30hrs for 1 piece of valor? accurate?

To answer the original question, no those numbers are not accurate. Without getting into all of the details, we have features like a bonus for the first activity of the day to encourage players to experiment with lots of different types of content rather than just solving which is the most efficient and running that until you're very sick of it (we call this the Mechanar Syndrome). We can try to put together a blog or some other way to convey all of the different ways to earn valor and how it all fits together.

Now, we are asking you to participate some in daily quests, scenarios, raid finder, challenge modes and the other new systems we're introducing in Mists of Pandaria. One of the pieces of feedback we heard loud and clear from Cataclysm is "I'm done raiding for the week and want to play WoW, but there is nothing to do." I know it's easy to dismiss everything that we're trying to give you to do as grinding, and I don't think we'll be able to change your mind on that until you get in the game and actually try out the content. We're pretty excited about it. Also note that players who raid the most will likely need to earn the least valor, because they'll have so many opportunities to get actual item drops.

For those of you only interested in raiding full stop, we were able to deliver a bunch of bosses for 5.0. So I think it's cynical to say that we're just adding grinding mechanics to stretch out the lifespan of the content. It's more that we're trying to give you something to do in between raids that feels like you're still making progress on your character.

Q: Why didn't you need to do that in prior expansions?

A: There was no LFR allowing casual players to full clear the raids in less than two hours.

Nah, we had farming for Whipper Root Tubers. Very compelling gameplay.

Is there a reason you're FORCING us to do daily quests for rep instead of allowing us to CHOOSE to grind the rep in dungeons?

Essentially because dungeons already reward loot from bosses and valor. Letting them also provide faction seems extraneous. Why not just increase the boss drops or give you more valor to let you buy stuff?

Here's how we got there though:

-- BC had an extensive attunement system. (I'm not passing judgment on that system because I kind of liked it myself.)
-- As part of that system, you were required to acquire a lot of reputation with different factions, which you achieved primarily by running dungeons over and over. This meant you might have a dude that needed to run Shadow Labs 3 more times while someone else needed Mechanar or Botanica.
-- To solve that problem, we let players wear tabards so they could earn whatever faction they wanted while running dungeons.
-- This made things much more convenient for players, arguably too convenient. The factions themselves sort of lost their identity. They were just different bars to fill. Also, sometimes by the time you hit Exalted or Revered with a given faction, you already had better gear from running the dungeon so much.
-- In Mists, we want to provide players alternative content to running dungeons. The dungeons are still there, but even with 6 new and 3 redone dungeons, you're ready for something else after a while.
-- Part of that something else are the Elder faction quests, such as Klaxxi and Shado-Pan. We put as much work into these quest chains as we did the level-up zone quests. The stories evolve and new branches unlock. You earn faction by doing these quests and can also earn valor to layer on top of what you're earning from dungeons, or even in lieu of dungeons if you just don't have enough time or aren't interested in a dungeon at that moment.
-- As I said above, I know not everyone loves questing. (For that matter not everyone loves mount collection or pet battles or achievements or raiding). Strictly speaking, you don't have to do the factions to progress your characters, but we figure a lot of players will.

We could have a long discussion, probably beyond the scope of this thread, about how much time you should have to commit to feel like you're keeping up with end game progression vs. how much extra time you should be able to commit if you're interested in doing so. In Cataclysm, we think we steered too far into the zone of telling players to stop playing because there was nothing else to do.

No developer wants to hear "I want to play your game, but there's nothing to do." For Mists, we are going out of our way to give players lots to do. We don't want it to be overwhelming, but we do want it to be engaging. We want you to have the option of sitting down to an evening of World of Warcraft rather than running your daily dungeon in 30 minutes and then logging out. We understand we have many players (certainly the majority in fact) who can't or aren't interested in making huge commitments to the game every week and we hope we have structured things so that you don't fall very far behind. The trick is to let players who want to play make some progress without leaving everyone else in the dust.

You're forcing people to grind the rep to exalted multiple times if you require exalted with the rep to use the mount.

If you make the mounts all BoA and don't require the exalted rep on a toon to use said mount, I'd be fine. But until a decision regarding that is made, I'm 10000000000% against this system.

On top of this, you made the new dragons mounts require the skill you get from hitting Exalted. There's ANOTHER thing you HAVE to grind to exalted on ALL your toons if you intend to use one of the best looking mounts in game that you ALREADY had to grind to get.

It's just ridiculous. You keep talking about choices, but when it comes to rep, A. Not Account Wide. B. You do it this way, or you don't get to do it at all.

I believe all of the faction mounts are account wide.

Our basic philosophy is that you don't have to get exalted to earn the best gear. Earning revered, even with every faction, isn't that daunting for someone who wants to log in and play regularly. Exalted is about prestige and vanity rewards, of which are best are often mounts. We want those mounts to take some amount of effort but they also aren't something you "need" in the game in order to do other content. I don't think it will be a brutal grind, and ideally you'll have fun along the way, but at the end of the day we want the game to be about playing to earn rewards, not just earning rewards, if that makes sense.

This is further reinforced by removing 310% flight from What a Long Strange Trip it's Been. If I spend an entire year getting the achievements on multiple toons (because I don't want cooking or fishing on one toon for instance), then I should get it on all toons. You guys told us LESS THAN A YEAR AGO that 310% was indeed a perk for WALSTIB. So a lot of people have been working towards it since then BECAUSE you told us.

We had to change that design though in order to allow account-wide mounts, which we suspected would be an even more popular feature. With account-wide mounts, every alt you ever made would have 310% flying for free had we not made that change. We want playing an alt to be about playing an alt, and not having that alt immediately as powerful as your main (though there certainly are a lot of shortcuts).

When players start getting forced to play every single day just to keep pace, you no longer have a game, you have a job.

I agree with that overall, but the definition of "forced" is pretty slippery. Some players might feel forced to play because they really, really want a nice mount.

I fundamentally believe, though there is a fair bit of data to back it up, that players lose interest when they can no longer progress their character. There are two main ways you can fail to progress. One is that you finish everything and there is nothing else to do. The other is that the tasks you want to do feel so insurmountable that you lose the urge to try. The former can be a problem if content is too gated and players are held back too often. The latter can happen when encounters feel impossible or the grind seems never ending. The challenge is to strike the right balance where players who can't play a lot feel like they aren't falling far behind, but players who want to play a lot feel like they have something to do. We can't cater to either extreme and just dismiss the other.

Those players who are complaining about nothing to do have plenty to do. Their problem is they aren't doing it. They are generally focused on one type of content (usually raiding) to the exclusion of all other. When they run out of new raid content, when they've received all the loot they want, they sit there and complain about nothing do it.

They could be going back to do the existing faction dailies but they don't.

They could be farming old content for fun and maybe items to sell on the AH for transmog but they don't.

They could be questing to experience the lore and storylines that have changed since the release of WoW, and especially in the Old World zones for Cata, but they don't.

They could be engaging in Archaeology or fishing but they don't.

They could be doing Arena or rated BGs with friends, but they don't.

Their complaints are all based on not having enough of one specific type of content when WoW is home to multiple types.

There is always more to do in the game if you look for it. Theoretically, I could tell a player that they could organize a huge roleplaying event on their server, or try to kill every boss in the game in one day, or try to /hug every NPC in Kalimdor, but that may not be anything they are interested in. Players are actually fantastic at creating their own fun -- just look at stuff like the Ironman challenge. But again, that's not going to appeal to everyone.

One of the challenges we have with maxing out professions or completing achievements or leveling alts or playing BGs is that players have done it all before. Sure, with a new expansion they'll have an opportunity to do some of that content again, and if we're lucky some of it will feel fresh, but overall we think we need to offer new plays to play as well. Then, we also have to structure the reward system in such a way that goal-oriented players are interested in pursuing that content in order to earn those rewards. That is ultimately how the endgame of MoP came to be designed.

We understand the concern from players with many alts that while Valor of the Ancients provides a form of Valor catch up for alts, that we could stand to have a Faction catch up for alts. That's a reasonable request and something we will investigate.

To state our philosophy very simply, leveling four characters should require a lot more work than leveling one character, but there is no reason it needs to take four times as long.