Islands going forward

[Cosmic Janitor]

Procedural dungeons are the next step, basically every other game does these, PoE, Diablo, Final Fantasy, etc. Blizz can't afford to be unique snowflakes anymore, they need to adopt some other standards that work.

IIRC, Final Fantasy has procedural dungeons that you can solo.

If you talk about FFXIV, then.. kinda. You can slog through them solo and it's tied to some (as of yet afaik never obtained achievments), but it really only works solo for a hand full of classes that have the burst and healing to manage it. Redmage was one of the hottest contenders for a while for example, complete dogshit for monks though.

Also the implementation is heavily used for alt job leveling and mostly boils down to rushing each floor to the boss and then reset and doing it again. The actual challenge part (becomes more relevant on later floors) is not really used by most, though it is an option I guess. The places are mostly popular for the high EXP reward (averaging a level per hour in the later one) and the fact that it uses it's own internal leveling system which means you get to use abilities above your level* which makes low level jobs more bearable.

The rewards are mostly cosmetic item sets, pets, mount barding and decorative items as well, in that regard it's very much like Island Expeditions. The difference is that it's styled like a rogue-like and you don't have to fight against the clock (the 90 minute time limit is way more than even the worst F players would need), which is something that WoW is really missing I guess. Everything is focused on speed running these days.

*(especially noteworthy for the 1-60 version, as you essentially get to use level 60 abilitites after the first 40 floors and people can start at 51 once they've done it on one character, meaning you can be actually level 1 and can use all available abilities up to level 60 inside)

[msdos]

The entire BFA has been an exercise in monitoring a stop watch. Everything is a race now'a days and I'm not really into it. I keep saying it, but retail is the modern day Dance Dance Revolution. Keyboard APM matters WAYYYYY more than planning and strategy.

[Nurmat]

Based on what i've read thus far on the subject the chance of a box containing a mount is about 10%-12.5%.
Boxes that can contain these cost 175 doublons, which means you will on average need 1750 doublons a mount. (of course good or bad RNG could significantly lower/increase the costs)

I've seen screenshots from PTR, if it makes to Live unchanged, i can see myself farming dubloons for it, only 5 mounts left.

[McCrazy]

I actually enjoyed Island Expeditions, But think they should have been more based on Exploring rather then a race to the end collecting Azerite. Make people want to explore every inch of the Island so not to miss out on clues to treasure or whatever.
I feel like they have been more of a success then Warfronts.

That was what I thought, when the IE were announced. That it is be some kind of race now makes me kind of sad because I would like exploring, unravel secrets and solve puzzles without a very close timelimit. But maybe thats just me and would probably work best in a solo-player-environment.

[horbindr]

I'm not so sure that they actually are that high tbh. I think the overwhelming majority that even still bothers only does by doing the 3 mandatory ones and then never bothers with it again, if you read that correct, then the participation is actually atrocious and at the bare minimum.

that's exactly the type of statistic you can turn into w/e you want.

you can either sell that as "people just do the bare minimum. they are obviously only there for the reward." or "our core players do over 15 islands month! we see strong correlations between AP driven rewards and participation! there is a huge uptick in participation when we "updated" islands in the patch! over 90% of all players has done islands at least once, thats more than raids!"

really just depends on your viewpoint going in. and one can imagine a developers viewpoint is a bit different from say a marketing guy or a player retention analyst or w/e.

[Soimu]

It's fun if they make them a bit more challenging like Mage Tower and available for solo, I mean why not - something to do once a week for an hour or two, no harm.

NO thank you.
Lost a lot of hair trying to get my druid skins, that tank challenge was hard as f..k.

[Pakheth]

I looked forward to exploring the islands but then they turned into timed zergfests with the gogogo mentality and I lost all interest.
Done them a few times when I am utterly bored and each time I realise that it is an extreme waste of time.

[Cosmic Janitor]

that's exactly the type of statistic you can turn into w/e you want.

you can either sell that as "people just do the bare minimum. they are obviously only there for the reward." or "our core players do over 15 islands month! we see strong correlations between AP driven rewards and participation! there is a huge uptick in participation when we "updated" islands in the patch! over 90% of all players has done islands at least once, thats more than raids!"

really just depends on your viewpoint going in. and one can imagine a developers viewpoint is a bit different from say a marketing guy or a player retention analyst or w/e.

While it's true that you can twist and turn those for marketing all day long, and when Blizzard were to talk positively about them I would agree with you, I think even as high as they are on their own farts, alot of devs still see the actual correlation and causation here. For all of Ions faults (and they are plenty), he is a numbers guy and probably not THAT dumb to actually believe it was well received. Especially after the classic hype I see alot of people at Blizzard readjusting their viewpoints a bit when it comes to fudging the statistics to fit their own narrative. At the end of the day they have to justify their budgets to the CFO and they can only coast that far on bullshit.

[Lei]

In my opinion random group play and slow exploration (=inefficent playing for not granted reward) will never work in wow. Not these days. Not with this reward structure like islands have. Like imagine islands with this drop rate, this much AP, but they take 8-10x long. Imagine fucking around, sorry, "exploring" one island for half an hour to an hour and then not getting anything (now at least it's fast and braindead easy to not get anything so it's excusable, right?). Or getting a green transmog item. Ouch.
Also they just can't make infinite scenarios (play outs) within islands, so eventually there would be a wowhead 10.000 word novelguide and people would be mad at you if you didn't know what to do on day 2.
They should have awarded inefficient play directly. Like events giving you plus dubloons, and putting rewards on dubloons from the get go.

But then the ultimate question is: does this kind of content worth investing this much resource (development) into it?

[horbindr]

While it's true that you can twist and turn those for marketing all day long, and when Blizzard were to talk positively about them I would agree with you, I think even as high as they are on their own farts, alot of devs still see the actual correlation and causation here. For all of Ions faults (and they are plenty), he is a numbers guy and probably not THAT dumb to actually believe it was well received. Especially after the classic hype I see alot of people at Blizzard readjusting their viewpoints a bit when it comes to fudging the statistics to fit their own narrative. At the end of the day they have to justify their budgets to the CFO and they can only coast that far on bullshit.

no doubt the devs know, the grunts on the workfloor always know. but you hear all these scary stories about blizzard lately where its not the devs making decisions, but the people in the suits from the finance department.

like who knows, maybe the devs were just straight up told to make it so people do x amount of islands to make the investment worth it, which is why the weekly reward is good. and after that it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that it's successful content if you just look at spreadsheets.

anyways i hope they let islands die, but you never know.

[klaps_05]

I think soloq for islands would be pretty cool to have. Maybe to keep the spirit of doing it in a group, 2 friendly NPCs can join you when queuing solo. Like if you go in as a mage, you get a tank and a healer to come with you.

[Reinhart11]

Did you just claim something was fun and then immediately afterwards lament that they aren't? Yikes.

On topic - Islands would have been fine if Ion wasn't a pathological liar and actually stuck to what he claimed they would be. Which was exploring an Island. Finding hidden quests, interactions, treasures and challenging mobs. You know - the kind of exploring you do in an actual MMO?

Instead we got glorified mob grinding with a fucking time limit. A race against time to see who can click rocks, chests and mindlessly AoE down mobs. Then they made them semi-mandatory checklist content by making it the only place you could get a decent chunk of their stupid AP system.

"We know this content is really shit. So we're going to force you to do it if you want to be competitive."

Great design. 10/10.

The only decent thing that came out of the island expeditions was the improved A.I. But they don't use it anywhere else so far.

Aside from that, the way they implemented island expeditions was pure garbage. I agree on that.

[Holdodlig]

Island needs to change into something different and eventually to be fused with the horrific vision imo. The main issue with it right now, outside of the shitty rewarding system it's that it was supposed to be different each run. But you always have the same spawn, the same monster families (which actually does not make any difference because they all do the same spells. Only the skins changes) and you're not even sure to get a reward at the end. You don't even feel that what you've done was enjoyable because you'll simply destroy the island. Hell, I even farm them alone in Mythic now.

But a good way to fix it would be to remove a loooot of useless family (saurok, mantid, undead vrykul ...) to focus on the interesting ones. Same for the island. Half of them are glitched to hell and they're simply too small. It's just too easy to explore all of it in a single run. Removing the PvP mode from the Island would also be a good fix. This gameplay is clearly not made for PvP and the fact they try to introduce it to the game simply ruins their chance to make it funnier. They can now improve the different remaining islands and family, add a mythic + in the island instead of the PvP, have affixes to make the island less boring and they can focus on something better.

[Reinhart11]

@ Nymrohd

Ah, yes. I forgot about that. I wish they would use the improved A.I. for important, named mobbs in the open world. That would be a good start i think.

And i like your idea for Island Expeditions. Implemented in that way, they could be great. The game these days really lacks the concept of exploring and wonder.

[Reinhart11]

It really is our fault though. Most of us just cannot manage to NOT READ GUIDES. Mechagon and Naz'jatar have so many little secrets but let's be frank, how many people try and find them and how many people instead just go to wowhead comments, use Paste and TomTom and get everything done in an hour?

Thats a problem, yes. I personally though would not use it. But in me the desire to explore doesn't come up anymore. Not completely sure why. The new regions are pretty big, but often times too filled up. I think i need bigger regions where every not every part is literally overflowing with mobbs.

[PaladinBash]

Islands now are wayyyyyy better than they were at launch. Are they amazing? Nope but they're good as a piece of easy grind content, like dailies but better. Some people hate doing anything, especially try-hards. You will see try-hards in every single thread bitching infinitely about things they 'have to do' like grinding islands but will defend imposing expectations on others like "you have to have 2k io to do a +10 because I don't want any scrubs". As such, I like them because they piss off a negative part of the playerbase who still do them. People that don't like and don't do them are fine. There's lots of things I don't like doing and don't do so don't care about.

You get lots of gold from mogs, lots of mounts, lots of pets, lots of azerite and they're fast and easy to smash even on Mythic for even the most mediocre players. This is good repeatable content and better than dungeons, that's for sure.

[Donald Hellscream]

I think the idea of going to an uncharted island to hunt for treasure is a cool one, but rather than it being a rush to fill the azerite bar I'd rather it was focused on the exploration and treasure hunting, maybe instead make it more like the treasure chest scenario from MoP where you have a certain amount of time to scrounge up as much treasure as you can before you have to leave for some arbitrary reason ( impending storm, volcanic eruption, massive army chasing you etc. )

[Lorgar Aurelian]

I think islands them selfs are fine they just need some tweaks.

-there should be no time limit so you can explore and clear the island as fast or slow as you want. Mabye put in some group chaining so if your faster you get more groups to spawn or something.

-they should be able to be down solo or with 5 people. Groups of 3 suck.

- there should be no Azerite to farm it should be solely for cosmetics so if you don’t want to you can ignore them.

[kyo wolfsfang]

So, ok, you're not a spring chicken and don't play the game in tourist mode. Cool. So that means you skip the queue dungeons and go for keys instead, you skip the queueable islands and go for the PvP variants. You skip LFV raids and go for the Heroic.

That means you don't actually do any of the things you complained about in your previous reply? How does the existence of those easier modes bother you, when you don't actually have to do them?

You don't play solo, yet solo players/features bother you?

Because those features DO affect me, because they promote bad behavior, entitlement, and makes it so less players will be motivated to raid. The community is affected as a whole from those systems and when the community is affected, Im affected in the ripple effect.


Also to reply to your post to someone else "They have all of that. If you run it with randoms or PVP, then they tend to be a rush. If you run them with a group of friends, you can actually take it easy and explore/do events. It's no different from queuing random heroic vs. running the same thing with your guild group."

Its not that the players want to rush, Yes there are those who wanna just get it over with, But you literally can not take your time because the other team, be it PVP or NPC will rush you. so if you dont rush, they win and you dont get any rewards.

[slime]

Feature is pretty cool...

All I care about is that they stop tying impossible to get mounts from them and I'll be happy.