Project Lore

There once was a time when earning a badge meant slogging through a 5-man dungeon over the span of a couple hours, or spending an entire night on downing two or three bosses in a raid. And it was a really long haul towards the next piece of gear. Not to mention that there was only one type of badge, so you knew exactly where to spend it and how many you would need when you got there. In an effort to equalize the playerbase, Blizzard has expanded on this idea several times in Wrath of the Lich King, first introducing a new set of badges for each tier of content, and then, in 3.2, making their acquisition even easier by handing them for just about anything remotely dungeon-related.

BlizzCon Entry Pass: the hardest badge to earn of all!

What once took weeks could take a matter of days, especially if you've got a group of people capable of running Trial of the Crusader in all its forms. Some in the community have cried foul, myself included, but even I can admit that its only because I've been around the block a few times. I've seen the gear grind at its worst, and it's all too tempting to look down my nose at the people who've only picked up the game more recently, and yell at them in my shrill old man voice, "Why, back in my day...!"

And also like a confused geriatric, keeping all the different badges (and how you can get them) straight sometimes makes my head spin. It's bad enough that (excluding Badges of Justice from Burning Crusade) we have four different kinds, but to obtain Tier 9.5 equipment, you need to pair them up with trophies you can only get from 25-man ToC.

As much as I'd like to see some sort of consolidated system implemented going forward, I'm starting to see what Blizzard is getting at here. Currently, Badges of Conquest drop from Heroic 5-man dungeons and all raids but ToC. With the introduction of Icecrown Citadel, we'll start to collect Badges of Frost, and all of those places that used to give Conquest will be bumped up to Triumph. Does anyone else see the pattern starting to form here?

I came to this revelation not too long ago, myself, so I'll give you a hint: Player versus Player. This style of progression isn't quite as new or damning as it might at first seem. Every time a new Arena season starts, they've been giving access to previous season sets at reduced rates. The reason for this, of course, is that it increases competition. If players new to Arena (or those that simply had trouble increasing their ratings in the past) weren't able to easily purchase said gear, then there might not ever be new blood pumped into the system. You'd have the same exact people at the top of the rankings time after time after time.

The rub is that Arena play fosters direct competition, so it's arguable that this method of gearing people up has more benefits in PvP than it does in PvE, right? Well, let's explore it a bit further. Raid progression isn't ranked in-game, and there are no rewards for doing something faster or better than another guild aside from prestige. For some, that's more than enough motivation. There's plenty of genital-waving going on in the WoW community, and a lot of it is associated with people achieving world firsts or beating others to the punch. While Blizzard may not do much to track it, there are websites out there that catalog progression and tell you which guilds are the "best."

But since this is an indirect form of competition, there is no particular need to funnel new players into the system in the same way there is for Arena. Barriers to raid progression are much more focused on learning than adapting, and since everybody has the same amount of access to all of the information out there on the internet, the playing field is, theoretically, already even. While gear is, and always be, a factor, the drive to push forward is much more important.

So, while there is a sort of meta-contest going on in the raiding community, I'm not sure that alone is enough to give the new badge system a thumbs up. After all, if you're already a good player in a top-tier guild, you don't really need the assistance.

Ask Blizzard, and they'll probably tell you that it's to keep the entirety of the playerbase current, so that everyone can see and play through the newest raid. But in reality, it's a little bit more than that. It's a psychological hook to keep middle-tier players in the game by allowing them an easy way to gear up to a level just below that of the latest content. And a lot of people bite, because looking cool and "being geared" make them feel better.

While it may have stabilized the population for now (after rumors of subscriptions starting to flag), I'm still not sure what this means for the game in the long term. The "realm" of hardcore players has been drastically marginalized. Don't get me wrong, there's still somewhere for them to hang with the Hard Modes, Achievements, and World Firsts, but if Blizzard allows the remainder of the playerbase to penetrate that sanctum, then what else is there to look forward to? For the good players or the merely okay ones?

As I've already said, I understand what Blizzard is trying to do, but I hope that they take Cataclysm as an opportunity to tone down the badge system. I think all it really needs are a few tweaks. Maybe a return to longer, harder 5-man dungeons? Or a single badge with rewards requiring an exponentially increasing number of them? But even those ideas have their flaws. The magic solution has to account for the average person's playtime, as well as their skill. It may call for more punctuated difficulty, such as relatively short instances featuring a handful of insanely challenging boss encounters. But then you're going to invite complaints of bad balance and unfair fights.

This is the kind of complicated matter that requires a little bit of group-think, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on how to rebuild the badge system. Tweak it as it is or start from the ground-up? Are you in favor of simply making encounters harder again or should they be more rare (perhaps not a guaranteed drop)?