So today I hopped over to MMO-Champion to see if there was anything going on and it turns out there’s a poll on the front page asking if you’d do Timewalking even if there was no reward. My first thought was, “Pffft, of course I would. Wouldn’t everyone?” So I clicked on the Yes button aaaand guess what: most people actually don’t agree with me.
And for a minute I felt absolutely flabbergasted. Only 15.96% of players love this stuff as much as I do? Really? How bizarre! I mean, I know that not everyone finds the same stuff fun, but dang.
After some thought, I realized that I’m probably coming at this from a different perspective than most other players. To me, WoW is not really a social game. Yes, I know, it’s an MMO. But as Bhagpuss recently very eloquently stated, it’s sort of like going to a cafe. Other people may be at the cafe to hang out with friends or socialize. Me, I’m there to eat. The other people are just atmosphere.
Back in TBC and WotLK I was in big guilds and I raided and stuff. It was great fun and I looked back on it fondly. But the social game eventually grew thin, and I went dark.
Now I’m here for fun. I do things in game not because they’re an obligation to my guild, but because I want to do them. This is a playstyle that fits my life very well and I like it a lot. I often see people decrying the state of the game or the expansion, and honestly if I felt the same as they did I would have bounced to another game long ago. But presumably for these other people, the game is still, ultimately, social.
So! Gaming out of obligation. It’s not something I do anymore. I used to do it, and it was fun, but those days are gone. There’s nothing bad about playing that way, of course, but I prefer my current style. And that, I think, is probably why I feel so disconnected from many other players.
But that’s okay. Whatever makes me happy, I’m gonna go with it. 🙂
I think if you phrase a question to a WoW player as “would you do x if it had no reward?” they will always say no.
My suspicion is that player psychology at the top level has become so focused on minmaxing their toon that this extends to lobbying the community. It’s like when government bodies ask the people profiting from an industry if they think the industry can afford more regulation– no of course not we’re barely scraping by stop picking on poor billion dollar corporations.
Changing the reward structure would definitely create huge disruption to the game, drive players to other MMOs and produce no positive outcome.
Unless they want to give me more stuff, then change is fine and will have no negative effects and I have this study showing that it would increase subscriptions by 200%.
Well, I tend to have a similar playstyle to you (is that because I love hunters as well?). However, in this case, I am not so certain Timewalking would be appealing to me if not for the rewards.
I would say, Timewalking was designed for people who barely play alts. If you just focus on your main, the last time you were in a BC/WoTLK dungeon was probably ages ago (6-7 years). If you level alts like I do (recently leveled another hunter to 100), and you do it based on dungeoning (like I do), you go to BC/WoTLK dungeons regularly, and the Timewalking versions are not appealing!
So despite a similar playstyle and the fact I like to explore the game I would probably skip Timewalking because I’ve become fed up with BC/WoTLK dungeons when leveling alts 🙂