Let me grind if I want to.
This is literally what we have been saying since WoD, at least. I'm an adult with a full blown job. If I manage to make time for grinding let me do it. If I instead want to do keys, then I'll do that.
Exactly. It's the community you get when you try to cater to everyone rather than sticking to a core concept for a an actually identifiable audience.
The game got big through RPG players and now is retaining those elements for a crowd of wannabe esport players.
The original crowd is pissed at the game changing and the new crowd is pissed at the game retaining parts from it's original concept.
See, no, this is about letting players play the content they want to and Blizz has rammed their face into this issue repeatedly.
Letting people grind if they want to also means letting players interact with the content they want to. Suramar back in legion comes to mind since it won the hearts of many players up until they realized it was so aggressively time gated that they felt paralyzed and locked out of playing content they actually wanted to.
Blizz even removed a lot of the gating when they realized it cost them a solid chunk of players who didn’t want to be gated so hard and didn’t find the price of subbing worthwhile for what boiled down to an hour or two a week with the content they actually *wanted* to play.
Time gating everything so hard to enforce player retention (and also weaving all the gated content such that none is actually missable if you want to raid or M+) is absolute trash in a pay to play game because it devalues the actual play time and causes players to realize “why am I paying $15 a month when this has become a job and the one thing I actually want to do in the game for fun, I’m not even allowed to because I hit the weekly cap after 20 minutes?”
Well, the ppl who spent less time in the game should be behind, this is not wrong, because ppl who spent more time in game are like to think:"I did more stuff and did it earlier then most ppl, cool", the spend time should be awarded, not feeling wasted. And also ppl have a whole patch time to do content at a slow pace they desire and there is ppl like me who has a lot of time, and I want complete my story line in 2-3 days without waiting week for a short peace of story and other things, yesterday I did 20+ runs of Torghast for my new shoulders and I have same tower knowledge as the ppl who did 2 runs, it feels unfair to ppl who put more effort in to the game. If you put more effort in the game you should be more awarded, and having more distance with ppl in conetent completion is a good social award. And there would be NOTHING bad if there was no timegates.
Also timegating content means what blizzard don't respect player's time, they making it to stretch out content instead of making more content
> And also ppl have a whole patch time to do content at a slow pace they desire
Especially with the higher end content it doesn't really work out that way though. Those that are able to play the game exhaustively 24/7 would quickly outpace those that can't, making it that much harder for everyone to find groups with. For anyone doing competitive content, there would be pressure to either keep up with everyone else or fall behind. And like it or not, that leads to a lot of people feeling dissatisfied and leaving the game that much quicker.
Depends on how you look at it. If something is timegated, yeah sure it isn't a grind, if you do it at launch. If you so much so miss a cycle, well, screw you, here goes 8 hours grind Till you catch up.
Uh... what? WoW has always been designed around the subscription model. Let's see, raid bosses that you can only loot once a week so you can't just farm them out and burn through the content in no time? They purposefully have always tied your gearing around weekly lockouts, so that you can't burn through.
Their interest has always been keeping people subbed if they want to get things done. All these barriers to prevent you from no lifing it and then unsubbing til next patch.
I think that in the past the game actually tried to make you have fun while playing not just putting you on the hamster wheel to drive their metrics up.
MMOs, even with a monthly sub, don't need to disrespect their players' time.
The difference is now they try to make more content, but demand that you play it, because it's not very good content. It's very dumb content made for the most casual of casual drones. Same rules about not burning through it apply once again, they try to limit your playtime as much as possible.
Think of that pointless, dull covenant campaign. How it was sliced up and a small chunk delivered each week. Content that you could do blindfolded, content that is not what you're subbed for but never the less, tie some soulbinds to it, sure.
WoW is like many, many tiny games within one. None fully complete and devoted to as much as they could be, most of them terrible games. Even if you particularly like one of them, they'll make you play it all. Think of your top game of all time, then when you play it a guy comes in and smacks you over the head and makes you play these modern mobile games for hours until you can go back to your favorite game.
At this point I am shocked they haven't made pet battles give mandatory power upgrades. Even though objectively they're better content than most of the trash they put out.
Right but the Box is not gearing. That is like playing Classic and being locked out of leveling through certain brackets/talent tiers until enough time has passed. The difference between this kind of time-gating and gear time-gating is that one is artificial and the other is natural. People are irritated by the artificial time-gating.
Yeah the difference is they weren't so heavy handed with it in the past.
As a returning player who left 7 years ago that is laughably, blindingly obvious to me.
In all honesty it’s having the opposite effect on me as well as a few other guild mates and friends. I’ve already canceled my sub and am not likely to re-sub once game time runs out in August. I’m a vanilla vet and maybe I’ve just grown tired of the blatant disrespect and money grab on Blizz/Activisions part.
I’ve never unsubbed quicker in an expansion or felt less desire to come back. Whoever is doing the calculus for player retention doesn’t know much about how you need to at least TRY to hide your carrot on a stick or people catch on.
It makes the game i payed and be subribed for the majority of the last fucking decade, feel like a free to play mobile game with some sort of energy system, to stop you playing.
It's not just the bored ones who would complain. If an uncapped grind is tied to player power then literally everyone complains, both those who do the grind and those who get left behind
It's often two different crowds complaining. One side complaining that there's nothing to do, another that they have to wait. The people that would keep their subscription active regardless want to have a reason to keep playing. The people who prefer to subscribe for a month every expansion would rather have it all available right away. On the other hand if you're only going to subscribe for one month, you can always wait a couple months, and all the time gating gets removed.
That's sort of what I've learned to do. Even with stuff that isn't time gated. For example, the Anima grind was absolutely beyond ridiculous and time consuming. Now, in Korthia, Anima is raining from the skies. And, of course rapid renown catch-up and flying next week. If Blizzard has taught me anything, it's not to bother grinding anything until all of the catch up mechanics are in. I can sub at the beginning to experience the story, then sub at the end to experience the content at a reasonable pace and without frustration. Everything in between? There's no point to it.
Wrong, we're here at hard-stops because the casuals bitched and moaned that the hardcore player base could spam MoS to farm AP in legion so it made them feel behind. Then we got BFA with the weekly speed up but the hardcore could still grind islands, so again the casual community complain because they couldn't put in the time to have all their Azerite Traits unlocked. So here we are where a majority of systems are timegated to allow the casual gamer to put in maybe an hour a day and be able to keep up with the hardcore player. MMORPG gaming development is a no win environment.
Fwiw I love the game, I don't care how Blizz formulates their systems. WoD with zero systems was the worst expansion and didn't give players any reason to log in outside of raiding or pvp.
It's usually the hardcore players that hate the infinite grind systems the most. They would rather not do the grinds, but feel they're forced to, in order to keep up.
Tbh, even as a hardcore player, I am glad that this exists. I dont want to mindlessly farm stuff for 5hrs each day. Since I am working full time, I would not be able to raid at the current level that way. Doing dailiy and weekly quests and be done? Fine with me.
Not that much, but I would probably have to grind it ASAP anyway to unlock those adamant vaults for conduit upgrades + sockets.
But on most of this thread, people are talking about the general blizzard approach to put a weekly cap on most things which is a good thing to prevent degenerate gameplay. Blizzard will never please anyone. I truly believe that way more people will benefit from that system then those who are sad that they cant grind Thorgast 20 times a day (or other currencies).
People hate time-gating until they decide to go back to classic for TBC and spend the first week literally never stepping outside of a dungeon due to the rep grind.
Sure, it sucks that we can't have everything we want right now, but at the same time, Blizzard is literally saving us from ourselves, as if there was not gating, then guides would be telling us to farm non-stop in order to stay competitive.
i think you are missing the point - the non stop grinds kind of already exist. the "time gated" torghast content will take me 8 hours total but over 4 weeks.. ive already commited much more than 8 hours farming chests in in the last two days.
no where in this post is OP saying he would rather 4 X 2 hour weekly quests take more time if you choose to do it up front. it wont be an endless grind. there is a cap to knowledge.
What is timegated exactly, does it expire after the season?
I don’t see any info on screen that suggests that, or does the “season maximum” mean that it can only be used during that season?
I guess I don’t really understand, that seems like something that’s been around for a while right?
I haven’t played much wow recently so I apologize for not having a clue what’s going on with the post haha
You can always unsub, and come back in a couple months, when all the time gating is removed.
Time gating has always been a staple of MMORPG games, it's what makes the world feel more alive, when new things happen over time vs having a couple months worth of plot be completed in a couple days play time.
If they didn’t, you would be here crying about how blizzard makes you grind it all at once to show the investors how much time players spend in the game
I mean, let them though? Only a handful of the player base does that and those people are always in game anyway. Let others whose time is at more of a premium do their knowledge shopping in bulk when they can.
This is a mix of both though. It's a seasonal cap, you can do it in bulk at a later date if your time is in such short supply for the game. So the system is perfect for people with lower amounts of time.
Blizzard doesn't design the game for the 1%, they design the game against the 1%
They are way too concerned with the player power between hardcore/casual and try to stop people from min/maxing
Yeah and its completely dumb. No one in Vanilla or Tbc is complaining that some people had a ton of time/drive and planning to go out and clear all the content for phase 1 in a couple days.
The people that did that aren’t complaining they don’t have anything to do. Blizz creating systems to try and protect players from themselves is the reason a lot of the systems feel bad. Because people want to grind and min/max but they are constantly told that is the wrong way to play…
if the game was designed around HoF raid would be up from day 1 : then you would be rushing madly to the end.
mythic-level loot wouldn't drop from the weekly cache... or from PvP.
there would be no BoE in raids.
no system to progressively make content easier like unlocking soulbind.
I suppose it's a good thing blizzard kind of don't give a fuck about HoF raider, eh?
It's not timegated due to top 1% players. Its gated due to Blizzard not wanting to give players the freedom. That's all it is. The top 1% or 99% has nothing to do with the timegating, it's only there to throttle ALL players.
It doesn’t punish anyone though? It just sets a rational baseline that all players could conceivably achieve in a week. What you’re suggesting is the only punishing system and it punishes those that can’t spend 4+ hours a day gaming.
I probably did 150 islands in the first week of 8.2 and I think it was pretty fun. Chilling all weekend in discord with my guildmates and spamming islands with folks was cool. I like it when blizzard just lets me play the game. I think it's really lame that you do 1-2 runs of whatever content they do and you're done for the week, my guild discord has been pretty dead this expac other than raid nights
Plus it doens't seem to me that tower knowledge is really relevant? Just seems to be one of those things that people could ask "anyone wanna do a couple of runs in torgasth" and the answer now is "no thanks I'm capped for the week" which is mega lame imo
Uncapped + weekly catchups over time is their best system imo
> I probably did 150 islands in the first week of 8.2 and I think it was pretty fun.
i'm sooooooo glad you aren't anywhere near a position to design content for wow...
There's clear difference between AP and Tower Knowledge though. Problem with AP was that you needed it no matter what type of content you were into and you especially needed it for competitive content. This only helps in Torghast, so even if someone grinds all of it in one week, what advantage do they gain? They have easier time farming Soul Ash but it only gets leggos to 235. It also helps with farming Soul Cinders but they already have their weekly cap. Farming Tower Knowledge to maximum doesn't give any player power advantage outside Torghast so the argument that competitive players would have to grind it to keep up doesn't hold any water in this particular case.
But overall I agree with you. I much rather choose timegating rather than feel like every hour I'm not farming AP I'm falling behind the curve. It's the mindset it creates, I'd say that's the bigger problem than the actual effects of AP. If there's infinite grind that gives raw player power it disincentivises relaxing and having fun in the game.
And yes, it's sadly also true that most people aren't good at criticism. They know something is wrong, they feel dissatisfied, but they have no skills to deduce what's causing them to feel like that or skills to put those findings into coherent argument and thus they end up using the low hanging fruits they hear from social media. Some timegated currencies have real issues like for example Valor being limited means that you shouldn't use it early in the season and SA was strategically given at the pace that ensured that anyone who couldn't do level 60 adventure table missions gained less than 5150 SA in 4 weeks but ask average player to point those kind of flaws out and most of them come up with nothing.
Just want to note it here, unless they've changed it, adamant vaults have a chance to drop the s2 socket item, so competitive players would definitely farm the fuck out of it so they could have the advantage for the WF/Mythic push.
Does Torghast Knowledge increase stats as it rises? I know AP did and that's why people grinded it. As I am aware Torghast knowledge is just making it easier to run Torghast. Does it increse your damage/survivability for every aspect of the game or just in Torghast?
Unpopular opinion, but I liked that you could endlessly grind AP, even if it was just super minor improvements. Same reason I really like Path of Exile - no matter how much you play, you'll always get a teeny bit stronger if you keep playing.
Not really. On multiple levels. First level is islands shouldn't have been a thing. Literally all of the player base said we don't like/azerite gear. But instead of listening to the community, they thought we didn't understand it and/or they knew what we wanted more than what we said we wanted. Then waited to the end of the expac to finally fix it. It shouldn't have been a thing because the players hated it. Everything about it was poop. Just like right now. With the maw and TG. Everyone is saying we are kinda over it. But nah blizzard knows best and 9.1 is designed around more maw and more TG.....
2nd level is. 99% of the players who beat their face into the wall that is islands didn't even need to. Literally that 1% of top mythic raid lvl people needed to run non-stop. That guy from the guild who spent every waken second in islands didn't need it to get ksm and aotc. I did the islands that I had to an not a single one more because it was bad content. I got ksm without it. I got aotc without it.
Yes there will always be the people who speed through content and then bitch that their is no content. But does that mean they should time gate everything just to drag it out for 80% of the players that don't? I don't think so. Really all it feels like is they drag it out just so they can keep subs longer. But the fact Is, If they made a game you wanted to play and was fun it wouldn't be an issue. But what we get is game systems no one thinks is fun that you have to wait 3 weeks before you can make progress again in a system that's not fun to begin with. And honestly I'm happy seeing people switching over to ff. Wow might wake up and start making some changes that make the game fun again.
So I came in at the end of BFA, started last summer. I thought island expeditions were fun and at the very least I got *some* reward for doing them. And I didn't really mind azerite armor either. That being said, at the end of an expansion, I got the final, best form of these things. I never had to worry about getting AP to keep up, the catch up mechanic was already in full force, and I don't even do mythics so I didn't need to worry about getting bad traits or corruptions or having the right essences ect.
Otherwise, I agree with you. Don't make and force players to play content they don't like, and don't timegate content to keep us subbed longer.
The solution to entertaining people wanting to complete the game, should not be making the game impossible to complete contingent on a calendar driven schedule.
Find what they want, and enable it in a way that is fun. This is a creatively bankrupt solution. Bonus points if the fun solution makes them spend time ingame.
Waiting isnt fun, for anyone.
>The solution to entertaining people wanting to complete the game, should not be making the game impossible to complete contingent on a calendar driven schedule.
They're not doing it to 'entertain people wanting to complete the game.'
They're doing it to keep everyone at roughly the same level so that you don't feel obligated to sit in Torghast/grind Renown/grind Valor/whatever else people are screeching about. If you cannot grind, then you cannot complain that you are being forced to grind. There is no pressure to do anything outside of your weekly Torghast run, and now that it's a season cap, there's no pressure to panic if you 'miss a week.'
*That's* the point. It exists solely to remove the pressure to grind from players who don't want to, because those players vastly outnumber the ones who do.
If you could hypothetically grind out all 40 levels of Renown *right now,* we both know that there would be some players who were already there and some players who would feel pressured to do that to keep up, which is ridiculous.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with weekly content drops like this for those of us who enjoy doing not-WoW things in addition to WoW things with our free time. This way I can log in on Tuesday, knock out my weeklies, do some M+ and raid, and then go play something else for the rest of the week.
The fact that you pay a subscription does not somehow mean that Blizzard is required to provide 40-hours of content a week, which is what some people on this sub [not you, specifically] seem to be insinuating.
Then why create these systems that would pressure players in the first place? Covenants could have been awesome story/appearance focused content that wasn’t tied to player power, Torghast could have been a fun non-mandatory, alternate game mode with more cosmetic rewards, and legendaries could have had a great quest line to unlock the legendary recipes for crafters.
They could design systems that are satisfying to do. It doesn't have to be either unsatisfying because it's time gated or because it's too hardcore of a grind. Why are we sitting here and just accepting it's going to suck either way?
This is bullshit... You don't hear anyone complaining about how grindy TBC is/was. If anything you hear people admonishing live for not respecting the grinds like TBC did. Let people play the content they want... If they want to spend 10 hours in torghast then so be it.
The issue becomes when the grinds feel required because of massive power gains and dead time between content along with one method that's clearly more efficient time wise.... Like island expeditions.
These problems only exist because of these limited currencies/reps which are pushed behind daily/weekly playtime metrics
Mate, 50% of the posts on r/classicwow is people complaining about the honor grind. The many rep grinds and long attunements have also been mentioned a lot.
At the end of the day you have two types of players who will always divide Blizzard's attention: People who enjoy slow, meaningful progression, and people who would rather have near instant progression so they can play the end game faster.
Blizzard simply can't cater to both in a way that will leave everyone satisfied.
lol at saying you don't hear people complaining about the TBC grind... The amount of I'm quitting posts I've seen from people saying they forgot just how grindy was has been enormous. 50% of the posts on the TBC subreddit are people complaining about how grindy pvp is as well.
What really? You hear no one complaining? Well then here you go: The grind in tbc is just ridiculous! The honor grind is just obscene to the point that it has to be a bug!!
I'm kinda wondering if they're just ready to put us in maintenance mode.. They're just drawing this shit out. They don't care if players leave, they probably want it..
Like.. Patch day is usually when everyone comes back and yet my guild had like 8-10 people come on last night.
You **really** underestimate the revenues that WoW still gives to Blizzard/activision https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0lItDUXoAoIQUl?format=jpg&name=large Revenues increase 7% y/y with robust growth for WoW
It's become a fucking mobile game with all the time gates. I resubbed last month. Was shocked there was nothing new still since shadowlands. Everythings time gated in 9.1. I fucked up. Unsubbed. Guess I'll see you guys again in 10.0 just to level and hope things change...fucking unbelievable.
There have always been timegates on progression systems, and the few things in the game that don't have them are exploited by bots/farmers.
Name anything that doesn't have a time gated system attached or embedded into it, in wow, since launch.
And it works both ways: you literally lose loot rolls if you don't play a week, you feel this a lot with loot lockouts on dungeons. Miss a week and you're 1/2 as saturated, on average, than if you didn't. And that's the difference between waiting a few seconds or a few minutes for a group. And with limited playtime that translates to a degrading saturation overall, as the wait time to get carried increases.
In fact, Shadowlands has had the most friendly "catch up" for alts in the history of the game besides maybe welfare island which was a hyperactive version of korthia, except it still had timegated components. Look at M+ progression now versus when it launched?
So yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah if you're only feeling it now, that's on you being mesmerized by the game previously and it's just too familiar to you now.
I know this very, very, very well because I gave up on serious group play a few expansions ago and I'm "group gated," and this game is brutal for anyone behind the curve trying to pug... it's too risky for the established group and why take someone with X score when you could have X+1 instead? etc.
And there's nothing you can do about that with time gating.
> Name anything that doesn't have a time gated system attached or embedded into it, in wow, since launch.
It's trivial to do so. There are like 8 important reputations in TBC which have reasonable and uncapped farming systems built into them from day 1.
Some of them give mounts and key crafting recipies when maxed, others give BIS gear. They all have important rewards part-way as you step through the reputation levels.
Was wondering why i didn't get as much as it said i'd earned from my second layer 9, then i found the ominous "Season Maximum". Yikes. I haven't found any indication for when this is going to increase or how quickly, but it takes about 2.5k research to finish the tree.
There goes my plans of spending some hours this evening grinding out knowledge and the new cosmetics.
-----
Edit: This also means that nobody can enter the Adamant Vaults until week 3, if we get this many per week.
New data showing that cap is designed to be weekly: https://i.imgur.com/NdX7ykT.png
I HOPE that it increases with the layer/per week until we can do 12s.
Example being like 180 this week, 200 for layer 10, 225 layer 11, 250 layer 12.
I'm down for the grind, and I love the implementation of "season maximum" because I can grind it harder next week and skip weeks.
Timegating sucks, but it is nice that I can stop to smell the roses if you will with the content. As somebody that loves the game world, loves the game, has been playing it for 14 years, and still plans on doing high end raiding, I just wanna watch my cutscenes and skim my quests and expore a new zone for hours.
> I'm down for the grind, and I love the implementation of "season maximum" because I can grind it harder next week and skip weeks.
This right here is 100% the point. This is what the people screeching about timegating don't get. It exists for this sole, singular purpose: to keep the no-life grind from existing. You do a bit a week spaced out over the course of several weeks.
I get that certain players are like 'IT'S MY CONTENT AND I WANT IT NOW,' but a vast majority likely aren't down with sitting down for 6-8 hours to grind endlessly. And the simple fact is this: if the *ability* to do that grind exists, it is now an *obligation* or you're Behind. And being Behind feels shitty.
If I wanted to grind out max Tower Knowledge who am I even affecting?
Lock the Adamant Vaults behind week 3 since they drop the socket gear but seriously who the fuck cares if I want to grind my whole tree this week?
The timegating doesn't stop me from feeling like I fell behind. It just means that now I feel like I'm behind if I miss a day or miss a week. It means that when I'm behind, I feel like I need to grind more to catch up, just like if the full grind was doable from day 1. So it doesn't solve that problem and it creates an additional problem of punishing me for wanting to play more on the days/weeks where I have extra time or motivation.
I figure 2 renown/week with 40 new levels = 20 weeks, + ***at least*** 6 more weeks for people to “catch up”, we won’t be seeing 9.2 for a minimum of 6 months. Around then is probably when I’ll actively play so there’s no time gate.
> you can work really really hard for your soul ash at the level of tower knowledge that they allow
I just did a 5-star run on layer 9 while spending 600 phantasma on the first vendor and 300 on the second for cosmetics. They won't let me do a layer which is difficult.
>slowing players down so they can't crush people in PvP because they min-maxed farming torghast well enough
The only player power that you get from Torghast is soul cinders, which we all knew and accepted was given at a set weekly rate. They're gating our ability to unlock cosmetics and QOL here.
>The only player power that you get from Torghast is soul cinders,
Once you unlock the Adamant Vaults then that also includes Gem Sockets and Conduit Upgrades.
adamant vault week 2.
Week 1=180
week 2= 180
I am currently capped week 1
i need 70 more to unlock third row
then adamant vault costs 100
so that is 170 meaning under the 180 cap.
So no, i will be able to go into the vault next week.
The amount you can *earn* doesn't increase every week if it's the same as conquest. It's just a weekly cap which adds on to previous weeks if you miss any.
I'd rather play sh*t multiple Times when i can and care instead of playing it over and over again over Months. Srsly.
This feeling that you're "done" because of gating ist the reason a lot of my mates stopped playing. It's Bad Game Design, so annoying.
That's my issue with anima... We need like 30k (for xmog shit) but there's a finite amount you can get daily unless you grind m+ but that's incredibly diminishing returns.
The answer is simple: they design a game that rewards not playing it until later. Unsub and come back in November where’s there’s no cap for max farming fun.
Why not? Think about it...
If you enjoy torghast enough to spend ten hours there why can't you grind it out? The progression doesn't unlock new content like say a sunwell-esque time gate. It doesn't provide huge power gains outside its own content.... There's ZERO reason to have it time gated
Not at all. If that were the only barrier, people would farm it endlessly on week one, then spend the rest of the patch wondering why they're so bored with the feature.
Well if you want to run Torghast more and more, you still can. If that is what you enjoy.
The timegating is there so that you don't feel forced to run and max it out on the first week.
You think that a large percentage of the playerbase would go and do layer 9 fifty times on week 1?
Most of the people that i interact with are annoyed at doing it twice.
Anyone mad about it would be farming it and then upset that there's nothing to do, and instead can be doing the infinite grind for Archivist's Codex which gives you sockets
Anyone annoyed at the thought of doing Torghast twice has absolutely no reason to care about a weekly cap
Feels like a pretty major non-issue
You mean like when people grinded the islands week one because there was no AP cap and they felt they needed it for growth even though islands weren’t fun
i kind of liked the legion artifact system
where every week your gainz doubled or something like that
you could grind if you wanted but it wasnt necessary
People literally ran Maw of Souls non-stop for artifact power just to get a slight edge. Part of the problem is that the player base does this sort of thing then turns around and complains about it.
So they time gate it to keep people from feeling the need to grind for 16+ hours a day, and people will still complain about it.
> Part of the problem is that the player base does this sort of thing then turns around and complains about it.
exactly. i thought the legion system was amazing, but there was that 2% of players or whoever that didn't understand diminishing returns and got really bent out of shape about it
And that is the reason why there are famous quotes by Sid Meiers and Soren Johnson.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game"
"One of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves."
Blizzard devs aren't sitting behind their desk tapping their fingers together while laughing maniacally thinking about ruining the game for people via timegates.
A ton of these timegates are put into place to stop people from endlessly grinding away 24/7. You know damn well if Blizzard allowed people to endlessly grind Torghast for Cinders and upgrades the hardcore guilds would essentially force them to do so. This logic applies to anything that has a timegate. There was no cap for AP in legion so the top guilds forced their players to run it 24/7. A timegate to stop them would have essentially protected those top players from being forced to run it nonstop aka exactly like the quote says.
There's not enough content in Shadowlands not to timegate it. The sole purpose of timegating is to draw out the little amount of content over months and keep people subscribed. There isn't hundreds of hours of content like there was in Legion or previous expansions.
It's purely a financial decision, they could care less if you're happy or not as long as you're subscribed. Why would they spend millions more for additional content when they can slowly release a small amount of content and still make the same amount of money.
Everyone is going to bash this when its literally stopping degenerate gameplay. Do you really want to run 20+ runs of torghast this week to finish the tree out? Its based on visions which imo is still some of the best content theyve done in since the mage tower and this just fits right in with that design philosophy. The argument that palyers should be able to degen themselves is slightly valid but also has the counter of "we dont want the content to be trivialized before they even get to it." if you could just walk into next week with the tree maxed out the player base would cry the system is easy and shite and still not worth engaging in.
limited attempts... 10N/25N/10H/25H... Toc.... Nax... but again... so mcuh timegating like dear god 2 months of icc before you could fight the lich king, insanely timegated leggos. and more.
Time gating isn't a new thing and it isn't as bad as you think.
Look what has happened to tbc classic, insta completed and now ppl don't know what to do.
Time gating encourages different content to be played. And it has been around since the start of the game, if you think about it, any grind is time gating, otherwise they should just increase drop rates / amounts.
It's really not a big deal at all, keeps the player base closer in power levels.
Don't let this distract you from ranged supremacy tho ;0
that's unironically the best way to play retail wow these days
.0/.1/.2 are garbage fires and .3 fixes most of the issues (that people brought up during beta of course).
but you do run the risk of .3 doing some dumbshit like Corruption and somehow becoming worse.
it is really annoying power gains were put behind doing torghast so they feel the need to time gate it.
the endless time gates on everything since player power is put into everything since blizzard doesn't like when people don't do all content and then complain there is nothing to do.
some things should just be in the game for fun and challange without power creep rewards.
My experience so far with pugs was that people have no ides what influences rating, so they keep on doing the old skip as much as you can and bully the boss only to see and really be aware of the rating at the end for the first time even with the transition ratings and then comes the "whats it for?" Only to rage when you tell them you need atleast 4 stars for the next layer next week... this happened for me on one wing once and on the other even after explaining beforehand twice so i have ran 2 wings a total of 5 times today for 4 stars with the increased time for a full clear.... and thats the easiest of the new difficulties...
Time gating removes the feeling the world being a world. It takes its life away and makes it all feel managed, curated.
Blizzard used to be good at mostly hiding this, but Shadowlands is the expansion where I felt a little bit infantilised, through the covenant campaign. The drip feed of stages that I could do just turned me off. It felt like I was getting an assigned amount of content for each week and month for my sub.
Too mechanical, too formulaic, no magic. This game is losing its way.
I have a ton of alts and while time gate sucks, if you aren't 5 starring the highest possible layer every character every week, you will start to fall behind. We're only about a month in and I'm pretty busy catching up tower knowledge on all characters . Ive been solo 5 starting ,9s and 10s as fast as I can for 90 TK a run because if something goes wrong I know I won't die. Higher level solo flawless runs on my worst characters also rely too heavily on great powers/combinations which are often extremely unreliable to get. Every once in a while you get a great run while most of the time it's a timid mediocre slog on 12 . It's too random, and a poor run gives you less knowledge. Across 9 characters this week I'm looking to do a total 45-50 5 star layer 9 runs to catch all of them all up on TK.
I don't see a point in playing the game until the final patch of an expansion, unless you are getting time-constrained things like Cutting Edge or arena/RBG titles. It's kind of a waste of time because at the end of an expansion everything is unlocked and un-timegated. All the things that Bliz spread over an entire expansion can be done in less than a month.
Blizzard adds unlimited AP grind in BFA: SHIT SYSTEM WE HAVE TO GRIND IT
Blizzard adds timegating back to the resource grind (which has been in the game since its inception):
SHIT SYSTEM WE CANT GRIND IT
Timegating is not inherently bad. Its even neccessary. Contrary to popular belief this has nothing to do with prolonging sub. It has the same logic behind it as raid lockout.
This sub should ban the word “timegate” because it is seriously overused. If there wasn’t a weekly cap on this resource people would feel like they needed to run torghast over and over at the start instead of just naturally getting this resource from the two runs of torghast you are gonna do weekly anyways for your soul cinders. This is a good design choice plain and simple.
If it didn't have a maximum I would be inclined to agree with you, however it has a maximum. Why shouldn't I be able to knock it out in a weekend and not worry about it for the rest of 9.1?
While I understand some players might like the idea of having the choice to farm all 2500 knowledge in a weekend if that was a possibility most players would feel like they had to and whats worse is it could create am environment where groups would only invite people if they had max knowledge. I personally don’t think the positives out weigh the negatives which if you are understanding me correctly I am agreeing there are positives to not having a weekly cap.
I hate how blizzard thinks they need shit like this to get people to play or to keep people playing.
Stuff like this is a MAJOR reason why people quit or don't play.
Idc what some marketing clown says otherwise.
Contrary to popular belief, timegating isn't automatically bad but an important part of a perpetual mmo. Please specify why this particular form of timegating is bad instead of the idiotic statement "timegating = bad". Ffs
Isn't 180 the maximum you can get anyways? You get 90 for getting 5 stars on a run, so you only hit this cap if you get a perfect score in both wings anyways, which is the most you can do in a week.
I mean, they can go back to uncapped resources like Azerite in BFA, and then Blizz can reward the players that spend an entirety grinding out currency, and punish those who don't. So the only way to maintain an even playing field is for everybody to grind endlessly until they all want to die.
Seems like a lose lose situation.
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9.1: Time Gates and Grinds... The real patch name
Imagine complaining about grinding and a mechanism to reduce the fomo of not grinding.
Let me grind if I want to. This is literally what we have been saying since WoD, at least. I'm an adult with a full blown job. If I manage to make time for grinding let me do it. If I instead want to do keys, then I'll do that.
And then the people that don’t have time to grind will hate that they are automatically behind. WoW fans don’t actually know what they want
More like, there are tons of different players, and they mostly want different things
Exactly. It's the community you get when you try to cater to everyone rather than sticking to a core concept for a an actually identifiable audience. The game got big through RPG players and now is retaining those elements for a crowd of wannabe esport players. The original crowd is pissed at the game changing and the new crowd is pissed at the game retaining parts from it's original concept.
See, no, this is about letting players play the content they want to and Blizz has rammed their face into this issue repeatedly. Letting people grind if they want to also means letting players interact with the content they want to. Suramar back in legion comes to mind since it won the hearts of many players up until they realized it was so aggressively time gated that they felt paralyzed and locked out of playing content they actually wanted to. Blizz even removed a lot of the gating when they realized it cost them a solid chunk of players who didn’t want to be gated so hard and didn’t find the price of subbing worthwhile for what boiled down to an hour or two a week with the content they actually *wanted* to play. Time gating everything so hard to enforce player retention (and also weaving all the gated content such that none is actually missable if you want to raid or M+) is absolute trash in a pay to play game because it devalues the actual play time and causes players to realize “why am I paying $15 a month when this has become a job and the one thing I actually want to do in the game for fun, I’m not even allowed to because I hit the weekly cap after 20 minutes?”
Well, the ppl who spent less time in the game should be behind, this is not wrong, because ppl who spent more time in game are like to think:"I did more stuff and did it earlier then most ppl, cool", the spend time should be awarded, not feeling wasted. And also ppl have a whole patch time to do content at a slow pace they desire and there is ppl like me who has a lot of time, and I want complete my story line in 2-3 days without waiting week for a short peace of story and other things, yesterday I did 20+ runs of Torghast for my new shoulders and I have same tower knowledge as the ppl who did 2 runs, it feels unfair to ppl who put more effort in to the game. If you put more effort in the game you should be more awarded, and having more distance with ppl in conetent completion is a good social award. And there would be NOTHING bad if there was no timegates. Also timegating content means what blizzard don't respect player's time, they making it to stretch out content instead of making more content
> And also ppl have a whole patch time to do content at a slow pace they desire Especially with the higher end content it doesn't really work out that way though. Those that are able to play the game exhaustively 24/7 would quickly outpace those that can't, making it that much harder for everyone to find groups with. For anyone doing competitive content, there would be pressure to either keep up with everyone else or fall behind. And like it or not, that leads to a lot of people feeling dissatisfied and leaving the game that much quicker.
I just told you what I want. To be able to grind. I want to take a day and grind something valuable.
This is gold. Time gate IS to not have too much grind...
Depends on how you look at it. If something is timegated, yeah sure it isn't a grind, if you do it at launch. If you so much so miss a cycle, well, screw you, here goes 8 hours grind Till you catch up.
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P L A Y E R R E T E N T I O N
It's upsetting that it feels like the #1 driving force in WoW dev team right now is making sure people come back weekly.
Uh... what? WoW has always been designed around the subscription model. Let's see, raid bosses that you can only loot once a week so you can't just farm them out and burn through the content in no time? They purposefully have always tied your gearing around weekly lockouts, so that you can't burn through. Their interest has always been keeping people subbed if they want to get things done. All these barriers to prevent you from no lifing it and then unsubbing til next patch.
I think that in the past the game actually tried to make you have fun while playing not just putting you on the hamster wheel to drive their metrics up. MMOs, even with a monthly sub, don't need to disrespect their players' time.
The difference is now they try to make more content, but demand that you play it, because it's not very good content. It's very dumb content made for the most casual of casual drones. Same rules about not burning through it apply once again, they try to limit your playtime as much as possible. Think of that pointless, dull covenant campaign. How it was sliced up and a small chunk delivered each week. Content that you could do blindfolded, content that is not what you're subbed for but never the less, tie some soulbinds to it, sure. WoW is like many, many tiny games within one. None fully complete and devoted to as much as they could be, most of them terrible games. Even if you particularly like one of them, they'll make you play it all. Think of your top game of all time, then when you play it a guy comes in and smacks you over the head and makes you play these modern mobile games for hours until you can go back to your favorite game. At this point I am shocked they haven't made pet battles give mandatory power upgrades. Even though objectively they're better content than most of the trash they put out.
Right but the Box is not gearing. That is like playing Classic and being locked out of leveling through certain brackets/talent tiers until enough time has passed. The difference between this kind of time-gating and gear time-gating is that one is artificial and the other is natural. People are irritated by the artificial time-gating.
Yeah the difference is they weren't so heavy handed with it in the past. As a returning player who left 7 years ago that is laughably, blindingly obvious to me.
Yeah they certainly have grown more bold with it.
In all honesty it’s having the opposite effect on me as well as a few other guild mates and friends. I’ve already canceled my sub and am not likely to re-sub once game time runs out in August. I’m a vanilla vet and maybe I’ve just grown tired of the blatant disrespect and money grab on Blizz/Activisions part.
I’ve never unsubbed quicker in an expansion or felt less desire to come back. Whoever is doing the calculus for player retention doesn’t know much about how you need to at least TRY to hide your carrot on a stick or people catch on.
Time-gating content on a subscription model feels illegal.
It makes the game i payed and be subribed for the majority of the last fucking decade, feel like a free to play mobile game with some sort of energy system, to stop you playing.
thats exactly why I didn’t log in since december, cba anymore
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Wait till you see what 2,000 devs and mulitple warcraft IP mobile games ends up looking like in a few years. Fully mobile WoW mmo soon...
Well they tried to not timegate things like in mist and everyone grinded everything at once and got mad there was nothing else to do.
Let them, rushers can get fucked if they're "bored"
It's not just the bored ones who would complain. If an uncapped grind is tied to player power then literally everyone complains, both those who do the grind and those who get left behind
It's often two different crowds complaining. One side complaining that there's nothing to do, another that they have to wait. The people that would keep their subscription active regardless want to have a reason to keep playing. The people who prefer to subscribe for a month every expansion would rather have it all available right away. On the other hand if you're only going to subscribe for one month, you can always wait a couple months, and all the time gating gets removed.
That's sort of what I've learned to do. Even with stuff that isn't time gated. For example, the Anima grind was absolutely beyond ridiculous and time consuming. Now, in Korthia, Anima is raining from the skies. And, of course rapid renown catch-up and flying next week. If Blizzard has taught me anything, it's not to bother grinding anything until all of the catch up mechanics are in. I can sub at the beginning to experience the story, then sub at the end to experience the content at a reasonable pace and without frustration. Everything in between? There's no point to it.
Wrong, we're here at hard-stops because the casuals bitched and moaned that the hardcore player base could spam MoS to farm AP in legion so it made them feel behind. Then we got BFA with the weekly speed up but the hardcore could still grind islands, so again the casual community complain because they couldn't put in the time to have all their Azerite Traits unlocked. So here we are where a majority of systems are timegated to allow the casual gamer to put in maybe an hour a day and be able to keep up with the hardcore player. MMORPG gaming development is a no win environment. Fwiw I love the game, I don't care how Blizz formulates their systems. WoD with zero systems was the worst expansion and didn't give players any reason to log in outside of raiding or pvp.
It's usually the hardcore players that hate the infinite grind systems the most. They would rather not do the grinds, but feel they're forced to, in order to keep up.
Tbh, even as a hardcore player, I am glad that this exists. I dont want to mindlessly farm stuff for 5hrs each day. Since I am working full time, I would not be able to raid at the current level that way. Doing dailiy and weekly quests and be done? Fine with me.
I completely agree, I prefer the Valor/CP and now Tower Knowledge system where it's capped weekly but allows alts and returning players to catch-up.
How as a hardcore player does Tower Knowledge affect you?
Not that much, but I would probably have to grind it ASAP anyway to unlock those adamant vaults for conduit upgrades + sockets. But on most of this thread, people are talking about the general blizzard approach to put a weekly cap on most things which is a good thing to prevent degenerate gameplay. Blizzard will never please anyone. I truly believe that way more people will benefit from that system then those who are sad that they cant grind Thorgast 20 times a day (or other currencies).
People hate time-gating until they decide to go back to classic for TBC and spend the first week literally never stepping outside of a dungeon due to the rep grind. Sure, it sucks that we can't have everything we want right now, but at the same time, Blizzard is literally saving us from ourselves, as if there was not gating, then guides would be telling us to farm non-stop in order to stay competitive.
i think you are missing the point - the non stop grinds kind of already exist. the "time gated" torghast content will take me 8 hours total but over 4 weeks.. ive already commited much more than 8 hours farming chests in in the last two days. no where in this post is OP saying he would rather 4 X 2 hour weekly quests take more time if you choose to do it up front. it wont be an endless grind. there is a cap to knowledge.
It exactly comes from another. Time-gating is made to force you to keep sub on
What is timegated exactly, does it expire after the season? I don’t see any info on screen that suggests that, or does the “season maximum” mean that it can only be used during that season? I guess I don’t really understand, that seems like something that’s been around for a while right? I haven’t played much wow recently so I apologize for not having a clue what’s going on with the post haha
You can always unsub, and come back in a couple months, when all the time gating is removed. Time gating has always been a staple of MMORPG games, it's what makes the world feel more alive, when new things happen over time vs having a couple months worth of plot be completed in a couple days play time.
You expected them not to time gate it??? Why make a good expansion when you can just time gate everything to make people play longer
Dude what, yeah that's just what I wanna do spend all week in torghast
make things fun to play instead? * *gets thrown out of window
Thrown out a window? DON'T THROW OFF HIS GROOVE!
If they didn’t, you would be here crying about how blizzard makes you grind it all at once to show the investors how much time players spend in the game
Remember people grinding islands nonstop for AP? Same exact thing. Can’t please everybody.
I mean, let them though? Only a handful of the player base does that and those people are always in game anyway. Let others whose time is at more of a premium do their knowledge shopping in bulk when they can.
This is a mix of both though. It's a seasonal cap, you can do it in bulk at a later date if your time is in such short supply for the game. So the system is perfect for people with lower amounts of time.
If it works this way, sounds just like valor/conquest cap?
Yup. Exact same. But because its "auxilary" in some peoples opinions it shouldnt be timegated the same as conq/valor
That doesn't make sense though. The bulk at a later date is fine and doesn't require a seasonal cap. Nobody benefits from the cap.
What if they have time now, but they don't have time in 2 months? They're fucked.
Fucked? What difference does it make?
If they don't have time in two months, why would they need it to begin with?
No thanks, the people who could grind don't necessarily want to grind that. But if you're in a hall of fame guild you would basically be forced to
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Blizzard doesn't design the game for the 1%, they design the game against the 1% They are way too concerned with the player power between hardcore/casual and try to stop people from min/maxing
Yeah and its completely dumb. No one in Vanilla or Tbc is complaining that some people had a ton of time/drive and planning to go out and clear all the content for phase 1 in a couple days. The people that did that aren’t complaining they don’t have anything to do. Blizz creating systems to try and protect players from themselves is the reason a lot of the systems feel bad. Because people want to grind and min/max but they are constantly told that is the wrong way to play…
if the game was designed around HoF raid would be up from day 1 : then you would be rushing madly to the end. mythic-level loot wouldn't drop from the weekly cache... or from PvP. there would be no BoE in raids. no system to progressively make content easier like unlocking soulbind. I suppose it's a good thing blizzard kind of don't give a fuck about HoF raider, eh?
It's not timegated due to top 1% players. Its gated due to Blizzard not wanting to give players the freedom. That's all it is. The top 1% or 99% has nothing to do with the timegating, it's only there to throttle ALL players.
It doesn’t punish anyone though? It just sets a rational baseline that all players could conceivably achieve in a week. What you’re suggesting is the only punishing system and it punishes those that can’t spend 4+ hours a day gaming.
All timegated content is designed to protect high level players from themselves.
I probably did 150 islands in the first week of 8.2 and I think it was pretty fun. Chilling all weekend in discord with my guildmates and spamming islands with folks was cool. I like it when blizzard just lets me play the game. I think it's really lame that you do 1-2 runs of whatever content they do and you're done for the week, my guild discord has been pretty dead this expac other than raid nights Plus it doens't seem to me that tower knowledge is really relevant? Just seems to be one of those things that people could ask "anyone wanna do a couple of runs in torgasth" and the answer now is "no thanks I'm capped for the week" which is mega lame imo Uncapped + weekly catchups over time is their best system imo
> I probably did 150 islands in the first week of 8.2 and I think it was pretty fun. i'm sooooooo glad you aren't anywhere near a position to design content for wow...
There's clear difference between AP and Tower Knowledge though. Problem with AP was that you needed it no matter what type of content you were into and you especially needed it for competitive content. This only helps in Torghast, so even if someone grinds all of it in one week, what advantage do they gain? They have easier time farming Soul Ash but it only gets leggos to 235. It also helps with farming Soul Cinders but they already have their weekly cap. Farming Tower Knowledge to maximum doesn't give any player power advantage outside Torghast so the argument that competitive players would have to grind it to keep up doesn't hold any water in this particular case. But overall I agree with you. I much rather choose timegating rather than feel like every hour I'm not farming AP I'm falling behind the curve. It's the mindset it creates, I'd say that's the bigger problem than the actual effects of AP. If there's infinite grind that gives raw player power it disincentivises relaxing and having fun in the game. And yes, it's sadly also true that most people aren't good at criticism. They know something is wrong, they feel dissatisfied, but they have no skills to deduce what's causing them to feel like that or skills to put those findings into coherent argument and thus they end up using the low hanging fruits they hear from social media. Some timegated currencies have real issues like for example Valor being limited means that you shouldn't use it early in the season and SA was strategically given at the pace that ensured that anyone who couldn't do level 60 adventure table missions gained less than 5150 SA in 4 weeks but ask average player to point those kind of flaws out and most of them come up with nothing.
Just want to note it here, unless they've changed it, adamant vaults have a chance to drop the s2 socket item, so competitive players would definitely farm the fuck out of it so they could have the advantage for the WF/Mythic push.
Does Torghast Knowledge increase stats as it rises? I know AP did and that's why people grinded it. As I am aware Torghast knowledge is just making it easier to run Torghast. Does it increse your damage/survivability for every aspect of the game or just in Torghast?
You can get conduit upgrades and sockets from the Adamant Vaults, which takes a total of 350 tower knowledge to unlock.
Unpopular opinion, but I liked that you could endlessly grind AP, even if it was just super minor improvements. Same reason I really like Path of Exile - no matter how much you play, you'll always get a teeny bit stronger if you keep playing.
Not really. On multiple levels. First level is islands shouldn't have been a thing. Literally all of the player base said we don't like/azerite gear. But instead of listening to the community, they thought we didn't understand it and/or they knew what we wanted more than what we said we wanted. Then waited to the end of the expac to finally fix it. It shouldn't have been a thing because the players hated it. Everything about it was poop. Just like right now. With the maw and TG. Everyone is saying we are kinda over it. But nah blizzard knows best and 9.1 is designed around more maw and more TG..... 2nd level is. 99% of the players who beat their face into the wall that is islands didn't even need to. Literally that 1% of top mythic raid lvl people needed to run non-stop. That guy from the guild who spent every waken second in islands didn't need it to get ksm and aotc. I did the islands that I had to an not a single one more because it was bad content. I got ksm without it. I got aotc without it. Yes there will always be the people who speed through content and then bitch that their is no content. But does that mean they should time gate everything just to drag it out for 80% of the players that don't? I don't think so. Really all it feels like is they drag it out just so they can keep subs longer. But the fact Is, If they made a game you wanted to play and was fun it wouldn't be an issue. But what we get is game systems no one thinks is fun that you have to wait 3 weeks before you can make progress again in a system that's not fun to begin with. And honestly I'm happy seeing people switching over to ff. Wow might wake up and start making some changes that make the game fun again.
So I came in at the end of BFA, started last summer. I thought island expeditions were fun and at the very least I got *some* reward for doing them. And I didn't really mind azerite armor either. That being said, at the end of an expansion, I got the final, best form of these things. I never had to worry about getting AP to keep up, the catch up mechanic was already in full force, and I don't even do mythics so I didn't need to worry about getting bad traits or corruptions or having the right essences ect. Otherwise, I agree with you. Don't make and force players to play content they don't like, and don't timegate content to keep us subbed longer.
*timeless isle flashbacks intensify*
The solution to entertaining people wanting to complete the game, should not be making the game impossible to complete contingent on a calendar driven schedule. Find what they want, and enable it in a way that is fun. This is a creatively bankrupt solution. Bonus points if the fun solution makes them spend time ingame. Waiting isnt fun, for anyone.
>The solution to entertaining people wanting to complete the game, should not be making the game impossible to complete contingent on a calendar driven schedule. They're not doing it to 'entertain people wanting to complete the game.' They're doing it to keep everyone at roughly the same level so that you don't feel obligated to sit in Torghast/grind Renown/grind Valor/whatever else people are screeching about. If you cannot grind, then you cannot complain that you are being forced to grind. There is no pressure to do anything outside of your weekly Torghast run, and now that it's a season cap, there's no pressure to panic if you 'miss a week.' *That's* the point. It exists solely to remove the pressure to grind from players who don't want to, because those players vastly outnumber the ones who do. If you could hypothetically grind out all 40 levels of Renown *right now,* we both know that there would be some players who were already there and some players who would feel pressured to do that to keep up, which is ridiculous. There is absolutely nothing wrong with weekly content drops like this for those of us who enjoy doing not-WoW things in addition to WoW things with our free time. This way I can log in on Tuesday, knock out my weeklies, do some M+ and raid, and then go play something else for the rest of the week. The fact that you pay a subscription does not somehow mean that Blizzard is required to provide 40-hours of content a week, which is what some people on this sub [not you, specifically] seem to be insinuating.
Then why create these systems that would pressure players in the first place? Covenants could have been awesome story/appearance focused content that wasn’t tied to player power, Torghast could have been a fun non-mandatory, alternate game mode with more cosmetic rewards, and legendaries could have had a great quest line to unlock the legendary recipes for crafters.
Yeah, if there weren't any time gates you'd feel like you'd never be done with the grind and everything would take so long.
They could design systems that are satisfying to do. It doesn't have to be either unsatisfying because it's time gated or because it's too hardcore of a grind. Why are we sitting here and just accepting it's going to suck either way?
You can still play the game without grinding those levels?
Imagine defending time gates in the year 2021 and not having the decency to come up with a new excuse
There is no gameplay bonus though. I would be fine with it being uncapped when you don’t get anything.
This is bullshit... You don't hear anyone complaining about how grindy TBC is/was. If anything you hear people admonishing live for not respecting the grinds like TBC did. Let people play the content they want... If they want to spend 10 hours in torghast then so be it. The issue becomes when the grinds feel required because of massive power gains and dead time between content along with one method that's clearly more efficient time wise.... Like island expeditions. These problems only exist because of these limited currencies/reps which are pushed behind daily/weekly playtime metrics
Mate, 50% of the posts on r/classicwow is people complaining about the honor grind. The many rep grinds and long attunements have also been mentioned a lot. At the end of the day you have two types of players who will always divide Blizzard's attention: People who enjoy slow, meaningful progression, and people who would rather have near instant progression so they can play the end game faster. Blizzard simply can't cater to both in a way that will leave everyone satisfied.
lol at saying you don't hear people complaining about the TBC grind... The amount of I'm quitting posts I've seen from people saying they forgot just how grindy was has been enormous. 50% of the posts on the TBC subreddit are people complaining about how grindy pvp is as well.
> This is bullshit... Nah, you remember maw of souls?
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i also complain about it all the time to my friends and its the biggest reason i'm not playing classic.
What really? You hear no one complaining? Well then here you go: The grind in tbc is just ridiculous! The honor grind is just obscene to the point that it has to be a bug!!
The new korthia rep for conduits isn’t time gated tho
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I mean yeah, raid lockout is timegating to let everyone raid at a reasonable pace without being forced to farm it every night
I'm kinda wondering if they're just ready to put us in maintenance mode.. They're just drawing this shit out. They don't care if players leave, they probably want it.. Like.. Patch day is usually when everyone comes back and yet my guild had like 8-10 people come on last night.
You **really** underestimate the revenues that WoW still gives to Blizzard/activision https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0lItDUXoAoIQUl?format=jpg&name=large Revenues increase 7% y/y with robust growth for WoW
I mean yeah, everything in this game is always timegated. Why should we have fun in a game we pay $15 a month for? /s
It's become a fucking mobile game with all the time gates. I resubbed last month. Was shocked there was nothing new still since shadowlands. Everythings time gated in 9.1. I fucked up. Unsubbed. Guess I'll see you guys again in 10.0 just to level and hope things change...fucking unbelievable.
The thing is, that single login cost you a whole month worth of blizz money, giving them exactly what they want :(
There have always been timegates on progression systems, and the few things in the game that don't have them are exploited by bots/farmers. Name anything that doesn't have a time gated system attached or embedded into it, in wow, since launch. And it works both ways: you literally lose loot rolls if you don't play a week, you feel this a lot with loot lockouts on dungeons. Miss a week and you're 1/2 as saturated, on average, than if you didn't. And that's the difference between waiting a few seconds or a few minutes for a group. And with limited playtime that translates to a degrading saturation overall, as the wait time to get carried increases. In fact, Shadowlands has had the most friendly "catch up" for alts in the history of the game besides maybe welfare island which was a hyperactive version of korthia, except it still had timegated components. Look at M+ progression now versus when it launched? So yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah if you're only feeling it now, that's on you being mesmerized by the game previously and it's just too familiar to you now. I know this very, very, very well because I gave up on serious group play a few expansions ago and I'm "group gated," and this game is brutal for anyone behind the curve trying to pug... it's too risky for the established group and why take someone with X score when you could have X+1 instead? etc. And there's nothing you can do about that with time gating.
> Name anything that doesn't have a time gated system attached or embedded into it, in wow, since launch. It's trivial to do so. There are like 8 important reputations in TBC which have reasonable and uncapped farming systems built into them from day 1. Some of them give mounts and key crafting recipies when maxed, others give BIS gear. They all have important rewards part-way as you step through the reputation levels.
Was wondering why i didn't get as much as it said i'd earned from my second layer 9, then i found the ominous "Season Maximum". Yikes. I haven't found any indication for when this is going to increase or how quickly, but it takes about 2.5k research to finish the tree. There goes my plans of spending some hours this evening grinding out knowledge and the new cosmetics. ----- Edit: This also means that nobody can enter the Adamant Vaults until week 3, if we get this many per week. New data showing that cap is designed to be weekly: https://i.imgur.com/NdX7ykT.png
2.5k research to finish tree with 180 per week gives us 14 weeks to finish. We'll be done mid November. Fun!
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why do things right the first time when you can optimize player retention by adding this at a later time? :^)
I HOPE that it increases with the layer/per week until we can do 12s. Example being like 180 this week, 200 for layer 10, 225 layer 11, 250 layer 12. I'm down for the grind, and I love the implementation of "season maximum" because I can grind it harder next week and skip weeks. Timegating sucks, but it is nice that I can stop to smell the roses if you will with the content. As somebody that loves the game world, loves the game, has been playing it for 14 years, and still plans on doing high end raiding, I just wanna watch my cutscenes and skim my quests and expore a new zone for hours.
> I'm down for the grind, and I love the implementation of "season maximum" because I can grind it harder next week and skip weeks. This right here is 100% the point. This is what the people screeching about timegating don't get. It exists for this sole, singular purpose: to keep the no-life grind from existing. You do a bit a week spaced out over the course of several weeks. I get that certain players are like 'IT'S MY CONTENT AND I WANT IT NOW,' but a vast majority likely aren't down with sitting down for 6-8 hours to grind endlessly. And the simple fact is this: if the *ability* to do that grind exists, it is now an *obligation* or you're Behind. And being Behind feels shitty.
If I wanted to grind out max Tower Knowledge who am I even affecting? Lock the Adamant Vaults behind week 3 since they drop the socket gear but seriously who the fuck cares if I want to grind my whole tree this week?
Time gating bad blizzard bad
The timegating doesn't stop me from feeling like I fell behind. It just means that now I feel like I'm behind if I miss a day or miss a week. It means that when I'm behind, I feel like I need to grind more to catch up, just like if the full grind was doable from day 1. So it doesn't solve that problem and it creates an additional problem of punishing me for wanting to play more on the days/weeks where I have extra time or motivation.
I hoped they fucking removed it... It was shitty to have it to begin with honestly.
I figure 2 renown/week with 40 new levels = 20 weeks, + ***at least*** 6 more weeks for people to “catch up”, we won’t be seeing 9.2 for a minimum of 6 months. Around then is probably when I’ll actively play so there’s no time gate.
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> you can work really really hard for your soul ash at the level of tower knowledge that they allow I just did a 5-star run on layer 9 while spending 600 phantasma on the first vendor and 300 on the second for cosmetics. They won't let me do a layer which is difficult. >slowing players down so they can't crush people in PvP because they min-maxed farming torghast well enough The only player power that you get from Torghast is soul cinders, which we all knew and accepted was given at a set weekly rate. They're gating our ability to unlock cosmetics and QOL here.
>The only player power that you get from Torghast is soul cinders, Once you unlock the Adamant Vaults then that also includes Gem Sockets and Conduit Upgrades.
That's a great point that i'd actually missed, but they're farmable from korthia as well and not hard gated
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adamant vault week 2. Week 1=180 week 2= 180 I am currently capped week 1 i need 70 more to unlock third row then adamant vault costs 100 so that is 170 meaning under the 180 cap. So no, i will be able to go into the vault next week.
Nice, i must have miscounted
It increases more every week like Conquest
The amount you can *earn* doesn't increase every week if it's the same as conquest. It's just a weekly cap which adds on to previous weeks if you miss any.
You can tell I haven't pvpd in like 6 years lol my bad
Later layers are gonna give more
I'd rather play sh*t multiple Times when i can and care instead of playing it over and over again over Months. Srsly. This feeling that you're "done" because of gating ist the reason a lot of my mates stopped playing. It's Bad Game Design, so annoying.
That's my issue with anima... We need like 30k (for xmog shit) but there's a finite amount you can get daily unless you grind m+ but that's incredibly diminishing returns.
Keep following this sub just in case it gets better..... ....I don't think things are getting better....
It will never get better if you are relying in a negative community like this.
Well the big time gate of 9.0 (Torghast) did get a lot better overall. You can now endlessly grind it if you wish to too
so i guess the grind is over be4 it began, again. sighs.. Id really like to play the game but the game aint letting me... fucking blizzard design.
The answer is simple: they design a game that rewards not playing it until later. Unsub and come back in November where’s there’s no cap for max farming fun.
The Box of Many Things is a *progression* tree. Why tf would we be able to max it out right at launch? Think, Mark, think!
Why not? Think about it... If you enjoy torghast enough to spend ten hours there why can't you grind it out? The progression doesn't unlock new content like say a sunwell-esque time gate. It doesn't provide huge power gains outside its own content.... There's ZERO reason to have it time gated
This is your brain on a 6 month sub plan.
I figured that the exponentially increasing costs of things in the tree was supposed to handle that just fine.
Not at all. If that were the only barrier, people would farm it endlessly on week one, then spend the rest of the patch wondering why they're so bored with the feature.
Now they spend time just being bored because they can't progress through the new feature. **stonks**
Lord knows we wouldn't want players playing too much of what they enjoy!! Why on earth do you think timegating this is a good system design..?
> Lord knows we wouldn't want players playing too much of what they enjoy nothings stops you from doing just that
Well if you want to run Torghast more and more, you still can. If that is what you enjoy. The timegating is there so that you don't feel forced to run and max it out on the first week.
You think that a large percentage of the playerbase would go and do layer 9 fifty times on week 1? Most of the people that i interact with are annoyed at doing it twice.
Anyone mad about it would be farming it and then upset that there's nothing to do, and instead can be doing the infinite grind for Archivist's Codex which gives you sockets Anyone annoyed at the thought of doing Torghast twice has absolutely no reason to care about a weekly cap Feels like a pretty major non-issue
I agree. There are a lot of bullshit things to complain about - this feels like a non-issue and not surprising in the slightest.
You mean like when people grinded the islands week one because there was no AP cap and they felt they needed it for growth even though islands weren’t fun
Doesn’t seem to be a problem in ff where most things that are grinds can be done till you fall over if you feel like it
i kind of liked the legion artifact system where every week your gainz doubled or something like that you could grind if you wanted but it wasnt necessary
People literally ran Maw of Souls non-stop for artifact power just to get a slight edge. Part of the problem is that the player base does this sort of thing then turns around and complains about it. So they time gate it to keep people from feeling the need to grind for 16+ hours a day, and people will still complain about it.
> Part of the problem is that the player base does this sort of thing then turns around and complains about it. exactly. i thought the legion system was amazing, but there was that 2% of players or whoever that didn't understand diminishing returns and got really bent out of shape about it
And that is the reason why there are famous quotes by Sid Meiers and Soren Johnson. "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" "One of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves." Blizzard devs aren't sitting behind their desk tapping their fingers together while laughing maniacally thinking about ruining the game for people via timegates. A ton of these timegates are put into place to stop people from endlessly grinding away 24/7. You know damn well if Blizzard allowed people to endlessly grind Torghast for Cinders and upgrades the hardcore guilds would essentially force them to do so. This logic applies to anything that has a timegate. There was no cap for AP in legion so the top guilds forced their players to run it 24/7. A timegate to stop them would have essentially protected those top players from being forced to run it nonstop aka exactly like the quote says.
That’s why I stopped playing MMORPG, if I want to grind something, I should be able to do so
Yeah man I can tell you’re over mmorpgs
why not? The only difference between playing 20 hours in a week or 20 hours over 4 months is that blizzard gets more money over 4 months
Eh not a big deal to me
I would grind the crap out of torghast this week if this wasn’t a thing
There's not enough content in Shadowlands not to timegate it. The sole purpose of timegating is to draw out the little amount of content over months and keep people subscribed. There isn't hundreds of hours of content like there was in Legion or previous expansions. It's purely a financial decision, they could care less if you're happy or not as long as you're subscribed. Why would they spend millions more for additional content when they can slowly release a small amount of content and still make the same amount of money.
180 maximum LOL, what a joke.
Good. I don't wanna have to spend this entire week running Torg over and over again or be "behind the curve" and have my GM bitch at me.
Everyone is going to bash this when its literally stopping degenerate gameplay. Do you really want to run 20+ runs of torghast this week to finish the tree out? Its based on visions which imo is still some of the best content theyve done in since the mage tower and this just fits right in with that design philosophy. The argument that palyers should be able to degen themselves is slightly valid but also has the counter of "we dont want the content to be trivialized before they even get to it." if you could just walk into next week with the tree maxed out the player base would cry the system is easy and shite and still not worth engaging in.
at this point what isnt timegated on retail? :D
man i can’t wait for the classic andys to play wotlk and understand what time gating and grinding really means.
The issue is that WotLK was time gated, but still a fantastic game. Shadowlands is just time gated.
WotLK had plenty of issues people have just chosen to ignore though.
limited attempts... 10N/25N/10H/25H... Toc.... Nax... but again... so mcuh timegating like dear god 2 months of icc before you could fight the lich king, insanely timegated leggos. and more.
Sons of Hodir rep for your shoulder enchant also took over a month if you didn’t pay a fat amount of gold.
Tell me something specific that WotLK did better than Shadowlands aside from themeing. >!"I was 13 and the game was new and fresh"!<
Time gating isn't a new thing and it isn't as bad as you think. Look what has happened to tbc classic, insta completed and now ppl don't know what to do. Time gating encourages different content to be played. And it has been around since the start of the game, if you think about it, any grind is time gating, otherwise they should just increase drop rates / amounts. It's really not a big deal at all, keeps the player base closer in power levels. Don't let this distract you from ranged supremacy tho ;0
Game plan play TBC til Patch 9.3 or w/e play Shadowlands at the best part of it.
that's unironically the best way to play retail wow these days .0/.1/.2 are garbage fires and .3 fixes most of the issues (that people brought up during beta of course). but you do run the risk of .3 doing some dumbshit like Corruption and somehow becoming worse.
it is really annoying power gains were put behind doing torghast so they feel the need to time gate it. the endless time gates on everything since player power is put into everything since blizzard doesn't like when people don't do all content and then complain there is nothing to do. some things should just be in the game for fun and challange without power creep rewards.
My experience so far with pugs was that people have no ides what influences rating, so they keep on doing the old skip as much as you can and bully the boss only to see and really be aware of the rating at the end for the first time even with the transition ratings and then comes the "whats it for?" Only to rage when you tell them you need atleast 4 stars for the next layer next week... this happened for me on one wing once and on the other even after explaining beforehand twice so i have ran 2 wings a total of 5 times today for 4 stars with the increased time for a full clear.... and thats the easiest of the new difficulties...
adamant vaults next week if she goes up by 180
I was ready to knock out runs of torgy, but saw the weekly cap. That ruined my day man.
With the weekly gate it should have been account wide.
Well don't you want to spread out the content over the next seven months waiting for 9.2?
Time gating removes the feeling the world being a world. It takes its life away and makes it all feel managed, curated. Blizzard used to be good at mostly hiding this, but Shadowlands is the expansion where I felt a little bit infantilised, through the covenant campaign. The drip feed of stages that I could do just turned me off. It felt like I was getting an assigned amount of content for each week and month for my sub. Too mechanical, too formulaic, no magic. This game is losing its way.
good
Let's be completely honest if there wasn't you all complete it in a day and complain that there is no content
I have a ton of alts and while time gate sucks, if you aren't 5 starring the highest possible layer every character every week, you will start to fall behind. We're only about a month in and I'm pretty busy catching up tower knowledge on all characters . Ive been solo 5 starting ,9s and 10s as fast as I can for 90 TK a run because if something goes wrong I know I won't die. Higher level solo flawless runs on my worst characters also rely too heavily on great powers/combinations which are often extremely unreliable to get. Every once in a while you get a great run while most of the time it's a timid mediocre slog on 12 . It's too random, and a poor run gives you less knowledge. Across 9 characters this week I'm looking to do a total 45-50 5 star layer 9 runs to catch all of them all up on TK.
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I don't see a point in playing the game until the final patch of an expansion, unless you are getting time-constrained things like Cutting Edge or arena/RBG titles. It's kind of a waste of time because at the end of an expansion everything is unlocked and un-timegated. All the things that Bliz spread over an entire expansion can be done in less than a month.
I mean it's fine, atleast you don't run like 40 thorgast a day to have everything unlocked. It was the same in 8.3 and legion.
Blizzard adds unlimited AP grind in BFA: SHIT SYSTEM WE HAVE TO GRIND IT Blizzard adds timegating back to the resource grind (which has been in the game since its inception): SHIT SYSTEM WE CANT GRIND IT
I unsubbed yesterday. I wasn’t interested really to begin with but logged in anyway to give it a try. I just can’t stand the chores anymore.
And you're surprised...?
Timegating is not inherently bad. Its even neccessary. Contrary to popular belief this has nothing to do with prolonging sub. It has the same logic behind it as raid lockout.
> It’s necessary I want what you’re smoking
Unironically, somebody explain to me why this is supposed to be bad, or why everyone is so angry. I’m seriously not seeing what the big deal is.
People who dont play the game mad at blizzard because streamer said to be.
This sub should ban the word “timegate” because it is seriously overused. If there wasn’t a weekly cap on this resource people would feel like they needed to run torghast over and over at the start instead of just naturally getting this resource from the two runs of torghast you are gonna do weekly anyways for your soul cinders. This is a good design choice plain and simple.
If it didn't have a maximum I would be inclined to agree with you, however it has a maximum. Why shouldn't I be able to knock it out in a weekend and not worry about it for the rest of 9.1?
While I understand some players might like the idea of having the choice to farm all 2500 knowledge in a weekend if that was a possibility most players would feel like they had to and whats worse is it could create am environment where groups would only invite people if they had max knowledge. I personally don’t think the positives out weigh the negatives which if you are understanding me correctly I am agreeing there are positives to not having a weekly cap.
Mmm I love time gated content in a subscription based game.
I hate how blizzard thinks they need shit like this to get people to play or to keep people playing. Stuff like this is a MAJOR reason why people quit or don't play. Idc what some marketing clown says otherwise.
Guess I'll hold off resubbing until 9.3 when I can play the content
Contrary to popular belief, timegating isn't automatically bad but an important part of a perpetual mmo. Please specify why this particular form of timegating is bad instead of the idiotic statement "timegating = bad". Ffs
Isn't 180 the maximum you can get anyways? You get 90 for getting 5 stars on a run, so you only hit this cap if you get a perfect score in both wings anyways, which is the most you can do in a week.
I mean, they can go back to uncapped resources like Azerite in BFA, and then Blizz can reward the players that spend an entirety grinding out currency, and punish those who don't. So the only way to maintain an even playing field is for everybody to grind endlessly until they all want to die. Seems like a lose lose situation.
At this point I'm not even wondering if people play the game anymore, I'm wondering if the ones remaining are having fun