The Weekly Marmot - What's Wrong With Rep?

[Dragore]

I like the idea of dailies to progress your character. Thats the point of Blizz is trying to get is you have this character and you have to work at it to get him more powerful. Yet i agree with the overload of dailies at the beginning. How i think they should have done it is use the same logic but only 1 rep per patch. Golden Lotus should be the main rep for the beginning when honored you open up the blue gear, when you exalted you open up the epics. At exalted you do a quest line that leads you to the Shado-Pan in 5.1 when you hit exalted with them you get new epics at a slight higher ilvl, etc. At least we will be progressing with the game and its patches. Then for people who level up after they can just go straight to the current rep and if you want can go back and get exalted with the older ones. I feel like that would have been better. Leaving the reps like anglers, cloud serpents, etc, the same since those aren't really required for raiding.

[sifuedition]

I dislike anything that says you have to log on every day. I have to have more flexibility than that. At a minimum, I feel that it needs to be something that you can grind up in your available time per week. Maybe I can squeeze in four hours just for dailies on a Saturday. Maybe I can get in two hours on Monday and two on Friday. Saying that I need to put in time EVERY day or I'm behind can't work for me and many others. I have managed to carve out my raid times as MY time. Any time beyond that is up in the air. I play every opportunity I have and probably more than that as there are lots of things I don't get done that I should. That doesn't mean I can play EVERY day.

On top of that, any quest is ok the first time. Any quest is dead boring the third time and beyond. That makes dailies a poor form of time investment to me. Obviously, everyone is different. That is why there should more than one way to skin this cat. I'm not even saying it needs to be dungeon crawling as we have been able to in the past, but there needs to be something else.

For those of us on a PvE server, the ENTIRE point of making the dailies so important doesn't even come into play. Being in a non-sanctuary doesn't even matter because we can't be jumped and/or ganked without us intentionally flagging ourselves or being griefed and falling for it. The only thing it does is open up a LOT of griefing with mob tagging and people stealing your quest items while you kill the mob/guards that were on top of it.

[Theotherone]

Dailies just bring out the worst in us - mob tagging, darting to nodes to pick something up before the other guy, having to wait a minute for some mini-boss to respawn because it was just killed...

Perhaps the most annoying daily for griefer purposes is where you need to "free" 6 guards from being subjugated in the town in the Vale (Mist something village I think, I don't pay a lot of attention to the names). You have to kill the subjugator but not kill or injure too badly the subjugated guard. Sooooo, you tag a subjugator first, and the pissed off player kills the guard. Or people just go around killing subjugated guards. Granted you have to kill 12 Mogul, but after 12 you're still stuck having to free 6 guards, who are being killed off.

[eald]

Perhaps the most annoying daily for griefer purposes is where you need to "free" 6 guards from being subjugated in the town in the Vale (Mist something village I think, I don't pay a lot of attention to the names). You have to kill the subjugator but not kill or injure too badly the subjugated guard. Sooooo, you tag a subjugator first, and the pissed off player kills the guard. Or people just go around killing subjugated guards. Granted you have to kill 12 Mogul, but after 12 you're still stuck having to free 6 guards, who are being killed off.

That quest sucks, the good thing is that I have seen it only twice. Now if helps a shaman can dispel mind control.

[screwzloos]

What would you think about letting players turn in Lesser Charms of Good Fortune for reputation? In lieu of removing rep requirements on valor gear, that would fix it for me. For example, I'm already revered with Golden Lotus so I have access to that gear, but if I don't like doing Shado-Pan dailies, I could instead keep doing Golden Lotus dailies and spend my extra Lesser Charms to replace that grind.

Any thoughts?

(This might also be an appropriate PST question.)

[Holychet]

The real problem is that they've tried making a one size fits all solution to "doing something" (advancing your character). While they've done well in giving us lots of different ways to get different currency, they've only given us one way to open the vendor so we can *spend* the currency.

What they *could* have done (if the rewards were indeed character advancement for not only raiders, but "casuals" as well), is offer the rewards twice on each vendor. Without rep, you straight purchase everything with valor. With rep (exalted), you can purchase with gold. That would at least give *two* different styles of gameplay the same options through different methods.

Personally, I don't care. I'll do the dailies when I feel compelled, and skip when I'm not in the mood. The pieces available aren't game breaking anyways.

[spaceghost7117]

That is not the conclusion I came to at all.

My apologies, I paraphrased a bit. Here's where I thought you really came upon an "ah-ha!" moment in the Reputation Dailies episode.

"You might say '21 weeks, that's too long. That's a long time to be working on pre-raid gear.' … I don't think valor gear is intended to be pre-raid gear.

The heroic dungeon gear, the justice point gear, that's your pre-raid gear. Maybe a couple pieces of valor gear would be considered getting ready for raid… LFR gear, when that opens next week, that will be considered as well.


I don't think it's expected that you should get all of that gear before you step into a raid. In fact, once you step into the normal mode raids most of that gear isn't even going to be an upgrade for you anyway because you will end up eventually getting pieces that drop anyway."

If last week you were OK with only getting a few pieces of VP gear, this week you seem be wrestling with grinding out every bit of rep and obtaining every piece of VP gear. Why the change of heart?

[Deandia]

I was doing my Golden Lotus dailys today and discovered several raid guild groups in the questing area mopping up every mob and killing them over and over again. I spent an hour there and only managed to kill 3 mobs. If rep is not so important then why are they there doing that activity? They are obviously farming rep, farming other items or simply putting solo players like me through a living hell.

It sure makes it difficult for a true solo player like me to get my dailys done each day.

I also think that with most of the valor gear being BOP that I am going to think twice about leveling the other 18 level 85 characters I have to level 90. Imagine having to do the daily rep grind on 19 characters.

As for this grind being temporary, I disagree. I think it will always be there. The days of tabards and dungeon grinds for Valor points is sadly, over.

[Fetzie]

That sounds like grinding Wrathion reputation for the Legendary quest (by the way, if they are doing that in the Vale, they are Doing It Wrong - better rep/hour in Dread Wastes).

[Marco]

Perhaps the most annoying daily for griefer purposes is where you need to "free" 6 guards from being subjugated in the town in the Vale (Mist something village I think, I don't pay a lot of attention to the names). You have to kill the subjugator but not kill or injure too badly the subjugated guard.

If you get on the hate list of the guard--without killing it, obviously--and then help kill the subjugator (or don't), you'll get credit for freeing the guard.

There's obviously a lot of potential for griefing, but if people aren't being boneheads and killing the guards, you can get the quest done really fast.

[Theotherone]

There's obviously a lot of potential for griefing, but if people aren't being boneheads and killing the guards, you can get the quest done really fast.

We had a group last week just killing guards - I just went off and mined for a while on an alt, came back later. Annoying as hell, but that's the community.

[ChampStanley]

The other issue I have with dailies I feel is systemic and should/could be fixed. Just as with Molten front I'm going to end up doing the initial Golden Lotus dailies way too much. The third (and if there is a fourth) tier dailies probably wont be bad at all in terms of repetition. The solution should be to either deprecate the first tier once you hit the third (and fold the rep you would get from the first tier into the third) or at least inflate the amount of rep you get in the higher tiers and not require going through the first 2 tiers to get to them. There is no reason why I should be doing the tier1 dailies 30-40 times and the tier3 ones 10 times - spreading out the number of times they get done to balance them would lead to less drudgery.

When I first read about the progression of the Molten Front dailies, the system you describe is exactly how I thought it would work. It's so obvious that I'm shocked they haven't adopted it. The Molten Front and Golden Lotus dailies get so tedious due to the fact that you have to start from scratch every day. Honestly, it would really help folks feel like they were actually making progress in the rep if they took this advice.

[Fim]

Perhaps the most annoying daily for griefer purposes is where you need to "free" 6 guards from being subjugated in the town in the Vale (Mist something village I think, I don't pay a lot of attention to the names). You have to kill the subjugator but not kill or injure too badly the subjugated guard. Sooooo, you tag a subjugator first, and the pissed off player kills the guard. Or people just go around killing subjugated guards. Granted you have to kill 12 Mogul, but after 12 you're still stuck having to free 6 guards, who are being killed off.

That one is around Whitepetal lake. The annoying one in Mistfall is the little sprites who carry barrels that you need to collect. They are neutral and toss the barrel into the air on aggro, which is great for everyone else to loot, and terrible for you since you've got a sprite whacking at you preventing you from looting said stupid barrel.

Everyone knows the spawn points of the sprites at this point so it's easy for griefers to sit near them and tag them with a DoT a split-second before some helpless sucker smacks the same mob and gets aggro, giving the griefer the kill and the barrel to boot. If that wasn't bad enough, the mobs have low-health, a fast respawn and the same rate of dropping skyshards so you aren't just contending with people on the quest, but also the skyshard farmers.

The easy fix is to make the barrels lootable from the corpses and randomize the spawn points to frustrate taggers, but that'd be against the Blizzard design philosophy of causing the maximum possible consternation with these dailies.

I also ran into a new type of griefing with today's dailies - we had a guild worth of people on mammoths/yaks/other stupidly large mounts covering every single quest giver in the golden pagoda. Looking up the names of the quest givers on wowhead and having interact with target bound was the only fix for this asinine behavior but again this is the sort of thing you can avoid with a rep tabard.

Blizzard really need to take some lessons from Guild Wars 2 when it comes to questing - the proximity based log for the heart quests, the lack of mob tagging for credit and the individual loot drops were all designed to address this stuff and the questing in that game was a lot less frustrating IMO.

[Theotherone]

And those little Sprites knocking you down every three seconds when you've aggro'd like 20 of them is annoying as hell too. But yeah, I see the grief potential.

[Slyvar]

Blizzard really need to take some lessons from Guild Wars 2 when it comes to questing - the proximity based log for the heart quests, the lack of mob tagging for credit and the individual loot drops were all designed to address this stuff and the questing in that game was a lot less frustrating IMO.

I definitely prefer the GW2 model for questing and world events, over what WoW has. In the end GW2's system is still gathering 50 of a certain item, or killing 25 of a specific mob. But something about it feels more interesting.

[tawnos]

The sprite quest isn't just grief potential - I have no desire to cause problems for others but its just the fastest way for me to complete the quest by running around waiting for people to tag the ones that carry the barrels and steal the drop while they are interrupted or stunned. I feel bad about it but it saves me too much time compared to being the one to tag the spire and losing the barrel 99% of the time. I have seen some people who stun them to buy time to loot the barrel and if i had a decent stun i would do that instead.

So many of the problems of these quests could be solved with Blizzard making some simple implementation modifications that become ridiculously obvious to anyone who actually goes through them (or at least goes through them on a high pop server). Blizzard routinely insists their devs play the game but if so and they let these things remain as they are they are a team of sadists (and presumably masochists as well).

[mavfin]

- I have no desire to cause problems for others but its just the fastest way for me to complete the quest by running around waiting for people to tag the ones that carry the barrels and steal the drop while they are interrupted or stunned. I feel bad about it but it saves me too much time compared to being the one to tag the spire and losing the barrel 99% of the time. I have seen some people who stun them to buy time to loot the barrel and if i had a decent stun i would do that instead.

This is not a personal attack on you, but, anyone consciously doing stuff like this, knowing it's wrong to do, no matter how you justify it, you are part of what makes these dailies a problem. I do them, but I refuse to be an ass to other people doing the dailies. I'll leap/go fast/charge to tag stuff, yes, but, I kill what I tag, and don't steal barrels/whatever from anyone who didn't already steal from me.

Also, on my war, I do them in tank, not fury. I can shockwave a couple, grab their barrels, then kill them. Or fear them, too if I have space.

[feralminded]

It seems like the obvious answer (someone else here already hinted at it, but I am clarifying) is to expose ALL of the dailies for a faction with each daily actually being a "weekly", and then just up the rep per quest such that the total earned per week is roughly the same as now. Players can then do them how they want, once per week, and all is good. On top of that as Fim pointed out earlier you HAVE to do something with the overflow of valor. I understand gating is necessary but don't leave us hanging.

Finally as Lore pointed out (but was not discussed in this thread much) ... integrate *something* into the economy. Some people really LOVE grinding and if they have a way to convert that into gold and the people who HATE it have a way to convert their gold into rep things just work better.

[findur]

loved the video. really described the problems most people are having with MoP expansion, or should i say DoPe (Dailies of Pandaria expansion)

[Mwawka]

Here's my problem with the dailies.

Blizzard recognized they had created a problem, by making most of the game play revolve around sitting in a city and queuing for stuff. I agree, it was a problem, and they needed to come up with a solution that got people out of the cities and playing the game again. However, rather than come up with a fun way to get people playing again, they decided to use dailies, so they created tons of dailies and tied VP gear to them to force raiders into doing them. Not a very creative solution to the existing problem and I would argue one that has created problems of its own. Combine this with the low amount of VP from dungeons and the daily dungeon bonus and they are basically saying to their subscribers that if you want to get the most out of the game you have to log on every day and do some stuff. That was a mindset I thought they were moving away from (and rightfully so), but now it's back. So until my VP gear is unlocked, I find myself logging on and doing something I'm not really enjoying as opposed to things I would enjoy more. I know that is my choice, but I put getting ready for raiding first, because that is my commitment to my team, and the other stuff comes later.

The funny thing is, if Valor Gear had not been tied to dailies, I think they still would have accomplished the goal of getting people out of the cities. There really is no great place to hang in Pandaria (seems like Halfhill is the choice for a lot of people) so you might as well be out doing stuff. I'd still be doing dailies if there was not VP gear attached, but at a slower pace and enjoying the journey a lot more.