Leveling can be fun. New content, new stories. Doing the same heroic for the 10th time to get that last token is not fun.
If the path from 70 to 80 is a boring, uninspired grind then I will not renew. There are too many fun things to do in life to waste time on anything that is characterized as a "grind".
P.S.: If they gave me the option of trading 10000 arena points for an instant jump to 80, yes I would take it. PvE in this game is simply running out of steam. Still high quality, polished content (for the most part) but nothing that excites me 3 years into the game. Most of my old WoW friends that have been playing since day 1 feel the same way. Most of them are quitting or simply playing less and less.
Originally Posted by Juice
I'd submit that you only do B because it is available, not because you "will not do" option A. When WOtLK comes out and the level cap is moved to 80, the arena requirements will likely be moved to lvl 80 with it. I predict you will suck it up and grind out another 10 levels and the appropriate honor to get into the lvl 80 arena, and then enjoy the pvp centric portion of the game again. I believe if you had the option to cheese the leveling process, you'd take it, but since you don't you'll take option A. [not you Aphyrax, but the royal 'you' of the random AFKer with the A-B-C attitude]
The honor grind is the most painful aspect of this entire game. I would rather farm consumables for loatheb than grind honor.
However, this isn't because battlegrounds aren't fun (at least, imo). Some of my best memories in this game are from when we faced other t3 guilds in WSG pre-BC. Highly competitive WSG/AB games are an absolute blast to play, easily as fun as a good arena match.
No, what sucks is that you are *penalized* for playing the hard, fun games. It is more rewarding to play 1-sided games that get stale extremely fast. This is completely ass-backwards, and is the core of what is wrong with the honor system imo.
I really, *really* wish blizzard would implement a BG system that works like the arena system. Being able to form a WSG/AB team, compete against similarly rated teams, and be rewarded with honor points based on your rating would be about a million times more fun than the current system. Hell, they could keep the current system in place as well if they wanted to, just give an option that encourages fun and rewards skill.
It's still Cheating.
- Just because an action (AFKing in AV) is understandable, that doesn't make it justified. You can talk about how you're sick of something, or explain how the system is broken, or note how it's necessary for high-end play. None of this makes cheating right in any way, especially since it does and always will affect others who are actually trying and doing the work. If you dislike your job and decide to goof off instead of working, are you going to use these reasons on your boss to explain why you should get paid while others continue working?
Epic gear shouldn't be trivial to obtain.
- The Honor rewards are very good. They're epic pieces that work nicely for high-end PvP, and they should *not* be easy to obtain in the span of 2-3 days (although it's possible). Daily quests of 4000 Honor would be like rewarding Daily quests in Ogri'la 150 gold per turn-in. It would make the pieces so easy to obtain, they would lose their meaning. They would not deserve such epic stats, because they're simply too easy to obtain. This is a fairly fundamental concept of game design - rewards should scale with the difficulty of obtaining them. If the complaint is that grinding Honor is no fun, then the solution is to change the game to make it fun. Making it trivial or cheating are not solutions.
Slow and Steady wins the race?
- What I don't understand is why people don't spread out their Battleground forays. Do 1 or 2 BG games a night. The Daily quests spread around Outlands have already made making money a walk in the park for casual players. I've accumulated large sums of Honor just by running Battlegrounds a few times every week, and plenty of gold by running 2 or 3 of the fastest daily quests - no burnout at all. Implementing Battleground Daily quests can almost double your Honor, if you play just one game a night. My 5 games spread out over the week will be worth almost twice as much as someone who grinds all 5 games out in one night. I'm really looking forward to this change, as it will almost double my Honor income.
What Blizzard wants is for you to consume as many parts of the game as you can. No company wants you using just one product they want as many hooks in you as they can. Blizzard does not intend for you to log on do 10 games and log off each week. If people think thats the model they want it isnt. By making people who want to be competitve in arena partake in several different parts of the game its better for them in the long run because they get a more engaged base. As a company they could care less about a customer like yourself they have millions like you. Customer's like you quit and activate constantly. What they want more of is those that consume many areas of the game because those are the customers the know they have for long term profit which helps their stock price.
This is a WoW-forums-quality post. Proofread your posts.
Blizzard's "stock price"? Blizzard Entertainment is not a publicly traded company, nor is their parent company (though theirparent company is). Someone who logs on every week for an hour is a wonderful customer. They use virtually no resources yet pay just as much as someone who plays nonstop.
The issue here isn't Blizzard forcing people to PvE because of their stock price or some such nonsense. It's that the game is in a transitional state and I think the devs are assessing the situation and figuring out how to deal with it. From 2004 through TBC release, WoW was a PvE game. PvP was a sideshow -- something to do as a diversion, with its own rewards and structure, but never a core part of gameplay. You got your toys through PvE (instances, quests, raids, etc.) and then you brought them into BGs.
With the new arena system, there is now a growing class of players for whom PvP is the entirety of the game. They'd prefer that instances, raids, levels, quests, and all the rest didn't exist. Just a city with queue NPCs and vendors providing arena and BG gear. and the arenas and BGs themselves. That's a very foreign concept to the vision that I think Blizzard's devs started out with. And they're trying to figure out what to do with it.
And now you have players who insist they will quit, and complain bitterly, over the idea of running heroics to get an optimal piece of gear for one single slot, so they can have [Cloak of Subjugated Power] instead of [Sergeant's Heavy Cape]. Compare that to the situation a year ago, when a typical priest might wear [Devout Robe] in WSG while a raiding priest had [Necro-Knight's Garb], with nary a peep from the masses. It's a drastic shift in mentality and the overall game climate, and I'm not sure anyone can really predict where we're going to end up.
Exactly. PvP thrives on competition. BGs, with their random matchmaking, are not competitive. Being a good PvPer (I would like to think that I am, being rated in the top 1% of arena) I don't get enjoyment out of stomping noobs. Well, for a bit, but not for long enough to make 75k honor.
Many PvPers I know were extremely excited when Blizzard announced rated BGs at Blizzcon. If BGs were like arena, where you get a rating, get matched against people of similar rating and your points are awarded based on that rating and not based on how much time you spent in them, no serious PvPer would AFK, ever.
Originally Posted by Obligatory
The honor grind is the most painful aspect of this entire game. I would rather farm consumables for loatheb than grind honor.
However, this isn't because battlegrounds aren't fun (at least, imo). Some of my best memories in this game are from when we faced other t3 guilds in WSG pre-BC. Highly competitive WSG/AB games are an absolute blast to play, easily as fun as a good arena match.
No, what sucks is that you are *penalized* for playing the hard, fun games. It is more rewarding to play 1-sided games that get stale extremely fast. This is completely ass-backwards, and is the core of what is wrong with the honor system imo.
I really, *really* wish blizzard would implement a BG system that works like the arena system. Being able to form a WSG/AB team, compete against similarly rated teams, and be rewarded with honor points based on your rating would be about a million times more fun than the current system. Hell, they could keep the current system in place as well if they wanted to, just give an option that encourages fun and rewards skill.
- The Honor rewards are very good. They're epic pieces that work nicely for high-end PvP, and they should *not* be easy to obtain in the span of 2-3 days (although it's possible). Daily quests of 4000 Honor would be like rewarding Daily quests in Ogri'la 150 gold per turn-in. It would make the pieces so easy to obtain, they would lose their meaning. They would not deserve such epic stats, because they're simply too easy to obtain. This is a fairly fundamental concept of game design - rewards should scale with the difficulty of obtaining them. If the complaint is that grinding Honor is no fun, then the solution is to change the game to make it fun. Making it trivial or cheating are not solutions.
"Epic" is meaningless. Epics are nothing special anymore and shouldn't be viewed as such. Purple is the new blue, and blue is the new green.
They already have no meaning. They aren't a reward. They're a prerequisite to participate on a level playing field.
Since we don't pay them by the hour they don't need us to play a lot. In fact they make more money if we play less. Also, what about the people who quit because they are forced to participate? Those don't make them any money.
The naive theory would be to say that a customer who is "prodded" to participate in more aspects of the game will subscribe longer because he is less likely to get bored.
The cynical theory would be that they envisioned heroics as the casual end game and are now presented with the problem that all the good players have moved past them, making it very hard for the casuals to find competent groups. So they force the good players back into the heroics via required gear, making us hand hold the casuals through their content.
I am a cynic.
I dont know what your job is but if you ever work in customer driven business this is exactly how it works. I used to work in the banking industry before I became a full time Financial Planner. In that industry like many others the more products you use the less likely you are going to leave that company. With WOW the more aspects you partake in the more time you invest the more relationships you build the less likely you are to quit. Trust me millions of dollars have been spent on studies that prove this. Blizzard does not want your only interaction in the game to be with the 5 people that you arena with that is a receipe for you just to leave the game.
Originally Posted by XI-
Step 1: Obtain Handgun
Step 2: Place in Mouth
Step 3: ?????????????
Step 4: Profit (this is for the rest of us).
It's still Cheating.
- Just because an action (AFKing in AV) is understandable, that doesn't make it justified.
They're not trying to justify it. They are simply stating that they do it, and why. No one enjoys BGs. No one enjoys playing with retards. There is a reason we don't do PUG heroics, why we don't do PUG arenas.
Epic gear shouldn't be trivial to obtain.
- The Honor rewards are very good. They're epic pieces that work nicely for high-end PvP, and they should *not* be easy to obtain in the span of 2-3 days (although it's possible).
So then let us buy PVP gear with arena points. No one enjoys playing with retards, against retards; arena is fun because it is matched gear-wise, skill-wise, and number-wise.
No, what sucks is that you are *penalized* for playing the hard, fun games. It is more rewarding to play 1-sided games that get stale extremely fast. This is completely ass-backwards, and is the core of what is wrong with the honor system imo.
Implementing an honor tick (ie: 20 honor every 20 seconds) would fix this. (and removing the pathetic "bonus" honor you get for winning).
The Washington Post helps perpetuate a common and pernicious misreading of the decision, referring to "the Supreme Court’s judgment that corporations have the same rights as people when it comes to political speech." What the Supreme Court actually said is that people do not lose their free speech rights when they organize as corporations, including nonprofit interest groups as well as businesses.
I dont know what your job is but if you ever work in customer driven business this is exactly how it works. I used to work in the banking industry before I became a full time Financial Planner. In that industry like many others the more products you use the less likely you are going to leave that company. With WOW the more aspects you partake in the more time you invest the more relationships you build the less likely you are to quit. Trust me millions of dollars have been spent on studies that prove this. Blizzard does not want your only interaction in the game to be with the 5 people that you arena with that is a receipe for you just to leave the game.
You are making a crucial mistake in your analogy. Yes, offering more products that the consumer wants will likely extend their relationship with you. The key part is that it must be products that I want. I am telling you, I don't want to do heroics. I have done them enough to be perfectly content to never set foot in one again.
To keep your analogy, if a customer told you to invest in bonds and you bought stocks for them instead because you thought it was the better investment, would the customer be happy? I personally would be pissed. Big time.
This is a WoW-forums-quality post. Proofread your posts.
Blizzard's "stock price"? Blizzard Entertainment is not a publicly traded company, nor is their parent company (though theirparent company is). Someone who logs on every week for an hour is a wonderful customer. They use virtually no resources yet pay just as much as someone who plays nonstop.
Please explain to me how someone who only plays an hour a week is blizzard's perfect customer? I hear this nonsense constantly, that customer is more likely just to cancel their sub than someone who plays on a consistent basis.
Originally Posted by XI-
Step 1: Obtain Handgun
Step 2: Place in Mouth
Step 3: ?????????????
Step 4: Profit (this is for the rest of us).
Please explain to me how someone who only plays an hour a week is blizzard's perfect customer? I hear this nonsense constantly, that customer is more likely just to cancel their sub than someone who plays on a consistent basis.
I could make the counter-assertion that someone who plays a lot is more likely to blow through all the content and quit from boredom and burnout. Without supporting evidence neither statement is of any particular value.
Implementing an honor tick (ie: 20 honor every 20 seconds) would fix this. (and removing the pathetic "bonus" honor you get for winning).
The very obvious problem with this 'fix' is that very quickly a tacit agreement for everyone to AFK every game would exist, as all you would need to do is sit in one instance for a very long time to gain huge amounts of honor. I agree that something needs to be done to encourage longer, more strategic games (and I think Blizz has tried doing that in 2.3), but rewarding honor just for existing is not the way to do it.
They're not trying to justify it. They are simply stating that they do it, and why.
Well, I think a few people were definitely rationalizing their way to acceptable moral grounds. =)
No one enjoys BGs. No one enjoys playing with retards. There is a reason we don't do PUG heroics, why we don't do PUG arenas.
I still enjoy BGs. Plenty of my guild mates and friends enjoy them when we can gather up a small group and do them together. Fair fights and competitions of skill in the Arena are very fun, I agree. But being able to hold back opponents while outnumbered, sneaking behind the front lines to take objectives, and engaging in massive group PvP can also be fun. (Maybe not to you, of course.)
So then let us buy PVP gear with arena points. No one enjoys playing with retards, against retards; arena is fun because it is matched gear-wise, skill-wise, and number-wise.
That's not a bad idea - I could see this being a pleasant alternative to those who really hate Battlegrounds. Seasons are long enough for good teams to have an abundance of Arena points.
They're not trying to justify it. They are simply stating that they do it, and why. No one enjoys BGs. No one enjoys playing with retards. There is a reason we don't do PUG heroics, why we don't do PUG arenas.
I actually enjoy BGs, as do many others. Please don't lump me (and a heck of a lot of other people) into one big "Everyone hates BGs" groups. As for PUG Heroics, my server does them all the time. Again, speak for yourself, not the masses as it's clear you are letting your own bias speak for you.
Please explain to me how someone who only plays an hour a week is blizzard's perfect customer? I hear this nonsense constantly, that customer is more likely just to cancel their sub than someone who plays on a consistent basis.
#1) The first person uses fewer resources (electricity for the servers, hourly wage of GMs petitioned for no good reason) and still pays $15 per month. Blizzard makes a higher margin on these people. Think of the game like an all you can eat buffet of food. You make more money on people who eat 1 plate than people who eat 5 plates, even if each extra plate of food only costs you 5 cents to make.
#2) I've never seen evidence that casual customers are more likely to cancel. People who play more are more likely to burnout, and casual customers are more likely to stop playing and forget to cancel their credit card auto-renew. We don't know who is more likely to quit, but as long as they haven't quit yet, Blizzard really does make more money from casual weekly players.
The very obvious problem with this 'fix' is that very quickly a tacit agreement for everyone to AFK every game would exist, as all you would need to do is sit in one instance for a very long time to gain huge amounts of honor. I agree that something needs to be done to encourage longer, more strategic games (and I think Blizz has tried doing that in 2.3), but rewarding honor just for existing is not the way to do it.
Perhaps a better solution would be for the "end" bonus Honor to scale with the time taken, both for the winners and the losers. This would award time spent in the BG even for the losing side, and current + improved mechanisms to discourage AFKing would guarantee that participants deserve the bonus.
The very obvious problem with this 'fix' is that very quickly a tacit agreement for everyone to AFK every game would exist, as all you would need to do is sit in one instance for a very long time to gain huge amounts of honor. I agree that something needs to be done to encourage longer, more strategic games (and I think Blizz has tried doing that in 2.3), but rewarding honor just for existing is not the way to do it.
This s why the "bugged" 4000-honor Daily was a good idea. It would've made winning everything, both for the quest completion and for accumulating tokens needed to buy items (which still would've been a major limiting factor). Instead of "hurry up and lose already so we can get our honor and requeue," a loss would've meant wasted time. It'd have encouraged defense, cooperation, and more activity because bonus honor from losing would be trivial compared to the prize for winning. Combine that perhaps with allowing people to queue for AV in groups of up to 15 (so you can take your AB team there if you feel like it, or queue for both at the same time), and you'd have an overall more pleasant environment.
Why not just take the ELO system from arena and apply it to BGs on a personal level, set a baseline minimum of games played to earn credit and dish out hefty sums of honor each week?
Perhaps a better solution would be for the "end" bonus Honor to scale with the time taken, both for the winners and the losers. This would award time spent in the BG even for the losing side, and current + improved mechanisms to discourage AFKing would guarantee that participants deserve the bonus.
Please no. The last thing the honor system needs is an even stronger correlation between time spent and rewards.
Arenas are fun because if you are good you get more points playing little than someone who is bad gets playing a lot. Skill, not time invested, is the factor that drives success. My 5v5 team has been collecting 1000+ points a week for months now playing less than 20 games a week (we can't schedule more, I would love to play more). Most people never get that many points, no matter how much they play. That is a good thing for me, because I have little time to play these days.
After the first 10 games you play for fun, bragging rights and to improve your skills. That are good reasons to play. Playing because you need 10k more honor to get all your gear even though you resent it is a bad reason.
Why not just take the ELO system from arena and apply it to BGs on a personal level, set a baseline minimum of games played to earn credit and dish out hefty sums of honor each week?
You mean model it after the Arena point system?
I wouldn't mind that, except you don't get to choose who you join the BG with. Getting unlucky and pairing with large groups of unskilled players would really hurt any sort of personal rating.
Please no. The last thing the honor system needs is an even stronger correlation between time spent and rewards.
Arenas are fun because if you are good you get more points playing little than someone who is bad gets playing a lot. Skill, not time invested, are the factors that drive success. My 5v5 team has been collecting 1000+ points a week for months now playing less than 20 games a week (we can't schedule more, I would love to play more). Most people never get that many points, no matter how much they play.
After the first 10 games you play for fun, bragging rights and to improve your skills. That are good reasons to play. Playing because you need 10k more honor to get all your gear even though you resent it is a bad reason.
Then what is needed is a complete revamp of the current Battlegrounds. My idea is to keep most of the core ideas intact, just bandaids on some aspects. I agree - if you want to change the idea behind battlegrounds, then the current mechanisms need to be scrapped.
I wouldn't mind that, except you don't get to choose who you join the BG with. Getting unlucky and pairing with large groups of unskilled players would really hurt any sort of personal rating.
It would not work on an individual level. The randomness is too high. How many serious players did 4v4 random team in WC3? Now imagine 40v40 random team. Eeeek. (Command and Conquer Renegade had a ranking system based on 32v32 random team and it worked somewhat ok, but it ultimately rewarded play time more than skill. It also would not work in WoW since it ranked based on individual contribution where the highest contributor on the losing team lost zero points and the lowest on the winning team got zero. How do you measure contribution in WoW).
As I said they promised guild-rated BGs in the future. That would be highly awesome.
Originally Posted by Rej
Then what is needed is a complete revamp of the current Battlegrounds. My idea is to keep most of the core ideas intact, just bandaids on some aspects. I agree - if you want to change the idea behind battlegrounds, then the current mechanisms need to be scrapped.
Yes. Please. Kill the current system. Yesterday. Please.
I wouldn't mind that, except you don't get to choose who you join the BG with. Getting unlucky and pairing with large groups of unskilled players would really hurt any sort of personal rating.
Well I assumed something more robust where your ELO rating would play heavily into determining your groupmates and opponents.
Edit: But Aphyrax doesn't think that will work too well, though I still maintain anything based around actual rating/skill level, instead of time spent, would be a massive improvement even if it was wildly inaccurate.
This s why the "bugged" 4000-honor Daily was a good idea. It would've made winning everything, both for the quest completion and for accumulating tokens needed to buy items (which still would've been a major limiting factor). Instead of "hurry up and lose already so we can get our honor and requeue," a loss would've meant wasted time. It'd have encouraged defense, cooperation, and more activity because bonus honor from losing would be trivial compared to the prize for winning. Combine that perhaps with allowing people to queue for AV in groups of up to 15 (so you can take your AB team there if you feel like it, or queue for both at the same time), and you'd have an overall more pleasant environment.
I agree, a one-time (daily) large reward for winning a battleground is good motivation for people who actually play to win. Unfortunately, for those that AFK it provides almost no incentive, as they thrive on running multiple BGs over and over, and odds are that at least one of them would be a win, so why put in the effort for something you'll get anyway? The only way to overcome that would make the difference in honor between winning and losing much greater for every game, but that runs the risk of cheapening the honor rewards, as it's much easier to increase the honor for a win than to lower the honor for a loss.
11/08/07, 3:44 PM
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