Tedious vs. Challenging

#1 - Jan. 14, 2014, 9:08 p.m.

I see a lot of complaints on the forums all the time saying that things are too "hard" or aren't "hard" enough. People talk about how leveling, raiding, and what have you were so much "harder" in Vanilla and that everything is too easy now.

I played since the game lunched (and one weekend of the Stress Test). I leveled six characters to 60 and raided a LOT, mostly on my Priest. I will tell you that Vanilla was not more challenging in any meaningful way. It was simply tedious. Things took much longer and were more "grindy". Raiding involved a week of consumable farming, followed by about 16 hours of actual raiding (a lot fo which was spent waiting for people, handing out consumables, and buffing).

I dinged 90 on this toon on Friday and now I'm working on the Black Prince quest lines in the hopes of getting my cloak in a few months and it got me thinking about this whole grind for a Legenday.

I don't think getting a Legendary should be easy, but I don't think it should be tedious either. Waiting three weeks to accumulate 3000 VP isn't challenging in any way. I'm gonna cap Valor every week on a new toon anyway so I can get her geared ASAP. Having three weeks of VP capping is just artificial gating. The rep grind is similarly tedious. There's no fun or challenging way to gain Black Prince rep. It's a rep grind in its purest form. I stand in one spot on Isle of Thunder having NPCs help me kill some statues for about 3 hours. How is that challenging? And, of course there's the sigils/secrets/runestones. Again, I'm just running LFRs that I would have run to gear up anyway and relying on RNG to get me all my sigils in something resembling a reasonable amount of time.

I really hope Blizzard learned a lesson with this quest line. I like the idea of a Legendary that is accessible to everyone. I think they were on the right track there. But, for me, the experience of earning a Legendary should feel more epic and challenging. I can understand their concern that if they made it challenging, some people might not be able to get it, so why not have both? Why not have a more tedious, but easy quest line for people who can't meet the challenge, and then have some challenging methods to move you along more quickly? Say there is a rep grind involved. Let people earn 55 rep per kill by grinding mobs like we did for Black Prince, but then let there be faster rep gains by doing something like a solo scenario or proving grounds that test you as a player.

Bashiok

Community Manager

#26 - Jan. 14, 2014, 10:02 p.m.

I posted about this somewhere before, but I can't find it now...

I'll largely avoid the tedious vs. challenging conversation as I'm not feeling very eloquent right now, but I will say that it's about variety. There need to be a wide variety of things to do with a wide variety of requirements to build a whole experience and appeal to any particular player at any particular moment in their schedule, knowledge, or skill with the game.

Ok, in any case, with the Legendary questline in Mists we wanted to have a reward that everyone could follow along with as the expansion progressed, and to create a story and gear-upgrade thread throughout the expansion, ultimately leading to a Legendary item of some kind. Also while developing the expansion it was important for us to support this fairly new system called LFR, and so for the Legendary to also be accessible regardless of the raid difficulty you were involved in. Obviously both have been really successful, and we're happy with hitting the goals we set for ourselves. That said we definitely learned a lot of lessons, and definitely agree on the 3000 VP step being wholly un-Legendary in particular. We think there's certainly room to improve for a future Legendary or Legendaries, and bigger goals to set to provide a challenging and rewarding experience to appeal to and be accessible by a wide range of players - to be completely vague about it. ;) Overall I'd say we're on the same page.