Jun 8
The Gap Widens
If you recall last week, I mumbled something about the increasing gap between raiders and non-raiders. Eyonix was nice enough to point out that the gap is working as intended.
Those with orange texted items are still unique and beautiful snowflakes. As the game evolves, the current “to-die-for” items will be yesterday’s news. Everyone will be chasing the “next-big-thing”, and so on and so forth.
Which, to a degree, I get. Just the same, my hopeful words from the last post (My hope is that the folks at Blizzard are aware of this and are taking steps to address this issue.) seem even more naive now. Blizzard is well aware of the issue; they just have no intention of doing anything about it.
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Well, he doesn’t mention raiding, only the intent to have a constant uberness creep. The gap between raiders and non-raiders is not correlated to item creep. The new ‘to die for’ items might be obtainable solo for example. I think these are basically two seperate issues to be addressed.
What’s more, the real test for a game is simply “Is it fun?” Having a gap between raiders and non-raiders is not a problem in and of itself if no one cares and everyone is having fun. The problem arises if Blizzard pulls EQ-esque bullshit and claims “That’s the way the game is, and we can’t change it or it would ruin everything”, e.g. EQ grinding, death penalties, time to travel, binding, quest discovery, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Once something is opposed by the majority of players, you had better get busy fixing the problem or another game will. Whether raiding is at that point is debateable, although I tend to think it is going to be a problem soon if it is not already.
I think all of us have at some early point in our lives once chased snowflakes, as a child. And given up on it after a short time, because once you got the snowflake, it would just melt and lose its beauty. There is always the next big thing snowflake, but it quickly stops being a motivating factor.
You can motivate players of MMORPGs with shiny things, as long as the player has the feeling that the next snowflake is always in his reach. Even if you know that this level 20 sword you just got will be useless to you in a couple of levels, it is still worth pursueing at the moment. But in the endgame the distance between one snowflake and the next becomes wider and wider. Getting a full tier 0 set is hard, getting a full tier 1 set is harder, getting a full tier 2 or 3 set is starting to get impossible for all but a tiny minority of players.
So the question is not whether there will be next-big-things in WoW (there always will), but how accessible these snowflakes are for chasing.
Perhaps epic/legendary items should lose their epic/legendary status as the expansions come out… If “the current “to-die-for†items will be yesterday’s news.”, as Eyonix says, surely it would make sense for orange to become purple, purple blue, etc… ?
The whole stat thing is relative I think. If 20 attrib is the best thing in the game, it will seem great until 25 is available, then everyone will want that. But there’s no absolute tacked to it like “Epic” or “Legendary”… Those terms to me seem like something that should always be reserved for the “next big thing”.