Blizzard's biggest failure - Managing to motivate people to gear up

[Huzzaa]

Because people don't just care about gear? Imagine playing WoW and gear is your main drive, what a cuckfest.

Yeah yo, that's your opinion m8 and people do care about gear.

I love how many of you #@$%s are in this echo chamber touting this trope like it's some sort of fact.

[Raelbo]

Why do people NOT farm the best possible gear? Because it feels like a huge waste of time. Just wait for the next catch up mechanic.

No. You farm the gear you need to do the content you want to engage in. Thereafter you can take it easier and focus on fun instead of just grinding.

Why do people NOT feel motivated to do Mythic raiding? Because they already beat the raid in LFR. Why would they bother? Blizzards current "carrot on a stick"? A Mount, of course! Other than that it's just the same gear with higher numbers that don't give you exclusive access to ANY content.

People do mythic raiding because they want to be challenged. It's what they find fun. For most people though, heroic or normal are already challenging enough to keep us entertained. Gear and mounts are of course nice, but they are of secondary importance.

Your comment about LFR is just asinine. If someone is getting all they want from the game out of LFR then clearly Mythic raiding is not for them.

It is BLIZZARDS JOB to make us motivated to do their activities.

Yes and no.

It's their job to do a good job of making the kind of content that we are naturally motivated to do. If someone has no inherent interest in putting in the excessive amount of effort and commitment necessary to beat mythic raiding, then it's Blizzard's job to provide those people with content that they are interested in doing (eg lfr/normal/heroic depending on the person).

It's not their job to force us into doing stuff we don't enjoy.

[Qnubi]

Luckily for me this is not the case at all, I still enjoy getting bigger numbers as is. Raiding was never about the challenge for me, just to get gear. Now that I can stop interacting with 20+ people and just interact with my close group of friends I am way happier with WoW, so happy that for the first time in years I am subbed for like 9+ months still (grabbed the mount). Last time I was subbed for close to a year without a break was, you guessed it, in Classic.

Pretty hyped for next week too, planning to spam M+ to gear to 415 on my alts and then decide who to gear to 430 first once Season 3 unlocks fully.

[MiiiMiii]

It's their job to do a good job of making the kind of content that we are naturally motivated to do. If someone has no inherent interest in putting in the excessive amount of effort and commitment necessary to beat mythic raiding, then it's Blizzard's job to provide those people with content that they are interested in doing (eg lfr/normal/heroic depending on the person).

It's not their job to force us into doing stuff we don't enjoy.

What does "Inherent interest" mean here? If people only should do things for an "inherent interest", why does any content give any rewards at all? Why even have gear, transmogs and mounts? The Inherent interest should be enough right?

I argue that it is Blizzards job to give me a reward cool enough for me to put in the effort to rise to the challenge.

All they give now is some achievement and some mount, and that is not enough.

They clearly realised this and did their "ahead of the curve" achievements, and it's still not enough.
They also added the first 100 guilds on each faction hall of fame, still not enough.

They understand the problem, it seems, but their solutions so far has been weak. The only solution is to go back to basics.

[Veggie50]

It's bullshit, I'm sitting at 415+ ilvl and I just destroy everything, even in the new zones.
If you want a more casual friendly mmo, play FF14, I play both and it's great. But it lacks "raid content" and that's why I'm sure I wont play it a lot after the initial SwB surge (just finished the MSQ and started "the stuff grind")

LFR content is not even a raid..... I have never set foot in that shit in 2 years. If people think they "finished the game" by doing LFR then Blizzard can't do anything about that...

What do you want ? Mythic only raid that no one clears ? DO you really think that would motivate people to gear ? Absolutely not, they just won't even enter the raids (like in vanilla/BC). Or just one "normal" raid, that every guild clears in 2 weeks ? Why that would motivate people to gear up ?!

I don't really understand what you're trying to say. Do you actually want LESS content ? (no normal/hc raids, no mm+ ?)

If people don't even raid after LFR then they probably don't have the skill or motivation to play seriously for mythic raids...

I play "semi hardcore" and I didnt even bother with allied races because I'm attached to my main... rerolls are for casuals or ultra hardcore people with a lot of free time

Without catch up mechanics, "bad" people whould be stuck in uldir forever, and then they would stop playing the game because they don't have acces to new content... There was catch up stuff EVEN IN FUCKING VANILLA (Or "classic" lol) ... One example : T0.5, Did you even play BC ? When sunwel was released you could get better gearr than BT via justice badges (heroic dungeons)... -_______-"""""

MMO-C forums never cease to amaze me... "Old raiders" that don't even know that catch up mecanics exist since Vanilla...

myeeeeeh technically true... vanilla had catchup gear... equating it to bfa catchup gear is disingenuous though...

Vanilla catchup gear (diremaul, zg and t0.5) all required a decent investment for a marginal upgrade. The t0.5 questline was quite harrowing and you needed to have the entire t0 set to do it (a feat in and of itself). Diremaul gear was catchup but mainly for a few specific items, with often low droprates. It gave goals. ZG was a raid in and fo itself. To experienced raiders no biggy, but by no means free gear.

In other words. Catchup gear done right.

[Raelbo]

What does "Inherent interest" mean here? If people only should do things for an "inherent interest", why does any content give any rewards at all? Why even have gear, transmogs and mounts? The Inherent interest should be enough right?

Where did say anything about only doing things for inherent interest? That's right, I didn't.

It's the same principle with your real life profession. You should never take up a career just for the money. You should do something you enjoy and are good at. That doesn't mean you should work for free.

Rewards in the game are great, and they add to the sense of player accomplishment. They can also help people to focus on an objective. But they should never be the primary reason someone is engaging in content.

I argue that it is Blizzards job to give me a reward cool enough for me to put in the effort to rise to the challenge.

Sure, but not to the extent that you end up doing stuff you don't enjoy just to get the reward. It's fine if you like the challenge. But it's not fine when all you want to do is "be done" with the content.

All they give now is some achievement and some mount, and that is not enough.

Then I would argue that maybe you need to re-assess what you enjoy doing in the game and focus on doing that.

They clearly realised this and did their "ahead of the curve" achievements, and it's still not enough.
They also added the first 100 guilds on each faction hall of fame, still not enough.

They understand the problem, it seems, but their solutions so far has been weak.

No. If people aren't doing the content, you don't fix the problem by increasing the rewards, you fix the problem by addressing the problems with the content. Rewards can, at best, motivate people to persist with content they aren't enjoying, but in the end it's not a sustainable solution. It tends to breed long term resentment and ultimately no reward is good enough.

The rewards from raiding are more than good enough. I would say that the problem with raiding is that it's possibly too punishing in the wrong ways. Here's an example:

Jadefire Masters: The fight and its mechanics are fun and engaging. The issue with the fight is that it introduces a new mechanic late in the fight (where you get teleported up to the platform with the charging monks) that will wipe the raid if even 1 or 2 people fail. It's a poorly designed mechanic in that it is very difficult to learn it through practice because you have to spend 5 minutes just to get to that mechanic, and then it kills you. So you wipe, release, run (a long run) and try again. ~8 minutes of effort for 5 seconds of learning. Our guild beat the mechanic by outgearing the encounter and thus circumventing the mechanic altogether. I never even managed to get the mechanic down successfully at all during progression, and I only figured it out at all by tank LFR which provided an opportunity for me to see it enough without getting 1 shot, to get it right.

This could have been improved in several possible ways:
1) Introduce the mechanic much earlier in the fight so that you don't have to spend so much time to just get to the point in the fight that you can start learning
2) Include the mechanic in normal mode where it is possible to survive and learn
3) Add a similar mechanic to trash to practice on
4) Make the mechanic not so immediately deadly: It can still be critical to get it right, but at least if you fail, you get to keep on learning the mechanic instead of being out of the fight.

[Gavll]

That's the main goal of a mmorpg... farm gear to be able to farm better gear (mythic raids). It's been like this since the beginning of wow and I don't see the problem, that's why I play wow => to get stuff to do raids (and mm+)

Why are you even complaining ? Are you new to mmos ?

Traditionally the content was locked behind the gear gate. Now it isn't. So you don't need any gear to see all the content. So there's a huge motivating factor gone.

[Tiwack]

OP needs to make up his mind setting his own goals and provide his own critique instead of using others to support whatever it is he's trying to say.

You want gear to be the main motivator but then don't want catch-ups/upgrades in new content... what? Never mind it's only one part of the equation that gives people a reason to keep playing. There's multiple ways to play the game, get over it, same as new content will always see your current gear be replaced over time. Push for it and let the casuals have their grinds and LFR, if you don't shit on them maybe they'll be interested in joining you in m+ or regular raids.

[Beatman]

If Blizzard had put some effort into the transmog sets I would be raiding mythic this season. However, since every set (except maybe mythic/pvp-elite cloth) looks like dogsh*t I have no incentive to gear up & raid (or pvp) at all.

Also, does Blizzard really think people still care about mounts? Perhaps, Blizzard should implement something completely new as an incentive instead of designing the 600th mount.

[Swarmyman]

Yeah I think all the split paths has gotten out of hand. Conversely pvp paths are worse than they were for the last few expansions now. I haven't cared for pvp since WoD.
The axing of tier sets because they are too money hungry for good artists has made me not want to raid whatsoever anymore.
I don't feel like having to go through the shit of raid progression and have nothing but a +item lvl to show for it, especially when that +item level is absolute by the next patch or expansion.
People leaving for ffxiv but goddamn the levelling in that game is boring af. But the group stuff and msq has been good.

August 27th feels like a lifetime away lol

[Babadoo]

I was only gearing up to have even ground while doing world pvp/invasions but now since we have flying world pvp is dead. So no bother for me to gear up anymore. I haven't played in two weeks and I don't plan to anymore. Just waiting for classic. Bfa is over for me now.

Also congrats to the people who enjoy current state of Bfa. You and under 1 mil subs speak for itself.

[Tiwack]

This is what quick-fix matchmaking gets you in a mmo-rpg. You say you're in a guild but it sounds like you're in a take-out-restaurant to me. M+ or whatever your heartache is is only a single aspect to the game, if you're tired of it why not break off and explore your options or take a break from the game altogether? Never mind you don't outline your issues as much as you shift blame to other players or the devs themselves. Take some responsibility if you want to have fun or a constructive conversation.

[Piesor]

just got back into the game... destroyed those same mobs in nazjatar with my 270 ilvl shaman after hitting 120.

Yeah, main reason why I don't want to gear up anymore. It just does not matter. Doing some m+ with my main to snipe specific loot and get the weekly chest is all I did. And I even stopped that ~2months ago because there weren't any upgrades anymore (ilvl417), exept for lucky 425 upgrades from the weekly chest. My Twinks are all low geared. Doing world content with lowtwinks feels almost the same like with the main.

[erifwodahs]

What does "Inherent interest" mean here? If people only should do things for an "inherent interest", why does any content give any rewards at all? Why even have gear, transmogs and mounts? The Inherent interest should be enough right?

I argue that it is Blizzards job to give me a reward cool enough for me to put in the effort to rise to the challenge.

All they give now is some achievement and some mount, and that is not enough.

They clearly realised this and did their "ahead of the curve" achievements, and it's still not enough.
They also added the first 100 guilds on each faction hall of fame, still not enough.

They understand the problem, it seems, but their solutions so far has been weak. The only solution is to go back to basics.

You think if people got 480ilvl from mythic raiding, people who can't be asked to do HC would do mythic? Yea, right. HC is minimal effort high power, quick and not grindy gear, as opposed to bentic, which will take months of grinding to get to 425 all slots, you do a weekly 3hr HC. 4 resets and you are 430+. Bentic on the other hand, I got what... 2 items tops? I been killing tons of rares, multiple hours daily. It's a no brainer math to go for hc as no.1 casual gearing, but tons of people can't be asked at all.

[valax]

people lose interest because a major patch worth of content is just a stupid questline that you can finish in a couple hours , rep grinds mounts and collectables get boring quite fast , add a time delay of couple weeks for the raid to come out and you have already a bored audience waiting impatiently for it to launch , with guides and videos already available it's assumed everyone stepping in the zone already know what to expect and what to do , so the game becomes in all a matter of flawless execution.
As for gear , when you first step in you'll probably have an ILVL on par or even superior to normal , so that difficulty it's already useless to you . You do heroic for a month or slightly more then unless you raid mythic the content has already been completely consumed for the next 5 months.

And to make it worse world content scaling renders your power gains completely meaningless so whatever you do you'll feel the same as 2 patches ago .
Every time I see mounts pets and toys being what the devs give us to strive for i feel repulsed from the game more and more , i'm not a collector I use the same old cool mounts because I like them , don't feel the need to get the remaining 300 recolors and ugly reskins .
In the past at least with tier sets you'd have a reason to go back and farm the older raids to complete them , In BFA who hasn't completed their armor type sets during current tier? it's far too simple when all armor classes share the same visuals , no offsets, everything looks the same way ..MAYBE the hardest set to complete is the LFR one , yeah I said it LFR is more rare than any other difficulty recolor. SAD

[Uvania]

I'm sorry but you clearly didn't play vanilla or TBC if you consider those 2 as "less is more"

In vanilla we had ONE difficulty on content from 5 mans to 40 mans and even doing a 5 man dungeon was a big thing since u had to manually go out and find 1 healer 1 tank and 3 dpsers in the appropriate level to complete the content and the harder things like raiding was a no go when it came to pugging it, on my realm we had weekly ony, mc, zg and aq20 runs for alts or people that didnt raid regularly that was a joined adventure between 3 guilds which one of them was a hardcore pvp guild, apart from that no "pugging" happened raiding wise if we skip UBRS from the equation.

In TBC pug raiding started to become a thing and i regularly did gruul and karazhan on alts and TK void reaver run, in the end even MH pugs managed to get atleast 3 bosses down

on my "mains" i spent way too much and combined on my 3 different paladins when TBC ended i had around 700 days played in total and 2 of the paladins had full T6 and another one was my pvp char on horde side rocking around in full s4 gear as retri

[Powerogue]

Mage towers worked great on the gear aspect since it was hard as balls regardless of your gear, but gear helped. You had to not just gear, but actually get good. I have no idea at all why they went back on such a great idea.

Even the quest chain "balance of power" required not just "any raid" but specifically normal mode or higher, meaning you couldn't fly by on idiot mode and still get the cool appearances.

Being stuck in the same room with other members of your class for so long you'd inevitably see those cool appearances and go "wow. I need that." and it sure kept me busy.

"Seeing new bosses" was at one point the big raiding motivator before LFR, though that was problematic in that for my raiding guilds I wound up in I'd literally never see all the bosses in a given raid. Still had fun though. Might not work quite as well with the end bosses of raids nowadays having a heavy impact on the story that would leave players confused without seeing it.

[Alkizon]

And so, next period made a full cycle, and we returned to discussing game design questions in the sense of: progress vs content, multi-complexity systems, world organization, catch-up mechanics, etc... Question: what has changed since time of these

1. General game design philosophy (&couple of words about armor types) +/+(+)+(+/+/+)+(more 2 msg after, so not my merit)
5. About dungeons&requirements also M+/modes (+RNG+g.tokens+t/wf) +(+/+)+(+/+/+/+)+(+/+/+)+(+)+(+/+/+)
6. Bad world (and not only) scaling +(+)+/+/+/+/+/+/+
8. Servers type/org (WM&MMO+changes'soc.psycho.res+auto/subscr) +(+/+/+/+/+)+(+)+(+/+/+/+/+/+)+(+/+/+/+)
9. Quests/leveling (&levels) +(+)+(+)
10. Threat philosophy & badge system & W.Boss mechanics (it's not mine, but I won't do this better) +/+/+

discussions? In my opinion, absolutely nothing.

[Luxeley]

PvP Players in BfA:
1. PvP players wanted less grinding over time, we got half fixed loot, half random loot for very little playtime now
2. PvP players wanted less ITEM GATING with RANKS/RATING, we got a very low elite rank, so this is no longer the "big" grind to get

The major issue with PvP players is, that they got what they wanted but that is very little playtime/weak. There is no other option left than to push those players to the easy PvE weekly content to fill up the wanted playtime.

The lesson from this is, if you enjoy your minigame, dont fucking ask blizzard to remove the grind part out of it over and over again.

Asking for a PVP-ONLY game mode, when the the playerbase was allways sub 2-3% in PvP, is ridiculous in the first place, but crying about the minimallstic PvE you might want to do right now is even worse.

4-5 hours for a weekly-10?
What are you even doing in PvP? Fishing?

Wrong. Pvp players wanted a vendor, always wanted a vendor and still haven't got a vendor.

I don't mind the grind in Pvp because I enjoy Pvp, but I am forced into Pve then I got an issue. It's translates to less time in pvp. And I can bitch about it as much as I want, I constantly hear pvers bitch now cause they need to do 2-3 BGs to get an essence.

The idea that 2-3% of player base makes up pvp is ridiculous. Arena happens to be the smallest part of the pvp player base and it's not the only part of the pvp player base. At most, I'd say 25-30% of the player is involved with pvp. Your numbers are off by ten-fold.

[Alkizon]

Wrong. Pvp players wanted a vendor, always wanted a vendor and still haven't got a vendor.

I don't mind the grind in Pvp because I enjoy Pvp, but I am forced into Pve then I got an issue. It's translates to less time in pvp. And I can bitch about it as much as I want, I constantly hear pvers bitch now cause they need to do 2-3 BGs to get an essence.

The idea that 2-3% of player base makes up pvp is ridiculous. Arena happens to be the smallest part of the pvp player base and it's not the only part of the pvp player base. At most, I'd say 25-30% of the player is involved with pvp. Your numbers are off by ten-fold.

Don't forget also about PvP vs PvE characteristics and "no-any-form-of-scaling/templates", more detailed about it here. I remembered this not only because it's important, but rather because I saw some activity of "templates-activists" on off.forum.

Also, side question to those who're more attentive and still playing: there judgment happened in one of recent threads that certain form of pvp-scaling was still preserved, albeit less noticeably, which is something bad of course, so - is this kind of truth, or just seemed wrongly to them? What could you say about it?