by JR Cook - 11 years ago     show comments

One of the more disturbing trends of recent time in World of Warcraft is that of player entitlement: the idea that because somebody pays to play, they are therefore entitled to experience the entire game and influence its development. The latest episode in the entitlement saga is that of new world boss Ordos, who is locked within a gated sanctuary on the Timeless Isle. In order to access Ordos, a player must have completed the legendary quest chain and obtained their legendary cloak on at least one character on their account. That player may then freely cross the broken bridge and enter the Ordos Sanctuary, where they can find the Fire-God of the Yaungol and his iLvl 559 Warforged loot.

I’m convinced that a rational person would look at this situation and see the access to Ordos as a reward for putting in the effort throughout the expansion to complete the legendary quest chain. However, that’s not the only perspective. A short, misleading (and in all fairness probably trolling) post on the forums titled “Legendary cloak and blizz” stated: “blizz seems to think its [sic] funny to close off half of the timeless isle to anyone without the legendary cloak”, which drew an (undeserved) response from Zarhym.

It is correct that you need the legendary cloak to fight Fire-God Ordos. It’s not half of the Timeless Isle. It’s one boss — literally one thing on the isle you can’t access without the legendary cloak. You can still get to the area surrounding Ordos using the Albatrosses.

It wasn’t designed this way to give us a laugh. The vast majority of the Timeless Isle is open to everyone at level 90, including the four celestials you can fight.

We feel that rewarding those who have invested time into the entire legendary quest chain with access to fight Ordos is justifiable. He’s analogous to Oondasta and Galleon in terms of difficulty and loot quality, but isn’t just another really rare spawn that can be zerged by everyone in the area, or friends being invited and summoned in.

I definitely agree with Zarhym here. There’s plenty of other stuff to do in patch 5.4 that Ordos himself doesn’t feel necessary, and to be perfectly honest he’s a bit of a non-event in terms of being an interesting boss, even compared with Nalak. I also think having long-term goals and achievements is a good thing for the overall health of the game, because it encourages commitment and discourages logging in for the first week of a patch, seeing everything and quitting. And, as Zarhym points out, there’s nothing stopping people from doing the legendary chain now, and it will be even easier when the Siege LFR opens up.

However, what I don’t like about Ordos is the rewards for beating him. Putting Warforged gear on him in addition to the recently hotfixed-in chance at Flex gear seems to just make the gear-rich richer. Ghostcrawler has admitted the legendary items are so strong that it has created a huge power differential between the haves and have nots, so why give them easy access to the best gear available as of day one (until Heroic unlocks)? If there was a reason to open up Ordos to everybody that would be it, as it transcends the entitlement issue and is more about fairness in player power. Yes, I put in the effort to get the legendaries, but does that mean I also deserve an extra chance at Warforged gear? Aren’t the legendaries reward enough? Would it make a difference to the power distribution if more casual players were getting a piece of Warforged gear now and then? Or is this gear-begets-gear paradigm central to WoW?

I certainly don’t envy Blizzard on this issue. Zarhym obviously felt he had to defend the company’s decision to gate off Ordos, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was plenty of internal debate about the Ordos decision at Blizzard. If they please the hardcore, the casuals get up in arms; and if the game isn’t casual-friendly, they are likely to lose subscribers. On the other hand, if there’s no reason to play the game long-term then people will simply sub and unsub as they please, and that’s just as bad.

What do you think about Ordos? Are you glad he is restricted? Or would you prefer access to him without going through the legendary chain?