I appreciate your advice, eighjan. There’s familiar and sensible wisdom in it. And yes, it is very akin to “the game playing the player.” Isn’t that part of the very spirit of World of Warcraft’s design philosophy today? You can see it all over the design principles of the end-game. The game is clearly being developed and designed to keep players chasing imaginary carrots, while depending on an RNG system that seems to have free reign to achieve pure chaos and wild randomness. “Maybe you’ll get ‘lucky’ … one day … maybe not. Maybe you’ll be rewarded sensibly for your efforts & time invested in the game … maybe not. Who knows? It’s all up in the air, up to sheer random chance.” And supposedly, “That makes the game unpredictable and oh-so-interesting. Would you want a boring predictable reward system? Come on.”
Actually, I would, yes.
For the past 3 weeks, I ran Plagueful M12 to M16 no less than 26 times for the stamina trinket upgrade that my character needs the most nowadays, and until last night, I still haven’t gotten it either from the Challenger’s Chest or the “Great” Vault which, according to the now ridiculous lore, rewards based on the “Purpose.” Blizzard loves to troll its players, and now it’s trolling us even in the very lore, calling chaos, injustice, and pure randomness … the “Purpose,” and putting NPCs in their game who revere and worship said “Purpose.”
Proof of my Plaguefall marathon for a stamina trinket I never got:
And when I finally got a trinket for my character, I got an iLvl 252 trinket in the vault that AMR calculates to be a 0.07% downgrade as you can see from the screenshot above!
This is all frustrating beyond belief, and I don’t even think taking a break from the game will resolve the issue. I kind of want the escapism, enjoy MMOs, and the MMO market is pathetic enough to not have something better, for me personally, than WoW … as cancerous as it has become. And it’s the slightest bit of consolation that I’m not even alone with some of these sentiments; WoW content creators and veteran players alike are quitting the game left and right, moving either to FF14 or New World or whatever else. The only thing that will resolve this issue is if Blizzard’s executives and decision-makers stop treating us like addicts, slaves, and rats on a treadmill, stop using this cancerous basis as the spirit from which they design the very systems and gear progression of the game, respect our time invested in the game more, and implement systems that reward players fairly — not damned randomly — for their efforts and time invested in the game.
And quitting now would be like quitting on personal goals. I had a goal to raid Mythic Sanctum of Domination for weeks now, and have been doing my damndest to get this character ready for it, but all I have to show for daily farming & grinding is the pathetic character sheet that you see above, largely due to the soul-draining cancerous RNG that decides progression and its speed if you ever progress at all.
This is basically my situation with the game as it stands, man. And believe me, if I achieved my goal of raiding Mythic Sanctum of Domination, even at an 8/10 level already, I would’ve quit the game or taken a break at this point, but I just hate to not finish what I start, so there’s a stubborn driving force within me pushing me through all these soul-draining futile exercises of trying to “win the gear lottery” over and over again. Blizzard, at this point of its immoral, unethical life, thinks that “this is great because it adds more time to our play-time metrics,” and yeah, it probably does … in the short run, but once I’ve achieved a certain bare minimum of the goal that I set for myself, I’ll most probably be completely burnt out from the game and not just take a break, but either quit altogether or take another one-year break from it. I don’t see how that benefits their “metrics” really, but shortsightedness is not the only problem of a bunch of executives driven by little more than sheer greed, arrogance, and contempt for their paying customers.
And thank you for the kind advice. It was a good opportunity to get all my true feelings about World of Warcraft today, its design philosophy, and its state out in the open. And I’m positive that I’m far from alone in some of these sentiments at least.