Saw a quest enjoyer on this sub complain about gaining too much exp from dungeon quests and how his normal quests are gray now so he has to skip them. Why do you think that is?
I’m just wrapped up the Westfall/Vanessa VanCleef storyline quests in Westfall on MoP at level 42. I enjoyed getting that backstory since I spent all my time in Kalimdor during those levels. I thought it was neat and it didn’t feel at all like a waste of my time.
thats great buddy, now, do that same for 8 more chars, as a current mega classic degenerate, the story is no longer the reason myself, and most of wow degens play the game.
Catering to the addicts creates an environment increasingly populated only by addicts.
That is a truly moronic long-term business strategy.
Continually redesigning the game around the people willing to repeat the same optimized loop across eight characters progressively makes the game less appealing to everyone who does not want to interact with it that way.
Then, as those other players leave, the remaining population increasingly consists of exactly the people whose behavior you catered toward in the first place.
And suddenly you have “evidence” that this is what your primary customer base wants.
Of course it is. You designed an environment that selected for them.
And I am not saying that a game should cater to everyone. A game should have an identity. It should have a philosophy, a direction, and a vision of the community it wants to cultivate.
What I am saying is that this vision should not be dictated by the addicts within that community simply because they are the people most willing to consume whatever optimized loop the game gives them.
Developers should build the game around the community they want their systems to produce.
Otherwise, they gradually select for the people most willing to organize their lives around those systems, everyone else becomes increasingly alienated, and then people like you point toward the population that remains as proof that catering to them was good business.
That is circular.
A healthy game should be more than a center for people who don't have an AA meeting to go to.
This is exactly what happened between Wotlk and Cata.
Heroics in Wotlk were brain dead easy, someone who was deaf and blind could likely do them easily.
Then Cata came around. Heroics were really hard, challenging, and engaging. You needed to be alert, you needed to use CC again, and you needed to be competent. It was what the players, the ones that were still playing after TBC, were hoping for. A real game.
But unfortunately the majority of the playerbase at that time, those that started with Wotlk, complained about the difficulty. So Blizzard nerfed everything, and the game was easy again. I was there when they nerfed Tier 11 raids because of complaints, it was honestly like night and day.
And it only devolved from that point on. Becoming more and more into what Retail is now.
Edit: This line is also why FFXIV is so widely popular and successful.
Developers should build the game around the community they want their systems to produce.
So many people are crying that Yoshi-P (director and producer of FFXIV) should cut out the beginning or early expansion parts of the story, so players can join up with their friends in the current end game content sooner. He has responded saying he will never do that. It is a game you play for the story, so cutting out the story is stupid.
WoW has practically removed the early game in the interest of allowing people to join others in newer content.
This has created a game where a large part of the world is abandoned.
WoW expanded vertically and forgot about the ground from which it came. That does not mean catering to casuals alone, nor does it mean catering to tryhards alone. It means designing for both in a way that makes the game actually feel like a world.
There are ways to make raids easier for casual players while preserving harder content for those who want it. Blizzard just has not explored those system designs very deeply.
Consider if the World First for a raid unlocked ways to make that raid easier for those who came afterward. This could address the very problem Blizzard encountered as it increasingly had to balance raids around the capabilities of its most dedicated players while still making that content accessible to everyone else.
World First could actually be brutally difficult again without requiring everyone who follows to meet the same standard.
Instead of simply nerfing the raid, the game could add a small story point: an encampment outside the raid built by those who came before. The camp provides buffs relevant to that specific raid for players who want assistance as they venture inside.
Those who want the original difficulty can simply refuse the assistance.
And those who complete the raid without it could be added to a “Hall of Fame,” with the first players to accomplish this memorialized within the encampment itself.
Now casual players can receive assistance without the harder experience being taken away from those who want it. At the same time, the accomplishments of the strongest players become part of the world experienced by everyone who follows them.
That is what I mean when I say developers should build the game around the community they want their systems to produce.
They do not have to choose between casuals and tryhards. They can design a world where both have a place.
I never said to cater to the giga casual. You assumed the weakest form of my argument and then argued that it would be bad.
Of course it would be bad.
There is an enormous space between catering to the giga casual and catering to the addict. My argument is that developers should build toward the community they actually want to cultivate, rather than either extreme.
I mean.... could we not argue that same point for dungeon 'enjoyers'? if the xp is nerfed, surely you'll keep running it anyway cause you enjoy the same monotone gameplay?
That's literally what you have been arguing this entire time. The whole point here was that when the shoe is on the other foot, you quest enjoyers suddenly don't like doing gray quests but you're forcing us to run a 1 hour dungeon for 2 bars of exp.
I am perfectly content running a dungeon one time if I am extremely over-leveled. I will assist my party just enough so that they do not die in the content, but I do not need to make it a breeze.
Working through the story of the game is half the point of playing the game. The world is the main character; you, the player, are there to learn about the main character.
But your question actually gets at something interesting. This is where I stop talking about my own perspective on the game and start talking about the relationship between a game designer and the systems-optimizer mindset.
Is the dungeon player repeatedly playing the dungeon because they enjoy the dungeon?
Or are they repeatedly playing the dungeon because they have determined that repeatedly running it is the optimal route through the game?
Those are not necessarily the same motivation.
If dungeon XP were reduced and someone immediately stopped running that dungeon, then by the same logic being applied to gray quests, were they actually a “dungeon enjoyer”? Or were they an optimization enjoyer who happened to be using that dungeon because the reward structure told them it was efficient?
That distinction matters for Blizzard.
And the funny thing about changing the optimization landscape is that optimizers will often complain precisely because the change forces them to put effort into relearning the game.
They naturally move toward the optimal path. Once they find it, that path becomes familiar and efficient. Changing the systems then destroys some of that accumulated efficiency and forces them to search for the optimal path again. Their frustration at having to do so can itself become a product of the same philosophy of optimization: they optimized the game, and now they want to minimize the effort required to continue optimizing it.
What if Blizzard understands this?
Players will naturally identify optimal routes and organize their behavior around them. But Blizzard can also recognize that some optimal routes produce behaviors that are actively worse for the kind of world they are trying to create.
Repeatedly isolating yourself from the world to run the same dungeon because it produces the best XP per hour may be optimal for leveling, but that does not mean it is optimal for the health of the game.
If Blizzard wants players moving through zones, encountering other players, following questlines, traveling between places, learning the world, and participating in the broader social environment, then there is nothing strange about designing rewards to encourage those behaviors and discourage routes that bypass them.
The optimal route for the individual player and the optimal behavior for the game as a social world do not have to be the same thing.
At some point, the thought structure of some players becomes:
“Gotta optimize so that I can optimize so that I can optimize!”
What is the end goal?
Optimization? For what purpose? To optimize further?
But why?
At some point, optimization is supposed to be serving an experience. If the experience itself is continually discarded whenever it stops being optimal, then I have to wonder whether the player was enjoying the content at all, or merely enjoying watching the numbers move efficiently.
I could go much further into the philosophy of why I am opposed to optimization for the sake of optimization, but that goes considerably deeper than this subreddit usually does.
So I will end with this:
If a game containing competitive and PvP elements naturally develops a subconscious current toward optimization, shouldn't the developers understand that current as something they are capable of shaping?
Players will optimize whatever systems they are given. The question is what behaviors the systems make optimal.
If Blizzard believes the core philosophy of the game is better served by players inhabiting the world, encountering one another, traveling, questing, exploring, and forming relationships with places rather than repeatedly extracting maximum efficiency from a single activity, then wouldn't it be in their best interest to guide that current toward those behaviors?
Developers do not have to eliminate optimization.
They have the power to decide what optimization leads toward.
TL;DR: Players will optimize whatever systems they are given. The question for Blizzard isn't whether optimization should exist, but what behaviors the game makes optimal. If dungeon spamming becomes the best way to progress but undermines the kind of social, interconnected world Blizzard wants to create, then changing that incentive is good game design.
Dungeon enjoyers also complained about dungeon quests giving too much xp and loot in dungeons being too powerful.
There’s no point in arguing, nobody will be happy with the result. Time to mute the sub and just wait for the 4th and pray to god blizzard just sticks to their design instead of listening to the minority on Reddit and streamers
They complained blues were too easy to get and they complained rewards were shit when they got nerfed, they're complaining now because there's some agi in cloth gear. All these people do is throw tantrums and cry.
No no, I'm perfectly aware all of these complainers are different people with completely different opinions. I just think it's lame there's absolutely nothing blizzard can do to please this community.
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u/Unlucky_Photo_599 7h ago
Saw a quest enjoyer on this sub complain about gaining too much exp from dungeon quests and how his normal quests are gray now so he has to skip them. Why do you think that is?