This is one of the big reasons why Blizzard is such a great company and why WoW is so insanely successful. They're always paying attention to the community and using that feedback; constantly refining and improving what does work and ruthlessly pruning what doesn't.

I really liked the badge system on paper. It really looked like a solid well-organized system for progression through tiers of gear levels. However in practice it didn't work out quite so well. I am intrigued with this point system that basically distills down the dual roads of casual and hardcore advancement. I'm interested to see how gear tiers will scale in this system.

I kinda still wish I was earning emblems or badges in PVE, just for the heft of actual high value tokens, instead of 10,000s of 'points'. It's just a personal flavor issue, but points is such a bland term. I'm sure I'll get over it.

I have to say, this change and the raiding lockout/difficulty change are making me a lot more optimistic about Cat. I was ready to shelve my account for a while after many of the seemingly half-done, vague, and even sometimes contradictory class previews. All of these developments though seem very well-defined, direct, and changes that I by and large not only agree with, but sound like things Blizz has been making noises about for a while and now are committing to releasing (no more soon(TM)?!). I just hope they start updating the class previews to read more like these releases. If they do, I'll send a couple bottles of Blue Sapphire on over. This is much better than the ramp up into BC and Wrath were (so far) IMO.

Wholly agreed. I've spent far too much time finding out what I need to kill to get what type of badge and if that's even worth doing because there's *another* type of badge that can get me better gear. @_@ Blizzard found a system that works and has now simplified it to make the system better, and I say huzzah. Can't wait to see this in action.

I agree that points are so boring. Surprised they couldn't have thought of something else. Seems like a step backwards in "flavor" at least.

This is an awesome change.

It effectively removes the current situation when disgruntled raiders are forced to run heroics each day for frost badges, potentially grieving undergeared or fresh 80s. Serious raiders will be able to hit the weekly cap with raids, while more casual players may opt to run heroics for valor points.

The best thing is that I can mix and match this. If one week I'm raiding a lot, I'll hit the cap and have no need to run heroics or in general I'm done with valor points for this week. Another week I can say screw raids and run a few heroics and still not miss out on valor points.

It makes sense. When they took badges and marks out of our bags and made a separate page for them, they basically stopped being items and just became another currency system anyway.

@Hollow Leviathan

Yeah I understand the flavor thing you said but look at it this way.. Think of it this way these points are like "renown" that we can spend to get gear for our effort.. Badges don't make sense right now flavor-wise because why do these bosses have badges on them, specially when most of these bosses were never meant to have met or be in the same group? THEN why do these badges change with each tier change?..

See this way the points being like "renown" we can kill and kill with impunity and gain some sort of "word of mouth" credit from it without it acting like an item THEN when these bosses become less difficult as the tiers rise we still gain renown but a lesser form of it for going after things that are technically below us. When we spend the points it'll be more like we're using our status to gain what we need to go on, while using it up (almost like a favor) till we gain it back to use the next time.

Reason I say renown, and not just reputation, because we grind reputations and I don't see them changing that at all, so it can't possibly be known as reputation.. Renown is generally something that can fluctuate (in this case spent) while reputations usually take a while to change.

Personally, I like this change.. Way less messy then the badge system.

I love these changes!

Now I won't feel that I "must" log in every day even if I don't want to. And the new Hero & Valor points system is far more elegant than having 5+ types of emblems. When new tier drops: Valor points => Hero Points! Simple, effective, prevents stockpiling, I like it.

And though I don't PvP too much, I like the fact that this system doesn't force you to do Arenas. I think both BG players and Arena players will be happy. (I'm more of a BG person, but that's just me).

I'm glad they're spending time on things as crucial as emblem system really.

/sarcasm

The auto-downgrading method is great.

Points vs. Badges

I hate points. From a psychological standpoint, having to amass 45,000 Honor to get a pvp helm was a huge numer. "Aww man, I gotta kill how many people to get that.. ugh! And I'm, late to WG, got stuck in the second raid group with 4 other people!"

Badges are easier to calculate. "ok.. I need 95 frost to get that helm.. that's 14 a week for randoms, 4 from VoA, 20+ from ICC, etc." So, I knew it was a 2 week grind to get a helm.