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.