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Replay value in a video game implies that the game was so enjoyable that you want to keep playing it from the beginning. WoW has never offered real replay value, just continued playability. Grinding is not replay value, grinding is continuous playability.Quote:
Originally Posted by Default
Spend 30 seconds in the Youtube comments ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Toypop
Raiding, Alts, PvP are just 3 small examples of replay value.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rennadrel
You're replaying the same thing you just completed.
Once you finish a raid, there is no reason to play it again. Same goes for everything else. Reputation = grind, gear = grind, PvP = grind
lol that intro was freaking awesome!
Big huge difference between grind and replayability. The confusion between the two and the credit that MMO's get for "replayablity" really irks me.
The only thing I think you should have mentioned is that while a sense of progression is needed, grind itself is not. Grind is simply the easiest method by which to create a sense of progression.
And economically feasible. Having had several friends now work in the MMO industry the thing of it is that truly fresh content is staggeringly expensive. If you could logon to wow every day and have 5 brand new quests or a zone or whatever that would be amazing ... and financially impossible. I hate dailies and I agree there's a lot of simple ways to improve them (for instance, why does everyone have to do the exact same dailies every day at each hub? If each hub has 3-5 different quest sets, why not have 20-33% of the population each doing their own set instead of forcing 100% onto a single set and overcrowding the mobs/objectives?) ... but financially speaking with current technology the choice is recurring content, or almost none. We had almost none in dragonsoul and people hated it and left the game in droves ... so now we have recurring and people are still bitching. Yeah I want the pie in the sky infinite content engine game too ... but its not happening so we need to find practical ways to improve what we have.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jjvalour
Yup, it's a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it.Quote:
Originally Posted by feralminded
You can have a game that offers almost infinite playtime, like WoW - or you can have your 12h storyline "normal" game. Complaining about their being a grind in MMO is silly, blaming the producers for having that instead of infinite content is ludicrous. If there's any problem with the grind being there, it's not on the developers side (although they certainly need to keep it in check, there are limits), it's on the purchasers - grind is as synonymous with MMORPG as Multiplayer - especially an 8year old one like WoW, which is essentially one of the last "old" MMOs before they all started trying to hit a different niche with odd gimmicks, to varying degrees of sucess.
That intro needs more cowbell.
I think the determining factor, at least for me, is the requirement of that grind. For instance, in Cata, every faction had nice shiny purples. For my first couple toons, I felt I had to do so much rep work because that gear represented a significant upgrade path that was guaranteed, even if it was slow. If RNG didn't favor me for that slot, then it would be worth it. For alts that generally didn't raid, it was probably going to be worth it anyways.
During that phase, I hated those dailies. There were so many that I felt I had to do. The constant shuffle of working on Arcanum/Shoulder enchants or that lagging slot. The feeling that it didn't really feel worth it, but you have to chase every upgrade. I just don't enjoy that.
Once we had a content patch or two, however, those items no longer represented the sole way to get those slots to a higher level. At that point, you had choices in how to obtain gear. There were still pieces I went after (tank boots I think from Twilight Highlands). I didn't completely abandon dailies but I felt less required to do them. I did the ones for rewards I felt were worth it rather than all of them because they were an exclusive path to a reward. IMO, that's the key to making rewarding content; give us options for how to obtain what we need so that we are not doing something only because we feel we "have to".
One thing I've discovered this xpac is that it's a grind only if you make it a grind. Don't want to do Golden Lotus today, don't; the game will there tomorrow. Don't want to max valor points this week, don't; so it's takes an extra week to get that 489 ring, game's not going anywhere. It's about pacing. For the average player whether or not you replace that 463 neck with the 489 this week or next isn't going to make a damn bit of difference.
People put pressure on themselves - it's the Violet Beauregarde syndrom; "I want it and I want it now."
While there is no doubt truth here, it's not helpful. The issue is rooted in basic psychology and it's along the lines of telling the bum on the side of the street to "get a job" ... it simply doesn't work and your words are wasted. It's like telling progression raiders that they "don't have to" do everything possible to improve. Sure they don't, but they feel they have to and therefore if they don't feel enormous anxiety and that they are letting their fellow raiders down. Ultimately progression raiding is a team environment and if someone isn't doing everything necessary they are implicitly letting the others down. This is the kind of psychological conundrums that seem trite to people who don't actually participate in such things but are morally conflicting to people who do.Quote:
Originally Posted by Theotherone
Either way I don't think there's a big issue this expansion. I hate dailies but the ones we have are not bad and they are getting better at it with using them as a story-telling vehicle (only took them 5 years to figure that out ... lol). I would personally like to see other max-level content besides dailies ... perhaps entire max-level zones like we had in vanilla/BC ... but they'd also need to offer tangible rewards or else people just won't do them.
Finally, and I know I've been appealing for this since the beginning of Cata, but bring back compelling, progression 5 man content. Take the Raid-finder level of gear and put it in HARD 5 mans that you cannot queue for. Call it 5 man raiding if you have to, I don't care, but I personally long for REAL heroics ... not this garbage filler content they called heroics now. You can keep it fresh each tier releasing new challenging 5 mans (and have their LFD "normal mode" equivalents so everyone can "see the content")
I don't believe I was telling anyone how to do things, but rather was relaying what I observed about the grind this xpac. The grind is something one brings on themselves and is made to feel worse by a lack of patience. One of the biggest contributors to this was the fast gear up at the end of Cata. I think people got very used to the idea that you could chain three dungeons for a day, be in full purples and ready to go into the disaster that was DS.
Now we have a gear progression route that's not entirely fast. You're not getting more than 1000 VP a week; your loot chance in LFR is 15% and you can give yourself a bonus roll - no more guild running and sharing loot. You have slow route to crafted gear because of Spirits of Harmony. Basically, no matter how hard you push, the days of being epic'd out in a day are gone. And if GC is to believed, they're not coming back anytime soon.
I think there is a very real desire to change the expectations of the player base as to just how fast one can gear up and force some patience on the player base so that they play the game, not just "ding", run some heroics and get all epics, log on for raid on Tuesday, then not been seen again until next Tuesday. These days you actually have to invest some time to gear up, or gear up an alt.
I don't think someone trying to do all they can to help a group of like minded individuals achieve a common purpose is "trite", but I do think people need to keep things in prespective. Without that perspective, the gind becomes overwhelming. "A man's got to know his limitations".
I completely agree with you and indeed perceptions are (however slowly) changing and I believe it is for the good of the game overall. The value of anything is directly correlated to how hard it is to acquire. Maybe back in Vanilla/BC with things too difficult to acquire you wound up with the haves and have-nots and with sharp lines between. The opposite happened by the end of Wrath and into Cata where everyone had so there was literally no point. Splitting the difference is definitely best for the game overall.
The point was fun. If it was fun acquiring, why care how many also had?
I'm not positive you're referring to my comment with regards to Wrath/Cataclysm ... but if you can't intuitively see the pitfalls/perils of what happened in cataclysm then I don't really know what to say to you beyond it's well documented how this is bad game design. In a situation where everyone "haves" then those working harder feel unrewarded for their increased effort and those working less quickly run out of reason to continue to work. Slowing down the process, as they have now done, still rewards harder/more work and gives those who either have less time or are willing to put in less effort something to continue to do over time. Last year yielded the biggest drop in wow subs, ever ... and while you can throw around that "it's just an old game" all you want or cite competition or whatever ... the truth is there was nothing to do.
It is a fact they can only produce so much content so fast. What is variable is how long it takes us to consume it and they can control this through their various gating mechanisms (drop rates, actual gating with reps and whatnot). They certainly had to produce more content ... which they've largely done ... but they also had to slow down our consumption rate ... which is also where we're currently at. I would like to see some different/more creative content ... but at this point I cannot expect MORE. 16 bosses, tons of dailies hubs, several orthogonal types of content (pets, fight club, farmville) ... they have delivered and we still have things to do ... which is the point. Still people bitch.
Isn't this what challenge modes basically are?Quote:
Originally Posted by feralminded
Challenge modes are races to cheese how few mobs you can kill. And there's no progression.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aggathon
There's a pretty huge difference between challenge modes and say ... a 5 man raid. Challenge modes, at their height, takes 10-20 minutes. I am harking back to the days of Vanilla/BC 5 mans that could take 3-4 hours and required plenty of coordination, patience, and practice to complete. For myself (and many other PvE players) challenge modes offer literally no reward ... they are something to do but they are not progression content. Challenge modes are more akin to pet battles or fight club ... only perhaps the most challenging version of such things. Yeah it's something to do, and it's even extremely difficult, but there's no progression involved. You do them either for your transmog or your title or whatever and then never do it again. Progression is really a separate model where you do something over and over again, even once you succeed, to prepare for the next tier.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aggathon