World of Waitcraft

[Saberstrike]

Speaking from the perspective of mostly a solo player / PvPer.

Am I the only one bothered by the amount of waiting and gating the game seems to be growing to use more and more of with each expansion? First there were daily heroic lockouts in TBC, then there were gated daily-based reputation grinds; Then it became better with tabards in wotlk and worse again when dungeon finder was introduced and 5-mans were boiled down to 'sit in queue' -- just like BGs.

Skipping to today, many professions have an annoying daily cooldown that you have to manage to make something cool -- as opposed to going out into the world and finding all the mats you need. Anything below proper raids is based on sitting and waiting in queues. The best non-RNG progression is gated behind weekly valor / conquest caps. Dailies are gone (and thank fucking god, good riddance), alongside to an extend 5-man lockouts -- admittedly, LFR took the place of 5-man heroics and that only has a tiny chance to give you upgrades once every bloody week.

So, to end my rant - am I the only one annoyed at the amount of waiting and gating there is between players and progression? In all fairness it just feels like lazy design, and right now at the end of an expansion is when it's at it's worst. Some could argue that it was always there for non-raiders, but here's the thing - presence of LFR kills any and all incentive for 99% of people to get better at the game and start proper raiding, which in the long run doesn't mean anything good for the game.

When you click a pandaren they sometimes say 'Patience, patience' -- and that seems to be a great summary of this expansion. It's just a whole lot of waiting for a mostly disappointing payoff.

What do you lot think?

[DriveKnight]

Funny cuz its true.

[Tech Priest Bojangles]

So, to end my rant - am I the only one annoyed at the amount of waiting and gating there is between players and progression?

No sir you are not the only one.
I understand why they are there but man they can be frustrating. Logging off and waiting for the next day/week isn't very fun.
Kinda worried about what all there will be to do at max level in WoD. No daily hubs to keep anyone busy, just a Garrison that you can be damn sure it will be gated like crazy.

[Paarthurnax]

I'm confused, what waiting and gaiting are we talking about here? 5 man's and lfr queues? That's what gets you all hot and bothered?

[Deleted]

I'm confused, what waiting and gaiting are we talking about here? 5 man's and lfr queues? That's what gets you all hot and bothered?

The waiting that he mentioned in the thread obviously.

[dacoolist]

So lets say WoW had no gaits, or profession cool downs, no daily cool downs, everything raid/pvp/profession/dailys - nothing like THAT had Cooldowns.
- I would say, the expansion would last about uh 1 month? You would cap out pvp gear, pve gear in less than a week, you could cap on professions in a week tops, and complain there is less to do after that than their already is now.

[crunk]

stop thinking about wow as an mmo and just realise its a lobby game. the wait times in that context dont seem too bad.


also, dual monitors really helps.

[Maddoc]

Am I the only one bothered by the amount of waiting and gating the game seems to be growing to use more and more of with each expansion? First there were daily heroic lockouts in TBC, then there were gated daily-based reputation grinds; Then it became better with tabards in wotlk and worse again when dungeon finder was introduced and 5-mans were boiled down to 'sit in queue' -- just like BGs.

Yeah, it was much more time efficient and fun to spam trade. "LF Tank and Healer for Bot HC" for 1-2 hours. Then travel to the instance by flight path or flying (aka go take a piss/get something to drink), only to find out that the healer doesn't have a flying mount and can't get there, since you have no Warlock to summon him with. Super fun.

[Milkyz]

So:

- No raid lockouts (You can loot every boss any amount of times you want every week);
- No dungeon lockouts (You can do the same Heroic Dungeon anytime);
- Either nothing gated behind Reputation or being possible to grind Reputation from Neutral to Exalted within a day;
- Being able to go from fresh max level to full Conquest by grinding arenas endlessly over the course of a week;
- Being able to go from fresh max level to full Heroic PvE by doing raids every night, clearing and resetting as you will;
- Being able to sit in front of Celestials and kill it any amount of time until you get all available pieces.

Seems like a legit game. Imagine how fast content would have to be created to attend such demands. I'm sure there would be only good outcomes of such changes, no drawbacks at all and no collateral damage.

Or not.

[seleri]

Yeah, it was much more time efficient and fun to spam trade. "LF Tank and Healer for Bot HC" for 1-2 hours. Then travel to the instance by flight path or flying (aka go take a piss/get something to drink), only to find out that the healer doesn't have a flying mount and can't get there, since you have no Warlock to summon him with. Super fun.

And if you had a crazy schedule like I used to (only able to play late at night), you could forget about ever finding a group.

[aoussar123]

So:

- No raid lockouts (You can loot every boss any amount of times you want every week);
- No dungeon lockouts (You can do the same Heroic Dungeon anytime);
- Either nothing gated behind Reputation or being possible to grind Reputation from Neutral to Exalted within a day;
- Being able to go from fresh max level to full Conquest by grinding arenas endlessly over the course of a week;
- Being able to go from fresh max level to full Heroic PvE by doing raids every night, clearing and resetting as you will;
- Being able to sit in front of Celestials and kill it any amount of time until you get all available pieces.

Seems like a legit game. Imagine how fast content would have to be created to attend such demands. I'm sure there would be only good outcomes of such changes, no drawbacks at all and no collateral damage.

Or not.

Or, you could wait. Imagine if every game forced you to wait after every activity, because 'you would finish it too quickly' lol. Bad game design is bad. Although I fail to come up with a compromise.

[Maddoc]

Or, you could wait. Imagine if every game forced you to wait after every activity, because 'you would finish it too quickly' lol. Bad game design is bad. Although I fail to come up with a compromise.

But why would you wait?

[Terahertz]

I'm confused, what waiting and gaiting are we talking about here? 5 man's and lfr queues? That's what gets you all hot and bothered?

If you had bothered reading the post you would know OP is talking about all the caps blizzard puts on its players. Specifically daily cooldowns, weekly cooldowns and queues.

So lets say WoW had no gaits, or profession cool downs, no daily cool downs, everything raid/pvp/profession/dailys - nothing like THAT had Cooldowns.
- I would say, the expansion would last about uh 1 month? You would cap out pvp gear, pve gear in less than a week, you could cap on professions in a week tops, and complain there is less to do after that than their already is now.

Except right now you play for a couple of hours a week to get your weekly cap and start wondering why you're still playing the game because there's nothing
exciting to do. Besides that you're basically forced to keep up your weekly 'caps' in order to stay competitive. That's what's bothering many people including me.

I usually cap my conquest cap and afk in stormwind with nothing else to do. LFR doesn't excite me besides transmog gear, which is made worse because of the absolutely disgusting RNG bullshit in this game as well as the gating of only being able to get gear once every week.

How I see it is blizzard is forcing our pace whether you're a 'casual' player or a 'hardcore' player. You're forced to play on the same pace.

[Mihalik]

The problem with not gating content is that it inevitably causes burn out and lack of content. In a very similar way to what we seen with MoP reputation grinds. Too much of a good thing can be bad for you.

Funny enough a lot of the mechanisms created to make content more available are the things responsible for the sensation of waiting. Before LFR if you wanted to pug you had to assemble a group. So while you were technically sitting and waiting in -insert city- you were active on chat, in guild etc trying to pull the group together, then you had to travel there etc. Same for Dungeons, Heroics, etc. This created a sensation that you were "doing something". Now you just press a button and you wait for the game to care of all that.

The other problem is if you don't set cooldowns and limits on certain things a lot of people will feel obligated to do it until completion. Like early MoP dailies... You could live without it, but it was better to do it then not doing it, so you ended up doing 3 hours of dailies every fucking day, causing a horrible burn out. Same happens with Valor points, conquest points etc. If no caps you would be forced to grind the points for every single piece of gear, day 1 or else you would be subpar. Once you have done that, what are you going to do for the next X weeks or months? If Blizz tailored content delivery to the "pro" gamers and overachievers then a huge chunk of the community who doesn't have the time or willpower to do all that would fall hopelessly behind.

Time sinks and gating have always been part of virtually any MMO. There are 2 ways of doing it.

1, You create a grind. You put everything behind gear, reputation, resistance gear, quest etc barriers. You force people to spend x zillion hours to grind out the entry level stuff for your next level of content, and you keep repeating that cycle endlessly.

2, You put everything behind time barriers. You can do x amount in a given day. If you want more log an alt and do it again.

If you don't do this, your game will be either unplayable for a large segment of the community or boring for others. Tough cookie.

[Millennía]

stop thinking about wow as an mmo and just realise its a lobby game. the wait times in that context dont seem too bad.


also, duel monitors really helps.

Totally agree. Went dual monitors a couple months ago and can't imagine life without it now.

OT: The waiting and gating does reduce the "epic" feeling a bit. I do want to go out in to the world and take part in zone events etc like GW2 zone events. The world needs to feel more alive because right now there is just very little activity.

[Orcbert]

Skipping to today, many professions have an annoying daily cooldown that you have to manage to make something cool -- as opposed to going out into the world and finding all the mats you need. Anything below proper raids is based on sitting and waiting in queues. The best non-RNG progression is gated behind weekly valor / conquest caps. Dailies are gone (and thank fucking god, good riddance), alongside to an extend 5-man lockouts -- admittedly, LFR took the place of 5-man heroics and that only has a tiny chance to give you upgrades once every bloody week.


What do you lot think?

There are three options Blizzard has with professions. Either they make non-competitive gear and are mostly useless (unfortunately very close to this as is), make them be able to use gathered mats to craft top end items and flood the market with cheap raid quality armor, or the current iteration where the daily makes the gear have some value.

I like the current system as it stops some 553 piece of crafted gear from being worth 2k gold. My only change would be to make it need less of the daily cooldown mats so that you can get a few more crafts in early in the patches while the items will still be sought after.

And looking for raid is what it is. I really can't think of any way of improving that system but if you are not going to do at least flex raids then you are at the mercy of the queue. There is no way to improve this unless you can think of a way to get people to stop abusing the tanks till so few of them want to LFR anymore.

[Mihalik]

If content is completed within weeks, then its a bad design. Putting lockout, gates, cool-downs etc are just cheap parlor tricks to delay the patch so that they have their own time and can bring in more content at liesure

The way they used to create "hard to complete" content before was equally cheap parlor tricks, of resistance gear, long winding atunements etc. same shit.

[Farabee]

But why would you wait?

Imagine if Skyrim made you wait 24 hours to craft a new piece of gear, or do one of the main quests. Imagine if the Battlefield games only let you get X amount of upgrades each day or week. Imagine if Dark Souls only let you kill one boss a day.

In those games, the longevity of the content rests on how much you play. OP is saying WoW should be like that. Considering each of those games are still played, daily, by people I'd say it's not a bad idea to try out.

I like the current system as it stops some 553 piece of crafted gear from being worth 2k gold.

You mean like this 553 belt for 1700g on Quel'Thalas Alliance?

https://theunderminejournal.com/item...las&item=98612

All the current system does is gate the player power level until the content becomes trivial just like every other system. It doesn't happen any slower or faster than before, it's just more annoying.

[Mihalik]

Imagine if Skyrim made you wait 24 hours to craft a new piece of gear, or do one of the main quests. Imagine if the Battlefield games only let you get X amount of upgrades each day or week. Imagine if Dark Souls only let you kill one boss a day.

In those games, the longevity of the content rests on how much you play. OP is saying WoW should be like that. Considering each of those games are still played, daily, by people I'd say it's not a bad idea to try out.

You are talking about utterly different genres. Skyrim places a grind limit on you (how many hours of play does it take to craft a full Daedric set). Also the game has an "end", the fact that is highly re-playable is great but very few people spend as many hours a day logged into Skyrim as they do in WoW. Battlefield gear progression has a much much much smaller influence on the game then WoW. To be honest Battlefield has no gear progression, most of the important unlocks can be done within a few days of lazy play. Dark Souls is again a different game. Its time sink is its artificially high difficulty.

[Milkyz]

Or, you could wait. Imagine if every game forced you to wait after every activity, because 'you would finish it too quickly' lol. Bad game design is bad. Although I fail to come up with a compromise.

It's a good design. Having a lockout makes it so there is still competition between people who have distinct amount of time available. The variance of rewards between people who play 14 hours a week and 40 hours a week would be too huge if you didn't have caps to hold those people who can play way more.

inb4 "If you want to be competitive you should have to devote 40+ hours to a game. Bad game design is bad". There are way more implications to that. It's ok to not like it though, hope you find a MMO that provides you non-gated content.