I've seen a lot of discussion lately about making content more exclusive, especially in light of Raid Finder and Flexible Raids. It occurs to me that everyone arguing for more exclusive content just so happens to be in a position to do that content.
Perhaps Blizzard should make more exclusive content. I suggest they start with a long, lore-filled questline with amazing rewards. However, you can only access this questline if your account, on any character, has never killed a raid boss in normal or heroic. And if you do kill a normal or heroic boss afterwards, the rewards become unusable.
Let's see how long the calls for more exclusive content last after that.
You do realise that you insert Exclusivity between two genuine PvE activities. Most people that enjoy raiding also like quest lines imho.
ReplyDeleteNOW go ahead and make a suggestion about making pve and pvp content exclusive. there we would agree. Most pve centric players would given our experiences thus far.
Guess who wouldn't like such a distinction...
Exclusivity is necessary for a reward to be reward. Otherwise it's "baseline item".
ReplyDeleteThe solution would probably be separating the players of different attitude into different servers.
For example:
* raiding servers: daily quests, dungeons, scenarios give no valor points, the only source of epics are LFR and raids.
* PvP server: no PvE gear is available at all over the levelling cap gear, go and get your stuff in PvP
* Lore server: no raids or PvP, leveling is 3x slower, epic questlines give the best gear.
This reminds me of Rift's launch of the first Chronicles (solo or duo friendly versions of raids). There were calls for exclusivity of content of course by some raiders alongside claims of dumbing down the game etc. Perhaps an unspoken reason behind this was the need to fill raid rosters, which becomes harder and harder as a game ages.
ReplyDeleteThis is probably the case with some of the detractors of the flexi-raiding system. They imagine players flocking to the new system and abandoning their 10 man normal/hard raiding groups.
Funny thing is, this quest line could and would probably be done (or at least started) by more people then hardmode only raid bosses.
ReplyDelete@Gevlon "Lore server: no raids or PvP, leveling is 3x slower, epic questlines give the best gear."
ReplyDeleteThis peaked my interest. There are a few folks in my guild who really like questing (me included) and after they hit max level, they work on an alt or reroll.
I'm up for that.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't that depend on what is exclusive? I'm not a heroic raider, actually I'll only raid LFR because of time and personality constraints. WoW, due to the item-based design, is always going to have a content hierarchy. Why shouldn't more difficult content not only reward more powerful items but visually distinct gear?
ReplyDeleteI'll agree on story-line content (which is the foundation for the flexible raid complaints). I would love nothing more than for WoW to extend the RIFT model and make each raid into a series of scenarios or solo quest chains.
Why shouldn't more difficult content not only reward more powerful items but visually distinct gear?
ReplyDeleteI don't think anyone has ever argued that harder bosses shouldn't reward better gear. The problem is that that apparently is not enough - the hardcore crowd wants exclusive content (read: raids/bosses/cinematics/etc) as well.
I think that some/many/all of the people wanting more exclusivity want it because it can feel like there's little reward for investing the time to improve your performance and kill bosses. You can AFK through LFR and get gear that looks equivalent to normal/heroic (except for a recolor), get tier bonuses, and get items with slightly worse stats.
ReplyDeleteThus the improved "reward" for doing normal/heroic is boiled down to gear that mostly looks the same with mostly the same stats. There's no prestige left in gear anymore and only people doing raiding tend to care about progression. This means raiders feel like they can't stand out in any way - used to be they were the only ones with epics, then they were the only ones with raid gear, and now they don't much much to separate them from the LFR crowd to a casual observer.
Granted, from a heroic raiding perspective, I only care about gear because it helps kill the next boss - but there are many people who view loot as the reward rather than a tool.
I suppose it really boils down to that high end raiders feel like not enough separates them from people AFKing through LFR. You can agree or disagree with their assessment, but that's where they're coming from.
So, in effect, your idea is saying "We're going to reward the people who don't care with exclusive content for not bothering to care." Does that really make much sense compared to "We're going to reward the people who invest in our game with some exclusive stuff for their dedication?"
"I don't think anyone has ever argued that harder bosses shouldn't reward better gear. The problem is that that apparently is not enough - the hardcore crowd wants exclusive content (read: raids/bosses/cinematics/etc) as well."
They want something to separate the people who care enough to gem/enchant/learn their class/put forth effort in raids from the people who AFK through LFR - and recolored gear with slightly improved stats doesn't feel like sufficient separation for them.
Temporary content is the easiest way to do this, and is already done in many other MMORPGs out there.
ReplyDeleteI think a good idea would be to make LFR gear rare/blue quality rather than epic/purple; same ilvl, same stat allocation, same point distribution, just not epic.
ReplyDeleteThat way, people fully decked out in epics would maintain a bit of prestige: your heroic raiders would be fully kitted out in epics in short order. Your normal raiders would take a bit longer, and would likely have a smattering of blues left to replace for a couple of months. Your LFR raiders would be mostly blues with a couple of epics.
You could then see at a glance how far a certain person had progressed.
I think the problem, of course, is that everybody feels like they deserve epics. People who only raid LFR would feel aggrieved even though it'd be the same ilvl as before.