Island Expeditions Soloable in Patch 9.1.5

[Esper]

Island Expeditions were better than Torghast because you could stop doing them entirely and never have to worry about them again. I forgot they were a thing. Meanwhile if you want a legendary item you need to suffer through Torghast every week forever.

[ohwell]

Funny how it takes a massive lawsuit, a huge walk out and subs dropping like icecream sales in a Siberian winter for them to finally think about making stuff that people have actually been asking for.

Oh please. The lawsuit has nothing to do with the current atmosphere there. The walkout was just people trying to add their pet demands to act like they were all oppressed in the workplace there when in reality it functions more like Google and the other companies today. The "bro culture" was reasonably long gone. This change has NOTHING to do with all of that.

[darklogrus]

This is shit they should have been done during the pre-patch along with fixing legacy raids..

[LostSinclair]

squeezing out the last bits of engagement because theres nothing new coming up in a loooooooooooong time?

next up: mage tower?

I know you're probably being sarcastic but Mage Tower would be appreciated, I have more than a few druid buddies who are still royally tilted that they don't get a gorilla bear or glow in the dark cat forms.

Come to think of it I'm missing several classes from that thing too.

[Niwes]

Which is exactly what they should be doing. Spending more money for less return is objectively a bad thing for the longevity of the game.

I've often seen you post things like this here, and I always wonder why you think Blizzard is the company you should be railing against for this kind of thing.. The mobile game market is beyond absurdly profitable right now, and the idea of "content" that you should pay for in that market is reskins. This forum has an active thread for Genshin, which is a literal unashamed slot machine. At the other end of the scale you have games like Path of Exile which add an entirely new mechanic, rebalance the game, add new skills, and potentially add entirely new endgame progression every three months, but then get forums full of crying because someone's meta build 3 months ago isn't as good now.

Game devs literally cannot win anymore. It's either create a mobile game where people will pay you $20 to get five more spins of the wheel and then praise you for blessing them with a "legendary" recolour, or its spend thousands of hours of cross-functional development effort to create an update that gets released for free and then have potentially tens of thousands of people complaining that you made their particular niche take 1% longer and therefore you're the Hitler of developers - so it's no wonder there's a race to the bottom to make trash mobile games.

maybe you not fully get what the term stands for. its not „invest and spend money as a gift to your customers“ or something like that. everything any company does, is effective. cost effective development means „piss on quality“, „piss on value“, „piss on the relation between what it costs, what its worth and what you gain“. it means: „sell the biggest shit, fastest done, least invested, worst quality, as gold“. means: you do not think about „whats good for the product/game“ or „what does our customers want“ or „what sells best“ or „what has the highest quality or value“. it means: „how can we implement and design some features, as cheap and as fast as possible, with the least possible investment and let it look like a fully valued feature?“.

you do this by recycling as much as you can. find design corners where you dont need investment, like gfx/world design or game engine logic. instead you design parts of the game with the following properties in mind:

- just DB entries
- simple UIs
- less logic code
- easy testable
- completely decoupled from the rest of the game logic
- using recycled sprites
- using recycled icons
- able to be used as a feature on the feature list
- able to be pushed by marketing
- low amount of coders needed
- low amount of designers needed
- independent from team strenghts and independent from specific know how
- cheap
- cheap
- cheap
- fast implemented
- fast implemented
- fast implemented
- easy to balance, bc its just DB entries

this means in short, you aim at trying to build the most cheap and lowest quality shit, while polishing it as a gold feature.

its the same as i.e. some companies built their software themeable and later sell directly to customers (companies, not end users) a „completely customized software for them“, with their corporate identity. these companies pay a LOT of money, for a branded version with their corporate identity, icons, colors, etc. and the company that sell em that sw version goes like „we had to rebuild the sw from the ground with all your stuff…“ but in reality they just changed a few settings and get A LOT of money for really cheap stuff.

aiming at such practices when developing a game or a software, this is called cost effective development.

blizz did the same. they implement „features“ that are „systems“ because they are super cheap to implement and can super easy be maintained and extended later. look i.e. at soulbinds and renown. its a simple UI and DB entries. and they can easily add items (also DB entries) to farm, that change the item level in DB soulbind entries, in a random way. also they have to do nearly nothing, and can time shift that task/investment easily (easier agile development and human resource planing), to add a higher renown level in patch 9.1 and call it a feature.

its very difficult for me, to explain all these things in a language, not my native language, to someone that not works in that business and talks about that stuff on a daily base. i am developer since 20+ years and i see exactly what Blizz does in wow these days, technically- and investment/design-wise.

hopefully this makes it more clean, that cost effective development is not just „dont invest high amount for low gain“. because no company out there is stupid enough to not doing this per se.

[Empower]

I mean...its a good change but I think they badly need actual new content and to tear out some of the grinds in the game. I really don't think people care that much for tiny fixes.

It feels like blizzard wanted to make sure that people never ran out of anything to do in wow without asking themselves if anything was fun to do.

Getting veiled market into mythic plus would help to since currently it exists in a weird gray area where it's good for alts of ce and mythic raiders and mostly useless for anyone else.

[Reckhx]

I know you're probably being sarcastic but Mage Tower would be appreciated, I have more than a few druid buddies who are still royally tilted that they don't get a gorilla bear or glow in the dark cat forms.

Come to think of it I'm missing several classes from that thing too.

Yeah sure, I'd like to run around with the AQ title and mount aswell. Some stuff are left alone for a reason, what's the point of making something special if you are just gonna keep giving it out after a point? Adding different stuff into Mage Tower I'd agree but not the old skins, even tho I'd love the druid form aswell but that would ruin the game for those who already have it, they removed them for a reason.

[Mendzia]

What does being able to solo old content for cosmetics have to do with gating?

... what are you talking about?

They could do it literally at the beginning of SL which were begged by people since start of it.
It was artificial 'gating' of soloing it until now and they decided to change it in content drought in the middle between patches.
It is now being released as feature and 'listening to community'.

Me use buzzwords, me write witty comment.

Me defend Blizzard everytime, me write witty comment.

[Luxeley]

its not out of date for all the people who dont have all the stuff from there,its basicaly like saying why make old raids soloable because they are out dated content lol

btw solo que is a shit idea,you literaly think you do...but you dont

Solo queue is not a terrible idea for RBGs. Not sure whether or not it's good for arena. What I do know is looking for ppl with the right i-lvl, the right xp, the right CR, the right schedule, the right comp and with the right ppl you can tolerate for more than 3mins definitely isn't working. The point is Blizzard ignores what pvpers want or more importantly need.

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Pretty sure it is more then 12 people that are interested in running Island Expeditions for collectibles. You can also solo queue for some PvP stuff. You couldn't solo queue for any island stuff. Just because they don't give you what they want doesn't mean they can't do something else. It isn't a sign of mismanagement and lack of attentiveness just because the game isn't catered to your own personal wants. Lol.

There are tons of videos and threads requesting solo queue for competitive pvp in one form or another, I am not the one and only advocate for it. LOL

[un_known]

even if you were a hunter or DH on Eonar it would still be difficult. if you're up in the ship clicking and meanwhile you got a bunch of Fel Annihilators bombing the crap out of Eonar it is game over. Odyn from Trial of Valor also has the same issue as Coven however that issue, you would think, is an easy one to fix simply by removing the damage reduction. Looking forward though to BfA it has some near impossible bosses to solo - G'huun, Rastakhan, Mekkatorque, Queen's Court, Skitra, Xanesh, Il'gynoth, Carapace and N'Zoth would all require significant mechanical changes and that list doesn't include the "damage reduction or damage boost" buff when bosses get close cause that is a relatively simple fix.

Compare that to Shadowlands where the only one that might have trouble solo-ing is Kel'thuzad and that is due to the adds not having anything to hit when you go downstairs

Odyn is actually easily done, you have a window to get the two adds when one of them stops to cast, just a case of kiting away and then nuking the one add them the other

And as for kel’thuzad, I’m guessing it’ll be the same as for the twin boss in tomb when you have to go down to reset your tormented stacks, as long as you’re in aggro range of an encounter then it won’t reset

[deenman]

Solo queue is not a terrible idea for RBGs. Not sure whether or not it's good for arena. What I do know is looking for ppl with the right i-lvl, the right xp, the right CR, the right schedule, the right comp and with the right ppl you can tolerate for more than 3mins definitely isn't working. The point is Blizzard ignores what pvpers want or more importantly need

it will just lead to frustration with people complaining ''golly geeee ofc we lost i got put with newbz''

i simply dont get it...people think rdf and lfr are the worst things ever put in the game....but they want the same thing for an actual hard and competitive format? wut?

[Mic_128]

This change has NOTHING to do with all of that.

Riiiiiiiiight.

[Pakheth]

Well alright, but you don't get anything from them. The loot when you finish them is random and isn't tied to what you did

That's fine, I just like exploration

But I will most likely farm for the stuff too eventually.

[froschhure]

i also hope they remove the aoe cap for this if you wanna solo? Or is that 2 much 2 ask for?

As if, suffer because you hated bfa

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The time has come? Good girl get a grip, literally no one is playing wow and I highly doubt anyone will play soloq expedition after all those nerfs thathave happened. Fix your game first!!!

[lolmmofuture]

the timing of this is hilarious lol

"you hate shadowlands? here, go do islands"

[Wangming]

Maybe it's the lawsuits or maybe it's the changes in leadership.

The change in leadership was the result of the lawsuit. It is not an either or situation. Time will tell how much pressure needs to be put on the leadership to get the good stuff. But remember that only the Blizzard president changed. Ion is still in place and so is Kotick.

[Sinured]

Oblivion better but skyrim is alright. Great choice.

I´m a Morrowind fanboy and think Oblivion is the weakest in the series, but i understand your point, alot of people like oblivion because it was their first tes game and/or the lush vibrant enviroments and the simpler combats and skills make the gameplay more enjoyable for non nerds

[Defcon1]

Single player game.

[Yarathir]

Nothing will save WoW, but this was something people requested and it has zero downdsides. So it is still a good thing.

You know, it is funny. All it took was multiple lawsuits and now we get two things the community actually wants instead of things we are told we should want.

I'm on this side. This and the customization are shrug worthy to me at this point, but they are two things people actually asked for that they listened to.. finally.

The problem is that it took them this long and WoW being in danger of sinking to go "Maybe we should do something the players want for once."

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The change in leadership was the result of the lawsuit. It is not an either or situation. Time will tell how much pressure needs to be put on the leadership to get the good stuff. But remember that only the Blizzard president changed. Ion is still in place and so is Kotick.

Ion really just needs to go back to being an encounter designer.

[Tertullian72]

Island Expeditions were fine if you were doing them once a day like I did. 5 minute runs with a reasonable chance of pet and mount drops compares very nicely with Torghast.

Of course, if you were running them over and over I'm sure it was a miserable experience. Systems should never work that way.