Originally Posted by Incoherence
That's really not what I'm saying. My concern is that if the next tier of instance gives you the same loot more quickly, you'll have to figure out a way to incentivize the large number of people motivated by loot to actually learn it.
I used the BT example to show that in order to even make this time-reward tradeoff close to balanced, you'd need a fairly large ramp-up between tiers: at 6 badges per boss, BT is roughly the same badge/hour ratio as Karazhan, while requiring quite a bit more gear, quite a bit more learning time, and 2.5 times as many people. So yeah, each tier could give N times the badges of the previous tier for large N (10 or 20) to get around this problem (since the new "tier" of badge loot is not realistically attainable using the old instances), but at that point you basically have per-instance tokens with a conversion factor.
Waving your arms around and saying "tell me what's wrong with this idea other than the numbers" is a very difficult position to argue against, for the record.
|
That's a fair point that it's a difficult position to argue against. However, it is still the case that the counter argument to "BT wouldn't be worth the effort given the Badges/hr" is simply, okay so instead of BT bosses dropping 6 tokens they drop 10 or 15 and instead of a BT level item being worth 50 tokens it's now worth 100 or 150. So basically you haven't said anything about the plusses or minuses of the system per se, except that the numbers would need fine tuning. Though I'm inclined to agree with Garak and say that they should probably be multiplicative between levels, though I would guess that probably doubling or tripling would be enough to make moving up worth while, while not ruining efforts to gear up chars behind in progression. I also like his idea about using rep to keep people coming back and the idea about fine tuning the rep. Although perhaps a more graduated scheme than all or nothing, e.g once you reach honored the lower level bosses give half as much rep as they used to. If you want to guarenttee that people kill the last boss or what not, then you could simply use attunment quest chains.
As fas as the "rng is necessary because it keeps more people playing" there is nothing about this argument that is necessarily true. If you want to say that people are only playing for gear and once they get their gear they stop, that's fine. If that's the case however, then you are just as likely to have someone complete a given gear set early as they are to complete it late. That is, over enough samples (players in this case) some average will form, thus half the people will be above that average and half the people will be below it. So if it takes, on average, 4 months to fill all your slots with best in slot items from BT, then some (lucky) outliers will have filled all their slots in 2 months and some (unlucky) outliers will take 6 months. Thus, if you want to argue that rng is good because it causes some people to want to play longer, then you have to accept that it also allows some people to quite earlier. Essentially what I am arguing is that if the average time Blizz wants someone to spend at a given level is 4 months that's fine, I just don't think that the system should be set up in such a way that there are outliers of 2 months on either side. Thus, badges, rep, tokens whatever, would serve the underlying purpose of grouping together the people in the guild so they all finish clearing an instance within a month say, instead of a 4 month interval.
There could be problems with people sitting out. However, that could be overcome and/or it is a problem now as well. It can be overcome simply by having some way of letting the people outside get a reward. E.g. a sack of token drops as well, and the raid leader can pass these out as they see fit, once passed out they are bound. Also, some people do get gear earlier than others even with DKP systems. Our fury warriors are always the lowest DKP in our guild but all that means is that they end up have a set of full off teir T6 while everyone else is running around in mostly T5 with some T6 because a peice of plate DPS gear that's split between 2 DPS warriors has about the same chance to drop as a peice of DPS leather that is split between 4 rogues and 3 feral druids.
@Maeltne I think this would end up doing two things, A it wouldn't be as fun because as Wunlastri mentioned, it would just be a question of math and an optimal distribution. B, it could end up causing a lot of headaches in a game with as many stats as WOW. That is, right now the game designers don't have to worry about how to design an encounter around someone with 100k +healing or a tank with 100k health but low avoidance because those are outside of the range of what is possible. Fights that are difficult now because the damage is spikey would be meaningless if a tank could stack that much health and the healers could sacrifice all there other stats to land a 50k heal every 5 seconds. Or a fight that is burst/DPS fight could be won with 25 destro locks, all with enough mana to fire off one shadow bolt because they've stacked their crit to 100% and their +damage to 20k. Maybe not perfect examples, but I think the idea comes through.