Would you play wow with cosmetic only gear?

[Lady Atia]

I dont disagree with any of this. I am pretty amazed that 1/3 of people claim they would still play the game without any power gains at all. Im not saying they are "wrong", no problem with their opinion at all, but I am surprised its literally one third of the people on here.

Well, I only care for the transmog/mounts/pets/achievements - stats/equipment are a mean to an end.

[iosdeveloper]

Or are we at the point where people just want a chat room with a GUI laid on top a la Second Life again?

this
chatting and acting silly is the best source of fun, it really allows me to escape real life
when i 'progress' i feel like i'm living a very minimal and watered down version of real life, maximum effort for the 'end goal' and little to no fun

[ellieg]

It probably makes more sense in context that mmoc is generally considered at least amongst itself as more competitive and less casual - and competitive pkayers usually aren't at a want for gear, or could make do with less. I think it makes sense to see more of the sentiment here, though it's likely less common around the rest of the game generally.

I've always thought the opposite lol. Except for a handful of ppl, most are super casual on here imo.

[Freedom]

My main game right now is Star Trek Online, where the true and most ardently indulged in endgame is "Space Barbie". DPS-chasing in that game is a side-hobby for a small number of folk, most people don't really care about it at all. I also play a good deal of SWTOR where 'better' gear really only matters if you're doing Ops and you get max level gear for doing pretty much any of the content in the game, slower for some content, and quicker for others. And right now I very much enjoy those games so much more than WoW and the "work ethic engine" that it's built to be.

If WoW removed gear as a measure of power in the game it really wouldn't make much difference to me other than something removed from a list to check off as having gotten 'done'. If you're playing for gear and power you're on a sad treadmill of being reset to zero every major patch, xmog is forever

What happens when you get "enough"? I used to play for transmog, and eventually found that I had sets I loved on my main character, and... didn't really feel like I needed any more. Needless to say I quit shortly after that.

At least with power gain you can get the satisfaction of going back and stomping old content that used to give you trouble, without having to level up to make it trivial. Or what a lot of people like - getting more gear to push farther into content, or even just to parse higher. By the time I quit I had become jaded about the gear treadmill prior, and the two things that kept me playing were the story and the transmog. When I ended up being jaded with transmog, I quickly after that also stopped caring much about the story (or at least the desire to experience it first hand).

If you have both cosmetic rewards and power rewards, and a player (like me) liked both, then that means there's not one thing you can become disillusioned with that causes you to leave, but two. So it is in Blizzard's interest to try and give players as many different reasons to play as possible to retain people on that one or two things they like about WoW, whether it's pet battles, the story, PvP(power gain), M+(power gain), raiding (power gain) or transmog.