"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
Why don't we just return to the loot scheme from every expansion before warforging and random "upgrading" existed that worked perfectly fine for the millions of people who loved it?
How about people just stop seeing problems where there are none? It´s not necessary to have uberf tf + socket and perfect stats in every slot. If you commit yourself to chasing this, you´ll never be happy.
Loot is fine as it is, players´ perspective is the problem. And a hard one to fix.
Last edited by XDurionX; 2019-07-21 at 07:49 AM.
Dude, seriously hide your rage boner for Blizzard, its showing. Everything they have done since day one of WoW's concept design has been to keep subs. Any other bottom line is stupid for a company. This is not new nor surprising, and definitely not a conspiracy that a company is doing something to make profit. It is all very much out there in the open and always has been.
You can also stop joining guilds that do not master loot either, because personal loot is basically a thing only first two three weeks until everything can be eaialy traded and thus assigned by RCLoot by officers to correct people.
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Pretty much. People got overpampered.
yeah you filthy casuals, your 15 dollars a month isn't worth the same amount as a mythic raiders! stopped reading your comment here, terrible idea.
and further more, screw the mythic raider. its a blend of the uber casual and the hardcore players that have fucked this game. the M+ crowd, if any, are who should be catered to.
but in the end it should all be equal opportunity.
and another thing, the skill jump from a normal raid to a mythic raid really isn't that huge. i speak from experience. it's not you who are the good player, its the fact that you made an agreement with 19 other people and those 19 other people came through. still a video game people, i'm sorry none of you are going to win a Nobel Prize for playing it.
Last edited by Vargulf the Happy Husky; 2019-07-21 at 10:05 AM.
No sense crying over spilt beer, unless you're drunk...
Your mythic raids skill nonsense aside, the game right now is laser focused on a casual buck. Why 8.2 is basically a casual heaven, offering alternative progression even for absolute solo players with manapearls. These loot systems are hard wired for casuals, by tossing gear at them for almost trivial shit.
I am not sure what more they would want there, because next step would be literally making it Guild Wars system where loot is purely cosmetic and everyone has same stats at level cap, depending solely on class.
Screw mythic raider? Not sure what else is there to screw at this point.
I would keep the current loot system unchanged but let people break down most of their gear (including crafted gear) in order to get either mats, the currency or both. The quality of the destroyed item would increase the numbers of the currency you get. You wouldn't be able to buy a new piece of gear but you could reforge your desired piece of armor using this currency. There would be three cost options when choosing the cheapest would mean loosing few stat numbers in the process.
Then an upgraded currency similar to primal obliterum could let you upgrade the desired item to a higher ilvl.
he/him/his • please go check out Nazdorei (Playable Naga Concept) and Kul Tiran Female Edit.
While TF and socket rolls suck for a very dedicated minority, for the majority of players they're actually very useful incentives to stretch out the relevance of content.
I don't know if you played during earlier expansions like, say, Cataclysm - but loot saturation was a real issue for some guilds there, especially the more casual ones (though high-end guilds were not immune either). Basically, players who had all or nearly all the pieces they wanted from a raid became reluctant to log on and help the other people in their guild get gear. Some people even quite entirely until the next tier rolled around. I remember some drama about certain top-end raiders mysteriously disappearing into disconnects or supposed RL emergencies after the one item they needed didn't drop.
The people who clamor the loudest for hard-set BiS lists are usually also the people who would be most likely to quit or not log on during lull periods. Heck, Cayna from Method even said outright on stream that if there was a hypothetical tournament realm for PvE raiding where you get all the gear you want for free for progression, he wouldn't even play the regular game at all.
That's very, very, very much NOT what Blizzard wants. They want people to keep their subs rolling with as few interruptions as possible. Things like TF and sockets with their impossible ceiling effectively help doing just that. They stretch out content and satiate a good portion of the player base - and, conveniently enough, they're the same players that are hard to keep engaged in the first place because they're so dedicated they'd deplete their effective content otherwise.
Now, that doesn't mean that TF/sockets couldn't be MODIFIED in some way to improve things a little.
Something that I've heard put forward a lot is that TF should not be uncapped, but rather be a fixed range added onto the base level of the item. I.e., you could get a substantial ilvl increase from a trivial ilvl item, but it wouldn't be so much that it could rival or surpass items from much higher tiers of difficulty. How much higher, and how much overlap there should be between tiers, that's up for debate.
For sockets, this could also be adapted by simply having tiers of sockets, i.e. you could have something like 1 socket on normal-mode gear, 2 sockets on heroic-mode gear, and 3 sockets on mythic-mode gear (with individual gem values adjusted accordingly). This would still allow customization, but would make the impact of sockets far weaker compared to (base) ilvl. A nice side effect would be a much-needed improvement for the gem market, where an overabundance of gems is currently driving prices into the gutter (most epic gems are cheaper than a SINGLE PIECE of ore on my server, for example).
Tuning would have to be made in a way that is weighted towards the lower end, i.e. it would be easier for a very low piece to get into middle-tier quality than it would be for a middle-tier quality piece to get into top-tier quality. That way, casuals retain the "OMG!" moment of a meaty TF without it actually spilling over into more hardcore raiders farming blue WQs hoping for a lottery win, or clearing normal mode hunting TF/socket forges. This counteracts the main objection against currency-based systems like Valor Points - i.e. that those are too deterministic and therefore unexciting. Keep in mind that the VAST majority of the WoW playerbase is made up of more or less casual players, not high-end raiders. Having systems that treat them with a little bit more differentiation would perhaps not be the worst idea.
Idea for loot in 9.0? Remove personal from a structured raid environment (ie. raid groups comprised of guild members) the whole experiment to try and hinder gear farming and split runs failed, the guilds just stockpile the same classes for raid groups and still funnel anyway.
Just need TBC era loot. No casino boxes, no RNG titanforging. Just gear drops and justice/valour badges.
It's not.
Relinquished azerite gear is a good way for ilvl catchup, but passives are usually a bigger changer than hard stats, as long as you close enough in ilvl.
Get rid of this randomness, it is a slot machine that on face value helps players who are casual. But it hurts them more because the chance to get the item they actually want is ~15%, so with limited time and no guarantee, it will leave casual players helpless and want to give up.
The specific azerite gear is in the right direction, but is bloated in price since relinquished exist. The price should be pretty high, but 200k for a 445ilvl when you get 30k from a 15+ mythic is daunting.
The reason prices should be brought down is because the coins are also used for upgrading the gear, similar to benthic gear. If you have a dual purpose for the currency but want to concentrate on one thing the currency does helps players have a more reasonal task.
If curiosity killed the cat, why can't speculation kill you?
This thread is wild it's just 20 people describing reward design systems we've had before that all had their own unique problems for different audiences and y'all just either weren't there or forgot
My solution: PARAGON GEAR
What?
Powerful gear comparable to Legendary quality. Each Tier of content would have it's own set of Paragon Gear. There would be a couple different options for every single gear slot to allow for some customization. Each slot piece would offer special bonuses and/or a multiple piece collection bonus similar to old Tier gear.
How?
Paragon Gear would cost Paragon Points. Basically, everything you do in game would reward differing amounts of Paragon Points. Raids, Dungeons, PvP, WQs, etc. There would be a weekly cap that rolls over any potential points not earned in the previous weeks. The idea is that it would take you 75-80% of a whole tier to fill every slot if you cap your points every week. Doing harder content rewards more points than easier content. For example: Someone clearing Mythic may only need to do a few other things each week to cap points. But someone who clears LFR may need to complete every single daily Emissary, Mythic Dungeon, etc. If you only do solo content, then it becomes a major grind.
Why?
Paragon Gear gives you a specific and attainable goal. Between Conquest, Azerite and Benthic gear, the underlying systems are already in place. The problem right now is everything is too disjointed and propped up by too much RNG. What I'm suggesting is combining all the good parts and making an over-arching system that is clearly defined and that can be reused each and every tier going forward.
The Paragon Gear system would be an additional layer. You would still get gear from all the traditional places. That is where RNG does it's job. But, you can always count on making progress towards your BIS gear no matter what. Additionally, Titanforged and random gem sockets need to go. That's just too much RNG and doesn't help anything. And in the case of this idea, it would no longer be needed anyway. People would have a tangible reason to keep playing all through any single tier of content.
No sense crying over spilt beer, unless you're drunk...