Emblem loot is a nice way of guaranteeing players a payoff for their effort, should luck not run their way. Here’s how the system goes now:
25 Ulduar: Emblems of Conquest
10 Ulduar & 25 Naxx: Emblems of Valor
10 Naxx & Heroics: Emblems of Heroism
What this implies: Next major raid content patch will drop Conquests in the 10-man and something new in the 25’s. Don’t have enough people to run a 25? Your options are either a) abandon your friends in favor of an impersonal “pro” raiding guild, or b) wait half a year for the next raid patch so you can get your hands on that next set of emblems.
Adding insult to injury, you can convert emblems downward, (Conquest -> Valor -> Heroism) but not upward. Cutting off folks from these rewards ultimately just sours the game for them and shows preferential treatment toward raiding.
A Solution: Make the Exchange Work Both Ways
You can already convert Conquest to Valor and Valor to Heroism on a 1-to-1 basis. What could be the harm in allowing the reverse with a steeper price tag? Say, 5 to 1? Let’s examine the prices that’s result from this.
Breastplate of the Wayward Vanquisher (T 8.5 chest)
Cost: 58 Emblems of Conquest
For a 5:1 upward exchange rate, that’d be 290 Emblems of Valor. That might even be a bit too much. Let’s make it 3:1, or 174 Emblems of Valor. Woould it be worth making a lot of 10-man raiders happy at the cost of a few 25-man raiders getting a little bit less exclusive content? It’s not like they’d be losing all the dropped content, and it’d even give ‘em a good reason to do that old content. 174 is pretty steep, but those that feel stunted by that 25-man barrier would probably be glad for the opportunity.
It’s easy to implement (2 item entries in a couple vendors – that’s like, what, 30 seconds of work?), and potentially makes a lot more people happy than it angers. It should result in more heroic runs, and more low-end raiding. That’s a good solution in my book.
I realize a lot of these solutions are obvious, probably even implemented elsewhere (as I’ve been informed), but it just baffles me that they aren’t implemented in an MMO with such vast resources as WoW’s.
#1 by Calise at June 15th, 2009
As a particularly anti-social MMO gamer (which may seem an oxymoron to many people, but that is another discussion), I would wholeheartedly support such a change. Heroics are far more palatable to me than large scale raids; I don’t mind putting in considerably more time than a raider to get comparable or slightly inferior gear.
I would even go so far as to suggest adding an another level to the system: solo quested or dropped tokens that could, over time, be converted to group emblems. The conversion rate could even be relatively extreme, say 1:5 or greater, as long as it wasn’t tied to a limitation like daily quests. The time required isn’t nearly as important to me, as long as it’s possible.
Will it ever happen? I seriously doubt it, but hey, I’ve been playing WoW for over 4 years now hoping for a change.
#2 by Seditia at June 17th, 2009
Solo content and the ability to just enjoy the game without other players is a whole other post, but yeah. Solo tokens of some sort would be pretty cool. The problem is once you get down to that point, assuming 3:1 exchange all the way, that 58-token Conquest chest is 1566 “solo tokens.” That’s a little much for, say, 99% of solo players.
I think, to an extent, that’s what the whole tournament rewards thing is all about. Raid-level rewards (well, low-end) for solo content. I just wish it wasn’t under the guise of a bunch of daily quests (ALSO broken! Future post on those, too!)