Before I explain this question, I am fully aware this this thread contains some touchy subjects that deal with "sense of entitlement" and "elitist jerk mentality". Please try to keep it academic and not attack people's motives.

Back to the question…

In a recent discussion with some fellow guild members, we found ourselves discussing the merits of levels, boss kills, achievements, acquiring gear, and Blizzard's decision to “wipe the slate” every expansion. The overall tone was a very clear disappointment at how this was being handled.

Argument A: New players will be easily discouraged if some sort of slate wiping is not conducted. This reasoning is well founded, as the game is a business endeavor and Blizzard most definitely has a vested interest in attracting as many customers as they can. Obviously one of the things that can hamper this is that new players should be given a shot to rise through the ranks, and become of a top guild just like those of us who have been playing for any number of years.

Argument B: Veteran players race through content, push themselves to the brink of insanity, and will do amazing things all in the name of server and world firsts. Many of us have been playing WoW for a minimum of 2 years and in fact many of us probably started on release or probably even in beta. We have spent countless days in game building our character, our faction standing, belongings, wealth, etc. When all this is said and done, it is my personal belief that many veteran players may become jaded because we have no (or at least minimal) way to distinguish ourselves from the crowd. There is some sense of entitlement here, make no mistake. We have done quite a bit of work in a virtual world, and I think that in some way we want this to be recognized.


Current methods of “Being Recognized”

1: Titles. Most titles are a joke at this point. The High Warlord title, while rare, basically meant someone took a few weeks off work and afk’d through AV. It wasn’t really to be applauded for skill but more for putting up with an insane grind.

2: Levels. Not much to say, level 70 isn’t exactly hard to get. I know multiple people in real life who play WoW at a very casual level and have multiple 70s. I only mention it because levels are a form of measurement.

3: Gear. This tends to be a bit more broad. Gear can include weapons and armor, but I believe it may also extend to extraneous items such as trinkets and other gadgets that have right click effects. Such items may include special mounts, special costumes, special items (snowballs?), etc. In previous games though, gear has been used as one of the primary measuring sticks. I’m going to reach way back for an example here, but for those of you who played Everquest it was almost awe inspiring to see someone with full Plane of Fear/Plane of Hate gear. A purple cleric was something that you almost kneeled down to. In WoW this has been diminished quite substantially. Welfare epics are common place. Unique weapon and armor graphics are going the way of the dodo. With the introduction of Season 3 gear having the same graphics as T6, it just reinforced the fact that Blizzard appears to be whitewashing any type of achievement system to allow the casual player to be “just like your favorite hero”. And yes, I realize that Season 3 gear will take more to use (personal rating etc). While that is true, I think there is a distinction that needs to be made between gathering a few friends for weekly PVP, and gathering a team of 25-30 people and completing a long list of boss encounters culminating in a grand finale boss killing of the entire expansion.


As a brief aside, perhaps this issue is a causality of a bigger problem. Has WoW lost it’s epic feeling? Killing Ragnaros and Nefarian back in the day was quite epic. But Killing Archimonde and Illidan… No city wide announcement, no “head quest”. It was quite a let down for some.


So to bring this full circle… Do players here play for the glory? Would you like to see more status symbol items introduced?

Some possible solutions that were thrown about may or may not include;

-Special Titles for killing higher level bosses
-Special Items from quests for killing end bosses
-An achievement page on your character that could list kill credit for bosses
-Visibly different armor for high end sets, differentiating between PVE and PVP accomplishments. I think it is absolutely fair that great PVPers be awarded with unique items as well. Especially with the introduction of resiliance gear, this really is it’s own avenue of advancement now.
-Changing character size depending upon achievements, or total value of item level of the gear you are wearing.


While it is certainly debatable on how far I think Blizzard should go to allow players to rise above the rest, it is clear that some system is wanted. I think it is pretty evident that the existence of sites such as bosskillers.com, and WoWjutsu, that we feel the need to benchmark our performance. It may be worth discussing the differences of out of game "ladders", vs in game achievement recognition methods. Expanding on this even further, sites like CTProfiles continue to pop up to rate stats across realms, which is all tied directly into gear earned. I think a good example of this that I just recently heard about is the EQ2 server first system. I don't know the specifics, but I believe they have some sort of board where you can see who "discovered" an item on a server. It basically keeps track of who was the first to loot a specific item. We know Blizzard can keep track of server data, as seen with the killboard, so would it be too much more difficult to track other in game accomplishments?


I'm trying not branch into too many areas of this, but I think it should be worth exploring a broader topic of why we play this game. In the aforementioned discussion regarding recognition, we also touched on what keeps us playing. For a few people in my guild, the general sentiment seems to be that we truly play for the people. I think it's fair to admit that in the gaming world, there are many options. Between all the different platforms, and game developers, our selection of games these days is a bottomless cornucopia of goodness. So what is the hook? I used to find a certain pleasure in the mindless grind of EQ, but those days are gone. Raiding is really my only thrill, and even then, I still feel like something is missing. Character progression is one of the few driving factors that keeps me hooked, and ofcourse the only other big factor is the people I play with. As sentimental as it sounds, I do value my guild, as we have got to know eachother over the years. I think it is worth noting that even in today's environment of rampant server transfers and reputation ditchers, that a community is really what counts. I don't know if I could go so far as to call my guild "a family", however I do feel some sort of tie to quite a few people in my guild. I would be kidding if I said I wouldn't miss em at all if I just got up and quit.


Alright, before I get too far out there I'll cut this off. I guess the two overall themes here are;
What motivates you in this game?
Would you like to see more ways to distinguish your character, and if so, what?

I am motivated to play this game by the other people I've played with for two years, and the game's very good interface.

As for distinguishing character features, it would be nice to actually get some kind of say in how my avatar looks. I personally think this is one place where WoW fails shockingly, for reasons not really apparent to me. I'm tired of seeing 20 guys who look identical to my char whenever I move from the portal to the bank, of using the same three casting animations for two years, and of the spells looking the same every single time.

This doesn't have any impact upon gameplay, and I'm absolutely positive the large majority of the playerbase would much rather see such implementations than another BT-level instance that barely 0.1% of them will see outside of movies, and that would be insufferable to play through if it wasn't for the people you do it with anyway. I would rather quit the game forever than do one more pre-nerf mother attempt or a illidan wipe DPS.

Several things took away the epicness of being first, but I think the three largest factors are that:

#1: A lot of the bosses were so bugged most people weren't willing to try them for extended periods of time.(See Vashj 1.0)

#2: There are maybe 2 or 3 guilds that are just so insanely hardcore, its virtually impossible to keep up with them. Lets face it, most of us just don't have the time to raid 6+hours a day 6 days a week without totally throwing the rest of our lives into chaos. We wish we did so that we could keep up, but we just don't, so we just can't be first and we know it.

#3: There is/was very little bottleneck boss structure in TBC. In SSC, really, you can do the bosses in any order. No one boss stands out as OMG INSANE, except maybe 1.0 leo. In TK, you can blatantly ignore any boss you don't like to clear the others. While BT/hyjal were more linear, the fact is that the bosses were very easy then got a huge boost, so they didnt feel that epic the 1st time through since they were already dead. Pre-TBC, many guilds were working on the same bosses at the same time, and the feeling was, "Hey, we can get a world first, this is awesome" Even my guild pre-tbc was only ~2 bosses behind the curve, so we felt like, hey, we can keep up. The bottleneck bosses really promoted an even playing field for the 3-4 day raid guild.

In TBC though, BT was cleared before more than 10-20 guilds were past kael. When someone is 2 full zones ahead of you, that really strips the epicness out of it, and makes it very non-competitve. It is still fun, but you cant be competitive when you are 15 bosses behind the #1 guild unless its on-server trash talk, etc.

It's just a simple extension of human psychology that applies whether the world is real or virtual. People are competitive, and judge themselves on how they compare to other people. You do it by looks, by accomplishments, by possessions, and so on. Many people only find gratification in how other's perceive them. Most people find at least some gratification in this. A very rare few, in my experience, really don't care what other people think, and just do what they what regardless. Not to bust this into a huge philosophical debate, but those latter people usually have the most self-confidence and are the strongest individuals, because they draw strength from themselves rather than what other people think. But needless to say, that is abnormal. Most people want the sports car so their neighbor will be jealous.

I guess I would say yes and no. "Epic" is purely a matter of perception. If one's perception is that the game is less epic because you aren't able to go afk in Ironforge and have 30 people looking at you, or that you can't zone into WSG after raiding and dominate people with crappy gear, then yeah, it is probably less epic. It is much easier for people to get cool-looking, competitive gear than it used to be. If one's perception is that the game is epic because you beat challenging encounters or teams of enemy players with a group of people, then no, TBC is doing that as well or better than vanilla in almost every way.

But it would only take you 10 minutes of forum searching to see topics like this on the WoW forums or even in some of the posts here (like arena weapons). I mean really, aside from the rational progression points in terms of how arena weapons mess with progression, I'd say almost all the other comments about arena gear and arena weapons in particular are pretty much the creation of wounded egos.

This is straight on the money. I've been playing since release and have played with many people who basically derived their entire sense of self-satisfaction from being "Better" than other players, for having cooler-looking gear, and whatnot. And over time, you eventually start to see how sad that is. In the end it doesn't matter at all, as long as you are enjoying your time you are spending in the game and the people you are playing with, that is what should satisfy you. If you are just miserable and feel unrewarded for your efforts, then just do something else. I think that's a big success of TBC - people should be doing something because they derive satisfaction from it, not because it necessarily makes them look cooler or have a more impressive array of virtual stats. For PvPers especially, the fact is you can basically ignore much of the PvE game now (and the people that invest in it) if you really want to, and just do what you want rather than feel compelled to raid. This is immensely better for the game in my opinion, but it is also certain to bruise some egos along the way.

I love just progressing and doing fights in the game. The challenge is usually what I enjoy.

I would enjoy more Onyxia style head turn ins for bosses like Illidan. However, as for long term recognition, either something like boss tabards, or boss minipets, or some form of trophy. Blizzard could always add in some trophy item, something like an offhanded boss head, or a picnic stand useable item to set up some plague/memorial to a downed boss.

What I would really enjoy is player housing that expanded with pve progression. Would be nice to know killing Illidan will add a sauna in your bedroom. Pretty sure that that idea will never happen, but it would be pretty amazing to flaunt a 9 story mansion to your friends.

I am slightly dissapointed with reused graphics, considering s3 arena gear is mostly BT gear graphics. Although I am slightly relieved that I dont get spam telled anymore setting foot in IF. Full naxx gear, and a Dark Edge of Insanity usually meant that unless I stripped down I would get 12+ tells everytime I went to the AH.

However, WoW will always try to boost non-hardcore raider support, so I am kind of set on knowing my gear will not stand out.

I always thought it odd how there's a crapton of PvP titles, half of which were practically trivial to get, and exactly one PvE title that was literally limited to half a dozen per server, tops. They're adding another title in 2.3 but it's still pretty hard to obtain. I like the idea of being able to show off your achievements, even if they're not cutting-edge. Scarab Lord means a fucking lot, and the people with that title deserve it, but killing nef or cthun or KT also means something. I would love a dragon-slayer title for turning in ony and nef's heads, even if it clearly puts me a rank or ten below Scarab Lord. And while I think everything before now will be lost in the tides of history, blizzard is slowly starting to turn towards that: champion of the naaru will not be achievable past level 70. It makes me wish the title "Champion of the Naaru" was less goddamn large and clunky, and didn't mention the Naaru.
In short, I do want some way to differentiate myself, even if it doesn't label me as top-of-the-top. Especially now that all the hats cover up my missing jaw, but are too awesome to turn off.
There's also the issue that my toon is a reference to a character who insisted he was "just plain, simple Garak" which makes me vacilate about using a title, but meh. I want the option.

As far as gear homogenization, it's a bit strange. Blizzard wants to say that two people with identical-looking sets represent the same level of progression from their respective areas, but I kinda prefered being able to tell which type of badass someone was by looking at their gear. Probably the more relavent issue is that the absolute plethora of different-looking gearsets would make it difficult to remember them all and size up your opponent on sight. I'm sure all of you have been able to spot-read at least half of someone's gear since they re-graphic'd T1, and I would not like to be in the spot of "well that looks fancy enough to be epics, but what type?" With progression coming as fast as it is in TBC, you very well could end up with 5 different tiers of armor being common at once (5-man + T4-T7), never mind the common offset items.

I fully support the fact that the various different TX sets for a given class are all the same because that's just too complicated, but I would at least like pallet swaps. I liked being able to tell ele shamans from resto shamans by the nature damage shoulders from MC, and I'm a bit tired of having to select someone and hunt through their buffs rather than spot-read their gear (although enh shammies stand out with their hunter gear).

I would also like bright, shiny, epix-looking and completely viable offset gear. I think that would diversify playstyles and gear styles in addition to just graphic styles. I am quite annoyed when itemization is determined entirely by set bonuses. It was such a freeing experience to finally break 8/8 T1 with awesome off-set pieces, and I never had more than 2 set pieces at a time after that. It made me have a much more relaxed attitude towards "needing" gear in that I could upgrade slot-by-slot, and let one upgrade slide while waiting for the next.
I'm really not seeing many people do that in TBC, and it tells me that the offset options are weak or the set bonuses are too strong or both. Either way, it leads to homogenization of appearance within the PvE population as much as identical-looking sets lead to homogenization between the PvE and PvP populations.

I play because I enjoy the game. That's about it. I don't really care about titles or status or individual character progression. I've played several characters since release. Alliance pre-TBC and this Blood Elf Shadow Priest in TBC. Honestly, there's a chance I might go with a Death Knight in WotLK but who knows... that's about half a year away. Who knows if I'll still be interested in raiding then.

Eventually... an undetermined amount of years from now they will pull the plug on WoW and all of it, everything will vanish in a puff of smoke. Sure you can always go to another MMO but the overall trend seems to be away from the EQ style of play (not that I ever played EQ and from the sounds of it I would have detested the game) and more towards casual players with instancing taking less of a time investment in terms of preparation.

I'm not going to start spewing the Lucy Van Pelt ten cent psychotherapy but I do think alarm bells should be going off in your head if you feel a bit too wed to your progression in an MMO. In the end it is a game meant to be played for fun and not to sort out people in a social hierarchy short of trolling some momos on WoW forums.

As time goes on I find that I enjoy talking about the mechanics, design, and content of the game as much as if not more than actually playing it -- especially in this post-Illidan lull.

This has a huge effect on things in my opinion. Now I'm not in any kind of server first (let alone world first) guilds, but I do like to progress through content and see what is out there. But when an entire zone has been cleared on the PTR before the patch is even out to everyone, I can't really ever see a "race" happening like happened in Naxx with the 4H or BWL. There is no mystery that will drive on a top guild to say lets see what no one else has seen. I bet Nihilum already has the content on farm before it leaves the PTR. So the competition mentality is gone from TBC.

AS for myself I mostly play to see the characters that I know from WC:III and TFT and maybe get to kick thier asses. How many times I've wanted to slap around Illidan or Thrall while playing a game of WC:III, and now I can, with the help of my raid =)

I'll touch on one other thing. I think the acheivements page would be an amazing idea. Not only would it increase the draw to those "old world" zones that so many people are angry about being forgotten, but it would add the cool factor to people when you can inspect that guy in Org or IF who has the Illidan/Archimonde mark checked. This doesn't even seem like a difficult thing to do. Make a seperate tab on the character sheet, put checks in for all the raid bosses or just the end bosses, whatever. Have them show up on inspect would give people that ego boost that I think lots are looking for. Anyone else actually think this is a really good idea?

Pretty much with every game I play I feel I need to do everything in it to get my moneys worth. If I am just standing around town saying "LFG random stratholme group" instead of putting my self out there and looking for a raid guild so I could have furthered my character's progression and explore the raid scene I would have quit years ago.

This is my first serious MMO. I played EQ before this but I was in elementary school (5th or 6th grade maybe? My brother got me hooked early ) and probably couldn't grasp the concept of raiding if I was tossed in to it. I continue to play WoW because I feel there is still work to be done on my character to further his "status". Most importantly though, I still play because of the all the great people I have met on WoW. Never would I have thought when I picked up this game that I would meet such cool people and share common interests and be able to talk for extended periods of time about pretty much nothing.

All in all, I raid for the fun and exploration of new content and secondarily for the progression of my own character. The people in your raid group make the game for you, they are the reasons you stay playing the game. I have become so attached to my character I could just never see letting him go to someone else or selling him even when I do eventually quit WoW some day, I just don't see it.

One last note, I think after being a tank and main tank for a raiding guild for multiple years through Molten Core all the way to Illidan, it might be sad to say but everytime I miss a raid I feel like I let the guild down. This might just be a tank mentality thing, but you feel like you are the center of the raid and that you need to be there every night, day in and day out to make it happen (obviously this is not true because no one is irreplaceable). Every mistake you feel like you cost 39, or in today's raids 24, other peoples time, but that is why I like being a tank as well, I feel like I work well under pressure situations (except for that 1 shear, shut up Gurgthock) and I am glad I decided to stick it out with my warrior.

I think this is the biggest thing missing from WoW, the fact that no body can easily recognise your accomplishments. Before Arena, there was nothing that would remotely reflect your "rank" in any part of the game. We now have it for Arena, but I think the PvE side of things definitely needs some kind of competitive recognition. Even something as little as an NPC saying "hey, your the guy that killed C'thun, wow! What was that like?" when you walk past them.

The game is in desperate need of "heart". Its always been lacking, and a lot of cool lore moments are totally watered down for no apparent reason. AQ was by far the best attempt at putting life into this game, and making it feel like a real war was happening, with the war effort and the fact that you could into Silithus and see the presence of the military of each faction.

Would it have been so hard for the Devs to allow us to see Thrall lead a battalion of troops outside Orgrimmar when the Naxx invasion world event was happening? For example.

One nice thing from FFXI was the title system that changed whenever you did a quest or killed a HNM (Boss basically in WoW). I wouldn't mind a PvP Title Name, Illidan Slayer. Or have a horrible pun like the FFXI ones did.