Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
I really do not care about players who have a negative amount of interest in the actual combat of the game and just want rewards. The games difficult is not and has never been defined by the complexity of the jobs—rather, it is defined by the lack of expectations set by the content itself, which barely checks if you’re breathing or not.

Kneecapping job design time and time again because some percentage of players couldn’t care less whether their job was literally 1 button is insulting. It doesn’t matter to them. It didn’t matter to them in ARR, HW, or SB, why does it magically matter now?
I don't think it is so simple as people just want rewards, because getting items is not really what makes something worthwhile as much as the journey to get the reward. Yoshi P. believes that players just want rewards immediately which is overlooking the value of the journey. This is unfortunately, a common problem when dealing with MMOs because by design they want people playing longer so they pay more money.

The first half of the problem is that the rewards they offer are often out of sight and out of mind. Orchestrions, housing items, and even outdoor housing items, tend to be unimpressive rewards because they never are available readily to display, so they should be relatively trivial to acquire. Dyable armor is also kind of a trivial reward because most of the aesthetic is determined by the base armor set, and on top of which dying armor is a basic customization system that should be available on all armors anyway.

So that leaves minions, mounts, and higher gear level items as the primary "long term" rewards, which pushes things in an aggressive performance related environment. What they are missing are the kind of special flare that games such as Path of Exile have on offer like special cosmetic glow effects, travel effects, weapon effects, etc, that people could earn from doing various things and have more long lasting value, thus making the tougher journey to acquire them worthwhile.

In the end the game is what the developers make, they just don't always know what they are making when they make specific choices like this. Glamour items they've added like the umbrellas and cosmetic wings are probably the start to these special flare items, but they got to work in all environments and right now they don't. They also need ways to turn them on and off just like weapon effects.