Is making every player a "hero" a good idea?

[shameheart]

Hey guys, so I've been just getting back into WoW over the last few weeks, and I've been leveling some alts with heirloom gear. I realized how boring it becomes to level up so quickly and so easily... When you can just throw a DoT on everything and run away as it dies, the game really loses its sense of challenge and reward.

I then attempted Deadmines as a level 14 Rogue in heirloom gear and found it lots of fun. I managed to finish it as a I reached level 20. It's absolutely ridiculous that this can happen in the first place, but I loved the challenge for the first time while leveling an alt.

Now this brings me to my question. Is it good to make every player a "hero" without any regard for their achievements?

Yes, I know, I could be raiding and PvPing for titles and world firsts, but personally, I don't have the time to dedicate myself to a raiding guild. It would be great to somehow get recognition simply for being a skilled player in solo content. Automatically being called a "hero" for finishing a zone-wide quest chain and getting nothing at all out of it besides a piece of blue gear just isn't satisfying. Arbitrarily being called a "hero" made my questing experience in WoD feel unsatisfying, as I had not done anything particularly special.

This desire to get rewarded for a difficult task and not having time for a raiding guild is why I love doing difficult solo content. I used to do this by soloing rare elites in Pandaria with pieces of gear removed or doing WoD dungeons on normal by myself, and it's why I solo'ed DM at low level.

I miss the challenge that used to be present in solo content, and I wish we weren't called "hero" left and right unless we had proven something. For example, if I went and completed a five person quest all on my own, I wished NPCs would somehow react to that, or gave a better item for completing the quest on my own.

With that said, having Order Halls and Artifact Weapons in Legion will feel unearned for me. I'm not the top of my class, and I'm not the player who is leading thousands of people. From what I've seen in the Legion beta, Order Halls don't really connect you with other players of the same class anyway, so this idea of "leading my class" is almost meaningless.

[Torgent]

Hey guys, so I've been just getting back into WoW over the last few weeks, and I've been leveling some alts with heirloom gear. I realized how boring it becomes to level up so quickly and so easily... When you can just throw a DoT on everything and run away as it dies, the game really loses its sense of challenge and reward.

I then attempted Deadmines as a level 14 Rogue in heirloom gear and found it lots of fun. I managed to finish it as a I reached level 20. It's absolutely ridiculous that this can happen in the first place, but I loved the challenge for the first time while leveling an alt.

Now this brings me to my question. Is it good to make every player a "hero" without any regard for their achievements?

Yes, I know, I could be raiding and PvPing for titles and world firsts, but personally, I don't have the time to dedicate myself to a raiding guild. It would be great to somehow get recognition simply for being a skilled player in solo content. Automatically being called a "hero" for finishing a zone-wide quest chain and getting nothing at all out of it besides a piece of blue gear just isn't satisfying. Arbitrarily being called a "hero" made my questing experience in WoD feel unsatisfying, as I had not done anything particularly special.

This desire to get rewarded for a difficult task and not having time for a raiding guild is why I love doing difficult solo content. I used to do this by soloing rare elites in Pandaria with pieces of gear removed or doing WoD dungeons on normal by myself, and it's why I solo'ed DM at low level.

I miss the challenge that used to be present in solo content, and I wish we weren't called "hero" left and right unless we had proven something. For example, if I went and completed a five person quest all on my own, I wished NPCs would somehow react to that, or gave a better item for completing the quest on my own.

With that said, having Order Halls and Artifact Weapons in Legion will feel unearned for me. I'm not the top of my class, and I'm not the player who is leading thousands of people. From what I've seen in the Legion beta, Order Halls don't really connect you with other players of the same class anyway, so this idea of "leading my class" is almost meaningless.

Lore-wise, if you reach level 100, you have killed all of the bosses up to that point personally. Because we, the player characters, were there. So yes, we are heroes at this point as we've had a hand in saving the world on multiple occasions. That's not to say that there should be no challenge. But us not being heroes would make no sense considering that we helped kill gods and elemental lords.

[psyquest]

it is crappy. In fact the days where you were a lowly guy were better. More danger in the world etc...

now we are those super heroes with super mega weapons having to kill ever increasing threats. at some point the threat has got to become so much bigger to take into account how stupidly "heroic" and powerful our characters have been designed.

This also begs the question: when legion is done, what will become of those artifacts that have been so freely distributed? Do we carry on another xpac again with those weapons? would blizzard make a quest that actually removes all of them from players?

[Daedius]

WoW has gone from being an adventurer in part of a grander scale, to being a hero in a solo player questing experience...

It's not a good direction, but there you have it -- WoW's become single player oriented now when it comes to quests and your position in its "lore".

[Tome]

I don't like that direction either. It's objectively bad MMO lore writing, but that's what you have to roll with when levelling.

[rda]

It's bad, but you are 5-6 years late.

[Seefer]

Solo stuff in this game is just stupid, I hate how it has become a single player game with a chat room, I miss the days where you could tell who the biggest players were, now? Go grind Apexis or whatever and here ya go!

[Leih]

Honestly at this point, after playing for 11 years and killing every evil bitch from Ragnaros to Deathwing to Archimonde, I personally think it'd feel pretty ridiculous if we still turned up in each expansion and were told "Get in line grunt. Go harvest me 4 flowers and kill 10 rats and I'll give you 8 copper."

I mean, it's fair to like things when they're simple and we're weak, but escalation is a natural part of progression. As much as I like the fresh feeling of being a low rank nooblet just gearing up and learning the ropes, it just feels lame to stay that way forever and never change.

[soulzek]

Because there is no longer a world of warcraft. You are just playing a progression excel-sheet MMO with a warcraft skin now.

[Kyrenna]

It's totally fine, because being a hero doesn't prevent NPCs from asking you to gather fruits or collect feathers for them.

[Wondercrab]

Story-wise it's just a horrible fit for an MMO since you have the narrative *constantly* clashing with the game mechanics and the social structure of the world. It's a single player story implemented in a multiplayer game, and it's horribly jarring. There are far, far better ways to handle narrative in an MMO, not to mention in a player-driven roleplaying experience in general.

[plantation]

I liked it more when you were an adventurer or just another warrior. I hate it when players are put in the position of General, Commander, "chosen one" etc. Unless it's for a distinguished reason, and the title/prestige is limited, such as a high arena ranking or whatever. When everyone feels special no one feels special.

I doubt anyone is impressed or immersed by the fact that their character is a Commander of the Frostwolf Garrison. It's bad MMO design, IMO.

[Deianeira]

it is crappy. In fact the days where you were a lowly guy were better. More danger in the world etc...

now we are those super heroes with super mega weapons having to kill ever increasing threats. at some point the threat has got to become so much bigger to take into account how stupidly "heroic" and powerful our characters have been designed.

This also begs the question: when legion is done, what will become of those artifacts that have been so freely distributed? Do we carry on another xpac again with those weapons? would blizzard make a quest that actually removes all of them from players?

My thought on the heroes that we have become is that if you interact with a npc they treat you as a hero/commander but not the ones in your party.

[Az0na]

Their fixing questing experiance so there is that.

Lore wise its only logic you get called a hero after saving the world multiple times and defeated many evil things.

About time my druid becomes an arch druid. Or what ever title other class gets.

[shameheart]

WoW has gone from being an adventurer in part of a grander scale, to being a hero in a solo player questing experience...

It's not a good direction, but there you have it -- WoW's become single player oriented now when it comes to quests and your position in its "lore".

I totally agree with this. The utter lack of difficulty until level cap completely destroys any need to group up besides for LFD. Also, even with that, people RARELY talk in a LFD group, and they almost never reply even when I start a conversation. It's just destroying one mob after another with no attention to boss mechanics.

Honestly at this point, after playing for 11 years and killing every evil bitch from Ragnaros to Deathwing to Archimonde, I personally think it'd feel pretty ridiculous if we still turned up in each expansion and were told "Get in line grunt. Go harvest me 4 flowers and kill 10 rats and I'll give you 8 copper."

I mean, it's fair to like things when they're simple and we're weak, but escalation is a natural part of progression. As much as I like the fresh feeling of being a low rank nooblet just gearing up and learning the ropes, it just feels lame to stay that way forever and never change.

Two things about that, though....

Number one, why can't quests be a local area thing? I mean, the thing is that almost everything goes back to normal once I'm done the quest. Say someone asks me to kill ten murlocs, and then a dozen other people do the same thing... Yet, when I look back, ALL the murlocs are still there. I don't have to be THE hero in this scenario, I could just be part of fixing this area of the Azeroth.

Number two, I rarely feel like I've become a hero in WoW even if I killed every major lore villain in the game. There's never once a mention of my titles or my previous acts in WoW. Yes, I get called Commander once in awhile if I'm walking around my garrison, and yet the voice acting or quest text never includes anything related to me, besides the word "hero".

Honestly, it could be a preset to one of my in-game titles... I do have some that I'm pretty proud of. It's a pretty big task, but given all the money Blizzard has and all the ingenious things so many other gaming companies are doing, I begin to wonder why I'm giving Blizzard my money.

[HuxNeva]

Nope, the hero fantasy doesn't work for me at all. Just let me be an adventurer in a small band that happens to stumble across the world's big events.

[Seifross]

But in a classic RPG sense "the chosen one," and starting out as a god or hero is just played out and dull.
I want to start from scratch and work my way to godhood.

This is what the players have done, though. People have been playing for 12+ years, and everybody is going to get the same story because of technical limitations. The options are to have people stick as regular old adventurers (and I guarantee that if this was the case we'd have people complaining about it on these forums), or go with the hero route.

This is a complaint I've never understood, though, to be honest. It's an issue people have with the story - they don't like that characters in-game refer to them as special, unique heroes. But story-wise we are. PCs have saved the world more times than your average comic book character, and the story takes that into account. If it didn't, you'd have an even bigger problem.

It's an interesting issue, because I agree that an MMO story should probably take into account that players aren't going to stand that far above their peers in terms of accomplishments. However, WoW is 12 years old, and so it faces unique issues like this. We'd either have to be facing crappier bosses (story wise), or having our story accomplishments ignored, which would bring about as many or more complaints from fans.

Mechanically speaking, there are plenty of ways to stand out from other players. Mythic and high-end PvP titles and mounts make an impact, so that feeling is certainly there for players who are able and willing to chase it. Story-wise, we've become heroes through 12 years of saving the world from various threats. We were regular adventurers, but this naturally snowballed as the story constantly upped the stakes throughout the years, and now other characters don't ignore us.

I remember even back in BC a lot of faction NPCs couldn't care less who you were, despite killing Ragnaros or even Kel'Thuzad as well as having a myriad of quests completed throughout the world. I found that jarring back then - I can't imagine how strange it would be to be treated as an adventurer after killing Kel'Thuzad (twice), Illidan, Arthas, Deathwing, Garrosh and Archimonde (as well as the other raid bosses, especially the Old Gods).

[Deleted]

Just wait until Legion where every single player will be leader of its class. Yep, that's right, Arthussdkqt the Keyboardturner will be leader of all death knights. Legalasxx the Puller with ever growling pet will be leader of all hunters. They will wield mighty artifacts and will be one and only savior(s) of Azeroth, defeating biggest baddest bosses in LFR or in easy single player quest with shiny cut scene.

Its stupid single player crap that does not belong to MMO and it annoys the hell out of me.

[Soeroah]

It's fine. There are always allowances for gameplay and story segregation in MMOs, unless dungeons and quests straight up don't exist.

[Manabomb]

Making everyone feel special is just as equally boring and moronic as making everyone feel equally unimportant or to paraphrase "adventurey". Infact, I'm not really certain why anyone cares what everyone else feels like in the game, as the story on an individual level should be what drives it.

In other words, why do you care if you and the guy next to you is a hero, because otherwise you'd both be "adventurers". It's just a label and a method of story telling, not some ground breaking new way for Blizzard to make players feel like entitled shits. You guys do that on your own.