Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street egy nagyon érdekes problémáról beszélt a WoW Insidernek adott interjúban. Ez pedig a Valor-pontok kérdése. Sok (nagyon sok) játékos úgy érzi, hogy csak akkor játszik “jól” a World of Warcrafttal, ha minden héten kifarmolja a maximálisan elérhető Valor-pont mennyiséget. A baj az, hogy ezt sokan kényelmetlen kötelességnek érzik. Borzasztóan nehéz belőnie a Blizzardnak az ideális Valor mennyiséget, hisz, ha sokat lehet összeszedni egy héten, akkor jön a panasz, hogy jaj, mennyit kell farmolni, ha viszont keveset, akkor meg értelmetlennek tűnik az egész a progress lassúsága miatt. A bibi csupán az, hogy senki sem tudja, hogy mi a “sok” és mi a “kevés”. Mindenkinek más az, naná. Még szép, hogy minden játékos a saját tempójában szeretné fejleszteni a karaktereit. Sajnos a Blizzard szuperagyainak még nincs sok ötlete arra vonatkozólag, hogy hogyan oldják meg ezt a nehézséget, de biztosak lehetünk benne, hogy szólni fognak, ha eszükbe jut valami.

We never intended for every player out there to max the number of daily quests and rep gain and lesser charms and valor points and everything else, every single week. But because players saw that cap, they thought that “This is how you’re supposed to play World of Warcraft. I’m supposed to fill up that bar, every single week,” and it gets to be, you know, for some players — that’s just not fun for them. That’s not interesting for them. We were hoping it would be that some people would earn 500 one week, 100 the next week, maybe cap once in awhile, some weeks they’re on vacation, they earn 0, and that’s okay — they’re still making progress overall.

But it didn’t work out that way, in the end, and for a lot of our players, they felt like we were — you know, once the bar was there, it was their duty to fill it, and if they couldn’t fill it, rather than being happy with whatever progress they could make, they just wanted to bail on the entire progress at all. So I don’t have a good solution for that yet, it’s something we talk a lot about, about giving players ways to keep playing as long as they want to without making them feel like the only way to stay competitive is to play as much as they possibly can.

It’s supposed to be a game, not a job, and we don’t want people to feel like you have to commit ridiculous hours in World of Warcraft to have fun with it. That has been a struggle, it continues to be a struggle, we don’t have great solutions to that yet — we’re giving players a lot more variety in earning valor and charms, and just gear in general, in patch 5.3 and 5.4. And if we can hit a sweet spot there, then that’s the model we can adopt for the future.