Repair costs - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

[Gar]

[My apologies for bad english, it's not my mothers tongue]

If anything is hurting World of Warcraft, it's the equipment durability and repair cost added into the game late in beta. I'm quite sure it was not fully thought off and several aspects of the overall gold reduce ingame was not calculated right. Most of you fuckers will say, learn 2 play right when you saw the topic, but I'm going to convince you otherwise. This shit has to get removed. It's pita in a game whos development team cried out in every aspect to remove tedium from the genre, but instead added the biggest turn down there is - horrible gold grind that forces you to avoid anything remotely fun and odd.

Let me explain in detail how things worked for our guild in BWL. When we were learning the instance:

Razorgore 20.8 first kill
Nefarian 22.11 we finally were "up there".

During these 3 months we had ~400 wipes in BWL. This might sound like a huge number, but in reality if you would have counted up your own total number of wipes in BWL or compare it to other guilds doign BWL fully, you notice it's pretty much the average. 400 wipes is basicly 6 wipes on every raid day. We raid 5 days a week, about 4-5 hours each day, this means we wiped 6 times each day, roughly 1 wipe for each hour of gameplay. That's about 800G per player just on the repairs. As I have heard from many other guilds, total amount of costs until Nefrian is dead, is between 700-1200 in gold.

Basicly, each hour of raiding of WoW costs player 2 gold just in repair costs. On average for each fucking hour you raid, you need to farm 10 minutes pure gold. On average, the best camps that are not permanently taked by ebayers, net 10-15 gold an hour. You spend after every 25 hour week of raiding, 4-8 hours farming gold, depending on your luck and what is camped.

Combine this repair costs farming with mana potions, rage potions, roots, flasks of titans and all that shit you need on a good BWL run, we are looking at 12 hours of farming each week to perform normally. During learning phase of the dungeon as potions are lost after one attempt, I counted that our warriors spent over 20 hours of farming for each 25 hour week in BWL. (thank you for the firemaw freakouts before it was fixed - yes I'm horde. Taunt + spellcast bug for the win.)

25 hours of actual fun for 12 hours of farmage. I call that the biggest tedium there ever is. This repair cost bullshit on PVE raid zones has to go.

Problems of repair costs are not just for the high end. WoW is killing the casual raiding in the same way, slowly. Casual raiding guilds progressing in MC have this very same problem on much larger scale due the fact that casual players just do not have the time or the dicipline to go through the constant farmage of gold and components after they have spent 5 hours failing at magmadar. This system is flawed to the core. Why keep on punish on the players that actually suck and have hard time to gather their members to tackle "hard" dungeons when it results in 50-70 gold loss for their members -> bitching and whining erupt.

There is even more worrying aspect for these repair costs. It's the lack of alternative tactics and bizzare fun.

Just last week we got a very nice new idea for timelapse + Acid Chromaggus. We really wanted to test it out, but problem was that to make the tactic work, it would had required us several (10+) attempts in practice. We decided against of even trying. Where's the problem then? We had all the time in the world to enjoy this new tactic and learn it out. We can do BWL in the 3 days limit. It would have been excelent fun and change of phase to try something new and enjoy trial and error. But there is no way we can have this fun, knowing that we would basicly put everyone in the raid for another hour of gold farm just to have fun in the game we love, the raid gameplay.

Another example, we had extremely bizzare group ready to go on to have fun in ZG. Had like 4 healers, several hunters, one warrior and random amount of int casters. Spirit was high to just go in, drunk, have some fun and see how far we could go. Then we just basicly had to decide against it, since we knew this would lead into use of several repair bots and up to 80 gold repairs to do up to hakkar with this party.

Why in the hell actually playing the game, doign the shit we like to do, raiding, is RESTRICTED like this? Crazy groups and shitty class balance and still pulling stuff off should be encouraged, not downright assfucked by some artificial thing like repair costs. Back in the days of more "modern" EQ, you could just drop the AA slider to 90% and enjoy the 9x% resses, making death just a very small timesink like it should be, while you progressed your char outside raidhours with AA. Not fucking grindsink of money completing with ebayers in Tyr's hand.

Is that the way Blizzard want's world of warcraft to be? Player rather going AFK or farm more gold than actually, play the game and have fun? Whole aspect of these purple-epic items with 160 durability kills all alternate tactics and just silly goofing around for _fun_. There is no guild funds or items to be sold in WoW expect the few bracers and belts you get in MC that sell shitty. There is no real preparation you can do to have "enough" gold to do the content, when actually doign the content means you allways aim for the perfect group. Even if its goofing around in ZG or actually *gasp* not reforming the raid to kill Vael with 9 rogues and 16 healers, trying to do him this time with little oddball group. But no, you can't since you know you will just fuck your friend up the ass, giving them another 10 minutes of great fun with chinease in tyr's hand.

Just remove it from 20-40 man instances. It servers no fucking purpose and avoids to fit in any blizzards idelogy of WoW design. It's downright lame.

[Alamando]

Originally Posted by Gar

[My apologies for bad english, it's not my mothers tongue]

Adding "fucking" to a post as often as possible always fixes this problem. ^_^

[Gar]

Originally Posted by Alamando

Adding "fucking" to a post as often as possible always fixes this problem. ^_^

Good point, I'll fix it up a bit.

[Zaptruder]

Wait wait wait. This is all bitching? I was lured here under false pretenses!

I thought you actually found a way to enjoy the game inspite of repair costs!

[Jait]

Shenanigans. I see no Slim Pickens going cowboy on a bomb. But I do empathize with your frustration at money sinks. But please don't use the term "Casual Guild" and "400+ wiped raids in 3 months in one zone" in the same thread again

[FanBuss]

Gar you win for best thread title ever. I dont give a shit what you actually wrote, the title alone makes your post worthwhile.

[Lhon]

As with all games, the money sinks in WoW are unbalanced. The raiders pay a disproportionate amount. The odds of this being changed? 0%. Instead of viewing it as a negative, start viewing it as a positive. Without repair costs there would be no death penalty, and therefore no barrier to any content.

[Praetor]

Once you learn the content you make money raiding. Small consolation as you're wiping, but it's something.

[Deathwing]

Originally Posted by Lhon

As with all games, the money sinks in WoW are unbalanced. The raiders pay a disproportionate amount. The odds of this being changed? 0%. Instead of viewing it as a negative, start viewing it as a positive. Without repair costs there would be no death penalty, and therefore no barrier to any content.

How about gear and skill being the barrier to content? Dieing would still piss me off even without repair costs because it takes at good amount of time to get the raid going again, even worse if no one was SSed.

I agree with the main poster. My guild is starting it's progression through MC, and repair costs in just plain blues is starting to kill the excitement for me. Farming IS NOT fun. Farming for resist gear, farming for potions, farming for repairs, it's all really fucking stupid. I'm a DPS warrior, and my guild is mandating an unbuffed 250FR on rag...why even have me fight? I'll do so little amount of damage.

[Gar]

Originally Posted by Lhon

As with all games, the money sinks in WoW are unbalanced. The raiders pay a disproportionate amount. The odds of this being changed? 0%. Instead of viewing it as a negative, start viewing it as a positive. Without repair costs there would be no death penalty, and therefore no barrier to any content.

I thought of this, but the problem is that the barrier is not in place.

Reason is that alot of players use ebay services. You make up 20-40$ a hour while working or what ever is average income. With that you buy quite damn many hours of raiding. Alot of people do it, those who play fully fair on our level of gameplay are either mad or unemployed. Trying to say that "yeah everyone is fucking legit around here" is bullshit. That is the reason why this is not a barrier of content, like the small experience penalty in Everquest was. You could not buy it back and avoid the tedium. One of the reasons, I think ebay gold farming in WoW is so out control. It's just a barrier for those who do not have the cash to buy themselfs out of the problem. Nor its no barrier for students in unversity as they have time. It's just tedium, that servers no purpose as a barrier.

Getting ZG augment is a barrier. Getting keyquest done is a barrier. Hard content is a barrier. Lack of good, dropable gear is a barrier. Gathering gold by ingame or offgame means can not be considered as a barrier - just becouse you can get it by offgame source easily. Same reason items that progress you in these games are mostly considered to be "no drop". - That's a barrier.

Originally Posted by Praetor

Once you learn the content you make money raiding. Small consolation as you're wiping, but it's something.

True, you start gaining money back slowly once you have learned the content. But that gain is slow as Razorgore and Vael will kick your ass from time to time, several times in row, even if rest of the dungeon would be a walk in the park. Also, gaining the gold back very slowly dosn't help one bit in spending time learning/trying new tactics on mobs that are allready on farm status. Nor it dosnt help having fun in bizzare groups or not reforming the raid to have the best posse available online for Vael. You still have to always take the "best" team availbale to do the content to get any benefits from this dropped gold.

Originally Posted by FanBuss

Gar you win for best thread title ever. I dont give a shit what you actually wrote, the title alone makes your post worthwhile.

Excelent, someone noticed the repair cost + blow bomb + stop worrying wordplay. Thank you. :-)

[WillzZz]

Originally Posted by Gar

I thought of this, but the problem is that the barrier is not in place.

Reason is that alot of players use ebay services. You make up 20-40$ a hour while working or what ever is average income. With that you buy quite damn many hours of raiding. Alot of people do it, those who play fully fair on our level of gameplay are either mad or unemployed. Trying to say that "yeah everyone is fucking legit around here" is bullshit. That is the reason why this is not a barrier of content, like the small experience penalty in Everquest was. You could not buy it back and avoid the tedium. One of the reasons, I think ebay gold farming in WoW is so out control. It's just a barrier for those who do not have the cash to buy themselfs out of the problem. Nor its no barrier for students in unversity as they have time. It's just tedium, that servers no purpose as a barrier.

Agree 100%. I will utilize purchased gold online to fight "money sinks" now that I am employed. Farming gold really has no place in the "end game". Money has very little use, and I can manage to spend 100% of my gold on consumables if I knew I didn't have to save a good amount of gold for my repairs (and those of people who run out of money or don't have the time to farm for gold)

My suggestion is to make bosses dynamic such that they drop more gold based on amount of times they've killed you while the instance is active. If you don't wipe, they drop the current amount of gold. If you wipe, it increases at the rate of 1/2 average repair costs per wipe.

The simple fact of the matter is that by keeping repair costs the way they are, they are encouraging players to support farmers.

[Nidhogg]

I dunno, it initially costs money to learn, but once a zone becomes Farm Status, just from BWL alone I've gone from having >30g to just short of 1k. Thats every week, 50g net from BWL and 20-30g net from MC. No wipes (maybe one or two) but they are from mobs that give you non-dura hit deaths (Vael or Divine Intervention). So 80g a week, with PvP / Farming as a side. The 1kg I have will dwindle when AQ comes out, but it will shoot back up once AQ hits BWL status... so it all evens out.

[Thhin]

Farm 10+ hours a week for repair costs to break even or....

make *minimun wage* for 1 hours and buy enough gold (thank you cheep labor china).

Now i don't make anywhere close to minimun wage, so it would be roughly 10 minutes of my time to buy the gold needed.

Yes this system is fucked up.

[Metranon]

20-30G from MC? does your guild sell cores and distribute the cash or something?

[Gar]

Originally Posted by Nidhogg

I dunno, it initially costs money to learn, but once a zone becomes Farm Status, just from BWL alone I've gone from having >30g to just short of 1k. Thats every week, 50g net from BWL and 20-30g net from MC. No wipes (maybe one or two) but they are from mobs that give you non-dura hit deaths (Vael or Divine Intervention). So 80g a week, with PvP / Farming as a side. The 1kg I have will dwindle when AQ comes out, but it will shoot back up once AQ hits BWL status... so it all evens out.

50g net from BWL? Bullshit. Nefarian drops the most and its around ~260 gold, rest split into normal 3 gold per boss. That is ~25g from the first 7 and 6 gold from nefarian. We have some god damn poor spawns then if you get close to 10 gold per kill. Your net gain can't be that high after repairing your normal hits to gear even without dying.

After taking off all normal costs that come from getting hit and tuning that 80g of yours down, its more like 40g gain per week without wipes if everything goes perfect and you are present of every raid. Take 10 gold off from just getting hit, and you get down to 30gold gain each week. When learning the dungeon you take 60-70 gold per week hits in period of 3 months. I really have to ask you:

Are you planning to farm BWL and MC for the next god damn 6 months on every raid just to get even from boss drops for the costs you took to learn BWL in 3 months timeframe?

Lies. I smell bullshit.

Ok, even more intresting bullshit. Let's say that you were one of the first guilds to kill nefarian in the first place. (27.9.2005) Then you instantly put the zone into farm mode as you told us. So you have somehow netted in this timeframe of 8 weeks 1000 gold just in BWL?

125 gold per week just alone from BWL since nefarian was first killed. Nice cascade exploit my boy. That's quite an achivement. So full BWL clearing 3 times a week without wipes to go from 30 gold to 1000g in the last 8 weeks.

Two words. Fuck off. Your credibility to say anything at all just ended for eternity.