The Reputation Grind of Old Returns

No Faction Tabards in Mists of Pandaria - The Casual Player Gently Weeps!

Whilst this is a strictly Protection Warrior website I do feel it necessary from time to time to keep you all up to date with certain global changes to our beloved game. Furthermore this will have an impact on how soon the MoP Reputation Gear will  be available to you from launch.

On a slight side note: waking up this morning to the following news made me sigh and Battle Shout at the same time!

The one and only Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street replied to a thread on the official WoW forums to confirm and cement a change to the way we are used to grinding reputation with the various factions within the game in MoP.

At present to grind reputation the easiest way is to goto the faction vendor, equip their tabard and run dungeon after dungeon after dungeon after du....... These level 90 faction tabards will still be in the game, however they will no longer give reputation to that specific faction. We will instead quest and do dailies to slog away at our reputation.

Here's Ghostcrawler with more:

 Ghostcrawler

Quote:

Is there a reason you're FORCING us to do daily quests for rep instead of allowing us to CHOOSE to grind the rep in dungeons?

Essentially because dungeons already reward loot from bosses and valor. Letting them also provide faction seems extraneous. Why not just increase the boss drops or give you more valor to let you buy stuff?

Here's how we got there though:

-- BC had an extensive attunement system. (I'm not passing judgment on that system because I kind of liked it myself.)
-- As part of that system, you were required to acquire a lot of reputation with different factions, which you achieved primarily by running dungeons over and over. This meant you might have a dude that needed to run Shadow Labs 3 more times while someone else needed Mechanar or Botanica.
-- To solve that problem, we let players wear tabards so they could earn whatever faction they wanted while running dungeons.
-- This made things much more convenient for players, arguably too convenient. The factions themselves sort of lost their identity. They were just different bars to fill. Also, sometimes by the time you hit Exalted or Revered with a given faction, you already had better gear from running the dungeon so much.
-- In Mists, we want to provide players alternative content to running dungeons. The dungeons are still there, but even with 6 new and 3 redone dungeons, you're ready for something else after a while.
-- Part of that something else are the Elder faction quests, such as Klaxxi and Shado-Pan. We put as much work into these quest chains as we did the level-up zone quests. The stories evolve and new branches unlock. You earn faction by doing these quests and can also earn valor to layer on top of what you're earning from dungeons, or even in lieu of dungeons if you just don't have enough time or aren't interested in a dungeon at that moment.
-- As I said above, I know not everyone loves questing. (For that matter not everyone loves mount collection or pet battles or achievements or raiding). Strictly speaking, you don't have to do the factions to progress your characters, but we figure a lot of players will.

We could have a long discussion, probably beyond the scope of this thread, about how much time you should have to commit to feel like you're keeping up with end game progression vs. how much extra time you should be able to commit if you're interested in doing so. In Cataclysm, we think we steered too far into the zone of telling players to stop playing because there was nothing else to do.

No developer wants to hear "I want to play your game, but there's nothing to do." For Mists, we are going out of our way to give players lots to do. We don't want it to be overwhelming, but we do want it to be engaging. We want you to have the option of sitting down to an evening of World of Warcraft rather than running your daily dungeon in 30 minutes and then logging out. We understand we have many players (certainly the majority in fact) who can't or aren't interested in making huge commitments to the game every week and we hope we have structured things so that you don't fall very far behind. The trick is to let players who want to play make some progress without leaving everyone else in the dust.

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