PST - Episode 83

This week:
1:15 - Would it be a good idea to let everyone earn their own legendary?
7:15 - What if killing someone in PvP gave you all their daily quest items?
10:46 - Will the BMAH result in a lot more business for gold sellers?
17:14 - What did you mean on Legendary when you said you weren't looking forward to MoP raiding?
28:56 - What happens to players on PvP servers who don't like the new world PvP changes?
37:09 - Should cross-realm Dragon Soul be available by now?
41:46 - Why does Blizzard raise the level cap every expansion?
44:53 - Should other MMOs try to mimic WoW's endgame content?

In my opinion about the Legendaries that span multiple tiers; I would have the completed tier X item let you skip the first stage of the Y item. So you could either have a completed Legendary already and be a bit a head, or just add one more quest on to the next one. And have the X item upgrade to the Y item on quest finish. This way you would not be forced to do old content to get the new version, but were still rewarded for having completed it already.

Do people actually get perma banned for buying gold? I always assumed that it was just like a month of something. I'm guessing if more people knew it was a perma ban then it might discourage those who would be tempted to buying gold from doing so.

My issue with server transfer fees is since its $25 per character, I’d have to spend $250 to transfer all 10 of my characters to a new server.
I’d personally like to see server transfers cost maybe $5 a character, with a deal for $25 or so to transfer your entire character roster from that server.
The idea of a completely raiding focused game sounds amazing. Depending on how the system for such a game would work it would be neat to see creative tools for players. If you look around many of the WoW fan sites you can find a ton of fan created raid and dungeon ideas.
Honestly the idea makes me want to try and get back into game design. A lot of the ideas you mentioned gave me ideas for how the game could be designed. I’d like to see something similar to monster hunter, where you don’t have a character level and all your stats are derived from gear. Players could have several characters to choose to play that would gear up from doing the “raids” allowing them to access harder difficulty modes or higher tiers of raids.
I’ll stop myself now otherwise this post could be pages long. Off to Word to type out these thoughts.

These days, smart gold sellers do not mail or trade gold to their buyers directly. They have them put up auctions of low cost items. For instance, if a buyer wants 10k gold, the seller tells buyer to put up 10 auctions of Rune Thread at 1053g ea. Buyer puts up the auctions, seller buys them, auction takes 5% cut and voila! Buyer has gold.

Blizzard would have an extremely difficult time automating the tracking of these kinds of transactions without venturing into auction house price setting and removing the free market philosophy of the auction house. And having a Blizz employee looking at threshold transactions and making judgement calls would demand human resources that I don't see them spending.

Another major bummer about transfers is the gold cap of 50k. That's whats holding me in place until MoP so I can blow the gold down on useful gearing and profession grinding stuff that just happens once you hit cap and my server doesn't have any really nice vanity items to just splurge on in either case. Just feels less wasteful this way anyway. Kind of sucks during this low time though as the whole world waits for MoP, and kind of wanting to be on a PVP server with a littler higher pop for more options with the cross realm zones and push back into the world since I think I would like that kind of play.

QQ I be on PVP realm soon.

I agree with MikeB -- the Black Market Auction house is designed to suck gold from the WoW economy. I really think that if the BMAH is cross-server so that competition is among 10 million players instead of just individual servers, it will accomplish that without ruining game balance. Blizzard doesn't have an easy way of removing gold from people that are at the gold cap; raising repair fees or making MoP flying expensive hurts all 10 million players instead of the top 1% that are at the gold cap.

Also with respect to the legendary, do we know anything beyond the quest text strings and item icons? Has the datamining performed so far turned up any stats or procs that indicate any sort of power advantage? What if Blizzard actually made it just a cool cosmetic effect or 'on-use' effect that any player could apply to an item of their choice?

-HP

Okay, here's a really insane idea. I hate to be the one to bring it up. We know Blizzard is perfectly fine with facilitating the purchasing of items/gold with real world currency.. "legally". You know, so long as they get their cut. So.. is the BMAH a way to kind of open that door? Without.. flat out opening it? Hear me out. The BMAH is taking a step in the direction of flatout purchasing rare/beneficial items with simple currency. This is already an option in the GAH/RMAH in D3. Is the BMAH simply the "gold only" side to that system? Now, I know the GAH/RMAH is player controlled, but the systems are undeniably similar. Can we expect to see the RMBMAH sometime down the road? Is that too much of a stretch? Or is this just the ramblings of a guy at 1am (Which is a very good possibility)?

On the subject of player looting, I personally wouldn't even entertain the idea of playing a game featuring player looting. The main reason is that as soon as this is implemented in game there WILL be groups of players who's only goal would be to gank people and loot items from them, repeatedly.

We have all seen it before in WoW, people find a way to spoil people play time. The Zombie invasion/infection or the disease from Zul Gurub spring to mind, then there is the classic standing pvp flagged on quest givers while shadow mealded so the person gets killed by the gaurds for attacking some one in a no pvp zone.

For me this would be one of the worst ideas!

I agree that something needs to be done about server transfers. During TBC you were a boss if you had 2 alts (in Kara gear). In WoTLK Blizzard made the cancerous design of making gearing so easy that why not just gear up another alt? So $25 dollars was fine in TBC, not from WoTLK on till MoP. Hell I haven't leveled up my only alt because he's on a different server from my friends and I was in school during the time I was playing Cata I didn't want to cough up $25 that I could use on a lot of other stuff just for an alt.

There needs to be a price reduction or a bundle deal of some sorts. I cant see Blizzard making it free, seeing how many times I"ve transfered its just too much money there losing out on and there thriving on the evolution of raiding as Lore mentioned. A price reduction is reasonable.

loved the ninja with a cold today @D

Looting other player's daily quest items: They did that in Wintergrasp, and it worked beautifully (for me at least). They later changed it so you just loot daily quest items off players but that player doesn't lose their items.

I'd love to see this come back for other quests in the future.

What about just looting a small portion of that person's gold(max 500-1500, also only for open world pvp)? This would give more incentive to initiate world pvp, give pvpers a way of making gold, and create actual consequences for dying in pvp.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jierda117

Do people actually get perma banned for buying gold? I always assumed that it was just like a month of something. I'm guessing if more people knew it was a perma ban then it might discourage those who would be tempted to buying gold from doing so.

---

I have always said that banning gold sellers is a waste of resources.

The way to combat the illegal gold market is a zero tolerance perma-ban rule on buyers regardless of whether it is the first offence or a small quantity bought. I am sure if they diverted resources from hunting sellers to hunting buyers they can find the end recipient of the gold and get around all the smart money laundering activities that gold buyers use (e.g. buying on second accounts etc).

However it appears as though Blizzard don't want to perma ban subscription payers so instead we are locked in this futile war against endless sellers.

I think the greatest impact of BMAH will be that of encouraging players to use farming bots. This is currently a huge a problem. It rarely seems to be punished (if the botter takes basic precautions) given that I have multiple friends that have been merrily botting for years without so much as a temporary ban. Furthermore players are also smart enough to bot on second accounts and Blizzard seem unwilling to apply enough resources into hunting down the end recipients of the gold this generates.

So as I said in another thread; BMAH is the least of our worries when it comes to illegal activities. There are plenty of items for sell on the regular AH that will tempt people into rule breaking. The advantage of the BMAH is that it destroys gold.

I am starting to wonder if we have to be more harsh with the "victims" of hacking. Maybe make an authenticator semi-mandatory. These devices are cheap and of course many already have smart phones. I'd treat the authenticator like an insurance policy. If you don't have an active authenticator attached to your account then your gear and gold will not be recovered if you are hacked. That way it is down to player choice, they are not forced to get one... It will stop inflation for sure.

So maybe you just don't see it or maybe your server hasn't been hit by it but on the really large servers its blatantly obvious Blizzard has no such enforcement tools to catch botters/goldsellers now. Maybe at one point (before the mass layoffs?) they were attempting to do such things but at this point its Lord of the Flies in terms of exploits. There were actually 2 competing bots on the Stormrage alliance tradechat selling obviously duplicated sands of time for hours last weekend (and yes at 10-12% of vendor cost I can be sure its not just someone circumventing the transfer gold cap). WHen such a blatant exploit is allowed to warp the economy repeatedly (this is at least the third wave I've observed and you can see the AH cost of vial of sands dropping to below vendor costs and then slowly rising until the next wave of botters) its pretty clear that support has left the building in terms of enforcement.

Last year on coming back to the game I didn't have an authenticator and got hacked twice in the span of a week (I tried the 'mobile authenticator' in between but apparently it does nothing). Given that it was my fault I wouldn't have blamed Blizzard for not reimbursing anything but instead both times they returned pretty much everything which amounted to 500k gold and ~300k gold worth of mats. The people who did the hacking transfered the mats around and Blizzard never found them - I was able to figure out where they ended up because it was easy to see the people on undermine selling exactly the things I had and even filed a ticket but nothing was ever done (or at least the same bots continued to sell the stuff for over a week). I don't know if it was some recognition that my account was probably a good target or not but Blizzard just gave me an authenticator the second time without having to pay for it (which I would have done anyway at that point). I think at this point they could probably do the same for all accounts at least in NA/EU.

I don't know that $25 is that big of a deterrent its that pretty much everyone has a number of alts now and raiding on separate servers is terrible. WHen it gets to $100, $200, $500 thats when it becomes problematic and I think Blizzard could retain some of their no-effort server transfer fees while improving the situation just by making it a one-off cost of $25 to transfer any number of characters on a battle.net account.

I love the idea of a totally raid focused game. That being said, I think that in many ways for an online game the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Pet battles is a perfect example. I wouldn't likely have much interest in a stand-alone pet battle game. But when you put a pet battle game into WoW, that changes the whole dynamic. I already have these characters that I am attached to, and they have these pets that I have earned. I'm already inside the game, with friends, doing different things. So the barrier to entry is non-existent and the social aspect is already established. So yea, I will absolutely be doing pet battles, even though I would never buy a pet battle game. My enjoyment of pet battles is strengthened by the fact that I enjoy other parts of the game. And the parts of the game that I most enjoy (raiding) and might play as a stand-alone activity are also enhanced by these ancillary activities. It's like a symbiotic relationship.

With a raiding game, I think the issue you might run into would be the prestige thing you talked about. Not only is part of the motivation to raid getting to show off your spoils standing around in Orgrimmar, but I also think it's important to have non-raiding content in which your gear lets you flex your muscles. Things like one-shotting mobs that used to take a couple of hits while doing dailies really enhance the feeling that your gear has worth and purpose.

Also, I think a good option for "free" transfers would be to transform the whole "WoW Remote" superscription into a true premium subscription. Obviously you couldn't just allow unlimited transfers with the premium subscription, otherwise people would just sign up, transfer all their characters as needed, then unsubscribe. But you could credit premium subscribers with a free transfer every couple of months. Add other benefits to the premium subscription such as other character services (name/race/faction changes), pets and mounts, access to betas, etc, etc.

No, guys, think about it, a solely raiding game wouldn't make any sense, how much time do u spend on raiding right now? 3, 4 hours a week? Some more? Nobody is going to buy a game just to play that much. Is there any way to make such a game last longer without completely straying from the original idea? I don't think so(and plz do tell if you can think of a way)

There is a reason if WoW has such a variety of stuff to do and if it doesn't let you mess around with one thing alone too much(in a short period of time), think about it as a human limit, there's no getting around it(yet).
Lastly there is also a reason if a raiding focused game does not exist yet, and believe me it's not because nobody ever thought about it.

Lore mate, I love your shows and seen almost all, but please please... don't discuss things that are related to economy before researching a bit... you sometimes sound like you've never been into any gold making or anything...

People that are not buying gold or playing on regular AH won't ever be able to afford anything from BMAH.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by tunaktunak-kazzak

Lore mate, I love your shows and seen almost all, but please please... don't discuss things that are related to economy before researching a bit... you sometimes sound like you've never been into any gold making or anything...

---

I agree with this (including the love XD).

In addition, to prove that I'm not trying to be annoying. I will comment about the only raiding game.

I think that art assets are way to expensive to make it how you think it is. Think in a WoW mage, you have all this spell animations, models, gear, sounds, even structure of the spell tree, mechanics and so. You make all that stuff, and then you deny yourself to give it some pvp playground? Aren't you shooting yourself in the foot? I can't imagine the latest AAA MMO taking that approach instead (I'm thinking in the level of art of Rift, GW2, SWTOR; the money they invested on art used "only" to Raids); you are asking for new art, design, development at the beginning of the game, and excluding characters doing this every time you need to provide new content and you NEED new content in this type of game.