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by Mathew McCurley 
Mar 17th 2011 at 7:00PM
What this seems to suggest is that instead of doing one random heroic dungeon per day to gain valor points, the system will be changed so that the first 7 random heroics you do, no matter which days, will grant valor points. This is an awesome change for those of us who do not play every day and instead like to stockpile our heroic dungeoneering on the weekend.LFD_RANDOM_REWARD_EXPLANATION1 = "The first seven random dungeons of this tier that you complete each week will earn you:";
Many of us weekend warriors have been asking for this very specific change to the random dungeon "highest tier" badges/points reward system since the beginning of the random heroic system. Hopefully this wonderful change makes it to live.
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Reader Comments (Page 2 of 5)
Qot Mar 17th 2011 9:08PM
"It looks like people who do 1 a day will still get the same rewards they get now...and the people who do 7 in one day will get the rewards they would get if they did 1 per day."
If that is true, then, as I said, it's fantastic.
However, the wording is ambiguous. You seem to interpret it as "The first seven random dungeons of this tier that you complete each week will **each** earn you", though that starred "each" is not actually present. I read it as potentially cumulative; that is, after completing seven heroics, you get points equivalent to seven day's worth of daily heroics as a sort of bulk reward (much like getting six swine bellies for the cooking daily will get you two cooking tokens but three won't get you a single one).
As we don't know what rewards the text blurb will coincide with, we can't tell whether this is a single day's reward (implying that the starred each is implied) or a week's reward (implying that the starred each is not present). That's why the article contains "seems to suggest" and "might hint": at this point, we don't know the mechanic. I outlined the two possibilities (a 7 times bigger reward after completing 7 dungeons versus a reward after each of the first 7 dungeons) and stated that I disliked the former.
To answer the rest of the replies: I already stated that I don't enjoy chain heroics (doing 3 in one day strikes me as a long time to watch strangers' health bars going up and down), nor do I typically do 7 heroics per week.
Jaq Mar 17th 2011 9:48PM
Then this doesn't effect you at all. You don't HAVE to run multiple heroics in a day to get VP. You don't have to do anything different at all. If you only run 5-6 heroics in a week, you get 350-420VP same as always.
I fail to understand what the problem you'd have is.
Cephas Mar 17th 2011 10:55PM
I admit that it's possible to read this that way, but I guarantee that it will not be "a 7 times bigger reward after completing 7 dungeons". As it stands right now a 10-man raider who clears all raid bosses every week needs to run 5 daily heroics to hit the valor cap and a 25-man raider doing the same thing needs to run 2 daily heroics. The new system as you've outlined it would essentially force everyone to do 7 heroics per week in order to hit the cap, which would break the major incentive to doing 25-mans, that you don't have to do as many heroics to hit the valor cap.
Astoreth Mar 18th 2011 1:26AM
I suppose you CAN read it that way, but it's a significantly less likely interpretation. If that was what they meant, they would have been more likely to say "Completing seven random dungeons" rather than "the first seven random dungeons that you complete".
Melvyl Mar 17th 2011 7:26PM
Even though I tend to play more than just on weekends, with the time commitment for a Heroic being a minimum of 90 minutes or so realistically, I don't always have that kind of time. It will be nice to be able to make up the nights I miss.
pinteresque Mar 17th 2011 7:26PM
It seems like this will make random queues move like lightning for a few days and brutally slowly for the rest. Or am I missing something?
Alchemistmerlin Mar 17th 2011 7:27PM
True, it does seem likely that whenever the week rolls over random queues will disappear, and then the rest of the week be terrible.
Hawkyn Mar 17th 2011 7:32PM
weekends the queue will be faster, but I doubt the weekday queues will be greatly effected. Those doing 1 per day will most likely stick to that schedule. I personally hope it does drop the times on weekends ... it would be nice to run thru 2 or 3 on a Saturday if the weather is bad.
DarkSpade Mar 17th 2011 7:33PM
This was my first thought exactly. DPS queues on mondays could be hours.
bean Mar 17th 2011 8:47PM
I doubt this will have an affect on queue times, just as making LFD in a battlegroup instead of the server didn't have a huge affect.
* Increasing the number of players total will not change DPS's queue time *
Sure more people are doing it on weekends, but that means more DPS will be queuing as well. The problem with queue times has nothing to do with the total number of players, it's the tank/DPS ratio that's the limiting factor. Throwing more people at it will increase the number of dungeons per our run total, but each individual's queue time will be the same as long as the tank/DPS ratio doesn't change.
If anything I'd say it might be _worse_ for DPS on weekends; the more "hardcore" players who do tanking/healing might "get it out of the way" earlier in the week, leaving lots of casual dps to wonder why queues went up hours on the weekends.
Literaltruth Mar 18th 2011 12:31AM
Not really - what affects queues is not the number of people queueing, but rather the ratios of DPS:Healers:Tanks. Especially since they consolidated Battlegroups for Dungeon Finder, it's extremely unlikely that there would ever be not enough people to form a 5man group considering the sheer size of the WoW subscriber base. The only reason it would make queues longer would be if somehow this change meant that all the tanks queued on the first day and then not again for the rest of the week while all the DPS waited longer in the week to do this.
There's nothing inherent in this change, though, that really suggests that one particular role is more likely to queue less at the end of the week than the beginning - so it shouldn't affect Queue times overly much.
pinteresque Mar 18th 2011 12:48AM
Bit of a flaw in your logic there, literal, I think: it assumes the only dps and healers wanting to queue are those necessary to make up $tanks number of 5-mans. I think, actually, that you don't need all the tanks to run early and all the dps to run late in the week to throw off the balance, you just need some of the tanks to run earlier than they are now. All you need is for there to be fewer tanks queueing at any given time to make queues at that given time longer, since tanks are the bottleneck (finite) you can assume an infinite supply of dps and healers and, more or less, remove them from the equation.
Every tank that tanks twice tuesday instead of once tuesday and once saturday is one less tank on saturday. The fact that some of the dps who were looking to run on Saturday started running on Tuesday doesn't change the fact that the ones looking to run on Saturday will have fewer tanks to wait for and a longer queue. it will be balanced by having a shorter queue on Tuesday, probably, but that doesn't make Saturday better.
Almerc Mar 18th 2011 3:30AM
@pinteresque
No, no flaw in the logic. If you assume an infinite supply of healers and dps, then you also assume an infinite wait time, which is clearly not the case. Even if tanks are the bottle neck, less water waiting to pass through the neck means a shorter wait for any individual molecule of H2O.
Perhaps you're thinking that, because tanks are always in demand, they have a wait time of zero. Taking the ratio of wait times then is meaningless because awful things happen to those who divide by zero. But that isn't the relevant ratio. It's all down to the number of tanks queuing per hour, relative to dps/heals, not how long they have to wait. Those numbers are likely to stay pretty much balanced.
Almerc Mar 18th 2011 3:50AM
Hmmm, thinking on this more, I think your logic is right, but your conclusion oversimplifies things. Theoretically, if 5 dps queue for every tank, then queue times should keep growing over time right on up towards the infinite. They don't though... Why? Because not every dps that queues actually makes it to the dungeon pop. So, if I'm picturing this right, queue times are established by the number of dps who are willing to tolerate waiting a given length of time. If 4 dps queue that are willing to wait 20 minutes, but only 3 who are willing to wait 40 minutes, then eventually dps queue times will settle on a 40 minute wait. Seems plausible, right?
So that suggests queue times are established by how flexible people are with their time, on average. Weekends should have longer queues because a bunch of dps are willing to wait an hour to queue, and so aren't jumping out of queue. It doesn't matter whether the ratio of people queuing is held constant. Only if the ratio of dps bailing out from frustration.
So how will this affect queue times? It's a little hard to say. I don't think it'll have a big effect, as this change doesn't affect WHEN people have time to spare, only how many dungeons they're willing to run while they have it. The biggest change, as I see it is that if you wind up with a good group and decide to chain some heroics, you'll only have to queue for it once. That's a good thing, yeah?
Hope my math's on.
drtongue Mar 18th 2011 11:35AM
This was my first thought exactly.
While I think it's a great change, I also can't help but think how miserable a dps queue time is gonna be on Monday afternoon. This will end up encouraging people too run *all* their chain heroics on Tuesday on as many toons as possible (which will be great for wait times). The rest of the majority playerbase will run their chain heroics on the weekend, which will leave Monday a cold, barren wasteland in DPS LFG.
Welshy Mar 17th 2011 7:28PM
This would be great for me. Don't get to do dungeons very much during the week so I'm fairly low on Valor.
Tim Mar 17th 2011 7:29PM
The LFG change was revolutionary for Wow. This would be yet another 'quality of life' change and they should do this across the board, for dailies (e.g. JC), rep, quests etc. As a 9-5 worker that travels and can't play for days sometimes, I love this idea.
Considering how bad they've nerfed my beloved druid, I have to admit this seemingly 'little' changes keep me coming back to the game, esp. with my growing stable of alts.
There's a ton of other changes that Blizz can make along these lines, daily quests, rep quest (btw I HATE rep grinding more than anything and wish blizz fixed this). Doing the SAME dailies day after day? Definition of insanity. Tabbards are awesome, but rep grinding blows, esp. for top enchants, that raid leaders require. For mounts or non-essential items, sure go for it.
The next big change blizz MUST make is the cross realm raiding. A bitpart of raiding comes down to when you can raid. For me it's 2-3 nights a week and specific nights and times. Yes , I do other things besides WOW. There's literally on 4 guilds on my server that Raid 25 mans and only 1 on the days I can make it. It's slim pickings (I know there's realm transfers etc.) but you get to know a group of people, you have alts, you do decide to transfer then that guild implodes etc.
I could easily make a list of 100 things that Blizz could do to make this game better and not drastically change the character, purpose or achievement.
Saeadame Mar 17th 2011 8:01PM
I think that would just be far too difficult, because cross-realm raids (that work like random dungeons, anyway) would be a) PUG raids and b) PUG raids with people you've never spoken to before and don't know if they have gear/achievements/etc. I currently do PUG raids because my raiding schedule changes from week to week, but I can't imagine the absolute nightmare that cross-realm PUG raiding would be.
If you meant non-PUG raiding... well, I'm just not sure exactly how they'd accomplish it. They currently can't let you send items between characters on different servers, so I'm not totally sure how they would let you add raid members when they're on different servers.
Tim Mar 18th 2011 12:12AM
@Saedame
I've played since Wrath, so longer then some, shorter than others. I know many people that have transferred realms. You can see lots of posts on the wow forums, you'll meet people on other realms. What I find is that you typically don't need a 'whole' PuG, but often a group of folks that need some additions, and often those additions can become perms.
I really don't think it's a big technological issue for Blizz, as the raids are instanced. I wonder how much $$ bliz makes though on the transfers and all.
Fweet Mar 17th 2011 7:36PM
What a great way to offer a lil' bit to the casuals without taking away from the hardcores.