EDIT: This has turned into a 4-part series! For the full story, read all 4 posts:
Emblems of Easymode
Badges, and Emblems, and Carrots Oh My!
The Carrot Complex
The Radish Reward

The other day I posted about the upcoming emblem changes and my generally ambivalent feeling towards the situation. Much of the post was tongue-in-cheek, but if you are not familiar with my style that is very easy to overlook. Perhaps I should preface all my less-than serious posts with “/sarcasm on.”

The post was linked over at Buff’d, which is a WoW community gathering place and is rather snazzy. That link, in turn, generated some traffic and prompted some discussion, particularly about Badges of Justice and how this is history repeating itself.

This post is in response to all that. Prepare for wall o’ text.

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Groundwork

• I do not think the entirety of the emblem change is bad. I only have an issue with one very small part of it.
• I do not think that this small part is going to ruin WoW forever or any such melodramatic nonsense. It won’t even tarnish WoW for me. I’m not threatening to cancel my account and I’m not on the forums throwing tomatoes at the developers. In my previous post, I even talked about how this is going to be a benefit, I’m just mildly irked about one issue. If my mild opinion differing from yours counts as QQ in your book, so be it. But it’s my blog and I can QQ if I want to. /raspberry
• I was not raiding in TBC. I was able to do some heroics and got into Magister’s Terrace a few times. Not all of us have been playing since Beta was released. Please find it in your heart to forgive newcomers like myself.
• T7 is my first gear set. I hold tier gear as sacred. It is my carrot for performance. I expect to have to perform at a T7 level to get T7 gear, perform at a T8 level to get T8 gear and so on. Other items are of little consequence to me. Wands, idols, cloaks, bracers are all filler; even of comparable ilevel or the same gear slot, they do not hold the same place in my black little heart that the tier items do.
• Vidi, from Inside Azeroth, commented on the other post:
  

  I want to say that I do have a very strong opinion about this. I have long felt and said ( InsideAzeroth.com ) that loot distribution in WoW is an antiquated system. The random loot drop is, in my strong opinion, a “Last Gen” MMO mechanic that needs to be changed into a Next Gen MMO mechanic. While the proposed changes don’t take us all the way to Next Gen, it is a step along the correct evolutionary path, and for this I am grateful.

  I agree, the loot system has some issues and I hope that the new token system will offer some relief. I appreciate the changes that will remove some of the fickleness of the RNG in deciding if we get our tier pieces or not. Making the tokens exchangeable for any of the pieces and making all the pieces purchasable with Emblems of Triumph are, in my opinion, a very good thing. To reap the benefits from this particular change, I still need to have been there and killed that to get a shot at the token.

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What’s My Beef? (more…)