Progression Remove the ID system (among other things).

I didn't realize I was supposed to stop when Dr Zed decided I should stop. Sorry, I'll remember to consult with you next time I decide to make a post.

Some problems just aren't solved by addition. Runescape's tried the "add more content" angle for many of its abandoned areas. You just end up with more abandoned content, because people will inevitably optimize their way through all the "irrelevant" stuff. Adding more content to abandoned areas just means there's more to balance, all for places people aren't naturally guided to by the the mechanics of the game. I am not a fan of stat creep by any stretch; either the additions will be better than what's already available, and you're just trading one abandoned area for another, or it's not, and you've wasted time making everything.

This isn't an "option"; No choice is being made. You breeze through the game, and by walking around as you normally would, you get upgrades to your equipment. Talking about this "option" makes it sound like this is a deliberate choice by a player and not the default track they've been put on. Nobody walks up to the local merchant and makes a conscious decision to grind loot instead after seeing the offerings. Or am I just so divorced from the average player's experience that I'm missing out on some cornerstone of the gameplay here?

Yup. Never played this game before.

>Merchants are probably the least utilized, but even in the endgame, there are rare occasions where an item from a merchant can be useful in your build.

Yeah. Kind of the point. There are maybe a handful of merchants that might complement your build while dozens of others are completely overlooked from the start because the alternative is objectively better. Now that I've re-focused on crafting, I've actually had a need for merchants, who occasionally offer unique ingredients.

This one is news to me. I've never seen anyone even approach an altar, and I probably spend more time near them than most people what with the fact that I give tours of these sorts of places from time to time.

Meanwhile I've yet to see any. In this very thread, exactly one poster has admitted to doing "optional" content. Now that's not exactly scientific, but it is telling.

Are you trying to tell me it's fine because you bought stuff eight years ago? How old were you, by the way?

I consider it unearned because it's right there. Runescape example: Most mobs don't actually drop any equipment. The ones that do will only drop specific pieces rather than just anything. If you want to get a full set by just killing mobs, you need to target specific kinds in different places. You don't get stronger by accident or coincidence- you work for it. Particularly powerful pieces of equipment involve making trips to dungeons and lairs to slay particularly strong enemies for the opportunity. The later and later you are in the game, the less likely you just stumbled onto your gearset just shambling around the map. Some people earned money, others made the equipment themselves, others finished a quest to unlock a certain class of it, and others still went into a dungeon for some good old-fashioned grinding, and yes, some of them went to a shop!

Their next stage didn't just happen to fall on their laps one day while they were running to the next city. They wanted better equipment, so they did something, anything, to get it. If you're just likely to get some by merely existing, it would only be moderately dumber to get rid of levels and just pretend you've gotten stronger in-universe every time you finish a quest.

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this is not a boss altar

boss altars refer to things like bovine barn, prison of souls, tribal sanctuary, bottomless pit, etc
you bring a certain amount of a specific ingredient to them and give it to the altar, and you get sent to a boss fight that typically drops very powerful items for the level they're at. they're nearly one of the most rewarding pieces of content you can do while progressing through the game and in every single one of my classes, i've stopped by them just to get the items they can drop.

 

You should’ve stopped at least 30 posts ago before I responded. Not because I would’ve said to stop, but because it truly is a waste of time and you simply are refusing to listen to anyone. You clearly aren’t convincing anyone and you keep just doubling down; so what’s the point then anymore? You can choose whether or not to heed what I said; it’s your time that’s being wasted, not mine.

 

Close enough. There's an altar, with a boss that drops loot. The focus is obviously less on the specific name for this and more the fact that it exists and the guy I was talking to apparently didn't even know it existed.

Oh my god, I'm so sorry!

 

i know that place ive been there, that was a funny monster, it flied.

i love your posts omg please stop guys just stop talking here, hell eventually realize that getting rid of one of the most unique things to the game and making it feel more like real life aka everything is work is a bad idea because the whole reason why we are playing a video game is to have fun

 

Is that a problem with the game, or the playerbase? Frankly, if you're ignoring content completely just because other content is more "optimal" then you're taking the game way too seriously and need to get a life. If the playerbase is full of insufferable tryhards it won't matter whether you try to remove, add, or change content. Unless you miraculously manage to perfectly balance it all, those tryhards will optimize out all but the most effective content. Frankly, there's nothing you can do about those players. The players who aren't trying to min-max their way through the game will feel like they're being forced into a playstyle if you remove one of the main ways of getting gear, especially the one that the devs have given the most attention to and have an entire team devoted to balancing and upkeeping. Once again, removing content is always going to result in negative feedback and less enjoyment. Isn't the main goal of a game to be fun?

 

I think most people haven't mentioned it because its kind of assumed that everybody's done it. If you aren't a member of the classbuilding community or at all unfamiliar with the meta, dungeon loot and boss alter items are very strong and used in almost every build. I regularly complete high level dungeons, boss alters, raids, etc. to get the gear I need for builds. If you want something that's REALLY optimized, you might get somebody to make crafteds for you (crafteds tend to be a bit better than regular items). While random mob drops do show up frequently, it would be a significant hindrance to only use the mob drops in a build and ignore the content that you've been suggesting are ignored by most of the playerbase. Even at low levels I'm frequently doing dungeons and boss alters to get gear like marius' prison, blasphemy, deadeye, admiral, durum's serenity, just to name a few off the top of my head. The list goes on and on. Basically, what I'm saying is that you only rely entirely on mob drops for gear if you're lazy and don't want to craft items, hire a crafter, or do dungeons/boss alters/raids.

 

It's a problem with the game. It's a problem with every MMO, really. You can't just make content then blame people for ignoring it. Nobody plays games to do them as inefficiently as possible. They will skip less optimal alternatives instinctively.

Content you don't interact with, don't know exists, and that isn't worth your time isn't "fun". It's not even really "content". How few people have to know about something in the game before it may as well not exist? How many have to actually use it before it's worth all the time and effort it took to make? We're not talking about secrets and discoveries here; those actually give you a bit of XP, a cool new sight, , they complete your quest book, and they have some lore behind them. They're specifically made to be hard to find, and finding them is an activity in itself. We're talking about those unmarked sites, shops, enemies, etc.

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I know people do raids. I know people go to the forgery sometimes. Dungeons have their own quests associated with them, and unsurprisingly, they get done at least once. The barley farm in Time Valley? I've been there hundreds of times. I've seen another person in the area exactly once... fighting in the Temple of Legends.

It's the most effective strategy by far. And not I'm getting people telling me they do dungeons and the like specifically for the items, so now I have to wonder what exactly the change is other than getting vendor trash!

 

While I'm not gonna lie and I'll gladly admit that most items that come from merchants are useless, having them sell op gear would just be broken cuz merchants are usually pretty cheap. And even if you raised the prices of items, just by doing quests, the players can acquire respectable wealth and could then buy those items. Unless you raised the prices to astronomical levels, then no one would bother to buy them in the first place. And I don't see how this encourages players to explore, or do basically anything that they're not doing right now. They are already doing quests regardless if they'd spend the money on gear from a merchant. And the merchant would most likely be in a town that the player is going to visit regardless, probably because of some quest. And if the merchant is hidden somewhere in the world, guess what is the player gonna do? Hop on google and type "Wynncraft where's the op gear merchant?", he won't spend hours looking for the said merchant. I'm not saying not a single person would do it, but the truth (maybe the sad truth) is that majority would just google it. So adding op/expensive merchants doesn't change the way the player plays and progresses whatsoever. That is until you remove all the other means of acquiring items/gear but then we get back to the point that I made earlier that you completely ignored, so I'm not going to repeat myself. And even if we talk earlygame merchants. Let's say that merchants are the only mean of getting items. For the players to be actually able to buy anything in the earlygame, the items would have to be really cheap. So probably a few emeralds minimum to a few emerald blocks maximum. A player will acquire that amount of emeralds really easily especially through quests, and now we come to the point: How exactly is buying items for a small number of emeralds more earned than killing mobs? You didn't have to go anywhere except a city where you would've gone anyway, you didn't have to work much harder than you would've been just killing mobs.

This just proves to me that you don't know anything about the player base and that you don't play too much, otherwise you would've never said either of those statements. I've seen countless players approach several altars in the game. I know that for sure because a lot of times it was me approaching the altar with someone else because one of us (or both of us) needed an item from the said altar. I've also met completely random people doing altars while I was "afking" by one of them. The fact that you've never seen someone approach an altar isn't the game's fault, it's yours. The second quote is the same story, only proves how little you know.

No, I'm trying to tell you that if I did it during my first playthrough being completely clueless, then a lot of people, if not the majority of people are probably gonna do it as well. When you first go into the game, you don't come in immediately with the mindset of "how can I skip as much content as possible?" or "how do I optimize the shit out of this". When I first got into the game, my thoughts were "holy shit, how is this even possible in Minecraft, there's so much to do.... WHAT THERE ARE QUESTS?! AND DUNGEONS?!". New players are usually gonna be like "oh cool, a merchant, what can I buy?" Also I have no idea what is the relation between my point and my age from 2014 whatsoever.

I think you seriously overestimate how good mob grinding (or rather mob killing) is. Sure, in the earlygame or midgame it can feel like your whole set just drops from the sky because you don't have to care about specific gear pieces. You will just wear anything that drops and it will usually work because most early to mid game Quest content isn't that hard and you can do it with just random items. The same probably goes for early game dungeons. With the unearned and right there statements that I will address more in details shortly, you also pretend like you will get the pieces you want "by accident" after just a mob kill or two, that's also just untrue.

But in the endgame, if you were to only grind mobs to get the gear you actually want, I GUARANTEE you, you are never going to get the gear/pieces you want. NEVER. I've killed over 600 000 mobs (but that's pretty low considering Wynncraft standards) and I've never assembled an actual build through items that dropped from the mobs I killed. Even if you are lucky enough to actually drop an item that you want, it's still likely that it's going to roll with shit IDs. Sure you can still use the item, but it's not going to be at its full potential... How exactly is this unearned or "right there"?? Sure the mobs are technically right there, but the drops from them are not. I could easily argue that dungeons are also RIGHT THERE, because the quests literally lead you to them and even give you a free key. It's neither unearned nor right there. It's a really grindy and especially hard way of getting actual good gear. Even in earlygame and midgame you're probably not getting very good gear from the mob drops you're getting, the difference just is, that it doesn't matter that much that your gear is shit in the earlygame. You will get much better gear much faster just doing dungeons, boss altars, lootrunning or just ANYTHING else other than mob grinding. Of course, the biggest thing mentioned is lootrunning. Lootrunning is superior to killing mobs for gear just in about every single way. You will get much more gear and you are much more likely to find the pieces you actually want. From lootrunning I've gotten pieces so good I still hold onto them years later. And even if you don't get the gear you want from lootrunning, you will get tons of emeralds that will enable to buy those things from the market.

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Also, I completely forgot to mention Quests in my original response. Even some quests have very cool, meta items that people actually use. Even though the items can be sold on the market after the fact, they still have the quest requirement, so you can only buy a better version of the item on the market, but you still have to do the quest.

 

I already referenced this a bit in my last post, but I'm going to expand on it and once again use BOTW as an example. BOTW has tons of these unmarked shops, entities, monsters, discoveries, etc. Heck, it must have been weeks before any player found all the koroks. But did that make it a bad game? No. Having content that's just there for the sake of being there gives the game personality. Not everything needs a purpose. In BOTW, if you found an interesting ruin, that was it. You might get a name for it and a note on the map for your shiekah slate, maybe a chest with some irrelevant item. If every single piece of content was given the same attention as every other piece and the player was encouraged to visit everything, ignoring nothing the devs added, then the game would lose some of its magic. Sure, 99% of the BOTW playerbase missed something that the devs added. Whether that was the great fairies, 100% of the shrines, 100% of the koroks, all the locations, all the side quests, there's almost a guarentee that a player missed a lot of content, simply because the game wasn't telling them to. The game frankly wasn't telling them to do anything more than slay ganon, and maybe get the divine beasts along the way. But people still explored. It wasn't because they demanded that each piece of content reward them for their exploration, but because the exploration itself was fun. Why else would people have gotten all the koroks, found all the locations, slain all the minibosses, completed all the shrines, finished all the side quests? Because it was fun. Even though their only reward would be a trophy item in their inventory, they still did it. And the game got great reviews. Everybody loved it (except for the people that hated its lack of traditional zelda music but that's a different topic.) Wynncraft is similar. It has a lot of content without telling the player to experience all of it. They let the player decide if they want to stick to the main gameplay loop or explore other options. If the game tells you to explore different options, is that really exploring? Or is it just following the game's directions? Like I've said many times before, the more freedom you have in a game, the better. And one of the greatest kinds of freedom you can have in a video game is the freedom of not knowing what you're missing. It might sound contradictory, but people will be far more likely to explore on their own volition if they don't know what they'd be missing out on if they decided not to. The air of mystery adds a lot of personality to the game. I remember my own first playthrough of wynncraft very well. It was during the 1.19 update, and I wanted to find EVERYTHING. I wanted to finish every quest, explore every area, do every dungeon, beat every boss alter, explore every corner of the map. I did that to the best of my ability. I did every quest (except for the ones that require multiple players to complete, screw you ??? and old Bob's Lost Tomb), beat every dungeon (although I was bad at the game and found some of them pretty hard), beat most of the boss alters (I didn't find them all until I looked the rest of them up later), and explored every area. I went from regular island to the clifftops of the pigman's ravines to every last corner of the canyon of the lost (seriously I actually got lost in there for multiple hours. Totally mixed up east from west and ended up in Kandon Beda. It took me multiple hours to find my way back to Thanos). It was fun, all of it. And it wasn't because I felt like I was being rewarded for going everywhere and getting totally lost along the way. It was because I felt like I was going on my own adventure. I had all the agency. The game wasn't telling me to do it, the game wasn't rewarding me for doing it, the game didn't even let me know such an option existed. The adventure felt like my idea, my mission, my own free will. If you took a game like wynncraft or BOTW and started telling the player how or where to explore, they would lose some of that sense of self-motivation, they'd feel like the game is holding their hand or dragging them by a leash. There are far more important principles when it comes to worldbuilding than just making sure every piece of content is justified. It might be a wiser choice to actually avoid justifying all the content, as counterintuitive as it might seem. It lets the players provide their own justification for why they want to do something. It also makes each player's experience unique, allowing more fan discussion about the game. Different players will play the game in different ways, which makes the playerbase more diverse and interesting to have conversations about the game with. If every player experienced all the content then there wouldn't be any diversity in the player's experiences. Wynncraft is an open world game, to a certain degree. Yes it has a leveling system but outside of that players can go wherever the heck they want at or below their level and do whatever the heck they want to do at or below their level. Forcing players to experience every single aspect of an open-world game stops it from being an open-world game. It would be more of a closed-world game at that point, because players don't get to play at the level of exploration they desire. Wynncraft is not trying to be a closed world game. I know plenty of people who played wynncraft and decided that all they wanted to do was quests and dungeons. They ignored the other optional content. Who are you to tell them they're playing the game wrong?

Sorry this is a little long winded but I had a lot to say.

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I have a challenge for you. Make yourself an endgame-viable build using only items you've found from mob drops. Trust me when I tell you that it's almost impossible. Anyone familiar with the wynncraft meta knows that you NEED that "vendor trash" to make good builds. Only relying on mob drops is a great way to make something painfully mediocre.

 

It's also worth noting that even if every piece of content in a game was equally optimal and equally incentivized players would still ignore aspects of it. They'd simply choose to do content that they deemed to be the most fun. Wynncraft already has a great example of this: Crafting. By the standards of optimally working your way through the game everybody should theoretically be using crafteds the whole time. If you look at wynncraft leveling speedruns you'll notice that they always use pre-crafted gear and consumables in their runs. Also, crafteds (with the right recipies) are the strongest items in the game at every level, barring mythics only. If everybody wanted to play optimally then everybody would use crafteds all the time. But they don't. This is because crafting professions are painfully unfun to level up. So really, players will value enjoyment over optimal strats every time unless they're super tryharding. Making content equally optimized will not solve the problem of players ignoring content. Instead of spreading their playtime out over every aspect of the game they'll just concentrate it into the most fun parts and ignore the rest.

 

I'm wondering why you're proposing your own solution to the problem, poking holes in it, then turning around and apparently leaving the blame for your idea at my feet.

I can't fix your confirmation bias.

Everyone optimizes their gameplay. This isn't up for debate. I watch the starting area most of all for new people to guide around. On a good day, I might see one or two go to the store. Jury's out on whether anyone actually buys anything. I don't see anyone go to any stores in Detlas, and it's all downhill from there. The most I consistently see people do is dungeons, and dungeon shops, along with raids.

Why focus on the endgame, though? By this point you've invested countless hours into the game just surviving off drops. What does it matter if magically at the end, drops aren't suddenly the best thing ever? How does this help you explore all the abandoned content? If this is your focus, I don't think you're actually trying to engage me as much as you're trying to engage some strawman version of me who just learned about the game yesterday. I don't have the patience for that.

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Gonna level with you: My eyes glazed over.

What's the metric? Do I have to personally get them, or are markets fine? I would assume so, since I suggest you buy items if you're too lazy to do anything else for them. But then again, maybe you've just given up on talking about the greater context and just want to focus on drops for the endgame specifically... for some reason.

I remember having this talk with another guy. Maybe you can tell me what exactly the problem is with just making a grinding set if it's so unbelievably bad.

 

But all the effort I put into writing it! Whatever, it was kinda rambling, but I'd like to think I did a good job at explaining exactly what makes a game good or bad. TLDR, not all content needs justification, and deliberately not telling players to explore will increase their enjoyment when they decide to do so. Also, there's nothing inherently wrong with just wanting to do a main gameplay loop. Who has the right to tell a player they're playing the game wrong if they're not exploring everything?

As somebody with a lot of classbuilding experience I can promise you that what I said doesn't just apply to endgame. I do a lot of classbuilding for early-mid game when I'm leveling a class, and I almost always use non-mob-drop items because they tend to be stronger (and easier to get: due to the rng of mob drops there's no guarantee you get the item you want, whereas if you grind for dungeon items or run a boss alter a couple times you'll always get what you need).

Grinding for crafting levels is terrible because you are basically just doing this: click, wait a bit, move a bit, click, wait a bit, move a bit, click wait a bit, move a bit, etc. It's about as interesting as watching paint dry. Also, getting crafting to high levels takes an absurd amount of time. I haven't maxed out professions myself but you could ask somebody who has, they'll tell you just how much of their lifetime they wasted just leveling profs. The actual crafting system itself is fine in my opinion. Going around the map to find the right mobs to get the right ingredients to craft the item with the right identifications is actually pretty interesting and there's some good strategy involved when it comes to designing a recipie. But actually leveling up the professions so you can get to the good part? It's basically cookie clicker.

I guess it's worth noting that I actually do grind professions at low levels when I'm starting a new class, specifically when the xp requirements per proffing level are actually reasonable. After about level 20 or so it starts taking way more time than it's worth imo.

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It's surprisingly easy to fix this issue too. All it would take is tweaking the numbers on the xp scaling for the profession levels so that they take less time to level up. I don't know why this hasn't been changed yet honestly.

 

Don't worry, I read half of it.

I do. I don't see what the big deal is with just taking a detour to get stuff instead of having it fall on your lap. First the complaint was that crafting was optional, then that professions are hard, and now it's all about how nobody actually uses mob drops anyway! The only real, practical issue anyone's been able to articulate is "I like them, fuck you!" Which isn't not a response, but I doubt it's such a pivotal part of the gameplay that these people would stop playing the game over it. Especially since they turn around and say they don't use them anyway! The game has levers at its disposal to expose people to more of the world that was specifically crafted to be seen and admired. What's the issue with nudging people to look at things by getting rid of junk items? Nobody has to find every secret in the world, but what's the issue with being placed in the general area of the neat stuff and letting people take it from there?

Right, but what's your metric? Challenge accepted. What are the rules and metrics?

The reason it hasn't been changed is specifically because of the conversation everyone's having here: Nobody wants to use it, even a little bit, so nobody uses it, so the devs have no reason to touch it, and it never gets fixed. Only content that's used by lots of people is likely to be touched.

And it's like you said: It's not a difficult fix. A few numbers changed here and there would go a long way. I've brought it up before, but turning Durum Isles into a hub for skilling would probably make it more enjoyable just by virtue of centralizing the activity. You go in, you get some repeatable mini-quest from a board or something, you get teleported to some corner of the map to a gathering spot, and you turn in for xp. Or hell, make spots where you can actually practice the profs. You know the fresh baked bread from Aldorei? You can keep baking for xp after doing the quest. Would it not be more interesting if you actually, you know, took up an apprentice position or something? You already have farms, blacksmiths, etc.

But again: Nobody likes it, nobody uses it, and devs don't want to focus on things nobody cares about. How likely is any of this to happen?

 

Because if I only proposed the solution, you would be the ones poking holes in it, the reason why I phrased my first paragraph the way I did was to demonstrate that the system wouldn't be perfect no matter what you would come up with. I'm not blaming you for my ideas, I'm calling your idea of merchants itself stupid. I'm not saying it couldn't work in different games, or that it doesn't work like that in other games already, I'm saying that it wouldn't work in Wynncraft.

I see I'm talking to a brick wall

Yes, everyone optimizes their gameplay, but not on their first playthrough, or at least not in the earlygame of their first playthrough. That's also not up for debate. A very, very small minority of players will probably try to optimize their way of playing from level 1 of their first class, but such people are incredibly rare. There's a reason why a lot of people take months if not years to get their first class to max level and then it usually only takes them a couple of weeks or one to three months of work to get their second class to max level. Because they started optimizing only after they've "completed" the game once. Or only started optimizing as they started to reach endgame on their first class. For the same reason most people quit the game in earlygame/midgame. If everyone optimized their gameplay as you say, they'd get to lvl 100 in a month (or quicker) and only then quit.

You certainly come off as someone who just learned about the game yesterday. Oh ye, why focus on the endgame? It's not like it's one of the most important aspects of the game (and not just this game, all mmorpgs... I thought you played other mmorpgs), that needs proper attention otherwise everyone would just quit once they reached max lvl and Wynn would slowly die out. Yea, we don't need to focus on that. Okay, now that we established that endgame is not an important piece of content that doesn't need to be regarded, let's go back to other stages of the game then.

Earlygame: What you, I guess, don't understand is that this stage is where most people quit. Early game needs to be easy to beat, easy to follow, easy to understand. The reason why players in the early game can afford to wear literal trash and beat most content at that level, is because of the difficulty they face, not the awesomeness of their gear that they got from mobs (and I don't think this in any way, shape or form bad). If the game was harder from the beginning then yea, they would have to think more about their gear, their builds, maybe use other resources to them available than just mob drops, but who will want to do that, when they barely just left the tutorial and know jack-all about the game? If the game was harder from the beginning it would only drive more new players away and Wynn is already having issues retaining new players and getting them at least through the early game. The fact that they can just wear anything the mobs drop and get through the game smoothly is great if anything.

Midgame: Pretty much the same story, at this stage of the game, there are still tons of players that lose interest and just quit, you just want them to progress smoothly over to the late midgame/early lategame. But starting here, if you ever actually spent some time in the community, you'd know that there are actually many players already asking for specific builds at this stage of the game because the random gear they've collected from mobs just simply isn't enough anymore.

Late Midgame: I usually don't like the terms like late midgame or early lategame, but it'll better explain the level range that I mean here (that being around lvl 57-80). At level 57, there's in my opinion one of the hardest quests at level. I can't speak from my own experience since the last time I did this quest at level (that quest being "The Passage"), was probably in 2015 or 2016, but one of my friends basically quit the game for about a year simply because no matter what he tried he couldn't beat the boss at the end of this quest. Not with random gear from mobs, nor with various actual builds. Following, in this level range are some of the hardest quests that you could do at level, especially during your first playthrough "Temple of the Legends" and "Bob's Reincarnation". If you could beat Bob's Reincarnation with random trash gear on your first playthrough at level, then I applaud you, but I could never do it, and I know many others couldn't and still can't do it.

So ye, I don't think you can survive off of just mob drops until lategame/endgame, unless you're a very skilled player and honestly then you just deserve it... or unless you get friends. And honestly, when designing content, you always have to assume that your players are going to try their best to suck at it. There are also tons of people who already want to start lootruning at level 60 or even lower to get better gear, even though lootrunning is generally regarded as an endgame activity and this only proves how ineffective mob grinding even is to get actually good gear.

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Anyway, I'm starting to think you're either a troll or that you've realized that you're wrong but you're too deep into this to back out and so you will literally refuse any other opinion that's not yours. (Seriously I haven't noticed you agreeing with a single person here even though everyone here is more sensible than you- but then again I guess that's why you don't agree with them).
The reason for this assumption is that you keep ignoring most of my arguments/points and only reply to very small parts of each of my paragraphs that you think you have an answer to.

 

Going to re-iterate the main point in my previous post because you seem to just completely ignore this fact:
The. Point. Of. A. Video. Game. Is. To. Have. Fun.
Most players find some number of quests and dungeons fun. Both could and should be improved, but most players do not find professions fun. There are some people who find professions fun so they have a place in the game, but they should not be content required for progression whatsoever. Sure, quests and dungeons may not take you to every nook and cranny of the map, but that is true of ANY game with a degree of non-linearity. (and again, quests are still not required, as there are viable leveling alternates like grind spots and dungeons)
Now, if you want to look at a game that forces you to do content, look no further than Hypixel Skyblock. Although there were many issues when it launched, it at least gave players many different ways of progressing, which in a disorganized game like Skyblock amounts to getting powerful gear and money. However, the developers have pretty much made it that only a few pieces of content are actually avoidable. Don't like dungeons? That's ok, hope you weren't planning on buying some of the best gear and weapons! You don't want to level up every skill to high-ish level? That's ok, but now your stats suck! You want to avoid boring, monotonous tasks? Go ahead, but I hope you didn't want a bunch of the best items in the game! My point is that forcing players to do most of a game's content (like exploring every part of the map) is just an awful idea.

 

Allow me to re-iterate now: Do literally any of the others things that get you loot if it's so bad. This whole "But professions are boring!" is a real blast from the past at this point. Buy mats and ingredients, make a grinding set, talk to a merchant, do a quest, a raid, a dungeon, walk into some cave somewhere. If you have a problem with professions, I suggest also making a post complaining about professions. Plenty of fixes for those have been talked about on this thread (mostly from me), even in the very first post!

 

I would like to point out that he is making valid counterpoints to nearly every point made and not just "refusing to listen to anyone". Sure, he has a highly unpopular opinion (source: I am literally the only "kind of" vote), but that doesn't mean that he isn't listening to other people. For instance, him and I came to a sort of "middle ground" a while back before I left the argument

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Also, in general, there is a lot of toxicity occurring towards Tour Guide - just because he disagrees with you doesn't mean you have to be a jerk about it.

 

Oh my god how is this thread seriously still going on this is just a worthless circle jerk of meaningless insults now

 

Gone are the days a dude could make a bad suggestion in peace without having to fight an entire army of angry crafters. Why are you guys arguing like salted is listening, he does not read this shit. this thread is not deciding the future of Wynncraft. You are not cool or smart for hitting the 20th slam dunk in a row on this guy who has been defending his homeland for 72 hours straight with no food or water.