Why has the game moved from skill gates to time gates?

[Krakan]

Topic has kind of been touched on before but I figured I would bring it up In a more focused form. In recent expansions wow has started to really focus on the concept that time gating is the preferred option to skill gating content.

Essences, ap, corruption resistance are all examples of content that is time gated to varies degrees. Now don't get me wrong blizzard has been desperately trying to time gate content as early as tbc and even vanilla if you count the aq gates.

It just seems that in the past it was massively pushed back against. The concept that if you were good enough at the game to run something you should be able to run it prevailed but I noticed that slowly but surely the idea that in order to run end game you must first farm trivial content to excess to succeed hs taken hold.

I can understand why pointless systems like leveling your cloak exists but with the playerbase becoming more and more accepting of practices that are only in place to draw out content do you think we will see a ever increasing amount of them put into place?

[potis]

The concept that if you were good enough at the game to run something you should be able to run it prevailed but I noticed that slowly but surely the idea that in order to run end game you must first farm trivial content to excess to succeed hs taken hold.

When exactly did this prevail? :P When 0.1% even saw the inside of naxxramas or sunwell, and the rest cried dear murder and after they tried different ways to get the majority to raid, they simply ended up with LFR cause it was pointless cause lower skilled players will never learn?

Puhlease.

Even WoW Classic indicates the actual fact, there was barely any skilled involved before ..Cata averagely, you just required time, the game has changed massively to become much more fast paced, dangerous and require way more coordination/reflexes/actual skill than before, and its why all the old dogs are crying cause they cant keep up.

Time gating just became more obvious over the years,instead of hiding it behind rep farm and similar stuff they simply release it weekly, annoying but who cares, i am gonna be playing the game to raid either way.

And it always existed as you said, but there are always 2 sides to that, there are people that no longer have the time to play but the sub runs either way cause they can afford it just for those 2-10h/month that they are gonna play, and the people that have all the time in the world and dont wanna pay.

Go figure which players are the majority of the income for WoW.

[vipers]

Classic was already time gated when you need to wait on AQ opening event

[Krakan]

When exactly did this prevail? :P When 0.1% even saw the inside of naxxramas or sunwell, and the rest cried dear murder and after they tried different ways to get the majority to raid, they simply ended up with LFR cause it was pointless cause lower skilled players will never learn?

Puhlease.

Even WoW Classic indicates the actual fact, there was barely any skilled involved before ..Cata averagely, you just required time, the game has changed massively to become much more fast paced, dangerous and require way more coordination/reflexes/actual skill than before, and its why all the old dogs are crying cause they cant keep up.

Time gating just became more obvious over the years,instead of hiding it behind rep farm and similar stuff they simply release it weekly, annoying but who cares, i am gonna be playing the game to raid either way.

And it always existed as you said, but there are always 2 sides to that, there are people that no longer have the time to play but the sub runs either way cause they can afford it just for those 2-10h/month that they are gonna play, and the people that have all the time in the world and dont wanna pay.

Go figure which players are the majority of the income for WoW.

I'm not entirely sure I followed all of that.. are you trying to say people who enjoy the grind stay subbed longer or those who try to push harder content do?

[potis]

I'm not entirely sure I followed all of that.. are you trying to say people who enjoy the grind stay subbed longer or those who try to push harder content do?

No, its simple.

A)The expansion hoppers cry dear murder because they wanna sit down, play 150 hours the first month and unsub, hence what you are seeing as complains about time gating, do they have a point ? Yes, Blizzard doesnt care, that wont bring them money, they want them to sub longer to get that 13e/month.

B)The people that play the game for what it is, aka raiders of all kinds and difficulties are irrelevant, they pay either way, and the content comes, i am annoyed when they time gate stuff also, cause i enjoy raid logging which means i cant sit down and play 100 hours and then raid log, i have to log to do some extra tiny shit now and then.

C)And then you have the actual majority of WoW, which has no idea how the game works or what to do, and they simply go on with their life, work, kids, and randomly play this game doing whatever they want, PvP, or some LFR, or pets, or simply playing which again, do not care about the time gating cause they barely ever experience it with how they play.

[Krakan]

No, its simple.

A)The expansion hoppers cry dear murder because they wanna sit down, play 150 hours the first month and unsub, hence what you are seeing as complains about time gating, do they have a point ? Yes, Blizzard doesnt care, that wont bring them money, they want them to sub longer to get that 13e/month.

B)The people that play the game for what it is, aka raiders of all kinds and difficulties are irrelevant, they pay either way, and the content comes, i am annoyed when they time gate stuff also, cause i enjoy raid logging which means i cant sit down and play 100 hours and then raid log, i have to log to do some extra tiny shit now and then.

C)And then you have the actual majority of WoW, which has no idea how the game works or what to do, and they simply go on with their life, work, kids, and randomly play this game doing whatever they want, PvP, or some LFR, or pets, or simply playing which again, do not care about the time gating cause they barely ever experience it with how they play.

Fair enough though you think they would support the idea of raid logging. They tend to stay during entire patches and are a rather light load on the servers with usually less then twelve hours a week.

[dacoolist]

People resub for a patch, and after Method.. sorry some guild gets world first.. they go back to sucking some other games tits until the next patch. Tbh, I’d rather people just either played the damn game or quit. It’s annoying AF to see people resub for 2 weeks and act hard, then leave until the next patch lol

[s_bushido]

What "skill gates" do you think existed in the past, exactly?

People love to whine endlessly about these systems they've implemented, seemingly without stopping to consider that if they didn't offer meaningful progression...people would just ignore them (like people ignore pet battles or the BfA mission table). And also without considering that this content gets cleared long before it's even possible to max some of these things out. You want to talk about skill, how much corruption were guilds wearing during the race to beat Mythic N'Zoth, compared to how much you have access to right now? Maybe stop making excuses and just play the game.

[XDurionX]

This game has always been time gated, never heard of attunements?

[Krakan]

What "skill gates" do you think existed in the past, exactly?

People love to whine endlessly about these systems they've implemented, seemingly without stopping to consider that if they didn't offer meaningful progression...people would just ignore them (like people ignore pet battles or the BfA mission table). And also without considering that this content gets cleared long before it's even possible to max some of these things out. You want to talk about skill, how much corruption were guilds wearing during the race to beat Mythic N'Zoth, compared to how much you have access to right now? Maybe stop making excuses and just play the game.

Actually weirdly enough a lot of the first kills have players using more powerful corruptions then what are currently available. Now the Cape buff and the nerfs to the fight more then compensate but this tier is a rather unusual one as you can make the case that later kills are mathematically harder then earlier ones.

Still I digress. It feels like a lot more content is gated off by time rather then ability. Take visions for example. The way the cloak works is completely arbitrary. There isn't a reason beyond stretching out content for it to work the way it does for the first 15 ranks.

All one has to do is create a new character and stop themselves from spending echoes to see the drastic change the game has gone through from just being good enough to do content to checking offa dozen time gated boxes to doing the content.

- - - Updated - - -

This game has always been time gated, never heard of attunements?

You mean the you clear something once and your done attunements?

Things that are measurably a expression of skill barring a complete carry?

I guess you could make the case about tbc heroics but it took all of a hour or two of farming the normal dungeon to get the rep for the keys.

[Solero]

When exactly did this prevail? :P When 0.1% even saw the inside of naxxramas or sunwell, and the rest cried dear murder and after they tried different ways to get the majority to raid, they simply ended up with LFR cause it was pointless cause lower skilled players will never learn?

Puhlease.

Even WoW Classic indicates the actual fact, there was barely any skilled involved before ..Cata averagely, you just required time, the game has changed massively to become much more fast paced, dangerous and require way more coordination/reflexes/actual skill than before, and its why all the old dogs are crying cause they cant keep up.

Time gating just became more obvious over the years,instead of hiding it behind rep farm and similar stuff they simply release it weekly, annoying but who cares, i am gonna be playing the game to raid either way.

And it always existed as you said, but there are always 2 sides to that, there are people that no longer have the time to play but the sub runs either way cause they can afford it just for those 2-10h/month that they are gonna play, and the people that have all the time in the world and dont wanna pay.

Go figure which players are the majority of the income for WoW.

LMFAO more dangerous ������������
Delusional asf

[Vakir]

Time gates happen because shareholders need to be sated and to a lesser extent it's an anti-poopsocking tool to prevent people from burning out on content.

That being said, higher skill usually reduces a lot of existing time gates. For example, even though cape levels were gated, some people were good enough to push further into side areas to attain more mementos to progress their trees sooner to do mask runs earlier to get higher gear than others. But the exponential cost of mementos and finite number of Coalescing Visions still prevented them from having a heart attack.

The skill gates of yesteryear were largely the product of people not knowing how to play the game in the first place, with the time gates still existing in the form of reputation, attunements, significantly more expensive consumables, or grinding currency. I was there when people needed to run Maraudon for nature resist gear, I was there spamming Mechanar because it was the most efficient to get reputation. It's more noticeable now because there's transparent time frames on them (via quest lines opening up week to week, board mission times, etc.), but they've existed in pretty much the same form.

[Cæli]

marketing and short term

[froschhure]

Topic has kind of been touched on before but I figured I would bring it up In a more focused form. In recent expansions wow has started to really focus on the concept that time gating is the preferred option to skill gating content.

Essences, ap, corruption resistance are all examples of content that is time gated to varies degrees. Now don't get me wrong blizzard has been desperately trying to time gate content as early as tbc and even vanilla if you count the aq gates.

It just seems that in the past it was massively pushed back against. The concept that if you were good enough at the game to run something you should be able to run it prevailed but I noticed that slowly but surely the idea that in order to run end game you must first farm trivial content to excess to succeed hs taken hold.

I can understand why pointless systems like leveling your cloak exists but with the playerbase becoming more and more accepting of practices that are only in place to draw out content do you think we will see a ever increasing amount of them put into place?

That’s nothing new, imagine bfa without these sYstem. Expansion would be even worse

[Azerate]

Blah.

Time gates have always been in the game, and there's nothing wrong with them. It's debatable how many and how severe, but they can definitely work and improve the experience.

[Venziir]

Topic has kind of been touched on before but I figured I would bring it up In a more focused form. In recent expansions wow has started to really focus on the concept that time gating is the preferred option to skill gating content.

Essences, ap, corruption resistance are all examples of content that is time gated to varies degrees. Now don't get me wrong blizzard has been desperately trying to time gate content as early as tbc and even vanilla if you count the aq gates.

It just seems that in the past it was massively pushed back against. The concept that if you were good enough at the game to run something you should be able to run it prevailed but I noticed that slowly but surely the idea that in order to run end game you must first farm trivial content to excess to succeed hs taken hold.

I can understand why pointless systems like leveling your cloak exists but with the playerbase becoming more and more accepting of practices that are only in place to draw out content do you think we will see a ever increasing amount of them put into place?

The game has always had time gates - always!

[Trend]

Topic has kind of been touched on before but I figured I would bring it up In a more focused form. In recent expansions wow has started to really focus on the concept that time gating is the preferred option to skill gating content.

Essences, ap, corruption resistance are all examples of content that is time gated to varies degrees. Now don't get me wrong blizzard has been desperately trying to time gate content as early as tbc and even vanilla if you count the aq gates.

It just seems that in the past it was massively pushed back against. The concept that if you were good enough at the game to run something you should be able to run it prevailed but I noticed that slowly but surely the idea that in order to run end game you must first farm trivial content to excess to succeed hs taken hold.

I can understand why pointless systems like leveling your cloak exists but with the playerbase becoming more and more accepting of practices that are only in place to draw out content do you think we will see a ever increasing amount of them put into place?

What an entirely 100% false premise. For example, in Vanilla, nothing at all was hard, not PvP and not PvE. It was all time spent over skill, as has been made obvious by Classic. 45 minutes after BWL opens it's cleared, lol. So if you're trying to say it was formerly skill based and now it's just time syncs, you're just objectively wrong.

As for corruptions, it's just part of your kit. With the changes made with the targetable acquisitions, there really isn't any excuse not to be set up at this point and the total time /played to get your kit put together isn't much different than it has ever been. There has always been dumb shit you have to do to put your kit together, except for WoD when most people complained there was nothing to do.

Also, just FYI, mythic NYA is tuned not to need max corruption resistance and perfect corruptions. Between the nerfs to the encounters and these weekly increasing throughput boosts it just helps less skilled players (like me) see more bosses than we would have seen in the past. You're approaching it like an "OMG I have to do this" instead of "this is a nice bonus I can take advantage of if I want to." Same applies to pushing keys, but for PvP, yeah, it definitely sucks if you're not maxed because most of your opponents are.

I'm not saying I like everything they have done with BfA, because I do not, I just do not agree with your premise.

[arandomuser]

Can there even be a skillcap when weakauras can basically do everything for you
as adk i remember like actually thinking before i pressed my abilities managing runes, and based on a series of factors it was better to use a different ability or re apply diseases, but now literally a weakaura would just tell you what to press

[Aleksej89]

Because only a small % has skill while everyone has time.

So blizzard caters for the biggest most profitable audience which are those who got time more than anything else.

[The Butt Witch]

Because as players became better and better at video games overall, the developers could no longer keep up by making difficult game mechanics and encounters, so they just switched to time gates as the safer and cheaper way.

Besides, you can't possibly be serious to claim that vanilla raiding was hard. The bosses had like 2 mechanics, and people still wiped. But then a lot of players were kinda trash at the game. That obviously changed over time, so the devs came up with bosses with tons of mechanics, but it was still not enough, as raids were cleared within days from release by the top guilds. So they put the time gate system up.