Are timegates really bad?

[Eosia]

Is see so many complains in the forums (only forums, never ingame) about timegates. But i don't really get why.

Most of it stems from the fact people confuse time gates with content gates. Even a few effort gates too.

A time gate is when time is the only factor the limits access to content. The Broken Shore "Campaign" was time gated with a new quest becoming available each week. A content gate is when you have to do specific pieces of content before more content opens up. Pathfinder is content gated for example. Effort gating is when a content needs to be done X amount of times (usually on a server level) before more content opens up. These are rare and I can only think of three instances being Gates of Ahn'Qiraj, Isle of Quel'Danas, and Isle of Thunder events.

Time gates are not necessarily a bad thing. They allow content to not be consumed instantly and leave a person with "nothing to do". And let's be honest here, the same people who complain about time/content/effort gates would be complaining that they had nothing to do because they blew through it all. They only become a problem when the content they are gating is boring and worthless like the aforementioned Broken Shore "Campaign" which had the absolute most stupid quests ever in it.

if they timegate stuff, people complain about it and accuse Blizzard of timegating so they can keep subs going.

if they don't timegate stuff, people complain about it and accuse Blizzard of not having enough content for them to do.

Blizzard cannot win.

Amen to that. And the whole "They do it for subs" is stupid because that is not even a metric they use anymore. They use "Monthly Active Units" which means if you logged in for 5 seconds on the first of the month, you count as 1 MAU even if you never log in again until the next month.

[Bladesyphon]

FFXIV has virtually zero timegating outside of gear and some things and its still flourishing.


Why?

Because the rest of the game is compelling enough to where once you get BiS you can enjoy the fruits of your labor because there's a lot of vanity stuff to do.



WoW suffers when there's no timegating because they devote very little of the game to vanity, it makes sense why they have to timegate everything, because if that weren't the case people would quit or get bored, I agree with this.



The solution is just to make the rest of the non-gear ladder oriented parts of the game fun to do.

...This is a joke post, right?

SE literally takes a single patch, and chops it into four chunks so that people can't bumrush all the content in a single day due to how little content actually is released per patch.

[Big Thanks]

Amen to that. And the whole "They do it for subs" is stupid because that is not even a metric they use anymore. They use "Monthly Active Units" which means if you logged in for 5 seconds on the first of the month, you count as 1 MAU even if you never log in again until the next month.

Who clears all content in a week when there are no timegates?
Hardcore players and no lifers.

Do you see hardcore players EVER complaining about not having content to do? No, never.

No lifers? Maybe

But makes no sense saying "people will complain if there are no timegates" when hardcore players dont give a damn about that. (and on top of that, are a minority)
No lifers are also a minority.

[Nnyco]

They arent bad, people just love to jump on hate bandwagons and throw buzzwords around like 'mau', 'timegated', 'shareholders', etc etc.

[Maquegyver]

Timegates aren't that bad on their own. Combined with the multitude of other play time mechanics they are terrible. They just keep piling them on which is destroying the game.

They also suck more and more at obfuscating timegate mechanics. They are all so arbitrary now with no back-story its insufferable. Sorry can only hold 5 visions cause reasons (which they make 100 times worse by arbitrarily removing it on a whim). Sorry can only do this wing in LFR cause reasons. Sorry can't unlock flying until this arbitrary faction is appeased... Part of the problem is factions are so tired in WoW at this point after 100 grinds of faction rep. They need to seriously up their game on disguising the gating/grinding. That is the artful part of developing MMO's but they have just mailed it in as they milk the dieing beast.

[Sliske]

Yes in WoW. Not only does it hurt WoW's content that it does do, but it shines a spotlight on a massive flaw with how WoW is developed since around patch 6.2 onwards.

Simply put, WoW is an MMO that is trying to be a single player RPG. The best comparison to this is GW2, a game that seems to not care that it is an mmo at all and the results are pretty bad. Every patch, which takes about 3 months to develop, has about 2 hours of meat in it, or less. Then, most people log out for 3 months.

WoW started doing this in 6.2 and has kept doing it since. The way to fix this is to stop devoting enormous amounts of resources to having this long ass fixed quest chains that last HOURS and are brutally painful on repeat play. Lets just run through an alt's experience going from 110 to 120.

BFA takes an hour to do its intro.
Nazjatar, another hour.
Mechagon, another hour.
Vale/Uldum, two hours.
The War Campaign, just the zone unlocking ones, is about an hour total.
The Neck quests are about two hours total.

All of this, probably a lot more i've forgotten about, is just a waste of time. It is C tier story telling at best and the entire time you do it, you're not challenged either by the story nor the gameplay, so your brain just tunes out. I just listed above what every alt goes through without even adding in the 5 hours of timewalking dungeons most people level to 120 in. Thats 8 hours of boring content that would put insomniacs to sleep. It all comes at a price too and we've reached this weird scenario where all of the villains aren't compelling, despite them adding an extra 100 hours of story telling content into the game over an expansion such as WoTLK.

THEN they time gate it, and your brain just implodes. One quest every week or day, the quest itself you dont remember and couldn't if held at gunpoint and told to remember it or die and the rewards are non-existent.

WoW has essentially taken GW2's failed MMO model and put it into its own game.

Take the story budget, slash it by 80% and funnel all of those resources instead into class design. I don't care if shit isn't balanced - make it fun. No one cares about balance. There is a reason the most popular game in the world isn't flipping a coin - because its boring after you do it twice. People care about fun, not balance. Make classes like vanilla > mop again and get rid of this boring homogenised 3 button GCD lagfest that started in WoD and has gotten worse and worse since.

BFA looks fucking terminal at this point. Shadowlands is the last attempt to save it and the thing that is supposed to replace old talent trees, artifact weapons, azerite gear, essences, corruptions and tier sets is a single order ability in Shadowlands, and some dumb non-combat spells like eyes of the beast.

IT ISN'T ENOUGH. Classes are going to feel like you're playing Diablo 3 - two buttons and a cooldown. Fuck. that.

[Taeldorian]

Some timegating is good and some is bad.

I think timegating cloak progression was actually a super good move. If they didn’t, people would’ve been spamming everything possible to max out vessels. Dailies, rares, caches, bonus objectives, everything in each zone. All of this on top of AP+raid progression would’ve been insane.

Timegating suramar is another good example imo. The story felt more organic that way. By waiting a week between each new questline (which fit with the story as we were building a resistance, doesn’t happen in one day) we were done with the story and built our resistance right as nighthold released which felt natural.

There are other timegates that feel pretty bad though. These are just two examples where I believe it works in our favor.

[Pony Soldier]

I guess it's subjective but for me personally I hate time gating. To me it's like having a parental controls on the game telling me to go do something else because I played too much in a day. Also, the thing is, time gating is a super lazy way of making your game seem like it has a lot of content. It's kind of like rationing the content of the game to the players. It's just lazy game design. They'll just make a handful of quests or have a certain craft item require a few pieces of material and stretch it out so that it takes a week or two or even a month to complete.

This is where the "time gating for subs" comes into discussion. They know you want that certain thing so they're going to drag it out as much as they can so you stay subbed for as long as possible so that you can get that thing you want. Longer sub = more money. So not surprisingly it's more of a minimum effort, maximum gain kind of thing than anything else.

[Sharby]

...This is a joke post, right?

SE literally takes a single patch, and chops it into four chunks so that people can't bumrush all the content in a single day due to how little content actually is released per patch.

The joke is you acting like the devs themselves haven't explicitly stated that the game is designed this way because they don't want people to feel compelled to stay subbed as long as possible. The lead Dev literally encouraged people to unsub if they get bored. I got bored, so I unsubbed, and felt no guilt because unlike with WoW's content cycles, if I ever want to play again and be relevant, I can with ease, because there aren't endless treadmills I'm falling behind in.


Your post also has nothing to with what I said, the content in FF14 patches is a lot more barebones than WoW's, this is true, however FF14 put a lot more resources into making content unrelated to end-game also be engaging for those who want something to do outside of raiding.


The fact that you can be every class on one character and have every profession on one character means that singular character progression isn't even complete until you max out both. It also means it takes a lot longer for the combat to be stale because you always can vastly change your playstyle with a click or two, and being that every single class is viable, you will never feel like a detriment to your group outside of personal skill, not to mention every single fight in their mythic equivalent can be specifically queue'd for with no trash, meaning parsing/practicing fights is a lot more practical and rewarding. When I got BiS, I spent days grinding out orange parses for my mains and alts and it was fun/satisfying, doing so in WoW is a lot harder.

The game has a fuckton of story content, from the entire main story to a plethora of side-stories that have cutscenes and voice acting in some cases, meaning that once you hit the top and have BiS, if you're interested in the world there are a ton of ways to deepen your experience with it.

If you're a collector or enjoy playing dress-up, the game is rich with that too. It has player housing for those who like designing. PvP in that game is horseshit, but its still a thing for people who like fighting other players, you can also just... sit around and hang out due to dynamic emotes and character models, which is a pretty underrated feature of the game imo.


My biggest problem with the game is that for people who only care about PvE, there is no M+ equiv so yes, you would essentially raid-log and then do nothing in it, but if that's the case I'm of the mind one would better off playing games like Monster Hunter. If FF14 ever designs and implements an M+ equiv, I think it would help the game to retain serious PvE'ers and I would probably be playing it now.


For veteran players the way FF14 is designed could lead to entertainment being a slow-drip type deal, but the monthly sub is cheaper than WoW's, and I think the way its setup is very engaging for new players. I prefer it.

[FelPlague]

He didnt call them "timegates"...but tell me...what are they?
They are timegated content, are they not?

He called them "chores" or something, cant remember was a while ago.

Cause do we call
1. daily heroic dungeon/weekly mythic dungeon lockouts timegating?
2. weekly raid lockouts timegating?
3. patch releases timegated?
4. crafting cooldown is that timegating?
5. is requiring you to grind reps timegating?
6. is locking reps behind dailies timegating?
7. is locking raids behind reps timegating?
8. is locking raids behind attunemnts timegating?

he was listing things that "to be optimal" he had to do EVERY WEEK and he did not like having to keep up with so much stuff. That has NOTHING to do with timegating. nor was he complaining about them.

btw the chores thing is literally he says "there is so much to do every week if you want to keep up with everything, your not needed to do it, but your inclined to, and my friends atleast call them chores"
he does mention carrot on a stick and such soon after, but that is to do with dailies, something that has always been and always will be a huge part of every mmo.

[Ehrenpanzer]

There are no timegates in Diablo 3, and the content locusts devoured it all and then quit long ago.

...yeah....THATS the reason why we all quit D3.... timegating...... /eyeroll

- - - Updated - - -

That was me with the mage tower.

I loved proving grounds on my tank. I could spend hours in there trying to perfect my strategy for endless.

But you could do endless attempts there. You could learn by doing not by reading the forums.

I only stopped doing it when my best attempt was around 45 levels meaning it took 45 minutes, too long to keep bothering.

I should have been a prime candidate for the mage tower. I did a total of one attempt, because you needed to do quests to farm currency to buy into the tower. In that attempt I died about 10 seconds in to a mechanic I didn’t know that auto killed me.

Grind dailies for 30 minutes to spend 10 seconds in the tower? Nope, byyyyeeee....

It took you 30 min to get enough for a mage tower attempt? The fuck were you doing? Having your cat play your toon while blindfolded and dumping all your gear in the bank?

[FelPlague]

The following time periods in wow did not have dailies/dailies could be mostly ignored:

Wrath during ICC
Cata
MoP during soo
WoD

I love how you chose literally the times when Dailies were the heaviest.
Wrath during icc- You needed to do your dailies to get your shoulder enchants. You also needed to do your daily heroic dungeon for your badges. You also needed to do the your argent crusade dailies, aswell as any reps you had not yet finished.

Cata- lol, they had tons of dailies, tol barad dailies were all over the isle of tol barad, and were quite annoying. Aswell as the molten front having its dailies, and boy oh boy were those fun.

Mop during Soo- yes, during one patch, but dont forget if you just returned to the game, you would still need to do all the old reps dailies, its not like SOO suddenly removed all of those dailies that still needed to be done for new/returning players.

Wod- Wod had a fair bit of daly quest content, although not as much as many others, but that is because most of its daily content was stuck in the garrison, the daily apexsis, the daily garrison stuff, the daily inn quests, the daily

[Big Thanks]

Cause do we call
1. daily heroic dungeon/weekly mythic dungeon lockouts timegating?
2. weekly raid lockouts timegating?
3. patch releases timegated?
4. crafting cooldown is that timegating?
5. is requiring you to grind reps timegating?
6. is locking reps behind dailies timegating?
7. is locking raids behind reps timegating?
8. is locking raids behind attunemnts timegating?

1. daily heroic dungeon/weekly mythic dungeon lockouts timegating? yes, since vanilla there is timegating things, just not as much as today
2. weekly raid lockouts timegating? yes
3. patch releases timegated? lets not get creative here
4. crafting cooldown is that timegating? yes
5. is requiring you to grind reps timegating? if they are locked behind dailies like in BfA...yes
6. is locking reps behind dailies timegating? there you go...yes
7. is locking raids behind reps timegating? depends...how can you farm the rep? can you do it all day? everyday? If so...No
8. is locking raids behind attunemnts timegating? Is the attunement timagated? Its pretty easy really

[Big Thanks]

Well..ofc while we might or might not agree...it all deflects from the question of this thread.."Are timegates really bad?"

Is a weekly raid lockout "bad" and if so ..why. What would be the consequences if there was no lockout

Same with daily heroics, crafting cooldowns, endless dailies. Is it really bad that there is a restriction on how much you can do. Because one thing I know is that when you could theoretically endlessly farm AP initially ...people complained how they were "being forced" to just do that.

As for point 5: "is requiring you to grind reps timegating? if they are locked behind dailies like in BfA...yes" don't blame that on BfA alone...and even if you do..again..why is that "bad"?

IMO they are bad and painful. Let me do it at my pace...whatever that means. Everyone is different.

But just to be clear i need to further explain myself.

A timegate is when Blizzard imposes a restriction on how much you can farm. Mainly caps and lockouts
Examples of something NOT having a timegate:
-Timbermaw reputation farm and every single rep that only required a tabard to farm. (you could do it all day everyday without restrictions)

And...mainly is just the dailies nowadays that are messing us up...because A LOT of things are locked behind dailies/weeklies.
Want an essense? Timegated with daily/weekly restrictions
Want an allied race?
Want flying and you came up late into the expansion? bad luck bro
Want pvp gear? Is much much more timegated now and random

Thats the main difference from "back then" and now".

[Big Thanks]

Limited attempts on bosses in ICC etc etc. But I agree on one thing, as I said earlier: There is more timegating now because there is also more to do. I know..I know..unpopular opinion with the ppl claiming we don't get content...(but really there were no Island Expeditions, Warfronts, Mythic+, Horrific visions equivalents through many of the older x-pacs. Looking back...I have no clue what I would have done if I didn't raid or pvp fro....Vanilla to Cata at max level)

Thats true, in my opinion at least, but...the unfortunate part is that i want everything i listed...and every single thing is heavily timegated to the point that i feel im on a leash created by Blizzard.

Yes...the timegates on essense, allied races, flying and pvp gear (ALL things i want) are realllllly infuriating to me.
Because im the type of person that is "random" when it comes to "wanting to play the game".
I dont want to be on a leash everyday.

And if i dont play everyday and do the "cap" / "lockout" daily like a good boy...i get heavily punished.
Thats mainly how i feel.

I can do "all nighters" some days...and dont play for a day or 2 next.
This type of play is heavily punished. You MUST be on a leash everyday and be a good boy.

[clevin]

it's how they are implemented and whether they stack. If *everything* is time gated and it implemented poorly, then, yeah they are bad.

Think about the Legion 7.2 patch with the chain on Broken Shore. Weekly time gates but most of the weekly quests were trivial and told no story. That was badly done. Now consider the Suramar chain... also weekly time gates but done well and with a pretty decent story.

Or think about when we've had valor points or the equivalent in the past. Sometimes they've been limited daily, other times weekly. The daily limits were bad because if you didnt login every day and get whatever VP you could, you fell behind. Weekly limits worked better, since you could login every day OR if your schedule didnt allow that, you could do long sessions a couple of times each week.

[Flower Milk]

It feels awful to be working towards a goal in any video game and being told after like an hour of playing "that's all the progress you can make for today, go play another game and come back tomorrow". That's the kind of game design you expect from a mobile game where they ask you if you want to pay real money to make progress instead of waiting until tomorrow. Except in WoW you can't even do that, it's somehow even worse.

After hitting that wall every single day too many times, eventually you just get fed up and say "fine, I will just go play this other game instead of WoW for good then". It's bad game design to try to coax people into playing other games while they wait for arbitrary time gates to make more progress in your game.

It was fine to time gate gear, you felt like you had to wait to gain more power. Time gating big and important features like flight or new races? Feels absolutely terrible. You feel like you can't do anything else in the game unless you get flight unlocked first, and you completely lose all motivation to make a new character if it takes you a month of doing daily chores every day to finally play one. It's bad game design, period.

[goldentforce]

Timegates aren't an evil concept, it all depends on the context. There is successful timegates and unsucessful ones. Suramar, thunder isle, horrific visions are examples of successful timegates. Suramar had a big chunk in the beginning, with further story being shown at rep intervals (which is time) with solid end points. In contrast, argus is considered a pretty bad time gate, because the story was an overarching one, with actual weekly timegates, which felt like interruptions to a story instead of points of a story. Horrific visions is timegated content because you only get so much a week and can't complete the system, but skill can push how far you get/how good the rewards are for doing. Corruption gear has multiple timegating elements, such as the amount of corruption you can wear depends on corruption resistance, but it has levels of acceptable negatives which depends on skill/class limitations/encounter, which is alright. The bad timegating is the way corruption roles with multiple types of corruption affix, with tiers of strength, and tiers of corruption. While you can rng the BIS corruption, with having so many variables the time to get all the best is inflated, which IMO feels bad, especially when the system has other limitations said above like corruption resistance/skill/encounter/class limitation. And as timegating is based on time there is a subjective element of how long are you willing to wait. Are you willing to do netherwing dailies every day for weeks or grind eggs,etc.

[Big Thanks]

You know what was one of the high points of BfA for me?

Farming the Battleground PvP essense...one of the only non-timegated things in the game.
It was a high point for me because i got RANK 4...yes, i went for the rank 4, rank 3 was too easy, in less than a week.
I felt awesome farming at my pace and even sometimes doing all nighters.

You know what happened to allied races, flying, some other essenses and pvp gear? (heavily timegated content)
I gave up and didnt even STARTED doing them.

Because in my brain i knew i had to go through the process of being on a leash for days/week/month. And i hate that process.

What i mean is:
The rank 4 pvp essense made me love the game. Which is an example of non-timegated content feeling amazing.
All other timegated things i gave up instantly just from the idea of having to play the game a certain way (the Blizzard's way)
So FOR ME...timegates = bad
For others? Well...if Blizzard is using/abusing them...is because they probably work as intended.

[Sharby]

You know what was one of the high points of BfA for me?

Farming the Battleground PvP essense...one of the only non-timegated things in the game.
It was a high point for me because i got RANK 4...yes, i went for the rank 4, rank 3 was too easy, in less than a week.
I felt awesome farming at my pace and even sometimes doing all nighters.

You know what happened to allied races, flying, some other essenses and pvp gear? (heavily timegated content)
I gave up and didnt even STARTED doing them.

Because in my brain i knew i had to go through the process of being on a leash for days/week/month. And i hate that process.

What i mean is:
The rank 4 pvp essense made me love the game. Which is an example of non-timegated content feeling amazing.
All other timegated things i gave up instantly just from the idea of having to play the game a certain way (the Blizzard's way)
So FOR ME...timegates = bad
For others? Well...if Blizzard is using/abusing them...is because they probably work as intended.

See that's how I feel too.



Essences like VoP and BotE feel good because they all can be gotten to rank 3 in one day if you're really no-lifing it, but its entirely at your own pace. It encourages playing the game constantly because you are chipping away at your goal piece by piece whether you want to go at it all day or not at all some days.


Whereas rep-locked essences just feel like trash to do.