1. Burning Crusade Greens
This Burning Crusade green blacksmithing recipe was better than 100% of epic tiered gear from old WoW.
The whining:
Blizzard had a problem when they went to launch their first Warcraft expansion. In old school WoW good epic gear was hard to come by. You either had to get together with thirty-nine of your best friends at least two nights every week to run raid content on the PVE side or spend twelve to fourteen weeks grinding out honor and battlefield marks in the rank-based PVP system of the time. This meant that the best gear in the game was concentrated in a small subset of the population who had the time and the masochistic desire to gear up under these flawed old school systems. Put simply, there was potential for that gear disparity to further fragment the population into the haves and the have-nots due to gear issues.
The Nerf:
Blizzard didn’t so much need old content as they just buffed up new content to the point that Burning Crusade greens and blues outpaced most epic tiered gear from the old world within a few levels of hitting Outland. This tended to annoy old-school 40-man raiders who spent pages and pages on the forums trying to convince themselves and anyone else who would listen that the epic gear they spent months gathering had some innate advantage over Outland items with superior stats simply because their gear had purple text in their names, but the rest of the more casual gaming population just shrugged and rolled with the changes.
The Inevitable Backlash:
Everyone who didn’t have epic gear was happy with the substantial upgrade and felt like gods as they blew through new content on their way to flying mounts and a date with the Burning Legion. Everyone who spent the three months leading up to Burning Crusade raiding for gear that they had deluded themselves into thinking would give them an advantage over other players when the expansion hit spent more time on the forums griping about the changes than they spent actually playing through the new content. Then they got over it and moved on to repeatedly raiding with twenty-four of their best friends instead of thirty-nine and life went on.
2. Burning Crusade Dungeons:
The problem:
Remember all that business two paragraphs up about needing thirty-nine best friends to even have a hope of getting decent gear? Well that annoyed a lot of people who were unwilling to invest the time and scheduling commitment of a part time job for a video game. The logistics of doing any sort of progression after hitting level 60 was frustrating to the point of turning more casual players off the game entirely.
Strangely, it takes fewer people to kill one of the most powerful demons in Warcraft than it does to down a wimpy old world dragon.
The nerf:
Raid content was reduced from forty man to twenty-five man across the board in Burning Crusade after latter-day original WoW raid dungeons like Ahn Qiraj 25 proved popular and workable. Additional dungeons that only required five or ten players that offered epics at slightly lower quality than the twenty-five man dungeons and the ability to turn in badges from those dungeons for epic loot made it even easier for more players to gear up.
The Inevitable Backlash:
The more you endure to achieve a goal, the more you’re willing to go to ridiculous lengths to convince yourself and the world of your love for that something. It’s why fraternity and sorority pledges look back on hazing with fond memories, why Playstation 3 early adopters try to pretend there are good games on their system, and why former forty-man raiders still look back on that dark period of the game with fuzzy butterflies in their stomach.
The reality is that scaling raid content for smaller groups was a smart move that allowed more people to see endgame content and get nice gear while still allowing for positively godly gear for those with the inclination to push at the lunatic fringe of content progression. The same is true of PVP revamps that allows casual gamers to get good gear while still leaving an opening for the most hardcore with the arenas. But that won’t stop an old school pre-BC raider from talking your ear off about how much they loved spending thirty hours a week waiting for everyone to get online and gather in Blackrock Spire for another wipe on Ragnaros. I’ll let you decide who’s on the right side in that debate between old school and new content.
3. Gold Farmers
The Problem:
Believe it or not, there was a time when gold farmers were just that: farmers. In old Warcraft they could be found in high level zones like Azshara where the gold per hour farmed ratio was pretty good. The biggest problem they created was economic destabilization as they flooded server markets with items and gold. This flood of items on the Auction coupled with all the people buying gold led to rampant inflation that started to create a cycle where only the rich could afford to buy items, and the quickest way to get rich was to buy gold from the gold farmers which just fed the inflationary cycle.
Hernán Cortés. Original Goldfarmer.
The Solution:
Gold farming was known but tolerated for the first year or so of the game, but then the farmers started to get greedy by advertising in-game and generally being a nuisance. Blizzard responded with an aggressive campaign to ban gold farmer accounts and even started to go after people buying the gold. Thousands of accounts were banned in early 2006 and server economies went into freefall as players adjusted to a World of Warcraft where they had to go out and farm money themselves rather than relying on a cheap cash infusion from China. Sound familiar?
The Inevitable Backlash:
Talk about being careful what you wish for. Banning all of the gold farmers who were farming items semi-legitimately in game using bot programs and Chinese laborers strapped to a computer in 24 hours a day forced gold selling operations to move underground. The result has been a rise in keyloggers, account theft, and in game scams that rely on stealing to gather gold rather than farming. So I guess that crackdown worked great, trading a little inflation for an organized international gold selling cartel willing to break game rules and bend the law in the name of profit.
4. Honor System Changes
Grand Marshal Hasnolife
The Problem:
Blizzard created a massive online world based on an ongoing conflict between two factions that had been at war for decades. So naturally they would have absolutely no PVP reward system in place when the game launched. Eventually they implemented a system where players gathered honor pints every week and then the honor was calculated against the total honor gathered by everyone on the server (this was before consolidated battlegroups) and players were assigned a rank based on how well they did in the weekly calculations. Going up in rank meant that you got access to newer and better gear that could be purchased in the capital cities for a modest amount of gold.
Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?
The Solution:
Blizzard still hasn’t quite figured this one out. They started by switching the PVP system to a straight buy system where honor points were accumulated on a daily basis and made available the next day to buy items in game. When that didn’t quite work out they moved to the current system where the best PVP items in the game are available as arena rewards are available for players who want to be on the cutting edge of competition while the arena rewards from previous seasons are available in exchange for honor points for players who want to PVP but don’t like the crushing competition of the arena system.
The Inevitable Backlash:
Turns out the arenas aren’t that popular, and participation has been on the decline steadily with each new season. Players also complain that being able to buy PVP gear for honor invalidates the whole system since anyone could conceivably get ahold of the PvP gear if they invested enough time into battlegrounds. Those people also tend to miss the point that the entire game is all about people investing enough time to get high end gear whether that time is spent in raids, arenas, or the battleground. Overall, however, the current honor system provides a nice alternative way of gearing up for players who are only interested in the PVP side of the game without affecting raid balance, as most of the PVP gear and PVP specs don’t easily translate to PVE situations.
