Originally Posted by
Malkiah
ok now that is a characterization i'll accept.
oh i never suggested the essence wasn't the BIS for many dps classes or meant to imply that it was "feelcraft" to say it was the best and absolutely a DPS increase.
but you didn't say any of that - you said it was mandatory to be "competitive"
now obviously this involves some supposition on my part and reading into intent and that's dangerous and unreliable, but given the context of the discussion for the last several pages of this thread i don't feel i'm going completely out on a limb here to assume that you're more or less using "competitive" interchangeably with "viable".
as in: you're suggesting that to be a legitimate player during BFA you had to have the PVP trinket or else you were physically incapable of putting up numbers adequate to... well i don't want to put words in your mouth here. push a key? be the top parser? get invited to a group for M+ or a raid?
there's a lot of unspoken implication and i'm trying to avoid straw-manning you here.
well then i just wouldn't play wow, because wow would be a game that was centered around activities i don't enjoy.
and then, most notably, i wouldn't spend the next 10 years racking up 10,000+ posts on MMO-C prolapsing my vagina with how hard i was crying about how much i hate WoW.
hate world quests so much that it makes you hate the game to do world quests, and then feel like it's mandatory to do world quests? cool, stop playing wow.
simple problem, simple solution.
i never played DAOC because it was a PVP oriented MMO. i didn't play DAOC and then bitch nonstop about how much PVP was in DAOC.
WoW is, always has been, and i'd guess always will be, a casual-attitude MMO that is designed from the ground up to be easy and quick to get into and get going on and full of simple little tasks you can accomplish in a short amount of time.
this has been true since the day they wrote the first line of code of WoW game engine, this became enshrined indelibly in the core foundational design philosophy of the game when they decided to make WoW be the lincoln logs version of everquest.
casual, easy, pop in and get some shit done with nearly any amount of time. that's the foundation on which WoW is built.
then over the years they built up on "some shit" you can get done in nearly any amount of time.
this isn't a completely pointless digression (at least i don't think so) - this speaks to the heart of what's at issue here with this specific point.
WoW is fundamentally a game where you can log in and do "stuff". it's also a game that has dungeons and raids. but the vast majority of development time and space goes to the "stuff" and the vast majority of people who play the game spend most of their time playing doing "stuff".
if you just hate doing "stuff" at its core, then WoW isn't a game you should be playing.
and this comes back to what i said above.
what is WoW? as a game, what is it? what is its game play loop? what are the core fundamentals of the way in which a player engages with the game world?
IMO it's both dungeons/raids and a fairly robust task-oriented open world.
IMO both are vital to the overall structure of the game, and perhaps most importantly IMO it's fine for both types of content to provide tangible rewards to character progression long term over the life of an expansion.
IMO absolutely knee-capping what's possible or available in one for the sake of making it so that 3% of your player base feels better about their feesfees opting out of the other is incredibly stupid, and expecting the game to be designed that way so that you don't have to actually play the game is also stupid.
to me your argument sounds like "in legion and BFA there was purpose within the framework of a character-progression based RPG to play the game and i hated it because it made me feel like i had to play the game" and that "in DF there is absolutely no purpose within the framework of a character-progression based RPG game to actually play the game and it's better because it means i never have to play the game"
i accept this is a position you and many others seem to have, i just don't get why you bother.