You're just arguing semantics now. Fanboy all you want, but your attitude does not make the game better. Toxic Community Example #3.
Blizzard's Virtual Realms might help with the problem, but honestly, they need a lot more than that. One place to start would be permanently removing all combat-related racials. Of course they are still completely indecisive on doing so, and considering it's already too late, the longer they wait the more they will need to do to reverse the long-term imbalances and playerbase losses it has and will continue to cause.
I'm not convinced racials are the main cause for the imbalance.
Also, I think racials should be treated like birth signs in Morrowind, where you can pick a set of those regardless of your race. This would allow us to keep racials that actually mean something besides cosmetic stuff.
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
They are whether people admit it or not. Again it has nothing to do with whether you specifically like racials or not, but as soon as the majority of the playerbase shifts to a faction whether due to racials or lore reasons, even removing the racials and "equalizing" the lore will have no more effect. Due to balance alone, people will be forced even more so to move to the "more dominant" side if anything for want of recruits.
This holds for World First down to even semi-hardcore guilds.
I don't think most of the playerbase even has them as a serious consideration. Most players couldn't care less that one racial provides a fraction more DPS for their class because most of them couldn't really care less about raiding or serious PvP. I imagine the human population has a slight overall population boost due to EMFH as the trolls will have one because of Beserking, but I can't imagine those numbers being any sort of meaningful contributor to the present situation.
It's quite simple why we have this situation. We have a server infrastructure which is supposed to house over twice the number of players (the low pop realm problem was very evident during the game's peak of 12mil during WotLK) leaving populations to have a diverse range of sizes. Over the years, players have gravitated away from the lower and even mid populated servers to cluster in the few high pop servers.
It actually does matter... a lot. Yes, most players may not care, but when a significant population do, then the rest of the players are forced to care due to diminished recruitment capabilities. Take a look at some of the statement of Alliance guilds in ToT (one of the worst offending imbalanced racial raids), both those that stayed Alliance despite a strong push from within guild to transfer, and those who were forced to transfer to Horde.
Again this is why it affects the World First level (method switching)... but will even bleed down to far more casual raiding guilds, down to even possibly semi-hardcore guilds. The latter may not give a shit that Troll is not 1% but rather like 10% more DPS... but they'll care that they have no recruits.
The QQers will come up with something to whine about I'm sure since they don't have dailies to bitch about anymore.
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By buying valor gear maybe? Crafting the 522 pieces? There is more to end game than heroic scenarios and LFR. Also there is the valor upgrade npc and the 2 new world bosses that were added in 5.2 that drop 522 gear. Then there is the fact many realms are able to pug parts of normal ToT now. Basically there is ZERO excuse for why players can't get geared up unless they are stubbornly avoiding the very content that has the upgrades they need.
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Dailies haven't been an "issue" since 5.2. Why are people still bitching about them? I mean really most of this stuff was addressed well over 6 months ago. It is time to let it go already.
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What on earth are you talking about? Normal ToT isn't tuned around having all 522 gear. The current gear available now is far from "laughable". Are you people really that desperate for complaints that you have to make complete bullshit up?
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Don't even bother. The people who endlessly whine about having to gear an army of alts isn't going to consider for a second that they don't need to transfer entire said army to a new realm.
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This is a rather shaky argument considering this is a subscription based game at $15 a month with $40 expansions coming out every 2 years or so.
While it DOES seem to be accurate (Blizzard is making T14 pretty much redundant at this point, akin to how the HoT 5 mans made T11 redundant) to get 496s so commonly, the gear aim for the island is 535 pieces, which can take a month to get a full set of.
Also, I'm seeing a whole bunch of alt complaints on this server, and I ask, what is your opinion of "geared" and how many alts do you feel should be "geared". If geared is 530 ilvl on 5+ alts, you have a pretty skewed vision of alts. Imo, having 2-3 alts at 500+ ilvl (about the average ilvl guilds enter ToT with) should be plenty of gear, and that amount of gear is easily obtainable with H Scenarios+LFR. Now, if you are comparing THIS tiers ilvl to next tiers ilvl, you are also skewing it a bit. After all, what happens in the future has no effect on what happened in the past.
hmmm...you may be doing something wrong then . you can get ten pieces of 522 gear from the valor quartermaster (wrists, ring, hands, chest, trinket, legs, waist, neck, back, and shoulders)which upgrades into 530.
So, assuming you get all the valor gear you can (lets say you get 7 -- say you skip on hands, chest, and legs so you can get your 4 piece set bonus) and the rest of your slots are filled with LFR gear (that would be 10 slots) your gear level would be
(7*530 + 9 * 510) / 16
or 518 as an average item level, assuming you upgraded every piece twice. Granted it is not 530, but it is not quite a bleak as you make it out. If you don't care about set bonuses you can easily break 520.
It could well be a server issue (or a faction issue). On my server I've never seen a pug raid forming, I would have to say that LFR has fairly well killed pug raids on my server. Hell, I haven't even seen pugs for the previous tier content.
On a night where my raid is down a person, it is a struggle sometimes just to find a stand-in for one night.
That definitely would have kept me subbed.
Spit on me all you want, but I loathe the gear-up process and just want to jump in. Trial of the Champnion / Frozen Halls / Hour of Twilight model of fast-forward gearing was appealing to me because it was quick, painless, and led straight to the current content.
MoP's "Let's party like it's TBC!" (except worse) gearing model was a complete turn-off because, well, it's not TBC any more and gating the "real" content behind tons of quaint but tiresome dailies (etc.) doesn't work in 2013. Not for me, at least.
I actually shed a genuine tear when old content becomes spontaneously obsolete, so I appreciate what the devs tried to do. But IMO, it just didn't work in a faster-paced, modernized MMO/gaming/IRL environment of the current day.
I think the newer idea of making old content stay relevant because it scales and is rewarding to play is the correct path, rather than because you're forced to retread it due to a rigidly linear gearing design.
Last edited by Lovestar; 2013-09-01 at 04:30 AM.
Yes. Blizzard might be able to do something about the realm population problem (hopefully connected realms will work out well), but Blizzard didn't create that problem. That part's all on the players.
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I don't think there was any value at all in the idea of "respecting" players who had completed a tier by making it more difficult for new or returning players to gear up for the following tier.
I understand the logic, but I think GC and the rest of the design team is just stroking egos that don't need to be stroked by making it difficult to get caught up.
Nice to know Blizzard is willing to accept losing more subs in 5.4 with them continuing the ridiculous catch up mechanisms that MoP has given us.
In Cataclysm, and Wrath, by the last raid tier, I would have DE'd gear that had the same item level as the first tier of the expansion. In 5.4, Blizzard has managed to make the sheep excited to get it.
I'm normally a Blizzard fan boy, but the catch up mechanisms for new players, and alts has been nothing but fail this expansion. This has been the #1 reason that I have personally seen people leave the game for in this expansion.