Today in WoW: Thursday, Aug. 11, 2011

We've offered players who don't raid a reasonable way to gear up, and achieve high levels of power. The JP/VP system makes a lot of sense to us, and gives everyone a pretty good personal progression track in addition to loot drops, and we feel pretty good about the system as it stands. That doesn't necessarily mean that we think that full sets are a necessary part of that picture, though.

We still want to preserve some of the most prestigious PvE loot for players who face down raid content (even if it's a tier behind), and we feel that completing a tier set means that a raid needs to fit in there somewhere. That design makes sense to us, and we want to preserve some of the reward for facing down those bad guys. We re-adjusted those instances specifically to encourage players to go experience them, and we want to leave some incentives in there for players who check those raids out.

So, in conclusion, please kill Nefarian and Cho'gall. They are mean and deserve it.

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I genuinely believe that this isn't the attitude. I think the perspective is "reward me for playing the game the way I want to play it." I can understand that perspective.

The challenge comes when our design intentions don't mesh with that. We want rewards to retain at least some meaning, because when they don't, all the aspects of play start to blend together. Greater challenges should offer greater rewards, but how do you accomplish that if you also allow lesser challenges to provide all the same rewards, across the board?

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That's been a long-standing challenge, I think, and the JP/VP system is the compromise answer to it. Please recall that at one time if you wanted purps then you went into a raid, period. We've come a long, long way since then.

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Those of us who have suffered this fate are what are called 'statistical outliers'. Some would call it 'unlucky'. We are, alas, the chosen few who must shake our tiny fists and curse the fickle gods of RNG and keep trying.

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Dragonitarian?

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My perspective would be this: I'm probably already farming VP to buy tier 12 stuff. I might as well farm VP in last tier's raid instance, so I can get a double shot at rewards I'm interested in (including trinkets and other incidentals which might be better than their vendor counterparts, or BoEs to sell).

We DO enforce the rules, but we have to be made aware of violations before the wheels of justice start turning.

Just because you see REPORTED in chat – doesn't mean they were, chances are extremely high they indeed were not.

Report rules violations you see. No, you won't be told what happened, that has never been done. There is also a penalty volcano http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20221 that comes into play. Keep in mind also, just because you may not see a noticeable reaction, i.e., that toon disappears for awhile, doesn't mean there was nothing done – or that an individual has been reported often enough to climb the ladder on the volcano.