The Purple Precedent: Why it is bad for the community

[MoanaLisa]

If color is meaningless

How would you react if all the out of raid epics were actually blue?

If it was an upgrade I'd take it. As would any good player. I could not care less about text color on gear popups. Are you going to keep your epics while leveling next expansion and the gear is green? Color is meaningless.

[GennGreymane]

If it was an upgrade I'd take it. As would any good player. I could not care less about text color on gear popups.

Alright then why be against the OPs desire to just change colors around?

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If it matters to one person to give a sense of goal to a player base and u dont care. Why not just go with the ones who do care? continue getting ur gear despite the color.

[rhorle]

If it was an upgrade I'd take it. As would any good player. I could not care less about text color on gear popups. Are you going to keep your epics while leveling next expansion and the gear is green? Color is meaningless.

The color system is outdated and rather dumb by this point not being worth the trouble it causes. I'm annoyed every expansion when we have to turn in all of our 'hard-won epics' for green questing gear which just is jarring and sort of stupid.

Then why are you annoyed when you replace your epics every expansion with greens and blues? That indicates you do care more then less. I think part of the problem is over the years the meaning of the color differences has shifted, and blizzard has encouraged that shift. But it doesn't have to stay that way and it can go back towards the original intent of color indicating more then simply a different color.

[ComputerNerd]

This problem exists only in peoples heads and on forums where "epic isn't epic" had become another bandwagon saying thrown around, in truth epics stopped being epic in BWL when you placed you MC gear and it's only grown from there.

As there is no such thing as gear who's colour changes over time and while there is 9 years worth of raids and content any talk of what epics were or are now is pointless.

The only thing that matters is what's written next to it; Raid Finder, Flex, Heroic or Warforged (normals blank right?) or it's ilevel, and even then only until the next tier comes out and we take another step on the treadmill.

This exactly.
It has never meant anything outside of the mind of elitist players who want to feel special in way other than being a player someone can look up to.

It can never go back to what it never was in the first place.
There were epics pre-60 in vanilla, so even with a single tier of raid content it wasn't true.

Epic was NEVER Epic.

The community is the problem here, something people keep trying to blame the game for.

[Yimereh]

This exactly.
It has never meant anything outside of the mind of elitist players who want to feel special in way other than being a player someone can look up to.

It can never go back to what it never was in the first place.
There were epics pre-60 in vanilla, so even with a single tier of raid content it wasn't true.

Epic was NEVER Epic.

The community is the problem here, something people keep trying to blame the game for.

Except you are forgetting that the playerbase did not create this and infact Blizzard and the creators of MMORPG's created this concept. So you are absolutely wrong the companies who forged these games created this and their lack of removing it certainly suggests that they believe that it is preferred in the game seeing as they haven't removed it and have continued to encourage it every expansion. This all comes back to my major argument, if the goal is to remove coloured gear then do so, but if not then they need to define better perimeters around coloured gear. Purple gear should only be obtainable through raids and not catch-up mechanics which set the precedent that purple gear is damn near free at 90.

Timeless Isle and content similar should reward rare gear because when it rewards epic gear it sets an improper precedent that purple gear is absurdly easy to obtain which is completely false because it requires time and commitment to obtain good purple gear through either LFR and beyond.

Through the first 90 levels green gear is easy to obtain, blue gear takes time and commitment and purple gear is exceedingly rare. However when you hit 90 purple gear becomes as common as green gear initially which completely defeats the purpose of gear colours. So once again I say either properly define and commit to the gear colour precedent or remove them entirely if they no longer serve a purpose.

[Normie]

"Properly define and commit to the gear colo[u]r precedent"?

What?

There are so many things implicit in and wrong with that statement that I don't even know where to begin.

[Azutael]

This "issue" has been around since classic. Even then most people had plenty of epic gear (especially after t2 came out), epic gear was only rare because raids where of 40 people and less items dropped. You do the math.

Item-level has taken over as the mark of quality, I don't mind. It is very obvious that a warforged item is much better than an item from LFR for example, so who cares if they both have the same color.

[Ronduwil]

Timeless Isle and content similar should reward rare gear because when it rewards epic gear it sets an improper precedent that purple gear is absurdly easy to obtain which is completely false because it requires time and commitment to obtain good purple gear through either LFR and beyond.

You keep saying this, but I'm not sure you understand the meaning of the word "false." You say that players obtain gear too quickly and gain a "false" impression that they obtain gear too quickly. Come again? Given that they obtained the gear quickly, I'd have to say that, in fact, purple gear can be quickly obtained under the game's current system. This a fact, an undeniable truth.

Furthermore, this has been consistent with the way this game has operated since late WotLK. Just because you believe that gear acquisition should happen more slowly doesn't suddenly make that idea a "fact," nor does it make the current reality "false." When you make these arguments I picture my shivering daughter insisting that the weather is perfectly fine, that she doesn't need a jacket, and that maybe I should consider ditching my own. They're just not convincing. Wishful thinking and nostalgia is not the same as fact.

Through the first 90 levels green gear is easy to obtain, blue gear takes time and commitment and purple gear is exceedingly rare.

When was the last time you levelled? Every single 20-minute dungeon you queue for prior to level 60 awards you a satchel of loot that is guaranteed to contain a blue item. How is 20 minutes a commitment? Many of the regular quests take longer than that and only award silver or a green item. Also, I've always obtained one or two purple items through world drops during the leveling process. This always happened randomly, often after killing a mob that wasn't even elite. I would say luck is more of a factor in obtaining low level purples than time or commitment.

However when you hit 90 purple gear becomes as common as green gear initially which completely defeats the purpose of gear colours.

This is always done at the end of an expansion because by that time raiders are burning out and they want to enable teams to fill deficiencies in their roster with buddies who have been out of the loop for a while. That's why gear is so easy to obtain at the end of the expansion. When MoP first dropped only 466 gear was easily obtainable. Going beyond that required weeks' worth of dailies and/or raiding. Every time a new raid comes out Blizzard adds a catch-up mechanic so that returning players can join their guild's raiding team as quickly as possible. You should know this by now. This is how the game has worked since Wrath.

So once again I say either properly define and commit to the gear colour precedent or remove them entirely if they no longer serve a purpose.

The purpose of the color is to determine what kind of shard you're going to get from the gear. If you're doing raid-level content (including LFR) you're going to want enchantments for that gear, so you need access to shards to afford those. Purple gear is not a "reward" for good behavior and time served. It's just a stepping stone to the next level of raiding. Once the final heroic tier of the expansion is complete then the remaining gear is simply there to keep the completionists happy. If you want to be substantially rewarded for you efforts then I suggest you direct your energies towards a productive real-life activity rather than at a virtual world. Virtual rewards are virtual.

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Then why are you annoyed when you replace your epics every expansion with greens and blues?

I can't speak for MoanaLisa, but for me it's annoying because you bust your butt for months to attain a certain level of power, and as soon as the expansion drops you go from facerolling the hardest content in the game back to putting in effort just to kill one quest mob without dying. It is jarring and irritating. Not because of the color of the gear you're ditching, but because of the decrease in power that you experience. That's why I don't view gear as a reward. If I did the frustration would be far too high.

[Berri]

Item level is the dividing factor, and frankly nobody cares whether or not a newly dinged character can have full epics. They certainly can't have 560+ on ding.

[Deleted]

http://www.wowhead.com/zone=3429 was a Vanilla raid. http://www.wowwiki.com/Zul%27Gurub_loot_%28original%29 was a vanilla raid.

You still don't understand what blue and purple represented. The same item in purple was slightly better then the same item in blue. Just as the same item in blue was slightly better then the same item in green. This is why people associated Purple as better then blue, and blue better then green. This is why Warforged and Thunderforged are comparable to the difference between blue and purple. Because Warforged is designed to be slightly better then the Non-Warforged version.

I know there wasn't always a chance to get better raid gear than normal. I have never stated that. But the rewards from doing raid content have changed every expansion. Because they've added heroic modes, added and removed different loot for different sizes of the same content, added LFR, added and remove LFR and Flex. All creating different levels of "end game epics" when there used to only be one level of end game epic per tier.

Hmm I guess you're right about ZG and AQ dropping blues with the same item level. But that is because ZG and AQ20 served as an entry-level raid for casuals, who most likely still had blues and greens from questing. It makes sense to slowly lead them to purple gear. It doesn't make sense for something like Naxxramas, though.

[3stats]

Not anymore, sadly. It was that way up through WotLK, but they changed it in Cataclysm. I can't find any items of identical item level, but http://www.wowhead.com/item=84012 is a pair of ilvl 437 green mail intellect pants, with 706 intellect, and http://www.wowhead.com/item=80910 is a pair of ilvl 435 blue mail intellect pants with 693 intellect.

These days, all item level indicates is either:
1) source (dungeon gear is blue, raid gear is epic, etc), or
2) Level it can be used at (http://www.wowhead.com/item=80910 is a pair of epic ilvl 440 agility pants that can be equipped at level 87, lower than you'd normally be able to equip something of that ilvl)

Edit: Another example:
http://www.wowhead.com/item=82543 Dreaming Spirit Guantlets, blue ilvl 434, 510 intellect
http://www.wowhead.com/item=88129 Withered Wood Handguards, green ilvl 437, 524 intellect (+14)
http://www.wowhead.com/item=87364 Gloves of Sanctity, blue ilvl 440, 539 intellect (+15)
Linear stat progression despite the change in color

Fuck

I didnt know of this change.

I do not like it.

I prefer the color to have some meaning, not just remain a vestigial aspect.

[Dormie]

The colors need to be tied to the actual rarity of items rather than quality.

[CandyCotton Marshmallows]

Alright then why be against the OPs desire to just change colors around?

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If it matters to one person to give a sense of goal to a player base and u dont care. Why not just go with the ones who do care? continue getting ur gear despite the color.

Because a lot of people want a lot of stupid things; should we just cater to all the ignorance in the world? (George Carlin said something in line with this regarding meanings of words)

People need to get over the gear color (and themselves). It doesn't matter, and it shouldn't matter what other players have either. Worry about your damn self. Live your life by that. If you want to concern yourself with someone else, then worry about HELPING them, not putting them down or making sure you stand out as better than them.

[Kujako]

If color is meaningless

How would you react if all the out of raid epics were actually blue?

Would not care a better item is a better item, sometimes this even means that a lower item level piece is better (for example I just swapped out some timeless isle 535 shoulders for LFR tier shoulders, lower item level but with the set bonus a better item).

The question is, why do some people put so much stock in the item color? Would people really turn down a blue item that was better then their epic? Actually, scratch that question because I've seen people who have done just that and held onto their tier gear from the previous expansion until they could get epics.

[Tzalix]

I see the logic you're using, OP, but I honestly think it really doesn't have much of an impact on the vast majority of new players.

[Trickname]

Colour is just an archaic system, it;s more to do with the tags now (flex RF, heroic) they are what indicate effort.

[MoanaLisa]

I can't speak for MoanaLisa, but for me it's annoying because you bust your butt for months to attain a certain level of power, and as soon as the expansion drops you go from facerolling the hardest content in the game back to putting in effort just to kill one quest mob without dying. It is jarring and irritating. Not because of the color of the gear you're ditching, but because of the decrease in power that you experience. That's why I don't view gear as a reward. If I did the frustration would be far too high.

I'll try and keep this short by just adding on to the above which I agree with. I do care about the color text system to the extent that it causes division among players; causes arguments that are silly and have nothing to do with the actual quality of game play so I suppose in that sense I need to plead guilty about caring that it exists and would like to see it gone. The game sends messages through gear text color and the problem across expansions is primarily one that's is one of the least seamless things in the game and non-immersive as this game gets.

You should hate that at some point in the coming expansion you're going to replace your "epics" from MoP with a "better" gear that you could possibly get as a reward by obtaining a dozen dinosaur livers or something else trivial. You will be trading some of the best pieces in the game for crap gear because the message the game sends to the player with green text is exactly that: This is gear that you will want to get rid of as quickly as you can. If the green text were removed--if all green/blue/purple/orange were totally removed--that would be one less jarring element in the gearing/progression system. It wouldn't fix it but it would remove something that I believe no longer has any meaning or place in the game.

I play on an RP server so my main has a history, a history that stretches across all expansions and a story that does not respect the boundaries between BC/Wrath/Cataclysm/MoP, etc. The gear resets between expansions are a problem with the gearing system generally that I have little respect for and of which the text color on the piece is just a small part. It's the system we have and despite the lobbying that people do on forums I don't expect it to change. In the best of all possible games, gearing would be a cohesive system that would respect your past accomplishments and instead of tossing off old gear like yesterday's trash it would make a certain amount of real world sense that it lacks now. Transmogrification has improved this quite a bit for players like myself but nonetheless we're constantly reminded that transmogrification is basically a thin veneer layed on to cover up the disparities in the system as a whole. Once you get to end game, your character as such stops progressing, it stops gaining experience as it experiences various events and the only thing you have to show for this is the rather impersonal reward of better stuff. It's gear progression, not character advancement.

It's a complicated subject that I can't do justice to in a few paragraphs so sorry about that. But my problems with the gearing system in WoW (and other games) is larger than just the colors used. It has to do with the messages the game sends you and has more to do with the lack of actual character advancement in the game which at end game is simply replaced with the artificiality of gear with better stats. Much more satisfying to me would be a system where the character itself would improve with experience, the gear should matter much less if at all. It's not a better staff, it's a staff that you learn to use in new ways and can bring new hard-won skills to.

That said, given the system we have, upgrades are upgrades whether or not the color changes and good players will take it even though players trash 'legendary' gear for the additional power of new 'green' gear. No I don't care about that but at some level I do very much care about the messages sent and how it leads to a much less seamless and immersive experience and how it has less to do with your character and everything to do with your possessions. Hope this explains in a minor way where I'm at. Gearing in WoW and how it corrupts your character's storyline of progression and personal advancement is probably the thing I like least about the game.

Someday I'd like to see a really serious conversation started up with the devs about this but at the end of the day it's probably a different game I'm asking for. But I think that to the extent that systems like gear take you out of the personal space that is "you" in the game it probably affects long-term retention and investment in your character.

[OK, so I failed at keeping it short, sorry. It's a topic that I think about a lot and if I ever leave the game it will more likely be due to this than anything.]

[Yriel]

Alright then why be against the OPs desire to just change colors around?

I think the problem would be that everyone of this OPs in these kind of threads sets the epic threshold to his own playing level.
Someone mainly playing flex is going "LFR shouldn't drop epics, only REAL raids should, like flex".
The next guy raids normal and says "Flex is easymode, only hard raids should drop epics, like normal".
And the third guy says "Only heroic is truly epic raiding and deserves epic loot".

You will never come to an agreement, thats the problem. If they'd change things to what the OP proposed you'll have the same kind of threads one week after that.

[Dormie]

The problem is that the item color is now tied to it's quality rather than its rarity. Having both ilvl and purple on the same piece of gear is redundant.

[GennGreymane]

If color really matters so little

why not just have normal modes, heroic, mythic dropping epics while everything else drops blue/green or gives blue/green with the occasional epic? I mean if color really does not mean much to you and you just go for the upgrade... get your upgrade, if you do raids of a higher difficulty it just so happens to be a purple upgrade.

It seems to me that those who dont care, want everyone to not care or to feel bad for wanting something that is traditional in MMOs and RPGs in general. Whats wrong with having a type of item that is considered more rare, or tied to an aspect of the game that you may or may not do? Whats wrong with the prestige of purple that the Op and many like him seem to want? If color really didnt matter to you, but enough people seem to agree with the OP because.... THIS HAS BEEN TALKED ABOUT SINCE WOTLK (tbc had the pvp epics) Clearly a lot of people want what the OP wants.


to me the "too cool to care" crowd might secretly care. I mean why even argue against it if all you want are upgrades?