[vbezhenar]

I'm not sure if this is a proper place to discuss WoW, but as a long standing player I can say that BfA is much better in terms of grinding than previous expansion Legion. You don't really need to grind anything, exactly because that grind is unrewarding and you was obliged to grind in Legion exactly because that grind was giving too much power. Again, according to my experience I'm not seeing big player exodus, most of those who started playing in my guild are continue to play, but that's only a personal anecdote, of course. Legion was much better in terms of perceived development cost: new gameplay systems, loads of new art and content, while BfA feels like cheap addon to build upon Legion investment, but that doesn't really makes it bad, it's just feels that they could do better.

[minimaxir]

> You don't really need to grind anything, exactly because that grind is unrewarding and you was obliged to grind in Legion exactly because that grind was giving too much power.

Interesting perspective. I've always wondered if rewarding grinds or unrewarding nongrinds are better for both player enjoyment and monetization. (I think the former does better; it's how addiction works)

[vbezhenar]

There are different players with different needs which are often contradictory. I don't like to spend many time in-game. Ideal WoW for me is 3 hours/3 days a week, when I log in, enter raid with my friends, spend some time inside trying to kill some bosses, log out. But there are many people who want to play 8-12 hours every day and they love when they can spend that time improving their character. So developers are trying to balance game for both types of players. Basically they are doing rewards which diminish in geometric progression. You can spend hour to get 1% power increased. Next hour will get you 0.5% power increase and so on, so you can spend hours and get that increase, but there's some limit and different players can draw it for themselves. Those who spend more time will be more powerful and those who don't want to spend too much time won't be too that much behind. But still some players think that they are obliged to spend those hours to farm those few % of power even if they hate the process, they just want the rewards. It's unhealthy behavior and only self-control might help there, I guess, otherwise player will burn out and unsubscribe from the game. Probably a hard balance from game developer perspective.

[jsgo]

It is basically a race to ilvl 320 and then run warfronts for gear and then go raid/heroics if inclined. Personally, I wish they'd open warfronts up earlier and the gear you get have ilvl similar to how world quest rewards "scale" as your ilvl increases.

I play solo which is an anomaly in the genre I know, but I'm starting to feel burnout: need to run the wheel multiple times so I can do various tradeskills (the 2 tradeskill, including gathering skills, max per character thing) to be self sufficient. Need to do content on characters I'm not interested in doing the content on because, oh, my mage is my tailor and I want to craft bags for my characters which requires non-100% drop BoP tradeskill drops among other things. Reputations supposedly are going to be more forgiving in 8.1, but I'm not sure if it is just Champions of Azeroth that is shared by characters (probably for the neck upgrade) or if all of the BfA reps will be shared across characters (hoping so, for tradeskill rank upgrades).

[nemo846]

> I play solo which is an anomaly in the genre I know

Not as uncommon as you think, https://youtu.be/b2l2ZxNhCSg