Echoes of Mortality, Vestments of the Eternal Traveler and Torghast

[Nosgoth]

Cool, then you play 1hr per day as you suggested instead of 5 hours in the weekend.

I don't like to be forced to play 1h a day. Why can't I just play whenever I want to?

[Toxuvox]

Those are entirely different things.

By just killing a couple of mobs every day for a week, you could reduce that time to maybe 30 minutes or less. So waiting still makes it more time-efficient.

?

90 minutes in between dungeon queues etc....hardly inefficient in terms of time.

[Caprias]

I don't like to be forced to play 1h a day. Why can't I just play whenever I want to?

You absolutely can? You are also not forced to play on a weekly basis lol.

Or is there a Blizzard employe behind you with a gun?

[PaladinBash]

I like daily/weekly systems. They give me something to do every time I log in. It doesn't MAKE me log in, having a long grind or something that can't be stabbed at daily would do that because if I wanted something, I'd have to go out of my way to do it. At the end of the day, someone has to take the hit and I'd rather it be someone other than me.

[Schizoide]

Hopefully they aren't using this exact mechanic. I'm perfectly fine with the daily part but not the grindable component, because that's no fun at all.

My ideal approach would be a high chance of X drops/chances/whatever per week, with a 1 realtime hour internal cooldown, placeholders dropping when you don't hit the jackpot, and with zero chance after that.

So assume they're using it for Legion-style legendary drops (which won't be a thing in SL, but just an example). You have 7 chances per week of rolling for a legendary drop. Every time one of those 7 chances happens, you loot either a legendary or a "token of lost legends", a vendor item which tells the player one of their weekly shots missed the basket. After you play for another 60 minutes you'll get another shot.

I would also add cumulative bad-luck protection to that legendary roll, resetting when you loot one. Every time you miss your shot, you get a stacking additional 15% chance to get a legendary the next roll, which makes it overwhelmingly likely everybody gets at least 1 legendary per week. Or whatever number the designers deem appropriate, of course.

[Nosgoth]

90 minutes in between dungeon queues etc....hardly inefficient in terms of time.

Less efficient than 30 minutes.

And I still doubt anyone that says they got this done in 90 minutes, when some people are saying they've gone hours without a drop. If that is true than the RNG here varies heavily.

[Venziir]

As an adult with responsibilities including a 9 to 5 job, I see no problems here. Most of my ingame goal are long-term ones.

Nothing says being an adult like stating that one is an adult...

[Schizoide]

RNG is RNG of course, but that does seem very unlikely.

[Chonar]

Nothing says being an adult like stating that one is an adult...

Cool. In the context of the point I felt like making, it felt appropriate to phrase the statement this way.
But just for you, I'll edit my post.

[Devilyaki]

A bonus for the best pre-order is a time gated or overly grindy quest. Not sure that is how I would start a expansion off but whatever ya go blizzard..

[Chonar]

A bonus for the best pre-order is a time gated or overly grindy quest. Not sure that is how I would start a expansion off but whatever ya go blizzard..

A bonus for the best pre-order is a transmog that's unlocked by doing the content you would be doing anyways over the next few weeks, or when playing through the final patch of current content.

[Darknessvamp]

Maybe they're planning on increasing the Time to get cosmetics?
E.g. "Good job champion, you're enamored by your covenant after grinding heavily for six weeks and gaining our favor. Now to get each piece of our iconic armour set you need to spend 30 weeks in total requiring a series of collections of special items/reagents/materials/artifacts from drops and limited gathering points in order to complete each piece's accompanying quest line. I mean you could try to grind it out in 20 weeks but the drop rate and limited access to gathering points will still feel slow." No more just buying it for gold, it's not "interesting" enough.

[Devilyaki]

If the quest was free then yes you would be killing random mobs to get the whatever. It is not free so it isn’t content I’d normally be doing. I did my dailies and got no drops and had to go out of my way to find the right mobs to kill. It’s annoying and boring, very lazy as well, could of added something interesting to do but no if get 40 whatever then turn in...

[Justpassing]

You absolutely can? You are also not forced to play on a weekly basis lol.

Or is there a Blizzard employe behind you with a gun?

It's Ion... he's at my house now, send help!!

[Tiwack]

Instant gratification vs. Longterm satisfaction. They're getting better and better at catering to players on completely different ends of the spectrum of how much they play. It'll never stop being a bit technically crude though and people react very different to these realizations.

[Shauren]

I've never noticed that, probably cause I never farmed those. Seems very irrelevant. That just seems like something done to diminish the effect bots have on the economy. So it's a totally different thing.

Did you just completely disregard the bigger picture and focus only on the one specific item?
For software (hint: wow server is software) it does not matter what reason you use but what outcome you get (diminish drop rate of item X after Y drops)

[GhostlyBG]

Got the quest. Noticed the initial large chunk dropping then nothing. Got into a hyena-farming grp in Vol'dun. Farmed for the hyena for some time - did not get the hyena, but got 40 quest items. Farmed the transmog while actually not farming the transmog (500 IQ play).

[rhunes]

In case you don't know, if you preorder the heroic edition, you can get a transmog set. However you have to do a quest first and gather 40 Echoes of Mortality. The thing is that there seems to be a mechanic, that gives you a couple of them rather quickly each day, but after a few, you hit a point where the droprate is severely reduced. So for example you might enter a dungeon, do 5 pulls and after 5 minutes get 6 Echoes from one mob. But then you hit the cap, and now you get like 1 drop per hour.

I and many other players have noticed this. Essentially this means that either you can invest 5 minutes per day and do that and get your quest done after about a week with minimal effort, or you can accept the low drop chances and grind all day. Some have reported finishing it in 90 minutes, but I am fairly skeptical of that, since others report 1 drop per hour, even in good farmspots.

Bottomline is, you can either wait and invest minimal time and effort, or get it done day one with a lot of grinding.

Why is Blizzard doing this? I mean let's set aside how obviously terrible it is to force players through this quest after they have just paid real money to have access to this transmog set. But what is the point of such a quest? Why let people decide between waiting it out and taking the grind?

Could it be that they are testing something for the next expansion?

We know that Torghast will give legendaries and that players will be able to do Torghast as much as they like. Now if whatever resource Torghast gives that is needed for crafting legendaries has a cap, then most likely people will just reach the cap and stop playing.

But let's say you need 1000x [legendary resource] and you can get 50 of them easily each day. It takes you just one average run or something. You do your daily Torghast for 20 days, and you get to craft your first legendary. But what if, if you kept playing, it keeps giving you that resource, but at a much reduced rate? So hardcore players will get to craft their legendary earlier, but they will have to grind it out.

I'm not saying this would be a great thing, I'm just wondering if Blizzard is considering something like this.

1 drop per hour? People saying this are not actually doing the quest and are just trying to create an issue where there is none. It took me around 2 hours farming the Blood Gates. Max it takes 3 hours.

[LordVargK]

I don't like to be forced to play 1h a day. Why can't I just play whenever I want to?

Your argument is childish and you know it. The keyword is "reasonable". The weekly system is a compromise between a daily cap and no cap at all, like you're suggesting in this quote (play whenever i want means no cap if you think about it).

But that's the point. It's better. It's better for everyone. How crazy would you be to grind for hours if you could just wait a week and achieve the same thing with minimal effort.

And in this quote you state, that you view the daily system as "better". You kinda contradict yourself here and you seem to argue for arguings sake.

My weekly model falls in line with other activities like raids (weekly reset), dungeons (weekly reward), PvP? (Weekly reward as well? don't know, I don't PvP), World Bosses, Bonus events, etc. To explain what i mean with the term "reasonable" I used earlier: In WoW you invest time to get a reward. Blizzard has to choose a limit at which rate you can consume content. There are many possible models. Lets say a new patch with content comes out every 3rd Month (12 weeks) and each patch has 84 hours of new content. Here are some possible Models:

1) play as much as you want. no caps. Is it reasonable? No. Hardcore players would consume the content in a few days with no regard to their health, leaving them with weeks of doing old content and (because it's the WoW community) whining.
2) have a monthly cap, 28h of content per month. same Problem as in 1) you will need like 2-3 days and have more than 3 weeks left before you have something new to do. Much whining ensured. But, if you have to stop playing an entire month, you will miss out on progress. Being unable to play for an entire month is very unlikely though
3) have a weekly cap. 7 hours a week. Well, hardcore players are done within a day. But they have to wait only a week before new content is available, which is a plus. much less whining, but still some. But, if you miss a week, you miss progress, though being unable to play for an entire week is unlikely, except for when you are on vacation or a businesstrip or something. But I'd wage 99% of the playerbase is in general capable of playing once a week.
4) daily cap, 1h per day. you have new content every day. yeay! few will complain about lack of content. But if you can't play one day, you'll lose progress. Being unable to play on weekdays is pretty common nowadays, most players are adults with jobs. So you're very likely to miss progress here.
5) hourly cap. you have permanent content. 2.5min per hour. So you practically have never to wait! But, will you miss out? Definetly. Noone is able to play every hour, even for 2.5min.

So here are some examples of systems to stagger content. which ist the best? You know my opinion, it's 3). A good compromise between the rate of content consumption and personal freedom to play when you like. 1) and 5) are obviously out of the question. as they are against Blizzards respectively the players interests.
Both 2) and 4) have pretty harsh downsides, being lack of content or rate of missed content. so 3) is the best compromise and is already used in many of WoW's systems. And it was always used in things like Raids and Dungeon lockouts, which is maybe the best comparison that we can draw to Torghast.

In theory a system like MoP conquest points (you have a cap, but if you miss the cap on the previous week the excess is added to your new cap for the week) would be optimal, but for things like daily quests, which are repeatable, it owuld be impractical. Totally possible for Torghast, warcampaign or other one time/farmable things though! I still support a softcap though.

[Nosgoth]

Your argument is childish and you know it. The keyword is "reasonable". The weekly system is a compromise between a daily cap and no cap at all, like you're suggesting in this quote (play whenever i want means no cap if you think about it).

Why does there have to be any cap at all?