Do people really enjoy having epics thrown at them?

[Gheld]

Epic is a word used to describe scale and quality. Not a word used to describe quantity. Hope that answers your question.

epic
/ˈɛpɪk/
adjective: epic

1. relating to or characteristic of an epic or epics.
"our national epic poem Beowulf"
synonyms: heroic, long, grand, monumental, vast, Homeric, Miltonian; More
lofty, grandiloquent, high-flown, high-sounding, extravagant, bombastic

"a traditional epic poem"

antonyms: understated

2. heroic or grand in scale or character.
"his epic journey around the world"

synonyms: ambitious, heroic, grand, arduous, extraordinary, Herculean; More

Are epic shoulders huge, and do they have good stats? Yes. Feels pretty epic to me.

[Sithalos]

I'm with itisamuh, i am the kind of person who uses cheatcodes to get unlimited ammo / health so i can enjoy a game.
Because that is what i'm playing, a game. If i want to work hard for something i'll actually...WORK.
Games are for mindless entertainment, not hard work :P

That's fine. Whatever you find fun, go for it. But you're not the type of person Blizzard should be catering to.

[ChadBroChill17]

I personally do not care about seeing people with epics, because I know that there are always people with higher item levels because they raid hardcore. If you I get a high item level item I am still stoked. I do not see the difference between LFR now and farming Karazhan for loot/badges.

[Deleted]

Well I don't. I'd rather have items mean something.

[Itisamuh]

I'm with itisamuh, i am the kind of person who uses cheatcodes to get unlimited ammo / health so i can enjoy a game.
Because that is what i'm playing, a game. If i want to work hard for something i'll actually...WORK.
Games are for mindless entertainment, not hard work :P

Haha I don't use cheats (usually.) I don't want to be invincible. I just don't enjoy having to grind boring crap before I can get to the fun part. You can't just hop in a new raid you're interested in doing, you have to have a certain level of gear. And you have to suffer through being weak in battlegrounds and arena (and as a result, unable to enjoy world battles) until you've got the full set (at which point I'm burnt out and not in the mood anymore.) I can't fathom the mentality of people who actually like it being this way.

You're in the wrong genre. Just saying.

I know. Unfortunately I can't seem to get my friends to play anything else.

[Zaqwert]

People think they want everything handed to them on a silver platter, but they actually don't.

Rewards only grant a good feeling when they come every now and then. Continually getting a reward results in the enjoyment from it dimishing to the point of disappearing. Eventually it just makes you angry not to get it and provides no joy if you do.

This isn't opinion, this is scientific fact. They've done thousands studies of reward behavior and brain chemistry.

Basically in order to maximize pleasure you need to balance out reward with lack of reward. NOT getting a reward sometimes makes getting the reward that much better and more enjoyable.

So yeah, people think they want goodies continually fed to them constantly without question, but long run that just destroys enjoyment of the game.

[The Madgod]

I used to love the feeling of getting an epic and it actually meaning something. Why are they even called epics now? They're hardly epic to obtain, they don't feel epic,

Dunno about you but heroic raiding is less stressful than LFR for me. People are earning those epics. Just not because of the difficulty of the gameplay in of itself. You aren't getting them for free.

and the majority don't even look epic.

Personal opinion.

What happened to blues being the most common form of gear? What was wrong with that?

For the argument that casuals wanted more epics because it felt like they were missing out - isn't that the point?

Casuals shouldn't miss out on something that, frankly, isn't the crux of the game.

It's a core mechanic of it but really the focus of the game is beating bosses (PvE) and beating each other (PvP). Gear is simply a means to elongate character progression and a means to provide scaling difficulty to the game aside from leveling. As a heroic raider who's also been pretty casual... the color of the item's name is irrelevant. The good gear will always be locked behind time put into the game and the bad gear will always be sub-optimal.

I never understood why people obsess over items like they do. It's a means to an end, that's really it.

[Sithalos]

I can't fathom the mentality of people who actually like it being this way.

Most people who like playing RPGs enjoy watching their characters grow in power over time. A slight feeling of accomplishment.

[Deleted]

And wrists!:-)

[Thage]

Most people who like playing RPGs enjoy watching their characters grow in power over time. A slight feeling of accomplishment.

So do the players who aren't in Flex-or-above raid guilds, or doing rated PvP. Eventually, if you hit a brick wall in that growth in power and have no avenues available to continue increasing your power, you get bored of the game.

[Itisamuh]

Most people who like playing RPGs enjoy watching their characters grow in power over time. A slight feeling of accomplishment.

I guess leveling, character story and getting new abilities is what does that for me, rather than numbers. Plus when I'm having to compete against other players, I prefer a level playing field. And to the science expert who claims people don't really enjoy getting free rewards constantly, maybe that's true. But I'm willing to bet a lot of those people are like me; they aren't playing for the rewards at all, they're playing for the fun (which unfortunately isn't possible without those "rewards".)

[Sithalos]

So do the players who aren't in Flex-or-above raid guilds, or doing rated PvP. Eventually, if you hit a brick wall in that growth in power and have no avenues available to continue increasing your power, you get bored of the game.

Flex raids and rated PvP are both easy enough to get into, with minimal effort. You just have to care a little bit.

[Manaroth]

But I'm the type that just turns on a game and plays. I don't give a crap about rewards or anything, I just want to do what I'm in the mood for at that moment without being hindered by useless grinds.

Maybe, just maybe this game is not the game for you then. Playing an mmo, is not just something you "flip on". You create a character with whom you can identify. Then you build said character. However nerdy it may sound, you build a relationship to that character. It becomes your medium into the world in which you play.
Building that character takes time and effort.
To me, the end is not the goal. The journey to the end is.

[Vyce223]

Flex raids and rated PvP are both easy enough to get into, with minimal effort. You just have to care a little bit.

Yes you can get into both after 3 hours in trade or so... or take the Oqueue route cut the time in half but the group risk times 2. However usually the groups almost never end up never finishing the flex raid from my experience. As with LFR people treat Flex as a ME ME ME experience. If they have finished the last 2 bosses and you clear the first 2... they WILL leave and you have to replace them and if it's a healer or tank +30 min waiting.

Guess what the point is... I'm going to be getting lesser gear in LFR/Flex for much more frustration and time than a raiding guild that I can't get into because I don't have the Ilvl they want.

[Raintola]

I'm not pretentious enough to care about text color.

[Sithalos]

Yes you can get into both after 3 hours in trade or so... or take the Oqueue route cut the time in half but the group risk times 2. However usually the groups almost never end up never finishing the flex raid from my experience. As with LFR people treat Flex as a ME ME ME experience. If they have finished the last 2 bosses and you clear the first 2... they WILL leave and you have to replace them and if it's a healer or tank +30 min waiting.

Guess what the point is... I'm going to be getting lesser gear in LFR/Flex for much more frustration and time than a raiding guild that I can't get into because I don't have the Ilvl they want.

Three hours? I don't know about your server, but on mine, people spam looking for Flex raids, and .. "#YOLORBGS" all the time..
Timeless Isle pretty much fixes the whole Ilvl problem. Timeless 535 Ilvl pieces aren't hard to farm.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go burn my clothes, because I used a fucking hashtag..

[Grishnaar]

Let's just pretend everything but Heroic Warforge Gear is blue, does anything change? No nothing at all.

Well, it probably would for some.
Though, only Heroic Warforged? Maybe, maybe not.

It all depends how you look at it. LFR epics don't feel epic at all. Or Timeless isle epics. Not so epic to me xD Time for more colors, Blizz! XD

[Thage]

Flex raids and rated PvP are both easy enough to get into, with minimal effort. You just have to care a little bit.

You missed the point--there were droves of people who either would not or could not break into raid guilds and who couldn't make it high enough to get the epic PvP sets in Vanilla, and thus they hit a wall in their growth. Hell, one of the biggest reasons Resilience was made a thing in TBC was because people were tired of getting globaled by bored BWL and Naxx raiders on non-raid nights, because the raid gear significantly outperformed all but Grand Marshal/High Warlord gear (and even then...).

Moving in to TBC, the guild culture was one of constant cannibalism from the top down when guilds began losing raiders to burnout in t5 and t6, especially on fights like Kael, Vashj, and pretty much all of t6. That left t4 feeder guilds quickly growing tired of attuning new recruits, which started turning the LFG channel into a catch-22 where most pugs refused to take someone not at least geared out in t4. On the PvP side of things, breaking into arena play meant getting an honor set, which meant playing the free-HK game until you got enough pity honor for your set. Steps were taken to alleviate that by putting old Season gear on the vendors, letting players not on the cutting edge in rated Arena play at least stand a chance to get above the 1700 bracket.

In Wrath, much of the problem with the glass ceiling was alleviated entirely with a tiered 5-man setup, one that was repeated but less successful in Cataclysm due to a lackluster endgame approach that combined the worst elements of TBC's difficult 5-man content (relative to quick-and-easy Wrath 5-man content) and a lackadaisical raid release schedule, leaving the entire player base with two dungeons as the only new content for months at a time, then leaving casual players with a poorly-executed daily zone as their content until 4.3.

Point being, people get bored when they hit a glass ceiling. Not everyone is interested in rated play and large group content, and those guys have pretty regularly gotten the shaft outside the final patch catchup, barring Wrath. That's where the 'welfare epics' came in to begin with and for the last seven years, it's been a matter of fine-tuning the process to allow for meaningful upgrades at level cap for various levels of skilled play.

[Itisamuh]

Maybe, just maybe this game is not the game for you then. Playing an mmo, is not just something you "flip on". You create a character with whom you can identify. Then you build said character. However nerdy it may sound, you build a relationship to that character. It becomes your medium into the world in which you play.
Building that character takes time and effort.
To me, the end is not the goal. The journey to the end is.

I can understand this to some extent for PvE. Unfortunately, I mostly PvP. This just has no merit in PvP, which is supposed to be about competition. Each tier you get a new raid, face new enemies, etc. It makes sense. But in PvP, it is just doing the exact same pointless grind each season, in exactly the same fields. And yeah, I already know I am playing the wrong genre haha. Friends refuse to play anything else.

[owbu]

I kinda stopped thinking in "epic" and "blue"
I am now happy to get a heroic.