grind this content, now you unlock this cool content, and rewards, now we do it again, something better happens. If they have a tough level of difficulty they get either nerfed or they bring catch up content anyway, i don't see much problem

[Osmeric]

How on earth it is players fault? They just played the game Blizzard offered to them.
Its Blizzard who made the game, not players.

What he is saying is that it's the players' collective fault, because the players, collectively, wanted something that he personally doesn't want.

This fails as an argument not because Blizzard designs the game, but because collectives aren't a thing that can be "at fault". They have no moral standing, they don't make conscious decisions, and cannot be held responsible (in a moral sense) for anything.

Blizzard cannot be faulted for following the market, since that's what rational business people do.

Basically, the casualization of WoW is something that follows inexorably from the facts of the situation. Complaining about it makes about as much sense as complaining about the weather. The move away from hardcoreness was inevitable as soon as WoW attracted so many non-hardcore players. The only thing Blizzard can be faulted on is having been so reluctant and slow to follow where the demographic facts were leading them (see Cataclysm).