Will you play the next expansion if the RNG stays

[Eurhetemec]

Make those quest hubs rewarding. They could take all the RNG rewards in Legion and simply pack them into the MOP content model. So instead of having 12 legendaries and an 8% chance per drop of getting the one you want, you have 12 factions that each give you a legendary when you reach exalted in their quest hub.

This might seem attractive on paper, but it's an excellent recipe for burnout and general disenchantment, much moreso than the current RNG-y systems (as much as some of them may suck). You're putting a massive premium on forcing people to log in every single day of their lives for what, three months, and not actually play the game, not do actual questing, dungeons, raids, PvP or any of that jazz, but just GRIND THEIR FACE OFF on a round of Daily quests. People, being rather Pavlovian, will absolutely do that in many cases. But they will not, generally, enjoy it. Many classes/specs will likely have to grind half-a-dozen or more reps every single day, because they have Legendaries which are situationally useful. God help those poor souls - given the amounts of time it took to do dailies in previous expansions they could be looking at 4+ hours of dailies required every single day. Even those grinding just a couple of factions are looking at probably about an hour (unless all the quests for all the factions are in some bizarrely tiny area) or more of grinding every single day. Given many people, even raiders, only have 1-3 hours to play most days (usually making an exception for raid nights, where they might have more like 4 or even 5), that's a huge imposition.

Then, twelve weeks in (or whenever), BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM, suddenly everybody and his mother has their Legendary, and if you started the expansion late, or had to change classes or something similar? Welp. Guess you're fucked until you catch up, and you're probably still fucked then, because you'll be so far behind the curve because you just had to spend 12 weeks grinding your face off on Dailies. Even M+ will probably auto-reject anyone without a Legendary in this situation.

And then what? Nothing. Because the Dailies are over. Done. Forgotten. You'll never talk to those guys again unless they sell a consumable or something.

I'm not trying to be mean, but that is a really bad model for how it could work out. I think it may even be worse, in terms of what it does to the game, in terms of the burnout it causes.

I mean, let's try to not even think about what happens the Legendary you face-ground for gets nerfed, and the one you ignored because it was a POS gets buff, and you have a happy 12-week+ facegrind to look forwards to. The total randomness of the current system is bad, but for most players, it encourages them to play a wide variety of content, and to actually PLAY THE DAMN GAME, even if they're slightly surly about it. An MOP-style facegrind would encourage people to do anything BUT actually play the damn game, it would encourage then to just spend weeks hyper-optimizing tedious Daily quests (god help us if some are competitive in design too), and largely ignoring all the rest of the content. Then that grind ends, and suddenly they don't know what to do with themselves. The life they built is gone... and I've seen this with players plenty of times - the grind they were doing ends, and that's it, they realize how burned out they were, and they quit. Maybe they come back in a few weeks or months or a year, but they burn out and quit from this kind of thing.

Oh and another thing - the sheer untold nerd rage if say, one faction with a Legendary "required" for a couple of class/specs had quests significantly more painful to do than another faction? It would be atomic. Faces would be burned off merely reading the rants about it. And it would be the case too, you can guarantee it. Some faction would have Dailies you could faceroll in 15 minutes and be on your merry way, and another would be 45+ minutes of cursing and scouring the area for mobs or clickables or whatever.

Again, nothing personal, I agree with some of what you're saying but Daily grinds of that kind should never happen again. They are a terrible idea.

[Ryzek]

Yes, I'll adapt to the changes that happen every xpac. Not a big deal.

[Eurhetemec]

Hmm...I don't know if I agree about the platemail reference. But you're right that most players naturally gravitate towards whatever has the "best" stats. I guess I'm just an idealist who wants to see MANY different versions of "best". Diversity. Maybe that's just embodied in WoW with different classes?

But I think you're right that arguing the definition is pointless.

I agree re: diversity - many kinds of "best" is good, and yes in WoW, that's expressed via classes/specs, not gearing, and that's always been the case. WoW has always had a linear gear ladder, and when lower-tier/ilvl gear has been so advantageous that people keep it on, Blizzard have taken note and put a stop to it one way or another. The only real mechanical gear-based diversity is trinkets, to a limited extent, and now Legendaries (though that's a whole other discussion). I supposed there's also "two two-piece vs one four piece" bonus, but 90% of the time, it's a very simple "Well I don't have the four-piece..." or "Well the four-piece is slightly inferior to two two-pieces but the ilvl of the gear is so much higher it doesn't matter...".

[SirCowdog]

I agree re: diversity - many kinds of "best" is good, and yes in WoW, that's expressed via classes/specs, not gearing, and that's always been the case. WoW has always had a linear gear ladder, and when lower-tier/ilvl gear has been so advantageous that people keep it on, Blizzard have taken note and put a stop to it one way or another. The only real mechanical gear-based diversity is trinkets, to a limited extent, and now Legendaries (though that's a whole other discussion). I supposed there's also "two two-piece vs one four piece" bonus, but 90% of the time, it's a very simple "Well I don't have the four-piece..." or "Well the four-piece is slightly inferior to two two-pieces but the ilvl of the gear is so much higher it doesn't matter...".

These days it's set bonus + BiS Legendary + BiS perfect rolled relic.

What I'd like to see is either more diversity within the class itself(Often 1 spec is outright better than others at any given role), or some kind of cross-class options. As we move more and more towards account wide options, it seems like it would make sense to change up to a job system like FFXIV uses. The current AP/Leg/Relic dynamic actively discourages playing alts, as the time required to get optimal stats on a single character is already ridiculous, much less splitting your time and effort between two classes.

Which is a long way of saying: If there's going to be only one "best" spec or gear loadout per class, then make it easier to switch between them.

[Eurhetemec]

These days it's set bonus + BiS Legendary + BiS perfect rolled relic.

What I'd like to see is either more diversity within the class itself(Often 1 spec is outright better than others at any given role), or some kind of cross-class options. As we move more and more towards account wide options, it seems like it would make sense to change up to a job system like FFXIV uses. The current AP/Leg/Relic dynamic actively discourages playing alts, as the time required to get optimal stats on a single character is already ridiculous, much less splitting your time and effort between two classes.

Which is a long way of saying: If there's going to be only one "best" spec or gear loadout per class, then make it easier to switch between them.

I agree entirely!

[Noblebanned]

...or if it gets worse.

And by this I mean the increased RNG of Legion. Not the RNG we had from the beginning.

Yes, and hopefully players that cry about it will all leave so I won't have to hear endless bitching anymore

[Magnagarde]

Legendaries and TF/set-piece/relic TF procs are only relevant in high-end raiding and extremely high M+ keys. They're irrelevant in terms of actually being able to go through the content and experience/succeed at moderately difficult content.

If you want to succeed in the high-end theatre, then you have to do what every single player has always had to do since WoW launched; spend a lot of time on getting there. Wether you are required to do all sorts of content in order to get your BiS within three months of time or wether you had to farm MC/AQ for 3 months in order to be raid-ready for Naxxramas, there is no difference. You're getting there faster the more time you spend playing.

[Noblebanned]

Never understood this kind of sentiment. What if 99.99% of players were those that "cried" about it and just decided to leave?

WoW players are their own worst enemies, in addition to the game's.

Then the game would have only people that enjoyed it playing, and the servers would be merged. I don't give a shit about how many people play, as long as I have enough for a group to do my content with. But whiney bitches like you kinda make it hard to enjoy the game with your endless tears

[Eurhetemec]

You're getting there faster the more time you spend playing.

That hasn't really been true in every expansion, or at least not equally true. In Vanilla it was true, certainly. With AQ and Naxx there was stuff to grind that advantaged you in various ways, for example. Ever since then the brakes gradually came on, and with Cata, I found I advanced at the same rate whether I played 40 hours a week, or literally just logged on to prep briefly for raids, then do the raids (total of about 8-10 hours/week). There was really almost nothing I could do to improve myself except raid when it was time. I had all the stuff from dungeons, I'd got everything worth having from rep grinds, I guess there was the PvP-area raid, but it didn't have anything special in it for me.

And what happened? I quit out of extreme boredom. I hated just logging on to raid. Raiding was fun in the context of playing the game generally. It was efficient, I guess - I've never had such steady advancement whilst playing so little but...

I skipped most of MoP because it seemed to be the exact same setup. WoD improved things in this area somewhat, but not a huge amount. Legion, though, it's like I'm back in Vanilla, almost - certainly TBC - I want to actually play the game, actually do stuff!

[threads]

wtf does "rng stays" even mean?

[HuxNeva]

Absolutely not. Blizzard keeping the ridiculous RNG despite the very clear reaction by fans, would be them exclaiming loud and proud that they do not give a damn what their fans think.

Well, let's say the 'very clear reaction' isn't very clear, and you'll find fans on both sides of the fence on this one.

[Bigbazz]

They keep adding RNG every expansion and I dislike it, some is fine but I can see us going full retard lootbox mode by the next expansion and I just don't actually enjoy the eternal grind model, I actually prefer the content capped model weekly that you had pre Legion because it gave you downtime where you wouldn't fall behind if you didn't play outside of raids.

It is what it is, I quite like a "raid log" mentality gameplay and not being punished for it, and I like having control over my gearing situation too and Legion was anything but that with the extreme gearing RNG. Of course in many aspects it was probably the best expansion for a long time, but I actually lost interest this time around in that I just wasn't getting excited about new content.. I even did a lot of theorycrafting in anticipation for TOS (which I fucking nailed, despite having been away from the game), only to completely lose interest on launch of that content.

So yeah, maybe the next expansion can't capture my interest even if they reign in the RNG stupidity, but It's definitely not gonna have me interested if they continue the trend of adding more.

wtf does "rng stays" even mean?

An extreme example but a real one, there was a guy in my guild at the start of Legion (top 100 raiding progression, semi-hardcore) who had 5 legendaries on his hunter while most others still had 0-1. Along with that, some legendaries were a downgrade to equip while others could provide 10% or more damage to your character, where it was possible that 2 chars of otherwise the same gear could have 20% difference in effectiveness purely due to Legendary RNG.

The whole expansion has been about "keep on pulling the lever to see if you get something", where you were playing your odds vs the lottery over and over to hope you strike lucky. Skinnerbox model, a bit like Diablo 3. So I would assume "RNG stays" means to keep with the gambling style model.

Everything would point to Blizzard doing that, since they have it in Overwatch too and half of the whole gaming industry is using the model.

[HuxNeva]

Make those quest hubs rewarding. They could take all the RNG rewards in Legion and simply pack them into the MOP content model. So instead of having 12 legendaries and an 8% chance per drop of getting the one you want, you have 12 factions that each give you a legendary when you reach exalted in their quest hub.

Keep the titanforge system, cap it to w/e the max ilevel was at the time the raid was current (so, say, EN items can't titanforge above 890, NH items can't titanforge above 925, TOS items can't titanforge above 955 etc), reintroduce valor points so you can work towards upgrading an item's ilevel even if you're not that one guy who got a lucky 955 Convergence of Fate in LFR. Tune it so that it's slow enough that you'll only be able to upgrade a few (1-3) items to the fully ilevel cap before the next raid comes out.

I don't mind the rewards Legion attaches to otherwise irrelevant content. I mind that the only reward scheme in this xpac seems to be "Roll the dice, buddy". I personally like the feeling of having worked towards something and having a tangible finish line. With legendaries if I set out to get a specific one for one of my characters, I'll be done some time between one week and 3 months after starting. That doesn't feel nice. One of my guildies farmed for his BIS legendaries for 8 months before he finally got them to drop. Until that point, he was being outperformed in raids by players much worse than him just because their luck was better than his. One of my guild's top DPS players in Nighthold was a fury warr who only topped meters because he got a 915 draught with socket in the second week of Nighthold.

You just described the most boring game ever. Maybe they could just prefill the ingame calendar with when you will get each piece of loot. Ugh!

[Deleted]

I unsubbed because of the layers RNG this expansion, mainly titanforging. I was raiding mythic and it just became a grind to do all the mythic+ and raids on every diffculty every week just for chances at better ilvl rolls. In previous expansions the RNG was simply if the item would drop or not but at least once you had it then you had it until the next tier. Now if you get an un-titanforged version of an item you aren't fully satisfied and it feels bad. I won't be returning until there's at least a reasonable cap on it.

[HuxNeva]

I unsubbed because of the layers RNG this expansion, mainly titanforging. I was raiding mythic and it just became a grind to do all the mythic+ and raids on every diffculty every week just for chances at better ilvl rolls. In previous expansions the RNG was simply if the item would drop or not but at least once you had it then you had it until the next tier. Now if you get an un-titanforged version of an item you aren't fully satisfied and it feels bad. I won't be returning until there's at least a reasonable cap on it.

I said before: the mechanism that is attractive for the 'casual' player as you can log in and no matter what you do there is always a chance that it can award you with an upgrade, is the exact same mechanism that an extreme min/max'er faces and burns them out as the 'work' is never done.
Understanding probabilistic reward/effort curves becomes essential. But like buying lottery tickets, people will keep pressing that button even if the chances are vey very small.

[berdrek]

an expansion without rng?
how is it even still an mmorpg at that point? they might as well turn wow into an fps

regular RNG maybe, i liked knowing what heroic dungeons or raid instances i needed to farm to have BiS. Hoping for gear to roll my stats and then hoping it titanforges should be a thing i do only in diablo not in wow. but then again so were rifts, but now here we are.

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I said before: the mechanism that is attractive for the 'casual' player as you can log in and no matter what you do there is always a chance that it can award you with an upgrade, is the exact same mechanism that an extreme min/max'er faces and burns them out as the 'work' is never done.
Understanding probabilistic reward/effort curves becomes essential. But like buying lottery tickets, people will keep pressing that button even if the chances are vey very small.

i play casually nowadays and this system actually turns me off a lot, it makes me feel like i have to grind hours on end and hope i get a legendary, i feel completely useless in a group not having legenderies that are worth it, or even having any at all. It makes me want to log off, and thats usually what i do.

[HuxNeva]

regular RNG maybe, i liked knowing what heroic dungeons or raid instances i needed to farm to have BiS. Hoping for gear to roll my stats and then hoping it titanforges should be a thing i do only in diablo not in wow. but then again so were rifts, but now here we are.

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i play casually nowadays and this system actually turns me off a lot, it makes me feel like i have to grind hours on end and hope i get a legendary, i feel completely useless in a group not having legenderies that are worth it, or even having any at all. It makes me want to log off, and that's usually what i do.

There can be outliers, but normally not having at least 2 legendary at this point indicates you wouldn't have played this character nearly at all. Especially your first is nealy guaranteed to drop from a few emissaries, World Boss or LFR's, and you can just buy a crafted one from the AH. If you go to the extreme of almost getting 2 legendaries on first login, then the people that do play more would feel like they had no rewards at all for their effort.

[Pachulius]

It's not so much about RNG as it is about shitiest game design ever in this expansion.
Lot of the problems we are facing could be easily fixed, while keeping the current system.
It's just that wow devs are fking notoriously stubborn. A simple legendary token drop, where you go to the vendor and choose what you want, would fix sooo many problems and satisfy most of us. Min-maxers would be sorted and nothing would change for people that like current system.

I mean at this point you can't even switch your loot spec to try and get a trinket for your OS.
Now tell me how is that a good design?

[ReleaseDay]

A fair amount of RNG isnt an issue. Now I haven't played WOW(LEG) since december so I can't really say how bad the RNG is.


I am playing BDO however, and the RNG is completely absurd. Gamebreaking without a doubt.

[DeuZWw]

I will never understand why people don't like random generated numbers in an RPG.

wasn't it all about rolling dices from the very beginning?