Rest State

[TheDragoon]

No, because as many people hate it as like it (see various polls on the official forums). It adds nothing to the game but an arbitrary and unfair penalty to those who chose to play more. If you are going to punish people, you should at least have some small reason beyond the sadistic pleasure some take in the punishment.

Again, I can understand why people don't like the current manifestation of the rest system, but I think that Blizzard is going in the right direction. Again, you harp on how it is "an arbitrary and unfair penalty to those who chose to play more." From what I've seen in the changes made going into this push, I think that Blizzard is aiming to design it so it doesn't feel like a penalty to those people. Perhaps we'll just have to wait and see what changes are made in the next push, however, since it seems like you've drawn your line in the sand and I've drawn mine. :)

Consider two players. Each only has ten hours a week to play. One plays two hours each night and is always at the 200% level. The other plays 5 hours on Sunday morning and 5 more on Wednesday afternoon. He's at 200% for the first two hours each day, then to 150% for one hour and has to grind out experience at 100% the remaining two hours. Now which is the power gamer and which is the casual gamer and why should the guy playing in two session get SCREWED!?

Go back and look at the game mechanics as you obviously don't know how they were designed to work this push. Rest is obtained continuously for up to FIVE AND A HALF DAYS. Thus, in the situation you describe, both would be at 200% XP for their entire playing period.

Here is a handy explanation. Go down and read what Ogre has to say about the rest system. I also linked and quoted it in this thread.

Don't you see that the people that want the rest system *don't* want the competition. They want the results without the effort.

Whatever. I have read what many people supports of the rest system have written about the system and none of them indicate to me that they want results without the effort. What they want is results eventually.

To continue on this point, let's examine what affects the level of a character with and without the rest system.

Without the rest system, your character will level at the same rate as other characters played by someone of a similar skill level (assuming of course that all classes and races are balanced... one can hope :) ). That is, a character's current level depends entirely upon the skill of the player and how long that player has been played. It doesn't matter if you play your character 2 hours a week, or 40 hours a week, if the player skill level is the same, then two characters played for 200 hours each will be the same level. However, for the person playing 2 hours a week, this will take 2 years to accomplish. For the person playing 40 hours a week, it will take 5 weeks to reach that level.

Without the rest system, leveling depends upon:
-Player Skill Level
-Total Time Logged

With the rest system, there is now an added variable thrown into the mix: real time. If you don't play as much, then things become a bit easier. Maybe for that 2 hour a week player, it will now take 80 weeks to llevel to the same point that the 40 hours a week player reaches in 5 weeks. The 40 hour a week player will still level faster than the more casual player, but if both are shooting for a certain level, the casual player will reach that point more quickly than before, but still much more slowly than the hardcore player.

With the rest system, leveling depends upon:
-Player Skill Level
-Total Time Logged
-Amount of Real-Time Elapsed

World of Warcraft is being designed to be a game with a fun end-game. Be it with instances (Group, Raid and the like) and the FvF or PvP servers to promote the underlying conflicts of Warcraft that we have all come to expect, the end-game is something that most people will want to experience at least once. As has been thrown around a lot recently, for many it is the journey that is the reward, not the destination. However, that doesn't apply to everyone. Hardcore and casual gamers alike has plenty of people who view the destination as the ultimate goal and that is what drives them to play the game. That end-game is of course going to be available to the hardcore gamers (and probably rather soon after release). But without the rest system, for a casual player reaching that point is something that might take a very, very long time. The rest system will lower the ceiling a bit for them, making it seem to be a more obtainable goal and perhaps keeping those players interested and motivated.

By the time the casual gamer gets maxed, he will be three months behind in practice. Sure, if he has great natural talent, he *might* hold his own.

You have made a lot of assumptions here and from what I have seen in other games, I've got to disagree with you on some of them. I used to hang around the Diablo II Druid forum a lot. A rather large portion of that group was very involved in the PvP dueling aspect of Diablo II. Some played a lot, others just a little. I found that the amount that they played the game had some influence upon how they fared, but it wasn't an all-or-nothing that you pose here. Rather, it did influence to a certain degree how skilled people were, but it was not even close to the only thing that mattered. Many of the people who played significantly less were still among the best of the duelers.

And that was in Diablo II where PvP combat was dominated by fast-twitch attacks and quick maneuvers that played into a strategy. World of Warcraft is a much slower game, by comparison. Thus, the learning curve for PvP combat will likely be less steep than Diablo II for the simple reason that you will have more time to think about what you're doing.

And since the rest system will *not* help him in PvP, he will lose ground at the rate of six weeks a week (his ten hours to the power gamer's 70).

But how long will they keep playing? A game like this is very much a game of perserverence if your goal is to become a very high-level character. I know that I am one of those players that will start a character, play it for a while but then get bored and move onto something else. Ultimately, I've no doubt that many of the power gamers will do the same. At that point, it really comes down to the casual player just working through at a steady rate until he eventually catches up with the power gamer's top level character (or perhaps his 3rd or 4th character).

Of course there will be some power gamers who will blast through with a single character and not start a 2nd. But I would imagine those players will be in the minority and I think it would be fair to expect those few to dominate in a PvP landscape. What the rest system will do is let the casual gamer catch up to the rest of the pack who might move on to a second or third character and so they will eventually be able to compete. "Eventually" will just be SLIGHTLY easier to reach for the causal gamer with the rest system. Blizzard isn't stupid. They're not going to make it so that "everyone that applies just gets a gold medal."

Look, if two people each play for ten hours, but one gets double experience for the same number of critters killed, then they are not being treated equally. You can call it a bonus (and probably will if you come out ahead). You can call it a penalty (and probably will if you're the one getting shafted). It doesn't matter what you call it. Ultimately one person is getting a greater reward for the same effort as is another. And no matter how you look at it, you've got to call that "unfair".

All the rest system does is introduces a new variable into the leveling process. If you level quickly, you'll still level quickly. If you level slowly, you will level slightly faster but still not as fast as those that level quickly. Looking at it on a kill-by-kill basis does not do justice to what the rest system will do. Ultimately, the player that plays more will get a bigger reward at the end. The rest system merely makes it so that they are a bit less behind than they would have been. How can this be unfair?