I’ve trawled through the gripefest to discover whats been pissing people off this week and boy, do we have some good-uns.

 

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So you remember the hot mess that was The Dreadwake mount that was given away free with a purchase of 6 months upfront game time?

Well, that gripe is back! This time with regards to the Sylverian Dreamer.

Yes, this mount that looks kinda like it belongs in FF has cause uproar again on the forums due to it being given away free with the 6 month sub package.

The OP was pissed off due to the fact that people who have been subbed on a rolling month basis rather than the rolling 6 month basis are not getting any loyalty perks when they are still there, paying, 6, 12, 24 months later…
There was also an issue that people who bought 6 months just before they announced this are getting nothing, despite doing what is requested, they just didn’t pay up in the right ‘time slot’.

There has been a call for a loyalty bonus to be given to people who have had accounts and continuous payment but so far, there’s been nothing.
Someone else did point out that this isn’t a loyalty bonus but more of an incentive, which I have to agree with.
This mount being free is the incentive to cough up the dollars for the whole 6 months up front, which means more money to instantly start getting interest in Blizzards bank account than if it came in a month at a time. Which on it’s own is fine.

Someone did comment that why don’t they do it for people who stay subbed for 6 months and then give them the mount at the end whereas the people who paid up front can get it instantly. This is a nice idea and one that I would welcome but it flies in the face that this is an incentive for a lot of money to be paid now rather than a trickle coming in over the period of half a year.

Confusion was also to be had over ‘Game Time’ v ‘Subscription’ with some people saying that paying month by month is buying Game Time. I know that I have a monthly subscription as being a poor student, the 6 month sub cost can be too much if I have had a heavy burden of textbooks.
With some saying monthly is game time and some saying monthly was a sub people were not only getting into a tizz over the mount but also over what the hell we are all actually paying for…

Now, to take a direct quote, the answer that was given by another player was that:

Game Time runs out and doesn’t renew, Subscription renews automatically when time runs out.

So if you pay monthly via a game card, it runs out and stays run out until you do something. That is Game Time.
If you pay on a debit/credit card, it runs out and then automatically charges your card so that you have a seamless run into the next month.

Blizzard itself makes no secret that paying monthly is still a subscription.

Is it unfair that people who pay for the 6 months up front get it and the people on the monthly or 3 month don’t? Especially when they are paying more?
Yes and no, don’t forget this isn’t a loyalty perk. This is an incentive. They way lots of money now, regardless if you actually play or not.

If I buy the 6 months now, they get £52.14 of my finest British Pounds.
If I buy the 3 months now, they get £28.17 of my finest British Pounds.
If I buy the 1 month now, they get £9.99 of my finest British Pounds.

If I actually stick around for the full length of the 6 month sub is of no consequence but tempting me to spend the most is. They get all that money and then it’s hands off, they’ve had the revenue from me for half a year. 3 months is a bit more risky and 1 month is the riskiest of all.
EG: it’s a bit easier to swallow that people might not be logging back in, if someone has stumped up 50 odd quid than if they only paid a tenner.

So the TL;DR?
This isn’t a loyalty reward. It’s a perk that is there to convince you to part with more money right now than spreading out the payments.
Don’t forget Blizz used to do this with 1 year subscriptions. You used to get incentives to pay all that money up front… now they have just moved the incentive to the 6 month plan.

And on the subject of loyalty rewards, seeing as we are moving towards the 15th Anniversary of WoW maybe people forgot that at the 10 year anniversary mark Blizzard had created and then shipped out these to their loyal adventurers…

Maybe if people stopped flooding the forums with “I’M QUITTING BECAUSE OF X/Y/Z” and throwing their teddies out of the pram over trivial matters then maybe Blizz might think it’s worthwhile to look into loyalty?

Currently though, those hoes ain’t loyal…

 

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I got fucking CLICKBAITED.

C L I C K B A I T E D

This post started off speculating that maybe Sylvanas wasn’t the bad girl and got my attention as a possible lore post.

Then it dissolved into a salt fest of crying over Horde killing the OP in Warmode but because the Horde had formed groups, they were cowards.

I have no fucking clue how that means that the Horde are killing WoW but
C L I C K B A I T

So. Cutting through the river of tears that was going on it turns out that the OP is upset that when they have Warmode on, they don’t join a group but just go out into the world. When they encounter a Horde they want to 1v1 them but ultimately, another Hordie joins the fray and then it’s 2v1 or as the OP put it 30v1.

Because other Horde members won’t sit out until the victor emerges, this is somehow KILLING WOW. The OP explained many times that the Horde are too scared to 1v1 them and all are in huge groups that just gank. They also refused to also join a group of Alliance members to, I dunno, even it up? Stand a fighting chance?

What we are left with is what life was like before Warmode!

I’m hard pushed to imagine that this came from someone who had previously played on a PvP server because this was how every day rolled around. If it was someone on a PvE server I’m guessing that they never enabled PvP?
I’m well aware that I am speculating and holding myself up to be labelled an elitist twat but… I just cant fathom that someone wouldn’t know what world PVP was/is like?

Even in Battlegrounds, if you’re not careful you can find yourself out on your own and surrounded. In Arenas, in anything… you can be outnumbered. The only place that you can 1v1 someone is a duel…
Trying to find Hordies on their own out in the world is under the assumption that they don’t have any friends or guildmates to call or and don’t use any of the zone wide channels.
But with this, the people that the OP has come into contact with might not have been in an Alliance Reaping Mega-Group but have just typed into Local Defence that there was some twat that was interrupting their farming and everyone who was close piled in.

It also completely sweeps aside all the instances that the Alliance are grouping up and taking a giant shit on the Horde. Even on RP servers, you just accept that flat out numbers, Alliance have more in WM without needing to group up. You suck it up.

This is another case of you are going to have to like it or lump it with regards to Warmode.
If it’s red, it’s dead is the motto after all and I know how frustrating it can be to be ganked but I also know how interesting it can be when you come across an opposition and you tolerate each other, neither of you sure what is going to happen but you both need to fish and this is the best spot.

What this boils down to is that the Horde aren’t cowards for forming groups and they are not cowards for piling in to help out a fellow Hordie because you fucking know that if it was an Alliance flying over at the time of the 1v1 they would have gone in for the kill too.

 

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Raider IO is getting a lot of hate recently.

I have to say, it is pretty frustrating for me as I’ve been turned down for 4’s because I don’t have a ‘high’ enough rating.
Even though since I logged back in after my exams, I have been doing them from M0 up. I just haven’t been doing them long enough to get the score of someone who has. That doesn’t mean that I’m a worse player but the number is apparently all that counts.

And this was the issue for the OP.

They said that WotLK had a similar add-on that was killing the group finder and Blizzard ended up blocking it as it was wrecking gameplay. In Legion when Raider IO came out not everyone cared about the score that you had but some did and the struggle returned. Now, you’re just judged by your number, making it difficult to get into groups and the OP wants Raider IO blocked.

This is a hard one as I do agree that the system is just creating a toxic cesspool but also, the mechanics of how keys work mean that you do need something like Raider IO if not Raider IO itself…

There was one person that left the obligatory snarky post implying that the OP must be someone who hasn’t managed to do a 10 because they were posting on a lvl 20 and therefore instead of improving themselves they decided that it was Raider IO’s fault.
Jokes on them though, you can see that they had the achievement for 15’s…

So once the personal attacks were out of the way the real discussion about Raider IO decended.

Raider IO gives you some level of security for your carefully pushed key.

You use it to judge who to risk taking on a key run. With the way that keys are depleted if you fuck them up, it can screw over your master plan of pushing. If the way you can see who might be better than others to enable that push is to check their score then so be it.
While one commented that didn’t agree with that and said that it just allowed people to create an elitist clown community, that was swiftly shut down in a kinda wanky way but ultimately said that if you’re DPS then there are 10 other people queuing to take that spot, you need to stand out.

This is where the mechanics of how Mythic+ works means that you can’t really get away from something like Raider IO. The previous incarnation of Challenge Modes meant that you were just on a league table, but you could keep trying and trying without the difficulty of the dungeon changing. It was all about speed.
Now we have speed, extra mechanics and keys changing dungeon and lowering to deal with. To counter all of those and not fuck up your run, you need some way of trusting what the other players are capable of.
And checking the numbers shown by Raider IO is a way to do that.

However, it’s not all roses and it also can be a complete waste of time…

Another poster did point out that it can be hard for people who play specs that aren’t flavour of the month to get into 10+ regardless of score.
Making the example that even though a player may have +2’ed all of the 9’s, they are overlooked for someone who has just done 7’s because the spec that the other person plays is deemed to be better.

But alas, that number attributed to a player doesn’t mean that the person is actually a good player. They could have been carried by guildmates through everything, or they could have paid for a boost through them all and not really know what they are doing.
Which is the risk by just relying on numbers and could end up with people actually wanting higher Raider IO scores for future dungeons of that key level, pushing even more people out of the running. As another poster put it:

“Nice idea, bad algorithm, toxic in practice”

Is there going to be a way of actually having a happy medium?

I don’t think so. Not easily anyway.

It would require a massive rework of how these dungeons work. Possibly taking Challenge mode as a basis but not having the lock out via keys.
Someone suggested that if you can only access the next ‘level’ by successfully finishing the previous level which kinda got me thinking.

Maybe they could do away with the keys and make it so that you do the specific dungeon that you want to walk into. So if you choose to do Tol Dagor, by doing it in ‘gold time’ you can queue for the any of the next three levels in that dungeon for example. Silver time would be the next two, bronze the one level above and if you miss the time you have to do it all over again. Instead of the depleting key system we have now, if you fail a second time it could remove the ability to do that dungeon at that level again and you have to do it one level down. So if you fucked up getting gold time in a +4 twice, you have to do a +3 and work your way back up. But your failure doesn’t mean that you have to do a dungeon that you don’t want to because there’s no key depletion rng.

Looking at you King’s Rest….

You could then add it to the group finder. As there would be a system that should ensure that people who join are all of the same level, kinda like how they work out this shit for PvP brackets.

As always, there is the option to host your own keys to ensure that you are not locked into trying to find a group that will accept your numbers in the dungeon you want. Might take a bit longer than just hopping into a +10 but you can pick the tone of the dungeon. The only thing you can’t help is the fact that you have a completely shitty key for dealing with the affixes that week…