Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Lesser Charms for Battles

An interesting bit of info came from a blue today on the official WoW forums:
"...the developers are planning to let you have a chante to earn Lesser Charms of Good Fortune through Pet Battles. Basically, if you win, you'll have a chance of receiving charms based on your pet level."
- Draztal
At first glance this sounds like good news. More rewards for the amount of time spent doing something we feel is our own personal progression in the game.

The only downside is that these lesser charms currently don't directly impact pet collecting. If we could use the charms as currency for Battle-Stones or some other pet-related item, this might be an even better setup.

I think that Pet Battles has a need for some kind of consistent reward and/or currency system. Maybe not now since this minigame is still so fresh and new, but down the road. Not because it will make things "easier" but it will help stabilize/balance the gameplay.

There's so much RNG involved in pet battles compared to other aspects of the game. The only constant is the dailies being there every day. It's not a bad thing, but it can be pretty daunting for some people.

A currency/reward system, however big or small it may be, would give players a sense of control over their gameplay. It's a tiny guarantee at something good at the end of the road. You do X amount of work, you will be rewarded Y some amount of time later.

On the other hand, though, having a system set up like that can lead to burn out. Look at the current situation with regular dailies. Raiders feel it's necessary to do them for VP and lesser charms (which turn into greater charms that you can use to gear up), but at the same time they're reluctant to do them because it's so tedious and time consuming yet it feels mandatory. This is not a good position to be in; feeling compelled to do something yet disgusted by it.

Well, anyway. There's no telling what the lesser charms will be used for in the future. Currency for pet items? Perhaps they WILL implement a new and exclusive pet to the charm rolls in raids, and this is their way of compensating some pet collectors who don't really put forth the time to PVE?

I can't think of any reason to not add this small extra bonus to Pet Battles, and if there's a negative to simply rewarding lesser charms for successful battles, it's not coming to mind at the moment.

EDIT: One thing that could potentially be a negative side effect of adding purchasable pet items for charms is the conflict between saving/using the charms for PVE progression or "pet progression". However, if the greater charms still remain reserved for gear rolls, and not turned into currency for both misc and PVE items, it might work out. Greater charms = PVE currency, but those extra lesser charms = possible pet currency...?

3 comments:

  1. yeah right as if anyone needs more of the useless charms....
    I myself finished today with all dailies including the dominion offensive and i have around 1400 charms wich will last for at least ~15 weeks wich is around ~4 month by wich we should be in the next tier allready....

    vps or even jps would be usefull but charms?
    another bad idea....

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    Replies
    1. @Anonymous: The success of the charms depends heavily on how we'll be able to use them in the future. If we can turn in more of the lesser ones for more of the greater ones each week, we can potentially use them for different things.

      As things are now, I agree, more lesser charms would be a bit useless. But if they increased the allowed cap for greater charms each week, more items could be added that would be purchased/rolled using the charms.

      Delete
  2. Mounts mounts and more mounts. As the chance to run sha continues to be once a week - with loot - there are 2 chances of a mount drop from him, and into the future some of us will still be using those charms on any boss that drops a mount (one less week of farming).
    Thankfully now that they no longer take up space in your bags, they're merely a bonus from running the dailies which already award valor points - seems a bit greedy to double dip - and if they keep to form allowing us to use them to roll on items in raids, they should have a future use beyond just sha, elegon etc. (and who really wants to keep grinding out the old dailies once the rep is exalted if they keep adding new options?)

    ReplyDelete

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