I can haz legendary?

In Vanilla WoW the hang out spot was Iron Forge, not Stormwind (I have no clue what was going on Horde side.  I’m a care bear through and through).  If you were one of the lucky few in a raiding guild that could scrape together 40 players toclear content, than you were probably spending many of your non-raiding hours parked on the AH bridge /flexing your muscles in your rare epic loot.   Most players didn’t have it, so it made it pretty satisfying to be the object of their envy.  Occasionally you’d see a rogue or warrior tank with Thunderfury or maybe the legendary 2hander.  Maybe you were lucky enough (i say lucky because the drops were a myth for my team) to have a player with the legendary.   Throughout BC, I was between guilds for a good bit, so raiding for me consisted of Kara and buying badge loot.  I would see a rogue in full tier 6 with glaives and become absolutely green with envy!!!   That was a sweet look right there.   The exclusivity and rarity of the item somehow contributed greatly to my level of envy.  I recently had a guildy win the rare Firelands mount.  I’m betting he gets his share of whispered “Where’d you get that?”.   I can’t decide if these objects of envious /inspect and whisper added to the drive of the game for me or not.   I certainly had no prayer of receiving one of the glaives (I was a rogue main at the time) because I wasn’t raiding Black Temple.  So I can’t say it drove me in any way at all.  I pursued character improvement through the avenues available to me and that was it.   I was fine with that.  

Over time though, the development team has changed it’s approach to items like these.  In DS, pretty much any rogue with 10k and a regular raid team could have legendary daggers that were insanely powerful.  There was really no serious envy to be had here because any rogue could get the daggers if they just put the time in.  The only real rarity in Cata were a few rare mounts.  But their rarity was often (Rag mount as the exception) counterbalanced by how outright ugly they were.  Or at least underwhelming.  This trend has continued into MoP and become even more pervasive.  Every single raider can have a legendary cloak.  Everyone!  There is nothing rare or prohibitive in any way about the questline.    But by putting everyone on equal footing, they are gently eroding one of the driving forces that motivates us to play.  I talked about it in my last entry.  The fantasy that I am special!  These rare items and their pursuit is important to an MMO.   Though I guess the real question is, since I had no hope of ever attaining a legendary back in the day, did it really make any difference at all that they existed?  Now that I do have access to the legendary, am I more or less driven to pursue it?  Well, more driven.  But there isn’t really much pursuit to be done.  Just keep chugging down the questline picking up drops and jumping through the gates as they come.  Easy peasy.

Similarly, we used to see the same type of exclusivity in the raid content itself.  I mentioned I never raided Black Temple though I did play through BC.  I was not unusual in this respect.  There was a large gate to entry.  If you were in a Kara guild, you likely saw your guild poached to death by Tier 5 and 6 guilds who didn’t want to have to gear their apps.   Fun!   So it left us stuck mainly in Kara for the bulk of an expansion while the cool kids had all the fun.   No only was their gear exclusive, but the content itself was exclusive.  I didn’t kill Illidan until the next expansion.  Blizzard’s solution to this conundrum is LFR.  Now the criteria for killing the end-of-tier boss is basically a pulse.   I can see where they’re coming from.  Honest.  They created raids like Vanilla Nax, and only a tiny fraction of their playerbase ever even stepped through the door.  They had players quitting the game in droves due to lack of content when there was content in the game that the players had not done yet.  The content was inaccessible to the players, so it may as well not have existed.  Hoping to address this once and for all, they created LFR.  This would allow players to see all the content they have made, with a few exceptions (Ra-den).      But their quest for accessibility has had some side effects.

LFR has made it so that a ultra-casual player can kill all the bosses a raider kills.  They can have all the gear a raider has, albeit at a lower ilvl.  It has fed this innate sense of entitlement in our playerbase.  I see this in new recruits all the time.  When prompted to put forth more effort or go the extra mile, they couldn’t care less.  You see, effort and going the extra mile has not been neccessary for them to progress.  Why should they start now?  The fact that they can be pretty well geared and kill all the bosses destroys the incentive to bother putting forth max effort.  Many of these sub-par players could certainly be a good player.  WoW is not exactly hard.  In previous expansions, they would have either improved or been locked out of seeing all the content.  So they improved!   Now, they just stick with LFR or continue apping to guilds until they find one that will carry them.

Not all is doom and gloom though.  We are starting to see signs that Blizzard is picking up on this culture of the freebie that they have built, or at least fed.  We had an exclusive HC boss in ToT and we’re getting an exclusive world boss that requires the legendary cloak in 5.4.   That means many of the LFR heroes are going to be stuck out in the cold on this boss.  OH NOES!!!  Honestly, it’s good for the game for there to be exclusive content.   But I think the exclusivity shouldn’t start with Heroic mode bosses like ra-den.  It should start with normal mode bosses.  Give us a bonus boss or two available only in normal mode.  That’s the gap that needs closing.  LFR to normals.  Give LFR players an incentive to put forth the effort to be a normal mode player.

To some degree, I think virtual realms, flex mode, and Proving Grounds will help with this sense of entitlement.  It will not be faceroll easy like LFR.  Players will have to try in order to succeed.  Truth be told, I am not completely sure there is a total solution.  Having nothing to do as a casual player stinks!  But having no competent players to recruit stinks too.  Blizzard is at least aware of it.  I look forward to what they may do in the expansion to get us back to a more skilled playerbase.

We’ll see.

>luvbacon<