Comment Meh at Community Goals (Score 1) 354
Blizzard has written new storylines before. Last winter, it challenged players to team up and fuel a worldwide war effort. As a payoff, it unlocked new territory. This was a good example of letting the users drive a story, but Warcraft needs more of them.
As great as this sounds on paper, this is exactly what WoW does not need more of, at least not how they implemented it. The reality is that the new content being unlocked was for large raiding guilds, a small percentage of the player base. The primary quest chains required large amounts of in-game funds and guild organization to achieve. Very very few people got to experience this (fun) part of the content.
Then, they added some grinding requirements (turnins of massive amounts of trivial items), something that required "everyone" to participate in. This was the not-fun part of the content, and it had to be done by people who would never, ever experience the content they were unlocking. Many servers were only able to get their content unlocked by exploiting players by holding "contests" in which the winner got a reward for turning in the most stuff.
Seriously, one of the lamest things they've ever done in this game to date. It follows the pattern that WoW has followed thus far: Raiders get the fun challenges, and the best rewards. Non-raiders get to put in massive amounts of time performing repetitive tasks for sub-par rewards or none at all.
It seems they are making strides with this in the upcoming Expansion, since gear will be equalized when the level cap is raised, and also the raiding requirements are being reduced to 25 people instead of 40. But, I remain skeptical that they will hold to this design principle.
As great as this sounds on paper, this is exactly what WoW does not need more of, at least not how they implemented it. The reality is that the new content being unlocked was for large raiding guilds, a small percentage of the player base. The primary quest chains required large amounts of in-game funds and guild organization to achieve. Very very few people got to experience this (fun) part of the content.
Then, they added some grinding requirements (turnins of massive amounts of trivial items), something that required "everyone" to participate in. This was the not-fun part of the content, and it had to be done by people who would never, ever experience the content they were unlocking. Many servers were only able to get their content unlocked by exploiting players by holding "contests" in which the winner got a reward for turning in the most stuff.
Seriously, one of the lamest things they've ever done in this game to date. It follows the pattern that WoW has followed thus far: Raiders get the fun challenges, and the best rewards. Non-raiders get to put in massive amounts of time performing repetitive tasks for sub-par rewards or none at all.
It seems they are making strides with this in the upcoming Expansion, since gear will be equalized when the level cap is raised, and also the raiding requirements are being reduced to 25 people instead of 40. But, I remain skeptical that they will hold to this design principle.
