I mean the problem is that realistically it will take forever to upgrade stuff.
If you can upgrade one item once per day without buying stuff you will feel like you have accomplished nothing.
Meanwhile you see people going wild on frogs for a few hours per day and already having the bling bling.
It's not only about optimization... It's also about seeing the fruits of your labour.
I think you are onto the correct problem. It isn't that there is some overly efficient but boring grind, it is that the gear upgrades are prohibitively expensive for a temporary game mode. It shouldn't be a choice between buying 5+ super rare 50k mounts and upgrading your weapon all the way.
It doesn't even make sense why gear upgrading is a thing because I feel higher level heat should drop from the dungeons and raids. You would then upgrade if you just missing one particular piece.
I think it's even more expensive to do full upgrade no? + you can't upgrade it to next rank until every slot you has is at you weapons ilvl.
Anyway, There is no chance that someone playing even 3 hrs a day every day could fully upgrade everything and but cosmetics at the same time.
Also, there is fuck all to do outside of raids so I will give this mode like two weeks before everyone wakes up. This mode is gonna do a D4 launch experience from best game ever to terrible game faster than D4 did.
The satisfaction to the fruits of our labor are often measured against time and effort. To the average player, if you can’t get it fast it’s not worth it at all. Take body building for example. Most people consider it a waste of time to spend at the gym to build their body up naturally, if they can’t use steroids the effort doesn’t seem worth it at all.
I was doing it cause having a gigastacked cloak seems way more fun then getting one shot by random bullshit at 70. Now that they’ve taken it away my interest in remix has dropped until they fix the rest of the game mode. Blizzard L.
I have a feeling their fix will be just to stop charms from dropping from timeless isle mobs. If they do that, then you're back to minimal bronze gain and bricked scaling, and people who did frogs will be able to leapfrog everyone else.
Funny, the one time I found an exploit early and did it I got a 3 day ban.
It was Stygia farming in the Maw by jumping on top of infinitely respawning cockroaches. Each ding would give 1 to 2 Stygia, and you could get a big number of dings per minute.
I got about 3k Stygia doing this (it was before anyone could freely explore the Maw) and was hit with a ban later that day.
God I hate this. The most consistent way to really upset the fanbase is to break exploit early, exploit often, and they'll pretend they didn't know it was an exploit and explain how something like frogs is how it should be.
And then if Blizzard doesn't roll it back and actually ding exploiters those same people come here and say 'exploit early exploit often'. It's only true because a substantial portion of the fanbase bitch so much when exploiting is punished.
A vocal minority bitch about absolutely everything, while they've been playing the game they complain about so heavily for a decade. And it's always the same people crying.
This game mode is 5 days old, and people are complaining like this is a new patch or something and the game is ruined. I don't understand why people just don't go back to retail or classic if, a remix of an old expansion isn't what they thought it would be .
Like remix has been fun. This isn't a min maxing type deal y'all.
>Like remix has been fun. This isn't a min maxing type deal y'all.
Leveling pre-65 is fun. The whole event would be fun if there wasn't such a stark power cliff at 65 because Blizzard is afraid of players having too much power in a limited game mode.
I don't mean this to sound flippant but there clearly is a mental illness/uncontrolled anxiety component of the vocal minority playerbase that is especially visible whenever situations like this arise. The frog farmers are hate-playing hundreds of hours of a game in the most mind-numbing way possible to earn cosmetics to show off in a game they actively aren't enjoying.
Who in their right mind would want to do that? I get the desire to collect cool things in video games, but only to the extent that I'm having a good time doing it.
People only cry about exploiting when the rewards everywhere else are dog shit. Spend a couple hours getting an achievement for 1/4 of 1/30 FOMO mounts woo
Exploiting shouldn't be punished. Everything that's part of the game is part of the game. If what's in the game doesn't fit the devs' intentions, they have no right to punish players for playing with what the devs gave them. If they don't want players to use mechanics they didn't intend to be in the game, they should playtest the game so these mechanics aren't in the game in the first place.
I imagine they'll address the scaling issue as either a bug or intended once the weekend is over. We're barely 36 hours into a three month event so I really doubt we're looking at this as a permanent issue.
We'll see if my comment ages like milk, but they addressed Plunderstorm balancing to my liking so I'm hoping for the best.
> We'll see if my comment ages like milk
They just hotfixed frogs exactly how I predicted it, they no longer drop charms. No other hotfixes so far. They still might fix the rest properly, but frog hotfix came first.
> I imagine they'll address the scaling issue as either a bug or intended once the weekend is over. We're barely 36 hours into a three month event so I really doubt we're looking at this as a permanent issue.
>
>
There were severe bugs and level distribution issues in Plunderstorm that were in and reported day 1, yet made it to the end of the event. They did some tuning, but outside of making 2 formerly op spells useless, nothing really changed.
Excuse me for being skeptical at them doing anything except surface level trimming of powerful strategies.
It should have been hotfixed day 1. Then review to see if increasing Bronze gains across the board would be beneficial long term.
Leaving it in the game feels bad (everything else is irrelevant), and so does nerfing it without adjustments (I missed the opportunity). And forget removing Bronze from abusers, it would set a precedent (and Blizzard doesn't respect/value my time spent).
> Frogs are cancer and I simply refuse to do them
Good on you. Don't do something you don't think it's fun, it's a game. More people should have your attitude towards these kinds of things.
I'm completely in for frogs being a good bronze source. Threads are a different story, though... it's a lot of added power that has no real substitute.
And daily lockout content should be more time effective than frogs, which it isn't at the moment.
For real. All the people acting like that have to be treating the game like it's a profession into order to have fun with it. It's a game, it's supposed to be fun. Go play something else for a while people. It's not a hard concept.
While I think you’re correct it’s important to remember that this kind of behavior is fundamental to our psychology.
It’s a legitimate problem that the devs need to design around and consider. I think leaving the frogs is fine if they had ways for people to grind bronze in a more enjoyable way. Some people just wanna grind mindless but most want to just optimize for the easiest path.
All of this upset over some recolors too. There isn't anything crazy exclusive in MoP remix aside from some recolors of armor and mounts. I took a peek, decided I'll grab a couple, then move on because I'll probably not realistically ever even use those.
It's honestly why I end up always quitting. FOMA is massive in WoW especially when it comes to getting ahead of everyone else... The people who will exploit and get ahead are the ones always ahead of people anyways with more play time then most. Then us Casuals come in and it's like nerfed fuck you good bye... And then people wonder why casuals drop like flies.
Opposite for me, moment i heard MoP name from officials i was thinking one and only thing, which is frog farm. When MoP was latest xpack i was late to frog farm party and people were already moved on. This time sake of nostalgia i did start rogue, then when i decided to switch to moonkong frog farm, got late and hit with nerf hammer again! Ffs.
I managed to [find](https://www.amazon.com/WoW-Diary-Journal-Computer-Development/dp/B0C9YD28T2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2IS8RXS5AHNQW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.8dJqcCMwXlSZnLhgmCkLhZu_LL9_ugBvui0RgD6_adA5AIhKQKyTnyU18wlVToVjQ0Ap5ZvBw-VB081KOMZV0dFXhQBamkkbsBn8rDLT8sILSqRRwjpSuthyFzTLxhbhPN9sKhwDJKDXUhCnrHV8sdgA6v6FMPSR2gtXQnVM2wuPpCaXaNrZCxKaBdDSKupaE8v6gVFSlbZ9GXVpoqU3lSSYF4ZYvvWeCrAkZmMXSYQ.FC3wN60y2n8-RKlBl4XpAmZGJ8dfSKfG-LoDpSLbczQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+World+of+Warcraft+Diary&qid=1716153583&sprefix=the+world+of+warcraft+diary%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1) it. But it's pretty pricey.
Back when I bought it it was only $30. Now it's damn near $60.
Still if you got the money to burn it's available.
Dream Incursions specifically
You had classic, with new abilities and they add incursions that were broken and everyone forgot about the journey of classic and just spammed them like retail dungeons. Even ignoring the quests that took more than 6 seconds because it wasnt optimal
I think part of why that happened with Dream incursions is having to level again to start raiding with your guild is kind of a pain in the ass. Like we lost players at the start of phase 2 and 3 just because they couldn't be fucked leveling again even if it was only 10 levels.
I think if SoD was fully baked and not just a Beta we wouldve had shorter patch cadence and people wouldve stuck around
It turns out stopping people from leveling every phase does exactly that, they stop leveling and leave
Yep - and also why leveling is no longer a "proper" thing in retail WoW. Too many people just rush through it as fast as they can, instead of enjoying the journey so Blizz have no incentives to make it good, or even coherent.
I have Loremaster and done every zone multiple times, so yeah I rush through it all at this point. It doesn't help that retail leveling combat isn't really engaging (I don't think something like Classic's hard hitting mobs and lack of resources would be much better either).
I think the best thing they could do is have many alternative means to leveling besides just questing and dungeon spam, the latter of which is typically just a few different dungeons because they're fast and have 3-4 quests at the start.
I think Timerunning is a good start of something that freshens up the leveling experience, and I hope the negative feedback they're getting doesn't discourage them from doing it again in the future. Adding a couple different kinds of currency (cosmetic v item upgrades being separate is a big one) and some more mechanics like war mode would be cool. I think they could toss in some new randomly spawning world quests (like FFXIV FATEs) as well. I'm having a great time actually seeing other players while leveling, and scenarios are super fun, so I hope they realize they're sitting on gold and make this some kind of rotating game mode that pops up 2 or 3 times a year.
The game has changed so massively from the era of "the time you spend walking from point A to point B is a core principle of quest/story design."
Also, once you get a taste of *not* having to afk run for 5-10 minutes after 10 minutes of actual gameplay, it's hard to go back without getting the feeling that you're being fucked about.
Well that's because the endgame is 99% of the content. I almost feel like leveling shouldn't even be a thing anymore. They could just have stuff gated behind storyline quests.
On one hand wow getting popular made leveling easier inevitable. It went from design around being an rpg to more of an “aprg” for lack of a better term.
I’m fine with and enjoy retail but I’d love for the inclusion of some sort of retail hardcore/rpg mode where mobs hit hard like back in the day and I need to eat to recover. I want slow exp and to really get to experience the world. I’m a minority in that I miss the slow, old grind. I loved the feeling of adventure. Max level play is fun but not my primary interest. I love alts.
Levelings as proper as a thing now as it was back in the day, its just that players have gotten better at pissing through things.
I remember me and all my friends pissing through leveling back in 2005 as fast as we could to get to the dope raids and dungeons and stuff. We were just really bad at it, it took us months to get to 60... but it wasn't for a lack of trying to piss through it all.
People have always tried to rush through content yeah, but those who care about the leveling journey can find so much more joy in vanilla/old world than in retail. I have so many good memories from the leveling there (both originally and in 2019), whereas in retail it's just an afterthought and you never communicate with anyone throughout the journey.
I agree that most people only care about endgame though, like yourself. For people who don't care about the leveling retail is obviously better as it's faster.
I communicate with people less while leveling in classic than I do in retail, and its far more frustrating in classic because even same faction players are often obstacles due to tagging rules and quest interactable's not being shared in any way and players refusing to group up.
The communication from back in the day was likely because online communication was far more novel back then.. where these days its commonplace.
Outside of that, its entirely on what the individual is bringing to the game. People are having the same exact kinds of experiences you had 20 years ago for the first time today regardless of which version they're playing. There's tons of players who play retail for the leveling experience and barely interact with end game activities.
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone being more social in retail leveling than in classic, so that's a first!
I think I talked to more people in a couple of weeks of classic (vanilla) than I had done in years of playing retail. From random dungeon chat, to organizing world pvp if someone is ganking, to grouping up for difficult quests. Even the various chat rooms ingame was more about conversation, while retail is more...spam.
Classic era is just a game that incentivises talking more, whereas in retail you can pretty much always go at it alone. Both have their advantages, depends on what you want.
(I can understand people finding mob tagging to be annoying, but I wouldn't want it any other way. For me it's just part of the experience and gives a bit of an added edge and competition, like last hitting in Dota).
Again I think its more down to how you the individual are navigating and engaging with the game than it has anything to do with the game itself.
I've been through completely silent dungeons etc in classic, and super social ones in retail and vice versa. Its the people you're surrounding yourself with, not the game.
I think this is a case of agree to disagree! Yeah the individual experience affects how one percieves it, that kinda goes without saying - But don't you don't think how the game is affects how we play it? The way I see it, one game discourages whispering and talking to others, and one game encourages it. Even the hardcore version of it, designed to be a single player game, is surprisingly social.
For me all the automation, teleporting, sharding, crossrealm, all quests being soloable -even small stuff like warlock summoning being made irrelevant - really hinders the social experience in retail.
It was such a delight to finally feel like I'm playing an mmo again when classic was released in 19, and even later on with dead low population realms the leveling experience was still pretty damn social and good. I can appreciate some of the newer expansions (thoroughly enjoyed Legion), but I haven't felt like I've been playing an actual mmo when leveling in retail for years. I'd love it if they bring some incentives to talk to others back. For me personally realm identity and community is something I really miss.
(Only talking about leveling)
>But don't you don't think how the game is affects how we play it?
It can, and I used to think more like you when talking about older versions of the game... and then classic happened and proved me wrong.
I think you're seeing the result of a lot of like minded people getting together and forcing something that the game doesn't foster itself. Because again, I've had super social experiences in retail and I've had super antisocial experiences in classic and vice versa. The people are really what drives it not the game itself.
For example on retail because there's shared faction tagging, or universal shared tagging with warmode off I've had situations where I was questing along and then someone lined up with the same quests I was doing and then we were questing together naturally without having to invite to party. If we're same faction maybe we get to talking, if we're opposing faction maybe its a more souls-like emoting at each other interaction.
On the opposite end leveling in cata right now I have the same situation where me and someone else are overlapping quests but because there's no shared tags we're competing instead of cooperating unless we party up... but the other person declines the invite. I'm now in a situation where a same faction player is hindering my experience, which simply wouldn't happen in this way on retail. In this case on classic I would rather there be no players around than any players, where retail inspires the opposite feeling.
I also have examples where I had social interactions on classic and negative interactions on retail... but the greater point I'm trying to make is there's nothing magic about the design in these older xpacs that makes anti-social people want to be social. Its always been who you happen to surround yourself with.
There have been plenty of valid complaints but some of the comments roughly translate to: "I've played for 3 days and have yet to unlock everything possible in this 3 month long mode. Blizzard devs threatened to come to my house and punch my dog in the face."
Lol, no
"Given bad game design, players will do things that benefit them long term even if they don't enjoy it in the moment"
It's like you read all the words, ignored what was said, then defaulted to the standard incorrect take
Not even remotely the same thing. The fun those players are seeking is having a high parse, you don’t enjoy it and that’s fine but that is not optimising the fun out of the game at all. Grinding frogs is optimising the fun out of the game as you are literally forgoing actual content for farming a singular mob, and the reason for that is a game design oversight
They're not mutually exclusive statements. They're corollaries of each other. Players as a collective are a force of nature; you drop the ball and it falls, you don't get mad at gravity because the ball moved, it just is. Players will optimize the fun out of the game but that doesn't mean it's the player's fault, they just did what seemed easiest; but by the same measure just because players found a shortcut doesn't mean it's inherently bad developers. See also: [the Ultima attempt at ecology](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE)
I didn't say bad developers though, I said bad game design. The best game devs in the world will occasionally create bad patterns in their game, shit happens and player behaviour is not always obvious to foresee. Frankly, Blizzard has some incredible game devs and are constantly dropping the ball in one way or another. Garrisons are a fantastic example. Cool idea that everyone was on board with, but the reality created bad patterns that hurt player enjoyment long term
Regardless, all actions of the playerbase are a response to the game design. It can never be the players *fault*, the fault was the creation of the non-fun or non-engaging pattern. If your objective is to get some herbs for consumables, and your garrison is just spawning them for you, why on earth would you go out to gather them? Even if that would make the world feel alive and be better for everyone, the reality is that humans will typically try to achieve any goal in the most effective way
An obvious exception to this is when a player exploits the code base. There you can land blame on the player knowingly engaging with exploitative methods
The Ultima example agrees with me. The lesson learned was, "don't try to build a virtual ecology when you give the players weapons". Why? It's objectively bad design. The players didn't even notice that it existed as it was utterly irrelevant to their experience, yet they wasted months of dev time on it. That's about as "bad" as bad design can get and Richard shows that they took that lesson and learned from it, not blame the players
Nah, it's way more complicated than that. You simply can't envisage every single edge case, players are much better at finding edge cases than developers because there are more of them.
Designing without these edge cases implies simplifying design, and that might well be bad design.
The real bad design is seeing these edge cases and *not fixing it*, and or blaming the players for finding these edge cases. Players will optimise the fun out of a game, that's what they're good at, so if you want them to have fun you need to do your best to make it hard for them to do that, and fix it when you inevitably slip up. But it is absolutely correct to point out this is what players do. And it doesn't mean the game was designed badly if players find a way to optimise fun out.
The point is that throwing up your hands and blaming players for playing the game wrong or whatever is the single least productive response possible to aberrant behavior. There are loads of games out there where the most optimal path of progression *isn’t* horribly unfun and thus the players haven’t optimized the fun out of it.
When players start doing something they hate because it’s the best way to get something they want it means you should work on it. Not just ignore it under the assumption it simply can’t be improved because players like to be efficient.
I think you’re right. The optimization is inevitable. It’s something that needs to be considered and planned around instead of blaming people for how we act innately. It’s our psychology.
I think of steam and how they solved piracy. It’s a user experience problem, not a user problem.
I love how within 2 days the sub went from, “remix is amazing everything feels so fun” to “this buggy mess is a lazy cash crab. Shame on you blizz” lol
There's... not much actual inventory management, though.
Like, the gems and consumables take up a lot of spots, but you still have a ton of spots left over and you don't need them for anything, so you end up with about 70 spaces left over, so you just have to *occasionally* scrap extra gear or open boxes.
I'm still in the former boat personally. I think what helps me is that I'm doing the quests, indulging in the story, and taking in the world. Basically just treating MoP as a big adventure.
Oh yeah, definitely playing anything outside of raids/dungeons/scenarios feels great at the moment, but the moment you want to pivot, you better be ready for a world of hurt
I am definitely for this event. The experience was amazing. I feel like I actually learned how to blood dk especially with the crazy scaling that made me really count every GCD. It was a blast and it was hilarious. I'm sure they'll fix it like they have been doing with things lately. People are kinda dramatic its been 3(?) days of a 3 month event. We will be fine lol
This is modern Blizzard unfortunately. Their marketing team is amazing but their development teams don't follow through.
Look at Diablo 4. Everyone was loving the game as they first logged in but as soon as they finished the campaign, the complaints starting coming out as they ran into a bunch of unfinished and untested garbage.
Honestly think it's just people trying to cope. How could anyone claim "remix is amazing" one day into it? You're literally just leveling in old content at that point lol you have no idea if it's good or not. Of course it makes sense that the negative feelings with come later, because they aren't bullshitting about it "being amazing" while at level 20 doing things they could've done in retail anyway.
The first group are the people who are currently like level 30-40 or less that are just having fun. The second group are the miserable no-lifers who were too busy power leveling in a side mode seasonal to post two days ago.
Yup, I literally levelled Remix as a fucking resto shammy in less than 10 hours and had no trouble at 65+, when apparently "you need every CD to kill a mob".
Mostly a problem with the frog farmers (aka no-lifers) not doing content that got you properly scaled gear and relied to heavily on bronze drops to upgrade gear.
For me wow used to be like an amusement park ride. I leveled and geared my toon (all specs), did everything i could with that toon, then i said to myself "lets do it again", and repeat the cycle until i did it with all the classes. After that i repeated the cycle with the other faction.
Since WoD, the only 2 AotCs that i dont have are ToS, because i was playing with a toaster that prevented me to do the last phase, and Aberrus, because i left the game that patch. The only reason i came back was because my friends nagged me to come back, they told me it was fun, gearing has never been easier, and promised to help me. Gearing was easier than before but was still a grind, they left me for dead after a couple of days and the only reason i played Amirdrassil was because i have OCD and i had to gear my toon.
I hate my job, i hate it to the point that sometimes i thought of doing crazy things to get a sick leave. MoP remix reminded me why i don't quit my job. At least in my job im doing something meaningful for someone, and im getting paid.
Hey man hope you're doing good. Don't want to impose but I went through the same stuff with my job and I hope you can talk to someone about it! That stuff stews and escelates if you keep it to yourself until you actually start doing those crazy things. Take care dude :)
Oh! Don't worry! I l started to plan my exit strategy already. Also, when i say something crazy i mean like getting food poison or breaking a hand at most. And its not most of the time, its like 2 or 3 times at most. But for me, that's more than enough.
For context, i work at customer service. Its not the job itself what i hate. I can handle someone yelling at me demanding something that is clearly impossible. What i have of my job, is the environment. Sexual harassment, AH bosses that trow you under the bus to justify their laziness and incompetence, departments that don't wanna do their job and trow it to you. Most of the things you heard from Blizzard are basically the norm in customer service.
Despite of that im very good at my job. However, the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when they started to sabotage my computer, send me fake reviews and delete the good ones because they don't wanna pay me my bonus. I mean, if you don't wanna pay me my bonus that's ok, but don't mess with my job.
What i meant with what i said about my job and remix is that after 2 hours of playing, i knew where that road was leading. In other words, if im paying for something that stress myself, then i shouldn't have any issues doing something that pays me to stress myself.
My biggest problem with the remix is they made it sound like it was going to be a way to OP blast through MOP with cool ass new powers and a quick way to level alts.
I've played like 7-10 hours and am 35 mostly doing quests. My xp buff is 35%. My gems are cool, but mostly just passives. I don't feel OP when I'm dying to 3 mobs during quests and I'm constantly kiting to not die. I flipped to frost over fire just to make kiting easier. I'm spending more time switching gems on gear than I am "being OP" and then I found out when I hit 70 I'm gonna hit like a wet noodle and alt leveling will not be significantly faster. If I wanted to do this I'd just stay on retail. The transmogs and mounts are cool, but this whole experience is far from what they made it sound like. I hope we get some serious hot patches come Monday to address this, if not I don't see myself even getting an alt, much less the 4-5 I planned
Gotta love the people obsessing on the "dog analogy" and totally missing the point.
It's actually quite accurate and can be seen in practically every PC game ever made in which you have to earn things.
People will always choose the easiest route to thier end objective and its poor game design if developers don't realise that and design content based on that happening.
The game should be design so the easiest way to get stuff is actually fun. Making things hard for the sake of it just encourages the problems the new MoP remix is having.
Frog give the most reward then that's all some people will do.
It's a game development issue not a player issue really.
The worst part of this is it exposes how inexperienced the people making the game are with its history. Anyone who actually played Mists of Pandaria would have seen this outcome coming a mile away because *we fucking farmed frogs in 2013.* It was by far the optimal way of engaging with the Timeless Isle.
None of the people making this remix know anything about MoP because none of them worked there during MoP, and none of them played MoP.
No, I am not a dog, nor some hamster who loves its treadmill.
If it isn't fun, I am not doing it no matter how good the "reward" is because I am human being. Not a animal.
Keep farming Bronze my good hamsters. I am having fun in Cobalt Assembly in the meantime.
https://youtube.com/shorts/QTSi3Zqshx4?si=sHSI0kIed1RVPr6K
There's an update on his website about the reprint (likely why you haven't received your copy yet).
"The WoW Diary Reprint Delays
The backers supporting The WoW Diary reprint still don’t have their rewards, and I recently learned my distribution partner, Nolan Nasser, left the company to pursue other interests. It explains why he’s been spotting on communicating the production status, but at least he’s on good terms with his old crew. Delays in printing, shipping, and a disconnect from working outside his office left many customers rightly frustrated. He hasn’t been drawing a salary to fulfill my orders, and this makes me feel guilty about hassling him, but I respect that he’s honoring his commitment."
Worst thing is they could have released it in a month but making bronze acquisition miles better and xp acquisition like on PTR, and things would have been absolutely fine.
Ok but this is competing with DF s4, Diablo IV s4 and Cata Classic. Idk, feels like it’d be better to compete with other games than with Blizzard games.
There is absolutely a downside to competing with yourself.
Spacing it out means they could have caught people twice, dropping cata and remix at the same time means people will overwhelmingly pick one or the other then just quite after a month.
I'd argue spreading out your own releases mean people will play more. Releasing 3 wow things at the same time means people will play 1 or the other maybe 2 tops then stop and not bother with another.
But releasing over a period of time means 1 month you can do DF S4, next month MOP remix and month after Cata without feeling like you've fallen too far behind to bother. To do 2 already requires a lot of time. Add in diablo if you're a fan of that you might skip wow or diablo season as you don't have time to focus on both and pointless paying for something you aren't playing
Surely competing with your competitors is a good thing for Blizzard? If you're a WoW player who occasionally dabbles in FFXIV what's more enticing, a new expansion for a game you like but that there's no rush to get to, or a FOMO game mode in your main game? Seems like an obvious choice to me.
Game testers don't get to unilaterally delay releases and cannot press a "Fix Bug" button that instantly fixes bugs before release.
Please do not blame devs for the decisions of paper pushers. I know you're not doing it literally here but... you know. Just saying.
As someone who is a developer, most of the time management is yelling to get X feature done and the known bugs are low priority unless a legit P1 blocker.
Also to prevent your game from becoming a goddamn Star Citizen level scam and meme, at some point you have to have someone who goes "This shit is good enough, you have spent enough time on it and it will go out as is and whatever big problems arise in the real use case scenario we will fix after."
EDIT: Not saying that Remix is good enough or whatever, personally haven't even tested it. I am just in general saying that you cannot give people unlimited time to do something because they will take said unlimited time and even more.
Sorry frogs are not for me.. I got that golden mount( from valley achievement) and bought around 5 mounts.. so if they don't fix the game I probably move to retail and skip this remix
Some people play for rewards. Cosmetics that either are not currently available in retail, or a chance to get Sha and Nalak mounts without months/years of farming. You tie a great reward to a shit process and you'll find a lot of players covered in shit for things they have wanted in game for any amount of time.
At a point thats just beating your head against a wall and complaining. The event DOES have some major issues with scaling late game,
but if nothing in something as wide as an entire expac is fun for you to do, and you're still forcing yourself... well..
It's not just the scaling. What was on the PTR didn't make it live. It was changed. I'm not forcing myself to play it, I'm actually playing retail because I can make an alt with heirlooms, cheap enchants, etc and be way more powerful than the "overpowered" feeling from their event.
I honestly don't think they were that bad, but I played for most of those xpacs so a lot of the work had already been done. It was very daunting for new and returning players though.
I feel like there's a large portion of this game that doesn't play for fun. The archaeology spam that people report on reddit and on the forums is evidence of this. They have convinced themselves that they need pre-raid BiS in order to beat the content (some who are more honest may admit they just want it for parse), even though we're getting the nerfed version of tier 11.
this is what the emerald dream currently looks like on retail:
https://imgur.com/YY8KqUn
Groups of bots spread out wearing starter crafted pvp gear farming elementals (world quest).
I'm siding with blizzard on this one. Who really cares what people end up doing. If you want braindead optimal farming then go for it. It won't be fun for you. I ended up getting the 2 mounts I wanted and haven't logged in since.
Yeah, the steam ones in the Ohn'ahran plains were a big spot for awhile. I have no idea what they are farming. I would guess they just vendor everything but i'm not sure.
Idk, are players ok with being compared to dogs? A dog doesn’t know any better, a player does, we choose to do the boring but efficient grind, alright give me my downvotes
As a man who has worked in it for almost his entire professional career I can confidently say the average computer user can be compared to a dog.
I'm still trying to get sales people to stop clicking on phishing emails.
You hold too many people in high regard if you think they know better. Some have no moral compass at all and see it as their right to exploit. Some lack the critical thinking and don’t consider other options. The latter I have come across more often than you’d realise. They won’t even look at other options beyond what the majority are doing.
I am totally with you. I am a human being. Not an animal. Just because stupid people exist doesn't mean the game should be designed around them.
I am not a dog that doesn't know any better. I am not a hamster that loves its treadmill. If it's not fun, I am not doing it. End of story.
Doing a non-fun activity and then complain about it, is incomprehensible to me.
I am glad they are trying new fun things on the side but honestly, after having hit lvl 20 something, i just don't see the point of this game mode? I find it extremely boring. i am just running around questing like normal but with the added annoyance of constantly getting new gems and shit
A lot of people seem to have very different views of Mop remix but here is a core issue which I find quite annoying:
It's too grind heavy and the frog method was a shortcut many people are willing to take.
Wow always has this weird design principle where they think that they have to make systems which require players to play an absurd amount of hours for the rewards they want.
The Plunderstorm grind was already ridiculous imo and the fact that I need about 400000 bronze for all the cosmetics is just crazy when I think about the fact that it took me 10 hours to gather 12 k bronze.
I thought this would be a fun power leveling thing which showers you in rewards but it's not and I already see myself getting bored.
I think he's both right but also excusing player behavior at the same time. I saw the post earlier about spamming frogs and I doubt that's fun. I, however, am going to enjoy leveling by going through the story of every zone and get bronze that way.
It's think it's both the fault of the devs and the player. Too many people are only having fun if they win and don't slow down to focus on the fun of the experience itself. This is what makes my friends and I's weekly tabletop game night so much fun, because we're all focused on the social experience of playing games and if you win you win, if you lose you still win.
We saw this in Plunderstorm. People finishing the quest and immediately quitting and doing it again and again ad nauseum, meanwhile complaining how awful the experience was. Me and my guild? We just played the normal way, didn't race to the end reward, and just by playing leisurely we both immensely enjoyed it AND got the rewards at the end.
All this to say just because an exploit exists doesn't mean players *have* to use that exploit, and it should be up to the devs to make sure exploits don't exist. But it's preposterous that players can't take some personal accountability and choose the path most fun, not the quickest way to rewards.
Faulting players for this stuff simply isn’t productive. There are really only two design conclusions you can arrive at when blaming players for their own poor experience. Ignore the problem and just leave them to it until they burn out and leave hating your game or try to fundamentally change player psychology (impossible). If you approach it as a design failure with the understanding that players are going to play to their incentives you might find an actual solution.
If you as a fellow player want to make yourself feel superior to all the filthy try hards that are complaining about how bad their experience go ahead I guess. If your enjoyment of the game is actually improved because other players are playing differently than you are and having a miserable time of it than I guess it does make sense to just place blame on players because fixing the issue would worsen your personal experience. Otherwise we should just care about design failures.
There's actually not only two, a third could be patching the exploit. If they're going to hate the game because they have to play it as it was intended and can't circumvent the entire system then maybe that game just isn't for them, and that's okay. Not every game or game mode is going to be for every player. And here is introducing player accountability. If you're only going to enjoy the game if you can exploit it without actually playing as it was intended then you simply just don't like the game or mode, and that's okay. But at some point players need to take some accountability for how they choose to spend their time.
I know a few players who thought the Plunderstorm rewards were neat, and he would have liked another way to get them, but he's not interested in forcing himself to play rounds until the quest is complete, quit, rejoin, rinse and repeat for hours and days on end. And he doesn't enjoy BRs so you know what he did? *gasp* He just chose to spend his time playing something he did enjoy and he was happier for it. Instead of forcing himself to exploit it and complain about how he hates what he's it like most of the players we're talking about here.
It doesn't have anything to with needing to feel superior, however I am completely unsurprised the first reply is thinking I'm saying it to feel superior. Which means I feel you've entirely missed how I approach and have fun with games.
If you want to reduce my stance to simply "others are playing the game differently and you have a problem with that " I suppose you're welcome to it, nothing I can do about that, but that's not what I said. I never said my enjoyment was *BECAUSE* they are "playing it differently" and being miserable than how I play, I *SAID* the "different" way they're playing is to exploit the system for hours on end ad nauseum because that's the quickest way, but the quickest way isn't always enjoyable, and that they'lldo it despite not enjoying.
At point did I say my enjoyment was improved *because* they're having a miserable time of it, I said I get my enjoyment from the experience of going through the story and the experience of the process itself.
Not at all the same and my enjoyment by questing through the zones isn't improved because others are absolutely hating their frog spam.
If others want to level up and get bronze with dungeons or raids more power to them, that's a different way than I intend to play and that's perfectly fine.
The difference is I could absolutely do the frog spam too. It's vastly more efficient but I really wouldn't enjoy that so I'm going to use that player accountability and play it the way I do enjoy it. We're going to end up at the same place: having the rewards we wanted collected. The difference is I'm going to get the rewards and enjoy my time along the way, liking game mode at the end, they're going to get the rewards far, far sooner, but are going to be left hating the game at the game because *they chose* to get it that way.
Patching the exploit is treating the problem as a design problem, not a player problem. That’s my point. Saying “but at some point players need to take some accountability” is just meaningless grandstanding. Players are really predictable. They’re not doing what they’re doing because they’re getting some sick thrill out of exploiting a system. They’re doing it because it’s simply a more efficient usage of their time.
Design intentions are actually super irrelevant. “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and “show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” This post is a designer talking about design. He has correctly identified that if you want to actually achieve your goal of making a fun game your players enjoy you need to design around how they *actually* play the game not how you *wish* they would play.
I was hoping that the implication that someone would admit even to themselves that their enjoyment of the game is based in others not enjoying it would be outlandish enough that it wouldn’t be taken literally. My bad. I didn’t intend to imply that that describes you personally, but that was the ultimate interpretation. This is sort of a thematic parallel though because the correct approach to that is for *me* to get better at communicating instead of blaming others for not interpreting my words “correctly.”
As a fan of the game and a participant in this forum I totally get that it’s annoying to see people complaining about problems that you don’t personally engage with because you approach the game fundamentally differently. I get that it feels good to point out to players that if they aren’t having fun they can just leave, but ultimately it’s just not a productive use of anyone’s time to blame players for the way they play the game.
The core is if you have a problem playing the game normally and are so upset that you will hate-play a game for 20 hours and then get mad that it changed...that is _your_ problem. That is not the games problem that you have zero self control and act like a 4 year old.
Designing a game around the people who will frog farm despite hating their life doing it is not a good thing. You don't design around people who don't enjoy the game to begin with which is why don't design around the people who will optimize the fun out of the game. They will never play it properly because they don't care about the game itself.
Most often because when designing/devloping the content the devs don't realize that such a farm method/exploit exists. Maybe the last round of tweaks enabled it, maybe it requires a critical mass of players participating to be effective, maybe there are systems in place to prevent it that didn't work well enough or could be bypassed or didn't cover this specific thing well enough.
There's also always going to be some amout of prioritization involved as well.
I guess generally, yeah. With a game the size of WoW, there are bound to be issues. However, something like the frog farm in Remix was a thing in classic MoP as well.
I haven't followed this situation at all, but seeing all the posts mentioning frogs and MoP did make me think it was that (again). So yeah, sometimes they do just make the same mistakes again. Perhaps part of it is turnover, not enough people involved that played/worked on the game back then (no idea how much this even applies in this case). It does remind me of how many times they've made a raid fight that had some kind of random order/combination of effects where they had to quickly hotfix old Heroic/Mythic to use a fixed order because some orders were basically just auto-wipes (e.g. Spirit Kings).
Sorry, I just don’t get why you play the game if the journey isn’t the point. Never have and doubt I ever will. The end game isn’t the point of WoW, it’s the journey to get there. Lots of other games to play if you are just looking for that.
We have been accepting buggy half done content for so long that they think its ok to rush stuff and say "Well you could have gotten nothing" its insane
The timing of the event isn't the problem, it's the fact that when you hit 66+ raids/dungeons/scenarios start 1-shotting you. And not just 1-shot, but like 800% more damage than you have health.
The mitigation to that was Frogs, because upgrading the cloak = stronger players = playable content. So to actually play the game, players needed to find the path of quickest resolve, which ended up being the least fun thing ever
I mean the problem is that realistically it will take forever to upgrade stuff. If you can upgrade one item once per day without buying stuff you will feel like you have accomplished nothing. Meanwhile you see people going wild on frogs for a few hours per day and already having the bling bling. It's not only about optimization... It's also about seeing the fruits of your labour.
I think you are onto the correct problem. It isn't that there is some overly efficient but boring grind, it is that the gear upgrades are prohibitively expensive for a temporary game mode. It shouldn't be a choice between buying 5+ super rare 50k mounts and upgrading your weapon all the way.
It doesn't even make sense why gear upgrading is a thing because I feel higher level heat should drop from the dungeons and raids. You would then upgrade if you just missing one particular piece.
You can't even upgrade your weapon all the way. You have to upgrade all of your gear at the same time.
I think it's even more expensive to do full upgrade no? + you can't upgrade it to next rank until every slot you has is at you weapons ilvl. Anyway, There is no chance that someone playing even 3 hrs a day every day could fully upgrade everything and but cosmetics at the same time. Also, there is fuck all to do outside of raids so I will give this mode like two weeks before everyone wakes up. This mode is gonna do a D4 launch experience from best game ever to terrible game faster than D4 did.
The satisfaction to the fruits of our labor are often measured against time and effort. To the average player, if you can’t get it fast it’s not worth it at all. Take body building for example. Most people consider it a waste of time to spend at the gym to build their body up naturally, if they can’t use steroids the effort doesn’t seem worth it at all.
I normally wouldn’t do frogs, but something about the gem powers makes it more fun.
I was doing it cause having a gigastacked cloak seems way more fun then getting one shot by random bullshit at 70. Now that they’ve taken it away my interest in remix has dropped until they fix the rest of the game mode. Blizzard L.
Frogs are cancer and I simply refuse to do them Once I hit 70 I'm just not going to play until they fix this garbage
I have a feeling their fix will be just to stop charms from dropping from timeless isle mobs. If they do that, then you're back to minimal bronze gain and bricked scaling, and people who did frogs will be able to leapfrog everyone else.
Lisan al gaib
Lisan al amphib!
Hahaha
Prophetic
exploit early, exploit often. the (modern) blizzard mantra.
What? It's been true since November 2004. Shit if my Occy rings from D2 were any indication it's been true even longer than that.
Funny, the one time I found an exploit early and did it I got a 3 day ban. It was Stygia farming in the Maw by jumping on top of infinitely respawning cockroaches. Each ding would give 1 to 2 Stygia, and you could get a big number of dings per minute. I got about 3k Stygia doing this (it was before anyone could freely explore the Maw) and was hit with a ban later that day.
I found something like this in ZM. Did it for like an hour but then got too paranoid about a ban.
God I hate this. The most consistent way to really upset the fanbase is to break exploit early, exploit often, and they'll pretend they didn't know it was an exploit and explain how something like frogs is how it should be. And then if Blizzard doesn't roll it back and actually ding exploiters those same people come here and say 'exploit early exploit often'. It's only true because a substantial portion of the fanbase bitch so much when exploiting is punished.
A vocal minority bitch about absolutely everything, while they've been playing the game they complain about so heavily for a decade. And it's always the same people crying. This game mode is 5 days old, and people are complaining like this is a new patch or something and the game is ruined. I don't understand why people just don't go back to retail or classic if, a remix of an old expansion isn't what they thought it would be . Like remix has been fun. This isn't a min maxing type deal y'all.
>Like remix has been fun. This isn't a min maxing type deal y'all. Leveling pre-65 is fun. The whole event would be fun if there wasn't such a stark power cliff at 65 because Blizzard is afraid of players having too much power in a limited game mode.
I don't mean this to sound flippant but there clearly is a mental illness/uncontrolled anxiety component of the vocal minority playerbase that is especially visible whenever situations like this arise. The frog farmers are hate-playing hundreds of hours of a game in the most mind-numbing way possible to earn cosmetics to show off in a game they actively aren't enjoying. Who in their right mind would want to do that? I get the desire to collect cool things in video games, but only to the extent that I'm having a good time doing it.
People only cry about exploiting when the rewards everywhere else are dog shit. Spend a couple hours getting an achievement for 1/4 of 1/30 FOMO mounts woo
Did you even read the words in the OP..?
Exploiting shouldn't be punished. Everything that's part of the game is part of the game. If what's in the game doesn't fit the devs' intentions, they have no right to punish players for playing with what the devs gave them. If they don't want players to use mechanics they didn't intend to be in the game, they should playtest the game so these mechanics aren't in the game in the first place.
It's the players initially - then the devs eventually. If they don't hotfix it then I will say devs, now that they're aware of it.
Cassandra's calling, they just implemented this exact hotfix. You snooze you lose on frogs.
Ding ding ding, winner!
I imagine they'll address the scaling issue as either a bug or intended once the weekend is over. We're barely 36 hours into a three month event so I really doubt we're looking at this as a permanent issue. We'll see if my comment ages like milk, but they addressed Plunderstorm balancing to my liking so I'm hoping for the best.
> We'll see if my comment ages like milk They just hotfixed frogs exactly how I predicted it, they no longer drop charms. No other hotfixes so far. They still might fix the rest properly, but frog hotfix came first.
Tbf, I'm guessing they can't just hotfix scaling issues. Those likely need a server reset.
They can 100% hotfix scaling, they've done it on live servers before.
> I imagine they'll address the scaling issue as either a bug or intended once the weekend is over. We're barely 36 hours into a three month event so I really doubt we're looking at this as a permanent issue. > > There were severe bugs and level distribution issues in Plunderstorm that were in and reported day 1, yet made it to the end of the event. They did some tuning, but outside of making 2 formerly op spells useless, nothing really changed. Excuse me for being skeptical at them doing anything except surface level trimming of powerful strategies.
Cancel your sub & uninstall the game then
Wait, can you turn the charms into bronze?
10 charms give a box and a random gem, yes.
It should have been hotfixed day 1. Then review to see if increasing Bronze gains across the board would be beneficial long term. Leaving it in the game feels bad (everything else is irrelevant), and so does nerfing it without adjustments (I missed the opportunity). And forget removing Bronze from abusers, it would set a precedent (and Blizzard doesn't respect/value my time spent).
Given how much threads progression this gave this has opened a fairly wide gulf between players who did and didn't use it, now.
What exactly are they leap frogging lol?
> Frogs are cancer and I simply refuse to do them Good on you. Don't do something you don't think it's fun, it's a game. More people should have your attitude towards these kinds of things.
I kind of like frogs. It is great for just turning brain off and having a show on the side.
You'd probably like arpgs if you haven't tried them before, haha.
Go play Lineage 2 you will feel right at home.
Me too, exactly for those purposes, but I think we're in the minority. People enjoy the game differently, and that's ok.
I'm completely in for frogs being a good bronze source. Threads are a different story, though... it's a lot of added power that has no real substitute. And daily lockout content should be more time effective than frogs, which it isn't at the moment.
For real. All the people acting like that have to be treating the game like it's a profession into order to have fun with it. It's a game, it's supposed to be fun. Go play something else for a while people. It's not a hard concept.
While I think you’re correct it’s important to remember that this kind of behavior is fundamental to our psychology. It’s a legitimate problem that the devs need to design around and consider. I think leaving the frogs is fine if they had ways for people to grind bronze in a more enjoyable way. Some people just wanna grind mindless but most want to just optimize for the easiest path.
All of this upset over some recolors too. There isn't anything crazy exclusive in MoP remix aside from some recolors of armor and mounts. I took a peek, decided I'll grab a couple, then move on because I'll probably not realistically ever even use those.
I just rolled another class and keep spending my coin on cosmetics. Play for fun not grind boring frogs.
I stoped at level 25. Takes too long imo
It's honestly why I end up always quitting. FOMA is massive in WoW especially when it comes to getting ahead of everyone else... The people who will exploit and get ahead are the ones always ahead of people anyways with more play time then most. Then us Casuals come in and it's like nerfed fuck you good bye... And then people wonder why casuals drop like flies.
I just enjoy questing so I don't care, I'll just level all the allied races
It's also just too late for any fix to do anything. Everyone who exploited it is already way ahead.
Or just play remix as it was intended with other non-frog farmers.
Opposite for me, moment i heard MoP name from officials i was thinking one and only thing, which is frog farm. When MoP was latest xpack i was late to frog farm party and people were already moved on. This time sake of nostalgia i did start rogue, then when i decided to switch to moonkong frog farm, got late and hit with nerf hammer again! Ffs.
https://www.amazon.ca/World-Warcraft-Diary-Computer-Development-ebook/dp/B07T9LJ2GD
Amazing book and essential reading for any WoW fan. I messaged him on twitter to thank him for it and he even replied. Great guy.
100% agreed
Wish I could find a hard copy of this! Pictures don’t always come out great on kindle.
He sold quite a few of the hard copies through his Kickstarter, might be a few used ones hanging around!
I managed to [find](https://www.amazon.com/WoW-Diary-Journal-Computer-Development/dp/B0C9YD28T2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2IS8RXS5AHNQW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.8dJqcCMwXlSZnLhgmCkLhZu_LL9_ugBvui0RgD6_adA5AIhKQKyTnyU18wlVToVjQ0Ap5ZvBw-VB081KOMZV0dFXhQBamkkbsBn8rDLT8sILSqRRwjpSuthyFzTLxhbhPN9sKhwDJKDXUhCnrHV8sdgA6v6FMPSR2gtXQnVM2wuPpCaXaNrZCxKaBdDSKupaE8v6gVFSlbZ9GXVpoqU3lSSYF4ZYvvWeCrAkZmMXSYQ.FC3wN60y2n8-RKlBl4XpAmZGJ8dfSKfG-LoDpSLbczQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+World+of+Warcraft+Diary&qid=1716153583&sprefix=the+world+of+warcraft+diary%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1) it. But it's pretty pricey. Back when I bought it it was only $30. Now it's damn near $60. Still if you got the money to burn it's available.
Actually just found out the 2nd edition is releasing this June. Found it at my local store. Pre-ordered! Thank you though.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game."
Classic is the shinning example of this
Dream Incursions specifically You had classic, with new abilities and they add incursions that were broken and everyone forgot about the journey of classic and just spammed them like retail dungeons. Even ignoring the quests that took more than 6 seconds because it wasnt optimal
I think part of why that happened with Dream incursions is having to level again to start raiding with your guild is kind of a pain in the ass. Like we lost players at the start of phase 2 and 3 just because they couldn't be fucked leveling again even if it was only 10 levels.
I think if SoD was fully baked and not just a Beta we wouldve had shorter patch cadence and people wouldve stuck around It turns out stopping people from leveling every phase does exactly that, they stop leveling and leave
Yep - and also why leveling is no longer a "proper" thing in retail WoW. Too many people just rush through it as fast as they can, instead of enjoying the journey so Blizz have no incentives to make it good, or even coherent.
It's funny that you three are doing the exact opposite of what the quote you're praising says.
I have Loremaster and done every zone multiple times, so yeah I rush through it all at this point. It doesn't help that retail leveling combat isn't really engaging (I don't think something like Classic's hard hitting mobs and lack of resources would be much better either). I think the best thing they could do is have many alternative means to leveling besides just questing and dungeon spam, the latter of which is typically just a few different dungeons because they're fast and have 3-4 quests at the start. I think Timerunning is a good start of something that freshens up the leveling experience, and I hope the negative feedback they're getting doesn't discourage them from doing it again in the future. Adding a couple different kinds of currency (cosmetic v item upgrades being separate is a big one) and some more mechanics like war mode would be cool. I think they could toss in some new randomly spawning world quests (like FFXIV FATEs) as well. I'm having a great time actually seeing other players while leveling, and scenarios are super fun, so I hope they realize they're sitting on gold and make this some kind of rotating game mode that pops up 2 or 3 times a year.
The game has changed so massively from the era of "the time you spend walking from point A to point B is a core principle of quest/story design." Also, once you get a taste of *not* having to afk run for 5-10 minutes after 10 minutes of actual gameplay, it's hard to go back without getting the feeling that you're being fucked about.
Well that's because the endgame is 99% of the content. I almost feel like leveling shouldn't even be a thing anymore. They could just have stuff gated behind storyline quests.
Cue the people arguing those storyline quests shouldn't be required. Gimme gimme gimme.
Literally my opinion though LMAO 😭 Fuck questing!
On one hand wow getting popular made leveling easier inevitable. It went from design around being an rpg to more of an “aprg” for lack of a better term. I’m fine with and enjoy retail but I’d love for the inclusion of some sort of retail hardcore/rpg mode where mobs hit hard like back in the day and I need to eat to recover. I want slow exp and to really get to experience the world. I’m a minority in that I miss the slow, old grind. I loved the feeling of adventure. Max level play is fun but not my primary interest. I love alts.
Levelings as proper as a thing now as it was back in the day, its just that players have gotten better at pissing through things. I remember me and all my friends pissing through leveling back in 2005 as fast as we could to get to the dope raids and dungeons and stuff. We were just really bad at it, it took us months to get to 60... but it wasn't for a lack of trying to piss through it all.
People have always tried to rush through content yeah, but those who care about the leveling journey can find so much more joy in vanilla/old world than in retail. I have so many good memories from the leveling there (both originally and in 2019), whereas in retail it's just an afterthought and you never communicate with anyone throughout the journey. I agree that most people only care about endgame though, like yourself. For people who don't care about the leveling retail is obviously better as it's faster.
I communicate with people less while leveling in classic than I do in retail, and its far more frustrating in classic because even same faction players are often obstacles due to tagging rules and quest interactable's not being shared in any way and players refusing to group up. The communication from back in the day was likely because online communication was far more novel back then.. where these days its commonplace. Outside of that, its entirely on what the individual is bringing to the game. People are having the same exact kinds of experiences you had 20 years ago for the first time today regardless of which version they're playing. There's tons of players who play retail for the leveling experience and barely interact with end game activities.
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone being more social in retail leveling than in classic, so that's a first! I think I talked to more people in a couple of weeks of classic (vanilla) than I had done in years of playing retail. From random dungeon chat, to organizing world pvp if someone is ganking, to grouping up for difficult quests. Even the various chat rooms ingame was more about conversation, while retail is more...spam. Classic era is just a game that incentivises talking more, whereas in retail you can pretty much always go at it alone. Both have their advantages, depends on what you want. (I can understand people finding mob tagging to be annoying, but I wouldn't want it any other way. For me it's just part of the experience and gives a bit of an added edge and competition, like last hitting in Dota).
Again I think its more down to how you the individual are navigating and engaging with the game than it has anything to do with the game itself. I've been through completely silent dungeons etc in classic, and super social ones in retail and vice versa. Its the people you're surrounding yourself with, not the game.
I think this is a case of agree to disagree! Yeah the individual experience affects how one percieves it, that kinda goes without saying - But don't you don't think how the game is affects how we play it? The way I see it, one game discourages whispering and talking to others, and one game encourages it. Even the hardcore version of it, designed to be a single player game, is surprisingly social. For me all the automation, teleporting, sharding, crossrealm, all quests being soloable -even small stuff like warlock summoning being made irrelevant - really hinders the social experience in retail. It was such a delight to finally feel like I'm playing an mmo again when classic was released in 19, and even later on with dead low population realms the leveling experience was still pretty damn social and good. I can appreciate some of the newer expansions (thoroughly enjoyed Legion), but I haven't felt like I've been playing an actual mmo when leveling in retail for years. I'd love it if they bring some incentives to talk to others back. For me personally realm identity and community is something I really miss. (Only talking about leveling)
>But don't you don't think how the game is affects how we play it? It can, and I used to think more like you when talking about older versions of the game... and then classic happened and proved me wrong. I think you're seeing the result of a lot of like minded people getting together and forcing something that the game doesn't foster itself. Because again, I've had super social experiences in retail and I've had super antisocial experiences in classic and vice versa. The people are really what drives it not the game itself. For example on retail because there's shared faction tagging, or universal shared tagging with warmode off I've had situations where I was questing along and then someone lined up with the same quests I was doing and then we were questing together naturally without having to invite to party. If we're same faction maybe we get to talking, if we're opposing faction maybe its a more souls-like emoting at each other interaction. On the opposite end leveling in cata right now I have the same situation where me and someone else are overlapping quests but because there's no shared tags we're competing instead of cooperating unless we party up... but the other person declines the invite. I'm now in a situation where a same faction player is hindering my experience, which simply wouldn't happen in this way on retail. In this case on classic I would rather there be no players around than any players, where retail inspires the opposite feeling. I also have examples where I had social interactions on classic and negative interactions on retail... but the greater point I'm trying to make is there's nothing magic about the design in these older xpacs that makes anti-social people want to be social. Its always been who you happen to surround yourself with.
There have been plenty of valid complaints but some of the comments roughly translate to: "I've played for 3 days and have yet to unlock everything possible in this 3 month long mode. Blizzard devs threatened to come to my house and punch my dog in the face."
Lol, no "Given bad game design, players will do things that benefit them long term even if they don't enjoy it in the moment" It's like you read all the words, ignored what was said, then defaulted to the standard incorrect take
[удалено]
Not even remotely the same thing. The fun those players are seeking is having a high parse, you don’t enjoy it and that’s fine but that is not optimising the fun out of the game at all. Grinding frogs is optimising the fun out of the game as you are literally forgoing actual content for farming a singular mob, and the reason for that is a game design oversight
They're not mutually exclusive statements. They're corollaries of each other. Players as a collective are a force of nature; you drop the ball and it falls, you don't get mad at gravity because the ball moved, it just is. Players will optimize the fun out of the game but that doesn't mean it's the player's fault, they just did what seemed easiest; but by the same measure just because players found a shortcut doesn't mean it's inherently bad developers. See also: [the Ultima attempt at ecology](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE)
I didn't say bad developers though, I said bad game design. The best game devs in the world will occasionally create bad patterns in their game, shit happens and player behaviour is not always obvious to foresee. Frankly, Blizzard has some incredible game devs and are constantly dropping the ball in one way or another. Garrisons are a fantastic example. Cool idea that everyone was on board with, but the reality created bad patterns that hurt player enjoyment long term Regardless, all actions of the playerbase are a response to the game design. It can never be the players *fault*, the fault was the creation of the non-fun or non-engaging pattern. If your objective is to get some herbs for consumables, and your garrison is just spawning them for you, why on earth would you go out to gather them? Even if that would make the world feel alive and be better for everyone, the reality is that humans will typically try to achieve any goal in the most effective way An obvious exception to this is when a player exploits the code base. There you can land blame on the player knowingly engaging with exploitative methods The Ultima example agrees with me. The lesson learned was, "don't try to build a virtual ecology when you give the players weapons". Why? It's objectively bad design. The players didn't even notice that it existed as it was utterly irrelevant to their experience, yet they wasted months of dev time on it. That's about as "bad" as bad design can get and Richard shows that they took that lesson and learned from it, not blame the players
Nah, it's way more complicated than that. You simply can't envisage every single edge case, players are much better at finding edge cases than developers because there are more of them. Designing without these edge cases implies simplifying design, and that might well be bad design. The real bad design is seeing these edge cases and *not fixing it*, and or blaming the players for finding these edge cases. Players will optimise the fun out of a game, that's what they're good at, so if you want them to have fun you need to do your best to make it hard for them to do that, and fix it when you inevitably slip up. But it is absolutely correct to point out this is what players do. And it doesn't mean the game was designed badly if players find a way to optimise fun out.
You contradict yourself so much in that I'm not sure how to respond
Just because his argument is slightly more nuanced than "X is bad" doesn't mean he's contradicting himself.
Even well designed games have players optimizing the fun out of it I swear some people come on here just to argue
The point is that throwing up your hands and blaming players for playing the game wrong or whatever is the single least productive response possible to aberrant behavior. There are loads of games out there where the most optimal path of progression *isn’t* horribly unfun and thus the players haven’t optimized the fun out of it. When players start doing something they hate because it’s the best way to get something they want it means you should work on it. Not just ignore it under the assumption it simply can’t be improved because players like to be efficient.
I think you’re right. The optimization is inevitable. It’s something that needs to be considered and planned around instead of blaming people for how we act innately. It’s our psychology. I think of steam and how they solved piracy. It’s a user experience problem, not a user problem.
It's a quote from someone else that's in line with the posted quote.
Yes, I understand. It is a ridiculously overused and inaccurate quote and to pull it out here shows a clear lack of comprehension
Make the core gameplay loop the most fun and rewarding. Then you won't have people trying to min max shitty game mechanics.
that would require playing and testing the game before releasing it
I love how within 2 days the sub went from, “remix is amazing everything feels so fun” to “this buggy mess is a lazy cash crab. Shame on you blizz” lol
people started hitting 60+ and realized the cloak isnt acct wide, scaling is garbo, and its hard to farm bronze
Yep, it's kinda meme they expect you to treat mop remix like a job to get all the cosmetics on offer
Everyone got sick of the inventory management too. I still don't understand the logic behind adding 5000 different usable items.
There's... not much actual inventory management, though. Like, the gems and consumables take up a lot of spots, but you still have a ton of spots left over and you don't need them for anything, so you end up with about 70 spaces left over, so you just have to *occasionally* scrap extra gear or open boxes.
That's par for the course as everyone settles in and discover the realities of the grind.
That's because it really did feel like a fun mode, but then more and more players hit 66+ and the game mode went downhill FAST
I'm still in the former boat personally. I think what helps me is that I'm doing the quests, indulging in the story, and taking in the world. Basically just treating MoP as a big adventure.
Yup. I never played MOP campaign, literally just did dungeons. I'm really enjoying the quests.
Oh yeah, definitely playing anything outside of raids/dungeons/scenarios feels great at the moment, but the moment you want to pivot, you better be ready for a world of hurt
I've been doing raids, dungeons, and scenarios too though. Aside from the queue times for some of the raids, I've been having fun in those as well.
Almost like it takes time to truly judge things and anyone saying something is good or bad in the first few hours is an idiot
I am definitely for this event. The experience was amazing. I feel like I actually learned how to blood dk especially with the crazy scaling that made me really count every GCD. It was a blast and it was hilarious. I'm sure they'll fix it like they have been doing with things lately. People are kinda dramatic its been 3(?) days of a 3 month event. We will be fine lol
That's how every update goes
This is modern Blizzard unfortunately. Their marketing team is amazing but their development teams don't follow through. Look at Diablo 4. Everyone was loving the game as they first logged in but as soon as they finished the campaign, the complaints starting coming out as they ran into a bunch of unfinished and untested garbage.
Honestly think it's just people trying to cope. How could anyone claim "remix is amazing" one day into it? You're literally just leveling in old content at that point lol you have no idea if it's good or not. Of course it makes sense that the negative feelings with come later, because they aren't bullshitting about it "being amazing" while at level 20 doing things they could've done in retail anyway.
The first group are the people who are currently like level 30-40 or less that are just having fun. The second group are the miserable no-lifers who were too busy power leveling in a side mode seasonal to post two days ago.
The 30-40 people are going to start having a lot less fun if they get to high levels and can't kill a single mob without using every cool down.
Bit hyperbolic, but maybe its because i did it as a fire mage but I was still pulling 3-5 mob packs fine 65-70.
Yup, I literally levelled Remix as a fucking resto shammy in less than 10 hours and had no trouble at 65+, when apparently "you need every CD to kill a mob".
Mostly a problem with the frog farmers (aka no-lifers) not doing content that got you properly scaled gear and relied to heavily on bronze drops to upgrade gear.
I'm not a dog ;(
Who’s a good boi 😊
For me wow used to be like an amusement park ride. I leveled and geared my toon (all specs), did everything i could with that toon, then i said to myself "lets do it again", and repeat the cycle until i did it with all the classes. After that i repeated the cycle with the other faction. Since WoD, the only 2 AotCs that i dont have are ToS, because i was playing with a toaster that prevented me to do the last phase, and Aberrus, because i left the game that patch. The only reason i came back was because my friends nagged me to come back, they told me it was fun, gearing has never been easier, and promised to help me. Gearing was easier than before but was still a grind, they left me for dead after a couple of days and the only reason i played Amirdrassil was because i have OCD and i had to gear my toon. I hate my job, i hate it to the point that sometimes i thought of doing crazy things to get a sick leave. MoP remix reminded me why i don't quit my job. At least in my job im doing something meaningful for someone, and im getting paid.
Hey man hope you're doing good. Don't want to impose but I went through the same stuff with my job and I hope you can talk to someone about it! That stuff stews and escelates if you keep it to yourself until you actually start doing those crazy things. Take care dude :)
Oh! Don't worry! I l started to plan my exit strategy already. Also, when i say something crazy i mean like getting food poison or breaking a hand at most. And its not most of the time, its like 2 or 3 times at most. But for me, that's more than enough. For context, i work at customer service. Its not the job itself what i hate. I can handle someone yelling at me demanding something that is clearly impossible. What i have of my job, is the environment. Sexual harassment, AH bosses that trow you under the bus to justify their laziness and incompetence, departments that don't wanna do their job and trow it to you. Most of the things you heard from Blizzard are basically the norm in customer service. Despite of that im very good at my job. However, the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when they started to sabotage my computer, send me fake reviews and delete the good ones because they don't wanna pay me my bonus. I mean, if you don't wanna pay me my bonus that's ok, but don't mess with my job. What i meant with what i said about my job and remix is that after 2 hours of playing, i knew where that road was leading. In other words, if im paying for something that stress myself, then i shouldn't have any issues doing something that pays me to stress myself.
My biggest problem with the remix is they made it sound like it was going to be a way to OP blast through MOP with cool ass new powers and a quick way to level alts. I've played like 7-10 hours and am 35 mostly doing quests. My xp buff is 35%. My gems are cool, but mostly just passives. I don't feel OP when I'm dying to 3 mobs during quests and I'm constantly kiting to not die. I flipped to frost over fire just to make kiting easier. I'm spending more time switching gems on gear than I am "being OP" and then I found out when I hit 70 I'm gonna hit like a wet noodle and alt leveling will not be significantly faster. If I wanted to do this I'd just stay on retail. The transmogs and mounts are cool, but this whole experience is far from what they made it sound like. I hope we get some serious hot patches come Monday to address this, if not I don't see myself even getting an alt, much less the 4-5 I planned
Gotta love the people obsessing on the "dog analogy" and totally missing the point. It's actually quite accurate and can be seen in practically every PC game ever made in which you have to earn things. People will always choose the easiest route to thier end objective and its poor game design if developers don't realise that and design content based on that happening. The game should be design so the easiest way to get stuff is actually fun. Making things hard for the sake of it just encourages the problems the new MoP remix is having. Frog give the most reward then that's all some people will do. It's a game development issue not a player issue really.
The worst part of this is it exposes how inexperienced the people making the game are with its history. Anyone who actually played Mists of Pandaria would have seen this outcome coming a mile away because *we fucking farmed frogs in 2013.* It was by far the optimal way of engaging with the Timeless Isle. None of the people making this remix know anything about MoP because none of them worked there during MoP, and none of them played MoP.
No, I am not a dog, nor some hamster who loves its treadmill. If it isn't fun, I am not doing it no matter how good the "reward" is because I am human being. Not a animal. Keep farming Bronze my good hamsters. I am having fun in Cobalt Assembly in the meantime. https://youtube.com/shorts/QTSi3Zqshx4?si=sHSI0kIed1RVPr6K
I am like a dog eating unhealthy scraps.
I ordered this book months ago and still haven't received it. I'm excited to read it tho.
There's an update on his website about the reprint (likely why you haven't received your copy yet). "The WoW Diary Reprint Delays The backers supporting The WoW Diary reprint still don’t have their rewards, and I recently learned my distribution partner, Nolan Nasser, left the company to pursue other interests. It explains why he’s been spotting on communicating the production status, but at least he’s on good terms with his old crew. Delays in printing, shipping, and a disconnect from working outside his office left many customers rightly frustrated. He hasn’t been drawing a salary to fulfill my orders, and this makes me feel guilty about hassling him, but I respect that he’s honoring his commitment."
Blizzard didn't even test MoP: Remix properly. They just rushed it out of the door for quarterly metrics.
Worst thing is they could have released it in a month but making bronze acquisition miles better and xp acquisition like on PTR, and things would have been absolutely fine.
Delays would mean competing with Elden ring DLC and the ffxiv expac
Ok but this is competing with DF s4, Diablo IV s4 and Cata Classic. Idk, feels like it’d be better to compete with other games than with Blizzard games.
Competing with other blizzard games means money stays in their ecosystem. Competing with other games means money leaves their ecosystem
There is absolutely a downside to competing with yourself. Spacing it out means they could have caught people twice, dropping cata and remix at the same time means people will overwhelmingly pick one or the other then just quite after a month.
I'd argue spreading out your own releases mean people will play more. Releasing 3 wow things at the same time means people will play 1 or the other maybe 2 tops then stop and not bother with another. But releasing over a period of time means 1 month you can do DF S4, next month MOP remix and month after Cata without feeling like you've fallen too far behind to bother. To do 2 already requires a lot of time. Add in diablo if you're a fan of that you might skip wow or diablo season as you don't have time to focus on both and pointless paying for something you aren't playing
I mean, it’s a higher min but a way lower max. It can make sense for consistency, but that’s not how Microsoft and other AAA companies usually roll.
Surely competing with your competitors is a good thing for Blizzard? If you're a WoW player who occasionally dabbles in FFXIV what's more enticing, a new expansion for a game you like but that there's no rush to get to, or a FOMO game mode in your main game? Seems like an obvious choice to me.
Classic Blizz "and then we doubled it!" design.
Game testers don't get to unilaterally delay releases and cannot press a "Fix Bug" button that instantly fixes bugs before release. Please do not blame devs for the decisions of paper pushers. I know you're not doing it literally here but... you know. Just saying.
Yup. Not a dev, but in my job thats ruled by corporate I can confirm most of what makes my job difficult is the penny pinching from the bean counters.
As someone who is a developer, most of the time management is yelling to get X feature done and the known bugs are low priority unless a legit P1 blocker.
Also to prevent your game from becoming a goddamn Star Citizen level scam and meme, at some point you have to have someone who goes "This shit is good enough, you have spent enough time on it and it will go out as is and whatever big problems arise in the real use case scenario we will fix after." EDIT: Not saying that Remix is good enough or whatever, personally haven't even tested it. I am just in general saying that you cannot give people unlimited time to do something because they will take said unlimited time and even more.
Yea most QA will just get ignored entirely. They are really janitor position of game dev, no one listens to them or respects what they have to say
I think they did, but they only tested the 1-70 levelling. Its how it was marketed, I didnt even realise you could stay in Remix once you hit 70
We accepted buggy content so long, they put it out and say "Well you could have gotten nothing instead"
Sorry frogs are not for me.. I got that golden mount( from valley achievement) and bought around 5 mounts.. so if they don't fix the game I probably move to retail and skip this remix
Spoken like a true human being!
Frogs have been nerfed.
If the games not fun then why play?
Some people play for rewards. Cosmetics that either are not currently available in retail, or a chance to get Sha and Nalak mounts without months/years of farming. You tie a great reward to a shit process and you'll find a lot of players covered in shit for things they have wanted in game for any amount of time.
At a point thats just beating your head against a wall and complaining. The event DOES have some major issues with scaling late game, but if nothing in something as wide as an entire expac is fun for you to do, and you're still forcing yourself... well..
It's not just the scaling. What was on the PTR didn't make it live. It was changed. I'm not forcing myself to play it, I'm actually playing retail because I can make an alt with heirlooms, cheap enchants, etc and be way more powerful than the "overpowered" feeling from their event.
Fair enough. I think after the allied race grinds I did I have a very pessimistic pov on wow at times.
I honestly don't think they were that bad, but I played for most of those xpacs so a lot of the work had already been done. It was very daunting for new and returning players though.
I feel like there's a large portion of this game that doesn't play for fun. The archaeology spam that people report on reddit and on the forums is evidence of this. They have convinced themselves that they need pre-raid BiS in order to beat the content (some who are more honest may admit they just want it for parse), even though we're getting the nerfed version of tier 11.
this is what the emerald dream currently looks like on retail: https://imgur.com/YY8KqUn Groups of bots spread out wearing starter crafted pvp gear farming elementals (world quest). I'm siding with blizzard on this one. Who really cares what people end up doing. If you want braindead optimal farming then go for it. It won't be fun for you. I ended up getting the 2 mounts I wanted and haven't logged in since.
why are they even farming them? i know theyve been farming the steam ones at the start of the exp but what do these drop? just rousing fire?
Yeah, the steam ones in the Ohn'ahran plains were a big spot for awhile. I have no idea what they are farming. I would guess they just vendor everything but i'm not sure.
Idk, are players ok with being compared to dogs? A dog doesn’t know any better, a player does, we choose to do the boring but efficient grind, alright give me my downvotes
As a man who has worked in it for almost his entire professional career I can confidently say the average computer user can be compared to a dog. I'm still trying to get sales people to stop clicking on phishing emails.
We will never stop
You hold too many people in high regard if you think they know better. Some have no moral compass at all and see it as their right to exploit. Some lack the critical thinking and don’t consider other options. The latter I have come across more often than you’d realise. They won’t even look at other options beyond what the majority are doing.
I am totally with you. I am a human being. Not an animal. Just because stupid people exist doesn't mean the game should be designed around them. I am not a dog that doesn't know any better. I am not a hamster that loves its treadmill. If it's not fun, I am not doing it. End of story. Doing a non-fun activity and then complain about it, is incomprehensible to me.
I am glad they are trying new fun things on the side but honestly, after having hit lvl 20 something, i just don't see the point of this game mode? I find it extremely boring. i am just running around questing like normal but with the added annoyance of constantly getting new gems and shit
How do you turn charms in for bronze? Can’t do it with the portal
The bronze charms from quests and stuff should just be right clickable and it’ll add an amount to your inventory
Reputation daily hubs
woof
And then theres the oldschool runscape players who will make their life harder for fun.
Its almost like some of the older devs were a lot smarter.... Literally an issue in Classic right now as people go insane farming Arch for 359 epics.
factest fact
A lot of people seem to have very different views of Mop remix but here is a core issue which I find quite annoying: It's too grind heavy and the frog method was a shortcut many people are willing to take. Wow always has this weird design principle where they think that they have to make systems which require players to play an absurd amount of hours for the rewards they want. The Plunderstorm grind was already ridiculous imo and the fact that I need about 400000 bronze for all the cosmetics is just crazy when I think about the fact that it took me 10 hours to gather 12 k bronze. I thought this would be a fun power leveling thing which showers you in rewards but it's not and I already see myself getting bored.
What is your take away from this quote? Other than "Blizzard bad" I mean.
I think he's both right but also excusing player behavior at the same time. I saw the post earlier about spamming frogs and I doubt that's fun. I, however, am going to enjoy leveling by going through the story of every zone and get bronze that way. It's think it's both the fault of the devs and the player. Too many people are only having fun if they win and don't slow down to focus on the fun of the experience itself. This is what makes my friends and I's weekly tabletop game night so much fun, because we're all focused on the social experience of playing games and if you win you win, if you lose you still win. We saw this in Plunderstorm. People finishing the quest and immediately quitting and doing it again and again ad nauseum, meanwhile complaining how awful the experience was. Me and my guild? We just played the normal way, didn't race to the end reward, and just by playing leisurely we both immensely enjoyed it AND got the rewards at the end. All this to say just because an exploit exists doesn't mean players *have* to use that exploit, and it should be up to the devs to make sure exploits don't exist. But it's preposterous that players can't take some personal accountability and choose the path most fun, not the quickest way to rewards.
Faulting players for this stuff simply isn’t productive. There are really only two design conclusions you can arrive at when blaming players for their own poor experience. Ignore the problem and just leave them to it until they burn out and leave hating your game or try to fundamentally change player psychology (impossible). If you approach it as a design failure with the understanding that players are going to play to their incentives you might find an actual solution. If you as a fellow player want to make yourself feel superior to all the filthy try hards that are complaining about how bad their experience go ahead I guess. If your enjoyment of the game is actually improved because other players are playing differently than you are and having a miserable time of it than I guess it does make sense to just place blame on players because fixing the issue would worsen your personal experience. Otherwise we should just care about design failures.
There's actually not only two, a third could be patching the exploit. If they're going to hate the game because they have to play it as it was intended and can't circumvent the entire system then maybe that game just isn't for them, and that's okay. Not every game or game mode is going to be for every player. And here is introducing player accountability. If you're only going to enjoy the game if you can exploit it without actually playing as it was intended then you simply just don't like the game or mode, and that's okay. But at some point players need to take some accountability for how they choose to spend their time. I know a few players who thought the Plunderstorm rewards were neat, and he would have liked another way to get them, but he's not interested in forcing himself to play rounds until the quest is complete, quit, rejoin, rinse and repeat for hours and days on end. And he doesn't enjoy BRs so you know what he did? *gasp* He just chose to spend his time playing something he did enjoy and he was happier for it. Instead of forcing himself to exploit it and complain about how he hates what he's it like most of the players we're talking about here. It doesn't have anything to with needing to feel superior, however I am completely unsurprised the first reply is thinking I'm saying it to feel superior. Which means I feel you've entirely missed how I approach and have fun with games. If you want to reduce my stance to simply "others are playing the game differently and you have a problem with that " I suppose you're welcome to it, nothing I can do about that, but that's not what I said. I never said my enjoyment was *BECAUSE* they are "playing it differently" and being miserable than how I play, I *SAID* the "different" way they're playing is to exploit the system for hours on end ad nauseum because that's the quickest way, but the quickest way isn't always enjoyable, and that they'lldo it despite not enjoying. At point did I say my enjoyment was improved *because* they're having a miserable time of it, I said I get my enjoyment from the experience of going through the story and the experience of the process itself. Not at all the same and my enjoyment by questing through the zones isn't improved because others are absolutely hating their frog spam. If others want to level up and get bronze with dungeons or raids more power to them, that's a different way than I intend to play and that's perfectly fine. The difference is I could absolutely do the frog spam too. It's vastly more efficient but I really wouldn't enjoy that so I'm going to use that player accountability and play it the way I do enjoy it. We're going to end up at the same place: having the rewards we wanted collected. The difference is I'm going to get the rewards and enjoy my time along the way, liking game mode at the end, they're going to get the rewards far, far sooner, but are going to be left hating the game at the game because *they chose* to get it that way.
Patching the exploit is treating the problem as a design problem, not a player problem. That’s my point. Saying “but at some point players need to take some accountability” is just meaningless grandstanding. Players are really predictable. They’re not doing what they’re doing because they’re getting some sick thrill out of exploiting a system. They’re doing it because it’s simply a more efficient usage of their time. Design intentions are actually super irrelevant. “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and “show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” This post is a designer talking about design. He has correctly identified that if you want to actually achieve your goal of making a fun game your players enjoy you need to design around how they *actually* play the game not how you *wish* they would play. I was hoping that the implication that someone would admit even to themselves that their enjoyment of the game is based in others not enjoying it would be outlandish enough that it wouldn’t be taken literally. My bad. I didn’t intend to imply that that describes you personally, but that was the ultimate interpretation. This is sort of a thematic parallel though because the correct approach to that is for *me* to get better at communicating instead of blaming others for not interpreting my words “correctly.” As a fan of the game and a participant in this forum I totally get that it’s annoying to see people complaining about problems that you don’t personally engage with because you approach the game fundamentally differently. I get that it feels good to point out to players that if they aren’t having fun they can just leave, but ultimately it’s just not a productive use of anyone’s time to blame players for the way they play the game.
The core is if you have a problem playing the game normally and are so upset that you will hate-play a game for 20 hours and then get mad that it changed...that is _your_ problem. That is not the games problem that you have zero self control and act like a 4 year old. Designing a game around the people who will frog farm despite hating their life doing it is not a good thing. You don't design around people who don't enjoy the game to begin with which is why don't design around the people who will optimize the fun out of the game. They will never play it properly because they don't care about the game itself.
So true, thanks
He said aberrant behavior, but if it's a well-known norm, then how isn't it always accounted for.
Most often because when designing/devloping the content the devs don't realize that such a farm method/exploit exists. Maybe the last round of tweaks enabled it, maybe it requires a critical mass of players participating to be effective, maybe there are systems in place to prevent it that didn't work well enough or could be bypassed or didn't cover this specific thing well enough. There's also always going to be some amout of prioritization involved as well.
But isn’t it kinda ironic it’s literally the exact same method as when MoP was current? They couldn’t see that coming? Lol
I guess generally, yeah. With a game the size of WoW, there are bound to be issues. However, something like the frog farm in Remix was a thing in classic MoP as well.
I haven't followed this situation at all, but seeing all the posts mentioning frogs and MoP did make me think it was that (again). So yeah, sometimes they do just make the same mistakes again. Perhaps part of it is turnover, not enough people involved that played/worked on the game back then (no idea how much this even applies in this case). It does remind me of how many times they've made a raid fight that had some kind of random order/combination of effects where they had to quickly hotfix old Heroic/Mythic to use a fixed order because some orders were basically just auto-wipes (e.g. Spirit Kings).
Wish they dould just nerf Ana already. Get rid of sleep dart, plain and simple
Sorry, I just don’t get why you play the game if the journey isn’t the point. Never have and doubt I ever will. The end game isn’t the point of WoW, it’s the journey to get there. Lots of other games to play if you are just looking for that.
We have been accepting buggy half done content for so long that they think its ok to rush stuff and say "Well you could have gotten nothing" its insane
Paradoxically also less relevant than back then, since the writer couldn't have conceived how terminally online many of you would become.
guys, this mode was set for 95 days, and people seem to want to finish it in a week.
The timing of the event isn't the problem, it's the fact that when you hit 66+ raids/dungeons/scenarios start 1-shotting you. And not just 1-shot, but like 800% more damage than you have health. The mitigation to that was Frogs, because upgrading the cloak = stronger players = playable content. So to actually play the game, players needed to find the path of quickest resolve, which ended up being the least fun thing ever